"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.
[Mikhail Iossel]
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"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."
So, doing a little writing for chapter twelve, and I snickered at this part.
When Daryl finally did awake, he knew he was somewhere different that wasn’t the cot in his tent. The bed beneath him was soft, and the sheet smelt far too clean to his senses. And then there were the pinpricks of pain in his lower abdomen and temple. Jolting, he immediately felt hands holding him still.
“Cease moving.”
The feminine voice was familiar, and in his slowly awakening state, he couldn’t quite place it. Opening his eyes, Daryl went ridged. Right in front of him were women’s breasts, hidden beneath a brown singlet top and a soft-padded bra that did nothing to hinder nipples from poking through. He swallowed thickly. Forcing his eyes away, he glanced up, seeing Cassidy’s serious expression, and he remembered everything. The horse throwing him off and bolting away, landing on one of his arrows, having to kill two walkers and finding Sophia’s doll. He had managed to walk all the way back to camp, and then there was the echoing of a gunshot and the pain in his head as he’d been knocked off his feet. Someone had actually shot at him.
“Who fuckin’ shot me…?” He rasped weakly, peering down the bed and seeing Hershel stitching up his side, making him understand why he felt two pangs of pain from needles. He froze again when he realised he was shirtless, which should have been obvious for the farmer to be stitching him up. Daryl glanced at Cassidy, barely registering her words when she said Andrea’s name. His jaw was tight as he held his tongue, his mouth in a thin line. He wanted nothing more than to roll over and reach for the blankets, covering himself. This was far outside his comfort zone. There was a knock at the door behind him, and when he went to turn his head towards the sound, Cassidy hissed at him to stay still and jerked his head back in her direction by his jaw, her fingertips soft against his skin.