5 excerpts about Loneliness

(Opening Pages)

It was during the time when I wandered through Kristiania, hungry...

I awoke in my attic room. A clock struck six; dawn was just breaking. Footsteps were already echoing up and down the staircase. The wall beside the door was papered with old issues of the *Morgenbladet*. From my bed I could read a notice from the Director of Taxes. A little farther to the left, in large, bold letters, the baker Fabian Olsen advertised his fresh bread.

The moment I opened my eyes, my first thought was whether another day of misery awaited me.

Life had been especially hard on me lately. One by one, the few possessions I owned had found their way to the pawnshop. My nerves were worn to the limit. At times I would lie in bed the entire day, overcome by fever and dizziness. Every now and then, if fortune smiled on me and one of my articles was accepted by a newspaper, I earned five kroner.

The daylight grew steadily brighter. I began reading the advertisements covering the walls. One of them, printed in tiny, cramped letters that were difficult to decipher, read:

**"Funerals – Miss Andersen, first door on the right."**

That mournful advertisement held my attention for quite some time. A little later I heard the clock upstairs strike eight. I got up and dressed.

I opened the window. Before me lay a vacant lot where a clothesline had been stretched from one end to the other. Beyond it stood the remains of a blacksmith's workshop that had recently burned down and was now being cleared away by laborers.

I leaned against the window and looked up. Soon it would be broad daylight. It was autumn—the season when everything begins to cool, to change color, to fade away.

The voices from the street drew me outside. The empty room, with its sagging, creaking floorboards, seemed like a great, dilapidated coffin. The lock barely worked, and there was no stove. At night I used to tuck my socks beneath the quilt so they would be dry by morning. Whenever the wind blew hard and the downstairs door was left open, strange whistles rose through the floorboards, and the newspapers covering the walls were often torn by the draft.

Yet there was one thing I loved in that room: a little red rocking chair. Every evening I would sink into it, half asleep, letting my thoughts and memories slowly fall into place.

I got up and searched the little basket beside my bed, hoping there might still be something left to eat. There was nothing. I went back to the window.

*"My God,"* I thought, *"is it really worth going on with this endless search for work?"*

So far my persistence had earned me nothing but empty promises and blunt refusals. I lived on hope alone, convincing myself each morning that something would change, only to begin the same fruitless round once again. One disappointment followed another until I had almost lost heart.

Had I not even applied for a position as a bookkeeper? It was already too late, and besides, I could never have produced the fifty-kroner security deposit they required. There was always some obstacle in my way.

I even tried to join the fire brigade. There must have been fifty applicants. We all stood there with our chests puffed out, trying to look as strong as possible. An inspector examined us one by one, feeling our arms and asking a few questions. When he came to me, he shook his head.

*"Impossible,"* he said. *"You wear glasses."*

A few days later I returned. This time I had left my glasses at home. I stood as straight as I could, my brows drawn together, trying to give myself the sharp, determined look of a man ready for anything. But the inspector walked past me smiling. He had recognized me.

Worst of all was the condition of my clothes. They were so worn that I was ashamed to present myself anywhere. Poverty had become my constant companion. I did not even own a comb to tidy my hair, nor a single book to comfort me during the long hours of despair.

I had spent the whole summer in the cemeteries and the Royal Gardens. There I wandered about, lost in thought, sat on benches, and wrote my articles. I filled page after page. Strange ideas came to me without end, and my restless mind flashed with images and inspirations.

Yet the misery in which I lived gradually clouded my judgment. I often chose subjects that no longer interested the newspapers, and my manuscripts were rejected. Still, how much labor had gone into them! Whenever I finished one article, I immediately began another, refusing to let the editors' rejections discourage me. I kept telling myself that sooner or later my turn would come.

And every now and then, fortune did smile on me. A newspaper would accept one of my pieces, and I would earn five whole kroner for an afternoon's work.

I stepped away from the window and walked over to the chair that served as my washstand. I picked up my trousers. The fabric had faded badly from wear. I dampened the worn patches, hoping to restore a little of their color and make them look less shabby.

I slipped a pencil and a few sheets of paper into my pocket and left the room. I crept quietly down the stairs. My rent had been overdue for several days, and I did not have a single coin with which to pay it.

It was nine o'clock.

The air was alive with voices, the rumble of carts and carriages, the footsteps of passersby, and the sharp cracks of coachmen's whips. Altogether it formed a strange morning symphony that somehow revived my spirits.

I had not gone out merely for a walk. What use was fresh air to my lungs? I felt as strong as Hercules. I fancied I could stop a whole carriage with nothing but my shoulder.

I was almost cheerful. The day was beautiful, and the lively atmosphere of the city swept me along. I amused myself by watching the people I passed and reading the posters plastered on the walls. I allowed myself to be captivated by countless little things—those insignificant details that crossed my path only to disappear again.

If only I had something to eat on such a splendid morning!

The brightness of the day stirred something deep within me, and I felt as though life itself were overflowing inside me.

(Opening Page)

When Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect. He lay on his hard, armour-like back, and if he lifted his head just a little, he could see his rounded brown belly, divided into stiff, curved segments, on top of which the bedcovers precariously rested, ready at any moment to slide completely to the floor. His numerous legs, pitifully thin in comparison with the rest of his body, waved helplessly before his eyes.

"What has happened to me?" he thought.

It was no dream. His room, an ordinary human bedroom, though somewhat smaller than usual, lay quietly enclosed within its four familiar walls. Above the table, where various samples of cloth lay scattered about — for Samsa was a travelling salesman — hung a picture he had recently cut from an illustrated magazine and set in a handsome gilt frame. It depicted a lady wearing a fur hat and a fur stole, sitting erect and extending toward the viewer an enormous fur muff into which her entire forearm disappeared.

Gregor's gaze then turned toward the window, and the gloomy, overcast sky — one could almost hear the raindrops striking against the windowpane — filled him with a heavy melancholy.

"Why don't I sleep a little longer and forget all this foolishness?" he thought.

But that was impossible, for he was accustomed to sleeping on his right side, and in his present condition he could not turn himself over. However hard he tried to roll onto his right, he always slipped back onto his back again. He tried at least a hundred times, closing his eyes so as not to witness the frantic movements of his legs, and gave up only when he began to feel a dull, unfamiliar pain in his side — a sensation he had never experienced before.

"My God," he thought, "what an exhausting profession I have chosen!"

The first chapter

1
It was dark by the time I reached Bonn, and I forced myself not to succumb to the series of mechanical actions which had taken hold of me in five years of traveling back and forth: down the station steps, up the station steps, put down my suitcase, take my ticket out of my coat pocket, pick up my suitcase, hand in my ticket, cross over to the newsstand, buy the evening papers, go outside, and signal for a taxi.

Almost every day for five years I had left for somewhere and arrived somwhere; in the morning I had gone up station steps and down again, in the afternoon down the steps and up again, signaled for a taxi, felt in my pockets for money to pay for my ticket, bought evening papers at kiosks, and savored in a corner of my mind the studied casualness of these mechanical actions. Ever since Marie left me to marry Züpfner, that Catholic, these actions have become more mechanical than ever, but without losing any of their casualness. There is a way of calculating the distance from station to hotel, from hotel to station—by the taxi meter. Two marks, three marks, four marks fifty from the station. Since Marie has been gone I have sometimes slipped out of the rhythm and confused the hotel with the station, I would start looking for my ticket as I approached the hotel porter or ask the ticket collector at the station for my room number, something—fate perhaps—must have made me remember my profession and my situation.

I am a clown, official description: comedian, no church affiliation, twenty-seven years old, and one of my turns is called: Arrival and Departure, a long (almost too long) pantomime during which the audience confuses arrival and departure all the way through. Since I usually go over this number once more in the train (it consists of over six hundred gestures, and I have to know their sequence by heart, of course), it is not unnatural that now and again I fall victim to my own imagination: rush into a hotel, look round for the departure board, find it, run up or down a flight of steps so as not to miss my train, while all I have to do is go to my room and get ready for the performance. Luckily they know me in most of the hotels. Over a period of five years a rhythm develops with fewer possibilities of variation than one might suppose—besides, my agent, who is familiar with my idiosyncrasies, sees to it that there is a minimum of friction.

What he calls “the sensitive soul of the artist” is fully respected, and an “aura of well-being” surrounds me as soon as I get to my room: flowers in an attractive vase, and, almost before I have thrown off my coat and tossed my shoes (I hate shoes) into a corner, a pretty chambermaid comes in with coffee and cognac and runs my bath, and the green bath salts she pours into it make it relaxing and fragrant. While I lie in the bathtub I read the papers, popular ones all of them, sometimes as many as six but at least three, and in a moderately loud voice I sing nothing but sacred songs: chorales, hymns, musical passages I recall from my school days. My parents, devout Protestants, subscribed to the postwar fashion of denominational tolerance and sent me to a Catholic school. I am not religious myself, I don’t even go to church, and I make use of the sacred texts and songs for therapeutic purposes: they help me more than anything else to overcome the two afflictions Nature has saddled me with: depression and headaches. Since Marie went over to the Catholics (although Marie is a Catholic herself I feel this phrase is appropriate), the intensity of these two complaints has increased, and even the Tantum Ergo or the Litany of Loreto—till now my favorite remedies for pain—are not much use any more. There is one temporarily effective remedy: alcohol; there could be a permanent cure: Marie. Marie has left me. A clown who takes to drink falls faster than a drunk tile-layer topples off a roof.

When I am drunk my gestures during a performance become confused—their only justification in the first place is their precision—and I fall into the most embarrassing trap to which a clown is ever exposed—I laugh at my own tricks. A ghastly humiliation. As long as I am sober my stage fright increases till the moment I walk on (I generally had to be pushed), and what some critics have called “that reflective, critical gaiety hiding a beating heart” was nothing but the desperate icy control with which I turned myself into a puppet; it was terrible, incidentally, when the thread broke and I fell back on myself. I imagine monks go through a similar experience when they are in a state of contemplation. Marie always carried around a lot of mystical literature, and I remember the words “empty” and “nothing” occurred very often.

For the past three weeks I had been drunk most of the time and had gone on stage with a deceptive air of confidence, the consequences showed up faster than with a slacker in school who still retains illusions about himself right up until he gets his report; six months is a long time to dream. After three weeks there were already no more flowers in my room, by the middle of the second month I no longer had a room with bath, and by the beginning of the third month the distance from the station was already seven marks, while my fee had shrunk to a third. Instead of cognac, gin, instead of vaudeville theaters, curious clubs which met in gloomy halls where I went on stage with wretched lighting, where my performance no longer even consisted of confused gestures but was reduced to outright clowning for the benefit of the postal and railway employees celebrating twenty-five years of service, or of Catholic housewives and Protestant nurses, and where the beer-drinking army officers whose promotion celebrations I enlivened hardly knew whether they ought to laugh or not when I did what was left of my “Defense Council” act; and yesterday, in Bochum, before an audience of young people, I slipped in the middle of a Chaplin imitation and couldn’t get up.

There weren’t even any catcalls—just a sympathetic murmuring, and when at last the curtain fell I quickly hobbled off, gathered up my belongings and, without removing my make-up, took a cab to my boarding-house where there was a terrible row because my landlady refused to let me have any money for the taxi. The only way I could placate the disgruntled taxi driver was to hand over my electric razor—not as security but as payment. He was decent enough to give me change in the form of a nearly full pack of cigarettes and two marks in cash. I lay down fully dressed on the unmade bed, drank the rest of my bottle, and for the first time in months felt completely rid of depression and headache. I lay on my bed in a state which I sometimes hope will be mine when I end my days: drunk and as if in the gutter. I would have given my shirt for a drink, and only the thought of the complicated negotiations involved in such an exchange discouraged me from undertaking this transaction. I slept marvelously—long and deep, and dreamed that the heavy stage curtain fell over me like a soft thick shroud, yet through sleep and dreams I was aware of my fear of waking up: the make-up still on my face, my right knee swollen, a lousy breakfast on a plastic tray and next to the coffee pot a wire from my agent: “Coblenz and Mainz have canceled stop phoning tonight Bonn. Zohnerer.” Then a call from the organizer of last night’s show who, I discovered, was head of the Christian Education Society. “Kostert speaking,” came his voice over the phone, a mixture of coldness and servility, “we have to clear up the matter of your fee, Mr. Schnier.” “By all means,” I said, “there’s nothing to stop you.”

“Oh?
” he replied. I said nothing, and when he went on his petty hostility had turned to downright sadism. “We agreed on a fee of a hundred marks for a clown who used to be worth two hundred”—he paused, presumably to give me a chance to be angry, but I was silent and, true to type, he became insulting again and said: “I am the chairman of a welfare organization, and my conscience won’t allow me to pay a hundred marks for a clown for whom twenty is a more than adequate—one might even say, a generous fee.” I saw no reason to break my silence. I lit a cigarette, poured out some more of the lousy coffee, and listened to his heavy breathing. He said, “Are you listening?
” And I said: “I’m listening,” and waited. Silence is a good weapon. When I was at school and got called up before the principal or the teachers I always kept silent. I let the Christian Mr. Kostert sweat it out back there at the other end of the line; he was too small to feel sorry for me, but not too small to feel sorry for himself, and finally he muttered: “Well, what would you suggest, Mr. Schnier?
”

“Now listen carefully, Kostert,” I said, “I’ll make you a deal—take a taxi, drive to the station, get me a first-class ticket to Bonn, buy me a bottle of schnapps, come to the hotel, pay my bill—including tips—and leave an envelope here containing enough money for me to pay for a taxi to the station. Furthermore, undertake on your Christian conscience to pay for sending my luggage to Bonn. O.K.?
” He did some mental arithmetic, cleared his throat, and said: “But my idea was to give you fifty marks.” “All right,” I said, “take the streetcar then—that way the whole thing will cost you less than fifty marks. How about that?
” He did some more mental arithmetic and said: “Couldn’t you take your luggage with you in the taxi?
”
“No I couldn’t,” I said, “I’ve hurt my knee and can’t be bothered.” Evidently his Christian conscience began to make itself felt. “Mr. Schnier,” he said in a mild voice, “I’m sorry I—” “Never mind, Kostert,” I said, “I am ever so glad I can save the Christian cause between fifty-four and fifty-six marks.” I pressed down the hook and put the receiver down by the phone. He was the type who would have called back and spent half an hour relieving his conscience—it was much better to leave him to pick around in it by himself. I felt sick. I forgot to say that not only do I suffer from depression and headaches but I also have another, almost mystical peculiarity: I can detect smells through the telephone, and Kostert gave off a sickly odor of violet cachous. I had to get up and clean my teeth. Then I gargled with some of the cognac that was left, laboriously removed my makeup, got into bed again, and thought of Marie, of Christians, of Catholics, and contemplated the future. I thought of the gutters I would lie in one day. For a clown approaching fifty there are only two alternatives: gutter or palace. I had no faith in the palace, and before reaching fifty I had somehow to get through another twenty-two years. The fact that Coblenz and Mainz had canceled was what Zohnerer would call the “Early Warning Stage,” but there was another quality to be taken into account which I forgot to mention: my laziness. There were gutters in Bonn too, and who said I was to wait till I was fifty?
I thought of Marie: of her voice and her breast, her hands and her hair, her movements and everything we had done with each other. Also of Züpfner, whom she wanted to marry. We had known each other quite well as boys—so well that when we met again as grown men we didn’t quite know whether to use first names or not—either way we felt embarrassed, and we never got over this embarrassment no matter how often we met. I couldn’t understand how Marie could have gone over to him of all people, but perhaps I never “understood” Marie.

I was furious when it was Kostert who aroused me from my thoughts. He scratched at the door like a dog and said: “Mr. Schnier, you must listen to me. Do you need a doctor?
” “Leave me alone,” I called out, “shove the envelope under the door and go home.” He pushed the envelope under the door, I got out of bed, picked it up, and opened it: it contained a second-class ticket from Bochum to Bonn, and the taxi fare had been calculated exactly: six marks fifty. I had hoped he would make it a round figure of ten marks, and I had already worked out how much I would get out of it if I turned in the first-class ticket and bought a second-class one. It would have been about five marks. “Everything all right?” he called from outside.

(excerpts)
What did that word mean to me? Earth? I thought of the great, noisy cities through which I would wander and lose myself. I thought of them the way I had thought of the ocean on my second or third night on Solaris, when I had wanted to go out and throw myself into the black waves.

I would immerse myself among people. I would be quiet and attentive, an understanding companion. There would be plenty of acquaintances, friends, women — perhaps even a wife. For a while, I would have to make a conscious effort to smile, to greet people, to stand up, to perform the thousands of small gestures that make up life on Earth. Before long, those gestures would become reflexes again.

I would find new interests and occupations. I would never give myself to them completely; never again would I give myself completely to anyone or anything. Perhaps at night I would look toward the dark nebula concealing the twin suns and remember everything, even what I am thinking now.

I would recall my fantasies and hopes with an indulgent, faintly sorrowful smile. And that future Kelvin would be no less worthy a man than the Kelvin of the past, who had once been ready for anything in pursuit of an ambitious undertaking called Contact. Nor would anyone have the right to judge me.

[…]

Despair and a kind of silent rage had sustained me while I worked at the computer. Now exhaustion had taken over, and I could not even remember how to lower a mechanical bed. I forgot to release the catches first and hung my whole weight on the lever. The mattress came crashing down on my head.

I took off my clothes, threw them aside, and collapsed onto the pillow without even bothering to inflate it. I fell asleep with the lights on.

When I opened my eyes, I had the impression that I had been asleep for only a few minutes. The room was bathed in a dim reddish light. It was cooler, and I felt better.

I remained lying there, uncovered and naked. The curtains were half open, and there, opposite me, beside the window illuminated by the red sun, someone was sitting.

It was Harey.

She was wearing a white summer dress that fitted closely around her breasts. She sat with one leg crossed over the other; she was barefoot. Motionless, her head resting against her sun-browned hands, she watched me from beneath her black eyelashes.

Harey, her black hair swept back.

For a long time I lay there looking at her. My first thought was reassuring: I was dreaming, and I knew it. Even so, I would have preferred her not to be there.

I closed my eyes and tried to drive the dream away. When I opened them again, Harey was still sitting opposite me. She pursed her lips slightly — an old habit of hers — as though she were about to whistle, but her expression was serious.

My thoughts turned to my recent reflections on dreams. She had not changed since the day I had last seen her. She had been nineteen then. Now she should have been twenty-nine.

But apparently the dead do not change. They remain forever young.

She continued to look at me, an expression of surprise on her face. I thought of throwing something at her, but even in a dream I could not bring myself to hurt someone who was dead.

I murmured:

“My poor darling, have you come to see me?”

The sound of my own voice frightened me. The room, Harey, everything seemed impossibly real. A three-dimensional dream, complete with the full range of colors…

On the floor I noticed several objects that I had not seen when I went to bed. When I wake up, I thought, I will check whether all these things are still here, or whether, like Harey, I saw them only in the dream.

“Are you planning to stay long?” I asked.

I realized that I was speaking very softly, like someone afraid of being overheard. Why should you worry about someone listening to you in a dream?

The sun was rising above the horizon. A good sign. I had gone to bed during a red day, which should have been followed by a blue day and then another red one. I could not possibly have slept for fifteen hours straight.

So it was a dream.

Reassured, I looked closely at Harey. Her silhouette stood out against the sun. The crimson rays illuminated the soft skin of her left cheek, while the shadows of her eyelashes fell across her face.

How beautiful she was.

Even in my sleep, my memory of her was astonishingly precise. I watched the sun move, waiting to see the dimple appear in its familiar, unusual place, just below the corner of her mouth.

Still, I would have preferred to wake up. It was time to get some work done. I squeezed my eyelids shut.

I heard a metallic sound and opened my eyes again. Harey was sitting beside me on the bed, still watching me solemnly.

I smiled at her.

She smiled back and leaned toward me. We kissed. At first it was a timid, almost childlike kiss, then longer ones followed. I held her in my arms for a long time.

I wondered how it was possible to feel so many things inside a dream. I was not betraying her memory, because it was precisely her I was dreaming of — her and no one else. Nothing like this had ever happened to me before…

Was that when I first began to doubt?

...

(selected excerpts)

*Sunday, July 19, 1910*
I often reflect upon it, and I am always compelled in the end to admit that my upbringing harmed me greatly in certain respects. This complaint is directed at a multitude of people who, standing together here as though in one of those old group photographs, do not know what to do with one another, do not dare lower their eyes or smile, so nervous are they. They are my parents, several relatives, a few teachers, one particular cook, some girls from dancing lessons, several visitors to our house from years ago, a number of writers, a swimming instructor, a lottery ticket seller, a school inspector, then some whom I met only once in the street, others whom I cannot remember at this moment, and still others whom I shall never remember at all. Finally, there are those whose lessons I had, in a sense, rejected at the time, whose influence I scarcely noticed.

In short, they are so many that I must take care not to mention anyone twice. To all of them I address my complaint, and by doing so I make them acquainted with one another. Yet I tolerate no objections. For indeed, I have endured enough objections already, and since most of them have only served to invalidate what I had said, I can do nothing but include those objections themselves in my complaint and say that, besides my upbringing, these refutations too have harmed me greatly in certain respects.

Does anyone imagine that I was brought up somewhere remote and isolated? No, I was brought up in the very heart of the city, in the very middle of urban life. Not, for example, in a ruined dwelling in the mountains or beside a lake. My parents and their entourage had until now stood wrapped in my complaint, grey and motionless; but now they step aside from it easily and smile, for I have removed my hands from them, placed them upon my forehead, and think:

I should have been the little inhabitant of ruins, listening to the cries of crows, watching their shadows pass over me in flight, cooling myself beneath the moonlight, even if at first I had been somewhat frail beneath the pressure of my own virtues, which would have grown within me with the strength of weeds — scorched by the sun that would have poured through the ruins from every side upon my bed of ivy.

*Source: Franz Kafka, Diaries I: 1910–1913.*

---

From *Letter to His Father*

At that time, this was only a small beginning. Yet that feeling of insignificance which so often overcomes me — a feeling that, from another perspective, is nevertheless noble and fruitful — derives in large measure from your influence.

What I needed was a little encouragement, a little kindness, a small opening in the path before me. Instead, you blocked that path, though certainly with the good intention that I should take another road. But I was not made for those other roads.

You encouraged me, for example, whenever I saluted properly or marched well, but I was not destined to become a soldier. Or you praised me when I could eat heartily or even drink beer in abundance, or when I could sing songs by repeating words whose meaning I did not understand, or parrot your favourite expressions. Yet none of these things belonged to my future.