From an undated entry in The Diaries of Franz Kafka, which was published by Schocken Books in January. Translated from the German.

1.

When I think about it, I must say that my education has in some respects done me great harm. I certainly wasn’t educated in some remote place, say, in a ruin in the mountains, against that I couldn’t utter so much as a word of reproach. At the risk of being misunderstood by every last one of my former teachers, I would gladly and preferably have been that little ruin dweller, burnt by the sun,…