Robert Walser: A Schoolboy's Diary and Other Stories

“On the Value and Necessity of School” says the topic on the blackboard. I would argue that school is useful. It holds me between its iron or wooden claws (school benches) six to eight hours a day and keeps my mind from degenerating into slovenliness. I have to study, that is excellent. It prepares me for the public life that stands before me: that is even better. It exists, and I love and honor facts. I am happy to go to school and happy to leave it. That’s the best variety a useless rascal could ask for. In school, a measuring stick is laid alongside everyone’s knowledge. Now everyone is in the same boat. The poorest kid has the right to be richest in knowledge and ability. No one, not even the teacher, can prevent him from standing out. Everyone has respect for him when he shines; everyone is ashamed of himself when he doesn’t know something. In my opinion that is a nice arrangement, to spur ambition and let you court the admiration of your classmates. I am terribly ambitious. Nothing delights my soul as much as the feeling I get when I surprise my teacher with a clever answer. I know that I’m one of the best students but I constantly tremble at the thought that someone even smarter could catch up to me or surpass me. This thought is as hot and exciting as Hell. That is the most useful thing about school: It tires you out, upsets you, gets you going, it nourishes the imagination, it is the anteroom, the waiting room as it were, of life. Nothing that exists is useless. School the least of all. Only lazy students, who are often punished as a result, could come up with that idea. In fact I’m surprised we were even given this as a topic at all. Schoolboys cannot actually talk about the value of school and need for school when they’re still stuck in it themselves. Older people should write about things like that. The teacher himself, for instance, or my father, who I think is a wise man. The present time, surrounding you, singing and making noise, cannot be put down in writing in any satisfactory way. You can blabber all kinds of nonsense, but it’s a real question whether the mishmash you write (I allow myself the bad manners of describing my work in this way) actually says and means anything. I like school. Anything forced on me, whose necessity has been mutely insisted upon from every side, I try to approach obligingly, and like it. School is the unavoidable choker around the neck of youth, and I confess that it is a valuable piece of jewelry indeed. What a burden we would be to our parents, workers, passersby, shop owners, if we didn’t have to go to school! What would we spend our time doing, if not homework! Playing tricks ends up being pretty exhausting after all. It’s impossible to go for a walk without taking the opportunity to play a trick somewhere or another. Yes, really, school is a nice arrangement. I do not in any way regret going to school, instead I celebrate it from the bottom of my heart. Every smart and truth-loving schoolboy would have to say the same thing, or something along the same lines. It’s pointless to talk about the value of something necessary, everything necessary is valuable automatically.

Nothing would be more boring than people not being polite to each other. Politeness is a delight, for civilized people, and the degree and type of politeness a person shows is like a mirror reflecting his true nature. It would be horrible if people walked right past each other without saying hello, or if you did not have to take off your hat when you walked into a room, or if you could turn your back on parents and teachers while they were talking to you. It would probably be practically unbearable. Without manners there would be no society and without society there would be no life. No question about it: If there were only two or three hundred people living scattered all over the world, manners would not be necessary, but we live so close together, practically on top of each other, that we would not survive a single day without proper rules for getting along. And how amusing they are, these rules that you have to submit to if you want to be a person among other people! There is not one single rule or regulation that lacks its charm. In the kingdom of manners, everything tingles with delicate, dainty little corridors, streets, bottlenecks, and twists and turns. There are spine-chilling abysses there too, more spine-chilling than up in the mountains. How easy it is to fall in, if you’re careless or awkward; on the other hand, how safe you are keeping to the narrow paths when you obediently pay attention. Of course you have to keep your eyes and ears and senses open, otherwise you’ll definitely fall. I feel that manners are almost something delightful. I often walk up and down the street hoping to meet someone my parents know so that I can greet him. I don’t actually know if the way I doff my hat is gracious. It’s enough that it makes me happy just to do it. And it’s nice when grown-ups give you a friendly greeting too. How glorious it is to doff your hat to a lady and be tenderly glanced at by her eyes. Ladies have such kind eyes, and nodding their heads is an extremely lovely way to thank you for such a minor expenditure of labor as raising your hat. Teachers should be greeted from a distance. But it’s proper for teachers to greet you back if you greet them. They only sink in their students’ estimation if they think that they can show their dignity by being rude. Manners are irrespective of age differences, they are simply sufficient unto themselves. If you are not a polite person you will not be polite to anyone, and if you like being polite then you will like being so to everyone that much more. The more big and important a polite person is, the more benevolence his civility has. To be greeted in a friendly fashion by a great and influential man is a true pleasure. Even great people must have once been small, and the best way they can show that they are now great is with kind and gentle behavior. Anyone with a heart is polite. The heart discovers the finest forms of politeness. You can tell when a person has the seat of their politeness somewhere other than in their heart. You can learn manners, but it is hard if you don’t have a talent for it, in other words the heartfelt wish to have the good manners. No one has to be polite, but easy and unforced good behavior is necessarily a part of anyone’s well-being.

It is hard to write about Nature, especially for someone in grade A-2. Writing about people is easy: they have fixed characteristics. But Nature is so blurry, so delicate, so intangible, so infinite. Still I’ll try. I like wrestling with difficult things. It makes your blood surge around in your veins and arteries and excites the senses. Nothing is impossible, I have heard it said somewhere or another. That may be a slightly superficial way to put it, but a streak of truth and fact runs through these words. I went for a walk in the mountains with my brother, the college student. It was in winter, two weeks before Christmas. The mountain is broad as an athlete’s shoulders. It was lightly covered with snow, as if a sensitive, careful hand had strewn it. Delicate little spikes of grass poked out, which was a very pretty sight. The air was full of mist and sun. The blue sky was lightly transparent everywhere — softly, lightly. We daydreamed while we walked. At the top, we sat down on a bench and enjoyed the view. A view like that is the most splendid and liberating thing in the world. Our gaze went down into the valleys and out into the farthest distance, only to tarry in the closest nearness the next moment. You look calmly at the fields, meadows, and mountainsides stretched out at your feet, as though lifeless, or asleep. Mist steals through the narrow valleys and the wide valleys, the forests dream, the roofs of the city sparkle blurrily, everything is a soft, pleasant, big silent dream. Now it looks like the rolling waves of the ocean, now like a cute little toy, now like something infinitely clear again, something that has suddenly become clear. I can’t think of the words for it. Neither of us wanted to interrupt the beautiful Sunday mountain silence. The bells tolled richly from the depths. It seemed to me that they were ringing very close to me, right next to my ears, and then a moment later it seemed to me that they had fallen silent and I could no longer perceive them with my weak hearing. We spoke softly, when we eventually spoke. About art. My brother said that it was a lot harder to play Karl in The Robbers than the villain, Franz, and I had to agree with him when he told me his reasons for saying so. My brother is an excellent painter, poet, singer, piano player, and gymnast. He is very, very talented. I love him, and not only because he is my brother. He is my friend. He wants to be a choirmaster, but really he would rather not be a choirmaster, he would rather be something that brings together all the arts in the world. One thing for sure, he wants to make something of himself. — We went home when the time came when you have to go home, as it always does. The snow gleamed as it fell off the early fir trees. We said that the firs looked marvelously beautiful, like noble, aristocratic women. Here I can see a smile floating over my teacher’s lips. The memory of that Sunday morning walk still floats over me — of the white, dreamy, light-blue view from the bench, of the conversation about art, and of… There’s the bell.