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The online edition of Der Spiegel recently reported the discovery, in an antique shop in the small town of Vauffelin, of a notebook (modest in size, A6 format) containing previously unpublished writings by Robert Walser, known to us through the edition of Ash, Needle, Pencil, and Match, a delightful anthology of short prose pieces, which the author composed during his (somewhat enigmatic and extremely discreet) passage through this world.
The following text is part of the manuscript now surrendered to the eager hands that will dissect it. For better or worse, the translation is ours. We share it, moved.
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If you are keeping vigil over someone ill and he sleeps, if the crackling of firewood makes the silence of the house all the more vivid, if the afternoon — like all cold and shadowed January afternoons — lends itself to meditation, and perhaps even to introspection, then perhaps you might grant yourself a few moments in which it still seems worthwhile to put to use a stubby pencil and a scrap of paper.
There is nothing quite like the poignant peace of one who waits. Most of the time, the clock finds a way to burrow into us and leave us restless and aching, perhaps even hollow. But that is not the case now: the flicker of the fire and the faint, drowsy light cast on the walls quiet our gestures.
The presence of someone sick, in need of our care, inspires a kind of concern akin to that which one feels for the stub of a candle: at any moment the wick might expire, and the tiny flame bid farewell in a thin, pale thread of final smoke. But while it burns, that tiny remnant of wax is marvellous, touching — a reason to revere the present.
Much the same could be said of a taut rope, across which our shirts hang, and whose frayed strands already foretell that painful peak at which the two ends will part forever, never to meet again. The breaking of matter is a puncture. But a sisal rope dies when it must die. The feeling of duty fulfilled requires no explanation, nor should it be prolonged.
I end here, grateful, reader, for your time. Time is precious — I might even say, deeply beautiful. A text, when read through someone else’s eyes, is nearly a miracle. You cannot imagine how much so, dear friend. Nor how profoundly.
