SHE THOUGHT she was ridiculous. What a bold beginning! My intention is to dance with words. She believed herself to be somewhat obsolete, marginalized, so to speak, by the times in which she lived. Without any rhyme or reason she felt she was a relic, historical, though she wore, as it were, fur. Did she live too lavishly? Perhaps I’ve posed this question somewhat carelessly, incautiously. Yet, now that the question has already been raised, I’ll try to answer it as firmly and elegantly as I can. Having possibly adopted the daily habit of imploring her husband to “Eat, my dear,” she probably helped herself too much to this herself. Her feet were pretty, her head in its daintiness a flower head. She would have preferred her hands a bit paler. In general she constantly thought she looked too wholesome, not sophisticated enough. To assess your own worth requires practice in desiring the possibility of being mistaken and the determination to place trust in having certain abilities. One might say, that is, hold the opinion, that she had never taken the trouble to make enough of an effort to love herself. For example, she still didn’t know if she respected herself at all. She had a page whom she permitted to edify her with his poetic skills by allowing him now and then to sit on a stool at her feet. May I ask that you put your confidence in this prose piece? I’d like to point out the fact that I’m thought capable of performing only for those anxiously willing to discover the possibility of appreciating more or less what’s being offered. Those who fail to see my industriousness for what it is naturally consider me indolent. Occasionally she wished her page didn’t poeticize, that he was just a page, and her wish was justified in that everyone who writes poetry is a bit discourteous, directing his courtesies to poeticizing and neglecting all sorts of other things. By the way, I declare that the page mentioned here is my very own invention and not the servant of some other Mr. Author. The woman often asked the page, less by setting her lips in motion than with her eyes, “Can I be content with myself?” Thanks to his independent spirit, the page replied, “Only you can be the judge of this! To me you’re beautiful. One can hardly expect me to know whether or not you are beautiful to yourself.” Thus she had to rely on her own self when it came to matters of her soul and its reassurance. If haughtily she sulked quietly over herself for a spell, she was soon reconciled again with her moodiness. She always reproached herself for something that perhaps she should have refrained from doing. Among other things she reproached herself for reproaching herself. Is that right? Really? Now she was expecting someone. I’d like to glide over depicting the room’s decorations, since I’d have to bestow praise and it can’t always be appropriate to delight in things.
“I put enormous constraints upon myself. Do you know what I’m trying to say?” Such were the words spoken by the woman who had just arrived.
She had always considered her perfectly happy. For a long time she had been envious of the one who had come to see her and still was. “I’m not as I would like to be,” I heard her say.
“How nice of you to complain. I thought you were always happy and thus almost feared you. Now you’ve put me at ease,” she said and sighed.
Her sigh was genuine, I mean it was sighed with thorough originality. It was not a sigh often sighed otherwise. Each sigh is always different, that is, unique.
In an age when much is in doubt, such observations seem to me permissible, if not perhaps even necessary.
(1928–1929)
Translated with Nicole Köngeter