Free The Diaries of Franz Kafka by Franz Kafka

study it if we want to go to Italy again this year. We simply have to. And so isn’t it best to study together?’
    ‘No,’ said Max, ‘we shall learn nothing together. I am as certain of that as you, Samuel, are certain that we ought to study together.’
    ‘Am I!’ Samuel said. ‘We shall certainly learn very well together, I always regret that we weren’t together even at school. Do you realize that we’ve known each other only two years?’ He bent forward to look at all three. They had slowed down their steps and let go their arms.
    ‘But we haven’t studied anything together yet,’ said Franz. ‘I like it very well that way, too. I don’t want to learn a thing. But if we have to learn Italian, then it is better for each one to learn it by himself.’
    ‘I don’t understand that,’ Samuel said. ‘First you want us to meet every week, then you don’t want it.’
    ‘Come now,’ Max said. ‘Franz and I, after all, just don’t want our being together to be disturbed by studying, or our studying by being together, nothing else.’
    ‘Yes,’ said Franz.
    ‘And indeed there isn’t much time,’ said Max. ‘It is June now and in September we want to leave.’
    ‘That’s the very reason why I want us to study together,’ Robert said, and stared in surprise at the two who opposed him. His neck became especially flexible when someone contradicted him. 14
    One thinks that one describes him correctly, but it is only approximate and is corrected by the diary.
    It probably lies in the essence of friendship and follows it like a shadow – one will welcome it, the second regret it, the third not notice it at all –
    26 September. The artist Kubin recommends Regulin as a laxative, a powdered seaweed that swells up in the bowels, shakes them up, is thus effective mechanically in contrast to the unhealthy chemical effect of other laxatives which just tear through the excrement and leave it hanging on the walls of the bowels.
    He met Hamsun at Langen. He (Hamsun) grins mockingly for no reason. During the conversation, without interrupting it, he put one foot on his neck, took a large pair of paper-shears from the table, and trimmed the frayed edges of his trousers. Shabbily dressed, with one or so rather expensive details, his tie, for example.
    Stories about an artist’s pension in Munich where painters and veterinaries lived (the latters’ school was in the neighbourhood) and where they acted in such a debauched way that the windows of the house across the way, from which a good view could be had, were rented out. In order to satisfy these spectators, one of the residents in the pension would sometimes jump up on the window sill in the posture of a monkey and spoon his soup out of the pot.
    A manufacturer of fraudulent antiques who got the worn effect by means of buckshot and who said of a table: ‘Now we must drink coffee on it three more times, then it can be shipped off to the Innsbruck Museum.’
    Kubin himself: very strong, but somewhat monotonous facial expression, he describes the most varied things with the same movement of muscles. Looks different in age, size, and strength according to whether he is sitting, standing, wearing just a suit, or an overcoat.
    27 September. Yesterday on the Wenzelsplatz met two girls, keptmy eye too long on one while it was just the other, as it proved too late, who wore a plain, soft, brown, wrinkled, ample coat, open a little in front, had a delicate throat and delicate nose, her hair was beautiful in a way already forgotten – Old man with loosely hanging trousers on the Belvedere. He whistles; when I look at him he stops; if I look away he begins again; finally he whistles even when I look at him – The beautiful large button, beautifully set low oh the sleeve of a girl’s dress. The dress worn beautifully too, hovering over American boots. How seldom I succeed in creating something beautiful, and this unnoticed button and its ignorant seamstress succeeded –