Dolorous Interlude

I’m tired of the street, but no, I’m not tired of it – the street is all of life. There’s the tavern opposite, which I can see if I look over my right shoulder, and there are the piled-up crates, which I can see by looking over my left shoulder; and in the middle, which I can only see if I turn around completely, there’s the steady sound of the shoemaker’s hammer, at the entrance to the offices of the Africa Company. I don’t know what’s on the upper floors. On the third floor there’s a rooming house which is said to be immoral, but so it is with everything, life.

Tired of the street? Only thinking makes me tired. When I look at the street, or feel it, then I don’t think: I do my work with great inner repose, ensconced in my corner, bookkeepingly nobody. I have no soul, nobody here does – it’s all just work in this large office. Where millionaires live the good life, always in some foreign country or other, there is likewise work, and likewise no soul. And all that will remain is one or another poet. If only a phrase of mine could remain, just one thing I’ve written that would make people say ‘Well done!’, like the numbers I register, copying them in the book of my entire life.

I think that I shall always be an assistant bookkeeper in a fabric warehouse. I hope, with absolute sincerity, never to be promoted to head bookkeeper.