No More Learning

One might gc;> so far as to say that conscientiousness fqrces them to act differently from the way they think. Director Fischel, for instance, could form no concept at all of true patriotism or the true Austria, but he did have his own opinion of true progress, which was certainly different from Count Leinsdorf's opinion. Exhausted by stocks and bonds or whatever it was he had to deal with, his only recreation an evening at the opera once a week, he believed in a progress of the whole that must some- how resemble his bank's progressively increasing profitability. But now that Count Leinsdorf claimed to know better even in this re- spect, and thus began to put pressure on Leo Fischel's conseience, Fischel felt that "you can never know, after all" (except, of course, with stocks and bonds), and since one might not know but on the other hand would rather not miss out on anything, he decided ~oin- formally sound out his general manager on the matter.
When. he did, the general manager had for quite similar reasons already had a talk with the chief executive of the National Bank and knew all about it. For not only the general manager of the lloyd Bank but, it goes without saying, the chief executive of the National Bank had also received an invitation from Count Leinsdorf. Leo Fischel, who was only a head of department, owed his invitation en- tirely to his wife's family connections: she came from the upper reaches ofthe government/bureaucracy and never forgot it, either in her social relations or in her domestic quarrels with Leo. He there- fore contented himself, as he and his superior talked about the Paral- lel Campaign, with wagging his head significantly, as if tO s~y "big proposition," though it might in other circumstances have meant "rotten business"-either way it couldn't hurt, but on account of his wife Fischel would probably have been happier if it had turned out to be a "rotten business. "
So far, however, von Meier-Ballot, the chief executive who had been consulted by the general manager, had himself formed an ex- cellent impression of the undertaking. When he received Count Leinsdorf's "suggestion," he went over to the mirror-naturally,
though not for that reason-and there he saw, above the tailcoat and the little gold chain ofhis order, the. composed face of a middle-class government minister, in which the hardness of money was at most barely visible somewhere far back in the eyes. His fingers hung down like flags in a calm, as though they had never in their life had to carry out the hasty movements with which an apprentice bank teller counts his cash. This bureaucratically overbred high fmancier who had hardly a thing in common any longer with the hungry, roaming wild dogs of the stock-exchange game, saw vague but pleasingly modulated pessibilities ahead, an outlook he had an opportunity of confirming that same evening in conversation with the former Minis- ters of State von Holtzkopf and Baron Wisnieczky at the Industrial- ists' Club.
These two gentlemen were well-informed, distinguished, and dis- creet persons in some kind of high positions into which they had been shunted after the brief caretaker government between two po- litical crises in which they had participated had become superfluous. They were men-who had spent their lives in the service of the State and the Crown, with no taste for the limelight unless ordered into it by His Majesty himself. They had heard the rumor that the great campaign . was to have a subtle barb aimed at Germany. They were still convinced, as they had been before the failure of their mission, that the lamentable manifestations that had even then been making the political life of the Dual Monarchy a focus of infection for Europe were extraordinarily complicated. But just as they had felt duty-bound to regard these problems as solvable when they received the order to solve them, so they would declare that it was not outside the realm of possibility that something might be achieved by the means Count Leinsdorfwas suggesting. Specifically, they felt that "a landmark," "a splendid show ofvitality," "a commanding role on the world stage that would have a bracing effect on the situation here at home," were goals so well formulated by Count Leinsdorf that one could no more refuse them than refuse a call for every man who de- sired the Good to step forward.
It is ofcourse possible that von Holtzkopfand Wisnieczky, as men informed and experienced in public affairs, felt some qualms, espe- cially as they might assume that they themselves would be expected to play a part in the further development of this campaign. But it is
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easy for people who live on the ground floor to be choosy and tum down whatever does not s1,1it them. One whose gondola in life is nine thousand feet up in the air, however, can't simply step outside, even if one is not in accord with everything going on. And since persons in such high circles really are loyal and-as opposed to the previously . mentioned bourgeois dither-do not like to act otherwise than they think, they must in many cases avoid giving too much careful thought to an issue. The banker von Meier-Ballot accordingly found his own favorable impression of the affair confirmed by what the two other gentlemen had to say about it; while he personally and professionally was given to caution, he had heard enough to decide that this was an affair to which he would lend his presence in any case, but without committing himself.
At this time the Parallel Campaign was not yet in existence, and not even Count Leinsdorf had any idea what form it would take. It can be said with certainty that at the moment, the only definite thing that had occurred to him was a list ofnames.
But even this is a great deal. It meant that even at this stage, with- out anyone needing to have a clear conception ofanything, a network of readiness that covered a great many connections was in place; and one can certainly maintain that this is the proper sequence. For first it was necessary to invent knife and fork, and then mankind learned to eat properly. This was how Count Leinsdorf explained it.
37
BY LAUNCHING THE SLOGAN "YEAR OF AUSTRIA," A JOURNALIST MAKES A LOT OF TROUBLE FOR COUNT LEINSDORF, WHO ISSUES A FRANTIC CALL FOR ULRICH
Although Count Leinsdorf had sent out invitations in many direc- tions "to start people thinking," he might riot have made headway so quickly had not an influential journalist who had heard that some- thing was in the wind quickly published two long articles in his paper offering as his own ideas everything he had guessed to be in the works. He did not know much-where, indeed, could he have found out? -but no one noticed; indeed, this was just what made it possible for his articles to be so irresistibly effective. He was really the inven- tor of the idea of the "Year of Austria" that he wrote about in his columns, without himself knowing what he meant by it but writing sentence after sentence in which this phrase combined with others as in a dream and took on new forms and unleashed storms of enthusi- asm. Count Leinsdorf was horrified at first, but he was wrong. The phrase "Year of Austria" showed what it means to be a journalistic genius, for it was a triumph of true instinct. It caused vibrations to sound that would have remained dumb at the mention of an "Aus- trian Century"; the call to bring about such an era would have struck sensible people as impossible to take seriously. Why this is so would be hard to say. Perhaps a certain vagueness, a metaphorical quality that lessens realistic perceptions, lent wings to the feelings of more people ~ just Count Leinsdorf. For vagueness has an elevating and magnifying power. '
It seems that the bona fide, practical realist just doesn't love reality or take it seriously. As a child he crawls under the table when his parents are out, converting their living room by this simple yet in- spired trick into an adventure. As a boy he longs for a watch; as a young man with a gold watch, for a wife to go with it; as a man with
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watch and wife, for a promotion; and yet, when he has happily achieved this little circle of desires and should be peacefully swing- ing back and forth in it like a pendulum, his supply of unsatisfied yearnings does not seem to have diminished at all. For if he wants to elevate himself above the daily rut, he resorts to figures of speech. Since to him snow is evidently unpleasant at times, he compares it to a woman's shimmering bosom, and as soon as he begins to tire of his ~fe's breasts, he likens them to shimmering snow. He would be hor- rified if the beaks of his wife's nipples actually turned to coral, or their billing and cooing turned out to come froin the horny beak of a real dove, but poetically it excites him. He is capable of turning ev- erything into something else-snow to skin, skin to flower petals, petals to sugar, sugar to powder, powder to drifting snow again-as long as he can make it out to be something it is not, which may be taken to prove that he cannot bear to stay in the same place for long, no matter where he may find himself. Most of all, no true Kakanian could, in his. soul, bear Kakania for long. To ask of him an "Austrian Century" would be tantamount to asking him to sentence himself and the world to the punishments of hell by an absurdly voluntary effort. An Austrian Year, on the other hand, was quite something else. It meant: Let's show them, for once, who we could be! -but, so to speak, only until further·notice, and for a year at most. One could understand by it whatever one liked, it wasn't for eternity, and this somehow touched the heart. It stirred to life the deepest love of one's country.
And so Count . Leinsdorf had an undreamed-of success. After all, his original idea had also come to him as such a figure of speech, but a number of names had occurred to him as well, and his moral nature aspired to something beyond such intangibles. He had a well-defined concept of the way the imagination of the common people or, as he now put it to a faithful journalist, the imagination of the public, must be directed to a goal that was clear, sound, reasonable, and in har- mony with the true aims of mankind and their own country. This journalist, spurred on by his colleague's success, wrote all this down immediately, and as he had the advantage of having it from "an au- thentic source," it was part ofthe technique ofhis profession to draw attention to this by attributing his information in large type to "influ- ential circles. " This was precisely what Count Leinsdorf had ex-
pected of him, for His Grace attached great importance to being no ideologue but an experienced practical statesman, and he wanted a fine line drawn between a "Year of Austria" as the brainchild of a clever member of the press and the circumspection of responsible circles. To this end he borrowed the technique of someone he would not normally have liked to regard as a model-Bismarck-to let newsmen serve as the mouthpiece for his actual intentions so as to be able to acknowledge or disavow them as circumstances might dictate.
But while Count Leinsdorf acted with such shrewdness, he over- looked something. For it was not only a man like himselfwho saw the Truth we so much need; innumerable other people saw themselves as possessing it as well. It may be defmed as a calcification of the previously described state of mind, in which one still makes meta- phors. Sooner or later even the desire for these metaphors disap- pears, and many ofthe people who still retain a supply ofdefinitively unfulfilled dreams create for themselves a point at which they stare in secret, as though it marks the beginning of a world that life still owes them. In almost no time after he had sent out his statement to the press, His Grace had intimations that all those who have no money harbor inside them an unpleasant crank. This opinionated man-within-the-man goes with him to the office every morning and has absolutely no way to air his protest against the way things are done in the world; so instead he keeps his eyes glued to a lifelong secret point ofhis own that everyone else refuses to see, although·it is obviously the source of all the misery in a world that will not recog-
·nize its savior. Stich fixed points, where the center of a person's equi- librium coincides with the world's center of equilibrium, may be, for instance, a spittoon that can be shut with a simple latch; or the aboli- tion of open salt cellars in restaurants, the kind people poke their knives into, so as to stop at one stroke the spread of that scourge of mankind, tuberculosis;· or the adoption of Oehl's system of short- hand, so effective a time-saver it can solve the problems of society once and for all; or conversion to a natural mode of living that would halt the present random destruction ofthe environment; not to men- tion a metaphysical theory ofthe motions ofcelestial bodies, simplifi- cation of the administrative apparatus, and a reform of s~x life. In the right circumstances a man can help himself by writing a book about
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his point, or a pamphlet, or at least a letter to the editor, thereby putting his protest on the historical record, which is marvelously comforting even if nobody ever reads it. Usually, however, it can be counted on to attract the attention of a few readers who assure the author that he is a new Copernicus, whereupon they introduce them- selves as unrecognized Newtons. This custom of picking the points out of each other's fur is widespread and a great comfort, but it is without lasting effect because the participants soon fall to quarreling and find themselves isolated again. However, it can also happen that a small circle of admirers gathers around one prophet or another, and with united energy accuses heaven of being remiss in not suffi- ciently supporting its anointed son. And if a ray of hope should sud- denly fall from on high upon such little piles of points, as it did when Count Leinsdorfissued a public statement that a "Year of Austria"- if it should materialize, which was still not yet settled-would fu any case have to be in accord with the true aims ofexistence, they receive it like saints vouchsafed a divine vision.
Count Leinsdorf had aimed at bringing about a powerful demon- stration arising spontaneously out of the midst of the people them- selves, meaning the universities, the clergy, certain names never absent from the rosters of charity affairs, and even the press. He was counting on the patriotic parties, the "sound sense" of the middle class, which hung out flags on the Emperor's birthday, and the sup- port of leading financiers; he even included the politicians, because he hoped in his heart that his great work would render politics super- fluous by bringing it all down to the common denominator of "our fatherland," from which he subsequently intended to subtract the "land," leaving the fatherly ruler as the only remainder. But the one thing His Grace had not reckoned with and that surprised him was the widespread need to improve the world, which was hatched out by the warmth of a great occasion as insect eggs are hatched by a fire. His Grace had not counted on this; he had expected a great amount of patriotism but was not prepared for inventions, theories, schemes for world unity, and people demanding that he release them from intellectual prisons. They besieged his palace, hailed the Parallel Campaign as a chance to help mak~ the truth prevail at last, and Count Leinsdorf did not know what to do with them. In awareness of his social position he could not, after all, sit down at table with all
these people, yet, given a mind filled with intense morality, he did not want to avoid meeting them, either; but since his education had been in politics and philosophy to the exclusion of science and tech- nology, he had no way of telling whether there was anything to their proposals or not.
In this situation he felt an increasingly desperate need for Ulrich, who had been recommended to him as the very man for the occa- sion; obviously, his secretary or any ordinary secretary could not cope with such exigencies. Once, when he had been very annoyed with his secretary, he had even prayed to God-though he was ashamed ofit the next day-for Ulrich to come. And when this did not happen, he personally took systematic steps to find him. He ordered the direc- tory to be checked, but Ulrich was not yet in it. He then went to his friend Diotima, who could usually be counted on for advice, and it turned out that the admirable woman had actually seen Ulrich al- ready, but she had forgotten to ask for his address, or pretended she had in order to us~the opportunity to propose a new and far better candidate for secretary of the great campaign. But Count Leinsdorf was quite agitated and declared most positively that he had already grown used to Ulrich, that a Prussian was out of the question, even a reformed Prussian, and that he wanted to hear nothing at all about still further complications. Dismayed to see that he had apparently hurt his friend's feelings, he came up with an idea of his own-he told her that he would drive straight to his friend the Commissioner of Police, who should certainly be able to dig up the address of any citizen whatever.
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CLARISSE AND HER DEMONS
When Ulrich's note arrived Walter and Clarisse were again playing the piano so violently that the spindly reproduction furniture rattled and the Dante Gabriel Rossetti prints on the walls trembled. The aged messenger who had found house and doors open without being challenged was met by a full blast of thunder in the face as he fought his way into the sitting room, and the holy uproar he had wandered into left him nailed to the wall With awe. It was Clarisse who finally discharged the· onrushing musical excitement with two powerful crashes and set him free. While she read the note, the interrupted outpouring still writhed under Walter's hands; a melody ran along jerkily like a stork and then spread its wings. Clarisse kept a mistrust- ful ear on this while she deciphered Ulrich's handwriting.
When she announced their friend's impending arrival, Walter said: "Too bad! "
She sat down again beside him on her little revolving piano stool, and a smile that for some reason struck Walter as cruel parted her lips, which looked sensual. It was that moment when the players rein in their blood in order to be able to release it in the same rhythm, eyes blazing out of their heads in four long parallel axes while their buttocks tense and grip the little stools that keep trying to wobble on the long necks of their wooden screws.
The next instant, Clarisse and Walter were off like two locomo- tives racing side by side. The piece they were playing came rushing at their eyes like flashing rails, vanished under the thundering engine, and spread out behind them as a ringing, resonant, marvelously pres- ent landscape. In the course of this. ride these two people's separate feelings were compressed into a single entity; hearing, blood, mus- cles, were all swept along irresistibly by the same experience; shim- mering, bending, curving walls of sound forced their bodies onto the same track, bent them as one, and expanded and contracted their chests in the same breath. In a fraction of a second, gaiety, sadness,
anger, and fear, love and hatred, desire and satiety, passed through Walter and Clarisse. They became one, just as in a great pan~c hun- dreds of people who a moment before had been distinct in every way suddenly make the same flailing movements offlight, utter the same senseless screams, their gaping mouths and staring eyes the same, all swept backward and forward, left and right, by the same aimless force, howling, twitching, tangling, trembling. Bufthis union did not have the same dull; overwhelming force as life itself, where this kind of thing does not happen so easily, although it blots out everything personal when it does. The anger, love, joy, gaiety, and sadness that Clarisse and Walter felt in their flight were not full emotions but lit- tle more than physical shells offee~ingsthat had been worked up into a frenzy. They sat stiffiy in a trance on their little stools, angry, in love, or sad, at nothing, with nothing, about nothing, or each of them at, with, about something else, thinking and meaning different things of their own; the dictate of music united them in highest passion, yet at the same time it left them with something absent, as in the com- pulsive sleep of hypnosis.
Each of these two people felt it in his own way. Walter was happy and excited. Uke most musical people, he considered these billow- ing surges and emotional stirrings, all this cloudy, churned-up, so- matic sediment of the soul, to be the simple language of the eternal that bindS all mankind together. It delighted him to press Clarisse to himself with the powerful arm of primal emotion. On this day, he had come home earlier than usual from the office, where he had been cataloging works of art that still bore the imprint of great, un- fragmented times and emitted a mysterious strength ofwill. Clarisse had given him a friendly welcome, and now in the awesome world of music she was firmly bound to him. It was a day of mysterious suc- cesses, a soundless march as if gods were approaching. "Perhaps today is the day? " Walter thought. He wanted to bring Clarisse back, but not by force; the realization would have to rise up from her in- nermost self and incline her gently to him.
The piano was hammering glinting note heads into a wall of air. Although the origin of this process was entirely real, the walls of the room soon disappeared, and there arose in their place golden parti- tions of music, that mysterious space in which self and world; per- ception and feeling, inside and outside, plunge into one another in
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the most indefinable way, while the space itself consists entirely of sensation, certainty, precision, a whole hierarchy of ordered detail of glory. It was to these sensual details that the threads of feeling were fastened, spun from the billowing haze of their souls, and this haze was mirrored in the precision of these walls of sound and appeared clear to itself. The two players' souls hung like cocoons in these threads and rays. The more tightly they became enwrapped and the farther their beams were spread, the cozier Walter felt; his dreams were assuming so much of the shape of a small child that he was be- ginning here and there to strike the notes with a false and too senti- mental emphasis.
But before it came to the point of making a spark of ordinary feel- ing strike through the golden mist and bring them back to an earthly relationship to each other, Clarisse's thoughts had diverged as far from Walter's as is possible for two people who are storming along side by side with twinned gestures of desperation and rapture. In fluttering mists, images sprang up, overlapped, fused, faded-that was Clarisse's thinking. She had her own way of thinking; sometimes several ideas were intertwined simultaneously, sometimes none at all, but then one could feel the thoughts lurking like demons behind the stage. The temporal sequence ofevents that gives such real sup- port to most people became in Clarisse a veil that threw its"folds one over the other, only to dissolve them into a barely visible puff of air.
This time, three people were around Clarisse: Walter, Ulrich, and the woman-killer Moosbrugger.
Ulrich had told her about Moosbrugger.
Attraction and repulsion blended into a peculiar spell.
Clarisse was gnawing at the root of love. It is a forked root, with
kisses and bites, glances clinging and a tormented last-minute aver- sion ofthe gaze. "Does getting along well together lead to hate? " she wondered. "Does a decent life crave brutality? Does peacefulness need cruelty? Does orderliness long to be tom apart? " Such were, and were not, the thoughts provoked by Moosbrugger. Beneath the thunder ofthe music a world was suspended around her, a conflagra- tion on the verge of breaking out, inwardly eating away at the tim- bers. But it was also like a metaphor, where the things compared are the same yet on the. other hand quite different, and from the dis- similarity of the similar as from the similarity of the dissimilar two
columns of smoke drift upward with the magical scent of baked ap- ples and pine twigs strewn on the fire.
"We should never have to stop playing," she said to herself, and flicking the pages back she started again at the beginning when they reached the end. Walter smiled self-consciously and joined in.
"What is Ulrich actually doing with his mathematics? " she asked him.
Walter shrugged his shoulders while playing, as if he were at the wheel of a racing car.
"One would have to go on and on playing, till the very end," Cla- risse thought. "Ifone could go on playing uninterruptedly to the end of one's life, what would Moosbrugger be then? A horror? An idiot? A black bird in the sky? " She did not know.
She knew nothing at all. One fme day-she could have calculated to the day when it happened-she had awakened from the sleep of childhood and found the conviction ready-made that she was called upon to accomplish something, to play a special role, perhaps even chosen for some great purpose. At the time, she knew nothing ofthe world. Nor did she believe what she was told about it-by her par- ents, her older brothers; their chattering was all well and good, but one could not assimilate what they said, one simply couldn't, any more than a chemical substance can absorb another that does not "fit" it. Then came Walter; that was the day; from that day on every- thing "fit. " Walter wore a little mustache, a toothbrush on his upper lip; he called her "Fraulein," and all at once the world was no longer a barren, chaotic, parched plain but a gleaming circle, with Walter at the center, herself at the center, two centers coinciding in one. Earth, buildings, fallen leaves not swept away, aching lines of per- spective (she remembered the moment as one ofthe most torment- ing of her childhood, when she stood with her father looking at a scenic view, and her father, the painter, went into endless raptures over it, while for her, gazing into the world along those long aerial lines ofperspective only hurt, as ifshe had to run her finger along the sharp edge of a ruler)-these were the things that had made up life before. Now, all at once, it had become hers, flesh ofher flesh.
She knew then that she would do something gigantic, though what it would be she did not yet know. Meanwhile she 'felt it most power- fully with music, and hoped then that Walter would become an even
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greater genius than Nietzsche, to say nothing of Ulrich, who arrived on the scene later and who had merely given her Nietzsche's works as a present.
From then on things had progressed. How fast, it was now impos- sible to say. How badly she had played the piano before; how little she had known about music! Now she played better than Walter. And all the books she had read! Where had they all come from? She saw it all before her like swarms of black birds fluttering around a little girl standing in the sno:w. But somewhat later she saw a black wall with white spots in it; black stood for ~ she didn't know, and while the white ran together to form little, and sometimes larger, is- lands, the black remained unchangingly infinite. This blackness emitted fear and agitation. "Is this the devil? " she thought. "Has the devil turned into Moosbrugger? " Between the white spots she now noticed thin gray tracks; on these she had moved from one thing to the next in her life; they were events: departures, arrivals, excited discussions, battling with her parents, the marriage, the house, the incredible struggle with Walter. The thin gray tracks coiled like snakes. "Snakes! " Clarisse thought. "Snakes! " These events entan- gled her, trapped her, kept her from getting where she wanted to go, were slippery, and made her aim at a target she did not want.
Snakes, snares, slippery; that was life's way. Her thoughts began to race like life. Her fmgertips dipped into the torrent of music. In the streambed of music snakes and snares came slithering down. Then the prison where they kept Moosbrugger hidden opened like the ref- uge of a quiet bay. Clarisse's thoughts entered his cell with a shud- der. "One must make music to the end," she repeated to herself for encouragement, but her heart was . trembling violently. When it had
calmed down the entire cell was filled with her self. It was as,gentle a feeling as salve on a wound, but when she tried to hang on to it for- ever it began to open and spread apart like a fairy tale or a dream. Moosbrugger sat with his head in his hand, and she freed him from his fetters. As her fingers moved, and as if at their summons, strength,·courage, virtue, kindness, beauty, and riches entered ~e cell like a breeze from many meadows. "It doesn't matter at all why I am doing this, it doesn't matter why I feel like doing this," Clarisse felt, "what counts is that now I am doing it. " She laid her hands, a
part of her own body, on his eyes, and when she withdrew her fingers Moosbrugger had turned into a handsome youth and she stood be- side him as an incredibly beautiful woman with a body as sweet and soft as a southern wine, not at all recalcitrant, as little Clarisse's body usually was. "This is the form of our innocence," she noted in some deep-down thinking layer of consciousness.
But why couldn't Walter be like this? Emerging from the depths of her music fantasy, she remembered what a child she still had been, already in love with Walter at fifteen, and prepared to save him by her courage, strength, and kindness from all the dangers that threatened his genius. And how· beautiful it had been when Walter glimpsed those deep spiritual pitfalls everywhere. She wondered whether it had all been mere childishness. Their marriage had ir- radiated it with a disturbing light. Somehow their marriage was sud- denly creating a great embarrassment for their love.
~ot that things hadn't also been wonderful of late, perhaps even richer in meaning and substance than formerly; still, that huge conflagration, those flames everywhere flickering across the sky, had dwindled to the dif- ficulties of a fire of the hearth that is reluctant to bum. Clarisse was not quite sure whether her struggles with Walter still mattered. Meanwhile life was racing by like this music that was vanishing under her hands. In a wink it would be over! She was gradually overcome by hopeless terror. At this moment she noticed that Walter's playing
was becoming unsure. His feelings were splashing like big raindrops on the keys. She instantly guessed what he was thinking of: the child. She knew that he wanted to bind her to himself with a child. They argued about it day in, day out. And the music did not stop for a second. The music knew no denial. Like a net whose entangling meshes she had not noticed, it was pulling shut with lightning speed.
Clarisse leapt up in mid-chord and banged the piano shut; Walter barely managed to save his fingers.
Oh, how that hurt! Still shocked, he understood everything. It was Ulrich's coming, the mere news of which was enough to throw her mind into a frenzy! Ulrich was bad for Clarisse in that he callously roused in her something that Walter himselfhardly dared touch, that wretched streak ofgenius in Clarisse. The secret cavern where some- thing calamitous was tearing at chains that might one day give way.
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He did not stir, but only gave Clarisse a dumbfounded stare.
And Clarisse offered no explanations, stood there, and breathed hard.
She was definitely not at all in love with Ulrich, she assured Walter after he had spoken. Ifshe were in love with him, she would say so at once. But she did feel kindled by him, like a light. She felt she shone more herself, amounted to more, when he was near; Walter on the. other hand always wanted only to close the shutters. Besides, her feelings were nobody else's business, not-Ulrich's and not Walter's!
Yet Walter thought that between the fury and indignation that breathed from her words he could scent a narcotic, deadly kernel of something that was not fury.
Dusk had fallen. The room was black. The piano was black. The silhouettes of two people who loved each other were black. Clarisse's eyes gleamed in the dark, kindled like a light, and in Walter's mouth, restless with pain, the enamel on a tooth shone like ivory. Regardless of the greatest affairs of state occurring in the world outside, and de- spite its vexations, this seemed to be one of those moments for which God had created the ear:th.
39
A MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES CONSISTS OF
QUALITIES WITHOUT A MAN
But Ulrich did not come that evening. After Director Fischel had left him in such haste, he fell to mulling over the question of his youth: why the world so uncannily favored inauthentic and-in a higher sense-untrue statements. "One always gets one step ahead pre- cisely when one lies," he thought. "That's another thing I should have told him. "
Ulrich was a passionate man, but not in the sense of passions as commonly understood. There must indeed have been something
that drove him again and again into this stat~. and it was perhaps passion, but when he was actually excited or behaving in an excited manner, his attitude was both passionate and detached at the same time. He had run the gamut of experience, more or less, and felt that he might still now at any time plunge into something that ! . teed not mean anything to him personally so long as it stimulated his urge to action. So without much exaggeration he was able to say of his life that everything in it had fulfilled itself as if it belonged together more than it belonged to him. B had always followed A, whether in battle or in lov,e. Therefore he had to suppose that the personal qualities he had achieved in this way had more to do with one another than with him; that every one of them, in fact, looked at closely, was no more intimately bound up with him than with anyone else who also hap- pened to possess them.
Nevertheless, one is undoubtedly conditioned by one's qualities and is made up ofthem, even ifone is not identical with them, and so one can sometimes seem just as much a stranger to oneself at rest as in motion. If Ulrich had been asked to say what he was really like he would have been at a loss, for like so many people he had never tested himself other than by a task and his relation to it. His self- confidence had not been damaged, nor was it coddled and vain; it never needed that overhauling and lubrication that is called probing one's conscience. Was he a strong person? He didn't know; on that point he was perhaps fatefully mistaken. But he had surely always been a person with faith in his own strength. Even now he did not doubt that the differences between identifying with one's own expe- riences and qualities and distancing oneself from them was only a difference in attitud~, in a sense a deliberate decision or a choice of
the degree to which one saw one's life as a general manifestation or an individual one. Put simply, one can take what one does or what happens to one either personally or impersonally. One can feel a blow as an insult as well as a pain, in which case it becomes unbeara- bly intensified; but one can also take it in a sporting sense, as a set- back by which one should not let oneself be either intimidated or enraged, and then, often enough, one never even notices it. But in this second case, all that has happened is that the blow has been put in a general context, that of combat, so that it is seen to depend on the purpose it is meant to serve. And it is just this-that an experi~
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ence derives its meaning, even its content, only from its position in a chain of logically consistent events-which is apparent when a man sees his experience not only as a personal event but as a challenge to his spiritual powers. He will also be less emotionally affected by what he does. But oddly enough, what we consider a sign of superior intel- ligence in a boxer is judged to be cold and callous in people who can't box but incline to an intellectual way of life. Whether we apply and demand a general or a personal attitude in a given situation is gov- erned by all sorts of distinctions. A murderer who goes coolly about his business is likely to be judged particularly vicious; a professor who continues to work out a problem in the arms of his wife is seen as a dry-as-dust pedant; a politician who climbs to high office over the bodies of those he has destroyed will be called a monster or a hero, depending on his success; but soldiers, hangmen, or surgeons, on the other hand, are expected to behave with the same impassivity that is condemned in others. Without going further into the morality of these examples, we cannot overlook the uncertainty that leads in every case to a compromise between the objectively and the subjec- tively proper attitude.
This uncertainty gave Ulrich's personal problem a broader con- text. In earlier times, one had an easier conscience about being a per- son than one does today. People were like cornstalks in a field, probably more violently tossed back and forth by God, hail, fire, pes- tilence, and war than they are today, but as a whole, as a city, a re- gion, a field, and as to what personal movement was left to the individual stalk-all this was clearly defined and could be answered for. But today responsibility's center of gravity is not in people but in circumstances. Have we not noticed that experiences have made themselves independent of people? They have gone on the stage, into books, into the reports of research institutes and explorers, into
ideological or religious communities, which foster certain kinds of experience at the expense ofothers as ifthey are conducting a kind of social experiment, and insofar as experiences are not actually being developed, they are simply left dangling in the air. Who can say now- adays th2t his anger is really his own anger when so many people talk about it and claim to know more about it than he does? A world of qualities without a man has arisen, of experiences without the person who experiences them, and it almost looks as though ideally private
experience is a thing ofthe past, and that the friendly burden ofper- sonal responsibility is to dissolve into a system offormulas ofpossible meanings. Probably the dissolution of the anthropocentric point of view, which for such a long time considered man to be at the center of the universe but which has been fading away for centuries, has finally arrived at the "I" itself, for the belief that the most important thing about experience is the experiencing, or of action the doing, is beginning to strike most people as naive. There are probably people who still lead personal lives, who say "We saw the So-and-sos yester- day" or 'We'll do this . or that today" and enjoy it without its needing to have any content or significance. They like everything that comes in contact with their fingers, and are purely private persons insofar as this is at all possible. In contact with such people, the world becomes a private world and shines like a rainbow. They may be very happy, but this kind of people usually seems absurd to the others, although it is still not at all clear why.
And suddenly, in view ofthese reflections, Ulrich had to smile and admit to himself that he was, after all, a character, even without hav- ing one.
A MAN WITH ALL THE QUALITIES, BUT HE IS INDIFFERENT TO THEM.
A PRINCE OF INTELLECT IS ARRESTED, AND THE PARALLEL CAMPAIGN GETS ITS HONORARY SECRETARY
It is not difficult to describe the basic traits ofthis thirty-two-year-old man Ulrich, even though all he knows about himself is that he is as close to as he is far from all qualities, and that they are all, whether or not he has made them his own, in a curious fashion indifferent to him. With a suppleness of mind, owing simply to his being gifted in
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various directions, he combines a certain aggressiveness. His is a masculine mind. He is not sensitive toward other people and rarely puts himself in their place, except to get to know them for his own purposes. He is no respecter of rights unless he respects the person whose rights they are, which is not very often. With the passage of time, a certain inclination toward the negative has developed in him, a flexible dialectic of feeling that easily leads him to discover a flaw in something widely approved or, conversely, to defend the forbidden and to refuse responsibilities with a resentment that springs from the desire to create his own responsibilities. Despite this need, however, and apart from certain self-indtilgences, he lets himself be 'guided morally by the chivalrous code that is followed by almost all men as long as they live in secure circumstances in middle-class society, and so, with all the arrogance, ruthlessness, and negligence of a man called to his vocation, he leads the life ofanother man who has made of his inclinations and abilities more or less ordinary, practical and social use. He was accustomed, instinctively and without vanity, to regard himself as the instrument of a not unimportant purpose,
which he intended to discover in good time; even now, early in this year of groping unrest, after he realized how his life had been drift- ing, the feeling that he waS on his way somewhere was soon restored, and he made no special effort with his plans. It is none too easy to recognize in such a temperament the passion that drives it; ambigu- ously formed by predisposition and circumstances, its fate has not yet been laid bare by any really tough counterpressure. But the main thing is that the missing element needed in order to crystallize a de- cision is still unknown. Ulrich was a man forced somehow to live against himself, though outwardly he appeared to be indulging his inclinations without constraint.
Comparing the world to a laboratory had rekindled an old idea in his mind. Formerly he had thought of the kind of life that would ap- peal to him as a vast experimental station for trying out the best ways of being a man and discovering new ones. That the great existing lab- oratory was functioning rather haphazardly, lacking visible directors or theoreticians at the top, was another matter. It might even be said that he himself would have wanted to become something like a phi- losopher king; who wouldn't? It is so natural to regard the mind as the highest power, the supreme ruler of everything. That is what we
are taught. Anybody who can dresses up in intellect, decks himself out in it. Mind and spirit, in· combination with a -numinous other something, is the most ubiquitous thing there is. The spirit ofloyalty, the spirit of love, a masculine mind, a cultivated mind, the greatest living mind, keeping up the spirit of one cause or another, acting in the spirit of this or that movement: how solid and unexceptionable it sounds, right down to its lowest levels. Beside it everything else, be it humdrum crime or the hot pursuit ofprofits, seems inadmissible, the dirt God removes from His toenails.
But what of "spirit" standing by itself, a naked noun, bare as a ghost to whom one would like to lend a sheet? One can read the poets, study the philosophers, buy paintings, hold all-night discus- sions-does all this bestow spirit on us? 0 Ifit does, do we then pos- sess it? And even if we should, this spirit is so firmly bound up with the accidental form in which it happens to manifest itself! It passes right through the person who wants to absorb it, leaving only a small tremor behind. What can we do with all this spirit? It is constantly being spewed out in truly astronomical quantities on masses of paper, stone, and canvas, and just as ceaselessly consumed at a tre- mendous cost in nervous energy. But what becomes of it then? Does it vanish like a mirage? Does it dissolve into particles? Does it evade the earthly law of conservation? The inotes of dust that sink and slowly settle down to rest inside us bear no relation to all that ex- pense. Where has it gone, where and what is it? If we knew more about it there might be an awkward silence around this noun, "spirit. "
Evening had come; buildings as if broken out of pure space, as- phalt, steel rails, formed the cooling shell that was the city. The mother shell, full of childlike, joyful, angry human movement. Where every drop begins as a droplet sprayed or squirted; a tiny ex- plosion caught by the walls, cooling, calming, and slowing down, hanging quietly, tenderly, on the slope of the mother shell, harden- ing at last into a little grain on its wall. ·
"Why," Ulrich thought suddenly, "didn't I become a pilgrim? " A
"The Gennan word Geist is variously rendered in this chapter as "mind," "spirit," and "intellect. " A powerful concept in Gennan culture, Geist embraces all three. - E D .
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pure, uncontingent way of life, as piercingly fresh as ozone, pre- sented itself to his senses; whoever cannot say ''Yes" to life should at least utter the "No" of the saint. And yet it was simply impossible to consider this seriously. . Nor could he see himselfbecoming an adven- turer, though it might feel rather like an everlasting honeymoon, and appealed to his limbs and his temperament. He had not been able to become a poet or one ofthose disillusioned souls who believe only in money and power, although he had the makings of either. He forgot his age, he imagined he was twenty, but even so, something inside him was just as certain that he could become none of those things; every possibility beckoned him, but something stronger kept him from yielding to the attraction. Why was he living in this dim and undecided fashion? Obviously, he said to himself, what was keeping him spellbound in this aloof and nameless way of life was nothing other than the compulsion to that loosening and binding ofthe world that is known by a word we do not care to encounter by itself: spirit, or mind. Without knowing why, Ulrich suddenly felt sad, and thought: "I simply don't love myself. " Within the frozen, petrified body of the city he felt his heart beatiilg in its innermost depths. There was something in him that had never wanted to remain any- where, had groped its way along the walls of the world, thinking: There are still millions of other walls; it was this slowly cooling, ab- surd drop "I" that refused to give up its fire, its tiny glowing core.
The mind has learned that beauty makes things or people good, bad, stupid, or enchanting. It dissects a sheep and a penitent and finds humility and patience in both. It analyzes a substance and notes that it is a poison in large quantities, a stimulant in smaller ones. It knows that the mucous membrane of the lips is related to the m~­ cous membrane of the intestine, but also knows that the humility of those lips is related to the humility of all that is saintly. it jumbles things up, sorts them out, and forms new combinations. To the mind, good and evil, above and below, are not skeptical, relative concepts, but terms of a function, values that depend on the context they find themselves in. The centuries have taught it that vices can turn into virtues and virtues into vices, so the mind concludes that basically only ineptitude prevents the transformation of a criminal into a use- ful person within the space ofa lifetime. It does not accept anything as permissible or impermissible, since everything may have some
quality that may someday make it part of a great new context. · It secretly detests everything with pretensions to permanence, all the great ideals and laws and their little fossilized imprint, the well- adjusted character. It regards nothing as fixed, no personality, no order of things; because our knowledge may change from day to day, it regards nothing as binding; everything has the value it has only until the next act of creation, as a face changes with the words we are
. speaking to it.
And so the mind or spirit is the great opportunist, itself impossible
to pin down, take hold of, anywhere; one is tempted to believe that of all its influence nothing is left but decay. Every advance is a gain in particular and a separation in general; it is an increase in power lead- ing only to a progressive increase in impotence, but there is no way to quit. Ulrich thought of that body of facts and discoveries, growing almost by the hour, out of which the mind must peer today if it wishes to scrutinize any given problem closely. This body grows away from its inner life. Countless views, opinions, systems of ideas from every age and latitude, from all sorts of sick and sound, waking and dreaming brains run through it like thousands of small sensitive nerve strands, but the central nodal point tying them all together is missing. Man feels dangerously close to repeating the fate of those gigantic primeval species that perished because of their size; but he cannot stop himself.
This reminded Ulrich of that rather dubious notion in which he had long believed a'nd even now had not quite uprooted from him- self: that the world would be best governed by a senate of the wisest, the most advanced. It is after all very natural to think that man, who calls in professionally trained doctors rather than shepherds to treat him when sick, has no reason, when well, to let public affairs be con- ducted by windbags no better qualified than shepherds. This is why the young, who care about the essentials in life, begin by regarding everything in the world that is neither true nor good nor beautiful, such as the Internal Revenue Service or a debate in the legislature, as irrelevant; at least they used to. Nowadays, thanks to their education in politics and economics, they are said to be different. But even at that time, as one got older and on longer acquaintance with the smokehouse of the mind, in which the world cures the bacon of its daily affairs, one learned to adapt oneself to reality, and a person with
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a trained mind would finally end up limiting himself to his specialty and spend the rest of his life convinced that the whole of life should perhaps be different, but there was no point in thinking about it. This is more or less how people who follow intellectual pursuits maintain their equilibrium. Suddenly Ulrich saw th~ whole thing in the comi- callight of the question whether, given that there was certainly an abundance of mind around, the only thing wrong was that mind itself was devoid of mind.
He felt like laughing. He was himself, after all, one of those spe- cialists who had renounced responsibility for the larger questions. But disappointed, still-burning ambition went through him like a sword. At this moment there were two Ulrichs, walking side by side. One took in the scene with a smile and thought: So this is the stage on which I once hoped to play a part. One day I woke up, no Ionge~ snug in mother's crib, but with the firm conviction that there was something I had to accomplish. They gave me cues, but I felt they had nothing to do with me. Like a kind of feverish stagefright, every- thing in those days was filled with my own plans and expectations. Meanwhile the stage has continued revolving unobtrusively, I am somewhat farther along on my way, and I may already be standing near the exit. Soon I shall be turned out, and the only lines of my great part that I will have uttered are "The horses are saddled! The devil take all ofyou! "
But while the Ulrich smiling at these. reflections walked on through the hovering evening, the other had his fists clenched in pain and rage. He was the less visible of the two and was searching for a magic formula, a possible handle to grasp, the real mind of the mind, the missing piece, perhaps only a small one, that would close the broken circle. This second Ulrich had no words at his disposal. Words leap like monkeys from tree to tree, but in that dark place where·a man has his roots he is deprived oftheir kind mediation. The ground streamed away under his feet. He could hardly open his eyes. Can a feeling rage like a storm and yet not be a stormy feeling at all? By a storm of feeling we mean something that makes our trunk groan and our branches flail to the verge ofbreaking. But this storm left the surface quite undisturbed. It was almost a state of conversion, of turning back. There was no flicker of change in his facial expression, yet inside him not an atom seemed to stay in place. Ulrich's senses
were unclouded, and yet each person he passed was perceived in some out-of-the-ordinaxy way by his eye, each sound differently by his ear. He could not have said more sharply, nor more deeply either, nor more softly, nor more naturally or unnaturally. Ulrich could not say anything at all, but at this moment he thought of that curious experience, "spirit," as he would of a beloved who had deceived him all his life without his loving her less, and it bound him to everything that came his way. For in love everything is love, even pain and revul- sion. The tiny twig on the tree and the pale windowpane in the eve- ning light became an experience deeply embedded in his own nature, barely expressible in words. Things seemed to consist not of wood and stone but ofsome grandiose and infinitely tender immoral- ity that, the moment it came·in contact with him, turned into a deep moral shock.
All this lasted no longer than a smile, and just as Ulric;! h was think- ing, "Now for once I shall remain wherever it has carried me," he had the misfortune to run into an obstacle that shattered this tension.
What happened now came out of a wholly different world than the one in which Ulrich had just been experiencing trees and stones as a sensitive extension of his own body.
A left-wing tabloid had slavered its venomous spittle all over the Great Idea, as Count Leinsdorf might have put it, calling it just an- other sensation for the ruling class in the wake of the latest sex mur- der, and this caused an honest workingman who had been drinking to lose his temper. He had brushed up against two solid citizens pleased with their day's business who, convinced that a contented frame of mind could express itself anywhere, were rather loudly air- ing their approval of the great patriotic campaign they had read about in their paper. Words were exchanged, and as the proximity of a policeman encouraged the citizens as much as it provoked their attacker, the scene became increasingly impassioned. The policeman began by watching it over his shoulder, subsequently turning to face it and then coming closer; he attended as an obseiVer, like a protrud- ing offshoot of the iron machinery of the state, which ends in buttons and other metal trim. There is always something ghostly about living constantly in a well-ordered state. You cannot step into the street or drink a glass of water or get on a streetcar without touching the bal- anced levers of a gigantic apparatus oflaws and interrelations, setting
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them in motion or letting them maintain you in your peaceful exis- tence; one knows hardly any of these levers, which reach de~p into the inner workings and, coming out the other side, lose themselves in a network whose structure has never yet been unraveled by anyone. So one denies their existence, just as the average citizen denies the air, maintaining that it is empty space. But all these things that one denied, these colorless, odorless, tasteless, weightless, and morally indefinable things such as water, air, space, money, and the passing of fime, tum out in truth to be the most important things of all, and this gives life a certain spooky quality. Sometimes a man may be seized by panic, helpless as in a dream, thrashing about wildly like an animal that has blundered into the incomprehensible mechanism of a net. Such was the effect ofthe policeman's buttons on the working- man, and it was at this moment that the arm of the state, feeling that it was not being respected in the proper manner, proceeded to make an arrest.
It was not made without resistance and repeated pronouncements of rebellious sentiments. Flattered by the sensation he was creating, the drunk unleashed a previously hidden, total antipathy toward his fellowman. An impassioned struggle for self-assertion began.