Imagine the clothes in which people have stood here through the ages, right where we are
standing
now.
Musil - Man Without Qualities - v1
Close beside magnificent staircases one stepped on boards of soft wood, and hideous new fur- niture stood carelessly alongside magnificent old pieces.
The new rich, on the other hand, in love with the imposing and grandiose mo- ments of their predecessors, had instinctively made a fastidious and refined selection.
Wherever a castle had passed into middle-class hands, was it not merely seen to be provided with modem comfort, like ah heirloom chandelier through which electric wiring had been threaded, but the inferior furnishings had also been cleared out and valuable pieces brought in, chosen either by the owner or according to the unassailable recommendation of experts.
It was not, inciden- tally, in the castles where this refinement showed itself most impres- sively but in the town houses that, in keeping with the times, had been furnished with all the impersonal luxury of an ocean liner and yet had preseiVed, in this country of subtly refined social ambition, through some ineffable breath, some hardly perceptible widening of the space between the pieces of furniture or the dominant position of a painting on a wall, the tender, clear echo of a great sound that had faded away.
Diotima was enchanted by so much "culture. " She had always known that her native country harbored such treasures, but even she was amazed at their abundance. They would be invited together to visit in the country, and Ulrich noticed, among other things, that the fruit here was not infrequently picked up in the fingers and eaten unpeeled, whereas in the houses of the upper bourgeoisie the cere- monial of knife and fork was strictly obseiVed. The same could also be said about conversation, which tended to be flawlessly distin- guished only in the middle-class homes, while among the nobility the well-known, relaxed idiom reminiscent of cabdrivers prevailed. Di- otima presented her cousin with an enthusiastic defense of all this. She conceded that the bourgeois estates had better plumbing and
showed more intelligence in their appointments, while at the nobil- ity's countzy seats one froze in winter, there were often narrow, worn stairs, stuffy, low-ceilinged bedrooms were the behind-the-scenes counterpart of magnificent public rooms, and there were no dumb-. waiters or bathrooms for the servants. But that was just what made it all, in a sense, more heroic, this feeling for tradition and this splendid nonchalance! she wound up ecstatically.
Ulrich used these excursions to examine the feeling that bound him to Diotima. But there were so many digressions along the way that it is necessary to follow them awhile before coming to the point.
At that time, women were encased in clothes from tlu:oat to ankle. Men's clothes today are like what they were then, but they used to be more appropriate because they still represented an organic outward sign of the flawless cohesion and strict reserve that marked a man of the world. In those days, even a person of few prejudices, unham- pered by shame in appreciating the undraped human body, would have regarded a display of nudity as a relapse into the animal state, not because of the nakedness but because of the loss of the civilized aphrodisiac of clothing. Actually, it would then have been considered below the animal state, for a three-year-old Thoroughbred and a playing greyhound are far more expressive in their nakedness than a human body can ever be. But animals can't wear clothes; they have
orily the one skin, while human beings in those days had many skins. In full dress, with frills, puffs, bell skirts, cascading draperies, laces, and gathered pleats, they had created a surface five times the size of the original one, forming a many-petaled chalice heavy with an erotic charge, difficult of access, and hiding at its core the slim white animal that had to be searched out and that made itselfterribly desirable. It was the prescribed process Nature herself uses when she bids her creatures fluff out their plumage or spray out clouds of ink, so that desire and terror raised to a degree of unearthly frenzy will mask the matter-of-fact proceedings that are the heart of the matter.
For the first time in her life Diotima felt herself more than S\! per- ficially affected by this game, though in the most decorous way. Co- quetry was not wholly unknown to her, since it was one of the social accomplishments a lady had to master. Nor had she ever failed to notice when a young man looked at her with a glance that expressed something besides respect; in fact she rather liked it, because it made
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her feel the gentle power of feminine reproof when she forced the eyes of a man, intent on her like the horns of a bull, to turn away by uttering high-minded sentiments. But Ulrich, in the security of their kinship and his selfless services to the Parallel Campaign, and pro- tected, too, by the codicil established in his favor, permitted himself liberties that pierced straight through the tangled weavings of her idealism. On one occasion, for instance, as they were driving thro~gh the countryside, they passed some delightful valleys where hillsides covered with dark pine woods sloped down toward the road, and Di- otima pointed to them with the lines "Who planted you, 0 lovely woods, so high up there above? '' She of course quoted these lines as poetry, without any hint of the·tune that went along with them; she would have considered that old hat and inane. Ulrich was quick to answer: "The Landbank of Lower Austria. Don't you know, cousin, that all the forests hereabouts belong to the Landbank? The master you are about to praise in the next line is a forester on the bank's payroll. Nature in these parts is a planned product of the forestry industry, a storehouse of serried ranks of cellulose for the manufac- turers, as you can see at a glance. "
His answers were quite often like that. When she spoke of beauty, he spoke of the fatty tissue supporting the epidermis. When she mentioned love, he responded with the statistical curve that indi- cates the automatic rise and fall in the annual birthrate. When she spoke of the great figures in art, he traced the chain of borrowings that links these figures to one another. Somehow it always began with Diotima talking as if on the sixth day of Creation God had placed man as a pearl in the shell of'the world, whereupon Ulrich reminded her that mankind was a tiny pile of'dots on the outermost crust of a dwarf globe. She was not quite sure what Ulrich was up to, though it was obviously an attack on that sphere of greatness with which Diotima felt allied, and most of all she felt that he was rudely showing off. She found it hard to take that her cousin, whom she reg~ded as an intellectual enfant terrible, imagined he knew more than she did, and his materialistic arguments, which meant nothing to her, drawn as they were from the lower culture of facts and fig- ures, annoyed her mightily.
"Thank heaven," she once came back at him sharply, "there are
still people capable of believing in simple things, no matter how great their experience! "
"Your husband, for instance," Ulrich said. "I've been meaning to tell you for a long time that I much prefer him to Arnheim. "
They had got into the habit of exchanging ideas by speaking about Arnheim. For like all people in love, Diotima derived pleasure from talking about the object of her love without, at least so she believed, betraying herself; and since Ulrich found this insufferable, as does any man who has no ulterior·motive in yielding the stage to another, it often happened on such occasions that he lashed out against Arn- heim. Between Arnheim and himselfa relationship ofa peculiar kind had developed. When Arnheim was not traveling, they met almost every day. Ulrich knew that Section Chief Tuzzi regarded the Pros- sian with suspicion, as he did himself from observing Arnheim's ef- fect on Diotima since the very beginning. Not that there was yet anything improper between them, so far as could be judged by a third party who was confirmed in this judgment by the revolting ex- cess of propriety between these lovers, who were evidently emulat- ing the loftiest examples of a Platonic union of souls. Yet Arnheim showed a striking inclination to draw his friend's cousin (or was she his lover after all? , Ulrich wondered, but considered it most probably something like lover plus friend divided by two) into this intimate relationship. He often addressed Ulrich in the manner of an older friend, a tone made permissible by the difference in age between them but that became unpleasantly tainted with condescension be- cause of the difference in . their position. Ulrich's response was al- most always standoffish in a rather challenging way: he made a point of not seeming in the least impressed by speaking with a man who might just as easily have been speaking with kings and chancellors instead. Annoyed with himself because of his lack of propriety, he contradicted Arnheim with impolite frequency and unseemly irony, as a substitute for which he would have done better to enjoy himself as a silent observer. He was astonished that Arnheim irritated him so violently. Ulrich saw in him, fattened by favorable circumstances, the model example ofan intellectual development he hated. For this cel- ebrated writer was shrewd enough to grasp the questionable situa- tion man had got himself into ever since he ceased looking for his
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image in the mirror of a stream, and sought it instead in the sharp, broken surfaces of his intelligence; but this writing iron magnate blamed the predicament on intelligence itself and not on its imper- fections. There was a con game in this union between the soul. and the price of coal, a union that at the same time purposefully setved to keep apart what Amheim did with his eyes wide open and what he said and wrote in his cloud of intuition. Added to this, to exacerbate Ulrich's uneasiness, was something new to him, the combination of intellect and wealth. When Amheim talked about some particular subject almost like a specialist and then suddenly, with a casual wave of his hand, made all the details disappear in the light of a "great thought," he might be acting on some not unjustified need of his own, but at the same time this manner of freely disposing of things in two directions at once was too suggestive of the rich man who can afford the best and most expensive of everything. He had a wealth of ideas that was always slightly reminiscent of the ways of real wealth. But perhaps it was not even this ~at most provoked Ulrich into creating difficulties for the celebrated man; perhaps it was rather the inclination of Arnheim's mind toward a dignified mode of holding court and keeping house that of itself led to an asso-ciation with the best brands of the traditional as well as of the unusual. For in the mirror of this Epicurean connoisseurship Ulrich saw the affected grimace that is the face of the times, if one subtracts the few really strong lines of passion and thought in it; all this left him with hardly a chance to reach a better understanding of the m. an, who could proba- bly be credited with all sorts of merits as well. U was, of course, an utterly senseless battle he was waging, in an environment predis- posed in Amheim's favor, and in a cause that had no importance at all; the most that could be said for it was that this senselessness gave the sense of the total expenditure of his own energies. It was also a quite hopeless struggle, for if Ulrich actually once managed to wound his opponent, he had to recognize that he had hit the wrong Arnheim; if Amheim the thinker lay defeated on the ground, Am- heim the master of reality rose like a winged being with an indulgent smile, and hastened from the idle games of such conversations to Baghdad or Madrid.
This invulner~bility made it possible for him to counter the younger man's bad manners with that amiable camaraderie the
source of which Ulrich could never quite pinpoint. Besides, Ulrich was himself concerned not to go too far in tearing Arnheim down, because he was determined not to slip again into one of those half- baked and demeaning adventures in which his past had been far too rich; and the progress he observed between Arnheim and Diotima served as an effective insurance against weakening. So he generally directed the points of his attacks like the points of a foil, which yield on impact and are shielded with a friendly little rubber button to soften the blow. It was Diotima who had come up with this compari- son. She found herself mystified by this cousin of hers. His candid face with the clear brow, his quietly breathing chest, the ease in all his movements, all clearly indicated to her that no malicious, spiteful, sadistic-libidinous impulses could dwell in such a body. Nor was she quitewithoutprideiiisopersonableamemberofherfamily; shehad made up her mind from the beginning of their acquaintance to take him under her wing. Had he had black hair, a crooked shoulder, a muddy skin, or a low forehead, she would have said that his views accorded with his looks. But as it was, she was struck by a certain discrepancy between his looks and his ideas that made itself felt as an inexplicable uneasiness. The antennae of her famed intuition groped in vain for the cause, hut she enjoyed the groping at the other end of the antennae. In a sense, though not of course seriously, she some- times even preferred Ulrich's company to Arnheim's. Her need to f e e l s u p e r i o r was m o r e g r a t i f i e d b y h i m , s h e f e l t m o r e s u r e o f h e r s e l f , and to regard him as frivolous, eccentri~. or immature gave her a cer- tain satisfaction that balanced the idealism, becoming increasingly dangerous from day to day, that she saw taking on incalculable di- mensions in her feelings for Amheim. Soul is a terribly grave affair, and materialism by eontrast is lighthearted. The conduct of her rela- tionship with Amheim was sometimes as much of a strain as her salon, and her contempt for Ulrich made her life easier. She did not understand herself, but she noticed this effect, and this enabled her whenever she was annoyed with her cousin over one of his remarks to give him a sideways look that was only a tiny smile in the comer of her eye, while the eye itself, idealistically untouched and indeed even slightly disdainful, gazed straight ahead.
Anyway, whatever their reasons may have been, Diotima ~d Am- heim behaved toward Ulrich like two fighters clinging to athird per-
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son whom in their alternating fear they shove back and forth be- tween themselves; a situation not without its dangers for Ulrich, for through Diotima the question arose: Must people be in accord with their bodies or not?
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A DIGRESSiON: MUST PEOPLE BE IN ACCORD WITH THEIR BODIES?
Independently of what their faces were talking about, the motion of the car on those long drives rocked the two cousins so that their clothes touched, overlapped a·bit, and moved apart again. One could only see this from their shoulders, because the rest of them was en- veloped by a shared blanket, but the bodies felt this contact, muffled by their clothing, as delicately indistinct as things seen ~ moonlight. Ulrich was n'ot unreceptive to this kind of flirting, without taking it too seriously. The overrefined transmission of desire from the body to the clothes, from the embrace to the obstacles, or, in short, from the goal to the approach, answered to his nature, whose sensuality drove him toward the woman; but its critical faculties held him back from the alien, uncongenial person it suddenly, with relentless lucid- ity, perceived her to be, and this made for a lively tug-of-war be- tween inclination and aversion. But this meant that the body's sublime beauty, its human beauty, the moment when the spirit's song rises from nature's instrument, or that other moment when the body is like a goblet filling up with a mystic potion, was something he had never known, leaving aside those dreams ofthe major's wife that had for the longest time put an end to such inclinations in him.
All his relationships with women, since then, had somehow not been right. With a certain amount of goodwill on both sides that hap- pens, unfortunately, all too easily. From the moment they first began to think about it, a man and a woman find a ready-made matriX of
feelings, acts, and complications waiting to take them in charge, and beneath this matrix the process takes its course in reverse; the stream no longer flows from the spring; the last things to happen push their way to the front of consciousness; the pure pleasure two people have in each other, this simplest and deepest of all feelings in love, and the natural source of all the rest, disappears completely in this psychic reversal.
So on his trips with Diotima, Ulrich not infrequently remembered their leave-taking after his first visit. He had taken her mild hand, an ·artfully and nobly perfected weightless hand, in his own as they gazed into each other's eyes. They both undoubtedly felt some aver- sion, and yet it occurred to them that they might nevertheless fuse to the point of extinction. Something of this vision had remained be- tween them. Thus two heads above cast a horrible chill on each other while the bodies below helplessly melt together at white heat. There is in this something nastily mythical, as in a two-headed god or the devil's cloven hoof, and it had often led Ulrich astray in his youth, when he had experienced it fairly often; but with the years it had proved to be no more than a very bourgeois aphrodisiac, in exactly the same way that the unclothed body substitutes for the nude. Nothi. rrg so inflames the middle-class lover as the flattering discovery of the power to drive another person into an ecstasy so wild that to be the cause of such changes by any other means one would have to
become a murderer.
And truly, that there can be such changes in civilized people, that
we actually can produce such effectsl-isn't this the question and the amazement in . the bold, glazed eyes of all those who dock at the lonely island of lust, where they are murderer, destiny, and God, and experience the maximum irrationality and adventurousness in the greatest comfort?
The repugnance he came to acquire with time against this kind of love eventually extended to his own body too, which had always en- couraged these misbegotten affairs by giving women the illusion of a reliable virility, for which Ulrich was too cerebral and too conflicted. At times he was as downright jealous of his own appearance as if it were a rival using cheap tricks against him. . :. . _in which a contradiction emerged that is also present in others who are not aware of it. For he was the one who kept his body trim by exercising it, giving it the
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shape, expression, and readiness for action that influence the mind no less than an ever-smiling or an ever-solemn face can. Oddly e~ough, the majority of people have either a neglected body, formed and deformed by chance circumstances, which seems to have almost no relation at all to their mind and character, or else a body disguised by th~ mask of sports, giving it the look of those hours when it is on vacation from itself. Those are the hours when a person spins out the daydream of his appearance, casually picked up from the magazines of the smart, great world. All those bronzed and muscular tennis players, horsemen, and race-car drivers, who look like world-record holders though usually they are merely competent; those ladies all dressed up or all undressed; they are all daydreamers, differing from common daydreamers only in that their dream doesn't stay in their brain but comes out into the open air as a projection of the mass soul-physically, dramatically, and (as one might say in the idiom of more-than-dubious occult phenomena) ideoplastically. But in com- mon with the usual spinners of fantasies they have a certain shallow-
ness of the dream, both as to its content and its nearness to the waking state. The problem of the integral physiognomy still eludes us, even though we have learned to draw conclusions about man's nature, sometimes even amazingly correct conclusions, from his handwriting, voice, sleeping position, and God knows what else; yet for the body as a whole we have only the fashionable models on which it forms itself, or at most a kind of nature-cure philosophy.
But is this the body ofour mind, our ideas, intimations, plans,. or- the pretty ones included-the body of our follies? That Ulrich had loved those follies and still to soine extent had them Pid not prevent him from feeling not at home in the body they had created.
6g
DIOTIMA AND ULRICH, CONTINUED
And it was above all Diotima who confirmed in a new way his sense that the surface and depths of his person were not one and the same. This came through clearly for him on these trips with her, which sometimes felt like drives through moonlight, when the young woman's beauty detached itself from her person altogether and mo- mentarily veiled his eyes like gossamer spun by a dream. He knew, of course, that Diotima compared everything he said with the conven- tional wisdom on the subject-the higher conventional wisdom, to be sure-and was pleased that she found it "immature," so that he constantly sat there as ifhe were before the wrong end of a telescope trained on him. He became smaller and smaller, and believed when he spoke with her (or at least was not far from believing) in his role'of devil's advocate and materialist that he could hear in his own words conversations from his last terms at school, when he and his class- mates had idolized all the villains and monsters of world history be- cause the teachers had presented them in tones of idealistic abhorrence. And when Diotima looked at him indignantly he grew smaller still, regressing from the morality of heroism and the drive for expansion to the defiant lies, callousness, and wavering excesses of adolescence-only quite figuratively, of course, as one can detect in a gesture or a word some distant ·similarity with gestures and words one has long since discarded, or only dreamed, or seen and disliked in others. In any event, this all resonated in his delight in shocking Diotima. The mind of this woman, who would have been so beautiful without her mind, aroused an inhuman feeling in him, per- haps a fear of mind itself, an aversion for all great things, a feeling that was quite faint, hardly detectable-and perhaps feeling was a much too pretentious expression for something that was but a mere breath. But if one magnified it into words, they would have gone something like this: at times he saw not only this woman's idealism but all the idealism in the world, in all its extent and ramifications,
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appear bodily in the form of an image hovering just above that Gre- cian head-it only just missed being the horns of the Devil! Then . Ulrich grew even smaller still and-again figuratively speaking-re- gressed to the first hotly moral state of childhood, in whose eyes temptation and terror lie as in the stare of a gazelle. The tender emo- tions of that age can in a single moment of yielding cause the whole, still-tiny world to burst into flames, since they have neither an aim nor the ability to make anything happen, but are a completely boundless fire. It was quite unlike him, and yet in Diotima's com- pany Ulrich ended up longing for these cb. ildhood feelings, though he could barely imagine them because they have so l\ttle in common with the conditions under which an adult lives.
At one point he very nearly confessed it to her. On one of their trips they had left the car to walk into a small valley that was like a river delta of meadows with steep forested banks and that formed a crooked triangle with a winding brook in its center stilled by a light frost. The slopes had been partly cleared of timber, with a few trees left standing like feather dusters stuck in the bare hillsides and hill- tops. This scene had tempted them to take a walk. It was one of those wistful, snowless days that seem in the middle ofwinter like a faded, no-longer-fashionable summer gown. Diotima abruptly asked her cousin: "Why does Amheim call you an activist? He says that you're always full of ideas how to do things differently and better. " She had suddenly remembered that her talk with Arnheim. about Ulrich and the General had ended inconclusively.
"I don't understand," she went on. "It always seems to me that you hardly ever mean anything seriously. But I must ask you, because we are involved together in such a responsible task. Do you remember our last conversation? There was something you said: you maintained that nobody, if he had the necessary power, would do what he wants to do. Now I would like to know what you meant by that. Wasn't it a horrible idea? "
Ulrich did not reply at once. And during this silence, after she had spoken as impudently as possible, she realized how much she had been preoccupied with the forbidden question of whether Amheim and she would do what each of them secretly wanted. She suddenly thought she had given herself away to Ulrich. She blushed, tried to stop herself, blushed even more, and did her best to gaze out over
the valley, away from him, with the most unconcerned expression she could muster.
Ulrich had observed the process. ''I'm very much afraid that the only reason Arnheim, as you say, calls me an activist is that he over- estimates my influence with the Tuzzi family," he answered. "You know yourself how little attention you pay to what I say. But now that you have asked me, I realize what my influence on you ought to be. May I tell you without your instantly criticizing me again? "
Diotima nodded silently as a sign of assent and tried to pull herself together behind an appearance of absentmindedness.
"So I said," Ulrich began, "that nobody would tum his dreams into realities even if he could. You remember our file folders full of suggestions? And now I ask you: Is there anyone who would not be embarrassed if something he had passionately demanded all his life were suddenly to come true? If, for instance, the Kingdom of God were suddenly to burst on the Catholics, or the classless society of the future on the socialists? But perhaps this doesn't prove anything. We get used to demanding things and aren't quite ready to have our wishes realized; it'fonly natural, many people would say. Let me go on: Music must be the most important thing in the world to a musi- cian, and painting to a painter, and probably even the building of cement houses to a cement specialist. Do you think that this will in- duce him to imagine God as a specialist in reinforced concrete and that the others will prefer a painted world, or a world blown on the bugle, to the real one? You'll call it a silly question, but what makes it serious is that we are expected to insist on just this kind of silliness!
"Now please don't think," he said, turning to her in all seriousness, "that all I mean by this is that everyone wants what is hard to get, and despises the attainable. What I mean is this: Within reality there is a senseless craving for unreality. "
He had inconsiderately led Diotima a long way into the little val- ley; the snow trickling down the slopes was perhaps what made the ground wetter the higher they went, and they had to hop from one small clump of grass to the next, which punctuated their talk and forced Ulrich to go on with it by fits and starts. There were, as a re- sult, so many obvious objections to what he was saying that Diotima did not know where to begin. She had got her feet wet and stood still on a grassy mound, led astray and anxious, clutching at her skirts.
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Ulrich turned back and laughed. "You've started something ex- ceedingly dangerous, great cousin. People are vastly relieved to be left in a position where they can't put their ideas into practice. "
"And wh-at would you do," Diotima asked irritably, "ifyou could rule the world for a day? "
"I suppose I would have no choice but to abolish reality. "
''I'd love to know how you'd go about it. "
"I don't know either. I hardly know what I mean by it. We wildly
overestimate the present, the sense ofthe present, the here and now; like you and me being here in this valley, as if we'd been put in a basket and the lid of the present had fallen on it. W e make too much of it. We'll remember it. Even a year from now we may be able to describe how we were standing here. But what really moves us-;-me anyway-is always-putting it cautiously; I don't want to look for an explanation or a name for it-opposed in a sense to this way of expe- riencing things. It is displaced by so much here and now, so much Present. So it can't become the present in its tum. "
In the narrow valley Ulrich's words sounded loud and confused. Diotima suddenly felt uneasy and moved to get back to the car. But Ulrich made her stay and look at the landscape.
"Some thousands of years ago this was a glacier," he explained. "Even the earth isn't altogether what it's pretending to be for the moment. This well-rounded character is a hysteric. Today it is acting the good middle-class mother feeding her children. Back then the world was frigid and icy, like a spiteful girl. Several thousand years before that it luxuriated in hot fern forests, sultry swamps, and de- monic beasts. We can't say that it has evolved toward perfection, nor what its true condition is. And the same goes for its. daughter, man- kind.
Imagine the clothes in which people have stood here through the ages, right where we are standing now. Expressed in terms of the madhouse, it suggests long-standing obsessions with suddenly erupt- ing manic ideas; after these run their course, a new concept of life is there. So you see, reality does away with itself!
"There's something else I'd like to tell you"-Ulrich made a fresh start after a while. "That sense of having firm ground underfoot and a firm skin all around, which appears so natural to most people, is not very strongly developed in me. T};llnk back to how you were as a
child; all gentle glow. And then a teenager, lips burning with longing. Something in me rebels against the idea that so-called mature adult- hood is the peak of such a development. In a sense it is, and in a sense it isn't. If I were a myrmeleonina, the ant predator that resem- bles a dragonfly, I'd be horrified to think that the year before I had been the squat gray myrmeleon, the ant lion, running backward and living at the edge of the forest, dug in at the bottom of a funnel- shaped hole in the sand, catching ants by the waist with invisible pincers after first exhausting them by somehow bombarding them with grains of sand. There are times when the thought of my youth horrifies me in quite the same way, even though I may have been a dragonfly then and may be a monster now. "
He did not really know what he was aiming at. With his myr- meleon and myrmeleonina he had only been aping Arnheim's cul- tured omniscience a little. But he had it on the tip of his tongue to say: "Please, won't you make love to me, just to be nice? We are kin- dred, not wholly separate, certainly not one; in any case, the polar opposite of a dignified and formal relationship. "
But Ulrich was mistaken. Diotima was the kind of person who is satisfied with herself and therefore regards each age she passes through as a step on a stairway leading upward from below. She had no way of understanding what Ulrich was talking about, especially as she did not know what he had left unsaid. But they had meanwhile returned to the car, so she felt serene again, taking in what he was saying as his usual kind of chatter, somewhere between amusing and irritating, commanding no more of her attention than at most the comer of an eye. At this moment he really had no influence whatso- ever on her except that of bringing her down to earth. A fUmy cloud of shyness, risen from some hidden comer of her heart, had dis- sipated in a dry void. For the first time, perhaps, she had a hard, clear glimpse of the fact that her relations with Arnheim would force her, sooner or later, to make a choice that could change her whole life. One could not say that she was happy about this just now, but it had the weighty presence of a real mountain range. A weak moment had passed. That "not to do what one wants to do" had had for an instant an absurd glow she no longer understood.
"Amheim is altogether the opposite of me. He is always overesti-
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mating the happiness with which time and space rendezvous with him to. form the present moment," Ulrich sighed with a smile, moved to bring what he had been saying to an orderly conclusion. But he said nothing further about childhood, so it never came to the point where Diotima would have found out that he had a tender side.
· CLARISSE VISITS ULRICH TO TELL HIM A STORY
Redecorating old castles was the specialty of the well-known painter van Helmond, whose masterpiece was his daughter Clarisse, and one day she unexpectedly walked in on Ulrich.
"Papa sends me," she informed him, "to find out whether you couldn't use your splendid aristocratic connections just a little for him too. " She eyed the room with interest, threw herself into one chair and her hat onto another. Then she held out her hand to Ulrich.
"Your Papa overestimates me," he started to say, but she cut him short.
"Nonsense. You know perfectly well the old man always ·needs money. Business simply isn't what it used to be! " She laughed. "Ele- gant place you've got here. Nice! " She scrutinized her surroundings again and then looked at Ulrich. Her whole bearing had something of the endearing shyness of a pet dog whose bad conscience makes its skin twitch.
"Anyway, if you can do it, you will. If not, then you won't. Of course, I promised him you would. But I came for another reason. His asking me to see you put an idea into my head. It's about a cer- tain problem in my family. I'd like to hear what you think. " Her mouth and eyes hesitated and flickered for an instant; then she took her leap over the initial hurdle. 'Would the term 'beauty doctor' sug- gest anything to you? A painter is a beauty doctor. "
Ulrich understood; he knew her parents' house.
"Dark, distinguished, splendid, luxurious, upholstered, pen- nanted, and tasseled," she went on. "Papa is a painter, a painter is a kind of beauty doctor, and visiting our house has always been re- garded as quite the thing socially, like going to the newest spa. You understand what I'm talking about. And one of Papa's main sources of income has always been decorating palaces and· big country houses. Do you know the Pachhofens? "
Ulrich was not acquainted with this patrician family except for a Fraulein Pachhofen he had met once, years ago, in Clarisse's company.
"She was my friend," Clarisse said. "She was seventeen, and I was fifteen. Papa was supposed to renovate the castle and do the interi- ors. The Pachhofen place, ofcourse. We were all invited. Walter too; it was the first time he came along with us. And Meingast. "
"Meingast? " Ulrich did not know who Meingast was.
"But of course you know him; Meingast,. who went to Switzerland later on. He wasn't yet a philosopher in those days, but a rooster in every family with daughters. "
"I've never met him," Ulrich said. "But now I do know who he is. "
"All right, then. " Clarisse did some strenuous mental arithmetic. "Just a minute! Walter was then twenty-three and Meingast some- what older. Walter was a great secret admirer of Papa's, and it was the first time he'd ever been invited to stay at a castle. Papa often had an air of wearing inner royal robes. I think at first Walter was more in love with Papa than with me. And Lucy-"
"Slow down, Clarisse, for heaven's sake! " Ulrich pleaded. . "I seem to have lost the connection. "
"Lucy," Clarisse said, "is Lucy Pachhofen, of course, the daughter of the Pachhofens with whom we were staying. Now do you under- stand? All right, then, you understand. Papa wrapped Lucy in velvet or brocade with a long train and posed her on one of her horses; she imagined he must be a Titian or Tintoretto. They were absolutely mad about each other. "
"Papa about Lucy, and Walter about Papa? "
"Give me a chance, will you? At that time, there was Impression- ism. Papa was still painting old-fashioned/musical, the way he still does today, brown gravy and peacocks' tails. But Walter was all for
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open air, the clean lines of English functionalism, the new and sin- cere. In his heart, Papa found him as insufferable as a Protestant ser- mon; he couldn't stand Meingast either, but he had two daughters to many off; he had always spent more than he made, so he was long- suffering with the souls of the two young men. Walter, for his part, secretly loved Papa, as I said, but publicly he had to criticize him because ofthe new art movements, and Lucy never understood any- thing about art at all, but she was afraid of making a fool of herself in front ofWalter, and she was afraid that Walter might tuni out to be right, in which case Papa would only be a ridiculous old man. Do you get the picture? '~
Before committing himself, Ulrich wanted to know where Mama had been.
"Mama was there too, of course. They quarreled every day as al- ways, no more and no less. You can see that in these circumstances Walter enjoyed a favorable position. Everthing converged on Walter: Papa feared him, Mama egged him on, and I was beginning to fall in love with him. But Lucy played up to him. So Walter had a certain power over Papa, which he was beginning to savor in a cautiously lascivious way. I mean, it was then that Walter began to have a sense of his own importance; without Papa and me· he would have been nothing. Do you see how it all hangs·together? "
Ulrich felt it was safe to say he did. ,
"But I wanted to tell you something else! " Clarisse exclaimed. She took some time to think before she said: "Listen. Let's just start with me and Lucy: that was complicated in an exciting way. I was naturally worried . about Papa, whose infatuation was on the point of ruining the whole family. But I was also curious about ho_w this kind of thing happens. They were both out of their minds. Lucy's friendship for me was ofcourse mixed up with the feeling that she had a man for a lover whom I still obediently called 'Papa. ' She was more than a little. proud, but at the same time it made her terribly ashamed to face me. I don't think the old castle had sheltered such complications under its roofsince it was built All day long Lucy hung around Papa when- ever she could, and then at night she came to me in the tower to confess. I slept in the tower, and we had the lights on almost all night long. ''
"I:Iow far did Lucy actually go with your father? ''
"That was the only thing I could never find out. But just think of those summer nights! The owls whimpering, the night moaning, and when it all got too spooky we both got into my bed so we could go on talking. We couldn't see how a man in the grip of so fatal a passion could do anything but shoot himself. We were really waiting for it to happen from one day to the next-" ,
"It strikes me," UlriCh interrupted, "that nothing muCh had really happened between them. "
"That's what I think too-not everything. Yet tillngs did happen. You'll see in a minute. All of a sudden, Lucy had to leave because her father arrived unexpectedly and took her off on a trip to Spain. You should have seen Papa then, when he was left on his own. I think there were times he came aWfully close to strangling Mama. He was off on horseback from dawn to dusk, with a folding easel strapped behind his saddle, but he never painted a stroke, and he never touChed a brush at home either. The point is, he usually paints like a robot, but in those days rd find him sitting in one of those huge, empty rooms with a book he hadn't even opened. He would some- times brood like this for hours, then he'd get up and do the same thing in some other room or in the garden, sometimes all day long. Well, he was an old man, and youth had left him in the lurch; it's understandable, isn't it? And I suppose the image of Lucy and me, seeing us all the time as two girlfriends with their arms around each other's waists, chatting confidentially, must have sprouted in him then-like some wild seed. Perhaps he knew that Lucy always used to join me in the tower. So one night, around eleven, all the lights in the castle were. out, and there he was. That was quite something! " Clarisse was carried away with the import of her own story. "You hear this tapping and scraping on the stairs, and don't know what to make of it; then you hear the clumsy fiddling with the door handle, and the door opening spookily-"
"Why didn't you call out for help? "
"That's what was so peculiar about it. I knew from the first sound who it was. He must have stood still in the doorway, because I didn't hear anything for quite a while. He was probably frightened too. Then he slowly, carefully shut the door and whispered my name. I was absolutely stunned. I had no intention ofanswering him, but this weird thing happened: from somewhere deep inside me, as though I
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were a deep space, came a sound like a whimper. Have you ever heard of such a thing? ''
"No. Go on! " ·
"Well, that's all; the next instant he was clutching at me with infi- nite despair; he almost fell on my bed, and his head was lying on the pillow beside mine. "
"Tears? "
"Dry spasms. An old body, abandoned. I understood that at once. Oh, I tell you, ifit were possible to tell afterward all one felt at such a moment, it would be something really enormous. I think he was be- side himself with fury against the whole world of propriety, because of what it had made him miss. Suddenly I sense that he is himself again, and I know right away, although it's pitch-dark, that he's abso- lutely convulsed with a ruthless hunger for me. I know there is not going to be any mercy or consideration for me; there hasn't been a sound since that moan of mine; my body was blazing dry and his was like a piece ofpaper one sets at the edge ofa fire. He became incred- ibly light. I felt his arm snaking down my body, away from my shoulder. And now there's something I want to ask you. It's why I came. . . . "
Clarisse broke off.
"What? You haven't asked anything! " Ulrich prompted her after a short pause.
"No. There's something else I have to say first: The idea that he must be taking my keeping so still as a sign of consent made me loathe myself. Yet I lay there, my mind a blank, petrified with fear. What do you make of that? "
"I don't know what to say. "
"With one hand he kept stroking my face; the other wandered around. Trembling, pretending it wasn't up to anything, passing over my breast like a kiss, then, as if waiting, listening for some response. Then finally it moved-well, you know, and at the same time his. face sought mine. But at that point I pulled myself away with all my strength and turned on my side; and again that sound came "out of my chest, a sound I didn't know, something halfway between pleading and moaning. You see, I have a birthmark, a black medallion-"
"And what did your father do? " Ulrieh interrupted coolly.
But Clarisse refused to be interrupted. "Right here," she said with
a tense smile, pointing through her dress to a spot inward from her hip. "This is how far he got, to the medallion. This medallion has a magic power, or anyway, there's something special about it. "
Suddenly the blood rushed to her face. Ulrich's silence had so- bered her and dissipated the idea that had kept her under its spell. With an embarrassed smile she quickly finished:
"My father? He instantly sat up. I couldn't see what was going on in his face; embarrassment, I suppose. Maybe gratitude. After all, I had saved him at the last moment. You must understand: an old man, and a young girl has the strength to do that! He must have thought I was st_range somehow, because he pressed my hand quite tenderly, and stroked my head twice with Qis other hand. Then he went away, without a word. So I hope you'll do what you can for him? After all, I had to tell you, so you'd understand.
Diotima was enchanted by so much "culture. " She had always known that her native country harbored such treasures, but even she was amazed at their abundance. They would be invited together to visit in the country, and Ulrich noticed, among other things, that the fruit here was not infrequently picked up in the fingers and eaten unpeeled, whereas in the houses of the upper bourgeoisie the cere- monial of knife and fork was strictly obseiVed. The same could also be said about conversation, which tended to be flawlessly distin- guished only in the middle-class homes, while among the nobility the well-known, relaxed idiom reminiscent of cabdrivers prevailed. Di- otima presented her cousin with an enthusiastic defense of all this. She conceded that the bourgeois estates had better plumbing and
showed more intelligence in their appointments, while at the nobil- ity's countzy seats one froze in winter, there were often narrow, worn stairs, stuffy, low-ceilinged bedrooms were the behind-the-scenes counterpart of magnificent public rooms, and there were no dumb-. waiters or bathrooms for the servants. But that was just what made it all, in a sense, more heroic, this feeling for tradition and this splendid nonchalance! she wound up ecstatically.
Ulrich used these excursions to examine the feeling that bound him to Diotima. But there were so many digressions along the way that it is necessary to follow them awhile before coming to the point.
At that time, women were encased in clothes from tlu:oat to ankle. Men's clothes today are like what they were then, but they used to be more appropriate because they still represented an organic outward sign of the flawless cohesion and strict reserve that marked a man of the world. In those days, even a person of few prejudices, unham- pered by shame in appreciating the undraped human body, would have regarded a display of nudity as a relapse into the animal state, not because of the nakedness but because of the loss of the civilized aphrodisiac of clothing. Actually, it would then have been considered below the animal state, for a three-year-old Thoroughbred and a playing greyhound are far more expressive in their nakedness than a human body can ever be. But animals can't wear clothes; they have
orily the one skin, while human beings in those days had many skins. In full dress, with frills, puffs, bell skirts, cascading draperies, laces, and gathered pleats, they had created a surface five times the size of the original one, forming a many-petaled chalice heavy with an erotic charge, difficult of access, and hiding at its core the slim white animal that had to be searched out and that made itselfterribly desirable. It was the prescribed process Nature herself uses when she bids her creatures fluff out their plumage or spray out clouds of ink, so that desire and terror raised to a degree of unearthly frenzy will mask the matter-of-fact proceedings that are the heart of the matter.
For the first time in her life Diotima felt herself more than S\! per- ficially affected by this game, though in the most decorous way. Co- quetry was not wholly unknown to her, since it was one of the social accomplishments a lady had to master. Nor had she ever failed to notice when a young man looked at her with a glance that expressed something besides respect; in fact she rather liked it, because it made
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her feel the gentle power of feminine reproof when she forced the eyes of a man, intent on her like the horns of a bull, to turn away by uttering high-minded sentiments. But Ulrich, in the security of their kinship and his selfless services to the Parallel Campaign, and pro- tected, too, by the codicil established in his favor, permitted himself liberties that pierced straight through the tangled weavings of her idealism. On one occasion, for instance, as they were driving thro~gh the countryside, they passed some delightful valleys where hillsides covered with dark pine woods sloped down toward the road, and Di- otima pointed to them with the lines "Who planted you, 0 lovely woods, so high up there above? '' She of course quoted these lines as poetry, without any hint of the·tune that went along with them; she would have considered that old hat and inane. Ulrich was quick to answer: "The Landbank of Lower Austria. Don't you know, cousin, that all the forests hereabouts belong to the Landbank? The master you are about to praise in the next line is a forester on the bank's payroll. Nature in these parts is a planned product of the forestry industry, a storehouse of serried ranks of cellulose for the manufac- turers, as you can see at a glance. "
His answers were quite often like that. When she spoke of beauty, he spoke of the fatty tissue supporting the epidermis. When she mentioned love, he responded with the statistical curve that indi- cates the automatic rise and fall in the annual birthrate. When she spoke of the great figures in art, he traced the chain of borrowings that links these figures to one another. Somehow it always began with Diotima talking as if on the sixth day of Creation God had placed man as a pearl in the shell of'the world, whereupon Ulrich reminded her that mankind was a tiny pile of'dots on the outermost crust of a dwarf globe. She was not quite sure what Ulrich was up to, though it was obviously an attack on that sphere of greatness with which Diotima felt allied, and most of all she felt that he was rudely showing off. She found it hard to take that her cousin, whom she reg~ded as an intellectual enfant terrible, imagined he knew more than she did, and his materialistic arguments, which meant nothing to her, drawn as they were from the lower culture of facts and fig- ures, annoyed her mightily.
"Thank heaven," she once came back at him sharply, "there are
still people capable of believing in simple things, no matter how great their experience! "
"Your husband, for instance," Ulrich said. "I've been meaning to tell you for a long time that I much prefer him to Arnheim. "
They had got into the habit of exchanging ideas by speaking about Arnheim. For like all people in love, Diotima derived pleasure from talking about the object of her love without, at least so she believed, betraying herself; and since Ulrich found this insufferable, as does any man who has no ulterior·motive in yielding the stage to another, it often happened on such occasions that he lashed out against Arn- heim. Between Arnheim and himselfa relationship ofa peculiar kind had developed. When Arnheim was not traveling, they met almost every day. Ulrich knew that Section Chief Tuzzi regarded the Pros- sian with suspicion, as he did himself from observing Arnheim's ef- fect on Diotima since the very beginning. Not that there was yet anything improper between them, so far as could be judged by a third party who was confirmed in this judgment by the revolting ex- cess of propriety between these lovers, who were evidently emulat- ing the loftiest examples of a Platonic union of souls. Yet Arnheim showed a striking inclination to draw his friend's cousin (or was she his lover after all? , Ulrich wondered, but considered it most probably something like lover plus friend divided by two) into this intimate relationship. He often addressed Ulrich in the manner of an older friend, a tone made permissible by the difference in age between them but that became unpleasantly tainted with condescension be- cause of the difference in . their position. Ulrich's response was al- most always standoffish in a rather challenging way: he made a point of not seeming in the least impressed by speaking with a man who might just as easily have been speaking with kings and chancellors instead. Annoyed with himself because of his lack of propriety, he contradicted Arnheim with impolite frequency and unseemly irony, as a substitute for which he would have done better to enjoy himself as a silent observer. He was astonished that Arnheim irritated him so violently. Ulrich saw in him, fattened by favorable circumstances, the model example ofan intellectual development he hated. For this cel- ebrated writer was shrewd enough to grasp the questionable situa- tion man had got himself into ever since he ceased looking for his
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image in the mirror of a stream, and sought it instead in the sharp, broken surfaces of his intelligence; but this writing iron magnate blamed the predicament on intelligence itself and not on its imper- fections. There was a con game in this union between the soul. and the price of coal, a union that at the same time purposefully setved to keep apart what Amheim did with his eyes wide open and what he said and wrote in his cloud of intuition. Added to this, to exacerbate Ulrich's uneasiness, was something new to him, the combination of intellect and wealth. When Amheim talked about some particular subject almost like a specialist and then suddenly, with a casual wave of his hand, made all the details disappear in the light of a "great thought," he might be acting on some not unjustified need of his own, but at the same time this manner of freely disposing of things in two directions at once was too suggestive of the rich man who can afford the best and most expensive of everything. He had a wealth of ideas that was always slightly reminiscent of the ways of real wealth. But perhaps it was not even this ~at most provoked Ulrich into creating difficulties for the celebrated man; perhaps it was rather the inclination of Arnheim's mind toward a dignified mode of holding court and keeping house that of itself led to an asso-ciation with the best brands of the traditional as well as of the unusual. For in the mirror of this Epicurean connoisseurship Ulrich saw the affected grimace that is the face of the times, if one subtracts the few really strong lines of passion and thought in it; all this left him with hardly a chance to reach a better understanding of the m. an, who could proba- bly be credited with all sorts of merits as well. U was, of course, an utterly senseless battle he was waging, in an environment predis- posed in Amheim's favor, and in a cause that had no importance at all; the most that could be said for it was that this senselessness gave the sense of the total expenditure of his own energies. It was also a quite hopeless struggle, for if Ulrich actually once managed to wound his opponent, he had to recognize that he had hit the wrong Arnheim; if Amheim the thinker lay defeated on the ground, Am- heim the master of reality rose like a winged being with an indulgent smile, and hastened from the idle games of such conversations to Baghdad or Madrid.
This invulner~bility made it possible for him to counter the younger man's bad manners with that amiable camaraderie the
source of which Ulrich could never quite pinpoint. Besides, Ulrich was himself concerned not to go too far in tearing Arnheim down, because he was determined not to slip again into one of those half- baked and demeaning adventures in which his past had been far too rich; and the progress he observed between Arnheim and Diotima served as an effective insurance against weakening. So he generally directed the points of his attacks like the points of a foil, which yield on impact and are shielded with a friendly little rubber button to soften the blow. It was Diotima who had come up with this compari- son. She found herself mystified by this cousin of hers. His candid face with the clear brow, his quietly breathing chest, the ease in all his movements, all clearly indicated to her that no malicious, spiteful, sadistic-libidinous impulses could dwell in such a body. Nor was she quitewithoutprideiiisopersonableamemberofherfamily; shehad made up her mind from the beginning of their acquaintance to take him under her wing. Had he had black hair, a crooked shoulder, a muddy skin, or a low forehead, she would have said that his views accorded with his looks. But as it was, she was struck by a certain discrepancy between his looks and his ideas that made itself felt as an inexplicable uneasiness. The antennae of her famed intuition groped in vain for the cause, hut she enjoyed the groping at the other end of the antennae. In a sense, though not of course seriously, she some- times even preferred Ulrich's company to Arnheim's. Her need to f e e l s u p e r i o r was m o r e g r a t i f i e d b y h i m , s h e f e l t m o r e s u r e o f h e r s e l f , and to regard him as frivolous, eccentri~. or immature gave her a cer- tain satisfaction that balanced the idealism, becoming increasingly dangerous from day to day, that she saw taking on incalculable di- mensions in her feelings for Amheim. Soul is a terribly grave affair, and materialism by eontrast is lighthearted. The conduct of her rela- tionship with Amheim was sometimes as much of a strain as her salon, and her contempt for Ulrich made her life easier. She did not understand herself, but she noticed this effect, and this enabled her whenever she was annoyed with her cousin over one of his remarks to give him a sideways look that was only a tiny smile in the comer of her eye, while the eye itself, idealistically untouched and indeed even slightly disdainful, gazed straight ahead.
Anyway, whatever their reasons may have been, Diotima ~d Am- heim behaved toward Ulrich like two fighters clinging to athird per-
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son whom in their alternating fear they shove back and forth be- tween themselves; a situation not without its dangers for Ulrich, for through Diotima the question arose: Must people be in accord with their bodies or not?
68
A DIGRESSiON: MUST PEOPLE BE IN ACCORD WITH THEIR BODIES?
Independently of what their faces were talking about, the motion of the car on those long drives rocked the two cousins so that their clothes touched, overlapped a·bit, and moved apart again. One could only see this from their shoulders, because the rest of them was en- veloped by a shared blanket, but the bodies felt this contact, muffled by their clothing, as delicately indistinct as things seen ~ moonlight. Ulrich was n'ot unreceptive to this kind of flirting, without taking it too seriously. The overrefined transmission of desire from the body to the clothes, from the embrace to the obstacles, or, in short, from the goal to the approach, answered to his nature, whose sensuality drove him toward the woman; but its critical faculties held him back from the alien, uncongenial person it suddenly, with relentless lucid- ity, perceived her to be, and this made for a lively tug-of-war be- tween inclination and aversion. But this meant that the body's sublime beauty, its human beauty, the moment when the spirit's song rises from nature's instrument, or that other moment when the body is like a goblet filling up with a mystic potion, was something he had never known, leaving aside those dreams ofthe major's wife that had for the longest time put an end to such inclinations in him.
All his relationships with women, since then, had somehow not been right. With a certain amount of goodwill on both sides that hap- pens, unfortunately, all too easily. From the moment they first began to think about it, a man and a woman find a ready-made matriX of
feelings, acts, and complications waiting to take them in charge, and beneath this matrix the process takes its course in reverse; the stream no longer flows from the spring; the last things to happen push their way to the front of consciousness; the pure pleasure two people have in each other, this simplest and deepest of all feelings in love, and the natural source of all the rest, disappears completely in this psychic reversal.
So on his trips with Diotima, Ulrich not infrequently remembered their leave-taking after his first visit. He had taken her mild hand, an ·artfully and nobly perfected weightless hand, in his own as they gazed into each other's eyes. They both undoubtedly felt some aver- sion, and yet it occurred to them that they might nevertheless fuse to the point of extinction. Something of this vision had remained be- tween them. Thus two heads above cast a horrible chill on each other while the bodies below helplessly melt together at white heat. There is in this something nastily mythical, as in a two-headed god or the devil's cloven hoof, and it had often led Ulrich astray in his youth, when he had experienced it fairly often; but with the years it had proved to be no more than a very bourgeois aphrodisiac, in exactly the same way that the unclothed body substitutes for the nude. Nothi. rrg so inflames the middle-class lover as the flattering discovery of the power to drive another person into an ecstasy so wild that to be the cause of such changes by any other means one would have to
become a murderer.
And truly, that there can be such changes in civilized people, that
we actually can produce such effectsl-isn't this the question and the amazement in . the bold, glazed eyes of all those who dock at the lonely island of lust, where they are murderer, destiny, and God, and experience the maximum irrationality and adventurousness in the greatest comfort?
The repugnance he came to acquire with time against this kind of love eventually extended to his own body too, which had always en- couraged these misbegotten affairs by giving women the illusion of a reliable virility, for which Ulrich was too cerebral and too conflicted. At times he was as downright jealous of his own appearance as if it were a rival using cheap tricks against him. . :. . _in which a contradiction emerged that is also present in others who are not aware of it. For he was the one who kept his body trim by exercising it, giving it the
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shape, expression, and readiness for action that influence the mind no less than an ever-smiling or an ever-solemn face can. Oddly e~ough, the majority of people have either a neglected body, formed and deformed by chance circumstances, which seems to have almost no relation at all to their mind and character, or else a body disguised by th~ mask of sports, giving it the look of those hours when it is on vacation from itself. Those are the hours when a person spins out the daydream of his appearance, casually picked up from the magazines of the smart, great world. All those bronzed and muscular tennis players, horsemen, and race-car drivers, who look like world-record holders though usually they are merely competent; those ladies all dressed up or all undressed; they are all daydreamers, differing from common daydreamers only in that their dream doesn't stay in their brain but comes out into the open air as a projection of the mass soul-physically, dramatically, and (as one might say in the idiom of more-than-dubious occult phenomena) ideoplastically. But in com- mon with the usual spinners of fantasies they have a certain shallow-
ness of the dream, both as to its content and its nearness to the waking state. The problem of the integral physiognomy still eludes us, even though we have learned to draw conclusions about man's nature, sometimes even amazingly correct conclusions, from his handwriting, voice, sleeping position, and God knows what else; yet for the body as a whole we have only the fashionable models on which it forms itself, or at most a kind of nature-cure philosophy.
But is this the body ofour mind, our ideas, intimations, plans,. or- the pretty ones included-the body of our follies? That Ulrich had loved those follies and still to soine extent had them Pid not prevent him from feeling not at home in the body they had created.
6g
DIOTIMA AND ULRICH, CONTINUED
And it was above all Diotima who confirmed in a new way his sense that the surface and depths of his person were not one and the same. This came through clearly for him on these trips with her, which sometimes felt like drives through moonlight, when the young woman's beauty detached itself from her person altogether and mo- mentarily veiled his eyes like gossamer spun by a dream. He knew, of course, that Diotima compared everything he said with the conven- tional wisdom on the subject-the higher conventional wisdom, to be sure-and was pleased that she found it "immature," so that he constantly sat there as ifhe were before the wrong end of a telescope trained on him. He became smaller and smaller, and believed when he spoke with her (or at least was not far from believing) in his role'of devil's advocate and materialist that he could hear in his own words conversations from his last terms at school, when he and his class- mates had idolized all the villains and monsters of world history be- cause the teachers had presented them in tones of idealistic abhorrence. And when Diotima looked at him indignantly he grew smaller still, regressing from the morality of heroism and the drive for expansion to the defiant lies, callousness, and wavering excesses of adolescence-only quite figuratively, of course, as one can detect in a gesture or a word some distant ·similarity with gestures and words one has long since discarded, or only dreamed, or seen and disliked in others. In any event, this all resonated in his delight in shocking Diotima. The mind of this woman, who would have been so beautiful without her mind, aroused an inhuman feeling in him, per- haps a fear of mind itself, an aversion for all great things, a feeling that was quite faint, hardly detectable-and perhaps feeling was a much too pretentious expression for something that was but a mere breath. But if one magnified it into words, they would have gone something like this: at times he saw not only this woman's idealism but all the idealism in the world, in all its extent and ramifications,
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appear bodily in the form of an image hovering just above that Gre- cian head-it only just missed being the horns of the Devil! Then . Ulrich grew even smaller still and-again figuratively speaking-re- gressed to the first hotly moral state of childhood, in whose eyes temptation and terror lie as in the stare of a gazelle. The tender emo- tions of that age can in a single moment of yielding cause the whole, still-tiny world to burst into flames, since they have neither an aim nor the ability to make anything happen, but are a completely boundless fire. It was quite unlike him, and yet in Diotima's com- pany Ulrich ended up longing for these cb. ildhood feelings, though he could barely imagine them because they have so l\ttle in common with the conditions under which an adult lives.
At one point he very nearly confessed it to her. On one of their trips they had left the car to walk into a small valley that was like a river delta of meadows with steep forested banks and that formed a crooked triangle with a winding brook in its center stilled by a light frost. The slopes had been partly cleared of timber, with a few trees left standing like feather dusters stuck in the bare hillsides and hill- tops. This scene had tempted them to take a walk. It was one of those wistful, snowless days that seem in the middle ofwinter like a faded, no-longer-fashionable summer gown. Diotima abruptly asked her cousin: "Why does Amheim call you an activist? He says that you're always full of ideas how to do things differently and better. " She had suddenly remembered that her talk with Arnheim. about Ulrich and the General had ended inconclusively.
"I don't understand," she went on. "It always seems to me that you hardly ever mean anything seriously. But I must ask you, because we are involved together in such a responsible task. Do you remember our last conversation? There was something you said: you maintained that nobody, if he had the necessary power, would do what he wants to do. Now I would like to know what you meant by that. Wasn't it a horrible idea? "
Ulrich did not reply at once. And during this silence, after she had spoken as impudently as possible, she realized how much she had been preoccupied with the forbidden question of whether Amheim and she would do what each of them secretly wanted. She suddenly thought she had given herself away to Ulrich. She blushed, tried to stop herself, blushed even more, and did her best to gaze out over
the valley, away from him, with the most unconcerned expression she could muster.
Ulrich had observed the process. ''I'm very much afraid that the only reason Arnheim, as you say, calls me an activist is that he over- estimates my influence with the Tuzzi family," he answered. "You know yourself how little attention you pay to what I say. But now that you have asked me, I realize what my influence on you ought to be. May I tell you without your instantly criticizing me again? "
Diotima nodded silently as a sign of assent and tried to pull herself together behind an appearance of absentmindedness.
"So I said," Ulrich began, "that nobody would tum his dreams into realities even if he could. You remember our file folders full of suggestions? And now I ask you: Is there anyone who would not be embarrassed if something he had passionately demanded all his life were suddenly to come true? If, for instance, the Kingdom of God were suddenly to burst on the Catholics, or the classless society of the future on the socialists? But perhaps this doesn't prove anything. We get used to demanding things and aren't quite ready to have our wishes realized; it'fonly natural, many people would say. Let me go on: Music must be the most important thing in the world to a musi- cian, and painting to a painter, and probably even the building of cement houses to a cement specialist. Do you think that this will in- duce him to imagine God as a specialist in reinforced concrete and that the others will prefer a painted world, or a world blown on the bugle, to the real one? You'll call it a silly question, but what makes it serious is that we are expected to insist on just this kind of silliness!
"Now please don't think," he said, turning to her in all seriousness, "that all I mean by this is that everyone wants what is hard to get, and despises the attainable. What I mean is this: Within reality there is a senseless craving for unreality. "
He had inconsiderately led Diotima a long way into the little val- ley; the snow trickling down the slopes was perhaps what made the ground wetter the higher they went, and they had to hop from one small clump of grass to the next, which punctuated their talk and forced Ulrich to go on with it by fits and starts. There were, as a re- sult, so many obvious objections to what he was saying that Diotima did not know where to begin. She had got her feet wet and stood still on a grassy mound, led astray and anxious, clutching at her skirts.
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Ulrich turned back and laughed. "You've started something ex- ceedingly dangerous, great cousin. People are vastly relieved to be left in a position where they can't put their ideas into practice. "
"And wh-at would you do," Diotima asked irritably, "ifyou could rule the world for a day? "
"I suppose I would have no choice but to abolish reality. "
''I'd love to know how you'd go about it. "
"I don't know either. I hardly know what I mean by it. We wildly
overestimate the present, the sense ofthe present, the here and now; like you and me being here in this valley, as if we'd been put in a basket and the lid of the present had fallen on it. W e make too much of it. We'll remember it. Even a year from now we may be able to describe how we were standing here. But what really moves us-;-me anyway-is always-putting it cautiously; I don't want to look for an explanation or a name for it-opposed in a sense to this way of expe- riencing things. It is displaced by so much here and now, so much Present. So it can't become the present in its tum. "
In the narrow valley Ulrich's words sounded loud and confused. Diotima suddenly felt uneasy and moved to get back to the car. But Ulrich made her stay and look at the landscape.
"Some thousands of years ago this was a glacier," he explained. "Even the earth isn't altogether what it's pretending to be for the moment. This well-rounded character is a hysteric. Today it is acting the good middle-class mother feeding her children. Back then the world was frigid and icy, like a spiteful girl. Several thousand years before that it luxuriated in hot fern forests, sultry swamps, and de- monic beasts. We can't say that it has evolved toward perfection, nor what its true condition is. And the same goes for its. daughter, man- kind.
Imagine the clothes in which people have stood here through the ages, right where we are standing now. Expressed in terms of the madhouse, it suggests long-standing obsessions with suddenly erupt- ing manic ideas; after these run their course, a new concept of life is there. So you see, reality does away with itself!
"There's something else I'd like to tell you"-Ulrich made a fresh start after a while. "That sense of having firm ground underfoot and a firm skin all around, which appears so natural to most people, is not very strongly developed in me. T};llnk back to how you were as a
child; all gentle glow. And then a teenager, lips burning with longing. Something in me rebels against the idea that so-called mature adult- hood is the peak of such a development. In a sense it is, and in a sense it isn't. If I were a myrmeleonina, the ant predator that resem- bles a dragonfly, I'd be horrified to think that the year before I had been the squat gray myrmeleon, the ant lion, running backward and living at the edge of the forest, dug in at the bottom of a funnel- shaped hole in the sand, catching ants by the waist with invisible pincers after first exhausting them by somehow bombarding them with grains of sand. There are times when the thought of my youth horrifies me in quite the same way, even though I may have been a dragonfly then and may be a monster now. "
He did not really know what he was aiming at. With his myr- meleon and myrmeleonina he had only been aping Arnheim's cul- tured omniscience a little. But he had it on the tip of his tongue to say: "Please, won't you make love to me, just to be nice? We are kin- dred, not wholly separate, certainly not one; in any case, the polar opposite of a dignified and formal relationship. "
But Ulrich was mistaken. Diotima was the kind of person who is satisfied with herself and therefore regards each age she passes through as a step on a stairway leading upward from below. She had no way of understanding what Ulrich was talking about, especially as she did not know what he had left unsaid. But they had meanwhile returned to the car, so she felt serene again, taking in what he was saying as his usual kind of chatter, somewhere between amusing and irritating, commanding no more of her attention than at most the comer of an eye. At this moment he really had no influence whatso- ever on her except that of bringing her down to earth. A fUmy cloud of shyness, risen from some hidden comer of her heart, had dis- sipated in a dry void. For the first time, perhaps, she had a hard, clear glimpse of the fact that her relations with Arnheim would force her, sooner or later, to make a choice that could change her whole life. One could not say that she was happy about this just now, but it had the weighty presence of a real mountain range. A weak moment had passed. That "not to do what one wants to do" had had for an instant an absurd glow she no longer understood.
"Amheim is altogether the opposite of me. He is always overesti-
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mating the happiness with which time and space rendezvous with him to. form the present moment," Ulrich sighed with a smile, moved to bring what he had been saying to an orderly conclusion. But he said nothing further about childhood, so it never came to the point where Diotima would have found out that he had a tender side.
· CLARISSE VISITS ULRICH TO TELL HIM A STORY
Redecorating old castles was the specialty of the well-known painter van Helmond, whose masterpiece was his daughter Clarisse, and one day she unexpectedly walked in on Ulrich.
"Papa sends me," she informed him, "to find out whether you couldn't use your splendid aristocratic connections just a little for him too. " She eyed the room with interest, threw herself into one chair and her hat onto another. Then she held out her hand to Ulrich.
"Your Papa overestimates me," he started to say, but she cut him short.
"Nonsense. You know perfectly well the old man always ·needs money. Business simply isn't what it used to be! " She laughed. "Ele- gant place you've got here. Nice! " She scrutinized her surroundings again and then looked at Ulrich. Her whole bearing had something of the endearing shyness of a pet dog whose bad conscience makes its skin twitch.
"Anyway, if you can do it, you will. If not, then you won't. Of course, I promised him you would. But I came for another reason. His asking me to see you put an idea into my head. It's about a cer- tain problem in my family. I'd like to hear what you think. " Her mouth and eyes hesitated and flickered for an instant; then she took her leap over the initial hurdle. 'Would the term 'beauty doctor' sug- gest anything to you? A painter is a beauty doctor. "
Ulrich understood; he knew her parents' house.
"Dark, distinguished, splendid, luxurious, upholstered, pen- nanted, and tasseled," she went on. "Papa is a painter, a painter is a kind of beauty doctor, and visiting our house has always been re- garded as quite the thing socially, like going to the newest spa. You understand what I'm talking about. And one of Papa's main sources of income has always been decorating palaces and· big country houses. Do you know the Pachhofens? "
Ulrich was not acquainted with this patrician family except for a Fraulein Pachhofen he had met once, years ago, in Clarisse's company.
"She was my friend," Clarisse said. "She was seventeen, and I was fifteen. Papa was supposed to renovate the castle and do the interi- ors. The Pachhofen place, ofcourse. We were all invited. Walter too; it was the first time he came along with us. And Meingast. "
"Meingast? " Ulrich did not know who Meingast was.
"But of course you know him; Meingast,. who went to Switzerland later on. He wasn't yet a philosopher in those days, but a rooster in every family with daughters. "
"I've never met him," Ulrich said. "But now I do know who he is. "
"All right, then. " Clarisse did some strenuous mental arithmetic. "Just a minute! Walter was then twenty-three and Meingast some- what older. Walter was a great secret admirer of Papa's, and it was the first time he'd ever been invited to stay at a castle. Papa often had an air of wearing inner royal robes. I think at first Walter was more in love with Papa than with me. And Lucy-"
"Slow down, Clarisse, for heaven's sake! " Ulrich pleaded. . "I seem to have lost the connection. "
"Lucy," Clarisse said, "is Lucy Pachhofen, of course, the daughter of the Pachhofens with whom we were staying. Now do you under- stand? All right, then, you understand. Papa wrapped Lucy in velvet or brocade with a long train and posed her on one of her horses; she imagined he must be a Titian or Tintoretto. They were absolutely mad about each other. "
"Papa about Lucy, and Walter about Papa? "
"Give me a chance, will you? At that time, there was Impression- ism. Papa was still painting old-fashioned/musical, the way he still does today, brown gravy and peacocks' tails. But Walter was all for
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open air, the clean lines of English functionalism, the new and sin- cere. In his heart, Papa found him as insufferable as a Protestant ser- mon; he couldn't stand Meingast either, but he had two daughters to many off; he had always spent more than he made, so he was long- suffering with the souls of the two young men. Walter, for his part, secretly loved Papa, as I said, but publicly he had to criticize him because ofthe new art movements, and Lucy never understood any- thing about art at all, but she was afraid of making a fool of herself in front ofWalter, and she was afraid that Walter might tuni out to be right, in which case Papa would only be a ridiculous old man. Do you get the picture? '~
Before committing himself, Ulrich wanted to know where Mama had been.
"Mama was there too, of course. They quarreled every day as al- ways, no more and no less. You can see that in these circumstances Walter enjoyed a favorable position. Everthing converged on Walter: Papa feared him, Mama egged him on, and I was beginning to fall in love with him. But Lucy played up to him. So Walter had a certain power over Papa, which he was beginning to savor in a cautiously lascivious way. I mean, it was then that Walter began to have a sense of his own importance; without Papa and me· he would have been nothing. Do you see how it all hangs·together? "
Ulrich felt it was safe to say he did. ,
"But I wanted to tell you something else! " Clarisse exclaimed. She took some time to think before she said: "Listen. Let's just start with me and Lucy: that was complicated in an exciting way. I was naturally worried . about Papa, whose infatuation was on the point of ruining the whole family. But I was also curious about ho_w this kind of thing happens. They were both out of their minds. Lucy's friendship for me was ofcourse mixed up with the feeling that she had a man for a lover whom I still obediently called 'Papa. ' She was more than a little. proud, but at the same time it made her terribly ashamed to face me. I don't think the old castle had sheltered such complications under its roofsince it was built All day long Lucy hung around Papa when- ever she could, and then at night she came to me in the tower to confess. I slept in the tower, and we had the lights on almost all night long. ''
"I:Iow far did Lucy actually go with your father? ''
"That was the only thing I could never find out. But just think of those summer nights! The owls whimpering, the night moaning, and when it all got too spooky we both got into my bed so we could go on talking. We couldn't see how a man in the grip of so fatal a passion could do anything but shoot himself. We were really waiting for it to happen from one day to the next-" ,
"It strikes me," UlriCh interrupted, "that nothing muCh had really happened between them. "
"That's what I think too-not everything. Yet tillngs did happen. You'll see in a minute. All of a sudden, Lucy had to leave because her father arrived unexpectedly and took her off on a trip to Spain. You should have seen Papa then, when he was left on his own. I think there were times he came aWfully close to strangling Mama. He was off on horseback from dawn to dusk, with a folding easel strapped behind his saddle, but he never painted a stroke, and he never touChed a brush at home either. The point is, he usually paints like a robot, but in those days rd find him sitting in one of those huge, empty rooms with a book he hadn't even opened. He would some- times brood like this for hours, then he'd get up and do the same thing in some other room or in the garden, sometimes all day long. Well, he was an old man, and youth had left him in the lurch; it's understandable, isn't it? And I suppose the image of Lucy and me, seeing us all the time as two girlfriends with their arms around each other's waists, chatting confidentially, must have sprouted in him then-like some wild seed. Perhaps he knew that Lucy always used to join me in the tower. So one night, around eleven, all the lights in the castle were. out, and there he was. That was quite something! " Clarisse was carried away with the import of her own story. "You hear this tapping and scraping on the stairs, and don't know what to make of it; then you hear the clumsy fiddling with the door handle, and the door opening spookily-"
"Why didn't you call out for help? "
"That's what was so peculiar about it. I knew from the first sound who it was. He must have stood still in the doorway, because I didn't hear anything for quite a while. He was probably frightened too. Then he slowly, carefully shut the door and whispered my name. I was absolutely stunned. I had no intention ofanswering him, but this weird thing happened: from somewhere deep inside me, as though I
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were a deep space, came a sound like a whimper. Have you ever heard of such a thing? ''
"No. Go on! " ·
"Well, that's all; the next instant he was clutching at me with infi- nite despair; he almost fell on my bed, and his head was lying on the pillow beside mine. "
"Tears? "
"Dry spasms. An old body, abandoned. I understood that at once. Oh, I tell you, ifit were possible to tell afterward all one felt at such a moment, it would be something really enormous. I think he was be- side himself with fury against the whole world of propriety, because of what it had made him miss. Suddenly I sense that he is himself again, and I know right away, although it's pitch-dark, that he's abso- lutely convulsed with a ruthless hunger for me. I know there is not going to be any mercy or consideration for me; there hasn't been a sound since that moan of mine; my body was blazing dry and his was like a piece ofpaper one sets at the edge ofa fire. He became incred- ibly light. I felt his arm snaking down my body, away from my shoulder. And now there's something I want to ask you. It's why I came. . . . "
Clarisse broke off.
"What? You haven't asked anything! " Ulrich prompted her after a short pause.
"No. There's something else I have to say first: The idea that he must be taking my keeping so still as a sign of consent made me loathe myself. Yet I lay there, my mind a blank, petrified with fear. What do you make of that? "
"I don't know what to say. "
"With one hand he kept stroking my face; the other wandered around. Trembling, pretending it wasn't up to anything, passing over my breast like a kiss, then, as if waiting, listening for some response. Then finally it moved-well, you know, and at the same time his. face sought mine. But at that point I pulled myself away with all my strength and turned on my side; and again that sound came "out of my chest, a sound I didn't know, something halfway between pleading and moaning. You see, I have a birthmark, a black medallion-"
"And what did your father do? " Ulrieh interrupted coolly.
But Clarisse refused to be interrupted. "Right here," she said with
a tense smile, pointing through her dress to a spot inward from her hip. "This is how far he got, to the medallion. This medallion has a magic power, or anyway, there's something special about it. "
Suddenly the blood rushed to her face. Ulrich's silence had so- bered her and dissipated the idea that had kept her under its spell. With an embarrassed smile she quickly finished:
"My father? He instantly sat up. I couldn't see what was going on in his face; embarrassment, I suppose. Maybe gratitude. After all, I had saved him at the last moment. You must understand: an old man, and a young girl has the strength to do that! He must have thought I was st_range somehow, because he pressed my hand quite tenderly, and stroked my head twice with Qis other hand. Then he went away, without a word. So I hope you'll do what you can for him? After all, I had to tell you, so you'd understand.
