the joys of reading

There are moments that just redeem everything and are a balm for your battered soul, as when a friend (thanks, dearest Jonathan!) introduces you to an unknown writer and a whole new world opens up.

Amazing, amazing Robert Walser. I shall hold you close forever keenly!

And has anyone ever described a boat trip so beautifully?

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       Not that the water was crystal clear everywhere. Who would want to give orders to Nature? She makes no pretense of being other than she is. I don't know which is lovelier, boating on a lake or on a river, but this knowing needn't bother me. In the boat sat a few understandably contented people. A cloth canopy was stretched over their heads, and their course led beneath the twigs of the trees on the bank. Slowly they moved forward, for the rowers saw no reason to overexert themselves. What cause could there have been for this? The day is long from early morning to late in the evening. On a pleasure trip the hours don't admonish you to hurry up. It's fine to waste a little time now and then. 

[...]

       Odd similarities between things at rest and things flowing occurred to me during the trip that I, too, participated in, and I would have been delighted to have been as fascinating a stroyteller as one person there, who was asked to invent a tale so that the outing not become boring. The trip took place beneath the baldachin formed by the sky. Everyone listened to the teller's words as if to something heartening. Here and there fish, driven it seemed by an uncontrollable curiosity, bobbed upward from the depths to visibility, as though wishing to help the listeners be satisfied with the tale. On fish one finds no arms. Is that why they have such huge eyes and expressive mouths? Is it because they have no legs that they make the best swimmers? Doesn't river, Fluss, come from Flosse, fins, and aren't the latter an impediment to walking, and isn't this limitation that forms the foundation of their strength?

       A girl sitting with us in the boat compared travelling over the water to the imperceptible gliding and progress of growth, that of fruit for example, which perhaps would have little desire to ripen if it knew to what end.

       The thoughtful girl called ignorance a magnificent figure endowed with unconscious delights, sorrowful and splendid, not like those who learn arithmetic and writing, weep inwardly over their joy, and whose hearts tell them their laughter is a hardness, that they are incapable of enduring anything.

Robert Wasler, from 'Boat Trip' in Masquerade and Other Stories, trans. Susan Bernofsky (Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 1990), pp. 199-200.