No More Learning

And you, and I mean you personally, are emi- nently qualified in this respect. What you said, for instance, the last time we all met at your cousin's before you left town, was that what we actually need-if you recall-is a central committee for eternal happiness, to bring it in step with our earthly precision in ratiocina- tion. . . . Well, it wouldn't work out quite so easily, but His Eminence laughed heartily when I told him about it; actually, I rubbed it in a bit, as they say, and even though he's always making fun of every- thing, I can tell pretty well whether his laugh comes from the spleen or from the heart. The fact is, my dear man, we simply can't do with- outyou. . . . " ·
While all of Count Leinsdorf's other pronouncements that day had had the character of complicated dreams, the wish he now ex- pressed-that Ulrich should give up "definitively, at least for now,"
924 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
any idea of resigning his post as Honorary Secretary of the Parallel Campaign-was so definite and so pointedly fledged, and his hand had come down on Ulrich's arm with such an effect of a surprise ma- neuver, that Ulrich almost had the not entirely pleasing impression that all the elaborate harangues he had been listening to had only been calculated, far more slyly than he had anticipated, to put him off'his guard. At this moment he was quite annoyed with Clarisse, who had got him into this fix. But since he had appealed on her be- half to Count Leinsdorf's kindness the very first time there had been an opening in the conversation, and the request had been granted instantly by the obliging high official, who wanted only to go on talk- ing without interruption, he had no choice now but reluctantly to square the account.
"I've heard from Tuzzi," Count Leinsdorf said, pleased with his success, "that you might decide on a man from his office to take the routine business off your hands. 'Splendid,' I told him, 'if he stays on. ' After all, his man has taken his oath of office, which we'll give you too, and my own secretary, whom I'd gladly have put at your disposal, is unfortunately an idiot. All you perhaps shouldn't let him see is the strictly confidential stuff, because he's Tuzzi's man, and that has certain drawbacks; but otherwise, do arrange matters to suit your own convenience," His Grace said, concluding this successful interview with the utmost cordiality.
21
CAST ALL THOU HAST INTO THE FIRE, EVEN UNTO THY SHOES
During this time and from the moment she had stayed behind alone, Agathe had been living in a state of utter release from all ties to the world, in a sweetly wistful suspension ofwill; a condition that was like a great height, where only the wide blue sky is to b~ seen. Once a day
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 925
she treated herself to a short stroll in town; at home, she read, at- tended to her affairs, and experienced this mild, trivial business of living with grateful enjoyment. Nothing troubled her state: no cling- ing to the past, no straining for the future; if her eye lit upon some nearby object, it was like coaxing a baby lamb to her: either it came gently closer or it took no notice ofher at all-but at no time did her mind deliberately take hold of it with that motion of inner grasping which gives to every act of cold understanding a certain violence as well as a certain futility, for it drives away the joy that is in things. In this fashion everything around her seemed far more intelligible to Agathe than ordinarily, but in the main she was still preoccupied with her conversations with her brother. In keeping with the pecu- liarity of her unusually exact memory, which did not distort its mate- rial with any bias or prejudice, there rose up in her mind more or less at random the living words, the subtle surprises of cadence and ges- tures, in these conversations, much as they were before she had quite understood them and realized where they were tending. Neverthe- less, it all held the utmost significance for her; her memory, so often dominated by remorse, was now suffused with a quiet devotion, and the time just past clung like a caress to the warmth of her body, in- stead of drifting off as it usually did into the frost and darkness that awaits life lived in vain.
And so, veiled in an invisible light, Agathe also dealt with the lawyers, notaries, brokers, and agents she now had to see. No one refused her; everyone was glad to oblige the attractive young woman-whose father's name was sufficient recommendation-in every way. She conducted herself with as much self-assurance as de- tachment; she was sure ofwhat she wanted, but it was detached from herself, as it were, and the experience she had acquired in life-also something that can be seen as detached from the personality-went on working in pursuit of that purpose like a shrewd laborer calmly taking advantage for his commission of whatever opportunities pre- sented themselves. That she was engaged in preparing a felony-the significance ofher action that would have been strikingly apparent to an outsider-simply did not enter her state of mind during this time. The unity of her conscience excluded it. The pure light of this con- science outshone this dark point, which nevertheless, like the core of a flame, formed its center. Agathe herself did not know how to ex-
gz6 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
press it; by virtue ofher intention she found herselfin a state that was a world away from this same ugly intention.
On the morning after her brother had left, Agathe was already considering her appearance with great care: it had begun by accident with her face, when her gaze had landed on it and not come back out of the mirror. She was held fast, much as one who sometimes has absolutely no desire to walk keeps walking a hundred steps, and then another hundred, all the way toward something one catches sight of only at the end, at which point one definitely intends to tum back and yet does not. In this way she was held captive, without vanity, by this landscape ofher self, which confronted her behind the shimmer ofglass. She looked at her hair, still like bright velvet; she opened the collar of her reflection's dress and slipped the dress off its shoulders; then she undressed the image altogether and studied it down to the rosy nails, to where the body tapers off into fingers and toes and hardly belongs to itself anymore. Everything was still like the spar- kling day approaching its zenith: ascendant, pure, exact, and infused with that forenoon growth that manifests itselfin a human being or a young animal as ineffably as in a bouncing ball that has not yet reached its highest point in the air, but is just about to. "Perhaps it is passing through that point this very moment," Agathe thought. The idea frightened her. Still, she was only twenty-seven; it might take a while yet. Her body, as untouched by athletic coaches and masseurs as it was by childbearing and maternal toil, had been formed by noth- ing but its own growth. Ifit could have been set down naked in one of those grand and lonely landscapes that mountain ranges form on the side turned toward the sky, the vast, infertile, billowing swell of such heights would have borne it upward like some pagan goddess. In a nature ofthis kind, noon does not pour down exhalations oflight and heat; it merely seems for a while longer to rise above its zenith and then to pass imperceptiblyinto the sinking, floating beautyofthe afternoon. From the mirror came the eerie sense ofthat undefinable hour.
It occurred to her at this moment that Ulrich, too, was letting his life go by as though it would last forever. "Perhaps it is a mistake that we didn't first meet when we were old," she said to herself, conjuring up the melancholy image of two banks of fog drifting earthward in the evening. "They're not as fine as the blaze of noon, but what do
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 927
those formless gray shapes care what people make of them? Their hour has come, and it is just as tender as the most glowing hour! "
She had now almost turned her back on the mirror, but was pro- voked by a certain extravagance in her mood to turn around again before she knew it, and had to laugh at the memory of two fat people taking the waters at Marienbad years ago; she had watched them as they sat on one of those green benches, doting on each other with the sweetest and tenderest feelings. "Their beating hearts are slim under all that fat, and being lost in their vision of each other, they have no idea how funny they look to the world," Agathe reminded herself, and made an ecstatic face while trying to puff up her body with imag- inary rolls offat. When this fit ofexuberance had passed, it looked as if some tiny tears of rage had risen to her eyes, and pulling herself together, she coolly resumed the point-by-point scrutiny of her ap- pearance. Although she was considered slender, she observed in her body with some concern a possibility that she could become heavy. Perhaps she was too broad-chested. In her face, its very white skin dimmed by her golden hair as if by candles burning in the daytime, the nose was a bit too wide, and its almost classical line a bit dented on one side at the tip. It could be that everywhere inside her flame- like given form a second was lurking, broader and more melancholy, like a linden leaf that has fallen among twigs of laurel. Agathe felt a curiosity about herself, as though she were really seeing herself for the first time. This was how she might well have been perceived by the men she had become involved with, without her having known anything about it. It was a rather uncanny feeling. But by some trick ofthe imagination, before she could call her memories to account for it, she kept hearing behind everything she had experienced the ar- dent, long-drawn-out mating cry of donkeys, which had always curi- ously aroused her: a hopelessly foolish and ugly sound, which for that very reason makes no other heroism of love seem so desperately sweet as theirs. She shrugged her shoulders at her life and resolutely turned back to her image to discover a place where her appearance might already be yielding to age. There were those small areas near the eyes and ears that are the first to change, beginning by looking as though something had slept on them, or the inner curve under the breasts, which so easily loses its definition. At this moment it would have been a satisfaction to her and a promise of peace to come had
928 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
she seen such a change, but there was none yet to be seen, and the loveliness of her body floated almost eerily in the depths of the mirror.
It now seemed odd to her that she was actually Frau Hagauer, and the difference between the clear and close relationship that implied and the vagueness with which the fact reached deep into her being was so great that she seemed to herself to be standing there without a body while the body in the mirror belonged to Frau Hagauer, who was the one who would have to learn to cope with its having commit- ted itself to a situation beneath its dignity. Even in this there was some of that elusive pleasure in living that sometimes startles, and it made Agathe, once she had hastily dressed again, go straight to her bedroom to look for a capsule that must be in her luggage. This small airtight capsule, which had been in her possession almost as long as she had been married to Hagauer, and which she always kept within reach, contained a tiny quantity of a drab powder she had been as- sured was a deadly poison. Agathe recalled certain sacrifices it had cost her to obtain this forbidden stuff, about which she knew only what she had been told of its effect and one of those chemical names the uninitiated must memorize, like a magic formula, without know- ing what they mean. But evidently all those means by which the end may be brought a little closer, such as poison or guns, or seeking out survivable dangers, are part ofthe romantic love oflife; and it may be that most people's lives are so oppressed, so fluctuating, with so much darkness in their brightness, and altogether so perverse, that life's inherent joy can be released only by the distant possibility of putting an end to it. Agathe felt better when her eyes lit on the tiny metal object, which she regarded, amid the uncertainty that lay ahead of her, as a bringer ofluck, a talisman.
So this did not at all mean that Agathe at this time already in- tended to kill herself. On the contrary, she feared death just as every young person does to whom, for instance, before falling asleep in bed at night, after a well-spent day, it suddenly occurs that "It's inevita- ble: sometime, on another fine day just like this, I'll be dead. " Nor does one acquire an appetite for dying by having to watch someone else die; her father's death had tormented her with impressions whose horrors had returned since she had been left alone in the house after her brother's departure. But ''I'm sort of dead, in a way"
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · gzg
was something Agathe felt often; and especially in moments like this, when she had just been conscious of her young body's shapeliness and good health, its taut beauty, equally unfathomable in the mystery of what held it together and what made its elements decompose in death, she tended to fall from her condition ofhappy confidence into one of anxiety, amazement, and silence: it was like stepping from a noisy, crowded room and suddenly standing under the shimmering stars. Regardless of her awakening intentions and her satisfaction at having extricated herself from a bungled life, she now felt rather de- tached from herself and only obscurely linked to her own existence. Coolly she thought of death as a state in which one is released from all efforts and illusions, imagined it as a tender inward rocking to sleep: one lies in God's hand, and this hand is like a cradle or a ham- mock slung between two tall trees swaying faintly in the wind. She thought of death as a great tranquillity and fatigue, the end of all wanting and striving, ofall paying attention and having to think, like the pleasant slackening ofthe fingers one feels when sleep cautiously loosens their hold on whatever last thing ofthis world they have still been clutching. No doubt she was indulging herself in a rather easy and casual notion ofdeath, typical ofsomeone disinclined to take on the exertions of living; and in the end she was amused to think how this was all of a piece with her moving the couch into her father's austere drawing room to lounge on, reading-the only change she had made in the house on her own initiative.
Still, the thought of giving up life was anything but a game for Agathe. It seemed profoundly believable to her that all this frustrat- ing tunnoil must be followed by a state ofblissful repose, which she could not help imagining in physical terms. She felt it this way be- cause she had no need of the suspenseful illusion that the world could be improved, and she was always ready to surrender her share in it completely, as long as it could be done in a pleasant fashion. Besides, she had already had a special encounter with death in that extraordinary illness that had befallen her on the borderline between childhood and girlhood. That was when-in an almost imperceptibly gradual loss of energy that seemed to infiltrate each tiniest particle of time, though as a whole it happened with an irresistible rush-more and more parts ofher body seemed to dissolve away from her day by day and be destroyed; yet, keeping pace with this decline and this
930 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
slipping away from life there was an unforgettable fresh striving to- ward a goal that banished all the unrest and anxiety of her illness, a curiously substantive state that even enabled her to exert a certain domination over the adults around her, who were becoming more and more unsure of themselves. It is not out of the question that this sense ofpower, gained under such impressive circumstances, could later have been at the heart of her spiritual readiness to withdraw in similar fashion from a life whose allurements for some reason fell short of her expectations. But more probably it was the other way around: that that illness, which enabled her to escape the demands of school and home, was the first manifestation of her attitude to the world, an attitude that was transparent and permeated by the light of an emotion unknown to her. For Agathe felt herself to be a person of a spontaneous, simple temperament, warm, lively, even gay and easy to please; she had in fact adapted herself good-naturedly to a great variety of circumstances, nor had she ever suffered that collapse into indifference that befalls women who can no longer bear their disillu- sionment. But in the midst of her laughter or the tumult of some sensual adventure that continued nonetheless, there lived a disen- chantment that made every fiber of her body tired and nostalgic for something else, something best described as nothingness.
This nothingness had a definite, ifindefinable, content. For a long time she had been in the habit of repeating to herself, on all sorts of occasions, words of Novalis: "What then can I do for my soul, that lives within me like an unsolved riddle, even while it grants the visi- ble man the utmost license, because there is no way it can control him? '' But the flickering light ofthis utterance always went out again, like a flash of lightning that only left her in darkness, for she did not believe in a soul, as it was something too presumptuous and in any case much too definite for her own person. On the other hand, she could not believe in the earthly here and now either. To understand this rightly, one need only realize that this turning away from an earthly order when there is no faith in a supernatural order is a pro- foundly natural response, because in every head, alongside the pro- cess of logical thought, with its austere and simple orderliness reflecting the conditions of our external world, there is an affective world, whose logic, insofar as it can be spoken of at all, corresponds to feelings, passions, moods. The laws governing these two bear
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 931
roughly the same relation to each other as those of a lumberyard, where chunks of wood are hewn into rectangular shapes and stacked ready for transport, bear to the dark tangled laws of the forest, with its mysterious workings and rustlings. And since the objects of our thought are in no way quite independent of its conditions, these two modes of thinking not only mingle in each person but can, to a cer- tain extent, even present him with two worlds, at least immediately before and after that "first mysterious and indescribable moment" of which a famous religious thinker has said that it occurs in every sen- sory perception before vision and feeling separate and fall into the places in which one is accustomed to find them: one of them an ob- ject in space and the other a mental process enclosed within the observer.
And so, whatever the relationship may be between objects and feeling in the civilized person's mature view of the world, everyone surely knows those ecstatic moments in which a split has not yet oc- curred, as though water and land had not yet been divided and the waves of feeling still shared the same horizon as the hills and valleys that form the shape of things. There is even no need to assume that Agathe experienced such moments unusually often or with unusual intensity; she merely perceived them more vividly or, if you like, more superstitiously, for she was always willing to trust the world and then again not really trust it, just as she had done ever since her school days, and she had not unlearned it even later, when she had come in closer contact with masculine logic. In this sense, which is not to be confused with whim and willfulness, Agathe could have claimed-given more self-confidence than she had-to be the most illogical of women. But it had never occurred to her to regard the alienated feelings she experienced as more than a personal eccen- tricity. It was only through the encounter with her brother that a transformation occurred within her. In these empty rooms, all hol- lowed out in the shadows of solitude, rooms so recently filled with talk and a fellowship that reached to the innermost soul, the distinc- tion between physical separation and mental presence unwittingly lost itself; and as the days glided by without a trace, Agathe felt with a hitherto unknown intensity the curious charm of that sense of omni- presence and omnipotence which occurs when the felt world makes the transition to perceptions. Her attention now seemed to be not
932 · THE MAN WITH0 UT QUALITIES
with the senses but already opened wide deep inside her emotions, where no light could enter that did not already glow like the light in her heart, and it seemed to her, remembering her brother's words, that regardless of the ignorance she normally complained of she could understand everything that mattered without having to reflect on it. And as in this way her spirit was so filled with itself that even the liveliest idea had something of the soundless floating quality of a memory about it, everything that came her way spread out into a lim- itless present. Even when she did something, only a dividing line melted between herself, the doer, and the thing done, and her move- ments seemed to be the path by which things came to her when she stretched out her arms to them. This gentle power, this knowledge, and the world's speaking presence were, however, whenever she wondered with a smile what she was doing after all, hardly distin- guishable from absence, helplessness, and a profound muteness of the spirit. With only a slight exaggeration of what she was feeling, Agathe could have said that she no longer knew where she was. On all sides she was in a state of suspension in which she felt both lifted up and lost to sight. She might have said: I am in love, but I don't know with whom. She was filled with a clear will, something she had always felt the lack of, but she did not know what she should under- take in its clarity, since all that her life had ever held of good and evil was now meaningless.
So it was not only when she looked at the poison capsule but every day that Agathe thought she would like to die, or that the happiness of death must be like the happiness in which she was spending her days while she was waiting to go and join her brother, meanwhile doing exactly what he had pleaded with her to stop doing. She could not imagine what would happen after she was with her brother in the capital. She remembered almost reproachfully that he had some- times nonchalantly given signs of assuming that she would be suc- cessful there and would soon find a new husband or at least a lover; it would be nothing like that, that much she knew. Love, children, fine days, gay social gatherings, travel, a little art-the good life was so easy; she understood its appeal and was not immune to it. But ready as she was to regard herselfas useless, Agathe felt the total contempt of the born rebel for this easy way out. She recognized it as a fake. The life supposedly lived to the full is in truth a life "without rhyme
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 933
or reason"; in the end-and truly at the real end, death-something is always missing. It is-how should she put it? -like things piled up without being ordered by some guiding principle; unfulfilled in its fullness, the opposite of easy or simple, a jumble one accepts with the cheerfulness of habit! And suddenly going off at a tangent, she thought: "It's like a bunch of strange children you look at with con- ventional friendliness, with growing anxiety because you can't find your own child among them! "
She took some comfort in her resolve to put an end to her life if the new tum it was about to take should prove to have changed noth- ing. Like fermenting wine, she felt hope streaming in her that death and terror would not be the finai word of truth. She felt no need to think about it. Actually, she feared this need, which Ulrich was al- ways so glad to indulge, and she feared it aggressively. For she did feel that everything that moved. her so strongly was not entirely free of a persistent hint that it was merely illusion. But it was just as true that every illusion contained a reality, however fluid and dissolved: perhaps a reality not yet solidified into earth, she thought; and in one ofthose wonderful moments when the place where she was standing seemed to melt away, she was able to believe that behind her, in that space into which one could never see, God might be standing. This was too much, and she recoiled from it. An awesome immensity and emptiness suddenly flooded through her, a shoreless radiance dark- ened her mind and overwhelmed her heart with fear. Her youth, eas- ily prone to such anxieties as come with a lack of experience, whispered to her that she might be in danger of allowing an incipient madness to grow in her; she struggled to back away. Fiercely, she reminded herselfthat she did not believe in God at all. And she really did not believe, ever since she had been taught belief; it was part of her mistrust of everything she was taught. She was anything but reli- gious ifit meant faith in the supernatural, or at least some moral con- viction. But after a while, exhausted and trembling, she still had to admit to herself that she had felt "God" as distinctly as if he were a man standing behind her and putting a coat on her shoulders.
When she had thought this over and recovered her nerve, she dis- covered that the meaning of her experience did not lie in that "solar eclipse" of her physical sensations, but was mainly a moral matter. A sudden change of her inmost condition, and hence of all her relations
934 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
with the world, had for a moment given her that "unity of the con- science with the senses" which she had so far experienced so fleet- ingly that it was barely sufficient to impart to her ordinary life a tinge of something disconsolate and murkily passionate, whether Agathe tried to behave well or badly. This change seemed to her an incom- parable outpouring that emanated as much from her surroundings toward her as from herself toward them, a oneness of the highest significance through the smallest mental motion, a motion that was barely distinguishable from the objects themselves. The objects were perfused by her sensations and the sensations by the objects in a way so convincing that Agathe felt she had never before been remotely touched by anything for which she had formerly used the word "con- vincing. " And this had happened in circumstances that would nor- mally be expected to rule out the possibility of her being convinced.
So the meaning ofwhat she experienced in her solitude did not lie in its possible psychological import, as an indication of a high-strung or overly fragile personality, for it did not lie in the person at all but in something general, or perhaps in the link between his generality and the person, something Agathe not unjustly regarded as a moral conclusion in the sense that it seemed to the young woman--disap- pointed as she was in herself-that ifshe could always live as she did in such exceptional moments, and if she was not too weak to keep it up, she could love the world and willingly accommodate herself to it-something she would never be able to do otherwise! Now she was filled with a fierce longing to recover that mood, but such mo- ments of highest intensity cannot be willed by force. It was only when her furious efforts proved useless that she realized, with the clarity which a pale day takes on after sunset, that the only thing she could hope for, and what in fact she was waiting for, with an impa- tience merely masked by her solitude, was the strange prospect that her brother had once half-humorously called the Millennium. He could just as well have chosen another word for it, for what it meant to Agathe was the convincing and confident ring of something that was coming. She would never have dared make this assertion. Even now she did not know whether it was truly possible. She had no idea what it could be. She had at the moment again forgotten all the words with which her brother had proved to her that beyond what filled her spirit with nebulous light, possibility stretched onward into
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 935
the uncharted. As long as she had been in his company she had sim- ply felt that a country was crystallizing out of his words, crystallizing not in her head but actually under her feet. The very fact that he often spoke of it only ironically, and his usual way of alternating be- tween coolness and emotion, which had so often confused her in the beginning, now gladdened her in her loneliness, and she took it as a kind of guarantee that he meant it-antagonistic states of soul being more convincing than rapturous ones. "I was apparently thinking of death only because I was afraid he was not being serious enough," she confessed to herself.
The last day she had to spend in absentia took her by surprise. All at once everything in the house was cleared out and tidied up; noth- ing was left to do but hand the keys over to the old couple who were being pensioned off under the provisions of the will and were to go on living in the servants' lodge until the property found a new owner. Agathe refused to go to a hotel, intending to stay at her post until her train left in the small hours. The house was packed up and shrouded. One naked bulb was lit. Some crates, pushed together, served as table and chair. She had them set her table for supper on the edge of a ravine on a terrace of crates. Her father's old factotum juggled a loaded tray through light and shadow; he and his wife had insisted on cooking a dinner in their own kitchen, so that, as they expressed it, "the young lady" should be properly taken care offor her last meal at home. Suddenly Agathe thought, completely outside the state of mind in which she had spent the last few days: "Can they possibly have noticed anything? " She could easily -have neglected to destroy every last scrap of paper on which she had practiced changing the will. She felt cold terror, a nightmarish weight that hung on all her limbs: the miserly dread of reality that holds no nourishment for the spirit but only consumes it. Now she perceived with fierce intensity her newly awakened desire to live; it furiously resisted the possibility of anything getting in her way. When the old servant returned, she scrutinized his face intently. But the old man, with his discreet smile, went about his business unsuspecting, seeming to feel something or other that was mute and ceremonious. She could not see into him any more than she could see into a wall, and did not know what else there might be in him behind his blank polish. Now she, too, felt something muted, ceremonious, and sad. He had always been her
936 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
father's confidant, unfailingly ready to betray to him his children's every secret as soon as he had discovered it. But Agathe had been born in this house, and everything that had happened since was com- ing to an end this day: Agathe was moved to find herself and him here now, solemnly alone. She made up her mind to give him a spe- cial little gift of money, and in a fit of sudden weakness she planned to tell him that it came from Professor Hagauer; not from some cal- culating motive but as an act of atonement, with the intention of leaving nothing undone, even though she realized this was as un- necessary as it was superstitious. Before the old man returned again, she also took out her locket and capsule. The locket with the portrait of her never-forgotten beloved she slipped, after one last frowning look at his face, under the loosely nailed lid of a crate destined to go into storage indefinitely; it appeared to contain kitchen utensils or lamps, for she heard the clink of metal on metal, like branches falling from a tree. Then she placed the capsule with the poison where she had formerly worn the portrait.
"How old-fashioned of me! " she thought with a smile as she did this. 'Tm sure there are things more important than one's love life! " But she did not believe it.
At this moment it would have been as untrue to say that she was disinclined to enter into illicit relations with her brother as that she desired to. That might depend on how things turned out; but in her present state of mind nothing corresponded to the clarity of such a problem.
The light painted the bare boards of the crates between which she was sitting a glaring white and deep black. And a similar tragic mask gave an eerie touch to the otherwise simple thought that she was now spending her last evening in the house where she had been born of a woman she had never been able to remember, who had also given birth to Ulrich. An old impression came to her of clowns with dead- serious faces and strange instruments standing around her. They began to play. Agathe recognized it as a childhood daydream of hers. She could not hear the music, but all the clowns were looking at her. She told herself that at this moment her death would be no loss to anyone or anything, and for herselfit would mean no more than the outward end of an inner dying. So she thought while the clowns were
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 937
sending their music up to the ceiling and she seemed to be sitting on a circus floor strewn with sawdust, tears dropping on her finger. It was a feeling of utter futility she had known often as a girl, and she thought: "I suppose rve remained childish to this day," which did not prevent her from thinking at the same time of something that loomed vastly magnified by her tears: how, in the first hour of their reunion, she and her brother had come face-to-face in just such clown costumes. "What does it mean that it is my brother, of all peo- ple, who seems to hold the key to what's inside me? " she wondered. And suddenly she was really weeping. It seemed to be happening for no other reason she knew of but sheer pleasure, and she shook her head hard, as though there were something here she could neither undo nor put together.
At the same time she was thinking with a native ingenuousness that Ulrich would flnd the answers to all problems . . . until the old man came back again and was moved at seeing her so moved. "Oh my, the dear young lady! " he said, also shaking his head.
Agathe looked at him in confusion, but when she realized the mis- understanding behind this compassion, that it had been aroused by her appearance ofchildlike grief, heryouthful high spirits rose again.
"Cast all thou hast into the fire, even unto thy shoes. When thou has nothing left, think not even on thy shroud, but cast thyself naked into the fire! " she said to him.
It was an ancient saying that Ulrich had read to her delightedly, and the old man showed the stumps of his teeth in a smile at the grave and mellow lilt of the words she recited to him, her eyes aglow with tears; with his eyes he followed her hand pointing at the high- piled crates-she was trying to help his understanding by misleading it-suggesting something like a pyre. He had nodded at the word "shroud," eager to follow even though the path of the words was none too smooth, but he'd stiffened from the word "naked" on, and when she repeated her maxim, his face had reverted to the mask of the well-trained servant whose expression gives assurance that he can be trusted not to hear, see, or judge his betters.
In all his years with his old master that word had never once been uttered in his hearing; "undressed" would have been the closest per- missible. But young people were different nowadays, and he would
938 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
probably not be able to give them satisfaction in any case. Serenely, as one who has earned his retirement, he felt that his career was over.
But Agathe's last thought before she left was: 'Would Ulrich really
cast everything into the fire? ''
22
FROM KONIA TOWSK(S CRITIQUE OF DANIELLJ'S THEOREM TO THE FALL OF MAN. FROM THE FALL OF MAN TO THE EMOTIONAL RIDDLE POSED BY A MAN'S SISTER
The state in which Ulrich emerged into the street on leaving the Palais Leinsdorf was rather like the down-to-earth sensation of hun- ger. He stopped in front of a billboard and stilled his hunger for bourgeois normality by taking in the announcements and advertise- ments. The billboard was several yards wide and covered with words.
"Actually," it occurred to him, "one might assume that these par- ticular words, which are met with in every comer of the city, have a great deal to tell us. " The language seemed to him akin to the cliches uttered by the characters in popular novels at important points in their lives. He read: "Have you ever worn anything so flattering yet so durable as Topinam silk stockings? '' "His Excellency Goes Out on the Town! " "Saint Bartholomew's Night-A Brand-New Produc- tion! " "For Fun and Food Come to the Black Pony! " "Hot Sex Show & Dancing at the Red Pony! " Next to this he noticed a political poster: "Criminal Intrigues! " but it referred to the price of bread, not to the Parallel Campaign. He turned away and, a few steps farther along, looked into the window of a bookshop. "The Great Author's Latest Work," said a cardboard sign beside a row of fifteen copies of the same book. In the opposite comer of the display window, a sign accompanying another book read: "Love's Tower ofBabel b y - - - makes gripping reading for men and women. "
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 939
"The Great Author? " Ulrich thought. He remembered having read one book by him and resolved never to read another; but since then the man had nevertheless become famous. Considering the window display of German intellect, Ulrich was reminded of an old army joke: "Mortadella! " During Ulrich's military service this had been the nickname ofan unpopular general, after the popular Italian sausage, and ifanyone wondered why, the answer was: "Part pig, part donkey. " He was prevented from pursuing this stimulating analogy by the voice of a woman asking him:
"Are you waiting for the streetcar too? '' Only then did he realize that he was no longer standing in front of the bookshop. He also had not realized that he was now standing immobile at a streetcar stop. The woman who had called this to his attention wore a knapsack and glasses, and turned out to be an acquaintance from the staff of the Astronomical Institute, one of the few women of accomplishment in this man's profession. He looked at her nose and the bags under her eyes, which the strain of unremitting intellectual effort had turned into something resembling underarm dress shields made of gutta- percha. Then he glanced down and noticed her short tweed skirt, then up and saw a black rooster feather in a green mountaineer's hat that floated over her learned features, and he smiled.
"Are you off to the mountains? '' he asked.
Dr. Strastil was going to the mountains for three days to "relax. " 'What do you think of Koniatowski's paper? '' she asked Ulrich. Ul- rich had nothing to say. "Kneppler will be furious," she said, "but Koniatowski's critique ofKneppler's deduction from Danielli's theo- rem is interesting, don't you agree? Do you think Kneppler's deduc- tion is possible? "
Ulrich shrugged his shoulders.
He was one of those mathematicians called logicians, for whom nothing was ever "correct" and who were working out new theoreti- cal principles. But he was not entirely satisfied with the logic of the logicians either. Had he continued his work, he would have gone right back to Aristotle; he had his own views of all that.
"For my part, I don't think Kneppler's deduction is mistaken, it's just that it's wrong," Dr. Strastil confessed. She might have said with the same firmness that she did consider the deduction mistaken but nevertheless not essentially wrong. She knew what she meant, but in
940 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
ordinary language, where the terms are undefined, one cannot ex- press oneself unequivocally. Using this holiday language under her tourist hat made her feel something of the timid haughtiness that might be aroused in a cloistered monk who was rash enough to let himself come in contact with the sensual world of the laity.
Ulrich got into the streetcar with Fraulein Strastil; he didn't know why. Perhaps it was because she cared so much about Koniatowski's criticism of Kneppler. Perhaps he felt like talking to her about litera- ture, about which she knew nothing.
"What will you do in the mountains? " he asked.
She was going up to the Hochschwab.
"There'll still be too much snow up there. " He knew the moun-
tains. "It's too late for skis, and too early to go up there without them. "
"Then I'll stay down;" Fraulein Strastil declared. "I once spent three days in a cabin at the foot of the Farsenalm. I only want to get back to nature for a bit! "
The expression on the worthy astronomer's face as she uttered the word "nature" provoked Ulrich to ask her what she needed nature for.
Dr. Strastil was sincerely indignant. She could lie on the mountain meadow for three whole days without stirring-"just like a boulder! " she declared.
"That's because you're a scientist," Ulrich pointed out. "A peasant would be bored. "
Dr. Strastil did not see it that way. She spoke ofthe thousands who sought nature every holiday, on foot, on wheels, or by boat.
Ulrich spoke of the peasants deserting the countryside in droves for the attractions of the city.
Fraulein Strastil doubted that he was feeling on a sufficiently ele- mentary level.
Ulrich claimed that the only elementary level, besides eating and love, was to make oneself comfortable, not to seek out an alpine meadow. The natural feeling that was supposed to drive people to do such things was actually a modem Rousseauism, a complicated and sentimental attitude.
He was not at all pleased with the way he was expressing himself, but he did not care what he said, and merely kept on talking because
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 941
he had not yet come to what he wanted to get out ofhis system. Frau- lein Strastil gave him a mistrustful look. She could not make him out. Here her considerable experience in abstract thinking was of no use to her; she could neither keep separate nor fit together the ideas he seemed merely to be juggling so nimbly; she guessed that he was talking without thinking. She took some comfort in listening to him with a rooster feather on her hat, and it reinforced her joy in the solitude she was heading for.
At this point Ulrich's eye happened to light on the newspaper of the man opposite him, and he read the opening line of an advertise- ment, in heavy type: "Our time asks questions-Our time gives an- swers. " It could have been the announcement of a new arch support or of a forthcoming lecture-who could tell these days? -but his mind suddenly leapt onto the track he had been seeking.
His companion struggled to be objective. 'Tm afraid," she admit- ted with some hesitation, "that I don't know much about literature; people like us never have time. Perhaps I don't know the right things, either. But ---"-she mentioned a popular name- "means a great deal to me. A writer who can make us feel things so intensely is surely what we mean by a great writer! "
However, since Ulrich felt he had now profited enough from Dr. Strastil's combination of an exceptionally developed capacity for ab- stract thought and a notably retarded understanding of the soul, he stood up cheerfully, treated his colleague to a bit of outrageous flat- tery, and hastily got off, excusing himself on the grounds that he had gone two stops past his destination. When he stood on the street, raising his hat to her once more, Fraulein Strastil remembered that she had recently heard some disparaging remarks about his own work; but she also felt herself blushing in response to his charming parting words to her, which, to her way ofthinking, was not exactly to his credit. But he now knew, without yet being fully conscious of it, why his thoughts were revolving on the subject ofliterature and what it was they were after, from the interrupted "Mortadella" compari- son to his unintentionally leading the good Strastil on to those confi- dences. After all, literature had been no concern of his since he had
written his last poem, at twenty; still, before that, writing secretly had been a fairly regular habit, which he had given up not because he had grown older or had realized he didn't have enough talent, but for
942 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
reasons that now, with his current impressions, he would have liked to define by some kind of word suggesting much effort culminating in a void.
For Ulrich was one of those book-lovers who do not want to go on reading because they feel that the whole business of reading and writing is a nuisance. "If the sensible Strastil wants to be 'made to feel,'" he thought ("Quite right too! If I had objected she'd have brought up music as her trump card! ")-and as one so often does, he was partly thinking in words, partly carrying on a wordless argument in his head-so if this reasonable Dr. Strastil wants to be made to feel, it only amounts to what everyone wants from art, to be moved, overwhelmed, entertained, surprised, to be allowed a sniff of noble ideas; in short, to be made to experience something "alive," have a "living" experience. Ulrich was certainly not against it. Somewhere at the back of his mind he was thinking something that ended in a mingling of a touch of sentiment and ironic resistance: "Feeling is rare enough. To keep feeling at a certain temperature, to keep it from cooling down, probably means preserving the body warmth from which all intellectual development arises. And whenever a per- son is momentarily lifted out of his tangle of rational intentions, which involve him with countless alien objects, whenever he is raised to a state wholly without purpose, such as listening to music, for in- stance, he is almost in the biological condition of a flower on which the rain and the sunshine fall. " He was willing to admit that there is a more eternal eternity in the mind's pauses and quiescence than in its activity; but he had been thinking first "feeling" and then "experi- encing": a contradiction was implied here. For there were experi- ences of the will! There were experiences of action at its peak! Though one could probably assume that by the time each experience had reached its acme of radiant bitterness it was sheer feeling; which would bring up an even greater contradiction: that in its greatest pu- rity the state offeeling is a quiescence, a dying away ofall activity. Or was it not a contradiction, after all? Was there some curious connec- tion by which the most intense activity was motionless at the core? At this point he realized that this sequence of ideas had begun not so much as a thought at the back of his mind as one that was unwel- come, for with a sudden stiffening of resistance against the sentimen- tal tum it had taken, Ulrich repudiated the whole train of thought
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 943
into which he had slipped. He had absolutely no intention of brood- ing over certain states of mind and, when he was thinking about feel- ing, succumbing to feelings.
He suddenly realized that what he was getting at could best be defined, without much ado, as the futile actuality or the eternal momentariness of literature. Does it lead to anything? Literature is either a tremendous detour from experience to experience, ending back where it came from, or an epitome of sensations that leads to nothing at all definite. "A puddle," he now thought, "has often made a stronger impression of depth on someone than the ocean, for the simple reason that we have more occasion to experience puddles than oceans. " It seemed to him that it was the same with feelings, which was the only reason commonplace feelings are regarded as the deepest. Putting the ability to feel above the feeling itself-the char- acteristic of all sensitive people-like the wanting to make others feel and be made to feel that is the common impulse behind all our arrangements concerning the emotional life, amounts to downgrad- ing the importance and nature of the feelings compared with their fleeting presence as a subjective state, and so leads to that shallow- ness, stunted development, and utter irrelevance, for which there is no lack of examples. "Of course," Ulrich added mentally, "this view will repel all those people who feel as cozy in their feelings as a rooster in his feathers and who even preen themselves on the idea that eternity starts all over again with every separate 'personality'! " He had a clear mental image of an immense perversity of a scope involving all mankind, but he could not find a way to express it that would satisfy him, probably because its ramifications were too intricate.
While busy with all this he was watching the passing trolley cars, waiting for the one that would take him back as close as possible to the center of town. He saw people climbing in and out of the cars, and his technically trained eye toyed distractedly with the interplay of welding and casting, rolling and bolting, of engineering and hand finishing, of historical development and the present state of the art, which combined to make up these barracks-on-wheels that these people were using.
"As a last step, a committee from the municipal transportation de- partment comes to the factory and decides what kind ofwood to use
944 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
as veneer, the color of the paint, upholstery, arms on the seats and straps for standees, ashtrays, and the like," he thought idly, "and it is precisely these trivial details, along with the red or green color of the exterior, and how they swing themselves up the steps and inside, that for tens of thousands of people make up what they remember, all they experience, of all the genius that went into it. This is what fonns their character, endows it with speed or comfort; it's what makes them perceive red cars as home and blue ones as foreign, and adds up to that unmistakable odor of countless details that clings to the clothing of the centuries. " So there was no denying-and this sud- denly rounded out Ulrich's main line of thought-that life itself largely peters out into trivial realities or, to put it technically, that the power of its spiritual coefficient is extremely small.
And suddenly, as he felt himself swinging aboard the trolley, he said to himself: "I shall have to make Agathe see that morality is the subordination of every momentary state in our life to one enduring one! " This principle had come to him all at once in the fonn of a definition. But this highly polished concept had been preceded and was followed by others which, though not so fully developed and ar- ticulated, rounded out its meaning. The innocuous business of feel- ing was here set in an austere conceptual framework, it was given a job to do, with a strict hierarchy of values, vaguely foreshortened, in the offing: feelings must either be functional or refer to a still- undefined condition as immense as the open sea. Should it be called an idea or a longing? Ulrich had to leave it at that, for from the mo- ment his sister's name had occurred to him her shadow had dark- ened his thoughts. As always when he thought ofher, he felt that he had shown himself in her company in a different frame of mind than usual. And he knew, too, that he was longing passionately to get back into that frame of mind. But the same memory overcame him with humiliation when he thought of himselfcarrying on in a presumptu- ous, ludicrous, and drunken fashion, no better than a man who sinks to his knees in a frenzy in front ofpeople he won't be able to look in the face the next day. Considering how balanced and controlled the intellectual exchange between brother and sister had been this was a wild exaggeration, and if it was not completely unfounded, it was probably no more than a reaction to feelings that had not yet taken shape. He knew Agathe was bound to arrive in a few days, and he had
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 945
done nothing to stop her. Had she actually done anything wrong? One might suppose that as she cooled off she had gone back on it all. But a lively premonition assured him that Agathe had not abandoned her scheme. He could have tried to find out by asking her. Again he felt duty bound to write and warn her against it. But instead of giving this even a moment's serious consideration, he tried to imagine what could have prompted Agathe to do something so irregular: he saw it as an incredibly vehement gesture meant to show her trust in him and to put herself entirely in his hands. "She has very little sense of reality," he thought, "but a wonderful way of doing what she wants. Rash, I suppose, but just for that reason spontaneous! When she's angry, she sees red with a vengeance. " He smiled indulgently and looked around at the other passengers. Every one of them had evil thoughts, of course, and every one suppressed them, and nobody blamed himself overmuch; but no one else had these thoughts out- side himself, in another person, who would give them the enchanting inaccessibility of an experience in a dream.
Since Ulrich had left his letter unfinished, he realized for the first time that he no longer had a choice but was already in the state he was still hesitating to enter. According to its Iaws-he indulged him- self in the overweening ambiguity of calling them "holy"-Agathe's misstep could not be undone by repentance but only be made good by actions that followed it, which incidentally was doubtless in keep- ing with the original meaning of repentance as a state of purifying fire, not a state of being impaired. To repair the damage done to Agathe's inconvenient husband, or indemnify him, would have meant only to undo the damage done, that is, it would only have been that double and crippling negation of which ordinary good conduct consists, which inwardly cancels out to zero. But what should be done for Hagauer, how a looming burden should be "lifted," was possible only ifone could marshal a great sympathy for him, a pros- pect Ulrich could not face without dismay. Keeping within the framework of this logic that Ulrich was trying to adapt to, all that could ever be made good was something other than the damage done, and he did not doubt for an instant that this would have to be his and his sister's whole life.
"Putting it presumptuously," he thought, "this means: Saul did not make good each single consequence of his previous sins; he turned
946 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
into Paul! " Against this curious logic, however, both feeling and judgment raised the customary objection that it would nevertheless be more decent-and no deterrent to more romantic future possibil- ities-to straighten out accounts with one's brother-in-law first, and only then to plan one's new life. The kind of morality to which he was so attracted was not, after all, suited in the least to dealing with money matters and business and the resulting conflicts. So insoluble and conflicting situations were bound to arise on the borderline be- tween that other life and everyday life, which it would be better not to allow to develop into borderline cases; they should be dispatched at the outset, in the normal, unemotional way of simple decency. But here again Ulrich felt it was impossible to take one's bearings from the normal conditions of goodness if one wanted to press on into the realm of unconditional goodness. The mission laid upon him, to take the first step into uncharted territory, would apparently suffer no abatement.
His last line of defense was his strong aversion to the terms he had been using so lavishly, such as "self," "feeling," "goodness," "alterna- tive goodness," "evil," for being so subjective and at the same time presumptuous, gauzy abstractions, which really corresponded to the moral ponderings of very much younger people. He found himself doing what any number of those who are following his story are likely to do, irritably picking out individual words and phrases, asking him- self such questions as:" 'Production and results of feelings? ' What a machinelike, rationalistic, humanly unrealistic notion! 'Morality as the problem of a permanent state to which all individual states are subordinate'-and that's all? The inhumanity of it! " Looked at through a rational person's eyes, it all seemed extraordinarily per- verse. "The essence of morality virtually hinges on the important feelings remaining constant," Ulrich thought, "and all the individual has to do is act in accord with them! "
But just at this point the rolling locale that enclosed him and that had been created with T -square and compass came to a halt, at a spot where his eye, peering out from the body of modem transportation and still an involuntary part of it, lit on a stone column that had been standing beside this roadway since the period of the Baroque, so that the engineered comfort of this calculated artifact, unconsciously taken for granted, suddenly clashed with the passion erupting from
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 94 7
the statue's antiquated pose, which suggested something not unlike a petrified bellyache. The effect of this optical collision was to power- fully confinn the ideas from which Ulrich had just been trying to es- cape. Could anything have illustrated life's confusion more clearly than this chance spectacle? Without taking sides with either the Now or the Then in matters of taste, as one usually does when faced with such a juxtaposition, he felt his mind abandoned by both sides with- out an instant's hesitation, and saw in it only the great demonstration of a problem that is at bottom a moral problem. He could not doubt that the transience ofwhat is regarded as style, culture, the will ofthe time, or the spirit of an era, for which it is admired, was a moral weakness. For in the great scale of the ages this instability means ex- actly what it would mean on the smaller scale ofpersonal life: to have developed one's potential one-sidedly, to have dissipated it in extrav- agant exaggerations, never taking the measure of one's own will, never achieving a complete form, and in disjointed passions doing now this, now that. Even the so-called succession or progress of the ages seemed to him to be only another term for the fact that none of these experiments ever reach the point where they would all meet and move on together toward a comprehensive understanding that would at last offer a basis for a coherent development, a lasting en- joyment, and that seriousness of great beauty of which nowadays hardly more than a shadow occasionally drifts across our life.
Ulrich of course saw the preposterous arrogance of assuming that everything had in effect come to nothing. And yet it was nothing. Immeasurable as existence; confusion as meaning. At least, judging by the results, it was no more than the stuff of which the soul of the present is made, which is not much. While Ulrich was thinking this he was nevertheless savoring the "not much," as if it were the last meal at the table of life his outlook would permit him to have. He had left the streetcar and taken a route that would bring him quickly to the city's center. He felt as if he were coming out of a cellar. The streets were screeching with gaiety and filled with unseasonable warmth like a summer day. The sweet poisonous taste of talking to oneself had left his mouth: everything was expansive and out in the sun. Ulrich stopped at almost every shop window. Those tiny bottles in so many colors, stoppered scents, countless variants of nail scis- sors-what quantities of genius there were even in a hairdresser's
948 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
window! A glove shop: what connections, what inventions, before a goat's skin is drawn up on a lady's hand and the animal's pelt has become more refined than her own! He was astonished at the luxu- ries one took for granted, the countless cozy trappings of the good life, as though he were seeing them for the first time. Trap-pings! What a charming word, he felt. And what a boon, this tremendous contract to get along together! Here there was no reminder of life's earth crust, of the unpaved roads of passion, of-he truly felt this- the uncivilized nature of the soul! One's attention, a bright and nar- row beam, glided over a flower garden of fruits, gemstones, fabrics, forms and allurements whose gently persuasive eyes were opened in all the colors of the rainbow. Since at that time a white skin was prized and guarded from the sun, a few colorful parasols were al- ready floating above the crowd, laying silky shadows on women's pale faces. Ulrich's glance was even enchanted by the pale-golden beer seen in passing through the plate-glass windows of a restaurant, on tablecloths so white that they formed blue patches at the edges of shadows. Then the Archbishop's carriage drove by, a gently rocking, heavy carriage, whose dark interior showed red and purple. It had to be the Archbishop's carriage, for this horse-drawn vehicle that Ul- rich followed with his eyes had a wholly ecdesiastical air, and two policemen sprang to attention and saluted this follower of Christ without thinking of their predecessors who had run a lance into his predecessor's side.
He gave himself up with such zest to these impressions, which he had ju~t been calling "life's futile actuality," that little by little, as he sated himself with the world, his earlier revulsion against it began to reassert itself. Ulrich now knew exactly where his speculations fell short. "What's the point, in the face of all this vainglory, of looking for some result beyond, behind, beneath it all? Would that be a phi- losophy? An all-embracing conviction, a law? Or the finger of God? Or, instead of that, the assumption that morality has up to now lacked an 'inductive stance,' that it is much harder to be good than we had believed, and that it will require an endless cooperative ef- fort, like every other science? I think there is no morality, because it cannot be deduced from anything constant; all there are are rules for uselessly maintaining transitory conditions. I also assume that there can be no profound happiness without a profound morality; yet my
Into the Millennium (The. Criminals) · 949
thinking about it strikes me as an unnatural, bloodless state, and it is absolutely not what I want! " Indeed, he might well have asked him- self much more simply, "What is this I have taken upon myself? '' which is what he now did.