No More Learning

The windows of the handsome old palace on the Ballhausplatz where Section Chief Tuzzi held sway often lit up the bare trees in the gardens across the way until late into the night, giving a thrill of awe to the better class of strollers who might be passing by in the darkness. For just as his sainthood penneates the figure of the humble carpenter Joseph, so the name Ballhausplatz penneated that palace with the aura of being one of a half-dozen mysterious kitchens where, behind drawn curtains, the fate of man- kind was being dished up. Dr. Arnheim was quite well infonned of. what was goiilg on. He received coded telegrams and, from time to time, a visit from one of his managers, bringing confidential informa7 tion from company headquarters; the windows of his hotel suite, too, were often lit up till all hours, and an imaginative observer might easily have thought that a secondary or counter-government was here in nightly session, a modem, apocryphal battle station of eco- nomic diplomacy.
Nor did Amheim for his part ever neglect to produce such an im-
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pression; without the power ofsuggestion in his appearance, a man i~ only a sweet watery fruit without a peel. Even at breakfast, which for this reason he never took in private but in. the hotel restaurant, open to all, he dictated his orders for the day to his shorthand-scribbling secretary with the authoritative air of the experienced ruler and the courteous poise of a man who knpws all eyes are upon him. Arnheim would have found none of the details inspiring in themselves, but since they not only combined to lay claim to his attention but also made room for the charms ofbreakfast, they produced a heightened sense of things. Human talent, he liked to think, probably,needs to be somewhat restricted ifit is to unfold to its best potential; the really fertile borderland between reckless freedom ofthought and a dispir- ited blankness of mind is, as everyone who knows life is aware, a very narrow strip of territory. Besides, he never doubted that it made all the difference who had an idea. Everyone knows that new and im- portant ideas seldom arise in only one· mind at a time, while, on the other hand, the brain of a mail who is accustomed to thinking is con- stantly breeding thoughts of unequal value, so that the end result, its final effective form, always comes to an idea from the outside, not merely from the thinker's mind but from the whole concatenation of his circumstances. A question from the secretary, a glance at a nearby table, a greeting from someone entering the room, or some such thing would always remind Amheim, at just the right moment,
. that he must keep up an imposing presence, and this perfecting of his appearance carried over to his thinking as well. It all culminated in his conviction, suiting his needs, that the thinking man must al- ways be simultaneously a man of action.
Nevertheless, he attached no great importance to his present oc- cupation; even though it was designed to achieve something that might, under certain circumstances, be remarkably profitable, he still felt that he was overstaying his time here. He repeatedly re- minded himself of that cold breath of ancient wisdom, Divide et im- pera, which applies to every transaction and calls for a certain subordination of each individual instance to the whole, for the secret of the successful approach to any undertaking is the same as that of the man who is loved by many women while himself careful to play no favorites. But it was no use. Fully mindful of the demands the world imposes on a man born to action on a grand scale, and no mat-
ter how often he took pains to search his soul, he could not close his eyes to the fact that he was·in love. It was an awkward fix, because a heart turned fifty is a tough muscle, not so easily stretched as that of a twenty-year-old in love's springtime, and it caused him considerable vexation. ·
It troubled him, to begin with, that his interest in his far-flung in- ternational concerns was withering like a flower cut off at the root, while everyday trivia like a sparrow on his windowsill or a waiter's smile positively blossomed into significance for him. As to his moral concepts, normally a comprehensive system for being always in the right, without any loopholes, he saw them shrinking in scope while taking on a certain physical quality. It could be called devotion, but this again was a word that usually had a much wider and anyway a quite different. meaning, for without devotion nothing can be achieved in any sphere: devotion to duty, to a superior or a leader, even devotion to life itself, in all its richness and variety, seen as a manly quality, had always seemed to him to be uprightness itself, which for all its openness had more to do with restraint than with a yielding up of the self. And the same might be said of faithfulness, which, confined to a woman, smacks of limitation, as was true of chivalry and gentleness, unselfishness and delicacy, all of them vir- tues usually thought of in association with her but losing their richest quality thereby, so that it is hard to say whether a man's experience of love only flows toward a woman as water tends to collect in the low- est, generally not the most acceptable spot, or whether the love of a woman is the volcanic center whose warmth sustains all life on earth. A supreme degree of male vanity therefore feels more at ease in male rather than female company, and when Amheim compared the wealth of ideas he had brought to the spheres of power with the state of bliss he owed to Diotima, he could not shake off the sense of hav- ing slipped somehow.
At times he longed for embraces and kisses like a boy ready to fling himself passionately at the feet o( the coldhearted beloved refusing him, or else he caught himselfwanting to burst out sobbing, or hurl a challenge to the world and, finally, carry off the beloved in his arms. Now, we all know that the irresponsible margin ofthe conscious per- sonality that breeds stories and poems is also the home base of all sorts of childish memories that surface on those rare occasions when
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the intoxication of fatigue, the release of alcohol, or some other dis- turbance brings them to light. Arnheim's bursts of feeling were no more substantial than these phantoms, so that he need not have been upset by them (thereby considerably increasing his original agita- tion), ifthese infantile regressions had not forced him to realize that his inner life was swarming with faded moral stereotypes. The stamp of general validity he was always at pains to give to his actions, as a man conscious of living with the eyes of all Europe upon him, sud- denly showed itself as having nothing to do with his inner life. This may be quite natural for anything supposed to be valid for everyone, but what troubled him was the implication that if what is generally valid is not the inward truth, then contrariwise the inward man is not generally valid. And so Amheim now felt haunted at every step not only by the urge to sound some deafening wrong note, or perfonn some foolishly illegitimate·act, but. also by the annoying thought that on some irrational level this. would be the right thing to do. Ever since he had come to know again the fire that makes the tongue go dry in the mouth, he was overcome with the sense of having lost a path he had always followed, the feeling that the whole ideology of the great man he lived by was only an emergency substitute for something that was missing.
This naturally brought his childhood to mind. In his early portraits he had big, dark, round eyes, like the paintings of the boy Jesus dis- puting With the doctors in the Temple, and he saw all his governesses and tutors standing around him in a circle, marveling at his precocity, because he had been a clever boy who had always had clever teach- ers. He had also proved himself to be a warmhearted, sensitive child who would tolerate no unfairness; since his life was far too sheltered to let any unfairness come his way, he made the wrongs ofothers his own where he came across them, and got himselfinto fights on their account. This was quite an achievement, considering what obstacles were put in his way to prevent this very thing, so that it never took more than a minute for someone to come rushing up to pry him loose from his opponent. Because such fights lasted just long enough to give him a taste of some painful experience but were always inter- rupted in time to leave him with the impression of his own unflinch- ing courage, Arnheim still remembered them with self-satisfaction; and this lordly quality of courage that would shrink from nothing
passed later into his books and his principles, as becomes a man who needs to tell his contemporaries how to conduct themselves for self- respect and happiness.
This childhood state was still vividly present to his mind, while an- other condition, of a somewhat later period, that had succeeded and partly transformed it now appeared to be dormant or on the verge of petrifaction-ifthis is understood as turning not to stone, in the ordi- nary sense, but to diamonds. It was love, now startled into a new life by his contact with Diotima, and it was characteristic of Arnheim that his first youthful experience of love had nothing to do with women, or indeed any specific persons; this was a rather perplexing business he had never quite resolved for himself, even though in the course of time he had come to learn the most up-to-date explanations for it.
"What he meant was perhaps only the baffling manifestation of something still absent, like those rare expressions that appear on faces with which they have no connection, belonging rather to other, different faces suddenly intuited beyond the horizon of the visible; simple melodies in the midst of mere noise, feelings inside people, feelings he sensed inside himself, in fact, that were not yet real feel- ings when he tried to capture them in wor. ds, but only something inside him reaching outward, its tips already breaking the surface, getting wet, as things sometimes do reach out on fever-bright spring days when their shadows creep beyond them and come to rest so quietly, all flowing in one direction, like reflections in a stream. "
This was how it was expressed, much later on and in other accents, by a poet Arnheim esteemed because to know of this reclusive man ' who avoided all notoriety made one an insider; not that Arnheirn un- derstood him, for he associated such allusions with the talk about the awakening of a new soul that had been in fashion during his youth, or with the then popular pictures of reedy girls, painted with ·a pair of lips that looked like fleshy flower buds.
At that time, around the year 1887'-"good heavens, almost a gen- eration ago! " Amheim thought-he appeared in photographs as the "new man" of the period, in a high-buttoned black satin waistcoat with a wide, heavy silk cravat deriving from the Biedermeier style but meant to suggest the Baudelairean, with the help of an orchid (the latest thing) in his buttonhole, exerting a malevolent fascination on all who saw Arnheim junior on his way to dine and impress his youth-
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ful person on some robust businessmen friends of his father's. Por- traits of young Amheim at work ran to a slide rule peeping decora- tively from the breast pocket of a tweedy English sport jacket, worn quite comically with a towering stiff collar, which nevertheless heightened the effect of the head. That was how Amheim had looked, and he still could not keep from looking at his image with a certain approval. He had played good tennis when it was still played on laWns, with all the ~eal of a passion as yet reserved for the few; surprised his father by openly attending workers' meetings, after a student year in Zurich where he had become unsuitably acquainted with socialist ideas, which did not prevent 'him from galloping his horse recklessly through a working-class quarter of town on another day. In short, it had all been a whirl of contradictory but challenging new experiences which gave him the enchanting illusion of having been born at just the right time, an illusion so important to a young man, even though he realizes later on that its value does not lie in its rarity, exactly. As time went on and Amheim came to think more and more conservatively, he did wonder whether this ever-renewed feel- ing of being the last word wasn't part of nature's wastefulness; but he never gave it up, because he never did like to give up anything that had ever belonged to him, and his collector's nature had carefully preserved within him all there was at the time. But today it seemed to him, however rounded and various his life appeared to be, that he had been most particularly moved and most lastingly influenced by what had seemed at first the most unreal element of all: precisely that romantically expectant state of mind whispering to him that he belonged not only to the world of bustling activity but to yet another
world, suspended inside it, as if holding its breath.
This dreamy expectancy, restored to him in its full original fresh-
ness· by Diotima's influence, becalmed all activity and busyness now; the tumult of youthful conflict and hopeful, ever-changing vistas gave way to a daydream in which all words, events, and needs were basically the same deep down, away from their surface differences. At such moments even ambition was hushed; the world was a distant noise beyond the garden wall, as though his soul had overflowed its banks and was truly present to him for the flrst time. It cannot be top strongly emphasized that this was not a philosophy but as physical an experience as seeing the moon, though oveiWhelmed by daylight,.
hovering mutely in the morning sky. In such a state of mind even the young Paul Arnheim had calmly dined at select restaurants, dressed with care to attend all the social functions, done everything that had to be done but always, as it were, with no greater or lesser distance from one part of himself to the other than to or from the. next person or object; somehow the outer world did not leave off at his skin, and his inner world did not merely shine out through the window of re- flection, but both blended into a single undivided state of separate- ness and presence, as mild, calm, and lofty as a dreamless sleep. Morally it felt like a truly great indifference, a sense of all values being equal; nothing was minor or major: a poem and a kiss on a woman's hand were the equal in significance of a scholarly work in several volumes or some great act of statesmanship, and just as ev- erything eVil was meaningless, so, basically, everything good had become superfluous in this immersion in the tender primal kinship of all created things. Arnheim behaved quite normally, except that he was doing it in an intangible atmosphere of special significance, behind the tremulous flame of which the inner man stood motion- less, watching the outer man eating an apple or being measured for a new suit.
Was it illusion, then, or the shadow of a reality never to be quite understood? The only possible answer is that all religions, at certain stages of their development, have asserted the reality of this shadow, and so have all lovers, all romantics, all those with a hankering for the moon, for springtime, and the blissful dying of the days in early fall. Eventually it fades away, however, it evaporates and dries up, one cannot say which-until one day something else has taken its place and it is instantly forgotten as only unreal experiences, dreams, and illusions are forgotten. Since this primal and cosmic love experience is normally encountered the first time one falls in love, one usually thinks even later in life that one knows just what to make of it, re- garding it as part of the foolishness one may indulge in before one is old enough to vote. So this was how it was with him, but since for Arnheim it had never been associated with a woman, it could never quite leave his heart in the usual way, along with her; instead, it was overlaid by impressions received, after completing hi! s schooling, when he entered his father's business. Since he did nothing by halves, he soon discovered here that the productive and well-
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balanced life is a poem greater by far than any hatched out by a poet in his garret, and a different sort of thing altogether.
Now for the first time he showed his talent for being an exemplary character. The poem of life has this advantage over all other poems, that it is set in all capital letters, as it were, no matter what its content may be. Even the youngest trainee in a firm of world rank has the whole world circling around him, with continents peering over his shoulder, so that nothing he does is without significance, while the
· lone writer in his seclusion has at most flies circling around him _no matter how hard he tries to get something done. This is so obvious that many people, from the moment they begin to work in the me-
. dium of life itself, regard everything that used to move them before as "mere literature," meaning that the effect it has is at best weak and muddled, generally contradictory so that it cancels itSelf out, and anyway not in proportion to the fuss made over it. Arnheim was not quite like that, of course; he neither denied the noble influence ofart nor was capable of regarding anything that had once strongly moved him as foolishness or a delusion. When he recognized the superiority of his adult responsibilities over the dreamy outlook of his youth he took steps, guided by his new mature. insights, to effect a fusion of both kinds of experience. He did, in fact, what so many, certainly the majority of the professional classes, do after beginning their careers: far from wishing to turn their backs entirely on their former inter- ests, they find themselves for the first time in a serene, mature rela- tionship to the enthusiastic impulses of their younger years. Discovering the great poem of life, knowing their own part in it, re- stores to them the courage of the dilettante they had lost when they burned their own poems. Working on the poem of their own life, they can at last regard themselves as hom expert~ and set about per- meating their daily round with a sense of intellectual responsibility, feeling themselves faced with a thousand small decisions in making it moral and attractive, modeling themselves on their notion of how Goethe led his life and giving everyone to understand that without music, without the beauties of nature and the sight of animals and children at play, and without a good book, life would not be worth having. This soulful middle class is still, among Germans, the leading consumer of the arts and of all literature that is not too heavy; but its members understandably look down upon art and literature, which
they once regarded as the ultimate fulfillment, as upon an earlier stage of development, even though it may have been more perfect in its way than what fate allotted to them; or else they regard it much as a manufacturer of sheet metal, say, might regard a sculptor of plaster statues if he were weak enough to see any beauty in that sort of product.
Now Arnheim resembled this cultural middle class as a glorious hothouse double carnation resembles a weedy little pink growing wild at the roadside. He never thought in terms of a cultural revolu- tion or radical innovation, but thought only of the interweaving of the new into the traditional, a taking over, with gentle modifications and a moral reanimation, of the faded privileges of the powers that were. He was no snob, no worshiper ofthose who outranked him in society. Received at court and on terms with the high nobility and the leading government officialdom, he adjusted himselfto this environment not at all as an imitator but only as an amateur of the conservative feudal manner, one·who never forgets or seeks to make others forget his patrician, quasi-Goethean-Frankfurt, origins. But with this conces- sion his capacity for resistance was exhausted, and any greater dis- tanc~g of himself from greatness would have seemed to him untrue to life. He was deeply convinced that the creators of wealth-led by the businessmen who directed life and would be shaping a new e r a - were destined to take over at some point from the ruling powers, and this gave him a certain quiet arrogance, which had been proved valid enough by the subsequent course of events. But taking money's claim to power as a given, the question was still how the desired power was to be rightly used. The bank directors' and industrial mag- nates' predecessors had no problem; they were feudal knights who made literal mincemeat of their enemies, leaving the clergy to han- dle the morals. But while contemporary man has in money, as Arn- heim saw it, the surest control of society, a means as tough and
precise as the guillotine, it can also be as vulnerable as an arthritic- how painfully the money market limps and aches all over at the slightest draftl-and is most ·delicately involved with everything it controls. Because he understood this subtle interdependence of all the forms of life, which only the blind arrogance of the ideologue can overlook, Arnheim came to see the regal man of business as the syn- thesis of change and permanence, power and civility, sensible risk-
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taking and strong-minded reliance on information, but essentially as the symbolic figure of democracy-in-the-making. By the persistent and disciplined honing of his own personality, by his intellectual grasp of the economic and social complexes at hand,' and by giving thought to the leadership and structure of the state as a whole, he hoped to help bring the new era to birth, that age where the social forces made unequal by fate and nature would be properly and fruit- fully organized and where the ideal would not be shattered by the inevitable limitations of reality, but be purified and strengthened in- stead. Objectively put, he had brought about the fusion of interests between business and the soul by working out the overall concept of the Business King, and that feeling of love that had once taught him the unity of all things now formed the nucleus of his conviction that culture'and all human interests formed a harmonious whole.
It was at about this time, too, that Arnlieim began to publish his writings, and in them surfaced the term "soul. " He presumably re- sorted to it as a device, a flying start, a royal motto, since princes and generals certainly have no souls, and as for financiers, he was the very first to have one. It undoubtedly also played a part in his need to set up defenses that could not be breached by the business· mentality of those forming his intimate circle, and more specifically by the impe- rious nature and greater business sense of his father, beside whom he was beginning to assume the role ofthe aging crown prince. And it is equally certain that his ambition to master all worthwhile knowl- edge-a taste for polyhistory so consuming that no single man could have lived up to the goals he set himself-found in the soul a means to rise above all that his intellect could not encompass. In this he was a man of his time, which had recently developed a strong religious bent, not because it had a call to religion but only, it seems, out of an irritable feminine revolt against money, science, and calculation, to all ofwhich it succumbed with a passion. What was questionable and uncertain, however, was whether Arnheim, in speaking of the soul, believed in it; whether it was real to him, like his stock portfolio. He used the word to express something for which he had no other term. Driven by his need to use it in conversation-Arnheim was a talker who did not easily let anyone else get a word in-and finding that he made an impression, he came to use it more and more in his writings, referring to it as though its existence were as assured as that of one's
own back, even though one never gets to see it. And so he wrote with real fervor of something vague and portentous that is intetwoven with the all-too-factual world ofbusiness affairs as a profound silence is intetwoven with vivid speech. He did not deny the usefulness of knowledge; quite the contrary, he was himself an impressively busy compiler of data, as only a man who has all the resources at his com- mand can be, but once he had proved himself in that arena he would say that above and beyond this level of keenness and precision there was a higher realm of wisdom that was accessible only to the vision- ary. He spoke of the will by which nation-states and international business giants are founded, so as to let it be understood that with all his greatness he was nothing but an arm that could be moved only by a heart beating somewhere beyond the range of human vision. He held forth on technological advances or moral values in the most down-to-earth fashion, in terms familiar to the man in the street, only to add that such exploitation of nature and man's spiritual ener- gies amounted to nothing more than a fatal ignorance if the sense was lacking that they were merely the surface ripples of an ocean the immense depths of which were hardly touched by them. He deliv- ered such sentiments in the manner of the regent of an exiled queen who had received her personal instructions and orders the world accordingly.
This keeping the world in order was perhaps his truest and fiercest passion, a craving for power far surpassing everything even a man in his position could afford, which drove this man who was so powerful in the real world to withdraw at least once a year to his castle in East Prussia, where he dictated a whole book to his secretary. The strange sense of mission that had surfaced first and most vividly in his early days ofyouthful enthusiasm and still affiicted him from time to time, though with lessened intensity, had found this outlet for itself. In the thick of his global undertakings it came over him like a sweet trance, a longing for the cloister, murmuring to him that all the contradic- tions, all the great ideas, all worldly experience and effort, were a unity, not only as vaguely understood by what we call culture and humanity but also in a wildly literal and shimmeringly passive sense, as when on a morbidly lovely day one might gaze out over river and meadows, hands crossed in one's lap, unwilling to tear oneself away, evermore. In this sense, his writing was a compromise. And because
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there is only one soul, not within reach but in exile, from which it has only one way to make itself known to us in all its hazy ambiguity, while there are such countless, endless problems in the world to which its royal message can be applied, so, as the years went by, he found himselfin that grave embarrassment suffered by all legitimists and prophets when it is all taking too long to happen. Arnheim had only to sit down alone to write for his pen to start leading him, with a truly uncanny flow of words, from the soul to the problems of the mind, the moral life, economics, and politics, all brilliantly lighted from some invisible source and appearing in a clear and magically unifying illumination. There was something intoxicating in this ex- pansiveness, but it. depended on that split consciousness which alone makes creative composition possible for so many writers, in that the mind shuts out and forgets whatever does not happen to fit into its sc~eme. Speaking to another person, whose presence was a link to the rest of the world, Arnheim would never have let himself go so recklessly; but bent over a sheet of paper·that was ready to reflect his views, he joyfully abandoned himself to a metaphoric expression of his convictions, only a small portion of which had any basis in fact, while the greater part was a billowing cloud ofwords whose sole- and incidentally not inconsiderable-claim to reality was that it al- ways arose spontaneously in the same places.
Anyone inclined to find fault should remember that having a split personality has long since ceased to be a trick reserved for lunatics; at the present-day tempo, our capacity for political insight, for writing a piece for the newspapers, for faith in the new movements in art and literature, and for countless other things, depends wholly on a knack for being, at times, convinced against our own convictions, splitting off a part of our mind and stretching it to form a brand-new whole- hearted conviction. So it was another point in Amheim's favor that he never quite honestly believed what he was saying. As a man in his prime he had already had his say on anything and everything; he had his convictions, which covered much ground, and saw no barriers to going on spinning new convictions smoothly out of the old ones, in- definitely. A man whose mind worked to such good effect and who could switch it in other states of consciousness to checking balance sheets and estimating profits to be made on his deals could not fail to notice that there was no shape or set course to his activity, though it
continued·to expand almost inexhaustibly in every direction; it was bounded only by the unity of his person, and although Amheim could hold a large amount of self-esteem, this was not for him an intellectually satisfactory state of affairs. He tried blaming it on the residual element of irrationality that the informed observer can de- tect everywhere in life; he tried to. shrug it offon the grounds that in our time everything tends to overflow its borders, and since no man can quite transcend the weaknesses of his century, he saw in this a welcome chance to practice that modesty typical of all great men by setting up above himself, quite unenviously, such figures as Homer and Buddha, because they had lived in more favorable eras. But as time went on and his literary success peaked without making any real difference to his crown-princely state, that element of irrationality, the absence of tangible results, and his troubling sense of having missed his target and lost his original resolve became more oppres- sive. He surveyed his work, and even though he saw that it was good, he felt as though all these ideas were setting up a barrier between some haunting primal home and him. self, like a wall of diamonds growing daily more encrusted.
Something unpleasant of this sort had happened and left its mark on him just recently. · He had made use of the leisure he currently indulged himself in more frequently than was his habit, to dictate to his secretary an essay on the essential accord between government architecture and the concept of the state, and he had broken off a sentence intended to run "Contemplating this edifice, we see the si- lence of the walls" after the word ''silence," in order to linger for a moment over the image of the Cancelleria in Rome, whiph had just risen up unbidden before his inner eye. But as he looked at the type- script over his secretary's shoulder he noticed that,· anticipating him as usual, the secretary had already written: ". . . we see the silence of the soul. " That day Arnheim dictated no more, and on the following day he had the sentence deleted.
Compared with experiences that reached so far and so deep, what price the ordinary physical love for a woman? Sadly, Amheim had to admit to himself that it mattered just as much as the realization, sum- ming up·his life, that all roads to the mind start in the soul, but none lead back there again. There were of course many women who had enjoyed close relations with him; but other than the parasitic species
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they tended to be professionally engaged, educated women or artists, for :with these two kinds, the kept women and the self-sustaining types, it was possible to have a clear-cut understanding. His moral nature had always guided him into relationships where instinct and the consequent inevitable arrangements with women could some- how be dealt with rationally. But. Diotima was the first woman to penetrate into his pre-moral, secret inner life, and this almost made him look at her askance. She was only the wife of a government offi- cial, after all, socially most presentable, of course, but without that supreme degree of cultivation that comes only with power, while Arnheim could marry a daughter of American high finance or of an English duke. He had moments of recoiling with a primitive nursery antagonism, the naYvely cruel arrogance and dismay of the well-bred child taken for the first time to a city school, so that his growing infat- uation seemed to threaten him with disgrace. When at such mo- ments he resumed his business activities with the icy superiority of a spirit that had died to the world and been reborn to it, then the cool rationality of money, immune to contamination, seemed an extraor- dinarily clean force compared with love.
But this only meant that for him the time had come when the pris- oner wonders how he could have let himself be robbed of his free- dom without putting up a life-and-death struggle. For when Diotima said: ''What do the affairs of the world amount to? Un peu de bruit autour de notre dme . . . ," he felt a tremor go through the edifice of his life.
MOOSBRUGGER DANCES
Meanwhile Moosbrugger was still sitting in a detention cell at the district courthouse while his case was under study. His counsel had got fresh wind in his sails and was using delaying tactics with the au- thorities to keep the case from coming to a final conclusion:
Moosbrugger smiled at all this. He smiled from boredom.
Boredom rocked his mind like a cradle. Ordinarily boredom blots out the mind, but his was rocked by it, this time anyway. He felt like an actor in his dressing room, waiting for his cue.
If Moosbrugger had had a big sword, he'd have drawn it and chopped the head off his chair. He would have chopped the head off the table and the window, the slop bucket, the door. Then he would have set his own head on everything, because in this cell there was only one head, his own, and that was as it should be. He could imag- ine his head sitting on top ofthings, with its broad skull, its hair like a fur cap pulled down over his forehead; he liked that.
If only the room were bigger and the food better!
He was quite glad not to see people. People were hard to take. They often had a way of spitting, or of hunching up a shoulder, that made a man feel down in the mouth and ready to drive a fist through their back, like punching a hole in the wall. Moosbrugger did not believe in God, only in what he could figure out for himself. His con- temptuous terms for the eternal truths were: the cop, the bench, the preacher. He knew he could count on no one but himselfto take care of things, and such a man sometimes feels that others are there only to get in his way. He saw what he had seen so often: the inkstands, the green baize, the pencils, the Emperor's portrait on the wall, the way they all sat there around him: a booby trap camouflaged, not with grass and green leaves, just with the feeling: That's how it is. Then remembered things would pop into his head-the way a bush stood at the river bend, the creak of a pump handle, bits of different landscapes all jumbled up, an endless stock of memories of things he hadn't realized he'd noticed at the time. "I bet I could tell them a thing or two," he thought. He was daydreaming like a youngster: a man they had locked up so often he never grew older. "Next time I'll have to take a closer look at it," Moosbrugger thought, "otherwise they'll never understand. " Then he smiled sternly and spoke to the judges about himself, like a father saying about his son: "Just you lock him up, that good-for-nothing, he needs to be taught a lesson. "
Sometimes he felt annoyed, ofcourse, with the prison regulations. Or he was hurting somewhere. But then he could ask to see the prison doctor or the warden, and things fell into place again, like water closing over a dead rat that had fallen in. Not that he thought
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of it quite in these terms, but he kept having the sense almost con- stantly these days, even if he did not have the words for it, that he was like a great shining sheet of water, not to be disturbed by anything.
The words he did have were: hm-hm, uh-uh.
The table was Moosbrugger.
The chair was Moosbrugger.
The barred window and the bolted door were himself.
There was nothing at all crazy or out of the ordinary in what he
meant. It was just that the rubber bands were gone. Behind every thing or creature, when it tries to get really close to another, is a rub- ber band, pulling. Otherwise, things might fmally go right through one another. Every movement is reined in by a rubber b~d that won't let a person do quite what he wants. Now, suddenly, all those rubber bands were gone. Or was it just the feeling of being held in check, as if by rubber bands?
Maybe one just can't cut it so fine? . "For instance, women keep their stockings up with elastic. There it is! " Moosbrugger thought. "They wear garters on their legs like amulets. Under their skirts. Just like the rings they paint around fruit trees to stop the worms from crawling up. " .
But we mention this only in passing. Lest anyone suppose that Moosbrugger felt he had to stay on good terms with everything. It wasn't really like that. It was only that he was both inside and outside.
He was the boss now, and he acted bossy. He was putting things in order before they killed him off.
The moment he thought of any- thing, anything . he pleased, it obeyed him like a well-trained dog to whom you say: "Down, boy! " Locked up though he was, he had a tremendous sense of power.
On the dot, his soup was brought. On the dot, he was awakened and taken out for his walk. Everything in his cell was on the mark, strict and immovable. This sometimes seemed incredible to him. He had the strangely topsy-turvy impression that all this order emanated from him, even though he knew that it was being imposed on him.
Other people have this sort of experience when they are stretched out in the summery shade of a hedge, the bees are buzzing, and the sun rides small and hard in the milky sky: the world revolves around them like a mechanical toy. Moosbrugger felt it when he merely looked at the geometric scene presented by his cell.
At such times he noticed that he had a mad craving for good food; he dreamed of it, and by day the outlines of a good plate of roast pork kept rising up before his eyes with an uncanny persistence the mo- ment his mind turned back from other preoccupations. "Two por- tions! " Moosbrugger then ordered. "No, make it three! " He thought this so hard, and heaped up his imaginary plate so greedily, that he instantly felt full to bursting, to the point of nausea; he gorged him- self in his imagination. "Why," he won~ered, wagging his head, "why do I feel so stuffed, so soon after wanting to eat? Between eating and bursting lie all the pleasures of this world! Hell, what a world! There are hundreds of examples to prove how little space it gives you. To take just one, for instance: a woman you don't have is like the moon at night climbing higher and higher, sucking and sucking at your heart; but once you've had her, you feel like trampling on her face with your boots. Why is it like that? " He remembered being asked about it lots of times. One could answer: Women are women and men too, because men chase after them. But it was only one more thing that the people who asked all the questions wouldn't·really un- derstand. So they asked him why he thought that people were in ca- hoots against him. As if even his own body wasn't in cahoots with them! This was quite obvious where women were concerned, of course, but even with men his body understood things better than he did himself. One word leads to another, you know what's what,
you're in each other's pocket all day long, and then, in a flash, you've somehow crossed that narrow borderline where you get along with them without any trouble. But ifhis body had got him into this, it had better get him out of it again! All Moosbrugger could remember was that he'd been vexed or frightened, and his chest with its arms flailing had rushed at them like a big dog on command. That was all Moos- brugger could understand anyway; between getting along and being fed up there's only a thin line, . that's all, and once something gets started it soon gets scary and tight.
Those people who were always using those foreign words and were always sitting in judgment on him would keep throwing this up to him: "But you don't go and kill a man just for that, surely! " Moos- brugger only shrugged. People have been done in for a few pennies, or for nothing at all, when someone happened to feel like it. But he had more self-respect than that, he wasn't one of that kind. In time
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the rebuke registered with him; he found himselfwondering why he felt the world closing in on him, or whatever you might call it, time and again, so that he had to clear a space for himself by force, in order that the blood could drain out of his head again. He thought it over. But wasn't it just the same with thinking too? Whenever he felt in the right mood for doing some thinking, the pleasure of it made him want to smile. Then his thoughts stopped itching under the skull, and suddenly there was just one idea there. It was like the dif- ference between an infant's toddling along and a fine figure of a woman dancing. It was like being under a spell. There's the sound of an accordion being played, a lamp stands on the table, butterflies come inside, out of the summer night-that was how his thoughts came fluttering into the light of the one idea, or else Moosbrugger grabbed them with his big fingers as they came and crushed them, looking for one breathtaking moment like little dragons caught there. A drop of Moosbrugger's blood had fallen into the world. You couldn't see it because it was dark, but he could feel what was going on out there. The tangled mess smoothed itself out. A soundless dance replaced the intolerable buzzing with which the world so often tormented him. Everything that happened was lovely now, just as a homely girl can be lovely when she no longer stands alone but is taken by the hand and whirled around in a dance, her face turned upward to a staircase from which others are looking down at her. It was a strange business. When Moosbrugger opened his eyes and looked at the people who happened to be nearby at such a moment,
when everything was dancing to his tune, as it were, they, too, seemed lovely to him. They were no longer in league against him, they did not form a wall against him, and he realized that it was only the strain of getting the better of him that twisted the look of people and things like some crushing weight. At such times ·Moosbrugger danced for them. He danced with dignity and invisibly, he who never danced with anyone in real life, moved by a music that increasingly turned into self-communion and sleep, the womb of the Mother of God, and finally the peace of God himself, a wondrously incredible state of deathlike release; he danced for days, unseen by anyone, until it was all. outside, all out of him, clinging to things around him like a cobweb stiffened and made useless by the frost.
How could anyone who had never been through all this judge the
rest? Mter those days and weeks when Moosbrugger felt so light he could almost slip out of his skin, there always came those long stretches of imprisonment. The public prisons were nothing by com- parison. Then when he tried to think, everything inside him shriv- eled up, bitter and empty. He hated the workingmen's study centers and the night schools where they tried to tell him how to think-after all, he knew the heady feeling of his thoughts taking off with long strides, as if on stilts! They ~ade him feel as if he had to drag himself through the world on leaden feet, hoping to f'md some place where things might be different again.
Now he thought back to that hope with no more than a pitying smile. He had never managed to find a possible resting point midway between his two extremes. He was fed up. He smiled grandly at on- coming death.
He had, after all, seen quite a bit ofthe world. Bavaria and Austria, all the way to Turkey. Arid a great deal had happened during his life-· time that he had read about in the papers. An eventful time, on the whole. Deep down he was quite proud to have been a part of it all. Thinking it over bit by bit, he had to take it as a troubled and dreary business, but his own track did run right across it; looking back, you could see it clearly, from birth to death. Moosbrugger was far from feeling that he would actually be executed; he was executing himself, with the help of those other people, that was the way he looked at what was coming. It all added up to a whole, of sorts: the highways, the towns,the cops and the birds, the dead and his own death. It wasn't altogether clear to him, and the others understood it even less, though they could talk more glibly about it.
He spat and thought of the sky, which looks like a mousetrap cov- ered in blue. "The kind they make in Slovakia, those round, high mousetraps," he thought.
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88
ON BEING INVOLVED WITH MATTERS OF CONSEQUENCE
It is now high time to consider something previously touched upon in various connections, which might be formulated as: There is noth- ing so hazardous to the mind as its involvement with matters of great consequence.
A man wanders through a forest, climbs· a mountain and sees the world spread out below him, stares at his infant just put into his arms for th{l first time, or enjoys the good fortune ofholding a position in life envied by all. And we ask: What is it like for him? Surely, he thinks, this is all many-layered, deep, important; it's just that he doesn't have the presence of ~ind to take it at its word, so to speak. The marvel that is facing him and outside him, enclosing him like a magnetic casing, drains his mind and leaves it a blank. While his gaze is held fast by a thousand details, he secretly feels as if he had spent all' his ammunition. Outwardly the soul-drenched, sun-drenched, deepened or heightened moment glazes the world with a galvanic silver coating, down to the tiniest leaflets and their capillaries, but here inside, at the world's personal end, a certain lack of inner sub- stance makes itselffelt, in the form ofa big, vacuous, round 0. This condition is the classic symptom of making contact with all that is eternal and great, like dwelling upon the peaks of humanity and na- ture. Those of us who prefer to live with greatness-first and fore- most among whom will be found those great souls for whom little things simply don't exist-find their inward life drawn out of them involuntarily and stretched into an extended superficiality.
The danger ofhaving to do with great things may therefore also be regarded as a law ofthe conservation ofspiritual energy, and it seems to be more or less generally valid. The utterances of socially promi- nent persons of great influence are usually more vacuous than 'our own. Ideas closely involved with particularly estimable subjects usu-
ally look as though it is only their privileged status that saves them from being regarded as not up to snuff. The causes dearest to our hearts-the nation, peace, humanity, character, and similarly sacred objectives-sprout on their backs the cheapest flora of the mind. This would make ours a topsy-turvy world, unless we assume that the more significant the subject, the more inanely it may be discussed, in which case the world is turned right side up again.
This law, however, helpful a5 it was toward our understanding of European culture, is not always clearly in evidence, and in times of transition from one group of great causes to another, the mind th1~t seeks to serve some great cause may even seem subversive, although it is only changing its uniform. A transition of this kind was already noticeable when the people we are speaking of were having their anxieties and triumphs. There were already, for instance--to start with a subject of special concern to Amheim-books enjoying huge sales, though these were not yet the books most respected, even though great respect was reserved only for those books that had im- pressive sales. Footb'an and lawn tennis had already become influen- tial industries, but thertl was still some hesitation at the institutes of advanced technology when it came to setting up professorial chairs for teaching them. All in all, whether it was in fact the late lamented rakehell and admiral Drake who introduced the potato from Amer- ica, heralding the end of recurrent famines throughout Europe, or the less lamented, highly cultivated, and equally pugnacious Admiral Raleigh, or some anonymous Spanish sailors, or even that worthy ras- cal and slave trader Hawkins, it was a long time before it occurred to anyone to consider these men more important, thanks to the potato, than, say, the physicist AI Shirazi, who is known only for his correct
explanation of the rainbow. But with the bourgeois era a revaluation of such achievements began, which in Amheim's time was far ad- vanced and hindered only by some residual old-fashioned preju- dices. The quantity of the effect, and the effect of quantity, as the new, self-evident object of veneration, still struggled against an aging, blind, aristocratic regard for quality, but in the popular imagi- nation this struggle had already spawned fantastic hybrids, quite like the concept of the "great mind" itself, which, in the form we have come to know it in the last generation, is a blend of its significance-
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as-such and its potato-significance, for we lived in expectation of a man who would personify the solitary genius and yet be instantly un- derstandable to all and sundry like a nightingale.
It was hard to tell what to expect along these lines, since the haz- ~dousness of being involved with greatness is usually not perceived until such greatness is halfway past and gone. Nothing is easier than to look down on the flunky who visibly condescends to His Majesty's guests in His Majesty's name, but whether the man who treats Today respectfully in the name ofTomorrow is a flunky or not is usually not known until the day after Tol! lorrow. The hazard of being involved with great things includes the unpleasant certainty that while the things change, the hazard remains the same.
8g
ONE MUST MOVE WITH THE TIMES
Dr. phil. Arnheim had received a scheduled visit from two top execu- tives of his firm and had held a long conference with them; in the morning, all the papers and calculations still lay in disorder in his sitting room, for his secretary to deal with. Amheim had decisions to make before ·his firm's emissaries left by the afternoon train, and he always enjoyed this sort of situation for the pleasurable tension it never failed to arouse. In ten years' time, he reflected, technology will have reached the point when our firm will have its own business planes, and I shall be able to direct my team long distance during a summer vacation in the Himalayas. As he had reached his decisions overnight and had only to go over them and confirm them in the light ofday, he was at"the moment free. He had ordered his breakfast sent up and was relaxing with his first cigar of the day, mulling over last night's gathering at Diotima's, which he had been obliged to leave rather early.
This time, it had been a most entertaining party, with a large num-
her of the guests under thirty, few over thirty-five, almost still bohemians but already beginning to. be famous and noticed in the newspapers: not only native talents but visitors from all· over the world attracted by word that in Kakania a lady who moved in the highest circles was blazing a trail for the spirit to penetrate the world. It was, at times, like finding oneselfin a literary cafe, and Am- heim had to smile at the thought of Diotima looking almost intimi- dated under her own roof; but it had been quite stimulating on ~he whoJe and in any case an extraordinary experiment, he felt. His friend Diotima, disappointed with the fruitless meetings of the very eminent, had made a determined effort to give the Parallel Cam- paign an infusion of the latest trends in thought and had made good use of Amheim's contacts for the purpose. He merely shook his head when he remembered the conversations he had been obliged to lis- ten to, crazy enough, in his opinion, but one must give way to youth, he told himself; to simply reject them puts one in an impossible posi- tion. So he felt as it were seriously amused by the whole thing, which had been a bit much. all at once.
They had said to hell with . . . what was it, now? Oh yes, experi- ence. That personal sensory experience the earthy warmth and im- mediacy ofwhich the Impressionists had apostrophized fifteen years earlier, as though it were some miraculous flower. Flabby and mind- less, was their verdict on Impressionism now. They wanted sensual- ity curbed and a spiritual synthesis.
Now, synthesis probably meant the opposite of skepticism, psy- chology, scientific study, and analysis, all the literary tendencies of their fathers' generation. ·
So far as could be gathered, theirs was not so much a philosophical stance as, rather, the craving. of young bones and muscles to move freely, to leap and dance, unhampered by criticism. When they felt like it they would not hesitat,e to consign synthesis to the devil too, along with analysis and all reflection. Then they maintained that the mind needed the sap ofimmediate experience to make it grow. Usu- ally it was members of some other group who took this position, of course, but sometimes in the heat ofargument it could tum out to be the same people.
What fine slogans they came up with! They called for the intellec- tual temperament. And lightning thought, ready to leap at the
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world's throat! Cosmic man's sharply honed brain! And what else had he heard?
A new human race, restyled on the basis of an American world plan for production by r'nechanized power.
Lyricism allied to the most intense dramatism of life. Technicism-a spirit worthy ofthe machine age.
Bleriot-one of them had cried out-was at that very moment
soaring. over the English Channel at thirty-five miles an houri Ifwe could write this "Thirty-five Mile" poem we would be able to. chuck all the rest of our moth-eaten literature into the garbage!
What was needed was accelei:ationism, the ultimate speeding up of experience based on the biomechanics learned in sports training ll;lld the circus acrobat's precision of movement!
Photogenic rejuvenation, by means offilm . . .
Someone pointed out that a man was a mysterious innerspace, who should be helped to fmd his place in the cosmos by means of the cone, the sphere, the cylinder, and the cube. Whereupon an oppos- ing voice made itself heard, to the effect that the individualistic view of art underlying that statemen~was on its way out and that a future humanity must be given a new sense of habitation by means of com- munal housing and settlements. While an individualistic faction and a socialistic one were forming along these lines, a third one began by voicing the opinion that only religious artists were truly social- minded. At this point a group of New Architects was heard from, claiming leadership on the grounds that religion was at the heart of architecture, besides which it promoted love of one's country and stability, attachment to the soil. The religious facti<:>n, reinforced by the geometric one, averred that art was not a peripheral but a central concern, a fulfillment of cosmic laws; but as the discussion went on, the religionists lost the cubists to the architects, whom they joined in insisting that man's . relation to the cosmos was, after all, best ex- pressed through spatial forms that gave validity and character to the individual element. The statement was made that one had to project oneself deep into the human soul and give it a fixed three-dimen- sional form. Then an angry voice dramatically asked all and sundry what they really thought: What was more important, ten thousand starvinghuman beings or a work ofart? Since almost all ofthem were artists of one kind or another, they did in fact believe that art alone
could heal the soul of man; they had merely been unable to agree on the nature of this healing process, or on what claims for it should be put to the farallel Campaign. But now the original social group came to the fore again, led by fresh voices: 'the question whether a work of art was more important than the misery of ten thousand people raised the question whether ten thousand works ofart could make up for the misery of a single human being. Some rather robust artists proposed that artists should take themselves les's seriously, become less nar-cissistic. Let the artist go hungry and develop some social concern! they demanded. Life was the greatest and the only work of art, someone said. A voice boomed out that it was not art but hunger that brought people together! A mediating voice reminded everyone that the best antidote to the overestimation of the self in art was a thorough grounding in craftsmanship. After this offer of a compro- mise, someone made use of the pause, born of fatigne and mutual revulsion, to ask serenely whether anyone present really supposed that anything at all could be done before the contact between man and space had even been defined? This became the signal for tech- nologists, accelerationists, and the rest to take the floor again, and the debate flowed on, this way and that, for a good while longer. Eventually an accord was struck, however, because everyone wanted to go home, but not without reaching some kind of conclusion, so they all fell in with a statement to the general effect that while the present time was full of expectation, impatient, wayward,. and miser- able, the messiah for whom it was hoping and. waiting was ·not yet in sight.
Amheim reflected for a moment.
He had been the center of a circle throughout all this; whenever those on the outer fringe who could not hear or make themselves heard slipped away, others immediately took their place; he had clearly become the center of this gathering too, even when this was not always apparent during the somewhat unmannerly debate. After all; he had for a long time been well up on the subjects discussed. He knew all about the cube and its applications; he had built garden housing for his employees; he knew machines, what made them work, their tempo; he spoke effectively on gaining insight into the self; he had money invested in the burgeoning film industry. Recon- structing the drift of the discussion, he realized besides that it had by
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no means gone as smoothly as his memory had represented it. Such discussions move in odd ways, as though the contending parties had been assembled blindfolded in a polyhedron, each armed with a stick and ordered to go straight ahead. A confused and wearisome spec- tacle devoid of logic. But isn't this an image of the way things gener- ally go in life? Here, too, control is gained not by the restraints and dictates of logic, which at most function like a police force, but only by the untamed dynamic forces of the mind. Such were Arnheim's reflections as he remembered the attention that had been paid to him, and he decided that the new style in thinking could be likened to the process of free association, when the conscious mind relaxed its controls, all undeniably very stimulating.
He made an exception and lit a second cigar, though he did not normally give in to such sensual self-indulgence. And even·as he was still holding up the match and needed to contract his facial muscles to suck in the first smoke, he could not help smiling as he thought of the little General, who had started a conversation with him at the party the night before. Since the Arnheims owned a cannon and armor-plate works and were prepared to tum out vast quantities of munitions, if it came to that, Arnheim was ready to listen when the slightly funny but likable General (who sounded quite different from a Prussian general, far more unbuttoned in his speech but also, one might say, more expressive of an ancient culture-though, one would have to say, a declining culture) turned to him confidentially and-with such a sigh, downright philosophicl-commented on the discussion going on around therp, which at least in part, one had to admit, was radically pacifist in tone. ,
The General, as the only military officer present, obviously felt a little out ofplace and bemoaned the fickleness ofpublic opinion, be- cause some comments on the sanctity of liuman life had just met with general approbation.
"I don't understand these people," were the words with which he turned to Arnheim, seeking enlightenment fro~ a man of interna- tionally recognized intellect. "I simply don't see why these new men in all their ignorance keep talking about generals drenched in blood! I think I understand quite well the older men who usually come here, even though they're rather unmilitary in their outlook as well. When, for instance, that famous poet-what's his name? -that tall
older gentleman with the paunch, who's supposed to have written those verses about the Greek gods, the stars, and our timeless emo- tions: our hostess told me he's a real poet in an age that turns out nothing but intellectuals . . . well, as I was saying, I haven't read any of his works, but I'm sure I'd understand him, if it's true that he's noted mainly for not wasting his time on petty stuff, because that's what we in the army call a strategist. A sergeant-if I may resort to such a humble example-must of course concern himself with the welfare of every single man in his company; the strategist, on the other hand, deals with at least a thousand men at a time and must be prepared to sacrifice ten such units at once if a higher purpose de- mands it. I see no logic in calling this sort of thing a blood-drenched general in one case and a sense oftimeless values in the other! I wish you'd help me understand this if you can. "
Amheim's peculiar position in this city and its society had stung him into a certain, otherwise carefully watched, impulse to mockery. He knew whom the little military gentleman meant, though he did not let on; besides, it didn't matter, since he himself could have men- tioned several other·varieties ofsuch eminences who had unmistaka- bly made a poor showing this evening.
Glumly thinking it over, Amheim held back the smoke of his cigar between parted lips. His own situation in this circle had also been none too easy. Despite all his prominence, he had overheard quite. a number of nasty remarks that could have been aimed at him person- ally, and what they condemned was often nothing less than what he had loved in his youth, just as these young inen now cherished the pet ideas of their own generation. It was a strange feeling, almost spooky, to find himself revered by young men who, almost in the same breath, savagely ridiculed a past in which he had a secret share of his own; it gave him a sense of his own elaSticity, adaptability, and enterprising spirit-almost, one might say, the reckless daring of a well-hidden bad conscience. He swiftly pondered what it was that differentiated him from this younger generation. These young men were at odds with one another on every single point at issue; all they unambiguously had in common was their joint assault on objectivity, intellectual responsibility, and the balanced personality.
There was one thing in particular that'enabled Amheim to take a kind of spiteful joy in this situation. The overestimation of certain of
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his contemporaries, in whom the personal element was especially conspicuous, had always irked him.