No More Learning

. " He answered his own question and fell silent again. This prescription holds all of life's wisdom, he thought, and the man who wants to oppose me knows only half of it: namely, thinking. This, too, could be what he had meant by "merely witty. " He recognized Ulrich's weakness. Wit comes from witting, or know- ing; the wisdom of language itself here pointed to the intellectual origins of this quality, its ghostly, emotionally impoverished nature. The witty man is inclined to. outsmart himself, to ignore those natural limits the man oftrue feeling respects. This insight brought the mat- ter of Diotima and the soul's capital substance into a more pleasing light, and as he was thinking this, Arnheim said to Soliman: "This maxim holds all the wisdom life can give, and it has led me to take away your books and make you go to work. "
Soliman said nothing and made a solemn face.
"You have seen my father several times," Arnheim said suddenly. "Do you remember him? '' ·
Soliman responded to this by rolling his eyes so that the whites showed, and Arnheim said pensively, "You see, my father almost never reads a book. How old do you think my father is? '' Again he did not wait for an answer and added: "He is already over seventy and still has a hand in everything in the world that might concern our firm. " Arnheim resumed pacing the room in silence. He felt an irrepressible urge to talk about his father, but could not say everything that was on his mind. No one knew better than he that even his father sometimes lost out in a business deal; but nobody would have believed him, be- cause once a man has the reputation of being Napoleon, even his lost battles count as victories. So there had never been any Way for Arn- heim of holding his own beside his father other than the one he had chosen, that of making culture, politics, and society serve business. Old Arnheim seemed pleased enough at the younger Arnheim's great knowledge and accomplishments, but whenever an important deci- sion had to be made, and the problem had been discussed and analyzed for days on end, from the production angle and the financial angle and for its impact on the world economy and civilization, he thanked everyone, not infrequently ordered the exact opposite of what had been proposed, and responded to all objections with only a helpless, stubborn smile. Even the directors often shook their heads dubiously over this way he had, but then sooner or later it would al- ways tum out that the old man had somehow been right. It was more or less like an old hunter or mountain guide having to listen to a meteorologists' conference but then always ending up in favor of the prophecies delivered by his own rheumatism; not so very odd, basi- cally, since there are so many problems where one's rheumati~m hap- pens to be a surer ·guide than science, nor does having an exact forecast matter all that much in a world where things always tum out differently from what one had expected, anyway, and the thing is to be shrewd and tough in adapting oneself to their waywardness. . So Paul Amheim should have had no trouble in understanding that an old hand at the game knows a great deal that cannot be foreseen theoreti- cally, and can do a great deal because of his knowledge; still, it was a fateful day for him when he discovered that old Samuel had intuition.
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"Do you know what is meant by intuition? " Arnheim asked, from deep in his thoughts, as though groping fpr the shadow of an excuse to speak of it. Soliman blinked hard, as he always did when he was being cross-examined about something he had forgotten to do, and Arnheim again caught himself up. 'Tm feeling a bit on edge today," he said, ''as you can't be expected to know, of course. But please pay close attention to what I am about to tell you: Making money often gets us into situations in which we don't look too good, as you can imagine. All this having to watch your arithmetic and make sure you get a profit out of everything, all the time, runs strictly counter to the ideal ofa great and noble life such as was possible for a man to aim at in happier times long ago. In those days they could make of murder the noble viitue of bravery, but it seems doubtful to me that some- thing of the sort can be done with bookkeeping: there is no real goodness, no dignity, no depth of feeling in it. Money turns every- thing into an abstraction, it is so coldly rational; whenever I see money I can't help thinking-! don't know whether you can follow me here-thinking of mistrustful fingers testing it, of loud argu- ments and much shrewd manipulation, all equally repulsive to me. " , He broke offand fell back into his solitary musing, as he thought of those uncles who had patted him on the head when he was a child, saying what a good little head he pad on his shoulders. A good little head for figures. How he hated that kind of attitude! Those shining gold coins reflected the mind of a family that had worked its way up in the world. Feeling ashame~ of his family was beneath him; on the contrary, he made a point of ijeknowledging his origins with a fine modesty, especially in the highest circles, but he dreaded any show of the calculating family mind as though it were a taint, like speaking with too much intensity and gesturing with hands aflutter, which would make him impossible among the best people.
This was probably the. root of his reverence for the irrational. The aristocracy was irrational-this might be taken as a witticism reflect- ing on the intellectual limitations ofthe nobility, but not as Arnheim meant it. It had to do with the fact that as a Jew he could not be appointed an officer in the Army Reserve, nor could he, as an Am- heim, occupy the lowly position of a noncom, so he was simply de- clared unfit for military service, and to this day he refused to see only the absurdity of this without duly appreciating the code of hon_or be-
hind it. This recollection moved him to enrich his speech to Soliman with some further remarks.
"It is possible"-he picked up the thread, for despite his distaste for pedantry he was a methodical man, even in his digressions-"it is possible, even probable, that our noble families were not always paragons ofwhat we today consider a noble bearing. To assemble all those huge landed estates upon which their titles of nobility came to be based, their forebears must have been no less calculating and sharp in their dealings than today's men of business; it is even possi- ble that the modem businessman conducts his affairs with far more honesty. But there is a force in the earth itself, you know, something in the soil, in hunting, in warfare, in faith, in tilling the Iand-in short, in the physical life of people who used their heads far less than their arms and legs; it was nature itself that gave them the strength to which they ultimately owed their dignity, their nobility, their disincli- nation to demean themselves in any way whatsoever. "
He wondered whether he had not allowed his mood to trick him into going too far. What if Soliman missed his master's meaning and misunderstood the words to suggest that he was entitled to think less highly of the upper classes? But something unexpected happened. Soliman had been fidgeting on his seat for a while, and he now inter- t:Upted his master with a question.
"Ifyou please, sir," Soliman asked, "about my father: is he a king? "
Amheim gave him a startled look. "I don't know anything about that," he said, still somewhat sternly, though inwardly a little amused. But as he gazed at Soliman's serious, almost resentful face, he found it touching. It pleased him to see the boy taking everything so seriously. He is a dimwit, he thought, and really a tragic case. Someh~w he equated witlessness with a heavy feeling of well-being. In a gently didactic manner, he went on to give the boy something more of an answer to his question. · "There is hardly any reason to assume that your father is a king. More likely he had a hard living to earn, because I found you in a troupe ofjugglers on a beach. "
"How much did I cost? " Soliman persisted.
"My dear boy, how can you expect me to remember that today? It couldn't. have been much. But why worry about that now? W e are born to create our own kingdom. Next year sometime I may let you take a commercial course, and then you could make a start as a
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trainee in one of our offices. Of course it will depend on you what you make of it, but I shall keep an eye on you. You might, for in- stance, aim at eventually ·representing our interests in places where the colored people already have some influence. We'd have to move with care, of course, but being a black man might tum out to have certain advantages for you. It is only in doing such work that you can come to understand fully how much -these years under my immedi- ate supervision have done for you already, and I can tell you one thing now: you belong to a race that still bears some of nature's own nobility. In our medieval tales of chivalry, black kings always played a distinguished role. If you cultivate what you have of spiritual qual- ity-,-your dignity, your goodness of heart, your openness, your coura- geous love of the truth, and the even greater courage ·to resist intolerance, jealousy, resentment, and all the petty nervous spiteful- ness that stigmatizes most people nowadays-ifyou can do that, you will certainly make your way as a man of business, because we are called upon to bring the world not only our wares but a better life. "
Arnheim had not ~alked so intimately with Soliman in a long time, and the idea that any onlooker might think him a fool inade him un- easy, but there was no onlooker, and besides, what he was saying to Soliman was only the surface ·layer covering far deeper currents of thought he was keeping to himself. What he was saying about the aristocratic mind and· the historic rise of the nobility was moving, deep inside him, in the opposite direction to his· spoken words. In- wardly he could not repress the thought that never since the begin- ning ofthe world had anything sprung from spiritual purity and good intentions alone; everything was far more likely to spring from the common dirt, which in time sheds its crudeness and cleans itself up and eventually even gives rise to greatness and purity ofthought. The rise of the nobility was not based on conditions pregnant with a lofty humanism, he thought,. any more than was the growth of the gar- bage-moving business into a worldwide corporation, and yet the one had blossomed into the silver age of the eighteenth ·century, and the other had led directly to Arnheim. Life was facing him, in short, with an inescapable problem best formulated in the dilemma: How much common dirt. is necessary and acceptable as the soil in which to prop- agate high-mindedness? ,
On another. level, his thoughts had meanwhile intermittently pur-
sued what he had been saying to Soliman about intuition and reason, and he suddenly had a vivid memory of the first time he had told his father that he-the ·old man-did business by intuition. Intuition was fashionable at the time with all those who could not justify what they did by logic; it was playing th~ same role, more or less, as is played today by having "flair. " Every false or ultimately unsatisfac- tory move was credited to intuition, and intuition was used for every- thing from cooking to writing books, but the elder Arnheim had not heard of it, and he actually let himself go so far as to look up in sur- prise at his son, for whom it was a moment of triumph. "Making money," he said to his father, "forces us to think along lines that are not always in the best style. Still, it will probably be up to us men of big business to take over. the leadership of the masses the next time there's a turning point in history, whether we are spiritually ready or not. But if there is anything in the world that can give me the courage to face such a burden, it is you; you have the vision and willpower of the kings and prophets ofthe great old days, who were still guided by God. Your way of tackling a deal is ineffable, a mystery, and I must say· that all mysteries that elude calculation are in the same class, w h e t h e r i t is t h e m y s t e r y o f c o u r a g e o r o f i n v e n t i o n o r o f t h e s t a r s ! " I t was humiliating to see oid Arnheim, who had been looking up at him, drop his eyes again, after his son's first sentences, back to his newspa- per, 'from which he did not raise them on any subsequent occasion when the younger man talked of business and intuition. Such was the characteristic relationship between father. and son, and on a third level ofhis thoughts,. on the same screen with these remembered im- ages, as it were, Arnheim was analyzing it even now. He regarded his father's superior gift for business, though it always depressed him to think of it, as a kind of primitive force that would forever elude the son, a more complicated man; this relieved him of having to keep striving in vain to emulate the inimitable, and at the same time pro- vided him with letters patent ofhis own noble descent. This brilliant double maneuver turned money into a suprapersonal, mythical force for which only the most primitive originality could be a match;and it also set his forebear among the gods, quite as had the ancient heroes, who undoubtedly also thought of their mythical forefather, with all the awe he inspired, as just a shade more primitive than themselves.
B u t o n a f o u r t h l e v e l o f h i s m i n d h e knew n o t h i n g o f t h e s m i l e t h a t
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hovered over. that third level, and rethought the same idea in a seri- ous vein, as he considered the role he still hoped to play on this earth. Such levels of thought are of course not to be taken literally, as if superimposed on each other like actual layers of the ,soil, but are merely meant to suggest currents of thought, flowing from various directions and perpetually crisscrossing under the influence of strong emotional conflicts. All his life, Arnheim had felt an almost morbidly sensitive dislike of wit and irony, a dislike probably moti- vated by a not inconsiderable hereditary tendency to both. He had suppressed this tendency because he felt it to be ignoble, a quality of the intellectual riffraff, yet it unaccountably popped up at this very moment, when he was feeling his most aristocratic and anti-intellec- tual, with regard to Diotima: just when his feelings were on tiptoe, ready to take flight, as it were, he felt a devilish temptation to give sublimity the slip by making one of those pointed lethal jokes about love he had heard often enough from the lips of law-ranking or coarse characters.
As his mind rose again to the surface through all these strata of thought, he abruptly found himself gazing at Soliman's gloomily lis- te~g face, like a black punchball on which unintelligible words of wisdom had come raining down like so many blows. What an absurd position I am getting myself into! Arnheim thought.
Soliman looked as if he had fallen asleep on his chair with his eyes wide open; as his master reached the end ofthat one-sided conversa- tion, the eyes set themselves in motion, while the body refused to stir, as though still waiting for the word to wake up. Arnheim saw it and saw in the black boy's gaze the craving to hear more about what- ever intrigues could have brought a king's son to be a valet. This gaze, lunging at. him like claws outstretched for their prey, momen- tarily reminded Arnheim of that gardener's helper who had made off with pieces from his collection, and he said to himself with a sigh that he would probably always be lacking in the natural acquisitive in- stinct. It suddenly occurred to him that this would also sum up, in a word, his relation to Diotima. Painfully moved, he felt how, at the very summit of his life, a cold shadow separated him from everything he had ever touched. It was not an easy thought for a man who had just stated the principle that a man must think in order to act, and who had always striven to make all greatness his own and to trans-
form whatever was less than great with the stamp of his own distin- guished imprint. But the shadow had slipped between him and the objects of his desire, despite the willpower he had never lacked, and Arnheim surprised himself by thinking that he could see a connec- tion between that shadow and those shimmers of awe that had cast their veils over his youth, as if, mishandled in some way, they had turned into an almost imperceptible skin of ice. Why this ice did not melt even·when confronted with Diotima's un~orldlyheart he could not tell; but, like a most unwelcome jab of a pain that had only been waiting for a touch to awaken it, there came the sudden thought of Ulrich. It came with the realization that the same shadow rested on the other man's life, but with so different an effect! Within the range of human passions, that of a man jealous of another man's personality is seldom accorded the recognition its intensity has earned for it, and th~ discovery that his uncontrollable irritation with Ulrich resem- bled, on a deeper 'level, the hostile encounter of two brothers un- aware of each other's identity gave him a rather pleasant jolt. Arnheim compared their two personalities from this angle with a new interest. Ulrich had even less ofthe crude acquisitive instinct for advantages in life, and his immunity to the sublime acquisitive in- stinct for status and recognition, whatever it was that mattered, was downright infuriating. This man needed none of the weight and sub- stance of life. His sober zeal, which was undeniable, was not a self- serving passion; it came close to reminding Amheim of. the self-effacing manner in which his own staff did their work, except that Ulrich's selflessness came with such a flourish of arrogance. One might call him a man possessed who was not interested in possessing anything. Or perhaps a man fighting for a cause who had taken a vow of poverty. He could also be regarded as a man given entirely to theorizing, arid yet this, too, fell short, because one could certainly not call him a theorist. Amheim recalled having pointed out to Ulrich that his intellectual capacities were no match for his practical ones.
Yet from a practical point ofview, the man was utte~lyimpossible. So Arnheim's mind turned this way and that, not for the first time, but despite the day's mood of self-doubt, he could not possibly grant Ulrich superiority over himself on any one count; the crucial differ- ence must be attributable to some deficiency of Ulrich's. And yet the man had such an air of freshness and freedom, which, Arnheim re-
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luctantly admitted to himself, reminded him of that "Secret of Integ- rity" which he knew himself to possess, though this other man some- how shook his faith in it. How else would it have been possible, on a purely rational plane, to attribute, however uneasily, the same "wit" . to this rootless phantom of a man as Arnheim had learned to fear in an all-too-expert realist such-as his father? "There's something miss- ing in the man," Arnheim thought, but as though this were merely the obverse of that tnith, it occurred to him at almost the same mo- ment and quite involuntarily that "the man has a soul! "
The man had resetves ofsoul as yet untapped. As this intuition had taken him by surprise, Arnheim was not ready to say just what he meant by it, but as time goes on, every man, as he knew, finds that his soul, by some irreversible process, has turned into intelligence, mo- rality, and lofty ideas; in his friendly enemy this had not yet run its course, and he still had some of his original store of it, something with an indefinable ambiguous charm, which manifested itself in pe- culiar combinations with elements from the realm ofthe soulless, the rational, the mechanical-everything that could not quite be re- garded as part of the cultural sphere itself.
While he was turning all this over in his mind and immediately adapting it to the style of his philosophical works, Amheim had inci- dentally not had a moment in which to credit any of it to Ulrich's account, not even as the single solitary credit to be granted to him, so strong was his sense of having made a discovery of his own, some- thing he alone had created; he felt like a maestro spotting a fme voice that had not yet fulfilled its potential. This glow of discovery only began to cool when he caught sight of Soliman's face; Soliman had obviously been staring at him for quite a while, and now believed the time had come again to be able to ask him more questions. His awareness that it was not given to everyone to organize his own mind with the aid of such a mute little semi-savage enhanced Arnheim's joy at being the only one to know his enemy's secret, even if there still were a few points to be cleared up as to their implications for the future. What he felt was the love ofthe usurer for the victim in whom he has invested his capital. Perhaps it was the sight of Soliman that suddenly inspired him to draw into his own orbit, at any cost, the man whom he had come to see as a different embodiment of the adventure that was his own self, even ifhe had to adopt him as a son!
He smiled at this overhasty enthusiasm for a notion that would take time to mature, and instantly cut short Soliman, whose face was twitching with a tragic need to know more, saying: "That's all for now. Take the flowers I ordered to Frau Tuzzi. If there's anything else you want to ask, we can deal with it some other time. "
113
ULRICH CHATS WITH HANS SEPP AND GERDA IN THE JARGON OF THE FRONTIER BETWEEN THE SUPERRA TIONAL AND THE SUBRA TIONAL
Ulrich had no idea what to do in response to his father's request that he pave the way for a personal talk with His Grace and other high- ranking patriots as a partisan of the sociopragmatic approach to crime and punishment. So he went to see Gerda, to put it all out of his mind. Hans was with her, and Hans instantly took the offensive.
"So now you're standing up for Director Fischel? "
Ulrich dodged the question by asking whether Hans had it from Gerda.
Yes, Gerda had told him.
"What about it? Would you like to know why? "
"Do tell me," Hans demanded.
"That's not so easy, my dear Hans. "
"Don't call me your dear Harrs. "
"Well then, my dear Gerda," Ulrich said, turning to her, "it's far
from simple. I've talked about it so exhaustively already that I thought you understood. "
"I understand you perfectly, but I don't believe a word of it," Gerda answered, trying hard to soften the blow of her siding with Hans against him by the conciliatory way she said it and looked at him.
'We don't believe you," Hans said, instantly aborting this tum to
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amiability in the conversation. "We don't believe that you can mean it . seriously. You picked it up somewhere. "
'What! ? I suppose you mean something one can't really put into words . . . ? "Ulrich had instantly realized that Hans's impertinence had to do with what Ulrich and Gerda had discussed in private.
"Oh, it can be put into words, all right, provided one means it. " "I don't seem to have the knack. But let me tell you a sto:ry. " "Another sto:ry! You seem to go in for telling stories like Great
Homer himself! " Hans was taking an even ruder and more arrogant tone. Gerda gave him a pleading look. But Ulrich would not let him- self be put off, and went on: "I was ve:ry much in love myself once, when I was just about the same age as you are now. Actually, I was in lo~ewith being in love, with my changed condition, rather than with the woman in the case, and that was when I found out all about the things you, your friends, and Gerda make such great mysteries of. That's the sto:ry I wanted to tell you. "
They were both startled that it turned out to be so short a sto:ry.
"So you were ve:ry much in love once . . . ? '' Gerda asked haltingly, and hated herself in that instant for having asked the question in front of Hans, with the shivering curiosity of a schoolgirl.
But Hans broke in: "Why are we talking about that sort of thing in the first place? Why don't you tell us instead what your cousin is really up to, now that she has fallen in with all those . cultural bankrupts? "
"She is searching for an idea that will give the whole world a splen- did image ofwhat our count:ry stands for," Ulrich replied. "Wouldn't you like to help her out with some suggestion of your own? I'd be glad to pass it on to her. "
Hans gave a scornful laugh. "Why do you act as if you didn't know that we intend to disrupt the whole show? "
"But why on earth are you so much against it? "
"Because it is an incredibly vicious scheme against all that's Ger- man in this count:ry,'' Hans said. "Is it possible that you -really don't know what a strong opposition is developing? The Pan-Gennan League has been alerted to your Count Leinsdorf's machinations. The Physical Culture Clubs have already lodged a protest against this affront to German aspirations. The Federation of Arms-bearing Stu- dent Corps throughout our Austrian universities is formulating an
appeal against the threat of Slavification, and the League of Gennan Youth, ofwhich I am a member, will not put up with it, even ifwe have to take to the streets! " Hans had drawn himself up tall and re- cited this speech with a certain pride. But he could not resist adding: "Not that any of this makes any difference. These people all make too much of externals.
What matters is that there's no way of getting anything done to anyone's satisfaction in this country! " ·
Ulrich asked him to explain.
The great races of mankind had all begun by creating their own mythology. ·Well, was there such a thing as a great myth of Austria? Hans asked. Did Austria have an ancient religion of its own, or a great epic poem? Neither the Catholic nor the Protestant religion had originated here; the art of printing and the Austrian tradition of painting had all come from Gennany. The reigning dynasty had come from Switzerland, Spain, Luxembourg; the technology from England and Gennany; our· most beautiful cities, Vienna, Prague, Salzburg, had been built by Italians or Germans; the anny was orga- nized on the Napoleonic model. Such a country had no business try- ing to take the lead. Its only possible salvation had to be union with Gennany. "Satisfied? " Hans concluded.
Gerda was not sure whether to be proud of him or ashamed. Her attraction to Ulrich had been flaring up again oflate, even though the natural human need to be someone in her own right was much better served by her younger friend. This young woman was strangely tom between the contradictory inclinations to grow old as a virgin and to give herself to Ulrich. The second of these inclinations was the natu- ral consequence of a love she had felt for years, though it never burst into flame but only smoldered listlessly inside her, and her feelings were like those of someone infatuated with an inferior, in that her soul was humiliated by her body's contemptible craving for submis- sion to this man. In strange contrast with this, though perhaps tied to it as simply and naturally as a yearning for peace, she suspected that she would never marry but would end up, when all the dreams were over, leading a solitary, quietly busy life of her own. This W! lS not a hope hom of conviction, for Gerda had no very clear idea of herself, only a foreboding such as the body may have long before the mind is alerted to it. The influence Hans had on her was part of it. Hans was a colorless young man, bony without being tall or strong, who tended
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to wipe his hands on his hair or his clothes and peer, whenever possi- ble, into a small round tin-framed pocket mirror because he was al- ways troubled by some new eruption of his muddy skin. But this, with the possible exception of the pocket mirror, was exactly how Gerda pictured the early Roman Christians, forgathering in their un- derground catacombs in defiance of their persecutors. It was not an exact correspondence of details that she meant, after all, but the basic general feeling of terror shared with the early Christian mar- tyrs, as she saw them. Actually, she found the well-scrubbed and scented pagans more attractive; but taking sides with the Christians was a sacrifice one owed to one's character. For Gerda the lofty de- mands of conscience had thereby acquired a moldy, slightly revolting smell, which went perfectly with the mystical. outlook Hans had opened up to her.
Ulrich was quite conversant with this outlook. We should perhaps feel indebted to spiritualism for satisfying-with its funny rappings from the Beyond so suggestive of the minds of deceased kitchen
·maids-that crude metaphysical craving for spooning up, ifnot God, then at least the spirits, like some food icily slipping down one's gul- let in the dark. In earlier centuries this longing for personal contact with God or His cohorts, said to occur in a state of ecstasy, did, de- spite the subtle and sometimes marvelous forms it took, make for a mixture of crude earthliness with experiences of an exceptional and ineffable condition of psychic awareness. The metaphysical was thus the physical, embedded in this intuitive state, a mirror image of earthly longings, believed to reveal whatever the concepts of those times encouraged people to expect that they would see. But it is just such concepts that change with the times and lose their credibility. If nowadays anyone told a story of God speaking to him personally, seizing him painfully by the hair to lift him up to Himself, or slipping into his breast in some numinous, intensely sweet way, no one would take any of these details. embodying the experience literally, least of all God's professional functionaries, ~ho, as children of a scientific age, feel an understandable horror of being compromised by hysteri- cal and maniacal adherents. Consequently we must either regard such experiences, of frequent and well-recorded occurrence in the Middle Ages and in classical antiquity, as delusions and pathological phenomena, or face the possibility that there is something to them,
something independent of the mythical terms in which it has hith- erto been expressed: a pure kernel of experience, in other words, that would have to pass strict empirical tests of credibility, where- upon it would of course become a matter of overriding importance long before anyone could deal with the next question, what conclu- sions to draw from this with regard to our relation. ship to the Beyond. And while faith based on theological reasoning is today universally engaged in a bitter struggle with doubt and resistance from the pre- vailing brand of rationalism, it does seem that the naked fundamen- tal experience itself, that•primal seizure of mystic insight, stripped of all the traditional, terminological husks of faith. freed from ancient religious concepts, perhaps no longer to be regarded as a religious
. experience at all, has undergone an immense expansion and now forms the soul of that complex irrationalism that haunts our era like a night bird lost in the dawn.
An absurd splinter of this manifold movement was in f~ct repre- sented by the social cirele or vortex in which Hans Sepp was playing his part. If one were to tabulate the ideas that ebbed and flowed within that company-though this would be against their principles, as they were against numbering and measuring things-the first one
would have been a timid and quite Platonic call for trial or·compan- ionate marriage, in fact for the sanctioning of polygamy and polyan- dry; next, when it came to art, they favored the most abstract, aiming at the universal and the timeless, then called Expressionism, which disdained mere appearances or the shell, the banal externals of things, the faithful, "naturalistic" delineation of which had oddly enough been regarded as revolutionary only one generation earlier. Cheek by jowl with this abstract aim of capturing the essential vision of the mind and the world, without bothering about externals, there was also a taste for the down-to-earth and limited kind of art, the so-called regional and folk arts; the promotion ofwhich these young people regarded as a sacred duty to their Pan-Germanic souls; thes·e and others were just some of the choice straws and grasses picked up beside the road of time to be woven into a nest for the human spirit, most particularly the most luxuriant ideas of the rights, duties, and creative promise of the young, which played so great a role that they must be considered in more detail.
The present era, they argued, was blind to the rights ofyoung peo-
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ple; a person had virtually no rights until he or she had come of age. Fathers, mothers, or guardians could dress, house, feed such a per- son as they Jiked, reprimand or punish and even, according to Hans Sepp, wreck the child's life, so long as they did not overstep some far-off provision of the law, which granted to a child no more protec- tion than it did to a domestic animal. The child is owned by its par- ents as a chattel and is, by virtue of its economic dependence on them, a piece of property, a capitalist object. This "capitalist dehu- manization of the child," which Hans had picked up somewhere in his reading and·then elaborated for himself, was the first lesson he taught his astonished disciple, Gerda, who·had until then felt quite well taken care of at home. Christianity had somewhat lightened the wife's yoke, but not that ofthe daughter, who was condemned to veg- etate at home by being forcibly kept away from real life. After this prelude, he indoctrinated her in the child's right to educate itself ac- cording to the laws of its own persoqality. The child was creative, it was growth personified and constantly engaged in creating itself. The child was regal by nature, hom to impose its ideas, feelings, and fan- tasies on the world;-oblivious to the ready-made world of accidentals, it made up its own ideal world. It had its own sexuality. In destroying creative originality by stripping the child ofits own world, suffocating it with the dead stuff of traditional learning, and training it for spe- cific utilitarian functions alien to its nature, the adult world commit- ted a· barbaric sin. The child was ·not goal-oriented-it created through play, its work was play and tender growth; when not deliber- ately interfered with, it took on nothing that was not utterly absorbed into its nature; every object it touched was a living thing; the child
was a world, a cosmos unto itself, in touch with the ultimate, the ab- solute, even though it could not express it. But the child was killed by being taught to serve worldly purposes and being chained to the vul- gar routines so falsely called reality! So said Hans s. epp. He was all of twenty-one when he brought his_ doctrines to the House of Fischel, and Gerda was no younger. In addition, Hans had been fatherless for a long time by then, and felt free at all times to bully his mother, who
:was supporting him and the rest of her children by keeping a small shop, so that there seemed to be no direct cause for his philosophy of the child as helpless victip1 of tyranny.
Gerda, absorbing these teachings of Hans, accordingly wavered
between a mild pedagogical urge to raise a future generation in their own light, and putting them to more immediate and direct use in her war upon Leo and Clementine. Hans Sepp; however, stood more firmly on his principles and on his slogan "Let us all be children! " That he clung so fiercely to a child's embattled stance might have originated in an early craving for independence, but he basically owed it to the fact that the language of the youth movement then coming into vogue was the first that helped his soul to find its tongue, and it led him, as any true language does, from one word to the next, each word saying more than the speaker had actually intended. And so the original call for a return to childhood gave rise to the most important insights. For the child should not go counter to its nature, renouncing it for the sake of becoming a father or a mother, which means only becoming a bourgeois, a slave of this world, tied hand and foot, and turned into a "useful" object. What ages people is their social conformism; the child resists being turned into a citizen, and so the objection that a twenty-one-year-old is not supposed to be- have like a child is swept away, because this struggle goes on from birth to old age and is ended only when the conventional world is overturned by the world of love. This was the higher aspect of Hans Sepp's doctrine, on all of which Ulrich had been kept informed by Gerda.
It was he who had discovered the link between what these young people called their love, or, alternatively, their community, and the consequences of a peculiar, wildly religious, unmythologically mythi- cal (or merely infatuated) state, and it touched him deeply, though they did not know it, because he confined himself to making fun of its manifestations in them. In the same vein he now answered Hans by asking him point-blank why he would not take advantage of the Parallel Campaign for advancing the cause of his "Community of the Purely Selfless. "
"Because it's out of the question," Hans replied.
The resulting conversation between them would have been as baf- fling to an uninitiated listener as an exchange in criminal street slang, although it was no more than the pidgin of social infatuation. So what follows is more the gist of what was said than a literal transcription of it. The Community of the Purely Selfless was what Hans called it; despite this, it was not devoid of meaning; the more selfless a person
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feels, the brighter and intenser the things of this world appear; the more weight a person sheds, the more he feels uplifted; everyone has probably experienced this at one time or another, though such expe- riences must not be confused with mere gaiety, cheerfuh1ess, light- heartedness, or the like, which are simply substitutes for it, serving a lower or even some corrupt purpose. Perhaps the real thing should be called not a state of uplift but rather a shedding of one's armor, that armor in which the ego was encased. You had to distinguish be- tween the two walls pressing in on the human being. Man succeeds in getting over the first rampart every time he does something kind and unselfish, but that is only the lesser rampart. The greater wall equals the selfhood ofeven the most unselfish person; this is original sin as such; with us, every sensation, every feeling, even that of self- surrender, is more a taking than a giving, and there is hardly any way of shaking off this armor of all-permeating selfishness. Hans ticked off specifics: Knowledge is simply the appropriation of something not our ~wn. We kill, tear, and digest our "object" as an animal does its prey. A concept is a living thought killed, never to stir again. A conviction is an impulse of faith, frozen into some unchanging life- less form. Research confirms the known. Character is inertia, the re- fusal to keep growing. To know a person amounts to no longer being moved by that person. Insight is one-way vision. Truth is the success- ful effort to think impersonally and inhumanly. Everywhere, the in- stinct to kill, to freeze, to clutch, to petrify, is a mixture. of self-seeking with a cold, craven, treacherous mock-selflessness. "And when," Hans wanted to know, even though the innocent Gerda was all he had experienced, "when has love ever been anything but pos- session, or the giving of oneself as its quid pro quo? "
Ulrich cautiously and with qualifications professed to agree with all these none too coherent assertions. He allowed that even suffer- ing and renunciation yielded a slight profit for the ego; ·a faint, as it were grammatical cast of egotism shadowed all we did as long as there was no predicate without a subject.
But Hans would have none ofthat! He and his friends argued end- lessly about the right way to live. Sometimes they assumed that ev- eryone had to live first and foremost for himself and only then for all the others; or else they agreed that a person could have only one true friend, who, however, needed his own one friend, so that they saw
the community as a circular linking of souls, like the spectrum or other chains of being; but what they most liked to believe was that there was such a thing as a communal soul; it might be overshadowed by the forces of egotism, but it was a deep, immense source of vital energy, its potential unimaginable and waiting to be tapped. A tree fighting for its life in the sheltering forest cannot feel more unsure of itself than sensitive people nowadays feel about the dark warmth of the mass, its dynamism, the invisible molecular process of its uncon- scious cohesion, reminding them with every breath they take that the greatest and the least among them are not alone. Ulrich felt the same. While he perceived clearly that the tamed egotism on which life is built inakes for an orderly structure, compared with which the single breath of all mankind is no more than the quintessence of murky thinking, and while for his part he preferred keeping to him- self, he could not help feeling oddly moved when Gerda's young friends talked in their extravagant fashion of the great wall that had to be surmounted.
Hans now reeled offthe articles ofhis faith in a drone interspersed with bursts of vehemence, his eyes staring straight ahead without seeing anything. An unnatural c~ack ran through the cosmos, break- ing it in two like the two halves of an apple, which consequently start to shrivel up. Which was why, nowadays, we had to regain by artifi- cial and unnatural means what had once been a natural part of our- selves. But this split could be healed by opening up the self, by a change of attitude, for the more a person could forget himself, blot himself out, get away from himself, the more his energy could be freed for the common good, as though released from a bad chemical combination; and the closer he drew to the community, the more he would realize his true self, because, as Hans saw it, true. originality was not a matter of empty uniqueness but came from opening one- self up, degree by degree, to participation and devotion, perhaps all the way to the ultimate degree of total communion with the world achieved by those dissolved in selflessness.
These propositions so devoid of content set Ulrich to wondering how they might possibly be substantiated, but all he did was to ask Hans coolly just how all this opening up of one's ·self and so forth might be done in actual practice.
Hans came up with some prodigious words for it: the transcendent
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ego in place ofthe sensu~ego, the Gothic ego instead ofthe natural- istic one, the realm of being rather than the realm of phenomena or appearances, the unconditional experience, and similar formidable expressions, which had to do duty for his sense of the indescribable reality he envisioned, as they all too often must, incidentally, to the detriment of the cause they somehow manage to enhance nonethe- less. And because this condition ofwhich he had occasional, p~rhaps even frequent, glimpses never stayed in focus for more than a few brief instants of meditation, he went even further and claimed that ! ranscendence nowadays simply did not manifest itself other than sporadically, in flashes of an extracorporeal vision that was naturally hard to pin down, except perhaps in the traces it left in gr'eat works of art, which led him on to the symbol, his favorite word both for art and for other supernaturally towering signs of life, and finally to the Germanic gift, peculiar to those who carried even a smattering of Germanic blood in their veins, for creating and envisioning said things. Using this sublime variant of "good old days" nostalgia made it easy for him to suggest that a lasting perception of the essence of things was a thing of the past and deriied to the present time, an as- sertion from which the whole debate had after all sprung.
Ulrich found this superstitious claptrap rather irritating. He ·had been wondering for a long time what it was that Gerda actually saw in Hans. There she sat, with her pale look, taking no active part in the conversation. Hans Sepp had a grandiose theory of love, in which she probably found the deeper meaning of her own existence. Ulrich now gave the conversation a new tum by stating-not without a pro- test against having to carry on this kind of talk in the first place-that the highest intensity of feeling ofwhich a person was capable did not arise out of one's usual egotistic31 appropriation of whatever came one's way or, as Hans and his friends felt, out of what is called self- enhancement through self-surrender, but was actually a state of rest, of changelessness, like still waters.
At this Gerda brightened up and asked what he meant.
Ulrich told her that Hans had actually been talking all this time, even when he went out ofhis way to disguise it, about love and noth- ing but love; saintly love, solitary love," the love that overflows its banks of desire, the love always described as a loosening, a dissolu-
tion, indeed a reversal of all earthly bonds, in any case no longer a mere emotion but a transformation of a person's whole way of think- ing and perceiving.
Gerda looked at him as though she were trying to decide whether this man who knew so much more than she did had somehow discov- ered this too, or whether this man she was secretly in love with and who sat beside her without revealing much of himself was emitting some strange sympathetic radiation that draws two people together even when their bodies do not touch.
Ulrich felt her probing look. It was as though he were speaking some foreign tongue in which he could go on fluently, but only su- perficially, because the words had no roots inside him.
"In this state," he said, "in which one oversteps the limits normally imposed on one's actions, one understands everything, because the soul accepts onlywhat is already part ofit; in a sense, it already knows all that's coming its way. Lovers have nothing new to say to each other; nor do they actually recognize each other; all that a lover recognizes is the indescribable way in which he is inwardly activated by the beloved. To recognize a person he does not love means draw- ing that person into the sphere of his love like a blank wall with the sunlight on it. To recognize some inanimate object doesn't mean de- coding its characteristics one by one; it means that a veil falls away or a barrier is lifted, somewhere beyond the world of the senses. Even the inanimate, unknown as it is, enters trustfully into the shared life of lovers. Nature and the spirit peculiar to love gaze into each other's eyes, two versions of the same act, a flowing in two directions, a burning at both ends. Awareness of a person or thing apart from one- selfthen becomes impossible, for to take notice is to take something from the things noticed; they keep their shape but tum to ashes in- side; something evaporates from them, leaving only their mummies. For lovers there is no such thing as a truth-it could only be a blind alley, the finish, the death ofsomething that, while it lives, is like the breathing edge of a flame, where light and darkness lie breast-to- breast. How can any one thing light up, in recognition, where all is light? Who needs the beggarly small change of security and proof where everything spills over in superabundance? And how can one still want anything for oneself alone, even the beloved itself, once
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one knows how those who love no longer belong to themselves but must give themselves freely, four-eyed intertwined creatures that they are, to everything that comes their way? "
Anyone who has mastered the idiom can run on in this vein with-. out even trying. It is like walking with a lighted candle that sheds its tender rays on one aspect of life after another, all of them looking as iftheir usual appearance in the hard light ofcommon day had been a crude misrepresentation. How impossible it becomes, for instance, to apply that verbal gesture "to possess" to lovers, once one remem- bers the etymology (from potts and sedere, i. e. , pos-sess equals "to sit upon," "be-set"). Does it show desires of a higher order, to aim at "pos-sessing" principles, the respect of one's children, ideas, one- self? But this clumsy ploy of a heavy animal subduing its prey with the full weight ofits own body is still, and rightly, the basic and favor- ite tenn of capitalism, showing the connection between the posses- sors of the social world and the possessors of knowledge and skills, which is what it makes of its thinkers and artists, while love and as- ceticism stand apart in their lonely kinship. How aimless this pair ap- pears, how devoid of a target, compared with the aims and targets of nonnallife. But the tenns. "aim" and "target" derive from the lan- guage of the marksman. To be without aim or target must have meant, originally, not to be out to kill. So merely by tracking down the clues in language itself-a blurred, but revealing trail! -one can see how a crudely changed meaning has· everywhere usurped the function of far subtler messages now quite lost to us, that ever-per- ceptible but never quite tangible nexus ofthings. Ulrich gave up pur- suing this idea Ol! t loud, but Hans could not be blamed for thinking that all he had to do was tug at a certain thread to unravel the whole fabric; the world had merely lost its instinct for the right thread to pull. He had been repeatedly interrupting Ulrich and finishing his sentences for him.
"If you choose to look at all this with a scientific eye, you'll see nothing more in it than any bank teller might. All empirical explana- tions are deceptive, they never take us beyond the level of crude sen- sory data. Your need to know would like to reduce the world ·to nothing more than . the so-called forces of nature twiddling their thumbs. ," These were Hans's objections, his interpolations. He alter- nated between rudeness and passion. He felt that he had done a poor
job of stating his case, and blamed his failure on the presence of this interloper between him and Gerda, for had he been alone with Gerda, eye-to-eye with her, the same words would have risen sky- ward like a shimmering fountain, like spiraling falcons. He knew it, he felt that this was one of his days. He was also surprised and an- noyed to hear Ulrich talking so fluently and so intently in his place.
Actually, Ulrich wa5 not speaking as a scientist at all but was saying far more than he would have been prepared to defend, although he was not saying anything he did not believe. He was carried away by a suppressed fury. To run on like this he had to be in a curiously ele- vated, a rather inflamed frame of mind, and Ulrich's mood was somewhere between this state and the one induced by seeing Hans, with his greasy, bristling hair, his muddy skin, his repellent emphatic gestures, and his foaming torrent of speech in which some filmy frag- ment of his true self hung trapped, like the skin from a flayed heart. But strictly speaking, Ulrich had been suspended all his life between two such aspects ofthis subject, always readyto expound it as he was doing, half believing what he was saying but never going beyond such verbal games, because he did not really take them for real, and so his discomfiture was keeping step with his pleasure in this conversation.
Gerda ignored the mocking asides that he injected into his talk from time to time as a kind of self-parody, overwhelmed as she was by her sense of his opening himself up at last. She looked at him with a touch of anxiety. He's much softer than he'll ever admit, she thought, with a feeling that broke down her own defenses, as if a baby were groping at her breast. Ulrich caught her eye. He knew almost everything that was going on between her and Hans, because "in her worry she needed to relieve her heart by at least throwing out hints ofher problems, and that made it easy enough for Ulrich to fill in the rest. She and Hans regarded the act ofphysical possession, the normal preoccupation ofyoung lovers, as a despicable surrender to capitalist urges; they thought they despised physical passion alto- gether, but they also despised self-control as a middle-class virtue, so what it came to was their always clinging to each other in a nonphysi- cal or semiphysical way. They tried to "accept" each other, as they called it, and felt that trembling, tender merging oftwo people lost in each other's eyes, slipping into the invisible currents that ripple through each other's heads and hearts, and feeling, at the apparent
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moment of mutual understanding, that each holds the other inside himself and is at one with the o~er. At less exalted times they were satisfied with ordinary mutual admiration, seeing in great paintings or dramatic scenes the parallels to their own condition and marvel- ing, when they kissed, at the thought that-as the saying goes-mil- lennia were gazing down upon them. They did kiss, even though they regarded the crude physical sensations of love, that spasm of the bodily self, as no better than a stomach cramp, but their limbs did not pay too much attention to their ideals and pressed hard against each other on their own. Afterward they both felt bewildered. Their budding philosophy was not proof against their heady sense of no- body watching, the dim lights, the furiously mounting attraction of two young bodies nestling close together, and Gerda especially, who as the girl was the more mature of the two, felt the craving to GOD- summate their embrace with the innocent intensity a tree might feel on being prevented from budding in the springtime. This arrested lovemaking, as bland as the kisses oflittle children and as intermina- ble as the aimless fondlings of the old, always left them feeling shat- tered. Hans found it easier to take because he could always regard it afterward as a successful test of his convictions.
"It isn't for us to have and to hold," he lectured her. 'We are nomads who must keep moving onward, step after step. " And when he noticed that Gerda's whole body was quivering with frustrated de- sire, he made no bones about calling it a weakness, if not actually a residue ofher non-Germanic genes, and felt like Adam walking with his God, his manly heart having once more resisted his erstwhile rib's tempting of his faith. At such moments Gerda despised him. Which was probably why she had told Ulrich so much about it, at least in the beginning. She suspected that a full-grown man would do both more and less than Hans, who would bury his tear-stained face in her lap like a child after he had insulted her. Since she was just as proud of her experiences as she was bored with them, she let Ulrich in on all this in the anxious hope that he would find something to say that would put an end to the agoni$g beauty ofit.
Ulrich, however, seldom spoke to her as she wished he might; in- stead, he cooled her offwith his sardonic tone, because even though it made Gerda more reserved, he knew too well that she longed to submit to him, and that neither Hans nor anyone else had the power
over her mind he could have if he chose. He justified himself with the thought that any other real man in his place would have the same effect on Gerda, that of a blessed relief after that woolly-minded dirty little tease Hans. But even as he was thinking it over, suddenly seeing it all in perspective, Hans had collected himself and started a fresh attack.
"All in all," he said, "you've made the biggest possible mistake by trying to express as a concept something that occasionally elevates an idea somewhat above the level of the merely conceptual. But I sup- pose that's what makes the difference between one of you intellec- tual people and the likes of us. First," he added proudly, "one must learn to ll. ve it before one can, perhaps, learn to think it. " When Ul- rich ~miled at this, he flashed out like a bolt of lightning: "Jesus was a seer at the age of twelve, without first getting his doctorate. "
This provoked Ulrich into breaking the silence he owed to Gerda by giving Hans a piece of advice that betrayed his knowledge of facts he could have learned only from her. "I don't know why," he said, "if you want to live it, you don't go all the way. I would take Gerda in my arms, forget all the qualms of my rational mind, and keep her locked in my arms until our bodies either crumbled to ashes or became transformed into the fullness of their own being in a way that is beyond our power of comprehension! "
Hans, feeling a stab ofjealousy, looked not at him but at Gerda, who turned pale with embarrassment. Ulrich's words about locking' her in his arms had touched her like a secret promise. At the moment she didn't care at all how "the other life" was to be imagined, and she felt sure that Ulrich would do everything just as it should be done, if he really wanted to. Hans, incensed at Gerda's betrayal, argued against Ulrich's proposal, which could not be carried out success- fully, he said, because the time was not ripe. The first souls to take flight would have to take off from a mountain, just like the first air- planes, and not from the lowlands of a period like the present. Per- haps there must first come a man who would release mankind from its bondage before it could achieve the heights. It was not unthink- able that he might be the man himself, but that was his own affair, and apart from this, the present low level of spiritual development was incapable ofproducing such a man.
Now Ulrich remarked on the proliferation of redeemers these
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days-indeed, every self-respecting chairman of a social club seemed to be eligible. If Christ were to come again tomorrow, he would certainly fare worse than the first time. The better newspapers and book clubs would fmd him vulgar, and the great international press would hardly be likely to welcome him to its columns.
With this they were back where they had started, the discussion had come full circle, and Gerda sank back into herself.
Yet something had changed; without giving any outward sign ofit, Ulrich had tripped himself up a little. His thoughts had parted com- pany with his words. He looked at Gerda. Her body was angular, her skin looked dull and tired.