#robert walser

[nobeerreviews]

Every sensitive person carries in himself old cities enclosed by ancient walls

-- Robert Walser

(Leuk, Switzerland)

[mon-nid]

Robert Walser

[sivavakkiyar]

Robert Walser

[mioritic]

Karl Walser (Swiss, 1877–1943)

Vignettes for a collection of short stories by brother Robert Walser (1878–1956), published in Robert Walser, Geschichten (Leipzig: Kurt Wolff Verlag, 1914)

[garadinervi]

Robert Walser, Le Territoire du crayon, Translation by Marion Graf, Éditions Zoé, Chêne-Bourg, 2003

[dk-thrive]

I wanted to speak with someone, but found no time; sought some fixed point, but found none. In the midst of the unrelenting forward thrust I felt the wish to stand still. The muchness and the motion were too much and too fast. Everyone withdrew from everyone. There was a running, as of something liquefied, a constant going forth, as of evaporation. Everything was schematic, ghostlike, even myself.

— Robert Walser, from "The City" in "Selected Stories" (Translated by Christopher Middleton, published by New York Review Books, 2002) (via Alive on All Channels)

[exhaled-spirals]

— Robert Walser, Girlfriends, Ghosts, and Other Stories

[archiveofcanvas]

“A Painter”, 1902 by Robert Walser

I don’t look at Nature so much these days, or at least almost never with painting eyes. I’ve already gazed my fill at Nature, gazed almost to the point of illness. Because I love her, I’m perhaps avoiding the sight of her, which is dangerous to me. Seeing her would have an instantly paralyzing effect on my productivity. What I can do, and must do, is to cause a second Nature - possibly similar to the first and only one - to arise within my memory: a Nature for my pictures. These, then, are my imaginings. My imagination is clearly the slave of Nature, if it is not itself Nature. My mind now contains my entire current and future collection of paintings. Cliff faces, chasms, valleys, views into valleys, glittering lakes, rivers, whorls of fog, the way fir trees stand, everything I have ever caught a glimpse of in Nature, everything I so indescribably, so pensively love - all of it glitters, roils, reposes and stretches out once more in my imagination.