Robert Walser

“They should not clench their fists,it’s my longing that’s drawing me near to them;they should not stand there full of rage,my longing is timidly drawing near to them;they should not be ready to pounce like vicious dogs,as if they wanted to tear my longing to shreds;they should not threaten with broad sleeves,that pains my longing.Why have they suddenly changed?As great and deep is my longing.No matter how difficult, no matter how menacing:I must reach them and I’m already there.”

“You do see me crossing the meadowstiff and dead from the mist?I long for that home,that home I've never had,and without any hopethat I'll ever be able to reach it.For such a home, never touched,I carry that longing that willnever die, like that meadow diesstiff and dead from the mist.You do see me crossing it, full of dread?”

“If a hand, a situation, a wave were ever to raise me up and carry me to where I could command power and influence, I would destroy the circumstances that had favoured me, and I would hurl myself down into the humble, speechless, insignificant darkness. I can only breathe in the lower regions.”

“This is freedom,’ said the instructress, ‘it’s something very wintry, and cannot be borne for long. One must always keep moving, as we are doing here, one must dance in freedom. It is cold and beautiful. Never fall in love with it. That would only make you sad afterwards, for one can only be in the realm of freedom for a moment, no longer. Look how the wonderful track we are floating on is slowly melting away. Now you can watch freedom dying, if you open your eyes…”

“Naturally I am of the deeply felt conviction that it is quite nice, quite lovely to be capable of enthusiam.”

“...He gave such a vulnerable impression. He resembled the leaf that a little boy strikes down from its branch with a stick, because its singularity makes it conspicuous.”

“How small life is hereand how big nothingness.The sky, tired of light,has given everything to the snow.The two trees bowtheir heads to each other.Clouds cross the world’ssilence in a circle dance”

“Debería estar completamente solo en este mundo,yo, Steiner, sin ninguna otra criatura.Sin sol, sin cultura. Yo, desnudo sobre una gran piedra sin tormentas, sin nieve, sin bancos, sin dinero, sin tiempo y sin respiración.Entonces, por fin, dejaría de tener miedo.”

“A quienes conservan el sano juicio les hago el siguiente llamamiento: no leáis siempre y de manera exclusiva esos libros sanos; acercaos un poquito a la llamada literatura enfermiza, de la que tal vez podáis sacar un consuelo vital. La gente sana debería arriesgarse siempre de una u otra manera. ¿Para qué demonios, si no, conservar el sano juicio? ¿Para morir un día saludablemente? Vaya un futuro desolador”

“¿Acaso no es tremendamente cómodo creer en alguien? Uno se puede dejar arrastrar por la fe sin el menor esfuerzo. Uno puede ser la deshonra en persona y creer firme y piadosamente en cualquier hombre bueno y valeroso. Uno puede comer chocolate y seguir creyendo sin el menor apuro en una gran persona que acaso no tiene qué llevarse a la boca. Y es que creer no cuesta nada. Creyendo y haciendo profesión de fe se perjudica por lo menos tanto como se ayuda. (...) Quien cree realmente hasta el punto de tener que luchar consigo mismo deja de hablar de ello, no dice una sola palabra al respecto, sino que se limita a creer, a sufrir y a creer.”

“I'd like to die listening to a piece of music. I imagine this as so easy, so natural, but naturally it's quite impossible. Notes stab too softly. The wounds they leave behind may smart, but they don't fester. Melancholy and pain trickle out instead of blood. When the notes cease, all is peaceful within me again.”

“So you, too, like fruitcake? (RW on meeting Lenin in Zurich during World War I.)”

“Estimado señor, le ruego que deje de creer en mí.”

“Ultimately, the most romantic thing is the heart, and every sensitive person carries in himself old cities enclosed by ancient walls.”

“Money rules the world, and doubtless also, here and there, the bit of love within it, and when love turns to hate, one remembers unpaid board.”

“Wallets can establish connections and change opinions. Things that fall apart can be glued back by money with astonishing alacrity.”

“How uninteresting interesting things can become.”

“Questions are usually more beautiful, more significant than their resolutions, which in fact never resolve them, are never sufficient to satisfy us, whereas from a question streams a wonderful fragrance.”

“[…] there come moments when we know we are no more and no less than waves and snowflakes, or than that which surely feels, now and then, from its so wonderfully charming confinement, the pull of longing: the leaf.”

“That lovely things exist is a lovely thought.”

“A girl sitting with us in the boat compared traveling over the water to the imperceptible gliding and progress of growth, that of fruit for example, which perhaps would have little desire to ripen if it knew to what end.”

“When we realize that words can destroy something good, wonderful, and dear, and that by keeping silent we can avoid causing the least damage or harm, it’s easy to stay silent.”

“[…] we humans, as long as we live, are generally incapable of freeing ourselves from a certain ardent searching and longing, and should not even strive to; that our longing for happiness seems far more beautiful, always far more sensitive, more significant and all in all probably far more desirable than happiness itself, which perhaps need not even exist, since the fervent, gratifying pursuit of happiness and an everlasting, deep desire for it perhaps not only suit perfectly our needs, but satisfy them far better, far more profoundly; that being happy is by no means to be taken casually, unquestioningly as the meaning of the world, the goal and purpose of life, and so on.”

“Listening to music, I always have exactly the same feeling: something’s missing. Never will I learn the cause of this gentle sadness, never will I wish to investigate it.”

“More people perish than want to. Death comes running with astonishing speed, strikes his victims with marvelous accuracy. These include generals, doctors, governesses, soldiers, policemen, ministers. None of them pass away peacefully, as it says in the newspapers. Their executions are violent enough.”

“Wherever poesie can be felt, all poetic touches are superfluous.”

“God is the opposite of Rodin.”

“Our car is constantly in motion. It is raining in the streets we glide through, and this constitutes one more added pleasantness. Some people find it frightfully agreeable to see that it is raining and at the same time be permitted to sense that they themselves are not getting wet. The image produced by a gray, wet street has something consoling and dreamy about it, and so you stand now upon the rear platform of the creaking car that is rumbling its way forward, and you gaze straight ahead. Gazing straight ahead is something done by almost all the people who sit or stand in the "electric.”

“That's what's so miraculous about the city: each person's bearing and behavior vanish among these thousand sorts, observations are fleeting, judgements swift, and forgetting inevitable.”

“How reprehensible it is when those blessed with commodities insist on ignoring the poor. Better to torment them, force them into indentured servitude, inflict compulsion and blows—this at least produces a connection, fury and a pounding heart, and these too constitute a form of relationship. But to cower in elegant homes behind golden garden gates, fearful lest the breath of warm humankind touch you, unable to indulge in extravagances for fear they might be glimpsed by the embittered oppressed, to oppress and yet lack the courage to show yourself as an oppressor, even to fear the ones you are oppressing, feeling ill at ease in your own wealth and begrudging others their ease, to resort to disagreeable weapons that require neither true audacity nor manly courage, to have money, but only money, without splendor: That’s what things look like in our cities at present”

“I wanted to speak with someone, but found no time; sought some fixed point, but found none. In the midst of the unrelenting forward thrust I felt the wish to stand still. The muchness and the motion were too much and too fast. Everyone withdrew from everyone. There was a running, as of something liquefied, a constant going forth, as of evaporation. Everything was schematic, ghostlike, even myself.”

“Your very eyes. How they have always been for me the command to obey, the inviolable and beautiful commandment. No, no, I'm not telling lies. Your appearance in the doorway!...You have been my body's health. Whenever I have read a book, it was you I was reading, not the book, you were the book. You were, you were.”

“God goes with thoughtless people.”

“Às pessoas saudáveis faço o seguinte apelo: não teimem em ler apenas esses livros saudáveis, travem um conhecimento mais estreito, também, com a literatura dita doentia, que vos transmitirá, decerto, uma cultura edificante. As pessoas saudáveis deveriam sempre expor-se um pouco ao perigo. Senão, com mil raios, para que serve ser saudável? Simplesmente para, num determinado dia, morrer de boa saúde?”

“A park like this resembles a large, silent, isolated room. In fact it's always Sunday in a park, by the way, for it's always a bit melancholy, and the melancholy stirs up vivid memories of home, and Sunday is something that only ever existed at home, where you were a child.”

“The lively is always more contemplative than what is dead and sad.”

“Instances of delightfulness are always intrinsically beautiful, so to speak, and yet under the right circumstances they may be swinish as well, for what is humanly beautiful might, as it were, be too beautiful for human beings, for which reason people are glad to place beauty in proximity to pigpens, as one is no doubt justified in saying.”

“I don't want a future, I want a present. To me this appears of greater value. You have a future only when you have no present, and when you have a present, you forget to even think about the future.”

“It doesn't take much to show love, but at some time or another in your, praise God, disastrous life you must have felt, honestly and simply, what love is and how love likes to behave.”

“I am not here [in the sanitarium] to write, but to be mad.”

“Houses, gardens, and people were transfigured into musical sounds, all that was solid seemed to be transfigured into soul and into gentleness. Sweet veils of silver and soul-haze swam through all things and lay over all things. The soul of the world had opened, and all grief, all human disappointment, all evil, all pain seemed to vanish, from now on never to appear again. Earlier walks came before my eyes; but the wonderful image of the humble present became a feeling which overpowered all others. The future paled, and the past dissolved. I glowed and flowered myself in the glowing, flowering present. From near and far, great things and small things emerged bright silver with marvelous gestures, joys, and enrichments, and in the midst of this beautiful place I dreamed of nothing but this place itself. All other fantasies sank and vanished in meaninglessness. I had the whole rich earth immediately before me, and I still looked only at what was most small and most humble. With gestures of love the heavens rose and fell. I had become an inward being, and walked as in an inward world; everything outside me became a dream; what I had understood till now became unintelligible. I fell away from the surface, down into the fabulous depths, which I recognized then to be all that was good. What we understand and love understands and loves us also. I was no longer myself, was another, and yet it was on this account that I became properly myself. In the sweet light of love I realized, or believe I realized, that perhaps the inward self is the only self which really exists.”

“The novel I am constantly writing is always the same one, and it might be described as a variously sliced-up or torn-apart book of myself.”

“What a terrible dream I had a few days ago. [...] To the knives and forks clung the tears of enemies I destroyed, and the glasses sang with the sighs of many poor people, but the tear-stains only made me want to laugh, while the hopeless sighs sounded to me like music. I needed banquet music and had it.”

“Before our eyes, at least before mine (not hers, perhaps), everything was veiled in impenetrable darkness. "It's the inner chambers," I thought, and I wasn't wrong, either. That's how it was, and my dear instructress seemed to be resolved to show me a world that had been hidden until now. But I must pause for breath.”

“Curious, the pleasure it gives me to annoy practitioners of force. Do I actually want this Herr Benjamenta to punish me? Do I have reckless instincts? Everything is possible, everything, even the most sordid and undignified things.”

“One is always half mad when one is shy of people.”

“I was, I remember, nineteen years old, wrote poems, still wore no proper collar, ran out in the rain and snow, always woke up early in the morning, read Lenau, considered an overcoat a superfluous item, received a monthly salary of one hundred twenty-five francs and didn't know what to do with all that money.”

“At least we should learn to understand our fellow beings, for we are powerless to stop their misery, their ignominy, their suffering, their weakness, and their death.”

“Exceptional estimable, good, nice, dear people they all were but they all, unluckily, kept asking me about the new novel, and that was excrutiating.”

“I've thought of myself a girl on several occasions because I like to polish shoes and find household tasks amusing. There was once even a time when I insisted on mending a torn suit with my own hands. And in winter I always light the heating stoves myself, as though this were the natural course of things. But of course I'm not a real girl. Please give me a moment to consider all this would entail. The first thing that comes to mind is the question of whether I might possibly be a girl has never, never, not for a single moment, troubled me, rattled my bourgeois composure or made me unhappy. An absolutely by no means unhappy person stands before you, I'd like to put quite special emphasis on this, for I have never experienced sexual torment or distress, for I was never at a loss for quite simple methods of freeing myself from pressures. A rather curious, that is to say, important discovery for me was that it filled me with the most delightful gaiety to imagine myself someone's servant.... My nature, then, merely inclines me to treat people well, to be helpful and so forth. Not long ago I carried with flabbergasting zeal a shopping bag full of new potatoes for a petit bourgeoise. She's have been perfectly able to tote it herself. Now my situation is this: my particular nature also sometimes seeks, I've discovered, a mother, a teacher, that is, to express myself better, an unapproachable entity, a sort of goddess. At times I find the goddess in an instant, whereas at others it takes time before I'm able to imagine her, that is, find her bright, bountiful figure and sense her power. And to achieve a moment of human happiness, I must always first think up a story containing an encounter between myself and another person, whereby I am always the subordinate, obedient, sacrificing, scrutinized, and chaperoned party. There's more to it, of course, quite a lot, but this still sheds light on a few things. Many conclude it must be terribly easy to carry out a course of treatment, as it were, upon my person, but they're all gravely mistaken. For, the moment anyone seems ready to start lording and lecturing it over me, something within me begins to laugh, to jeer, and then, of course, respect is out of the question, and within the apparently worthless individual arises a superior one whom I never expel when he appears in me....”