Here's a nice short one to make up for yesterday's nice long one. From Robert Walser, a master of the short-short story, and the closest anyone's come to Swift since Kipling. Basta is one of those fine Italian words that the Germans have managed to appropriate (read: swipe), and I've long wished we would adopt it. We, English speakers, you know, not savages.

If you want to read the original in German, you can do so here. But I should point out that if you can read along in German while listening along in English, then maybe you don't get the point of Basta... then again, if you can do so, or even if you try to do so, you probably get it exactly.

Basta can be found in this book. So, Basta!