No More Learning

In her ample body every stimulus took an astonishingly long time to reach the brain, and it happened that her eyes began to glaze over for no apparent reason in midafter- noon, although the night before they had been fixed on a point on the ceiling as though she were observing a fly. Or else in the midst of a complete silence she might begin to laugh at a joke she just now understood, having listened to it days ago without any sign of under- standing it. When she had no particular reason to be otherwis~, she was completely ladylike. She could never be made to tell how she had got into her line ofwork in the first place. She apparently did not quite remember this herself. But it was clear that she regarded the work of a cabaret singer as a necessary part of life, bound up with everything she had ever heard about greatness in art and artists, so that it seemed to her altogether right, uplifting, and refined to step out every evening onto a tiny stage enveloped in billowing cigar haze to sing songs known for their heartrending appeal. Ifthings needed livening up a bit she did not, of course, shrink from slipping in some- thing gamy now and then, but she was quite sure that the prima donna at the Imperial Opera did exactly the same.
Of course, if the art of trading for money not the entire person, as usual, but only the body must be called prostitution, then Leona oc- casionally engaged in prostitution. But if you have lived for nine years, as she had from the age of sixteen, on the miserable pay of the lowest dives, with your head full ofthe prices ofcostumes and under- wear, the deductions, greediness, and caprices of the owners, the commissions on the food and drink of the patrons warming up to their fun, and the price of a room in the nearby hotel, day after day, including the fights and the business calculations, then everything the layman enjoys as a night on the town adds up to a profession full ofits own l9gic, objectivity, and class codes. Prostitution especially is a matter in which it makes all the difference whether you see it from above or from below.
But even though Leona's attitude toward sexual questions was completely businesslike, she had her romantic side as well. Only with her, everything high-flown, vain, and extravagant, all her feelings of pride, envy, lust, ambition, and self-abandonment, in short, the driv-
ing forces of her personality and upward social mobility, were an- chored by some freak of nature not in the so-called heart but in the gut, the eating processes-which in fact were regularly associated in earlier times and still are today, as can be seen among primitives and the carousing peasantry, who manage to express social standing and all sorts of other human distinctions at their ritual feasts by overeat- ing, with all the side effects. At the tables in the honky-tonk where she worked, Leona did her job; but what she dreamed of was a cava- lier who would sweep her away from all this by means of an affair as long as one of her engagements and allow her to sit grandly in a grand restaurant studying a grand menu. She would then have pre- ferred to eat everything on the menu at once, yet the pain of having to choose was sweetened by the satisfaction of having a chance to show that she knew how one had to choose, how one put together an exquisite repast. Only in the choice of desserts could she let herself go, so that reversing the . usual order she ended up turning dessert into an extensive second supper. With black coffee and stimulating quantities of drink Leona restored her capacities, then egged herself on through a sequence of special treats until her passion was finally quenched. Her body was now so stuffed with choice concoctions that it was ready to split at the seams. She then looked around in indolent triumph and, though never talkative, enjoyed reminiscing about the expensive delights she had consumed. She would speak of Polmone a la Torlogna or Pommes ala Melville with the studied casualness with which some people affectedly let drop the name of a prince or a lord of the same name they have met.
Because public appearances with Leona were not exactly to Ul- rich's taste, he usually moved her feedings to his house, with the ant- lers and the stylish furniture for an audi. ence. Here, however, she felt cheated of her social satisfaction, and whenever the man without qualities tempted her to these private excesses with the choicest fare ever supplied by a restaurant chef she felt ill-used, exactly like a woman who realizes she is not being loved for her soul. She was a beauty, she was a singer, she had no reason to hide, as several dozen men she aroused every evening would have testified. Yet this man, although he wanted to be alone with her, would not even give her the satisfaction of moaning "Leona, you devil, your ass is driving me crazy! " and licking his mustache with desire when he so much as
A Sort ofIntroduction · 19
20 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
looked at her, as she wru; accustomed to expect from her gallants. Although she stuck to him faithfully Le~>na despised him a little, and Ulrich knew it. He also knew well what was expected of him, but the days when he could have brought himself to say such things and still had a mustache were too long gone. To be no longer able to do some- thing one used to be able to do, no matter how foolish it was, is ex- actly as ifapoplexy has struck an arm and a leg. His eyeballs twitched when he looked at her after food and drink had gone to her head. Her beauty could be gently lifted off her. It was the beauty of that duchess whom Scheffel's Saint Ekkehard had carried over the con- vent's threshold, the beauty of the great lady with the falcon on her glove, the beauty of the legendary Empress Elizabeth of Austria, with her heavy crown of braids, a delight for people who were all dead. An~ to put itprecisely, she also brought to mind the divine Juno-not the eternal and imperishable goddess herself, but the quality that a vanished or vanishing era called "Junoesque. " Thus was the dream of life only loosely draped over its substance.
But Leona knew that such elegant entertainment entitled the'host to something more than a guest who was. merely there to be gaped at, even when he asked for nothing more; so she rose to her feet as soon as she was able and serenely broke into full-throated song. Her friend regarded such an evening as a ripped-out page, alive with all sorts of suggestions and ideas b':lt mummified, like everything tom from its context, full of the tyranny of that eternally fixed stance that accounts for the uncanny fascination of tableaux vivants, as though life had suddenly been given a sleeping pill and was now standing there stiff, full of inner meaning, sharply outlined, and yet, in sum, making absolutely no sense at all.
7
IN A WEAK MOMENT ULRICH ACQUIRES A NEW MISTRESS
One morning Ulrich came home looking a mess. His clothes hung in shreds, he had to wrap his bruised head in a cold towel, his watch and wallet were gone. He had no idea whether he had been robbed by the three men with whom he had got into a fight or whether a passing Samaritan had quietly lifted them while he lay unconscious on the pavement. He went to bed, and while his battered limbs, tenderly borne up and enveloped, were restored to being, he mulled over his adventure once more. ·
The three heads had suddenly loomed up in front of him; perhaps he had brushed up against one of the men at that late, lonely hour, for his thoughts had been wandering. But these faces were already set in anger and moved scowling into the circle of the lamplight. At that point he made a mistake. He should have instantly recoiled as if in fear, backing hard into the fellow who had stepped into him, or jabbing an elbow into his stomach, and tried. to escape; he could not take on three strong men single-handed. He resisted the idea that the three faces suddenly glaring at him out ofthe night with rage and scorn were simply after his money, but chose to see them as a spon- taneous materialization of free-floating hostility. Even as the hooli- gans were cursing at him he toyed with the notion that they might not perhaps be hooligans at all but citizens like himself, only slightly tipsy and freed of their inhibitions, whose attention had fastened on his passing form and who now discharged on him the hatred that is always ready and waiting for him or for any stranger, like a thunder- storm in the atmosphere. There were times when he felt something of the sort himself. Regrettably, a great many people nowadays feel antagonistic toward a great many other people. It is a basic trait of civilization that man deeply mistrusts those who are outside his own circle, so it is not only the Teuton who looks down on the Jew but also the soccer player who regards the pianist as an incomprehensible
21
22 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
and inferior creature. Ultimately a thing exists only by virtue of its boundaries, which means by a more or less hostile act against its sur- roundings: without the Pope there would have been no Luther, and without the pagans no Pope, so there is no getting away from the fact that man's deepest social instinct is his antisocial instinct. Not that Ulrich thought this out in such detail, but he knew this condition of vague atmospheric hostility with which the air of our era is charged, and when it suddenly comes to a head in the form of three strangers who lash out like thunder and lightning and then afterward vanish again forever, it is almost a relief.
In any case, facing three such louts, he apparently indulged in too much thinking. For although the first one who jumped him, antici- pated by Ulrich with a blow on the chin, went flying back, the sec- ond, who should have been felled in a flash immediately afterward, was only grazed by Ulrich's fist because a blow from behind with a heavy object had nearly cracked Ulrich's skull. Ulrich's knees buck- led, and he felt a hand grabbing at him; recovering with that almost unnatural lucidity of the body that usually follows an initial collapse, he struck out at the tangle of strange bodies but was hammered down by fists growing larger all the time.
Satisfied with his analysis of what had gone wrong a5 primarily an athlete's slipup-anyone can jump too short on occasion-Ulrich, whose nerves were s~ in excellent shape, quietly fell asleep, with precisely the same delight in the descending spirals of fading con- sciousness that he had dimly felt·during his defeat.
When he woke up again he checked to make sure he had not been seriously hurt, and considered his experience once again. A brawl al- ways leaves a bad taste in the mouth, that ofan overhasty intimacy, as it were, and leaving aside the fact that he had been the one attacked, Ulrich somehow felt that he had behaved improperly. But in what way? Close by those streets where there is a policeman every three hundred paces to avenge the slightest offense against law and order lie other streets that call for the same strength of body and mind as a jungle. Mankind produces Bibles and guns, tuberculosis and tuber- culin. It is democratic, with kings and nobles; builds churches and, against the churches, universities; turns cloisters into barracks, but assigns field chaplains to the barracks. It naturally arms hoodlums with lead-filled rubber truncheons to beat a fellow man within an
inch of his life and then provides featherbeds for the lonely, mis- treated body, like the one now holding Ulrich as if filled with respect and consideration. It is the old story ofthe contradictions, the incon- sistency, and the imperfection of life. It makes us smile or sigh. But not Ulrich. He hated this mixture of resignation and infatuation in regard to life that makes most people put up with its inconsistencies and inadequacies as a doting maiden aunt puts up with a young nephew's boorishness. Still, he did not immediately leap out of bed when it looked as though he were profiting from the disorderliness of human affairs by lingering there, because in many ways it is only a premature compromise with one's conscience at the expense of the general cause, a short circuit, an evasion into the private sphere, when one avoids doing wrong and does the right thing for one's own person instead of working to restore order in the whole scheme of things. In fact, after his involuntary experience Ulrich saw desper- ately little value even in doing away with guns here, with monarchs there, in making some lesser or greater progress in cutting down on stupidity and viciousness, since the measure of all that is nasty and bad instantly fills up again, as if one leg of the world always slips back when the other pushes forward. One had to find the cause of this, the secret mechanism behind it! How incomparably more important that would be than merely being a good person in accordance with ob- solescent moral principles, and so in matters of morality Ulrich was attracted more to service on the general staff than to the everyday heroism of doing good.
At this point he went back in his mind to the sequel of last night's . adventure. As he regained his senses from the beating he had suf- fered, a cab stopped at the curb; the driver tried to lift up the wounded stranger by the shoulders, and a lady was bending over him with an angelic expression on her face. This child's picture-bo. ok vi- sion, natural to moments of consciousness rising from the depths, soon gave way to reality: the presence of a woman busying herself with him had the effect on Ulrich of a whiff of cologne, superficial and quickening, so that he also instantly knew that he had not been too badly damaged, and tried to rise to his feet with good grace. In this he did not succeed as smoothly as he would have liked, and the lady anxiqusly offered to drive him somewhere to get help. Ulrich asked to be taken home, and as he really still looked dazed and help-
A Sort ofIntroduction · 23
24 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
less, she granted his request. Once inside the cab, he quickly recov- ered his poise. He felt something maternally sensuous beside him, a fine cloud of solicitous idealism, in the warmth of which tiny crystals of doubt were already hatching, filling the air like softly falling snow and generating the fear of some impulsive act as he felt himself becoming a man again. He told his story, and the beautiful woman, only slightly younger than himself, around thirty, perhaps, lamented what brutes people were and felt terribly sorry for him.
Ofcourse he now launched into a lively defense ofhis experience, which was not, as he explained to the surprised motherly beauty, to be judged solely by its outcome. The fascination of such a fight, he said, was the rare chance it offered in civilian life to perform so many · varied, vigorous, yet precisely coordinated movements in response to barely perceptible signals at a speed that made conscious control quite impossible. Which is why, as every athlete knows, training must stop several days before a contest, for no other reason than that the muscles and nerves must be given time to work out the final coordi- nation among themselves, leaving the will, purpose, and conscious- ness out ofit and without anysayin the matter. Then, at the moment of. action, Ulrich went on, muscles and nerves leap and fence with the "I"; but this "1"-the whole body, the soul, the will, the central and entire person as legally distinguished from all others-is swept along by his muscles and nerves like Europa riding the Bull. When- ever it does not work out this way, if by some unlucky chance the merest ray of reflection hits this darkness, the whole effort is invari- ably doomed.
Ulrich had talked himself into a state of excitement. Basically, he now maintained, this experience of almost total ecstasy or transcen- dence of the conscious mind is akin to experiences now lost but known in the past to the mystics ofall religions, which makes it a kind o f c o n t e m p o r a r y s u b s t i t u t i o n f o r a n e t e r n a l h u m a n n e e d . E v e n i f i t is not a very good substitute it is better than nothing, and boxing or similar kinds of sport that organize this principle into a rational· sys- tem are therefore a species of theology, although one cannot expect this to be generally understood as yet.
Ulrich's lively speech to his companion was probably inspired, in part, by vanity, to make her forget the sorry state in which she had found him. Under these circumstances it was hard for her to tell
whether he was being serious or sardonic. In any case it might have seemed quite natural, perhaps even interesting, to her that he should tzy to explain theology in terms of sport, since sport is a timely topic while nobody really knows anything about theology, although there were undeniably still a great many churches around. All in all, she decided that by some lucky chance she had come to the rescue of a brilliant man, even though she did wonder, betweenwhiles, whether he might have suffered a concussion.
Ulrich, who now wanted to say something comprehensible, took the opportunity to point out in passing that even love must be re- garded as one of the religious and dangerous experiences, because it lifts people out of the arms of reason and sets them afloat with no ground under their feet.
True enough, the lady said, but sports are so rough.
So they are, Ulrich hastened to concur, sports are rough. One could say they are the precipitations of a most finely dispersed gen- eral hostility, which is deflected into athletic games. Of course, one could also say the opposite: sports bring people together, promote the team spirit and all that-which basically proves only that brutal- ity and love are no farther apart than one wing of a big, colorful, si- lent bird is from the other.
He had put the emphasis on the wings and on that bright, mute bird-a notion that did not make much sense but was charged with some of that vast sensuality with which life simultaneously satisfies all the rival contradictions in its measureless body. He now noticed that his neighbor had no idea what he was talking about, and that the soft snowfall she was diffusing inside the cab had grown thicker. So he turned to face her completely and asked whether she was perhaps repelled by such talk ofphysical matters? The doings ofthe body, he went on, were really too much in fashion, and they included a feeling of horror: because a body in perfect training has the upper hand, it responds automatically in its finely tuned way to every stimulus, so surely that its owner is left with an uncanny sensation of having to watch helplessly as his character runs off with some part of his anat- omy, as it were.
It indeed seemed that this question touched the young woman deeply; she appeared excited by his words, was breathing hard, and cautiously moved away a little. A mechanism similar to the one he
A Sort ofIntroduction · 25
26 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
had just described-heavy breathing, a flushed skin, a stronger beat- ing ofthe heart, and perhaps some other symptoms as well-seemed to have been set off inside her. B~t just then the cab stopped at Ul- rich's gate, and there was only time for him to ask with a smile for his rescuer's address so that he could thank her properly. To his aston- ishment, this favor was not granted. And so the black wrought-iron gate banged shut behind a baffied stranger. What she presumably saw were the trees of an old park rising tall and dark in the light of electric streetlights and lamps· going on in windows, and the low wings of a boudoir-like, dainty little chateau spreading out on a well- shorn emerald lawn, and a glimpse of an interior hung with pictures and lined with colorful bookshelves, as her erstwhile companion dis- appeared into an unexpectedly delightful setting.
So concluded the events oflast night, and as Ulrich was still think- ing how unpleasant it would have been if he had had to spend more time on yet another of those love affairs he had long since grown tired of, a lady was announced who would not give her name and who now entered his room heavily veiled. It was she herself, who had not wanted to give him her name and address, but had now come in per- son to cany on the adventure in her own romantically charitable fashion, on the pretext of being concerned about his health.
Two weeks later Bonadea had been his mistress for fourteen days.
8
KAKANIA
At the age when one still attaches great importance to everything connected with tailors and barbers and enjoys looking in th~·mirror, one also imagines a place where one would like to spend one's life, or at least where it would be smart to stay even if one did not care for it too much personally. For some time now such an obsessive day- dream has been a kind of super-American city where everyone
rushes about, or stands still, with a stopwatch in hand. Air and earth form an anthill traversed, level upon level, by roads live with traffic. Air trains, ground trains, underground trains, people mailed through tubes special-delivery, and chains of cars race along horizontally, while express elevators pump masses of people vertically from one traffic level to another; at the junctions, people leap from one vehicle to the next, instantly sucked in and snatched away by the rhythm of it, which makes a syncope, a pause, a little gap of twenty seconds during which a word might be hastily exchanged with someone else. Questions and answers synchronize like meshing gears; everyone has only certain fixed tasks to do; professions are located in special areas and organized by group; meals are taken on the run. Other parts of the city are centers of entertainment, while still others contain the towers where one finds wife, family, phonograph, and soul. Tension and relaxation; activity and love, are precisely timed and weighed on the basis of exhaustive laboratory studies. If anything goes wrong in any of these activities the whole thing is simply dropped; something else or sometimes a better way will be found or someone else will find the way one has missed; there's nothing wrong with that, while on the other hand nothing is so wasteful of the social energies as the presumption that an individual is called upon to cling for all he is worth to some specific personal goal. In a community coursed through by energies every road leads to a worthwhile goal, provided one doesn't hesitate or reflect too long. Targets are short-term, but since life is short too, results are maximized, which is all people need to be happy, because the soul is formed by what you accomplish, whereas what you desire without achieving it merely warps the soul. Happiness depends very little on what we want, but only on achiev- ing whatever it is. Besides, zoology teaches that a number of flawed individuals can often add up to a brilliant social unit.
It is by no means certain that this is the way it has to be, but such ideas belong to those travel fantasies reflecting our sense ofincessant movement that carries us along. These fantasies are superficial, rest- less, and brief. God knows what will really happen. Presumably it is up to us to make a new start at any given moment and come up with a plan for us all. If all that high-speed business doesn't suit us, let's do something else! For instance, something quite slow-moving, with a veiled, billowing, sea-slug-like, mysterious happiness and the deep,
A Sort ofIntroduction · 2 7
28 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
cow-eyed gaze the ancient Greeks admired. But that is not how it really is; we are at the mercy ofour condition. We travel in it day and night, doing whatever else we do, shaving, eating, making love, read- ing books, working at our jobs, as though those four walls around us were standing still; but the uncanny fact is that those walls are mov- ing along without our noticing it, casting their rails ahead like long, groping, twisted antennae, going we don't know where. Besides, we would like to think of ourselves as having a hand in making our time what it is. It is a very uncertain part to play, and sometimes, looking out the window after a fairly long pause, we find that the landscape has changed. What flies past flies past, it can't be helped, but with all our devotion to our role an uneasy feeling grows on us that we have traveled past our goal or got on a wrong track. Then one day the vio- lent need is there: Get off the train! Jump clear! A homesickness, a longing to be stopped, to cease evolving, to stay put, to return to the
point before the thrown switch put us on the wrong track. And in the good old da~ when the Austrian Empire still existed, one could in such a case get off the train of time, get on an ordinary train of an ordinary railroad, and travel back to one's home.
There, in Kakania, that state since vanished that no one under~ stood, in many ways an exemplary state, though unappreciated, there was a tempo too, but not too much tempo. Whenever one thought of that country from someplace abroad, the memory that hovered before one's eyes was of white, wide, prosperous-looking roads dat- ing from the era of foot marches and mail coaches, roads that criss- crossed the country in every direction like rivers of order, like ribbons of bright military twill, the paper-white arm of the adminis- tration holding all the provinces in its embrace. And what provinces they were! Glaciers and sea, Karst limestone and Bohemian fields of grain, nights on the Adriatic chirping with restless cicadas, and Slovakian villages where the smoke rose from chimneys as from up- turned nostrils while the village cowered between tw~ small hills as if the earth had parted its lips to warm itS child between them. Of course cars rolled on these roads too, but not too many! The con- quest of the air was being prepared here too, but not too intensively. A ship would now and then be sent off to South America or East Asia, but not too often. There was no ambition for world markets or world power. Here at the very center of Europe, where the world's
old axes crossed, words such as "colony" and "overseas" sounded like something quite untried and remot~. There was some show of lux- ury, but by no means as in such overrefmed ways as the French. Peo- ple went in for sports, but not as fanatically as the English. Ruinous sums of money were spent on the army, but only just enough to se- cure its position as the second-weakest among the great powers. The capital, too, was somewhat smaller than all the other biggest cities of the world, but considerably bigger than a mere big city. And the country's administration was conducted in an enlightened, unobtru- sive manner, with all sharp edges cautiously smoothed over, by the best bureaucracy in Europe, which could be faulted only in that it regarded genius, and any brilliant individual initiative not backed by noble birth or official status, as insolent and presumptuous. But then, who welcomes interference from unqualified outsiders? And in Ka- kania, at least, it would only happen that a genius would be regarded as a lout, but never was a mere lout taken-as happens elsewhere- for a genius. ·
All in all, how many amazing things might be said about this van- ished Kakania! Everything and every person in it, for instance, bore the label of kaiserlich-koniglich (Imperial-Royal) or kaiserlich und koniglich (Imperial and Royal), abbreviated as "k. k. " or "k. &k. ," but to be sure which institutions and which persons were to be desig- nated by "k. k. " and which by "k. &k. " reqUired the mastery of a secret science. On paper it was called the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, but in conversation it was called Austria, a name solemnly abjured offi- cially while stubbornly retained emotionally, just to show that feel- ings are quite as important as constitutional law and that regulations are one thing but real life is something else entirely. Liberal in its constitution, it was administered clerically. The government was clerical, but everyday life was liberal. All citizens were equal before the law, but not everyon_e was a citizen. There was a Parliament, which asserted its freedom so forcefully that it was usually kept shut; there was also an Emergency Powers Act that enabled the govern- ment to get along without Parliament, but then, when everyone had happily settled for absolutism, the Crown decreed that it was time to go back to parliamentary rule. The country was full of such goings- on, among them the sort of nationalist movements that rightly at- tracted so much attention in Europe and are so thoroughly
A Sort ofIntroduction · 2 9
30 · T-HE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
misunderstood today. They were so violent that they jammed the machinery of government and brought it to a dead stop several times a year, but in the intervals and during the deadlocks people got along perfectly well and acted as if nothing had happened. And in fact, nothing really had happened. It was only that everyone's natural re- sentment of everyone else's efforts to get ahead, a resentment we all feel nowadays, had crystallized earlier in Kakania, where it can be said to have assumed the form of a sublimated ceremonial rite, which could have had a great future had its development not been cut prematurely short by a catastrophe.
For it was not only the resentment of one's fellow citizens that had become intensified there into a strong sense of community; even the lack of faith in oneself and one's own fate took on the character of a deep self-certainty. In this country one acted-sometimes to the highest degree of passion and its consequences--differently from the way one thought, or one thought differently from the way one acted. Uninitiated observers have mistaken this for charm, or even for a weakness ofwhat they thought to be the Austrian character. But they were wrong; it is always wrong to explain what happens in a country by the character of its inhabitants. For the inhabitant of a country has at least nine characters: a professional, a national, a civic, a class, a geographic, a sexual, a conscious, an unconscious, and pos- sibly even a private character to bo~t. He unites them in himself, but they dissolve him, so that he is really nothing more than a small basin hollowed out by these many streamlets that trickle into it and drain out of it again, to join other such rills in filling some other basin. Which is why every inhabitant ofthe earth also has a tenth character that is nothing else than the passive fantasy of spaces yet unfilled. This permits a person all but one thing: to take seriously what his at
least nine other characters do and what happens to them; in other words, it prevents precisely what should be his true fulfillment. This interior spac~admittedly hard to describe-is of a different shade and shape in Italy from what it is in England, because everything that stands out in relief against it is of a different shade and shape; and yet it is in both places the same: an e~pty, invisible space, with reality standing inside it like a child's toy town deserted by the imagination.
Insofar as this can become visible to all eyes it had happened in Kakania, making Kakania, unbeknownst to the world, the most pro-
gressive state of all; a state just barely able to go along with itself. One enjoyed a negative freedom there, always with the sense of insuffi- cient grounds for one's own existence, and lapped around by the great fantasy of all that had not happened or at least not yet hap- pened irrevocably as by the breath of those oceans from which man- kind had once emerged.
. Events that might be regarded as momentous elsewhere were here introduced with a casual "Es ist passiert . . . " - a peculiar form of "it happened" unknown elsewhere in German or any other lan- guage, whose breath could transform facts and blows of fate into something as light as thistledown or thought. Perhaps, despite so much that can be said against it, Kakania was, after all, a country for geniuses; which is probably what brought it to its ruin.
9
THE FIRST OF THREE ATTEMPTS TO BECOME A GREA T MAN
This man who had returned could not remember any time in his life when he had not been fired with the will to become a great man; it was a desire Ulrich seemed to have been born with. Such a dream may of course betray vanity and stupidity, but it is no less true that it is a fine and proper ambition without which there probably would not be very many great men in the world.
The trouble was that he knew neither how to become one nor what a great man is. In his school days his model had been Napoleon, partly because of a boy's natural admiration for the criminal and partly because his teachers had made a point of calling this tyrant, who had tried to tum Europe upside down, the greatest evildoer in history. This led di~ectlyto Ulrich's joining the cavalry as an ensign as soon as he was able to escape from school. The chances are that even then, had anyone asked him why he chose this profession, he would
A Sort ofIntroduction · 31
32 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
no longer have replied: "In order to become a tyrant. " But such wishes are Jesuits: Napoleon's genius began to develop only after he became a general. But how could Ulrich, as an ensign, have con- vinced his colonel that becoming a general was the necessary next step for him?
Even at squadron drill it seemed often enough that he and the colonel did not see eye-to-eye. Even so, Ulrich would not have cursed the parade ground-that peaceful common on which pretensions are indistinguishable from vocations-had he not been so ambitious. Pacifist euphemisms such as "educating the people to bear arms" meant nothing to him in those days; instead, he surren- dered himself to an impassioned nostalgia for heroic conditions of lordliness, power, and pride. He rode in steeplechases, fought duels, and recognized only three kinds of people: officers, women, and civilians, the last-named a physically underdeveloped and spiritually contemptible class of humanity whose wives and daughters were the legitimate prey of army officers. He indulged in a splendid pessi- mism: it seemed to him that because the soldier's profession was a sharp, white-hot instrument, this instrument must be used to sear and cut the world for its salvation.
As luck would have it he came to no harm, but one day he made a discovery. At a social gathering he P,ad a slight misunderstanding with a noted financier, which Ulrich was going to clear up in his usual dashing style; but it turned out that there are men in civilian clothes also who know how to protect their women. The financier had a word with the War Minister, whom he knew personally, and soon thereaf- ter Ulrich had a lengthy interview with his colonel, in which the dif- ference between an archduke and a simple army officer was made clear to him. From then on the profession of warrior lost its charm for him. He had expected to find himselfon a stage ofworld-shaking adventures with himself as hero, but now saw nothing but a drunken young man shouting on a wide, empty square, answered only by the paving stones. When he realized this, he took his leave of this thank- less career, in which he had just been made lieutenant, and quit the service.
10
THE SECOND A TTEMPT. NOTES TOW ARD A MORALITY FOR THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
But when Ulrich switched from the cavalry to civil engineering, he was merely swapping horses. The new horse had steel legs and ran ten times faster.
In Goethe's world the clattering of looms was still considered a disturbing noise. In Ulrich's time people were just beginning to dis- cover the music of machine shops, steam hammers, and factory si- rens. One must not believe that people were quick to notice that a skyscraper is bigger than a man on a horse. On the contrary, even today those who want to make an impression will mount not a sky- scraper but a high horse; they are swift like the wind and sharp- sighted, not like a giant refractor but like an eagle. Their feelings have not yet learned to make use oftheir intellect; the difference in devel- opment between these two faculties is almost as great as that between the vermiform appendix and the cerebral cortex. So it was no slight advantage to realize, as Ulrich did when barely out ofhis teens, that a man's conduct with respect to what seem to him the Higher Things in life is far more old-fashioned than his machines are.
From the moment Ulrich set foot in engineering school, he was feverishly partisan. Who still needed the Apollo Belvedere when he had the new forms of a turbodynamo or the rhythmic movements of a steam engine's pistons before his eyes! Who could still be cap- tivated by the thousand years of chatter about the meaning of good and evil when it turns out that they are not constants at all but func- tional values, so that the goodness ofworks depends on historical cir- cumstances, while human goodness depends on the psychotechnical skills with which people's qualities are exploited? Looked at from a technical point ofview, the world is simply ridiculous: impractical in all that concerns human relations, and extremely uneconomic and imprecise in its methods; anyone accustomed to solving his problems with a slide rule cannot take seriously a good half of the assertions
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34 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
people make. The slide rule is two systems of,numbers and lines combined with incredible ingenuity; the slide rule is two white- enameled sticks of flat trapezoidal cross section that glide past each other, with whose help the most complex problems can be solved in an instant without needlessly losing a thought; the slide rule is a small symbol carried in one's breast pocket and sensed as a hard white line over one's heart. Ifyou own a slide rule and someone comes along with big statements or great emotions, you say: "Just a moment, please-let's first work out the margin for error, and the most- probable values. "
This was without doubt a powerful view ofwhat it meant to be an engineer. It could serve as the frame for a charming future self- portrait, showing a man with resolute features, a shag pipe clenched between his teeth, a tweed cap on his head, traveling in superb riding boots between Cape Town and Canada on daring missio~s for his business. Between trips there would always be time to draw on his technical knowledge for advice on world organization and manage- ment, or time to formulate aphorisms like the one by Emerson that ought to hang over every workbench: "Mankind walks the earth as a prophecy of the future, and all its deeds are tests and experiments, for every deed can be surpassed by the next. " Actually, Ulrich had written· this himself, putting together several of Emerson's pronouncements.
It is hard to say why engineers don't quite live up to this Vision. Why, for instance, do theyso often wear a watch chain slung on a steep, lopsided curve from the vest pocket to a button higher up, or across the stomach in one high and two low loops, as if it were a met- rical foot in a poem? Why do they fav~r tiepins topped with stag's teeth or tiny horseshoes? Why do they wear suits constructed like the early stages o f the automobile? And why, fmally, do they never speak of anything but their profession, or if they do speak of something else, why do they have that peculiar, stiff, remote, superficial manner that never goes deeper inside than the' epiglottis? Of course this is not true of all of them, far from it, but it is true of many, and it was true ofall those Ulrich met the first time he went to work in a factory office, and it was true of those he met the second time. They all- turned out to be men fmnly tied to their drawing boards, who loved their profession and were wonderfully efficient at it. But any sugges-
tion that they might apply their daring ideas to themselves instead of to their machines would have taken them aback, much as if they had been asked to use a hammer for the unnatural purpose of killing a man.
And so Ulrich's second and more mature attempt to become a man of stature, by ~y of technology, came quickly to an end.
11
THE MOST IMPORTANT ATTEMPT OF ALL
Thinking over his time up to that point today, Ulrich might shake his head in wonder, as if someone were to tell him about his previous incarnations; but his third effort was different. An engineer may un- derstandably become absorbed in his specialty instead of giving him- self up to the freedom and vastness of the world of thought, even though his machines are delivered to the ends of the earth, for he is no more called upon to adapt the daring and innovative soul of his technology to his private soul than a machine can be expected to apply to itselfthe differential calculus upon which it is based. But the same cannot be said of mathematics, which is the new method of thought itself, the mind itself, the very wellspring of the times and the primal source of an in9redible transformation.
If it is the fulfillment of man's primordial dreams to be able to fly, travel with the fish, drill our way beneath the bodies of towering mountains, send messages with godlike speed, see the invisible and hear the distant speak, hear the voices of the dead, be miraculously cured while asleep; see with our own eyes how we will look twenty years after our death, learn in flickering nights. thousands of things above and below this earth no one ever knew before; if ,light, warmth, power, pleasure, comforts, are man's primordial dreams, then present-day research is not only science but sorcery, spells woven from the highest powers of heart and brain, forcing God to
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36 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
open one fold after another of his c:loak; a religion whose dogma is permeated and sustained by the hard, courageous, flexible, razor- cold, razor-keen logic of mathematics.
Of course there is no denying that all these primordial dreams ap- pear, in the opinion of nonmathematicians, to have been suddenly realized in a form quite different from the original fantasy. Baron Miinchhausen's post hom was more beautiful than our canned music, the Seven-League Boots more beautiful than a car, Oberon's kingdom lovelier than a railway tunnel, the magic root of the man- drake better than a telegraphed image, eating ofone's mother's heart and then understanding birds more beautiful than an ethologic study of a bird's vocalizing. We have gained reality and lost dream. No more lounging under a tree and peering at the sky between one's big and second toes; there's work to be done. To be efficient, one cannot be hungry and dreamy but must eat steak and keep moving. It is ex- actly as though the old, inefficient breed of humanity had fallen asleep on an anthill and found, when the new breed awoke, that the ants had crept into its bloodstream, making it move frantically ever since, unable to shake off that rotten feeling of antlike industry. There is really no need to belabor the point, since it is obvious to most of us these days that mathematics has taken possession, like a demon, of every aspect of our lives. Most of us may not believe in the story of a Devil to whom one can sell one's soul, but those who must know something about the soul (considering that as clergymen, his- torians, and artists they draw a good income from it) all testify that
the soul has been destroyed by mathematics and that mathematics is the source of an evil intelligence that while making man the lord of the earth has also made him the slave of his machines. The inner drought, the dreadful blend of acuity in matters of detail and indif- ference toward the whole, man's monstrous abandonment in a desert of details, his restlessness, malice, unsurpassed callousness, money- grubbing, coldness, and violence, all so characteristic of our times, are by these accounts solely the consequence of damage done to the soul by keen logical thinking! Even back when Ulrich ftrst turned to mathematics there were already those who predicted the collapse of European civilization because no human faith, no love, no simplicity, no goodness, dwelt any longer in man. These people had all, typi- cally, been poor mathematicians as young people and at school. This
later put them in a position to prove that mathematics, the mother of natural science and grandmother oftechnology, was also the primor- dial mother of the spirit that eventually gave rise to poison gas and warplanes.
The only people who actually lived in ignorance of these dangers were the mathematicians themselves and their disciples the scien- tists, whose souls were as unaffected by all this as if they were racing cyclists pedaling away for dear life, blind to everything in the world except the back wheel of the rider ahead of them. But one thing, on the other hand, could safely be said about Ulrich: he loved mathe- matics because of the kind of people who could not endure it. He was in love with science not so much on scientific as on human grounds. He saw that in all the problems that come within its orbit, science thinks differently from the laity. If we translate "scientific outlook" into "view oflife," "hypothesis" into "attempt," and "truth" into "action," then there would be no notable scientist or mathemati- cian whose life's work, in courage and revolutionary impact, did not far outmatch the greatest deeds in history. The man has not yet been born who could say to his followers: ''Xou may steal, kill, fornicate- our teaching is so strong that it will transform the cesspool of your sins into clear, sparkling mountain streams. " But in science it hap- pens every few years that something till then held to be in error sud- denly revolutionizes the field, or that some dim and disdained idea ' becomes the ruler of a new realm of thought. Such events are not merely upheavals but lead us upward like a Jacob's ladder. The life of science is as strong and carefree and glorious as a fairy tale. And Ul- rich felt: People simply don't realize it, they have no idea how much thinking can be done already; if they could be taught to think a new way, they would change their lives.
Now, it is a question whether the world is so topsy-turvy that it always needs turning around. The world itself has always had a two- fold answer to this question. From the beginning of the world most people, in their youth, have been in favor of turning the world around. They have always felt it was ridiculous the way their elders clung to convention and thought with the heart-a lump of flesh- instead of with the brain. To the young, the moral stupidity of their elders has always looked like the same inability to make new connec- tions that constitutes ordinary intellectual stupidity, and their own
A Sort of Introduction · 37
38 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
natural morality has always been one of achievement, heroism, and change. But they have no sooner reached their years of accomplish- ment than they no longer remember this, and even·less do they want to be reminded of it. Which is why many of those for whom mathe- matics or science is a true profession are bound to disapprove of any- one taking up science for reasons such as Ulrich's.
Nevertheless, experts judged his achievements in this third profes- sion, in the few years since he had taken it up, to have been not in- considerable.
1. 2
THE LADY WHOSE LOVE ULRICH WON AFTER A CONVERSA TION ABOUT SPORTS AND MYSTICISM
It turned out that Bonadea, too, yearned for great ideas.
Bonadea was the lady who had rescued Ulrich on the night of his ill-fated boxing match and who had visited him the next morning shrouded in veils. He had baptized her Bonadea, "the Good God- dess," for th'e way she had entered his life and also after that goddess of chastity whose ancient temple in Rome had become, by an odd reversal of fate, a center for all the vices. She did not know that story. She was pleased at the euphonious nickname Ulrich had conferred
on her, and wore it on her visits to him as if it were a sumptuously embroidered housedress. "Am I really your good goddess," she asked, "your own bona dea? " And the correct pronunciation of these two words demanded that she throw her arms around his neck and lift her face up to his with a gaze full of feeling.
She was the wife of a prominent man and the fond mother of two handsome boys. Her favorite phrase was "highly respectable," ap- plied to people, messengers, shops, and feelings, when she wanted to
praise them. She could utter the words "truth, goodness, and beauty" as often and as casually as someone else might say "Thurs- day. " Her intellectual needs were most deeply satisfied by her con- cept of a peaceful, idyllic life in the bosom of her family, its radiant happiness toned down to a gentle lamplight by the hovering pres- ence far beneath of the dark realm of "Lead me not into tempta- tion. " She had only one fault: she could become inordinately aroused at the mere sight of a man. She was not lustful; she was sensual, as other people have other afflictions, for instance suffering from sweaty hands or blushing too readily. It was something she had ap- parently been born with and could never do anything to curb. Meet- ing Ulrich in circumstances so like a novel, so firing to the imagination, she had been· destined from the first moment to fall prey to a passion that began as sympathy, then led, after a brief though intense inner struggle, to forbidden intimacies, and con- tinued as a seesaw between pangs of sinful desire and pangs of remorse.
But Ulrich was only the most recent of God knows how many men in her life. Once they have caught on, men tend to treat such nym- phomaniac women no better than morons for whom the cheapest tricks are good enough and who can be tripped up in the same way time and again. The tenderer feelings of male passion are something like the snarling of a jaguar over fresh meat-he doesn't like to be disturbed. Consequently, Bonadea often led a double life, like any other respectable citizen who, in the dark interstices of his con- sciousness, is a train robber. Whenever no one was holding her in his arms, this quiet, regal woman was oppressed by self-hatred for the lies and humiliations she had to risk in order to be held in someone's arms. When her senses were aroused she was subdued and gentle; her blend of rapture and tears, crude directness shadowed by pre- dictable remorse, mania bolting in panic from the lurking depression that threatened, heightened her attraction, arousing excitement much like a ceaseless tattoo on a drum hung with black crepe. But between lapses, in her intervals of calm, in the remorse that made her aware of her helplessness, she was full of the claims of respecta- bility, and this made life with her far from simple. A man was ex- pected to be truthful and kind, sympathetic toward every misfortune,
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40 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
devoted to the Imperial House, respectful toward everything re- spected, and, morally, to conduct himself with all the delicacy of a visitor at a sickbed. -
Not that it made any difference if these expectations were disap- pointed. To justify her conduct, she had made up a tale of how her husband had caused her unfortunate condition in the innocent early years of their marriage. This husband, considerably older and physi- cally bigger than she, was cast as a ruthless monster in the sad, porten- tous account she gave to Ulrich during the very first hours oftheir new love. It was only sometime afterward that he discovered that the man was a well-known and respected judge, of high professional compe- tence, who was also given to the form of hunting that consists in the harmless gunning down of wild game; a welcome figure at various pubs and clubs frequented by hunters and lawyers, where male topics rather than art or love were the subject of conversation. The only failing of this rather unaffected, good-natured, and jovial man was that he was married to his wife, so that he found himself more often than other men engaged with her in what is referred to in the lan- guage of the law courts as a casual encounter. The psychological ef- fect of submitting for years to a man she had married from motives of the head rather than the heart had fostered in Bonadea the illusion that she was physically overexcitable, and fantasy made it almost inde- pendent of her consciousness. She was chained to this man, so fa- vored by circumstance, by some compulsion she could not fathom; she despised him for her own spinelessness and felt spineless in order to despise him; she was unfaithful to him as a means of escape but always chose the most awkward moments to speak of him or of their children; and she was never able to let go of him completely. Like many unhappy wives, she ended up with an attitude-in an otherwise rather unstable personal environment-determined by resentment
of her solidly rooted husband, and she carried her conflict with him into every new experience that was supposed to free her from him.
What could a man do to stlence her lamentations but transport her with all possible speed from the depressive to the manic state? She would p~omptly charge the doer of this deed with taking advantage of her weakness and with being devoid of all finer sensibilities, but her affliction laid a veU of moist tenderness over her eyes when she, as she put it with scientific detachment, "inclined" to this man.
13
A RACEHORSE OF GENIUS CRYSTALLIZES THE RECOGNITION OF BEING A MAN WITl:IOUT QUALITIES
It is not immaterial that Ulrich could say to himself that he had ac- complished something in his field. His work had in fact brought him recognition. Admiration would have been too much to ask, for even in the realm of truth, admiration is reserved for older scholars on whom it depends whether or not one gets that professorship or pro- fessorial chair. Strictly speaking, he had remained "promising," which is what, in the Republic of Learning, they call the republicans, that is, those who imagine that they should give all their energies to their work rather than reserve a large part of them for getting ahead. They forget that individual achievement is limited: while on the other hand everybody wants to get ahead, and they neglect the social duty of climbing, which means beginning as a climber so as to become in tum a prop and stay to other climbers on the way up.
And one day Ulrich stopped wanting to be promising. The time had come when people were starting to speak of genius on the soccer field or in the boxing ring, although there would still be at most only one genius of a halfback or great tennis-court tactician for every ten or so explorers, tenors, or writers of genius who cropped up in the papers. The new spirit was not yet quite sure of itself. But just then Ulrich suddenly read somewhere, like a premonitory breath of-ripen- ing summer, the expression "the racehorse of genius. " It stood in the report of a sensational racing success, and the author was proba- bly not aware ofthe full magnitude ofthe inspiration his pen owed to the communal spirit. But Ulrich instantly grasped the fateful connec- tion between his entire career and this genius among racehorses. For the horse has, of course, always been sacred to the cavalry, and as a youth Ulrich had hardly ever heard talk in barracks of anything but horses and women. He had fled from this to become a great man,
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42 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
only to find that when as the result of his varied exertions he per- haps could have felt within reach of his goal, the horse had beaten him to it. ·
No doubt this has a certain temporal justification, since it is not so very long ago that our idea of an admirable masculine spirit was ex- emplified by a person whose courage was moral courage, whose strength was the strength of a conviction, whose steadfastness was of the heart and of virtue, and who regarded speed as childish, feinting as not permissible, and agility and verve as contrary to dignity. Ulti- mately no such person could be found alive, except on the faculty of prep schools and in all sorts of literary pronouncements; he had become an ideological phantasm, and life had to seek a new image of manliness. As it looked around, it found that the tricks and dodges of an inventive mind working on logical calculations do not really differ all that much from the fighting moves of a well-trained body. There is a general fighting ability that is made cold and· calculating by obsta- cles and openings, whether one is trained to search out the vulnera- ble spot in a problem or in a bodily opponent. A psychotechnical analysis of a great thinker and a champion boxer would probably show their cunning, courage, precision and technique, and the speed oftheir reactions in their respective fields to be the same. It is proba- bly a safe assumption that the qualities and skills by which they suc- ceed do not differ from those of a famous steeplechaser~for one should never underestimate how many major qualities are bought into play in clearing a hedge. But on top of this, a horse and a boxer have an advantage over a great mind in that their performance and rank can be objectively measured, so that the best of them is really acknowledged as the best. This is why sports and strictly objective criteria have deservedly come to the forefront, displacing such obso- lete concepts as genius and human greatness.
As for Ulrich, he must even be credited with being a few years ahead ofhis time on this point. He hadconducted his scientific work in precisely this spirit of improving the record by a victory, an inch or a pound. He meant his mind to prove itself keen and strong, and it had performed the work of the strong. This pleasure in the power of the mind was a state of expectancy, a warlike game, a kind of vague masterful claim on the future. What this power would enable him to accomplish was an open question; he could do everything with it or
nothing, become a savior of mankind or a criminal. This is probably the nature of the mind that provides the world of machines and dis- coveries its constant flow of new supplies. Ulrich had regarded sci- ence as a preparation, a toughening, and a kind of training. If it turned out that this way of thinking was too dry, hard, narrow, and blinkered, it would have to be accepted, like the grimace of extreme exertion and tension that show on the face when the body and the will are being pushed to great accomplishments. He had for years gladly endured spiritual hardship. He despised those who could not follow Nietzsche's dictum to "let the soul starve for the truth's sake," those who tum back, the fainthearted, the softheaded who comfort their souls with spiritual nonsense and feed it-because reason al- legedly gives it stones instead of bread-on religious, metaphysical, and fictitious pap, like rolls soaked in milk. It was his opinion that in this century, together with everything human, one was on an expedi- tion, which required as a matter of pride that one cut off all useless questions with a "not yet," and that life be conducted on a provi- sional basis, but with awareness of the goal to be reached by those who will come after. The fact is, science has developed a concept of hard, sober intelligence that makes the old metaphysical and moral ideas of the human race simply intolerable, even though all it has to put in their place is the hope that a distant day will come when a race of intellectual conquerors will descend into the valleys of spiritual fruitfulness.
But this works only so long as the eye is not forced to abandon visionary distance for present nearness, or made to read a statement that in the meantime a racehorse has become a genius. The next morning Ulrich got out of bed on his left foot and fished halfheart- edly for his slipper with his right. That had been in another city and street from where he was now, qut only a few weeks ago. On the brown, gleaming asphalt under his windows cars were already speed- ing past. The pure morning air was filling up with the sourness of the day, and as the milky light filtered through the curtains it seemed to him unspeakably absurd to start bending his naked body forward and backward as usual, to strain his abdominal muscles to push it up off the ground and lower it again, and finally batter away at a punching bag with his fists, as so many people do at this hour before going to the office. One hour daily is a twelfth of a day's conscious life,
A Sorl ofIntroduction · 43
44 • T H E M A N W I T H 0 U T Q U A L I T I E S
enough to keep a trained body in the condition ofa panther alert for any adventure; but this hour is sacrificed for a senseless expectation, because the adventures worthy of such preparation never come along. "The same is true oflove, for which people get prepared in the most monstrous fashion. Finally, Ulrich realized that even in science hew~ like a man who has climbed one mountain range after another without ever seeing a goal. He had now acquired bits and pieces of a ~ew way to think and feel, but the glimpse of the New, so vivid at first, had been lost amid the ever-proliferating details, and if he had once thought that he was drinking from the fountain of life, he had now drained almost all his expectations to the last drop. At this point he quit, right in the middle of an important and promising piece ofwork. He now saw his colleagues partly as relentless, obses- sive public prosecutors and security chiefs of logic, and partly as opium eaters, addicts of some strange pale drug that filled their
world with visions of numbers and abstract relations. "God help me," he thought, ·"surely I never could have meant to spend all my life as a mathematician? "
But what had he really meant to do? At this point he could have turned only to philosophy. But the condition philosophy found itself in at the time reminded him of the oxhide being cut into strips in the story of Dido, even as it remained highly doubtful that these strips would ever measure out a kingdom, and what was new in philosophy resembled what he had been doing himself and held no attraction for him. All he could say was that he now felt further removed from what he had really wanted to be than he had in his youth, if indeed he had ever known what it was. With wonderful clarity he saw in himself all the abilities and'qualities favored by his time-except for the ability to earn his living, which was not necessary-but he had lost the ca- pacity to apply them. And since, now that genius is attributed to soc- cer players and horses, a man can save himself only by the use he makes of genius, he resolved to take a year's leave of absence from his life in order to seek an appropriate application for his abilities.
BOYHOOD FRIENDS
Since his return, Ulrich had already been a few times to see his frJends Walter and Clarisse, for these two had not left town, although it was summer, and he had not seen them for a number of years. Whenever he got there, they were playing the piano tog~ther. It was understood that they would take no notice of him until they had fin- ished the piece; this time it was Beethoven's jubilant "Ode to Joy. " The millions sank, as Nietzsche describes it, awestruck in the dust; hostile boundaries shattered, the gospel of world harmony recon- ciled and unified the sundered; they had unlearned walking and talk- ing and were about to fly off, dancing, into the air. Faces flushed, bodies hunched, their heads jerked up and down while splayed claws banged away at the mass of sound rearing up under them. Something unfathomable was going on: a balloon, wavering in outline as it filled up with hot emotion, was swelling to the bursting point, and from the excited fmgertips, the nervously wrinkling·foreheads, the twitching bodies, again and again surges of fresh feeling poured into this awe- some private tumult. How often they had been through this!
Ulrich could never stand this piano, always open and savagely bar- ing its teeth, this fat-lipped, short-legged idol, a cross between a dachshund and a bulldog, that had taken over his friends' lives even as far as the pictures on their walls and the spindly design of their arty reproduction furniture; even the fact that there was no live-in maid, but only a woman who came in daily to cook and clean, was part of it. Beyond the windows of this household the slopes of vine- yards with clumps of old trees and crooked shacks rose as far as the sweeping forests beyond; but close in, everything was untidy, bare, scattered, and corroded, as it is wherever the edges of big cities push forward into the countryside. The arc that spanned such afore- ground and the lovely distance was created by the instrument; gleaming black, it sent fiery pillars of tenderness and heroism out through the walls, even if these pillars, pulverized into a fine ash of
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46 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
sound, collapsed only a hundred yards away without ever reaching the hillside with the flr trees where the tavern stood halfway up the path leading to the forest. ' But the house was able to make the piano resound, forming one of those megaphones through which the soul cries into the cosmos li~e a rutting stag, answered only by the same, competing cries of thousands of other lonely souls roaring into the cosmos. Ulrich's strong position in this household rested on his insis- tence that music represented a failure of the will and a confusion of the mind; he spoke of it with less respect than he actually felt. Since at that time music was, for Walter and Clarisse, the source of their keenest hope and anxiety, they partly despised him for his attitude and partly revered him as an evil spirit.
When they had flnished this time, Walter did not move but sat there, drooping, drained and forlorn on his half-turned piano stool, but Clarisse got up and gave the intruder a lively greeting. Her hands and face were still twitching with the electric charge of the music, and her smile forced its way through a tension between ecstasy and disgust.
"Frog Prince! " she said, ·with a nod backward at the music or Wal- ter. Ulrich felt the elastic bond between himself and Clarisse tense again. On his last visit she had told him of a terrible dream in which a slippery creature, big-belly soft, tender and gruesome, had tried to overpower her in her sleep, and this huge frog symbolized Walter's music. The two of them had few secrets from Ulrich. Now, having barely said hello to Ulrich, Clarisse turned away from him and quickly back to Walter, again uttered her war cry-"Frog Princel"- which Walter evidently did not understand, and, her hands still trem- bling from the music, gave a pained and painfully wild pull at her husband's hair. He made an amiably puzzled face and came back one step closer out of the slippery void of the music.
Then Clarisse and Ulrich took a walk through the slanting arrows ofthe evening sun, without Walter; he remainedbehind at the piano. Clarisse said:
"The ability to fend off harm is the test of vitality. The spent is drawn to its own destruction. What do }'ou think? Nietzsche· main- tains it's a sign ofweakness for an artist to be overly concerned about the morality of his art. " She had sat down on a little hummock.
Ulrich shrugged. When Clarisse married his boyhood friend three
years ago she was twenty:. . two, and it was he himself who had given her Nietzsche's works as a wedding present. He smiled, saying:
"If! were Walter, I'd challenge Nietzsche to a duel. "
Clarisse's slender, hovering back, in delicate lines under her dress, stretched like a bow; her face, too, was tense with violent emotion; she kept it anxiously averted from her friend.
''You are still both maidenly and heroic at the same time," Ulrich added. It might or might not have been a question, a bit of a joke, but there was also a touch of affectionate admiration in his words. Cla- risse did not quite understand what he meant, but the two words, which she had heard from him before, bored into her like a flaming arrow into a thatched roof.
Intermittent waves of random churning sounds reached them. Ul. :. rich knew that Clarisse refused her body to Walter for weeks at a time when he played Wagner.