No More Learning

A locksmith. But he's a lock- smith who works on cabinets, Moosbrugger grinned rather sheepishly, (he's not easy to find), he works in many places. He'd do it, but Ulrich would have to go to his wife and get his address from her. And he didn't want to impose that on him, this wife was an awful person. Moosbrugger was visibly cutting capers and preening in a courtly way before Ulrich. Ulrich said she would probably give him the information, whether she was awful or not. Yes, she no doubt would; he would have to mention Moosbrugger's name. Before his last wandering, when he was working in Vienna, he had lived with her himself, the heart of the matter now emerged; he, Moosbrugger; but she was a woman with low tastes, a
1414 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
criminal, a quite common sort. . . . Moosbrugger shows all the symptoms of his hatred for women only because he is afraid that Ulrich might have a poor opinion of him when he sees this woman.
So she would tell Ulrich where he could meet her partner.
Ulrich went to see her. Borne by the automatism that accompanies all deeds ofdaring. He was really not in the least surprised when he entered an apartment that looked like forty others in a building on the outskirts of the city, and encountered in the kitchen a young woman doing chores, who must have been just like the forty other housewives. Nor did the suspicion with which he was greeted in any way differ from the suspicion one often finds in these circles. As soon as he entered he had to say something, and through the general European courtesies he uttered was immediately placed in a quite impersonal relationship. There wasn't a breath of crime in this environment. She was a coarse young woman, and her breasts moved under her blouse like a rabbit under a cloth.
When he brought up the name of Moosbrugger Fraulein Hornlicher smiled deprecatingly, as if to say: the useless crazy things he gets himself into; but she was willing to help him. Of course it depended on Karl, but she didn't think he'd leave Moosbrugger in the lurch. This all took place in courteous exchanges, as when a businessman who's got himself into a comer begs his solid neighbors for support.
She gave Ulrich the name of a small tavern where he would presum- ably find Karl. He'd probably have to go several times, since Karl's movements were never entirely predictable. He should tell the tavern keeper who had sent him and whom he wanted to speak to and calmly sit down and wait.
Ulrich was lucky, and found Karl Biziste on his first try. Again an auto- matic play of limbs and thoughts carried him there; but this time Ulrich was paying attention, and followed with curiosity what seemed to be happening to him rather than to be something he was doing. His emo- tions were the same as they were the time when he had been arrested. From that moment, when Clarisse's interest had cautiously begun to tickle him like the end of a thread, until now, where events were already being woven into a heavy rope, things had taken their own course, one thing leading to another with a necessity that merely carried him along. It seemed incredibly strange to him that the course of most people's lives is this course of things that so alienated him, while on the contrary for other people it is quite natural to let themselves be borne along by whatever turns up, and thus finally be raised to a solid existence. Ulrich also felt that soon he would no longer be able to tum around, but this made him as curious as when one suddenly notices the inexorable move- ment of one's own breathing.
From the Posthumous Papers · 1415
And he made yet another observation. When he imagined how much mischief could arise from what he was proposing to do, and that it soon would no longer be in his power to avoid initiating the process. With an evil deed that he felt on his conscience as ifit had already been commit- ted, he saw the world he was walking through in a different way. Almost as if he had a vision in his heart. Of God, or a great invention, or a great happiness. Even the starry sky is a social phenomenon, a structure of the shared fantasy of our species, man, and changes when one steps out of its circle.
Moosbrugger-Ulrich told himself-will wreak more havoc if I help him to freedom. There's no denying that sooner or later he will again fall victim to his disposition, and I will bear the responsibility for it. -But when he tried grave self-reproach in order to stop himself, there was something really untruthful in it. About as if one were to take the stance of being able to see clearly through a fog. The suffer- ings of those victims were really not certain. Had he seen the suffering creatures before him, he would probably have been overcome by a fierce empathy, for he was a person of oscillations, and that also meant of sympathetic oscillations. But as long as this suggestive power of ex- periencing with the senses was missing, and everything remained only a play of men:tal forces, these victims remained adherents of a man- kind that he would really have liked to abolish, or at least greatly change, and no amount of sympathy diminished the emotional force of this dislike. There are people whom this horrifies; they are under the impress of a very strong moral or social power of suggestion; they speak up and start shouting as soon as they notice even the most re- mote injustice, and are furious at the badness and coldness of feeling that they frequently find in the world. They demonstrate violent emo- tions, but in most cases these are the emotions imposed on them by their ideas and principles: that is, an enduring suggestiveness, which like all powers of suggestion has something automatic and mechanical about it, whose path never dips into the realm of living emotions. The person who lives disinterestedly is, in contrast to them, ill-disposed and indifferent toward everything that does not touch his own circle of interests; he not only has the indifference of a mass murderer, in its passive form, when he reads in his morning paper about the accidents and misfortunes of the previous day, but he can also quite easily wish all kinds of misfortune on people he doesn't care about, if they annoy him. Certain phenomena lead one to assume that a forward-marching civilization based on shared works also strengthens the repressed and immured antagonists of these emotions. This was what was going through Ulrich's mind as he walked along. Moosbrugger's victims were
1416 · THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
abstract, threatened, like all the thousands who are exposed to the dangers of factories, railroads, and automobiles.
When he happened to look around on his way to Herr Biziste, he thought he could see that all the life we have created has been made possible only through our neglecting our duty to care for our more dis- tant neighbor. Otherwise we would never think of putting on the street machines that kill him; indeed, we would never let him go out on the street himself, as is actually the case with cautious parents and their chil- dren. Instead of this, however, we live with a statistically predictable an- nual percentage of murders, which we commit rather than deviate from our manner of living and the line of development we hope to maintain. Ulrich suddenly thought, too, that part of this was a general division of labor in which it is always the task of a particular group of people to heal injuries caused by the indispensable activities of others; but we never restrain a force by demanding that it moderate itself; and finally there are still quite specific institutions, like parliaments, kings, and the like, that serve exclusively as equalizers. Ulrich concluded from this that for him to assist Moosbrugger's escape had no significance, for there were enough other people whose job it was to prevent any injuries that might result, and if they fulfilled their obligations they were bound to succeed, which made his personal deed no worse than an irregularity. This indi- vidual, moral prohibition-that he was nevertheless obliged as an indi- vidual not to let things go that far-was in this context nothing more than a doubled coefficient of security, which the knowledgeable person could afford to neglect.
The vision of a different order of things hovering far in advance of these specific ideas, an order that was more honest, one might say tech- nically without cliches, accompanied Ulrich even as the adventure en- ticed him, tired as he was of the indecisive life of a person of today. I Possibly: It was not his good fortune to be effective in the world and to be defined by that. Like Thomas Mann or the good upstanding citizen of this age. Nor was he involved in the struggle for something. I Thus this path was not unlike the dive into the water, well known to Ulrich, from a height of thirty feet. On the way down one sees one's own image rushing toward one faster and faster in a watery reflection and can adjust small errors in one's position; but for the rest, one can no longer change any- thing in what is taking place.
When he had found the tavern, Ulrich did everything as Fraulein Hornlicher had indicated. He mentioned her name, told the proprietor what he wanted, was asked to sit down and told that he might have to
From the Posthumous Papers · 1417
wait quite a while. He inspected the guests, many of whom spoke to the proprietor as they entered and left; felt himself observed, but could not make out a great deal himself. It was an hour at which the patrons were intermingled with workers and petit bourgeois. Finally, he thought he could make out the criminals among the guests by the peculiarly ridicu- lous elegance of their clothes.
Ulrich had not made out Herr Biziste, who, when he came in, spoke with the proprietor like the others after glancing quickly around the room and, after he had sat down, was looked at in the same way by everyone else around the room, and who was dressed with an equally counterfeit elegance I with a somewhat different elegance. Nor did the owner give Ulrich any sign. Biziste was drinking with several men, then stood up to go, stopped as if idly by Ulrich's table, and asked him dismissively what it was he was after. Ulrich had the tact not to stand, but to look up carelessly and offer Biziste a chair. This was of course presumptuous, but since he could be certain that Biziste was still interested in Moosbrugger, he could permit himselfto meet the great man on the same level. He told him that Moosbrugger would be executed within a few weeks if no one helped him. For some reason or other, Ulrich seemed to himself like a spoiled boy who is playing with street urchins and is showing off with fairy tales he has invented. Biziste seemed to disapprove ofUlrich as ofan incorrigi- ble blockhead. Still dismissive, he asked Ulrich how he thought this could be done. Ulrich quickly emptied his glass and by a rather vague gesture left it to the proprietor whether he was to bring another glass for himself and his tablemate as well. Then he related that arranging an escape from the observation clinic would not be all that difficult. Herr Biziste was interested in this new milieu that Ulrich described to him. Ulrich became inventive; it amused him to think it out in front of a hardened criminal, and on the spot he made up a specific plan in which only the hour re- mained unfixed but that otherwise, thanks to Ulrich's exact knowledge of the place, didn't seem at all bad. Three men would be needed, one as a lookout outside the garden wall they had to climb over, so that on their way out they would not fall into the hands of a police patrol or give them- selves away to passersby; the other two would be enough to bring Moos- brugger civilian clothes and hold off any guard who might come by until Moosbrugger had changed.
The arrogant irony with which Biziste listened to this plan, as Ulrich spoke faster and faster from nervousness, was striking.
Then Biziste stood up and said: Ifyou come to such and such a place on Wednesday, perhaps we can talk about it some more.
Will you bring along a third person?
Biziste shrugged his shoulders, and Ulrich was dismissed.
1418 · THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
It gave Ulrich a peculiar, bitter pleasure that in the meantime every- thing else went on inexorably.
On the day Biziste had set, he had gone to the rendezvous but did not meet the third man. Bi. ziste, treating the whole business casually, merely said to him that for a certain sum this third man had declared himself willing. He mentioned a day and time, and revealed that Ulrich would have to go over the wall too, since he was the only one who knew the layout.
All Biziste probably wanted to do was frighten him, and for money a new partner could have been found, but the bizarre situation attracted Ulrich; since one could also break one's neck skiing, why should he not climb over a wall in the night with criminals? Incidentally, he heartily wished the police on this puffed-up Biziste.
He put on his oldest suit, omitted a collar, and topped it off with a sports cap; in this way his silhouette in the shadows of the night was not conspicuously different from that of the other people one might encoun- ter on the remote street along which the wall of the asylum garden ran. Moosbrugger had been alerted; over time, three linen sheets had disap- peared in the hospital, to serve as a rope on which he was to let himself down. Ulrich could probably have smuggled in a climber's rope, but he wanted to avoid anything that might betray the assistance supplied, since it was not out of the question that suspicion would fall on him. On this night the window of Moosbrugger's room was dimly lit; Ulrich had got him the stump of a candle so that they would be able to orient them- selves in the darkness of the moonless night.
Biziste had climbed onto the back of the second "gentleman," swung himself up on top of the wall, and could be heard jumping down into the leaves on the other side. As Ulrich was about to follow, voices were heard; the "gentleman" stood up so inconsiderately that Ulrich, who had already got a foot up to mount on his back, nearly fell, and the other man strolled, hands in pockets, into the night.
Ulrich's heart was pounding and he felt a need to run, which he con- trolled with effort; but in order not to attract attention by behaving oddly, he imagined that he ought not to be walking alone, caught up with the "gentleman," and took his arm like that of a drinking companion, which the "gentleman" seemed to find ridiculously overdone.
The voices died away, and the "gentleman" again offered his back; Ulrich grasped the mortar and brick dust, felt the stab ofa pulled muscle in his leg, so forcefully had he swung it up in his excitement, hung there, let himself fall into the darkness, and ended in an applauding sound of
From the Posthumous Papers · 1419
dead leaves such as he had not heard since his boyhood. He stood up in total darkness, unable to discern the slightest trace of Biziste. He groped right and left, in the hope that another noise would answer his own, but it remained as quiet as it was dark. He had to make up his mind to go in the direction of the building alone, hoping that he would meet up with Biziste on the way.
Again Ulrich's heart pounded; the bushes scratched, as ifin his fear he was making only inappropriate movements. Distances, odors, physical contacts, sounds--everything was new, never experienced. He had to stop, collect his will, and tell himself that he had no other recourse than to see this stupid adventure through. He stumbled onto a path and de- duced which direction would lead to the building most quickly, but was suddenly overcome by the problem of whether he should walk on the crunching gravel or go on working his way through the bushes.
That damned Biziste ought to have waited for him, but at the same time he longed for him as ifhe were a stronger brother. Ifhe would not have been ashamed ofhimself because ofthe fellow on the other side of the wall, Ulrich would have turned around. But he did not even know what signal he was supposed to give to find out whether all was clear on the other side. He realized that he was a fool, and gained some respect for these rogues. But he was not a man to let himself be defeated so easily; it would have been ridiculous for an intellectual not to be able to cope with this too. Ulrich marched forward straight through the shrub- bery; the excitement he was in and the self-control his progress required (entirely without reflection; it was simply moral pains) made him ruth- lessly crack, break, and rustle the bushes. To have slunk forward like an Indian seemed to him just then incredibly silly and childish, and this was the moment in which the normal person in him began to reawaken.
When he came to the edge, Biziste, as Ulrich really might have ex- pected from the first, was squatting there observing the building, and he turned a witheringly punitive glance toward his noisy arrival. Moosbrug- ger's window was dimly lit; Biziste whistled through his teeth. The huge shoulders of the murderer filled the rectangle of the window, the rope fashioned from the sheets rolled down; but Moosbrugger was not skilled in crime and had underestimated the strength of the rescue line re- quired for his enormous weight; hardly had he suspended himself from it when it broke, and the force ofhis landing exploded the stillness with a muflled detonation. At this moment two guards materialized in the half- light that illuminated the wall.
Two days earlier, two mentally ill prisoners had escaped from another observation clinic, but Ulrich had neither heard nor read about it. And so he had not known that since yesterday security had been generally
1420 • THE MAN WITH 0 U T QUALITIES
tightened and old, long-forgotten measures were again being enforced for a while. Among these was the two-man patrol, which, perhaps drawn by the noises Ulrich had made and now alarmed by the muffied fall, stopped, looked around, recognized in the sand a heavy body that with great effort was trying to get up, rushed over, saw a rope hanging from the window, and with all their lung power signaled for help through shrill little whistles. Moosbrugger had dislocated his shoulder and bro- ken an ankle, otherwise it would have been an unhappy encounter for the guards who jumped on him; as it was, he knocked one bleeding into the sand, but when he tried to straighten up to shake off the second, pain deprived him of his footing. The guard hung on his neck and whistled piercingly; the second man, full of pain and rage, pounced on him, and at this moment Biziste sprang out of the bushes. With a powerful blow of his fist, he smashed one guard's whistle between his teeth so that he tumbled off Moosbrugger, but now the other whistled like mad and rushed at Biziste. Such guards are strong men, and Biziste was not ex- ceptionally powerful. If at this instant Ulrich had come fmward to help, with his considerable trained strength, they would no doubt have suc- ceeded in rendering both attackers mute and motionless for a while, but Ulrich did not feel the slightest desire to do so. In the tangle before him his sympathies lay quite honestly with the men unexpectedly set upon, who were fighting for their duty, and if he had only followed his emo- tions, he would have grabbed this Biziste by the collar and given him a solid hook to the chin. But perhaps that was also merely the somewhat comical maternal voice of bourgeois order in him, and as the situation tensed his muscles and nerves, so his mind ebbed, filling him with dis- gust at contradictions whose resolution was not worth the effort. An- other semi-event, Ulrich said to himself. A very painful sensation of the awful ludicrousness of his situation came over him.
Biziste reached for his knife. But before he raised it to thrust, his glance, practiced in weighing risk and advantage, revealed to him the hopelessness of the outcome: Moosbrugger could not stand up without assistance, the noise of the alarmed people on night duty was already coming out of the darkness from the wing of the building, flight was the only recourse. The guard, who would not let him go, screamed, hit by a stab in the arm. Biziste disappeared, leaving Ulrich behind, as Ulrich ascertained with cheerful satisfaction in spite of the quite awkward situ- ation. He had meantime been thinking how he himself might get out of this stupid business. The way over the wall was blocked, for he hadn't the slightest desire to meet Herr Biziste and his friend ever again in his life, nor did he feel like climbing over the wall alone and perhaps being
From the Posthumous Papers · 1 4 2 1
detained by the curious drawn to the scene by the shouts of the guards, who would certainly be chasing after Biziste. He settled on the only thing that occurred to him, a very stupid thing: to run a little farther, quickly find a bench, and pretend to be asleep in case he was found. He raised the collar of his coat so his bare neck could not be seen, took off his cap, and "awoke" with as much surprise as possible when, sur- rounded by a maze of lights, he was knocked from the bench by an in- credible fist and his arms grabbed by six men. He did not know whether he gave a good performance as the righteous person drunk with sleep; it was his good fortune that one of the guards immediately recognized him, upon which he was released with reluctant respect. He was taken for a doctor who was doing studies at the clinic. He now tried to make credible that after a visit he had been walking in the grounds and had fallen asleep here. To this end, he involuntarily looked at his watch, re- membered that he had left it at home but could no longer take back the gesture and therefore found it missing; reached into his jacket and pants pockets and immediately found his money missing too, for he had of course also not brought it along; and as stupid as this comedy was, as he told himself, there was an even stupider guard who believed it, or really just one whose servile officiousness and desire to please Ulrich sug- gested what Ulrich wanted him to believe, so that he immediately called out: The rascals have also robbed the Herr Doktor. Ulrich did not say either yes or no, but only went on like someone who missed his belong- ings without knowing anything about what had happened and now found out the entire drama backward and in snatches. As an object of respect and the remaining center of interest, he left the clinic in this feigned role as quickly as he could; he was not to enter it again as long as it sheltered Moosbrugger.
For after this attempted flight Moosbrugger was placed under heavy guard, and Ulrich, on the orders of the head of the clinic, was no longer allowed to visit him. Nor did Ulrich have the slightest desire to. Still, the unpleasant uncertainty, whether the doctor . . .
The very unpleasant doubt remained whether, upon investigating the circumstances, they had not come to suspect him, which of course they would not express but were just as little ready to abandon.
In mania, this would be a depressive cycle ofshort duration.
1422 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
LATE 1920s
Her brother's conduct, the restlessness that the visit to Lindner had intensified in her, stimulated Agathe to a degree that remained hidden even from herself. She did not know how it had happened, or when; suddenly her soul was transported out of her body and looked around curiously in the alien world. This world pleased her soul uncommonly. Anything that might have disturbed it was lost in the completeness of its pleasure.
Agathe dreamed.
Her body lay on the bed without stirring, though it was breathing. She looked at it and felt a joy like polished marble at the sight. Then she observed the objects that stood farther back in her room; she recognized them all, but they were not exactly the things that otherwise were hers. For the objects lay outside her in the same way as her body, which she saw resting among them. That gave her a sweet pain!
Why did it hurt? Apparently because there was something deathlike about it; she could not act and could not stir, and her tongue was as ifcut off, so that she was also unable to say anything about it. But she felt a great energy. Whatever her senses lit upon she grasped immediately, for everything was visible and shone the way sun, moon, and stars are re- flected in water. Agathe said to herself: "You have wounded my body with a rose"-and turned to the bed in order to take refuge in her body.
Then she discovered that it was her brother's body. He, too, was lying in the reflecting glorious light as in a crypt; she saw him not distinctly but more penetratingly than usual, and touched him in the secrecy of the night. She raised him up; he was a heavy burden in her arms, but she nevertheless had the strength to carry and hold him, and this embrace had a supranatural charm. Her brother's body nestled so lovably and in- dulgently against her that she rested in him; as he in her; nothing stirred in her, not even now the beautiful desire. And because in this suspen- sion they were one and without distinctions, and also without distinc- tions within themselves, so that her understanding was as iflost and her memory thought of nothing and her will had no activity, she stood in this calm as if facing a sunrise, and melted into it with her earthly details. But while this was happening, joyously, Agathe perceived surrounding her a wild crowd of people who, as it appeared, found themselves around her in great fear. They were running excitedly back and forth, and gesturing
From the Posthunwus Papers · 1423
warningly and resentfully with increasing din. In the manner of a dream, this was happening quite close to her but without involving her, but only until the noise and fright suddenly intruded violently into her mind. Then Agathe was afraid, and quickly stepped back into her sleeping body; she had no idea at all how everything might have been changed, and for a time left off dreaming.
But after a while she began again. Again she left her body, but this time met her brother immediately. And again her body was lying naked on the bed; they both looked at it, and indeed the hair over the genitals of this unconscious body that had been left behind burned like a small golden fire on a marble tomb. Because there was no "I" or "you" be- tween them, this being three did not surprise her. Ulrich was looking at her softly and earnestly in a way she did not recognize as his. They also looked at their surroundings together, and it was their house in which they found themselves, but although Agathe knew all the objects quite well, she could not have said in which room this was happening, and that again had a peculiar charm, for there was neither right nor left, earlier nor later, but when they looked at something together they were united like water and wine, a union that was more golden or silver, depending on whichever was poured in in greater quantity. Agathe knew immedi- ately: "This is what we have so often talked of, total love," and paid close attention so as not to miss anything. But she still missed how it was hap- pening. She looked at her brother, but he was looking in front of him with a stiff and embarrassed smile. At this moment she heard a voice somewhere, a voice so exceedingly beautiful that it had nothing to com- pare with earthly things, and it said: "Cast everything you have into the fire, down to your shoes; and when you no longer have anything don't even think of a shroud, but cast yourself naked into the fire! " And while she was listening to this voice and remembering that she knew this sen- tence, a splendor rose into her eyes and radiated from them, a splendor that took away precise earthly definition even from Ulrich, though she had no impression that anything was missing from him, and her every limb received from it in the manner of its special pleasure great grace and bliss. Involuntarily she took some steps toward her brother. He was coming toward her from the other side in the same way.
Now there was only a narrow chasm between their bodies, and Agathe felt that something must be done. At this place in her dream she began, too, with the greatest effort, to think again. "If he loves something and receives and enjoys it," she said to herself, "then he is no longer he, but his love is my love! " She doubtless sensed that this sentence, the way she had uttered it, was somehow distorted and emasculated, but still she un- derstood it through and through, and it took on a significance that clari-
1424 ·THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
fied everything. "In the dream," she explained it to herself, "one must not think about things, then everything will happen! " For everything she was thinking she believed to see transpiring, or rather, what happened and partook of the desire of matter also partook of the desire of the spirit, which penetrated it as thought in the profoundest possible way. This seemed to her to give her a great superiority over Ulrich; for while he was now standing there helplessly, without stirring, not only did the same splendor as before rise into her eyes and fill them, but its moist fire suddenly broke out from her breasts and veiled everything that faced her in an indescribable sensation. Her brother was now seized by this fire and began to burn in it, without the fire growing more or less. "Now you see! " Agathe thought. 'We've always done it wrong!
One always builds a bridge of hard material and always crosses over to the other at a single place: but one must cross the abyss at every place! " She had seized her brother by the hands and tried to draw him to her; but as she pulled, the burning naked male body, without really being changed, dissolved into a bush or a wall of glorious flowers and, in this form, came loosely closer. All intentions and thoughts vanished in Agathe; she lay fainting with desire in her bed, and as the wall strode through her she also be- lieved that she had to wander through large brooks of soft-skinned flow- ers, and she walked without being able to make the spell vanish. "I am in love! " she thought, as someone finds a moment when he is able to draw breath, for she could hardly still bear this incredible excitement that did not want to end. Since the last transformation she also no longer saw her brother, but he had not disappeared.
And looking for him, she woke up; but she felt that she wanted to go back once more, for her happiness had attained such an intensification that it went on increasing. She was quite confused as she got out of bed: the beginnings of wakefulness were in her mind, and all the ll'est of her body held the not-yet-ended dream that apparently wanted to have no end.
Since the dream, there had been in Agathe an intention to lead her brother astray on some mad experiment. It was not clear even to herself. Sometimes the air was like a net in which something invisible had got caught. It spread the web apart but was not able to break through it. All impressions had somewhat too great a weight. When they greeted each other in the morning, the first impression was of a quite sharply sensual
From the Posthumous Papers · 1425
delimitation. They emerged from the ocean of sleep onto the islands of "you" and "I. " The body's color and shape drifted like a bouquet offlow- ers on the depths of space. Their glances, their movements, seemed to reach farther than usual; the inhibition that otherwise catches and stops them in the secret mechanism of the world must have grown weaker. But words were often suppressed by the fear that they would be too weak to utter this.
In order to understand such a passion, one must remember the habits of consciousness. Not long ago, for example, a woman wearing glasses not only was considered ridiculous, but really looked it; today is a time in which they make her look enterprising and young: those are habitual attitudes of consciousness; they change but are always present in some connection, forming a scaffolding through which perception enters into consciousness. The image is always present before its component parts are, and is what first gives significance to the meaningless daubings of sense impressions. Polonius's cloud, which appears sometimes as a ship, sometimes as a camel, is not the weakness of a servile courtier but com- pletely characterizes the way God has created us. The play between self and external world is not like the die and the stamping but is reciprocal and capable of extremely fine motions, to the extent that it is freed from the cruder mechanisms of utility. One rarely imagines how far this ex- tends. In truth it reaches from beautiful, ugly, good, and evil, where it still seems natural to everyone that one man's morning cloud should be another man's camel, through bitter and sweet, fragrant and stinking, as far as the apparently most precise and least subjective impressions of colors and forms. Herein lies perhaps the deepest sense of the support that one person seeks in another; but Ulrich and Agathe were like two people who, hand in hand, had stepped out of this circle. What they felt for each other was by no means simply to be called love. Something lay in their relationship to each other that could not be included among the ordinary notions of living together; they had undertaken to live like brother and sister, ifone takes this expression in the sense not ofan offi- cial marriage-bureau document but of a poem; they were neither brother and sister nor man and wife, their desires like white mist in which a fire bums. But that sufficed at times to remove their hold on the world from what they were for each other. The result was that what they were became senselessly strong. Such moments contained a tenderness without goals or limits. And also without names or aid. To do something for someone's sake contains in the doing a thousand connections to the world; to give someone pleasure contains in the giving all considerations that bind us to other people. A passion, on the other hand, is an emotion
1426 • THE MAN WITH 0 U T QUALITIES
that, free from all contaminants, can never do enough for itself. It is simultanously the emotion of a powerlessness in the person and that of a movement proceeding from it, which seizes the entire world.
And it is not to be denied that in the company of her brother Agathe tasted the bitter sweetness of a passion. Today one often confuses pas- sion and vice. Cigarette smoking, cocaine, and the vigorously esteemed recurrent need for coitus are, God knows, no passions. Agathe knew that; she knew the substitutes for passion, and recognized passion at the first moment in that not only the self bums, but the world as well; it is as if all things were behind the air just above the tip of a flame. She would have liked to thank the Creator on her knees that she was experiencing it again, although it is just as much a feeling ofdevastation as ofhappiness. Agathe felt, too, that this life is like a ship gliding along in infinite seclu- sion. The sounds on the shore become ever weaker, and objects lose their voice: they no longer say, now you should do this or that with me; movement dies away; the nimble words die away. At times in the morn- ings there already lay, between the house they were living in and the street, a nothingness that neither Ulrich nor Agathe could penetrate; life's charms lost their power to evoke the ridiculous little decisions that are so vital: putting on a hat, inserting a key, those small touches of the rudder by means of which one moves forward. But the space in the rooms was as if polished, and everything was full of a soft music, which ceased only when one strained to hear it more clearly. And that was why the loving anxiety was there; the silence behind the sound of a word, behind a handshake, a movement, could often suddenly detach itself for a moment from a series of others, divest itself of the chains of temporal and spatial connections and send the sound out onto an infinite deep, above which it rested motionless. Life then stood still. The eye, in sweet torment, could not withdraw itselffrom the image. It sank into existence as into a wall of flowers. It sank ever deeper and ever more slowly. It reached no bottom; it could not tum around! What might the clocks be doing now? Agathe thought; the idiotic little second hand she remem- bered, with its precise forward movement around its little circle: with what longing for salvation she now thought of it! And should a glance be absorbed in the other, how painful it was to withdraw it; as if their souls had linked together! It was very nearly comical, this silence. A heavy mountain of soulfulness. Ulrich often struggled to find a word, a jest; it would not matter in the least what one y. ill<ed about, it only needed to be something indifferent and real that is domesticated in life and has a right to a home. That puts souls back into connection with reality. One can just as well start talking about the lawyer as come up with any clever observation. All it had to be was a betrayal of the moment; the word falls
FromthePosthumousPapers · 1427
into the silence then, and in the next moment other corpses of words gleam around it, risen up in great crowds like dead fish when one throws poison into the water! Agathe hung on Ulrich's lips while he was search- ing for such a word, and when his lips could no longer find it and no longer part, she sank back exhausted into the silence that burned her too, like a pallet consisting of nothing but little tips of flame.
Whenever Ulrich resisted: - B u t we do have a mission, an activity in the world! Agathe answered: - N o t I, and you are certainly only imagin- ing yours. We have some idea ofwhat we have to do: be together! What difference does it make what progress is made in the world? Ulrich dis- agreed, and attempted to convince her ironically of the impossibility of what it was that kept him bound in chains. -There's only one explana- tion for our inactivity that is to some degree satisfactory: to rest in God and be subsumed in God. You can use another word instead of God: the Primal One, Being, the Unconditional . . . there are a few dozen words, all powerless. They all oppose assurance to the terror at the sweet cessa- tion of being human: you have arrived at the edge of something that is more than being human. Philosophical prejudices then take care of the rest. Agathe replied: - I understand nothing of philosophy. But let's just stop eating! Let's see what comes of that?
Ulrich noticed that in the bright childishness of this proposal there was a fine black line.
-W hat would come of that? He answered in detail: -First hunger, then exhaustion, then hunger again, raging fantasies about eating, and finally either eating or dying!
- Y o u can't know without having tried it!
- B u t , Agathe! It's been tried and tested a thousand times!
-By professors! Or by bankrupt speculators. Do you know, dying
must be not at all like one says. I nearly died once: it was different. Ulrich shrugged his shoulders. He had no idea how close together in Agathe the two feelings were, to impulsively ignore all her lost years or, if that failed, to want to stop. She had never, like Ulrich, felt the need of making the world better than it is; she was happy lying around some- where, while Ulrich was always on the go. This had been a difference between them since childhood, and it remained a difference until death. Ulrich did not so much fear death as regard it as a disgrace that is set as a final price on all striving. Agathe had always been afraid of death when she imagined it, as every young and healthy person does, in the unbeara- ble and incomprehensible form: Now you are, but at some point you will no longer be! But at the same time she had, in her early youth, already become acquainted with the gradual process of separation that is capa- ble ofinserting itselfinto the tiniest span oftime, that hurtlingly rapid-
1428 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
in spite of all its slowness-being turned away from life and becoming tired of and indifferent to it, and striving trustingly into the approaching nothingness that sets in when the body is grievously harmed by an illness without the senses being affected. She had confidence in death. Perhaps it's not so bad, she thought. It's always, in any case, natural and pleasant to stop, in everything one does. But decay, and the rest of those horrible things: for heaven's sake, isn't one used to everything happening to one while one has nothing to do with it? You know, Ulrich-she terminated the conversation-you're like this: ifyou're given leaves and branches, you always sew them together into a tree; but I would like to see what would happen if we would once, for instance, sew the leaves finnly onto ourselves.
And yet Ulrich, too, felt they had nothing else to do but be together. Whenever Agathe called through the rooms: -Leave the light onl-a quick call, before Ulrich on his way out darkened the room to which Agathe wished to return once more, Ulrich thought: A request, hasty, what more? Oh, what more? No less than Buddha running to catch a tram. An impossible gait! A collapse of absurdity. But still, how lovely Agathe's voice was! What trust lay in the brief request, what happiness that one person can call out something like that to another without being misunderstood. Of course, such a moment was like a piece of earthly thread running among mysterious flowers, but it was at the same time moving, like a woolen thread that one places around one's beloved's neck when one has nothing else to give her. And when they then stepped out into the street and, walking side by side, could not see much of each other but only felt the tender force of unintended contact, they be- longed together like an object that stands in an immense space.
It lies in the nature of such experiences that they urge their own tell- ing. Within the tiniest amount of happening they contain an extreme of inner processes that needs to break a path for itself to the outside. And as in music or a poem, at a sickbed or in a church, the circle of what can be uttered in such circumstances is peculiarly circumscribed. Not, as one might believe, through solemnity or some other subjective mood, but through something that has far more the appearance of an objective thing. This can be compared with the remarkable process through which one assimilates intellectual influences in one's youth; there, too, one takes in not every truth that comes along but really only a truth that comes to meet it from one's own mind, a truth that therefore, in a cer- tain sense, has only to be awakened, so that one already knows it in the moment one comes across it. There are at that age the truths that are destined for us and those that aren't; bits of knowledge are true today and false tomorrow, ideas light up or go out-not because we change
From the Posthumous Papers · 1429
our minds but because with our thoughts we are still connected to our life as a whole and, fed by the same invisible springs, rise and sink with them. They are true when we feel ourselves rising at the moment of thinking them, and they are false when we feel ourselves falling. There is something inexpressible in ourselves and the world that is increased or diminished in the process. In later years this changes; the disposition of the emotions becomes less flexible, and the understanding becomes that extraordinarily flexible, firm, doughty tool which we know it to be when we refuse to allow ourselves to be swayed by emotion. At this point the world has already divided itself: on the one side into the world of things and dependable sensations of them, of judgments and, as it can also be put, recognized emotions or will; on the other side into the world ofsub- jectivity, that is of caprice, of faith, taste, intimation, prejudices, and all those uncertainties, taking an attitude in regard to which, whatever it may be, there remains a kind of private right of the individual, without any claims to public status. When that happens, individual industry may sniff out and take in everything or nothing;-it rarely happens in the steeled soul that in the fire of the impression the walls, too, stretch and move.
But does this attitude really permit one to feel as secure in the world as it might lead one to think? Does not the whole solid world, with all our sensations, buildings, landscapes, deeds, drift on countless tiny clouds? Beneath every perception lies music, poem, feeling. But this feeling is tied down, made invariable, excluded, because we want to per- ceive things truly, that is, without emotion, in order to let them guide us, instead of our guiding them, which, as one knows, amounts to meaning that we finally, quite suddenly, have really learned to fly instead of merely dreaming about flying, as the millennia before us did. To this emotion imprisoned in objects there corresponds, on the individual side, that spirit of objectivity which has pushed all passion back into a condi- tion where it is no longer perceptible, so that in every person there slum- bers a sense ofhis value, his usefulness, and his significance that cannot be touched, a basic feeling of equilibrium between himself and the world. Yet this equilibrium need only be disturbed at any point, and ev- erywhere the imprisoned little clouds escape. A little fatigue, a little poi- son, a little excess of excitement, and a person sees and hears things he doesn't want to believe; emotion rises, the world slides out of its mid- dling condition into an abyss or rises up energetically, solitary, like a vi- sion and no longer comprehensible!
Often everything that he and Agathe undertook, or what they saw and experienced, seemed to Ulrich only a simile. This tree and that smile are reality, because they have the quite specific quality of not merely being
1430 · THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
illusion; but are there not many realities? Was it not just yesterday that we were wearing wigs with long locks, possessed very imperfect ma- chines, but wrote splendid books? And only the day before yesterday that we carried bows and arrows and put on gold hoods at festivals, over cheeks that were painted with the blue of the night sky, and orange- yellow eye sockets? Some kind of vague sympathy for these things still quivers within us today. So much was like today and so much was differ- ent, as if it was trying to be one of many hieroglyphic languages. Does not this mean that one should also not set too much store in present things? What is bad today will perhaps in part be good tomorrow, and the beautiful ugly; disregarded thoughts will have become great ideas, and dignified ideas decay to indifference. Every order is somehow ab- surd and like a wax figure, if one takes it too seriously; every thing is a frozen individual instance of its possibilities. But those are not doubts, rather a dynamic, elastic, undefined quality that feels itself capable of anything.
But it is a peculiarity of these experiences that they are almost always experienced only in a state of nonpossession. Thus the world changes when the impassioned person yearns for God, who does not reveal Him- self, or the lover for his distant beloved, who has been snatched from him. Agathe as well as Ulrich had known these things, and to experience them reciprocally when they were together sometimes gave them real difficulty. Involuntarily they pushed the present away, by telling each other for the first time the stories of their past in which this had hap- pened. But these stories again reinforced the miraculousness of their coming together, and ended in the half-light, in a hesitant touching of hands, silences, and the trembling ofa current that flowed through their arms.
And sometimes there were violent rebellions.
Let's make an assumption-[Ulrich] said to himself, for example, in order to exclude it again later-and let's suppose that Agathe would feel loathing at the love of men. In that case, in order to please her as a man, I would have to behave like a woman. I would have to be tender toward her without desiring her. I would have to be good in the same way to all things in order not to frighten her love. I could not lift a chair unfeel- ingly, in order to move it to some other place in unsentient space; for I may not touch it out of some random idea; whatever I do must be some- thing, and it is involved with this spiritual existence, the way an actor
From the Posthumous Papers · 1431
lends his body to an idea. Is that ridiculous? No, it's nothing other than festive. For that's the sense of sacred ceremonies, where every gesture has its significance. That is the sense of all things when they emerge again before our eyes for the first time with the morning sun. No, the object is not a means for us. It is a detail, the little nail, a smile, a curly hair of our third sister. o "I" and "you" are only objects too. But we are objects that are engaged in exchanging signals with each other; that is what gives us the miraculous: something is flowing back and forth be- tween us, I cannot look at your eyes as if at some dead object, we are burning at both ends. But if I want to do something for your sake, the thing is not a dead object either. I love it, that means that something is happening between me and it; I don't want to exaggerate, I have no in- tention of maintaining that the object is alive like me (and has feeling and talks with me), but it does live with me, we always stand in some relationship to each other.
I have said we are sisters. You have nothing against my loving the world, but I must love it like a sister, not like a man or the way a man loves a woman. A little sentimentally; you and it and I give one another presents. I take nothing away from the tenderness that I present you with if I also make a present to the world; on the contrary, every prodi- gality increases our wealth. We know that each of us has our separate relations to one another that one could not totally reveal even if one wanted to, but these secrets do not arouse any jealousy. Jealousy as- sumes that one wishes to tum love into a possession. However, I can lie in the grass, pressed to the lap of earth, and you will feel the sweetness of this moment along with me. But I may not regard the earth as an artist or a researcher: then I would be making it my own, and we would form a couple that would exclude you as a third.
What, then, in everyday life really distinguishes the most primitive af- fect oflove from mere sexual desire? Mixed in with the desire to rape is a dread, a tenderness, one might almost say something feminine mixed in with the masculine. And that's the way it is with all emotions; they are peculiarly pitted of their seeds and magnified.
"Ulrich elsewhere defines the three sisters as himself, Agathe, and the Other Condi- tion. -TRANs.
1432 • THE MAN WITH 0 U T QUALITIES
Morality? Morality is an insult in a condition in which every move- ment finds its justification in contributing to the honor of that condition.
But the more vividly Ulrich imagined this assumed sisterly feeling, the more . . .
To previous page: One could variously call the cardinal sin in this par- adise: having, wanting, possessing, knowing. Round about it gather the smaller sins: envying, being offended.
They all come from one's wanting to put oneself and the other in an exclusive relationship. From the selfwanting to have its way like a crystal separating from a liquid. Then there is a nodal point, and nothing but nodal points collect around it.
But ifwe are sisters, then you will want not the man, nor any thing or thought but yours. You do not say: I say. For everything will be said by everything. You do not say: I love. For love is the beloved of all of us, and when it embraces you it smiles at me. . . .
When Agathe next entered Lindner's house, he seemed to have fled in a hurry a short time before. The inviolable order in hall and rooms had been thrown into disorder, which admittedly did not take much, for quite a few of the objects that were not in their usual places in these rooms were quite upsetting to look at anyway. Hardly had Agathe sat down to wait for Lindner when Peter came rushing through the room; he had no idea that she had come in. He seemed bent on smashing to pieces everything in his path, and his face was bloated, as if everywhere beneath the pink skin tears were hiding, preparing themselves for an eruption.
-Peter? Agathe asked in dismay. -What's the mat;ter?
He wanted to go right by, but suddenly stopped and stuck out his tongue at her with such a comical expression of disgust that she had to laugh.
From the Posthumous Papers · 1433
Agathe had a soft spot for Peter. She understood that it could be no fun for a young man to have Professor Lindner for a father, and when she imagined that Peter perhaps suspected her of being his father's fu- ture wife, his antagonistic attitude toward her met with her secret ap- plause. Somehow she felt him to be a hostile ally. Perhaps only because she remembered her own youth as a pious convent-school girl. He had as yet no roots anywhere; was seeking himself, and seeking to grow up; growing up with the same pains and anomalies inside as outside.