Robert Walser - The Tanners

“How sad!” the other man said.

“Let’s drink up and go,” said the one who’d been telling this story, adding: “Some insist on claiming that the girls of ill repute he’d been involved with had destroyed him, but I don’t believe this; I think people tend to exaggerate the bad influence these wenches can exert on a man. These things aren’t quite so serious, and perhaps madness just ran in the family.”

Simon leapt to his feet, violently agitated, his cheeks flushed with indignation:

“What’s that you’re saying? In the family? You’re quite mistaken, my noble storyteller. Take a good look at me, if you will. Do you perhaps see in me as well something that might run in the family? Must I too be sent to the madhouse? This would indubitably occur if it ran in the family, for I too come from this family. That young man is my brother. I’m not at all ashamed to identify as my brother this merely unfortunate and by no means insidious individual. Is his name not Emil, Emil Tanner? Could I know this if he were not my own dear natural brother? Is his father, who is also mine, not a flour merchant by any chance, who also does a flourishing business in wine from the Burgundy region and oil from Provence?”

“Indeed, all that is true,” said the man who’d been telling the story.

Simon went on: “No, it cannot possibly run in the family. I shall deny this as long as I live. It’s simply misfortune. It can’t have been the women. You’re quite right when you say it wasn’t them. Must these poor women always be at fault when men succumb to misfortune? Why don’t we think a bit more simply about it? Can it not lie in a person’s character, in a particle of the soul? Like this, and always like this, and therefore in the soul? Look, if you will, how I am moving my hand just now: Like this, and in the soul! That’s where it lies. A human being feels something, and then he acts in such-and-such a way, and then collides with various walls and uneven spots, just like that. People are always so quick to think of horrific genetic inheritances and the like. To me that seems ridiculous. And what cowardice and lack of reverence to insist on holding his parents and his parents’ parents responsible for his misfortune. This shows a lack of both propriety and courage, not to mention the most unseemly soft-heartedness! When misfortune crashes down upon your head, it’s just that you’ve provided all that was needed for fate to produce a misfortune. Do you know what my brother was to me, to me and Kaspar, my other brother, to us younger ones? He taught us on our shared walks to have a sense for the beautiful and noble, at a time when we were still the most wretched rascals whose only interest was getting up to tricks. From his eyes we imbibed the fire that filled them when he spoke to us of art. Can you imagine what a splendid time that was, how ambitious — in the boldest, most beautiful sense of the word — our quest for understanding? Let’s drink one more bottle together, I’m buying, yes that’s right, even though I’m just an unemployed ne’er-do-well. Hey there! Innkeeper, a bottle of Waadtländer , your finest. — I’m a person who knows no pity. I forgot all about my poor brother Emil long ago. I can’t even manage to think of him, for you see, I’m the sort whose standing in the world is so precarious that he must struggle with all his might to keep on his feet. I don’t want to fall down until such time as I’ll no longer harbor thoughts of getting up again. Yes, that’s when I might perhaps have time to think of these unfortunates and feel pity: when I myself have become pitiable. But this isn’t yet the case, and for the moment when it comes to my own death I intend to go on laughing and jesting. In me you behold a fairly indestructible individual able to endure all sorts of adversity. Life need not be so sparkly to enchant my eyes — to me it’s already sparkling. I generally find it quite beautiful and can’t understand the ones who carp and call it ugly. Here comes the wine. Drinking wine always makes me feel so elegant. My poor brother is still alive! I thank you, sir, for having forced my memory to encounter this unhappy man today. And now, leaving all soft-heartedness behind: Let us raise our glasses, gentlemen: Long live misfortune!—”

“Why, if I might ask?”

“You go too far!”

“Misfortune is educational, that’s why I’m asking you to raise your glasses with this glittering wine to drink a toast to it. And again! There. I thank you. Let me tell you, I’m a friend of misfortune, a very intimate friend, for misfortune merits feelings of closeness and friendship. It makes us better — that’s doing us quite a good turn. Indeed, such an act of friendship must be reciprocated if a person wishes to behave respectably. Misfortune is our lives’ cantankerous but nonetheless honest friend. It would be quite insolent and dishonorable of us to overlook this fact. At first glance we never quite understand misfortune, and for this reason we hate it the moment it arrives. Misfortune is a refined, quiet, unannounced fellow who always surprises us as if we were mere galoots and easily surprised. Anyone who has a talent for surprising others must certainly, regardless of who he is and where he comes from, be something quite extraordinarily refined. Not letting any forebodings come to light and then suddenly standing there; having about one not the faintest inquisitive, anticipatory taste or odor, and then all at once clapping a person chummily on the shoulder, addressing him in a familiar tone while smiling and showing him a pale, mild, all-knowing, beautiful face: This takes more skill than eating bread, requires other devices than those flying contraptions mankind has already started boasting about with grandiose, bombastic words even though they’re still just half invented. No, it’s destiny — misfortune — that’s beautiful. It’s also good, for it contains fortune, its opposite. It appears to be armed with weapons of both sorts. It has an angry crushing voice, but also a gentle mellifluous one. It awakens new life when it has destroyed old life that failed to please it. It spurs one on to live better. All beauty, if we still harbor hopes of experiencing beautiful things, is due to it. Misfortune allows us to grow tired of beautiful things and shows us new ones with its outstretched fingers. Isn’t unhappy love the most emotional sort and thus the most delicate, refined and beautiful? Does not abandonment ring out in soft, flattering, soothing notes? Are these things I am saying all new to you, gentlemen? Well, they surely are new when someone says them aloud; for they rarely get said. Most people lack the courage to welcome misfortune as something in which you can bathe your soul just as you bathe your limbs in water. Just take a look at yourself when you’ve undressed and are standing there naked: What splendor: a naked healthy human being! What good fortune: being clothed no longer and standing there naked! It’s already a stroke of fortune to have come into this world, and having no other good fortune than your health is still fortune that outsparkles and outshines all the finest gemstones, all the beautiful tapestries and flowers, the palaces and miracles. The most marvelous thing of all is health, this is a fortune to which nothing comparable can be added, unless a person in the course of time has become savage enough to wish he might become ill in exchange for a money-purse filled with cash. This plenitude of splendor and good fortune — if we are indeed inclined to see the naked, firm, pliant, warm members that have been given us for our journey through life as such a plenitude — must be counterbalanced, and thus we have misfortune! It can prevent us from bubbling over, it provides us with a soul. Misfortune educates our ears to perceive the beautiful sound that rings out when soul and body, intermingled and conjoined, respire as one. It turns our body into something bodily-soulful and gives our soul a firm existence at our center so that if we choose, we can feel our entire body as a soul, the leg as leaping soul, the arm as carrying soul, the ear as a hearing one, the foot as a nobly walking soul, the eye as the seeing one and the mouth as the kissing one. It makes us truly love, for where can we have loved if no misfortune was present? In dreams it’s even more beautiful than in reality, for when we dream we suddenly understand the sensuality of misfortune, its enchanting kindness. Otherwise it’s usually a hindrance, particularly when it arrives in the form of financial loss. But can this be a misfortune? Say we lose a banknote — what are we losing? Admittedly, this circumstance is highly disagreeable, but it’s no cause to feel inconsolable for any longer than it takes to realize that this is hardly true misfortune. And so on! One could speak a great deal about this; and eventually grow weary of the topic—”