No More Learning

"Will you go back to them now? " Bonadea asked.
"And save Moosbrugger from injustice? No; I don't even know
whether injustice is being done to him. What do I really know about him? I saw him once, just a glimpse in a courtroom, and I've read a few things that were written about him. It's as though I had dreamed that the tip ofyour breast is like a poppy leaf. Does that give me the right to think it is any such thing? "
He stopped to think. So did Bonadea. He was thinking, "One human being, when you think of it, means nothing more to another one than a string of similes. " Bonadea's thinking concluded with: "Come, let's get away from here. "
"That's impossible," Ulrich told her. "They would wonder about my disappearance, and then if something should leak out about your coming here, it could cause quite a scandal. "
Again they both fell silent, staring out the window together, into something that could have been a night in October, a night in Janu- ary, a woolen blanket, sorrow, or joy, though they didn't attempt to define it. ·
"Why do you never do the natural next thing? " Bonadea asked.
Pseudoreality Prevails · 633
634 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
He suddenly remembered a recent dream. He was one of those people who seldom have dreams, or at least never remember their dreams, so that it gave him a queer feeling to have this unexpected memory opening up and letting him in. In the dream, he had kept trying to cross a steep mountainside and was driven back, again and again, by violent dizzy spells. Without trying to interpret it, he now knew that the dream was about Moosbrugger, who never actually appeared in it. Since a dream image often has several meanings, it was also a physical representation of his mind's useless struggles to make some he. adway, as recently manifested again and again in his conversation and in his affairs, struggles that exactly resembled walking without a path to follow . and being unable to get beyond a certain point. He could not help smiling at the ingenuous concrete- ness of the dream imagery for this: smooth rock and slippery earth undertoot, the occasional lone tree to hold on to or to aim for, the abrupt increase in the steepness of the grade as he went. He had tried and failed to make it on a higher and a lower route and was growing sick with vertigo, when he said to someone with him, Let's give it up; there's the easy road down there in the valley that every- one takes! The meaning was obvious. Incidentally, it occurred to Ulrich that the person·with him might very well have been Bona- dea. It was quite possible that he had also dreamed of her nipple as a poppy leaf-some unconnected thing that might, to the groping touch, easily seem broad and jagged, the dark purplish hue of a mallow, floating like a mist from some as yet unlit cranny in the dream world.
Now he experienced a moment of that special lucidity that lights up everything going on behind the scenes of oneself, though one may be far from being able to express it. He understood the'rela- tionship between a dream and what it expresses, which is no more than analogy, a metaphor, something he often thought about. A metaphor holds a truth and an untruth, felt as inextricably bound up with each other. If one takes it as it is and gives it some sensual form, in the shape of reality, one gets dreams and art; but between these two and real, full-scale life there is a glass partition. If one, analyzes it for its rational content and separates the unverifiable from the verifiable, one gets truth and knowledge but kills the feel-
ing. Like certain kinds of bacteria that split an organic substance into two parts, mankind splits the originalli~ng body of the meta- phor into the firm substance of reality and truth, and the glassy un- reality of intuition, faith, and artifact. There seems to be nothing in between; and yet how often a vaguely conceived undertaking does succeed, if only one goes ahead without worrying it too much! Ul- rich felt that he had at last emerged from the tangle of streets through which his thoughts and moods had so often t~en him, into the central square where all streets had their beginning. And he touched on all this in answering _Bonadea's question as to why he never did the natural next thing. She probably did not understand his answer, but this was decidedly one of her good days; after thinking it over, she slipped her arm more firmly into his and summed it all up by saying: 'Well, in your dreams you don't think either; you only live through some story or other. " This was almost true. He squeezed her hand. Suddenly her eyes filled with tears again. They coursed slowly down her cheeks, and from her skin, bathed in those salty tears, there arose the indefinable scent of de- sire. Ulrich breathed it in and felt a great longing for this slippery nebulous state, for surrender and forgetfulness. But he pulled him- self together and led her tenderly to the door. At this moment he felt sure that there, was still something ahead of him and that he must not fritter it away in halfhearted attachments.
"You must go now," he said gently, "and don't be angry with me because I don't know when we can see each other again. I have a great deal to work out for myself just now. "
And wonder of wonders! Bonadea put up no resistance and said nothing in anger or wounded pride. Her jealousy was gone. She felt that she was herself part of a story. She felt like taking him in her arms, gues~ing that he needed to be brought down to earth again, and was tempted to make the sign of the cross over his forehead for his protection, as she did with her children. It was all so romantic that it never occurred to her that it could be the end. She put on her hat and kissed him, and then she kissed him again through her veil, so that the threads seemed to glow like red-hot wires.
With the help of Rachel, who had been guarding the door and lis- tening, Bonadea managed to slip away unseen, even though the party
Pseudoreality Prevails · 6 3 5
636 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
was breaking up and people were coming out. Ulrich pressed a big tip into Rachel's hand and complimented her on her presence of mind, making Rachel so ecstatic that her fingers unconsciously kept clutching his hand with the money. He had to laugh; when she blushed scarlet at this, he patted her on the shoulder.
THE TWO TREES OF LIFE AND A PROPOSAL TO ESTABLISH A GENERAL SECRETARIAT FOR PRECISION AND SOUL
That evening at the Tuzzis', there had been fewer guests than for- merly; attendance at meetings of the Parallel Campaign was falling off, and people tended to leave earlier. Even the last-minute appear- ance of His Grace-who incidentally looked worried and preoc- cupied, and was in a bad mood, in fact, because he had received disturbing news about the nationalist intrigues against his work- could not prevent the party from breaking up. People lingered on for a bit in the expectation that he had brought some special news, but then, when he gave no sign of having anything of the kind to report and paid scant attention to the remaining guests, even the last of them left. By the time Ulrich reappeared, he was shocked to see the rooms almost empty. Shortly aftelWlll'd only the "innermost circle" was left, joined by Section Chief Tuzzi, who had meanwhile come home.
His Grace had reverted to a favorite topic: "Of course we· can re- gard an eighty-eight-year-old monarch of peace as a symbol; it gives us so much to think about. But it must be giv. en a political content as well. Without that, it is only too natural fm: people to lose interest. In other words, as far as I am concerned, I've done all I could. The Ger- man Nationalists are furious with me for appointing Wisnieczky, whom they regard as a Slavophile, and the Slavs are furious because,
as far as they're concerned, when he was in the government he was a wolf in sheep's clothing. All that only goes to show that he is a true patriot who stands above parties, and I wouldn't think of dropping him! However, we must supplement this with all possible speed on the cultural front, so that people have something positive to go on. Our public-opinion survey of what the various population sectors want is moving far too slowly. An Austrian Year or a World Year of Austria is a splendid idea, of course, but I must say that every symbol must in due course tum into something real; that is to say, I can let myself be deeply moved by a symbol without necessarily understand- ing it, but after a while I am bound to tum away from the mirror of my heart and get something else done, something I have mean~hile found needs doing. I wonder if I have managed to make my point? Our admirable friend the lady of the house is doing her utmost, and the discussions that have been held in this house for months have been most fruitful, I'm sure, but attendance is falling off neverthe- less, and I have a feeling that we shall soon have to decide on some- thing definite. I don't know what it will be: perhaps a second steeple on St. Stephen's, or an Imperial and Royal Colony in Africa; it doesn't matter what-it's sure to tum into something else at the last moment anyway. The main thing is to harness the inventi~eness of the participants in time, before it all dribbles away. "
Count Leinsdorf felt that he had spoken to the point. Amheim now took the floor on everybody else's behalf. "What you say about the need, at times, to fructify thought by taking action, even if only pro tern, is most realistic and is true to life in general. You will be interested to know that there is a new mood, corresponding to what you say, among those of us meeting here regularly. W e are no longer being swamped with an endless stream of considerations; almost no new proposals are being put forward now, and the older proposals are hardly ever mentioned, or at any rate nobody is fighting for them in any persistent way. Everyone seems to realize that in accepting the invitation to take part in this campaign he has obligated himself to come to an agreement, so that any acceptable proposal would now stand a good chance of being approved. "
"And how are we coming along, my dear fellow? " said His Grace, turning to Ulrich, whom he had spotted meanwhile. "Can we see our way to winding it up? "
Pseudoreality Prevails · 637
638 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
Ulrich had to admit that it was not so. An exchange of views can be drawn out on paper to everyone's pleasure for far longer than in per- son, and even the influx of proposed reforms had not abat~d. so that he was still founding organizations and referring them, in His Grace's name, to the various government departments whose readi- ness to deal with them had, however, shown a marked decline lately. This was what he had to report.
"No wonder," His Grace commented, turning to the others. "There's no dearth of patriotism among the population, but one would have to be as well informed as'an encyclopedia to satisfy all the people on every point they bring up. Our go-vernment departments simply can't cope, which proves that the time has come for us to in- tervene from above. "
"In this connection"-Arnheim spoke up again-"Your Grace might be interested to note that General von Bordwehr has been at- tracting increasing interest in the Council oflate. "
Count Leinsdorflooked at the General for the first time. "In what way? " he asked witho-ut in the least bothering to mask the rudeness ofhis question. .
"Oh, how very embarrassing! I never intended anything of the kind," Stumm von Bordwehr demurred bashfully. "The role of the soldier in the council chamber can only be a modest one; that's al- ways been a principle with me. But Your Grace may remember that at the very first meeting, only doing my duty as a soldier, so to speak, I suggested that ifthe Committee-had no better idea, they might re- member that our artillery has no up-to-date guns and our navy, for that matter, has no ships-not enough ships, that is, to defend the country ifthat should ever have to be done-"
"And? " His Grace interrupted him and shot a surprised, question- ing look at Diotima that made rio secret of his displeasure.
Diotima shrugged her beautiful shoulders in resignation; she had almost become hardened to the fact that wherever she might turn, the pudgy little General popped up like a nightmare, as if sponsored by some sinister forces.
"And lately, you see," Stumm von Bordwehr hastened to say before his modesty could get the better of him in the face of his suc- cess, "voices have been raised that would support such a proposal if someone were to come forward with it. It is being said, in fact, that
the Army and the Navy are a concept behind which all could rally, and a great concept too, after all, and His Majesty would be pleased as well. Besides, it would be an eye-opener for the Prussians-no offense, I hope, Herr von Arnheim. "
"Not at all, General. The Prussians wouldn't be at all disconcerted by it. " Arnheim waved this aside with a smile. "Besides, it goes with- out saying that whenever such Austrian concerns come up I am sim- ply not present, even while I most humbly take the liberty of listening in anyway. . . . "
"Well then, in any case," the General concluded, "opinions have in fact been expressed that the simplest thing would be not to keep talk- ing much longer but to settle for a military solution. For myself, I'd be inclined to think that this could be done in combination with something else, some great civilian concept, perhaps, but as I say, it's not for a soldier to interfere, and views to the effect that nothing bet- ter is likely to come out of all this civilian thinking have just been voiced in the most intellectual quarters. "
Toward the end of the General's speech, His Grace was listening with a fixed stare, and only involuntary twitchings in the direction of twiddling his thumbs, which he could not quite suppress, betrayed the strain of his painful inner workings.
Section Chief Tuzzi, whose voice was not usually heard on these occasions, now slipped in a comment, speaking slowly and in a low tone: "I don't believe the Ministry of Foreign Affairs would have any objections. "
"Aha, so the departments have been in touch on this subject al- ready? " Count Leinsdorfasked ironically, in a tone betraying his irri- tation. Unshaken, Tuzzi replied affably: "Your Grace is joking. The War Department would sooner welcome universal disarmament than have any truck with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. " He went on to tell a little story. "Your Grace must have heard about the fortifi- cations in the southern Tyrol that have been built during the last ten years at the insistence of the Chief of the General Staff. They are said to be perfectly splendid, quite the latest thing. They. have of course also been equipped with electrically charged barbed wire and huge searchlights that get their current from underground diesel engines; no one could say that we're behind the times in this. The only trouble is that the engines were ordered by the Artillery, and the fuel is pro-
Pseudoreality Prevails · 639
640 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
vided by the War Ministry's Departn:~entofWorks, according to reg- ulations, which is why the fortifications can't be made operational, b(;lcause the two authorities can't agree on whether the match that has to be used to start the engine should be regarded as fuel and supplied by the Department of Works, or as a mechanical part for which the Artillery is responsible. "
"How delightful! " Arnheim said, though he knew that Tuzzi was confusing a diesel engine with a gas engine and that even with gas it was a long time since matches had been used. It was the kind of story that circulates in government offices, full of enjoyable self-depreca- tion, and the Section Chief had told it in a tone of tolerant amuse- ment. Everyone smiled or laughed, none more appreciatively than General Stumm. "Of course, it's the civilians in the other depart- ments who are really to blame," he said, to take the joke a little fur- ther,. "because the minute we order something not regularly provided for in the budget, the Finance Ministry loses no time in reminding us that we don't know the first thing about the workings of constitutional government. So if war were to break out-God for- bidl-before the end of the fiscal year we would have to teiegraph the commanding officers of these fortifications at dawn, on the first day of mobilization, empowering them to buy matches, and if there were none to be had in those mountain villages, the war ·would have to be conducted with the matches in the pockets of the officers' orderlies. "
The General had probably gone a little too far in his elaboration of the joke; as its humor thinned out, the dire seriousness of the prob- lems facing the Parallel Campaign became apparent again. His Grace said pensively: "As time goes on . . . •:· but then he remem- bered that it is wiser in a difficult situation to let the others do the talking, and did not finish. The six persons present were silent for a moment, as though they were all standing around a deep well, staring down into it. '
"No," Diotima said, "that's impossible. "
What? all eyes seemed to ask.
'W e would only be doing what Germany is accused of: arming for
war. " Her soul had paid no attention to the anecdotes, or had forgot- ten them already, arrested at the moment of the General's success.
"But what is to be done? " Count Leinsdorf asked gratefully, but
still troubled. 'W e must look for some temporary expedient, at the very least. "
"Gennany is a relatively nai've country, bristling with energy," Amheim said, as though he felt called upon to ap9logize to his lady on behalf of his country. "It has been handed gunpowder and . schnapps. "
Tuzzi smiled at this metaphor, which struck him ~ more than daring.
"There's no denying that Germany is regarded with growing dis- taste in those circles to which our Campaign is meant to appeal. " Count Leinsdorf did not pass up the opportunity to slip this in. "And even, I am sorry to say, in those circles it has already appealed to," he added, for a wonder.
Amheim surprised him by stating that he was not unaware of it. 'W e Gennans," he said, "are an ill-fated nation. Not only do we live in the heart ofEurope; we even suffer the pains ofthis heart. . . . "
"Heart? " Count Leinsdorf asked involuntarily. He would have been prepared for "brain" aJ)d would have more readily acceded to this. But Amheim insisted on heart. "Do you remember," he asked, "that not so long ago the City Council of Prague awarded a very large order to France, although we had also made a tender, of course, and would have filled our order more efficiently and more cheaply? It is simply an emotional prejudice at work. And I must admit that I fully understand it. "
Before he could go on, Stumm von Bordwehr was happy to eluci- date. "All over the world," he said, "people are struggling desper- ately, but in Germany they're struggling even harder. All over the world a lot'of noise is being made, but even more in Germany. Busi- ness has lost touch with traditional culture everywhere, but most of all in Gennany. Everywhere the flower ofyouth is stuck into barracks as a matter of course, but the Germans have more barracks than any- on~else. And so We are bound, in a way, as brothers, not to hang back too far behind Germany," he concluded. "Ifall this sounds a bit para- doxical, I hope you'll all excuse me, but·such are the complications faced by the intellect nowadays. "
Amheim nodded in agreement. "America may be even worse than we are," he added, "but America is at least utterly nai've, without our intellectual conflicts. We Gennans are in every respect the nation at
Pseudoreality Prevails · ·641
642 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
the center of things, where all the world's currents crisscross. More than any other we need a synthesis. And we know it. W e have a sense of sin, as it were. But admitting this frapkly, at the outset, I think it is only fair to ackn'? wledge that we also suffer for the others, that we take their faults upon ourselves, so to speak, and that in a sense we are being cursed or crucified, however you might want to put it, on behalf of the whole world. A change of heart in Germany would probably be the most significant thing that could happen. I rather suspect that some vague idea ofthis-is present in that conflicted and, as it seems, somewhat impassioned opposition to us of which you have just spoken. "
Now Ulrich joined in: "You gentlemen underestimate the pro- German elements. I am reliably informed that any day now there is going to be a fierce demonstration against our campaign by those who consider us anti-German. Your Grace will see the people of Vienna demonstrating in the streets. There is to be a protest against the appointment of Baron Wisnieczky. Our friends Tuzzi and Arn- heim are assumed to be acting in collusion, while you, sir, are said to be working to undermine the German influence on the Parallel Campaign. "
Count Leinsdorf's eyes now reflected something between the im- passivity of a frog's gaze·and the irritability of a hull's. Tuzzi looked up slowly at Ulrich's face and gave him a warm, questioning look. Arnheim laughed heartily and stood up, trying to catch the Section Chief's eye with an urbane, humorous glance as a way of deprecating the absurd insinuation about the two of them,. but as he could not connect with him he turned to Diotima instead. Tuzzi had mean- while taken Ulrich by the arm and asked where he had got his infor- mation. Ulrich told him it was no secret but a widely accepted rumor he had heard at a friend's house. Tuzzi brought his face closer, forc- ing Ulrich to turn slightly aside from the others, and with this effect of privacy he suddenly whispered: "Don't you know yet why Arn- heim is here? He is an intimate friend ofPrince Mosyutov and very much persona grata with the Czar.
He keeps in touch with Russia and is supposed to influence this Campaign in a pacifist direction. Unofficially, of course, on his Russian Majesty's private initiative, as it were. A matter of ideology. Something for you,' my friend," he con- cluded in a mocking tone. "Leinsdorfhas no inkling ofit. "
Section Chief Tuzzi had this information through official chan- nels. He believed it because he saw pacifism as a movement that was in keeping with the outlook a beautiful woman would have, which would explain Diotima's being so enraptured with Amheim and Am- heim's spending more time in Tuzzi's house than anywhere else. Before this he had come close to being jealous. He could believe in "intellectual affinities" up to a point, but he did not care to use devi- ous methods to find out whether this point had been passed or not, so he had forced himself to go on trusting his wife. But while this was a victory of his· manly self-respect over mere sexual instincts, these could still arouse enough jealousyin him to make him see for the first time that a professional man can never really keep an eye on his wife unless he is willing to neglect his work. Though he told himself that if an engine driver could not keep his woman with him on the job, a man at the controls of an empire could afford even less to be a jeal- ous husband, it went against his character as a diplomat to settle for the noble ignorance in which this left him, and it undermined his professional self-assurance. So he was most thankful to be restored to his old self-confidence by this harmless explanation for everything that had worried him. There was even a little bonus in his feeling that it served his wife right that he knew all about Amheim, while she saw only the human being and never dreamed that he was an agent of the Czar. Now Tuzzi again enjoyed asking her for little scraps ofinforma- tion, which she undertook to provide with a mixture of graciousness and impatience. He had· worked out a whole series of seemingly harmless questions, the answers to which would enable him to draw his own conclusions. The husband would have been glad to take the "cousin" into his confidence, and was just wondering how to go about it without exposing his wife, when Count Leinsdorf again took the lead in the conversation. He alone had remained seated, and no- body had noticed anything of the struggle going on inside him as the problems piled up. But his fighting spirit seemed to be restored. He twirled his Wallenstein mustache and said slowly and firmly: "Some- thing will have to be done. "
"Have you come to·a decision, Count? " they asked him.
"I haven't been able to come up with anything," he said simply. "Still, something must be done. " He sat there like a man who does not intend to move from the spot until his will is done.
Pseudoreality Prevails · 643
644 • THE MAN WITH~UT QUALITIES
The effect was so powerful that everyone present felt the futile straining after an answer rattling inside him like a penny in a piggy bank that no amount of shaking will get out through the slot.
Arnheim said: "Now, really, we can't let ourselves be influenced by that sort of thing. "
Leinsdorf did not reply.
The whole litany of proposals intended to give the Parallel Cam- paign some content was gone over again:
Count Leinsdorf reacted like a pendulum, always in a different po- sition but always swinging the same way: This can't be done because we have to think of the Church. That can't be done, the freethinkers won't like it. The Association of ArchitectS has already protested against this. There are qualms about that in the Department of Finance.
So it went, on and on.
Ulrich kept out ofit: He felt as ifthe five persons taking their tum to speak had just crystallized out of some impure liquid in which his senses had been marinated for months now. Whatever had he meant by telling Diotima that it was necessary to take control of the imagi- nary, or that other time, when he had said that reality should be abol- ished? Now she was sitting here, remembering such statements of his, and probably thinking all sorts of things about him. And what on earth had made him say to her that one should live like a character in a book? He felt certain that she had passed all that on to Amheim by now.
But he also felt sure that he knew what time it was, or the price of eggs, as well as anyone. If he nevertheless happened, just now, to hold aposition halfway between his own and that of the others, it did not take some queer shape such as might result from a dim and ab- sent state of mind; on the contrary, he again felt flooded by that illu- mination he had noticed earlier, in Bonadea's presence. He recalled going With the Tuzzis to a racecourse last fall, not so long ago, when there was an incident involving great, suspicious betting losses, and a peaceful crowd had in a matter of seconds turned into a turbulent sea of people pouring into the enclosure, not only smashing every- thing within reach but rifling the cash boxes as well, until the police succeeded. in transforming them back into an assemblage ofpeople out for a harmless and customary good time. In such a world it was
absurd to think in terms of metaphors and the vague borderline shapes life might possibly, or impossibly, assume. Ulrich felt that there was nothing amiss with his perception of life as a crude and needy condition where it was better not to worry too much about tomorrow because it was hard enough to get through today. How could one fail to see that the human world is no hovering, insubstan- tial thing but craves the most concentrated solidity, for fear that any- thing out of the way might make it go utterly to pieces? Or, to take it a step further, how could a sound observer fail to recognize that this living compound of anxieties, instincts, and ideas, such as it is, though it uses ideas at most in order to justify itself, or as stimulants, gives those ideas their form and coherence, whatever defines them and sets them in motion? We may press the wine from the grapes, but how much more beautiful than a pool ofwine is the sloping vine- yard with its inedible rough soil and its endless rows of shining wooden stakes. In short, he reflected, the cosmos was generated not by a theory but-he was about to say "by violence," but a word he had not expected leapt to mind, and so he f'mished by thinking: but by violence and love, and the usual linkage between these two is wrong.
At this moment violence and love again did not have quite their conventional meaning for Ulrich. Everything that inclined him to- ward nihilism and hardness was implied in the word "violence. " It meant whatever flowed from every kind of skeptical, factual, con- scious behavior; a certain hard, cold aggressiveness had even entered into his choice of a career, so that an undercurrent of cruelty might have led to his becoming a mathematician. It was like the dense foli- age of a tree hiding the trunk. And if we speak of love not merely in the usual sense but are moved by the word to long for a condition profoundly different, unto the very atoms that make up the body, from the poverty of lovelessness; or when we feel that we can lay claim to every quality as naturally as to none; or when it seems to us that what happens is only semblances prevailing, because life- bursting with conceit over its here-and-now but really a most uncer- tain, even a downright unreal condition-pours itself headlong into the few dozen cake molds ofwhich reality consists; or that in all the orbits in which we keep revolving there is a piece missing; or that of all the systems we have set up, none has the secret of staying at rest:
Pseudoreality Prevails · 645
646 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
then all these things, however different they look, are also bound up with each other like the branches of a tree, completely concealing the trunk on all sides.
These two trees were the shape his life had taken, like a two- pronged fork. He could not say when it had entered into the sign of the tree with the hard, tangled branchwork, but it had happened early on, for even his immature Napoleonic plans had shown him to be a man who looked on life as aproblem he had set himself, some- thing it was his vocation to work out. This urge to attack life and mas- ter it had always been clearly discernible in him, whether it had manifested itself as a rejection of the existing order or as various forms of striving for a new one, as logical or moral needs or even merely as an urge to keep the body in fighting trim. And everything that, as time went on, he had called essayism, the sense ofpossibility, and imaginative in contrast with pedantic precision; his suggestions that history was something one had to invent, that one should live the history of ideas instead of the history of the world, that one should get a grip on whatever cannot quite be realized in practice and should perhaps end up trying to live as if one were a character in a book, afigure with all the inessential elements left out, so that what was left would consolidate itself as some magical entity-all these different versions of his thinking, all in their extreme formulations against reality, had just one thing in common:" an unmistakable, ruth- less passion to influence reality.
Harder to recognize because more shadowy and dreamlike were the ramifications of the other tree that formed an image for his life, rooted perhaps in some primal memory of a childlike relationship to the world, all trustfulness and yielding, which ·had lived on· as a haunting sense of having once beheld the whoie vast earth in what normally only fills the flowerpot in which the herbs of morality send up their stunted sprouts. No doubt that regrettably absurd affair of the major's wife was his only attempt to reach a full development on this gentle shadow side ofhis life; it was. also the beginningofa recoil that had never stopped. Since then, the leaves and twigs always drift- ing on the surface were the only sign that the tree still existed, though it had disappeared from view. This dormant half of his per- sonality perhaps revealed itself most clearly in his instinctive assump- tion that the active and busy side of him was only standing in for the
real self, an assumption that cast a shadow on his active self. In all he did-involving physical passions as well as spiritual-he had always ended up feeling trapped in endless preparations that would never come to fruition in anything, so that as the years went by his life had lost any sense of its own necessity, just as alamp runs out of oil. His development had evidently split into two tracks, one running on the surface in daylight, the other in the dark below and closed to traffic, so that the state of moral arrest that had oppressed him for a long time, and perhaps more than was strictly necessary, might simply be the result of his failure to bring these two tracks together.
Now, as he realized that this failure to achieve integration had lately been apparent to him in what he called the strained relation- ship between literature and reality, metaphor and truth, it flashed on Ulrich how much more all this signified than any random insight that turned up in one ofthose meandering conversations he had recently engaged in with the most inappropriate people. These two basic strategies, the figurative and the unequivocal, have been distinguish- able ever since-the beginnings of humanity. Single-mindedness is the law of all waking thought and action, as much present in a compelling logical conclusion as in the mind of the blackmailer who enforces his will on his victim step by step, and it arises from the exigencies oflife where only the single-minded control of circumstances can avert di- saster. Metaphor, by contrast, is like the image that fuses several meanings in a dream; it is the gliding logic of the soul, corresponding to the way things relate to each other in the intuitions of art and reli- gion. But even what there is in life of common likes and dislikes, ac- cord and rejection, admiration, subordination, leadership, imitation, and their opposites, the many ways man relates to himself and to na- ture, which are not yet and perhaps never will be purely objective, cannot be understood in other than metaphoric or figurative terms. No doubt what is called the higher humanism is only the effort to fuse together these two great halves oflife, metaphor and truth, once they have been carefully distinguished from each other. But once one has distinguished everything in a metaphor that might be true from what is mere froth, one usually has gained a little truth, but at the cost of destroying the whole value of the metaphor. The extrac- tion of the truth may have been an inescapable part of our intellec- tual evolution, but it has had the same effect of boiling down a liquid
Pseudoreality Prevails · 647
648 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
to thicken it, while the really vital juices and elements escape in a cloud of steam. It is often hard, nowadays, to avoid the impression that the concepts and the rules of the moral life are only metaphors that have been boiled to death, with the revolting greasy kitchen va- pors of humanism billowing around the corpses, and if a digression is permissible at this point, it can only be this, that one consequence of this impression that vaguely hovers over everything is what our era should frankly call its reverence for all that is common. For when we lie nowadays it is not so much' mit of weakness as out of a conviction that a man cannot prevail in life unless he is able to lie. We resort to violence because, after much long and futile talk, the simplicity of violence is an immense relief. People band together in organizations because obedience to orders enables them to do things they have long been incapable of doing out ofpersonal cc;mviction, and the hos- tility between organizations allows them to engage in the unending reciprocity ofblood feuds, while love would all too soon put everyone to. sleep. This has much less to do with the question ofwhether men are good or evil than with the fact that they have lost their sense of high and low. Another paradoxical result of this disorientation is the vulgar profusion of intellectual jewelry with which our mistrust of
· the intellect decks itself out. The coupling of a "philosophy" with ac- tivities that can absorb only a very small part ofit, such as politics; the general obsession with turning every viewpoint into a standpoint and regarding every standpoint as a viewpoint; the need of every kind of fanatic to keep reiterating the one idea that has ever come his way, like an image multiplied to infinity in a hall of mirrors: all these wide- spread phenomena, far from signifying a movement toward human- ism, as they wish to do, in fact represent its failure. All in all, it seems that what needs to be excised from human relations is the soul that finds itself misplaced in them. The moment Ulrich realized this he felt that his life, if it had any meaning at all, demonstrated the pres- ence of the two fundamental spheres of human existence in their separateness and in their way ofworking against each other. Clearly, people like himself were already being hom, but they were isolated, and in his isolation he was incapable of bringing together again what had fallen apart. He had no illusions about the value ofhis philosoph- ical experimentation; even ifhe observed the strictest logical consist- ency in linking thought to thought, the effect was still one of piling
one ladder upon another, so that the topmost rungs teetered far above the level of natural life. He Contemplated this with revulsion.
This could have been the reason he suddenly looked at Tuzzi. Tuzzi was speaking. As though his ear were receiving the first sounds of the morning, Ulrich heard him say: "I am in no position to judge whether our time is devoid of great human and artistic achievements as you say; I can only assure you that foreign policy is nowhere else so hard to determine as in this country ofours. It is fairly safe to predict that even in our great Jubilee Year, French foreign policy will be mo- tivated by the desire to settle scores and by colonialism, the English will be pushing their pawns to advantage on the world's chessboard, as their game has been characterized, and the Germans will be pur- suing what they call, not always unambiguously, their Place in the Sun. But our old Empire is so self-contained that it's anyone's guess in what direction we may be driven by circumstances. " It was as though Tuzzi ~ere trying to put on the brakes, to utter a warning. That whiff of unintended irony came only from the naively factual tone in which he dryly presented to them his conviction that to want for nothing in this world was highly dangerous. The effect on Ulrich was to perk him up, as if he had been chewing on a coffee bean.
Meanwhile Tuzzi kept harping on his warning note, and he ended by saying:
"Who can tak~ it upon himself, today, even to think of putting great political ideas into practice? It would take a criminal or a gam- bler courting bankruptcy. You surely wouldn't want that? The func- tion ofdiplomacy is to keep what we have. "
"Keeping what we have leads to war," Arnheim countered.
"It may, I suppose," Tuzzi conceded. "All one can do, probably, is to choose the most favorable moment for being led into it. Remem- ber Czar Alexander II? His father, Nicholas, was a despot, but he died a natural death. Alexander was a magnanimous ruler who began his reign by instituting sweeping liberal reforms, so that Russian lib- eralism turned into Russian radicalism, and Alexander survived three attempts to assassinate him, only to succumb to a fourth. " .
Ulrich looked at Diotima. There she sat, upright, alert, serious, vo- luptuous, and corroborated her husband: "That's right. From what I have seen of the radical temper in our own discussions, I would say that ifyou give them an inch they'll take a mile. "
Pseudoreality Prevails · 649
650 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
Tuzzi smiled with the sense of having won a small victory over Arnheim.
Arnheim looked impassive where he sat, his lips slightly parted, like a bud opening. Diotima, a silent tower of radiant flesh, gazed at him across the moat between them.
The General polished his hom-rimmed glasses.
Ulrich spoke with care: "That's only because those who feel called upon to act, in order to restore some meaning to life, have one thing in common: they despise 'mere' thinking just at the point where it could lead us to truths rather than simple personal opinions; instead, where everything depends on pursuing those views to their inex- haustible wellspring, they opt for shortcuts and half-truths. "
Nobody spoke in answer. And why should anyone have answered him? What a· man said was only words, after all. What mattered was that there were six people ·sitting in a room and having an important discussion; what they said or did not say in the course of it, their feel- ings, apprehensions, possibilities, were all included in this actuality without being on a level with it; they were included in the same way the dark movements of the liver and stomach are included in the ac- tuality of a fully dressed person about to put his signature to an im- portant document. This hierarchical order was not to be disturbed; this was reality itself.
Ulrich's old friend Stumm had now finished cle~ing his glasses; he put them on and looked at Ulrich. .
Even though Ulrich had always assumed that he was only toying with these people, he suddenly felt quite forlorn among them. He remembered feeling something like it a few weeks or months before, a little puff of Creation's breath asserting itself against the petrifl. ed lunar landscape where it had been exhaled; he thought that all the decisive moments of his life had been accompanied by such a sense of wonder and isolation. But was it anxiety that was troubling him this time? He could not qliite pin his feeling down, but it suggested that he had never in his life come to a real decision, and that it was high time he did. This occurred to him not in so many words but only as an uneasy feeling, as though something were trying to tear him away from these people he was sitting with, and even though they meant nothing to him, his will suddenly clung to them, kicking and screaming.
Count Leinsdorf was now reminded by the silence in the room of his duties as a political realist, and said in a rallying tone: "Well then, what's to be done? We must do somethingfmal, even ifit's only tem- porary, to save our campaign from all those threats against it. "
This moved Ulrich to try something preposterous. .
"Your Grace," he said, "there is really only one real task for the Parallel Campaign: to make a start at taking stock ofour general. cul- tural situation. We must act more or less as ifwe expected the Day of Judgment to dawn in 1918, when the old spiritual books will be closed and a higher accounting set up. I suggest that you found, in His Majesty's name, a World Secretariat for Precision and Soul. Without that, all our other tasks cannot be solved, or else they are illusory tasks. " He now added some ofthe things that had crossed his mind during the few minutes he had been lost in thought.
As he spoke, it seemed to him not only that everybody's eyes were popping out of their sockets in sheer amazement, but also that their torsos were lifting up from their backsides. They had expected him to follow their host's example and come up with an anecdote, and when the joke failed to materialize he was left sitting there like a child sur- rounded by leaning towers that looked slightly offended at his silly game. Only Count Leinsdorf managed to put a good face on it. "Quite so," he said, though surprised. "Nevertheless, we are obliged now to go beyond mere suggestions and offer some concrete solu- tion, and in that respect I must say that Property and Culture have left us badly stranded. "
Arnheim felt he must save the great nobleman from being taken in by Ulrich's jokes.
"Our friend is caught up in an idea of his own," he explained. "He thinks it is possible to synthesize a right way to live, just like synthetic rubber or nitrogen. But the human mind"-here he gave Ulrich his most chivalrous smile-"is sadly limited in being unable to breed its life forms as white mice are bred in the laboratory; on the contrary, it takes a huge granary to support no more than a few families of mice. " He immediately apologized for indulging in sq daring an analogy, but was in fact quite pleased with himself for coming up with something in the aristocratic Leinsdorf style of scientific large-scale land man- agement, while so vividly illustrating the difference between ideas with and without the res~onsihilityfor carrying them out.
Pseudorealtty Prevails · 651
652 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
But His Grace shook his head irritably. "I take his point quite well," he said. "People used to grow naturally into the conditions of their lives as they found them, and it was a sound way of coming into their own; but nowadays, with everything being shaken up as it is, everything uprooted from its natural soil, we will have to replace the traditional handicrafts system, even in the raising of squls, as it were, by the intelligence of the factory. " It was one of those remarkable statements His Grace occasionally voiced, to his own and everyone else's surprise, all the more so as he had merely been staring at Ul- rich with a dumbfounded expression the whole time before he began to speak.
"Still, everything our learned friend is saying is totally impractica- ble, just the same," Arnheim said firmly.
"Oh, would you say so? " Count Leinsdorf said curtly, full of fight- ing spirit.
Diotima now tried to make peace. "But, Count," she said, as if asking him for something one doesn't put into words: namely, to come to his senses. 'We've long since tried everything my cousin says·. What else are these long, strenuous talks, such as the ones we had this evening, about, after all? "
"Indeed? '' the annoyed peer huffed. "I had an idea from the first that all these clever fellows won't get us anywhere. All of that psycho- analysis and relativity theory and whatever they call all 'that stuff is pure vanity. Every on:e of them is trying to make his own special blueprint of the world prevail over all the others. Let me tell you, even if our Herr Doktor did not express himself as well as he might have, he's basically quite right. People are always trying on some- thing new whenever the times begin to change, and no good ever comes ofit. "
The nervous strain caused by the abortive meanderings of the Par- allel Campaign had now broken through to the surface. Count Leins- dorf had, without being aware of it, switched from twisting his mustache to fretfully twiddling his thumbs. Perhaps something else had also come to the SJ. uface: his dislike of Arnheim. While he had been astonished when Ulrich brought up the word "soul," he was quite pleased with what followed. 'When a fellow like Amheim ban- dies that word about," he thought, "that's a lot offlimflam. We don't need it from him-what else is religion for? '' But Arnheim, too, was
upset; he had gone white to the lips. Up to now, Count Leinsdorfhad spoken in that tone only to the General. Amheim was not the sort of man to take it lying down. Still, he could not help being impressed with Count Leinsdorf's firmness in taking Ulrich's part, which pain- fully reminded him of his own divided feelings about Ulrich. He felt at a loss, because he had wanted to talk things out with Ulrich but had not found an opportunity to do so before this fortuitous clash in front ofalfthe others, and so, instead ofturning on Count Leinsdorf, whom he simply ignored, he addressed his words to Ulrich, with every sign of intense mental and physical agitation to a degree quite out of character for him.
"Do you actually believe what you have just been saying? " he asked sternly, with no regard to considerations of civility. "Do you believe it can be done? Are you really of the opinion that it is possible to live in accordance with some analogy? If so, what would you do if His Grace were to give you a free hand? Do tell me, I beg you! "
It was an awkward moment. Diotima was oddly enough reminded of a story she had read in the papers a few days before. A woman had received a merciless sentence for giving her lover an opportunity to murder her aged husband, who had not "exercised his marital rights" for years but would not agree to a separation. The case had caught Diotima's attention by its quasi-medical physical detail, and held it by a certain perverse fascination; it was all so understandable that one was not inclined to blame any of the persons involved, limited as they were in their ability to help themselves; it was only some unnat- ural general state of affairs that gave rise to such situations. She had no idea what made her think of this case just at this moment. But she was also thinking that Ulrich had been talking to her lately about all sorts of things that were "up in the air," and always ended up by an- noying her with some outrageous suggestion of a personal kind. She had herself spoken of the soul emerging from its insubstantial state, in the case of a few privileged human beings. She decided that her cousin was just as unsure of himself as she was of herself, and per- haps just as passionate too. All of this was intetwoven just now-in her head or in her heart, that abandoned seat of the noble Leinsdor- fian amity-with the story of the condemned woman, in a way that caused her to sit there with parted lips, feeling that something terri- ble would happen if Amheim and Ulrich were allowed to go on like
Pseudoreality Prevails · 653
654 • THE MAN WITH. 0UT QUALITIES
this, but that it might be even worse ifanyone interfered and tried to stop them.
During Arnheim's attack on him, Ulrich had been looking at Tuzzi. It cost Tuzzi an effort to hide his eager curiosity in the brown furrows of his face. He was thinking that all these goings-on. in his house were now coming to a head, propelled by their inherent con- tradictions. Nor had he any sympathy for Ulrich, whose line of talk went quite against Tuzzi's grain, convinced as he was that a man's worth lay in his will or in his work, and certainly not in his feelings or ideas; to talk such nonsense about mere figures of speech, he felt, was positively indecent.
Ulrich might have been sensing some of this, because he remem- bered telling Tuzzi that he would kill himselfifthe year he was "tak- ing off" from his life were to pass without results. He had not said it in so many words but had made his meaning painfully clear, and he now felt ashamed of himself. Again he had the impression, without being able to account for it, that his moment of truth was at hand. Suddenly Gerda Fischel came to mind; there was a dangerous possi- bility of her coming to see him, to continue their last conversation. He realized that even as he had only been toying with her, they had already reached the limit ofwhat words could do, and there was only one last step: he would have to fall in with the girl's unexpressed longings, ungird his intellectual loins, and breach her "inner ram- parts. " This was crazy; he would never have gone this far with Gerda had he not felt safe with her on this point.