"I am here to be mad, not to write."
Robert Walser, a brilliant writer deeply relevant to our times, who spent the last twenty-seven years of his life in a mental institution, responding to visiting journalist's question as to why he was not writing anymore.
In “The Walk,” his most famous short story, he describes a stroll through a rural landscape in the minutest of fantastic and tragically funny detail. Here he is, on that walk from Herisau to Wil, Austria, in 1939.
At seventy-eight, he disappeared from that mental asylum in Herisau and later was found dead in the snow.
"Without walking and the contemplation of nature which is connected with it, without this equally delicious and admonishing search, I deem myself lost, and I am lost. With the utmost love and attention the man who walks must study and observe every smallest living thing, be it a child, a dog, a fly, a butterfly, a sparrow, a worm, a flower, a man, a house, a tree, a hedge, a snail, a mouse, a cloud, a hill, a leaf, or no more than a poor discarded scrap of paper on which, perhaps, a dear good child at school has written his first clumsy letters. The highest and the lowest, the most serious and the most hilarious things are to him equally beloved, beautiful, and valuable. He must bring with him no sort of sentimentally sensitive self-love or quickness to take offense. Unselfish and unegoistic, he must let his careful eye wander and stroll where it will; only he must be continuously able in the contemplation and observation of things to efface himself, and to put behind him, little consider, and forget like a brave, zealous, and joyfully self-immolating front-line soldier, himself, his private complaints, needs, wants, and sacrifices. If he does not, then he walks only half attentive, with only half his spirit, and that is worth nothing."
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