As if a heart about to burst revealed its grief and then closed up again for eternity—. That’s why I often turn to page 37 in Niggli’s biography of Schubert.
Gramophone Record (Deutsche Grammaphonaktiengesellschaft.)
C2-42531. The Trout by Schubert.
Mountain stream water burbling crystal clear between cliff and pine tree permutated into music. The trout, a ravishing predator, light gray with red speckles, lurking, standing, flowing, shooting forward, downward, upward, disappearing. Beautiful blood-thirstiness!
The piano accompaniment is sweet, soft, monotone of gurgling torrent, deep and dark green. Real life is no longer needed. We feel the fairy tale of nature!
Every day in Gmunden in the afternoon hours, a lady in a watch-maker’s shop had them play the gramophone record C2-42531 two to three times. She sat on a tabouret, I stood close to the device.
We never said a word to each other.
Henceforth she would always hold off on the concert till I appeared.
One day she paid to have it played three times, whereupon she was about to leave. I paid to have it played a fourth time. She waited at the door, listened along to the end.
Gramophone record C2-42531, Schubert, The Trout.
One day she didn’t come any more.
The song survived like a present from her.
Autumn came, and the esplanade was lightly paved with scattered yellow leaves.
And then they shelved the gramophone in the watchmaker’s shop since it no longer paid to keep it.
A Real True Relationship
She sat by the immense ground floor window that almost reached down to the ground of the dusty, gray, miserable country lane, and sewed blouses on a lovely, glittering sewing machine from morning to night. Her eyes wore an expression of despair. But she herself was not aware of it. She sewed, sewed and sewed.
She was very slender, not made for the storm of life that shakes and sweeps away souls and bodies. In the evening she ate the cold vegetables from her midday meal. All this I saw through the immense ground floor window and she saw that I saw it all.
One evening she stood leaning against the front door of the house. And she said to me: “I’ve taken a job in a blouse factory in Mariahilf, so I won’t have to work on my own any longer in this lonely room.”
And I thought: “Country lane, country lane, you’ve lost your sparkle, you’ve lost your riches.
“A person’s got to get ahead in life, isn’t that so?” she said, “and by the way, I’ve always watched you walk by my window, three times a day. Three times a day you walked by, that’s right. But in Mariahilf there’ll be forty girls, and we’ll be able to chatter and work like in an anthill—.”
“Listen, Miss, I’ll still walk three times past your window when you won’t be seated there anymore—.”
“Will you really?!? Well, then in a way I’ll still be there too, I’ll be back home just like before—.”
“Maybe you could leave your glittering little sewing machine at the window and with it one of your unfinished blouses—.”
“Sure, why not, I will—.”
That was the only real true relationship I ever had with a female soul in my entire uneventful life—.
Country lane, gray, dusty country lane, so now you’ve lost your sparkle, you’ve lost your riches—. And she, she’s going to work now, going out into the world—!
The Nature of Friendship
I know two people with true feelings of friendship for me, my brother and A.R. They understand everything I think, feel, say, derive from all these things the rosiest interpretation. They have absolutely no wish to set traps for me. They perceive only the worthwhile, ignore any possible sour notes without blinking. They draw off the cream from the beloved person, don’t quibble about the watery milk that floats beneath it, but rather take it as a law of nature that the cream can’t reach down all the way to the bottom—. They elucidate us according to our own ideals hidden within, not according to our all too conspicuous everyday failings! They watch for our rare highpoints, turning a blind eye to our depravities. They are noble interpreters, expounders of our true nature. They fathom our frailties, they respect our strengths. They deal with us as one does with purebred canaries, parrots, starlings, dogs, monkeys. One respects their innate character, but demands nothing impossible from them. One holds up their “distinctive” exceptional qualities. This benevolently sentimental form of even-keeled kindheartedness is called: friendship. Any other kind is a sham. This noble “eternal kindheartedness” is a gift of God! It is generally reserved for the dearly departed. Only after death do we fully fathom the distinctive qualities of a loved one, delve deeper into their essence, the living manifestations of which no longer disturb us. So long as he lived he committed the irritating maladroitness to be someone other in his thinking and feeling than ourselves!
October Sunday
A steamy sun-drenched quiet afternoon. I sit and write. Somebody knocks at the door. “Please do not disturb me, I must be alone!”
“Gee, Peter, I really just wanted to chitchat with you, it’s so boring today, do you have office hours, are you poetizing?”
“Why the irony? Yes, I’m poetizing.”
“But Peter, you’re not some kind of manual laborer, thank God you’ve got no steady job, you can go right back to composing your poetry undisturbed in two hours when I’m gone!?”
“Just try it some time, you don’t seem to understand much about this kind of work!”
“That’s a new one, a poet who keeps office hours and refuses to receive a friend who’d just like to pleasantly chitchat with him. It’s not like your impressions are going to evaporate away! Or are they?!”
“Would you ever think of troubling a lawyer, a doctor, a bank director while he was engaged in his work?!”
“Engaged in his work, Peter, come off it, yours isn’t work in the ordinary sense of the word, it’s a distraction, an amusement!”
“Do you wish to impede my distraction, my amusement with your pleasant chitchat?!”
“See you ’round, Peter, you’re downright ungrateful to your admirers, but nobody takes you seriously, thank God. Adieu. Poet! I don’t want to be the cause of the world’s missing out on something! So long.”
Fellow Man
No one man can abide another, in matters big or small, he just can’t do it, that is his eternally unspoken tragedy. He can’t give the reasons, which is why he must keep it to himself. That is his tragedy. He has no reason to be unhappy and yet he is, and so must bear it in silence. But when grief finally explodes it generally explodes wrongly and unjustly. Which is far worse. So to “grin and bear it” is the best thing to do. A “flare-up” calls for an immense reserve of spiritual strength and brutality, disregard for others. Who has it?! Who benefits from it?!?
So grin and bear it! Yuck!
Can you possibly know what plagues another, say your fellow man? The fact is, you don’t even want to know. What a miserable doddering camel you are, loaded down, burdened with your own intimate woes. Your concern for others is a forced comedy you put on for your allegedly kind heart! Nobody has natural Savior-like inclinations. There is only one. And he got his just due, they finished him off, in fact. Interest?! At best you’re interested in yourself and not even that, you’re not wise enough to be so farsighted. You lend an ear, but that’s the most tiresome thing of all, the fate of others. “Here, take twenty Crowns, but do shut up!” No, better let him get it off his chest—.