No More Learning

Earlier centuries tried to answer it with their own inadequate means, but the great age ofempiricism has done nothing ofits own, so far. . . . "
Arnheim, who caught on quickly and liked to interrupt, laid his hand on Ulrich's shoulder as if to restrain him. "This implies an in- creasing relationship with God! " he said in a low tone of warning.
'Would that be so terrible? " Ulrich asked, not without a hint of mockery at such premature alarm. "But I haven't gone that far yet! " Arnheim promptly checked himself and smiled. "How delightful
after a long absence to find someone unchanged. Such a rarity, these days! " he said. He was genuinely glad, in fact, once he felt safe again behind his defensive front of benevolence. Ulrich might, after all, have very well taken him up on that rash offer of a position, and Arn- heim was grateful that Ulrich, in his irresponsible intransigence, dis- dained touching the earth with his feet. "We must have a talk about this sometime," he added cordially. "It's not clear to me how you conceive of applying our theoretical attitude to practical affairs. "
Ulrich knew very well that it was still unclear. What he meant was not a life of "research," or a life "in the light of science," but a "quest for feeling" similar to a quest for truth, except that truth was not the issue here. He watched Arnheim moving over to Agathe. Diotima was standing there too; Tuzzi and Count Leinsdorf came and went. Agathe was chatting with everyone and thinking: "Why is he talking with all these people? He ought to have left with me! He's cheapen- ing what he said to me! " She liked many of the things she heard him say from across the room, and yet they hurt her. Everything that came from Ulrich was hurting her again, and for the second time that day she suddenly felt the need to get away from him. She despaired of ever being able, with her limitations, to be what he wanted, and the prospect that they would soon be going home like any other cou- ple, gossiping about the evening behind them, was intolerable.
Meanwhile Ulrich was illinking: "Arnheim will never understand that. " And he added: "It is precisely in his feelings that the scientist is limited, and the practical man even more so. It's as necessary as hav- ing your legs finnly planted ifyou intend to lift something with your arms. " In ordinary circumstances he was that way himself; the mo-
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 1 1 2 9
ment he began thinking about anything, even if it was about feeling itself, he was very cautious about letting any feeling into it. Agathe called this coldness, but he knew that in order to be wholly otherwise one has to be prepared to renounce life, as if on a mortal adventure, for one has no idea what its course will be! He was in the mood for it, and for the moment no longer feared it. He gazed for a long time at his sister: the lively play of conversation on the deeper, untouched face. He was about to ask her to leave with him, but before he could move, Stumm had come back and was intent on talking with him.
The good General was fond of Ulrich. He had already forgiven him his witticisms about the War Ministry, and was actually rather taken with the phrase "religious war": it had such a festively military air, like oak leaves on a helmet, or shouts of hurrah on the Emperor's birthday. With his arm pressed to Ulrich's, he steered him out of ear- shot of the others. "You know, I like what you said about all events originating in the imagination," he said. "Of course, that's more my private opinion than my official attitude," and he offered Ulrich a cigarette.
''I've got to go home," Ulrich said.
"Your sister is having a fine time; don't disturb her," Stumm said. "Arnheim's outdoing himself to pay court to her. But what I was going to say: the joy seems to have gone out of mankind's great ideas. You ought to put some life back into them. I mean, there's a new spirit in the air, and you're the man to take charge! "
"What gives you that idea? '' Ulrich asked guardedly.
"That's how it strikes me. " Stumm passed over it and went on in- tently: "You're for order too; everything you say shows it. And so then I ask myself: which is more to the point-that man is good, or that he needs a firm hand? It's all tied in with our present-day need to take a stand. I've already told you it would put my mind at rest ifyou would take charge of the campaign again. With all this talk, there's simply no knowing what may happen otherwise! "
Ulrich laughed. "Do you know what I'm going to do now? I'm not coming here anymore! " he said happily:
"But why? '' Stumm protested hotly. "All those people will be right who've been saying that you've never been a real power! "
"If I told them what I really think, they would really say so. " Ul- rich answered, laughing, and disengaged himself from his friend.
1130 · THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
Stumm was vexed, but then his good humor prevailed, and he said in parting: "These things are so damned complicated. Sometimes I've actually thought it would be best if a real idiot came along to tackle all these insoluble problems-I mean some sort ofJoan ofArc. A person like that might be able to help! "
Ulrich's eyes searched for his sister but did not find her. While he was asking Diotima about her, Leinsdorf and Tuzzi returned from the salon and announced that everyone was leaving.
"I said all along," His Grace remarked cheerfully to the lady ofthe house, "that what those people were saying was not what they really meant. And Frau Drangsal has come up with a really saving idea; we've decided to continue this evening's meeting another time. Feuermaul, or whatever his name is, will read us some long poem he has written, so things will be much quieter. I of course took it upon myself, on account of the urgency, to say I was sure you'd agree! "
It was only then that Ulrich learned that Agathe had suddenly said good-bye and left the house without him. She had left word that she had not wanted to disturb him.
FROM THE POSTHUMOUS PAPERS
TRANSLATED FROM THE GERMAN BY
BURTON PIKE
Preface
xi
CONTENTS
PART 1
Twenty chapters, continuing the previous volume, that Musil withdrew in galleys in 1938, and related drafts
39 Aftertheencounter 40 The do-gooder
Brother and sister the next morning
42 Up Jacob's ladder into a stranger's dwelling
43 The do-gooder and the do-no-gooder; but Agathe
1135 1140 1148 1 1 5 3
41
44 A mighty discussion 1166
45 Beginning of a series of wondrous experiences 1176
46 Moonbeams by sunlight 1182
47 Wanderings among people 1192
48 Love blinds. Or difficulties where they are not
looked for 1202
49 General von Stumm drops a bomb. Congress for
World Peace 1212
so Agathe finds Ulrich's diary 1222
51
historical synopsis of the psychology of the emotions 1239 53 The D and L reports 124fi
too 1158
Great changes 1230 52 To her displeasure, Agathe is confronted with a
viii · Contents
54 Nai've description of how an emotion originates 1258
55 Feeling and behavior. The precariousness of
emotion 1266
s6 The do-gooder sings 1280
57 Truth and ecstasy 1295
58 Ulrich and the two worlds of emotion 1304
Alternate Draft Versions, 1940-1942
49 Conversations on love 1312
50 Difficulties where they are not looked for 1313
51 Loving is not simple 1317
52 Breaths of a summer day 1327
Further Sketches, 1939-1941
48 A mentality directed toward the significant, and the
beginning of a conversation on the subject 1335
49 General von Stumm on genius 1341
50 Genius as a problem 1349
Sketches for a Continuation of the "Galley Chapters," 1938 and Later
59
6. . . 62
Night talk 1353 Early-morning walk 1360 Walter and Clarisse's woodsy armistice 1372 Breaths of a summer day 1381 The constellation of brother and sister; or, the
unseparated and not united
PART 2
Drafts of Character and Incident
Ulrich I Ulrich ar~:dAgathe I Agathe
Ulrich visits the clinic 1413 Late 1920s 1422 V alerie 1442 Ulrich-Agathe journey 1450 OnKakania 1474
On the young Socialist Schmeisser 1490 On Agathe 14g8 Museum pre-chapter: At the lawyer's 1507
52 The three sisters 1513
48 The sun shines on just and unjust 1519
49 Special mission of a garden fence 1526
49 Musings 1532
Clarisse I Walter I Ulrich
Clarisse 1537 After confinement 1577 On Clarisse 1580 Clarisse 1582 The world of ideas in Clarisse's insanity 1583 Late 1920S 1586 193o-1934 On Clarisse-Walter 1618 1936 New ideas about the Clarisse-Walter-Ulrich complex 1623 Clarisse in Rome 1623 Clarisse-Island 1626 Island I 1627 Island II 1628 Visit to the madhouse 1630
Fischel I Gerda I Hans SeppI Ulrich
Late 1gzos
1936 To the complex: Leo Fischel-Gerda-Hans Sepp
Rachel
Narrative Drafts
A dreadful chapter: The dream 1703 49 Ulrich's diary 17o8 50 An entry 1713 51 Endoftheentry 1716
Sketches and Notes About the Novel 1722 Translator's Aftexword 1771
Contents ix
PREFACE
Musil did not finish The Man Without Qualities, although he often said he intended to. There is no way of telling from either the parts published in his lifetime or his posthumous papers how he would have done so, or indeed whether he could have done so to his own satisfaction. This is because of the novel's rigorously experimental structure, consisting of an "open architecture" that could be devel- oped in many directions from any given point. The novel does con- tain coherent individual threads and incidents, but Musil finnly rejected the idea of a plotted narrative whole. Therefore, while the drafts of the twenty chapters in Part 1 of "From the Posthumous Pa- pers" carry on from where "Into the Millennium" left off, the mate- rial in Part 2 is not preliminary to a final version in the usual sense, but consists rather of notes, sketches, and drafts that Musil was keep- ing in suspension for possible use in some form at some place in the ultimate text, a version he never decided upon and that must forever remain the object of tantalizing speculation.
We have a fortuitous, ifunhappy, benchmark for this posthumous material: When Musil had to leave Vienna in 1938, he took with him into exile in Switzerland material that he considered most useful for his further work on The Man Without Qualities. Everything left be- hind in Vienna was destroyed during the war. (A further loss was suf- fered when two of Musil's surviving notebooks were stolen from an editor's car in Italy in 1970, before they could be transcribed. )
The extent to which Musil regarded this novel as experimental was extraordinary. He had begun work on it in earnest in 1924 and was most reluctant when the urging ofpublishers and worsening external conditions forced him to publish parts of it in 1931 and 1933 (pages 1-1130 in this edition). From his point ofview, the entire text ought
xii · Preface
to have remained "open" from the beginning until it had all been written and he could then revise the text as a whole. He complained that partial publication removed those parts of the novel from the possibility of further alteration, as well as distorting the shape (again, a never defined, "open" shape) he had in mind for the whole work. As it was, in 1938, in less than robust health and apparently appre- hensive that he would again be forced into premature publication, he withdrew the first twenty chapters that appear in "From the Posthu- mous Papers" when they were already set in galleys, in order to re- work them still further. These chapters were intended not to conclude the novel but to continue "Into the Millennium. " Like Goethe, Musil had a strange sense of having infinite time stretching out before him in which to complete his task. One is tempted to see in his solitary and stubborn pursuit of his ideal more than a llttle of Kafka's Hunger Artist.
Musil's purpose in writing The Man Without Qualities was a moral one. He had set out to explore possibilities for the right life in a cul- ture that had lost both its center and its bearings but could not tear itself away from its outworn forms and habits of thought, even while they were dissolving. Musil equated ethics and aesthetics, and was convinced that a union of "precision and soul," the language and dis- coveries of science with one's inner life of perceptions and feelings, could be, and must be, achieved. He meant this novel to be experi- enced as a moral lever to move the world, as Emerson and Nietzsche intended their writing to be experienced, in such a way that (in Rilke's words) "you must change your life. " Musil's anguish becomes palpable as he pursues this search for the right life using the tools of scientific skepticism, while remaining all too aware of the apparently inherent limitations ofhuman societies and, especially, ofhuman na- ture. Fortunately, this anguish is leavened by a sparkling wit of lan- guage and situation, as when a character is described as wearing "a wig of split hairs. "
The search for the right life leads to an increasing inwardness in the novel. Musil intended to have Ulrich and Agathe somehow rejoin the world after the failure of their attempt to achieve a unio mystica, but as the reader will see, this was left completely up in the air among a welter of conflicting possibilities. Much of the material in Part z consists of startlingly dramatic or even melodramatic nuclei
that Musil weighed using at some point. He frequently inserts identi- cal or slightly varied material in different places, obviously to try it out in alternative contexts, but without committing himself. Always an analytical thinker and a methodical worker, Musil used an elabo- rate and cryptic system of referencing and cross-referencing codes and notations, some of them still undeciphered, to remind himself of the many interconnections. These markings are ubiquitous, indicat- ing how thoroughly the different parts of the work were simulta- neously present in his mind. These codes are to be found in the German edition but have been suppressed here in the interest of readability.
Among the experiments Musil tries out, for example, are the possi- bilities of Ulrich having sexual relations, sometimes aggressive and perverse, with his sister, Agathe, his cousin Diotima, and Clarisse, his friend Walter's wife. Moosbrugger, the sex murderer who haunts the entire novel, is somehow freed by Clarisse in one version, while Ul- rich's attempt to free him himself, together with some hired crimi- nals, fails in another. Moosbrugger is executed, and Hans Sepp commits suicide (under a train in one place, by gunshot in another). Ulrich's escape to the idyllic Italian island is now with Agathe, now with Clarisse; the idyll fails with Agathe, fails with Clarisse. Clarisse looms much larger in these drafts than in the main text; here the stages of her growing insanity are carefully detailed. Ulrich appears crueler, more morally indolent, as his successive failures are re- corded. (Musil should not be identified with Ulrich; as is made quite clear here, in his role as narrator Musil is usually critical of Ulrich. ) These posthumous papers also shed a great deal of light on Musil's concept of mysticism and the "Other Condition. "
Musil had suffered a stroke in 1936, and the tone of Part 1 of "From the Posthumous Papers," written after that, is markedly dif- ferent from the earlier sections of the novel; quieter, strikingly in- ward, more difficult, the writing often of a rare beauty. In the selection of drafts, notes, and sketches presented in Part 2, which cover the span of time between 1920 and 1942, Musil makes clear how the faults of his characters are intended to mirror the larger faults of the age; as he says, these figures live on an arc without being able to close the circle. As the age comes unglued and spirals toward war, so do the characters spiral more clearly toward failure, helpless-
Preface · xiii
xiv · Preface
ness, madness, and suicide, even as they press forward in their firm belief in a better future, if only they could find the key. The Man Without Qualities is not a pessimistic work
The contents of "From the Posthumous Papers" have not been previously translated into English. Much of what is presented here became available in German for the first time only with the publica- tion of the 1978 German edition of Musil's collected works. This new German edition is not definitive, but it completely supersedes the edition of the 1950s on which the first, incomplete, English transla- tion was based. The guiding principle in selecting the material for translation in "From the Posthumous Papers" was to present to the English-speaking public in readable form the major narrative por- tions ofthe posthumous material in the 1978 German edition, as well as selections that illuminate Musil's methods of thinking and work- ing. Scholarly completeness could not be the goal in any case, since the 1978 German edition offers only a major selection from the ex- tant posthumous papers, together with some scholarly apparatus. There exists in manuscript even more material relating to The Man Without Qualities than is in the German edition: The various Musil research centers finished the painstaking process of transcribing these papers only in 1990, and this transcription, 34 megabytes of data (not all of it relating to the novel), has been made available in German on a CD-ROM disk Omitted in what follows, aside from the cross-referencing codes, are (1) longer repetitive variations of chapters or sections in which the changes are slight-Musil was an obsessive rewriter and polisher; and (z) many brief notes, jottings, and indications that are too sketchy to be informative except to the specialist.
Except for the galley drafts of the first twenty chapters, this mate- rial is for the most part not polished or "written up" in final form; some ofit is quite sketchy, some merelyjotted notes. Over the years, Musil changed the names of some of his characters and switched others, and this can be confusing. The essence of the characters, however, seems to have been fixed from the early stages, so these name changes are purely verbal. Ulrich was originally called "An- ders," then called "Achilles"; the names, but not the characters, of
Lindner and Meingast were reversed. Clarisse's brother is called Siegmund in the main text, Siegfried and Wotan here. In the interest of readability the names, with one or two obvious exceptions, have been changed to be consistent with those used previously in the novel and are spelled out-Musil usually refers to them by their ini- tials-as are most of the numerous other abbreviations. Given the fragmentary nature ofthe texts in Part 2, and for the sake ofreadabil- ity, elisions have not been indicated; with very minor exceptions they are between selections, not within selections. Items between slashes or in parentheses are Musil's; material in square brackets is mine. Double and triple ellipsis points in the text reproduce those in the German edition.
The only major departure from the 1978 German edition in how this material appears has to do with the ordering of the contents of Part 2. The German edition presents this material in reverse chro- nology, beginning with what Musil was working on at his death and proceeding backward to the earliest sketches. It seemed to me that since Musil was thinking about this material experimentally and not chronologically, such an ordering is not necessarily indicated, espe- cially in the absence of the author's ultimate intentions about the work as a whole.
A further problem was that in chronological order, whether for- ward or backward, the random mixture of elements in Part 2 of "From the Posthumous Papers" would put off the general reader, for whom this edition is intended. That would be unfortunate, since these pages contain some of Musil's most powerful and evocative writing. Rearranging the contents of Part 2 according to character groupings, narrative sections, and Musil's notes about the novel makes this material much more accessible, and given the author's experimental attitude toward these fragments this rearrangement seems not unreasonable. Readers who wish to see this material pre- sented in roughly chronological reverse order-some of it can be dated only approximately-should consult the German edition.
The original choice of material to include here was made in exten- sive consultation with Professor Philip Payne of the University of Lancaster, England, to whom I would like to express my apprecia- tion. I owe a profound debt of gratitude to Professor Adolf Frise, editor of the German edition, for his constant friendly encourage-
Preface · xv
xvi · Preface
ment and advice. Without his work, and without the unflagging pa- tience and skill with which he and the various Musil research teams in Vienna, Klagenfurt, Saarbriicken, and Reading deciphered Musil's difficult manuscripts, no Musil edition would have been pos- sible. And without the determination, persistence, fine German, and ear and eye for quality of Carol Janeway, Sophie Wilkins's and my editor at Knopf, this translation would never have come to fruition.
Burton Pike
PART 1
Musil had given chapters 39 through 58 to the printer. He re- vised them in galley proofs in 1937-1938, then withdrew them to work on themfurther. They were intended to continue "Into the Millennium," of 1932-1933, but not conclude it.
39
AFTER THE ENCOUNTER
As the man who had entered Agathe's life at the poet's grave, Profes- sor August Lindner, climbed down toward the valley, what he saw opening before him were visions of salvation.
I f she had looked around at him after they parted she would have been struck by the man's ramrod-stiff walk dancing down the stony path, for it was a peculiarly cheerful, assertive, and yet nervous walk. Lindner carried his hat in one hand and occasionally passed the other hand through his hair, so free and happy did he feel.
"How few people," he said to himself, "have a truly empathic soul! " He depicted to himself a soul able to immerse itself com- pletely in a fellow human being, feeling his inmost sorrows and low- ering itself to his innermost weaknesses. "What a prospect! " he exclaimed to himself. ''What a miraculous proximity of divine mercy, what consolation, and what a day for celebration! " But then he re- called how few people were even able to listen attentively to their fellow creatures; for he was one of those right-minded people who descend from the unimportant to the trivial without noticing the dif- ference. "How rarely, for instance, is the question 'How are you? ' meant seriously," he thought. "You need only answer in detail how you really feel, and soon enough you find yourself looking into a bored and distracted face! "
Well, he had not been guilty of this error! According to his princi- ples the particular and indispensable doctrine of health for the
1136 · THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
strong was to protect the weak; without such a benevolent, self-im- posed limitation, the strong were all too easily susceptible to brutal- ity; and culture, too, needed its acts of charity against the dangers inherent within itself. "Whoever tries to tell us what 'universal edu- cation' is supposed to be," he affirmed for himself through inner ex- clamation, mightily refreshed by a sudden lightning bolt loosed against his fellow pedagogue Hagauer, "should truly first be advised: experience what another person feels like! Knowing through empa- thy means a thousand times more than knowing through books! " He was evidently giving vent to an old difference of opinion, aimed on the one hand at the liberal concept of education and on the other at the wife of his professional brother, for Undner's glasses gazed around like two shields of a doubly potent warrior. He had been self- conscious in Agathe's presence, but if she were to see him now he would have seemed to her like a commander, but a commander of troops that were by no means frivolous. For a truly manly soul is ready to assist, and it is ready to assist because it is manly. He raised the question whether he had acted correctly toward the lovely woman, and answered himself: "It would be a mistake if the proud demand for subordination to the law were to be left to those who are too weak for it; and it would be a depressing prospect if only mind- less pedants were permitted to be the shapers and protectors ofman- ners and morals; that is why the obligation is imposed upon the vital and strong to require discipline and limits from their instincts of energy and health: they must support the weak, shake up the thoughtless, and rein in the licentious! " He had the impression he had done so.
As the pious soul of the Salvation Army employs military uniform and customs, so had Lindner taken certain soldierly ways of thinking into his service; indeed, he did not even flinch from concessions to the "man of power" Nietzsche, who was for middle-class minds of that time still a stumbling block, but for Lindner a whetstone as well. He was accustomed to say of Nietzsche that it could not be main- tained that he was a bad person, but his doctrines were surely exag- gerated and ill equipped for life, the reason for this being that he rejected empathy; for Nietzsche had not recognized the marvelous counterbalancing gift of the weak person, which was to make the strong person gentle. And opposing to this his own experience, he
From the Posthumous Papers · 1 1 3 7
thought with joyful purpose: "Truly great people do not pay homage to a sterile cult of the self, but call forth in others the feeling of their sublimity by bending down to them and indeed, if it comes to that, sacrificing themselves for them! " Sure ofvictory and with an expres- sion of amicable censure that was meant to encourage them, he looked into the eyes of a pair of young lovers who, intricately inter- twined, were coming up toward him. But it was a quite ordinary cou- ple, and the young idler who formed its male component squeezed his eyelids shut as he responded to this look of Undner's, abruptly stuck out his tongue, and said: "Nyaa! " Undner, unprepared for this mockery and vulgar menace, was taken aback; but he acted as if he did not notice. He loved action, and his glance sought a policeman, who ought to have been in the vicinity to guarantee honor's public safety; but as he did so his foot struck a stone, and the sudden stum- bling motion scared off a swarm of sparrows that had been regaling themselves at God's table over a pile of horse manure. The explosion of wings was like a warning shot, and he was just able at the last mo- ment, before falling ignominiously, to hop over the double obstacle with a balletically disguised jump. He did not look back, and after a while was quite satisfied with himself. "One must be hard as a dia- mond and tender as a mother! " he thought, using an old precept from the seventeenth century.
Since he also esteemed the virtue of modesty, at no other time would he have asserted anything like this in regard to himself; but there was something in Agathe that so excited his blood! Then again, it formed the negative pole of his emotions that this divinely tender female whom he had found in tears, as the angel had found the maiden in the dew . . . oh, he did not want to be presumptuous, and yet how presumptuous yielding to the spirit ofpoetry does make one! And so he continued in a more restrained manner: that this wretched woman was on the point of breaking an oath placed in the hands of God-for that is how he regarded her desire for a divorce. Unfortu- nately, he had not made this forcefully clear when they had stood face-to-face-God, what nearness again in these words! -unfortu- nately, he had not presented this idea with sufficient firmness; he merely remembered having spoken to her in general about loose morals and ways of protecting oneself against them. Besides, the name of God had certainly not passed his lips, unless as a rhetorical
1138 • THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
flourish; and the spontaneity, the dispassionate, one might even say the irreverent, seriousness with which Agathe had asked him whether he believed in God offended him even now as he remem- bered it. For the truly pious soul does not permit himself to simply follow a whim and think of God with crude directness. Indeed, the moment Lindner thought ofthis unreasonable question he despised Agathe as ifhe had stepped on a snake. He resolved that ifhe should ever be in the situation of repeating his admonitions to her, he would follow only the dictates of that powerful logic which is in keeping with earthly matters and which has been placed on earth for that pur- pose, because not every ill-bred person can be permitted to ask God to trouble Himself on behalf of his long-established confusions; and so he began to make use of this logic straightaway, and many expres- sions occurred to him that it would be appropriate to use to a person who has stumbled. For instance, that marriage is not a private affair but a public institution; that it has the sublime mission of evolving feelings of responsibility and empathy, and the task (which hardens a people) of exercising mankind in the bearing of difficult burdens; perhaps indeed, although it could only be adduced with the greatest tact, that precisely by lasting over a fairly long period of time, mar- riage constituted the best protection against the excesses of desire. He had an image of the human being, perhaps not wrongly, as a sack full of devils that had to be kept firmly tied shut, and he saw unshaka- ble principles as the tie.
How this dutiful man, whose corporeal part could not be said to project in any direction but height, had acquired the conviction that one had to rein oneself in at every step was indeed a riddle, which could only be solved, though then quite easily, when one knew its benefit. When he had reached the foot of the hill a procession of soldiers crossed his path, and he looked with tender compassion at the sweaty young men, who had shoved their caps back on their heads, and with faces dulled from exhaustion looked like a proces- sion of dusty caterpillars. At the sight of these soldiers, his horror at the frivolity with which Agathe had dealt with the problem ofdivorce was dreamily softened by a joyful feeling that such a thing should be happening to his free-thinking colleague Hagauer; and this stirring in any event served to remind him again of how indispensable it was to mistrust human nature. He therefore resolved to make ruthlessly
From the Posthu11WUs Papers · 1139
plain to Agathe-should the occasion actually, and through no fault ofhis own, arise-that selfish energies could in the last analysis have only a destructive effect, and that she should subordinate her per- sonal despair, however great it might be, to moral insight, and that the true basic touchstone of life is living together.
But whether the occasion was once again to offer itself was evi- dently just the point toward which Lindner's mental powers were so excitedly urging him.
"There are many people with noble qualities, which are just not yet gathered into an unshakable conviction," he thought ofsaying to Agathe; but how should he do so ifhe did not see her again; and yet the thought that she might pay him a visit offended all his ideas about tender and chaste femininity. "It simply has to be put before her as strongly as possible, and immediately! " he resolved, and because he had arrived at this resolution he also no longer doubted that she really would appear. He strongly admonished him- selfto selflessly work through with her the reasons she would advance to excuse her behavior before he went on to convince her of her er- rors. With unwavering patience he would strike her to the heart, and after he had imagined that to himself too, a noble feeling of fraternal attention and solicitude came over his own heart, a consecration as between brother and sister, which, he noted, was to rest entirely on those relations that the sexes maintain with each other. "Hardly any men," he cried out, edified, "have the slightest notion how deep a need noble feminine natures have for the noble man, who simply deals with the human being in the woman without being immediately distracted by her exaggerated desire to please him sexually! " These ideas must have given him wings, for he had no idea how he had got to the terminus of the trolley line, but suddenly there he was; and before getting in he took off his glasses in order to wipe them free of the condensation with which his heated inner processes had coated them. Then he swung himself into a comer, glanced around in the empty car, got his fare ready, looked into the conductor's face, and felt him- self entirely at his post, ready to begin the return journey in that admi- rable communal institution called the municipal trolley. He discharged the fatigue ofhis walk with a contented yawn, in order to
stiffen himselffor new duties, and summed up the astonishing digres- sions to which he had surrendered himselfin the sentence: "Forget- ting oneselfis the healthiest thing a human being can do! "
THE DO-GOODER
Against the unpredictable stirrings of a passionate heart there is only one reliable remedy: strict and absolutely unremitting planning; and it was to this, which he had acquired early, that Lindner owed the successes of his life as well as the belief that he was by nature a man of strong passions and hard to discipline. He got up early in the morning, at the same hour summer,and winter, and at a washbasin on a small iron table washed his face, neck, hands, and one seventh of his body-every day a different seventh, of course-after which he rubbed the rest with a wet towel, so that the bath, that time-consum- ing and voluptuous procedure, could be limited to one evening every two weeks. There was in this a clever victory over matter, and who- ever has had occasion to consider the inadequate washing facilities and uncomfortable beds that famous people who have entered his- tory have had to endure will hardly be able to dismiss the conjecture that there must be a connection between iron beds and iron people, even ifwe ought not exaggerate it, since otherwise we might soon be sleeping on beds of nails. So here, moreover, was an additional task for reflection, and after Lindner had washed himself in the glow of stimulating examples he also took advantage of drying himself off to do a few exercises by skillful manipulation of his towel, but only in moderation. It is, after all, a fateful mistake to base health on the animal part ofone's person; it is, rather, intellectual and moral nobil- ity that produce the body's capacity for resistance; and even if this does not always apply to the individual, it most certainly applies on a larger scale, for the power of a people is the consequence of the proper spirit, and not the other way around. Therefore Lindner had also bestowed upon his rubbings-down a special and careful training, which avoided all the uncouth grabbing that constitutes the usual male idolatry but on the contrary involved the whole personality, by combining the movements of his body with uplifting inner tasks. He especially abhorred the perilous worship of smartness that, coming
From the Posthumous Papers · 1 1 4 1
from abroad, was already hovering as an ideal before many in his fa- therland; and distancing himself from this was an integral part of his morning exercises. He substituted for it, with great care, a states- manlike attitude in the calisthenic application of his limbs, combin- ing the tensing ofhis willpower with timely yielding, the overcoming ofpain with commonsense humanity, and ifperchance, in a conclud- ing burst ofcourage, he jumped over an upside-down chair, he did so with as much reserve as self-confidence. Such an unfolding of the whole wealth ofhuman talents made his calisthenics, in the few years since he had taken them up, true exercises in virtue for him.
That much can also be said in passing against the bane of transi- tory self-assertion that, under the slogan of body care, has taken pos- sessionofthehealthyideaofsports,andthereis evenmoretobesaid against the peculiarly feminine form of this bane, beauty care. Lind- ner flattered himself that in this, too, he was one of the few who knew how to properly apportion light and shadow, and thus, as he was ever ready to remove from the spirit of the times an unblem- ished kernel, he also recognized the moral obligation of appearing as healthy and agreeable as he possibly could. For his part, he carefully groomed his beard and hair every morning, kept his nails short and meticulously clean, put lotion on his skin and a little protective oint- ment on the feet that in the course ofthe day had to endure so much: given all this, who would care to deny that it is lavishing too much attention on the body when a worldly woman spends her whole day at it? But if it really could not be otherwise-he gladly approached women tenderly, because among them might be wives of very wealthy men-than that bathwaters and facials, ointments and packs, ingenious treatments ofhands and feet, masseurs and friseurs, succeed one another in almost unbroken sequence, he advocated as a counterweight to such one-sided care of the body the concept of inner beauty care-inner care, for short-which he had formulated in a public speech. May cleanliness thus serve as an example to re- mind us ofinner purity; rubbing with ointment, ofobligations toward the soul; hand massage, ofthat fate bywhich we are bound; and ped- icure, that even in that which is more deeply concealed we should offer a fair aspect. Thus he transferred his image to women, but left it to them to adapt the details to the needs of their sex.
Of course it might have happened that someone who was unpre-
1142 • THE MAN WITH 0 U T QUALITIES
pared for the sight Lindner offered during his health and beauty worship and, even more, while he was washing and drying himself, might have been moved to laughter: for seen merely as physical ges- tures, his movements evoked the image of a multifariously turning and twisting swan's neck, which, moreover, consisted not of curves but of the sharp element of knees and elbows; the shortsighted eyes, freed from their spectacles, looked with a martyred expression into the distance, as if their gaze had been snipped off close to the eye, and beneath his beard his soft lips pouted with the pain of exertion. But whoever understood how to see spiritually might well experience the spectacle of seeing inner and outer forces begetting each other in ripely considered counterpoint; and if Lindner was thinking mean- while of those poor women who spend hours in their bathrooms and dressing rooms and solipsistically inflame their imaginations through a cult of the body, he could seldom refrain from reflecting on how much good it would do them if they could once watch him. Hannless and pure, they welcome the modem care of the body and go along with it because in their ignorance they do not suspect that such exag- gerated attention devoted to their animal part might all too easily awaken in it claims that could destroy life unless strictly reined in!
Indeed, Lindner transformed absolutely everything he came in contact with into a moral imperative; and whether he was in clothes or not, every hour of the day until he entered dreamless sleep was filled with some momentous content for which that hour had been permanently reserved. He slept for seven hours; his teaching obliga- tions, which the Ministry had limited in consideration of his well- regarded writing activity, claimed three to five hours a day, in which was included the lecture on pedagogy he held twice weekly at the university; five consecutive hours-almost twenty thousand in a dec- ade! -were reserved for reading; two and a half served for the set- ting down on paper of his own articles, which flowed without pause like a clear spring from the inner rocks of his personality; mealtimes claimed an hour every day; an hour was dedicated to a walk and simultaneously to the elucidation of major questions of life and pro- fession, while another was dedicated to the traveling back and forth determined by his profession and consecrated also to what Lindner called his "little musings," concentrating the mind on the content of an activity that had recently transpired or that was to come; while
From the Posthumous Papers · I I 43
other fragments of time were reserved, in part permanently, in part alternating within the framework of the week, for dressing and un- dressing, gymnastics, letters, household affairs, official business, and profitable socializing. And it was only natural that this planning o f his life not only was carried out along its more general disciplinary lines but also involved all sorts of particular anomalies, such as Sunday with its nondaily obligations, the longer cross-country hike that took place every two weeks, or the bathtub soak, and it was natural, too, for the plan to contain the doubling of daily activities that there has not yet been room to mention, to which belonged, by way of exam- ple, Lindner's association with his son at mealtimes, or the character training involved in patiently surmounting unforeseen difficulties while getting dressed at speed.
Such calisthenics for the character are not only possible but also extremely useful, and Lindner had a spontaneous preference for them. "In the small things I do right I see an image of all the big things that are done right in the world" could already be read in Goe- the, and in this sense a mealtime can serve as well as a task set by fate as the place for the fostering of self-control and for the victory over covetousness; indeed, in the resistance of a collar button, inaccessi- ble to all reflection, the mind that probes more deeply could even learn how to handle children. Lindner of course did not by any means regard Goethe as a model in everything; but what exquisite humility had he not derived from driving a nail into a wall with ham- mer blows, undertaking to mend a tom glove himself, or repair a bell that was out oforder: ifin doing these things he smashed his fingers or stuck himself, the resulting pain was outweighed, if not immedi- ately then after a few horrible seconds, by joy at the industrious spirit of mankind that resides even in such trifling dexterities and their ac- quisition, although the cultivated person today imagines himself (to his general disadvantage) as above all that. He felt with pleasure the Goethean spirit resurrected in him, and enjoyed it all the more in that thanks to the methods of a more advanced age he also felt supe- rior to the great classic master's practical dilettantism and his occa- sional delight in discreet dexterity. Lindner was in fact free of idolatry of the old writer, who had lived in a world that was only half- way enlightened and therefore overestimated the Enlightenment, and he took Goethe as a model more in charming small things than in
1144 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
serious and great things, quite apart from the seductive Minister's notorious sensuality.
His admiration was therefore carefully meted out. There had nev- ertheless been evident in it for some time a remarkable peevishness that often stimulated Lindner to reflection. He had always believed that his view of what was heroic was more proper than Goethe's. Lindner did not think much of Scaevolas who stick their hands in the fire, Lucretias who run themselves through, or Judiths who chop the heads off the oppressors of their honor-themes that Goethe would have found meaningful anytime, although he had never treated them; indeed, Lindner was convinced, in spite of the authority of the classics, that those men and women, who had committed crimes for their personal convictions, would nowadays belong not on a pedestal but rather in the courtroom. To their inclination to inflict severe bodily injury he opposed an "internalized and social" concept of courage. In thought and discourse he even went so far as to place a duly pondered entry on the subject into his classbook, or the respon- sible reflection on how his housekeeper was to be blamed for precip- itate eagerness, because in that state one should not be permitted to follow one's own passions only, but also had to take the other per- son's motives into account. And when he said such things he had the impression of looking back, in the well-fitting plain clothes of a later century, on the bombastic moral costume of an earlier one.
He was by no means oblivious to the aura of absurdity that hov- ered around such examples, but he called it the laughter of the spiri- tual rabble, and he had two solid reasons for this. First, not only did he maintain that every occasion could be equally well exploited for the strengthening or weakening of human nature, but it seemed to him that occasions of the smaller kind were better suited for strengthening it than the large ones, since the human inclination to arrogance and vanity is involuntarily encouraged by the shining ex- ercise of virtue, while its inconspicuous everyday exercise consists simply of pure, unsalted virtue. And second, systematic management of the people's moral good (an expression Lindner loved, along with the military expression "breeding and discipline," with its overtones of both peasantry and being fresh from the factory) would also not despise the "small occasions," for the reason that the godless belief advanced by "liberals and Freemasons" that great human accom-
From the Posthu11WUs Papers · 1145
plishments arise so to speak out ofnothing, even ifit is called Genius, was already at that time going out offashion. The sharpened focus of public attention had already caused the "hero," whom earlier times had made into a phenomenon of arrogance, to be recognized as a tireless toiler over details who prepares himself to be a discoverer through unremitting diligence in learning, as an athlete who must handle his body as cautiously as an opera singer his voice, and who as political rejuvenator ofthe people must always repeat the same thing at countless meetings. And of this Goethe, who all his life had re- mained a comfortable citizen-aristocrat, had had no idea, while he, Lindner, saw it coming! So it was comprehensible, too, that Lindner thought he was protecting Goethe's better part against the ephem- eral part when he preferred the considerate and companionable, which Goethe had possessed in such gratifying measure, to the tragic Goethe; it might also be argued that it did not happen without reflec- tion when, for no other reason than that he was a pedant, he consid- ered himself a person threatened by dangerous passions.
Truly, it shortly afterward became one of the most popular human possibilities to subject oneself to a "regimen," which may be applied with the same success to overweight as it is to politics and intellectual life. In a regimen, patience, obedience, regularity, equanimity, and other highly respectable qualities become the major components of the individual in his private, personal capacity, while everything that is unbridled, violent, addictive, and dangerous, which he, as a crazy romantic, cannot dispense with either, has its admirable center in the "regimen. " Apparently this remarkable inclination to submit oneself to a regimen, or lead a fatiguing, unpleasant, and sorry life according to the prescription of a doctor, athletic coach, or some other tyrant (although one could just as well ignore it with the same failure rate), is a result of the movement toward the worker-warrior-anthill state toward which the world is moving: but here lay the boundary that Lindner was not able to cross, nor could he see that far, because his Goethean heritage blocked it.
To be sure, his piety was not of a sort that could not have been reconciled to this movement; he did leave the divine to God, and undiluted saintliness to the saints; but he could not grasp the thought of renouncing his personality, and there hovered before him as an ideal for the world a community offully responsible moral personali-
1146 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
ties, which as God's civil army would certainly have to struggle against the inconstancy of baser nature and make everyday life a shrine, but would also decorate this shrine with the masterpieces of art and science. Had someone counted Lindner's division ofthe day, it would have struck him that whatever the version, it added up to only twenty-three hours; sixty minutes of a full day were lacking, and ofthese sixty minutes, forty were invariably set aside for conversation and kindly investigation into the striving and nature ofother people, as part of which he also counted visits to art exhibitions, concerts, and entertainments. He hated these events. Almost every time, their content affronted his mind; as he saw it, it was the infamous over- wrought nerves of the age that were letting off steam in these over- blown and aimless constructions, with their superfluous stimulants and genuine suffering, with their insatiability and inconstancy, their inquisitiveness and unavoidable moral decay. He even smiled dis- concertedly into his scanty beard when on such occasions he saw "or- dinary men and women" idolize culture with flushed cheeks. They did not know that the life force is enhanced by being circumscribed, not by being fragmented. They all suffered from the fear of not hav- ing time for everything, not knowing that having time means nothing more than not having any time for everything. Lindner had realized that the bad nerves did not come from work and its pressure, which in our age are blamed for them, but that on the contrary they came from culture and humanitarianism, from breaks in routine, the inter- ruption ofwork, the free minutes in which the individual would like to live for himself and seek out something he can regard as beautiful, or fun, or important: these are the moments out ofwhich the mias- mas of impatience, unhappiness, and meaninglessness arise. This was what he felt, and ifhe had had his way-that is, according to the visions he had at such moments-he would sweep away all these art workshops with an iron broom, and festivals oflabor and edification, tightly tied to daily activity, would take the place of such so-called spiritual events; it really would require no more than excising from an entire age those few minutes a day that owed their pathological existence to a falsely understood liberality. But beyond making a few allusions, he had never summoned up the decisiveness to stand up for this seriously and in public.
Lindner suddenly looked up, for during these dreamy thoughts he
From the Posthu11WUs Papers · 1147
had still been riding in the trolley; he felt irritated and depressed, as one does from being irresolute and blocked, and for a moment he had the confused impression that he had been thinking about Agathe the entire time. She was accorded the additional honor that an an- noyance that had begun innocently as pleasure in Goethe now fused with her, although no reason for this could be discerned. From habit, Lindner now admonished himself. "Dedicate part of your isolation to quiet reflection about your fellowman, especially ifyou should not be in accord with him; perhaps you will. then learn to better under- stand and utilize what repels you, and will know how to be indulgent toward his weaknesses and encourage his virtue, which may simply be overawed," he whispered with mute lips. This was one of the for- mulas he had coined against the dubious activities of so-called cul- ture and in which he usually found the composure to bear them; but this did not happen, and this time it was apparently not righteousness that was missing. He pulled out his watch, which confirmed that he had accorded Agathe more time than was allotted. But he would not have been able to do so if in his daily schedule there had not been those twenty leftover minutes set aside for unavoidable slippage. He discovered that this Loss Account, this emergency supply of time, whose precious drops were the oil that lubricated his daily works, even on this unusual day, would still hold ten spare minutes when he walked into his house. Did this cause his courage to grow? Another of his bits of wisdom occurred to him, for the second time this day: "The more unshakable your patience becomes," said Lindner to Lindner, "the more surely you will strike your opponent to the heart! " And to strike to the heart was a pleasurable sensation, which also corresponded to the heroic in his nature; that those so struck
never strike back was of no importance.
1148 · THE MAN WITH 0 U T QUALITIES
41
BROTHER AND SISTER THE NEXT MORNING
Ulrich and his sister came to speak of this man once more when they saw each other again the morning after Agathe's sudden disappear- ance from their cousin's party. On the previous day Ulrich had left the excited and quarrelsome gathering soon after she had, but had not got around to asking her why she had up and left him; for she had locked herself in, and was either already sleeping or purposely ignor- ing the listener with his soft inquiry as to whether she was still awake. Thus the day she had met the curious stranger had closed just as ca- priciously as it had begun. Nor was any information to be had from her this morning. She herself did not know what her real feelings were. When she thought ofher husband's letter, which had forced its way to her and which she had not been able to bring herself to read again, although from time to time she noticed it lying beside her, it seemed to her incredible that not even a day had passed since she had received it; so often had her condition changed in the meantime. Sometimes she thought the letter deserved the horror tag "ghosts from the past"; still, it really frightened her, too. And at times it aroused in her merely a slight unease of the kind that can be aroused by the unexpected sight of a clock that has stopped; at other times, she was plunged into futile brooding that the world from which this letter came was claiming to be the real world for her. That which inwardly did not so much as touch her surrounded her outwardly in an invisible web that was not yet broken. She involuntarily compared this with the things that had happened between her and her brother since the arrival of this letter. Above all they had been conversations, and despite the fact that one of them had even brought her to think of suicide, its contents had been forgotten, though they were evi- dently still ready to reawaken, and not surmounted. So it really did not matter much what the subject of a conversation was, and ponder- ing her heart-stopping present life against the letter, she had the im- pression of a profound, constant, incomparable, but powerless
From the Posthumous Papers · 1149
movement. From all this she felt this morning partly exhausted and disillusioned, and partly tender and restless, like a fever patient after his temperature has gone down.
In this state of animated helplessness she said suddenly: "To em- pathize in such a way that one truly experiences another person's mood must be indescribably difficult! " To her surprise, Ulrich re- plied immediately: "There are people who imagine they can do it. " He said this ill-humoredly and offensively, having only half under- stood her. Her words caused something to move aside and make room for an annoyance that had been left behind the day before, al- though he ought to find it contemptible. And so this conversation came to an end for the time being.
The morning had brought a day of rain and confined brother and sister to their house. The leaves of the trees in front of the windows glistened desolately, like wet linoleum; the roadway behind the gaps in the foliage was as shiny as a rubber boot. The eyes could hardly get a hold on the wet view. Agathe was sony for her remark, and no lon- ger knew why she had made it. She sighed and began again: "Today the world reminds me of our nursery. " She was alluding to the bare upper rooms in their father's house and the astonishing reunion they had both celebrated with them. That might be farfetched; but she added: "It's a person's first sadness, surrounded by his toys, that al- ways keeps coming back! " After the recent stretch of good weather, expectations had automatically been directed toward a lovely day, and this filled the mind with frustrated desire and impatient melan- choly. Ulrich, too, now looked out the window. Behind the gray, streaming wall of water, will-o'-the-wisps of outings never taken, open green, and an endless world beckoned; and perhaps, too, the ghost of a desire to be alone once more and free again to move in any direction, the sweet pain ofwhich is the story ofthe Passion and also the Resurrection of love. He turned to his sister with something of this still in the expression on his face, and asked her almost vehe- mently: ''I'm surely not one of those people who can respond em- pathically to others? ''
"No, you really aren't! " she responded, and smiled at him.
"But just what such people presume," he went on, for it was only now that he understood how seriously her words had been meant, "namely, that people can suffer together, is as impossible for them as
II50 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
it is for anyone else. At most they have a nursing skill in guessing what someone in need likes to hear-"
"In which case they must know what would help him," Agathe objected.
"Not at all! " Ulrich asserted more stubbornly. "Apparently the only comfort they give is by talking: whoever talks a lot discharges another person's sorrow drop by drop, the way rain discharges the electricity in a cloud. That's the well-known alleviation of every grief through talking! "
Agathe was silent.
"People like your new friend," Ulrich now said provocatively, "perhaps work the way many cough remedies do: they don't get rid of the sore throat but soothe its irritation, and then it often heals by itself! "
In any other situation he could have expected his sister's assent, but Agathe, who since yesterday had been in a peculiar frame of mind because ofher sudden weakness for a man whose worth Ulrich doubted, smiled unyieldingly and played with her fingers. Ulrich jumped up and said urgently: "But I know him, even if only fleet- ingly; I've heard him speak several times! "
"You even called him a 'vacuous fool,'" Agathe interjected.
"And why not? '' Ulrich defended it. "People like him know less than anyone about how to empathize with another person! They don't even know what it means. They simply don't feel the difficulty, the terrible equivocation, of this demand! "
Agathe then asked: 'Why do you think the demand is equivocal? "
Now Ulrich was silent. He even lit a cigarette to underline that he was not going to answer; they had, after all, talked about it enough yesterday. Agathe knew this too. She did not want to provoke any new explanations. These explanations were as enchanting and as dev- astating as looking at the sky when it forms gray, pink, and yellow cities of ,marble cloud. She thought, "How fine it would be if he would only say: 'I want to love you as myself, and I can love you that way better than any other woman because you are my sister! ' " But because he was not about to say it, she took a small pair of scissors and carefully cut off a thread that was sticking out somewhere, as if this were at that moment the only thing in the entire world that de- served her full attention. Ulrich observed this with the same atten-
From the Posthumous Papers · 1 1 5 1
tion. She was at this instant more seductively present to all his senses than ever, and he guessed something ofwhat she was hiding, even if not everything. For she meanwhile had had time to resolve: if Ulrich could forget that she herself was laughing at the stranger who pre- sumed he could be of help here, he was not going to find it out from her now. Moreover, she had a happy presentiment about Lindner. She did not know him. But that he had offered his assistance self- lessly and wholeheartedly must have inspired confidence in her, for a joyous melody of the heart, a hard trumpet blast of will, confidence, and pride, which were in salutary opposition to her own state, now seemed to be playing for her and refreshing her beyond all the com- edy of the situation. "No matter how great difficulties may be, they mean nothing if one seriously wills oneself to deal with them! . . she thought, and was unexpectedly overcome by remorse, so that she now broke the silence in something of the way a flower is broken off so that two heads can bend over it, and added as a second question to her first: "Do you still remember that you always said that 'love thy neighbor' is as different from an obligation as a cloudburst of bliss is from a drop of satisfaction? . .
She was astonished at the vehemence with which Ulrich answered her: ''I'm not unaware of the irony of my situation. Since yesterday, and apparently always, I have done nothing but raise an army of rea- sons why this love for one's neighbor is no joy but a terribly magnifi- cent, half-impossible task! So nothing could be more understandable than that you're seeking protection with a person who has no idea about any of this, and in your position I'd do the same! . .
"But it's not true at all that I'm doing that! . . Agathe replied curtly.
Ulrich could not keep himself from throwing her a glance that held as much gratitude as mistrust. "It's hardly worth the bother of talking about,. . he assured her. "I really didn't want to either. . . He hesitated a moment and then went on: "But look, if you do have to love someone else the way you love yourself, however much you love him it really remains a self-deceiving lie, because you simply can't feel along with him how his head or his finger hurts. It is absolutely unbearable that one really can't be part of a person one loves, and it's an absolutely simple thing. That's the way the world is organized. We wear our animal skin with the hair inside and cannot shake it out. And this horror within the tenderness, this nightmare of coming to a
1152 • THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
standstill in getting close to one another, is something that the peo- ple who are conventionally correct, the 'let's be precise' people, never experience. What they call their empathy is actually a substi- tute for it, which they use to make sure they didn't miss anything! "
Agathe forgot that she had just said something that was as close to a lie as a non-lie. She saw illuminated in Ulrich's words the disillusion over the vision of sharing in each other, before which the usual proofs of love, goodness, and sympathy lost their meaning; and she understood that this was the reason he spoke of the world more often than ofhimself, for ifit was to be more than idle dreaming, one must remove oneself along with reality like a door from its hinges. At this moment she was far away from the man with the sparse beard and timid severity who wanted to do her good. But she couldn't say it. She merely looked at Ulrich and then looked away, without speaking. Then she did something or other, then they looked at each other again. After the shortest time the silence gave the impression of hav- ing lasted for hours.
The dream of being two people and one: in truth the effect of this fabrication was at many moments not unlike that of a dream that has stepped outside the boundaries of night, and now it was hovering in such a state of feeling between faith and denial, in which reason had nothing more to say. It was precisely the body's unalterable constitu- tion by which feeling was referred back to reality. These bodies, since they loved each other, displayed their existence before the in- quiring gaze, for surprises and delights that renewed themselves like a peacock's tail sweeping back and forth in currents of desire; but as soon as one's glance no longer lingered on the hundred eyes of the spectacle that love offers to love, but attempted to penetrate into the thinking and feeling being behind it, these bodies transformed them- selves into horrible prisons. One found oneselfagain separated from the other, as so often before, not knowing what to say, because for everything that desire still had to say or repeat a far too remote, pro- tective, covering gesture was needed, for which there was no solid foundation.
And it was not long before the bodily motions, too, involuntarily grew slower and congealed. The rain beyond the windows was still filling the air with its twitching curtain of drops and the lullaby of sounds through whose monotony the sky-high desolation flowed
From the Posthumous Papers · 1153
downward. It seemed to Agathe that her body had been alone for centuries, and time flowed as ifit were flowing with the water from the sky. The light in the room now was like that of a hollowed-out silver die. Blue, sweetish scarves of smoke from heedlessly burning cigarettes coiled around the two of them. She no longer knew whether she was tender and sensitive to the core of her being or im- patient and out of sorts with her brother, whose stamina she ad- mired. She sought out his eyes and found them hovering in this uncertain atmosphere like two dead moons. At the same instant something happened to her that seemed to come not from her will but from outside: the surging water beyond the windows suddenly became fleshy, like a fruit that has been sliced, and its swelling soft- ness pressed between herself and Ulrich. Perhaps she was ashamed or even hated herself a little for it, but a completely sensual wanton- ness-and not at all only what one calls an unleashing of the senses but also, and far more, a voluntary and unconstrained draining of the senses away from the world-began to gain control over her; she was just able to anticipate it and even hide it from Ulrich by telling him with the speediest ofall excuses that she had forgotten to take care of something, jumped up, and left the room.
UP JACOB'S LADDER INTO A STRANGER'S DWELLING
Hardly had that been done when she resolved to look up the odd man who had offered her his help, and immediately carried out her resolution. She wanted to confess to him that she no longer had any idea what to do with herself. She had no clear picture of him; a per- son one has seen through tears that dried up in his company will not easily appear to someone the way he actually is. So on the way, she thought about him. She thought she was thinking clearheadedly, but
1154 · THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
actually it was fantasy. She hastened through the streets, bearing before her eyes the light from her brother's room. It had not been a proper kind of light at all, she considered; she should rather say that all the objects in the room had suddenly lost their composure, or a kind of understanding that they must certainly have otherwise had. But if it were the case that it was only she herself who had lost her composure, or her understanding, it would not have been limited just to her, for there had also been awakened in the objects a libera- tion that was astir with miracles. "The next moment it would have peeled us out of our clothes like a silver knife, without our having moved a finger! " she thought.
She gradually let herself be calmed by the rain, whose harmless gray water bounced off her hat and down her coat, and her thoughts became more measured. This was perhaps helped, too, by the simple clothes she had hastily thrown on, for they directed her memory back to schoolgirl walks without an umbrella, and to guiltless states. As she walked she even thought unexpectedly of an innocent summer she had spent with a girlfriend and the friend's parents on a small island in the north: there, between the harsh splendors of sea and sky, she had discovered a seabirds' nesting place, a hollow filled with white, soft bird feathers. And now she knew: the man to whom she was being drawn reminded her of this nesting place. The idea cheered her. At that time, to be sure, in view of the strict sincerity that is part of youth's need for experience, she would have hardly let it pass that at the thought of the softness and whiteness she would be abandon- ing herself to an unearthly shudder, as illogically, indeed as youth- fully and immaturely, as she was now allowing to happen with such assiduity. This shudder was for Professor Lindner; but the unearthly was also for him.
The intimation, amounting to certainty, that everything that hap- pened to her was connected as in a fairy tale with something hidden was familiar to her from all the agitated periods of her life; she sensed it as a nearness, felt it behind her, and was inclined to wait for the hour of the miracle, when she would have nothing to do but close her eyes and lean back.