No More Learning

"You must give me a kiss! " she demanded, laughing, and pressed her arm in her brother's as they stood on the threshold of the hut and the low door opened into the darkness ofevening.
11
HOL Y DISCOURSE: BEGINNING
For the rest of Ulrich's stay little more was said about Hagauer; nor for a long time did they again refer to the idea that they should make their reunion permanent and take up life together. Nevertheless, the fire that had flamed up in Agathe's unrestrained desire to do away with her husband still smoldered under the ashes. It spread out in conversations that reached no end and yet burst out again; perhaps one should say: Agathe's feelings were seeking another possibility of burning freely.
She usually began such conversations with a definite, personal question, the inner form of which was: "May I, or may I not . . . ? " The lawlessness of her nature had until now rested on the sad and dispirited principle that 'Tm allowed to do anything, but I don't want to anyway," and so his young sister's questions sometimes seemed to Ulrich, not inappropriately, like the questions of a child, which are as warm as the little hands of these helpless beings.
His own answers were different in kind, though no less character- istic: he always enjoyed sharing the yield of his experience and his reflections, and as was his custom expressed himself in a fashion as frank as it was intellectually enterprising. He always arrived quickly at the "moral of the story" his sister was talking about, summed things up in formulas, liked to use himself for illustration, and managed in this fashion to tell Agathe a great deal about himself, especially about his earlier, more eventful life. Agathe told him noth- ing about herself, but she admired his ability to speak about his own
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life like that, and his way of subjecting every point she raised to moral scrutiny suited her very well. For morality is nothing more than an ordering that embraces both the soul and things, so it is not strange that young people, whose zeal for life has not yet been blunted on every side, talk ~bout it a good deal. But with a man of Ulrich's age and experience some explanation is called for, because men talk of morality only in their working lives, if it happens to be part of their professional jargon; otherwise, the word has been swallowed by the business of living and never manages to regain its freedom. So when Ulrich spoke of morality it was a sign of some profound disorder, which attracted Agathe because it corresponded to something in her- self. She was ashamed, now that she heard what complicated precon- ditions would have to be met, of her naYve proclamation that she intended to live "in complete harmony" with herself, and yet she was impatient for her brother to come more quickly to a conclusion; for it often seemed to her that everything he said brought him closer to it, and with greater precision the further he went, but he always stopped at the last step, just at the threshold, where, every time, he gave up the attempt.
The locus of this deflection and of these last steps-and their par- alyzing effect did not escape Ulrich-can most generally be indi- cated by noting that every proposition in European morality leads to such a point, which one cannot get beyond, so that a person taking stock ofhimselfhas first the gestures ofwading in shallows, as long as he feels firm convictions underfoot, succeeded by the sudden ges- tures of horribly drowning when he goes a little farther, as though the solid ground of life had abruptly fallen off from the shallows into a completely imponderable abyss. This had a particular way of mani- festing itself as well when brother and sister were talking: Ulrich could speak calmly and clearly on any subject he brought up, so long as his reason was involved, and Agathe felt a similar eagerness in lis- tening; but when they stopped and fell silent, a much greater tension came over their faces. And so it happened once that they were car- ried across the frontier they had hitherto unconsciously respected. Ulrich had maintained that "the only basic characteristic of our mo- rality is that its commandments contradict each other. The most moral of all propositions is: The exception proves the rule! " He had apparently been moved to this assertion only by his distaste for a sys-
812 · THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
tern that claims to be unyielding, but in practice must yield to every deflection, which makes it the opposite of a precise procedure that first bases itself on experience and then derives the general law from these observations. He was of course aware of the distinction be- tween natural and moral laws, that the first are derived from observ- ing amoral nature, while the second have to be imposed on less stubborn human nature; but being of the opinion that something about this opposition was today no longer accurate, he had been just about to say that the moral system was intellectually a hundred years behind the times, which was why it was so hard to adapt it to changed conditions. But before he could get that far with his explanation Agathe interrupted him with an answer that seemed very simple, but for the moment took him aback.
"Isn't it good to be good? " she asked her brother, with a gleam in her eye like the one she'd had when she was fiddling with her father's medals, which presumably not everybody would have considered good.
"You're right," he replied eagerly. "One really has to formulate some such proposition ifone wants to feel the original meaning again! But children still like being 'good' as ifit were some tidbit. . . . "
"And being 'bad' as well," Agathe added.
"But does being good have any part in the passions of adults? " Ul- rich asked. "It certainly is part of their principles. Not that they are good-they would regard that as childish-but that their behavior is good. A good person is one who has good principles and who does good things: it's an open secret that he can be quite disgusting as well. "
"See Hagauer," Agathe volunteered.
"There's an absurd paradox inherent in those good people," Ul- rich said. "They turn a condition into an imperative, a state of grace into a norm, a state of being into a purpose! In a whole lifetime this household of good people never serves up anything but leftovers, while keeping up a rumor that these are the scraps from a great feast day that was celebrated once. It's true that from time to time a few virtues come back into fashion, but as soon as that happens they lose their freshness again. "
"Didn't you once say that the same act may be either good or bad, depending on circumstances? " Agathe asked.
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 813
Ulrich agreed. That was his theory, that moral values were not ab- solutes but functional concepts. But when we moralize or generalize we separate them out from their natural context: "And that is pre- sumably the point where something goes wrong on the path to virtue. "
"OtheiWise, how could virtuous people be so dreary," Agathe added, "when their intention to be good ought to be the most de- lightful, challenging, and enjoyable thing anyone could imagine! "
Her brother hesitated, but suddenly he let slip a remark that was soon to bring them into a most unusual relationship.
"Our morality," he declared, "is the crystallization of an inner movement that is completely different from it. Not one thing we say is right! Take any statement, like the one that just occurred to me: 'Prison is a place for repentance. ' It's something we can say with the best conscience in the world, but no one takes it literally, because it would mean hellfue for the prisoners! So how is one to take it? Surely few people know what repentance is, but everybody can tell you where it should reign. Or imagine that something is uplifting- how did that ever get to be part of our morals? When did we ever lie with our faces in the dust, so that it was bliss to be uplifted? Or try to imagine literally being seized by an idea-the moment you were to feel such a thing physically you'd have crossed the border into insan- ity! Every word demands to be taken literally, otheiWise it decays into a lie; but one can't take words literally, or the world would turn into a madhouse! Some kind of grand intoxication rises out of this as a dim memory, and one sometimes wonders whether everything we experience may not be fragmented pieces tom from some ancient entity that was once put together wrong. "
The conversation in which this remark occurred took place in the library-study, and while Ulrich sat over several books he had taken along on his trip, his sister was rummaging through the legal and philosophical books, a bequest ofwhich she was the co-inheritor and out of which she picked the notions that led to her questions. Since their outing the pair had rarely left the house. This was how they spent most of their time. Sometimes they strolled in the garden, where winter had peeled the leaves from the bare shrubbery, expos- ing the earth beneath, swollen with rain. The sight was agonizing. The air was pallid, like something left too long under water. The gar-
814 · THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
den was not large. The paths soon turned back upon themselves. The state of mind induced in both of them by walking on these paths edd- ied in circles, as a rising current does behind a dam. When they re- turned to the house the rooms were dark and sheltered, and the windows resembled deep lighting shafts through which the day ar- rived with all the brittle delicacy of thinnest ivory.
Now, after Ulrich's last, vehement words, Agathe descended from the library ladder on which she had been sitting and put her arms around his shoulders without a word. It was an unaccustomed show of tenderness, for apart from the two kisses, the first on the evening of their first encounter and the other a few days ago when they had set out on their way home from the shepherd's hut, the siblings' nat- ural reserve had released itself in nothing more than words or little acts of attentiveness, and on both those occasions, too, the effect of the intimate contact had been concealed by its unexpectedness and exuberance. But this time Ulrich was instantly reminded of the still- warm garter that his sister had given the deceased as a parting gift instead of a flood of words. The thought shot through his head: "She certainly must have a lover; but she doesn't seem too attached to him, otherwise she wouldn't be staying on here so calmly. " Clearly, she was a woman, who had led her life as a woman independently of him and would go on doing so. His shoulder felt the beauty of her arm from the distribution of its resting weight, and on the side turned toward his sister he had a shadowy sense of the nearness of her blond armpit and the outline of her breast. So as not to go on sitting there in mute surrender to that quiet embrace, he placed his hand over her fingers close to his neck, with this contact drowning out the other.
"You know, it's rather childish, talking the way we do," he said, not without some ill humor. "The world is full of energetic resolution, and here we sit in luxuriant idleness, talking about the sweetness of being good and the theoretical pots we could fill with it. "
Agathe freed her fingers but let her hand go back to its place. 'What's that you've been reading all this time? " she asked.
"You know what it is," he said. "You've been looking at the book behind my back often enough! "
"But I don't know what to make of it. "
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He could not bring himselfto talk about it. Agathe, who had drawn up a chair, was crouching behind him and had simply nestled her face peacefully in his hair as though she were napping. Ulrich was strangely reminded of the moment when his enemy Amheim had thrown an arm around him and the unregulated current of physical contact with another being had invaded him as through a breach. But this time his own nature did not repel the alien one; on the contrary, something in him advanced toward her, something that had been buried under the rubble of mistrust and resentment that fills the heart of a man who has lived a fairly long time. Agathe's relationship to him, which hovered between sister and wife, stranger and friend, without being equatable to any one of them, was not even based on a far-reaching accord between their thoughts or feelings, as he had often told himself, yet it was in complete accord-as he was now al- most astonished to note-with the fact, which had crystallized after relatively few days full of countless impressions not easy to review in a moment, that Agathe's mouth was bedded on his hair with no fur- ther claim, and that his hair was becoming warm and moist from her breath. This was as spiritual as it was physical, for when Agathe re- peated her question Ulrich was overcome with a seriousness such as he had not felt since the credulous days of his youth; and before this cloud of imponderable seriousness fled again, a cloud that extended from the space behind his back to the book before him, on which his thoughts were resting, he had given an answer that astonished him more for the total absence of irony in its tone than for its meaning:
''I'm instructing myself about the ways of the holy life. "
He stood up; not to move away from his sister but in order to be able to see her better from a few steps away.
"You needn't laugh," he said. ''I'm not religious; I'm studying the road to holiness to see ifit might also be possible to drive a car on it! " "I only laughed," she replied, "because I'm so curious to hear what you're going to say. The books you brought along are new to me, but I have a feeling that I would find them not entirely incomprehensi-
ble. "
''You understand that? " her brother asked, already convinced that
she did understand. "One may be caught up in the most intense feel- ing, when suddenly one's eye is seized by the play of some godfor-
816 • THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
saken, man-forsaken thing and one simply can't tear oneself away. Suddenly one feels borne up by its puny existence like a feather float- ing weightlessly and powerlessly on the wind. "
"Except for the intense feeling you make such a point of, I think I know what you mean," Agathe said, and could not help smiling at the almost ferocious glare of embarrassment on her brother's face, not at all in keeping with the tenderness ofhis words. "One sometimes for- gets to see and to hear, and is struck completely dumb. And yet it's precisely in minutes like these that one feels one has come to oneself for a moment. "
"I would say," Ulrich went on eagerly, "that it's like looking out over a wide shimmering sheet ofwater-so bright it seems like dark- ness to the eye, and on the far bank things don't seem to be standing on solid ground but float in the air with a delicately exaggerated dis- tinctness that's almost painful and hallucinatory. The impression one gets is as much ofintensification as ofloss. One feels linked with ev- erything but can't get close to anything. You stand here, and the world stands there, overly subjective and overly objective, but both almost painfully clear, and what separates and unites these normally fused elements is a blazing darkness, an overflowing and extinction, a swinging in and out. You swim like a fish in water or a bird in air, but there's no riverbank and no branch, only this floating! " Ulrich had slipped into poetry, but the fire and firmness of his language stood out in relief against its tender and airy meaning like metal. He seemed to have cast off the caution that usually controlled him, and Agathe looked at him astonished, but also with an uneasy gladness.
"So you think," she asked, "that there's something behind it? More than a 'fit,' or whatever hateful, placating words are used? "
"I should say I do! " He sat down again at his earlier place and leafed through the books that lay there, while Agathe got up to make room for him. Then he opened one ofthem, with the words: "This is how the saints describe it," and read aloud:
"'During those days I was exceeding restless. Now I sat awhile, now I wandered back and forth through the house'. It was like a tor- ment, and yet it can be called more a sweetness than a torment, for there was no vexation in it, only a strange, quite supernatural con- tentment. I had transcended all my faculties and reached the ob- scure power. There I heard without sound, there I saw without light.
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And my heart became bottomless, my spirit formless, and my nature immaterial. ' "
It seemed to them both that this description resembled the rest- lessness with which they themselves had been driven through house and garden, and Agathe in particular was surprised that the saints also called their hearts bottomless and their spirits formless. But Ul- rich seemed to be caught up again in his irony.
He explained: "The saints say: Once I was imprisoned, then I was drawn out of myself and immersed in God without knowledge. The emperors out hunting, as we read about them in our storybooks, de- scribe it differently: They tell how a stag appeared to them with a cross between its antlers, causing the murderous spear to drop from their hands; and then they built a chapel on the spot so they could get on with their hunting. The rich, clever ladies in whose circles I move will answer immediately, ifyou should ask them about it, that the last artist who painted such experiences was van Gogh. Or perhaps in- stead of a painter they might mention Rilke's poetry, but in general they prefer van Gogh, who is a superb investment and who cut his ear offbecause his painting didn't do enough when measured against the rapture ofthings. But the great majority ofour people will say, on the contrary, that cutting your ear offis not a German way of express- ing deep feelings; a German way is that unmistakable vacuousness of the elevated gaze one experiences on a mountaintop. For them the essence of human sublimity lies in solitude, pretty little flowers, and murmuring little brooks; and yet even in that bovine exaltation, with its undigested delight in nature, there lurks the misunderstood last echo of a mysterious other life. So when all is said and done, there must be something of the sort, or it must have existed at some time! "
"Then you shouldn't make fun of it," Agathe objected, grim with curiosity and radiant with impatience.
"I only make fun of it because I love it," Ulrich said curtly.
BIB
12
HOL Y DISCOURSE: ERRA TIC PROGRESS
In the following days there were always many books on the table, some ofwhich he had brought from home, others that he had bought since, and he would either talk extemporaneously or cite a passage, one ofmany he had marked with little slips ofpaper, to prove a point or quote the exact wording. The books before him were mostly lives of the mystics, their writings, or scholarly works about them, and he usually deflected the conversation from them by saying: "Now let's take a good hard look and see what's really going on here. " This was a cautious attitude he was not prepared to give up easily, and so he said to her once:
"If you could read right through all these accounts that men and women of past centuries have left us, describing their state of divine rapture, you would find much truth and reality in among the printed words, and yet the statements made of these words would go wholly against the grain ofyour present-day mind. " And he went on: "They speak of an overflowing radiance. Of an infinite expanse, a boundless opulence of light. Of an overarching oneness of all things and all the soul's energies. Of an awesome and indescribable uplifting of the heart. Of insights coming so swiftly that it's all simultaneous and like drops of fire falling into the world. And then again they speak of a forgetting and no longer understanding, even of everything falling utterly away. They speak of an immense serenity far removed from all passion. Of growing mute. A vanishing of thoughts and inten- tions. A blindness in which they see clearly, a clarity in which they are dead and supernaturally alive. They call it a shedding of their being, and yet they claim to be more fully alive than ever. Aren't these the same sensations, however veiled by the difficulty of expressing them, still experienced today when the heart-'greedy and gorged,' as they say! -stumbles by chance into those utopian regions situated somewhere and nowhere between infinite tenderness and infinite loneliness? "
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As he paused briefly to think, Agathe's voice joined in: "It's what you once called two layers that overlie each other within us. "
"I did? When? "
"When you walked aimlessly into town and felt as though you were dissolving into it, although at the same time you didn't like the place. I told you that this happens to me often. "
"Oh yes! You even said 'Hagauer! '" Ulrich exclaimed. "And we laughed-now I remember. But we didn't really mean it. Anyway, it's not the only time I talked to you about the kind ofvision that gives and the kind that receives, about the male and female principles, the hermaphroditism of the primal imagination and so o n -I can say a lot about these things. As if my mouth were as far away from me as the moon, which is also always on hand for confidential chats in the night! But what these believers have to say about their souls' adven- tures," he went on, mingling the bitterness of his words with objec- tivity and even admiration, "is sometimes written with the force and the ruthless analytic conviction ofa Stendhal. But only"-he limited this-"as long as they stick to the phenomena and their judgment doesn't enter in, which is corrupted by their flattering conviction that they've been singled out by God to have direct experience of Him. For from that moment on, of course, they no longer speak of their perceptions, which are so hard to describe and have no nouns or verbs, but begin to speak in sentences with subject and object, be- cause they believe in their soul and in God as in the two doorposts between which the miraculous will blossom. And so they arrive at these statements about the soul being drawn out of the body and ab- sorbed into the Lord, or say that the Lord penetrates them like a lover. They are caught, engulfed, dazzled, swept away, raped by God, or else their soul opens to Him, enters into Him, tastes of Him, em- braces Him with love and hears Him speak. The earthly model for this is unmistakable, and these descriptions no longer resemble tre- mendous discoveries but rather a series of fairly predictable images with which an erotic poet decks out his subject, about which only one opinion is permissible. For a person like me, anyway, brought up to maintain reserve, these accounts stretch me on the rack, for the elect, even as they assure me that God has spoken to them, or that they have understood the speech of trees and animals, neglect to tell me what it was that was imparted to them; or if they do, it comes out
820 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
as purely personal details, or a rehash of the Clerical News. It's an everlasting pity that no trained scientists have visions! " he ended his lengthy reply.
"Do you think they could? '' Agathe was testing him.
Ulrich hesitated for an instant. Then he answered like a believer: "I don't know; maybe it could happen to me! " When he heard him- selfsaying these words he smiled, as ifto mitigate them.
Agathe smiled too; she now seemed to have the answer she had been hankering after, and her face reflected the small moment of letdown that follows the sudden cessation of a tension. Perhaps she now raised an objection only because she wanted to spur her brother on.
"You know," she said, "that I was raised in a very strict convent school. So I have the most scandalous urge to caricature anyone I hear talking about pious ideals. Our teachers wore a habit whose two colors formed a cross, as a sort of enforced reminder of one of the sublimest thoughts we were supposed to have before us all day long; but we never once thought it; we just called the good sisters the cross-spiders, because of the way they looked and their silky way of talking. That's why, while you were reading aloud, I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. "
"Do you know what that proves? '' Ulrich exclaimed. "Just that the power for gopd which is somehow present in us eats its way instantly through the walls if it gets locked into solid form, and immediately uses that as a bolt hole to evil! It reminds me of the time I was in the army and upheld throne and altar with my brother officers; never in my life have I heard such loose talk about both as I did in our circle! All emotions refuse to be chained, and some refuse absolutely. I'm convinced your good nuns believed what they preached to you, but faith mustn't ever be more than an hour old! That's the point! "
Although in his haste Ulrich had not expressed himself to his satis- faction, Agathe understood that the faith of those nuns who had taken away the pleasure of faith for her was merely a "bottled" vari- ety, preserved in glass jars, so to speak, in its natural condition and not deprived of any of its qualities of faith but still not fresh; indeed, in some imponderable way it had changed into a different condition from its original one, which now hovered momentarily before this truant and rebellious pupil of holiness as a kind of intimation.
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This, with everything else they had been saying about morality, was one of the gripping doubts her brother had implanted in her mind, and also part of that inner reawakening she had been feeling ever since, without rightly knowing what it was. For the attitude of indifference she made such a point of displaying outwardly and en- couraging inwardly had not always ruled her life. Something had once happened that had caused her need for self-punishment to spring directly out of a deep depression, which made her appear to herself as unworthy because she believed she had not been granted the ability to keep faith with lofty emotions, and she had despised herself for her heart's sloth ever since.
This episode lay between her life as a young girl in her father's house and her incomprehensible marriage to Hagauer, and was so narrowly circumscribed that even Ulrich, for all his sympathy, had forgotten to ask about it. What had happened is soon told: At the age of eighteen Agathe had married a man only slightly older than her- self, and on a trip that began with their wedding and ended in his death, he was snatched away from her within a few weeks, before they had even had time to think about choosing a place to live, by a fatal disease he had caught on their travels. The doctors called it ty- phus, and Agathe repeated the word after them, finding in it a sem- blance of order, for that was the side of the event polished smooth for the uses of the world; but on the unpolished side, it was different: until then Agathe had lived with her father, whom everyone re- spected, so that she reluctantly regarded herself as to blame for not loving him; and the uncertain waiting at school to become herself, through the mistrust it awakened in her mind, had not helped to sta- bilize her relationship to the world either. Later, on the other hand, when with suddenly aroused vivacity she had united with her child- hood playmate to overcome in a matter of months all the obstacles put in the way of such a youthful marriage (even though their fami- lies had no objections to each other), she had all at once no longer been isolated and had thereby become herself. This could well be called love; but there are lovers who stare at love as into the sun and merely become blinded by it, and there are lovers who seem to dis- cover life for the first time with astonishment when it is illuminated by love. Agathe was one of the latter kind; she had not even had time to find out whether it was her husband she loved or something else,
822 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
when something struck that was called, in the language of the unil- luminated world, an infectious disease. With primal suddenness hor- ror irrupted upon them from the alien regions of life-a struggle, a flickering, an extinction; a visitation upon two human beings clinging to each other and the disappearance of an innocent world in vomit- ing, excrement, and fear.
Agathe had never faced up to this event that had annihilated her feelings.
Bewildered with despair, she had lain on her knees at the dying man's bedside and persuaded herself that she could conjure up the power that had enabled her as a child to overcome her own ill- ness. When his decline continued nevertheless, and his conscious- ness was already gone, she kept staring into the vacant face, in that hotel room far from home, unable to understand; she had held the dying body in her arms without considering the danger and without considering the realities being attended to by an indignant nurse. She had done nothing but murmur for hours into his fading ear: "You can't, you can't, you can't! " But when it was all over she had stood up in amazement, and without thinking or believing anything in particu- lar, acting simply from a solitary nature's stubbornness and capacity to dream, she had from that moment on inwardly treated this empty astonishment at what had happened as though it were not final. We see the onset of something similar in everyone who cannot bring himself to believe bad news, or finds a way to soften the irrevocable, but Agathe's attitude was unique in the force and extent of this reac- tion, which marked the sudden outburst of her disdain for the world. Since then she had conscientiously assimilated anything new as something less actual than extremely uncertain, an attitude greatly facilitated by the mistrust with which she had always confronted real- ity; the past, on the other hand, was petrified by the blow she had suffered, and eroded by time much more slowly than usually hap- pens with memories. But it had none of the swirl of dreams, the one- sidedness or the skewed sense of proportion that brings the doctor on the scene. On the contrary, Agathe went on living in perfect lucid- ity, quietly virtuous and merely a little bored, slightly inclined to that reluctance about life that was really like the fever she had suffered so willingly as a child. In her memory, which in any case never let its impressions dissolve into generalizations, every hour of what had been and still was fearful remained vivid, like a corpse under a white
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 823
sheet; despite all the anguish of remembering so exactly, it made her happy, for it had the effect of a secret, belated indication that all was not yet over, and it preserved in her, despite the decay of her emo- tional life, a vague but high-minded tension. In truth, all it meant was that she had again lost the sense of meaning in her life and had con- sciously put herself in a state of mind that did not suit her years; for only old people live by dwelling on the experiences and achieve- ments of a time that is gone and remain untouched by the present. But at the age Agathe was then, fortunately, while resolves are made for eternity a single year feels like half an eternity, and so it was only to be expected that after a time a repressed nature and a fettered imagination would violently free themselves. The details of how it happened are of no consequence in themselves; a man whose ad- vances would in other circumstances never have succeeded in dis- turbing her equilibrium succeeded, and became her lover, but this attempt at reliving something ended, after a brief period of manic hope, in passionate disenchantment. Agathe now felt herself cast out by both her real life and her unreal life, and unworthy of her own high hopes. She was one ofthose intense people who can keep them- selves motionless and in reserve for a long time, until at some point they suddenly fall prey to total confusion; and so, in her disappoint- ment, she soon took another rash step, which was, in short, to punish herself in a way opposite to the way she had sinned, condemning her- self to share her life with a man who inspired in her a mild aversion. And this man whom she had picked out as a penance was Gottlieb Hagauer.
"It was certainly both unfair to him and inconsiderate," Agathe ad- mitted to herself-and it must be admitted that this was the first time she had ever faced up to it, because fairness and consideration are not virtues in high favor with the young. Still, her self-punish- ment in this marriage was not inconsiderable either, and Agathe now gave it some more thought. She had strayed far from their conversa- tion, and Ulrich, too, was leafing through his books for something and seemed to have forgotten the conversation. "In earlier centu- ries," she thought, "a person in my state of mind would have entered a convent," and the fact that she had got married instead was not without an innocently comical side, which had previously escaped her. This comedy, which she had then been too young to notice, was
824 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
simply that of the present day, which satisfies its need for a refuge from the world at worst in some tourist accommodation but usually in an Alpine hotel, and even strives to furnish its prisons tastefully. It expresses the profound European need not to overdo anything. No European any longer scourges himself, smears himself with ashes, cuts out his tongue, really takes part in things or totally withdraws from society, swoons with passion, breaks people on the wheel or im- pales them, but everyone sometimes feels the need to do so, so that it's hard to say which is more to be avoided: wanting to do it or not doing it. Why should an ascetic, ofall people, starve himself? It only gives him disturbing fantasies. A sensible asceticism consists of an aversion to eating while being constantly well nourished. Such an as- ceticism promises longevity and offers the mind a freedom that is unattainable so long as it remains enslaved to the body in passionate rebellion. Such bitterly humorous reflections, which she had learned from her brother, were now doing Agathe a world of good, for they dissected the "tragic"-a rigid beliefthat in her inexperience she had long assumed to be a duty-into irony and a passion that had neither name nor aim, and for that reason alone were not bracketed with what she had experienced previously.
It was in this way above all that she had begun to realize, ever since being with her brother, that something was happening to the great split she had suffered between irresponsible living and a spectral fan- tasy life; there was a movement of release and of recombining what had been released. Now, for instance, in this silence between herself and her brother, which was deepened by the presence of books and memories, she thought ofthe description Ulrich had given her ofhis wandering aimlessly into town, and ofhow the town had entered him as he entered it. It reminded her very exactly ofthe few weeks ofher happiness. And it had also been right for her to laugh, wildly and for no reason, when he told her about it, because it struck her that there was something of this turning of the world inside out, this delicious and funny inversion he was speaking of, even in Hagauer's thick lips when they pursed for a kiss. It made her shudder, of course, but there is a shudder, she thought, even in the bright light of noon, and it made her feel that somehow there was still hope for her. Some mere nothing, some break that had always lain between past and present, had recently vanished. She glanced around covertly. The
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room she was in had formed part of the space in which her fate had taken shape: it was the first time since her arrival that this had occurred to her. For it was here that she had met with her childhood friend when her father was out, and they made the great decision to love each other; here, too, she had sometimes received her "un- worthy" suitor, standing at the window hiding tears of rage or des- peration, and here, finally, Hagauer's courting had run its course, with her father's blessing. After having been for so long merely the unnoticed other side ofevents, the furniture and walls, the peculiarly confined light, now became in this moment of recognition strangely tangible, and the quixotic things that had occurred here assumed a physical and completelyunambiguous pastness, as ifthey were ashes or burned charcoal. What remained, and became almost unbearably powerful, was that funny, shadowy sense of things done with-that strange tickling one feels when confronted with old traces, dried to dust, of one's self-which, the moment one feels it, one can neither grasp nor banish.
Agathe made sure that Ulrich was not paying attention, and care- fully opened the top ofher dress, where she kept next to her skin the locket with the tiny picture that she had never taken off through the years. She went to the window and pretended to look out. Cau- tiously, she snapped open the sharp edge of the tiny golden scallop and gazed furtively at her dead love. He had full lips and soft, thick hair, and the cocky expression ofthe twenty-one-year-old flashed out at her from a face still half in its eggshell. For a long time she did not know what she thought, but then suddenly the thought came: "My God, a twenty-one-year-old! "
What do such youngsters talk about with each other? What mean- ing do they give to their concerns? How funny and arrogant they often are! How the intensity of their ideas misleads them about the worth of those ideas! Curious, Agathe unwrapped from the tissue paper of memory some sayings that she-thank goodness for her cleverness-had preserved in it. My God, that was almost worth say- ing, she thought, but she could not really be sure of even that unless she also recalled the garden in which it had been spoken, with the strange flowers whose names she did not know, the butterflies that settled on them like weary drunkards, and the light that flowed over their faces as if heaven and earth were dissolved in it. By that mea-
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sure she was today an old, experienced woman, even though not that many years had passed. With some confusion she noted the incon- gruity that she, at twenty-seven, still loved the boy of twenty-one: he had grown much too young for her! She asked herself: "What feel- ings would I have to have if, at my age, this boyish man were really to be the most important thing in the world to me? " They would cer- tainly have been odd feelings, but she was not even able to imagine them clearly. It all dissolved into nothing.
Agathe recognized in a great upsurge offeeling that the one proud passion of her life had been a mistake, and the heart of this error consisted of a fie:ry mist she could neither touch nor grasp, no matter whether one were to say that faith could not live more than an hour, or something else. It was always this that her brother had been talk- ing about since they had been together, and it was always herself he was speaking of, even though he hedged it about in his intellectual fashion and his diplomacy was much too slow for her impatience. They kept coming back to the same conversation, and Agathe herself blazed with desire that his flame should not diminish.
When she now spoke to Ulrich he had not even noticed how long the interruption had lasted. But whoever has not already picked up the clues to what was going on between this brother and sister should lay this account aside, for it depicts an adventure of which he will never be able to approve: a journey to the edge ofthe possible, which led past-and perhaps not always past-the dangers of the impossi- ble and unnatural, even of the repugnant: a "borderline case," as Ul- rich later called it, of limited and special validity, reminiscent of the freedom with which mathematics sometimes resorts to the absurd in order to arrive at the truth. He and Agathe happened upon a path that had much in common with the business of those possessed by God, but they walked it without piety, without believing in God or the soul, nor even in the beyond or in reincarnation. They had come upon it as people ofthis world, and pursued it as such-this was what was remarkable about it. Though at the moment Agathe spoke again Ulrich was still absorbed in his books and the problems they set him, he had not for an instant forgotten their conversation, which had bro- ken off at the moment of her resistance to the devoutness of her teachers and his own insistence on "precise visions," and he immedi- ately answered:
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"There's no need to be a saint to experience something of the kind! You could be sitting on a fallen tree or a bench in the moun- tains, watching a herd of grazing cows, and experience something amounting to being transported into another life! You lose yourself and at the same time suddenly find yourself-you talked about it yourself! "
"But what actually happens? " Agathe asked.
"To know that, you first have to decide what is normal, sister human," Ulrich joked, trying to brake the much too rapid rush of the idea. "What's normal is that a herd of cattle means nothing to us but grazing beef. Or else a subject for a painting, with background. Or it hardly registers at all. Herds ofcattle beside mountain paths are part of the mountain paths, and we would only notice what we experience when we see them if a big electric clock or an apartment house were to stand there in their place. For the rest, we wonder whether to get up or stay put; we're bothered by the flies swarming around the cat- tle; we wonder whether there's a bull in the herd; we wonder where the path goes from here-there are any number of minor delibera- tions, worries, calculations, and observations that make up the paper, as it were, that has the picture of the cows on it. We have no aware- ness of the paper, only of the cows! "
"And suddenly the paper tears! " Agathe broke in.
"Right. That is, some tissue of habit in us tears. There's no longer something edible grazing out there, or something paintable; nothing blocks your way. You can't even form the word 'grazing,' because a host of purposeful, practical connotations go along with it, which you have suddenly lost. What is left on the pictorial plane might best be called an ocean swell of sensations that rises and falls, breathes and shimmers, as though it 61led your whole field ofview without a hori- zon. Of course, there are still countless individual perceptions con- tained within it: colors, horns, movements, smells, and all the details of reality; but none of them are acknowledged any longer, even if they should still be recognized. Let me put it this way: the details no longer have their egoism, which they use to capture our attention, but they're all linked with each other in a familiar, literally 'inward' way. And of course the 'pictorial plane' is no longer there either; but everything somehow flows over into you, all boundaries gone. "
Again Agathe picked up the description eagerly. "So instead of the
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egoism of the details, you only need to say the egoism of human be- ings," she exclaimed, "and you've got what is so hard to put into words. 'Love thy neighbor! ' doesn't mean love him on the basis of what you both are; it characterizes a dream state! "
"All moral propositions," Ulrich agreed, "characterize a sort of dream state that has already flown the coop of rules in which we tether it. "
"Then there's really no such thing as good and evil, but only faith-or doubt! " cried Agathe, to whom a self-supporting primal condition offaith now seemed so close, as did its disappearance from the morality her brother had spoken ofwhen he said that faith could not live past the hour.
''Yes, the moment one slips away from a life ofinessentials, every- thing enters into a new relationship with everything else," Ulrich agreed. "I would almost go so far as to say into a nonrelationship. For it's an entirely unknown one, ofwhich we have no experience, and all other relationships are blotted out. But despite its obscurity, this one is so distinct that its existence is undeniable. It's strong, but impalpa- bly strong. One might put it this way: ordinarily, we look at some- thing, and our gaze is like a fine wire or a taut thread with two supports-one being the eye and the other what it sees, and there's some such great support structure for every second that passes; but at this particular second, on the contrary, it is rather as though some- thing painfully sweet were pulling our eye beams apart.
"One possesses nothing in the world, one holds on to nothing, one is not held by anything," Agathe said. "It's all like a tall tree on which not a leaf is stirring. And in that condition one could not do anything mean. "
"They say that nothing can happen in that condition which is not in harmony with it," Ulrich added. "A desire to 'belong to' it is the only basis, the loving vocation, and the sole form of all acting and thinking that have their place in it. It is something infinitely serene and all-encompassing, and everything that happens in it adds to its quietly growing significance; or it doesn't add to it, in which case it's a bad thing, but nothing bad can happen, because ifit did the stillness and clarity would be torn and the marvelous condition would end. " Ulrich gave his sister a probing look she was not meant to notice; he
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had a nagging feeling that it was about time to stop. But Agathe's face was impassive; she was thinking of things long past.
"It makes me wonder at myself," she answered, "but there really was a brief period when I was untouched by envy, malice, vanity, greed, and things like that. It seems incredible now, but it seems to me that they had all suddenly disappeared, not only out of my heart but out of the world! In that state it isn't only oneself who can't be- have badly; the others can't either. A good person makes everything that touches him good, no matter what others may do to him; the instant it enters his sphere it becomes transformed. "
"No," Ulrich cut in, "not quite. On the contrary, put that way, this would be one of the oldest misconceptions. A good person doesn't make the world good in any way; he has no effect on it whatsoever; all he does is separate himself from it. "
"But he stays right in the midst ofit, doesn't he? ''
"He stays right in its midst, but he feels as if the space were being drawn out of things, or something or other imaginary were happen- ing; it's hard to say. "
"All the same, I have the idea that a 'highhearted' person-the word just occurred to me! -never comes in contact with anything base. It may be nonsense, but it does happen. "
"It may happen," Ulrich replied, "but the opposite happens too! Or do you suppose that the soldiers who crucified Jesus didn't feel they were doing something base? And they were God's instrument! Incidentally, the mystics themselves testify to the existence of bad feelings-they complain about falling from the state of grace and then enduring unspeakable misery, knowing fear, pain, shame, and perhaps even hatred. Only when the quiet burning begins again do remorse, anger, fear, and misery turn into bliss. It's so hard to know what to make of all this! "
"When were you that much in love? '' Agathe asked abruptly.
"Me? Oh . . . I've already told you about that: I fled a thousand miles away from the woman I loved, and once I felt safe from any possibility of really embracing her, I howled for her like a dog at the moon! "
Now Agathe confided to him the story of her love. She was ex- cited. Her last question had snapped from her like an overly tight-
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ened violin string, and the rest followed in the same vein. She was trembling inwardly as she revealed what had been concealed for many years.
But her brother was not particularly moved. "Memories usually age along with people," he pointed out, "and with time the most pas- sionate experiences take on a comic perspective, as though one were seeing them at the end of ninety-nine doors opened in succession. Still, sometimes certain memories that were tied to strong emotions don't age, but keep a tight grip on whole layers of one's being. That was your case. There are such points in almost everyone, which dis- tort the psychic balance a little. One's behavior flows over them like a river over an invisible boulder-in your case this was very strong, so that it almost amounted to a dam. But you've freed yourself after all; you're moving again! "
He said this with the calm of an almost professional opinion; how easily he was diverted! Agathe was unhappy. Stubbornly she said: "Of course I'm in motion, but that's not what I'm talking about! I want to know where I almost got to back then. " She was irritated too, without meaning to be, but simply because her excitement had to express itself somehow. She went on talking, nevertheless, in her original direction and was quite dizzy between the tenderness of her words and the irritation behind them. She was talking about that pe- culiar condition of heightened receptivity and sensitivity that brings about a rising and falling tide of impressions and creates the feeling of being connected with all things as in the gentle mirror of a sheet of water, giving and receiving without will: that miraculous feeling of the lifting of all bounds, the boundlessness of the outer and inner that love and mysticism have in common. Agathe did not, of course, put it in such terms, which already contain an explanation; she was merely making passionate fragments of her memories into a se- quence. But even Ulrich, although he had often thought about it, could not offer any explanation of these experiences; indeed, he did not even know whether he should attempt to deal with such an expe- rience in its own way or according to the usual procedures of ratio- nality; both came naturally to him, but not to the obvious passion of his sister. And so what he said in reply was merely a mediation, a kind oftesting ofthe possibilities. He pointed out how in the exalted state they were speaking of, thought and the moral sense went hand in
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hand, so that each thought was felt as happiness, event, and gift, and neither lost itself in the storerooms of the brain nor formed attach- ments to feelings of appropriation and power, of retention and ob- smvation; thus in the head no less than in the heart the delight of self-possession is replaced by a boundless self-giving and bonding.
"Once in a lifetime," Agathe replied with passionate decisiveness, "everything one does is done for someone else. One sees the sun shining for him. He is everywhere, oneself nowhere. But there is no egoism adeux, because the same thing must be happening with the other person. In the end, they hardly exist for each other anymore, and what's left is a world for nothing but couples, a world consisting of appreciation, devotion, friendship, and selflessness! "
In the darkness of the room her face glowed with eagerness like a rose standing in the shade.
"Let's be a little more sober again," Ulrich gently proposed. "There can be too much fakery in these matters. " There was nothirlg wrong with that either, she thought. Perhaps it was the irritation, still not quite gone, that somewhat dampened her delight over the reality he was invoking. But this vague trembling of the borderline was a not unpleasant feeling.
Ulrich began by speaking of the mischief of interpreting the kind of experiences they were talking about not as if what was going on in them was merely a peculiar change in thinking, but as if superhuman thinking was taking the place of the ordinary kind. Whether one called it divine illumination or, in the modem fashion, merely intui- tion, he considered it the main hindrance to real understanding. In his opinion, nothing was to be gained by yielding to notions that would not stand up under careful investigation. That would only be like Icarus's wax wings, which melted with the altitude, he ex- claimed. Ifone wished to fly other than in dreams, one must master it on metal wings.
He paused for a moment, then went on, pointing to his books: "Here you have testimony, Christian, Judaic, Indian, Chinese, some separated by more than a thousand years. Yet one recognizes in all of them the same uniform structure of inner movement, divergent from the ordinary. Almost the only way they differ from each other comes from the various didactic superstructures of theology and cos- mic wisdom under whose protective roofthey have taken shelter. We
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therefore may assume the existence of a certain alternative and un- common condition of great importance, which man is capable of achieving and which has deeper origins than religions.
"On the other hand," he added, qualifying what he had said, "the churches, that is, civilized communities of religious people, have al- ways treated this condition with the kind of mistrust a bureaucrat feels for the spirit of private enterprise. They've never accepted this riotous experience without reservations; on the contrary, they've di- rected great and apparently justified efforts toward replacing it with a properly regulated and intelligible morality. So the history of this alternative condition resembles a progressive denial and dilution, something like the draining of a swamp.
"And when confessional authority over the spirit and its vocabu- lary became outmoded, our condition understandably came to be re- garded as nothing more than a chimera. Why should bourgeois culture, in replacing the old religious culture, be more religious than its predecessor? Bourgeois culture has reduced this other condition to the status of a dog fetching intuitions. There are hordes of people today who find fault with rationality and would like us to believe that in their wisest moments they were doing their thinking with the help of some special, suprarational faculty. That's the final public vestige of it all, itself totally rationalistic. What's left of the drained swamp is rubbish! And so, except for its uses in poetry, this old condition is excusable only in uneducated people in the first weeks of a love af- fair, as a temporary aberration, like green leaves that every so often sprout posthumously from the wood of beds and lecterns; but if it threatens to revert to its original luxuriant growth, it is unmercifully dug up and rooted out! "
Ulrich had been talking for about as long as it takes a surgeon to wash his arms and hands so as not to carry any germs into the field of operation, and also with all the patience, concentration, and even- handedness it paradoxically takes to cope with the excitement at- tendant on the task ahead. But after he had completely disinfected himself he almost yearned for a little fever or infection-after all, he did not love sobriety for its own sake. Agathe was sitting on the li- brary ladder, and even when her brother fell silent she gave no sign of participation. She gazed out into the endless oceanic gray of the
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sky and listened to the silence just as she had been listening to the words. So Ulrich took up the thread again, with a slight obstinacy that he barely managed to mask by his lighthearted tone.
"Let's get back to our bench on the mountain, with that herd of cows," he suggested. "Imagine some high bureaucrat sitting there in his brand-new leather shorts with 'Gruss Gott' embroidered on his green suspenders. He represents 'real life' on vacation. Of course, this temporarily alters his consciousness of his existence. When he looks at the herd ofcows he neither counts them, classifies them, nor estimates the weight on the hoof of the animals grazing before him; he forgives his enemies and thinks indulgently of his family. For him the herd has been transformed from a practical object into a moral one, as it were. He may also, ofcourse, be estimating and counting a little and not forgiving a whole lot, but then at least it is bathed in woodland murmurs, purling brooks, and sunshine. In a word, what otherwise forms the content of his life seems 'far away' and 'not all that important. ' "
"It's a holiday mood," Agathe agreed mechanically.
"Exactly! I f he regards his nonvacation life as 'not all that impor- tant,' it means only as long as his vacation lasts. So that is the truth today: a man has two modes of existence, of consciousness, and of thought, and saves himself from being frightened to death by ghosts-which this prospect would of necessity induce-by regard- ing one condition as a vacation from the other, an interruption, a rest, or anything else he thinks he can recognize. Mysticism, on the other hand, would be connected with the intention of going on vaca- tion permanently. Our high official is bound to regard such an idea as disgraceful and instantly feel-as in fact he always does toward the end of his vacation-that real life lies in his tidy office. And do we feel any differently?