“Education Has Done Me Great Harm—” Kafka’s Diaries 1910
It’s a Sunday.
19 July.
But the year reads 1910.
Education Has Done Me Great Harm…
[S]lept, awoke, slept, awoke, miserable life.
When I think about it, I must say that my education has done me great harm in some respects. I was not, as a matter of fact, educated in any out-of-the-way place, in a ruin, say, in the mountains — something against which in fact I could not have brought myself to say a word of reproach. In spite of the risk of all my former teachers not understanding this, I should prefer most of all to have been such a little dweller in the ruins, burnt by the sun which would have shone for me there on the tepid ivy between the remains on every side; even though I might have been weak at first under the pressure of my good qualities, which would have grown tall in me with the might of weeds.
The wild would’ve taught him.
Learning has killed the wild within him, killed the imagination, a kind, beautiful thing. This is him longing to grow up as a “dweller in the ruins”, untamed, wild, sunburnt. There is a kind of discomfort he seems to be wanting for. A kind of challenge. The kind one finds upon living among the mountains where no day is the same as the one before it, not really.
This is the artist’s rebellion against conformity.
He wanted the world to teach him.
The next paragraph is a slightly extended rewrite of this one, where Kafka introduces all the people he holds this begrudging against: his parents, several relatives, visitors to his house, writers, the cook who took him to school, the teachers themselves, the school inspector, even the passers-by. This reproach is everywhere, spread all over his society like a dagger. And the contradiction and defending arguments that he has received for these reproachments—have now too, along with his education, done him great harm.
The rewrites in Kafka’s diary of this same one paragraph is a writer trying to think through his torment, practicing again and again what pains him until it numbs him instead. He keeps reshaping it, not copying, but trying to catch the exact emotion that’s hidden somewhere in there.
In the entry for _ he writes:
My condition is not unhappiness, but it’s not happiness either, not indifference not weakness, not fatigue, not interest in anything else, so what is it then? The fact that I don’t know is probably connected with my inability to write.
Writing helps him think, this shows, as it helps most people. He is a sculptor trying to chisel out the raw core of the idea, of what he actually feels. With each version he adds more metaphors to his explanation of this feeling.
This self-blame also loops endlessly. The psychological spiral is mirrored in his words. Step-by-step, his thoughts just become tangled.
Above all, this is the artist’s struggle for perfection, or writers spending nights away rewriting the same damn paragraph just to hit the core. Kafka begins from the core. He tries to come out into the light but each version, at least to me, feels more ambiguous than the last, adds more emotions to this feeling that one doesn’t really understand at the first read.
Maybe that’s the point.
Buy Kafka’s Diaries.
