Robert Walser - A Schoolboy's Diary and Other Stories

1917

READING is as productive as it is enjoyable. When I read, I am a harmless, nice and quiet person and I don’t do anything stupid. Ardent readers are a breed of people with great inner peace as it were. The reader has his noble, deep, and long-lasting pleasure without being in anyone else’s way or bothering anyone. Is that not glorious? I should think so! Anyone who reads is far from hatching evil schemes. An appealing and entertaining thing to read has the good quality of making us forget for a time that we are nasty, quarrelsome people who cannot leave each other in peace. Who could deny this clearly rather sad and melancholy-inducing sentence? No doubt books often also sidetrack us from useful and productive actions; still, all things considered, reading has to be commended as beneficial, since it seems to be utterly necessary to apply a restraint to our violent craving for belongings and a gentle anesthetic to our often ruthless thirst for action. To a certain extent, a book is a fetter: It is not for nothing that one speaks of a captivating or gripping read. A book bewitches and dominates us, it holds us spellbound, in other words it exerts a power over us, and we are happy to let such tyranny occur, for it is a blessing. Anyone captivated and gripped by a book for a given time does not use that time to initiate gossip about his dear fellow man, which is always a great and crude mistake. To talk pointlessly is always a mistake. Anyone who holds a newspaper in his hand and assiduously reads around in it qualifies, practically automatically from that very fact alone, as a good citizen. A newspaper reader is not cursing, swearing, and blustering, and for that reason alone reading newspapers is a true benediction, that should be obvious. A reader always looks proper, decent, decorous, and consummately respectable. I have sometimes heard people talk about so-called harmful reading, e.g., infamous Gothic novels. That’s another story we shall avoid getting into, but we can say this much: The worst book in the world is not as bad as the complete indifference of never picking up a book at all. A trashy book is not nearly as dangerous as people sometimes think, and the so-called really good books are under certain conditions by no means as free of danger as people generally like to believe. Intellectual things are never as harmless as eating chocolate or enjoying an apple tart or the like. In principle, the reader just has to know how to cleanly separate reading from life. I remember that as a schoolboy I used to carefully creep under or behind a pear tree every once in a while with an absolutely phenomenally great and fat trashy Gothic novel that took place in Hungary, needless to say, so that my father wouldn’t catch me at my eager reading and greedy enjoyment, which would have resulted in a humiliating tribunal of justice. The book had the mysterious title: Sandor. To follow up on what I have just said about reading and life, perhaps I may be permitted to tell a short story as well, namely:

THE WOMAN WHO READ GOTTFRIED KELLER

A pretty young woman assiduously read the works of Gottfried Keller. Who does not admire these works? Anything I say here can budge the great writer’s reputation as little as it could a boulder. When this pretty young good woman had finished her beautiful book, which conveyed to her such a comfortably noble picture of the world and its inhabitants, she felt in a strange way depressed about life. Her own modest life path suddenly seemed to her very bare. She had become, through her reading, demanding. What she saw in Gottfried Keller’s books she would very much have liked to see in daily life as well, but life was and always is different from books. Living and reading are two very different things. The Gottfried Keller reader felt like hanging her little head in a disappointed sulk. She was almost angry at and resentful of human life, because it was not like the life in Keller’s works. Luckily, she soon thereafter realized that there was little or no point in bearing a grudge against everyday life, which was admittedly perhaps somewhat beastly from a certain point of view. “Be humble, don’t make special demands, and for God’s sake take existence as it is and comes and is given to you,” an inner voice said to the ardent reader of the works of Gottfried Keller, and as soon as she had realized clearly and unambiguously how necessary it was to be modest and undemanding from the bottom of your heart in this, as mentioned, arguably now and then rather cold and beastly world, she straightaway made a happy, cheerful face again, had to laugh at herself and her Gottfried Keller obsession, and was content.

1917

NOW, DEAR reader, let me tell you the story of a love that was of much too high and delicate a type to be able to have any sort of tangible, proper consequences. I should, of course, write a long and finely structured novel on such a moving and beautiful theme, but it’s so nice and sunny and hot outside at the moment that an ordinary person like me would rather take a walk, or perhaps nurse a glass of beer with visible pleasure in a shady garden under the plane trees, or maybe go swimming in the nearby lake under a refreshing west wind. So I will make it brief and say that once, a short while ago, there was a woman (oh, if only she had been Swedish, Russian, Danish!) who loved a young man, and in fact loved him so passionately that she wanted to run away with him out into the wide world, but the messed-up thing was that she was married, and the even more messed-up part of the story was that she was unable to do her husband wrong. Here, oh esteemed reader of Swedish and Nordic novels, I arrive at and in fact wade knee-deep into what is generally called the Danish or psychological novel. And so I continue, with trembling quill, no, hand (but thence quill!) and relate what a real writer cannot say without a sob, namely that the woman almost went out of her healthy and right mind. The good husband likewise, practically. Both of them were, that is to say, too tactful, refined, and sensitive ever to be able to bring their respective selves to cause each other sorrow. Behold the intricate and involved story I have so rashly embroiled myself in! The woman would have been all too happy to be up and off with her stormy lover, but she was too noble to run off, and, yes, she loved, oh dear Lord, them both: her husband as well as the young man. A frightful situation. Now, now I say! by the honor I enjoy as an agile pusher of and painter with the pen, we are seriously daning and sweding now, in a way that I am unwaveringly convinced no one far and wide can match. Can I depart with my lover in search of wide open spaces if at the same time I want with all my heart to stay right here at home with my dear and good husband? Can I love my lover lovingly enough if I am unable to stop loving this legally wedded and espoused husband? Here, it seems to me, the situation is crawling with true if not indeed true blue spiritual and novelistic problems. But onward! The good husband wanted with all his soul to permit his wife to rush off, so that she might become intoxicated with monstrously unprecedented amorous joy, but then he did not give her his permission after all, since doing so would have torn his very heart asunder. From love he was happy to allow it, but then it was from love and nothing but that he begged and pleaded with her to stay nice and well-behaved at home, so that he would not go out of his poor, healthy mind, which nonetheless he would be only too glad to lose and lack forever out of love for her. The wife cried, first of all because she could not go out into the world with her lover, and secondly because she no longer found the strength to stay calmly at home with her husband and dutifully attend to the housework, as previously. The husband cried, tears poured down his face, and he was acting like a desperate man, first of all because he was simply compelled to say to his wife that she should please just stay home and calm down, which caused him pain, since after all as a loving husband he wanted to give his wife everything she wanted, and secondly because he wanted to allow his wife everything possible and everything thinkable, but just couldn’t. The wife wanted to, but was unable to, and similarly the husband wanted to, but couldn’t. And so they both cried. Even the young man had to partake of these tears, like it or not. All three of them wretchedly sobbed. It was just that all three were too sensitive, and so nothing came of it, and with that this story is over too.