Robert Walser: A Schoolboy's Diary and Other Stories

This time, the teacher said, each of you can write whatever comes to mind. To be honest, nothing comes to mind. I don’t like this kind of freedom. I am happy to be tied to a set subject. I am too lazy to think of something myself. And what would it be? I’m equally happy to write about anything. I don’t like hunting around for a topic, I like looking for beautiful, delicate words. I can come up with ten, even a hundred ideas from one idea, but the original idea never comes to me. What do I know. I write because it’s nice to fill up the lines with pretty little letters like this. The “what” makes no difference to me at all. — Aha, I’ve got it. I will try to give a description of our schoolroom. No one has ever done that before. I’ll definitely get an Excellent for that. — When I raise my head and look out over the many schoolboy heads around me, I cannot help but laugh. It is so mysterious, so strange, so bizarre. It is like a sweetly humming fairy tale. To think that every one of those heads is full of diligent, frolicking, racing thoughts is mysterious enough. Writing class may be the most lovely, attractive time for just this reason. No other class time goes by so noiselessly, so worshipfully, and with everyone working so quietly on their own. It is as though you could hear Thought itself softly whispering, softly stirring. It’s like the scurrying of little white mice. Now and then a fly rises up and then softly sinks back down onto a head to relax on a single hair. The teacher sits at his desk like a hermit between high cliffs. The blackboards are black, unfathomable lakes. The gaps between them are the white foam of the waves. The hermit is completely sunk in thoughts and reflections. Nothing that happens anywhere in the world, i.e., in the schoolroom, touches him. Now and then he gives his scalp a luxurious scratch. I know what a sensual pleasure it is to scratch your head. You stir up countless ideas that way. It doesn’t look especially nice, that’s true, but anyway, not everything can look nice. The teacher is a short, frail, feeble man. I’ve heard it said that men like that are the smartest and most learned. That may well be true. I am firmly convinced that this teacher is infinitely smart. I wouldn’t want to bear the burden of his knowledge. If it’s unseemly to write that, please keep in mind that it is absolutely necessary for a portrait of our schoolroom. The teacher is very excitable. He often flies into a terrible rage when a schoolboy makes him angry by not being able to do something. That’s wrong. Why get excited about something as minor as a schoolboy being lazy? But actually I’m not one to talk. If I had to be in his place, I might have an even shorter temper. You need a very special kind of talent to be a teacher. To keep your dignity faced with rascals like us all day long requires a lot of willpower. All things considered our teacher has good self-control. He has a gentle, intelligent way of telling stories, which you can’t give him enough credit for. He is very properly dressed, and it’s true that we laugh behind his back a lot. A back is always a little ridiculous. There’s nothing you can do about it. He wears high boots, as though just returning from the Battle of Austerlitz. These boots that are so grand, only the spurs are missing, give us a lot to think about. The boots are practically bigger than he is. When he’s really mad, he stamps his feet with them. I’m not very happy with my portrait.

We’re supposed to write something from our imagination. My imagination likes brightly colored things, like fairy tales. I don’t like dreaming about chores and homework. What’s all around you is for thinking, what’s far away is for dreaming. — On the lake whose waves beat against the outermost houses in our city, a noble lady and a noble lad are floating in a small rowboat. The lady is dressed in extremely luxurious and valuable clothing, the boy more humbly. He is her page. He rows, then he lifts up the oars and lets drops of water fall like pearls into the great, recumbent water. It is quiet, wonderfully quiet. The large lake lies there as still as a puddle of oil. The sky is in the lake, and the lake looks like a watery, deep sky. Both of them, the lake and the sky, are a softly dreaming blue, a blue. Both of them, the noble lady and the noble lad, are dreaming. Now the boy calmly rows a bit farther out, but as quietly, as slowly, as if he were afraid to move any farther. It’s more like floating than gliding, and more like being quiet and not moving than gliding. The lady is smiling at the boy the whole time. She must like him very much. The boy smiles under her smile. It is morning, one of those lake mornings with a kiss of sunshine. The sun blazes down onto the lake, the rowboat, both people, onto their happiness, onto everything. Everything is happy. Even the colors on the beautiful lady’s clothes are happy. Colors must have feelings too. Colors are lovely and they go well with happiness. The lady is from the castle rising up on the right-hand shore of the lake, its towers glittering. She is a countess. At her behest the boy has untied the little boat and rowed out to where they are now: almost in the middle of the lake. The lady holds her white hand in the greenish, bluish water. The water is warm. It kisses the offered hand. It has a real wet mouth for kissing. The white walls of the scattered country houses shimmer toward them from the shore. The brown vineyards are beautifully reflected in the water, the country houses too. Obviously! The one has to be reflected just as much as the other. Nothing gets special treatment. Everything that makes the shoreline lively with shape and color is subject to the lake, which does with it whatever it wants. It mirrors it. It, the lake, is the magician, the lord, the fairy tale, the picture. — The rowboat glides across this deep, watery, undulating picture. Always the same calm floating. We have already described it, even if we have not said enough. We? Good grief, am I speaking in the plural? That’s a habit authors have, and whenever I write essays I always feel like a real author. But the lake, the boat, the waves, the lady, the boy, and the oar can’t fade away quite yet. I want to look at them one more time. The lady is sweet and beautiful. I don’t know any ladies who aren’t sweet and beautiful. This one, though, in such charmingly sweet surroundings transfigured with sun and colors, is especially so. Plus of course she’s also a distinguished countess from bygone times. The boy is a figure from an earlier century too. There aren’t pages anymore. Our era no longer needs them. The lake, on the other hand, is the very same lake. The same blurry distances and colors as back then shine across it now , and the same sun. The castle still stands too, but it’s empty.

Anyone who wants to lead an upstanding life in this world needs a career. You can’t just work your way along. Work has to have a particular character and a goal it is aiming toward. To reach that goal, you choose a profession. This happens when a person leaves school, at which point that person is an adult, or in other words, now he has another school he has to attend: life. Life is a strict schoolmaster, they tell you, and it must be true if it is such a universal opinion. We can choose whatever we want as our profession, and anywhere we can’t do that, it is an injustice. There are all kinds of jobs I’d like. That makes it hard to choose one. I think the best thing to do would be take up some profession or another, maybe the first one that comes along, try it out, and, when I’ve had enough of it, toss it aside. For is it even possible to know how things will look from inside a given job? It seems to me that you have to live it first. Inexperienced minds, like ours, cannot be faced with a choice without making spectacular fools of themselves. It’s really something for parents to do, choosing a career for you. They know what’s right for you better than anyone. And if something other than what they’ve decided on for our lives turns out to suit us better, there’s always time to change saddles later. You don’t sink to the level of a saddler. No, it is rarely unfair to us, whatever they do. — Well, I’d like to be captain of a ship. But I wonder if my parents would agree. They love me very much and they would be worried about me if they knew I was exposed to the ocean’s storms. The best thing to do would naturally be to run away in secret — at night, out through the window, down a rope, and goodbye forever. But no! I don’t have the courage to trick my parents, and who knows if I even have what it takes to be a ship’s captain. I don’t want to be a locksmith, a joiner, or a carpenter. Such manual labor is not suited to an essayist of my caliber. A bookbinder would be nice, but my parents would not allow it, since I know they think I’m much too good for that. As long as they don’t make me go to university, I would go crazy there. I have no desire to be a doctor, no talent to be a pastor, no stick-to-itiveness to be a lawyer or a teacher… I’d rather die. Our teachers, in any case, are all unhappy, you can tell just by looking at them. I’d like to be a forest ranger. I would build myself a little house overgrown with ivy at the edge of the forest and wander around in the forest all day until late at night. Maybe that would start to seem boring to me too eventually and I would long for the big fancy cities. As a poet I would want to live in Paris, as a musician in Berlin, as a businessman nowhere. Just stick me in an office and see what happens. Well there’s one other thing I have in my soul: It would be great to join the circus. A famous tightrope walker, sparklers on my back, the stars above me, an abyss to either side, and just a slender, delicate path to walk before me. — A clown? I do feel that I have some talent for joking around. But my parents would be hurt if they knew I was onstage with a long nose painted red and flour sprinkled on my cheeks and wearing a wide, ridiculous suit. — Well, then what? Stay home and whine? Not that, never. One thing for sure, I’m not worried about finding a career. There are so many of them.