No More Learning

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BONADEA HAS A VISION
When Ulrich got up on the morning following 'this night, late and feelmg as if he had been badly beaten up, he was told that Bonadea had come to call; it was the flrst time since their quarrel that they would see each other.
During the period of their separation, Bonadea had shed many tears. She often felt in this time that she had been ill-treated. She had often resounded like a muffled drum. She had had many adventures and many disappointments. Atid although the memory of Ulrich sank into a deep well with every adventure, after every disappointment it emerged again, helpless and reproachful as the desolate pain in a child's face. In her heart, Bonadea had already asked her friend a hundred times to forgive her jealousy, "castigating her wicked pride," as she put it, until at last she decided to sue for peace.
She sat before him, charming, melancholy, and beautiful, and feel- ing sick to her stomach. He stood in front of her "like a youth," his skin polished like marble from the great events and high diplomacy she believed him engaged in. She had never before noticed how strong and determined his face looked. She would gladly have sur- rendered herself to him entirely, but she dared not go so far, and he showed no. disposition to encourage her. This coldness saddened her beyond words, but had the grandeur of a statue. Unexpectedly, Bonadea seized his dangling. hand and kissed it. Ulrich stroked her hair pensively. Her legs turned to water in the most feminine way in the world, and she was about to fall to her knees. But Ulrich gently pushed her back in her chair, brought whiskey and soda, and lit a cigarette.
"A lady does not drink whiskey in the morning! " Bonadea pro- tested. For an instant she regained enough . energy to be offended, and her heart roseto her head with the suspicion that the matter-of- fact offer of such a strong and, as she thought, licentious drink con- tained a heartless implication. ·
But Ulrich said kindly: "It will do you good. All the women who have played a major role in politics have drunk whiskey. " For in order to justify her visit, Bonadea had said how impressed she was with the great patriotic campaign, and that she would like to lend a hand in it.
That was her plan. She always believed several things at the same time, and half-truths made it easier for her to lie.
The whiskey was pale gold and warming like the sun in May.
Bonadea felt like a seventy-year-old woman sitting on a garden bench outside her house. She was getting old. Her children were growing up. The eldest was already twelve. It was certainly disgrace- ful to follow a man one didn't even know very well into his house, just because he had eyes that looked at one like a man behind a window. One notices, she thought, little details about this man one doesn't like and that could be a warning. One could, in fact-if only there were something to hold one back at such times! -break it off, flushed with shame and perhaps even flaming with anger; but be- cause this doesn't ~appen, this man grows more and more passion- ately into his role. And one feels oneself very clearly like a stage set in the glare of artificial light; what one has before one is stage eyes, a stage mustache, the buttons ofa costume being unbuttoned, and the whole scene from the first entrance into the room to the first horrible moment of being sober again all takes place inside a consciousness that has stepped outside one's head and papered the walls with pure hallucination. Bonadea did not use precisely these words-her thought was only partly verbal anyway-but even as she was trying to visualize it she felt herself at the mercy of this change in conscious- ness. "Whoever could describe it would be a great artist-no, a por- nographer! " she thought, looking at Ulrich. She never for an instant lost her good intentions, her determination to hold on to decency, even in this condition; only then they stood outside and waited but had absolutely nothing to say in a world transformed by desire. When Bonadea's reason returned, this was her worst anguish. The change of consciousness during sexual arousal, which people pass over as something natural, was in her so overpowering in the depth and sud- denness not only of her ecstasy but< also of her remorse that it fright- ened her in retrospect as soon as she had returned to the peace of her family circle. She thought she must be going mad. She hardly
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dared look at her children, for fear of banning them with her corrupt glance. And she winced whenever her husband looked at her with more than his usual warmth, but was afraid of freedom from con- straint in being alone. All this led her, in the weeks of separation, to plan that henceforth she would have no other lover beside Ulrich; he would be her mainstay and would save her from excesses with strangers.
"How could I have allowed myself to find fault with him? " she now thought as she sat facing him for the first time in so long. "He is so much more complete than I am. " She gave him credit for her-hav- ing been a much improved person duringtheir embraces, and was probably also thinking that he would have to introduce her to his new social Circle at the next charity affair. Bonadea inwardly swore an oath of allegiance, and teari of emotion came to her eyes as she turned all this over in her mind.
Ulrich meanwhile was finishing' his whiskey with the deliberate- ness of a man who has to act on a hard decision. For the time being, he told her, it was not yet possible to introduce her to Diotima.
Bonadea naturally wanted to know exactly why it was not possible; and then she wanted to know exactly when it would be possible.
Ulrich had to point out to her that she was not a person of promi- nence in the arts, nor in the sciences, nor in organized charity, so that it would take a very long time before he could convince Diotima of the need for Bonadea's assistance.
Bonadea had in the meantime been filled with curious feelings to- ward Diotima. She had heard enough about Diotima's virtues not to be jealous; rather, she envied and admired this woman, who could hold the interest of Bonadea's beloved without making improper concessions to him. She ascribed the statuesque serenity she thought she saw in Ulrich to this influence. Her term for herself was "pas- sionate," by which she understood both her dishonorable state and an honorable excuse for it. But she admired cool women with much the same feeling with which unfortunate owners ofperpetually damp hands put their hands in a hand that is particularly dry and lovely. "It is her doing! " she thought. "It is she who has changed Ulrich so much! '. ' A hard drill in her heart, a sweet drill in her knees: these two drills whirring simultaneously and in opposite direc:;tions made Bona-
dea feel almost ready to faint as she came up against Ulrich's resist- ance. So she played her trump card: Moosbrugger.
She had realized on agonizing reflection that Ulrich must have a strange liking for this horrible character. She herself simply felt re- volted by "the brutal sensuality," as she saw it, expressed in Moos- brugger's acts of violence. In this respect her feeling was much the same-though of course . she did not know this-as that of the prosti- tutes who quite single-mindedly, untainted by bourgeois romanti- cism, see in the sex murderer simply a hazard of their profession. But what she needed, including her unavoidable lapses, was a tidy and credible world, and Moosbrugger would help her to restore it. Since Ulrich had a weakness for him, and she had a husband who was a judge and could supply useful information, the thought had ripened ofits own accord in her forlorn state that she might link her weakness to Ulrich's weakness by way ofher husband; this yearning image had the comforting power ofsensuality sanctioned by a feeling ofjustice. But when she approached her spouse on the subject, he was as- tounded at her juridical fervor, although he knew how easily she got carried away by everything great and good in human nature. But since he was not only a judge but a hunter too, he put her off good- humoredly by saying that the only way to deal with such vermin was to exterminate them wherever one came across them without a lot of sentimental fuss, and he did not respond to further inquiries. On her second try, some time later, all Bonadea,could get out ofhim was the supplementary opinion that childbearing was a woman's affair while killing was a job for men, and as she did not want to stir up any suspi- cions by being overzealous on this dangerous subject she was de-- barred, for the time being, from the path of the law. This left mercy as the only way ofpleasing Ulrich by doing something for Moosbrug- ger, and this way led her-one can hardly call this a surprise, more a kind of attraction-to Diotima.
In her mind she could see herself as Diotima's friend, and she granted herself her own wish to be forced to make her admired rival's acquaintance for the sake of the cause, which brooked no delay, although of course she was too proud to seek it for herself. She was going to win Diotima over to Moosbrugger's cause-something Ulrich had clearly not succeeded in doing, as she had instantly
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guessed-and her imagination painted the situation in beautiful scenes. The tall, marmoreal Diotima would put her arm around Bonadea's warm shoulders, bowed down by sins, and Bonadea ex- pected that her own role would more or less be to anoint that di- vinely untouched heart with a drop of mortal fallibility. This was the stratagem she proposed to her lost friend.
But today Ulrich was impervious to any suggestion of saving Moosbrugger. He knew Bonadea's noble sentiments and knew how easily the flaring up of a single worthy impulse could tum into a rag- ing fire consuming her whole body. He made it clear that he did not have the slightest intention of meddling in the Moosbrugger case.
Bonadea looked up at him with hurt, beautiful eyes in which the water rose above the ice like the borderline between winter and spring.
Ulrich had never entirely lost a certain gratitude for the childlike beauty of their first meeting, that night he lay senseless on the pave- ment with Bonadea crouching by his head, and the wavering, roman- tic vagueness of tl,te world, of youth, of emotion, came trickling "into his returning consciousness from this young woman's eyes. So he tried to soften his offending refusal, to dissipate it in talk.
"Imagine yourself walking across a big park at night," he sug- gested, "and two ruffians come at you. Would your first thought be to feel pity for them and that their brutality is society's fault? "
"But I never walk through a· park at night," Bonadea promptly parried.
"But suppose a policeman came along: wouldn't you ask him to arrest them? "
"I would ask him to protect me. "
"Which means that he would arrest them. "
"I don't know what he would do with them. Anyway, Moosbrugger
is not a ruffian. "
"All right, then, let's assume he is working as a carpenter in your
house. You're alone with him in the place, and his eyes start to slither from side to side. "
Bonadea protested: "What an awful thing you're making me do! "
"Of course," Ulrich said, "but I'm only trying to show you how extremely unpleasant the kind of people are who lose their balance so easily. One can only indulge in an impartial attitude toward them
when someone else takes the beating. In that case, I grant you, as the victims of society or fate they bring out our tenderest feelings. You must admit that no one can be blamed for his faults, as seen through his own eyes; from his point of view they are, at worst, mistakes or bad qualities in a whole person who is no less good because of them, and of course he's perfectly right. "
Bonadea had to adjust her stocking and felt compelled as she did so to look up at Ulrich with her head slightly tilted back, so that- unguarded by her eye-a richly contrasting life of lacy frills, smooth stocking, tensed fingers, and the gentle pearly gleam of skin emerged around her knee.
Ulrich hastily lit a cigarette and went on:
"Man is not good, but he is always good; that's a tremendous dif- ference, don't you see? We find a sophistry of self-love amusing, but we ought t<Yconclude from it that a human being can really do no wrong; what is wrong can only be an effect of something he does. This insight could be the right starting point for a social morality. "
With a sigh, Bonadea smoothed her skirt back in place; straight- ened, and sought to calm herselfwith a sip ofthe pale golden fire.
"And now let me explain to you," Ulrich went on with a smile, "why it is·possible to have all sorts offeeling for Moosbrugger but not to do anything for him. Basically, anthese cases are like the loose end of a thread-if you pull at it, the whole fabric of society starts to unravel. I can illustrate this, for a start, by some purely rational problems. "
Somehow or other, Bonadea lost a shoe. Ulrich bent down for it, and the foot with its warm toes came up to meet the shoe in his hand like a small child. "Don't bother, don't, I'll do it myself," Bonadea said, holding out her foot to him.
"There are, to begin with, the psychiatric-juridical questions," Ul- rich continued relentlessly, even as the whiff of diminished responsi- bility rose frqm her leg to his nostrils. 'We know that medicine has already practically reached the point of being able to prevent most such crimes if only we were prepared to spend the necessary amo~nts of money. So now it's only a social question. "
"dh please, not that again! " Bonadea pleaded, now that he had said "social" for the second time. "When they get started on that at home, I leave the room; it bores me to death. "
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"All right," Ulrich conceded, "I meant to say that just as we al- ready have the technology to make useful things out of corpses, sew- age, scrap, and toxins, . we almost have the psychological techniques too. But the world is taking its time in solving these questions. The government squanders money on every kind offoolishness but hasn't a penny to spare for solving the most pressing moral problems. That's in its nature, since the state is the stupidest and most malicious per- son there is. "
He spoke with conviction. But Bonadea tried to lead him back to the heart of the matter.
"Dearest," she said longingly, "isn't it the best thing for Moos- brugger that he's not responsible? "
Ulrich fought her off: "It would probably be more important to execute several responsible people than to save one irresponsible person from execution! "
He was now pacing the floor in front of her. Bonadea found him revolutionary and inflaming. Sqe managed to catch his hand, and laid it on her bosom.
"Fine," he said. "I shall now explain to you the emotional ques- tions. "
Bonadea opened his fingers and spread his hand over her breast. The accompanying glance would have melted a heart of stone. For the next few moments Ulrich felt as ifhe had two hearts in his breast, like the confusion of clocks ticking in a watchmaker's shop. Muster- ing all his willpower, he restored order in his breast and said gently: "No, Bonadea. "
Bonadea was now on the brink of tears, and Ulrich spoke to her: "Isn't it contradictory that you get yourselfworked up about this one affair just because I happened to tell you about it, whereas you don't even notice the millions of equally unjust things that happen every day? " .
"What difference does that make? " Bonadea pro! ested. "The point is, I do happen to know about this one, and I would be a bad person ifi stayed calm! "
Ulrich said that one had t~ keep calm; absolutely, passionately calm, he added. He had repossessed his hand and sat down ;orne distance from Bbnadea. "Nowadays everything is done 'meanwhile' and 'for the time being,'" he obseiVed. "It can't be helped. We are
driven by the scrupulousness of our reason into an atrocious un- scrupulousness of our hearts. " He poured another whiskey for him- self, too, and put his feet up on the sofa. He was beginning to feel tired.
"Everyone. starts out wanting to understand life as a whole," he said, "but the more accurately one thinks about it, the more it nar- rows down. When he's mature, a person knows more about one par- ticular square millimeter than all but at most two dozen other people in the world; he knows what nonsense people talk who know less about it, but he doesn't dare move because if he shifts even a mi- cromillimeter from his spot he will be talking nonsense too. "
His weariness was now the same transparent gold as his drink on the table. I've been talking nonsense for the last half hour too, he thought. But this diminished state was comfortable enough. The only thing he feared was that it might 'occur to Bonadea to come and sit down next to him. There was only one way to forestall this: keep talk- ing. He had propped up his head on his hands and lay stretched at full length like the effigies on the tombs in the Medici Chapel. He suddenly became aware of this, and as he assumed his pose he actu- ally felt a certain grandeur flowing through his body, a hovering in their serenity, and he felt more powerful than he was. For the first time he thought he distantly understood these works ofart, which he had previously only looked at as foreign objects. Instead of saying anything, he fell silent. Even Bonadea felt something. It was a "mo- ment," as one calls it, that defies characterization. Some dramatic ex- altation united the two of them, and left them mute.
'What is left of me? " Ulric~ thought bitterly. "Possibly someone who has courage and is not for sale, and likes to think that for the sake of his inner freedom he respects only a few external laws. But this inner freedom consists of being able to think whatever one likes; it means knowing, in every human situation, why one doesn't need to be bound by it, but never knowing what one wants to be bound by! " In this far from happy moment, when the curious little wave offeel- ing that had held him for an instant ebbed away again, he would have been ready to ad~t that he had nothing but an ability to see two sides to everything-that moral ambivalence that marked almost all his contemporaries and was the disposition of his generation, or per- haps their fate. His connections to the world had become pale, shad-
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owy, and negative. What right did he have to treat Bonadea badly? It was always the same frustrating talk they had, over and over again; it arose from the inner acoustics of emptiness, where a shot resounds twice as loudly and echoes on and on. It burdened him that he could no longer· speak to her except like this. For the spe~ial misery this caused them both, he came up with an almost witty, appealing name: Baroque of the Void. He sat up to say something nice to her.
"It just struck me," he said to Bonadea, who had kept her seat and dignified position. "It's a funny thing. A remarkable difference: a person able to be responsible for what he does can always do some- thing different, but a person who isn't never can. "
Bonadea responded with something quite profound: "Oh, Ul- rich! " she said. That was the only interruption, and silence closed around them once more.
When Ulrich spoke in generalities in her presence, she did not like it at all. She felt quite rightly that despite her many lapses, she lived surrounded by people like herself, and she had a sound instinct for the unsociable, eccentric, and solipsistic way he had of treating her with ideas instead of feelings. Still, crime, love, and sadness had linked themselves ill her mind, a highly dangerous mixture. Ulrich now seemed to her not nearly as intimidating, as much of a paragon, as he had at ~e beginning of their meeting; by way of compensation she now saw in him a boyish quality that aroused her idealism, the air ofa child not daring to run past some obstacle in order to throw itself into its mother's arms. She had felt for the longest time a free-float- ing, almost uncontrollable tenderness for him. But after Ulrich had checked her first hint ofthis, she forc;ed herself with great effort to hold back. The memory ofhow she had lain undressed and powerless on his sofa on her previous visit still rankled, and she was resolved to sit, if she had to, on that chair in her hat and veil to the very end in order to teach him that he had before him a person who knew how to control herselfas much as her rival, Diotima. Bonadea always missed the great idea that was supposed to go along with the great excite- ment she felt througa the nearness of a lover. Unfortunately, this can, ofcourse, be s. aid oflife itself, which contains~lot ofexcitement and little sense, but Bonadea did not know this, and she tried to ex- press some great idea. Ulrich's thoughts lacked the dignity she needed, to her way of thinking, and she was probably searching for
something finer, more deeply felt. But refined hesitancy and vulgar attraction, attraction and a terrible dread of being attracted prema- turely, all became part of the stimulus of the silence in which the suppressed actions twitched, and mingled, too, with the memory of the great peace that had so united her with her lover for a second. It was, in the end, like when rain hangs in the air but cannot fall; a numbness that spread over her whole skin and terrified her with the idea that she might lose her self-control without noticing it.
Suddenly a physical illusion sprang from al1 this: a flea. Bonadea could not tell whether it was reality or imagination. She felt a shud- der in her brain, a dubious impression as if an idea had detached itself from the shadowy bondage of all the rest but was still only a fantasy-and at the same time she felt an undeniable, quite realistic shudder on her skin. She held her breath.
When one hears some- thing coming, pit-a-pat, up the stairs, knowing there is no one there but quite distinctly hearing pit-a-pat-that's how it is. Bonadea real- ized in a flash that this was an involuntary continuation of the lost shoe. A desperate expedient for a lady. But just as she was trying to banish the spook, she felt a sharp sting. She gave a little shriek, her cheeks flushed a bright red, and she called upon Ulrich to help her look for it. A flea favors the same regions as a lover; her stocking was searched down to the shoe; her blouse had to be unbuttoned in front. Bonadea declared that she must have picked it up in the streetcar or from Ulrich. But it was not to be found, and had left no traces behind.
"I can't imagine what it could have been! " Bonadea said. Ulrich smiled with unexpected friendliness. ' Bonadea burst into tears, like a little girl who has misbehaved.
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288
GENERAL STUMM VON BORDWEHR VISITS DIOTIMA
General Stumm von Bordwehr had paid his first call on Diotima. He was the army officer sent by the War Ministry as their observer to the great inaugural meeting, where he made an impressive speech, which, however, could not prevent the War Ministry from being passed over-for obvious reasons-when the committees for the great peace campaign were set up, one for each ministry.
He was a not very imposing general, with his little paunch and the little toothbrush on his upper lip in place ofa real mu5tache. His face was round and expressed something of the family man with no money beyond the funds for the statutory bond required when an officer wanted to marry. He said to Diotima that a soldier could ex- pect to play only a modest role in the council chamber. Besides, it went without saying that for political reasons the Ministry of War could not be included in the roster of committees. Nevertheless, he dared maintain that the proposed campaign should have an effect abroad, and what had an influence abroad was the might of a people. He repeated the celebrated philosopher. Treitschke's observation that the state is the power to su. rvive in the struggle of nations. Power displayed in peace kept war at bay, or at least shortened its cruelty. He went on like this for another quarter of an hour, slipping in classi- cal quotations he fondly remembered from his school days; main- tained that those years of humanistic studies had been the happiest of his life; tried to make Diotima feel that he admired her and was delighted with the way she had cond~cted the great conference; wanted only to repeat once again that, rightly understood, the build- ing up of the armed forces that lagged far behind those of the other great powers could be the most impressive demonstration of peace- ful intentions; and for the rest declared his confident expectation that a widespread popular concern for the country's military prob- lems was bound to arise of its own accord.
This amiable general gave Diotima the fright of her life. There ·were in those days in Kakania families whose houses were fre- quented socially by army officers because their daughters married army officers, and then there were families whose daughters did not marry army officers, either because there was no money for the man-
datory security bond or on principle, so they did not receive army officers socially. Diotima's family had belonged to the second sort for both reasons, with the consequence that this conscientiously beauti- ful woman had gone out into life with a concept of the military that was something like an image of Death decked out in motley.
She replied that there was so much that was great and good in the world that the choice was not easy. It was a great privilege to be al- lowed to give. a great sign in the midst of the world's materialistic bustle, but also a grave responsibility. And the demonstration was meant, after all, to arise spontaneously from the midst of the people themselves, for which reason she had to keep her own wishes a little in the background. She placed her words with care, as though stitch- ing them together with threads in the national colors, and burned the mild incense of high bureaucratic phraseology upon her lips.
But when the General had left, the sublime woman suffered an inner breakdown. Had she been capable of so vulgar a sentiment as hatred she would have hated the pudgy little man with his waggling eyesandthegoldbuttonson. hisbelly,butsincethiswasimpossibleshe feltvaguelyinsultedbutcouldnotsaywhy. Despitethewintrycoldshe opened the windows and paced the room several times, her silks rus- tling. When she shut the windows again there were tears in her eyes. She was quite amazed. This was now the second time she was weeping without reason. She remembered the night when, in bed at her hus- band's side, she had shed tears without being able to explain them. This time the purely nervous character ofthe process, unrelated to any tangible cause, was even more evident; this fat general caused tears to gush from her eyes like an onion, without any sensible feeling being involved. She had good cause to be worried; a shadowy fear told her that a wolf was prowling round her flocks and that it was high time to exorcise it by the power of the Idea. This is how it happened that after the General's visit Diotima made up her mind to organize with the greatest speed the planned gathering of great minds who wo~d help her define the proper content ofthe patriotic campaign.
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FROM THE CONVERSATIONS BETWEEN ARNHEIM AND DIOTIMA
It greatly eased Diotima's heart that Arnheim had just returned from a trip and was at her disposal.
"Your cousin and I were talking about generals just a few days ago," he instantly responded, with the air of a man alluding to a sus- picious coincidence without wanting to be specific. Diotima received the impression that her contradictory cousin, with his unenthusiastic
. view of the great campaign, also favored the vague menaces emanat- ing from the General.
"I wouldn't like to expose this to ridicule in the presence of your cousin," Arnheim went on, changing the subject, "but I would like to be able to make you feel something you would hardly come upon by yourself, far away as you are from such things: the connection be- tween business and poetry. Of course, I mean business in the largest sense, the world's business, such as I have been fated to conduct by the position to which I was born; it. is related to poetry, it has irratio- nal, even mystical aspects. I might even say that business is quite par- ticularly endowed with those aspects. You see, money is an extraordinarily intolerant power. "
"There is probably a certain intolerance in everything people stake their lives on," Diotima said hesitantly, her mind still on the unfin- ished first part of the conversation. .
"Especially with money! " Arnheim quickly said. "Foolish people imagine it's a pleasure to have money. It is in fact a terrible responsi- bility. I won't speak of the countless lives dependent on me, for whom I represent a sort of fate; let me just mention that my grandfa- ther started by picking up garbage in a middle-sized town in the Rhineland. "
At these words Diotima actually felt a sudden shiver of what she thought was economic imperialism, but this was an error; since she was not quite without the prejudice of her social circle, she as-
sociated garbage removal with what was called in her regional dialect the dungman, and so her friend's courageous confession made her blush.
'With this refining process for waste," he continued his confes- sion, "my grandfather laid the groundwork for the influence of the Arnheims. But even my father was a self-made man, if you consider that it was he who in forty years expanded the fum into a worldwide concern. Two years at a trade school was all he had, but he can see through the most tangled world affairs at a glance, and knows every- thing he needs to know before anyone else does. I myself studied economics and every conceivable branch of science, all quite beyond his ken, and no one has any idea how he does it, but he never misses a detail. That is the mystery of a vigorous, simple, great, and healthy life! "
Arnheim's voice, as he spoke of his father, took on a special, rever- ential tone, as though its magisterial calm had a small crack some- where. It struck Diotima all the more because Ulrich had told her that old Arnheim was supposed to be a short, broad-shouldered fel- low with a bony face and a button nose, who always wore a gaping swallowtail coat and handled his investments with the dogged cir- cumspection of a chess player moving his pawns. Without waiting for her response, Amheim continued after a brief pause:
· "Once a business has expanded to the degree reached only by the very few I speak of, there is hardly anything in life it is not somehow involved with. It is a little cosmos. You would be amazed ifyou knew what seemingly quite uncommercial problems-artistic, moral, po- litical-! sometimes have to bring up in conferring with my manag- ing director. But the firm is no longer mushrooming the way it did in its early days, which I'd like to call its heroic days. No matter how prosperous a business firm may be, there is a mysterious limit to its growth, as there is with everything organic. Have you ever asked yourself why no animal in our time grows bigger than an elephant? You'll find the same mystery in the history of art and in the strange relationships of the life of peoples, cultures, and epochs. "
Diotima was now ashamed of herself for having shrunk from the refining process for waste disposal, and felt confused.
"Life is full of such mysteries. There is something that defies all reason. My father is in league with it. But a man like your eousin,"
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Arnheim said, "an activist with a h~d full of ideas how things could be done differently and better, has no feeling for it. "
Diotima responded to this second reference to Ulrich with a smile suggesting that a man like her cousin had no claim to exert any influ- ence on her: Arnheim's even, somewhat sallow skin, which in his face was . as smooth as a pear, had flushed over the cheekbones, He had succumbed to a curious urge Diotima had been arousing in him for some time now to let down his guard and confide in her totally, down to the last hidden detail. Now he locked himself up again, picked up a book from the table, read its title without taking it in, impatiently laid it down again, and said in his usual voice-it moved Diotima as deeply a~ this moment as the gesture of a man who, in gathering up his clothes, reveals that he has been naked-"! have wandered from the point. What I have to say to you about the General is that you could do nothing better than to realize your plan as quickly as possi- ble and raise the level of our campaign with the help of humanistic ideas and their recognized representatives. But there's no need to
tum the General away on principle. Personally he may be a man of goodwill, and you know my principle of not missing any opportunity to bring the life of the spirit into a sphere of mere power. "
Diotima seized his hand and summed up the conversation in her good-bye: "Thank you for being so frank with me. "
Amheim irresolutely let that gentle hand rest in his own for a mo- ment, staring down at it thoughtfully as though there were some- thing he had forgotten to say.
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ALL IS NOT WELL BETWEEN ULRICH AND ARNHEIM
Her cousin often took pleasure, at that time, in reporting to Diotima his experiences as His Grace's aide-de-camp, and always made a spe- cial point of showing her the files with all the proposals that kept pouring into Count Leinsdorf's office.
"Almighty cousin," he reported, with a fat folder in his hand, "I can no longer handle this alone. The whole world seems to expect improvements from us. Half of them begin with the words 'No more of . . . ' and the other half with 'Fotward to . . . ' Here is a batch of demands starting with 'No more Rome! ' and going all the way to 'Fotward to kitchen gardens! ' What would you want to choose? "
It was not easy to sort out all the petitions the world was address- ing to Count Leinsdorf, but two kinds surpassed all the rest in vol- ume. One blamed the troubles of the times on one particular detail and demanded its abolition; such details were nothing less than the Jews or the Church of Rome, socialism or capitalism, mechanistic thinking or the neglect of technical possibilities, miscegenation or segregation, big landed estates or big cities, overemphasis on intel- lect or inadequate popular education. The second 'group, on the other hand, pointed to a goal just ahead that, when reached, would suffice to take care ofeverything. These desirable goals ofthe second persuasion differed from the specific evils denounced by the first mostly by nothing more than the emotional plus or minus signs at- tached, obviously because the world is made up of both critical and affirming temperaments. So there were letters of the second cate- gory that joyfully took the negative line that it was high time to break with the ridiculous cult of the arts, because life was a far greater poet than all the scribblers. These letters demanded courtroom reports and travel books for general use; while letters on the same subject · from the first category would be joyfully positive in maintaining that the mountaineer's ecstasy upon reaching the summit outdid all the
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sublimities of art, philosophy, and religion, so instead of these one should support mountain-climbing clubs. In this double-jointed fashion the public demanded a slowing·down of the tempo of the times just as much as a competition for the best short essay, because life was unbearably/exquisitely short, and there was a desperate need for the liberation of mankind from/by garden apartments, the eman- cipation of women, dancing, sports, interior decoration, and from any number of other burdens by any number of other panaceas.
Ulrich closed his folder and spoke privately.
"Mighty cousin," he said, "it is amazing that half of them seek sal- vation in the future and the other half in the past. I don't know what we are to make of that. His Grace would say that the present is with- out salvation. "
"Is His Grace thinking in terms of the Church? " Diotima asked.
"He has only just come up with the discovery that in the history of mankind there is no turning back voluntarily. What makes it difficult is that going forward is riot much use either. Permit me to say that we're in a very peculiar situation, unable to move either forward or backward, whtle the present moment is felt to be unbearable too. "
When Ulrich talked like this Diotima barricaded herself in her tall body as in a tower marked with three stars in Baedeker.
"Do you believe, dear lady, that anyone fighting for or against a cause today," Ulrich asked, "who tomorrow by some miracle were to become the all-powerful ruler of the world, would instantly do what he had been clamoring for all his life? I am convinced he would grant himself a few days' delay. "
Ulrich paused. Diotima suddenly turned to him without respond- ing and asked him sternly:
"Why did you encourage the General about our campaign? " "What general? "
"General von Stumm! "
"Do you mean that round little general from the first big meeting?
Me? I haven't even seen him since, let alone encouraged him! " Ulrich's astonishment was convincing and called for an explana- tion on her part. Since it was impossible that a man like Arnheim should be guilty of a falsehood, there had to be a misunderstanding
somewhere, and Diotima gave him the reason for her assumption. "So I am supposed to have spoken with Arnheim about General
von Stumm? I never did that either," Ulrich assured her. "I did talk with Arnheim-just a moment . . . " He searched his memory, then broke into a laugh. "It would be very flattering if Amheim attached so much importance to every word I say. W e have had several discus- sions lately-if that's the word for our differences-and I did once say something about a general, but not any particular one, only inci- dentally to illustrate a point. I maintained that a general who for stra- tegic reasons sends his battalions to certain doom is a murderer, if you think ofthem as thousands ofmothers' sons, but that he immedi- ately becomes something else seen from some other perspective, such as, for example, the necessity of sacrifice, or the insignificance of life's short span. I used a lot. of other examples. But here you must allow me to digress. For quite obvious reasons, every generation treats the life into which it is born as firmly established, except for those few things it is interested in changing. This is practical, but it's wrong. The world can be changed in all directions at any moment, or at least in any direction it chooses; it's in the world's nature. Wouldn't it be more original to try to live, not as a definite person in a definite world where only a few buttons need adjusting-what we call evolution-but rather to behave from the start as someone born to change surrounded by a world created to change, roughly like a drop of water inside a cloud? Are you annoyed with me for being so obscure again? "
''I'm not annoyed with you, but I can't understand you. " Diotima commanded: "Do tell me the whole conversation! "
'Well, Arnheim started it. He stopped me and formally challenged me to a conversation," Ulrich began. " W e businessmen,' he said to me with a rather puckish smile, quite in contrast to his usual quiet pose, but still very majestic, 'we businessmen are not as calculating as you might think. Actually, we-I mean the leading men, ofcourse; the small fry may spend all their time calculating-we come to re- gard our really successful ideas as something that defies all calcula- tion, like the personal success ofa politician, and, in the last analysis, like the artist's too. ' Then he asked me to judge what he was going to say next with the indulgence we grant the irrational: from the first day he saw me, he confided, he'd had certain ideas about me-and it seems, gracious cousin, that you also told him many things about me, which he assured me he had not needed to hear to form his opinion,
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which was that strangely enough I had made a mistake in choosing a purely abstract, conceptual profession, because no matter how gifted I was in that direction, I was basically a scientist, and no matter how surprised I might be to hear it, my real talent lay in the field of action and personal effectiveness! "
"Oh really? " Diotima said.
"I quite agree with you," Ulrich hastened to say. "There is nothing I am less fit for than being myself. "
"You are always making fun of things instead of devoting yourself to life," Diotima said, still annoyed with him over the files.
"Amheim maintains the opposite. I am under a compulsion to think my way to excessively thorough conclusions about life-he says. "
"You're always sardonic and negative, always leaping into the im- possible and avoiding every real decision," Diotima maintained.
"It is simply my conviction," Ulrich replied, "that thinking is a world of its own, and real life is another. The difference between their respective levels of development at the present time is too great. Our brain is some thousands of years old, but if it had worked out only half of everything and forgotten the other half, its true image would be our reality. All one can do is refuse intellectual par- ticipation in it. "
"Aren't you making things much too easy for yourself? " Diotima asked, without any offensive intention, rather like a mountain look- ing down on a little brook at its foot. "Amheim enjoys theorizing too, but I think he lets hardly anything pass without examining all its as- pects. Don't you feel that the point of thinking is to be a concen- trated capacity for applying-"
"No," Ulrich said.
''I'd like to hear what answer Amheim gave you. "
"He told me that the intellect today is the helpless spectator of real
developments because it is dodging the great tasks of life. He asked me to look at what subjects the arts treat, at what trivia the churches concern themselves with, at how narrow even the perspective of the scholars is-and I should consider that all the while, the earth is being literally carved up! Then he said that this was precisely what he wanted to talk with me about. "
"And what was your answer? " Diotima asked eagerly, supposing
that Amheim had been trying to appeal to her cousin's conscience about his indifferent attitude to the problems of the Parallel Campaign. ·
':I told him that realizing a potential always attracts me less than the unrealized, and I mean not only the future but also the past and missed opportunities. -It seems to me our history has been that every time we have fulfilled some small part of an idea, we are so pleased that we leave the much greater remainder unfinished. Magnificent institutions are usually the bungled drafts of their ideas; so, inciden- tally, are magnificent personalities. That's what I answered. A differ- ence in the angle of perspective, so to speak. "
"How argumentative of you! " said Diotima, with a sense of injury.
"He retaliated by telling me his impression of me when I resist the active life because of some unfulfilled intellectual element in the general scheme. Would you like to hear it? Like a man who lies down on the ground beside a bed that has been prepared for him. A squandering of energy, something physically immoral, is what he called it, to make sure I didn't miss the point. He kept at me to make me see that great goals can be reached only by using the existing eco- nomic, political, and, not least, intellectual structure of power. For his own part, he considers it more ethical to make use of it than to neglect it. He really hammered away at me. He called me a man of action in a defensive stance, a cramped defensive stance. I think he has some sinister reason for wanting to gain my respect. "
"He wants to be helpful! " Diotima cried out in reproof.
"Oh no," Ulrich said. "I may be only a little pebble, and he is a splendid, puffed-out glass ball. But I have the impression he's afraid of me. "
Diotima made no answer. Wh~t Ulrich had said might be pre- sumptuous, but it had occurred to her that the conversation he had just recounted was not at all what it should have been according to the impression she had got from Arnheim. It even worried her a bit. Although she thought Amheim quite incapable of intrigue, Ulrich was gaining her confidence, and so she asked him what she should do about the case of General Stumm.
"Keep him off!