INSTEAD OF AN ESSAY
A letter to me from my brother: Dear Brother! I got your letter, read it, and read it again with amazement, yes, almost with admiration. You are a little scoundrel when it comes to style. You write like two professors put together. A real professional writer couldn’t say it any better. Where did you get it from? — I especially liked what you wrote about art. Yes, brother, art is a great and beautiful thing, but it is damn hard. If it was made out of the fantastic ideas people had, it would be quickly and easily finished, but there’s dexterity and craft that stands blocking the way between it and its execution. I have sighed more terrible sighs over it than a religious extremist. Brother, let me tell you: I have recently been writing poems. I sit at night for hours by the light of the lamp on my desk and I try to give my feelings a sonorous expression. It is hard, but other people, who seem to have no problems doing it, accomplish astounding things. There is one in particular who has even gotten famous. He is no older than I am and has already landed a book of poems. I’m not jealous but it pains me to see how far behind I still am despite all of my desperate efforts. Either the Muse smiles upon me in a hurry or I’m going to give it all up and become a mercenary. Studying philosophy seems ridiculous to me, and I’m not cut out for a job. I will carry off more laurels in some foreign army than I could harvest here, even if I got used to having a regular job. I will just live a wild, adventurous life, like so many other people who felt that life in their homeland was too narrow. I must admit that I’m worried about telling you these things. But I have faith in your strength and discretion. Our parents won’t hear any of this from your lips, I’m sure of that. So, my dear brother, how are things with you? Before I go we have to spend one more lovely night with each other. Maybe I’ll have some luck with my poems and then I won’t need to run away. You wrote to me that you’re bored. It’s too early for that, my good man. It seems to me that your lively spirit and your mania for expressing yourself in fine, elegant phrases prove it. What I wanted to say was that you were and are and always will be dear to me. You’re a funny kid, and easy to talk to. You will be something very great in life or else I’m an idiot. Yes, art really makes me sweat. It would really be too bad if I had to give it all up. But either I’ll create something first-rate or else nothing at all. Nothing is more pathetic than being a dilettante. Do you still take walks the way we used to together last summer? You can get a lot out of a solitary walk. Be patient with school. You may be twice as smart as your teacher but it’s still good to stick it out. Goodbye kid, goodbye my dear fellow. In any case, we’ll talk soon on a starry night over a beer about all the things that can be so beautiful and so ugly in this world. We need the wings of an eagle, but farewell! — I am using this letter from my brother in place of an essay because I’m totally lazybrained today. I ask that the teacher, insofar as one can request a favor of him as a man of honor, not tattle on my brother but observe the strictest secrecy. By the way, my dear brother’s poems have long since won applause and made him famous.
THE FAIR
The usefulness of a fair is great, and the pleasure it gives perhaps even greater. The farmers bring their cattle to market, the merchants their goods, the performers their curiosities, and the artists their works. Everyone wants to buy and sell. One person sells what he’s bought for a higher price and buys something else with the profit; someone else buys back the sold item from the buyer at a loss so that he can sell it somewhere else for more. Then maybe he slaps himself on the forehead and calls himself a fool. All anyone does is trade, bustle, shout, run around, look, and buy and sell. We impartial bystanders drift around in the crowded fair with our schoolboy intentions. There are plenty of grand things to see. The lady there with her tight-fitting red dress, feathered hat, and high little boots is a snake-charmer. I can watch her for hours with the greatest pleasure. She stands supremely still. Her face is pale, her eyes are big and lackluster, and the expression of her mouth is filled with contempt. I don’t mind letting her despise me: She is so sad. She must bear some kind of indelible sorrow. — Here are the shooting galleries. This is where young patriots practice their bull’s-eyes. The distance from the barrel of the gun to the target is admittedly not very great, but a lot of people still miss. Shots cost 5 cents each. An incredibly beautiful girl lures everyone in the mood to try shooting to her booth, and even people who aren’t in the mood. Her colleagues give her the evil eye. She is as beautiful as a princess and friendly like no one else but her—. There are carousels everywhere, steam-powered and not. The music is not very uplifting and still you wouldn’t want to do without it. I let myself be carried up and down, and down and up. You ride in the most beautiful sleighs of silver and gold, the stars in the sky dance around you, the world revolves with you. It’s worth the money. — Then there’s the Kasperli puppet show. I’m glad I didn’t walk past that and not see it. I would have missed out on the best laughs. You have to laugh at every blow that the Kasperl strikes with his monstrous whip. More people die than want to die. Death leaps out unbelievably fast and strikes his victims down with marvelous accuracy. These victims include generals, doctors, governesses, soldiers, policemen, and ministers. Not one of them dies a peaceful death, as the newspapers say. They are pretty violently executed. Kasperl gets away with a light beating. At the end of the show, he politely bows to us and invites us to a brand-new, never-before-performed show. I like how his rascally face never changes. — Here you can have your photograph taken. There a panorama offers anyone who wants to look the chance to see every continent and every historical event in the world. Here you can see the three-legged horse. And just three steps farther on, you can look at the biggest ox in the world. No one has to but everyone is most politely invited to. People pay their entrance fees as they walk by. We keep walking. I take one last look at the snake lady. Truly, she deserves it. She stands there as tall and motionless as a picture. My parents gave me a frank to spend. I wonder where it went. — Beautiful snake lady!
“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.