Noel’s Reviews > Diaries, 1910-1923 > Status Update

In a better state because I read Strindberg (Separated). I don’t read him to read him, but rather to lie on his breast. He holds me on his left arm like a child. I sit there like a man on a statue. Ten times I almost slip off, but at the eleventh attempt I sit there firmly, feel secure, and have a wide view.

Reflection on other people’s relationship to me. Insignificant as I may be, nevertheless there is no one here who understands me in my entirety. To have someone possessed of such understanding, a wife perhaps, would mean to have support from every side, to have God. … Sometimes I thought she [Felice] understood me without realizing it; for instance, the time she waited for me at the U-Bahn station – I had been longing for her unbearably, and in my passion to reach her as quickly as possible almost ran past her, thinking she would be at the top of the stairs, and she took me quietly by the hand.

(By now World War I has broken out. Kafka writes drolly about the people he observes on a train journey from Prague to Nagymihály (now Michalovce in Slovakia); his sister Elli is going to see her husband stationed there, Karl Herman, a reserve officer in the Austro-Hungarian army, and needed a travel companion—“the much-travelled, all-knowing, all-judging Viennese”; “the old woman from Dresden with a face like Bismarck’s”; “the hussar in the laced fur jacket [who] danced and shifted his feet like a show horse”; “two Hungarian Jewesses in the compartment, mother and daughter [who] resembled each other, the mother decent-looking, the daughter a miserable if self-conscious remnant. Mother – well-proportioned face, a fuzzy beard on her chin.” Kafka also writes about “the huge German officer hung with every kind of accoutrement”—and “the firmness of the officer’s waist, the breadth of his shoulders, the slimness of his body” that “made one’s eyes open in surprise.” (Kafka really loathes his body and displays an almost erotic longing for this idealized “German” type.))