"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.
Musil - Man Without Qualities - v1
They're like a field over which bees fly back and forth; they them- selves are flying back and forth, as it were.
Their thoughts and feel- ings show all the gradations between truth and even error, as can be demonstrated if necessary, and changeable natures that come close to us at will and then elude us when we try to observe them closely.
"There is no detaching an idea in a book from its context on the page. It catches our eye like the face of a person looming up in a crowd as it is being swept past us. I suppose I'm exaggerating a little again, but tell me, what happens in our lives that is any different from this? Leaving the precise, measurable, and definable sensory data out of account, all the other concepts on which we base our lives are no more than congealed metaphors. Take as simple a concept as manliness, and think how it keeps wavering among its many possible variants. It's like a breath that changes shape at every exhalation,
with nothing to hold on to, no finn impression, no logic. So when we simply leave out in art whatever doesn't suit us and our conceptions, we're merely going back to the original condition of life itself. "
"My dear friend," Diotima said, "you don't seem to be talking about anything in particular. " Ulrich had paused for a moment, and her words fell into that pause.
"Yes, I suppose so. I hope I haven't been talking too loudly. "
"You've been talking fast, in a low voice, and at length," she said, with a touch of sarcasm. 'Without saying a word of what you meant to say. Do you realize what you've just explained to me all over again? That reality should be abolished! It's true that when I heard you make this point the first time, on one of our trips into the country, I
·think, it made a lasting impression-I don't know why. But how this is to be done is something you haven't yet revealed, I'm sorry to say. " "Clearly, I'd have to go on talking for at least as long again to do so. But do you really expect it to be that simple? IfI'm not mistaken, you spoke of wanting to fly away with Arnheim into some kind of tran- scendent state. Something you regard as another kind of reality. What I have been saying, on the other hand, is that we must try to
recover unreality. Reality no longer makes sense. "
"Oh, Arnheim would hardly agree with you there," Diotima said. "Of course not. That's just the difference between him and me.
He is trying to make the fact that he eats, sleeps, is the great Arn- heim, and doesn't know whether to marry you or not, mean some- thing, and to this end he has been colle9ting all the treasures of the mind throughout his life. " Ulrich suddenly paused, and the silence lengthened.
After a:while he asked, in a different tone: "Can you explain to me why I should be having this conversation with you, of all people? Suddenly I'm reminded of my childhood. You won't believe this, but I was a good child, mild as the air on a warm moonlit night. I could fall madly in love with a dog, a pocketknife . . . " But then he left this statement unfinished too.
Diotima looked at him, wondering what he could mean. She again remembered how he had once hotly advocated "precision of feel- ing," while just now he was taking the opposite view. He had accused Arnheim of insufficiently clean-cut intentions, while now he favored "letting things happen. " And she was troubled by the fact that Ulrich
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was advocating an intense emotional life without any "time off," compared with Amheim's ambiguous suggestion never to let oneself in for single-minded hatred or total love/ These thoughts left her uneasy.
"Do you really believe that there is such a thing as boundless feel- ing? " Ulrich asked her.
"Oh yes, there is such a thing as boundless emotion," Diotima said, the ground finn under her feet again.
"You see, I don't quite believe that," Ulrich said absently. "Strange how often we talk about it, but we certainly do our best to avoid it throughout our lives, as if we were ~raid of drowning in it. "
He noticed that Diotima was not listening. She was upeasily watching Amheim, who was looking around for a cab.
'Tm afraid we ought to rescue him from the General," she said.
"I'll go and, get a cab and take the Generai off your hands," Ulrich offered, and at the moment he turned to go, Diotima laid her hand on his arm and said kindly, as if to reward him for his trouble: "Any feeling that isn't boundless is worthless. "
115
THE TIP OF YOUR BREAST IS LIKE A POPPY LEAF
In accordance with the law that periods of great stability tend to be followed by violent upheavals, Bonadea, too, suffered a relapse. Her attempts to get on closer terms with Diotima had failed, and her fine scheme to get even with Ulrich by making friends with her rival, leaving Ulrich out in the cold-a fantasy she had spent much time in spinning out-had come to nothing. She had to swallow her pride and come knocking on his door again, but when she was there her beloved seemed to have arranged for constant interruptions, and her stories to account for her coming to see him again even though he
did not deserve it were wasted on his impervious friendliness. She was longing to make a terrible scene but committed to behaving with absolute propriety, so that in time she came to hate herself for being so good. At night her head, heavy with unappeased cravings, sat on her shoulders like a coconut with its mat of monkeylike hair growing freakishly inside the shell, and she came close to bursting with help- less rage, like a drinker deprived of his bottle. She privately called Diotima every name she could think of, such as fraud and insuffer- able pompous bitch, and came up with cynical glosses on that noble femininity which was the secret of Diotima's charm. Her aping of Diotima's style, which had delighted her for a while, had now become a prison from which she broke out into an almost licentious freedom; her curling iron and mirror lost the power to tum her into an idealized image of herself, and th~ artificial state of mind it had supported collapsed as well. Even sleep, which Bonadea had always reveled in despite her chronic inner conflicts, sometimes kept her waiting when she had· gane to bed, an experience so new to her that she thought she must be sick with insomnia, and felt what people usually feel when they are seriously ill, that her spirit was deserting her body,leaving it helpless like a wounded soldier on the battlefield. As she lay there in her vexations as if on red-hot sand, all that high- minded talk of Diotima's, which Bonadea had so admired, seemed to her infinitely beside the point, and she honestly despised it.
When she found it impossible to go to Ulrich yet again, she thought of another scheme to bring him back to his senses. It was of course the culmination of the plan that came to her first: a vision of herself effecting an entrance at Diotima's when that. siren had Ulrich with her. Bonadea regarded. all his visits with ·Diotima as transparent pretexts for carrying on their flirtation rather than actually doing something for the public good. So it was up to Bonadea to do some- thing for the public good-and this gave her the opening gambit of her plan as well: no one was paying any attention to Moosbrugger anymore, and he was going to his doom, while all the others were pontificating about it. Bonadea never stopped to wonder that it was Moosbrugger once more who came to her rescue in her hour of need. Had she bothered to think about him at all, she would have been horrified, but all she was thinking was that if Ulrich cared so much about Moosbrugger, she would see to it that he would at least
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not forget the man. & she mulled over her plan, she rem~mbered two things Ulrich had said when they were talking·about the mur- derer: namely, that everyone had a second soul, which was always innocent; and that a responsible persqn could always choose to do otherwise, but an irresponsible person had no such choice. From this she somehow concluded that she wanted to be irresponsible, which would mean that she would also be innocent, which Ulrich was not, and which he needed to be, for his own salvation.
So motivated, and dressed as for a social occasion, she spent sev- eral evenings wandering up and doWI1 past Diotima's windows, and never had long to wait before they lit up along the whole front, betokening something going on inside. She had told her husband that she was invited out but would not stay too long, and in the course of a few days, while sh~ was still trying to screw up her cour- age, her lies and her strolls in front of a house where she had no business to be unleashed a growing impulse that would soon drive her up those steps to the front door. What if she was seen by some acquaintance, or even by her husband if he should pass that way by chance, or what if she was noticed by the doorman, or by a police- man, who might decide to question her-the more often she went out on this expedition, the greater the risks, and the more probable that if she hesitated too long an incident would occur. Now, it was true that Bonadea ha~ more than once slipped into doorways or places where she did not want to be seen, but on those occasions she had been fortified by the thought that it had to be; this time she was about to intrude where she was not expected and could not be sure of her reception. She felt like an assassin who has started out with none too clear an idea of what it would be like, and is then swept by circumstances into a state in which the actual pistol shot or the glitter of vitriol drops flying through the air no longer adds much to the excitement.
Without any such dramatic intentions, Bonadea nevertheless felt similarly benumbed by. the time she actually found herself pressing the doorbell and walking inside. Little Rachel had slipped over to Ulrich and told him that someone was waiting out in the hall to see him, not mentioning that this someone was a heavily veiled unknown lady-who, when Rachel shut the door to the salon behind him,
flung the veil back from her face. At the moment she was absolutely convinced that Moosbrugger's fate depended on her taking instant action, and she received Ulrich not like a lover plagued by jealousy, but gasping for breath like a marathon runner. With no effort, she lied that her husband had tolq her yesterday that Moosbrugger would soon be past saving.
"There's nothing I hate so much," she ended, "as this obscene kind of murderer. But even though it goes against my grain, I've taken the risk of being regarded as an intruder here, because you must go straight back to the lady of the house and her very influential guests and get their help if you still want to get anything done:" She had no idea what she expected to come of this. Perhaps that Ulrich would be deeply moved and would thank her, then call Diotima, who would then take Bonadea into some private place to talk, away from the other gues~s. Or else Diotima might be drawn to the hall by the sound of voices, and Bonadea was ready to let her see that she, Bona- dea, was far from being the person least qualified to take an interest in Ulrich's noble causes. Her eyes were moist and flash~g. her hands trembled, her voice rose out of control. Ulrich, deeply embarrassed, smiled desperately to quiet her down and gain time while he found a way to talk her into leaving as quickly as possible. It was a ticklish situation and could have ended with Bonadea's having a screaming or crying fit, if Rachel had not come to his aid. Little Rachel had been standing close by all this time, with wide-open, shining eyes. When the beautiful stranger, trembling all over, had asked to speak to Ulrich, the maid had instantly divined the romantic nature of the affair. She managed to hear most of what was said, and the syllables of Moosbrugger's name fell on her ear like pistol shots. The sadness, passion, and jealousy throbbing in this lady's voice moved her power- fully, although she knew nothing of what was behind it. She guessed that the woman was Ulrich's mistress, and it doubled her infatuation with him. It was as though the two of them had burst into full- throated song together and made her want to lift up her own voice
and join in, or do something to help. And so, with a glance enjoining secrecy, she opened a door and inVited the pair into the only room not being used for the gathering this evening. It was Rachel's flrst conscious act of disloyalty to her mistress, and she knew what would
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happen if she was found out, but life was so exciting, and romantic passion such an untidy state of mind, that she had no chance to think twice about it.
When the gaslight flamed upward a11-d Bonadea's eyes gradually took in her surroundings, her legs almost gave way under her, and her cheeks flushed red with jealousy: they were inside Diotima's bedroom. There were stockings, hairbrushes, and much else lying around, whatever is left in view when a woman must change hastily from head to foot for a big party and the maid has not had time to put things away or has left it till the next morning, as in this case, because the room was due for a thorough cleaning then anyway; on big-party evenings the bedroom was used to store furnishings from the other rooms where the space was needed. So the·air was heavy with the smell of all this furniture jammed together, and of powder, soap, and scent.
"What a silly thing for the girl to do," Ulrich said with a laugh. "We can't stay here. Anyway, you shouldn't have come. There's nothing to be done for Moosbrugger. "
"So I shouldn't have bothered, is that it? " Bonadea echoed him almost inaudibly. Her eyes strayed all over the place. How could the girl have even thought of taking Ulrich into the most private room in the house, she wondered in anguish, if she had not done it often before? Yet she could not bring herself tQ confront him with this proof of his infidelity, but chose instead to say dully: "How can you sleep in peace when such injustice is being done? I haven't been able to sleep at night, which is why I decided to come looking for you. " She had turned her back on the room and stood staring out the win- dow into the opaque, glassy darkness outside, at what might be tree- tops or some deep courtyard down below. Upset as she was, she had enough sense of orientation to know that she was not looking out on the street, and when she considered that here she was in her rival's bedroom, standing in a flood of light in the uncurtained window be- side her faithless lover, as on a stagein front ofan unseen audience, it threw her mind into turmoil. She had taken off her hat and thrown her coat back; her forehead and the warm tips of her breasts touched the cold windowpane; tenderness ·and tears moistened her eyes. Slowly she freed herself from the spell and turned back to her friend,
but her eyes still held some of that soft, yielding darkness she had gazed into, and were deeper than she knew.
"Ulrich," she said with feeling, "you're not a bad man! You only pretend to be. You go to a lot of trouble to be as good as you can be. " These incongruously perceptive words of Bonadea's made the sit- uation precarious again; for once, they were not the ridiculous desire of a woman to mask her body's demands for consolation with an overlay of lofty sentiment, but the beauty of that body itself claiming its right to the gentle dignity of love. Ulrich went up to her and put his arm around her shoulder; together they turned and looked into the darkness outside. A faint glimmer of light from the house was dissolving in the infinite darkness beyond so that it looked like a dense mist softening the air, and Ulrich felt as if he were staring out into a mildly chilly October night, though it was late winter; the whole city seemed wrapped in a vast woolen blanket. Then it occurred to him that one could just as well say that a woolen blanket resembled a night in October. He felt a gentle uncertainty on his skin
and drew Bonadea closer.
"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.
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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
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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? "
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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-
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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
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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.
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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:
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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
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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.
"There is no detaching an idea in a book from its context on the page. It catches our eye like the face of a person looming up in a crowd as it is being swept past us. I suppose I'm exaggerating a little again, but tell me, what happens in our lives that is any different from this? Leaving the precise, measurable, and definable sensory data out of account, all the other concepts on which we base our lives are no more than congealed metaphors. Take as simple a concept as manliness, and think how it keeps wavering among its many possible variants. It's like a breath that changes shape at every exhalation,
with nothing to hold on to, no finn impression, no logic. So when we simply leave out in art whatever doesn't suit us and our conceptions, we're merely going back to the original condition of life itself. "
"My dear friend," Diotima said, "you don't seem to be talking about anything in particular. " Ulrich had paused for a moment, and her words fell into that pause.
"Yes, I suppose so. I hope I haven't been talking too loudly. "
"You've been talking fast, in a low voice, and at length," she said, with a touch of sarcasm. 'Without saying a word of what you meant to say. Do you realize what you've just explained to me all over again? That reality should be abolished! It's true that when I heard you make this point the first time, on one of our trips into the country, I
·think, it made a lasting impression-I don't know why. But how this is to be done is something you haven't yet revealed, I'm sorry to say. " "Clearly, I'd have to go on talking for at least as long again to do so. But do you really expect it to be that simple? IfI'm not mistaken, you spoke of wanting to fly away with Arnheim into some kind of tran- scendent state. Something you regard as another kind of reality. What I have been saying, on the other hand, is that we must try to
recover unreality. Reality no longer makes sense. "
"Oh, Arnheim would hardly agree with you there," Diotima said. "Of course not. That's just the difference between him and me.
He is trying to make the fact that he eats, sleeps, is the great Arn- heim, and doesn't know whether to marry you or not, mean some- thing, and to this end he has been colle9ting all the treasures of the mind throughout his life. " Ulrich suddenly paused, and the silence lengthened.
After a:while he asked, in a different tone: "Can you explain to me why I should be having this conversation with you, of all people? Suddenly I'm reminded of my childhood. You won't believe this, but I was a good child, mild as the air on a warm moonlit night. I could fall madly in love with a dog, a pocketknife . . . " But then he left this statement unfinished too.
Diotima looked at him, wondering what he could mean. She again remembered how he had once hotly advocated "precision of feel- ing," while just now he was taking the opposite view. He had accused Arnheim of insufficiently clean-cut intentions, while now he favored "letting things happen. " And she was troubled by the fact that Ulrich
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was advocating an intense emotional life without any "time off," compared with Amheim's ambiguous suggestion never to let oneself in for single-minded hatred or total love/ These thoughts left her uneasy.
"Do you really believe that there is such a thing as boundless feel- ing? " Ulrich asked her.
"Oh yes, there is such a thing as boundless emotion," Diotima said, the ground finn under her feet again.
"You see, I don't quite believe that," Ulrich said absently. "Strange how often we talk about it, but we certainly do our best to avoid it throughout our lives, as if we were ~raid of drowning in it. "
He noticed that Diotima was not listening. She was upeasily watching Amheim, who was looking around for a cab.
'Tm afraid we ought to rescue him from the General," she said.
"I'll go and, get a cab and take the Generai off your hands," Ulrich offered, and at the moment he turned to go, Diotima laid her hand on his arm and said kindly, as if to reward him for his trouble: "Any feeling that isn't boundless is worthless. "
115
THE TIP OF YOUR BREAST IS LIKE A POPPY LEAF
In accordance with the law that periods of great stability tend to be followed by violent upheavals, Bonadea, too, suffered a relapse. Her attempts to get on closer terms with Diotima had failed, and her fine scheme to get even with Ulrich by making friends with her rival, leaving Ulrich out in the cold-a fantasy she had spent much time in spinning out-had come to nothing. She had to swallow her pride and come knocking on his door again, but when she was there her beloved seemed to have arranged for constant interruptions, and her stories to account for her coming to see him again even though he
did not deserve it were wasted on his impervious friendliness. She was longing to make a terrible scene but committed to behaving with absolute propriety, so that in time she came to hate herself for being so good. At night her head, heavy with unappeased cravings, sat on her shoulders like a coconut with its mat of monkeylike hair growing freakishly inside the shell, and she came close to bursting with help- less rage, like a drinker deprived of his bottle. She privately called Diotima every name she could think of, such as fraud and insuffer- able pompous bitch, and came up with cynical glosses on that noble femininity which was the secret of Diotima's charm. Her aping of Diotima's style, which had delighted her for a while, had now become a prison from which she broke out into an almost licentious freedom; her curling iron and mirror lost the power to tum her into an idealized image of herself, and th~ artificial state of mind it had supported collapsed as well. Even sleep, which Bonadea had always reveled in despite her chronic inner conflicts, sometimes kept her waiting when she had· gane to bed, an experience so new to her that she thought she must be sick with insomnia, and felt what people usually feel when they are seriously ill, that her spirit was deserting her body,leaving it helpless like a wounded soldier on the battlefield. As she lay there in her vexations as if on red-hot sand, all that high- minded talk of Diotima's, which Bonadea had so admired, seemed to her infinitely beside the point, and she honestly despised it.
When she found it impossible to go to Ulrich yet again, she thought of another scheme to bring him back to his senses. It was of course the culmination of the plan that came to her first: a vision of herself effecting an entrance at Diotima's when that. siren had Ulrich with her. Bonadea regarded. all his visits with ·Diotima as transparent pretexts for carrying on their flirtation rather than actually doing something for the public good. So it was up to Bonadea to do some- thing for the public good-and this gave her the opening gambit of her plan as well: no one was paying any attention to Moosbrugger anymore, and he was going to his doom, while all the others were pontificating about it. Bonadea never stopped to wonder that it was Moosbrugger once more who came to her rescue in her hour of need. Had she bothered to think about him at all, she would have been horrified, but all she was thinking was that if Ulrich cared so much about Moosbrugger, she would see to it that he would at least
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not forget the man. & she mulled over her plan, she rem~mbered two things Ulrich had said when they were talking·about the mur- derer: namely, that everyone had a second soul, which was always innocent; and that a responsible persqn could always choose to do otherwise, but an irresponsible person had no such choice. From this she somehow concluded that she wanted to be irresponsible, which would mean that she would also be innocent, which Ulrich was not, and which he needed to be, for his own salvation.
So motivated, and dressed as for a social occasion, she spent sev- eral evenings wandering up and doWI1 past Diotima's windows, and never had long to wait before they lit up along the whole front, betokening something going on inside. She had told her husband that she was invited out but would not stay too long, and in the course of a few days, while sh~ was still trying to screw up her cour- age, her lies and her strolls in front of a house where she had no business to be unleashed a growing impulse that would soon drive her up those steps to the front door. What if she was seen by some acquaintance, or even by her husband if he should pass that way by chance, or what if she was noticed by the doorman, or by a police- man, who might decide to question her-the more often she went out on this expedition, the greater the risks, and the more probable that if she hesitated too long an incident would occur. Now, it was true that Bonadea ha~ more than once slipped into doorways or places where she did not want to be seen, but on those occasions she had been fortified by the thought that it had to be; this time she was about to intrude where she was not expected and could not be sure of her reception. She felt like an assassin who has started out with none too clear an idea of what it would be like, and is then swept by circumstances into a state in which the actual pistol shot or the glitter of vitriol drops flying through the air no longer adds much to the excitement.
Without any such dramatic intentions, Bonadea nevertheless felt similarly benumbed by. the time she actually found herself pressing the doorbell and walking inside. Little Rachel had slipped over to Ulrich and told him that someone was waiting out in the hall to see him, not mentioning that this someone was a heavily veiled unknown lady-who, when Rachel shut the door to the salon behind him,
flung the veil back from her face. At the moment she was absolutely convinced that Moosbrugger's fate depended on her taking instant action, and she received Ulrich not like a lover plagued by jealousy, but gasping for breath like a marathon runner. With no effort, she lied that her husband had tolq her yesterday that Moosbrugger would soon be past saving.
"There's nothing I hate so much," she ended, "as this obscene kind of murderer. But even though it goes against my grain, I've taken the risk of being regarded as an intruder here, because you must go straight back to the lady of the house and her very influential guests and get their help if you still want to get anything done:" She had no idea what she expected to come of this. Perhaps that Ulrich would be deeply moved and would thank her, then call Diotima, who would then take Bonadea into some private place to talk, away from the other gues~s. Or else Diotima might be drawn to the hall by the sound of voices, and Bonadea was ready to let her see that she, Bona- dea, was far from being the person least qualified to take an interest in Ulrich's noble causes. Her eyes were moist and flash~g. her hands trembled, her voice rose out of control. Ulrich, deeply embarrassed, smiled desperately to quiet her down and gain time while he found a way to talk her into leaving as quickly as possible. It was a ticklish situation and could have ended with Bonadea's having a screaming or crying fit, if Rachel had not come to his aid. Little Rachel had been standing close by all this time, with wide-open, shining eyes. When the beautiful stranger, trembling all over, had asked to speak to Ulrich, the maid had instantly divined the romantic nature of the affair. She managed to hear most of what was said, and the syllables of Moosbrugger's name fell on her ear like pistol shots. The sadness, passion, and jealousy throbbing in this lady's voice moved her power- fully, although she knew nothing of what was behind it. She guessed that the woman was Ulrich's mistress, and it doubled her infatuation with him. It was as though the two of them had burst into full- throated song together and made her want to lift up her own voice
and join in, or do something to help. And so, with a glance enjoining secrecy, she opened a door and inVited the pair into the only room not being used for the gathering this evening. It was Rachel's flrst conscious act of disloyalty to her mistress, and she knew what would
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happen if she was found out, but life was so exciting, and romantic passion such an untidy state of mind, that she had no chance to think twice about it.
When the gaslight flamed upward a11-d Bonadea's eyes gradually took in her surroundings, her legs almost gave way under her, and her cheeks flushed red with jealousy: they were inside Diotima's bedroom. There were stockings, hairbrushes, and much else lying around, whatever is left in view when a woman must change hastily from head to foot for a big party and the maid has not had time to put things away or has left it till the next morning, as in this case, because the room was due for a thorough cleaning then anyway; on big-party evenings the bedroom was used to store furnishings from the other rooms where the space was needed. So the·air was heavy with the smell of all this furniture jammed together, and of powder, soap, and scent.
"What a silly thing for the girl to do," Ulrich said with a laugh. "We can't stay here. Anyway, you shouldn't have come. There's nothing to be done for Moosbrugger. "
"So I shouldn't have bothered, is that it? " Bonadea echoed him almost inaudibly. Her eyes strayed all over the place. How could the girl have even thought of taking Ulrich into the most private room in the house, she wondered in anguish, if she had not done it often before? Yet she could not bring herself tQ confront him with this proof of his infidelity, but chose instead to say dully: "How can you sleep in peace when such injustice is being done? I haven't been able to sleep at night, which is why I decided to come looking for you. " She had turned her back on the room and stood staring out the win- dow into the opaque, glassy darkness outside, at what might be tree- tops or some deep courtyard down below. Upset as she was, she had enough sense of orientation to know that she was not looking out on the street, and when she considered that here she was in her rival's bedroom, standing in a flood of light in the uncurtained window be- side her faithless lover, as on a stagein front ofan unseen audience, it threw her mind into turmoil. She had taken off her hat and thrown her coat back; her forehead and the warm tips of her breasts touched the cold windowpane; tenderness ·and tears moistened her eyes. Slowly she freed herself from the spell and turned back to her friend,
but her eyes still held some of that soft, yielding darkness she had gazed into, and were deeper than she knew.
"Ulrich," she said with feeling, "you're not a bad man! You only pretend to be. You go to a lot of trouble to be as good as you can be. " These incongruously perceptive words of Bonadea's made the sit- uation precarious again; for once, they were not the ridiculous desire of a woman to mask her body's demands for consolation with an overlay of lofty sentiment, but the beauty of that body itself claiming its right to the gentle dignity of love. Ulrich went up to her and put his arm around her shoulder; together they turned and looked into the darkness outside. A faint glimmer of light from the house was dissolving in the infinite darkness beyond so that it looked like a dense mist softening the air, and Ulrich felt as if he were staring out into a mildly chilly October night, though it was late winter; the whole city seemed wrapped in a vast woolen blanket. Then it occurred to him that one could just as well say that a woolen blanket resembled a night in October. He felt a gentle uncertainty on his skin
and drew Bonadea closer.
"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.
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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
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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? "
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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-
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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
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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.
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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:
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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.
