He goes for a walk. Why, he asks himself with a smile, why must it be he who has nothing to do, nothing to strike at, nothing to throw down? He feels the sap and the strength in his body softly complaining. His entire soul thrills for bodily exertion. Between high ancient walls he climbs, down over whose gray stone screes the dark green ivy passionately curls, up to the castle hill. In all the windows up here the evening light is aglow. Up on the edge of the rock face stands a delightful pavilion, he sits here, and lets his soul fly, out and down into the shining holy silent prospect. He would be surprised if he were to feel well now. Read a newspaper? How would that be? Conduct an idiotic political or generally useful debate with some respected official half-wit or other? Yes? He is not unhappy. Secretly he considers happy alone the man who is inconsolable: naturally and powerfully inconsolable. With him the position is one small faint shade worse. He is too sensitive to be happy, too haunted by all his irresolute, cautious, mistrusted feelings. He would like to scream aloud, to weep. God in heaven, what is wrong with me, and he rushes down the darkening hill. Night soothes him. Back in his room he sits down, determined to work till frenzy comes, at his writing table. The light of the lamp eliminates his image of his whereabouts, and clears his brain, and he writes now.
On rainy days it is terribly cold and void. The place shivers at him. The green shrubs whine and whimper and shed rain tears for some sun. Over the heads of the mountains drift monstrous dirty clouds like great impudent murderous hands over foreheads. The countryside seems to want to creep away and hide from this evil weather, to shrivel up. The lake is leaden and bleak, the language of the waves unkind. The storm wind, wailing like a weird admonition, can find no issue, crashes from one scarp to the next. It is dark here, and small, small. Everything is pressed right up against one’s nose. One would like to seize a sledgehammer and beat a way out of it all. Get away there, get away!
The sun shines again, and it is Sunday. Bells are ringing. The people are leaving the hilltop church. The girls and women in tight black laced bodices with silver spangles, the men dressed simply and soberly. They carry prayer books in their hands, and their faces are peaceful, beautiful, as if all anxiety were vanished, all the furrows of worry and contention smoothed away, all trouble forgotten. And the bells. How they peal out, leap out with peals and waves of sound. How it glitters and glows with blue and bell tones over the whole Sunday sunbathed little town. The people scatter. Kleist stands, fanned by strange feelings, on the church steps and his eyes follow the movements of the people going down them. Many a farmer’s child he sees, descending the steps like a born princess, majesty and liberty bred in the bone. He sees big-muscled, handsome young men from the country, and what country, not flat land, not young plainsmen, but lads who have erupted out of deep valleys curiously caverned in the mountains, narrow often, like the arm of a tall, somewhat monstrous man. They are the lads from the mountains where cornland and pasture fall steep into the crevasses, where odorous hot grass grows in tiny flat patches on the brinks of horrible ravines, where the houses are stuck like specks on the meadows when you stand far below on the broad country road and look right up, to see if there can still be houses for people up there.
Sundays Kleist likes, and market days also, when everything ripples and swarms with blue smocks and the costumes of the peasant women, on the road, and on the narrow main street. There, on this narrow street, by the pavement, the wares are stacked in stone vaults and on flimsy stalls. Grocers announce their cheap treasures with beguiling country cries. And usually on such a market day there shines the most brilliant, the hottest, the silliest sun. Kleist likes to be pushed hither and thither by the bright bland throng of folk. Everywhere there is the smell of cheese. Into the better shops go the serious and sometimes beautiful countrywomen, cautiously, to do their shopping. Many of the men have pipes in their mouths. Pigs, calves, and cows are hauled past. There is one man standing there and laughing and forcing his rosy piglet to walk by beating it with a stick. It refuses, so he takes it under his arm and carries it onward. The smells of human bodies filter through their clothes, out of the inns there pour the sounds of carousal, dancing, and eating. All this uproar, all the freedom of the sounds! Sometimes coaches cannot pass. The horses are completely hemmed in by trading and gossiping men. And the sun shines dazzling so exactly upon the objects, faces, cloths, baskets, and goods. Everything is moving and the dazzle of sunlight must of course move nicely along with everything else. Kleist would like to pray. He finds no majestic music so beautiful, no soul so subtle as the music and soul of all this human activity. He would like to sit down on one of the steps which lead into the narrow street. He walks on, past women with skirts lifted high, past girls who carry baskets on their heads, calm, almost noble, like the Italian women 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 jewelry, jaws, noses, hats, horses, veils, blankets, woolen 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 odor 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 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.