The reality about which they felt so expect- ant was, to be sure,
remarkably
lacking a nucleus and only half com- prehensible, and it was a long-intimate half-truth, familiar and unfulfillable, that wooed credibility: not an everyday reality and truth for everyone, but a secret one for lovers.
Musil - Man Without Qualities - v2
Let's go away!
It would be so nice to lie on a meadow and get back to nature as simply as a discarded shoe!
"
"But all that means is being released from all feelings," Ulrich ob- jected. "And God alone knows what would become of us if feelings did not appear in swarms, these loves and hates and sufferings and goodnesses that give the illusion of being unique to eve:ry individual. We would be bereft of all capacity to think and act, because our soul was created for whatever repeats itself over and over, and not for what lies outside the order ofthings. . . . " He was oppressed, thought he had stumbled into emptiness, and with an uneasy frown looked questioningly at his sister's face.
But Agathe's face was even clearer than the air that enveloped it and played with her hair, as she gave a response from memory. " 'I know not where I am, nor do I seek myself, nor do I want to know of it, nor will I have tidings. I am as immersed in the flowing spring of His love as ifI were under the surface ofthe sea and could not feel or see from any side any thing except water. ' "
"Where's that from? " Ulrich asked curiously, and only then dis- covered that she was holding in her hands a book she had taken from his own library.
Agathe opened it for him and read aloud, without answering: " 'I have transcended all my faculties up to the dark power. There I heard without sound, saw without light. Then my heart became bot- tomless, my soul loveless, my mind formless, and my nature without being. '"
Ulrich now recognized the volume and smiled, and only then did
From the Posthu11WUs Papers · 1187
Agathe say: "It's one ofyour books. " Then, closing the book, she con- cluded from memory: "'Are you yourself, or are you not? I know nothing of this, I am unaware of it, and I am unaware of myself. I am in love, but I know not with whom; I am neither faithful nor unfaith- ful. Therefore what am I? I am even unaware of my love; my heart is at the same time full oflove and empty oflove! ' "
Even in ordinary circumstances her excellent memory did not eas- ily rework its recollections into ideas but preserved them in sensory isolation, the way one memorizes poems; for which reason there was always in her words an indescribable blending of body and soul, no matter how unobtrusively she uttered them. Ulrich called to mind the scene before his father's funeral, when she had spoken the in- credibly beautiful lines of Shakespeare to him. "How wild her nature is compared to mine! " he thought. "I haven't let myself say much today. " He thought over the explanation of "day-bright mysticism" he had given her: All things considered, it was nothing more than his having conceded the possibility of transitory deviations from the ac- customed and verified order of experience; and looked at this way, her experiences were merely following a basic principle somewhat richer in feelings than that of ordinary experience and resembled small middle-class children who have stumbled into a troupe of ac- tors. So he had not dared say any more, although for days every bit of space between himself and his sister had been filled with uncom- pleted happenings! And he slowly began to concern himselfwith the problem of whether there might not be more things that could be believed than he had admitted to himself.
After the lively climax of their dialogue he and Agathe had let themselves fall back into their chairs, and the stillness of the garden closed over their fading words. Insofar as it has been said that Ulrich had begun to be preoccupied by a question, the correction must be made that many answers precede their questions, the way a person hastening along precedes his open, fluttering coat. What preoc- cupied Ulrich was a surprising notion, one that did not require belief but whose very appearance created astonishment and the impression that such an inspiration must never be allowed to be forgotten, which, considering the claims it asserted, was rather disquieting. Ul- rich was accustomed to thinking not so much godlessly as God-free, which in the manner of science rpeans to leave every possible turning
1188 · THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
to God to the emotions, because such a turning is not capable of fur- thering knowledge but can only seduce it into the impracticable. And even at this moment he did not in the least doubt that the way of science was the only correct way, since the most palpable successes of the human spirit had managed to come into being only since this spirit had got out of God's way. But the notion that had come upon him said: "What ifthis selfsame ungodliness turned out to be nothing but the contemporary path to God? Every age has had its own path- way of thought to Him, corresponding to the energies of its most powerful minds; would it not also be our destiny, the fate of an age of clever and entrepreneurial experience, to deny all dreams, legends, and ingeniously reasoned notions only because we, at the pinnacle of exploring and discovering the world, again turn to Him and will begin to derive a relationship to Him from a kind of experience that is just beginning? "
This conclusion was quite undemonstrable, Ulrich knew that; in- deed, to most people it would appear as perverse, but that did not bother him. He himself really ought not to have thought it either: the scientific procedure-which he had just finished explaining as legiti- mat~onsists, aside from logic, in immersing the concepts it has gained from the surface, from "experience," into the depths of phe- nomena and explaining the phenomena by the concepts, the depths by the surface; everything on earth is laid waste and leveled in order to gain mastery over it, and the objection came to mind that one ought not extend this to the metaphysical. But Ulrich now contested this objection: the desert is ~tan objection, it has always been the birthplace of heavenly visions, and besides, prospects that have not yetbeenattainedcannotbepre ·ctedeither! Butitescapedhimthat he perhaps found himself in a seoond kind of opposition to himself, or had stumbled on a direction leading away from his own: Paul calls faith the expectation of things hoped{or and belief in things ·not seen, a statement thought out to the point of radiant clarity; and Ul- rich's opposition to the Pauline statement, which is one of the basic tenets of the educated person, was among the strongest he bore in his heart. Faith as a diminished form ofknowingwas abhorrent to his being, it is always "against one's better knowl~ge"; on the other hand, it had been given to him to recognize in the "intimation 'to the best of' one's knowledge" a special condition and an area in which
From the Posthumous Papers · 1189
exploring minds could roam. That his opposition had now weakened was later to cost him much effort, but for the moment he did not even notice it, for he was preoccupied and charmed by a swarm of incidental considerations.
He singled out examples. Life was becoming more and more ho- mogeneous and impersonal. Something mechanical, stereotypical, statistical, and serial was insinuating itself into every entertainment, excitement, recreation, even into the passions. The life will was spreading out and becoming shallow, like a river hesitating before its delta. The will to art had already become more or less suspicious, even to itself. It seemed as though the age was beginning to devalue individual life without being able to make up the loss through new collective achievements. This was the face it wore. And this face, which was so hard to understand; which he had once loved and had attempted to remold in the muddy crater of a deeply rumbling vol- cano, because he felt himselfyoung, like a thousand others; and from which he had turned away like these thousands because he could not gain control over this horribly contorted sight-this face was trans- figured, becoming peaceful, deceptively beautiful, and radiant, by a single thought! For what if it were God Himself who was devaluing the world? Would it not then again suddenly acquire meaning and desire? And would He not be forced to devalue it, if He were to come closer to it by the tiniest step? And would not perceiving even the anticipatory shadow of this already be the one real adventure? These considerations had the unreasonable consistency of a series of adventures and were so exotic in Ulrich's head that he thought he was dreaming. Now and then he cast a cautiously reconnoitering glance at his sister, as if apprehensive that she would perceive what he was up to, and several times he caught sight ofher blond head like light on light against the sky, and saw the air that was toying with her hair also playing with the clouds.
When that happened, she too, raising herself up slightly, looked around in astonishment. She tried to imagine how it would be to be set free from all life's emotions. Even space, she thought, this always uniform, empty cube, now seemed changed. If she kept her eyes closed for a while and then opened them again, so that the garden met her glance untouched, as if it had just that moment been cre- ated, she noticed as clearly and disembodiedly as in a vision that the
1190 · THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
course that bound her to her brother was marked out among all the others: the garden "stood" around this line, and without anything having changed about the trees, walks, and other elements of the ac- tual environment-about this she could easily reassure herself-ev- erything had been related to this connection to make an axis and was thereby invisibly changed in a visible way. It may sound paradoxical; but she could just as well have said that the world was sweeter here; perhaps, too, more sorrowful: what was remarkable was that one thought one was seeing it with one's eyes. There was, moreover, something striking in the way all the surrounding shapes stood there eerily abandoned but also, in an eerily ravishing way, full of life, so that they were like a gentle death, or a passionate swoon, as if some- thing unnameable had just left them, and this lent them a distinctly human sensuality and openness. And as with this impression of space, something similar had happened with the feelings of time: that flowing ribbon, the rolling staircase with its uncanny incidental association with death, seemed at many moments to stand still and at many others to flow on without any associations at all. In the space of one single outward instant it might have disappeared into itself, with- out a trace ofwhether it had stopped for an hour or a minute.
Once, Ulrich surprised his sister during these experiments, and probably had an inkling of them, for he said softly, smiling: "The/e is a prophecy that a millennium is to the gods no longer than a blink of the eye! " Then they both leaned back and continued listening to the dream discourse of the silence.
Agathe was thinking: "Having brought all this about is all his doing; and yet he doubts every time he smiles! " But the sun was fall- ing in a constant stream ofwarmth as tenderly as a sleeping potion on his parted lips. Agathe felt it falling on her own, and knew herself at one with him. She tried to put herself in his place and guess his thoughts, which they had really decided they would not do because it was something that came from outside and not from their own cre- ative participation; but as a deviation it was that much more secret. "He doesn't want this to become just another love story," she thought, and added: "That's not my inclination either. " And immedi- ately thereafter she thought: "He will love no other woman after me, for this is no longer a love story; it is the very last love story there can be! " And she added: "We will be something like the Last Mohicans
From the Posthunwus Papers · 1 1 9 1
of love! " At the moment she was also capable of this tone toward herself, for if she summed things up quite honestly, this enchanted garden in which she found herself together with Ulrich was also, of course, more desire than reality. She did not really believe that the Millennium could have begun, in spite of this name Ulrich had once bestowed on it, which had the sound ofstanding on solid ground. She even felt quite deserted by her powers of desire, and, wherever her dreams might have sprung from, she didn't know where it was, bit- terly sobered. She remembered that before Ulrich, she really had more easily been able to imagine a waking sleep, like the one in which her soul was now rocking, which was able to conduct her be- hind life, into a wakefulness after death, into the nearness of God, to powers that came to fetch her, or merely alongside life to a cessation of ideas and a transition into forests and meadows of imaginings: it had never become clear what that was! So now she made an effort to call up these old representations. But all she could remember was a hammock, stretched between two enormous fingers and rocked with an infinite patience; then a calm feeling of being towered over, as if by high trees, between which she felt raised up and removed from sight; and finally a nothingness, which in some incomprehensible way had a tangible content: All these were probably transitory images of suggestion and imagination in which her longing had found solace. But had they really been only passing and half formed? To her aston- ishment, something quite remarkabie slowly began to occur to Agathe. "Truly," she thought, "it's as one says: a light dawns! And it spreads the longer it lasts! " For what she had once imagined seemed to be in almost everything that was now standing around her, calm and enduring, as often as she dispatched her glance to look! What she had imagined had soundlessly entered the world. God, to be sure-<llfferently from the way a literally credulous person might have experienced it-stayed away from her adventure, but to make up for this she was, in this adventure, no longer alone: these were the only two changes that distinguished the fulfillment from the presen- timent, and they were changes in favor of earthly naturalness.
47
W ANDERINGS AMONG PEOPLE
In the time that followed they withdrew from their circle of ac- quaintances, astonishing them by turning down every invitation and not allowing themselves to be contacted in any way. They stayed at home a great deal, and when they went out they avoided places in which they might meet people of their social set, visiting places of entertainment and small theaters where they felt secure from such encounters; and whenever they left the house they generally simply followed the currents of the metropolis, which are an image of peo- ple's needs and, with the precision of tide tables, pile them up in specific places or suck them away, depending on the hour. It amused them to participate in a style of living that differed from their own and relieved them for a time of responsibility for their usual way of life. Never had the city in which they lived seemed to them at once so lovely and so strange. In their totality the houses presented a grand picture, even if singly or in particular they were not handsome at all; diluted by the heat, noise streamed through the air like a river reach- ing to the rooftops; in the strong light, attenuated by the depths of the streets, people looked more passionate and mysterious than they presumably deserved. Everything sounded, looked, and smelled ir- replaceable and unforgettable, as ifit were signaling how it appeared to itself in all its momentariness; and brother and sister not unwill- ingly accepted this invitation to tum toward the world.
In doing so, they came upon an extraordinary discord. The experi- ences that they had not shared openly with each other separated them from other people; but the same problematic passion, which they continued to feel undiminished and which had come to grief not because of a taboo but because of some higher promise, had also transported them to a state that shared a similarity with the sultry intermissions of a physical union. The desire that could not find ex- pression had again sunk back within the body, filling it with a tender- ness as indefinable as one of the last days of autumn or first days of
From the Posthurrwus Papers · I I 93
spring. It was, nonetheless, not at all as if they loved every person they saw, or everything that was going on: they merely felt the lovely shadow of "how it would be" falling on their hearts, and their hearts could neither fully believe in the mild delusion nor quite escape its pull. It seemed that through their conversations and their conti- nence, through their expectation and its provisional limits, they had become sensitive to the barriers reality places before the emotions, and now perceived together the peculiarly double-sided nature of life, which dampens every higher aspiration with a lower one. This two-sided nature combines a retreat with every advance, a weakness with every strength, and gives no one a right that it does not take away from others, straightens out no tangle without creating new disorder, and even appears to evoke the sublime only in order to mis- take it, an hour later, for the stale and trite. An absolutely indissolu- ble and profoundly necessary connection apparently combines all happy and cheerful human endeavors with the materialization of their opposites and makes life for intellectual people, beyond all dis- sension, hard to bear.
The way the plus and minus sides of life adhere to each other has been judged in quite different ways. Pious misanthropists see in it an effluence of earthly decrepitude, bulldog types life's juiciest filet; the man in the street feels as comfortable within this contradiction as he does between his left and right hands, and people who are proper say that the world was not created in order to correspond to human ex- pectations but it is the other way round: these ideas were created in order to correspond to the world, and why is it that they never bring it to pass in the sphere of the just and the beautiful? As mentioned, Ulrich was of the opinion that this state of affairs served the produc- tion and preservation of a middling condition of life, which more or less leaves it up to chance to mix human genius with human stupid- ity, as this condition itself also emerges from such a mixture; a long time ago he had expressed this by saying that the mind has no mind, and just recently, at Diotima's soiree, he had again talked about it at length as the great confusion of the emotions. But whether it had been recently or long ago, and no matter how obvious it might have been to continue the same thought, as soon as Ulrich began to do so he had the feeling that such words were coming from his mouth a few days too late. This time, he frequently found himself lacking in
1194 · THE MAN WITH 0 U T QUALITIES
desire to occupy himself with things that did not directly concern him, for his soul was prepared to submit to the world with all its senses, however this might tum out. His judgment was as good as disconnected from this altogether. Even whether something pleased him or not hardly mattered, for everything simply seized hold of him in a way that surpassed his capacity for understanding. This was as true for every general state of mind as for every particular and indi- vidual one; indeed, at times it was entirely without thought, and cor- poreal; but when it had lasted awhile and reached full measure, it became unpleasant or seemed ridiculous to him, and he was then ready, in a manner just as unfounded as the one in which he had first submitted, to retract that submission.
And Agathe in her fashion was experiencing pretty much the same thing. At times, her conscience was oppressed, and expected or made for itself new oppressions from the world she had left behind but that nonetheless proclaimed itself in all its power all around her. In the manifold bustle that fills day and night there was probably not a single task in which she could participate with all her heart, and her failure to venture into anything should not be regarded with the cer- tainty of blame or disdain, or even contempt. There was in this a re- markable peace! It might perhaps be said, to alter a proverb, that a bad conscience, as long as it is bad enough, may almost provide a better pillow on which to rest than a good one: the incessant ancillary activity in which the mind engages with a view to acquiring a good individual conscience as the final outcome of all the injustice in which it is embroiled is then abolished, leaving behind in mind and emotions a hectic independence. A tender loneliness, a sky-high ar- rogance, sometimes poured their splendor over these holidays from the world. Alongside one's own feelings the world could then appear clumsily bloated, like a captive balloon circled by swallows, or, muta- tis mutandis, humbled to a background as small as a forest at the periphery of one's field of vision. The offended civic obligations echoed like a distant and crudely intrusive noise; they were insignifi- cant, if not unreal. A monstrous order, which is in the last analysis nothing but a monstrous absurdity: that was the world. And yet every detail Agathe encountered also had the tensed, high-wire-act nature of the once-and-never-again, the nature of discovery, which is magi-
From the Posthumous Papers · 1195
cal and admits of no repetition; and whenever she wanted to speak of this, she did so in the awareness that no word can be uttered twice without changing its meaning.
So the attitude of brother and sister toward the world at this time was a not entirely irreproachable expression of confident benevo- lence, containing its own brand of parallel attraction and repulsion in a state of feeling that hovered like a rainbow, instead of these oppo- sites combining in the stasis that corresponds to the self-confident state of every day. And something else was connected with this: in the days following that strange night, the tone of their conversations changed too; the echo of destiny faded, and the progression became freer and looser; indeed, it sometimes volatilized in a playful flutter- ing of words. Still, this did not indicate a temporizing born of de- spondency as much as it indicated an unregulated broadening of the living foundations of their own adventure. They sought support in observing the ordinary ways in which life was carried on, and were secretly convinced that the equilibrium of this usual form of living was also a pretense. In this way it happened one day that their con- versation took a direction in which, despite some fluctuation, it per- sisted. Ulrich asked: "What does the commandment 'Love thy neighbor as thyself' really mean? "
"Love the person farthest away like thyself is what it means! " Agathe responded with the tenderest forbearance, to which her brother had a right in questions of loving one's fellowmen.
But Ulrich was not satisfied. "And what does it mean to say 'Love what you do not know'? To love someone you don't know, although you might well be convinced that after you got acquainted you wouldn't like each other? So, in the last analysis: to love him although you know him? '' he insisted more explicitly.
"That's clearly the situation most people are in, but they don't let it bother them! " Agathe replied. "They put doubt and confidence in- side each other! "
"They foresee nothing more in the commandment oflove than the reasonable prohibition against hurting each other so long as it seiVes no purpose," Ulrich offered.
But Agathe said that that would be the insipid rule of thumb "What you don't want someone to do to you, don't do to anyone
1196 · THE MAN WITH 0 U T QUALITIES
else," and it was impossible that the entire purpose of this high- mindedly passionate, cheerfully generous task could be to love a stranger without even asking who he was!
"Perhaps the word 'love' here is only an expression that has taken far too great a swing to overcome the obstacles? '' Ulrich reflected. But Agathe insisted that it really did mean "love him! " and "without any particular reason," and that it was not to be haggled over, so Ul- rich yielded. ''What it means is: Love him in spite ofwhat you know! " he objected. "And before you know him! " Agathe repeated and un- derlined it once again: "At least, without knowing him! "
But she stopped abruptly and looked at her brother, bewildered. "But what is it you really love in a person if you don't know him at all? '' she asked impatiently.
Thus the playful questions took on various forms as they sped back and forth. But Ulrich did not hasten to his sister's aid. He was of the opinion that to love something means to prefer it over other things, and that surely assumed a certain knowing.
"Almost everybody loves himself best, and knows himself least! " Agathe threw in.
"True love is independent of merit and reward," Ulrich con- firmed, mimicking a moralizing tone and shrugging his shoulders.
"Something's wrong here! "
"A lot's wrong! " he ventured.
"And ifyou love everything? Ifyou're supposed to love the whole
world, the way you are today? What is it then that you're loving? You would say: 'Nothing special'! " Agathe laughed.
"Haven't you noticed, too, that today it's downright disturbing if you happen to meet a person who is so beautiful that you have to say something personal about it? '' he asked her.
'Then it's not a feeling about the real world and the real person! " she said firmly.
"So then we have to tackle the question as to what part of this per- son it's true of, or what metamorphosis and transformation of the real person and the real world," Ulrich said, softly but emphatically.
After a short pause, Agathe answered, with a timid conscience: "Perhaps that is the real person? '' But Ulrich hesitantly resisted this, shaking his head.
Shining through the content of this inquiring assertion there was,
From the Posthumous Papers · z197
no doubt, a profound obviousness. The breezes and delights of these days were so tender and merry that the impression arose spontane- ously that man and world must be showing themselves as they really were: this transparency harbored a small, odd, suprasensory shud- der, such as is glimpsed in the flowing transparency of a brook, a transparency that allows the glance to see to the bottom but, when it arrives there, wavering, makes the mysterious colored stones look like fish scales, and beneath them what the glance had thought it was experiencing is truly concealed, without possibility of access. Agathe, surrounded by sunshine, needed only to disengage her glance a little to have the feeling of having stumbled into a supernatural domain; for the shortest interval she could easily imagine that she had come in contact with a higher truth and reality, or at least had come upon an aspect of existence where a little door behind the earth mysteri- ously indicated the way from the earthly garden into the beyond. But when she again limited the range of her glance to an ordinary span and let life's glare stream in on her once more, she saw whatever might actually happen to be there: perhaps a little flag being waved to and fro by a child's hand, merrily and without any kind of puzzled thought; a police wagon with prisoners, its black-green paint spar- kling in the light; or a man with a colorful cap contentedly turning a pile of manure; or finally a company of soldiers, whose shouldered rifles were pointing their barrels at the sky. All this seemed to have had poured over it something related to love, and everyone also seemed more ready to open themselves to this feeling than usual: but to believe that the empire oflove was now really happening would be just as difficult, Ulrich said, as imagining that at this moment no dog could bite or no person do anything evil.
The same happened with all the other attempts at explanation, which had in common with this one that they opposed some kind of person who was far off and true to people who were everyday, earth- bound, and bad and good, but at all events people as we know them. Brother and sister examined these ideal types one after the other, and could not believe in any of them. There was the feeling that on such festive days nature brought forth in her creatures all their hid- den goodness and beauty. Then there were the more psychological explanations, that people in this transparent, nuptial air did not show themselves as different in some magical way, but still displayed
Izg8 • THE MAN w·ITH0UT QUALITIES
themselves so as to be as lovable as they would like to be and saw themselves as being: sweating their egotism and inward-turned in- dulgence, as it were, out through their pores. And finally there is also the variation that people were showing their goodwill; to be sure, this cannot prevent them from doing evil, but emerges miraculously and unscathed on days like these from the evil will that usually governs them, like Jonah from the belly of the whale. But the most succinct explanation one heard was that this is the immortal part of man, which shimmers through the mortal part. All these imputations had in common that they located the real person in a part of him that, among the insubstantial remainder, does not come into play; and if the promising contact with this real self was a process clearly di- rected upward, there was also a second, no less abundant group of explanations, which directed this process just as clearly downward: these were all those according to which man is supposed to have lost his natural innocence through intellectual arrogance and all kinds of misfortune brought upon him by civilization. There are, therefore, two genuine people, who appear to the mind with the greatest punc- tuality in the same, constantly recurring situations, yet both these types-the one a divine superman, the other an animal-like infra- man-were on opposite sides of the person as he really is. Finally, Ulrich remarked dryly: "The only trait that remains as common, and also very characteristic, is that even when he is being good, a person does not seek the true person in himself but takes himself to be something else 'plus or minus'! "
But here brother and sister had arrived at a borderline case of that love for another that is so problematic and so gently entwines every- thing within it, and Agathe sighed in vexation, but not without charm. "Then all that remains of all this is just a 'mood'! " she said, disappointed. "The sun is shining. You get into a frame of mind! "
Ulrich added to this: "The social instincts stretch themselves out in the sun like mercury in the thermometer tube, at the expense of the egotistic instincts, which otherwise hold them more or less in bal- ance. Perhaps nothing else. "
"So an 'unconscious craving' like a schoolgirl's or schoolboy's! " Agathe continued. "They would like to kiss the whole world and have no idea why! So we can't say any more than that either? ''
They had suddenly become tired offeeling; and it sometimes hap-
From the Posthumous Papers · 1199
pened that in such a conversation, dealing only with their capacity for feeling, they neglected to use it. Also, because the surfeit of emotions that could nowhere find an outlet actually hurt, they sometimes got back at it with a little ingratitude. But when they had both spoken in this fashion, Agathe quickly looked sidelong at her brother. "That would," she protested, "be saying too little! "
The moment she said this, they both felt once more that they were not just relying on some subjective fantasy but were facing an invisi- ble reality. Truth was hovering in the mood inundating them, reality was under the appearance, transformation of the world gazed out of the world like a shadow!
The reality about which they felt so expect- ant was, to be sure, remarkably lacking a nucleus and only half com- prehensible, and it was a long-intimate half-truth, familiar and unfulfillable, that wooed credibility: not an everyday reality and truth for everyone, but a secret one for lovers. Obviously, it was not just caprice or delusion either, and its most mysterious insinuation whis- pered: "Just leave yourself to me without mistrust, and you'll dis- cover the whole truth! " Giving an account of this was so difficult because the language of love is a secret language and in its highest perfection is as silent as an embrace.
The thought "secret language" had the effect of making Agathe dimly recall that it was written somewhere: ''Whosoever abides in love abides in God, and God in him. He who has not love does not know God. " She did not know where.
Ulrich on the other hand, because she had said before that it was "just a mood," was considering an idea as sweetly temperate as the sound of a flute. One had only to assume that such a mood of being in love was not always just a transitory special state but was also, beyond its immediate occasion, capable of enduring and spreading; in other words, all you had to assume was that a person could be a lover alone and in accordance with his enduring being, in exactly the same way that he can be indifferent, and this would lead him to a totally changed way of life: indeed, presumably it would take him to an en- tirely unfamiliar world that would be present in his mind without his having to be considered mentally ill. This thought, that everything could be made different by one small step, indeed just by a move- ment that the mind merely had to let happen, was extremely seduc- tive. And suddenly Ulrich asked his sister with curiosity: ''What do
I. 200 • THE MAN WITH0 UT QUALITIES
you think would happen if we were to stop one of these people and say to him: 'Brother, stay with us! ' or 'Stop, 0 hastening soul'? ''
"He would look at us flabbergasted," Agathe replied.
"And then unobtrusively double his pace, or call a policeman," Ul- rich finished.
"He would probably think he'd fallen in with good-natured mad- men," Agathe added.
"But ifwe were to yell at him: 'You criminal, you piece of nothing! ' he probably wouldn't consider us crazy," Ulrich noted with amuse- ment, "but would merely take us to be 'people who think differently,' or 'members of a different party,' who had turned angry at him. "
Agathe frowned, smiling, and then they both again gazed into the human current that was pulling them along and flowing against them. Together they felt again the self-forgetfulness and power, the happiness and goodness, the deep and elevated constraint, that pre- dominate inside a vital human community, even if it is only the con-, tingent community of a busy street, so that one does not believe that there could also be anything bad or divisive; and their own sense of existence, that sharply bounded and difficult having-been-placed- here, that basic happiness and basic hostility, stood in marvelous contrast to this communal scene. They both thought the same; but they also thought differently, without its being obvious. They guessed each other's meaning; but sometimes they guessed wrongly. And gradually an indolence, indeed a paralysis of thinking, emanated from this double-pearled juxtaposition on the oyster shell of the world, as Ulrich called it rather scornfully, and they then parried it by laughing at each other, or about something.
But when this happened again Agathe said: "It always makes me so sadwhen we're forced to laugh at ourselves; and I don't know why I have to. "
Ulrich replied: "Nothing is funnier than opening one's eyes tore- ality when they're still filled with the inner soul! "
But Agathe did not pick up on this; she repeated: "Everything re- mains so uncertain. It seems to draw itselftogether and then extend itself again, without any shape. It pennits no activity, and the inac- tivity becomes unbearable. I can't even say that I really love these people, or that I love these real people, as they are when we look at them. I'm afraid our own feelings are pretty unreal! "
From the Posthumous Papers · I . 20 I
"But these people respond to each other in exactly the same way! " Ulrich retorted. "They want to love each other, yet at the decisive moment they think antipathy is more natural and healthier! So it's the same for everyone: We feel that real life has snapped off a possi- ble life! "
"But then tell me," Agathe retorted angrily, "why love always needs a church or a bed! "
"For heaven's sake"-Ulrich soothed his companion with a laugh-"don't speak so openly! " He touched her hand with his fin- gertips and went on, joking mysteriously: "All these people can also be called in public what you and I are in private: the unseparated but not united! "
It was not an assertion, merely a cajoling constellation of words, a joke, a candid little cloud of words; and they knew that feeling one- self chosen was the cheapest of all magic formulas and quite adoles- cent. Nevertheless, Ulrich's fraternal words slowly rose from the ground to a position above their heads. Agathe, too, now whispered jokingly: "Sometimes you feel your breath blow back from your veil still hot, like a pair of strange lips: that's how it sometimes seems to me-call it illusion or reality-that I'm you! " was her response, and her gentle smile drew silence closed like a curtain after it as it died away.
In such back-and-forth fashion they came to reproach the millions of loving couples who in their serious desire for certainty ask them- selves a hundred times a day whether they really and truly love each other, and how long it can last: who, however, don't have to fear con- juring up similar oddities.
1202
LOVE BLINDS. OR DIFFICULTIES WHERE THEY ARE NOT LOOKED FOR
Another of these world-oriented discussions went like this: "Then how would things stand when a love occurs between two so-called persons of different gender, which is as famous as it is gladly experi- enced? " Ulrich objected. "You probably are really partly in love with the person you think you're loving. "
"But what you're mostly doing is simply making a puppet of him! " Agathe interjected resentfully.
"In any event, what he says and thinks in the process also has its charm! "
"As long as you love him! Because you love him! But not the other way round! I f you've once understood how the other person means it, it's not only anger that's disarmed, as one always says, but for the most part love as well! "
Again it was Agathe who gave this passionate answer. Ulrich smiled. She must have banged her head pretty hard against this wall more than once.
"But at first you can like the other person's opinions, that's often involved in the beginning: the well-known marvelous 'agreeing about everything'; later, of course, you no longer understand it at all," he said placatingly, and asked: "But deeds? Does love depend on deeds? ''
"Only insofar as they embody a person's sentiments. Or tum the imagination into a sort of monument! "
"But didn't we just decide it wasn't so much a matter of senti- ments? '' Ulrich recalled teasingly.
"It doesn't depend on anything at alii" Agathe cried. "Not on what the other person is, not on what he thinks, not on what he wants, and not on what he does! There are times when you despise a person but love him all the same. And there are times when you love a person
From the Posthu'TTWUs Papers · 1 2 0 3
and have the secret feeling that this person with the beard (or breasts), whom you think you've known for a long time and . . . trea- sure, and who talks about himself incessantly, is really only visiting love. You could leave aside his sentiments and merits, you could change his destiny, you could give him a new beard or different legs-you could leave aside almost the whole person, and still love him! As far as you happen to love him at all," she added, mitigating her statement.
Her voice had a deep ring, with a restless glitter buried in its depths like a flame. She sat down guiltily, having involuntarily jumped up from her chair in her zeal.
Ulrich summed up the result in balanced fashion: "Both contra- dictions are always present and form a team of four horses: you love a person because you know him and because you don't know him; and you know him because you love him and don't know him because you love him. And sometimes that grows strong enough to become quite palpable. Those are the well-known moments when Venus gazes through Apollo and Apollo through Venus at an empty scare- crow, and each is mightily surprised at having seen something there before. If, furthermore, love is stronger than astonishment, it comes to a struggle between them, and sometimes out of this struggle love emerges-even if it is despairing, exhausted, and mortally wounded-as the victor. But if love is not that strong, it leads to a battle between the people involved, to insults intended to make up for having been played for a simpleton . . . to terrible incursions of reality . . . to utter degradation. . . . " He had participated in this stormy weather of love often enough to be at ease describing it.
Agathe interrupted him. "But I fmd that these marital and extramarital affairs of honor are usually greatly overrated! " she objected.
"Love as a whole is overrated! The maniac who in his delusion pulls a knife and stabs some innocent person who just happens to be standing in for his hallucination-in love he's the normal one! " Ul- rich said, and laughed.
Agathe, too, smiled as she looked at him.
Ulrich became serious. "It's odd enough to have to think that there really are no two people who can agree spontaneously, without
1204 • THE MAN WITH0 UT QUALITIES
their opinions and convictions being more or less powerfully in- fluenced," he noted thoughtfully, and for a while this gave the con- versation a somewhat different turn.
Brother and sister were sitting in Ulrich's room, on either side of the long, darkly shining desk of heavy wood, whose center was now empty because apparently Ulrich was not working on anything. Each of them had lazily posed an arm on the desk and was looking at a small papier-mache horse standing in the vacant middle ground be- tween them.
"Even in rational thinking, where everything has logical and objec- tive connections," Ulrich went on, "it's usually the case that you un- reservedly recognize the superior conviction of someone else only if you have submitted to him in some way, whether as a model and guide, or as a friend or teacher. But without such a feeling, which has nothing to do with the case, every time you make someone else's opinion your own, it will only be with the silent reservation that you can do more with it than its originator; if indeed you weren't already out to show this fellow what unsuspected importance his idea really contained! Especially in art, most of us certainly know it would be impossible for us to do ourselves what we read, see, and hear; but we still have the patronizing awareness that ifwe were able to do any of these things, we could of course do them better! And perhaps it has to be that way, and lies in the active nature of the mind, which doesn't allow itself be filled up like an empty pot," Ulrich concluded, "but actively appropriates everything, and literally has to make it part of itself. "
He would gladly have added something more that occurred to him, and it would not let him rest, so he was already giving vent to his scruple before Agathe had any chance to respond. "But we should also ask ourselves," he suggested, "what sort of life would arise if all this were not so unfavorable. Our feelings ultimately want to be han- dled quite roughly, it appears, but in the other borderline case- when we assimilate someone else's sentiments without resistance, when we submit completely to someone else's feelings, indeed, when we reach a pure agreement with a second understanding-is there not a happiness that is pathologically tender, in fact almost anti-intellectual? And how could this light be produced without the shadow? '' This thought made him want to linger over the conversa-
From the Posthurrwus Papers · 1 2 0 5
tion; but although the idea was not entirely alien to Agathe either, she was occupied at the moment with smaller concerns. She looked at her brother for a while without speaking, struggling against what was coming over her, but then made up her mind to ask the offensive question, as casually as possible, whether that meant he had arrived at the considered conviction that "even only two people" could never be of one mind, and lovers under no circumstances whatever?
Ulrich was almost at the point of expressing through a gesture that this was neither to be taken as real nor worth talking about, when he was struck by his sister's misplaced warmth; he had to suppress a smile at this suspicious inquisitiveness, but in doing so lost his own more serious inquisitiveness and fell back again into the interrupted meny flow ofhis initial jokingway oftalking. "You yourselfbegan by belittling love! " he replied.
"Let's leave it at that! " Agathe decreed magnanimously. "Let's leave it at people not agreeing, when they're in love. But in ordinary life, which is certainly nothing less than loving, you must admit that all kinds of people have similar convictions and that that plays an enormous role! "
"They only think they have them! " Ulrich broke in.
"They agree with each other! "
"The agreement is imposed on them! People are like a fire that
immediately shoots out in all directions unless there's a stone on top! "
"But aren't there, for instance, generally prevailing opinions? " Agathe asked, intending to keep up with her brother.
"Now you're saying it yourself! " he countered. "'Prevailing! ' Since it's necessary that we agree, innumerable' arrangements of course exist to take care of the externals and delude us inwardly into thinking it so. In making us people of one mind, these arrangements aren't exactly subtle. Hypnotic suggestion, violence, intimidation, thoughtlessness, cowardice, and such things play a not inconsidera- ble role. The exercise of these arrangements is mostly alloyed with something base and corrupting. But iftheir influence stops for just a single moment, allowing reason to take over their affairs, you will very shortly see mankind start gabbling and fall to quarreling, the way the insane start running around when their warders aren't looking! "
1:206 · THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
Agathe recalled the walks in lovely weather where everything had been in unqualified harmony with everything else, and the people, even if they were apparently mistaken in believing that they loved each other, were at least very attentive to one another and filled with an almost solemn amiability and curiosity. It seemed appropriate to mention that love was, after all, the only thing in the world that made people of one mind, and that in every one of its varieties it did so from both sides voluntarily.
"But love is precisely one of the agreement machines. It has the lucky effect of making people blind! " Ulrich objected. "Love bli~: half the riddles about loving one's neighbor we've been trying to solve are already contained in this proposition! "
"The most one might add is that love also enables one to see what isn't there," Agathe maintained, concluding reflectively: "So really these two propositions contain everything you need in the world, in order to be happy despite it! "
In direct connection with this point, however, it was the tiny papier-mache horse, standing between them all alone in the middle of the desk, that bore the sole responsibility for their conversation. It was hardly a hand's breadth high; its neck was daintily curved; the brown of its coat was as tender and full as the stomach of a fifteen- year-old girl who has almost, but not yet quite, eaten too much cake, and its mane and tail, its hooves and reins, were of one single, deep- est black. It was a horse belonging to a court carriage, but as in leg- end two gods often grow into one, it was also a candy box in the form of a horse. Ulrich had discovered this little horse in a suburban con- fectioner's window and had immediately acquired it, for he knew it from his childhood and had loved it so intensely back then that he could hardly recall whether he had ever owned it. Fortunately, such mercantile poems are sometimes preserved over several generations and merely wander with time from the centers of commerce to dis- play windows in more modest parts of the city. So Ulrich had rever- ently installed this find on his desk, having already explained the significance of the species to his sister. The candy horse was a close relative ofthose circus animals-lions, tigers, horses, and dogs-that had lived at the same time, the time of Ulrich's childhood, on the posters of traveling circuses, and could no more be summoned from the raging expressions of their palpable but one-dimensional exis-
From the Posthumous Papers · 1 2 0 7
tence into fully developed life than this·little horse could jump through the glass pane of the shop window. Agathe had quickly un- derstood this, for the confectioner's horse constituted part of the large family of children's fancies which are always chasing their desires with the zigzag flight of a butterfly, until at last they reach their goal only to find a lifeless object. And wandering back along childhood's paths of love, brother and sister had even opened the horse and, with the mixed feelings attending the unsealing of a crypt, found inside a variety of round, flat little tents strewn with grains of sugar, which they thought they had not seen for decades, and which they enjoyed with the cautious courage of explorers.
In a distracted and pensive way, during the pause that had fol- lowed the last exchange with Ulrich, Agathe had been observing this small object with the magnetic soul that stood before them. In the far distances of this daydreaming, perhaps there also emerged from the river ofwords about similarities and differences in thinking, that idea of the unseparated but not united, and now this joined in a peculiar way with their companionship as children. Agathe finally landed on time's other shore of silence without knowing how long the interrup- tion had lasted, and she picked up the conversation where it had left off by asking with direct vehemence, as if something had been for- gotten: "But not every love has to blind! "
Ulrich, too, was immediately ready to be pressed into service again in pursuit of the exchange of words that had rushed away, as if he were not sure how long he had been standing there distracted. "Let's go on! " he suggested, and led with a random example: "Maternal love! "
"Doting, it's called," Agathe replied.
"In any case, it loves blindly, loves in advance. Won't let anything distract it," Ulrich stated, immediately continuing: "And its opposite, a child's love? "
"Is that love at all? " Agathe asked.
"There's a lot ofselfishness and instinctive need for protection and such things in it," Ulrich ventured, but added that it could also be, at least at certain stages, a real passion. Next, he asked about the love of friends.
They were again agreed: youth was the only time for passionate friendships.
1208 • THE MAN WITH 0 U T QUALITIES
"Love of honor? " Ulrich asked.
Agathe shrugged her shoulders.
"Love of virtue? "
She repeated the gesture, then thought it over and said: "Saints or
martyrs might call it love. "
"But then it's obviously a passion for overcoming the world, or
something like that, as well," Ulrich interjected. "An oppositional passion, but in any case something containing a lot ofcomplications. " "But there can also be a lot of complications in love of honor,"
Agathe added.
"Love of power? " Ulrich went on, assenting to her objection with
only a nod of his head.
"That's probably a contradiction in terms. "
"Perhaps," Ulrich agreed. "You might think that force and love are
mutually exclusive. "
"But they aren't/" Agathe exclaimed, having changed her mind in
the meantime. "Look: to be compelled! For women especially, being loved and being compelled is no contradiction at all! "
Ulrich responded in contradictory ways to this reminder of the possibility of such experiences in his sister's past; on the one hand he desired an informed explanation; on the other, the primordial igno- rance of the gods. Frowning, he thought over what his response should be, and finally said, clearly but hesitating involuntarily: "In that case the association ofthe words is indeed ambivalent. All power is laid low before love, and ifit humiliates love, then-"
"Let's not dwell on it," Agathe interrupted, and offered a new question: "Love of truth? "
Since he hesitated, "You should know all about that! " she added in jesting reproach; his long-drawn-out efforts to be accurate some- times made her impatient.
But the conversation was already inhibited, and slowly it became diffuse. "There, too, it's not easy to separate out the right concepts," Ulrich decided. "You can love truth in many different ways: as honor, as power, as virtue, or also like pure spring water and the air you breathe, or like-"
"Is that love? " Agathe interrupted him again. "That way you could love spinach too! "
"And why not? Even being partial to something is a form oflove.
From the Posthurrwus Papers · 1 2 o g
There are many transitions," Ulrich countered. "And 'love of truth' especially is one of the most contradictory tenns: If the concept of truth is stronger, love is correspondingly less, and in the last analysis you can hardly call the honorable or even the utilitarian need for truth 'love'; but if the concept oflove is strong, what you might call the purest, highest love, then truth ceases to exist. "
"Truth, unfortunately, arises in cold blood," Agathe remarked pointedly.
"To demand truth from love is just as mistaken as demanding jus- tice from anger," Ulrich agreed. "Emotion is injurious there. "
"Oh perhaps that's only men's talk! " Agathe protested.
"That's the way it is: Love tolerates truth, but truth does not toler- ate love," Ulrich confirmed. "Love dissolves truth. "
"But if it dissolves the truth, then it has no truth? " Agathe asked this with the seriousness of the ignorant child who knows by heart the story it wants to hear repeated for the twentieth time.
"A new truth begins," Ulrich said.
"But all that means is being released from all feelings," Ulrich ob- jected. "And God alone knows what would become of us if feelings did not appear in swarms, these loves and hates and sufferings and goodnesses that give the illusion of being unique to eve:ry individual. We would be bereft of all capacity to think and act, because our soul was created for whatever repeats itself over and over, and not for what lies outside the order ofthings. . . . " He was oppressed, thought he had stumbled into emptiness, and with an uneasy frown looked questioningly at his sister's face.
But Agathe's face was even clearer than the air that enveloped it and played with her hair, as she gave a response from memory. " 'I know not where I am, nor do I seek myself, nor do I want to know of it, nor will I have tidings. I am as immersed in the flowing spring of His love as ifI were under the surface ofthe sea and could not feel or see from any side any thing except water. ' "
"Where's that from? " Ulrich asked curiously, and only then dis- covered that she was holding in her hands a book she had taken from his own library.
Agathe opened it for him and read aloud, without answering: " 'I have transcended all my faculties up to the dark power. There I heard without sound, saw without light. Then my heart became bot- tomless, my soul loveless, my mind formless, and my nature without being. '"
Ulrich now recognized the volume and smiled, and only then did
From the Posthu11WUs Papers · 1187
Agathe say: "It's one ofyour books. " Then, closing the book, she con- cluded from memory: "'Are you yourself, or are you not? I know nothing of this, I am unaware of it, and I am unaware of myself. I am in love, but I know not with whom; I am neither faithful nor unfaith- ful. Therefore what am I? I am even unaware of my love; my heart is at the same time full oflove and empty oflove! ' "
Even in ordinary circumstances her excellent memory did not eas- ily rework its recollections into ideas but preserved them in sensory isolation, the way one memorizes poems; for which reason there was always in her words an indescribable blending of body and soul, no matter how unobtrusively she uttered them. Ulrich called to mind the scene before his father's funeral, when she had spoken the in- credibly beautiful lines of Shakespeare to him. "How wild her nature is compared to mine! " he thought. "I haven't let myself say much today. " He thought over the explanation of "day-bright mysticism" he had given her: All things considered, it was nothing more than his having conceded the possibility of transitory deviations from the ac- customed and verified order of experience; and looked at this way, her experiences were merely following a basic principle somewhat richer in feelings than that of ordinary experience and resembled small middle-class children who have stumbled into a troupe of ac- tors. So he had not dared say any more, although for days every bit of space between himself and his sister had been filled with uncom- pleted happenings! And he slowly began to concern himselfwith the problem of whether there might not be more things that could be believed than he had admitted to himself.
After the lively climax of their dialogue he and Agathe had let themselves fall back into their chairs, and the stillness of the garden closed over their fading words. Insofar as it has been said that Ulrich had begun to be preoccupied by a question, the correction must be made that many answers precede their questions, the way a person hastening along precedes his open, fluttering coat. What preoc- cupied Ulrich was a surprising notion, one that did not require belief but whose very appearance created astonishment and the impression that such an inspiration must never be allowed to be forgotten, which, considering the claims it asserted, was rather disquieting. Ul- rich was accustomed to thinking not so much godlessly as God-free, which in the manner of science rpeans to leave every possible turning
1188 · THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
to God to the emotions, because such a turning is not capable of fur- thering knowledge but can only seduce it into the impracticable. And even at this moment he did not in the least doubt that the way of science was the only correct way, since the most palpable successes of the human spirit had managed to come into being only since this spirit had got out of God's way. But the notion that had come upon him said: "What ifthis selfsame ungodliness turned out to be nothing but the contemporary path to God? Every age has had its own path- way of thought to Him, corresponding to the energies of its most powerful minds; would it not also be our destiny, the fate of an age of clever and entrepreneurial experience, to deny all dreams, legends, and ingeniously reasoned notions only because we, at the pinnacle of exploring and discovering the world, again turn to Him and will begin to derive a relationship to Him from a kind of experience that is just beginning? "
This conclusion was quite undemonstrable, Ulrich knew that; in- deed, to most people it would appear as perverse, but that did not bother him. He himself really ought not to have thought it either: the scientific procedure-which he had just finished explaining as legiti- mat~onsists, aside from logic, in immersing the concepts it has gained from the surface, from "experience," into the depths of phe- nomena and explaining the phenomena by the concepts, the depths by the surface; everything on earth is laid waste and leveled in order to gain mastery over it, and the objection came to mind that one ought not extend this to the metaphysical. But Ulrich now contested this objection: the desert is ~tan objection, it has always been the birthplace of heavenly visions, and besides, prospects that have not yetbeenattainedcannotbepre ·ctedeither! Butitescapedhimthat he perhaps found himself in a seoond kind of opposition to himself, or had stumbled on a direction leading away from his own: Paul calls faith the expectation of things hoped{or and belief in things ·not seen, a statement thought out to the point of radiant clarity; and Ul- rich's opposition to the Pauline statement, which is one of the basic tenets of the educated person, was among the strongest he bore in his heart. Faith as a diminished form ofknowingwas abhorrent to his being, it is always "against one's better knowl~ge"; on the other hand, it had been given to him to recognize in the "intimation 'to the best of' one's knowledge" a special condition and an area in which
From the Posthumous Papers · 1189
exploring minds could roam. That his opposition had now weakened was later to cost him much effort, but for the moment he did not even notice it, for he was preoccupied and charmed by a swarm of incidental considerations.
He singled out examples. Life was becoming more and more ho- mogeneous and impersonal. Something mechanical, stereotypical, statistical, and serial was insinuating itself into every entertainment, excitement, recreation, even into the passions. The life will was spreading out and becoming shallow, like a river hesitating before its delta. The will to art had already become more or less suspicious, even to itself. It seemed as though the age was beginning to devalue individual life without being able to make up the loss through new collective achievements. This was the face it wore. And this face, which was so hard to understand; which he had once loved and had attempted to remold in the muddy crater of a deeply rumbling vol- cano, because he felt himselfyoung, like a thousand others; and from which he had turned away like these thousands because he could not gain control over this horribly contorted sight-this face was trans- figured, becoming peaceful, deceptively beautiful, and radiant, by a single thought! For what if it were God Himself who was devaluing the world? Would it not then again suddenly acquire meaning and desire? And would He not be forced to devalue it, if He were to come closer to it by the tiniest step? And would not perceiving even the anticipatory shadow of this already be the one real adventure? These considerations had the unreasonable consistency of a series of adventures and were so exotic in Ulrich's head that he thought he was dreaming. Now and then he cast a cautiously reconnoitering glance at his sister, as if apprehensive that she would perceive what he was up to, and several times he caught sight ofher blond head like light on light against the sky, and saw the air that was toying with her hair also playing with the clouds.
When that happened, she too, raising herself up slightly, looked around in astonishment. She tried to imagine how it would be to be set free from all life's emotions. Even space, she thought, this always uniform, empty cube, now seemed changed. If she kept her eyes closed for a while and then opened them again, so that the garden met her glance untouched, as if it had just that moment been cre- ated, she noticed as clearly and disembodiedly as in a vision that the
1190 · THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
course that bound her to her brother was marked out among all the others: the garden "stood" around this line, and without anything having changed about the trees, walks, and other elements of the ac- tual environment-about this she could easily reassure herself-ev- erything had been related to this connection to make an axis and was thereby invisibly changed in a visible way. It may sound paradoxical; but she could just as well have said that the world was sweeter here; perhaps, too, more sorrowful: what was remarkable was that one thought one was seeing it with one's eyes. There was, moreover, something striking in the way all the surrounding shapes stood there eerily abandoned but also, in an eerily ravishing way, full of life, so that they were like a gentle death, or a passionate swoon, as if some- thing unnameable had just left them, and this lent them a distinctly human sensuality and openness. And as with this impression of space, something similar had happened with the feelings of time: that flowing ribbon, the rolling staircase with its uncanny incidental association with death, seemed at many moments to stand still and at many others to flow on without any associations at all. In the space of one single outward instant it might have disappeared into itself, with- out a trace ofwhether it had stopped for an hour or a minute.
Once, Ulrich surprised his sister during these experiments, and probably had an inkling of them, for he said softly, smiling: "The/e is a prophecy that a millennium is to the gods no longer than a blink of the eye! " Then they both leaned back and continued listening to the dream discourse of the silence.
Agathe was thinking: "Having brought all this about is all his doing; and yet he doubts every time he smiles! " But the sun was fall- ing in a constant stream ofwarmth as tenderly as a sleeping potion on his parted lips. Agathe felt it falling on her own, and knew herself at one with him. She tried to put herself in his place and guess his thoughts, which they had really decided they would not do because it was something that came from outside and not from their own cre- ative participation; but as a deviation it was that much more secret. "He doesn't want this to become just another love story," she thought, and added: "That's not my inclination either. " And immedi- ately thereafter she thought: "He will love no other woman after me, for this is no longer a love story; it is the very last love story there can be! " And she added: "We will be something like the Last Mohicans
From the Posthunwus Papers · 1 1 9 1
of love! " At the moment she was also capable of this tone toward herself, for if she summed things up quite honestly, this enchanted garden in which she found herself together with Ulrich was also, of course, more desire than reality. She did not really believe that the Millennium could have begun, in spite of this name Ulrich had once bestowed on it, which had the sound ofstanding on solid ground. She even felt quite deserted by her powers of desire, and, wherever her dreams might have sprung from, she didn't know where it was, bit- terly sobered. She remembered that before Ulrich, she really had more easily been able to imagine a waking sleep, like the one in which her soul was now rocking, which was able to conduct her be- hind life, into a wakefulness after death, into the nearness of God, to powers that came to fetch her, or merely alongside life to a cessation of ideas and a transition into forests and meadows of imaginings: it had never become clear what that was! So now she made an effort to call up these old representations. But all she could remember was a hammock, stretched between two enormous fingers and rocked with an infinite patience; then a calm feeling of being towered over, as if by high trees, between which she felt raised up and removed from sight; and finally a nothingness, which in some incomprehensible way had a tangible content: All these were probably transitory images of suggestion and imagination in which her longing had found solace. But had they really been only passing and half formed? To her aston- ishment, something quite remarkabie slowly began to occur to Agathe. "Truly," she thought, "it's as one says: a light dawns! And it spreads the longer it lasts! " For what she had once imagined seemed to be in almost everything that was now standing around her, calm and enduring, as often as she dispatched her glance to look! What she had imagined had soundlessly entered the world. God, to be sure-<llfferently from the way a literally credulous person might have experienced it-stayed away from her adventure, but to make up for this she was, in this adventure, no longer alone: these were the only two changes that distinguished the fulfillment from the presen- timent, and they were changes in favor of earthly naturalness.
47
W ANDERINGS AMONG PEOPLE
In the time that followed they withdrew from their circle of ac- quaintances, astonishing them by turning down every invitation and not allowing themselves to be contacted in any way. They stayed at home a great deal, and when they went out they avoided places in which they might meet people of their social set, visiting places of entertainment and small theaters where they felt secure from such encounters; and whenever they left the house they generally simply followed the currents of the metropolis, which are an image of peo- ple's needs and, with the precision of tide tables, pile them up in specific places or suck them away, depending on the hour. It amused them to participate in a style of living that differed from their own and relieved them for a time of responsibility for their usual way of life. Never had the city in which they lived seemed to them at once so lovely and so strange. In their totality the houses presented a grand picture, even if singly or in particular they were not handsome at all; diluted by the heat, noise streamed through the air like a river reach- ing to the rooftops; in the strong light, attenuated by the depths of the streets, people looked more passionate and mysterious than they presumably deserved. Everything sounded, looked, and smelled ir- replaceable and unforgettable, as ifit were signaling how it appeared to itself in all its momentariness; and brother and sister not unwill- ingly accepted this invitation to tum toward the world.
In doing so, they came upon an extraordinary discord. The experi- ences that they had not shared openly with each other separated them from other people; but the same problematic passion, which they continued to feel undiminished and which had come to grief not because of a taboo but because of some higher promise, had also transported them to a state that shared a similarity with the sultry intermissions of a physical union. The desire that could not find ex- pression had again sunk back within the body, filling it with a tender- ness as indefinable as one of the last days of autumn or first days of
From the Posthurrwus Papers · I I 93
spring. It was, nonetheless, not at all as if they loved every person they saw, or everything that was going on: they merely felt the lovely shadow of "how it would be" falling on their hearts, and their hearts could neither fully believe in the mild delusion nor quite escape its pull. It seemed that through their conversations and their conti- nence, through their expectation and its provisional limits, they had become sensitive to the barriers reality places before the emotions, and now perceived together the peculiarly double-sided nature of life, which dampens every higher aspiration with a lower one. This two-sided nature combines a retreat with every advance, a weakness with every strength, and gives no one a right that it does not take away from others, straightens out no tangle without creating new disorder, and even appears to evoke the sublime only in order to mis- take it, an hour later, for the stale and trite. An absolutely indissolu- ble and profoundly necessary connection apparently combines all happy and cheerful human endeavors with the materialization of their opposites and makes life for intellectual people, beyond all dis- sension, hard to bear.
The way the plus and minus sides of life adhere to each other has been judged in quite different ways. Pious misanthropists see in it an effluence of earthly decrepitude, bulldog types life's juiciest filet; the man in the street feels as comfortable within this contradiction as he does between his left and right hands, and people who are proper say that the world was not created in order to correspond to human ex- pectations but it is the other way round: these ideas were created in order to correspond to the world, and why is it that they never bring it to pass in the sphere of the just and the beautiful? As mentioned, Ulrich was of the opinion that this state of affairs served the produc- tion and preservation of a middling condition of life, which more or less leaves it up to chance to mix human genius with human stupid- ity, as this condition itself also emerges from such a mixture; a long time ago he had expressed this by saying that the mind has no mind, and just recently, at Diotima's soiree, he had again talked about it at length as the great confusion of the emotions. But whether it had been recently or long ago, and no matter how obvious it might have been to continue the same thought, as soon as Ulrich began to do so he had the feeling that such words were coming from his mouth a few days too late. This time, he frequently found himself lacking in
1194 · THE MAN WITH 0 U T QUALITIES
desire to occupy himself with things that did not directly concern him, for his soul was prepared to submit to the world with all its senses, however this might tum out. His judgment was as good as disconnected from this altogether. Even whether something pleased him or not hardly mattered, for everything simply seized hold of him in a way that surpassed his capacity for understanding. This was as true for every general state of mind as for every particular and indi- vidual one; indeed, at times it was entirely without thought, and cor- poreal; but when it had lasted awhile and reached full measure, it became unpleasant or seemed ridiculous to him, and he was then ready, in a manner just as unfounded as the one in which he had first submitted, to retract that submission.
And Agathe in her fashion was experiencing pretty much the same thing. At times, her conscience was oppressed, and expected or made for itself new oppressions from the world she had left behind but that nonetheless proclaimed itself in all its power all around her. In the manifold bustle that fills day and night there was probably not a single task in which she could participate with all her heart, and her failure to venture into anything should not be regarded with the cer- tainty of blame or disdain, or even contempt. There was in this a re- markable peace! It might perhaps be said, to alter a proverb, that a bad conscience, as long as it is bad enough, may almost provide a better pillow on which to rest than a good one: the incessant ancillary activity in which the mind engages with a view to acquiring a good individual conscience as the final outcome of all the injustice in which it is embroiled is then abolished, leaving behind in mind and emotions a hectic independence. A tender loneliness, a sky-high ar- rogance, sometimes poured their splendor over these holidays from the world. Alongside one's own feelings the world could then appear clumsily bloated, like a captive balloon circled by swallows, or, muta- tis mutandis, humbled to a background as small as a forest at the periphery of one's field of vision. The offended civic obligations echoed like a distant and crudely intrusive noise; they were insignifi- cant, if not unreal. A monstrous order, which is in the last analysis nothing but a monstrous absurdity: that was the world. And yet every detail Agathe encountered also had the tensed, high-wire-act nature of the once-and-never-again, the nature of discovery, which is magi-
From the Posthumous Papers · 1195
cal and admits of no repetition; and whenever she wanted to speak of this, she did so in the awareness that no word can be uttered twice without changing its meaning.
So the attitude of brother and sister toward the world at this time was a not entirely irreproachable expression of confident benevo- lence, containing its own brand of parallel attraction and repulsion in a state of feeling that hovered like a rainbow, instead of these oppo- sites combining in the stasis that corresponds to the self-confident state of every day. And something else was connected with this: in the days following that strange night, the tone of their conversations changed too; the echo of destiny faded, and the progression became freer and looser; indeed, it sometimes volatilized in a playful flutter- ing of words. Still, this did not indicate a temporizing born of de- spondency as much as it indicated an unregulated broadening of the living foundations of their own adventure. They sought support in observing the ordinary ways in which life was carried on, and were secretly convinced that the equilibrium of this usual form of living was also a pretense. In this way it happened one day that their con- versation took a direction in which, despite some fluctuation, it per- sisted. Ulrich asked: "What does the commandment 'Love thy neighbor as thyself' really mean? "
"Love the person farthest away like thyself is what it means! " Agathe responded with the tenderest forbearance, to which her brother had a right in questions of loving one's fellowmen.
But Ulrich was not satisfied. "And what does it mean to say 'Love what you do not know'? To love someone you don't know, although you might well be convinced that after you got acquainted you wouldn't like each other? So, in the last analysis: to love him although you know him? '' he insisted more explicitly.
"That's clearly the situation most people are in, but they don't let it bother them! " Agathe replied. "They put doubt and confidence in- side each other! "
"They foresee nothing more in the commandment oflove than the reasonable prohibition against hurting each other so long as it seiVes no purpose," Ulrich offered.
But Agathe said that that would be the insipid rule of thumb "What you don't want someone to do to you, don't do to anyone
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else," and it was impossible that the entire purpose of this high- mindedly passionate, cheerfully generous task could be to love a stranger without even asking who he was!
"Perhaps the word 'love' here is only an expression that has taken far too great a swing to overcome the obstacles? '' Ulrich reflected. But Agathe insisted that it really did mean "love him! " and "without any particular reason," and that it was not to be haggled over, so Ul- rich yielded. ''What it means is: Love him in spite ofwhat you know! " he objected. "And before you know him! " Agathe repeated and un- derlined it once again: "At least, without knowing him! "
But she stopped abruptly and looked at her brother, bewildered. "But what is it you really love in a person if you don't know him at all? '' she asked impatiently.
Thus the playful questions took on various forms as they sped back and forth. But Ulrich did not hasten to his sister's aid. He was of the opinion that to love something means to prefer it over other things, and that surely assumed a certain knowing.
"Almost everybody loves himself best, and knows himself least! " Agathe threw in.
"True love is independent of merit and reward," Ulrich con- firmed, mimicking a moralizing tone and shrugging his shoulders.
"Something's wrong here! "
"A lot's wrong! " he ventured.
"And ifyou love everything? Ifyou're supposed to love the whole
world, the way you are today? What is it then that you're loving? You would say: 'Nothing special'! " Agathe laughed.
"Haven't you noticed, too, that today it's downright disturbing if you happen to meet a person who is so beautiful that you have to say something personal about it? '' he asked her.
'Then it's not a feeling about the real world and the real person! " she said firmly.
"So then we have to tackle the question as to what part of this per- son it's true of, or what metamorphosis and transformation of the real person and the real world," Ulrich said, softly but emphatically.
After a short pause, Agathe answered, with a timid conscience: "Perhaps that is the real person? '' But Ulrich hesitantly resisted this, shaking his head.
Shining through the content of this inquiring assertion there was,
From the Posthumous Papers · z197
no doubt, a profound obviousness. The breezes and delights of these days were so tender and merry that the impression arose spontane- ously that man and world must be showing themselves as they really were: this transparency harbored a small, odd, suprasensory shud- der, such as is glimpsed in the flowing transparency of a brook, a transparency that allows the glance to see to the bottom but, when it arrives there, wavering, makes the mysterious colored stones look like fish scales, and beneath them what the glance had thought it was experiencing is truly concealed, without possibility of access. Agathe, surrounded by sunshine, needed only to disengage her glance a little to have the feeling of having stumbled into a supernatural domain; for the shortest interval she could easily imagine that she had come in contact with a higher truth and reality, or at least had come upon an aspect of existence where a little door behind the earth mysteri- ously indicated the way from the earthly garden into the beyond. But when she again limited the range of her glance to an ordinary span and let life's glare stream in on her once more, she saw whatever might actually happen to be there: perhaps a little flag being waved to and fro by a child's hand, merrily and without any kind of puzzled thought; a police wagon with prisoners, its black-green paint spar- kling in the light; or a man with a colorful cap contentedly turning a pile of manure; or finally a company of soldiers, whose shouldered rifles were pointing their barrels at the sky. All this seemed to have had poured over it something related to love, and everyone also seemed more ready to open themselves to this feeling than usual: but to believe that the empire oflove was now really happening would be just as difficult, Ulrich said, as imagining that at this moment no dog could bite or no person do anything evil.
The same happened with all the other attempts at explanation, which had in common with this one that they opposed some kind of person who was far off and true to people who were everyday, earth- bound, and bad and good, but at all events people as we know them. Brother and sister examined these ideal types one after the other, and could not believe in any of them. There was the feeling that on such festive days nature brought forth in her creatures all their hid- den goodness and beauty. Then there were the more psychological explanations, that people in this transparent, nuptial air did not show themselves as different in some magical way, but still displayed
Izg8 • THE MAN w·ITH0UT QUALITIES
themselves so as to be as lovable as they would like to be and saw themselves as being: sweating their egotism and inward-turned in- dulgence, as it were, out through their pores. And finally there is also the variation that people were showing their goodwill; to be sure, this cannot prevent them from doing evil, but emerges miraculously and unscathed on days like these from the evil will that usually governs them, like Jonah from the belly of the whale. But the most succinct explanation one heard was that this is the immortal part of man, which shimmers through the mortal part. All these imputations had in common that they located the real person in a part of him that, among the insubstantial remainder, does not come into play; and if the promising contact with this real self was a process clearly di- rected upward, there was also a second, no less abundant group of explanations, which directed this process just as clearly downward: these were all those according to which man is supposed to have lost his natural innocence through intellectual arrogance and all kinds of misfortune brought upon him by civilization. There are, therefore, two genuine people, who appear to the mind with the greatest punc- tuality in the same, constantly recurring situations, yet both these types-the one a divine superman, the other an animal-like infra- man-were on opposite sides of the person as he really is. Finally, Ulrich remarked dryly: "The only trait that remains as common, and also very characteristic, is that even when he is being good, a person does not seek the true person in himself but takes himself to be something else 'plus or minus'! "
But here brother and sister had arrived at a borderline case of that love for another that is so problematic and so gently entwines every- thing within it, and Agathe sighed in vexation, but not without charm. "Then all that remains of all this is just a 'mood'! " she said, disappointed. "The sun is shining. You get into a frame of mind! "
Ulrich added to this: "The social instincts stretch themselves out in the sun like mercury in the thermometer tube, at the expense of the egotistic instincts, which otherwise hold them more or less in bal- ance. Perhaps nothing else. "
"So an 'unconscious craving' like a schoolgirl's or schoolboy's! " Agathe continued. "They would like to kiss the whole world and have no idea why! So we can't say any more than that either? ''
They had suddenly become tired offeeling; and it sometimes hap-
From the Posthumous Papers · 1199
pened that in such a conversation, dealing only with their capacity for feeling, they neglected to use it. Also, because the surfeit of emotions that could nowhere find an outlet actually hurt, they sometimes got back at it with a little ingratitude. But when they had both spoken in this fashion, Agathe quickly looked sidelong at her brother. "That would," she protested, "be saying too little! "
The moment she said this, they both felt once more that they were not just relying on some subjective fantasy but were facing an invisi- ble reality. Truth was hovering in the mood inundating them, reality was under the appearance, transformation of the world gazed out of the world like a shadow!
The reality about which they felt so expect- ant was, to be sure, remarkably lacking a nucleus and only half com- prehensible, and it was a long-intimate half-truth, familiar and unfulfillable, that wooed credibility: not an everyday reality and truth for everyone, but a secret one for lovers. Obviously, it was not just caprice or delusion either, and its most mysterious insinuation whis- pered: "Just leave yourself to me without mistrust, and you'll dis- cover the whole truth! " Giving an account of this was so difficult because the language of love is a secret language and in its highest perfection is as silent as an embrace.
The thought "secret language" had the effect of making Agathe dimly recall that it was written somewhere: ''Whosoever abides in love abides in God, and God in him. He who has not love does not know God. " She did not know where.
Ulrich on the other hand, because she had said before that it was "just a mood," was considering an idea as sweetly temperate as the sound of a flute. One had only to assume that such a mood of being in love was not always just a transitory special state but was also, beyond its immediate occasion, capable of enduring and spreading; in other words, all you had to assume was that a person could be a lover alone and in accordance with his enduring being, in exactly the same way that he can be indifferent, and this would lead him to a totally changed way of life: indeed, presumably it would take him to an en- tirely unfamiliar world that would be present in his mind without his having to be considered mentally ill. This thought, that everything could be made different by one small step, indeed just by a move- ment that the mind merely had to let happen, was extremely seduc- tive. And suddenly Ulrich asked his sister with curiosity: ''What do
I. 200 • THE MAN WITH0 UT QUALITIES
you think would happen if we were to stop one of these people and say to him: 'Brother, stay with us! ' or 'Stop, 0 hastening soul'? ''
"He would look at us flabbergasted," Agathe replied.
"And then unobtrusively double his pace, or call a policeman," Ul- rich finished.
"He would probably think he'd fallen in with good-natured mad- men," Agathe added.
"But ifwe were to yell at him: 'You criminal, you piece of nothing! ' he probably wouldn't consider us crazy," Ulrich noted with amuse- ment, "but would merely take us to be 'people who think differently,' or 'members of a different party,' who had turned angry at him. "
Agathe frowned, smiling, and then they both again gazed into the human current that was pulling them along and flowing against them. Together they felt again the self-forgetfulness and power, the happiness and goodness, the deep and elevated constraint, that pre- dominate inside a vital human community, even if it is only the con-, tingent community of a busy street, so that one does not believe that there could also be anything bad or divisive; and their own sense of existence, that sharply bounded and difficult having-been-placed- here, that basic happiness and basic hostility, stood in marvelous contrast to this communal scene. They both thought the same; but they also thought differently, without its being obvious. They guessed each other's meaning; but sometimes they guessed wrongly. And gradually an indolence, indeed a paralysis of thinking, emanated from this double-pearled juxtaposition on the oyster shell of the world, as Ulrich called it rather scornfully, and they then parried it by laughing at each other, or about something.
But when this happened again Agathe said: "It always makes me so sadwhen we're forced to laugh at ourselves; and I don't know why I have to. "
Ulrich replied: "Nothing is funnier than opening one's eyes tore- ality when they're still filled with the inner soul! "
But Agathe did not pick up on this; she repeated: "Everything re- mains so uncertain. It seems to draw itselftogether and then extend itself again, without any shape. It pennits no activity, and the inac- tivity becomes unbearable. I can't even say that I really love these people, or that I love these real people, as they are when we look at them. I'm afraid our own feelings are pretty unreal! "
From the Posthumous Papers · I . 20 I
"But these people respond to each other in exactly the same way! " Ulrich retorted. "They want to love each other, yet at the decisive moment they think antipathy is more natural and healthier! So it's the same for everyone: We feel that real life has snapped off a possi- ble life! "
"But then tell me," Agathe retorted angrily, "why love always needs a church or a bed! "
"For heaven's sake"-Ulrich soothed his companion with a laugh-"don't speak so openly! " He touched her hand with his fin- gertips and went on, joking mysteriously: "All these people can also be called in public what you and I are in private: the unseparated but not united! "
It was not an assertion, merely a cajoling constellation of words, a joke, a candid little cloud of words; and they knew that feeling one- self chosen was the cheapest of all magic formulas and quite adoles- cent. Nevertheless, Ulrich's fraternal words slowly rose from the ground to a position above their heads. Agathe, too, now whispered jokingly: "Sometimes you feel your breath blow back from your veil still hot, like a pair of strange lips: that's how it sometimes seems to me-call it illusion or reality-that I'm you! " was her response, and her gentle smile drew silence closed like a curtain after it as it died away.
In such back-and-forth fashion they came to reproach the millions of loving couples who in their serious desire for certainty ask them- selves a hundred times a day whether they really and truly love each other, and how long it can last: who, however, don't have to fear con- juring up similar oddities.
1202
LOVE BLINDS. OR DIFFICULTIES WHERE THEY ARE NOT LOOKED FOR
Another of these world-oriented discussions went like this: "Then how would things stand when a love occurs between two so-called persons of different gender, which is as famous as it is gladly experi- enced? " Ulrich objected. "You probably are really partly in love with the person you think you're loving. "
"But what you're mostly doing is simply making a puppet of him! " Agathe interjected resentfully.
"In any event, what he says and thinks in the process also has its charm! "
"As long as you love him! Because you love him! But not the other way round! I f you've once understood how the other person means it, it's not only anger that's disarmed, as one always says, but for the most part love as well! "
Again it was Agathe who gave this passionate answer. Ulrich smiled. She must have banged her head pretty hard against this wall more than once.
"But at first you can like the other person's opinions, that's often involved in the beginning: the well-known marvelous 'agreeing about everything'; later, of course, you no longer understand it at all," he said placatingly, and asked: "But deeds? Does love depend on deeds? ''
"Only insofar as they embody a person's sentiments. Or tum the imagination into a sort of monument! "
"But didn't we just decide it wasn't so much a matter of senti- ments? '' Ulrich recalled teasingly.
"It doesn't depend on anything at alii" Agathe cried. "Not on what the other person is, not on what he thinks, not on what he wants, and not on what he does! There are times when you despise a person but love him all the same. And there are times when you love a person
From the Posthu'TTWUs Papers · 1 2 0 3
and have the secret feeling that this person with the beard (or breasts), whom you think you've known for a long time and . . . trea- sure, and who talks about himself incessantly, is really only visiting love. You could leave aside his sentiments and merits, you could change his destiny, you could give him a new beard or different legs-you could leave aside almost the whole person, and still love him! As far as you happen to love him at all," she added, mitigating her statement.
Her voice had a deep ring, with a restless glitter buried in its depths like a flame. She sat down guiltily, having involuntarily jumped up from her chair in her zeal.
Ulrich summed up the result in balanced fashion: "Both contra- dictions are always present and form a team of four horses: you love a person because you know him and because you don't know him; and you know him because you love him and don't know him because you love him. And sometimes that grows strong enough to become quite palpable. Those are the well-known moments when Venus gazes through Apollo and Apollo through Venus at an empty scare- crow, and each is mightily surprised at having seen something there before. If, furthermore, love is stronger than astonishment, it comes to a struggle between them, and sometimes out of this struggle love emerges-even if it is despairing, exhausted, and mortally wounded-as the victor. But if love is not that strong, it leads to a battle between the people involved, to insults intended to make up for having been played for a simpleton . . . to terrible incursions of reality . . . to utter degradation. . . . " He had participated in this stormy weather of love often enough to be at ease describing it.
Agathe interrupted him. "But I fmd that these marital and extramarital affairs of honor are usually greatly overrated! " she objected.
"Love as a whole is overrated! The maniac who in his delusion pulls a knife and stabs some innocent person who just happens to be standing in for his hallucination-in love he's the normal one! " Ul- rich said, and laughed.
Agathe, too, smiled as she looked at him.
Ulrich became serious. "It's odd enough to have to think that there really are no two people who can agree spontaneously, without
1204 • THE MAN WITH0 UT QUALITIES
their opinions and convictions being more or less powerfully in- fluenced," he noted thoughtfully, and for a while this gave the con- versation a somewhat different turn.
Brother and sister were sitting in Ulrich's room, on either side of the long, darkly shining desk of heavy wood, whose center was now empty because apparently Ulrich was not working on anything. Each of them had lazily posed an arm on the desk and was looking at a small papier-mache horse standing in the vacant middle ground be- tween them.
"Even in rational thinking, where everything has logical and objec- tive connections," Ulrich went on, "it's usually the case that you un- reservedly recognize the superior conviction of someone else only if you have submitted to him in some way, whether as a model and guide, or as a friend or teacher. But without such a feeling, which has nothing to do with the case, every time you make someone else's opinion your own, it will only be with the silent reservation that you can do more with it than its originator; if indeed you weren't already out to show this fellow what unsuspected importance his idea really contained! Especially in art, most of us certainly know it would be impossible for us to do ourselves what we read, see, and hear; but we still have the patronizing awareness that ifwe were able to do any of these things, we could of course do them better! And perhaps it has to be that way, and lies in the active nature of the mind, which doesn't allow itself be filled up like an empty pot," Ulrich concluded, "but actively appropriates everything, and literally has to make it part of itself. "
He would gladly have added something more that occurred to him, and it would not let him rest, so he was already giving vent to his scruple before Agathe had any chance to respond. "But we should also ask ourselves," he suggested, "what sort of life would arise if all this were not so unfavorable. Our feelings ultimately want to be han- dled quite roughly, it appears, but in the other borderline case- when we assimilate someone else's sentiments without resistance, when we submit completely to someone else's feelings, indeed, when we reach a pure agreement with a second understanding-is there not a happiness that is pathologically tender, in fact almost anti-intellectual? And how could this light be produced without the shadow? '' This thought made him want to linger over the conversa-
From the Posthurrwus Papers · 1 2 0 5
tion; but although the idea was not entirely alien to Agathe either, she was occupied at the moment with smaller concerns. She looked at her brother for a while without speaking, struggling against what was coming over her, but then made up her mind to ask the offensive question, as casually as possible, whether that meant he had arrived at the considered conviction that "even only two people" could never be of one mind, and lovers under no circumstances whatever?
Ulrich was almost at the point of expressing through a gesture that this was neither to be taken as real nor worth talking about, when he was struck by his sister's misplaced warmth; he had to suppress a smile at this suspicious inquisitiveness, but in doing so lost his own more serious inquisitiveness and fell back again into the interrupted meny flow ofhis initial jokingway oftalking. "You yourselfbegan by belittling love! " he replied.
"Let's leave it at that! " Agathe decreed magnanimously. "Let's leave it at people not agreeing, when they're in love. But in ordinary life, which is certainly nothing less than loving, you must admit that all kinds of people have similar convictions and that that plays an enormous role! "
"They only think they have them! " Ulrich broke in.
"They agree with each other! "
"The agreement is imposed on them! People are like a fire that
immediately shoots out in all directions unless there's a stone on top! "
"But aren't there, for instance, generally prevailing opinions? " Agathe asked, intending to keep up with her brother.
"Now you're saying it yourself! " he countered. "'Prevailing! ' Since it's necessary that we agree, innumerable' arrangements of course exist to take care of the externals and delude us inwardly into thinking it so. In making us people of one mind, these arrangements aren't exactly subtle. Hypnotic suggestion, violence, intimidation, thoughtlessness, cowardice, and such things play a not inconsidera- ble role. The exercise of these arrangements is mostly alloyed with something base and corrupting. But iftheir influence stops for just a single moment, allowing reason to take over their affairs, you will very shortly see mankind start gabbling and fall to quarreling, the way the insane start running around when their warders aren't looking! "
1:206 · THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
Agathe recalled the walks in lovely weather where everything had been in unqualified harmony with everything else, and the people, even if they were apparently mistaken in believing that they loved each other, were at least very attentive to one another and filled with an almost solemn amiability and curiosity. It seemed appropriate to mention that love was, after all, the only thing in the world that made people of one mind, and that in every one of its varieties it did so from both sides voluntarily.
"But love is precisely one of the agreement machines. It has the lucky effect of making people blind! " Ulrich objected. "Love bli~: half the riddles about loving one's neighbor we've been trying to solve are already contained in this proposition! "
"The most one might add is that love also enables one to see what isn't there," Agathe maintained, concluding reflectively: "So really these two propositions contain everything you need in the world, in order to be happy despite it! "
In direct connection with this point, however, it was the tiny papier-mache horse, standing between them all alone in the middle of the desk, that bore the sole responsibility for their conversation. It was hardly a hand's breadth high; its neck was daintily curved; the brown of its coat was as tender and full as the stomach of a fifteen- year-old girl who has almost, but not yet quite, eaten too much cake, and its mane and tail, its hooves and reins, were of one single, deep- est black. It was a horse belonging to a court carriage, but as in leg- end two gods often grow into one, it was also a candy box in the form of a horse. Ulrich had discovered this little horse in a suburban con- fectioner's window and had immediately acquired it, for he knew it from his childhood and had loved it so intensely back then that he could hardly recall whether he had ever owned it. Fortunately, such mercantile poems are sometimes preserved over several generations and merely wander with time from the centers of commerce to dis- play windows in more modest parts of the city. So Ulrich had rever- ently installed this find on his desk, having already explained the significance of the species to his sister. The candy horse was a close relative ofthose circus animals-lions, tigers, horses, and dogs-that had lived at the same time, the time of Ulrich's childhood, on the posters of traveling circuses, and could no more be summoned from the raging expressions of their palpable but one-dimensional exis-
From the Posthumous Papers · 1 2 0 7
tence into fully developed life than this·little horse could jump through the glass pane of the shop window. Agathe had quickly un- derstood this, for the confectioner's horse constituted part of the large family of children's fancies which are always chasing their desires with the zigzag flight of a butterfly, until at last they reach their goal only to find a lifeless object. And wandering back along childhood's paths of love, brother and sister had even opened the horse and, with the mixed feelings attending the unsealing of a crypt, found inside a variety of round, flat little tents strewn with grains of sugar, which they thought they had not seen for decades, and which they enjoyed with the cautious courage of explorers.
In a distracted and pensive way, during the pause that had fol- lowed the last exchange with Ulrich, Agathe had been observing this small object with the magnetic soul that stood before them. In the far distances of this daydreaming, perhaps there also emerged from the river ofwords about similarities and differences in thinking, that idea of the unseparated but not united, and now this joined in a peculiar way with their companionship as children. Agathe finally landed on time's other shore of silence without knowing how long the interrup- tion had lasted, and she picked up the conversation where it had left off by asking with direct vehemence, as if something had been for- gotten: "But not every love has to blind! "
Ulrich, too, was immediately ready to be pressed into service again in pursuit of the exchange of words that had rushed away, as if he were not sure how long he had been standing there distracted. "Let's go on! " he suggested, and led with a random example: "Maternal love! "
"Doting, it's called," Agathe replied.
"In any case, it loves blindly, loves in advance. Won't let anything distract it," Ulrich stated, immediately continuing: "And its opposite, a child's love? "
"Is that love at all? " Agathe asked.
"There's a lot ofselfishness and instinctive need for protection and such things in it," Ulrich ventured, but added that it could also be, at least at certain stages, a real passion. Next, he asked about the love of friends.
They were again agreed: youth was the only time for passionate friendships.
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"Love of honor? " Ulrich asked.
Agathe shrugged her shoulders.
"Love of virtue? "
She repeated the gesture, then thought it over and said: "Saints or
martyrs might call it love. "
"But then it's obviously a passion for overcoming the world, or
something like that, as well," Ulrich interjected. "An oppositional passion, but in any case something containing a lot ofcomplications. " "But there can also be a lot of complications in love of honor,"
Agathe added.
"Love of power? " Ulrich went on, assenting to her objection with
only a nod of his head.
"That's probably a contradiction in terms. "
"Perhaps," Ulrich agreed. "You might think that force and love are
mutually exclusive. "
"But they aren't/" Agathe exclaimed, having changed her mind in
the meantime. "Look: to be compelled! For women especially, being loved and being compelled is no contradiction at all! "
Ulrich responded in contradictory ways to this reminder of the possibility of such experiences in his sister's past; on the one hand he desired an informed explanation; on the other, the primordial igno- rance of the gods. Frowning, he thought over what his response should be, and finally said, clearly but hesitating involuntarily: "In that case the association ofthe words is indeed ambivalent. All power is laid low before love, and ifit humiliates love, then-"
"Let's not dwell on it," Agathe interrupted, and offered a new question: "Love of truth? "
Since he hesitated, "You should know all about that! " she added in jesting reproach; his long-drawn-out efforts to be accurate some- times made her impatient.
But the conversation was already inhibited, and slowly it became diffuse. "There, too, it's not easy to separate out the right concepts," Ulrich decided. "You can love truth in many different ways: as honor, as power, as virtue, or also like pure spring water and the air you breathe, or like-"
"Is that love? " Agathe interrupted him again. "That way you could love spinach too! "
"And why not? Even being partial to something is a form oflove.
From the Posthurrwus Papers · 1 2 o g
There are many transitions," Ulrich countered. "And 'love of truth' especially is one of the most contradictory tenns: If the concept of truth is stronger, love is correspondingly less, and in the last analysis you can hardly call the honorable or even the utilitarian need for truth 'love'; but if the concept oflove is strong, what you might call the purest, highest love, then truth ceases to exist. "
"Truth, unfortunately, arises in cold blood," Agathe remarked pointedly.
"To demand truth from love is just as mistaken as demanding jus- tice from anger," Ulrich agreed. "Emotion is injurious there. "
"Oh perhaps that's only men's talk! " Agathe protested.
"That's the way it is: Love tolerates truth, but truth does not toler- ate love," Ulrich confirmed. "Love dissolves truth. "
"But if it dissolves the truth, then it has no truth? " Agathe asked this with the seriousness of the ignorant child who knows by heart the story it wants to hear repeated for the twentieth time.
"A new truth begins," Ulrich said.
