the soul as though he could see it
standing
there.
Musil - Man Without Qualities - v1
So merely by tracking down the clues in language itself-a blurred, but revealing trail!
-one can see how a crudely changed meaning has· everywhere usurped the function of far subtler messages now quite lost to us, that ever-per- ceptible but never quite tangible nexus ofthings.
Ulrich gave up pur- suing this idea Ol!
t loud, but Hans could not be blamed for thinking that all he had to do was tug at a certain thread to unravel the whole fabric; the world had merely lost its instinct for the right thread to pull.
He had been repeatedly interrupting Ulrich and finishing his sentences for him.
"If you choose to look at all this with a scientific eye, you'll see nothing more in it than any bank teller might. All empirical explana- tions are deceptive, they never take us beyond the level of crude sen- sory data. Your need to know would like to reduce the world ·to nothing more than . the so-called forces of nature twiddling their thumbs. ," These were Hans's objections, his interpolations. He alter- nated between rudeness and passion. He felt that he had done a poor
job of stating his case, and blamed his failure on the presence of this interloper between him and Gerda, for had he been alone with Gerda, eye-to-eye with her, the same words would have risen sky- ward like a shimmering fountain, like spiraling falcons. He knew it, he felt that this was one of his days. He was also surprised and an- noyed to hear Ulrich talking so fluently and so intently in his place.
Actually, Ulrich wa5 not speaking as a scientist at all but was saying far more than he would have been prepared to defend, although he was not saying anything he did not believe. He was carried away by a suppressed fury. To run on like this he had to be in a curiously ele- vated, a rather inflamed frame of mind, and Ulrich's mood was somewhere between this state and the one induced by seeing Hans, with his greasy, bristling hair, his muddy skin, his repellent emphatic gestures, and his foaming torrent of speech in which some filmy frag- ment of his true self hung trapped, like the skin from a flayed heart. But strictly speaking, Ulrich had been suspended all his life between two such aspects ofthis subject, always readyto expound it as he was doing, half believing what he was saying but never going beyond such verbal games, because he did not really take them for real, and so his discomfiture was keeping step with his pleasure in this conversation.
Gerda ignored the mocking asides that he injected into his talk from time to time as a kind of self-parody, overwhelmed as she was by her sense of his opening himself up at last. She looked at him with a touch of anxiety. He's much softer than he'll ever admit, she thought, with a feeling that broke down her own defenses, as if a baby were groping at her breast. Ulrich caught her eye. He knew almost everything that was going on between her and Hans, because "in her worry she needed to relieve her heart by at least throwing out hints ofher problems, and that made it easy enough for Ulrich to fill in the rest. She and Hans regarded the act ofphysical possession, the normal preoccupation ofyoung lovers, as a despicable surrender to capitalist urges; they thought they despised physical passion alto- gether, but they also despised self-control as a middle-class virtue, so what it came to was their always clinging to each other in a nonphysi- cal or semiphysical way. They tried to "accept" each other, as they called it, and felt that trembling, tender merging oftwo people lost in each other's eyes, slipping into the invisible currents that ripple through each other's heads and hearts, and feeling, at the apparent
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moment of mutual understanding, that each holds the other inside himself and is at one with the o~er. At less exalted times they were satisfied with ordinary mutual admiration, seeing in great paintings or dramatic scenes the parallels to their own condition and marvel- ing, when they kissed, at the thought that-as the saying goes-mil- lennia were gazing down upon them. They did kiss, even though they regarded the crude physical sensations of love, that spasm of the bodily self, as no better than a stomach cramp, but their limbs did not pay too much attention to their ideals and pressed hard against each other on their own. Afterward they both felt bewildered. Their budding philosophy was not proof against their heady sense of no- body watching, the dim lights, the furiously mounting attraction of two young bodies nestling close together, and Gerda especially, who as the girl was the more mature of the two, felt the craving to GOD- summate their embrace with the innocent intensity a tree might feel on being prevented from budding in the springtime. This arrested lovemaking, as bland as the kisses oflittle children and as intermina- ble as the aimless fondlings of the old, always left them feeling shat- tered. Hans found it easier to take because he could always regard it afterward as a successful test of his convictions.
"It isn't for us to have and to hold," he lectured her. 'We are nomads who must keep moving onward, step after step. " And when he noticed that Gerda's whole body was quivering with frustrated de- sire, he made no bones about calling it a weakness, if not actually a residue ofher non-Germanic genes, and felt like Adam walking with his God, his manly heart having once more resisted his erstwhile rib's tempting of his faith. At such moments Gerda despised him. Which was probably why she had told Ulrich so much about it, at least in the beginning. She suspected that a full-grown man would do both more and less than Hans, who would bury his tear-stained face in her lap like a child after he had insulted her. Since she was just as proud of her experiences as she was bored with them, she let Ulrich in on all this in the anxious hope that he would find something to say that would put an end to the agoni$g beauty ofit.
Ulrich, however, seldom spoke to her as she wished he might; in- stead, he cooled her offwith his sardonic tone, because even though it made Gerda more reserved, he knew too well that she longed to submit to him, and that neither Hans nor anyone else had the power
over her mind he could have if he chose. He justified himself with the thought that any other real man in his place would have the same effect on Gerda, that of a blessed relief after that woolly-minded dirty little tease Hans. But even as he was thinking it over, suddenly seeing it all in perspective, Hans had collected himself and started a fresh attack.
"All in all," he said, "you've made the biggest possible mistake by trying to express as a concept something that occasionally elevates an idea somewhat above the level of the merely conceptual. But I sup- pose that's what makes the difference between one of you intellec- tual people and the likes of us. First," he added proudly, "one must learn to ll. ve it before one can, perhaps, learn to think it. " When Ul- rich ~miled at this, he flashed out like a bolt of lightning: "Jesus was a seer at the age of twelve, without first getting his doctorate. "
This provoked Ulrich into breaking the silence he owed to Gerda by giving Hans a piece of advice that betrayed his knowledge of facts he could have learned only from her. "I don't know why," he said, "if you want to live it, you don't go all the way. I would take Gerda in my arms, forget all the qualms of my rational mind, and keep her locked in my arms until our bodies either crumbled to ashes or became transformed into the fullness of their own being in a way that is beyond our power of comprehension! "
Hans, feeling a stab ofjealousy, looked not at him but at Gerda, who turned pale with embarrassment. Ulrich's words about locking' her in his arms had touched her like a secret promise. At the moment she didn't care at all how "the other life" was to be imagined, and she felt sure that Ulrich would do everything just as it should be done, if he really wanted to. Hans, incensed at Gerda's betrayal, argued against Ulrich's proposal, which could not be carried out success- fully, he said, because the time was not ripe. The first souls to take flight would have to take off from a mountain, just like the first air- planes, and not from the lowlands of a period like the present. Per- haps there must first come a man who would release mankind from its bondage before it could achieve the heights. It was not unthink- able that he might be the man himself, but that was his own affair, and apart from this, the present low level of spiritual development was incapable ofproducing such a man.
Now Ulrich remarked on the proliferation of redeemers these
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days-indeed, every self-respecting chairman of a social club seemed to be eligible. If Christ were to come again tomorrow, he would certainly fare worse than the first time. The better newspapers and book clubs would fmd him vulgar, and the great international press would hardly be likely to welcome him to its columns.
With this they were back where they had started, the discussion had come full circle, and Gerda sank back into herself.
Yet something had changed; without giving any outward sign ofit, Ulrich had tripped himself up a little. His thoughts had parted com- pany with his words. He looked at Gerda. Her body was angular, her skin looked dull and tired. That faint breath ofold-maidishness that hung over her had suddenly become apparent to him, although it had probably always been the major factor holding him back fro111 ever coming to the point with this girl who was in love with him. Of course, Hans also had something to do with it, what with the semi- physical nature of his communal utopia, which had an old-maidish quality ofits own. Ulrich did not feel attracted to Gerda, but even so he was inclined to continue his dialogue with her. This reminded him that he had invited her to come to see him. She gave no sign ofeither remembering this invitation or of having forgotten it, and he got no opportunity to ask her about it privately. It left him with an uneasy sense ofregret as-well as ofrelief, such as one feels when one skirts a danger recognized too late.
114
THINGS ARE COMING TO A BOIL. ARNHEIM IS GRACIOUS TO GENERAL STUMM. DIOTIMA PREPARES TO MOVE OFF INTO INFINITY. ULRICH DAYDREAMS ABOUT LIVING ONE'S LIFE AS ONE READS A BOOK
His Grace had urged Diotima to find out about the famous Makart pageant, which had brought all Austria together in the 1870s in a burst of national fervor; he still had vivid memories of the richly draped carriages, the heavily caparisoned horses, the trumpeters, and the pride people took in their medieval costumes, which lifted them out of their humdrum daily lives. It was this that had brought Diotima, Amheim, and Ulrich to go through the materials on the pe- riod at the Imperial Library, from which they were now emerging together. As Diotima, her lip curling with disdain, had predicted to His Grace, what they had come up with was quite impossible; such frippery could no longer make people forget the monotony of their existence. They were still on the library stairs when the beauty in- formed her companions that she felt like making the most of the sunny day and the year 1914-which in the few weeks ofits existence had already left the moldering past so far behind-by walking home. But they had no sooner stepped out into the light of day when they bumped into the General, on his way in. Proud to be discovered on· such a mission of high learning, he instantly offered to tum back and enlarge Diotima's entourage by joining it. This made Diotima realize after only a few steps that she was tired and wanted a cab. With no such vehicle in sight, they all stopped in front of the library, which faced a trough-shaped rectangular square, three sides ofwhich were formed by splendid ancient fa~ades, while on the fourth the asphalt street in front of a long, low palace shimmered like an ice rink, with cars and carnages rushing past, none ofwhich responded to the four people waving and signaling to them like survivors of a shipwreck,
616 • THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
until they tired of it and forgot about giving anything but the occa- sional halfhearted signal in the direction of the traffic.
Arnheim had a big book under his arm. He was pleased with this gesture, both condescending and respectful toward the life of the mind. He greeted the General eagerly: "How nice to see you coming to the library too; men of position nowadays so seldom seek out the life of the mind in its own house. ".
General Stumm replied that he was quite at home in this library.
Arnheim was impressed. "Almost all we have nowadays is writers, and hardly anyone who reads books an:ymore," he went on. "Do you realize, Ge~eral, how many books are printed annually? I think it's over a hundred books a day published ill Germany alone. Over a thousand periodicals are founded every year. The whole world is writing! Everyone helps himself to ideas as though they were his own, all the time. Nobody feels any respansibility toward the situa- tion as a whole. Ever since the Church lost its influence, there is no central authority to stem our general chaos. There is no educational model, no educational principle. In these circumstances it is only natural that feeling and morality should drift without an anchor, and the most stable person begins to waver. "
The General felt his mouth turning dry. It wasn't as though Dr. Arnheim was actually addressing him in person; he was a man stand- ing in the square and thinking out loud. The General thought of how many people talk to themselves in the street, on their way to some- where; civilians, of course, because a soldier who did such a thing would be locked up, and an officer would be sent to the psychiatric clinic. Stumm felt embarrassed at the thought of standing there phi- losophizing in public, as it were, smack-dab in the middle of the Im- perial Residential capital. Apart from the two men, there seemed to be only one other, a mute figure ofbronze standing on a stone pedes- tal in the sunny square. The General had only just noticed this monu- ment and did not remember whom it represented, so that he had to apologize for his ignorance when Arnheim asked him.
"And to think that he was put here to. be venerated," the great man remarked. "But that's how it is. Every moment of our lives we move among institutions, problems, and challenges of which we have barely caught the tail end, so that the present is constantly reaching into the past. We keep crashing through the floor, if I may put it so,
into the cellars of time, even while we imagine ourselves to be occu- pying the top floor of the present. "
Amheim smiled. " He was making conversation. His moving lips flickered in the sunshine, and the lights in his eyes kept changing like those on a signaling steamer. Stumm was growing uneasy; he found it hard to keep acknowledging so many and such unusual turns in 'the conversation while being served up to the world, in full uniform, on this platter of a square. Grass was growing in the cracks between the cobblestones; it was last year's grass but looked implausibly fresh, like a corpse left lying in the snow; it was, in fact, most peculiar and disturbing that grass should be growing here between the stones, when only a few steps farther on the asphalt was being polished, in keeping with the times, by the passing cars. The General began to be troubled by a nervous fear that if he had to go on listening much longer he might suddenly go down on his knees and eat grass in front of the whole world, without knowing why. He looked around for Ul- rich and Diotima for protection.
These two had taken shelter where a thin veil of shade had spun itself around the comer of the wall, and seemed to be involved in an argument, though their voices were too low to be understood.
''You make it sound hopeless," Diotima was saying.
'What do you mean? " Ulrich asked, without real interest.
"There is still such a thing as individuality. " .
Ulrich tried to catch her eye sideways. "Good heavens, we've been
all over this already. "
"You have no heart, or you wouldn't always talk like this," she said
softly. The sun-heated air was rising from the stone pavement up be- tween her legs, which were encased in long skirts like those of a robed statue, inaccessible and to all intents nonexistent. She showed no awareness ofit. It was a caress that had nothing to do with anyone, any man. Her eyes turned pale, but that Inight have been merely the effect of her reserve in a situation where she was exposed to the glances of the passersby. Turning to Ulrich, she said with an effort:
'When a woman has to choose between duty and passion, what can she rely on if not her character? "
"You don't have to choose," Ulrich replied.
· "You go too far; I wasn't speaking of myself," his cousin whispered.
As he did not reply, they both stared across the square fot a while
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in a hostile silence. Then Diotima asked: "Do you think that what we call our soul might emerge from the shadows where it usually keeps itself? "
Ulrich gave her a puzzled look.
"In the case of unusual, specially gifted persons," she added. '~Am I to understand that you're interested in establishing a rap-
port with the Beyond? " Ulrich asked incredulously. "Has Amheim introduced you to a medium? "
Diotima was disappointed in him. "I would never have thought you capable of such a misunderstanding," she said reproachfully. "When I speak of emerging from the shadows, I mean from the un- reality, from that flickering concealment in which we sometimes sense the presence of the unusual. It is spread out like a net that torments us because it will neither hold us nor let us go. Don't you think that there have been times when it was otherWise? When the inner life was a stronger presence, when there were individuals who walked in the light or, as people used to say, walked in holiness, and miracles could happen in reality because they are an ever-present form of another reality, and nothing else! "
Diotima surprised herself by the firmness with whi~h it seemed possible to say this sort of thing, without any special elation, as though she were walking on solid ground. Ulrich felt secretly in- furiated, but actually he was deeply shocked. lias it come to this, he thought, that this giant hen can talk the way I do? Again he saw Di- otima's soul in the shape of a colossal chicken pecking at his own soul, in the shape of a little worm. He was seized by the primal child- hood terror of the giantess, mixed with another strange sensation; there was a certain gratification in be4lg spiritually coJtsumed, as it were, in mindless accord with a kinswoman. Their unanimity was a silly coincidence, of course; he did not believe that there was any magic in being related by blood, nor could he possibly·have taken his cousin seriously even if he were dead drunk. But he had been chang- ing lately, mellowing perhaps; his characteristic inner readiness to move to the ·attack was giving way to a need for tenderness, dreams, kinship, whatever, which also mi}Ilifested itself in sudden outbreaks of the ill will that was its opposite.
Which prompte~him to make fun ofhis cousin now: "Ifthat's how
you feel," he said, "then you ought to go all the way and become Arnheim's lover, openly or in secret, as soon as possible. "
"You shouldn't say such things; I've given you no right! " Diotima rebuked him.
"But I must speak of it. Until now I wasn't sure what was going on between you and Arnheim. But now I understand, and you look to me like a person who is seriously thinking of flying to the moon. I would never have thought you capable of such madness. "
''I've told you that I'm capable of going to extremes. " Her upward gaze was meant to be audacious, but the sun made her screw up her eyes, so that she seemed to be twinkling at him.
"These are the ravings of starved love," Ulrich said, "which pass off when hunger is appeased:" He wondered what Arnheiin's plans might be with regard to her. Did he regret his proposal, and was he covering his retreat by putting on some sort of act? But then he could simply leave and not come back; a man who had been in business all his life would surely have the necessary callousness for that? Here- membered noticing certain signs in Arnheim that indicated passion in an older man; his face was sometimes a grayish yellow, slack and tired, like a room with the bed still unmade at noon. The most likely explanation was the havoc caused by two almost equally strong pas- sions fighting each other to a standstill. But since he was incapable of imagining the passion for power in the degree to which it ruled Am- heim, he could not conceive ofthe measures love had to take in order to fight it.
"You're an odd sort of man," Diotima said. "Always different from what one would expect. Wasn't it you who spoke to me of seraphic love? "
"You regard that as a possibility? " Ulrich asked absentmindedly. "Not as you described it, of course. "
"So Arnheim loves you seraphically? " Ulrich began to laugh softly. "I wish you wouldn't laugh. " Diotima almost hissed at him.
"You don't understand," he apologize& "It's only the excitement. You and Arnheim are sensitive people. You love poetry. I'm sure that you are sometimes touched by a breath . . . a breath of something: the question is just what that is. And now you want to get to the bot- tom of it, with all the thoroughness of your idealism. "
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"Aren't you always saying that one must be precise and thorough? " Diotima countered. .
It was too much. ''You're mad! " he said. "Forgive my saying so, but you are mad. And you of all people mustn't be. "
Meanwhile Arnheim had been telling the General that for the last two generations the world had been undergoing the most profound revolution of all: the end of the soul was in sight.
It gave the Genera! a stab. What the devil, here was yet another problem to think about. To be honest, he ·had thought until this mo- ment, despite Diotima, that there was no such thing as the soul. At military school and in the regiment, nobody gave a hang about this kind of preacher's talk. But here was this manufacturer of guns and tanks, tallCing about.
the soul as though he could see it standing there. The General's eyes began to itch and to roll around gloomily, gog- gling at the translucent air around them.
But Arnheim was not waiting to be asked for particulars; words flowed from his lips, from that pale pink slit between his clipped mustache and his little pointed beard. As he phrased it, the soul had started to shrivel and age ever since the Church began to crumble, around the beginning ofthe bourgeois era. Since then it had lost God and all solid values and ideals until the present, when men had actu- ally reached the point of living without morals, without principles, without real experiences, in fact.
The General could not quite see why one could not have experi- ences ifone had no morals. Whereupon Arnheim opened the big vol- ume bound in pigskin that he was holding, revealing an expensive facsimile of a manuscript so valuable that even a mortal of Amheim's extraordinary standing could not be permitted to take the original out of the building. The General saw the depiction of an angel with wings spread horizontally across two pages, against ·a background of dark earth, golden sky, and marvelous colors layered like clouds; he was looking at a reproduction of one of the most moving and splen- did of early medieval paintings, but since he did not know this, while he did know all about bird-hunting and depictions of it, he could only conclude that a creature with wings and a long neck that was neither human nor a snipe must be an aberration to which his companion wished to draw his attention.
Amheim was. pointing his finger at it and saying pensively: "Here
you see what that great lady who is creating the Austrian Campaign is trying to bring back into the world. . . . "
"I see, I see," Stumm said, realizing that he had failed to appreci- ate this thing for what it was and that he had better watch his step.
"The great expressiveness, and with such utter simplicity," Am- heim went on, "bears witness to what our age has lost forever. What is our science compared with this? Patchwork. Our art? Extremes, without~ mediating substance to hold them together. We lack the magic key to unity, and this, you see, is why I am so deeply moved by this Austrian plan to set the world an example of unification, of a shared idea, even though I do not quite believe it can be done. I am a German. Everything in the world today is loud and crude, and Ger- many is the loudest. In every country the people are straining them- selves morning, noon, and night, whether at work or at play, but in Germany they start earlier and stop later than anywhere else. In all the world the spirit of cold calculation and brute force has lost touch with the soul, but we in Germany have the most businessmen and the strongest army in the world. " He looked around the square with delight. "Here in Austria, things have not yet gone so far. The past is still with you, and the people have kept something of their original intuitiveness. Ifthe German spirit can still be saved from rationalism, this is the only place left. from which a start can be made. But I am afraid," he added with a sigh, "we can hardly succeed. A great idea nowadays encounters too much resistance; great ideas just barely help to prevent each other from being misused. We are living in a state of moral truce, as it were, armed to the teeth with ideas. "
He smiled at his own joke. Then something more occurred to him: "You know, the difference between Germany and Austria we have just touched on always reminds me of billiards. Even at billiards ev- erything goes wrong if you try to do it all by calculation instead of with feeling. "
The General had guessed that he was supposed to feel flattered by the reference to a moral armed truce, and he wanted to show that he had been paying attention. He did know something about billiards, so he said, "I play snooker myself, and skittles too, but I never heard that there's a difference between the Austrian and the German styles ofplay. " u
Amheim shut his eyes and gave it some thought: "I myself never
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play billiards," he said after a moment, "but I know that you can play the ball high or low, from the right or from the left; that you can strike the second ball head-on or merely graze it; that you can hit it hard or lightly, bluffa little-or a lot-and there must be many more such options. Now, if you imagine each of these elements with all their inherent gradations, you have an almost infinite number ofpos- sible combinations. To state them theoretically, I should have to take into account, besides the laws of mathematics and statics, the me- chanics ofsolids, plus the laws ofelasticity; I would have to know the coefficients of the materials, the influence of the temperature, the most precise means of measuring the coordination and gradation of my motor impulses, of estimating distances exactly, like a nonius, how to combine the various factors with better than the speed and accuracy of a slide rule, to say nothing of allowing for margins of error, fields of dispersal, and the fact that the aim, which is the cor- rect coincidence of the two balls, is in itself not clearly definable but only a collection of barely adequate data round an average value. "
Arnheim spoke slowly, and in·~way that compelled attention, as though pouring a liquid drop by drop from a vial to a glass; he did not spare his interlocutor a single detail.
"And so you see," he continued, "that I should need to have all the qualities, and do all the things, I cannot possibly ·have and do. You must be enough of a mathematician to see that. it would take a life- time to plan a single carom shOt in that fashion; it boggles the mind! And yet I step up to the table with a cigarette between my lips, a tune in my ear, and my hat on, as it were, and hardly bothering to look over the board, I take my cue to the ball and the problem is solved! General, this is the sort of thing that happens all the time in real life. You are not only an Austrian, you are a military man, so you're bound to understand me: politics, honor, war, art, all the crucial processes of life, take place beyond the scope of the conscious rational mind. Man's greatness is rooted in the irrational. Even we businessmen don't really operate by calculation-not the leading men, that is. The little fellows may have to count their pennies; we learn to regard our really successful moves as a mystery that defies analysis. A man who doesn't care deeply about feeling, morality, religion, music, 'poetry, form, discipline, chivalry, generosity, cru\dor, tolerance-believe me, such a man will never make a businessman of real stature. This is why
I have always admired the military, especially the Austrian military, based as it is on age-old traditions, and I am truly delighted that Frau Tuzzi can count on your support. It is a relief to me to know it. Your influence, with that of our younger friend, is extremely important. All great things rest on the same principles; great obligations are a blessing, General. "
To his own surprise he suddenly found himself spontaneously shaking Stumm's hand, then he ended by saying: "Hardly anyone realizes that true greatness has no rational basis; I mean to say, every- thing strong is simple. "
Stumm von Bordwehr held his breath; he was not sure he under- stood a word of it all, and wished he could rush back into the library and spend hours reading up on all these points that the great man had paid him the compliment of making to him. At last, out of this March gale whirling in his mind, there came a piercing ray of lucid- ity. What the hell, he thought, this fellow wants something from me! He looked up. Arnheim was still holding the book in both hands but was now turning his attention seriously to hailing a cab. His face was slightly flushed with animation, like that of a man who has just been trading ideas with another. The General was silent, like a man awed by a portentous thought. If Arnheim wanted something from him, then General Stumm was free to want something from Amheim too, to the advantage of His Majesty's service. This perception opened such vistas of possibility that Stumm put off thinking about just what it all really meant. But if the angel in the book had suddenly lifted up a wing to give clever General S~mm a glimpse of what was hidden underneath, the General could not have felt more bewildered and overjoyed.
Over in Diotima's and Ulrich's comer, the following question had meanwhile been posed: Should a woman in Diotima's difficult posi- tion make a gesture ofrenunciation, or let herselfbe swept into adul- tery, or take a third, mixed course, such as belonging physically to one man and spiritually to another, or perhaps physically to neither? For this third solution there was as yet no libretto, as it were, only some great harmonic chords. Diotima still wanted it understood that she was absolutely not speaking of herself but speaking only of "a woman"-every time Ulrich tried to fuse the two together he got a warning glance from her.
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And so he also chose a devious course. ''Have you ever seen a dog? " he asked. "You only think you have. What you see is only something you feel more or less justified in regarding as a dog. It isn't a dog in every respec;t, and always has some personal quality no other. dog has. So how can we ever hope, in this life, to do 'the right thing'? A1). we can do is something that's never the right thing and is always both more· and less than that. Has a tile ever fallen off the roof in precise accord with the law of falling bodies? Never. Even in the lab, things never behave just as they should. 11ley diverge from the ideal course in all possible directions, while we keep up a fiction that this is to be blamed on our faulty execution of the experiment, and that somewhere midway a perfe. Ct result is obtainable.
"Or else you find certain stones, and because of the properties they have in common they are all regarded as diamonds. But suppose one ofthem comes from Africa. and another from Asia, one is dug out of the ground by a black man and the other by an Oriental. What if these differences in circumstances were to matter so much that they cancel out what the objects have in common? In th~ equation 'dia- mond plus circumstances is still diamond,' the use value of the dia- mond is so great that it makes the value of the circumstances negligible. But it's. possible to imagine spiritual circumstances in which the situation is reversed. .
"Everything partakes of the universal and also has something spe- cial all its own. Everything is both true to type and refuses to con- form to type and is in a category all its own, simultan~ously. The personal quality of any given creature is precisely that which doesn't coincide with anything else. . I once said to you that the more truth we discover, the less of the personal is left in the world, because of the longtime war again. st individuality that individuality is losing. By the time everything has been rationalized, there's no telling how much of us will be left. Nothing at all, possibly, but then, when the false sig- nificance we attach to personality has gone, we may enter upon a new kind of sigriificance as if embarking upon a splendid adventure.
"So how do you decide? Should 'a woman' go by the law? Then she may as well go by the laws of society. Conventional morality is a per- fectly valid average and collective value, to b~ Uterally adhered to, without deviations, wherever it is acknowledged. But no individual case can be decided on moral grounds alone; morality is irrelevant to
it in the precise degree that it shares in the inexhaustible nature of the universe. "
"That was quite a speech," Diotima said. She took a certain satis- faction in the loftiness of discourse being'imposed upon her, but in- tended to gain the upper hand by not talking in equally wild
. generalities. "But what is a woman to do, given the circumstances, in real life? "
"Let things happen," Ulrich answered.
"What things? "
"Whatever happens. Her husband, her lover, her renunciation,
her mixed feelings. "
"Do you have any idea what you are saying? " Diotima asked, feel-
ing painfully reminded of how her high resolve possibly to give up Amheim had its wings clipped every night by the mere fact that she slept in Tuzzi. 's bed. Ulrich must have sensed-some of this, because he asked her bluntly: 'Would you try your luck with me? "
'With you? " Diotima drawled, then decided to save face by taking a humorous tack. "Ifthis is an offer,justwhat is it you have iil mind? " "I'll tell you," Ulrich replied seriously. "You read a great deal,
don't you? "
"Of course. "
'What is it you do, then? I'll tell you: You leave out whatever
doesn't suit you. As the author himself has done before you. Just as you leave things out of your dreams or fantasies. By leaving things out, we bring beauty and excitement into the world. We evidently handle our reality by effecting some sort of compromise with it, an in-between state where the emotions prevent each other from reach- ing their fullest intensity, graying the colors somewhat. Children who haven't yet reached that point of control are both happier and un- happier than adults who have. And yes, stupid people also leave things out, which is why ignorance is bliss. So I propose, to begin with, that we try to love each other as ifwe were characters in a novel who have met in the pages ofa book. Let's in any case leave offall the fatty tissue that plumps up reality. "
Diotima felt called upon to argue the case; she wanted to direct the conversation away from this too~personal vein, and she also wanted to show that she understood something of the problems that had been touched upon.
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"All well and good," she said, "but art is supposed to afford us a vacation from reality, so that we can return to it with our energies restored. "
"And I am opinionated enough to say that there should be no time off,'' her cousin retorted. "What sort of a life is it that we have to drill holes in it called holidays; would we punch holes in a painting be- cause it makes too strenuous demands on our sense of beauty? Should we look forward to taking time off from eternal bliss in the next world? Even the thought of time taken off my life by having to sleep sometimes seems unacceptable to me. "
"Ah, there it is. " Diotima seized her opportunity. "You see how unnatural it all is, what you're saying. What human being doesn't need to rest and take a break? It's a perfect illustration of the differ- ence between you and Amheim. Yours is a mind that will not ac- knowledge the shadow on things, the dark side, while his has developed out of the fullness of human experience, with sunshine and shadow intenningled. "
"Of course I exaggerate,'' Ulrich admitted coolly. "You will see it even more clearly as we go into more detail. Think of the great writ- ers, for instance. We can model our lives on them, but we can't squeeze life out of them, like wine out of grapes. They have given so solid a fonn to what once moved them that it confronts us like pressed metal even between the lines. But what have they actually said? . Nobody knows. They themselves never knew all of it at a time. They're like a field over which bees fly back and forth; they them- selves are flying back and forth, as it were. Their thoughts and feel- ings show all the gradations between truth and even error, as can be demonstrated if necessary, and changeable natures that come close to us at will and then elude us when we try to observe them closely.
"There is no detaching an idea in a book from its context on the page. It catches our eye like the face of a person looming up in a crowd as it is being swept past us. I suppose I'm exaggerating a little again, but tell me, what happens in our lives that is any different from this? Leaving the precise, measurable, and definable sensory data out of account, all the other concepts on which we base our lives are no more than congealed metaphors. Take as simple a concept as manliness, and think how it keeps wavering among its many possible variants. It's like a breath that changes shape at every exhalation,
with nothing to hold on to, no finn impression, no logic. So when we simply leave out in art whatever doesn't suit us and our conceptions, we're merely going back to the original condition of life itself. "
"My dear friend," Diotima said, "you don't seem to be talking about anything in particular. " Ulrich had paused for a moment, and her words fell into that pause.
"Yes, I suppose so. I hope I haven't been talking too loudly. "
"You've been talking fast, in a low voice, and at length," she said, with a touch of sarcasm. 'Without saying a word of what you meant to say. Do you realize what you've just explained to me all over again? That reality should be abolished! It's true that when I heard you make this point the first time, on one of our trips into the country, I
·think, it made a lasting impression-I don't know why. But how this is to be done is something you haven't yet revealed, I'm sorry to say. " "Clearly, I'd have to go on talking for at least as long again to do so. But do you really expect it to be that simple? IfI'm not mistaken, you spoke of wanting to fly away with Arnheim into some kind of tran- scendent state. Something you regard as another kind of reality. What I have been saying, on the other hand, is that we must try to
recover unreality. Reality no longer makes sense. "
"Oh, Arnheim would hardly agree with you there," Diotima said. "Of course not. That's just the difference between him and me.
He is trying to make the fact that he eats, sleeps, is the great Arn- heim, and doesn't know whether to marry you or not, mean some- thing, and to this end he has been colle9ting all the treasures of the mind throughout his life. " Ulrich suddenly paused, and the silence lengthened.
After a:while he asked, in a different tone: "Can you explain to me why I should be having this conversation with you, of all people? Suddenly I'm reminded of my childhood. You won't believe this, but I was a good child, mild as the air on a warm moonlit night. I could fall madly in love with a dog, a pocketknife . . . " But then he left this statement unfinished too.
Diotima looked at him, wondering what he could mean. She again remembered how he had once hotly advocated "precision of feel- ing," while just now he was taking the opposite view. He had accused Arnheim of insufficiently clean-cut intentions, while now he favored "letting things happen. " And she was troubled by the fact that Ulrich
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was advocating an intense emotional life without any "time off," compared with Amheim's ambiguous suggestion never to let oneself in for single-minded hatred or total love/ These thoughts left her uneasy.
"Do you really believe that there is such a thing as boundless feel- ing? " Ulrich asked her.
"Oh yes, there is such a thing as boundless emotion," Diotima said, the ground finn under her feet again.
"You see, I don't quite believe that," Ulrich said absently. "Strange how often we talk about it, but we certainly do our best to avoid it throughout our lives, as if we were ~raid of drowning in it. "
He noticed that Diotima was not listening.
"If you choose to look at all this with a scientific eye, you'll see nothing more in it than any bank teller might. All empirical explana- tions are deceptive, they never take us beyond the level of crude sen- sory data. Your need to know would like to reduce the world ·to nothing more than . the so-called forces of nature twiddling their thumbs. ," These were Hans's objections, his interpolations. He alter- nated between rudeness and passion. He felt that he had done a poor
job of stating his case, and blamed his failure on the presence of this interloper between him and Gerda, for had he been alone with Gerda, eye-to-eye with her, the same words would have risen sky- ward like a shimmering fountain, like spiraling falcons. He knew it, he felt that this was one of his days. He was also surprised and an- noyed to hear Ulrich talking so fluently and so intently in his place.
Actually, Ulrich wa5 not speaking as a scientist at all but was saying far more than he would have been prepared to defend, although he was not saying anything he did not believe. He was carried away by a suppressed fury. To run on like this he had to be in a curiously ele- vated, a rather inflamed frame of mind, and Ulrich's mood was somewhere between this state and the one induced by seeing Hans, with his greasy, bristling hair, his muddy skin, his repellent emphatic gestures, and his foaming torrent of speech in which some filmy frag- ment of his true self hung trapped, like the skin from a flayed heart. But strictly speaking, Ulrich had been suspended all his life between two such aspects ofthis subject, always readyto expound it as he was doing, half believing what he was saying but never going beyond such verbal games, because he did not really take them for real, and so his discomfiture was keeping step with his pleasure in this conversation.
Gerda ignored the mocking asides that he injected into his talk from time to time as a kind of self-parody, overwhelmed as she was by her sense of his opening himself up at last. She looked at him with a touch of anxiety. He's much softer than he'll ever admit, she thought, with a feeling that broke down her own defenses, as if a baby were groping at her breast. Ulrich caught her eye. He knew almost everything that was going on between her and Hans, because "in her worry she needed to relieve her heart by at least throwing out hints ofher problems, and that made it easy enough for Ulrich to fill in the rest. She and Hans regarded the act ofphysical possession, the normal preoccupation ofyoung lovers, as a despicable surrender to capitalist urges; they thought they despised physical passion alto- gether, but they also despised self-control as a middle-class virtue, so what it came to was their always clinging to each other in a nonphysi- cal or semiphysical way. They tried to "accept" each other, as they called it, and felt that trembling, tender merging oftwo people lost in each other's eyes, slipping into the invisible currents that ripple through each other's heads and hearts, and feeling, at the apparent
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moment of mutual understanding, that each holds the other inside himself and is at one with the o~er. At less exalted times they were satisfied with ordinary mutual admiration, seeing in great paintings or dramatic scenes the parallels to their own condition and marvel- ing, when they kissed, at the thought that-as the saying goes-mil- lennia were gazing down upon them. They did kiss, even though they regarded the crude physical sensations of love, that spasm of the bodily self, as no better than a stomach cramp, but their limbs did not pay too much attention to their ideals and pressed hard against each other on their own. Afterward they both felt bewildered. Their budding philosophy was not proof against their heady sense of no- body watching, the dim lights, the furiously mounting attraction of two young bodies nestling close together, and Gerda especially, who as the girl was the more mature of the two, felt the craving to GOD- summate their embrace with the innocent intensity a tree might feel on being prevented from budding in the springtime. This arrested lovemaking, as bland as the kisses oflittle children and as intermina- ble as the aimless fondlings of the old, always left them feeling shat- tered. Hans found it easier to take because he could always regard it afterward as a successful test of his convictions.
"It isn't for us to have and to hold," he lectured her. 'We are nomads who must keep moving onward, step after step. " And when he noticed that Gerda's whole body was quivering with frustrated de- sire, he made no bones about calling it a weakness, if not actually a residue ofher non-Germanic genes, and felt like Adam walking with his God, his manly heart having once more resisted his erstwhile rib's tempting of his faith. At such moments Gerda despised him. Which was probably why she had told Ulrich so much about it, at least in the beginning. She suspected that a full-grown man would do both more and less than Hans, who would bury his tear-stained face in her lap like a child after he had insulted her. Since she was just as proud of her experiences as she was bored with them, she let Ulrich in on all this in the anxious hope that he would find something to say that would put an end to the agoni$g beauty ofit.
Ulrich, however, seldom spoke to her as she wished he might; in- stead, he cooled her offwith his sardonic tone, because even though it made Gerda more reserved, he knew too well that she longed to submit to him, and that neither Hans nor anyone else had the power
over her mind he could have if he chose. He justified himself with the thought that any other real man in his place would have the same effect on Gerda, that of a blessed relief after that woolly-minded dirty little tease Hans. But even as he was thinking it over, suddenly seeing it all in perspective, Hans had collected himself and started a fresh attack.
"All in all," he said, "you've made the biggest possible mistake by trying to express as a concept something that occasionally elevates an idea somewhat above the level of the merely conceptual. But I sup- pose that's what makes the difference between one of you intellec- tual people and the likes of us. First," he added proudly, "one must learn to ll. ve it before one can, perhaps, learn to think it. " When Ul- rich ~miled at this, he flashed out like a bolt of lightning: "Jesus was a seer at the age of twelve, without first getting his doctorate. "
This provoked Ulrich into breaking the silence he owed to Gerda by giving Hans a piece of advice that betrayed his knowledge of facts he could have learned only from her. "I don't know why," he said, "if you want to live it, you don't go all the way. I would take Gerda in my arms, forget all the qualms of my rational mind, and keep her locked in my arms until our bodies either crumbled to ashes or became transformed into the fullness of their own being in a way that is beyond our power of comprehension! "
Hans, feeling a stab ofjealousy, looked not at him but at Gerda, who turned pale with embarrassment. Ulrich's words about locking' her in his arms had touched her like a secret promise. At the moment she didn't care at all how "the other life" was to be imagined, and she felt sure that Ulrich would do everything just as it should be done, if he really wanted to. Hans, incensed at Gerda's betrayal, argued against Ulrich's proposal, which could not be carried out success- fully, he said, because the time was not ripe. The first souls to take flight would have to take off from a mountain, just like the first air- planes, and not from the lowlands of a period like the present. Per- haps there must first come a man who would release mankind from its bondage before it could achieve the heights. It was not unthink- able that he might be the man himself, but that was his own affair, and apart from this, the present low level of spiritual development was incapable ofproducing such a man.
Now Ulrich remarked on the proliferation of redeemers these
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days-indeed, every self-respecting chairman of a social club seemed to be eligible. If Christ were to come again tomorrow, he would certainly fare worse than the first time. The better newspapers and book clubs would fmd him vulgar, and the great international press would hardly be likely to welcome him to its columns.
With this they were back where they had started, the discussion had come full circle, and Gerda sank back into herself.
Yet something had changed; without giving any outward sign ofit, Ulrich had tripped himself up a little. His thoughts had parted com- pany with his words. He looked at Gerda. Her body was angular, her skin looked dull and tired. That faint breath ofold-maidishness that hung over her had suddenly become apparent to him, although it had probably always been the major factor holding him back fro111 ever coming to the point with this girl who was in love with him. Of course, Hans also had something to do with it, what with the semi- physical nature of his communal utopia, which had an old-maidish quality ofits own. Ulrich did not feel attracted to Gerda, but even so he was inclined to continue his dialogue with her. This reminded him that he had invited her to come to see him. She gave no sign ofeither remembering this invitation or of having forgotten it, and he got no opportunity to ask her about it privately. It left him with an uneasy sense ofregret as-well as ofrelief, such as one feels when one skirts a danger recognized too late.
114
THINGS ARE COMING TO A BOIL. ARNHEIM IS GRACIOUS TO GENERAL STUMM. DIOTIMA PREPARES TO MOVE OFF INTO INFINITY. ULRICH DAYDREAMS ABOUT LIVING ONE'S LIFE AS ONE READS A BOOK
His Grace had urged Diotima to find out about the famous Makart pageant, which had brought all Austria together in the 1870s in a burst of national fervor; he still had vivid memories of the richly draped carriages, the heavily caparisoned horses, the trumpeters, and the pride people took in their medieval costumes, which lifted them out of their humdrum daily lives. It was this that had brought Diotima, Amheim, and Ulrich to go through the materials on the pe- riod at the Imperial Library, from which they were now emerging together. As Diotima, her lip curling with disdain, had predicted to His Grace, what they had come up with was quite impossible; such frippery could no longer make people forget the monotony of their existence. They were still on the library stairs when the beauty in- formed her companions that she felt like making the most of the sunny day and the year 1914-which in the few weeks ofits existence had already left the moldering past so far behind-by walking home. But they had no sooner stepped out into the light of day when they bumped into the General, on his way in. Proud to be discovered on· such a mission of high learning, he instantly offered to tum back and enlarge Diotima's entourage by joining it. This made Diotima realize after only a few steps that she was tired and wanted a cab. With no such vehicle in sight, they all stopped in front of the library, which faced a trough-shaped rectangular square, three sides ofwhich were formed by splendid ancient fa~ades, while on the fourth the asphalt street in front of a long, low palace shimmered like an ice rink, with cars and carnages rushing past, none ofwhich responded to the four people waving and signaling to them like survivors of a shipwreck,
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until they tired of it and forgot about giving anything but the occa- sional halfhearted signal in the direction of the traffic.
Arnheim had a big book under his arm. He was pleased with this gesture, both condescending and respectful toward the life of the mind. He greeted the General eagerly: "How nice to see you coming to the library too; men of position nowadays so seldom seek out the life of the mind in its own house. ".
General Stumm replied that he was quite at home in this library.
Arnheim was impressed. "Almost all we have nowadays is writers, and hardly anyone who reads books an:ymore," he went on. "Do you realize, Ge~eral, how many books are printed annually? I think it's over a hundred books a day published ill Germany alone. Over a thousand periodicals are founded every year. The whole world is writing! Everyone helps himself to ideas as though they were his own, all the time. Nobody feels any respansibility toward the situa- tion as a whole. Ever since the Church lost its influence, there is no central authority to stem our general chaos. There is no educational model, no educational principle. In these circumstances it is only natural that feeling and morality should drift without an anchor, and the most stable person begins to waver. "
The General felt his mouth turning dry. It wasn't as though Dr. Arnheim was actually addressing him in person; he was a man stand- ing in the square and thinking out loud. The General thought of how many people talk to themselves in the street, on their way to some- where; civilians, of course, because a soldier who did such a thing would be locked up, and an officer would be sent to the psychiatric clinic. Stumm felt embarrassed at the thought of standing there phi- losophizing in public, as it were, smack-dab in the middle of the Im- perial Residential capital. Apart from the two men, there seemed to be only one other, a mute figure ofbronze standing on a stone pedes- tal in the sunny square. The General had only just noticed this monu- ment and did not remember whom it represented, so that he had to apologize for his ignorance when Arnheim asked him.
"And to think that he was put here to. be venerated," the great man remarked. "But that's how it is. Every moment of our lives we move among institutions, problems, and challenges of which we have barely caught the tail end, so that the present is constantly reaching into the past. We keep crashing through the floor, if I may put it so,
into the cellars of time, even while we imagine ourselves to be occu- pying the top floor of the present. "
Amheim smiled. " He was making conversation. His moving lips flickered in the sunshine, and the lights in his eyes kept changing like those on a signaling steamer. Stumm was growing uneasy; he found it hard to keep acknowledging so many and such unusual turns in 'the conversation while being served up to the world, in full uniform, on this platter of a square. Grass was growing in the cracks between the cobblestones; it was last year's grass but looked implausibly fresh, like a corpse left lying in the snow; it was, in fact, most peculiar and disturbing that grass should be growing here between the stones, when only a few steps farther on the asphalt was being polished, in keeping with the times, by the passing cars. The General began to be troubled by a nervous fear that if he had to go on listening much longer he might suddenly go down on his knees and eat grass in front of the whole world, without knowing why. He looked around for Ul- rich and Diotima for protection.
These two had taken shelter where a thin veil of shade had spun itself around the comer of the wall, and seemed to be involved in an argument, though their voices were too low to be understood.
''You make it sound hopeless," Diotima was saying.
'What do you mean? " Ulrich asked, without real interest.
"There is still such a thing as individuality. " .
Ulrich tried to catch her eye sideways. "Good heavens, we've been
all over this already. "
"You have no heart, or you wouldn't always talk like this," she said
softly. The sun-heated air was rising from the stone pavement up be- tween her legs, which were encased in long skirts like those of a robed statue, inaccessible and to all intents nonexistent. She showed no awareness ofit. It was a caress that had nothing to do with anyone, any man. Her eyes turned pale, but that Inight have been merely the effect of her reserve in a situation where she was exposed to the glances of the passersby. Turning to Ulrich, she said with an effort:
'When a woman has to choose between duty and passion, what can she rely on if not her character? "
"You don't have to choose," Ulrich replied.
· "You go too far; I wasn't speaking of myself," his cousin whispered.
As he did not reply, they both stared across the square fot a while
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in a hostile silence. Then Diotima asked: "Do you think that what we call our soul might emerge from the shadows where it usually keeps itself? "
Ulrich gave her a puzzled look.
"In the case of unusual, specially gifted persons," she added. '~Am I to understand that you're interested in establishing a rap-
port with the Beyond? " Ulrich asked incredulously. "Has Amheim introduced you to a medium? "
Diotima was disappointed in him. "I would never have thought you capable of such a misunderstanding," she said reproachfully. "When I speak of emerging from the shadows, I mean from the un- reality, from that flickering concealment in which we sometimes sense the presence of the unusual. It is spread out like a net that torments us because it will neither hold us nor let us go. Don't you think that there have been times when it was otherWise? When the inner life was a stronger presence, when there were individuals who walked in the light or, as people used to say, walked in holiness, and miracles could happen in reality because they are an ever-present form of another reality, and nothing else! "
Diotima surprised herself by the firmness with whi~h it seemed possible to say this sort of thing, without any special elation, as though she were walking on solid ground. Ulrich felt secretly in- furiated, but actually he was deeply shocked. lias it come to this, he thought, that this giant hen can talk the way I do? Again he saw Di- otima's soul in the shape of a colossal chicken pecking at his own soul, in the shape of a little worm. He was seized by the primal child- hood terror of the giantess, mixed with another strange sensation; there was a certain gratification in be4lg spiritually coJtsumed, as it were, in mindless accord with a kinswoman. Their unanimity was a silly coincidence, of course; he did not believe that there was any magic in being related by blood, nor could he possibly·have taken his cousin seriously even if he were dead drunk. But he had been chang- ing lately, mellowing perhaps; his characteristic inner readiness to move to the ·attack was giving way to a need for tenderness, dreams, kinship, whatever, which also mi}Ilifested itself in sudden outbreaks of the ill will that was its opposite.
Which prompte~him to make fun ofhis cousin now: "Ifthat's how
you feel," he said, "then you ought to go all the way and become Arnheim's lover, openly or in secret, as soon as possible. "
"You shouldn't say such things; I've given you no right! " Diotima rebuked him.
"But I must speak of it. Until now I wasn't sure what was going on between you and Arnheim. But now I understand, and you look to me like a person who is seriously thinking of flying to the moon. I would never have thought you capable of such madness. "
''I've told you that I'm capable of going to extremes. " Her upward gaze was meant to be audacious, but the sun made her screw up her eyes, so that she seemed to be twinkling at him.
"These are the ravings of starved love," Ulrich said, "which pass off when hunger is appeased:" He wondered what Arnheiin's plans might be with regard to her. Did he regret his proposal, and was he covering his retreat by putting on some sort of act? But then he could simply leave and not come back; a man who had been in business all his life would surely have the necessary callousness for that? Here- membered noticing certain signs in Arnheim that indicated passion in an older man; his face was sometimes a grayish yellow, slack and tired, like a room with the bed still unmade at noon. The most likely explanation was the havoc caused by two almost equally strong pas- sions fighting each other to a standstill. But since he was incapable of imagining the passion for power in the degree to which it ruled Am- heim, he could not conceive ofthe measures love had to take in order to fight it.
"You're an odd sort of man," Diotima said. "Always different from what one would expect. Wasn't it you who spoke to me of seraphic love? "
"You regard that as a possibility? " Ulrich asked absentmindedly. "Not as you described it, of course. "
"So Arnheim loves you seraphically? " Ulrich began to laugh softly. "I wish you wouldn't laugh. " Diotima almost hissed at him.
"You don't understand," he apologize& "It's only the excitement. You and Arnheim are sensitive people. You love poetry. I'm sure that you are sometimes touched by a breath . . . a breath of something: the question is just what that is. And now you want to get to the bot- tom of it, with all the thoroughness of your idealism. "
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"Aren't you always saying that one must be precise and thorough? " Diotima countered. .
It was too much. ''You're mad! " he said. "Forgive my saying so, but you are mad. And you of all people mustn't be. "
Meanwhile Arnheim had been telling the General that for the last two generations the world had been undergoing the most profound revolution of all: the end of the soul was in sight.
It gave the Genera! a stab. What the devil, here was yet another problem to think about. To be honest, he ·had thought until this mo- ment, despite Diotima, that there was no such thing as the soul. At military school and in the regiment, nobody gave a hang about this kind of preacher's talk. But here was this manufacturer of guns and tanks, tallCing about.
the soul as though he could see it standing there. The General's eyes began to itch and to roll around gloomily, gog- gling at the translucent air around them.
But Arnheim was not waiting to be asked for particulars; words flowed from his lips, from that pale pink slit between his clipped mustache and his little pointed beard. As he phrased it, the soul had started to shrivel and age ever since the Church began to crumble, around the beginning ofthe bourgeois era. Since then it had lost God and all solid values and ideals until the present, when men had actu- ally reached the point of living without morals, without principles, without real experiences, in fact.
The General could not quite see why one could not have experi- ences ifone had no morals. Whereupon Arnheim opened the big vol- ume bound in pigskin that he was holding, revealing an expensive facsimile of a manuscript so valuable that even a mortal of Amheim's extraordinary standing could not be permitted to take the original out of the building. The General saw the depiction of an angel with wings spread horizontally across two pages, against ·a background of dark earth, golden sky, and marvelous colors layered like clouds; he was looking at a reproduction of one of the most moving and splen- did of early medieval paintings, but since he did not know this, while he did know all about bird-hunting and depictions of it, he could only conclude that a creature with wings and a long neck that was neither human nor a snipe must be an aberration to which his companion wished to draw his attention.
Amheim was. pointing his finger at it and saying pensively: "Here
you see what that great lady who is creating the Austrian Campaign is trying to bring back into the world. . . . "
"I see, I see," Stumm said, realizing that he had failed to appreci- ate this thing for what it was and that he had better watch his step.
"The great expressiveness, and with such utter simplicity," Am- heim went on, "bears witness to what our age has lost forever. What is our science compared with this? Patchwork. Our art? Extremes, without~ mediating substance to hold them together. We lack the magic key to unity, and this, you see, is why I am so deeply moved by this Austrian plan to set the world an example of unification, of a shared idea, even though I do not quite believe it can be done. I am a German. Everything in the world today is loud and crude, and Ger- many is the loudest. In every country the people are straining them- selves morning, noon, and night, whether at work or at play, but in Germany they start earlier and stop later than anywhere else. In all the world the spirit of cold calculation and brute force has lost touch with the soul, but we in Germany have the most businessmen and the strongest army in the world. " He looked around the square with delight. "Here in Austria, things have not yet gone so far. The past is still with you, and the people have kept something of their original intuitiveness. Ifthe German spirit can still be saved from rationalism, this is the only place left. from which a start can be made. But I am afraid," he added with a sigh, "we can hardly succeed. A great idea nowadays encounters too much resistance; great ideas just barely help to prevent each other from being misused. We are living in a state of moral truce, as it were, armed to the teeth with ideas. "
He smiled at his own joke. Then something more occurred to him: "You know, the difference between Germany and Austria we have just touched on always reminds me of billiards. Even at billiards ev- erything goes wrong if you try to do it all by calculation instead of with feeling. "
The General had guessed that he was supposed to feel flattered by the reference to a moral armed truce, and he wanted to show that he had been paying attention. He did know something about billiards, so he said, "I play snooker myself, and skittles too, but I never heard that there's a difference between the Austrian and the German styles ofplay. " u
Amheim shut his eyes and gave it some thought: "I myself never
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play billiards," he said after a moment, "but I know that you can play the ball high or low, from the right or from the left; that you can strike the second ball head-on or merely graze it; that you can hit it hard or lightly, bluffa little-or a lot-and there must be many more such options. Now, if you imagine each of these elements with all their inherent gradations, you have an almost infinite number ofpos- sible combinations. To state them theoretically, I should have to take into account, besides the laws of mathematics and statics, the me- chanics ofsolids, plus the laws ofelasticity; I would have to know the coefficients of the materials, the influence of the temperature, the most precise means of measuring the coordination and gradation of my motor impulses, of estimating distances exactly, like a nonius, how to combine the various factors with better than the speed and accuracy of a slide rule, to say nothing of allowing for margins of error, fields of dispersal, and the fact that the aim, which is the cor- rect coincidence of the two balls, is in itself not clearly definable but only a collection of barely adequate data round an average value. "
Arnheim spoke slowly, and in·~way that compelled attention, as though pouring a liquid drop by drop from a vial to a glass; he did not spare his interlocutor a single detail.
"And so you see," he continued, "that I should need to have all the qualities, and do all the things, I cannot possibly ·have and do. You must be enough of a mathematician to see that. it would take a life- time to plan a single carom shOt in that fashion; it boggles the mind! And yet I step up to the table with a cigarette between my lips, a tune in my ear, and my hat on, as it were, and hardly bothering to look over the board, I take my cue to the ball and the problem is solved! General, this is the sort of thing that happens all the time in real life. You are not only an Austrian, you are a military man, so you're bound to understand me: politics, honor, war, art, all the crucial processes of life, take place beyond the scope of the conscious rational mind. Man's greatness is rooted in the irrational. Even we businessmen don't really operate by calculation-not the leading men, that is. The little fellows may have to count their pennies; we learn to regard our really successful moves as a mystery that defies analysis. A man who doesn't care deeply about feeling, morality, religion, music, 'poetry, form, discipline, chivalry, generosity, cru\dor, tolerance-believe me, such a man will never make a businessman of real stature. This is why
I have always admired the military, especially the Austrian military, based as it is on age-old traditions, and I am truly delighted that Frau Tuzzi can count on your support. It is a relief to me to know it. Your influence, with that of our younger friend, is extremely important. All great things rest on the same principles; great obligations are a blessing, General. "
To his own surprise he suddenly found himself spontaneously shaking Stumm's hand, then he ended by saying: "Hardly anyone realizes that true greatness has no rational basis; I mean to say, every- thing strong is simple. "
Stumm von Bordwehr held his breath; he was not sure he under- stood a word of it all, and wished he could rush back into the library and spend hours reading up on all these points that the great man had paid him the compliment of making to him. At last, out of this March gale whirling in his mind, there came a piercing ray of lucid- ity. What the hell, he thought, this fellow wants something from me! He looked up. Arnheim was still holding the book in both hands but was now turning his attention seriously to hailing a cab. His face was slightly flushed with animation, like that of a man who has just been trading ideas with another. The General was silent, like a man awed by a portentous thought. If Arnheim wanted something from him, then General Stumm was free to want something from Amheim too, to the advantage of His Majesty's service. This perception opened such vistas of possibility that Stumm put off thinking about just what it all really meant. But if the angel in the book had suddenly lifted up a wing to give clever General S~mm a glimpse of what was hidden underneath, the General could not have felt more bewildered and overjoyed.
Over in Diotima's and Ulrich's comer, the following question had meanwhile been posed: Should a woman in Diotima's difficult posi- tion make a gesture ofrenunciation, or let herselfbe swept into adul- tery, or take a third, mixed course, such as belonging physically to one man and spiritually to another, or perhaps physically to neither? For this third solution there was as yet no libretto, as it were, only some great harmonic chords. Diotima still wanted it understood that she was absolutely not speaking of herself but speaking only of "a woman"-every time Ulrich tried to fuse the two together he got a warning glance from her.
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And so he also chose a devious course. ''Have you ever seen a dog? " he asked. "You only think you have. What you see is only something you feel more or less justified in regarding as a dog. It isn't a dog in every respec;t, and always has some personal quality no other. dog has. So how can we ever hope, in this life, to do 'the right thing'? A1). we can do is something that's never the right thing and is always both more· and less than that. Has a tile ever fallen off the roof in precise accord with the law of falling bodies? Never. Even in the lab, things never behave just as they should. 11ley diverge from the ideal course in all possible directions, while we keep up a fiction that this is to be blamed on our faulty execution of the experiment, and that somewhere midway a perfe. Ct result is obtainable.
"Or else you find certain stones, and because of the properties they have in common they are all regarded as diamonds. But suppose one ofthem comes from Africa. and another from Asia, one is dug out of the ground by a black man and the other by an Oriental. What if these differences in circumstances were to matter so much that they cancel out what the objects have in common? In th~ equation 'dia- mond plus circumstances is still diamond,' the use value of the dia- mond is so great that it makes the value of the circumstances negligible. But it's. possible to imagine spiritual circumstances in which the situation is reversed. .
"Everything partakes of the universal and also has something spe- cial all its own. Everything is both true to type and refuses to con- form to type and is in a category all its own, simultan~ously. The personal quality of any given creature is precisely that which doesn't coincide with anything else. . I once said to you that the more truth we discover, the less of the personal is left in the world, because of the longtime war again. st individuality that individuality is losing. By the time everything has been rationalized, there's no telling how much of us will be left. Nothing at all, possibly, but then, when the false sig- nificance we attach to personality has gone, we may enter upon a new kind of sigriificance as if embarking upon a splendid adventure.
"So how do you decide? Should 'a woman' go by the law? Then she may as well go by the laws of society. Conventional morality is a per- fectly valid average and collective value, to b~ Uterally adhered to, without deviations, wherever it is acknowledged. But no individual case can be decided on moral grounds alone; morality is irrelevant to
it in the precise degree that it shares in the inexhaustible nature of the universe. "
"That was quite a speech," Diotima said. She took a certain satis- faction in the loftiness of discourse being'imposed upon her, but in- tended to gain the upper hand by not talking in equally wild
. generalities. "But what is a woman to do, given the circumstances, in real life? "
"Let things happen," Ulrich answered.
"What things? "
"Whatever happens. Her husband, her lover, her renunciation,
her mixed feelings. "
"Do you have any idea what you are saying? " Diotima asked, feel-
ing painfully reminded of how her high resolve possibly to give up Amheim had its wings clipped every night by the mere fact that she slept in Tuzzi. 's bed. Ulrich must have sensed-some of this, because he asked her bluntly: 'Would you try your luck with me? "
'With you? " Diotima drawled, then decided to save face by taking a humorous tack. "Ifthis is an offer,justwhat is it you have iil mind? " "I'll tell you," Ulrich replied seriously. "You read a great deal,
don't you? "
"Of course. "
'What is it you do, then? I'll tell you: You leave out whatever
doesn't suit you. As the author himself has done before you. Just as you leave things out of your dreams or fantasies. By leaving things out, we bring beauty and excitement into the world. We evidently handle our reality by effecting some sort of compromise with it, an in-between state where the emotions prevent each other from reach- ing their fullest intensity, graying the colors somewhat. Children who haven't yet reached that point of control are both happier and un- happier than adults who have. And yes, stupid people also leave things out, which is why ignorance is bliss. So I propose, to begin with, that we try to love each other as ifwe were characters in a novel who have met in the pages ofa book. Let's in any case leave offall the fatty tissue that plumps up reality. "
Diotima felt called upon to argue the case; she wanted to direct the conversation away from this too~personal vein, and she also wanted to show that she understood something of the problems that had been touched upon.
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"All well and good," she said, "but art is supposed to afford us a vacation from reality, so that we can return to it with our energies restored. "
"And I am opinionated enough to say that there should be no time off,'' her cousin retorted. "What sort of a life is it that we have to drill holes in it called holidays; would we punch holes in a painting be- cause it makes too strenuous demands on our sense of beauty? Should we look forward to taking time off from eternal bliss in the next world? Even the thought of time taken off my life by having to sleep sometimes seems unacceptable to me. "
"Ah, there it is. " Diotima seized her opportunity. "You see how unnatural it all is, what you're saying. What human being doesn't need to rest and take a break? It's a perfect illustration of the differ- ence between you and Amheim. Yours is a mind that will not ac- knowledge the shadow on things, the dark side, while his has developed out of the fullness of human experience, with sunshine and shadow intenningled. "
"Of course I exaggerate,'' Ulrich admitted coolly. "You will see it even more clearly as we go into more detail. Think of the great writ- ers, for instance. We can model our lives on them, but we can't squeeze life out of them, like wine out of grapes. They have given so solid a fonn to what once moved them that it confronts us like pressed metal even between the lines. But what have they actually said? . Nobody knows. They themselves never knew all of it at a time. They're like a field over which bees fly back and forth; they them- selves are flying back and forth, as it were. Their thoughts and feel- ings show all the gradations between truth and even error, as can be demonstrated if necessary, and changeable natures that come close to us at will and then elude us when we try to observe them closely.
"There is no detaching an idea in a book from its context on the page. It catches our eye like the face of a person looming up in a crowd as it is being swept past us. I suppose I'm exaggerating a little again, but tell me, what happens in our lives that is any different from this? Leaving the precise, measurable, and definable sensory data out of account, all the other concepts on which we base our lives are no more than congealed metaphors. Take as simple a concept as manliness, and think how it keeps wavering among its many possible variants. It's like a breath that changes shape at every exhalation,
with nothing to hold on to, no finn impression, no logic. So when we simply leave out in art whatever doesn't suit us and our conceptions, we're merely going back to the original condition of life itself. "
"My dear friend," Diotima said, "you don't seem to be talking about anything in particular. " Ulrich had paused for a moment, and her words fell into that pause.
"Yes, I suppose so. I hope I haven't been talking too loudly. "
"You've been talking fast, in a low voice, and at length," she said, with a touch of sarcasm. 'Without saying a word of what you meant to say. Do you realize what you've just explained to me all over again? That reality should be abolished! It's true that when I heard you make this point the first time, on one of our trips into the country, I
·think, it made a lasting impression-I don't know why. But how this is to be done is something you haven't yet revealed, I'm sorry to say. " "Clearly, I'd have to go on talking for at least as long again to do so. But do you really expect it to be that simple? IfI'm not mistaken, you spoke of wanting to fly away with Arnheim into some kind of tran- scendent state. Something you regard as another kind of reality. What I have been saying, on the other hand, is that we must try to
recover unreality. Reality no longer makes sense. "
"Oh, Arnheim would hardly agree with you there," Diotima said. "Of course not. That's just the difference between him and me.
He is trying to make the fact that he eats, sleeps, is the great Arn- heim, and doesn't know whether to marry you or not, mean some- thing, and to this end he has been colle9ting all the treasures of the mind throughout his life. " Ulrich suddenly paused, and the silence lengthened.
After a:while he asked, in a different tone: "Can you explain to me why I should be having this conversation with you, of all people? Suddenly I'm reminded of my childhood. You won't believe this, but I was a good child, mild as the air on a warm moonlit night. I could fall madly in love with a dog, a pocketknife . . . " But then he left this statement unfinished too.
Diotima looked at him, wondering what he could mean. She again remembered how he had once hotly advocated "precision of feel- ing," while just now he was taking the opposite view. He had accused Arnheim of insufficiently clean-cut intentions, while now he favored "letting things happen. " And she was troubled by the fact that Ulrich
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was advocating an intense emotional life without any "time off," compared with Amheim's ambiguous suggestion never to let oneself in for single-minded hatred or total love/ These thoughts left her uneasy.
"Do you really believe that there is such a thing as boundless feel- ing? " Ulrich asked her.
"Oh yes, there is such a thing as boundless emotion," Diotima said, the ground finn under her feet again.
"You see, I don't quite believe that," Ulrich said absently. "Strange how often we talk about it, but we certainly do our best to avoid it throughout our lives, as if we were ~raid of drowning in it. "
He noticed that Diotima was not listening.
