Robert Walser - A Schoolboy's Diary and Other Stories

Yes, goodness gracious, I am certainly a proponent of the slackard’s life, laziness, happiness, and peace; but alas I am also for the military. I think peace is nice and I think the military is nice. How can I make heads or tails of this strange contradiction? I cannot deny the peace-loving part of myself, but nor can I deny that I am a true friend of the soldier’s life. Anyway, I notice that this essay is about ready to draw to a close, and so I take my leave with all best regards until the next time I have the opportunity to take pen in hand.

September 1915

ONCE IT was great and powerful, with lordly gaze and posture, but then came a time when it forgot itself and permitted itself to be misused, and it turned ugly. Those who spoke it made it into a means of expression for everything banal, so that the whole world laughed at its low and sorry state. The whole beautiful thing collapsed. What had once been exemplary became a caricature. The splendid tree withered away, and still it fancied itself, as bad as it had become. Its disgrace lasted for a long time. Some people thought it was near death, and they were right. It died, that is to say, it crept around like a dead thing. No one thought it would ever regain its strength. It lost all its charm and attraction, sounded dry, hard, and clownish, and served the purposes almost solely of rude aggression and rough haste. Its ruined voice was the most unpleasant thing imaginable; most people found it horrific. Yes, it was sick, and it now lies downtrodden and crushed, and yet there are still those who love it as they always have, and who want to remain true to it, for they think that it is imperishable and that it will one day regain its beauty. In total silence, in dark and inconspicuous places, they nurse it back to health. Surely it will rise up once more and perfume the air and blossom and have its spring and ring out like birdsong. One won’t want to miss that. Those who believe in it have to be patient. Now it is tired, sleepy, with weary limbs and soundless words. It seems paralyzed, but it will leap again and dance and have all the agility it once possessed. Just wait until it has been restored. It is lost, it is crying, but it will find its way and laugh out loud. Then it will be like a summer garden, like a resurrected sun, and everything around it will be happy and rich and strong and good. And soft and natural. Then it will know itself once more, and all will delight in it. It will blast like a beatific wind across the earth and all things. Downcast now, it will rejoice. Desire and comfort will be felt by all who hear it speak. Maybe, when that day comes, I will lie beneath a fir tree on the grass and kiss it and once again be its poet.

May 1919

EARLY in the morning, how good, how blindingly bright your mood was, how you peeked into life like a child and, no doubt, often enough acted downright fresh and improper. Enchanting, beautiful morning with golden light and pastel colors!

How different, though, at night — then tiring thoughts came to you, and solemnity looked at you in a way you had never imagined, and people walked beneath dark branches, and the moon moved behind clouds, and everything looked like a test of whether you too were firm of will and strong.

In such a way does good cheer constantly alternate with difficulty and trouble. Morning and night were like wanting to and needing to. One drove you out into vast immensity, the other pulled you back into modest smallness again.

May 1920

HOW QUIET you are, you dear, delicate flowers. You don’t move from place to place, you have neither eyes nor ears, and you never take a walk, which is so nice. Now and then you look like you can talk, but in any case you certainly have feelings and a sensitivity of your own. I often feel like you are pondering, with all kinds of thoughts. I’m doubtless deluding myself. But still, I think about you a lot and I would love to live with you, as one of you, I would happily be like you, let the sunshine caress me, rock and sway in the wind.

May 1920

I SEE IT even when I am not paying attention and walk right by it. It doesn’t run away, it doesn’t move at all, can’t think, doesn’t want a thing, no, only to grow, to exist in space and have leaves that one doesn’t touch, only looks at. Hurrying past in the shadows they cast are all sorts of busy people.

Have I really never given you anything? But it doesn’t need any happiness. Maybe it is pleased when someone finds it beautiful. Do you think so, dear readers? What holy innocences it proclaims. It knows nothing, it is there entirely and only for my pleasure.

Why does it have no way to perceive my love? We say something and mean well but no sense of hearing is granted it. Never does it see me smile at its greeting that it is not aware of itself. Or lie down at the feet of its being, like that woman departing forever painted by Courbet, to die!

And yet I will live on, but then what will become of you?

October 1925

THIS IS probably my last prose piece. There are all sorts of considerations that lead me to conclude that it is high time for a goatherd boy like myself to be done with the composing and submitting of prose pieces and abandon this clearly too difficult occupation. I am happy to look around for another line of work that might make it possible for me to eat my bread in peace.

What have I been doing these ten long years? In order to be able to answer that question I must first sigh, second sob, and third start a new chapter or at least a fresh paragraph.

For ten long years I have continually written little prose pieces, which rarely proved worth the trouble. What have I not had to endure! A hundred times over, I cried, “Never again shall I write and send out!” only to write and send out new productions every time on the same or at most the following day, to the extent that today I can hardly believe this course of action myself.

The extent of my submissions will probably never be matched. It stands alone. Due to its drollness it really belongs affixed to an advertising pillar so that all can marvel at my guileless fidelity. Nothing of its like will ever happen again. With respect to the production and releasing out into the world of appropriate prose pieces I manifested an unspeakable avidity and indescribable perseverance. It flew out from my watchmaking studio or dressmaker’s/shoemaker’s shop in every direction like doves from a dovecote or bees from a beehive. Flies and mosquitoes buzz hither and thither no more busily than did the prose pieces I sent winging their way to all sorts of editors and publishers.

What did messieurs the librarians do with all the sketches, studies, and essays I heaped upon their heads? They read them, nosed them, eyeballed them, took them under consideration, and then put them neatly back into their folders or drawers where they remained safe and sound awaiting their respective appropriate opportunities.

And did said opportunity hasten to show its face? It most certainly did not! It never seemed to be in much of a hurry to turn up. Sometimes it took years before it arrived, during which span of time an unfortunate man in his attic room tore out his hair.

What I joyfully wrote and shooed forth was thrown into as it were solitary confinement, where it slowly shriveled up. Lines, sentences, pages died heartrending deaths in the air of the drawer, death by drying up and withering. I saw what I had so briskly brought forth turn dull, pale, and wan.

One time, a fresh young verdant rosy-cheeked pretty round prose piece spent six whole years sitting in a barren, desolate place, where eventually it became completely scraggly and dried up. When at last it came to light, i.e., appeared in print, I had to cry for joy, behaving like a poor father overcome with tender feelings.