is more critical than enthusiastic, on which I congratulate myself. I am a person who feels degraded when he meets an ideal man, with long hair, sandals on his naked legs, apron of skin around his loins, and flowers in his hair. I smile, with embarrassment, in such cases. To laugh aloud, the thing one would certainly most like to do, is impossible, also it is in fact more a cause for annoyance than for laughter, living among people who regard a smooth head of hair like mine with distaste. I like to be annoyed, so I always get annoyed at the least provocation. I often make sarcastic remarks and yet certainly have little need to be malicious toward others, since I know quite well what it means to be grieved by the scorn of others. But that is just it: I observe nothing, learn nothing, and behave just as on the day I left school. There’s a good deal of the schoolboy in me, and it will probably remain my constant companion through life. There are said to be people who have no capacity for betterment and no talent for learning from the behavior of others. No, I do not learn, for I find it beneath my dignity to surrender to the urge for education. Besides, I am already educated enough to carry a walking stick in my hand with some grace, and to knot a necktie, and to grasp a spoon with my right hand, and to say, when asked, “Thank you, it was very nice yesterday evening.” What more can education make of me? Honestly: I think education would be coming to quite the wrong person. I go for money and comfortable status, that’s my urge for education. I seem to be terribly superior to a miner, even if he, if he so wished, could whisk me, with the forefinger of his left hand, into a hole in the earth, where I would get dirty. Strength and beauty among poor people and in modest dress make no impression on me. I always think, when I see a person like that, how well-off people like us are, with our superior position in the world, compared with such a work-raddled fool, and no compassion steals into my heart. Where should I keep a heart? I have forgotten that I have one. Certainly it is sad, but how should I find it proper to feel sorrow? One feels sorrow only when one has lost money, or when one’s new hat does not fit well, or when one’s holdings on the stock exchange drop, and even then one has to ask if that is sorrow or not, and on closer inspection it is not, it is only a fleeting regret, which vanishes like the wind. It is, no, how can I put it now — it is marvelously strange to have no feelings in this way, not to know at all what an emotion is. Feelings which concern one’s own person, everyone has these, and they are at root despicable ones, presumptuous ones if they relate to humanity as a whole. But feelings for particular people? Of course, one sometimes would like to ask oneself about this, one feels something like a slight longing to become a good, compliant person, but when could one manage it? Perhaps at seven in the morning, or some other time? Already on Friday, and right through the Saturday following, I am wondering what to do on Sunday, since on Sunday something always has to be done. I seldom go for a walk alone. Usually I join a group of young people, the way one does; it is quite simple, one simply goes along with them, though one knows that one is rather a boring companion. I take the steamer, for example, across the lake, or go on foot, into the forest, or travel by train to more distant, beautiful spots. Often I accompany girls to a dance, and I have found that the girls like me. I have a white face, beautiful hands, an elegant, fluttering dinner jacket, gloves, rings on my fingers, a cane with silver mountings, clean polished shoes, and a tender Sunday sort of bearing, such a remarkable voice, and about my mouth a peevish trait, which I myself have no words to describe, but which seems to endear me to the girls. When I speak, it is as if a man of some gravity were speaking. Pomposity appeals, there’s no doubt about that. As for my dancing, it is like that of a person who has only just taken, and enjoyed, lessons: jaunty, delicate, punctual, precise, but too fast and insipid. There is precision and buoyancy in my dancing, but unfortunately no grace. How could I be capable of grace? But I love to dance, passionately. When I dance I forget that I am Helbling, for I am nothing but a happy floating-in-the-air. Thoughts of the office, with its manifold agonies, would not intrude on me at all. Around me are flushed faces; perfume and brightness of girls’ clothes, girls’ eyes gaze at me; I am flying: can one imagine oneself happier? Now I have got it: once in the cycle of the week I can be happy. One of the girls whom I always accompany is my fiancée, but she treats me badly, worse than the other ones do. She is not even — and I do certainly notice it — faithful to me, hardly loves me, I suppose, and I, do I love her? I have many faults, which I have candidly disclosed, but here all my faults and inadequacies seem to be forgiven me: I love her. It is my joy, that I may love her and often despair because of her. She gets me to carry her gloves and pink silk sunshade when it is summer; and in winter I am allowed to trot after her in the deep snow, carrying her skates. I do not understand love, but feel it. Good and evil are nothing compared with love, which knows nothing other than or outside of love. How should I express it: worthless and empty as I otherwise am, not everything is lost, for I really am capable of faithful love, although I could have ample scope for infidelity. I go with her in the sunshine, under the blue sky, in a boat, which I row forward, and keep on smiling at her, while she seems to be bored. Yes, I am a very boring person. Her mother has a small, seedy, rather ill-reputed workingman’s bar, where I can spend whole Sundays on end, sitting, saying nothing, smiling at her. Sometimes, too, her face comes down to mine so as to let me press a kiss on her mouth. She has a sweet, sweet face. On her cheek there is the scar of an old scratch, which makes her mouth twist a little, but sweetly. She has very small eyes, which twinkle at you craftily as if to say: “I’ll show you a thing or two!” Often she sits beside me on the shabby, hard sofa, and whispers in my ear that it really is lovely to be engaged. I seldom know what to say to her, for I am always afraid that it would not be opportune; so I am just silent and yet want badly to say something to her. Once she extended to my lips her small, fragrant ear: Hadn’t I got anything to say, something that could only be whispered? I said, trembling, that I did not think so, and then she boxed my ears and laughed as well, but not in a friendly way, no, coldly. She does not get on well with her mother and her little sister, and will not let me be kind to her sister. Her mother has a nose that is red from drinking, and she is a lively little woman, who likes to sit at the table with the men. But my fiancée sits with the men, too. Once she said to me, in a quiet voice: “I’m not chaste any more”; her tone was quite natural, and I had no objection to make. What could I possibly have had to say? With other girls I am brisk, and am even witty in my speech; but with her I sit dumbly and look at her and follow each of her movements with my eyes. Each time I sit there until the bar has to close, or even longer, till she packs me off home. When the daughter is not there, the mother comes to sit at my table and tries to make me think of her. I fend it off with a hand and I smile. The mother hates her daughter, and it is obvious that they hate each other, for each obstructs the other’s intentions. Each wants a husband and each grudges the husband to the other. When I am sitting, evenings, on the sofa, all the people who come to the bar notice that I am the bridegroom-to-be, and everyone has a friendly word for me, but I really could not care. Beside me, the little sister, who is still at school, reads in her books, or she does big tall letters in her writing book, and always she passes it across to me, so that I can look at what she has done. I have never taken any notice, normally, of such little creatures, and now all at once I understand how interesting every little growing creature is. It is because of my love for the other one. An honest love makes one better and more alert. In winter she tells me: “It will be lovely in spring when we can walk together along the garden paths”; and in spring she tells me: “It is boring with you.” She wants to live in a big town when she is married, because she wants to get something out of life. The theaters and fancy-dress balls, beautiful costumes, wine, laughing conversation, gay exciting people, that is what she loves, that is what she longs for. I long for it too, as a matter of fact, but how it can all be done, I do not know. I told her: “Perhaps by next winter I shall have lost my job.” She looked at me them, open-eyed, and asked: “Why?” What sort of answer should I have given her? I certainly cannot with a single stroke show her what sort of person I am. She would despise me. Till now, she has always thought of me as a man of some ability, a man, of course a rather odd and boring one, but still a man with a position in the world. If I now tell her: “You are wrong, my position is very shaky indeed,” she would have no reason to want my company any more, seeing all her hopes of me destroyed. I let it go, I am a master in letting things slide, as they say. Perhaps, if I were a dancing instructor, owner of a restaurant, or a theater director, or had some other profession connected with the entertainment of people, then I might have some luck, for I am that sort of person, jaunty, afloat, leg-flinging, light, buoyant, quiet, always making a bow and having a tender emotion, who would do well as a landlord, stage manager, or tailor, or something. Whenever I have a chance to make a bow, I am happy. That helps one, does it not, to give a deep look? I even bow where it is not usual to do so, or when only toadies and imbeciles do, so much in love am I with the procedure. For serious man’s work I have not the intellect or the sense, neither ear nor eye nor mind. Nothing in the world could be further from me. I want to make a profit, but it has got to cost me no more than the twinkling of an eye, at most the lazy extending of a hand. Normally, unwillingness to work is not quite natural in men, but it fits me, it suits me, even if this is a sorry garb which suits me so perfectly, and even if the garb’s cut is pitiable: why shouldn’t I say, “It suits me,” when anyone can see for himself that it does, to a T. Unwillingness to work! But I don’t want to say any more about it. I am always thinking, too, that it is the fault of the climate, the damp lake air, which prevents me from getting to work, and now, with this knowledge pressing upon me, I am looking for a job in the south, or in the mountains. I could direct a hotel, or manage a factory, or run the counter at a smallish bank. A sunny, open landscape should be able to develop talents in me which till now have been dormant. A greengrocery would not be bad. In any case, I am a person who always believes that great inward gains come through external change. Another climate would produce, also, a different menu for lunch, and perhaps this is what the matter is. Could it really be that I am ill? So much is wrong; I am deficient, actually, in everything. Could it be that I am an unlucky person? Could it be a sort of sickness to concern oneself always, as I do, with such questions? Anyway, it is not quite normal. Today I was ten minutes late again at the bank. I cannot get there on time any more as the others do. I ought really to be quite alone in the world, me, Helbling, and not a single living being besides me. No sun, no culture, me, naked on a high rock, no storms, not even a wave, no water, no wind, no streets, no benches, no money, no time, and no breath. Then, at least, I should not be afraid any more. No more fear and no more questions, and I should not be late any more, either. I could imagine that I was lying in bed, everlastingly in bed! Perhaps that would be the best thing.