You really do have to understand these people correctly! They are very happy indeed to be on a vacation trip and to see so many beautiful things that others cannot see; but it causes them pain and embarrassment actually to have to look at these things. If a tower is taller than other towers, a precipice deeper than the common precipice or a famous painting particularly large or small, that is all right, for the difference can be ascertained and talked about; it is for this reason that they tend to seek out a famous palace that is particularly spacious or particularly old, and among landscapes they prefer the wild ones. If you could only trick them about train schedules, hotel rates, and uniforms (but that is just what they would never fall for!), and set them down unawares on a cliff in the Saxon Switzerland, you could no doubt convince them to feel a genuine Matterhorn thrill, for surely Saxony is dizzying enough. If, however, something is not high, deep, large, small, or strikingly painted, in short, if something is not a phenomenon worth talking about, but merely beautiful, they choke — as though on a big smooth bite that will neither go up nor down, a morsel too soft to suffocate on, and too tough to let a word pass. Thus emerge those Oohs! and Ahs! painful syllables of suffocation. You cannot very well reach with your fingers down your throat; and we have not yet found a better means of getting the necessary words out of our mouth. It isn’t right to make fun of this. Such exclamations express a very painful feeling of constriction.
Experienced art commentators naturally have their own special techniques about which we might well have something to say; but this would be going too far. And, moreover, even the uncorrupted average man, despite the disagreeable effects of his constriction, feels a genuine satisfaction when standing face to face, as it were, with something that is acknowledged by experts as beautiful. This satisfaction has its own curious nuances. It contains for instance some of the same pride you feel when you can say that you passed the bank building at the very same hour when the famous bank robber X must have made his escape; other people already feel enraptured just to set foot in the city in which Goethe spent eight days, or to know the cousin by marriage of the lady who first swam the English Channel; there are indeed people who find it particularly wonderful just to live in such a momentous era. It always seems to revolve around a having-been-there; though in general it requires some element of complication, it must have an air of personal exclusivity. For as much as people lie, pretending to be completely engrossed in their occupations, they take a childish delight in personal experiences and that incalculable sense of importance that such experiences give us. It is then that they feel touched by their own “personal destiny,” which is an altogether extraordinary thing: “He was just talking to me at that very moment when he slipped and broke his leg. .!” What they feel, were they to be able to put it into words, is as if, behind that great blue window with the cloud curtains, someone had been standing a long time watching them.
And you may not want to believe it, but it is usually for this very reason alone that we ourselves travel to those places depicted in the postcards we buy, a tendency which does not in and of itself make sense, since it would after all be much easier simply to order the cards by mail. And this is the reason why such postcards have to be so overbearingly and over-realistically beautiful; if ever they were to start looking natural, then mankind would have lost something. “So this is what it looks like here,” we say to ourselves and study the card mistrustfully; then we write below: “You can’t imagine how lovely it is. .!” It is the same manner of speaking by which one man confides in another: “You can’t imagine how much she loves me. .”
Who Made You, Oh Forest Fair. .?
When it is very hot outside and you see a forest, you sing: “Who made you, oh forest fair, rise so tall above the ground?” This occurs with automatic certainty and is one of the reflex actions of the German nation. The more unconsciously their heat-parched tongue knocks about in their mouth, and the more like a sharkskin their throat has become, the more passionately will they gather their last strength for a musical finale, and they solemnly affirm that they will sing praises to the master above as long as their voice fills the air. This song is sung with all the obduracy of that idealism which, when all sufferings have come to an end, deserves a drink.
Yet whoever you are, you need only to have been once, for an extended period of time, in the proximity of a sweltering 104° fever, at which the border between death and life begins, to drop all your scorn for this song. You lie there — assuming you have been through a serious accident, have been operated on, and are all patched up again — as a convalescent in the beautiful sanatorium of some health resort, all wrapped up in white sheets and blankets on an airy balcony, and the world is nothing but a distant hum; and chances are, if the sanatorium is so designed, you will also be bedded down in such a way that for weeks you will have nothing before your eyes but the steep, green canopy of trees hugging the side of a mountain. You become as patient as a pebble in a brook, over which the water rushes.
Your memory is still all afever, and you taste nothing but the residual sweet dryness after the anesthesia. And you humbly remember that in the days and nights during which life wrestled over you and the most profound and ultimate thoughts would have been appropriate, you had absolutely nothing on your mind but the same redundant image: on a hike in high summer you are approaching the cool edge of a forest. Again and again this illusion returns, stepping out of the bilious blaze of the sun into the dampness of the dark, only to have to be thrust back again, approaching the same destination through sun-parched fields. How little do paintings, novels, and philosophies count at such moments! In such a weakened state the meager remains of our corporal self close up like a feverish hand, in which our intellectual aspirations melt away like little ice cubes that cannot keep you cool. You resolve henceforth to live a life which is as ordinary as possible, replete with serious attempts to achieve affluence and its rewards, which are as simple and unchanging as the taste of coolness, pleasure, and a quiet occupation. Oh, how you abhor everything out of the ordinary, everything that demands effort and ingenuity when you are sick, and how you long for the eternal, healthy mediocrity common to all men. Is there a problem in that? Let it wait! Sometimes it is a more pressing question, whether in an hour there will be chicken broth or something more invigorating on the table, and you sing to yourself: “Who made you, oh forest fair, rise so tall above the ground?. .” Life seems bent so strangely straight, since, by the way, you never could keep a tune before.
But little by little your recovery proceeds, and with it the evil spirit of the intellect returns. You start observing things. Directly opposite your balcony that green canopy of trees still hugs the side of a mountain, and you still hum that grateful song to it, a habit which all of a sudden you can’t seem to shake; but one day you realize that the forest does not consist only of a series of notes, but of trees, which before you couldn’t tell for the forest. And if you look very closely, you can even recognize how these friendly giants struggle over light and ground with the envy of horses fighting over fodder. They stand quietly side by side, here perhaps a grove of spruce, there a grove of beech trees: it looks naturally dark and light as in a painting, and moralistically edifying as the touching togetherness of families. But, in fact, it is the eve of a thousand-year-long battle.