Robert Walser - Selected Stories

“This dependent of mine may now be smiling to himself with extraordinary placidity,” he thinks; and he’d gladly expire with a magisterial wrath which almost puts him out of countenance; and that such an incomprehensible kind of wrath should be possible at all belongs among the perils of the master’s state. A master frequently ought to be something like a superman, yet still he remains a man, a fellow man, and “Damnation!” he shouts, fearing for himself, as it were. “Hasn’t he been waiting long enough, this man, martyrizing me with his patience?” And he presses the bell button; that’s to say, he gives the button a bash, and sees in an instant the fatuity of his explosion. He snubs an incoming zealot with a melodramatic brutality that should be seen, and he would happily devour, tigerlike, the sheep who’s waiting for his masterednesses and self-composures, and instead of dropping destructively on an enervating nonentity he jumbles up papers that seem to be giving him a professional look, in a daze, as if they were poor sinners, and the worker has no idea what’s got into the master who is offended to be capable of a sentiment, who is insulted to be able now and again to be unhappy, who is emotionally almost demolished to be regarded as a demolisher, which he is not, doesn’t want to be, cannot be.

“Let me help you!” They’re most often unspeakably good-humored, the people who write such turns of speech, and an incredibly bad mood can possess a person who has occasion to write: “I readily assume that such and such has been promptly dealt with.”

Obeying and commanding commingle; good manners rule masters as well as workers. I offer this essay workerishly and regard its peruser as a master to whom I wish acquaintance with the gratification of seeing some chance to prize what I give him.

My theme does meddle somewhat, of course, as if it came too close to life, which may perhaps have grown too sensitive. What made life so? Is it going to stay as it is, or change? Why am I asking this? Why do so many questions come to me, softly, one after the other? I know, for instance, that I can live without questions. I lived without them for a long time, knew nothing of them. I was open-minded, without their invading me. Now they look at me as if I had an obligation to them. I too, like many people, became sensitive. Time is sensitive, like a person begging for help, a person perplexed. The questions beg and are sensitive and insensitive. The sensitivities harden. The disobliged person is perhaps the most sensitive. Obligations make me, for instance, hard. Those who are begged beg the beggars, who don’t understand this. The questions gaze solicitously in upon them, and are not solicitous, and those who take care of them care for the increase of the questions which regard their answerers as being insensitive. The person who’ll not let them disturb his equanimity for an instant is sensitive in their sight. In that they appear to him answered, he answers them. Why do many people not trust them this way?

[1928]

PUTTING on airs, playing squeamish, acting sensitive, shilly-shallying, finessing, fussing, and frequent dreaming in the night, all this too appertains to freedom, which one can never, in my opinion, comprehend, sense, consider, and respect variously enough. One should always be bowing inwardly to the pure image of freedom; there must be no pause in one’s respect for freedom, a respect which seems to bear a persistent relation to a kind of fear. A remarkable thing here is that freedom sets out to be single, tolerates no other freedoms beside itself. Although this can certainly be said with greater precision, I quickly take occasion to insist that I am a person who tends to appear to himself more frail than he perhaps actually is.

For instance, I allow myself to be positively governed by freedom, so to speak oppressed by it, to be regulated by it in every imaginable way, and with a constancy that amuses me there dwells within me a most outspoken distrust of it, admirable though it be, this freedom, which I almost refrain from mentioning at all. — Freedom smiles at me, and what in turn do I do but say to myself: “Mind you, don’t let yourself be seduced by this smile into all sorts of unprofitabilities.”

I return now to nocturnal dreams, whose main intent, in my opinion, is to intimidate us. The dreams make the free person aware of the dubieties, limits, or provisos of freedom, especially of its being a beautiful delusion which needs to be handled in the most delicate way. Perhaps for this reason not many people know how to deal with freedom correctly, because they do not wish to become accustomed to allowing for its violability. A delusion quickly flits away; we easily contrive to make the fantasm, as it were, hate us, because we do not understand what it essentially is. Freedom wants both to be understood and to be almost continuously not understood; it wants to be seen and then again to be as if it were not there; it is at once real and unreal, and on this point much more might well be said. Last night I dreamed among other things of quite remarkable advances being made to me by a person from whom I had never, never expected anything of the sort. Enchanting it is, the way dreams can mock the sleeper, the way they flutter the brain with freedoms which, on waking, seem laughable.

With the reader’s leave, or rather that of the readeress, whom the writer always pictures as a lovely person, well-disposed, I draw attention, with a humility which cannot of course be free from decorous irony, to the droll possibility that, within freedom, puzzles are thinkable. One evening I start off homeward and on arriving at the house where I live I see two people, a man and a woman, looking out of the window of my room. Both these unknown people have conspicuously large faces and are quite motionless, a sight possibly apt to make a free person unfree on the spot, in every way. For quite a long time he stares at the people staring, so to speak nonchalantly, down at him, he cannot explain to himself their presence, goes upstairs, intending to ask the inexplicable occupants of his room, as politely as possible, to tell him, if they would be so kind, why they are there, and I walk in, find everything quiet, no persons are there. For a time I do not sense my own person either, I am pure independence, which is not in every way quite what it ought to be, and I ask myself if I am free.

Isn’t there a beautiful woman I know who remarks, every time I meet her, that I do not please her, because once I did please her but apparently was not able to feel fortunate enough about it? She is a free woman, and consequently a sensitive one, who feels every insensitivity most sensitively, who in other words considers every freedom one allows oneself to take regarding her to be unrefined and partly forfeits her candor, that is, her freedom, which, as I believe I have been able to stress, has about it much that is not understood, never experienced, constantly astonishing, warming and chilling, something that is troubled by any failure to consider how it is constituted.

I hope I may be believed if I permit myself to say that freedom is difficult and produces difficulties, with which phrase perhaps there sprang from my mouth an insight the expression of which could be accomplished by none but a connoisseur and gourmet of freedom who notes and cherishes all the unfreedoms internal to freedom.

[1928]

IN the Biedermeier period, thus during the time when, let’s say, a Lenau brought to the shaping stage his ineffably delicate and beautiful verses, at his ease, and slowly, as he raised them up out of the silent depths of not yet having been written down, there lived, unless my presence of mind forsakes me entirely, a housemaid, of whom and in whose hearing, albeit she was in her way an excellent person perhaps, more young than old, and more nearly beautiful than fundamentally hideous, some were apt to say she was a beast.