Selected Stories Read Online Free PDF Page A

dreaming distance. Everything is sheathed in
     a hot cloud. Summer, but what sort of a summer? I am not alive, he cries out, and
     does not know where to turn with his eyes, hands, legs, and breath. A dream. Nothing
     there. I do not want dreams. In the end he tells himself he lives too much alone.
     He shudders, compelled to admit how unfeeling is his relation to the world about him.
    Then come the summer evenings. Kleist sits on the high churchyard wall. Everything
     is damp, yet also sultry. He opens his shirt, to breathe freely. Below him lies the
     lake, as if it had been hurled down by the great hand of a god, incandescent with
     shades of yellow and red, its whole incandescence seems to glow up out of the water’s
     depths. It is like a lake of fire. The Alps have come to life and dip with fabulous
     gestures their foreheads into the water. His swans down there circle his quiet island,
     and the crests of trees in dark, chanting, fragrant joy float over—over what? Nothing,
     nothing. Kleist drinks it all in. To him the whole dark sparkling lake is the cluster
     of diamonds upon a vast, slumbering, unknown woman’s body. The lime trees and the
     pine trees and the flowers give off their perfumes. There is a soft, scarcely perceptible
     sound down there; he can hear it, but he can also see it. That is something new. He
     wants the intangible, the incomprehensible. Down on the lake a boat is rocking; Kleist
     does not see it, but he sees the lanterns which guide it, swaying to and fro. There
     he sits, his face jutting forward, as if he must be ready for the death leap into
     the image of that lovely depth. He wants to perish into the image. He wants eyes alone,
     only to be one single eye. No, something totally different. The air should be a bridge,
     and the whole image of the landscape a chair back to relax against, sensuous, happy,
     tired. Night comes, but he does not want to go down, he throws himself on a grave
     that is hidden under bushes, bats whiz around him, the pointed trees whisper as soft
     airs pass over them. The grass smells so delicious, blanketing the skeletons of buried
     men. He is so grievously happy, too happy, whence his suffocation, his aridity, his
     grief. So alone. Why cannot the dead emerge and talk a half hour with the lonely man?
     On a summer night one ought really to have a woman to love. The thought of white lustrous
     breasts and lips hurls Kleist down the hill to the lakeside and into the water, fully
     dressed, laughing, weeping.
    Weeks pass, Kleist has destroyed one work, two, three works. He wants the highest
     mastery, good, good. What’s that? Not sure? Tear it up. Something new, wilder, more
     beautiful. He begins The Battle of Sempach, in the center of it the figure of Leopold of Austria, whose strange fate attracts
     him. Meanwhile, he remembers his Robert Guiscard. He wants him to be splendid. The good fortune to be a sensibly balanced man with
     simple feelings he sees burst into fragments, crash and rattle like boulders collapsing
     down the landslip of his life. He helps him nevertheless, now he is resolute. He wants
     to abandon himself to the entire catastrophe of being a poet: the best thing is for
     me to be destroyed as quickly as possible.
    What he writes makes him grimace: his creations miscarry. Toward autumn he is taken
     ill. He is amazed at the gentleness which now comes over him. His sister travels to
     Thun to bring him home. There are deep furrows in his cheeks. His face has the expression
     and coloring of a man whose soul has been eaten away. His eyes are more lifeless than
     the eyebrows over them. His hair hangs clotted in thick pointed hanks over his temples,
     which are contorted by all the thoughts which he imagines have dragged him into filthy
     pits and into hells. The verses that resound in his brain seem to him like the croakings
     of ravens; he would like to eradicate his memory. He would like to shed his life;
     but first he wants to shatter