The Tanners Read Online Free PDF Page B

look up for a moment in my daily work to see him
     standing somewhere, a little apart, the unmistakable figure of the solitary walker
     just pausing to take in the surroundings. And sometimes I imagine that I see with
     his eyes the bright
Seeland
and within this land of lakes the lake like a
     shimmering island, and in this lake-island another island, the Île Saint-Pierre
     "shining in the bright morning haze, floating in a sea of pale trembling light."
     Returning home then in the evening we look out, from the lakeside path suffused by
     mournful rain, at the boating enthusiasts out on the lake "in boats or skiffs with
     umbrellas opened above their heads," a sight which allows us to imagine that we are
     "in China or Japan or some other dream-like poetical land." As Mächler reminds us,
     Walser really did consider for a while the possibility of traveling, or even
     emigrating, overseas. According to his brother, he once even had a check in his
     pocket from Bruno Cassirer, good for several months' travel to India. It is not
     difficult to imagine him hidden in a green leafy picture by Henri Rousseau, with
     tigers and elephants, on the veranda of a hotel by the sea while the monsoon pours
     down outside, or in front of a resplendent tent in the foothills of the Himalayas,
     which––as Walser once wrote of the Alps––resemble nothing so much as a snow-white
     fur boa. In fact he almost got as far as Samoa, since Walter Rathenau, whom––if we
     may believe
The Robber
on this point––he had met one day, quite by chance,
     in the midst of an incessant stream of people and traffic on the Potsdamer Platz in
     Berlin, apparently wanted to find him a not-too-taxing position in the colonial
     administration on the island known to the Germans as the "Pearl of the South Seas."
     We do not know why Walser turned down this in many ways tempting offer. Let us
     simply assume that it is because, among the first German South Sea discoverers and
     explorers, there was a certain gentleman called Otto von Kotzebue, against whom
     Walser was just as irrevocably prejudiced as he was against the playwright of the
     same name, whom he called a narrow-minded philistine, claiming he had a too-long
     nose, bulging eyes and no neck, and that his whole head was shrunk into and hidden
     by a grotesque and enormous collar. Kotzebue had, so Walser continues, written a
     large number of come die which enjoyed runaway box-office success at a time when
     Kleist was in despair, and bequeathed a whole series of these massive, collected,
     printed volumes, coxed and boxed and bound in calfskin, to a posterity which would
     blench with shame were it ever to read them. The risk of being reminded, in the
     midst of a South Sea idyll, of this literary opportunist, one of the heroes of the
     German intellectual scene, as he dismissively calls him, was probably just too high.
     In any case, Walser didn't care much for travel and––apart from Germany––never
     actually went anywhere to speak of. He never saw the city of Paris, which he dreams
     of even from the asylum at Waldau. On the other hand, the Untergasse in Biel could
     seem to him like a street in Jerusalem "along which the Saviour and deliverer of the
     world modestly rides in." Instead he criss-crossed the country on foot, often on
     nocturnal marches with the moon shining a white track before him. In the autumn of
     1925, for example, he journeyed on foot from Berne to Geneva, following for quite
     a
     long stretch the old pilgrim route to Santiago da Compostela. He does not tell us
     much about this trip, other than that in Fribourg––I can see him entering that city
     across the incredibly high bridge over the Sarine––he purchased some socks; paid his
     respects to a number of hostelries; whispered sweet nothings to a waitress from the
     Jura; gave a boy almonds; strolling around in the dark doffed his hat to the Roussea
     monument on the island in the Rhône; and, crossing