O, Robert Walser, why do you continue to haunt me so. Your life, I want to know it. Sometimes I feel I am living something like it. You may be the closest I've come so far to a muse for my own writing. But what really happened in your mind. Did something actually disengage, unhinge, or did you simply realize that the way you wanted to live—the hard-coding inside you—was incompatible with the harsh money-driven structure of modern society. Did you give in and allow yourself to be institutionalized because you saw no alternative. Did you despair of the futility inherent in the incessant submissions of your prose pieces, your "little Walserings," as you not so subtly hinted at in "The Last Prose Piece," the last line of which so ominously reads:

I think the best thing for me would be to sit in a corner and be silent.

Everywhere in this collection I see signs pointing toward your eventual check-out from society, with the signs coming stronger and brighter the closer these writings drew to the fateful diagnosis that sent you away for good.

In the coffee shop, which was practically depopulated at present, a sketch writer wrote a sketch wherein he felt obliged to give voice to the humble notion that life itself might be sketching more subtle sketches than he.

Was that the realization you came to? That simply walking in the woods, seeing and listening, and not reporting, was enough? That the ultimate subtlety was impossible, that it is was in fact found merely in the observance of life itself? Because I see a trend here. You gave up on the novels. They weren't selling well, I think, and there was also that habit you had of losing them. You turned to the little prose pieces, where you seem to be most at home. After all, your novels are not much more than a batch of 'little Walserings' strung together into one long Walsering hung at a jaunty angle from the rafters. Your frustration at the endless process of submitting these pieces to the local newspapers is more than evident, especially when you spell it out in "The Last Prose Piece." But there is other evidence of your growing despair with writing in general. At the end of one piece you report that you're going off to bed, telling the reader to "figure out the story for yourself if you like." Asides to yourself appear in the pieces with more frequency, hinting at a deep boredom with traditional narrative. And yet having exhausted so many forms by that point, where else was there to turn.

Yet despite all this, there are so many wondrous pieces in this collection. Your absurdity and surrealistic flourishes shine. Who else could write a sentence such as this: "I found a dumpling with mustard delicious, which won't keep me from noting the possibility of a first-person book's 'I' being modestly metaphorical, not authorial." [a possibility I am clearly ignoring here-ed.] At times it seems you are just rapidly cycling through your mind as you write, alighting for a few seconds here and a few more there, before finally collapsing in a heap at the end. I understand this. I like when you have conversations with yourself or with imagined interlopers. I don't find this intrusion distracting; rather, I welcome it. Knowing you had worked as a butler briefly (after attending servant school, the experience of which you mined so splendidly for Jakob von Gunten), I was also quite pleased to read "Tobold" and see how you rendered that experience into prose.

I love how you incorporate your unabashed love of nature into your writing. I love how over the top you get with it, spinning out these flowery descriptions of lakes and forests. Nature is always so pure in your work, something incorruptible, and a respite from the chaos of the modern world. I like when you make the story a character, having become fed up with its main character. In another writer's unskilled hands, these habits of yours to intrude could prove disastrous to the work's integrity, mere parlor tricks to cover up a lack of substance, of any real meaning. But with you it always just makes me laugh. And that matters so much to me, for as you say in "Marie":

After all, of the moments experienced by us poor human beings, who, alas, are too often tormented by low spirits, are not humorous moments the most beautiful?

I know that it will never be clear to me exactly what happened to you, why your last two decades unraveled the way they did. But it is my hope that you were indeed at peace. With your beloved walks through field and forest, no longer writing, occupied as you were with the everyday business of 'being mad'. Unlike some others, I don't see your death in that snowy field as a lonely one. I like to think of you out there, walking in the newly fallen snow, relishing its purity, and right then, as your heart gives out, before you fall, I like to imagine what you saw, gazing across one of your cherished clearings, perhaps catching one last glimpse of some glittering lake in the distance.
( )

The very short stories of Robert Walser in no way thrill me as much as his longer fiction does. Even though, I do like to read them. It is amazing to realize for oneself the same as the critics say about his work in the short form. That though he often repeats himself each story seems fresh in its own way. And not too long after finishing, the story is forgotten, which I find very strange indeed. There seems to be many short stories of Robert Walser available to read and even more on the way. I suppose I will keep circling his wagon for some time to come. ( )

German modernists-- so dreamy! ( )