Without Lifting A Finger

Yet the way in which Walser then breathes life into them, in an act of complete assimilation and empathy, reveals how in the end emotions are perhaps most deeply felt when applied to the most insignificant things. “Indeed,” Walser writes about ash, “if one goes into this apparently uninteresting subject in any depth there is quite a lot to be said about it which is not at all uninteresting; if, for example, one blows on ash it displays not the least reluctance to fly off instantly in all directions. Ash is submissiveness, worthlessness, irrelevance itself, and best of all, it is itself pervaded by the belief that it is fit for nothing. Is it possible to be more helpless, more impotent, and more wretched than ash? Not very easily. Could anything be more compliant and more tolerant? Hardly. Ash has no notion of character and is further from any kind of wood than dejection is from exhilaration. Where there is ash there is actually nothing at all. Tread on ash, and you will barely notice t...

This description of the distinctly melancholic scrawl is reminiscent of the blue sheets of paper that Keller used as blotters as he toiled over his Bildungsroman at his desk in Berlin, and which over and over again repeat the name of his unrequited love in long intricately entwined lines, swirls, columns, and loops in a myriad variations—Betty Betty Betty, BBettytybetti, bettibettibetti, Bettybittebetti [Bettypleasebetti] is scrawled and doodled there in every calligraphic permutation imaginable. And around and between these five or six letters there is nothing, save here and there a sketch of a gateway to a walled garden, also with Betty inscribed above it, a Betty-mirror, a Betty-room, and a Betty-clock and next to it a Reaper, and another skeleton playing the fiddle, a funeral bell, and a kind of miniature coat of arms in which, through a magnifying glass, something can be made out which looks like a heart pierced through with pins. The art of writing is the attempt to contain the t...

From the essay on Rousseau: If he nevertheless persevered with writing, then only, as Jean Starobinski notes, in order to hasten the moment when the pen would fall from his hand and the essential things would be said in the silent embrace of reconciliation and return. Less heroically, but certainly no less correctly, one could also see writing as a continually self-perpetuating compulsive act, evidence that of all individuals afflicted by the disease of thought, the writer is perhaps the most incurable.

St. Peter’s Island (German: St. Petersinsel, French: Île de St-Pierre) is a peninsula situated in Lake Biel in the canton of Bern, Switzerland. It has a length of about 5 kilometres and a maximum width of 800 metres. Its highest point is 474 metres above sea level or 45 metres above lake level (429 m). It was formed in the last Ice Age (see Pleistocene), when the Rhône Glacier reached as far as the Jura mountains. It is a promontory of the Jolimont, above Erlach. Politically the island is split between the municipalities of Erlach and Twann-Tüscherz, the largest part belonging to the latter municipality. In the late nineteenth century following the engineering works of the Jura water correction, the water-level of the three lakes of the Seeland have dropped enough to clear the until then hidden isthmus, linking Erlach to St. Peter’s Island, which has eversince become a peninsula. Monks of the Cluniac order were the first inhabitants of the island, and built a monastery here in 1127. ...