Robert Walser

Overcoats




At the moment overcoats are in vogue.  Advertising posters draw our attention to this.

I'm not wearing one yet because I don't want to pamper myself.

Ladies' coats are awe-inspiring.  I find it enchanting to help women put them on or take them off, although it seems to me advisable to impose limits on one's passion to serve.

One smiles now and then at an excess of courtesy, but in general it's quite nice.

Fur coats command respect.

Recently, after the end of a concert, I excelled in dispensing coats.  A need to be courteous had taken control of me.

Prose writers love poetry.

Girls go cloaked to see Mozart's Magic Flute.  Doesn't Goethe speak about magic cloaks?

I hope my essay may be appealing and give warmth.

There were times I wore the coat of an art dealer, on other occasions the coat of a count.  Both smarted me up.

An appropriation that's not refuted means one has availed oneself of munificence.  Receiving gifts requires understanding.

"Clothes make the man," a novella by Keller reads.  An overcoat confers self-confidence.

Sometimes, though an overcoat be old, the heart beneath it can burgeon and beat with youthfulness, for which excuses may be found.

A housewife said to her maid, "What's come over you?"  The servant was strutting about in her mistress's mantilla.

Once I presented to a friend a light-blue overcoat idea.  To call attention to oneself is tiring, he responded.  I agreed and let the inspiration drop.

My overcoat article has exhausted me:  How often have tasks that seemed so easy caused us difficulties!





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