Music
by Robert Walser
Music is the sweetest thing in the world. I absolutely adore notes. I'll run a thousand paces just to hear one. Often when I'm walking through the hot streets in summer and hear the sounds of a piano from an unknown house I stop in my tracks, ready to die on the spot. I'd like to die listening to a piece of music.
I imagine this is so easy, so natural, but naturally it is 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 again within me. Then I go to do my homework, to eat or play, and then forget about it.
A piano, I find, sounds most enchanting of all. Even beneath the hand of an amateur. It's not the playing I hear, just the sound.
I could never be a musician. For music-making would never be sweet enough, intoxicating enough for me. Listening to music is far holier.
Music always puts me in a sad mood, but sad in the way a sad smile is sad. A friendly sadness is what I mean. The happiest music isn't happy to me, and the most melancholy music fails to strike me as particularly melancholy or disheartening.
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. I've no desire to know what it is.
I've no desire to know everything. As intelligent as I think myself, I possess, generally speaking, very little thirst of knowledge. I suppose that's because by nature I am the opposite of curious.
I'm perfectly happy to let all sorts of things go on around me without bothering my head about how they happen. Certainly this is deplorable and unlikely to help me make a career for myself.
Perhaps I am not afraid of death, so I'm not afraid of life either. I see I'm starting to philosophize.
Music is the most thoughtless and thus sweetest of the arts. Purely intellectual people will never appreciate it, but they are the ones who benefit most deeply when they hear it.
You can't want to understand and appreciate an art. Art wants to snuggle up to us. She is so terribly pure and self-satisfied a creature that she takes offense when someone tries to win us over. She punishes anyone who approaches with the intention of laying hold of her.
Artists soon find this out. They see it as their profession to deal with her, the one who won't let anyone touch her.
That's why I never want to be a musician. I'm afraid of the punishment so fair a creature would administer. It's fine to love an art, but you must be careful not to admit it to yourself. Your love is warmest when you don't admit it is there.
--Music hurts me. I don't know if I truly love it. It finds me wherever it happens to. I don't go looking for it. I let it caress me. But these caresses are injurious.
How should I say? Music is a weeping in melodies, a remembrance in notes, a painting in sounds. I can't rightly say.
Just so no one takes my statements about art up there too seriously. They're certainly to miss the mark somewhat as not a single note has struck me today.
There's something missing when I don't hear music, and, when I do, then there's really something missing.
That's the best I can say about music.
"Music" is part of the early plotless novel Fritz Kocher's Essays by Robert Walser (Swiss, 1878-1956). The novel purports to be a collection of essays by a schoolboy.
Robert Walser wrote "Music" as a single paragraph. I've taken the liberty to break it up for ease of reading for PR members. Forgive me, dear Robert.
This translation of "Music" is included in a collection of Robert Walser's work, Masquerade and Other Stories, translated by Susan Bernofsky.
by Robert Walser
Music is the sweetest thing in the world. I absolutely adore notes. I'll run a thousand paces just to hear one. Often when I'm walking through the hot streets in summer and hear the sounds of a piano from an unknown house I stop in my tracks, ready to die on the spot. I'd like to die listening to a piece of music.
I imagine this is so easy, so natural, but naturally it is 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 again within me. Then I go to do my homework, to eat or play, and then forget about it.
A piano, I find, sounds most enchanting of all. Even beneath the hand of an amateur. It's not the playing I hear, just the sound.
I could never be a musician. For music-making would never be sweet enough, intoxicating enough for me. Listening to music is far holier.
Music always puts me in a sad mood, but sad in the way a sad smile is sad. A friendly sadness is what I mean. The happiest music isn't happy to me, and the most melancholy music fails to strike me as particularly melancholy or disheartening.
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. I've no desire to know what it is.
I've no desire to know everything. As intelligent as I think myself, I possess, generally speaking, very little thirst of knowledge. I suppose that's because by nature I am the opposite of curious.
I'm perfectly happy to let all sorts of things go on around me without bothering my head about how they happen. Certainly this is deplorable and unlikely to help me make a career for myself.
Perhaps I am not afraid of death, so I'm not afraid of life either. I see I'm starting to philosophize.
Music is the most thoughtless and thus sweetest of the arts. Purely intellectual people will never appreciate it, but they are the ones who benefit most deeply when they hear it.
You can't want to understand and appreciate an art. Art wants to snuggle up to us. She is so terribly pure and self-satisfied a creature that she takes offense when someone tries to win us over. She punishes anyone who approaches with the intention of laying hold of her.
Artists soon find this out. They see it as their profession to deal with her, the one who won't let anyone touch her.
That's why I never want to be a musician. I'm afraid of the punishment so fair a creature would administer. It's fine to love an art, but you must be careful not to admit it to yourself. Your love is warmest when you don't admit it is there.
--Music hurts me. I don't know if I truly love it. It finds me wherever it happens to. I don't go looking for it. I let it caress me. But these caresses are injurious.
How should I say? Music is a weeping in melodies, a remembrance in notes, a painting in sounds. I can't rightly say.
Just so no one takes my statements about art up there too seriously. They're certainly to miss the mark somewhat as not a single note has struck me today.
There's something missing when I don't hear music, and, when I do, then there's really something missing.
That's the best I can say about music.
"Music" is part of the early plotless novel Fritz Kocher's Essays by Robert Walser (Swiss, 1878-1956). The novel purports to be a collection of essays by a schoolboy.
Robert Walser wrote "Music" as a single paragraph. I've taken the liberty to break it up for ease of reading for PR members. Forgive me, dear Robert.
This translation of "Music" is included in a collection of Robert Walser's work, Masquerade and Other Stories, translated by Susan Bernofsky.