A Schoolboy's Diary and Other Stories Read online

  “The Fair”

  MUSIC

  I think music is the sweetest thing in the world. I absolutely adore sounds. I would leap a thousand steps to hear a single sound. In summer, when I’m walking down the hot streets and I hear the sounds of a piano from a stranger’s house, I often stand there and think I should die on the spot. I would like dying while listening to a piece of music. I imagine it as so easy, so natural, but of course it’s impossible. Sounds stab too sweetly. The wounds hurt but they don’t fester. Melancholy and suffering trickle out instead of blood. When the notes stop, everything is back to normal inside me. I go back to my homework, eating, or playing, and forget it. I think pianos make the most magical sounds. Even if someone with all thumbs is playing. I don’t hear the playing, only the sounds. I will never be a musician, because making music would never be sweet and intoxicating enough for me. It is much holier to listen to music. Music always makes me feel sad, but sad like a sad smile. What I’m trying to say is: friendly-sad. When I hear happy music I can’t think of it as happy, and the gloomiest music is for me in no way especially gloomy and depressing. I always have exactly the same feeling about music: something is missing. I will never learn the reason for this gentle sadness, and never want to try to figure it out. I don’t want to know the answer. I don’t want to know everything. In general, however intelligent I may seem to be, I possess very little thirst for knowledge. I think it’s because my nature is the opposite of curious. I am happy to let lots of things happen around me without worrying about how or why. That is no doubt something to criticize me for, and not very well suited to helping me find my path in life. That may be true. I am not afraid of death and so I am also not afraid of life. It looks like I’ve ended up philosophizing. Music is the least intellectual and therefore the loveliest art. Purely rational beings will never appreciate it, but they are precisely the ones it is most deeply beneficial for, in the moments when they do listen to it. You can’t try to comprehend and appreciate any kind of art. Art wants to cuddle up to us. Its nature is so completely pure and self-sufficient that it doesn’t like it when you pursue it. It punishes whoever approaches it trying to grasp it. Artists know that. They are the ones who make art their profession, even though art absolutely does not like to be grasped. That is why I never want to be a musician. I am afraid of being punished by such a sweet creature. You can love an art but you have to make sure you don’t admit it to yourself. The deepest love is when you don’t even know you are in love.—Music hurts me. I don’t know if I really do love it. It hits me wherever it finds me. I don’t look for it. I let it caress me, but its caresses hurt. How can I put it? Music is a kind of crying in melodies, a remembering in notes, a painting in sounds. I can’t say it right. And you can’t really take seriously what I said before about art. These things aren’t exactly on target, the same way no sounds have hit the target in me today. Something feels like it’s missing when I haven’t heard any music, and when I hear music, then I really feel like something is missing. That’s the best I can do in trying to describe music.

  THE ESSAY

  Essays should always be written neatly and legibly. Only a bad essay-writer forgets to apply himself to the clarity of both the thoughts and the letters. You should always think first before you write. To start a sentence with an unfinished thought is sloppiness that can never be forgiven. And yet the slothful schoolboy believes that words will arise from other words. That is nothing but a vain and dangerous idea though. You get tired from walking on a country road much faster if you don’t have a goal in mind.—Periods, commas, and other punctuation are a mistake to neglect, a mistake with a further consequence: untidiness of style. Style is a sense of order. Anyone with an unclear, untidy, unsightly mind will write in a style with those same qualities. From the style, says a proverb old and clichéd but no less true for all that, you can know the man.—When writing an essay, your elbows can’t fly around too wildly back and forth. That annoys the writer next to you, who is no doubt not insensitive to disturbances since he too is a thinker and a writer. Writing is about getting quietly worked up. Anyone who can’t sit still but who always has to act loud and self-important to get his work done will never be able to write anything lively and beautiful.—It’s much prettier, and thus much quicker, and thus much more sensitive and pleasing to write on clean, smooth paper, so always make sure you have good writing paper ready. Why else are there so many stationery stores? Writing something thoughtful is good, but wanting to stuff your work too full of thoughts is something you should avoid. An essay, like any other work for that matter, should be pleasant to read and to use. Too many thoughts and opinions make the simple framework, in other words the form on which every essay must be draped, just collapse. What, then, is an essay? A quarry, a landslide, a raging fire that may be splendid to look at but is also very sad. Someone with no thoughts doesn’t need his nose rubbed in this point, since there is no way he will overload his construction anyway.—Humor can be used in essays, but only as a subtle, delicate adornment. Anyone funny by nature needs to pay especially careful attention. Jokes that sound nice when they come out of your mouth only rarely look as good on paper. In addition, it is unrefined to make use of a gift one is richly endowed with in any but the most selective way.—Crossing out words looks messy. You should try to avoid this habit. I myself often need to remind myself of this. Self, hear and obey! Looking in the notebook of the boy next to you, to steal thoughts or ideas that you can’t think up yourself, is a rotten thing to do. No student should have so little self-respect that he prefers a stupid theft to the noble confession that his knowledge has reached its limits. It’s best not to pester the teacher with questions and sighs. Acting like that is weak and it only shows how embarrassed you are about the knowledge you are supposed to have but don’t. Teachers despise that.

  “The Classroom”

  THE CLASSROOM

  Our classroom is a miniature world. After all, can’t all the feelings and passions in the world be found just as well among thirty people as among thirty thousand? Love and hate, ambition and revenge, nobler and also more primitive conceptions all play an important role with us. We have poverty and richness, knowledge and stupidity, success and failure in all their variations and fine distinctions. You often have the opportunity in the classroom to play the hero, the traitor, the victim, the martyr. If a novelist or poet cast his eye into our social world he would find rich material for exciting works. We are short-tempered and affectionate, hotheaded and docile, obedient and fresh, sarcastic and pious, moved and silly, indifferent and enthusiastic. We have every type of virtue and bad behavior among us, every kind of rascalliness and charm. You have to respect us, whether you want to or not. Often the teacher in fact hates one or another of us in the most violent way. Maybe he shouldn’t do that. We are maybe not worth being taken so seriously. He really does stand a bit too high, too far superior to us. It seems to me at least that it would make more sense for him to mock us than hate us. We have a class clown in our class. He gives us more to laugh at in fifteen minutes than ten other kids in a whole year. He is unbelievably good at making funny faces and has all kinds of expressions at his disposal. His sheep face is for when he’s in real trouble. He puts that one on when he’s getting caned. We all like him, and even the biggest scaredy-cat in our class would never dream of tattling on him to the teacher. On walks and field trips and in games, he’s our god. His pranks are never-ending and make the air shake with our laughter. We are always pushing him into playing naughty tricks, which he does as casually as can be, no matter how bold they may seem to us. Even the teacher can’t help laughing along with us sometimes, probably because he’s touched by so much humor. He is also a handsome, flexible boy, good at gymnastics, smart, but he pays so little attention it’s outrageous. Every day blows rain down upon his back. He will come to a bad end if he’s ever caught playing one of his crazy, reckless tricks. And it has to happen sometime. His parents won’t feel any particularly great sorrow whe
n it does, because they are small-minded people and don’t look after their son much. In a certain sense he is noble. All unthinking, slovenly people are. When they do something bad it is only a game. It’s their passion, and being totally in the grip of a passion is never smart, but it is beautiful. He is like a kind of king among us. We are all happy to follow him, because every one of us secretly feels sorry for how abandoned he is. That is our little world. The teacher is like someone from the bigger outside world. But really he is too small to seem big to us.

  “Fritz Kocher’s Grave”

  1904

  PART II

  GREIFEN LAKE

  IT IS A crisp, clear morning and I set out to hike from the big city and its big famous lake to a small, almost unknown lake. Along the way, I encounter nothing but everything an ordinary person can encounter on his ordinary way. I say “Good day” to a couple of hard-working reapers, that’s all; I attentively observe the dear flowers, that’s all too; I start a friendly chat with myself, that is once again all. I do not pay attention to any special features of the landscape, because I’m walking and I think that there is nothing special for me here anymore. And so I walk, and in so walking I have already passed the first village, with the big wide houses, with the parks inviting the walker to rest and forget, with the splashing fountains, the beautiful trees, courtyards, shops, and other things I don’t at the forgetful moment happen to remember. I keep walking and only start paying attention again when the lake shimmers forth over the green foliage and quiet tips of the fir trees; I think: That is my lake, which I have to walk to, which draws me to it. The way in which and reason why it draws me to it are things the gentle reader will soon know himself should he have any interest in continuing to follow my description, which will now take the liberty of bypassing paths, meadows, forest, forest stream, and field and leap all the way to the little lake itself, where it will stop along with me and be unable to marvel enough at the unexpected, only secretly suspected beauty of said lake. Let us now let it speak for itself in all its traditional volubility: It is a broad, white silence, edged with green, airy silence; it is lake and surrounding forest; it is sky, and so light-blue, so half-sad a sky; it is water, and so sky-like is the water that it could just as well be the sky and the sky the blue water; it is sweet blue warm silence and morning; it is a beautiful, beautiful morning. I cannot find the words for it, although I have put forth far too many words already, it seems to me. I do not know what to describe because all of it is so beautiful, so simply there for sheer beauty’s sake. The sun shines down from the sky onto the lake which becomes completely like a sun with the sleepy shadows of the life all around it quietly rocking back and forth within it. There is nothing to disturb the scene, everything is lovely in the sharpest closeness, in the haziest distance; all the colors in the world play together and are a single charmed and charming world of morning. The high Appenzeller mountains rise up modestly in the distance, no cold wrong note, no, only a high, distant, blurry green, part of the green that is so splendid, so soft, in the whole vicinity. Oh, how soft, how still, how pristine this vicinity is, and consequently how still, soft, and pristine is this little, practically unnamed lake.—This description of mine, an enthusiastic, enraptured description, really does talk like that. And what should I add? If I had to start over again I would talk the same way it does, for this description is utterly what my heart has to say. On the whole lake I see only a single duck, swimming back and forth. I quickly pull off my clothes and do as the duck does: I swim far out into the lake, with the greatest delight, until my breast has to work hard, my arms are tired, and my legs are sore. What a pleasure it is to tire oneself out with pure delight! The sky that has already been described, described with far too little heartfeltness, is above me and a sweet, silent depth is beneath me; and with anxious, apprehensive breast, I work my way across the depth back to land, where I shiver and laugh and cannot breathe, almost cannot breathe. The old Greifensee Castle says hello from across the lake, but I have absolutely no interest in historical recollections at the moment; rather, I look forward to spending an evening or night here at this very place, and I go over and over in my mind what it will be like on this little lake when the last light of day hovers over its surface, or how it will be when the countless stars hover overhead—and I swim out again.—

  July 1899; 1914

  SIX LITTLE STORIES

  1. ABOUT A POET

  A POET is bent over his poems, of which he has assembled twenty. He turns one page after another and finds that every poem awakens a very particular feeling inside him. He racks and racks his brain to try to figure out what kind of something it is hovering over or around his poeticizings. He presses hard but nothing comes out, he strikes with the ball of his hand but nothing comes out, he pulls but everything stays exactly as it is, namely shrouded in darkness. He lays his head down on his crossed arms and completely covers the open book with his body and cries. I, on the other hand, the wag of a writer, am bent over his work and can solve with infinite ease the riddle of his volume. Very simply, it contains twenty poems, one of which is simple, one pompous, one enchanting, one boring, one moving, one divine, one childish, one very bad, one animalistic, one awkward, one impermissible, one incomprehensible, one repulsive, one charming, one reticent, one magnificent, one tasteful, one worthless, one poor, one unspeakable, and one more cannot be because there are only twenty different poems, each of which has received from my lips perhaps not exactly a just but at least a quick judgment, which always takes the least trouble on my part. One thing is certain, though: The poet who wrote them is still crying, bent over the book; the sun is shining over him; and my laughter is the wind that violently, coldly musses his hair.

  2. LUTE

  I play upon the lute of memory. It is a minor instrument, which always only makes one and the same sound. This sound is sometimes long, sometimes short, sometimes sluggish, sometimes quick. It breathes calm breaths, or else it surpasses itself in a hasty leap. It is sad and merry. The strange thing is that when it sounds melancholy it makes me laugh, that when it is merry and leaping I cannot keep from crying. Has there ever been a sound like it? Has music ever been played on such a wondrous instrument? It is almost impossible to pick it up, this instrument: Hands, even the softest and most slender of build, are too rough for it. It has unspeakably thin, delicate strings. Hairs are halters in comparison. There is a young man who knows how to play it, and I, who have time to settle down and wait, listen to him. He plays day and night, without thought of food or drink, late into the night and the day. From day to night and from night to day again. Time must exist for him only so that he can let it waft past him like a melody. The same way I listen to him, the lute player, he, the lute player, spends the whole time listening to his beloved, i.e., the sound of his instrument. Never has a lover listened and lain in wait so faithfully, so steadfastly. How sweet it is to listen to a listener, to watch a lover, to feel a forgotten one at one’s side. The young man is an artist, memory his instrument, night his space, dream his time, and the melodies he gives to life are his faithful servants who speak of him into the greedy ears of the world. I am only an ear, an unutterably moved ear.

  3. PIANO

  There is a boy, I don’t know his name, who is lucky enough to enjoy lessons on the grand piano from a very beautiful and regal piano teacher. Right at this moment he is being instructed in agility on the keys by the most beautiful hands on earth. The lady’s hands glide across the keys like white swans on dark water. They already say very gracefully what later lips will repeat. The boy is wreathed in absent-mindedness, which the teacher does not seem to want to notice. “Play that”—but he plays it indescribably badly. “Play it again”—but he plays it even worse than before. Well, he needs to play it yet again—but he plays badly. “You’re lazy.” He cries, he to whom this is said. She smiles, she who says it. He lays his head down on the piano, he who has to accept this being said of him. She strokes his soft brown hair, she who has had no ch
oice but to say it. Now the boy, awakened from his shame by the soft caress, kisses the loving hand, which is very elegant and white. Now the lady throws her splendid arms, which are very soft and just the right tongs for a hug, around the boy’s neck. Now the lady lets herself kiss him and now the lips of the dear boy succumb to a kiss from the friendly lady. Now the knees of the kissee have nothing more urgent to do than sink down like falling blades of grass, and the arms of the kneeler nothing simpler to do than clasp the respective knees of the lady. The lady’s knees likewise waver, and now both of them, beautiful gracious lady and ordinary poor young man, are a single embrace, a kiss, a tumbling to the floor, a teardrop—and something else, too: an unexpected nasty surprise for someone who at this very moment opens the doors of the room, thereby bringing the sweetness of the love both have now forgotten, and also the story thereof, to an end.

  4.

  Now I’ve just remembered that once upon a time there lived a poor poet, very oppressed by dark moods, who, since he had seen his fill of God’s great world, decided to put only his imagination into his poems. He sat one evening, afternoon, or morning, at eight, twelve, or two o’clock, in the dark space of his room and he said to the wall the following: Wall, I’ve got you in my head. Don’t try to trick me with your strange and placid visage! From now on, you are the prisoner of my imagination. Thereupon he said the same thing to the window and to the gloomy view it offered him day after day. After which, spurred on by wanderlust, he undertook a walk that led him through fields, forests, meadows, villages, cities, and over rivers and lakes, always under the same beautiful sky. But to these fields, forests, meadows, villages, cities, and rivers he continually repeated: Guys, I’ve got you locked tight in my head. Don’t any of you think any longer that you make an impression on me. He went home, constantly laughing to himself: I have them all, I have them all in my head. And presumably he has them in there still, and they can’t (however much I want to help them do so) get out again. Isn’t this story very full of imagination???