On the Street
Baudry de Saunier’s The Art of Driving
Why do all the splendid things conceived, dreamed up by the godlike human brain so soon degenerate into grotesque chicaneries?!? For the very reason that everywhere you look in this earthly existence there’s heaven and hell, the deceptive devil and guardian angel side by side!
Nobody who loves the fresh air of nature, the forest and field, the evening and morning, the lazy, easygoing afternoon and the forceful vibrant magnificence before noon, nobody eager to catch a glimpse of a deer in the early evening on the edge of the woods, of hungry crows in a snowy field, of the blossoming and wilting bushes bordering endless streets, the stormy symphonies of mountain streams and the noble, discreet silence of homogeneous groves of trees, nobody so inclined would speed through the world in his holy private luxury automobile and, thereby, endanger his fellow man, animals and himself!
Could you imagine Beethoven, Goethe, Kant speeding along, you men of means?
To let life slowly flow into you, that’s all there is to life! Everything else is the pitiful attempt to elude at a speedy clip God’s indictment of your failure to grasp the beauties of this world, for lack of eye, ear, time! The noble horse and buggy in the Prater that can tear along at a speedy clip, still leaves us the pleasure of the morning dew on the meadow, the lonely woods, the old head waters of the Danube, of pebble banks in modern faded tones of gray-brown-blue, of old pastures and cawing crow rookeries. But the speeding automobile wants to whisk away what’s left of your already overly burdened soul! It wants to abduct your own sense of peace with a meanspirited spurt of speed! Roll on, destiny’s children, at the tempo of a rubber-tired hack on the Praterhauptallee, cherish the riches of nature more than the pace of your passage, and above all read: Baudry de Saunier’s The Art of Driving!
The Walking Stick
I admit it. I have a fanatic attachment to particularly striking walking sticks, it might even be the onset of an incipient mania in which one’s entire lust for life is henceforth linked to lovely walking sticks. Forest, lake, spring, winter, woman, art — all fade away, and there’s only one still thrilling thing left: your lovely walking stick! Even though, in my case, I do not suspect this insidious devolution of a predilection, every pet feeling in our nervous system can, alas, evolve, or realign itself into an idée fixe. The fact is, I know all the walking sticks for sale in Vienna, have my own special favorites in each establishment, sticks which, strange at it may seem, are the least likely to be bought by someone else. Does that surprise you, Peter Altenberg, you with your eccentric taste?! A young woman once gave me as a gift one of these passionately coveted walking sticks which stood for two years in the display case. It was made of light gray spayed goat horn and sugar cane. A remarkably successful product made in Vienna in the English style, it cost only eleven Crowns. The dear young donor sewed me a sheath of fine deer hide with brown silk for the handle.
But then they kidded in café and restaurant: “What’s wrong with your Sir Stick?! Did he catch a cold in inclement weather?!?”
Somebody said: “Peter Altenberg, you’re striking enough as is. Enough already with these forced efforts to make yourself ridiculous. The effect is self-evident!”
My walking stick was often knocked over. One time a man said: “Don’t look so reproachful, you think I did it on purpose?!”
“No,” I replied, “I don’t think so; for what reason would you have to deliberately knock down my poor walking stick?!”
“There, you see, just be a little sensible,” said the man and pardoned me.
As a consequence of these painful occurrences, I brought my beloved walking stick back each week to the little shop in which it had been bought and asked them to make good the damages through polishing etc., etc. The salesman always replied politely: “In two to three days! No charge for the repairs!” After a while I realized that he took me for a “walking stick nut” and never even thought of sending the stick back for repair. He always said: “That’s exactly how the stick came from the ‘factory’! It’s as if you’d divined it!” One time I noticed a tiny nick.
“But this nick is still there,” I humbly maintained.
“Yes, well, that’s an innate function of the organic structure of the goat horn cell tissue itself, even our factory can’t iron it out—.”
Then I thought: If they had seriously filed, grated, polished it down, there would be nothing left today of my wondrous spayed goat horn handle. How can I thank you enough for your considerate wisdom: “He’s a stick-nut! Better handle with kid gloves!”
A Walk
I ran into an important politician in the Stadtpark. “Well, that’s all very interesting, but everyone of you writers has a screw loose!”
“Well, for heaven’s sake, that’s the tool of our trade. The shoemaker has a shoemaker’s bench, or else he wouldn’t be able to make any shoes. We have a screw loose, or else we wouldn’t be able to be any different from the others and would be unable, therefore, to communicate anything special to them that they don’t already know!”
“But what about those writers with no screw loose?!”
“Writers, precisely, my dear sir, they are not!”
“For once you actually seem to hit the nail on the head. Why just the other day when I went for a walk in the woods with one of those famous ‘altogether normal’ ones, and he suddenly screamed on the verge of despair: ‘These woods are too green for me, too green, much much too green!’ it first dawned on me and I recognized that he was a real great writer!”
“On the contrary, that one, in particular, was a just a fool! Any man for whom the woods are too green is no writer, but rather a fool! He really has no screw loose. He’s a perfectly normal fool!”