The Walk Read Online Free PDF

carrying jugs he has seen in paintings, past shouting men and drunken men, past policemen, past schoolboys moving with their schoolboy purposes, past shadowy alcoves which smell cool, past ropes, sticks, foodstuffs, imitation jewellery, jaws, noses, hats,horses, veils, blankets, woollen stockings, sausages, balls of butter, and slabs of cheese, out of the tumult to a bridge over the Aare, where he stops, and leans over the rail to look down into the deep blue water flowing wonderfully away. Above him the castle turrets glitter and glow like brownish liquid fire. This might almost be Italy.
    At times on ordinary weekdays the whole small town seems to him bewitched by sun and stillness. He stands motionless before the strange old town hall, with the sharp-edged numerals of its date cut in the gleaming white wall. It is all so irretrievable, like the form of a folk song the people have forgotten. Hardly alive, no, not alive at all. He mounts the enclosed wooden stair to the castle where the old earls lived, the wood gives off the odour of age and of vanished human destinies. Up here he sits on a broad, curved, green bench to enjoy the view, but closes his eyes. It all looks so terrible, as if asleep, buried under dust, with the life gone out of it. The nearest thing lies as in a faraway veil-like 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 treesin 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