No More Learning

After him came a man with the following story: On his walks through the streets-though it was even more exciting when one rode a trolley-he had for years been in the habit of counting the number of straight strokes in the big block letters of the shop signs (there were three strokes in an A, for instance, and four in an M) and dividing the sum tqtal by the number ofletters counted. His average so far had been consistently two and a half strokes to a letter, but this was obviously not invariable, since it could change with every new street. Now, deviations from the norm could be quite distressing, while there was greatsatisfaction every time the numbers came out right-an effect quite like the catharsis said to be achieved while
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watching classical tragedy on the stage. If you considered the letters themselves, however-anyone could check this out-divisibility by three was a rare bit of luck, which is why most inscriptions tended to leave you with a noticeable sense of frustration, except for those con- sisting of several letters each composed of four strokes, as in M, E, W, for instance, which could be depended upon to leave one feeling remarkably happy. So what to do? the visitor asked. Simply this, an order issued by the Public Health Office favoring four-stroke letter series in shop signs and discouraging as far as possible the use of one- stroke letters, such as 0, S, I, C, which, lead to poor and therefore depressing results.
Ulrich looked the man over and took care to keep a distance be- tween them; yet he did not really look like a mental case, but was a well-dressed person in his thirties with an intelligent and amiable ex- pression. He went on calmly explaining that mental arithmetic was an indispensable skill in every line ofwork, that to teach by means of games was in keeping with modem educational methods, that statis- tics had often revealed deep connections between things long before these could be explained, that everyone knew the damage done by an education based on book learning alone, and, in conclusion, that the excitement his findings had aroused in all those who had chosen to repeat his experiments spoke for itself. If the Public Health Office could be induced to adopt his disrovery, other countries would soon follow suit, and the Jubilee-Year could turn out to be a blessing for all mankind.
Ulrich advised all these people to organize: "You still have almost four years' time, and ifyou succeed, His Grace will be sure to '! ! Se all his influence on your behalf. "
Most of them, however, were already organized, which of course changed matters. It was relatively simple when a soccer club wanted an honorary professorship for its outside right, to demonstrate the importance of modem physical culture; one coul<! always promise to take the matter under consideration. But it was hard in such cases as the following: A man in his fifties presented himself as a senior exec- utive in a government department; his forehead shone with the light of martyrdom when he identified himself as the founder and presi- dent of the Oehl Shorthand Association, hoping to draw the atten-
tion of the great patriotic campaign's Secretary to the Oehl short- hand system.
Oehl shorthand was an Austrian system, he 'Went on to explain, which was all you needed to know to understand why it was not widely adopted or encouraged. Was the Secretary himself a practic- ing stenographer, by any chance? No? Then he was perhaps not aware of the advantages of any stenographic system: the saving in time, in mental energy. Did he have any idea what a tremendous waste of mental effort was entailed by all those curlicues and prolixi- ties, the imprecision and the bewildering repetition of similar parts, and the confusion that arose between truly expressive, significant graphic components and merely ritualistic and· arbitrarily idiosyn- cratic flouri,shes of the pen?
Ulrich was amazed to meet a man so implacably determined to stamp out ordinary, presumably harmless, handwriting. When it came to saving mental effort, shorthand was a vital necessity for a rapidly growing world that had to get things done quickly. But even from a moral standpoint the question of Short or Long was crucial. The long-eared script, as the senior official bitterly"tenned it because of the senseless loops it was full of, encouraged tendencies to im- precision, arbitrariness, and wastefulness, especially the waste of time, while shorthand inculcated precision, willpower, manliness. Shorthand, he said, taught people to do what was necessary and to avoid what was unnecessary and irrelevant. Surely there was a lesson in practical morality here, of the greatest possible significance espe- cially for any Austrian. And then there was the aesthetic side of it. Wasn't prolixity rightly considered an ugly quality? Had not the great classical authors rightly declared economy of means to be an essen- tial element of beauty? But even regarding it from the public-health angle, the senior executive official went on, it was most important to shorten the time spent sitting hunched over one's desk. Mter having in this fashion illuminated the subject of shorthand from various other scientific-scholarly angles as well, to his listener's. edification, the visitor finally began to dilate upon the Oehl system's immense superiority over all other systems of shorthand. He showed that from every one ofthe points ofview under consideration, all other systems ofshorthand were a mere betrayal ofthe veryprinciple ofshorthand.
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He then unfolded the story of his own personal martyrdom to the cause. There were all the older, more powerful systems, which had had time to ally themselves with all sorts of vested interests. All the trade schools were teaching the Vogelbauch system and stood pat against any change, backed up, in accordance with the laws ofinertia, by the business community. The newspapers, which obviously profit enormously from the advertisements of the trade schools, would not hear of any proposals for reform. And the Education Office? What a sad joke that was, according to Herr Oehl. Five years ago, when shorthand was first made a required subject in the secondary schools, the Office of Education had set up a committee of advisers on the system to be chosen; the committee was naturally packed with repre-
sentatives of the trade schools and the business community and with government stenographers, who were of course hand in glove with the press, and that was that! It was all too obvious that the Vogel- bauch system was slated to win! The Oehl Shorthand Association had issued a warning and a protest against such criminal indifference to the public interest. But its delegates could no longer get anyone at the Education Office to see them!
Ulrich took cases of this kind to His Grace. "Oehl? " Count Leins- dorf said. "An official, you say? " His Grace rubbed his nose for a long time but came to no decision. "Perhaps you should see his head of department and find out if there's anything to what he says," he mused after a while, but he was feeling creative and canceled this suggestion. "No, ! 'II tell you what we'll do: we'll draw up a memoran- dum. Let's find out what they have to say for themselves. " And he added confidentially, to give Ulrich an insight into the deeper work- ings of things: 'With any of these things, you can never tell whether
·they are nonsense or not," he said. "But you see, my dear feiiow, you can always depend on something important coming of the fact that somebody attaches importance to it. Take the case of Dr. Amheim, that darling of all the newspapers. The newspapers could just as eas-
. ily pursue some other hare. But given that they pursue him, that makes Amheim important. You said, didn't you, that this man Oehl has an organization behind him? Not that it proves anything, of course, but on the other hand, as I said, we must keep up with the times, and when a good many people are for something, the chances are that something will come of it. "
82
CLARISSE CALLS FOR AN ULRICH YEAR
There was really no reason for Ulrich to pay Clarisse a visit other than his having to give her a good talking-to about the letter she had written to Count Leinsdorf; when she had come to see him a few days earlier, he had forgotten all about it. On his way there, however, it occurred to him that Walter was defmitely jealous of him and would be upset about the visit when he heard of it. But there was nothing Walter could do about it. The majority of men find them- selves in this funny situation if they happen to be jealous: they cannot keep an eye on their women until after office hours.
The time of day Ulrich had chosen to go there made it unlikely that he would find Walter at home. It was quite early in the after- noon. He had phoned to say he was coming. The snowy whiteness of the landscape outside shone so intensely into the room that it was as though there were no curtains at all on the windows. In this
. merciless light that glittered off every object stood Clarisse, greet- ing Ulrich with a laugh from the center of the room. On the side toward the window, the minimal curvature of her boyish body flashed in vivid colors, while the side in shadow was a bluish-brown mist from which her forehead, nose, and chin jutted out like snowy ridges whose edges are blurred by wind and sun. The . impression she gave was less that of a human being than of the meeting of ice and light in the spectral solitude of an Alpine winter. Ulrich caught some of the spell she must cast on Walter at times, and his mixed feelings for his boyhood friend briefly gave way to an insight into the image two people presented to each other, whose life he per- haps knew hardly at all.
"I don't know whether you told Walter anything about the letter you wrote to Count Leinsdorf," he began, "but I've come to speak to you alone, and to warn you never to do that kind of thing again. " Clarisse pushed two chairs together and made him sit down.
"Don't tell Walter," she asked him, "but tell me what you have
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against it. You mean the Nietzsche Year? What did your Count say to that? "
'What do you suppose he could have said? The way you tied it in with Moosbrugger was utterly crazy. And even without that he'd probably have thrown your letter away. "
"Oh, really? " Clarisse was very disappointed. Then she said: "Luckily, you have some say in it tool"
"But don't you see, you're simply out of your mind! "
Clarisse smiled, accepting this as a compliment. She laid her hand on his arm and asked him: "But an Austrian Year is nonsense, isn't it? "
"Of course it is. "
"But a Nietzsche Year would be a fine thing. Why should it be wrong to want something just because we happen to like the idea ourselves? "
"And what exactly is your idea of a Niemche Year? "
"That's your affair. "
"Very funny. "
"Not at all. Why does it seem funny to you to try to put into prac-
tice something you take seriously as an intellectual matter? Tell me that. "
''I'll be glad to," Ulrich said, freeing his arm from her hand. "After. all, Nietzsche isn't the issue; it could just as well be Christ or Buddha. " ,
"Or you. Why not get to work on an Ulrich Year! " She said this with the same casual air as when she had urged him to free Moos- brugger. This tirp. e, however, his attention had not strayed, and he was looking at her face while he listened to her words. All he saw was Clarisse's usual smile, that funl! y little grimace that was the unin- tended result of the ment;U effort she was making.
"Oh well," he thought, "she doesn't mean any harm. "
But Clarisse drew closer to him again. 'Why don't you make it You Year? You might just be in a position to do it now. Only -don't say anything to Walter about it-I've told you that already-nor about my Moosbrugger letter. Not a word, ever, that I've talked to you about it. But I assure you, this murderer is musical, even though he can't actually compose. Haven't you ever noticed that every human being is the center of a cosmic sphere? When the person moves, the
sphere moves with him. That's the way to make music, without think- ing about it, simple as the cosmic sphere around you. . . . "
"And you feel that I should work on something of that sort for a year of my own, do you? " ·
"No," Clarisse answered, playing it safe. Her fine lips seemed about to say something but held their peace, and the flame blazed silently from her eyes. It was hard to say what it was that emanated from her at such moments. One felt scorched, as if one had come too close to something red hot. Now she smiled, but it was a smile that curled on her lips like an ash left behind in the wake of the burned- out flare from her eyes.
"Still, that is the sort of thing I could do, if I had to," Ulrich went on, "but I'mafraid you think I should make a coup d'etat? "
Clarisse thought it over. "Let's say a Buddha Year, then," she said evasively. "I don't know what Buddha stood for, or only vaguely, but let's accept it, and if we think it matters, then we should do some- thing about it. It either deserves our faith in it or it doesn't! "
"Fine. Now . . . a Nietzsche Year was what you said. But what was it Nietzsche actually wanted? "
Clarisse reconsidered. 'Well, of course I don't mean a Nietzsche monument ·or a Nietzsche street," she said in some embarrassment. "But people should try to live as h e - "
"As he wanted? " he interrupted her. "But what did he want? "
Clarisse started to answer, hesitated, and finally said: "Oh come on, you know all that yourself. . . . "
"I don't know a thing," he teased her. "But I can tell you this: You can set up a Kaiser Franz Josef Soup Kitchen, and you can meet the needs of a Society for the Protection of the House Cat, but you can- not tum great ideas into reality any more than you can do it with music. Why is that? I dmi't know. But that's how it is. "
He had finally found refuge on the little sofa behind the little table; it was a position easier to defend than the chair. In the open space in the middle of the room, on the far bank, as it were, of an illusory prolongation of the shining tabletop, Clarisse was still stand- ing and talking. Her whole slender body was involved; she actually felt everything she wanted to say with her whole body first of all, and was always needing to do something with it. Ulrich had always thought of her body as hard and boyish, but now, as it gently swayed
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on legs pressed close together, he saw Clarisse as a Javanese dancer. Suddenly it occurred to him that he would not be surprised if she fell into a trance. Or was he in a trance himself? He launched into a long speech:
"You want to organize your life around an idea," he began. "And you'd like to know how to do that. But an idea is the most paradoxical thing in the world. The flesh in the grip of an idea is like a fetish. Bonded to an idea, it becomes magical. An ordinary slap in the face, bound up with ideas of honor, or of punishment and the like, can kill a man. And yet ideas can never maintain themselves in the state in which they are most powerful; they're like the kind of substance that, exposed to the air, instantly changes into some other, more lasting, but corrupted form. You've been through this often yourself. Be- cause an idea is what you are: an idea in a particular state. You are touched by a breath of something, and it's like a note suddenly ~mergingfrom the humming ofstrings; in front ofyou there is some- thing like a mirage; out of the confusion of your soul an endless pa- rade is taking shape, with all the world's beauty looking on from the roadside. All this can be the effect of a single idea. But after a while it comes to resemble all your previous ideas, it takes its place among them, becomes part ofyour outlook and your character, your princi- ples or your moods; in the act oftaking shape it has lost its wings and its mystery. "
Clarisse answered: "Walter is jealous of you. Not on my account, I'm sure. It's because you look as though you could do what he wishes he could do. Do you see what I mean? There is something about you that cuts him down. I wish I knew how to put it. " She scrutinized him.
Their two speeches intertwined.
Walter had always been life's special pet, always held on its lap. He transformed everything that happened to him and gave it a tender vitality. Walter had always been the one whose life had been the pcher in experiences. "But having more of a life is one of the earliest and subtlest signs of mediocrity," Ulrich thought. "Seen in context, an experience loses its personal venom or sweetness. " That was how it was, more or less. Even the assertion that this was the case estab- lished a context, and one got no kiss of welcome or good-bye for it.
And despite all that, Walter was jealous of him? He was glad to hear it.
"I told him he ought to kill you," Clarisse reported.
"What? "
"Ext~rminate him! I said. Suppose you're not really all you think
you are, and suppose Walter is the better man and has no other way to gain his peace of mind: it would make sense, wouldn't it? Besides, you can always fight back. "
"No half measures for you, I see," Ulrich said, somewhat shaken.
'Well, we were only talking. How do you feel about it, by the way? Walter says it's wrong even to think such things. "
"Oh no, thinking is quite in order," he replied hesitantly, taking a good look at Clarisse.
She had a peculiar charm all her own. Was it as though she were somehow standing side by side with herself? She was not quite there, yet all there, both in close proximity.
"Bah, thinking! " she cut in. Her words were addressed to the wall behind him, as though her eyes were fixed on a point somewhere between. "You're every bit as passive as Walter. " These words, too, fell somewhere midway between them, keeping their distance like an insult, yet sounding conciliatory, because of the confidential closeness they implied. ''What I say is, if you can think something, you should be able to do it too," she insisted dryly.
Then she moved off, walked to the window, and stood there with her hands clasped behind her back.
Ulrich stood up quickly, went over to her, and placed an arm around her shoulders.
"Dear little Clarisse," he said, "you're being a bit strange today, aren't you? But I must put in a good word for myself; you're notre- ally concerned with me anyway, are you? "
Clarisse was staring out the window. But now her gaze sharpened; she was focusing on something specific out there, for support. She felt as if her thoughts had strayed outside and had only just returned. This feeling of being like a room, with the sense of the door just hav- ing shut, was nothing new to her. On and off she had days, even weeks, when everything around her was brighter and lighter than usual, as though it would take hardly any effort to slip out of herself and go traipsing about the world unencumbered; then again there
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were the bad times, when she felt imprisoned, and though these times usually passed quickly, she dreaded them like a punishment, because everything closed in on her and was so sad. Just now she was aware of a lucid, sober peacefulness, and it worried her a little; she was not sure what it was she had wanted just a while ago, and this sense of leaden clarity and quiet control was often a prelude to the time of punishment. She pulled herself together with the feeling that if she could keep this conversation going with conviction, she would be back on safe ground.
"Don't say 'dear little' to me," she said, pouting, "or I might end up killing you myself. " It came out like a joke, so she felt she had made one. She stole a cautious look at him, to see how he was taking it. "Ofcourse, it was only a way of putting it, hut you must realize that I'm serious. Where were we? You said it wasn't possible to live by an idea. There's no real energy in you, neither you nor Walter! "
"You horrified me by calling me a passivist! But there are two kinds. There's a passive passivism, like Walter's and then there's the active kind! "
"What is active passivism? " Clarisse was intrigued. "A prisoner waiting for his chance to break out! " "Bah! " said Clarisse. "Excuses. "
'Well, yes," he conceded. "Maybe. "
Clarisse still held her hands clasped behind her back and stood with her legs wide apart, as though in. riding boots.
"You know what Nietzsch·e says? Wanting to know for sure is like wanting to know where the ground is for your next step, mere cow- ardice. One has to start somewhere to act on one's intentions, not just talk about it. And I've always expected you of all people to do something special someday! "
Suddenly she had taken hold of a button on his vest and started twisting it, her face lifted up to his. Instinctively he laid his hand on hers to save the button.
''I've been thinking for a long time," she went on shyly, "that the really rotten, vile things that go on happen not because someone is doing them but because we are letting them happen. They expand to fill a void! " After this coup she looked at him expectantly. Then she burst out: "Letting things happen is ten times more dangerous than doing them, don't you see? " She struggled inwardly for a more exact
formulation, but then she only added: "You know exactly what I mean, don't you? Even though you are always saying that we have to let things go their own way. But I understand what you're saying. It's occurred to me more than once that you're the Devil himself! " These wordS had slipped out of Clarisse's mouth like a lizard. They frightened her. All she had been thinking of at the outset was Wal- ter's begging her to have a child by him. Ulrich caught a flicker in her eyes; she wanted him. Her upturned face was suffused with some- thing-nothing at all lovely, something ugly but touching. Something like a violent outbreak of sweat blurring the features. But it was disembodied, purely imaginary. He felt infected by it against his will and overcome by a slight absentmindedness. He was losing his power to hold out against her craziness, and so he grabbed her hand to make her sit down on the sofa, and sat down beside her.
"Let me tell you now why I do nothing," he began, and fell silent.
Clarisse, who had become herself again the moment she felt his touch, urged him on.
"There's nothing a man can do, because . . . but I can't really ex- pect you to understand this," he began, then he extracted a cigarette and devoted himself to lighting it.
"Go on," Clarisse prompted him. "What are you trying to say? "
But he kept silent. She pushed her arm behind his back and shook him, like a boy showing how strong he can be. With her, there was no need to say anything; the mere suggestion of something out of the
"ordinary was enough to set her imagination going. "You're really evil! " she said, and tried in vain to hurt him. But at this moment they were unpleasantly interrupted by Walter's return.
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What could Ulrich have said to Clarisse anyway? ·
He had kept it to himself because she had somehow brought him
to the verge of actually saying "God. " He had been about to say, more or less: God does not really mean the world literally; it is a met- aphor, an analogy, a figure of speech that He has to resort to for some reason or other, and it never satisfies Him, of course. We are not supposed to take Him at his word, it is we ourselyes who must come up with the answer for the riddle He sets us. He wondered whether Clarisse would have agreed to regard the whole thing as a game of Cowboys and Indians or Cops and Robbers. Of course she would. Whoever took the first step, she would stick by him like a she-wolf and keep a sharp lookout.
But there was something else he had also had on the tip of his tongue, something about mathematical problems that do not admit of a general solution but do allow for particular solutions, which one could combine to come nearer to a general solution. He might have added that he regarded the problem ofhuman life as that kind o( problem. What we call an age-without specifying whether we mean. . centuries, millennia,- or the time span between schoolchild and grandparent-that broad unregulated flow of conditions would come to mean a more or less chaotic succession of unsatisfactory and, .
in themselves, false answers out of which there might emerge the right and whole solution only when mankind had learned to put all the pieces together.
On his way home in the streetcar, it all came back to ·him, but he was rather ashamed of such thoughts in the presence of the other passengers riding into town with him. One could tell by looking at them that they were on their way home from definite occupations or setting out toward definite entertainments; even just by looking at their clothes one could tell where they had come from or were going.
He studied the woman next to him; clearly a wife and mother, forty- ish, probably the wife of an academic, and she had small opera glasses on her lap. Sitting beside her, toying with those ideas, he felt like a little boy at play, and playing something slightly improper, at that.
For to think without pursuing some practical purpose is surely an improper, furtive occupation; especially those thoughts that take huge ~trides on stilts, touching experience only with tiny soles, are automatically suspect of having disreputable origins. There was a time when people talked of their thoughts taking wing; in Schiller's time such intellectual highfliers would have been widely esteemed, but in our own day such a person seems to have something the mat- ter with him, unless it happens to be his profession and source of income. There has obviously been a shift in our priorities. Certain concerns have been taken out of people's hearts. For high-flown thoughts a kind of poultry farm has been set up, called philosophy, theology, or literature, where they proliferate in their own way beyond anyone's ability to keep track of them, which is just as well, because in the face of such expansion no one need feel guilty about not bothering with them personally. With his respect for profession- alism and expertise, Ulrich was basically determined to go along with any such division oflabor. Nevertheless, he still indulged in thinking for himself, even though he was no professional philosopher, and at the moment he could see that to do otherwise was to take the road leading to the beehive state. The queen would lay her eggs, the drones would devote themselves to lust and the life of the mind, and the specialists would toil. It was quite possible to imagine the world so organized; total productivity might even go up as a result. For the present, every human being is still a microcosm of all humanity, as it were, but this has clearly become too much to bear and it no longer works, so that the humane element has become a transparent fraud. For the new division of labor to succeed, it might be necessary to arrange for at least one set ofworkers to evolve an intellectual syn- thesis. After all, without mind . . . What Ulrich meant was that it would give him nothing to look forward to. But this was of course a
prejudice. No one really knows what life depends on. He shifted in his seat and studied the reflection ofhis face in the windowpane op- posite, looking for something else to think about. But there was his
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head floating along in the fluid glass, midway between the inside and the outside, becoming remarkably compelling after a while in its in- sistence on some kind of completion.
Was there a war actually going on in the Balkans or not? Some sort of intervention was undoubtedly going on, but whether it was war was hard to tell. So much was astir in the world. There was another new record for high-altitude flight; something to be proud of. If he was not mistaken, the record now stood at 3,700 meters and the man's name was Jouhoux. A black boxer had beaten the white cham- pion; the new holder ofthe world title was Johnson. The President of France was going to Russia; there was talk of world peace being at stake. A newly discovered tenor was garnering fees in South America that had never been equaled even in North America. A terrible earthquake had devastated Japan-the poor Japanese. In short, much was happening, there was great excitement everywhere around the tum of 1913-1914. But two years or five years earlier there had also been much excitement, every day had had its sensa- tions, and yet it was hard, not to say impossible, to remember what it was that had actually happened. A possible synopsis: The new,cure for syphilis was making . . . Research into plant metabolism was mov- ing . . . The conquest of the South Pole seemed . . . Professor Stei- nach's experiments with monkey glands were arousing . . . Half the details could easily be left out without making much difference. What a strange business history was! We could safely say of this or that event that it had already . found its place in history, or certainly would find it; but whether this event had actually taken place was not so sure! Because for anything to happen, it has to happen at a certain date and not at some other date or even not at all; also, the thing itself has to happen illld not by chance something merely approximating it or something related. But this is precisely what no one can· say of history, unless he happens to have written it down at the time, as the newspapers do, or it's a matter of one's professional or financial af- fairs, since it is of course important to know how many years one has to go till retirement or when one will come into a certain sum of money or when one will have spent it, and in such a context even wars can become memorable occurrences. Examined close up, our history looks rather vague and messy, like a morass only partially made safe for pedestrian·traffic, though oddly enough in the end
there does seem to be a path across it, that very "path of history" of which nobody knows the starting ·point. This business of serving as "the stuffofhistory" infuriated Ulrich. The luminous, swaying box in which he was riding seemed to be a machine in which several hun- dred kilos of people were being rattled around, by way of being pro- cessed into "the future. " A hundred years earlier they had sat in a mail coach with the same look on their faces, and a hundred years hence, whatever was going on, they would be sitting as new people in exactly the same way in their updated transport machines-he was revolted by this lethargic acceptance of changes and conditions, this helpless contemporaneity, this mindlessly submissive, truly demean- ing stringing along with the centuries, just as if he were suddenly rebelling against the hat, curious enough in shape, that was sitting on his head.
Instinctively he got to his feet and made the rest of his way on foot. In the more generous human confines of the city, in which he now found himself, his uneasiness gave way to good humor again. What a crazy notion of little Clarisse's, to want a year of the mind. He con- centrated his attention on this point. What made it so senseless? One might just as well ask why Diotima's patriotic campaign was senseless.
Answer Number One: Because world history undoubtedly comes into being like all the other stories. Authors can never think of any- thing new, and they all copy from each other. This is why ail politi- cians study history instead of biology or whatever. So much for authors.
Answer Number Two: For the most part, however, history is made without authors. It evolves not from some inner center but from the periphery. Set in motion by trifling causes. It probably doesn't take nearly as much as one would think to tum Gothic man or the ancient Greek into modem civilized man. Human nature is as capable of cannibalism as it is of the Critique ofPure Reason; the same convic- tions and qualities will serve to tum out either one, depending on circumstances, and very great external differences in the results cor- respond to very slight internal ones.
Digression One:. Ulrich recalled a similar experience dating from his army days. The squadron rides in double file, and "Passing on orders" is the drill; each man in tum whispers the given order to the
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next man. So ifthe order given up front is: "Sergeant major move·to the head of the column," it comes out the other end as "Eight troop- ers to be shot at orice," or something like that. And this is just how world history is made.
Answer Number Three: If, therefore, we were to transplant a gen- eration of present-day Europeans at a tender age into the Egypt of 5000 B. C. , world history would begin afresh in. the year 5000 B. C. , repeat itself for a while, and then, for reasons nobody could fathom, gradually begin to deviate from its established course.
Digression Two: The law of world history-it now occurred to him-was none other than the fundamental principle of government in old Kakania: "muddling through. " Kakania was an incredibly clever state.
Digression Three or Answer Number Four: The course of history was therefore not that of a billiard ball-which, once it is hit, takes a definite line-but resembles the movement of clouds, or the path of a man sauntering through the streets, turned aside by a shadow here, a crowd there, an unusual architectural outcrop, until at last he ar- rives at a place he never knew or meant to go to. Inherent in the course of history is a certain going off course. The present is always like the last house of a town, which somehow no longer counts as a house in town. Each generation wonders "Who am I, and what were my forebears? " It would make more sense to ask ''Where am I? " and to assume that one's predecessors were not different in kind but merely in a different place; that would be a move in the right direc- tion, he thought.
He had been numbering his own answers and digressions as he went along, while glancing now into some passing face, now into a shop window, to keep his thoughts from running away with him en- tirely, but had nevertheless gone slightly astray and had to stop for a moment to see where he was and find the best way home. Before taking this route, he tried once more to get his question straight in his mind. Crazy little Clarisse was quite right in saying that we should make history, make it up, even though he had argued against it with her. But why didn't we?
All that occurred to him in answer at the moment was Director Fischel of lloyd's Bank, his friend Leo Fischel, with whom years ago he had sometimes sat outside a cafe in the summer. For if Ulrich had
been talking to Fischel instead of to himself, Fischel would typically have said: "I should only have your worries! " Ulrich appreciated this refreshing answer Fischel would have given. "My dear Fischel," he immediately replied in his mind, "it's not that simple. When I say history, I mean, ifyou recall, our life. And I did admit from the start that it's in very bad taste for me to ask: Why don't people create his- tory-that is, why do they attack history like so many beasts only when they are wounded, when their shirttails are on fire, in short, only in an emergency? So why is this question in such bad taste? What do \'Ve have against it, when all it means is that people shouldn't let their lives drift as they do? ""'
"Everybody knows the answer," Director Fischel would retort. "We're lucky when the politicians and the clergy and the big shots with nothing to do, and everybody else who runs around with all the answers, keep their hands off our daily lives. Besides which, we're a civilized people. I f only so many people nowadays weren't so uncivi- lized! " And of course Director Fischel was right. A man is lucky if he knows his way around stocks and bonds, and other people refrain from dabbling so much in history just because they think they know how it works. We couldn't live without ideas, God forbid, but we have to aim at a certain equilibrium among them, a balance ofpower, an armed truce of ideas, so that none of the contending parties can get too much done. Fischel's sedative was civilization.