Trafika Europe 11 - Swiss Delights

Matteo Terzaghi

to his friend and guardian Carl Seelig, to “disappear as discreetly as possible.” Regazzoni had won five Grand Prix cups and enjoyed perennial popularity, even during the 26 years he was confined to a wheelchair. Just as he’d never given up his love of auto racing, he never stopped launching auto shows and ignoring speed limits. “The police here know me and let me go,” he once said in an interview. One newspaper ran an excerpt from his autobiography: “For me, the racecar was an island, a fortress of solitude. When I was in the cockpit I was completely unaware of the outside world. The roar of the engine let me be both completely concentrated and relaxed.” As I read his declaration I could almost hear the drone of the electric toy racecars that obsessively circled the figure 8–shaped racetrack at my cousins’ house when we were kids, and I remembered our faces looking hypnotized at that entrancing sight. What happens in Robert Walser’s Walk ? A writer dons his cap, leaves home and, venturing out, he lets the world come meet him. For Walser and his literary doubles, walking through the great outdoors meant rediscovering the state of grace that emanates from his stories to this very day—the grace that by 1917 was already threatened not only by the Great War, but by Clay Regazzoni’s predecessors: “Woe betide the

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