PRESENCE, RATHER:

On the afternoon of Christmas Day 1956, in a snow-covered field on the outskirts of the small Swiss town of Herisau, some children and their dog discovered the body of a dead man, hand clutched tight to his stilled heart. It was the writer Robert Walser, who had died that day, aged seventy-eight, while out walking far from the mental institution where he had dwelled for the previous two decades. A photograph taken by the local medical examiner Kurt Giezendanner shows the body at rest, left arm thrown out as in the style of a sleeper midway through a restless night, while two shadowy figures at the margins look on. The sorrow of the scene is rather gently assuaged by the odd fact that Walser's hat, perhaps moved by a breeze, lies at a modest distance from his body, as if it has leapt off his head to cartoonishly express surprise at its owner's death. A few distant trees squeeze into the top of the frame like awkward mourners paying their respects. The snow, even on the ground but for a few shaggy lumps close to his boots, appears at first to be nothing more than a dazzling absence, as if the dead Walser were floating on a white winter sky.

In his essay on Walser, William H. Gass takes the perspective of one of those marginal witnesses and studies the photograph as a peculiar abstraction: "I like to think the field he fell in was as smoothly white as writing paper. There his figure ... could pretend to be a word--not a statement, not a query, not an exclamation--but a word, unassertive and nearly illegible, squeezed into smallness by a cramped hand."6 Another photograph of the scene by the medical examiner taken from a different angle reveals the fateful trail of footprints--the only other marks in the snow. Examine them with a Gass-like slant and they become an ellipsis on this near-blank page, trailing away from a last, unfinished thought.

In his prose, Walser assumes the voice of a bewildered innocent, neither a child nor a full-grown man, enchanted and unsettled by the surrounding world. Snow was certainly something that fascinated him, and perhaps left him a little scared: "If there is snow, everything is soft, it's as if you were walking on a carpet."7 Before this comes the little wonder of watching snow fall "slowly, that is, bit by bit, which means flake by flake, down to the earth."8 The schoolboy narrator of Fritz Kocher's Essays adores snow because it smoothly removes the loud distraction of color from the landscape: "Colors fill up your mind too much with all sorts of muddled stuff. ... I love things in one color, monotonous things. Snow is such a monotonous song."

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