Robert Walser: A Schoolboy's Diary and Other Stories

Since all of these things literally swarmed and seethed to be diligently, properly stored up in his memory, there always remained a large number left over that he should have paid equal attention to, although there was in fact no possible way he could have possessed enough brainpower to do so.

But at least there was the day when he helped two poor village schoolboys pull and push their cart for a ways, an occurrence or diminutive incident that stayed with Hans always, the same way a faithful, obedient dog makes sure to run after his master or mistress always. However trivial the little event might have been in and of itself, it nonetheless burrowed its way deeply into his inner life. The deed took place on a steep mountain road, where the two boys were struggling to try to move a cart from the spot where it found itself. One of them even started crying because the difficult task just did not want to be accomplished. In vain was one desperate expenditure of strength after another sacrificed to the attempt.

Now since our Mister Hans happened to come walking down the road just then and saw the desperate situation, he helped push, thereby making the thing progress nice and quickly. When the little lads politely thanked the grown-up passerby for his assistance, he thought and said to himself:

“How beautiful it is to be able to lend a hand and help someone. How happy this most charming of all little adventures makes me. How the tear-stained face before me has just this minute been transformed into an unclouded, satisfied, noticeably smiling one.

“Often enough have I longed to be able to do some small good in the world, something kind in some way. And now a modest opportunity to be good-hearted, feel human sympathy, and help out has just presented itself.”

The fact is, Hans had for the longest time held it against himself that all he did was roam around for himself, free and easy, neither attached to other people nor bound up in some way with rough-and-tumble day-to-day working life but rather just flitting past human beings and social conditions, not so much standing on his own two feet in life itself as alas instead simply strolling past it, admittedly in no sense inattentive to the cares and joys of his fellow man but still in truth moving past them too quickly, too exclusively concerned with himself, and therefore only looking on at active, suffering life rather than actually living it — too much the spectator and correspondingly much too little the active participant, the essentially affected party concerned.

One time, it happened that he went walking with an old gentleman, whose white hair made a deep impression on him, up a moderately high hill. Several cherry trees adorning the road were thickly covered with ripening red fruit, smiling out from the soft pale green of the foliage like a kind of cheerful eye.

The two of them walked into the nearby forest. Before they reached it, they passed through a little newly built area or nice outlying district.

The old man proved to have the liveliest interest in everything that looked in any way worth seeing, in a manner that made his old age give an impression of utmost youth.

The sight of the pleasant green forest, which looked like a green capital city, ceremonial residence, king’s palace, and amiable-solemn high cathedral in green in one, gave great pleasure to the old man’s ancient eyes and heart. Hans noticed this and it made him happy. To be permitted to see someone made happy makes us happy ourselves, provided we are decent people.

Out from the sweetly hidden depths of the forest came the sounds of the woodland birds, an army as unwarlike as it was invisible, performing an afternoon concert in the best possible way, which would have been able to satisfy even the most spoiled and fastidious ears.

Visibly glad as he was about his well-preserved health, which allowed him to hike in the mountains in order to enjoy the lovely view in person even in this his time of old age, the old man expressed the opinion, almost with pride but in any case with uncommon good spirits, that his old legs did his bidding better than young legs did that of most young people. Hans, contemplating the January snow on the old man’s head with a certain amount of pity, could not do enough to approve the vitality and joie de vivre he saw the man displaying.

“If accumulated years and long since entered-upon fragility are still able to greet the world so joyously, how committed in every sense to good humor and grateful affirmation of life must not those who are still young and strong feel?” was the noble thought that came to his consciousness in the company of the old man.

On August First, which as is well known is our fatherland’s most beautiful holiday, all sorts of boat rides were organized on the lake in the evening under flashing, hissing fireworks. Rowboats and sailboats glided this way and that through the water while a large crowd of cheerful people stood and promenaded on the streetlight-bedecked shore. Rockets flew high into the night sky only to rain back onto the lake as a scintillating spray of fire, a spectacle that looked almost like a Venetian night. The incandescent spheres of fireworks shone down from above; through the silent blackness of the night shot magnificent if admittedly artificial stars. Farther off in the distance, high atop the mountains, the memorial fires burned. The night was still and warm, like a carefully locked room or like a high, beautiful, dark, aristocratic hall where everyone involuntarily falls silent because unnecessary noise seems inappropriate.

On the nearby forested mountains, among all sorts of scattered, light-green hazelnut shrubs and isolated taller trees standing all around, Hans found places to play and rest that were more lovely that any you could have probably ever seen anywhere else. There were places there that Hans could tear himself away from only with great difficulty, since they invited him to remain in what seemed like everlasting sitting and lying by offering the wanderer and mortal creature an uninterrupted slumber.

Hans lay down, now here, now there, on the green, soft, familiar ground thickly covered with sweet-smelling grass and wildflowers, looked up at the sky, and stood up and kept walking so that he could soon thereafter lie back down again once more in the meadow under some other tree in some other little clearing.

In such a way, he spent the most beautiful hours. It seemed to him that he had never before felt so easy and light. No longer did his happy heart encounter anything dark, at most only something half dark every now and then. Illusions took possession of his unconstricted soul. He threw himself into the arms of the enjoyment of outdoor nature much like the way a lover throws herself into those of her beloved, a mother into those of her child, a wife into those of her faithful and good husband, or a friend into those of his friend, to hold fast, full of trust, to the good and the beautiful.

As he lay there quietly, he saw people come and go who took just as great if not even greater pleasure in the beauty and freedom, breath and movement, ease, calm, and peace spread out all around him as he, and who felt if not happier than he about all these straightforwardnesses and suchlike reverberations then certainly just as happy.

His lazy loafing increased noticeably from day to day, not entirely unlike the waters of a great flood. Hans thought: “I really do have to see to it soon that I start to work hard.” Iron resolutions and steadfast vows are after all inherently beautiful things. Hans did not however for all that start to work hard for a long time. Maybe it would come to him later, he consoled himself.

Plucking and eating whole hand- or fistfuls of wild strawberries he found very pleasing. Possibly the time will come one day when anyone caught in such states of idleness or sluggardly activities is thrown in jail and sentenced to hard labor.