Jakob Von Gunten: Ein Tagebuch
1909
Jakob von Gunten has run away from his old family, from his old life, from any reasonable expectation of who he ought to become. He enrolls instead at the Institute Benjamenta, a school for servants where the teachers sleep in one room and the education amounts to learning how to obey. Seventeen years old and armed only with a diary, Jakob observes his strange surroundings with an ironist's eye and a melancholic heart. The Institute is a place of profound strangeness: students come and go as they please yet submit to bizarre discipline; the formidable Herr Benjamenta and his beautiful, ailing sister run an institution that seems designed to extinguish rather than illuminate. Yet Jakob finds something here, something like belonging in the margins, in the absurdity, in the quiet comedy of daily life among fellow misfits. Walser's novel unfolds like a dream dissolving as you watch it, each entry pulling the reader deeper into a world that feels both utterly particular and achingly universal. It is a book about the search for purpose in a world that seems designed to deny it, about the small rebellions that constitute a life, about the peculiar courage it takes to remain in places that offer nothing and still find something there.
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“That is all very senseless, but this senselessness has a pretty mouth, and it smiles.””
— Robert Walser
“One is always half mad when one is shy of people.””
— Robert Walser
“Your very eyes. How they have always been for me the command to obey, the inviolable and beautiful commandment. No, no, I'm not telling lies. Your appearance in the doorway!...You have been my body's health. Whenever I have read a book, it was you I was reading, not the book, you were the book. You were, you were.””
— Robert Walser
“With all my ideas and follies I could one day found a corporate company for the propagation of beautiful but unreliable imaginings.””
— Robert Walser
“make yourself invisible, or get busy with something.””
— Robert Walser
“If a hand, a situation, a wave were ever to raise me up and carry me to where I could command power and influence, I would destroy the circumstances that had favoured me, and I would hurl myself down into the humble, speechless, insignificant darkness. I can only breathe in the lower regions.””
— Robert Walser
“I tell lies somewhere else, but not here, not in front of myself.””
— Robert Walser
“This is freedom,’ said the instructress, ‘it’s something very wintry, and cannot be borne for long. One must always keep moving, as we are doing here, one must dance in freedom. It is cold and beautiful. Never fall in love with it. That would only make you sad afterwards, for one can only be in the realm of freedom for a moment, no longer. Look how the wonderful track we are floating on is slowly melting away. Now you can watch freedom dying, if you open your eyes…””
— Robert Walser
“I feel how little it concerns me, everything that’s called "the world," and how grand and exciting what I privately call the world is to me.””
— Robert Walser
