I do not speak as I think, I do not think as I should, and so it all goes on in helpless darkness.

The line condenses a characteristically Kafkaesque sense of inner disjunction: speech fails to match thought, and thought fails to meet an ethical or rational ideal (“as I should”). The result is not merely confusion but a felt moral and existential paralysis—an ongoing drift “in helpless darkness,” where self-knowledge and self-expression cannot align. Read this way, the quote captures a modernist anxiety about language’s inadequacy and the self’s fragmentation: the speaker is trapped between inauthentic expression and insufficient inward clarity, unable to correct either. It also echoes Kafka’s recurring themes of guilt, self-scrutiny, and the oppressive opacity of one’s own motives.