A Schoolboy's Diary and Other Stories

by Robert Walser

  SCHOOL

  “On the Value and Necessity of School” says the topic on the blackboard. I would argue that school is useful. It holds me between its iron or wooden claws (school benches) six to eight hours a day and keeps my mind from degenerating into slovenliness. I have to study, that is excellent. It prepares me for the public life that stands before me: that is even better. It exists, and I love and honor facts. I am happy to go to school and happy to leave it. That’s the best variety a useless rascal could ask for. In school, a measuring stick is laid alongside everyone’s knowledge. Now everyone is in the same boat. The poorest kid has the right to be richest in knowledge and ability. No one, not even the teacher, can prevent him from standing out. Everyone has respect for him when he shines; everyone is ashamed of himself when he doesn’t know something. In my opinion that is a nice arrangement, to spur ambition and let you court the admiration of your classmates. I am terribly ambitious. Nothing delights my soul as much as the feeling I get when I surprise my teacher with a clever answer. I know that I’m one of the best students but I constantly tremble at the thought that someone even smarter could catch up to me or surpass me. This thought is as hot and exciting as Hell. That is the most useful thing about school: It tires you out, upsets you, gets you going, it nourishes the imagination, it is the anteroom, the waiting room as it were, of life. Nothing that exists is useless. School the least of all. Only lazy students, who are often punished as a result, could come up with that idea. In fact I’m surprised we were even given this as a topic at all. Schoolboys cannot actually talk about the value of school and need for school when they’re still stuck in it themselves. Older people should write about things like that. The teacher himself, for instance, or my father, who I think is a wise man. The present time, surrounding you, singing and making noise, cannot be put down in writing in any satisfactory way. You can blabber all kinds of nonsense, but it’s a real question whether the mishmash you write (I allow myself the bad manners of describing my work in this way) actually says and means anything. I like school. Anything forced on me, whose necessity has been mutely insisted upon from every side, I try to approach obligingly, and like it. School is the unavoidable choker around the neck of youth, and I confess that it is a valuable piece of jewelry indeed. What a burden we would be to our parents, workers, passersby, shop owners, if we didn’t have to go to school! What would we spend our time doing, if not homework! Playing tricks ends up being pretty exhausting after all. It’s impossible to go for a walk without taking the opportunity to play a trick somewhere or another. Yes, really, school is a nice arrangement. I do not in any way regret going to school, instead I celebrate it from the bottom of my heart. Every smart and truth-loving schoolboy would have to say the same thing, or something along the same lines. It’s pointless to talk about the value of something necessary, everything necessary is valuable automatically.

  POLITENESS

  Nothing would be more boring than people not being polite to each other. Politeness is a delight, for civilized people, and the degree and type of politeness a person shows is like a mirror reflecting his true nature. It would be horrible if people walked right past each other without saying hello, or if you did not have to take off your hat when you walked into a room, or if you could turn your back on parents and teachers while they were talking to you. It would probably be practically unbearable. Without manners there would be no society and without society there would be no life. No question about it: If there were only two or three hundred people living scattered all over the world, manners would not be necessary, but we live so close together, practically on top of each other, that we would not survive a single day without proper rules for getting along. And how amusing they are, these rules that you have to submit to if you want to be a person among other people! There is not one single rule or regulation that lacks its charm. In the kingdom of manners, everything tingles with delicate, dainty little corridors, streets, bottlenecks, and twists and turns. There are spine-chilling abysses there too, more spine-chilling than up in the mountains. How easy it is to fall in, if you’re careless or awkward; on the other hand, how safe you are keeping to the narrow paths when you obediently pay attention. Of course you have to keep your eyes and ears and senses open, otherwise you’ll definitely fall. I feel that manners are almost something delightful. I often walk up and down the street hoping to meet someone my parents know so that I can greet him. I don’t actually know if the way I doff my hat is gracious. It’s enough that it makes me happy just to do it. And it’s nice when grown-ups give you a friendly greeting too. How glorious it is to doff your hat to a lady and be tenderly glanced at by her eyes. Ladies have such kind eyes, and nodding their heads is an extremely lovely way to thank you for such a minor expenditure of labor as raising your hat. Teachers should be greeted from a distance. But it’s proper for teachers to greet you back if you greet them. They only sink in their students’ estimation if they think that they can show their dignity by being rude. Manners are irrespective of age differences, they are simply sufficient unto themselves. If you are not a polite person you will not be polite to anyone, and if you like being polite then you will like being so to everyone that much more. The more big and important a polite person is, the more benevolence his civility has. To be greeted in a friendly fashion by a great and influential man is a true pleasure. Even great people must have once been small, and the best way they can show that they are now great is with kind and gentle behavior. Anyone with a heart is polite. The heart discovers the finest forms of politeness. You can tell when a person has the seat of their politeness somewhere other than in their heart. You can learn manners, but it is hard if you don’t have a talent for it, in other words the heartfelt wish to have the good manners. No one has to be polite, but easy and unforced good behavior is necessarily a part of anyone’s well-being.

  NATURE

  It is hard to write about Nature, especially for someone in grade A-2. Writing about people is easy: they have fixed characteristics. But Nature is so blurry, so delicate, so intangible, so infinite. Still I’ll try. I like wrestling with difficult things. It makes your blood surge around in your veins and arteries and excites the senses. Nothing is impossible, I have heard it said somewhere or another. That may be a slightly superficial way to put it, but a streak of truth and fact runs through these words. I went for a walk in the mountains with my brother, the college student. It was in winter, two weeks before Christmas. The mountain is broad as an athlete’s shoulders. It was lightly covered with snow, as if a sensitive, careful hand had strewn it. Delicate little spikes of grass poked out, which was a very pretty sight. The air was full of mist and sun. The blue sky was lightly transparent everywhere—softly, lightly. We daydreamed while we walked. At the top, we sat down on a bench and enjoyed the view. A view like that is the most splendid and liberating thing in the world. Our gaze went down into the valleys and out into the farthest distance, only to tarry in the closest nearness the next moment. You look calmly at the fields, meadows, and mountainsides stretched out at your feet, as though lifeless, or asleep. Mist steals through the narrow valleys and the wide valleys, the forests dream, the roofs of the city sparkle blurrily, everything is a soft, pleasant, big silent dream. Now it looks like the rolling waves of the ocean, now like a cute little toy, now like something infinitely clear again, something that has suddenly become clear. I can’t think of the words for it. Neither of us wanted to interrupt the beautiful Sunday mountain silence. The bells tolled richly from the depths. It seemed to me that they were ringing very close to me, right next to my ears, and then a moment later it seemed to me that they had fallen silent and I could no longer perceive them with my weak hearing. We spoke softly, when we eventually spoke. About art. My brother said that it was a lot harder to play Karl in The Robbers than the villain, Franz, and I had to agree with him when he told me his reasons for saying so. My brother is an excellent painter, poet, singer, piano player, and gymnast. He is very, very talented. I love him, a
nd not only because he is my brother. He is my friend. He wants to be a choirmaster, but really he would rather not be a choirmaster, he would rather be something that brings together all the arts in the world. One thing for sure, he wants to make something of himself.—We went home when the time came when you have to go home, as it always does. The snow gleamed as it fell off the early fir trees. We said that the firs looked marvelously beautiful, like noble, aristocratic women. Here I can see a smile floating over my teacher’s lips. The memory of that Sunday morning walk still floats over me—of the white, dreamy, light-blue view from the bench, of the conversation about art, and of . . . There’s the bell.

  OPEN TOPIC

  This time, the teacher said, each of you can write whatever comes to mind. To be honest, nothing comes to mind. I don’t like this kind of freedom. I am happy to be tied to a set subject. I am too lazy to think of something myself. And what would it be? I’m equally happy to write about anything. I don’t like hunting around for a topic, I like looking for beautiful, delicate words. I can come up with ten, even a hundred ideas from one idea, but the original idea never comes to me. What do I know. I write because it’s nice to fill up the lines with pretty little letters like this. The “what” makes no difference to me at all.—Aha, I’ve got it. I will try to give a description of our schoolroom. No one has ever done that before. I’ll definitely get an Excellent for that.—When I raise my head and look out over the many schoolboy heads around me, I cannot help but laugh. It is so mysterious, so strange, so bizarre. It is like a sweetly humming fairy tale. To think that every one of those heads is full of diligent, frolicking, racing thoughts is mysterious enough. Writing class may be the most lovely, attractive time for just this reason. No other class time goes by so noiselessly, so worshipfully, and with everyone working so quietly on their own. It is as though you could hear Thought itself softly whispering, softly stirring. It’s like the scurrying of little white mice. Now and then a fly rises up and then softly sinks back down onto a head to relax on a single hair. The teacher sits at his desk like a hermit between high cliffs. The blackboards are black, unfathomable lakes. The gaps between them are the white foam of the waves. The hermit is completely sunk in thoughts and reflections. Nothing that happens anywhere in the world, i.e., in the schoolroom, touches him. Now and then he gives his scalp a luxurious scratch. I know what a sensual pleasure it is to scratch your head. You stir up countless ideas that way. It doesn’t look especially nice, that’s true, but anyway, not everything can look nice. The teacher is a short, frail, feeble man. I’ve heard it said that men like that are the smartest and most learned. That may well be true. I am firmly convinced that this teacher is infinitely smart. I wouldn’t want to bear the burden of his knowledge. If it’s unseemly to write that, please keep in mind that it is absolutely necessary for a portrait of our schoolroom. The teacher is very excitable. He often flies into a terrible rage when a schoolboy makes him angry by not being able to do something. That’s wrong. Why get excited about something as minor as a schoolboy being lazy? But actually I’m not one to talk. If I had to be in his place, I might have an even shorter temper. You need a very special kind of talent to be a teacher. To keep your dignity faced with rascals like us all day long requires a lot of willpower. All things considered our teacher has good self-control. He has a gentle, intelligent way of telling stories, which you can’t give him enough credit for. He is very properly dressed, and it’s true that we laugh behind his back a lot. A back is always a little ridiculous. There’s nothing you can do about it. He wears high boots, as though just returning from the Battle of Austerlitz. These boots that are so grand, only the spurs are missing, give us a lot to think about. The boots are practically bigger than he is. When he’s really mad, he stamps his feet with them. I’m not very happy with my portrait.

  FROM THE IMAGINATION

  We’re supposed to write something from our imagination. My imagination likes brightly colored things, like fairy tales. I don’t like dreaming about chores and homework. What’s all around you is for thinking, what’s far away is for dreaming.— On the lake whose waves beat against the outermost houses in our city, a noble lady and a noble lad are floating in a small rowboat. The lady is dressed in extremely luxurious and valuable clothing, the boy more humbly. He is her page. He rows, then he lifts up the oars and lets drops of water fall like pearls into the great, recumbent water. It is quiet, wonderfully quiet. The large lake lies there as still as a puddle of oil. The sky is in the lake, and the lake looks like a watery, deep sky. Both of them, the lake and the sky, are a softly dreaming blue, a blue. Both of them, the noble lady and the noble lad, are dreaming. Now the boy calmly rows a bit farther out, but as quietly, as slowly, as if he were afraid to move any farther. It’s more like floating than gliding, and more like being quiet and not moving than gliding. The lady is smiling at the boy the whole time. She must like him very much. The boy smiles under her smile. It is morning, one of those lake mornings with a kiss of sunshine. The sun blazes down onto the lake, the rowboat, both people, onto their happiness, onto everything. Everything is happy. Even the colors on the beautiful lady’s clothes are happy. Colors must have feelings too. Colors are lovely and they go well with happiness. The lady is from the castle rising up on the right-hand shore of the lake, its towers glittering. She is a countess. At her behest the boy has untied the little boat and rowed out to where they are now: almost in the middle of the lake. The lady holds her white hand in the greenish, bluish water. The water is warm. It kisses the offered hand. It has a real wet mouth for kissing. The white walls of the scattered country houses shimmer toward them from the shore. The brown vineyards are beautifully reflected in the water, the country houses too. Obviously! The one has to be reflected just as much as the other. Nothing gets special treatment. Everything that makes the shoreline lively with shape and color is subject to the lake, which does with it whatever it wants. It mirrors it. It, the lake, is the magician, the lord, the fairy tale, the picture.— The rowboat glides across this deep, watery, undulating picture. Always the same calm floating. We have already described it, even if we have not said enough. We? Good grief, am I speaking in the plural? That’s a habit authors have, and whenever I write essays I always feel like a real author. But the lake, the boat, the waves, the lady, the boy, and the oar can’t fade away quite yet. I want to look at them one more time. The lady is sweet and beautiful. I don’t know any ladies who aren’t sweet and beautiful. This one, though, in such charmingly sweet surroundings transfigured with sun and colors, is especially so. Plus of course she’s also a distinguished countess from bygone times. The boy is a figure from an earlier century too. There aren’t pages anymore. Our era no longer needs them. The lake, on the other hand, is the very same lake. The same blurry distances and colors as back then shine across it now, and the same sun. The castle still stands too, but it’s empty.

  “From the Imagination”

  CAREERS

  Anyone who wants to lead an upstanding life in this world needs a career. You can’t just work your way along. Work has to have a particular character and a goal it is aiming toward. To reach that goal, you choose a profession. This happens when a person leaves school, at which point that person is an adult, or in other words, now he has another school he has to attend: life. Life is a strict schoolmaster, they tell you, and it must be true if it is such a universal opinion. We can choose whatever we want as our profession, and anywhere we can’t do that, it is an injustice. There are all kinds of jobs I’d like. That makes it hard to choose one. I think the best thing to do would be take up some profession or another, maybe the first one that comes along, try it out, and, when I’ve had enough of it, toss it aside. For is it even possible to know how things will look from inside a given job? It seems to me that you have to live it first. Inexperienced minds, like ours, cannot be faced with a choice without making spectacular fools of themselves. It’s really something for parents to do, choosing a career for you. They know what’s righ
t for you better than anyone. And if something other than what they’ve decided on for our lives turns out to suit us better, there’s always time to change saddles later. You don’t sink to the level of a saddler. No, it is rarely unfair to us, whatever they do.— Well, I’d like to be captain of a ship. But I wonder if my parents would agree. They love me very much and they would be worried about me if they knew I was exposed to the ocean’s storms. The best thing to do would naturally be to run away in secret—at night, out through the window, down a rope, and goodbye forever. But no! I don’t have the courage to trick my parents, and who knows if I even have what it takes to be a ship’s captain. I don’t want to be a locksmith, a joiner, or a carpenter. Such manual labor is not suited to an essayist of my caliber. A bookbinder would be nice, but my parents would not allow it, since I know they think I’m much too good for that. As long as they don’t make me go to university, I would go crazy there. I have no desire to be a doctor, no talent to be a pastor, no stick-to-itiveness to be a lawyer or a teacher . . . I’d rather die. Our teachers, in any case, are all unhappy, you can tell just by looking at them. I’d like to be a forest ranger. I would build myself a little house overgrown with ivy at the edge of the forest and wander around in the forest all day until late at night. Maybe that would start to seem boring to me too eventually and I would long for the big fancy cities. As a poet I would want to live in Paris, as a musician in Berlin, as a businessman nowhere. Just stick me in an office and see what happens. Well there’s one other thing I have in my soul: It would be great to join the circus. A famous tightrope walker, sparklers on my back, the stars above me, an abyss to either side, and just a slender, delicate path to walk before me.—A clown? I do feel that I have some talent for joking around. But my parents would be hurt if they knew I was onstage with a long nose painted red and flour sprinkled on my cheeks and wearing a wide, ridiculous suit.— Well, then what? Stay home and whine? Not that, never. One thing for sure, I’m not worried about finding a career. There are so many of them.