Selected Stories by Robert Walser Read Free Book Online Page A

I do not learn, for I find it beneath
     my dignity to surrender to the urge for education. Besides, I am already educated
     enough to carry a walking stick in my hand with some grace, and to knot a necktie,
     and to grasp a spoon with my right hand, and to say, when asked, “Thank you, it was
     very nice yesterday evening.” What more can education make of me? Honestly: I think
     education would be coming to quite the wrong person. I go for money and comfortable
     status, that’s my urge for education. I seem to be terribly superior to a miner, even
     if he, if he so wished, could whisk me, with the forefinger of his left hand, into
     a hole in the earth, where I would get dirty. Strength and beauty among poor people
     and in modest dress make no impression on me. I always think, when I see a person
     like that, how well-off people like us are, with our superior position in the world,
     compared with such a work-raddled fool, and no compassion steals into my heart. Where
     should I keep a heart? I have forgotten that I have one. Certainly it is sad, but
     how should I find it proper to feel sorrow? One feels sorrow only when one has lost
     money, or when one’s new hat does not fit well, or when one’s holdings on the stock
     exchange drop, and even then one has to ask if that is sorrow or not, and on closer
     inspection it is not, it is only a fleeting regret, which vanishes like the wind.
     It is, no, how can I put it now—it is marvelously strange to have no feelings in this
     way, not to know at all what an emotion is. Feelings which concern one’s own person,
     everyone has these, and they are at root despicable ones, presumptuous ones if they
     relate to humanity as a whole. But feelings for particular people? Of course, one
     sometimes would like to ask oneself about this, one feels something like a slight
     longing to become a good, compliant person, but when could one manage it? Perhaps
     at seven in the morning, or some other time? Already on Friday, and right through
     the Saturday following, I am wondering what to do on Sunday, since on Sunday something
     always has to be done. I seldom go for a walk alone. Usually I join a group of young
     people, the way one does; it is quite simple, one simply goes along with them, though
     one knows that one is rather a boring companion. I take the steamer, for example,
     across the lake, or go on foot, into the forest, or travel by train to more distant,
     beautiful spots. Often I accompany girls to a dance, and I have found that the girls
     like me. I have a white face, beautiful hands, an elegant, fluttering dinner jacket,
     gloves, rings on my fingers, a cane with silver mountings, clean polished shoes, and
     a tender Sunday sort of bearing, such a remarkable voice, and about my mouth a peevish
     trait, which I myself have no words to describe, but which seems to endear me to the
     girls. When I speak, it is as if a man of some gravity were speaking. Pomposity appeals,
     there’s no doubt about that. As for my dancing, it is like that of a person who has
     only just taken, and enjoyed, lessons: jaunty, delicate, punctual, precise, but too
     fast and insipid. There is precision and buoyancy in my dancing, but unfortunately
     no grace. How could I be capable of grace? But I love to dance, passionately. When
     I dance I forget that I am Helbling, for I am nothing but a happy floating-in-the-air.
     Thoughts of the office, with its manifold agonies, would not intrude on me at all.
     Around me are flushed faces; perfume and brightness of girls’ clothes, girls’ eyes
     gaze at me; I am flying: can one imagine oneself happier? Now I have got it: once
     in the cycle of the week I can be happy. One of the girls whom I always accompany
     is my fiancée, but she treats me badly, worse than the other ones do. She is not even—and
     I do certainly notice it—faithful to me, hardly loves me, I suppose, and I, do I love
     her? I have many faults, which I have candidly