Hegel's preface to the Phenomenology is damn hard work to understand. The dense use of terminology makes no concessions to the reader less closely familiar with this philosopher and remains a challenge to the initiate. It is best to skip it and get to the introduction and read the preface after having gotten through the whole book. It then yields much of its abstruse clarity and throws its own reflective light on not just the work itself but also on the vast field cleared out by Hegel. Ernst Bloch's book on H. also affords some help but not really insightful somehow: it seems to prepare him but leaves the reader unsuspecting and deplorably unprepared. Much biographical detail making for a rather sympathetic and drawing portrait.

Besides this renewed and much hesitating approach to Hegel, I am reading Max Brod's (kafka's friend and editor) very autobiographical Prager Tagblatt. A Prague german speaking newspaper in the thirties peopled its staff of highly differentiated characters and their relations with the czech and german demi-monde. Comic yet static.

Long talk last saturday at work with G. over the challenges of his new promotion, the job of heading our department which I turned down. I wonder if I did the right thing. I would have meant full time work. It would have meant thinking about work outside of work. I am still not ready to give up my free time which is, when I think about it, much taken up by - what shall I call it? the demands of stressful inquiry? Sounds prententious though I am convinced the prententions are made upon me! I have enough of this shadow existence and have seen the bare outlines of the other.