'What right have I to write on Prudence, whereof I have little, and that of the negative sort? My prudence consists in avoiding and going without, not in the inventing of means and methods, not in adroit steering, not in gentle repairing. I have no skill to make money spend well, no genius in my economy, and whoever sees my garden discovers that I must have some other garden. Yet I love facts, and hate lubricity and people without perception. Then I have the same title to write on prudence that I have to write on poetry or holiness. We write from aspiration and antagonism, as well as from experience. We paint those qualities which we do not possess.'

Soon after he has begun keeping his notebook (in the eleventh entry), Malte Laurids Brigge has a good day, which is figured for him, retrospectively, by the newly healthy man he sees walking down the street, not needing his crutch: 'he held it in front of him lightly, and from time to time to set it down firm and loud like a herald's staff. He could not repress a smile of joy, and smiled, past everything, at the sun, at the trees. His step was bashful as a child's, but unusually light, full of remembrance of earlier walking.'

The entry ends there, with not many more sentences before that. If it were longer, if it reported on too many more things seen (Malte also describes the morning, the setting), or worse, if it had continued with further events, or another encounter, or anything Malte could have said, it would not have been a good day. By its brevity, its consisting of this lone anecdote, excluding all else, the entry stands in for any other good day: this, or something like this, is sufficient for a good day. As anecdotal, it is the kind of thing anyone might have seen, and that anyone might accept that someone else had seen. Malte states what might work as a principle for the transferability of the anecdotal, later in the fourteenth entry when he says why his juvenile verses are no good. He says more than this, but basically, he says, they were about feelings, rather than experiences. The principle, then: an anecdote is a minimally complete story about someone having an experience.

'Blessed is he who expecteth nothing, for he shall never be disappointed.'

As I get off the bus, a couple is walking past the stop. 'Hello! Hello! Do you have a cigarette?' shouts the woman, waving her hands.

I tell her that I don't smoke.

'Thank you,' says the man, 'I wish I could sleep with you tonight.'

Do I want your arm there on the back of the seat, o man on the bus?

No I do not.

Drafts!

'Every word they say chagrins us and we know not where to begin to set them right.'

'con men guessing at the dreams of the customers'

'Those, then, were Hans Castorp's favorite recordings.'