Franz Kafka : The Trial

I have examined my desk and seen that nothing good can be done with it. It is midnight, the burning electric light, the silent house, the darkness outside, they give me the right to write, even if it be the most miserable stuff, and this right I use hurriedly, that's the person I am.

I feel restless and vicious. I have now, a great yearning to write all my anxiety entirely out of me. I stare, rigidly ahead, as my eyes lose the imaginary peoples, of the imaginary kaleidoscope, into which I am looking. I invite heaven and earth to take part in my scheme, and what is my scheme?

To observe myself, this inescapable duty to observe oneself. But most of these observations are no more than lies. We often ask, who is been telling lies about us? Who could have said such things?

Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K. For, without even done anything wrong, he was arrested, one fine morning. His landlady's cook who always brought him his breakfast at eight o'clock failed to appear on this occasion. That had never happened before.

(...) For two days, I have noticed an inner coolness and indifference. Yesterday evening, during my walk, every little street sound, every eye turned towards me, was more important to me than myself.

Many years ago, I went over the wishes that I wanted to realize in life. I found that the most important and most delightful was the wish to attain a view of life, and to convince others of it in writing, in which, life while still retaining its full bodied rise and fall, would simultaneously be recognized no less clearly as a nothing, a dream that dimmed, hovering a beautiful wish, perhaps if I had wished it rightly.

(...) One morning, while he was working in the bank, K was informed, by telephone, that next Sunday, a short inquiry into his case would take place. Sunday had been selected so he might not be disturbed in his professional work. It was, of course, understood that he must appear without fail. He did not need to be reminded of that.

(...)This back and forth is getting worse all the time. At the office, I live up to my outward duties, but not to the inner duties, and those unfulfilled duties grow into a permanent torment. Those are the seductive voices of the night. The sirens too, sound that way. It would be doing them an injustice to think that they wanted to seduce, they knew they had claws and stab wounds and they lamented aloud. They couldn't help it if their lament sounded so beautiful.

Kafka's relationship with his father.

(...) There is only one episode in the early years of which I have a direct memory. You may remember it too. Once, in the night, I kept calling, whimpering for water. After several vigorous threats that failed to have any effect. You took me out of bed, carried me to the balcony, and left me there alone for a while in my night shirt, outside the shut door. I dare say I was quite obedient afterwards of that period. But, it did me inner harm. Even years afterwards, I suffered from the tormenting fancy that a huge man, my father, the ultimate authority. could come, almost for no reason all, and take me out of bed in the night.

(...)It seems so dreadful to be a bachelor, to become an old man, struggling to keep one's dignity while begging for invitation whenever one wants to spend the eveving in the company. Never being able to run up a stairway besides one's wife. The farther one's move away from the living, so much the smaller space is considered necessary for him. This bachelor, still in the midst of life, apparently of his own free will, resigns himself to an ever-smaller space, and when he dies, the coffin is exactly like mine.

(...) This story I wrote at one fitting, from ten o'clock at night to six o'clock in the morning. I was outwardly able to pull out my legs from under the desk, they have got so stiff from sitting. Several times during the night, I heaved at own weight upon my back. How everything can be said, how from the strangest fancies that lights a great fire in which they perish and then rise up again, how it turns blue outside the window.

Transcription, Weiner Marthone author of Under Fire