220 Kant: A Biographycontribute greatly to the improvement of my situation. I believe I must pay attention
to this instinct of my nature, if I still want to lengthen somewhat the thread, which fate
spins very thinly and delicately for me.^121It would be easy to dismiss Kant's fears today, but we should realize the hard¬
ships that any extended trip would have presented in the eighteenth cen¬
tury. A move from one city to another was not an easy matter, and if Kant's
health was as delicate as he believed it to be - and there really is no reason
to doubt this - then his cautiousness was not altogether unreasonable.
Around the end of 1777 Kant did move out of Kanter's house into quar¬
ters "at the Ochsenmarkt." Borowski detailed the reason as follows: "he was
driven out of his [Kanter's] house by a neighbor, who held a cock on his
property, whose crowing often interrupted Kant in his meditations. He of¬
fered to buy the animal from the neighbor at any price to obtain peace from
the loud animal. Yet he did not succeed to persuade the stubborn neigh¬
bor who could not at all comprehend how the cock could bother Kant."^122
Again, it was noise that made Kant move.
The new quarters could not have been very comfortable. Kraus, who
moved into the very same rooms (after Kant vacated them to move into a
house of his own), complained about them in the very cold winter of 1786.
Thus he spoke of "my broken rooms, in which my fingers get stiff and my
thoughts stop."^123 Kant, who placed the greatest emphasis on well-heated
rooms, would not have appreciated the new drafty abode either. But Kraus,
just like Kant, seemed to like the peacefulness of the surroundings. He
took up Kant's quarters at the Ochsenmarkt because he wanted to escape
from his own noisy neighborhood. Thus he wrote in April of 1783 that the
lack of progress in his work "must be the fault of the most horrible street
noise because I am not entirely thoughtless. But I cannot keep my thoughts
together at all. As soon as it is no longer necessary to heat, I will move to
the back [of the house] where at least no carriages go by."^124 The drafts
seem to have been so bad and the situation so irreparable that the owner
later bricked in the windows altogether. It was thus not so easy for a young
professor at the University of Königsberg to find acceptable rooms. After
all, they not only had to house him, but also had to provide him with large
enough lecture rooms. Price certainly was a consideration as well.
Kant only rented rooms and did not really maintain a household. He
thus had to eat out every day. Indeed, this was a constant in Kant's life.
From the time of his earliest years as a Magister until about Easter of 1787,
when he finally set up his own "economy" or household, he had to eat at a