an excerpt from:
The Blue Octavo Notebooks
by Franz Kafka

from THE FIRST NOTEBOOK

Everyone carries a room about inside him. This fact can even be proved by means of the sense of hearing. If someone walks fast and one pricks up one’s ears and listens, say in the night, when everything round about is quiet, one hears, for instance, the rattling of a mirror not quite firmly fastened to the wall.

He stands with chest sunken, shoulders forward, arms dangling, feet that can scarcely be picked up, his gaze fixed in a stare on one spot. A stoker. He shovels up coal and flings it into the furnace, the opening full of flames. A child has come stealing through the twenty courtyards of the factory and tugs at his apron. "Father," it says, "l’ve brought you your soup."

Is it warmer here than down on the wintry earth? How white it towers all around, my coal bucket the only thing that’s dark. If I was high up before, now I am far down, and gazing up at the hills almost dislocates my neck. White, frozen plains of ice, streaked into slices here and there by the tracks of skaters since disappeared. On the high snow, which doesn’t give more than an inch, I follow the tracks of the small arctic dogs. My riding has lost all meaning, I have dismounted and am carrying the coal scuttle on my shoulder.

V. W.
My heartfelt thanks for the Beethoven book. I am beginning the Schopenhauer today. What an achievement this book is. It is devoutly to be hoped that with your so utterly delicate hand, with your so utterly intense vision of true reality, with the disciplined and mighty underground fire of your poetic nature, with your fantastically extensive knowledge, you will raise yet more such monuments — to my unspeakable joy.

Old, in the fullness of the flesh, suffering slight palpitations, I was Iying on the sofa after lunch, one foot on the floor, and reading a historical work. The maid came and, with two fingers laid on her pursed lips, announced a visitor.

"Who is it?" I asked, irritated at having to entertain a visitor at a time when I was expecting my afternoon coffee.

"A Chinaman," the maid said and, turning convulsively, suppressed a laugh that the visitor outside the door was not supposed to hear.

"A Chinese? To see me? Is he in Chinese dress?"

The maid nodded, still struggling with the desire to laugh.

"Tell him my name, ask if I am really the person he wants to see, unknown as I am even to the people next door, and how very unknown then in China."

The maid tiptoed over to me and whispered: "He has only a visiting card, it says on it that he asks to be admitted. He can’t talk German at all, he talks some incomprehensible language. I was frightened to take the card away from him."

"Let him come!" I exclaimed, in the agitation that my heart trouble often brings on, flinging the book to the floor, and cursing the maid for her awkwardness. Standing up and stretching my gigantic form, which could not fail to be a shock to any visitor in this low-ceilinged room, I went to the door. And in fact, the Chinese had no sooner set eyes on me than he flitted straight out again. I merely reached out into the passage and carefully pulled the man back inside by his silken belt. He was obviously a scholar, small, weakly, wearing horn-rimmed spectacles, and with a thin, grizzled, stiff goatee. An amiable mannikin, his head inclined to one side, smiling, with half-closed eyes.