No More Learning

Processions march with banners to the Vir- gin and gorgeous robes. She was walking in the middle. When they stopped, however, the crowd did not stop. But that was not upsetting.
[Clarisse flees to Italy, where she joins Ulrich on the "Island of Health":]
-In Pompeii-Ulrich said-the cast of a woman has been found sealed in a fraction of a second into the cooling lava like a statue by the gases into which her body dissolved when the terrible stream of fire en- veloped her. This nearly naked woman, whose shift had slid up to her back, had been overtaken as she was running and fallen facedown with her arms outstretched, while her small hair-knot, untidily put up, still sat fumly on the back of her head; she was neither ugly nor beautiful, nei- ther voluptuous from living well nor gnawed by poverty, neither twisted by horror nor unwittingly overpowered without fear; but just because of all that, this woman, who many centuries ago jumped out of bed and was thrown on her stomach, has remained as incredibly alive as ifat any sec- ond she could stand up again and run on. Clarisse understood exactly what he meant. Whenever she scratched her thoughts and emotions in the sand, with some mark or other that was as charged with them as a boat that can hardly stay afloat for the multiplicity of its cargo, and the wind then blew on it for a day, animal tracks ran over it, or rain made pockmarks in it and eroded the sharpness of the outlines the way the cares of life erode a face, but most especially when one had forgotten it completely and only through some chance stumbled on it again and sud- denly confronted oneself, confronted an instant compressed and full of emotions and thoughts that had become sunken, faded, small, and barely recognizable, overgrown from left to right but not vanished, with
grasses and animals living around it without shyness, when it had become world, earth: then . . . ? Hard to say what then; the island be- came populated with many Clarisses; they slept on the sand, flew on the light through the air, called from the throats of birds; it was a lust to
From the Posthumous Papers · 1 555
touch oneself everywhere, to run into oneself everywhere, an unuttera- ble sensitivity: a giddiness escaped from the eyes of this woman and was able to infect Ulrich, the way one person's lustful glance can ignite the greatest lust in another. God knows what it is-Ulrich thought-that causes lovers to scratch the mystery of their initials into the bark of trees, so that they grow along with it; that has invented the seal and the coat of arms, the magic of portraits gazing out of their frames: to end ultimately in the trace ofthe photographic plate, which has lost all mystery because it is already nearly reality again.
But it was not only that. It was also the multiplicity of meaning. Some- thing was a stone and signified Ulrich; but Clarisse knew that it was more than Ulrich and a stone, that it was everything in Ulrich that was hard as stone and everything heavy that was oppressing her, and all in- sight into the world that one acquired, once one had understood that the stones were like Ulrich. Exactly as if one says: This is Max, but he is a genius. Or the fork ofa branch and a hole in the sand say: this is Clarisse, but at the same time she is a witch and is riding her heart. Many emo- tions that are otherwise separate crowd around such a sign, one never quite knew which ones, but gradually Ulrich also recognized such an uncertainty in the world in his own feelings. It threw into relief some of Clarisse's peculiarly invented trains ofthought, which he almost learned to understand.
I The uncertainty: I For a while Clarisse saw things that one otherwise does not see. Ulrich could explain that splendidly. Perhaps it was insan- ity. But a forester out walking sees a different world from the one a bota- nist or a murderer sees. One sees many invisible things. A woman sees the material of a dress, a painter a lake of liquid colors in its stead. I see through the window whether a hat is hard or soft. If I glance into the street I can likewise see whether it is warm or cold outside, whether people are happy, sad, healthy, or ailing; in the same way, the taste of a fruit is sometimes already in the fingertips that touch them. Ulrich re- membered: if one looks at something upside down-for instance, be- hind the lens ofa small camera--one notices things one had overlooked. A waving back and forth of trees or shrubs or heads that to the nonnal eye appear motionless. Or one becomes conscious of the peculiar hop- ping quality of the way people walk. One is astonished at the persistent restlessness of things. In the same way, there are unperceived double images in the field ofvision, for one eye sees something differently from the other; afterimages crystallize from still pictures like the most deli- cate-colored fogs; the brain suppresses, supplements, fonns the sup- posed reality; the ear does not hear the thousand sounds of one's own body: skin, joints, muscles, the innermost self, broadcast a contrapuntal
1556 · THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
composition ofinnumerable sensations that, mute, blind, and deaf, per- form the subterranean dance of the so-called waking state. Ulrich re- membered how once, not even very high up in the mountains, he had been overtaken by a snowstorm early in the year; he was on his way to meet some friends who were supposed to be coming down a path, and was surprised at not yet having met up with them, when the weather suddenly changed; the clarity darkened, a howling storm came up, and thick clouds of snow flung sharp icy needles at the solitary wanderer, as iffor him it were a matter oflife and death. Although after a few minutes Ulrich reached the shelter of an abandoned hut, the wind and the tor- rents of snow had gone right through him, and the icy cold as well as the exertions of his struggle against the storm and the force of the snow had exhausted him within a very brief period. When the storm passed as quickly as it had come, he of course set out on his way again; he was not the sort ofperson to let himselfbe intimidated by such an event, at least his conscious selfwas totally free ofexcitement and any kind of overesti- mation of the danger he had come through; indeed, he felt himself in the highest of spirits. But he still must have been shaken, for he sud- denly heard his party coming toward him and cheerfully called to them. But no one answered. He again called out loudly-for it is easy to get off the path in the snow and miss each other-and ran, as well as he could, in the direction indicated, for the snow was deep and he had not been prepared for it, having undertaken the climb without either skis or snowshoes. After some twenty-five paces, at every one ofwhich he sank in up to his hips, exhaustion forced him to stop, but just then he again heard voices in animated conversation, and so near that he absolutely should have seen the speakers, whom there was nothing to conceal. And yet no one was there except the soft, bright-gray snow. Ulrich collected his senses, and the conversation became more distinct. I'm hallucinat- ing, he said to himself. Yet he called out again; without success. He began to fear for himself and checked himself in every way he could think of; spoke loudly and coherently, calculated small sums in his mind, and carried out movements of arms and fingers whose execution de- manded total control. All these things worked, without the phenomenon vanishing. He heard whole conversations full of surprising import and a harmonious multiplicity of voices. Then he laughed, found the experi- ence interesting, and began to observe it. But that did not make the phe- nomenon disappear either; it faded only when he turned around and had already climbed down several hundred yards, while his friends had not taken this way back at all and there was no human soul in the vicin- ity. So unreliable and extensive is the boundary between insanity and health. It really did not surprise him when in the middle of the night
From the Posthunwus Papers · 1557
Clarisse, trembling, woke him up and claimed she was hearing a voice. When he asked her, she said it was not a human voice and not an animal voice, but a "voice of something," and then he, too, suddenly heard a noise that could in no way be ascribed to a material being; and the next instant, while Clarisse was trembling more and more violently and opened her eyes wide like a night bird, something invisible seemed to glide around the room, bumping into the mirror in its glass frame and exerting a disembodied pressure, and in Ulrich, too, fears-not one fear, a bundle offears, a world offears-poured out in panic, so that he had to bring all his reason to bear in order to resist and to calm Clarisse down.
Dramatize! Make all this present!
But he was reluctant to apply his reason. One could feel strangely happy in this uncertainty that the world assumed in Clarisse's vicinity. The sketchings in the sand and the models made ofstones, feathers, and branches now took on meaning for him too, as if here, on this Island of Health, something was trying to come to fulfillment that his life had al- ready touched on several times. The foundation of human life seemed to him a monstrous fear of some kind, indeed really a fear of the indetermi- nate. He lay on the white sand between the blue of the air and the blue of the water on the small, hot sandy platform of the island between the cold depths of sea and sky. }Je lay as in snow. If he were to have been blown away then, this is the way it could have happened. Clarisse was romping and playing like a child behind the thistly dunes. He was not afraid. He saw life from above. This island had flown away with him. He understood his past. Hundreds of human orders have come and gone: from the gods to brooch pins, and from psychology to the record player, every one ofthem an obscure unit, every one an obscure conviction that it was the ultimate, ascendant one, and every one of them mysteriously sinking after a few hundred or a few thousand years and passing into rubble and building sitet what else is this but a climbing up out of noth- ingness, each attempt on a different wall? Like one of those dunes blown by the wind, which for a while forms its own weight and then is blown away again by the wind? What is everything we do other than a nervous fear of being nothing: beginning with our pleasures, which are no plea- sures but only a din, a chattering instigated to kill time, because a dark certainty admonishes us that it will in the end annihilate us, all the way to those inventions that outdo each other, the senseless mountains of
money that kill the spirit, whether one is suffocated or borne up by
1558 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
them, to the continually changing fashions of the mind, of clothes that change incessantly, to murder, assassination, war, in which a profound mistrust of whatever is stable and created explodes: what is all that but the restlessness of a man shoveling himself down to his knees out of a grave he will never escape, a being that will never entirely climb out of nothingness, who fearfully flings himself into shapes but is, in some se- cret place that he is hardly aware of himself, vulnerable and nothing?
To here: Role of human experiences that spread not through rational transmission but through contagion. A social (humanity's) experience in two people.
And no way at all of framing this in cycles!
Ulrich remembered the man he had observed with Clarisse and Meingast in the green circle of the lantern. Here on the Island of Health even this distorted human creation, this exhibitionist, this despairing creature, this sexual desire stealing forth in a crouch out of the darkness when a woman passed by, was not basically different from other people. What else but a solitary exhibitionism were Walter's sentimental music, or Meingast's political thoughts about the common will of the many? What is even the success of a statesman standing in the midst of human bustle other than an anesthetizing exercise that has the appearance of a gratification? In love, in art, in greed, in politics, in work, and in play, we seek to articulate our painful secret: A person only half belongs to him- self, the other half is expression. I This quotation from Emerson is I think word for word! I In the travail of their souls, all people yearn for expression. The dog sprays a stone with himself and sniffs his excre- ment: to leave a trace in the world, to erect in the world a monument to oneself, a deed that will still be celebrated after hundreds of years, is the meaning of all heroism. I have done something: that is a trace, a dis- similar but immortal portrait. "I have done something" binds parts of the material world to myself. Even just expressing something already means having one sense more with which to appropriate the world. Even wheedling someone into something the way Walter does has this sense. Ulrich laughed, because it occurred to him that Walter would walk around in despair with the thought: Oh, I could say a thing or two about that . . . ! It is the profound basic feeling ofthe bourgeois, a feeling that is steadily being silenced and pacified. But on the Island of Health
From the Posthumous Papers · 1559
Ulrich ended by taking back all the ambition of his life. What are even theories, other than wheedling? Discussions. And at the conclusion of such hours Ulrich was no longer thinking of anything but Agathe, the distant, inseparable sister, of whom he did not even know what she was doing. And he sadly recalled her favorite expression: ''What can I do for my soul, which lives in me like an unsolved riddle? Which leaves visible man free to make any kind ofchoice because it cannot govern him in any way? "
Here a settlement ofaccounts about Ulrich's mood in regard to heroism.
The dog, which after long association with man involuntarily caricatures him so splendidly in many ways.
The feeling of never being allowed to leave here again.
Clarisse meanwhile was playing out her game of signs; sometimes he saw her scurrying over the dunes like a fluttering cloth. . . We are playing our story here," she claimed, . . on the stage of this island. " Basically it was only the exaggerated form of this having to imprint oneself on un- certainty. Formerly, when Clarisse had still been going to the opera with Walter, she had often said: ''What is all art! Ifwe could act out our sto- ries! " She was now doing this as well. All lovers ought to do it. All lovers have the feeling that what we are experiencing is something miraculous, we are chosen people; but they ought to play it before a large orchestra and a dark hall-real lovers on the stage, and not people who are paid: not only a new theater would arise but also an entirely new kind of love, which would spread, lighting up human gestures like a fine network of branches, instead of, like today, creeping into the child's darkness. That was what Clarisse said. Please, no child! Instead of accomplishing some- thing, people have children! Sometimes she called the small keepsakes she put in the sand for Ulrich her secret children, or so she called every impression she received, for the impression melted into her like fruit. Between her and things there existed a continual exchanging of signs and understandings, a conspiracy, a heightened thinking I heightened correspondence I a burning, spirited life process. Sometimes this be- came so intense that Clarisse thought she was being tom out of her slen- der body and flying like a veil over the island, without rest, until her eyes
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were transfixed by a small stone or a shell and a credulous astonishment rooted her to the spot, because she had already been here once and al- ways, and had lain quietly as a trace in the sand, while a second Clarisse had flown over the island like a witch.
At times, her person seemed to her only an obstacle, unnaturally in- serted in the dynamic exchange between the world that affected her and the world she affected. In its most intense moments, this selfseemed to tear apart and disintegrate. I Cf. piano scene. Beethoven-Nietzsche quotation. Even then Clarisse was serious about tearing apart. I Even if she was unfaithful to Walter with this body and this . . soul fastened to her skin," it did not mean anything: there were many hours in which the frigid, rejecting Clarisse transformed herself into a vampire, insatiable, as if an obstacle had fallen away and for the first time she could yield to this heretofore forbidden pleasure. She sometimes seemed to plan things to suck Ulrich dry: . . There's still one more devil in you I have to exorcise! " she said. He owned a red sport jacket, and she sometimes made him put it on in the middle ofthe night and did not let up until he turned pale under his tanned skin. Her passion for him, and in general all the emotions she expressed, were not deep--Ulrich felt that dis- tinctly-but somehow at times passed by depth on their precipitous fall into the abyss.
Nor did she entirely trust Ulrich. He did not completely understand the greatness of what she was experiencing. During these days she had of course recognized and seen through everything that had previously been inaccessible to her. Formerly, she had experienced infinite heavi- ness, the enterprising spirit's fall from almost-attained heights of great- ness to the deepest anxiety and anguish. It seems that a person can be driven out from the ordinary real world we all know by processes that take place not in her but above or below the earth, and in the same way the person can intensify them into the incommensurable. On the island she explained it to Ulrich like this: One day everything around Clarisse had been enhanced: colors, smells, straight and crooked lines, noises, her emotions or thoughts, and the ones she aroused in others; what was taking place might have been causal, necessary, mechanical, and psycho- logical, but aside from that it was moved by a secret driving force; it might have happened precisely that way the day before, but today, in some indescribable and fortunate way, it was different. -Oh---Clarisse immediately said to herself-! am freed from the law of necessity,
From the Posthumous Papers · 1561
where every thing depends on some other thing. For things depended on her emotions. Or rather, what was at work was a continual activity of the self and of things penetrating and yielding to each other, as if they were on opposite sides of the same elastic membrane. Clarisse discov- ered that what she was acting from was a veil of emotions, with things on the other side. A little later she received the most terrible confirmation: she perceived everything going on around her just as correctly as before, but it had become totally dissociated and alienated. Her own emotions seemed foreign to her, as ifsomeone else were feeling them, or as ifthey were drifting around in the world. It was as ifshe and things were badly fitted to each other. She no longer found any support in the world, did not find the necessary minimum of satisfaction and self-moderation, was no longer able to maintain through inner action the equilibrium with the events of the world, and felt with unspeakable anguish how she was being inexorably squeezed out of the world and could no longer escape suicide (or perhaps madness). Again she was exempted from ordinary necessity and subjected to a secret law; but then she discovered, at the last moment when she could possibly be saved, the law that no one before her had noticed:
W e-that is, people lacking Clarisse's insight-imagine that the world is unambiguous, whatever the relationship between the things out there and inner processes may be; and what we call an emotion is a personal matter that is added to our own pleasure or uneasiness but does not oth- erwise change anything in the world. Not just the way we see red when we get angry-that too, moreover; it is only erroneously that one consid- ers it something that is an occasional exception, without suspecting what deep and general law one has touched upon! -but rather like this: things swim in emotions the way water lilies consist not only of leaves and flowers and white and green but also of "gently lying there. " Ordi- narily, they are so quiet about this that one does not notice the totality; the emotions have to be calm for the world to be orderly and for merely rational associations to be dominant in it.
But assuming for instance that a person suffers some really serious and annihilating humiliation that would have to lead to his destruction, it does happen that instead of this shame a surpassing pleasure in the hu- miliation sets in, a holy or smiling feeling about the world, and this is then not merely an emotion like any other or a deliberation, not even the reflection that we might perchance console ourselves that humility is vir- tuous, but a sinking or rising of the whole person on another level, a "sinking on the rise," and all things change in harmony with this; one might say they remain the same but now find themselves in some other space, or that everything is tinged with another sense. At such moments
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one recognizes that aside from everyone's world, that solid world that can be investigated and managed by reason, there is a second world, dy- namic, singular, visionary, irrational, which is only apparently congruent with the first and which we do not, as people think, merely cany in our hearts or our minds, but which exists externally with precisely the same reality as the prevailing world. It is an uncanny mystery, and like every- thing mysterious it becomes, whenever one tries to articulate it, easily confused with what is most banal. Clarisse herself had experienced- when she was unfaithful to Walter, and although she had to be, on which account she did not recognize any remorse--how the world became black; however, it was not a real color but a quite indescribable one, and later this "sense color" of the world, as Clarisse called it, became a hard, burnt brown.
Clarisse was very happy on the day when she grasped that her new understanding was the continuation of her efforts on the subject of ge- nius. For what distinguishes the genius from the healthy, ordinary per- son, other than the secret involvement of the emotions in everything that happens, which in the healthy person is stable and unnoticed but in the genius, on the other hand, is subject to incessant irritations? More- over, Ulrich too said that there are many possible worlds. Rational, rea- sonable people adapt themselves to the world, but strong people adapt the world to themselves. As long as the "sense color" of the world, as Clarisse called it, remained stable, equilibrium in the world also had something stable. Its unnoticed stability might even be considered healthy and ordinarily indispensable, the way the body, too, is not per- mitted to feel all the organs that maintain its equilibrium. Also un- healthy is a labile equilibrium, which tips over at the first chance and falls into the inferior position. Those are the mentally ill, Clarisse told herself, of whom she was afraid. But on top, conquerors in the realm of humanity, are those whose equilibrium is just as vulnerable but full of strength and, constantly disturbed, is constantly inventing new forms of equilibrium.
Itisanuncannybalance,andClarissehadneverfeltherselfas mucha creature perched on the razor's edge between annihilation and health as she did now. But whoever has followed the development of Clarisse's thoughts up to this point will already know that she had now come upon the traces of the "secret of redemption. " This had entered her life as the mission to liberate the genius that was inhibited by all sorts of relations in herself, Walter, and their surroundings, and it is easy to see that this inhibition comes about because one is forced to yield to the repression the world practices against every person of genius, and is submerged in obscurity; but here, on the other side, it throws the world into relief in a
From the Posthumous Papers · 1563
new color. This was for her the significance of the soul color dark red, a marvelous, indescribable, and transparent shade in which air, sand, and vegetation were immersed, so that she moved everywhere as in a red chamher of light.
She once called this the "darkroom," herself surprised by its similarity to a room in which in the midst of acrid vapors one bends tense and excited over the delicate, barely recognizable images that appear on the negative. It was her task to prefigure the redemption, and Ulrich seemed to her to be her apostle, who would after a while leave her and go out into the world, and whose first task would be to liberate Walter and Meingast. From this point on, her progress was much more rapid.
The blows of confused and anarchic ideas that Ulrich received every day, and the movement of these thoughts in an imprudent but clearly palpable direction, had in fact gradually swept him up, and the only thing that still differentiated his life from that of the insane was a consciousness of his situation, which he could interrupt by an effort. But for a long time he did not do so. For while he had always felt only like a guest among rational people and those effectively engaged in life, at least with one part of his being, and as alien or meaningless as a poem would be were he suddenly to start reciting one at the general meeting ofa corporation, he felt here in this nothingness ofcertainty an enhanced security, and lived with precisely this part of his being among the structures of absurdity in the air, but as securely as on solid ground. Happiness is in truth not some- thing rational, which depends once and for all on a specific action or the possession of specific things, but much more a mood of the nerves through which everything becomes happiness or doesn't; to this extent Clarisse was right. And the beauty, goodness, and quality of genius in a woman, the fire she kindles and sustains, is not to be settled by any legal determination of truth but is a mutual delirium. One could maintain, Ulrich told himself, that our entire being-which we basically cannot find a basis for but complacently accept on the whole as God, while, acting from this assumption, it is easy for us to deduce the details-is nothing but the delirium of many; but if order is reason, then every sim- ple fact, if we observe it outside of any order, is already the germ of a madness. For what do facts have to do with our mind? The mind governs itself by them, but they stand there, responsible to no one, like mountain peaks or clouds or the nose on a person's face; there were times when it would have been a pleasure to crush the nose on the face of the lovely Diotima with two fingers; Clarisse's nose sniffed, alert, like the nose of a pointer, and was able to impart all the excitement of the invisible.
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But soon he was no longer able to follow Clarisse's idea of order. You scratch a sign in a stone at the spot where you happen to be: that this is art, just as the greatest is, was a feeling one could sympathize with. And Clarisse did not want to possess Ulrich, but-each time in a new leap- live with him. - I don't perceive truly-she said-but I perceive fruit- fully. Her ideas scintillated, things scintillated. One does not gather up one's insights in order to form a self out of them, like a cold snowman, when like her one is growing into ever-new catastrophes; her ideas grew "in the open"; one weakens oneself by scattering everything, but spurs oneself on to new, strange growth. Clarisse began to express her life in poems; on the Island of Health Ulrich found this quite natural. In our poems there is too much rigid reason; the words are burned-out notions, the syntax holds out sticks and ropes as if for the blind, the meaning never gets off the ground everyone has trampled; the awakened soul cannot walk in such iron garments. Clarisse discovered that one would have to choose words that are not ideas; but since there don't seem to be any, she chose instead the word pair. Ifshe said "I," this word was never able to shoot up as vertically as she felt it; but "I-red" is not yet impris- oned by anything, and flew upward. Just as beneficial is freeing words from their grammatical bonds, which are quite impoverished. For exam- ple, Clarisse gave Ulrich three words and asked him to read them in any order he chose. If they were "God," "red," and "goes," he read "God goes red," or "God, red, goes"-that is, his brain immediately either un- derstood them as a sentence or separated them by commas in order to underline that it was not making them into a sentence. Clarisse called this the chemistry of words, that they always cohere in groups, and showed how to counter this. Her favorite bit of information was that she worked with exclamation points or underlining. God! ! red! ! ! goes! Such accumulations slow one down, and the word dams up behind them to its full meaning.
She also underlined words from one to ten times, and at times a page she had written this way looked like a cryptic musical score. Another means, but one she used less frequently, was repetition; through it the weight of the repeated word became greater than the power of the syntactic bond, and the word began to sink without end. God goes green green green. It was an incredibly difficult problem to ascertain correctly the number of repetitions so that they would express exactly what was meant.
One day, Ulrich showed up with a volume of Goethe's poems, which he happened to have brought along, and proposed taking several words out of each of a number of poems and putting them together, to see what came out. Poems like this came out:
From the Posthumous Papers · 1565
It cannot be overlooked that an obscure, incoherent charm emanates from these constellations, something with the glowing fire of a volcano, as if one were looking into the bowels of the earth. And a few years after Clarisse, a similar play with words actually did become an ominous fash- ion among the healthy.
Clarisse anticipated remarkable conclusions. Flakes of fire were sto- len by poets from the volcano of madness: at some point in primeval times and later, every time a genius revisited earth; these glowing con- nections ofwords, not yet constricted to specific meanings, were planted in the soil of ordinary language to form its fertility, "which as we know comes from its volcanic origins. " But-so Clarisse concluded-it follows from this that the mind must decay to primal elements again and again in order for life to remain fruitful. This placed in Clarisse's hands the responsibility for a monstrous irresponsibility; she knew that she was re- ally uneducated, but now she was filled with a heroic lack of respect for everything that had been created before her.
Ulrich was able to follow Clarisse's games this far, and youth's lack of respect made it easier for him to dream into the shattered mind these new structures that could be formed: a process that has repeated itself among us several times, around 1900, when people loved the suggestive and sketchy, as after 1910, where in painting people succumbed to the charm of the simplest constructive elements and bid the secrets of the visible world echo by reciting a kind of optical alphabet.
But Clarisse's decline progressed more rapidly than Ulrich could follow. One day, she came with a new discovery. -Life withdraws powers from nature once and for all, forever-she began, making a connection with poems that tear words out of nature in order slowly to make it barren-while life transforms these powers withdrawn from nature into a new condition, "consciousness," from which there is no return. It seemed obvious, and Clarisse was surprised that no one before her had noticed it. This was because people's morality pre- vented them from noticing certain things. -All physical, chemical, and other such stimuli that strike me-she declared-! transform into consciousness; but never has the reverse been achieved, otherwise I could raise this stone with my will. So consciousness is constantly in- terfering with the system of nature's powers. Consciousness is the cause of all insignificant, superficial movement, and "redemption" de- mands that it be destroyed.
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Leo Tolstoy: Consciousness is the greatest moral misfortune that a man can attain.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky: "All consciousness is a disease. "
From Gorky's diary.
Clarisse immediately made a further discovery. The vanished forests of the carboniferous era, bubbling, rampant, gigantic, fantastic, are being freed again today under the influence of the sun as psychic forces, and it is through the exploitation of the energy that perished in that ear- lier time that the enormous spiritual energy of the present age arises.
She says: Before, it was only a game, now it has to get serious; here she becomes uncanny to him.
It was evening. To cool off she and Ulrich went for a walk in the dark. Hundreds of frogs were drumming in a small pond, and the crickets were rasping shrilly, so that the night was as animated as an African vil- lage starting a ritual dance. Clarisse asked Ulrich to go into the pond with her and kill himself so that their consciousness would gradually become swamp, coal, and pure energy.
Kill him!
This was a little too much. Ulrich was in danger, ifher ideas ran on in this fashion, of having Clarisse slit his throat one of these nights.
Another chapter: she really tries it!
He telegraphed Walter to come immediately, since his attempts to calm Clarisse had failed and he could no longer assume the respon- sibility.
From the Posthumous Papers · 1567
A kind of settling of accounts takes place between Walter and Ulrich. Walter reproaches him: You fell in with this "redemption"; do you want to be a redeemer? (Instead of subjecting Clarisse to being cured by means of society. ) Ulrich to this: If I myself really had the redeeming ideas, no one would believe them. IfChrist were to return, he wouldn't
get through today.
Rather paunchy belly, profound solidarity with Clarisse.
Ulrich: Aren't you jealous?
Walter: If I were, it would be a serious mistake (crime). I can't have that to complain about too; there are deeper values between people (husband and wife) than faithfulness.
Ulrich-who was thinking of Agathe---is depressed, seems ordinary to himself. But sensitive personal reactions while conforming to public norms belong to the uncreative person. Tells himself with a venomous clarity.
Walter sees him lying on the ground. Wrecked person. Takes revenge.
A weak person who sees a strong person on the ground loves him. Not because he now has him in his power. Nor because the envied person is now just as weak as he is. But loving himself in the other. He feels through him an enhancement of his self-love and tortures him from a kind of masochism.
This weak egotist, who has pushed his life hither and yon in trivial arrangements, is in this instance, where everything is the way he wants it to be and has often dreamed it, filled with soft beauty.
It was decided to bring Clarisse back to a new sanatorium; she ac- cepted this without resistance and almost in silence. She was terribly disappointed in Ulrich and realized that she would have to go back into a clinic--"in order to try to get the circulation working once more"; it was so sluggish that even she had not been able to do it the first time.
She settled into her new abode with the confidence of a person re- turning to a hotel where he is a familiar guest. Walter stayed with her for four days. He felt the blessing of Ulrich's not being along and of being
1568 · THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
able to control Clarisse alone, but did not admit this to himself. The manner he had adopted toward Ulrich had, he thought, great loftiness, and he also believed he had succeeded in that; but now that it was over, something quite unpleasant made its presence known: that he had been afraid of Ulrich the whole time. His body desired manly satisfaction. He ignored Clarisse's condition and convinced himself that she was not sick but would recover most quickly if, aside from the physical care, she were treated psychologically as an ordinary woman as much as possible. But still he knew that he was only telling himselfthis. To his astonishment, he found less resistance in Clarisse than he was accustomed to. He suf- fered. He felt disgusted with himself. In the first night he had got a small cut that hurt: in his pain, and shuddering at his brutality, he thought he was scourging both her and himself. Then his leave was over. It did not occur to him to desert his office. He had to pack his soul with watch in hand.
Clarisse underwent a diet cure that had been prescribed for her, since her nervous overexcitement was regarded as the consequence of her physical deterioration. She was emaciated and as unkempt as a dog that has been wandering around free for weeks. The unaccustomed nourish- ment, whose effect she began to feel, impressed her. She even put up with Walter, gently, as she did with the cure that forced strange bodies on her and compelled her to gulp down coarse things. Dejectedly she put up with everything in order to acquire in her own mind the attesta- tion of health. ''I'm only living on my own credit," she told herself, "no one believes in me. Perhaps it's only a prejudice that I'm alive? " It calmed her, while Walter was there, to fill herself up with matter and take on earthly ballast, as she called it.
But the day Walter left, the Greek was there. He was staying at the sanatorium, perhaps he had been there longer than Clarisse, but now he crossed her path. As Clarisse passed by he was saying to a lady: "A per- son who has traveled as much as I have finds it absolutely impossible to love a woman. " It might even be that he had said: "A person who comes from as far away as I do . . . "; Clarisse immediately understood it as a sign meant for her that this man had been led onto her path. The same eve- ning she wrote him a letter. Its contents ran: I am the only woman you will love. She went into detail. You are a good height for a man-she wrote--but you have a figure like a woman's and feminine hands. You have a "vulture's beak," an aquiline nose from which the useless excess of energy has been drained; it is more beautiful than an aquiline nose. You have large, dark, deep eye sockets, painful caves of vice. You know the world, the overworld, and the underworld. I noticed right away that
From the Posthumous Papers · 1569
you wanted to hypnotize me, although your glance was really tired and timid. You guessed that I am your destiny.
I am not here because I am ill. But because, instinctively, I always choose the right means. My blood courses slowly. No one has ever been able to find a fever in me. At worst, some undetectable local contamina- tion; no organically caused stomach illness, however much I suffer the greatest weakness as the result of complete exhaustion of my gasbic sys- tem. Whatever our doctor may tell you, moreover, I am on the whole healthy, even though I myself might be ill in part. Proof: precisely that energy for absolute isolation and detachment that brought me here. I guessed with unerring accuracy what is needed at the moment, while a typically sick creature cannot become healthy at all, much less make it- self healthy. Pay attention to me. This has also made me guess with unerring accuracy what it is you need.
You are the great hermaphrodite everyone is waiting for. Upon you the gods have bestowed male and female in equal measure. You will re- deem the radiant world from the dark, unutterable schism of love. Oh, how I understood when you exclaimed that no woman was able to claim you! But I am the great feminine hermaphrodite. Whom no man can satisfy. In solitude I bear being split into two. Which you possess only in your mind, and therefore still only as a longing that we must over- come. With a black shield before it. A divine encounter has brought us here. We cannot evade our destiny and make the world wait a hundred years . . . !
The next day the Greek brought her letter back. Out of discretion he brought it himself. He told her he did not want to give her any occasion to write such things to him. His rejection was noble but firm. His hypno- tist's face, cinematically demonic, masculine, would, placed in any ran- dom crowd ofpeople, immediately have become the center ofattention. But his hands were weak like a woman's; the skin of his head twitched involuntarily at times beneath his thick, carefully parted blue-black hair, and his eyes trembled slightly while Clarisse observed them. Under the influence of the diet cure and new moods, Clarisse had indeed changed physically in the last few days; she had become heavier and coarser, and her piano hands, rough from work, which she was clenching and un- clenching in her excitement, aroused in the Levantine a peculiar fear; he was constantly drawn to look at them, felt the impulse to flee, but could not stand up.
Clarisse repeated to him that he could not evade his destiny, and reached out to grab him. He saw the horrible hand coming at him and could not stir. Only when her mouth slid past his eyes to his own did he
1570 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
find the strength to jump up and flee. Clarisse held on to his pants and tried to embrace him. He uttered a soft cry of disgust and fear and reached the door.
Clarisse was overjoyed. She was left with the feeling that this was a man ofincredible, rare, and absolutely demonic purity; but the indecen- cies that she herself had committed also seemed to her tinged with this feeling. Her breathing became broad and free; the satisfaction at follow- ing the command of her inner voice past the ultimate constraints stretched her breasts like metal springs. For twenty-four hours she actu- ally forgot everything that had brought her here, mission and suffering; her heart no longer shot arrows at the sky; all those she had fired off previously came back one after the other and drilled through it. Proudly she suffered horrible pains of desire. For the space of twenty-four hours. This frigid young woman, who as long as she had been healthy had never learned the frenzy of sex, received this delirium like an agony that raged through her body with such force that it could not hold still for an in- stant, but was driven back and forth by the terrible hunger of her nerves, while her delighted mind determined by this violence that the boundless power of all sexual desire, from which she had to redeem the world, had entered into her. The sweetness ofthis torture, the restless impotence, a need to throw herself in front of this man and weep with gratitude, the happiness she could not forbid herself, were for her a demonstration of how monstrous the demon was with whom she had to take up the strug- gle. This mentally ill woman who had not yet loved now loved with ev- erything that had been spared in her, like a healthy woman but with desperate intensity, as if, with the utmost possible strength of which this emotion was capable, she wanted to tear it away from the shadows that surrounded and irresistibly reinterpreted it.
Like all women, she waited for the return of the man who had spurned her. Twenty-four hours passed, and then-approximately at the same hour as previously-the Greek actually did knock at Clarisse's door. A power he could not understand led this weak-willed man with the feminine sensibility to return to the situation in which the brutal at- tack on him had been inconclusively broken off. He came impeccably attired and coiffed, pleading carefully rehearsed excuses, and inwardly reinforced by the reflection that one had to fully enjoy this interesting woman; but when he looked at Clarisse his pupils trembled like the breasts of a girl being fondled for the first time. Clarisse did not beat around the bush. She repeated to him that he was not allowed to duck out, God too had suffered on the Mount of Olives, and went for him. His knees trembled and his hands went up against hers as helplessly as hand- kerchiefs to fend her off, but Clarisse slung her legs and arms around
From the Posthumous Papers · 1571
him and sealed his mouth with the hot phosphate breath of her own. In the extremity of his fear the Greek defended himself by confessing that he was homosexual. The unfortunate man had no idea what to do when she declared that that was precisely why he had to love her.
He was one of those half-sick, half-sociable people who wander through sanatoriums like hotels in which one meets more interesting people than in the ordinary kind. He spoke several languages and had read the books that were on everyone's tongue. A southeastern Euro- pean elegance, black hair, and indolent dark eyes made him the focus of admiration of all those women who love intellect and the demonic in a man. The story of his life was like a lottery of the numbers of the hotel rooms to which he had been invited. He had never worked in his life, had been set up by his wealthy merchant family, and was in accord with the idea that after the death of his father his younger brother would take charge of their affairs. He did not love women but became their prey out of vanity, and was not resolute enough to follow his preference for men other than occasionally in the circles of big-city prostitution, where they disgusted him. He was really a big fat boy in whom the predilection of that indeterminate age for all vices had never given way to anything sub- sequent, and who had merely wrapped himself in the protection of a melancholy indolence and irresolution.
This wretched man had never experienced from a woman an attack of the kind Clarisse was now subjecting him to. Without his being able to grasp it from anything specific, she addressed herself to his vanity. "Great hermaphrodite," she said again and again, and there shone from her eyes something that was like the King of the Mountain, for him play- ful and yet frenzied. -Remarkable woman, the Greek said. -Y ou are the great hermaphrodite-she said-who is not able to love either women or men! And that's just why you've been called to redeem them from the original sin that weakens them!
Of the three men who influenced Clarisse's life, Walter, Meingast, and Ulrich, Meingast, without its ever having become clear to her, was the one who had through his manner made the greatest impression on her by most powerfully stimulating her ambition-if one may so charac- terize the desire for wings of the uncreative mind banished to an ordi- nary life. His league of men, from which she was excluded, clanking in her imagination like archangels, had transformed themselves into the idea that the strong and redeemed person (and along with this: re- deemed from marriage and love) was homosexual. "God himself is ho- mosexual," she told the Greek. "He penetrates the believer, overpowers him, impregnates him, weakens him, rapes him, treats him like a woman, and demands submission from him, while excluding women
1572 ·THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
from the Church. Impregnated by his God, the believer walks among women as among petty, silly elements he doesn't notice. Love is unfaith- fulness to God, adultery; it robs the spirit of its human dignity. The mad- ness of sin and the madness of bliss entice human action into the marriage bed (bed of adultery). 0 my female king. assume along with me the sins of humanity in order to redeem it by committing them, al- though we already see through them. "
"Crazy-crazy," the Greek murmured, but at the same time Clarisse's ideas made unresisting sense to him and touched a point in his life that had never been treated with such seriousness or such passion. Clarisse roused his indolent soul like a dream raging in deepest darkness but, in doing so, treated him the way an older boy in puberty gets hold of a younger one and fondles him in order to carry out on him the most in- sane sacrifices ofthe cult offirst love. The Greek's dignity as an interest- ing man was most violently compromised by this role being forced upon him, but at the same time this role hit upon fantasies buried deep within him, and Clarisse's ruthless visits aroused in him a trembling condition of bondage. Nowhere did he any longer feel safe from her; she invited him on outings in a carriage, during which she molested him behind the driver's back, and his greatest fear was that one day she would do it in the sanatorium in front of everybody, without his being able to defend himself. Finally, he began to tremble as soon as she came near him, but let her do whatever she wanted. Cettefemme estfoUe-he said this sen- tence softly, plaintively, incessantly, in three languages·, like a magic charm.
But at last-this peculiar, half-transparent relationship was attracting attention, and he imagined people were already making fun of him-his vanity tore him out of it; weeping almost from weakness, he gathered all his strength to shake this woman off. When they got into the carriage he said, averting his face, that it was the last time. As they were riding. he pointed out a policeman to her, claimed that he was having a relation- ship with him and that the policeman wanted him to have nothing more to do with Clarisse; he slung his glances around this massive man stand- ing in the street as if he were a rock, but was tom away by the rolling carriage, feeling nevertheless strengthened by his lie, as if someone had sent him some kind of help. But it had the opposite effect on Clarisse. To see the lover of her "female king" affected her as a surprising con- cretization. In poems she had already characterized herself as a her- maphrodite, and now thought she could distinguish hermaphroditic qualities in her body for the first time. She could hardly expect them to break through to the surface. It's a divine constellation oflove, she said.
From the Posthumous Papers · 1573
The Greek was concerned about the coachman and pushed her away. He breathed into her face that this was their last trip. Without looking around, the coachman, apparently sensing that something was going on behind him, whipped the horses on. Suddenly a thunderstorm came up from three sides and surprised them. The air was heavy and filled with an uncanny tension; lightning flashed and thunder came crashing down. "This evening I'm receiving a visit from my lover," the Greek said. "You may not come to me! " "We're leaving tonight! " Clarisse answered. "For Berlin, the city of tremendous energies! " Just then, with a shattering crash, a bolt struck the fields not far from them, and the horses strained in a gallop against the traces. "No! " the Greek shouted, and involuntarily hid himself against Clarisse, who embraced him.