Complete Plays, Lenz, and Other Writings Book

'LENZ
On 20th January Lenz crossed the mountains. Snow on the peaks and upper slopes, down into the valleys grey stone, green patches, rocks and pine-trees. It was cold and wet, the water trickled down the rocks and leapt across the path...
He felt no tiredness, just occasional regret that he couldn't walk on his head. A surge swept through his breast at first when the rock seemed to leap away, the grey wood shuddered beneath him, and the mist devoured the shape of things then half revealed their giant limbs; the surge swept through him, he sought for something, as though for lost dreams, but he found nothing. Everything was so small to him, so near, so wet, he would have liked to tuck the earth behind the stove, he couldn't understand that he needed so much time to clamber down a slope, to reach a distant point; he thought he should be able to measure out everything with a few strides....
Towards evening he reached the crest of the mountains, the snowfields that led down again to the westward plain, he sat a while at the top. It had turned calmer towards evening; the clouds lay solid and motionless in the sky, nothing so far as the eye could see but mountain peaks from which broad slopes descended, and everything so quiet, grey, increasingly faint; he felt a terrible loneliness, he was all alone, completely alone, he wanted to talk to himself, but he couldn't, he scarcely dared breathe, his footfall rang like thunder beneath him, he had to sit down; a nameless fear took hold of him in this nothing, he was in empty space, he leapt to his feet and flew down the slope. Darkness had fallen, heaven and earth had melted into one."
'You need to love mankind to be able to reach the essential being of each individual, you must consider no one too lowly, no one too ugly, only then can you understand them; the most ordinary of faces makes a deeper impression than any contrived sensation of beauty, and you can let the characters' own being emerge quite naturally without bringing in anything copied from outside where no life, no pulse, no muscles surge and throb. Kaufmann objected that he would find no models in reality for the Apollo Belvedere19 or Raphael's Madonnas.20 What does that matter, Lenz retorted, I have to confess that things like that leave me utterly cold. If I work at it within myself, I can doubtless generate feeling of some kind, but it takes a real effort. The writers and artists I like above all are those that most strongly convey the reality of nature, with the result that their work engages my feelings. Everything else troubles me. I prefer the Dutch painters to the Italians, they are the only ones, too, that you can truly grasp;'