There is nothing one can hold
responsible
for this, nor can one say how it all came about.
Musil - Man Without Qualities - v1
Faces flushed, bodies hunched, their heads jerked up and down while splayed claws banged away at the mass of sound rearing up under them.
Something unfathomable was going on: a balloon, wavering in outline as it filled up with hot emotion, was swelling to the bursting point, and from the excited fmgertips, the nervously wrinkling·foreheads, the twitching bodies, again and again surges of fresh feeling poured into this awe- some private tumult.
How often they had been through this!
Ulrich could never stand this piano, always open and savagely bar- ing its teeth, this fat-lipped, short-legged idol, a cross between a dachshund and a bulldog, that had taken over his friends' lives even as far as the pictures on their walls and the spindly design of their arty reproduction furniture; even the fact that there was no live-in maid, but only a woman who came in daily to cook and clean, was part of it. Beyond the windows of this household the slopes of vine- yards with clumps of old trees and crooked shacks rose as far as the sweeping forests beyond; but close in, everything was untidy, bare, scattered, and corroded, as it is wherever the edges of big cities push forward into the countryside. The arc that spanned such afore- ground and the lovely distance was created by the instrument; gleaming black, it sent fiery pillars of tenderness and heroism out through the walls, even if these pillars, pulverized into a fine ash of
45
46 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
sound, collapsed only a hundred yards away without ever reaching the hillside with the flr trees where the tavern stood halfway up the path leading to the forest. ' But the house was able to make the piano resound, forming one of those megaphones through which the soul cries into the cosmos li~e a rutting stag, answered only by the same, competing cries of thousands of other lonely souls roaring into the cosmos. Ulrich's strong position in this household rested on his insis- tence that music represented a failure of the will and a confusion of the mind; he spoke of it with less respect than he actually felt. Since at that time music was, for Walter and Clarisse, the source of their keenest hope and anxiety, they partly despised him for his attitude and partly revered him as an evil spirit.
When they had flnished this time, Walter did not move but sat there, drooping, drained and forlorn on his half-turned piano stool, but Clarisse got up and gave the intruder a lively greeting. Her hands and face were still twitching with the electric charge of the music, and her smile forced its way through a tension between ecstasy and disgust.
"Frog Prince! " she said, ·with a nod backward at the music or Wal- ter. Ulrich felt the elastic bond between himself and Clarisse tense again. On his last visit she had told him of a terrible dream in which a slippery creature, big-belly soft, tender and gruesome, had tried to overpower her in her sleep, and this huge frog symbolized Walter's music. The two of them had few secrets from Ulrich. Now, having barely said hello to Ulrich, Clarisse turned away from him and quickly back to Walter, again uttered her war cry-"Frog Princel"- which Walter evidently did not understand, and, her hands still trem- bling from the music, gave a pained and painfully wild pull at her husband's hair. He made an amiably puzzled face and came back one step closer out of the slippery void of the music.
Then Clarisse and Ulrich took a walk through the slanting arrows ofthe evening sun, without Walter; he remainedbehind at the piano. Clarisse said:
"The ability to fend off harm is the test of vitality. The spent is drawn to its own destruction. What do }'ou think? Nietzsche· main- tains it's a sign ofweakness for an artist to be overly concerned about the morality of his art. " She had sat down on a little hummock.
Ulrich shrugged. When Clarisse married his boyhood friend three
years ago she was twenty:. . two, and it was he himself who had given her Nietzsche's works as a wedding present. He smiled, saying:
"If! were Walter, I'd challenge Nietzsche to a duel. "
Clarisse's slender, hovering back, in delicate lines under her dress, stretched like a bow; her face, too, was tense with violent emotion; she kept it anxiously averted from her friend.
''You are still both maidenly and heroic at the same time," Ulrich added. It might or might not have been a question, a bit of a joke, but there was also a touch of affectionate admiration in his words. Cla- risse did not quite understand what he meant, but the two words, which she had heard from him before, bored into her like a flaming arrow into a thatched roof.
Intermittent waves of random churning sounds reached them. Ul. :. rich knew that Clarisse refused her body to Walter for weeks at a time when he played Wagner. He played Wagner anyway, with a bad conscience; like a boyhood vice.
Clarisse would have liked to ask Ulrich how much he knew of this: Walter could never keep anything to himself. But she was ashamed to ask. So she finally said something quite different to Ulrich, who had sat down on a small nearby mound.
''You don't care about Walter," she said. ''You're not really his friend. " It sounded like a challenge, though she said it with a laugh.
Ulrich gave her an unexpected answer. 'We're just boyhood friends. You were still a child, Clarisse, when the two of us were al- ready showing the unmistakable signs of a fading schoolboy friend- ship. Countless years ago we admired each· other, and now we mistrust each other with intimate understanding. Each of us would
·like to shake off the painful sense of having once mis_taken himself for the other, so now we perform the mutual service of a pitilessly honest distorting mirror. "
"So you don't think he will ever amount to anything? " Clarisse asked.
"There is no second such example of inevitability as that offered by a gifted young man narrowing himself down into an ordinary young man, not as the result ofany blow offate but through a kind of preordained shrinkage. "
Clarisse closed her lips firmly. The old youthful pact between them, that conviction should come before consideration, made her
A Sort o f Introduction · 4 7
1
heart beat high, but the truth still hurt. Music! The sounds continued to chum toward them. She listened. Now, in their silence, the seeth- ing ofthe piano was distinctly audible; ifthey listened without paying attention, the sound might seem to be boiling upward out of the grassy hummocks, like Briinnhilde's flickering flames.
It would have been hard to saywhat Walter really was. Even today he was an engaging person with richly expressive eyes, no doubt about it, although he was already over thirty-four and had been for some time holding down a government job vaguely concerned with the fine arts. His father had got him this berth in the civil service, threatening to stop his allow~ce if he did not accept it. Walter was actually a painter. While studying the history of art at the university, he had worked in a painting class at the academy; afterward he had lived for a time in a studio. He had still been a painter when he moved with Clarisse into this house under the open sky, shortly after they were married. But now he seemed to be a musician again, and in the course ofhis ten years ! 11love he had sometimes been the one, sometimes the other, and a poet as well, during a period when he had edited a literary publication with marriage in mind; he had then taken a job with a theatrical concern but had dropped it after a few weeks; sometime later, again in order to be able to marry, he became the conductor of a theater orchestra, saw the impossibility of this, too, after six months, and became a drawing master, a music critic, a recluse, and many other things until his father and his future father- in-law, broad-minded as they were, could no longer take it. Such older people were accustomed to say that he simply lacked will- power, but it would have been equally valid to call him a lifelong, many-sided dilettante, and it was quite remarkable that there were always authorities in the worlds of music, painting, and literature who expressed enthusiastic views about Walter's future. In Ulrich's
life, by contrast, even though he had a few undeniably noteworthy achievements to his credit, it had never happened that . someone came up to him and said: ''You are the man I have always been look- ing for, the man my friends are waiting for. " In Walter's life this had happened every three months. Even though these were not neces- sarily the most authoritative people in the field, they all had some influence, a promising idea, projects under way, jobs open, friend- ships, connections, which they placed at the service of the Walter
48 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
they had discovered, whose life as a result took such a colorful zigzag course. He had an air about him that seemed to matter more than any specific achievement. Perhaps he had a particular genius for passing as a genius. Ifthis is dilettantism, then the intel). ectuallife of the German-speaking world rests largely upon dilettantism, for this is a talent found in every degree up to the level of those who really are highly gifted, in whom it usually seef! lS, to all appearances, to be missing.
Walter even had the gift of seeing through all this. While he was, naturally, as ready as the next person to take credit for his successes, his knack for being home upward with such ease by every lucky chance had always troubled him. as a terrifying sign that he was a lightweight. As often as he moved on to new activities and new peo- ple, he did it not simply from instability but in great inner turmoil, driven by anxiety that he had to move on to safeguard his spiritual integrity before he took root where the ground was already threaten~ ing to give way under him. His life had been a series of convulsive experiences from which emerged the heroic struggle of a soul resist- ing all compromise, never suspecting that in this way it was only creating its own dividedness. For all the time he was suffering and struggling for his intellectual integrity, as befits a genius, and invest- ing all he had in his talent, which was not quite a great talent, his fate had silently led him in an inward full circle back to nothing. He had at long last reached the point where no further obstacles stood in his way. The quiet, secluded, semi-scholarlyjob that sheltered him from the corruptions of the art market gave him all the time and indepen- dence he needed to listen exclusively to his inner call. The woman he loved was his, so there were no thorns in his heart. The house "on the brink of solitude" they had taken after they married could not have been more suitable for creative work. But now that there was no lon- ger anything left to be overcome, the unexpected happened: the works promised for so long by the greatness ofhis mind failed to ma- terialize. Walter seemed no longer able to work. He hid things and destroyed things; he locked himself in every morning. and every af- ternoon when he came home; he went for long walks, with his sketchbook shut; but the little that came of all this he never showed to anyone, or else tore it up. He had a hundred different reasons for this. His views also underwent a conspicuous change at this time. He
A Sort ofIntroduction · 49 ·
50 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
no longer spoke of "art of our time" and "the art of the future"- concepts Clarisse had associated with him since she was fifteen, but drew a line somewhere-in music it might be with Bach, in literature with Stifter, in painting with Ingres-and declared that whatever came ll;lter was bombastic, degenerate, oversubtle, or dissolute. With mounting vehemence he insisted that in a time so poisoned in its in- tellectual roots as the pres~nt, a pure talent must abstain from cre- ation altogether. But although such. stringent pronouncements came from his mouth, he was betrayed by the sounds of Wagner, which began to penetrate the walls of his room more and more often as soon as he shut himselfin-the music he had once taught Clarisse to despise as the epitome ofa philistine, bombastic, degenerate era but to which he was now addicted as to a thickly brewed, hot, benumbing drug.
Clarisse fought against this. She hated Wagner, iffor nothing else for his velvet jacket and beret. She was the daughter of a painter world-famous for his stage designs. She had spent her childhood in the realm o£stage sets and greasepaint; amid three different kinds of art jargon-of the theater, the opera, and the painter's studio; sur- rounded by velvets, carpets, genius, panther skins, knickknacks, pea- cock feathers, chests, and lutes. She had come to loathe from the depths of her soul everything voluptuary in art, and was drawn to everything lean and austere, whether it was the metageometry of the new atonal music or the clarified will of classic fonn, stripped of its skin, like a muscle about to be dissected. It was Walter who had first brought this new gospel into her virginal captivity. She called him "my prince of light," and even when she was still a child, she and Walter had vowed to each other not to marry until he had become a king. The story of his various met~orphoses and projects was also a chronicle ofinfinite sufferings and raptures, for all ofwhich she was to be the trophy. Clarisse was not as gifted as Walter; she had always felt it. But she saw genius as a question ofwillpower. With ferocious energy she set out to make the study of music her own. It was not impossible that she was completely unmusical, but she had ten sinewy fingers and resolution; she ·practiced for ·days on end and drove her ten fingers like ten scrawny oxen trying to tear some over- whelming weight out of the ground. She attacked painting in the
same fa8hion. She had considered Walter a genius since she was fif- teen, because she had always intended to marry only a genius. She would not let him fail her in this, and when she realized that he was failing she put up a frantic struggle against the suffocating, slow change in the atmosphere of their life. It was at just this point that Walter could have used some human warmth, and when his helpless- ness tormented him he would clutch at her like a baby wanting milk and sleep; but Clarisse's small, nervous body was not maternal. She felt abused by a parasite trying to ensconce itselfin her flesh, and she refused herself to him. She scoffed at the steamy laundry warmth in which he sought to be comforted. It is possible that ~at was cruel, but she wanted to be the wife of a great man and was wrestling with destiny. '
Ulrich had offered Clarisse a cigarette. What more could he have said, after so brusquely telling her what he thought? The smoke from their cigarettes drifted up the rays of the evening sun and mingled some distance away from them.
How much does Ulrich know about this? Clarisse wondered on her hummock. Anyway, what can he possibly know about such strug- gles? She remembered how Walter's face fell apart with pain, almost to extinction, when the agonies of music and lust beset him and her resistance left him no way out. No, she decided, Ulrich couldn't know anything of their monstrous love-game on the Himalayas of love, contempt, fear, and the obligations of the heights. She had no great opinion of mathematics and had never considered Ulrich to be as talented as Walter. He was clever, he was logical, he knew a l o t - but was that any better than barbarism? She had to admit that his tennis used to be incomparably better than Walter's, and she could remember sometimes watching his ruthless drives with a passionate feeling of "he'll get what he wants" such as she had never felt about
Walter's painting, music, or ideas. Now she thought: "What if he knows all about us and just isn't saying anything? " Only a moment ago he had, after all, distinctly alluded to her heroism. The silence between them had now become strangely exciting.
But Ulrich was thinking: "How nice Clarisse was ten years ago- half a child, blazing with faith in the future of the three of us. " She had been actually unpleaslmt to him only once, when she and Walter
A Sorl ofIntroduction · "51
52 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
had just got married and she had displayed that unattractive selfish- ness-for-two that so often makes young women who are ambitiously in love with their husbands so insufferable to other men. "That's got a lot better since," he thought.
CULTURAL REVOLUTION
Walter and he had been young in that now-forgotten era just after the turn of the last century, when many people imagined that the century was young too.
The just-buried century in Austria could not be said to have cov- ered itself with glory during its second half. It had been clever in technology, business, and science, but beyond these foeal points of its energy it was stagnant and treacherous as a swamp. It had painted like the Old Masters, written like Goethe and Schiller, and built its houses in the style of the Gothic and the Renaissance. The demands of the ideal ruled like a police headquarters over all expressions of life. But thanks to the unwritten law that allows mankind no imita- tion without tying it to an exaggeration, everything was produced with a degree of craftsmanship the admired prototypes could never have achieved, traces of which can still be seen today in our streets and museums; and-relevant or not-the women ofthe period, who were as chaste as they were shy, had to wear dresses that covered them from the ears down to the ground while showing off a billowing bosom and a voluptuous behind. For the rest, there is no part of the past we know so little about, for all sorts of reasons, as the three to five decades between our own twentieth year and the twentieth year of our fathers. So it may be useful to be reminded that in bad periods the most appalling buildings and poems are constructed on princi: ples just as fine as in good periods; that ! ill the people involved in destroying the achievements of a preceding good epoch feel they are
improving on them; and that the bloodless youth of such inferior periods take just as much pride in their young blood as do the new generations of all other eras.
And each time it is like a miracle when after such a shallow, fading period all at once there comes a small upward surge. Suddenly, out of the becalmed mentality of the nineteenth century's last two decades, an invigorating fever rose all over Europe. No one knew exactly what was in the making; nobody could have said whether it was to be a new art, a new humanity, a new morality, or perhaps a reshuffling of society. So everyone said what he pleased about it. But everywhere people were suddenly standing up to struggle against the old order. Everywhere the right man suddenly appeared in the right place and-this is so important! -enterprising men of action joined forces with enterprising men of intellect. Talents of a kind that had previously been stifled or had never taken part in public life suddenly came to the fore. They were as different from each other as could be, and could not have been more contradictory in their aims. There were those who loved the overman and those who loved the under- man; there were health cults and sun cults and the cults ofconsump- tive maidens; there was enthusiasm for the hero worshipers and for the believers in the Common Man; people were devout and skepti- cal, naturalistic and mannered, robust and morbid; they dreamed of old tree-lined avenues in palace parks, autumnal gardens, glassy ponds, gems, hashish, disease, and demonism, but also of prairies, immense horizons, forges and rolling mills, naked wrestlers, slave uprisings, early man, and the smashing of society. These were cer- tainly opposing and widely varying battle cries, but uttered in the same breath. An analysis of that epoch might produce some such nonsense as a square circle trying to consist of wooden iron, but in reality it all blended into shimmering sense. This illusion, embodied in the magical date ofthe tum ofthe century, was so powerful that it made some people hurl themselves with zeal at the new, still-unused century, while others chose one last quick fling in the old one, as'one runs riot in a house one absolutely has to move out of, without any- one feeling much of a difference between these two attitudes.
If one does not want to, there is no need to make too much of this bygone "movement. " It really affected only that thin, unstable layer of humanity, the intellectuals, who are unanimously despised by all
A Sort ofIntroduction · 53
54 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
those who rejoice in impregnable views, no matter how divergent from one another (the kind of people who are back in the saddle today, thank God); the general population was not involved. Still, even though it did not become a historical event, it was an eventlet, and the two fritmds, Walter and Ulrich, in their early youth had just caught its afterglow. Something went through the thicket of beliefs in those days like a single wind bending many trees-a spirit of her- esy and reform, the blessed sense of an arising and going forth, a mini-renaissance and -reformation, such as only the best oftimes ex- perience; whoever entered the world then felt, at the first comer, the
breath of this spirit on his cheek.
A MYSTERIOUS MALADY OF THE TIMES
So th:ey had actually been two young men, not so long ago-Ulrich thought when he was alone again-who, oddly enough, not only had the most profound insights before anyone else did, but even had them simultaneously, for one of them had only to open his mouth to say something new to f'md that the other had been making the same tremendous discovery. There is something special about youthful friendships: they are like an egg that senses in its yolk its glorious future as a bird, even while it presents to the world only a rather expressionless egg shape indistinguishable from any other. He viv- idly remembered the boy's and student's room where they had met whenever he returned for a few weeks from his first outings into the world: Walter's desk, covered with drawings, ·notes, and sheets of music, like the early rays of the glory of a famous man's future; facing it, the narrow bookcase where Walter sometimes stood in his ardor like Sebastian at the stake, the lamplight on his beautiful hair, which Ulrich had always secretly admired. Nietzsche, Peter Altenberg, Dostoyevsky or whoever they had just been reading had to resign
themselves to being left lying on the floor or the bed when they had served their purpose and the flood of talk would not suffer the petty interruption of putting a book tidily back in place. The arrogance of the young, who find the greatest minds just good enough to serve their own occasions, now seemed to Ulrich -strangely endearing. He tried to remember these conversations. It was like reaching on awak- ening for the last vanishing, dreamlike thoughts of sleep. And he thought, in mild astonishment: When we were assertive in those days, the point was not to be right-it was to assert ourselves! A young man needs to shine, far more than he needs to see something in the light. He now felt the memory of the feeling of being young, that hovering on rays oflight, as an aching loss.
It seemed to Ulrich that with the beginning of his adult life a gen- eral lull had set in, a gradual running down, in spite of occasional eddies of energy that came and went, to an ever more listless, erratic rhythm. It was very hard to say what this change consisted of. Were there suddenly fewer great men? Far from it! And besides, they don't matter; the greatness of an era does not depend on them. The intel- lectually lackluster 186os and 188os, for instance, could no more pre- vent the rise of a Nietzsche or a Hebbel than either-of these men could raise the intellectual level of his contemporaries. Had life in general reached a standstill? No, it had become more powerful! Were there more paralyzing contradictions than before? There could hardly be morel Had the past not known any absurdities? Heaps! Just between ourselves: people threw their support to the weak and ignored the strong; sometimes blockheads played leading roles while brilliant men played the part of eccentrics; the good Germanic citi- zen, untroubled by history's labor pains, which he dismissed as deca- dent and morbid excrescences, went on reading his family magazines and visited the crystal palaces and academies in vastly greater num- bers than he did the avant-garde exhibitions. Least of all did the po- litical world pay attention to the New Men's views and publications; and the great public institutions resisted everything new as if sur- rounded by a cordon santtatre against the plague. Could one not say, in fact, that things have got better since then? Men who once merely
headed minor sects have become aged celebrities; publishers and art dealers have become rich; new movements are constantly being started; everybody attends both the academic and the avant-garde
A Sort ofIntroduction · 55
56 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
shows, and even the avant-garde ofthe avant-garde; the family maga- zines have bobbed their hair; politicians like to sound off on the cul- tural arts, and newspapers make literary history. So what has been lost?
Something imponderable. An omen. An illusion. As when a mag- net releases iron filings and they fall in confusion again. As when a ball of string comes undone. As when a tension slackens. As when an orchestra begins to play out of tune. No details could be adduced that would not also have been possible before, but all the relation- ships had shifted a little. Ideas whose currency had once been lean grew fat. Persons who would before never have been taken seriously became famous. Harshness mellowed, separations fus~d, intransi- gents made concessions to popularity, taste$ already formed relapsed into uncertainties. Sharp boundaries everywhere became blurred and some new, indefinable ability to form alliances brought new peo- ple and new ideas to the top. Not that these people and ideas were bad, not at all; it was only that a little too much of the bad was mixed with the good, of error with buth, of accommodation with meaning.
There even seemed to be a privileged proportion of this mixture that got furthest on in the world; just the right pinch of makeshift to bring out the genius in genius and make talent look like a white hope, as a pinch of chicory, according to some people, brings out the right cof- fee flavor in coffee. Suddenly all the prominent and important posi- tions in the intellectual world were filled by such people, and all decisions went their way.
There is nothing one can hold responsible for this, nor can one say how it all came about. There are no persons or ideas or specific phenomena that one can fight against. There is no lack of talent or goodwill or even of strong personalities. There is just something missing in everything, though you can't put your finger on it, as if there had been a change in the blood or in the air; a mysteri- ous disease has eaten away the previous period's seeds of genius, but everything sparkles with novelty, and finally one has no way of know- ing whether the world has really grown worse, or oneself merely older. At this point a new era has definitively arrived.
So the times had changed, like a day that begins radiantly blue and then by degrees clouds over, without having the kindness to wait for Ulrich. He evened the score byholding the cause ofthese mysterious changes that made up the disease eating away genius to be simple,
common stupidity. By no means in an insulting sense. For if stupid- it)r, seen from within, did not so much resemble talent as possess the ability to be mistaken for it, and if it did not outwardly resemble progress, genius, hope, and improvement, the chances are that no one would want to be stupid, and so there would be no stupidity. Or fighting it would at least be easy. Unfortunately, stupidity has some- thing uncommonly endearing and natural about it. Ifone finds that a reproduction, for instance, seems more of an artistic feat than a hand-painted original, well, there is a certain truth in that, and it is easier to prove than that van Gogh was a great artist. It is also easy and profitable to be a more powerful playwright than Shakespeare or a less uneven storyteller than Goethe, and a solid commonplace al- ways contains more humanity than a new discovery. There is, in short, no great idea that stupidity could not put to its own uses; it can
move in all directions, and put on all the guises oftruth. The truth, by comparison, has only one appearance and only one path, and is al- ways at a disadvantage.
But after a while Ulrich had a curious notion in this connection. He imagined that the great churchman and thinker Thomas Aquinas (d. 1274), after taking infinite pains to put the ideas of his own time in the best possible order, had then continued through history to go even deeper to the bottom ofthings, and had just finished. Now, still young by special dispensation, he stepped out of his arched doorway with many folios under his arm, and an electric trolley shot right past his nose. Ulrich chuckled at the dumbstruck amazement on the face of the doctor untversalis, as the past had called the celebrated Thomas.
A motorcyclist came up the empty street, thundering up the per- spective bow-armed and bow-legged. His face had the solemn self- importance of a howling child. It reminded Ulrich of a photo he had seen a few days ago in a magazine of a famous woman tennis player poised on tiptoe, one leg exposed to above the garter, the other flung up toward her head as she reached for a high ball with her racket, on her face the expression of an English governess. In the same issue there was also a picture of a champion swimmer being massaged after a contest. Two women dressed in street clothes, one at the swimmer's feet, the other at her head, were solemnly looking down at her as she lay on a bed, naked on her back, one knee drawn up in a
A Sort ofIntroduction · 57
sB·THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
posture of sexual abandon, the. masseur standing alongside resting his hands on it. He wore a doctor's gown and gazed out ofthe picture as though this female flesh had been skinned and hung on a meat hook. Such were the things people were beginning to see at the time, and somehow they had to be acknowledged, as one acknowledges the presence of skyscrapers and electricity. A man can't be angry at his own time without suffering some damage, Ulrich felt. Ulrich was also always ready to love all these manifestations oflife. But he could never bring himself to love them wholeheartedly, as one's general sense of social well-being requires. For a long time now a hint of aversion had lain on everything he did and experienced, a shadow of impotence and loneliness, an all-encompassing distaste for which he could not find the complementary inclination. He felt at times as though he had been born with a talent for which there was at present no objective.
EFFECT OF A MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES ON A MAN WITH QUALITIES
While Ulrich and Clarisse were talking. they did not notice that the music in the house behind them broke oH" now and again. At those moments Walter had gone to the Window. He could not see them, but felt that they were just beyond his field of vision. Jealousy tor- mented him. The cheap intoxicant of sluggishly sensual music, was luring him back to the piano. It lay behind him, open like a bed rum- pled by a sleeper resisting consciousness in order to avoid facing re- ality. He was racked by the jealousy of a paralyzed man who can sense how the healthy walk, yet he could not bring himself to join them, for his anguish offered no possibility of defending himself against them.
When Walter got up in the morning and had to rush to the office,
when he talked with people during the day and rode home among them in the afternoon, he felt he was an important person, called upon to do great things. He believed then that he. saw things differ- ently: he was moved where others passed by unresponsively, and where others reached for a thing without thinking, for him the very act of moving his own arm was fraught with spiritual adventure, or else it was paralyzed in loving contemplation of itself. He was sensi- tive, and his feelipgs were constantly agitated by brooding, depres- sions, billowing ups and downs; he was never indifferent, always seeing joy or misery in everything, so he always had something excit- ing to think about. Such people exercise an unusual attraction, be- cause the moral flaw in which they incessantly live communicates itself to others. Everything in their convetsation takes on a personal significance, and one feels free in their company to be constantly preoccupied with oneself, so that they provide a pleasure otherwise obtainable only from an analyst or therapist for a fee, with the further difference that with the psychiatrist one feels \sick, while Walter helped a person to feel very important for reasons that had previ- ously escaped one's attention. With this talent for encouraging self- preoccupation, he had in fact conquered Clarisse and in time driven all his rivals from the field. Since everything became for him an ethi- cal move~ent, he could hold forth convincingly on the immorality of ornament, the hygiene ofsimple forms, and the beery fumes ofWag- ner's music, in accord with the new taste in the arts, terrorizing even
his future father-in-law, whose painter's brain was like a peacock's tail unfurled. So there could be no question that Walter had his suc- cesses to look back on.
And yet, when he got home full of impressions and plans, ripe and new as perhaps n~ver before, a demoralizing change took place in him. Merely putting a cai)vas on the easel or a sheet of paper on the table was the sign of a terrible flight from his heart. His head re- mained clear, and the plan inside it hovered as ifin a very transpar- ent and distinct atmosphere; indeed, the plan split and became two or more plans, all ready to compete for supremacy-but the connec- tion between his head and the first movements needed to carry it out seemed severed. Walter could not even make up his mind to lift a finger. He simply did not get up from where he happened to be sit- ting, and his thoughts slid away from the task he had set himself like
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6o • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
snow evaporating as it falls. He didn't know where the time went, but all of a sudden it was evening, and since after several such experi- ences he had learned to start dreading them on his way home, whole series of weeks began to slip, and passed away like a troubled half- sleep. Slowed down by a sense of hopelessness in all his decisions and movements, he suffered from bitter sadness, and his incapacity solidified into a pain that often sat like a nosebleed behind his fore- head the moment he tried to make up his mind. to do something. Walter was fearful, and the symptoms he recognized in himself not only hampered him in his work but also filled him With anxiety, for they were apparently so far beyond his control that they often gave him the impression of an incipient mental breakdown. '
But as his condition had grown steadily worse in the course of the last year, he found a miraculous refuge in a thought he had never valued enough before. The idea was none other than that the . Europe in which he was forced to live was hopelessly decadent. During ages in which things seerp to be going well outwardly, while inwardly they undergo the kind of regression that may be the fate of all things, in- cluding cultural development-unless special efforts are made to keep them supplied with new ideas-the obvious question was, pre- sumably, what one could do about it. But the tangle of clever, stupid, vulgar, and beautiful is at such times so particularly dense and intri- cate that many people obviously find it easier to believe that there is something occult at the root of things, and proclaim the fated fall of one thing or another that eludes precise definition and is porten- tously vague. It hardly matters whether the doomed thing is the human race, vegetarianism, or the soul; all that a healthy pessimism needs is merely something inescapable to hold on to. Even Walter, who in better days used to be able to laugh at su~h doctrines, soon discovered their advantages once he began to try them out. Instead ofhis feeling bad and unable to work, it was now the times that were sick, while he was fine. His life, which had come to nothing, was now, all at once, tremendously accounted for, justified on a world-histori- cal scale that was worthY. of him, so that picking up a pen or pencil and laying it down again virtually took on the aura of a great sacrifice.
With all this, however, Walter still had to struggle with himself, and Clarisse kept on tormenting him. She turned a deaf ear to his critical discussions of the times; with her it was genius or nothing.
What it was she did not know, but whenever the subject came up her whole body began to tremble and tense up. "You either feel it or you don't" was all the proofshe could offer. For him she always remained the same cruel little fifteen-year-old girl. She had never quite under- stood his way of feeling, nor could he ever control her. But cold and hard as she was, and then again so spirited, with her ethereal, flaming will, she had a mysterious ability to influence him, as though shocks were coming through her from a direction that could not be fitted into the three dimensions of space. This influence sometimes bor- dered- on the uncanny. He felt it most keenly when they played the piano together. Clarisse's playing was hard and colorless, prompted by stirrings in her that he did not share, and that frightened him as they reached him when their bodies glowed till the soul burned through. Something indefinable then tore itself loose inside her and threatened to fly away with her spirit. It came out of some secret hollow in her being that had to be anxiously kept shut up tight. He had no idea what made him feel this, or what it was, but it tortured him with an unutterable fear and the need to do something decisive against it, which he could not do because no one but him noticed anything.
As he stood at the window watching Clarisse coming back alone, he dimly knew that he would again not be able to resist the urge to make disparaging remarks about Ulrich. Ulrich had returned from abroad at a bad time. He was bad for Clarisse. He ruthlessly exacer-
'bated something inside Clarisse that Walter dared not touch: the cavern of disaster, the pitiful, the sick, the fatal genius in her, the secret empty space where something was tearing at chains that might someday give way. Now she had entered and was standing bare- headed before him, sunhat in hand, and he looked at her. Her eyes were mocking, tender, clear-perhaps a little too clear. Sometimes he felt that she simply had a certain strength he lacked. Even when she was a child he had felt her as a thorn that would never let him find peace, and evidently he had never wanted her to be otherwise; perhaps this was the secret of his life, which the other two did not understand.
"How deeply we suffer," he thought. "I don't think it can happen often·that two people love each other as deeply as we must. "
And he began to speak without preamble: "I don't want to know
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62 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
what Ulo has been telling you, but I can tell you that the strength you marvel at in him is pure emptiness. " Clarisse looked at the piano and smiled; he had involuntarily sat down again beside the open instru- ment. "It must be easy to feel heroic," he went on, "when one is nat- urally insensitive, and to think in miles when you've no idea what riches can be hidden in an inch! " They sometimes called him Ulo, his boyhood nickname, and he liked them for it, as one may keep a smil- ing respect for one's old nanny. "He's come to a dead end! " Walter added. "You don't see it, but don't imagine that I don't know him. "
Clarisse had her doubts.
Walter said vehemently: "Today it's all decadence! A bottomless pit of intelligence! He is intelligent, I grant you that, but he knows nothing at all about the ·power of a soul in full possession of itself. What Goethe calls personality, what Goethe calls mobile order- those are things he doesn't have a clue about! 'This noble concept of power and restraint, ofchoice and law, offreedom and measure, mo- bile order . . . '"The poet's lines came in waves from his lips. Clarisse regarded these lips in amiable wonder, as though they had just let fly a pretty toy. Then she collected herself and interjected like a good little housewife: 'Would you like a beer? " "Yes. Why not? Don't I always have one? " 'Well, there is none in the house. '' "I wish you hadn't asked," Walter sighed. "I might never have thought of it. ''
And that was that, as far as Clarisse was concerned. But Walter had been thrown off the track and didn't know how to continue.
"Do you remember our conversation about the artist? " he asked tentatively.
'Which one? "
"The one we had a few days ago. I explained to you what a living principle of form in a person means. Don't you remember, I came to the conclusion that in the old days, instead of death and logical mechanization, blood and wisdom reigned? "
"No. " 1
Walter was stymied; he groped, wavered. Suddenly he burst out: "He's a man without qualities! "
'What is that? " Clarisse asked, giggling.
"Nothing. That's just it, it's nothing. ''
But Clarisse found the phrase intriguing.
"There are millions of them nowadays," Walter declared. "It's the
human type produced by our time! " He was pleased with the term he had hit upon so unexpectedly. As if he were starting a poem, he let the expression drive . him on even before its meaning was· clear to him. "Just look at him! What would you take him for? Does he look like a doctor, a businessman, a painter, or a diplomat? "
"He's none of those," Clarisse said dryly.
"Well, does he look like a mathematician? "
"I don't know-how should I know what a mathematician is sup-
posed to look like? "
"You've hit the nail on the head! A mathematician looks like noth-
ing at all-that is, he is likely to look intelligent in such a general way that there isn't a single specific thing to pin him down! Except for the Roman Catholic clergy, no one these days looks the way he should, because we use our heads even more impersonally than our hands. But mathematics is the absolute limit: it already knows as little about itself as future generations, feeding on energy pills instead of bread and meat, will be likely to know about meadows and young calves and chickens! "
Clarisse had meanwhile put their simple supper on the table, and Walter was already digging into it, which may have suggested the analogy to him. Clarisse was watching his lips. They reminded her of his late mot;her's. They were strong feminine lips that ate as if they were getting the housework done, and were topped off by a small clipped mustache. His eyes shone like freshly peeled chestnuts, even when he was merely looking for a piece of cheese on the platter. Al- though he was short, and flabby rather than delicate of build, he was a man of striking appearance, the kind who always seem to be stand- ing in a good light. He now continued:
"His appearance gives no clue to what his profession might be, and yet he doe~n't look like a man without a profession either. Consider what he's like: He always knows what to do. He knows how to gaze into a woman's eyes. He can put his mind to any question at any time. He can box. He is gifted, strong-willed, open-minded, fearless, tena- cious, dashing, circumspect-why quibble, suppose we grant him all those qualities-yet he has none of them! They've made him what he is, they've set his course for him, and yet they don't belong to him. When he is angry, something in him laughs. When he is sad, he is up to something. When something moves him, he turns against it. He'll
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64 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
always see a good side to every bad action. What he thinks of any- thing will always depend on some possible context-nothing is, to him, what it is; everything is subject to change, in flux, part of a whole, of an infinite number of wholes presumably adding up to a superwhole that, however, he knows nothing about. So every answer he gives is only a partial answer, every feeling only an opinion, and he never cares what something is, only 'how' it is-some extraneous seasoning that somehow goes along with it, that's what interests him. I don't know whether I'm making myself clear-? "
"Quite clear," Clarisse said, "but I think that's all very nice of him. "
Walter had unintentionally spoken with signs of growing dislike; his old boyhood sense of being weaker than his friend increased his jealousy. For although he was convinced that Ulrich-had never really achieved anything beyond a few proofs of naked intellect and capac- ity, he could never shake off a secret sense of always having been Ulrich's physical inferior. The portrait he was sketching freed him, like bringing offa work ofart, as ifit were not his own doing at all but something that had begun as a mysterious inspiration, with word after word coming to him, while inwardly something dissolved with- out his being conscious of it. By the time he finished he had recog- nized that Ulrich stood for nothing but this state of dissolution that all present-day phenomena have.
"So you like it; do you? " he said, painfully surprised. "You can't be serious? "
Clarisse was chewing bread and soft cheese; she could only smile with her eyes.
"Oh well," Walter said, "I suppose we used to think that way our- selves, in the old days. But surely it can't be regarded as anything more than a preliminary phase? Such a man is not really a human being! "
Clarisse had sWallowed her mouthful. "That's what he says him- self! " she affirmed.
"What does he say himself? "
"Oh, I don't know-that today everything is coming apart. Every- thing has come to a standStill, he says, not just him. But he doesn't take it as hard as you do. He once gave me a long talk about it: Ifyou analyze a thousand people, you will find two dozen qualities, emo-
tions, forms of development, types of structure and so on, which are what they all consist of. And if you do a chemical analysis of your body, all you get is water with a few dozen little heaps of matter swimming in it. The water rises inside us just as it does inside trees, and it forms the bodies ofanimals just as it forms the clouds. I think that's neatly put. But it doesn't help you to know what to say about yourself. Or what to do. " Clarisse giggled. "So then I told him that you go fishing for days when you have time off, and lie around by the water. "
"So what? I'd like to know if he could stand that for even ten min- utes. But human beings," Walter said firmly, "have been doing that for ten thousand years, staring up at the sky, feeling the warmth of the earth, without trying to analyze it any more than you'd analyze your own mother. "
Clarisse couldn't help giggling again. "He says things have become more complicated meanwhile. Just as we swim in water, we also swim in a sea of fire, a storm of electricity, a firmament of magnet- ism, a swamp of warmth, and so on. It's just that we can't feel it.
Ulrich could never stand this piano, always open and savagely bar- ing its teeth, this fat-lipped, short-legged idol, a cross between a dachshund and a bulldog, that had taken over his friends' lives even as far as the pictures on their walls and the spindly design of their arty reproduction furniture; even the fact that there was no live-in maid, but only a woman who came in daily to cook and clean, was part of it. Beyond the windows of this household the slopes of vine- yards with clumps of old trees and crooked shacks rose as far as the sweeping forests beyond; but close in, everything was untidy, bare, scattered, and corroded, as it is wherever the edges of big cities push forward into the countryside. The arc that spanned such afore- ground and the lovely distance was created by the instrument; gleaming black, it sent fiery pillars of tenderness and heroism out through the walls, even if these pillars, pulverized into a fine ash of
45
46 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
sound, collapsed only a hundred yards away without ever reaching the hillside with the flr trees where the tavern stood halfway up the path leading to the forest. ' But the house was able to make the piano resound, forming one of those megaphones through which the soul cries into the cosmos li~e a rutting stag, answered only by the same, competing cries of thousands of other lonely souls roaring into the cosmos. Ulrich's strong position in this household rested on his insis- tence that music represented a failure of the will and a confusion of the mind; he spoke of it with less respect than he actually felt. Since at that time music was, for Walter and Clarisse, the source of their keenest hope and anxiety, they partly despised him for his attitude and partly revered him as an evil spirit.
When they had flnished this time, Walter did not move but sat there, drooping, drained and forlorn on his half-turned piano stool, but Clarisse got up and gave the intruder a lively greeting. Her hands and face were still twitching with the electric charge of the music, and her smile forced its way through a tension between ecstasy and disgust.
"Frog Prince! " she said, ·with a nod backward at the music or Wal- ter. Ulrich felt the elastic bond between himself and Clarisse tense again. On his last visit she had told him of a terrible dream in which a slippery creature, big-belly soft, tender and gruesome, had tried to overpower her in her sleep, and this huge frog symbolized Walter's music. The two of them had few secrets from Ulrich. Now, having barely said hello to Ulrich, Clarisse turned away from him and quickly back to Walter, again uttered her war cry-"Frog Princel"- which Walter evidently did not understand, and, her hands still trem- bling from the music, gave a pained and painfully wild pull at her husband's hair. He made an amiably puzzled face and came back one step closer out of the slippery void of the music.
Then Clarisse and Ulrich took a walk through the slanting arrows ofthe evening sun, without Walter; he remainedbehind at the piano. Clarisse said:
"The ability to fend off harm is the test of vitality. The spent is drawn to its own destruction. What do }'ou think? Nietzsche· main- tains it's a sign ofweakness for an artist to be overly concerned about the morality of his art. " She had sat down on a little hummock.
Ulrich shrugged. When Clarisse married his boyhood friend three
years ago she was twenty:. . two, and it was he himself who had given her Nietzsche's works as a wedding present. He smiled, saying:
"If! were Walter, I'd challenge Nietzsche to a duel. "
Clarisse's slender, hovering back, in delicate lines under her dress, stretched like a bow; her face, too, was tense with violent emotion; she kept it anxiously averted from her friend.
''You are still both maidenly and heroic at the same time," Ulrich added. It might or might not have been a question, a bit of a joke, but there was also a touch of affectionate admiration in his words. Cla- risse did not quite understand what he meant, but the two words, which she had heard from him before, bored into her like a flaming arrow into a thatched roof.
Intermittent waves of random churning sounds reached them. Ul. :. rich knew that Clarisse refused her body to Walter for weeks at a time when he played Wagner. He played Wagner anyway, with a bad conscience; like a boyhood vice.
Clarisse would have liked to ask Ulrich how much he knew of this: Walter could never keep anything to himself. But she was ashamed to ask. So she finally said something quite different to Ulrich, who had sat down on a small nearby mound.
''You don't care about Walter," she said. ''You're not really his friend. " It sounded like a challenge, though she said it with a laugh.
Ulrich gave her an unexpected answer. 'We're just boyhood friends. You were still a child, Clarisse, when the two of us were al- ready showing the unmistakable signs of a fading schoolboy friend- ship. Countless years ago we admired each· other, and now we mistrust each other with intimate understanding. Each of us would
·like to shake off the painful sense of having once mis_taken himself for the other, so now we perform the mutual service of a pitilessly honest distorting mirror. "
"So you don't think he will ever amount to anything? " Clarisse asked.
"There is no second such example of inevitability as that offered by a gifted young man narrowing himself down into an ordinary young man, not as the result ofany blow offate but through a kind of preordained shrinkage. "
Clarisse closed her lips firmly. The old youthful pact between them, that conviction should come before consideration, made her
A Sort o f Introduction · 4 7
1
heart beat high, but the truth still hurt. Music! The sounds continued to chum toward them. She listened. Now, in their silence, the seeth- ing ofthe piano was distinctly audible; ifthey listened without paying attention, the sound might seem to be boiling upward out of the grassy hummocks, like Briinnhilde's flickering flames.
It would have been hard to saywhat Walter really was. Even today he was an engaging person with richly expressive eyes, no doubt about it, although he was already over thirty-four and had been for some time holding down a government job vaguely concerned with the fine arts. His father had got him this berth in the civil service, threatening to stop his allow~ce if he did not accept it. Walter was actually a painter. While studying the history of art at the university, he had worked in a painting class at the academy; afterward he had lived for a time in a studio. He had still been a painter when he moved with Clarisse into this house under the open sky, shortly after they were married. But now he seemed to be a musician again, and in the course ofhis ten years ! 11love he had sometimes been the one, sometimes the other, and a poet as well, during a period when he had edited a literary publication with marriage in mind; he had then taken a job with a theatrical concern but had dropped it after a few weeks; sometime later, again in order to be able to marry, he became the conductor of a theater orchestra, saw the impossibility of this, too, after six months, and became a drawing master, a music critic, a recluse, and many other things until his father and his future father- in-law, broad-minded as they were, could no longer take it. Such older people were accustomed to say that he simply lacked will- power, but it would have been equally valid to call him a lifelong, many-sided dilettante, and it was quite remarkable that there were always authorities in the worlds of music, painting, and literature who expressed enthusiastic views about Walter's future. In Ulrich's
life, by contrast, even though he had a few undeniably noteworthy achievements to his credit, it had never happened that . someone came up to him and said: ''You are the man I have always been look- ing for, the man my friends are waiting for. " In Walter's life this had happened every three months. Even though these were not neces- sarily the most authoritative people in the field, they all had some influence, a promising idea, projects under way, jobs open, friend- ships, connections, which they placed at the service of the Walter
48 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
they had discovered, whose life as a result took such a colorful zigzag course. He had an air about him that seemed to matter more than any specific achievement. Perhaps he had a particular genius for passing as a genius. Ifthis is dilettantism, then the intel). ectuallife of the German-speaking world rests largely upon dilettantism, for this is a talent found in every degree up to the level of those who really are highly gifted, in whom it usually seef! lS, to all appearances, to be missing.
Walter even had the gift of seeing through all this. While he was, naturally, as ready as the next person to take credit for his successes, his knack for being home upward with such ease by every lucky chance had always troubled him. as a terrifying sign that he was a lightweight. As often as he moved on to new activities and new peo- ple, he did it not simply from instability but in great inner turmoil, driven by anxiety that he had to move on to safeguard his spiritual integrity before he took root where the ground was already threaten~ ing to give way under him. His life had been a series of convulsive experiences from which emerged the heroic struggle of a soul resist- ing all compromise, never suspecting that in this way it was only creating its own dividedness. For all the time he was suffering and struggling for his intellectual integrity, as befits a genius, and invest- ing all he had in his talent, which was not quite a great talent, his fate had silently led him in an inward full circle back to nothing. He had at long last reached the point where no further obstacles stood in his way. The quiet, secluded, semi-scholarlyjob that sheltered him from the corruptions of the art market gave him all the time and indepen- dence he needed to listen exclusively to his inner call. The woman he loved was his, so there were no thorns in his heart. The house "on the brink of solitude" they had taken after they married could not have been more suitable for creative work. But now that there was no lon- ger anything left to be overcome, the unexpected happened: the works promised for so long by the greatness ofhis mind failed to ma- terialize. Walter seemed no longer able to work. He hid things and destroyed things; he locked himself in every morning. and every af- ternoon when he came home; he went for long walks, with his sketchbook shut; but the little that came of all this he never showed to anyone, or else tore it up. He had a hundred different reasons for this. His views also underwent a conspicuous change at this time. He
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50 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
no longer spoke of "art of our time" and "the art of the future"- concepts Clarisse had associated with him since she was fifteen, but drew a line somewhere-in music it might be with Bach, in literature with Stifter, in painting with Ingres-and declared that whatever came ll;lter was bombastic, degenerate, oversubtle, or dissolute. With mounting vehemence he insisted that in a time so poisoned in its in- tellectual roots as the pres~nt, a pure talent must abstain from cre- ation altogether. But although such. stringent pronouncements came from his mouth, he was betrayed by the sounds of Wagner, which began to penetrate the walls of his room more and more often as soon as he shut himselfin-the music he had once taught Clarisse to despise as the epitome ofa philistine, bombastic, degenerate era but to which he was now addicted as to a thickly brewed, hot, benumbing drug.
Clarisse fought against this. She hated Wagner, iffor nothing else for his velvet jacket and beret. She was the daughter of a painter world-famous for his stage designs. She had spent her childhood in the realm o£stage sets and greasepaint; amid three different kinds of art jargon-of the theater, the opera, and the painter's studio; sur- rounded by velvets, carpets, genius, panther skins, knickknacks, pea- cock feathers, chests, and lutes. She had come to loathe from the depths of her soul everything voluptuary in art, and was drawn to everything lean and austere, whether it was the metageometry of the new atonal music or the clarified will of classic fonn, stripped of its skin, like a muscle about to be dissected. It was Walter who had first brought this new gospel into her virginal captivity. She called him "my prince of light," and even when she was still a child, she and Walter had vowed to each other not to marry until he had become a king. The story of his various met~orphoses and projects was also a chronicle ofinfinite sufferings and raptures, for all ofwhich she was to be the trophy. Clarisse was not as gifted as Walter; she had always felt it. But she saw genius as a question ofwillpower. With ferocious energy she set out to make the study of music her own. It was not impossible that she was completely unmusical, but she had ten sinewy fingers and resolution; she ·practiced for ·days on end and drove her ten fingers like ten scrawny oxen trying to tear some over- whelming weight out of the ground. She attacked painting in the
same fa8hion. She had considered Walter a genius since she was fif- teen, because she had always intended to marry only a genius. She would not let him fail her in this, and when she realized that he was failing she put up a frantic struggle against the suffocating, slow change in the atmosphere of their life. It was at just this point that Walter could have used some human warmth, and when his helpless- ness tormented him he would clutch at her like a baby wanting milk and sleep; but Clarisse's small, nervous body was not maternal. She felt abused by a parasite trying to ensconce itselfin her flesh, and she refused herself to him. She scoffed at the steamy laundry warmth in which he sought to be comforted. It is possible that ~at was cruel, but she wanted to be the wife of a great man and was wrestling with destiny. '
Ulrich had offered Clarisse a cigarette. What more could he have said, after so brusquely telling her what he thought? The smoke from their cigarettes drifted up the rays of the evening sun and mingled some distance away from them.
How much does Ulrich know about this? Clarisse wondered on her hummock. Anyway, what can he possibly know about such strug- gles? She remembered how Walter's face fell apart with pain, almost to extinction, when the agonies of music and lust beset him and her resistance left him no way out. No, she decided, Ulrich couldn't know anything of their monstrous love-game on the Himalayas of love, contempt, fear, and the obligations of the heights. She had no great opinion of mathematics and had never considered Ulrich to be as talented as Walter. He was clever, he was logical, he knew a l o t - but was that any better than barbarism? She had to admit that his tennis used to be incomparably better than Walter's, and she could remember sometimes watching his ruthless drives with a passionate feeling of "he'll get what he wants" such as she had never felt about
Walter's painting, music, or ideas. Now she thought: "What if he knows all about us and just isn't saying anything? " Only a moment ago he had, after all, distinctly alluded to her heroism. The silence between them had now become strangely exciting.
But Ulrich was thinking: "How nice Clarisse was ten years ago- half a child, blazing with faith in the future of the three of us. " She had been actually unpleaslmt to him only once, when she and Walter
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52 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
had just got married and she had displayed that unattractive selfish- ness-for-two that so often makes young women who are ambitiously in love with their husbands so insufferable to other men. "That's got a lot better since," he thought.
CULTURAL REVOLUTION
Walter and he had been young in that now-forgotten era just after the turn of the last century, when many people imagined that the century was young too.
The just-buried century in Austria could not be said to have cov- ered itself with glory during its second half. It had been clever in technology, business, and science, but beyond these foeal points of its energy it was stagnant and treacherous as a swamp. It had painted like the Old Masters, written like Goethe and Schiller, and built its houses in the style of the Gothic and the Renaissance. The demands of the ideal ruled like a police headquarters over all expressions of life. But thanks to the unwritten law that allows mankind no imita- tion without tying it to an exaggeration, everything was produced with a degree of craftsmanship the admired prototypes could never have achieved, traces of which can still be seen today in our streets and museums; and-relevant or not-the women ofthe period, who were as chaste as they were shy, had to wear dresses that covered them from the ears down to the ground while showing off a billowing bosom and a voluptuous behind. For the rest, there is no part of the past we know so little about, for all sorts of reasons, as the three to five decades between our own twentieth year and the twentieth year of our fathers. So it may be useful to be reminded that in bad periods the most appalling buildings and poems are constructed on princi: ples just as fine as in good periods; that ! ill the people involved in destroying the achievements of a preceding good epoch feel they are
improving on them; and that the bloodless youth of such inferior periods take just as much pride in their young blood as do the new generations of all other eras.
And each time it is like a miracle when after such a shallow, fading period all at once there comes a small upward surge. Suddenly, out of the becalmed mentality of the nineteenth century's last two decades, an invigorating fever rose all over Europe. No one knew exactly what was in the making; nobody could have said whether it was to be a new art, a new humanity, a new morality, or perhaps a reshuffling of society. So everyone said what he pleased about it. But everywhere people were suddenly standing up to struggle against the old order. Everywhere the right man suddenly appeared in the right place and-this is so important! -enterprising men of action joined forces with enterprising men of intellect. Talents of a kind that had previously been stifled or had never taken part in public life suddenly came to the fore. They were as different from each other as could be, and could not have been more contradictory in their aims. There were those who loved the overman and those who loved the under- man; there were health cults and sun cults and the cults ofconsump- tive maidens; there was enthusiasm for the hero worshipers and for the believers in the Common Man; people were devout and skepti- cal, naturalistic and mannered, robust and morbid; they dreamed of old tree-lined avenues in palace parks, autumnal gardens, glassy ponds, gems, hashish, disease, and demonism, but also of prairies, immense horizons, forges and rolling mills, naked wrestlers, slave uprisings, early man, and the smashing of society. These were cer- tainly opposing and widely varying battle cries, but uttered in the same breath. An analysis of that epoch might produce some such nonsense as a square circle trying to consist of wooden iron, but in reality it all blended into shimmering sense. This illusion, embodied in the magical date ofthe tum ofthe century, was so powerful that it made some people hurl themselves with zeal at the new, still-unused century, while others chose one last quick fling in the old one, as'one runs riot in a house one absolutely has to move out of, without any- one feeling much of a difference between these two attitudes.
If one does not want to, there is no need to make too much of this bygone "movement. " It really affected only that thin, unstable layer of humanity, the intellectuals, who are unanimously despised by all
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54 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
those who rejoice in impregnable views, no matter how divergent from one another (the kind of people who are back in the saddle today, thank God); the general population was not involved. Still, even though it did not become a historical event, it was an eventlet, and the two fritmds, Walter and Ulrich, in their early youth had just caught its afterglow. Something went through the thicket of beliefs in those days like a single wind bending many trees-a spirit of her- esy and reform, the blessed sense of an arising and going forth, a mini-renaissance and -reformation, such as only the best oftimes ex- perience; whoever entered the world then felt, at the first comer, the
breath of this spirit on his cheek.
A MYSTERIOUS MALADY OF THE TIMES
So th:ey had actually been two young men, not so long ago-Ulrich thought when he was alone again-who, oddly enough, not only had the most profound insights before anyone else did, but even had them simultaneously, for one of them had only to open his mouth to say something new to f'md that the other had been making the same tremendous discovery. There is something special about youthful friendships: they are like an egg that senses in its yolk its glorious future as a bird, even while it presents to the world only a rather expressionless egg shape indistinguishable from any other. He viv- idly remembered the boy's and student's room where they had met whenever he returned for a few weeks from his first outings into the world: Walter's desk, covered with drawings, ·notes, and sheets of music, like the early rays of the glory of a famous man's future; facing it, the narrow bookcase where Walter sometimes stood in his ardor like Sebastian at the stake, the lamplight on his beautiful hair, which Ulrich had always secretly admired. Nietzsche, Peter Altenberg, Dostoyevsky or whoever they had just been reading had to resign
themselves to being left lying on the floor or the bed when they had served their purpose and the flood of talk would not suffer the petty interruption of putting a book tidily back in place. The arrogance of the young, who find the greatest minds just good enough to serve their own occasions, now seemed to Ulrich -strangely endearing. He tried to remember these conversations. It was like reaching on awak- ening for the last vanishing, dreamlike thoughts of sleep. And he thought, in mild astonishment: When we were assertive in those days, the point was not to be right-it was to assert ourselves! A young man needs to shine, far more than he needs to see something in the light. He now felt the memory of the feeling of being young, that hovering on rays oflight, as an aching loss.
It seemed to Ulrich that with the beginning of his adult life a gen- eral lull had set in, a gradual running down, in spite of occasional eddies of energy that came and went, to an ever more listless, erratic rhythm. It was very hard to say what this change consisted of. Were there suddenly fewer great men? Far from it! And besides, they don't matter; the greatness of an era does not depend on them. The intel- lectually lackluster 186os and 188os, for instance, could no more pre- vent the rise of a Nietzsche or a Hebbel than either-of these men could raise the intellectual level of his contemporaries. Had life in general reached a standstill? No, it had become more powerful! Were there more paralyzing contradictions than before? There could hardly be morel Had the past not known any absurdities? Heaps! Just between ourselves: people threw their support to the weak and ignored the strong; sometimes blockheads played leading roles while brilliant men played the part of eccentrics; the good Germanic citi- zen, untroubled by history's labor pains, which he dismissed as deca- dent and morbid excrescences, went on reading his family magazines and visited the crystal palaces and academies in vastly greater num- bers than he did the avant-garde exhibitions. Least of all did the po- litical world pay attention to the New Men's views and publications; and the great public institutions resisted everything new as if sur- rounded by a cordon santtatre against the plague. Could one not say, in fact, that things have got better since then? Men who once merely
headed minor sects have become aged celebrities; publishers and art dealers have become rich; new movements are constantly being started; everybody attends both the academic and the avant-garde
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56 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
shows, and even the avant-garde ofthe avant-garde; the family maga- zines have bobbed their hair; politicians like to sound off on the cul- tural arts, and newspapers make literary history. So what has been lost?
Something imponderable. An omen. An illusion. As when a mag- net releases iron filings and they fall in confusion again. As when a ball of string comes undone. As when a tension slackens. As when an orchestra begins to play out of tune. No details could be adduced that would not also have been possible before, but all the relation- ships had shifted a little. Ideas whose currency had once been lean grew fat. Persons who would before never have been taken seriously became famous. Harshness mellowed, separations fus~d, intransi- gents made concessions to popularity, taste$ already formed relapsed into uncertainties. Sharp boundaries everywhere became blurred and some new, indefinable ability to form alliances brought new peo- ple and new ideas to the top. Not that these people and ideas were bad, not at all; it was only that a little too much of the bad was mixed with the good, of error with buth, of accommodation with meaning.
There even seemed to be a privileged proportion of this mixture that got furthest on in the world; just the right pinch of makeshift to bring out the genius in genius and make talent look like a white hope, as a pinch of chicory, according to some people, brings out the right cof- fee flavor in coffee. Suddenly all the prominent and important posi- tions in the intellectual world were filled by such people, and all decisions went their way.
There is nothing one can hold responsible for this, nor can one say how it all came about. There are no persons or ideas or specific phenomena that one can fight against. There is no lack of talent or goodwill or even of strong personalities. There is just something missing in everything, though you can't put your finger on it, as if there had been a change in the blood or in the air; a mysteri- ous disease has eaten away the previous period's seeds of genius, but everything sparkles with novelty, and finally one has no way of know- ing whether the world has really grown worse, or oneself merely older. At this point a new era has definitively arrived.
So the times had changed, like a day that begins radiantly blue and then by degrees clouds over, without having the kindness to wait for Ulrich. He evened the score byholding the cause ofthese mysterious changes that made up the disease eating away genius to be simple,
common stupidity. By no means in an insulting sense. For if stupid- it)r, seen from within, did not so much resemble talent as possess the ability to be mistaken for it, and if it did not outwardly resemble progress, genius, hope, and improvement, the chances are that no one would want to be stupid, and so there would be no stupidity. Or fighting it would at least be easy. Unfortunately, stupidity has some- thing uncommonly endearing and natural about it. Ifone finds that a reproduction, for instance, seems more of an artistic feat than a hand-painted original, well, there is a certain truth in that, and it is easier to prove than that van Gogh was a great artist. It is also easy and profitable to be a more powerful playwright than Shakespeare or a less uneven storyteller than Goethe, and a solid commonplace al- ways contains more humanity than a new discovery. There is, in short, no great idea that stupidity could not put to its own uses; it can
move in all directions, and put on all the guises oftruth. The truth, by comparison, has only one appearance and only one path, and is al- ways at a disadvantage.
But after a while Ulrich had a curious notion in this connection. He imagined that the great churchman and thinker Thomas Aquinas (d. 1274), after taking infinite pains to put the ideas of his own time in the best possible order, had then continued through history to go even deeper to the bottom ofthings, and had just finished. Now, still young by special dispensation, he stepped out of his arched doorway with many folios under his arm, and an electric trolley shot right past his nose. Ulrich chuckled at the dumbstruck amazement on the face of the doctor untversalis, as the past had called the celebrated Thomas.
A motorcyclist came up the empty street, thundering up the per- spective bow-armed and bow-legged. His face had the solemn self- importance of a howling child. It reminded Ulrich of a photo he had seen a few days ago in a magazine of a famous woman tennis player poised on tiptoe, one leg exposed to above the garter, the other flung up toward her head as she reached for a high ball with her racket, on her face the expression of an English governess. In the same issue there was also a picture of a champion swimmer being massaged after a contest. Two women dressed in street clothes, one at the swimmer's feet, the other at her head, were solemnly looking down at her as she lay on a bed, naked on her back, one knee drawn up in a
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sB·THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
posture of sexual abandon, the. masseur standing alongside resting his hands on it. He wore a doctor's gown and gazed out ofthe picture as though this female flesh had been skinned and hung on a meat hook. Such were the things people were beginning to see at the time, and somehow they had to be acknowledged, as one acknowledges the presence of skyscrapers and electricity. A man can't be angry at his own time without suffering some damage, Ulrich felt. Ulrich was also always ready to love all these manifestations oflife. But he could never bring himself to love them wholeheartedly, as one's general sense of social well-being requires. For a long time now a hint of aversion had lain on everything he did and experienced, a shadow of impotence and loneliness, an all-encompassing distaste for which he could not find the complementary inclination. He felt at times as though he had been born with a talent for which there was at present no objective.
EFFECT OF A MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES ON A MAN WITH QUALITIES
While Ulrich and Clarisse were talking. they did not notice that the music in the house behind them broke oH" now and again. At those moments Walter had gone to the Window. He could not see them, but felt that they were just beyond his field of vision. Jealousy tor- mented him. The cheap intoxicant of sluggishly sensual music, was luring him back to the piano. It lay behind him, open like a bed rum- pled by a sleeper resisting consciousness in order to avoid facing re- ality. He was racked by the jealousy of a paralyzed man who can sense how the healthy walk, yet he could not bring himself to join them, for his anguish offered no possibility of defending himself against them.
When Walter got up in the morning and had to rush to the office,
when he talked with people during the day and rode home among them in the afternoon, he felt he was an important person, called upon to do great things. He believed then that he. saw things differ- ently: he was moved where others passed by unresponsively, and where others reached for a thing without thinking, for him the very act of moving his own arm was fraught with spiritual adventure, or else it was paralyzed in loving contemplation of itself. He was sensi- tive, and his feelipgs were constantly agitated by brooding, depres- sions, billowing ups and downs; he was never indifferent, always seeing joy or misery in everything, so he always had something excit- ing to think about. Such people exercise an unusual attraction, be- cause the moral flaw in which they incessantly live communicates itself to others. Everything in their convetsation takes on a personal significance, and one feels free in their company to be constantly preoccupied with oneself, so that they provide a pleasure otherwise obtainable only from an analyst or therapist for a fee, with the further difference that with the psychiatrist one feels \sick, while Walter helped a person to feel very important for reasons that had previ- ously escaped one's attention. With this talent for encouraging self- preoccupation, he had in fact conquered Clarisse and in time driven all his rivals from the field. Since everything became for him an ethi- cal move~ent, he could hold forth convincingly on the immorality of ornament, the hygiene ofsimple forms, and the beery fumes ofWag- ner's music, in accord with the new taste in the arts, terrorizing even
his future father-in-law, whose painter's brain was like a peacock's tail unfurled. So there could be no question that Walter had his suc- cesses to look back on.
And yet, when he got home full of impressions and plans, ripe and new as perhaps n~ver before, a demoralizing change took place in him. Merely putting a cai)vas on the easel or a sheet of paper on the table was the sign of a terrible flight from his heart. His head re- mained clear, and the plan inside it hovered as ifin a very transpar- ent and distinct atmosphere; indeed, the plan split and became two or more plans, all ready to compete for supremacy-but the connec- tion between his head and the first movements needed to carry it out seemed severed. Walter could not even make up his mind to lift a finger. He simply did not get up from where he happened to be sit- ting, and his thoughts slid away from the task he had set himself like
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6o • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
snow evaporating as it falls. He didn't know where the time went, but all of a sudden it was evening, and since after several such experi- ences he had learned to start dreading them on his way home, whole series of weeks began to slip, and passed away like a troubled half- sleep. Slowed down by a sense of hopelessness in all his decisions and movements, he suffered from bitter sadness, and his incapacity solidified into a pain that often sat like a nosebleed behind his fore- head the moment he tried to make up his mind. to do something. Walter was fearful, and the symptoms he recognized in himself not only hampered him in his work but also filled him With anxiety, for they were apparently so far beyond his control that they often gave him the impression of an incipient mental breakdown. '
But as his condition had grown steadily worse in the course of the last year, he found a miraculous refuge in a thought he had never valued enough before. The idea was none other than that the . Europe in which he was forced to live was hopelessly decadent. During ages in which things seerp to be going well outwardly, while inwardly they undergo the kind of regression that may be the fate of all things, in- cluding cultural development-unless special efforts are made to keep them supplied with new ideas-the obvious question was, pre- sumably, what one could do about it. But the tangle of clever, stupid, vulgar, and beautiful is at such times so particularly dense and intri- cate that many people obviously find it easier to believe that there is something occult at the root of things, and proclaim the fated fall of one thing or another that eludes precise definition and is porten- tously vague. It hardly matters whether the doomed thing is the human race, vegetarianism, or the soul; all that a healthy pessimism needs is merely something inescapable to hold on to. Even Walter, who in better days used to be able to laugh at su~h doctrines, soon discovered their advantages once he began to try them out. Instead ofhis feeling bad and unable to work, it was now the times that were sick, while he was fine. His life, which had come to nothing, was now, all at once, tremendously accounted for, justified on a world-histori- cal scale that was worthY. of him, so that picking up a pen or pencil and laying it down again virtually took on the aura of a great sacrifice.
With all this, however, Walter still had to struggle with himself, and Clarisse kept on tormenting him. She turned a deaf ear to his critical discussions of the times; with her it was genius or nothing.
What it was she did not know, but whenever the subject came up her whole body began to tremble and tense up. "You either feel it or you don't" was all the proofshe could offer. For him she always remained the same cruel little fifteen-year-old girl. She had never quite under- stood his way of feeling, nor could he ever control her. But cold and hard as she was, and then again so spirited, with her ethereal, flaming will, she had a mysterious ability to influence him, as though shocks were coming through her from a direction that could not be fitted into the three dimensions of space. This influence sometimes bor- dered- on the uncanny. He felt it most keenly when they played the piano together. Clarisse's playing was hard and colorless, prompted by stirrings in her that he did not share, and that frightened him as they reached him when their bodies glowed till the soul burned through. Something indefinable then tore itself loose inside her and threatened to fly away with her spirit. It came out of some secret hollow in her being that had to be anxiously kept shut up tight. He had no idea what made him feel this, or what it was, but it tortured him with an unutterable fear and the need to do something decisive against it, which he could not do because no one but him noticed anything.
As he stood at the window watching Clarisse coming back alone, he dimly knew that he would again not be able to resist the urge to make disparaging remarks about Ulrich. Ulrich had returned from abroad at a bad time. He was bad for Clarisse. He ruthlessly exacer-
'bated something inside Clarisse that Walter dared not touch: the cavern of disaster, the pitiful, the sick, the fatal genius in her, the secret empty space where something was tearing at chains that might someday give way. Now she had entered and was standing bare- headed before him, sunhat in hand, and he looked at her. Her eyes were mocking, tender, clear-perhaps a little too clear. Sometimes he felt that she simply had a certain strength he lacked. Even when she was a child he had felt her as a thorn that would never let him find peace, and evidently he had never wanted her to be otherwise; perhaps this was the secret of his life, which the other two did not understand.
"How deeply we suffer," he thought. "I don't think it can happen often·that two people love each other as deeply as we must. "
And he began to speak without preamble: "I don't want to know
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62 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
what Ulo has been telling you, but I can tell you that the strength you marvel at in him is pure emptiness. " Clarisse looked at the piano and smiled; he had involuntarily sat down again beside the open instru- ment. "It must be easy to feel heroic," he went on, "when one is nat- urally insensitive, and to think in miles when you've no idea what riches can be hidden in an inch! " They sometimes called him Ulo, his boyhood nickname, and he liked them for it, as one may keep a smil- ing respect for one's old nanny. "He's come to a dead end! " Walter added. "You don't see it, but don't imagine that I don't know him. "
Clarisse had her doubts.
Walter said vehemently: "Today it's all decadence! A bottomless pit of intelligence! He is intelligent, I grant you that, but he knows nothing at all about the ·power of a soul in full possession of itself. What Goethe calls personality, what Goethe calls mobile order- those are things he doesn't have a clue about! 'This noble concept of power and restraint, ofchoice and law, offreedom and measure, mo- bile order . . . '"The poet's lines came in waves from his lips. Clarisse regarded these lips in amiable wonder, as though they had just let fly a pretty toy. Then she collected herself and interjected like a good little housewife: 'Would you like a beer? " "Yes. Why not? Don't I always have one? " 'Well, there is none in the house. '' "I wish you hadn't asked," Walter sighed. "I might never have thought of it. ''
And that was that, as far as Clarisse was concerned. But Walter had been thrown off the track and didn't know how to continue.
"Do you remember our conversation about the artist? " he asked tentatively.
'Which one? "
"The one we had a few days ago. I explained to you what a living principle of form in a person means. Don't you remember, I came to the conclusion that in the old days, instead of death and logical mechanization, blood and wisdom reigned? "
"No. " 1
Walter was stymied; he groped, wavered. Suddenly he burst out: "He's a man without qualities! "
'What is that? " Clarisse asked, giggling.
"Nothing. That's just it, it's nothing. ''
But Clarisse found the phrase intriguing.
"There are millions of them nowadays," Walter declared. "It's the
human type produced by our time! " He was pleased with the term he had hit upon so unexpectedly. As if he were starting a poem, he let the expression drive . him on even before its meaning was· clear to him. "Just look at him! What would you take him for? Does he look like a doctor, a businessman, a painter, or a diplomat? "
"He's none of those," Clarisse said dryly.
"Well, does he look like a mathematician? "
"I don't know-how should I know what a mathematician is sup-
posed to look like? "
"You've hit the nail on the head! A mathematician looks like noth-
ing at all-that is, he is likely to look intelligent in such a general way that there isn't a single specific thing to pin him down! Except for the Roman Catholic clergy, no one these days looks the way he should, because we use our heads even more impersonally than our hands. But mathematics is the absolute limit: it already knows as little about itself as future generations, feeding on energy pills instead of bread and meat, will be likely to know about meadows and young calves and chickens! "
Clarisse had meanwhile put their simple supper on the table, and Walter was already digging into it, which may have suggested the analogy to him. Clarisse was watching his lips. They reminded her of his late mot;her's. They were strong feminine lips that ate as if they were getting the housework done, and were topped off by a small clipped mustache. His eyes shone like freshly peeled chestnuts, even when he was merely looking for a piece of cheese on the platter. Al- though he was short, and flabby rather than delicate of build, he was a man of striking appearance, the kind who always seem to be stand- ing in a good light. He now continued:
"His appearance gives no clue to what his profession might be, and yet he doe~n't look like a man without a profession either. Consider what he's like: He always knows what to do. He knows how to gaze into a woman's eyes. He can put his mind to any question at any time. He can box. He is gifted, strong-willed, open-minded, fearless, tena- cious, dashing, circumspect-why quibble, suppose we grant him all those qualities-yet he has none of them! They've made him what he is, they've set his course for him, and yet they don't belong to him. When he is angry, something in him laughs. When he is sad, he is up to something. When something moves him, he turns against it. He'll
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64 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
always see a good side to every bad action. What he thinks of any- thing will always depend on some possible context-nothing is, to him, what it is; everything is subject to change, in flux, part of a whole, of an infinite number of wholes presumably adding up to a superwhole that, however, he knows nothing about. So every answer he gives is only a partial answer, every feeling only an opinion, and he never cares what something is, only 'how' it is-some extraneous seasoning that somehow goes along with it, that's what interests him. I don't know whether I'm making myself clear-? "
"Quite clear," Clarisse said, "but I think that's all very nice of him. "
Walter had unintentionally spoken with signs of growing dislike; his old boyhood sense of being weaker than his friend increased his jealousy. For although he was convinced that Ulrich-had never really achieved anything beyond a few proofs of naked intellect and capac- ity, he could never shake off a secret sense of always having been Ulrich's physical inferior. The portrait he was sketching freed him, like bringing offa work ofart, as ifit were not his own doing at all but something that had begun as a mysterious inspiration, with word after word coming to him, while inwardly something dissolved with- out his being conscious of it. By the time he finished he had recog- nized that Ulrich stood for nothing but this state of dissolution that all present-day phenomena have.
"So you like it; do you? " he said, painfully surprised. "You can't be serious? "
Clarisse was chewing bread and soft cheese; she could only smile with her eyes.
"Oh well," Walter said, "I suppose we used to think that way our- selves, in the old days. But surely it can't be regarded as anything more than a preliminary phase? Such a man is not really a human being! "
Clarisse had sWallowed her mouthful. "That's what he says him- self! " she affirmed.
"What does he say himself? "
"Oh, I don't know-that today everything is coming apart. Every- thing has come to a standStill, he says, not just him. But he doesn't take it as hard as you do. He once gave me a long talk about it: Ifyou analyze a thousand people, you will find two dozen qualities, emo-
tions, forms of development, types of structure and so on, which are what they all consist of. And if you do a chemical analysis of your body, all you get is water with a few dozen little heaps of matter swimming in it. The water rises inside us just as it does inside trees, and it forms the bodies ofanimals just as it forms the clouds. I think that's neatly put. But it doesn't help you to know what to say about yourself. Or what to do. " Clarisse giggled. "So then I told him that you go fishing for days when you have time off, and lie around by the water. "
"So what? I'd like to know if he could stand that for even ten min- utes. But human beings," Walter said firmly, "have been doing that for ten thousand years, staring up at the sky, feeling the warmth of the earth, without trying to analyze it any more than you'd analyze your own mother. "
Clarisse couldn't help giggling again. "He says things have become more complicated meanwhile. Just as we swim in water, we also swim in a sea of fire, a storm of electricity, a firmament of magnet- ism, a swamp of warmth, and so on. It's just that we can't feel it.
