PERHAPS I’ll procure a book by Marcel Proust, in its original language, of course, not the language of its translatedness. I still don’t know a single syllable by Romain Rolland, which I can conceive as evidence that culturally I’m neither frightened nor curious. In addition, I considered this author still quite young. It grieves me that he’s already sixty. Once a Jewish author wrote from his exile in Paris works that afterwards were eagerly read by many, as well as by the likes of Bismarck, in the Augsburger Abendblätter, and not long ago, while perusing a magazine, there passed before my eyes pictures of the Fuggerhaus in Augsburg. Today I received an aggrieved letter, I mean the sender was out of sorts, not the letter. This Heinrich Heine possesses a flourishing immortality, but still he rhymed about things most immoral, yet fate had marked him out as someone never to be forgotten. Once I loved a woman who had both an illegitimate child and a wealth of enthusiasm for Heine. I was, so to speak, in this woman’s good books. And now someone who had already elaborated on how one should treat books wrote an extensive essay on divine Italian laughter, though it had no air of laughter about it. At one of the occasional meetings of the Berlin Secession, Walther Rathenau once told me how taken he was with Hesse’s Peter Camenzind. I, in turn, shared with a girl that Hesse had married a waitress. The recipient of this news was so kind as to accept this as true. Lies casually served up can garner absolute belief. One can be counted a liar when telling the truth and be deemed well behaved when impudent. In a feverish state of ethical fervor, Tolstoy unleashed an assault against Shakespeare, only to perish afterwards of grief over this outrage, which of course is spoken anecdotally. A few days ago I heard a hurdy-gurdy man playing and a comedian delivering a lecture. The former stood in a landscape, the latter sat at a lectern before a select audience. The reading, like the organ-grinding, was done for money, the only difference being that the organ-grinder’s remuneration was put into a proffered hat while the admission fee was paid at the ticket counter. After that I saw a chair beam with joy to have had the chance to serve as a seat for a young lady. Bread rolls lay unspeakably quiet on the shimmering white plates. Then I found myself in a church where Haydn’s The Seasons was being performed. Two teachers were present who, in the most educated, that is, sophisticated manner, sought to avoid meeting, since they couldn’t stand each other. A singer sang so beautifully, almost to the point of it being sickening, but this is a sickness that heals, and now once again someone spoke to me about an unhappy young poet whose misery it was for an unbridgeable gulf to gape between his desire to live and his desire to figurate. To the bearer of this sensation, I answered that, for proponents of culture, internal dissension had always been the order of the day. Once a very dear, good, refined, elegant, in some respects knotty, unruly, but, as such, otherwise significant book was taken up by a girl. In her girlishly hot little hand the literary product melted away like snow when April comes around. I, too, am one of those who have already read Anatole France. With the request that the present piece not be taken as excessively heavy but rather as light as swan’s down, I grant myself permission to take my leave, though most likely I’ll be back in a bit.
(1926)