"You're
certainly
sorry not to be part of it?
Musil - Man Without Qualities - v2
"
"I am first of all man and woman. "
"But you just said goat too. "
"That too. Tool It's not the sort of thing you can measure with ruler
and compass. "
"No, that you can't! " Walter moaned aloud, covering his eyes with his
hands and clenching his hands into fists. As he lay there mute in this posture, Clarisse crept up to him, threw her arms around his shoulders, and kissed him from time to time.
Walter lay motionless.
Clarisse was whispering and murmuring something into his ear. She was telling him that the man under the window had been sent by the goat, and that the goat signified sensuality, which had everywhere sepa- rated itself from the rest of mankind. All people creep to each other in bed every night and leave the world where it is: this lower solution to the great powers of desire in people must finally be stopped, and then the goat would become the god! This was what Walter heard her say. And wasn't she right? Yet how did it happen that it pleased him? How did it happen that for a long time nothing else had pleased him? Not the paint- ings that he had earlier admired; not the masters of music whom he had loved; not the great poems, and not the mighty ideas? And that he now found pleasure in listening to Clarisse telling him something that anyone else would say was fantasy? These were the questions that went through Walter's mind. As long as his life had lain before him, he had felt it to be full of great desire and imagination; since then, Eros had truly separated himself from it. Was there anything he still did body and soul? Was not everything he touched insignificant? Truly, love was gone from his fin- gertips, the tip of his tongue, his entrails, eyes, and ears, and what re- mained was merely ashes in the form oflife, or, as he now expressed it
From the Posthurrwus Papers · 1381
rather magniloquently, "dung in a polished glass," the "goat"! And be- side him, at his ear, was Clarisse: a little bird that had suddenly begun to prophesy this in the woods! He could not find the suggestive, the com- manding tone to point out to her where her ideas went too far and where they did not. She was full ofimages jumbled together; he, too, had been this full of images once, he persuaded himself. And of these great im- ages, one has no idea which ones can be made into reality and which ones cannot. So every person bears within himself a leading ideal figure, Clarisse was now maintaining, but most people settle for living in the form of sin, and Walter found that it might well be said of him that he bore an ideal figure within himself, although he, perhaps even self-peni- tently, at least voluntarily, lived in ashes. The world also has an ideal figure. He found this image magnificent. Of course it did not explain anything, but what good is explanation? It expressed the will of human- ity, striving upward again and again after every defeat. And it suddenly struck Walter that Clarisse had not kissed him voluntarily for at least a year, and that she was now doing it for the first time.
6 . . .
BREATHS OF A SUMMER DAY
On the same morning, Agathe, impelled by moody contradictions left over from the previous night, said to her brother: "And why should it be possible to live a life in love? There are times when you live no less in anger, in hostility, or even in pride or hardness, and they don't claim to be a second world! "
'Td prefer to say that one lives for love," Ulrich replied indolently. ~·our other emotions must inspire us to action in order that they last; that's what anchors them in reality. "
"But it's usually that way in love too," Agathe objected. She felt as if she were swinging on a high branch that was threatening to break off under her any moment. "But then why does every beginner swear to himself that it will 'last' forever, even if he's beginning for the tenth time? " was her next question.
"Perhaps because it's so inconstant. "
"One also swears eternal enmity. "
"Perhaps because it's such a violent emotion. "
1382 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
"But there are emotions whose nature it is to last longer than others: loyalty, friendship, obedience, for example. "
"I think because they are the expression of stable, indeed even moral, relationships. "
"Your answers aren't very consistent! "
The interruptions and continuations of the conversation seemed to nestle in the shallow, lazy breaths of the summer day. Brother and sister lay, a little bleary-eyed and overtired, on garden chairs in the sunshine. After a while Agathe began again:
"Faith in God imposes no action, contains no prescribed relationships to other people, can be totally immoral, and yet it's a lasting emotion. "
"Faith and love are related to each other," Ulrich remarked. "Also, unlike all the other emotions, both have available their own manner of thinking: contemplation. That means a great deal; for it is not love and faith themselves that create the image of their world; contemplation does it for them. "
"What is contemplation? "
"I can't explain it. Or maybe, in a nutshell, a thinking by intimation. Or, in other words: the way we think when we're happy. The other emo- tions you named don't have this resource. You could also call it meditat- ing. If you say that faith and love can 'move mountains,' it means that they can entirely take the place of the mind. "
"So the thought of the believer and the lover is intimation? The real inner manner oftheir thinking? "
"Right! " Ulrich confirmed, surprised.
"No reason to praise mel You said it yourselfyesterday! " his sister in- formed him. "And just so that I'm sure: contemplation, then, is also the thinking that allows itself to be led not by our actual emotions but by our other ones? "
"Ifyou want to put it that way, yes. "
"So that's the way one could think in a world of special people? Yes- terday you used the term 'ecstatic society' for it. Do you remember? "
"Y es. "
"Good! "
"Why are you laughing now? " Ulrich asked.
"Because Mephistopheles says: 'Truth is proclaimed through the
mouths of two witnesses! ' So two suffice! "
"He's evidently wrong," Ulrich contradicted calmly. "In his day,
dilire adeux, the joint insanity of two people, had not yet been recog- nized. . . . "
A noiseless stream ofweightless drifting blossoms, emanating from a group of trees whose flowering was done, drifted through the sunshine,
From the Posthumous Papers · 1383
and the breath that bore it was so gentle that not a leafstirred. It cast no shadow on the green of the lawn, but this green seemed to darken from within like an eye. Extravagantly and tenderly leaved by the young sum- mer, the trees and bushes standing in the wings or forming the backdrop gave the impression of being amazed spectators who, surprised and spellbound in their gay attire, were participating in this funeral proces- sion and celebration of nature. Spring and fall, speech and nature's si- lence, life and death, mingled in this picture. Hearts seemed to stop, to have been removed from their breasts, in order to join this silent proces- sion through the air. "My heart was taken from out my breast," a mystic had said. Agathe cautiously abandoned herself to the enthusiasm that once before in this garden had almost led her to believe in the arrival of the Millennium and under the image ofwhich she imagined an ecstatic society. But she did not forget what she had learned since: in this king- dom, you must keep quite still. You cannot leave room for any kind of desire: not even the desire to ask questions. You must also shed the un- derstanding with which you ordinarily perform tasks. You must strip the selfofall inner tools. It seemed to her that walls and columns retreated to the side within her, and that the world was entering her eyes the way tears do. But she suddenly discovered that she was only superficially holding fast to this condition, and that her thoughts had long since slipped away from it.
When she encountered them again, her thoughts were considering a quite remote problem, a little monster of disaffection. She was asking herselfin the most foolish fashion, and intent on this foolishness: 'Was I ever really impetuous and unhappy? " A man without a name came to mind, whose name she bore, indeed had borne away from him, and she repeated her question with the mute, unmoving obstinacy with which one gazes after a wave that has ebbed away. Presumably, young people (whose life span is still short) are more disposed to be amazed at what they have already felt than older people, who have become accustomed to the changeability of life's passions and circumstances; except that the escape of feeling is also the stream in whose motion the stone heavens of mystic emotion are reflected, and for one of these reasons it was proba- bly a supranaturally magnified astonishment that contained the question ofwhere the hatred and violence she had felt against Hagauer had come from. Where was the desire to hurt him? She was close to thinking she had lost it, like an object that must still be somewhere nearby.
So Agathe's thoughts were doubtless still completely under the spell of the procession of flowers and death, but they were not moving with it, and in its mute and solemn way, but making little jumps here and there. It was not "meditating" she was indulging in, but a "thinking," even if a
1384 ·THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
thinking without rigor, a branching off and inner continuation of what had earlier been left unsaid in the fleeting exchange about the constancy of the emotions; without exactly wanting to be, she was still gripped by it, and she recalled an image that Ulrich had suggested on another occa- sion, and with greater sympathy, about this constancy and inconstancy of the emotions. She was thinking now that nothing was more remote from her than expressing her emotions in "works," and apparently she was thinking for a moment of August Lindner and meant "good works," "works oflove," "signs oflove's practical orientation," such as he desired of her in vain; but by and large, she meant simply "works" and was think- ing of Ulrich, who earlier had always spoken of spiritual work that one had to fashion out ofeverything, even ifit was only a deeper breath. And that one derived a rule or created an idea for everything and felt respon- sible for the world also remained a matter of indifference to her most profound inclination: her ambition was not tempted to sit in the master's saddle of a hobbyhorse. And finally character was not the refuge of her emotions either, and when she confronted this question she received the answer: "I never used to love what I felt so strongly that I would have wanted to be, so to speak, its cupboard for my entire life! " And it oc- curred to her that for her emotions, insofar as they had been aroused by men, she had always chosen men whom she did not like with either all her soul or all her body. "How prophetic! " she thought cheerfully. "Even then I weakened the desires, the pull toward reality in my emo- tions, and kept open the path to the magic kingdom! "
For wasn't that now Ulrich's theoxy about passion? Either howl like a child with rage and frustration or enthusiasm-and get rid of it! Or ab- stain entirely from the pull toward the real, the active, and desire of any kind that evexy emotion contains. What lies in between is the real "king- dom of the emotions"- i t s works and transformations, its being filled up with reality-as lovely as a storeroom full of apples of evexy hue, and absurdly monotonous too, like everything that fades and falls the same way with evexy new year! This was what she was thinking, and she tried to find her way back again to the emotion hovering silently through the world of nature. She kept her mind from turning toward anything in a specific way. She strained to shed all knowledge and desire, all utilitarian use of head and heart and limbs. "You must be unegotistic in this most extreme sense; you have to strive to gain this mysterious 'unmediated' relationship to outer and inner," she said to herself, and collected her- selfalmost as ifshe wanted to feign death. But this seemed as impossible a task as it had been in childhood not to commit a sin between confes- sion and communion, and finally she abandoned the effort entirely. "What? " she asked herselfsulkily. "Is a world in which one desires noth-
From the Posthumous Papers · 1385
ing perhaps not desirable? " At this moment she was honestly suspicious of the world of ecstasy, and she urgently wanted to present this funda- mental question that underlies all ascesis to her brother. He, however, seemed not to want to be disturbed by anything as he lay there enjoying his comfortable position and closed the narrow slit between his eyelids completely every time she looked over at him.
So she abandoned her deck chair and stood irresolutely for a while, smiling, looking now at Ulrich, now at the garden. She stretched her legs and adjusted her skirt with small blows of her hand. Each one of these actions had a kind of rustic beauty, simple, healthy, instinctive; and it was this way either by chance or because her most recent thoughts had led her to be cheerful in a robust way. Her hair fell in a scallop at each side of her face, and the background, formed of trees and bushes that, from where she was standing, opened into depth, was a frame that posi- tioned her image before earth and sky. This view, which Ulrich was en- joying, for he was secretly observing his sister, not only was attractive but soon became so much so that it suffered nothing else beside it that it would not have drawn in. Ulrich thought this time ofthe expression "en- hanced accountability" for this enchanting image that was forming, not for the first time, between brother and sister; he extrapolated the term from a word that ages ago, in another charmed circle, had meant much to him: and truly, as there is a diminished sense of accountability, whose bewitched nature had formerly astounded him, and which is ultimately always stamped with the defect of senselessness, what seemed to be reigning here was an increased and intensified fullness of the senses, a high superabundance, indeed a distress, of such a kind that everything about Agathe and which was taking place cast a reflection on her that could not be grasped by sensory designations, and placed her in an as- pect for which not only no word existed but also no expression or outlet of any kind. Every fold of her dress was so laden with powers, indeed it almost might be said with value, that it was impossible to imagine a greater happiness, but also no more uncertain adventure, than cau- tiously to touch this fold with the tips of one's fingers!
She had now half turned away from her brother and was standing mo- tionless, so that he could observe her freely. He knew that experiences of this kind had bound the two of them together for as long as they had known each other. He remembered the morning after his arrival at their father's house, when he had caught sight of her in woman's clothes for the first time; it had been at that time, too, that he had had the strange experience of seeing her standing in a grotto of rays of light, and this in addition: that she was a more beautiful repetition and alteration of his self. There were, moreover, many things connected with this that
1386 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
merely had a different external shape. For the painted circus animals that he had loved more ardently than real ones, the sight of his little sister dressed for a ball, her beauty kindling in him the longing to be her, then even the confectioner's horse that had lately been the object of a bantering conversation, all arose from the same enchantment; and now, when he again returned to the present, which was by no means droll, the most contradictory scruples about coming too close to one another, the staring at and bending over, the heavy figurative quality of many mo- ments, the gliding into an equivocal we-and-the-world feeling, and many other things, demonstrated to him the same forces and weaknesses. In- voluntarily he reflected on these things. Common to all these experi- ences was that they received an emotion of the greatest force from an impossibility, from a failure and stagnation. That they were missing the bridge of action leading to and from the world; and finally, that they ended on a vanishingly narrow borderline between the greatest happi- ness and pathological behavior. Looked at in an unholy way, they were all somewhat reminiscent of a porcelain still life, and of a blind window, and of a dead-end street, and of the unending smile of wax dolls under glass and light: things that appear to have got stuck on the road between death and resurrection, unable to take a step either forward or back- ward. In bringing such examples to mind, Ulrich thought that they were also to be understood without mystery and myth. Such images entice our emotions, which are accustomed to act, and our sympathies, which are usually dispersed over many things, in a direction in which no progress is possible; and this might easily give rise to an experience of dammed-up significance that permits no access of any kind, so that it grows and grows in absolutely unbearable fashion. "Externally, nothing new hap- pens anymore, but the one thing is repeated again and again," Ulrich thought. "And internally, it's as ifwe had henceforth only said, thought, and felt: one thing, one thing, one thing! But it's not entirely like that either! " he interjected to himself. "It's rather like a very slow and mo- notonous rhythm. And something new arises: bliss! A tormenting bliss one would like to give the slip to but can't! Is it bliss at all? " Ulrich asked himself. "It's an oppressive increase in the emotion that leaves all quali- ties behind. I could just as easily call it a congestion! "
Agathe did not seem to notice that she was being observed. "And why does my happiness-for it is happiness--search out just such occasions and hiding places? " Ulrich went on to ask again, with one small change. He could not keep from admitting to himselfthat separated out from the stream, such an emotion could also wash around the love for a dead per- son, whose countenance belongs with a more profound defenselessness than any living one to the glances which it cannot drive off. And his hap-
From the Posthumous Papers · 1387
pening to think that in literature moody, necrophilic art thoughts were not exactly a rarity did not make it any better, but merely led him to reflect that the charming insanity of relating things, which combines all the soul's longing into the representation of a beautiful dead woman, has some kind of connection with the malevolent insanity in which a fe- tish-a hairband, a shoe-<lraws all the currents of body and soul to it- self. And every "fixed idea" too, even one that is only "overpowering" in the ordinary sense, is accompanied by such an intensified usurpation. There was in this a kinship more or less crippled and not entirely pleas- ant, and Ulrich would not have been a man had not the twisted, slippery, lurking, lost nature of these relationships filled him with suspicion. To be sure, his spirits were lifted by the idea that there was nothing in the world that did not have some black-sheep kin, for the world of health is composed of the same basic elements as the world of disease: it is only the proportions that differ; but when he cautiously directed his glance at Agathe and allowed it to drink from the sight of her, there still domi- nated in his feelings, in spite of their miserable sublimity, an uncanny absence of will, a marked displacement or being carried away into the vicinity of sleep, of death, of the image, of the immobile, the imprisoned, the powerless. Ideas drained away, every energetic drive dissipated, the unutterable paralyzed every limb, the world slipped away remote and unheeding, and the unstable armistice on the borderline between the enhanced and the diminished was barely to be borne any longer. But precisely with the entrance of this enormous draining away of power something different began, for their bodies seemed to be losing some- thing of their boundaries, of which they no longer had any need. "It's like the frenzy of the bee swarm that's trying to surround the queen! " Ulrich thought silently.
And finally the unavoidable discovery dawned on him, although he had so far avoided it, that all these strange, individual temptations of the emotions and emotional experiences, which intermingled and hovered within him like the shadows cast by the foliage of a restless tree when the sun is high, could be encompassed and understood at a single glance if he regarded his love for his sister as their origin. For evidently this emo- tion and this alone was the hero of his breaking down, of his blocked path, and of all the ambiguous adventures and detours associated with this. Even the psychology of the emotions, which he was pursuing on his own in his diaries, now seemed to him merely an attempt to conceal the love between him and his sister in a quixotic edifice of ideas. Did he, then, desire her? He was really astonished that he was confessing this to himself for the first time, and he now clearly saw the possibilities be- tween which he had to make up his mind. Either he really had to believe
1388 ·THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
that he was making ready for an adventure such as had never existed before, an adventure that he needed only to urge on and set out on with no second thoughts . . . Or he had to yield to his emotion, even should this feeling be unnatural, in the natural way, or forbid himself to; and was all he was accomplishing through his irresolution to become inven- tive in subterfuges? When he asked himself this second, rather con- temptible question, he did not fail to ask the third it entailed: What was there to prevent him from doing what he wanted? A biological supersti- tion, a moral one? In short, the judgment of others? Thinking of this, Ulrich felt such a violent boiling up of feeling against these others that he was even more surprised, especially as this sudden stab bore no rela- tion to the gentle emotions with which he believed himself filled.
But in reality what came to the fore was only something that had re- cently receded into the background. For his attachment to Agathe and his detachment from the world were always two sides of one and the same situation and inclination. Even in those years when he had almost never thought that he had a real sister, the concept of"sister" had had a magic effect on him. No doubt this happens often, and it is usually noth- ing very different from the soaring youthful form of that need for love which in the later condition of submission seeks out a bird, a cat, or a dog, at times too, probably, humanity or one's neighbor, because be- tween the dust and heat of the struggle to live and life's games this need cannot truly unfold. Sometimes this need for love is already even in youth full of submission, of timidity toward life, and loneliness, and in that case the misty image of the "sister" takes on the shadowboxing grace of the doppelganger, which transforms the anxiety of being aban- doned by the world into the tenderness of lonely togetherness. And sometimes this ecstatic image is nothing but the crassest egotism and selfishness, that is to say an excessive wanting to be loved, which has entered into a jerry-built agreement with sweet selflessness. In all such cases-and Ulrich thought again of the case in which it transforms itself into a fellow human being and then dispenses with its ambiguity, but also with its beautyl-"sister" is a creation originating from the ··other" part of emotion, from the uproar of this emotion and the desire to live differently; that's the way Ulrich would understand it now. But it proba- bly is this only in the weak form of longing. But familiar with longing as he was, his mind was no less acquainted with struggle, and ifhe correctly understood his past, his precipitate turning toward Agathe had initially been a declaration ofwar against the world; love is, moreover, always the revolt of a couple from the wisdom of the crowd. It could be said that in his case, the revolt had come first; but it could be said just as well that the core of all his criticism of the world was nothing so much as a know-
From the Posthumous Papers · 1389
ing about love. "So I a m - i f a hermaphroditic monasticism is conceiv- able, why shouldn't this bel-in the dubious situation of having been, at bottom, a soldier with monastic inclinations, and ultimately a monk with soldierly inclinations who can't leave off swearing! " he thought cheer- fully, but still with astonishment; for he was made aware for perhaps the first time of the profound contradiction between his passion and the en- tire disposition of his nature. Even as he now looked at Agathe, he thought he perceived his conflict on the sea-bright surface of inwardness spreading out around her, as an evil, metallic reflection. He was so lost in these thoughts that he did not notice that she had for some time been curiously observing his eyes.
Now she stepped up to her brother and mischievously passed her hand downward before his eyes, as if she wished to cut off his peculiar glance. And as if that were not sufficient, she grasped his arm and pre- pared to pull him up from his chair. Ulrich stood and looked around him the way a person does emerging from sleep. "To think that at this very moment, hundreds of people are fighting for their lives! That ships are sinking, animals are attacking people, thousands of animals are being slaughtered by people! " he said, half like someone looking back with a shudder from a blissful shore, half like a man who is sorry not to be part ofit.
"You're certainly sorry not to be part of it? " Agathe then did indeed ask.
His smile denied it, but his words conceded the point: "It's pleasant to think about how pleasant it is when I grasp with my whole hand a thing that I've merely been stroking for some time with the tip of a finger. "
His sister put her arm through his. "Come, let's walk around a little! " she proposed. In the hardness of his arm she felt the manly joy at every- thing savage. She pressed her fingernails against the unyielding muscles, seeking to hurt him. When he complained, she offered the explanation: "In the infinite waters of bliss I'm clutching at the straw of evil! Why should you be the only one? " She repeated her attack. Ulrich placated her with a smile: "What your nails are doing to me is not a straw but a girder! " They were walking meanwhile. Had Agathe demonstrated the ability to guess his thoughts? Were the two of them twin clocks? When emotions are tuned to the same string, is it entirely natural to read emo- tions from each other's faces? It is at any rate an impressive game, so long as one does not miss the mark and crash. The loveliest assurance of the miracle's enduring now lay in their motion, lay in the garden, which seemed to be sleeping in the sunshine, where the gravel crunched, the breeze freshened from time to time, and their bodies were bright and alert. For surmising oneself bound in feeling to everything the eye could
1390 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
see was as easy as the transparent air, and only when they stopped was it afterward as melancholy as a deep breath to take first steps again through this imagistic landscape. The words they exchanged meanwhile really signified nothing, but merely cradled them as they walked, like the childishly amused conversation a fountain has with itself, babbling gos- sip about eternity.
But without their needing to say anything, they slowly turned into a path that led them near the boundary of their small garden kingdom, and it was evident that this was not happening for the first time. Where they came in sight of the street, rolling animatedly past beyond the high iron fence that was supported by a stone base, they abandoned the path, taking advantage of the cover of trees and bushes, and paused on a small rise, whose dry earth formed the place where several old trees stood. Here the picture of the resting pair was lost in the play of light and shadow, and there was almost no likelihood of their being discovered from the street, although they were so near it that the unsuspecting pe- destrians made that exaggerated outward impression which is peculiar to everything one merely observes without in any way participating in it. The faces seemed like things, indeed even poorer than things, like flat disks, and if words were suddenly carried into the garden they had no sense, only an amplified sound such as hollow, decayed rooms have. But the two observers did not have long to wait before one person or another came still closer to their hiding place: whether it was someone stopping and looking in astonishment at all the green suddenly revealed along his course, or whether it was someone moved to stop by the favorable op- portunity of resting something in his hand on the stone base of the fence for a moment, or to tie his shoelace on it, or whether in the short shad- ows of the fence pillars falling on the path it was two people stopped in conversation, with the others streaming past behind them. And the more accidentally this seemed to happen in single cases, the more clearly the invariable, unconscious, enduring effect of the fence detached itself from the variety and contingency ofthese manifold actions, invading the individual life like a trap.
They both loved this game of cause and effect, which stood in scornful contrast to the game of souls
They had discovered this place on the days when they, too, had strolled through the streets and talked about the difficulties of loving one's neighbor, and the contradictions of everyone loving everybody;
From the Posthurrwus Papers · 1391
and the fence, which separated them from the world but connected them with it visually, had seemed to them then the manifest image of the human world, not least of themselves: in short, the image of everything which Ulrich had once summarized in the terse expression "the un- separated and not united. " Most of this now seemed quite superfluous and a childish waste of time; as indeed its only mission had been to give them time and to gain from the observing game with the world the con- viction that they had something in mind that concerned everyone and did not just spring from a personal need. Now they were much more secure, they knew more about their adventure. All individual questions were froth, beneath which lay the dark mirror ofanother possible way of life. Their great sympathy with each other and with others, and in gen- eral the fulfillment of the promises sunk into the world, promises that constantly emanate the peculiar mirage that life-as-it-is strikes us as fragmented in every way by life-as-it-might-be-this fulfillment was never to be won from details but only from the Totally Different! The fence, however, had still preserved something of its coarse, prompting distinctness, and was at least able to beckon to a leave-taking.
Agathe laid her hand, which had the light, dry warmth of the finest wool, on Ulrich's head, turned it in the direction of the street, let her hand fall to his shoulder, and tickled her brother's ear with her fingernail and no less with the words: "Now let's test our love for our neighbors once more, Teacher! How would it be if today we tried to love one of them like ourselves! "
"I don't love myself! " Ulrich resisted in the same tone. "I even think that all the earlier energy I was so proud of was a running away from myself. "
"So what you've sometimes said, that I'm your self-love in the form of a girl, is altogether not terribly flattering. "
"Oh, on the contrary! You're another self-love, the other! "
"Now, that you'll have to explain to me! " Agathe commanded without looking up.
"A good person has good defects and a bad one has bad virtues: so the one has a good self-love and the other a bad one! "
"Obscure! "
"But from a famous author from whom Christendom has learned a great deal, but unfortunately just not that. "
"Not much clearer! "
"Half a millennium before Christ, he taught that whoever does not love himself in the right way is not able to love others either. For the right love for oneself is also being naturally good to others. So self-love is not selfishness but being good. "
1392 • THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
"Did he really say that? "
"Oh, I don't know, perhaps I'm putting the words in his mouth. He also taught that goodwill is not wanting the good but wanting something with goodness. He was a logician and natural philosopher, soldier and mystic, and, significantly, is supposed to have been the greatest teacher, and so it did not even escape him that morality can never be completely detached from mysticism. " ·
"You're an insufferable exercise instructor who shows up in the morn- ing; the cock crows, and one's supposed to hop to it! I'd rather sleep! "
"No, you ought to help me. "
They lay on their stomachs on the ground, next to each other. If they raised their heads, they saw the street; if they didn't, they saw between pointed young blades of grass the drying fallen leaves from the high tree.
Agathe asked: "So that's why it's love your neighbor 'as yourself'? It could also be the other way around: Love yourself as your neighbor. "
"Yes. And it's easier to love him not only less than oneself but also more. What's almost impossible is to love him and yourself in the same way. Compared with that, loving someone so much that you sacrifice yourself for him is positively a relief," Ulrich replied. For the moment, the conversation had taken on the playful tone that deftly stirred up pro- found questions, a tone to which they had become accustomed during their walks through the city; but really-and although since then noth- ing that could be counted as time had passed-they were deliberately imitating themselves, the way one casually immerses oneself again in a game one has outgrown. And Agathe remarked: "So then love your neighbor as yourself also means: don't love your neighbor selflessly! "
"Actually, yes," Ulrich conceded. And without agreeing with her inci- dental arguments against selfless goodness, which in male human form were courting her soul, he added: "That's even quite important. For the people who talk ofselfless goodness are teaching something that's better than selfishness and less than goodness. "
And Agathe asked: "But when you fall in love the usual way, doesn't that inevitably involve desire and selflessness? "
"Y es. "
"And it really can't be said of self-love either that one desires oneself, or that one loves oneself selflessly? "
"No," Ulrich said.
"Then what's called self-love may not be any kind of love at all? " Agathe hazarded.
"That's as you take it," her brother replied. "It's more a confiding in oneself, an instinctive caring for oneself-"
From the Posthunwus Papers · 1393
"Self-toleration! " Agathe said, quite deliberately making a dissatisfied and slightly disgusted face, although she did not exactly know why.
"Why are we talking about it at all? " Ulrich intexjected.
"But we're talking about others! " Agathe answered, and laughter at her brother and herselflit up her face. She had again directed her glance at the fence, drawing her brother's after her; and because their eyes were not focused on a specific distance, the host of vehicles and pedes- trians swam past it. "Where shall we begin? " she asked, as if the rest were understood as a matter of course.
"You can't just do it on command! " Ulrich objected.
"No. But we can try to just feel everything in some such way; and we can enbust ourselves to it more and more! "
"That has to happen of itself. "
"Let's help it along! " Agathe proposed. "For instance, let's stop talk- ing and do nothing but look at them! "
"That's all right with me," Ulrich agreed.
For a short time they were silent; then something else occurred to Agathe: "To love something in the ordinary sense means to prefer it to something else: so we must try to love one person and at the same time prevent ourselves from preferring him to others," she whispered.
"Keep quiet! You have to be quiet! " Ulrich fended her off.
Now they gazed out for a while again. But soon Agathe propped her- self up on her elbow and looked despairingly at her brother. "It's not working! As soon as I tried it, the people outside became like a river full of pale fish. We're dreadful idlers! " she complained.
Ulrich turned toward her, laughing. "You're forgetting that striving for bliss isn't work! "
''I've never done anything in my whole life; now I'd like something to happen! Let's do something good to someone! " Agathe pleaded.
"Even doing good is a notion that doesn't occur at all in real goodness. It's only when the waves break that the ocean disintegrates into drop- lets! " Ulrich countered. "And what would it mean anyway to do some- thing good in a situation in which you can't do anything but good? " The anticipation, the headiness ofa feeling ofvictory, the confidence ofpow- ers that were for the moment at rest, allowed him to be playful with his seriousness.
"So you don't want to do anything? " Agathe asked coolly.
"Of course I do! But the kingdom oflove is in every respect the great antireality. That's why the first thing you have to do is cut the arms and legs off your emotions; and then we'll see what can happen in spite of that! "
1394 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
"You make it sound like a machine," Agathe chided.
"You have to undertake it as a good experimenter," Ulrich contra- dicted her, unmoved. "You have to try to circumscribe the decisive part. "
Agathe now offered serious resistance. 'We're not concluding some scientific investigation but, ifyou'll permit the expression, opening our hearts," she said with somewhat sarcastic sharpness. "And also the point we'd have to start from has not been exactly new for some time, since the Gospels! Exclude hatred, resistance, strife from yourself; just don't be- lieve that they exist! Don't blame, don't get angry, don't hold people re- sponsible, don't defend yourself against anything! Don't struggle anymore; don't think or bargain; forget and unlearn denial! In this way fill every crack, every fissure, between you and them; love, fear, beg, and walk with them; and take everything that happens in time and space, whatever comes and goes, whatever is beautiful or disturbing, not as re- ality but as a word and metaphor of the Lord. That's how we should go to meet them! "
As usually happened, during this long and passionate and unusually resolute speech her face had taken on a deeper hue. "Splendid! Every word a letter in a great scripture! " Ulrich exclaimed appreciatively. "And we, too, will have to gain courage. But such courage? Is that what you really want? "
Agathe subdued her zeal and denied it mutely and honestly. "Not en- tirely! " she added by way of explanation, so as not to deny it too much.
"It is the teaching of Him who advised us to offer our left cheek ifwe have been struck on the right one. And that's probably the mildest trans- gression that ever was," Ulrich went on reflectively. "But don't misun- derstand one thing, that this message too, if carried out, is a psychological exercise! A particular behavior and a particular group of ideas and emotions are bound up in it together and mutually support each other. I mean everything in us that is suffering, enduring, tender, susceptible, protective, and yielding: in short, love. And it's so far from that to everything else, especially to whatever is hard, aggressive, and actively life-shaping, that these other emotions and ideas and the bitter necessities disappear from view entirely. That doesn't mean that they fade from reality; merely that you don't get angry at them, don't deny them, and that you forget knowing about them; so it's like a roof that the wind can get under and that can never stand for long-"
"But one has faith in goodness! It's faith! You're forgetting that! " Agathe interrupted.
"No, I'm not forgetting that, but that came along only later, through Paul. I made a note of his explanation. It runs: 'Faith is the substance of
From the Posthumous Papers · 1395
things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. ' And that's a gross, I'd almost say covetous; misunderstanding. The tenet of the kingdom that will come at the end of days would like to have something it can get hold of in place of the bliss that the Son of Man has already experienced on earth. "
"It has been promised. Why are you running it down? Is it then worth nothing to be able to believe not merely with all one's soul but utterly, with parasol and clothes? "
"But the breath of the annunciation was not promise and faith but intimation! A condition in which one loves metaphors! A bolder condi- tion than faith! And I'm not the first to notice this. The only thing that's been regarded as truly real for the bringer of salvation has been the ex- periencing of these foreshadowing metaphors of happy unresistingness and love; the miserable rest, which we call reality, natural, sturdy, dan- gerous life, has simply mirrored itself in his soul in a completely dematerialized way, like a picture puzzle. And-by Jehovah and Jupi- ter! -that assumes, first ofall, civilization, because no one is so poor that robbers can't be found to murder him; and it assumes a desert in which there are indeed evil spirits, but no lions. Secondly, these high and happy tidings appear to have originated pretty much in ignorance of all contemporarycivilizations. Itis remote from the multiplicities ofculture and the spirit, remote from doubts, but also from choice, remote from sickness but also from almost all discoveries that fight it: in short, it is remote from all the weaknesses, but also from all the advantages of human knowledge and capability, which even in its own time were by no means meager. And incidentally, that's why it also has rather simple no- tions of good and evil, beautiful and ugly. Now, the moment you make room for such objections and conditions, you'll also have to content yourself with my less simple procedure! "
Agathe argued against it anyway. "You're forgetting one thing," she repeated, "that this teaching claims to come from God; and in that case everything more complex that deviates from it is simply false or in- different! "
"Quieti" Ulrich said, placing a finger on his mouth. "You can't talk about God in such a stubbornly physical way, as if He were sitting be- hind that bush over there the way He did in the year wo! "
"All right, I can't," Agathe conceded. "But let me tellyau something, tool You yourself, when you're devising bliss on earth, are prepared to renounce science, tendencies in art, luxury, and everything people rush around for every day. Then why do you begrudge it so much to others? "
"You're certainly right," Ulrich conceded. A dry twig had found its way into his hand, and he pensively poked the ground with it. They had
1396 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
slid down a little, so that once again only their heads peeked over the top of the rise, and that only when they lifted them. They lay beside each other on their stomachs like two marksmen who have forgotten what they were lying in wait for; and Agathe, touched by her brother's yield- ing, threw her arm around his neck and made a concession of her own. "Look, what is it doing? " she exclaimed, pointing with a finger to an ant beside his twig, which had attacked another ant.
"It's murdering," Ulrich ascertained coldly.
"Don't let it! " Agathe pleaded, and in her excitement raised a leg to the sky so that it rose upside down over her knee.
Ulrich proposed: "Try to take it metaphorically. You don't even have to rush to give it a particular significance: just take its own! Then it be- comes like a dry breath of air, or the sulfurous smell of decaying foliage in autumn: some kind of volatizing drops of melancholy that make the soul's readiness for dissolution tremble. I can imagine that one could even get over one's own death amicably, but only because one dies just once and therefore regards it as especially important; because the un- derstanding of saints and heroes is pretty lacking in glory in the face of nature's constant small confusions and their dissonances! "
Possibly: Ulrich: Through faith!
Agathe: Intimation and metaphor won't do it either. Ulrich: Exactly!
While he was speaking, Agathe had taken the twig from his fingers and attempted to rescue the ant that had been attacked, with the result that she nearly crushed both, but finally she succeeded in separating them. With diminished vitality, the ants crept toward new adventures.
"Did that make any sense? " Ulrich asked.
"I understand you to mean by that that what we were trying to do by the fence is against nature and reason," Agathe answered.
"Why shouldn't I say it? " Ulrich said. "Anyway, I wanted to say to surprise you: the glory of God does not twitch an eyelid when calamity strikes. Perhaps too: life swallows corpses and filth without a shadow on its smile.
"I am first of all man and woman. "
"But you just said goat too. "
"That too. Tool It's not the sort of thing you can measure with ruler
and compass. "
"No, that you can't! " Walter moaned aloud, covering his eyes with his
hands and clenching his hands into fists. As he lay there mute in this posture, Clarisse crept up to him, threw her arms around his shoulders, and kissed him from time to time.
Walter lay motionless.
Clarisse was whispering and murmuring something into his ear. She was telling him that the man under the window had been sent by the goat, and that the goat signified sensuality, which had everywhere sepa- rated itself from the rest of mankind. All people creep to each other in bed every night and leave the world where it is: this lower solution to the great powers of desire in people must finally be stopped, and then the goat would become the god! This was what Walter heard her say. And wasn't she right? Yet how did it happen that it pleased him? How did it happen that for a long time nothing else had pleased him? Not the paint- ings that he had earlier admired; not the masters of music whom he had loved; not the great poems, and not the mighty ideas? And that he now found pleasure in listening to Clarisse telling him something that anyone else would say was fantasy? These were the questions that went through Walter's mind. As long as his life had lain before him, he had felt it to be full of great desire and imagination; since then, Eros had truly separated himself from it. Was there anything he still did body and soul? Was not everything he touched insignificant? Truly, love was gone from his fin- gertips, the tip of his tongue, his entrails, eyes, and ears, and what re- mained was merely ashes in the form oflife, or, as he now expressed it
From the Posthurrwus Papers · 1381
rather magniloquently, "dung in a polished glass," the "goat"! And be- side him, at his ear, was Clarisse: a little bird that had suddenly begun to prophesy this in the woods! He could not find the suggestive, the com- manding tone to point out to her where her ideas went too far and where they did not. She was full ofimages jumbled together; he, too, had been this full of images once, he persuaded himself. And of these great im- ages, one has no idea which ones can be made into reality and which ones cannot. So every person bears within himself a leading ideal figure, Clarisse was now maintaining, but most people settle for living in the form of sin, and Walter found that it might well be said of him that he bore an ideal figure within himself, although he, perhaps even self-peni- tently, at least voluntarily, lived in ashes. The world also has an ideal figure. He found this image magnificent. Of course it did not explain anything, but what good is explanation? It expressed the will of human- ity, striving upward again and again after every defeat. And it suddenly struck Walter that Clarisse had not kissed him voluntarily for at least a year, and that she was now doing it for the first time.
6 . . .
BREATHS OF A SUMMER DAY
On the same morning, Agathe, impelled by moody contradictions left over from the previous night, said to her brother: "And why should it be possible to live a life in love? There are times when you live no less in anger, in hostility, or even in pride or hardness, and they don't claim to be a second world! "
'Td prefer to say that one lives for love," Ulrich replied indolently. ~·our other emotions must inspire us to action in order that they last; that's what anchors them in reality. "
"But it's usually that way in love too," Agathe objected. She felt as if she were swinging on a high branch that was threatening to break off under her any moment. "But then why does every beginner swear to himself that it will 'last' forever, even if he's beginning for the tenth time? " was her next question.
"Perhaps because it's so inconstant. "
"One also swears eternal enmity. "
"Perhaps because it's such a violent emotion. "
1382 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
"But there are emotions whose nature it is to last longer than others: loyalty, friendship, obedience, for example. "
"I think because they are the expression of stable, indeed even moral, relationships. "
"Your answers aren't very consistent! "
The interruptions and continuations of the conversation seemed to nestle in the shallow, lazy breaths of the summer day. Brother and sister lay, a little bleary-eyed and overtired, on garden chairs in the sunshine. After a while Agathe began again:
"Faith in God imposes no action, contains no prescribed relationships to other people, can be totally immoral, and yet it's a lasting emotion. "
"Faith and love are related to each other," Ulrich remarked. "Also, unlike all the other emotions, both have available their own manner of thinking: contemplation. That means a great deal; for it is not love and faith themselves that create the image of their world; contemplation does it for them. "
"What is contemplation? "
"I can't explain it. Or maybe, in a nutshell, a thinking by intimation. Or, in other words: the way we think when we're happy. The other emo- tions you named don't have this resource. You could also call it meditat- ing. If you say that faith and love can 'move mountains,' it means that they can entirely take the place of the mind. "
"So the thought of the believer and the lover is intimation? The real inner manner oftheir thinking? "
"Right! " Ulrich confirmed, surprised.
"No reason to praise mel You said it yourselfyesterday! " his sister in- formed him. "And just so that I'm sure: contemplation, then, is also the thinking that allows itself to be led not by our actual emotions but by our other ones? "
"Ifyou want to put it that way, yes. "
"So that's the way one could think in a world of special people? Yes- terday you used the term 'ecstatic society' for it. Do you remember? "
"Y es. "
"Good! "
"Why are you laughing now? " Ulrich asked.
"Because Mephistopheles says: 'Truth is proclaimed through the
mouths of two witnesses! ' So two suffice! "
"He's evidently wrong," Ulrich contradicted calmly. "In his day,
dilire adeux, the joint insanity of two people, had not yet been recog- nized. . . . "
A noiseless stream ofweightless drifting blossoms, emanating from a group of trees whose flowering was done, drifted through the sunshine,
From the Posthumous Papers · 1383
and the breath that bore it was so gentle that not a leafstirred. It cast no shadow on the green of the lawn, but this green seemed to darken from within like an eye. Extravagantly and tenderly leaved by the young sum- mer, the trees and bushes standing in the wings or forming the backdrop gave the impression of being amazed spectators who, surprised and spellbound in their gay attire, were participating in this funeral proces- sion and celebration of nature. Spring and fall, speech and nature's si- lence, life and death, mingled in this picture. Hearts seemed to stop, to have been removed from their breasts, in order to join this silent proces- sion through the air. "My heart was taken from out my breast," a mystic had said. Agathe cautiously abandoned herself to the enthusiasm that once before in this garden had almost led her to believe in the arrival of the Millennium and under the image ofwhich she imagined an ecstatic society. But she did not forget what she had learned since: in this king- dom, you must keep quite still. You cannot leave room for any kind of desire: not even the desire to ask questions. You must also shed the un- derstanding with which you ordinarily perform tasks. You must strip the selfofall inner tools. It seemed to her that walls and columns retreated to the side within her, and that the world was entering her eyes the way tears do. But she suddenly discovered that she was only superficially holding fast to this condition, and that her thoughts had long since slipped away from it.
When she encountered them again, her thoughts were considering a quite remote problem, a little monster of disaffection. She was asking herselfin the most foolish fashion, and intent on this foolishness: 'Was I ever really impetuous and unhappy? " A man without a name came to mind, whose name she bore, indeed had borne away from him, and she repeated her question with the mute, unmoving obstinacy with which one gazes after a wave that has ebbed away. Presumably, young people (whose life span is still short) are more disposed to be amazed at what they have already felt than older people, who have become accustomed to the changeability of life's passions and circumstances; except that the escape of feeling is also the stream in whose motion the stone heavens of mystic emotion are reflected, and for one of these reasons it was proba- bly a supranaturally magnified astonishment that contained the question ofwhere the hatred and violence she had felt against Hagauer had come from. Where was the desire to hurt him? She was close to thinking she had lost it, like an object that must still be somewhere nearby.
So Agathe's thoughts were doubtless still completely under the spell of the procession of flowers and death, but they were not moving with it, and in its mute and solemn way, but making little jumps here and there. It was not "meditating" she was indulging in, but a "thinking," even if a
1384 ·THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
thinking without rigor, a branching off and inner continuation of what had earlier been left unsaid in the fleeting exchange about the constancy of the emotions; without exactly wanting to be, she was still gripped by it, and she recalled an image that Ulrich had suggested on another occa- sion, and with greater sympathy, about this constancy and inconstancy of the emotions. She was thinking now that nothing was more remote from her than expressing her emotions in "works," and apparently she was thinking for a moment of August Lindner and meant "good works," "works oflove," "signs oflove's practical orientation," such as he desired of her in vain; but by and large, she meant simply "works" and was think- ing of Ulrich, who earlier had always spoken of spiritual work that one had to fashion out ofeverything, even ifit was only a deeper breath. And that one derived a rule or created an idea for everything and felt respon- sible for the world also remained a matter of indifference to her most profound inclination: her ambition was not tempted to sit in the master's saddle of a hobbyhorse. And finally character was not the refuge of her emotions either, and when she confronted this question she received the answer: "I never used to love what I felt so strongly that I would have wanted to be, so to speak, its cupboard for my entire life! " And it oc- curred to her that for her emotions, insofar as they had been aroused by men, she had always chosen men whom she did not like with either all her soul or all her body. "How prophetic! " she thought cheerfully. "Even then I weakened the desires, the pull toward reality in my emo- tions, and kept open the path to the magic kingdom! "
For wasn't that now Ulrich's theoxy about passion? Either howl like a child with rage and frustration or enthusiasm-and get rid of it! Or ab- stain entirely from the pull toward the real, the active, and desire of any kind that evexy emotion contains. What lies in between is the real "king- dom of the emotions"- i t s works and transformations, its being filled up with reality-as lovely as a storeroom full of apples of evexy hue, and absurdly monotonous too, like everything that fades and falls the same way with evexy new year! This was what she was thinking, and she tried to find her way back again to the emotion hovering silently through the world of nature. She kept her mind from turning toward anything in a specific way. She strained to shed all knowledge and desire, all utilitarian use of head and heart and limbs. "You must be unegotistic in this most extreme sense; you have to strive to gain this mysterious 'unmediated' relationship to outer and inner," she said to herself, and collected her- selfalmost as ifshe wanted to feign death. But this seemed as impossible a task as it had been in childhood not to commit a sin between confes- sion and communion, and finally she abandoned the effort entirely. "What? " she asked herselfsulkily. "Is a world in which one desires noth-
From the Posthumous Papers · 1385
ing perhaps not desirable? " At this moment she was honestly suspicious of the world of ecstasy, and she urgently wanted to present this funda- mental question that underlies all ascesis to her brother. He, however, seemed not to want to be disturbed by anything as he lay there enjoying his comfortable position and closed the narrow slit between his eyelids completely every time she looked over at him.
So she abandoned her deck chair and stood irresolutely for a while, smiling, looking now at Ulrich, now at the garden. She stretched her legs and adjusted her skirt with small blows of her hand. Each one of these actions had a kind of rustic beauty, simple, healthy, instinctive; and it was this way either by chance or because her most recent thoughts had led her to be cheerful in a robust way. Her hair fell in a scallop at each side of her face, and the background, formed of trees and bushes that, from where she was standing, opened into depth, was a frame that posi- tioned her image before earth and sky. This view, which Ulrich was en- joying, for he was secretly observing his sister, not only was attractive but soon became so much so that it suffered nothing else beside it that it would not have drawn in. Ulrich thought this time ofthe expression "en- hanced accountability" for this enchanting image that was forming, not for the first time, between brother and sister; he extrapolated the term from a word that ages ago, in another charmed circle, had meant much to him: and truly, as there is a diminished sense of accountability, whose bewitched nature had formerly astounded him, and which is ultimately always stamped with the defect of senselessness, what seemed to be reigning here was an increased and intensified fullness of the senses, a high superabundance, indeed a distress, of such a kind that everything about Agathe and which was taking place cast a reflection on her that could not be grasped by sensory designations, and placed her in an as- pect for which not only no word existed but also no expression or outlet of any kind. Every fold of her dress was so laden with powers, indeed it almost might be said with value, that it was impossible to imagine a greater happiness, but also no more uncertain adventure, than cau- tiously to touch this fold with the tips of one's fingers!
She had now half turned away from her brother and was standing mo- tionless, so that he could observe her freely. He knew that experiences of this kind had bound the two of them together for as long as they had known each other. He remembered the morning after his arrival at their father's house, when he had caught sight of her in woman's clothes for the first time; it had been at that time, too, that he had had the strange experience of seeing her standing in a grotto of rays of light, and this in addition: that she was a more beautiful repetition and alteration of his self. There were, moreover, many things connected with this that
1386 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
merely had a different external shape. For the painted circus animals that he had loved more ardently than real ones, the sight of his little sister dressed for a ball, her beauty kindling in him the longing to be her, then even the confectioner's horse that had lately been the object of a bantering conversation, all arose from the same enchantment; and now, when he again returned to the present, which was by no means droll, the most contradictory scruples about coming too close to one another, the staring at and bending over, the heavy figurative quality of many mo- ments, the gliding into an equivocal we-and-the-world feeling, and many other things, demonstrated to him the same forces and weaknesses. In- voluntarily he reflected on these things. Common to all these experi- ences was that they received an emotion of the greatest force from an impossibility, from a failure and stagnation. That they were missing the bridge of action leading to and from the world; and finally, that they ended on a vanishingly narrow borderline between the greatest happi- ness and pathological behavior. Looked at in an unholy way, they were all somewhat reminiscent of a porcelain still life, and of a blind window, and of a dead-end street, and of the unending smile of wax dolls under glass and light: things that appear to have got stuck on the road between death and resurrection, unable to take a step either forward or back- ward. In bringing such examples to mind, Ulrich thought that they were also to be understood without mystery and myth. Such images entice our emotions, which are accustomed to act, and our sympathies, which are usually dispersed over many things, in a direction in which no progress is possible; and this might easily give rise to an experience of dammed-up significance that permits no access of any kind, so that it grows and grows in absolutely unbearable fashion. "Externally, nothing new hap- pens anymore, but the one thing is repeated again and again," Ulrich thought. "And internally, it's as ifwe had henceforth only said, thought, and felt: one thing, one thing, one thing! But it's not entirely like that either! " he interjected to himself. "It's rather like a very slow and mo- notonous rhythm. And something new arises: bliss! A tormenting bliss one would like to give the slip to but can't! Is it bliss at all? " Ulrich asked himself. "It's an oppressive increase in the emotion that leaves all quali- ties behind. I could just as easily call it a congestion! "
Agathe did not seem to notice that she was being observed. "And why does my happiness-for it is happiness--search out just such occasions and hiding places? " Ulrich went on to ask again, with one small change. He could not keep from admitting to himselfthat separated out from the stream, such an emotion could also wash around the love for a dead per- son, whose countenance belongs with a more profound defenselessness than any living one to the glances which it cannot drive off. And his hap-
From the Posthumous Papers · 1387
pening to think that in literature moody, necrophilic art thoughts were not exactly a rarity did not make it any better, but merely led him to reflect that the charming insanity of relating things, which combines all the soul's longing into the representation of a beautiful dead woman, has some kind of connection with the malevolent insanity in which a fe- tish-a hairband, a shoe-<lraws all the currents of body and soul to it- self. And every "fixed idea" too, even one that is only "overpowering" in the ordinary sense, is accompanied by such an intensified usurpation. There was in this a kinship more or less crippled and not entirely pleas- ant, and Ulrich would not have been a man had not the twisted, slippery, lurking, lost nature of these relationships filled him with suspicion. To be sure, his spirits were lifted by the idea that there was nothing in the world that did not have some black-sheep kin, for the world of health is composed of the same basic elements as the world of disease: it is only the proportions that differ; but when he cautiously directed his glance at Agathe and allowed it to drink from the sight of her, there still domi- nated in his feelings, in spite of their miserable sublimity, an uncanny absence of will, a marked displacement or being carried away into the vicinity of sleep, of death, of the image, of the immobile, the imprisoned, the powerless. Ideas drained away, every energetic drive dissipated, the unutterable paralyzed every limb, the world slipped away remote and unheeding, and the unstable armistice on the borderline between the enhanced and the diminished was barely to be borne any longer. But precisely with the entrance of this enormous draining away of power something different began, for their bodies seemed to be losing some- thing of their boundaries, of which they no longer had any need. "It's like the frenzy of the bee swarm that's trying to surround the queen! " Ulrich thought silently.
And finally the unavoidable discovery dawned on him, although he had so far avoided it, that all these strange, individual temptations of the emotions and emotional experiences, which intermingled and hovered within him like the shadows cast by the foliage of a restless tree when the sun is high, could be encompassed and understood at a single glance if he regarded his love for his sister as their origin. For evidently this emo- tion and this alone was the hero of his breaking down, of his blocked path, and of all the ambiguous adventures and detours associated with this. Even the psychology of the emotions, which he was pursuing on his own in his diaries, now seemed to him merely an attempt to conceal the love between him and his sister in a quixotic edifice of ideas. Did he, then, desire her? He was really astonished that he was confessing this to himself for the first time, and he now clearly saw the possibilities be- tween which he had to make up his mind. Either he really had to believe
1388 ·THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
that he was making ready for an adventure such as had never existed before, an adventure that he needed only to urge on and set out on with no second thoughts . . . Or he had to yield to his emotion, even should this feeling be unnatural, in the natural way, or forbid himself to; and was all he was accomplishing through his irresolution to become inven- tive in subterfuges? When he asked himself this second, rather con- temptible question, he did not fail to ask the third it entailed: What was there to prevent him from doing what he wanted? A biological supersti- tion, a moral one? In short, the judgment of others? Thinking of this, Ulrich felt such a violent boiling up of feeling against these others that he was even more surprised, especially as this sudden stab bore no rela- tion to the gentle emotions with which he believed himself filled.
But in reality what came to the fore was only something that had re- cently receded into the background. For his attachment to Agathe and his detachment from the world were always two sides of one and the same situation and inclination. Even in those years when he had almost never thought that he had a real sister, the concept of"sister" had had a magic effect on him. No doubt this happens often, and it is usually noth- ing very different from the soaring youthful form of that need for love which in the later condition of submission seeks out a bird, a cat, or a dog, at times too, probably, humanity or one's neighbor, because be- tween the dust and heat of the struggle to live and life's games this need cannot truly unfold. Sometimes this need for love is already even in youth full of submission, of timidity toward life, and loneliness, and in that case the misty image of the "sister" takes on the shadowboxing grace of the doppelganger, which transforms the anxiety of being aban- doned by the world into the tenderness of lonely togetherness. And sometimes this ecstatic image is nothing but the crassest egotism and selfishness, that is to say an excessive wanting to be loved, which has entered into a jerry-built agreement with sweet selflessness. In all such cases-and Ulrich thought again of the case in which it transforms itself into a fellow human being and then dispenses with its ambiguity, but also with its beautyl-"sister" is a creation originating from the ··other" part of emotion, from the uproar of this emotion and the desire to live differently; that's the way Ulrich would understand it now. But it proba- bly is this only in the weak form of longing. But familiar with longing as he was, his mind was no less acquainted with struggle, and ifhe correctly understood his past, his precipitate turning toward Agathe had initially been a declaration ofwar against the world; love is, moreover, always the revolt of a couple from the wisdom of the crowd. It could be said that in his case, the revolt had come first; but it could be said just as well that the core of all his criticism of the world was nothing so much as a know-
From the Posthumous Papers · 1389
ing about love. "So I a m - i f a hermaphroditic monasticism is conceiv- able, why shouldn't this bel-in the dubious situation of having been, at bottom, a soldier with monastic inclinations, and ultimately a monk with soldierly inclinations who can't leave off swearing! " he thought cheer- fully, but still with astonishment; for he was made aware for perhaps the first time of the profound contradiction between his passion and the en- tire disposition of his nature. Even as he now looked at Agathe, he thought he perceived his conflict on the sea-bright surface of inwardness spreading out around her, as an evil, metallic reflection. He was so lost in these thoughts that he did not notice that she had for some time been curiously observing his eyes.
Now she stepped up to her brother and mischievously passed her hand downward before his eyes, as if she wished to cut off his peculiar glance. And as if that were not sufficient, she grasped his arm and pre- pared to pull him up from his chair. Ulrich stood and looked around him the way a person does emerging from sleep. "To think that at this very moment, hundreds of people are fighting for their lives! That ships are sinking, animals are attacking people, thousands of animals are being slaughtered by people! " he said, half like someone looking back with a shudder from a blissful shore, half like a man who is sorry not to be part ofit.
"You're certainly sorry not to be part of it? " Agathe then did indeed ask.
His smile denied it, but his words conceded the point: "It's pleasant to think about how pleasant it is when I grasp with my whole hand a thing that I've merely been stroking for some time with the tip of a finger. "
His sister put her arm through his. "Come, let's walk around a little! " she proposed. In the hardness of his arm she felt the manly joy at every- thing savage. She pressed her fingernails against the unyielding muscles, seeking to hurt him. When he complained, she offered the explanation: "In the infinite waters of bliss I'm clutching at the straw of evil! Why should you be the only one? " She repeated her attack. Ulrich placated her with a smile: "What your nails are doing to me is not a straw but a girder! " They were walking meanwhile. Had Agathe demonstrated the ability to guess his thoughts? Were the two of them twin clocks? When emotions are tuned to the same string, is it entirely natural to read emo- tions from each other's faces? It is at any rate an impressive game, so long as one does not miss the mark and crash. The loveliest assurance of the miracle's enduring now lay in their motion, lay in the garden, which seemed to be sleeping in the sunshine, where the gravel crunched, the breeze freshened from time to time, and their bodies were bright and alert. For surmising oneself bound in feeling to everything the eye could
1390 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
see was as easy as the transparent air, and only when they stopped was it afterward as melancholy as a deep breath to take first steps again through this imagistic landscape. The words they exchanged meanwhile really signified nothing, but merely cradled them as they walked, like the childishly amused conversation a fountain has with itself, babbling gos- sip about eternity.
But without their needing to say anything, they slowly turned into a path that led them near the boundary of their small garden kingdom, and it was evident that this was not happening for the first time. Where they came in sight of the street, rolling animatedly past beyond the high iron fence that was supported by a stone base, they abandoned the path, taking advantage of the cover of trees and bushes, and paused on a small rise, whose dry earth formed the place where several old trees stood. Here the picture of the resting pair was lost in the play of light and shadow, and there was almost no likelihood of their being discovered from the street, although they were so near it that the unsuspecting pe- destrians made that exaggerated outward impression which is peculiar to everything one merely observes without in any way participating in it. The faces seemed like things, indeed even poorer than things, like flat disks, and if words were suddenly carried into the garden they had no sense, only an amplified sound such as hollow, decayed rooms have. But the two observers did not have long to wait before one person or another came still closer to their hiding place: whether it was someone stopping and looking in astonishment at all the green suddenly revealed along his course, or whether it was someone moved to stop by the favorable op- portunity of resting something in his hand on the stone base of the fence for a moment, or to tie his shoelace on it, or whether in the short shad- ows of the fence pillars falling on the path it was two people stopped in conversation, with the others streaming past behind them. And the more accidentally this seemed to happen in single cases, the more clearly the invariable, unconscious, enduring effect of the fence detached itself from the variety and contingency ofthese manifold actions, invading the individual life like a trap.
They both loved this game of cause and effect, which stood in scornful contrast to the game of souls
They had discovered this place on the days when they, too, had strolled through the streets and talked about the difficulties of loving one's neighbor, and the contradictions of everyone loving everybody;
From the Posthurrwus Papers · 1391
and the fence, which separated them from the world but connected them with it visually, had seemed to them then the manifest image of the human world, not least of themselves: in short, the image of everything which Ulrich had once summarized in the terse expression "the un- separated and not united. " Most of this now seemed quite superfluous and a childish waste of time; as indeed its only mission had been to give them time and to gain from the observing game with the world the con- viction that they had something in mind that concerned everyone and did not just spring from a personal need. Now they were much more secure, they knew more about their adventure. All individual questions were froth, beneath which lay the dark mirror ofanother possible way of life. Their great sympathy with each other and with others, and in gen- eral the fulfillment of the promises sunk into the world, promises that constantly emanate the peculiar mirage that life-as-it-is strikes us as fragmented in every way by life-as-it-might-be-this fulfillment was never to be won from details but only from the Totally Different! The fence, however, had still preserved something of its coarse, prompting distinctness, and was at least able to beckon to a leave-taking.
Agathe laid her hand, which had the light, dry warmth of the finest wool, on Ulrich's head, turned it in the direction of the street, let her hand fall to his shoulder, and tickled her brother's ear with her fingernail and no less with the words: "Now let's test our love for our neighbors once more, Teacher! How would it be if today we tried to love one of them like ourselves! "
"I don't love myself! " Ulrich resisted in the same tone. "I even think that all the earlier energy I was so proud of was a running away from myself. "
"So what you've sometimes said, that I'm your self-love in the form of a girl, is altogether not terribly flattering. "
"Oh, on the contrary! You're another self-love, the other! "
"Now, that you'll have to explain to me! " Agathe commanded without looking up.
"A good person has good defects and a bad one has bad virtues: so the one has a good self-love and the other a bad one! "
"Obscure! "
"But from a famous author from whom Christendom has learned a great deal, but unfortunately just not that. "
"Not much clearer! "
"Half a millennium before Christ, he taught that whoever does not love himself in the right way is not able to love others either. For the right love for oneself is also being naturally good to others. So self-love is not selfishness but being good. "
1392 • THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
"Did he really say that? "
"Oh, I don't know, perhaps I'm putting the words in his mouth. He also taught that goodwill is not wanting the good but wanting something with goodness. He was a logician and natural philosopher, soldier and mystic, and, significantly, is supposed to have been the greatest teacher, and so it did not even escape him that morality can never be completely detached from mysticism. " ·
"You're an insufferable exercise instructor who shows up in the morn- ing; the cock crows, and one's supposed to hop to it! I'd rather sleep! "
"No, you ought to help me. "
They lay on their stomachs on the ground, next to each other. If they raised their heads, they saw the street; if they didn't, they saw between pointed young blades of grass the drying fallen leaves from the high tree.
Agathe asked: "So that's why it's love your neighbor 'as yourself'? It could also be the other way around: Love yourself as your neighbor. "
"Yes. And it's easier to love him not only less than oneself but also more. What's almost impossible is to love him and yourself in the same way. Compared with that, loving someone so much that you sacrifice yourself for him is positively a relief," Ulrich replied. For the moment, the conversation had taken on the playful tone that deftly stirred up pro- found questions, a tone to which they had become accustomed during their walks through the city; but really-and although since then noth- ing that could be counted as time had passed-they were deliberately imitating themselves, the way one casually immerses oneself again in a game one has outgrown. And Agathe remarked: "So then love your neighbor as yourself also means: don't love your neighbor selflessly! "
"Actually, yes," Ulrich conceded. And without agreeing with her inci- dental arguments against selfless goodness, which in male human form were courting her soul, he added: "That's even quite important. For the people who talk ofselfless goodness are teaching something that's better than selfishness and less than goodness. "
And Agathe asked: "But when you fall in love the usual way, doesn't that inevitably involve desire and selflessness? "
"Y es. "
"And it really can't be said of self-love either that one desires oneself, or that one loves oneself selflessly? "
"No," Ulrich said.
"Then what's called self-love may not be any kind of love at all? " Agathe hazarded.
"That's as you take it," her brother replied. "It's more a confiding in oneself, an instinctive caring for oneself-"
From the Posthunwus Papers · 1393
"Self-toleration! " Agathe said, quite deliberately making a dissatisfied and slightly disgusted face, although she did not exactly know why.
"Why are we talking about it at all? " Ulrich intexjected.
"But we're talking about others! " Agathe answered, and laughter at her brother and herselflit up her face. She had again directed her glance at the fence, drawing her brother's after her; and because their eyes were not focused on a specific distance, the host of vehicles and pedes- trians swam past it. "Where shall we begin? " she asked, as if the rest were understood as a matter of course.
"You can't just do it on command! " Ulrich objected.
"No. But we can try to just feel everything in some such way; and we can enbust ourselves to it more and more! "
"That has to happen of itself. "
"Let's help it along! " Agathe proposed. "For instance, let's stop talk- ing and do nothing but look at them! "
"That's all right with me," Ulrich agreed.
For a short time they were silent; then something else occurred to Agathe: "To love something in the ordinary sense means to prefer it to something else: so we must try to love one person and at the same time prevent ourselves from preferring him to others," she whispered.
"Keep quiet! You have to be quiet! " Ulrich fended her off.
Now they gazed out for a while again. But soon Agathe propped her- self up on her elbow and looked despairingly at her brother. "It's not working! As soon as I tried it, the people outside became like a river full of pale fish. We're dreadful idlers! " she complained.
Ulrich turned toward her, laughing. "You're forgetting that striving for bliss isn't work! "
''I've never done anything in my whole life; now I'd like something to happen! Let's do something good to someone! " Agathe pleaded.
"Even doing good is a notion that doesn't occur at all in real goodness. It's only when the waves break that the ocean disintegrates into drop- lets! " Ulrich countered. "And what would it mean anyway to do some- thing good in a situation in which you can't do anything but good? " The anticipation, the headiness ofa feeling ofvictory, the confidence ofpow- ers that were for the moment at rest, allowed him to be playful with his seriousness.
"So you don't want to do anything? " Agathe asked coolly.
"Of course I do! But the kingdom oflove is in every respect the great antireality. That's why the first thing you have to do is cut the arms and legs off your emotions; and then we'll see what can happen in spite of that! "
1394 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
"You make it sound like a machine," Agathe chided.
"You have to undertake it as a good experimenter," Ulrich contra- dicted her, unmoved. "You have to try to circumscribe the decisive part. "
Agathe now offered serious resistance. 'We're not concluding some scientific investigation but, ifyou'll permit the expression, opening our hearts," she said with somewhat sarcastic sharpness. "And also the point we'd have to start from has not been exactly new for some time, since the Gospels! Exclude hatred, resistance, strife from yourself; just don't be- lieve that they exist! Don't blame, don't get angry, don't hold people re- sponsible, don't defend yourself against anything! Don't struggle anymore; don't think or bargain; forget and unlearn denial! In this way fill every crack, every fissure, between you and them; love, fear, beg, and walk with them; and take everything that happens in time and space, whatever comes and goes, whatever is beautiful or disturbing, not as re- ality but as a word and metaphor of the Lord. That's how we should go to meet them! "
As usually happened, during this long and passionate and unusually resolute speech her face had taken on a deeper hue. "Splendid! Every word a letter in a great scripture! " Ulrich exclaimed appreciatively. "And we, too, will have to gain courage. But such courage? Is that what you really want? "
Agathe subdued her zeal and denied it mutely and honestly. "Not en- tirely! " she added by way of explanation, so as not to deny it too much.
"It is the teaching of Him who advised us to offer our left cheek ifwe have been struck on the right one. And that's probably the mildest trans- gression that ever was," Ulrich went on reflectively. "But don't misun- derstand one thing, that this message too, if carried out, is a psychological exercise! A particular behavior and a particular group of ideas and emotions are bound up in it together and mutually support each other. I mean everything in us that is suffering, enduring, tender, susceptible, protective, and yielding: in short, love. And it's so far from that to everything else, especially to whatever is hard, aggressive, and actively life-shaping, that these other emotions and ideas and the bitter necessities disappear from view entirely. That doesn't mean that they fade from reality; merely that you don't get angry at them, don't deny them, and that you forget knowing about them; so it's like a roof that the wind can get under and that can never stand for long-"
"But one has faith in goodness! It's faith! You're forgetting that! " Agathe interrupted.
"No, I'm not forgetting that, but that came along only later, through Paul. I made a note of his explanation. It runs: 'Faith is the substance of
From the Posthumous Papers · 1395
things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. ' And that's a gross, I'd almost say covetous; misunderstanding. The tenet of the kingdom that will come at the end of days would like to have something it can get hold of in place of the bliss that the Son of Man has already experienced on earth. "
"It has been promised. Why are you running it down? Is it then worth nothing to be able to believe not merely with all one's soul but utterly, with parasol and clothes? "
"But the breath of the annunciation was not promise and faith but intimation! A condition in which one loves metaphors! A bolder condi- tion than faith! And I'm not the first to notice this. The only thing that's been regarded as truly real for the bringer of salvation has been the ex- periencing of these foreshadowing metaphors of happy unresistingness and love; the miserable rest, which we call reality, natural, sturdy, dan- gerous life, has simply mirrored itself in his soul in a completely dematerialized way, like a picture puzzle. And-by Jehovah and Jupi- ter! -that assumes, first ofall, civilization, because no one is so poor that robbers can't be found to murder him; and it assumes a desert in which there are indeed evil spirits, but no lions. Secondly, these high and happy tidings appear to have originated pretty much in ignorance of all contemporarycivilizations. Itis remote from the multiplicities ofculture and the spirit, remote from doubts, but also from choice, remote from sickness but also from almost all discoveries that fight it: in short, it is remote from all the weaknesses, but also from all the advantages of human knowledge and capability, which even in its own time were by no means meager. And incidentally, that's why it also has rather simple no- tions of good and evil, beautiful and ugly. Now, the moment you make room for such objections and conditions, you'll also have to content yourself with my less simple procedure! "
Agathe argued against it anyway. "You're forgetting one thing," she repeated, "that this teaching claims to come from God; and in that case everything more complex that deviates from it is simply false or in- different! "
"Quieti" Ulrich said, placing a finger on his mouth. "You can't talk about God in such a stubbornly physical way, as if He were sitting be- hind that bush over there the way He did in the year wo! "
"All right, I can't," Agathe conceded. "But let me tellyau something, tool You yourself, when you're devising bliss on earth, are prepared to renounce science, tendencies in art, luxury, and everything people rush around for every day. Then why do you begrudge it so much to others? "
"You're certainly right," Ulrich conceded. A dry twig had found its way into his hand, and he pensively poked the ground with it. They had
1396 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
slid down a little, so that once again only their heads peeked over the top of the rise, and that only when they lifted them. They lay beside each other on their stomachs like two marksmen who have forgotten what they were lying in wait for; and Agathe, touched by her brother's yield- ing, threw her arm around his neck and made a concession of her own. "Look, what is it doing? " she exclaimed, pointing with a finger to an ant beside his twig, which had attacked another ant.
"It's murdering," Ulrich ascertained coldly.
"Don't let it! " Agathe pleaded, and in her excitement raised a leg to the sky so that it rose upside down over her knee.
Ulrich proposed: "Try to take it metaphorically. You don't even have to rush to give it a particular significance: just take its own! Then it be- comes like a dry breath of air, or the sulfurous smell of decaying foliage in autumn: some kind of volatizing drops of melancholy that make the soul's readiness for dissolution tremble. I can imagine that one could even get over one's own death amicably, but only because one dies just once and therefore regards it as especially important; because the un- derstanding of saints and heroes is pretty lacking in glory in the face of nature's constant small confusions and their dissonances! "
Possibly: Ulrich: Through faith!
Agathe: Intimation and metaphor won't do it either. Ulrich: Exactly!
While he was speaking, Agathe had taken the twig from his fingers and attempted to rescue the ant that had been attacked, with the result that she nearly crushed both, but finally she succeeded in separating them. With diminished vitality, the ants crept toward new adventures.
"Did that make any sense? " Ulrich asked.
"I understand you to mean by that that what we were trying to do by the fence is against nature and reason," Agathe answered.
"Why shouldn't I say it? " Ulrich said. "Anyway, I wanted to say to surprise you: the glory of God does not twitch an eyelid when calamity strikes. Perhaps too: life swallows corpses and filth without a shadow on its smile.
