walser

Of course I could have chosen the ever popular robert walser is dead photo with him lying in the snow face down smothered in snow,  but it's depressing and really doesn't reflect the man, the one who would be happy to die outside, in the snow, alone and unaided, the appropriate photo of an event that had already happened to him years earlier, before he was committed to that dire place, and was an idol to young Franz Kafka and Herman Hesse -and everyone else who had somehow  managed to read him.

But it is only now, thanks to jochen greven that we can read him at all.  And thank god for that.

THE JOB APPLICATION

BY ROBERT WALSER

Esteemed gentlemen, I am a poor, young, unemployed person in the business field, my name is Wenzel, I am seeking a suitable position, and I take the liberty of asking you, nicely and politely, if perhaps in your airy, bright, amiable rooms such a position might be free. I know that your good firm is large, proud, old, and rich, thus I may yield to the pleasing supposition that a nice, easy, pretty little place would be available, into which, as into a kind of warm cubbyhole, I can slip. I am excellently suited, you should know, to occupy just such a modest haven, for my nature is altogether delicate, and I am essentially a quiet, polite, and dreamy child, who is made to feel cheerful by people thinking of him that he does not ask for much, and allowing him to take possession of a very, very small patch of existence, where he can be useful in his own way and thus feel at ease. A quiet, sweet, small place in the shade has always been the tender substance of all my dreams, and if now the illusions I have about you grow so intense as to make me hope that my dream, young and old, might be transformed into delicious, vivid reality, then you have, in me, the most zealous and most loyal servitor, who will take it as a matter of conscience to discharge precisely and punctually all his duties. Large and difficult tasks I cannot perform, and obligations of a far-ranging sort are too strenuous for my mind. I am not particularly clever, and first and foremost I do not like to strain my intelligence overmuch. I am a dreamer rather than a thinker, a zero rather than a force, dim rather than sharp. Assuredly there exists in your extensive institution, which I imagine to be overflowing with main and subsidiary functions and offices, work of the kind that one can do as in a dream? —I am, to put it frankly, a Chinese; that is to say, a person who deems everything small and modest to be beautiful and pleasing, and to whom all that is big and exacting is fearsome and horrid. I know only the need to feel at my ease, so that each day I can thank God for life’s boon, with all its blessings. The passion to go far in the world is unknown to me. Africa with its deserts is to me not more foreign. Well, so now you know what sort of a person I am. —I write, as you see, a graceful and fluent hand, and you need not imagine me to be entirely without intelligence. My mind is clear, but it refuses to grasp things that are many, or too many by far, shunning them. I am sincere and honest, and I am aware that this signifies precious little in the world in which we live, so I shall be waiting, esteemed gentlemen, to see what it will be your pleasure to reply to your respectful servant, positively drowning in obedience. WENZEL

Here is his pencil script.  It took them near fifty years to figure out that it is simply German.

and if it's okay let's toss in a little Melville:

-- Can you send me about fifty fast-writing youths, with an easy style & not averse to polishing their labors? If you can, I wish you would, because since I have been here I have planned about that number of future works & cant find enough time to think about them separately. -- But I don't know but a book in a man's brain is better off than a book bound in calf -- at any rate it is safer from criticism. And taking a book off the brain, is akin to the ticklish and dangerous business of taking an old painting off a panel -- you have to scrape off the whole brain in order to get at it with due safety -- & even then, the painting may not be worth the trouble. --Letter to Evert Duyckinck, December 13 1850

I heard sometime that if we had like 10,000 monkeys and gave each one a typewriter, in 10 years they could write Ulysses.  Ever since then I've wished I had 10,000 monkeys and I'd give each some paints, and by god I'd never have to work again.

I would wish it on no one to be me.

Only I am capable of bearing myself.
To know so much, to have seen so much, and
To say nothing, just about nothing.
- Robert Walser

billy childish a beautiful painting. robert walser lying dead in the snow.

With all my ideas and follies I could one day found a corporate company for the propagation of beautiful but unreliable imaginings.

- Robert Walser