Robert Walser - Berlin Stories

1912

How uncertain, how difficult people make one another’s lives! How they belittle each other and are at pains to suspect and dishonor. How everything takes place merely for the sake of triumph. When they leave things undone, this occurs because of external exigencies, and when they err, it is never they who are at fault. Their fellow men always appear to them as obstacles, while their own person is always the highest and most noble of creatures. What efforts people make to disguise themselves with the intention of causing harm. How often we long for open, honest rudeness. At least during a fit of rage the heart chimes in. It’s strange how quick people are to dismiss one another, to invoke a scornful tone, trifling with what is most noble, precious, and meaningful. And how they never grow weary of finding fault, how it never occurs to them simply to hope there might be greatness, goodness, and honesty on earth. The notion that the earth itself is honorable is something they cannot quite grasp, obvious as it appears. Only their own trifling concerns seem to them deserving of the respect that in fact they owe the world, this majestic church. How seriously they take their own sins, and how convinced they’ve been throughout their adult lives that nothing more refined or heed-worthy than they can possibly exist. How they persist in worshiping something utterly undeserving of worship, the ancient golden calf, the expressionless monstrosity, how industriously they believe in the unbelievable. The stars mean nothing to them: in their opinion, stars are for children; and yet what are they themselves if not unruly children intent on doing what should not be done. How good they are at spreading fearfulness all around them, well aware that they themselves are constantly beset by dark, dull, foolish fears. How fervently they long never to do anything foolish, and yet this ignoble longing is itself the most foolish thing that can be felt under the sun. They wish to be the cleverest of people, but they’re the most miserable ones imaginable. A thief has done something, he’s been seduced into doing something illicit and bad — but these people have never done anything at all, neither something base and heinous nor something tenderhearted and good, and they firmly resolve never to do anything that could possibly arouse attention. Indeed, they give us something to think about.

How they misapprehend themselves in their narrow-minded conviction that they are worth more than others. Out of sheer naïveté they refer to themselves as cultivated, turning up their snub noses at one another. The poor things. If only they knew how uncultivated and unschooled pride is, how poorly brought up the one who is ruled by his own incapacity to judge himself. “Come, let’s go find a quiet corner where we can experience remorse on account of all the presumptuousness and lovelessness whose influence we haven’t been able to break free of.” This is how a person would speak if he were sensible of the slightest cultivation. “Would you like to come? There’ll be a temple standing there, a holy, invisible one. Do come. You’ll see, it will give you pleasure, and will do both our hearts good!” Such or similar words would be exchanged among fellow human beings. What barbarians these are who speak of culture, of all these marvelous things, of beauty that will remain forever alien to them as long as they cannot will themselves to practice beauty. All practice and motion are so far from them. They just talk and talk and talk, and for just this reason sink ever deeper into the midnight of unrefinedness, for only action is refined; talk is murky and dark, as unclean as hell itself. How they squander their time and the light, golden, fluid worth of their existence by passing hours on end in places where they exhaust their ears and minds speaking about things that a sensible, hardworking person would give a swift thought to, soon reaching a conclusion. Apparently by speaking they are attempting to come to terms with certain significations, but in this they will never succeed. No, they don’t even wish to succeed, they understand perfectly well that they are indulging in a sort of linguistic gourmandizing. They’re just gluttons. But gluttony cannot be anything other than an abomination; a sin committed against one’s parents and children; an injustice against every other living being; an atrocity against oneself. The nights, the holy temples of life, how unspeakably they are devalued, dishonored, and desecrated by lines such as this: “Come with me, let’s dash over to such-and-such a place!” The cultivated person is constantly having to dash somewhere or other, and why? This is something he himself honestly doesn’t know. How ceaselessly they chase after pleasures even a blackamoor would disdain, hungering after diversions that would make even a Kalmuck shrug her shoulders in unimaginable scorn. What indignation they display when confronted with the outrageous expectation that they might calmly observe the wending of the weeks, quietly perform devotions of a sensible, lovely sort or, quite simply, go to church. Oh, by God — the Invincible One — church can make a person forget the horrors he has on his conscience and entice him to submit. Enough of all the emptinesses, loathsomenesses, soul- and heartlessnesses brought about by this garrulous modernity.

And how they suffer. You have to have lived among them, you have to have partaken in the follies they pay homage to, whose charms have been plucked bare and are no longer able to invigorate either the mind or the senses, in order to understand how they suffer. Their consolation is that it is they who set the tone in the world. What a consolation. Their pride is that they are mentioned in the press. What a thing to be proud of. Their triumph is to stand at the forefront of what people love to call progress. What an accomplishment. And beside them one sees these weary, withered, half-alive men, these soulful women whose entire souls have been eaten up and destroyed by furious, hopeless, half-mad dissatisfactions. Unfortunate women poised at the pinnacle of culture, where they dally; unenviable men; impoverished human beings. And they half admit they are impoverished. But how did they get so poor? They are dear human beings. Yes, truly. But why is it they in particular who are so unreliable, so out of sorts, withered, and querulous? This too might give us something to think about.

Spirits and gods no longer speak to them. Their lives are based solely upon sensual pleasures and trinkets when they should be founded upon reason and solid thought. They want to take striving as their basis, but this empty ascent from step to step is not a just, honorable foundation and ground. This striving would have to be conjoined in a forward-thinking way with valor and nobility, but this is not at all the case, in fact the opposite is true: schism, disintegration, unraveling. High above, nothing remains. The upper regions have been strangely depleted of development. There’s no making headway, and so we are obliged to turn back — which in and of itself is something to think about.

1910

The Tales of Hoffmann

I was living in the tranquillity of rural, provincial isolation, in the flat countryside where fields and forests lie about motionless and mute, the plains and plots of land appear endless, broad wide regions often prove to be only narrow strips, and vast estates slumber peacefully one beside the other.

Brown, yellow, red autumnal foliage, fog that mysteriously wrapped the wintry earth in veils; large, wet, fat snowflakes tumbling down into a morning-dark courtyard, a white park covered in snow, a winter village with village lads and village women and geese in the village street — all this I had seen.