No More Learning

Addition to hennaphrodite: For the first time again like it used to be, when young girls had secrets. You really lmow what it means to be mar- ried, and you lmow how Walter is. (Each of these sentences occurs to her as at the beginning. ) And I'm sometimes a man. I've never "per- ished" in a man's arms; I push! I permeate him! I don't belong to any- one; I'm so strong that I could have a friendship with several men at once. A woman loves like an enormous pot that draws all the fire into itself. Clarisse says of herself: To love not like a woman but the way a brave little fox loves a big dog against which it is helpless. Or like a brave dog its master. That's what you love. Or: I'm a soldier, I disarm you, then disarm you just one degree more. Can't move a limb because ofso much superior strength. That's thewayyou love boys. Young people. But I'm a person too, why then just a woman.
But isn't she still-hermaphrodite-a woman too? Perhaps depict it this way: as i f a man would think it beautiful.
I go my way, I have my tasks; but you open my dress and fall upon me and draw my helplessness out of me. And I lean on you, unhappy at what you're doing to me but unable to resist. And go on and wear a black crepe on my helmet.
She would like to have intercourse (possibly with Walter too).
It is weakening.
From this the idea: You will weaken me, make me a woman, so that
you remain radiant . . . (at times)
We struggle hand to hand and are like the bath after the battle. Concretely: I have the character and duties of a man. I don't want
1598 ·THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
(this time) a child and don't want love, but I want the deep phenomenon of desire, of purification (salvation) through wealmess. I-you like you- me, even if servant and master.
? I'll press one leg against yours and wind the other around your hips, and your eyes will mist over.
I'll be insolent and forget my shyness toward you.
The woman has feminine feelings for the superior man, masculine feelings for the subordinate man. Therefore something hermaphroditic arises, a spiritually intertwined threesome.
Clarisse waited for Meingast's letter; the letter did not arrive. Clarisse became agitated. Ulrich, whom she suddenly thought of again, was away. She did not want to talk to Walter.
One morning, something strange happened. Clarisse was reading the newspaper; Walter had not yet left for the office. Suddenly Clarisse asked: -Wasn't there something in the paper yesterday about a train wreck near Budweis? -Y es, said Walter, who was reading another part ofthe paper. -How many dead? -Oh, ofcourse I can't remember; I think two or three; it was a small accident. Why are you asking? -Noth- ing. Reading on for a while, Clarisse said: -Because there's been an accident in America too. Where's Pennsylvania? - I don't know. In America. They went on reading. Clarisse saw strands like railroad tracks fanning out before her, which went on tangling wildly. Had she not seen these strands of tracks weeks or months ago? She reflected. Little trains shot out on the tracks, roared through curves, and collided. Clarisse said: -The engineers never mean for their locomotives to collide. -Of course not, Walter said, without paying attention. Clarisse asked whether her brother Siegfried was coming later that afternoon. Walter answered, he hoped so. He was bothered, it was time for him to be off, and Clarisse was constantly interrupting his reading.
Suddenly Clarisse said: - I want to talk with Siegfried about taking me to see Moosbrugger.
- W h o is Moosbrugger?
- Y o u mean you don't remember? Ulrich's friend the murderer. Now Walter understood whom she meant. She had once talked about
this man. - B u t Ulrich knows him either not at all or only very slightly, he corrected Clarisse.
-W ell, in any case--
- Y o u really shouldn't be so eccentric.
From the Posthumous Papers · 1599
Clarisse did not dignify this with a response. Walter leafed through the paper once more and thought he was surprised at not finding any mention of this person; he had assumed that Clarisse had been moved to make her comment because of some article; but he didn't have time for a question or genuine surprise, because he had to find his hat and rush off. Clarisse made an unpleasant face when he kissed her on the fore- head; two arrogant long lines ran down alongside her nose, and her chin jutted fmward. This very unreal face, which Walter did not notice, might have been grounds for anxiety.
But the strange thing that happened was this. While Clarisse was ask- ing her question, she had recognized that an accident happens not be- cause of evil intent but because in the confused network of tracks, switches, and signals that she saw before her, the human being loses the power of conscience with which he ought to have checked over his task once more; had that happened, he would certainly have done whatever was necessary to avoid the accident. At this moment, where she saw this before her eyes like a child's toy, she felt an enormous power of con- science. So she possessed it. She had to halfclose her eyes so that Walter would not notice their flashing. For she had recognized instantly that when one said "letting things prevail," it was only another expression for it. She understood that one was forced to let things have their way. But she did not let Walter have his, and would not do so.
That was the moment when Moosbrugger had occurred to her.
Everyone is familiar with what a miracle it is when a long-forgotten name, and one that moreover may be unimportant, suddenly pops up in one's memory. Or a face, with details that one is not at all aware of hav- ing seen. Evoked by some accidental stimulus. It is really as if a hole were to open in the sky. Clarisse was by no means wrong when she felt it as a process with two ends, Moosbrugger at one end, and far away, look- ing at him, herself; although one could of course say that in general this is not correct, because memory outside ourselves is nothing.
But precisely if something is not true in general, but is in particular, then this was something for Clarisse. It now occurred to her that Moos- brugger was a carpenter. And we know who else was a carpenter? Right. So at one end there was the carpenter, and at the other, Clarisse. Cla- risse, who was not permitted to let things prevail, who had a black mole on her thigh that fascinated every man. For there was no question that Meingast had run away from her; it had come too suddenly, he had wanted to save himself.
One cannot expect everything to be equally clear in the first moment. Somehow, of course, the carpenter was also connected with Ulrich; when a person whom one has almost forgotten after having loved him
1600 • THE MAN WITH0 UT QUALITIES
suddenly walks in the door, without, so to speak, being inwardly an- nounced, as Ulrich now did, even though in the company of other peo- ple, this is in and of itself something of the kind that makes one have to hold one's breath for a moment. Nor was it clear what all this had to do with the hermaphrodite that Clarisse was in order to enter the league of men; but she would get to that, she felt, and at the root of the emotion there most certainly was a connection; that could be seen in the manner of activity among these thoughts, which up there, on the outside, re- mained isolated for now.
For all these reasons Clarisse considered it her duty to meet Moos- brugger. That certainly wouldn't be difficult. Her brother was a physi- cian and could help her with it. She waited for him, and the time passed quickly. She considered how little Meingast had meant to her when she had known him before, and how great he had become since. While he was present, everything here in the house had been elevated. She had the feeling that he had simply taken her and Walter's sins upon himself, and that was what had made everything so easy. Perhaps now, in the next phase, she would have to take Meingast's sins upon herself.
But what are sins? She used this word perhaps too often, without thinking enough about it. It is a poisonous Christian word. Clarisse could not discover what she herself meant, precisely. A butterfly occurred to her, which suddenly falls motionless to the ground and becomes an ugly worm with dead wings. Then naturally Walter, who sought the milk of love at her breast and thereafter became stiff and lazy. Besides, had she not once known quite clearly that she would redeem this carpenter from his sins? She had, had she not, once written a letter? It was uncanny to recall that only so dimly. It obviously signified that something was still to come.
No letter came from Meingast, the business with the league of men remained out of Clarisse's purview; sometimes she forgot it because of the new things that were happening. She had to think how she might get into the clinic again in spite of Dr. Friedenthal, who had forbidden her to return. She realized that it would be difficult. Climb over the wall surrounding the grounds? she thought; this idea of penetrating the for- bidden space like a warrior appealed to her greatly, but since the clinic was not in open country but in the city, ifit was to be done without being seen it could be risked only at night, and then, once on the grounds, how was Clarisse to find her way among the many locked buildings? She was
From the Posthumous Papers · 1 6 0 1
afraid. Although she knew that it would have to be considered out of the question, she was frightened by the image of falling into the hands of a madman among the black trees and being raped or strangled by him. She still had the screams of the maniacs in her ears: at the last station, before she went past the lovely ladies and returned once more to ratio- nal life. She often saw before her the naked man standing in the center of a totally empty room that had nothing in it but a low cot and a toilet that were of a piece with the floor. He had a blond beard and light- brown pubic hair. He ignored both the opening of the door and the peo- ple looking at him; he stood with his legs spread apart, kept his head lowered like a savage, had thick saliva in his beard, and repeated like a pendulum the same motion again and again, throwing his upper body around in a shallow circle, always with a push, always toward the same side, his arms forming an acute angle to his body, and the only thing that changed was that with every one of these motions another finger jumped up from his clenched fist; it was accompanied by a loud, panting scream, forced out by the requisite monstrous exertion of the whole body. Dr. Friedenthal had explained that this went on for hours, and had allowed Clarisse to look into other cells, where for the moment quiet reigned. But this had been if anything even more horrifying. He showed her the same bare cement room containing nothing but a person whose fit was imminent, and one of these people was sitting there still in his street clothes; ~<. nlyhis tie and collar had been removed. It was a lawyer with a lovely full beard and carefully parted hair; he sat there and glanced at the visitors as if he had been on the point of going to court and had sat down on this stone bench only because he was compelled, for God knows what reason, to wait. Clarisse was especially horrified by this per- son because he looked so natural; but Dr. Friedenthal said that just a few days before, in his first fit, he had killed his wife, and almost all the transient inhabitants of this section were murderers. Clarisse asked her- selfwhy she was afraid of them, when it was precisely these patients who were best secured and supervised? She feared them because she did not . understand them. There were several others in her memory who af- fected her the same way. -But that's still no reason for my having to meet them if I'm walking through the grounds at night! she said to herself.
But it was like this. It was almost certain that she would meet them; that was an idea it was impossible to eradicate, for no matter how often Clarisse imagined the process ofclimbing over the wall and then walking forward through the gloomy, widely spaced trees, sooner or later it came to a gruesome encounter. This was a given fact one had to reckon with, and therefore it was reasonable to ask what it meant. Even as solid a man
1602 • THE MAN WITH 0 U T QUALITIES
as the famous old American writer Ralph Waldo Emerson, whom she had read in her adolescence because her friends told her he was marvel- ous, maintained that it is a general law of nature and man that like is attracted by like. Clarisse remembered a sentence which went, roughly, that everything that comes to a person tends toward him ofitself, so that cause and effect only apparently succeed each other but in reality are simply two sides ofthe same thing, and all cleverness is bad because with every precautionary rule against danger one is put in the power of this danger. All Clarisse had to do, when she remembered this, was to apply it to herself. If it was established that she, even if at first only in some mysterious fashion in her mind, was continually meeting murderers, then she was attracting these murderers. But is like being attracted by like? That meant that she bore within herself the soul of a murderer. One can imagine what it means when such extraordinary thoughts sud- denly find solid ground beneath their feet! Meingast had run away from her; she was apparently too strong for him. It was like lightning bolts striking each other! Walter was attracted by her to murder his talent again and again in her, no matter how much she pushed him away. She carried a black medallion at the crease ofher hip, and the insane divined it: perhaps such people can see through clothes and came toward her rejoicing. In a confusing way, all the facts fit.
Laughter and difficulties struggled around Clarisse's mouth; it alter- nately opened and clamped tight. She had got up too early; Walter was still sleeping; she had hastily thrown on a light dress and gone outside. The singing of birds reached her from the woods through the empty morning stillness. The hemisphere of the sky had not yet filled with warmth. Even the light was still shallowly dispersed. - I t only reaches as far as my ankles-Clarisse thought-the faucet of the morning has just been opened. Everything was before its time. Clarisse was deeply moved that she was wandering through the world before its time. It al- most made her cry. She fervently regretted that during her visit to the madhouse she had seen through Moosbrugger's situation too late. What she had seen being played out before her was worthless devils gambling for a soul. She heard herself being called to tum back there once more, but Dr. Friedenthal blocked her path. She felt quite ashamed, and went on like that for a ways. But at some point a thought took shape that re- leased her from this depression: Many great men had been in insane asylums. And they had been derided by those who had remained in pos- session of their reason. They had now become incapable of explaining themselves to those for whom earlier they had had only contempt. She remembered the muteness ofthe late Nietzsche, whom she worshiped. And what had vexed her just now because she had not seen through it in
From the Posthumous Papers · 1603
time, how the three devils had intentionally brought her before Moos- brugger in so miserably casual a fashion in order to get the better of her through cunning and paralyze her, indeed that she had really shown her- self to be stupid and weak, now slowly made her understand as a sign that the fate of the great man among the repulsive jailers of the world would be laid upon her too. Her heart was filled by a drifting rain oflight and tears. It was uncanny, putting oneself on an equal footing with the insane; but being on the same footing with the uncanny is to cast one's lot for genius! She decided to free Moosbrugger from his jailers. Thoughts regarding how she might do this flitted around in her mind. The swallows had meanwhile begun to flit through the air. In some way it would have to work. Clarisse was so absorbed in these thoughts that she felt the depths like the narrow incline of an abyss. She had to draw in her shoulders and could only cautiously venture a smile. It occurred to her that this would be the "depth of antimoral inclination" that Nietz- sche demanded of his disciples. She was astonished at this, for she had not expected that it was possible to experience it so palpably. It was a path through a "landscape of countermorality. "
The landscape of countermorality lies deep beneath that of ordinary life, not deep in yards but many octaves deeper. That is how it seemed to her. Everything great lives in the landscape of countermorality (there). It goes the same ways others go, but without touching them. Against that Clarisse said to herself half aloud: - I am following in Nietzsche's foot- steps. She could also imagine that Moosbrugger had taken Nietzsche's sorrow upon himself and was Nietzsche in the shape of a sinner. But that was not her object at the moment. Now she had to take "the sorrow" upon herself: this is what preoccupied her. She felt it hovering, other- worldly, in the vacancy of the morning. She was carrying something that towered up hugely from her shoulders. But then she thought something over and went home.
When she got there, Walter was not yet up, although he ought to have been on his way to the office already. He slept so badly that he could not get up on time in the morning. Dreams tortured him, leaving behind when he woke up, although he could not remem~r them, a feeling of being inwardly wiped out.
Walter felt like a piece o£ paper that has been rolled up by an unpleasant warmth, and so dried out that it cracks at the slightest touch. That was the effect of Clarisse, who slept beside him, dressed and undressed beside him, but hardly permitted him to kiss her. His blood stagnated and became restless. It was dammed up like a crowd of people that is stopped at its head, while behind, where people
1604 • THE MAN WITH0 UT QUALITIES
no longer see the cause, they begin to push forward until they're out of control. Walter pulled himselftogether; he did not want to hurt Clarisse, he understood her, she moved him with her childish resolve, there was nobility in her agonized exaggerating. But perhaps, too, that nervous ex- altation which stigmatized everything she did. It seemed to Walter that it was his duty to clear away the·obstacles she erected, even with force, if need be. It would be necessazy to go through such brutality in order to restore normal intellectual opposition, if opposition there had to be. He felt it in himself; both their minds needed a surgeon: a mental growth had proliferated wildly and needed to be cut out. But he was convinced that a sorrow such as had been laid upon them would not be any less deep or strange than Tristan and Isolde's.
Only his most extreme personal need had prompted him, a few days before, to seek a consultation with Clarisse's brother Siegfried. - Y o u know Clarisse---he had said-that is, of course you don't know her, but you know a lot about her, and perhaps you can just this once, as a doctor, also give some advice. Siegfried gave this advice. It was remarkable how much patronizing he accepted from Walter. Life is full of such relation- ships, where one person humiliates and brushes aside another, who of- fers no resistance. Perhaps only healthy life. The world would probably already have perished at the time of the great migrations if people had all defended themselves to the last drop of blood; instead of which the weaker gave in and moved on, preferring to seek other neighbors, whom they in turn could brush aside. This is the model on which human rela- tionships are still carried on, and with time everything works out by it- self. In the circle where Walter was thought to be a genius who had not yet found his definitive expression, Siegfried was considered a lout and a blockhead. He had accepted that, never argued against it, and even today, ifit should come to an intellectual collision with Walter, Siegfried would be the one to yield and pay homage. But for years he had as good as never been in this situation, for they had grown apart, and the old relations had become quite insignificant in comparison with new ones. Siegfried not only had his practice as a doctor-and the doctor rules dif- ferently from the bureaucrat, through his own intellectual power and not that of others, and comes to people who are waiting for his help and accept it obediently-but he also possessed a wife with means, who within a short time had been required to present him with three chil- dren and whom he cheated on with other women, if not often at least now and then, when he felt like it. Siegfried was quite logically also in a situation where he could give Walter the advice he demanded. -Cla- risse---he diagnosed-is excessively nervous. It was always her way to charge through walls, and now her head has got stuck in a wall. You have
From the Posthumous Papers · z6os
to give a good tug, even if she resists. It is against her own advantage if you let her get away with too much. Neurotic people demand a certain sbictness. Walter had answered that doctors understand absolutely nothing about spiritual processes, but meanwhile he managed to put Siegfried's advice in a form that was personally agreeable to him: that two people had to suffer in order to accomplish their burdensome des- tiny of loving each other. As far as the situation itself was concerned, this amounted to the same thing. And he said to Clarisse: -Please, Clarisse, be reasonable!
Clarisse had just got home, had called out: You layabout! to Walter, filled the bath with cold water, and slipped out of her thin dress, when she felt Walter behind her. He was standing there the way he had got out of bed, in a long nightshirt that fell down to his bare feet, and had warm cheeks like a girl's, while Clarisse, in her brief panties and with her skinny arms, looked like a boy. She put her hand on his chest and shoved him back. But Walter reached out for her. With one hand he seized her arm, and with the other sought to grasp her by the crotch and pull her to him. Clarisse tore at the embrace, and when that didn't help shoved her free hand into Walter's face, into his nose and mouth. His face turned red and the blood trembled in his eyes while he struggled with Clarisse. He did not want to let her see that she was hurting him, but when he was in danger of suffocating he had to strike her hand from his face. Quick as lightning, she went at it again, and this time her nails tore two bleeding furrows in his skin. Clarisse was free. Just then Walter again snatched at her, this time with all his strength. He had become angry, and feared nothing in the whole world so much as becoming rational again. Clarisse struck at him. She had lost her shoe and kicked at him. She understood that this time it was for real. Walter was gasping out meaningless sen- tences. The voices of loneliness, as if a robber had jumped on them. She felt she had the strength of giants. Her clothing tore; Walter seized the shreds; she reached for his neck. She would have liked to kill him. She did not know what she was doing. Naked, slippery, she struggled like a wriggling fish in his arms. She bit Walter, whose strength was not suffi- cient to overpower her calmly; he swung her this way and that, and pain- fully sought to block her attacks. Clarisse got tired. Her muscles became numb and slack. There were pauses where she was pressed by Walter's weight against the wall or the floor and could no longer defend herself. Then again there would come a series of defensive movements and ruth- less attacks against sensitive parts ofthe body and face. Then suffocation again, powerlessness, and the heart's beating. Walter was intermittently ashamed. The pain hit him like a ray of light: Reasonable people don't act this way! He thought that Clarisse looked as ugly as a madwoman.
1606 · THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
But it had taken so much to get himself this far that the acting man ran on by himself, paying no attention to the feeling man. Clarisse, too, no longer had the feeling that she was being raped by Walter; she had only the feeling that she was not able to insist on her will, and when she was forced to yield she uttered a long, shrill, wild cry, like a locomotive. She herself found this inspiration quite strange. Perhaps her will was escap- ing in this cry, now that it was of no more use to her. Walter was scared. And while she had to endure his will she had the consolation: Just wait, I'll get my revenge!
The moment this repulsive scene was over, shame crashed down on Walter. Clarisse sat in a comer, naked as she was, with a thunderous face and made no response to his pleas for forgiveness. He had to get dressed; blood and tears flowed through his shaving foam. He had to leave in a hurry. He felt that he could not leave the beloved of all the days since his youth in this condition. He sought to at least move her to get dressed. Clarisse countered that she could just as well remain sitting this way until Judgment Day. In his despair and helplessness, his whole life as a man shrank back; he threw himself on his knees and with hands raised begged her to forgive him, as he had once prayed against blows; he could not think of anything else to do.
-I'll tell Ulrich everything! Clarisse said, slightly reconciled.
Walter begged her to forget it. There was something in his lack of dignity that called for reconciliation: he loved Clarisse; the shame was like a wound from which real, warm blood was flowing. But Clarisse did not forgive him. She could forgive him as little as an emperor who bears the responsibility for a kingdom can forgive; such people are something other than private individuals. She made him swear never to touch her again before she gave him permission. Walter was expected at a meet- ing; he gave his oath quickly, with the clock in his heart. Then Clarisse gave him the additional task of sending Ulrich over; she agreed to keep silent, but she needed the calming presence of a person she could trust.
During a break at work Walter took a taxi to Ulrich's, to get there as quickly as possible.
Ulrich was at home. His life wearied him. He did not know where Agathe was. Since she had separated herself from him he had had no news of her; he was tortured by worries about what might be happening to her. Everything reminded him of her. How short a time ago he had
From the Posthumous Papers · 1607
restrained her from a rash decision. Yet he did not believe she would do it without speaking to him once more.
Perhaps for that very reason: for the intoxication-a real intoxication, an enchantment! -was over. The experiment they had undertaken to shape their relationship had failed irrevocably. Vast regions of emotions and fancies that had endowed many things with a perennial splendor of unknown origin, like an opalizing sky, were now desolate. Ulrich's mind had dried out like soil beneath which the layers that conduct the mois- ture that nourishes all green things had disappeared. If what he had been forced to wish for was folly-and the exhaustion with which he thought of it admitted of no doubts about that! -then what had been best in his life had always been folly: the shimmer of thinking, the breath of presumption, those tender messengers of a better home that flutter among the things of the world. Nothing remained but to become reason- able; he had to do violence to his nature and apparently submit it to a school that was not only hard but also by definition boring. He did not want to think himself born to be an idler, but would now be one if he did not soon begin to make order out of the consequences of this failure. But when he checked them over, his whole being rebelled against them, and when his being rebelled against them, he longed for Agathe; that hap- pened without exuberance, but still as one yearns for a fellow sufferer when he is the only one with whom one can be intimate.
With distracted politeness, Walter inquired about Ulrich's absence; Ulrich waited with embarrassment for him to ask about Agathe, but for- tunately Walter forgot to. He had recently come to realize that it is in- sanity to doubt the love of a woman whom one loves oneself, he began. Even if one should be disappointed, it was only a matter of letting one- self be disappointed fruitfully, in such a way that the inner lives of all concerned be raised a degree. All feelings that are only negative are un- fruitful; on the other hand, there was nothing in which one could not find a core of fruitfulness if one peeled off the layers of world commu- nity. For instance: He had often committed the wrong of being jealous of Ulrich.
-W ere you really jealous of me? Ulrich asked.
-Yes, Walter confessed, and for an instant, in an unconsciously sig- nificant but ridiculously chilling fashion, he bared two teeth. -Of course I never thought of it in any other way than intellectually. Clarisse feels a certain sensual kinship with your body. You understand: it's not that your body attracts her body, or your mind her mind, but your body attracts her mind; you'll have to admit that's not so simple, and that it wasn't always easy for me to behave properly toward you.
1608 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
-And Meingast?
-Meingast has left-Walter began by saying-but that was different. I admire Meingast myself. Nobody today can compare with him, all in all. There's no way I could forbid Clarisse to love him.
-Y es, you could. First you would have to tell her that Meingast is a woolgatherer-
- C u t it out! Today I need your friendship, not a quarrel!
-Then you could always say to Clarisse that it's not the mission of a great man to draw the nails out of every marriage like a giant magnet; therefore, on the side of the marriage, there has to be something that can't be changed by the superiority of this third person. You're conserva- tive, you'll no doubt be able to work that out. Moreover, it's an absorbing question. Just consider: Today every writer, musician, philosopher, leader, and boss finds people who think he's the greatest thing on earth. The natural consequence, especially for women who are more easily moved, would be that they flock to him as a whole person. Their own personal, bodily philosopher or writer! These words have a right to be taken literally; for where else should one wish to go with soul and body if not to this ultimate refuge? But it's just as certain that this doesn't hap- pen. Today only hysterical women run after great minds. And why?
Walter answered reluctantly. -Y ou said yourself that there are other reasons for living together. Children, the need for a solid place; and then there's a suitability of two people for each other that's greater than the meeting of their minds!
-Those are just excuses! The agreement you're talking about is noth- ing more than trusting opinions even less than a life of habit that has turned out to be not entirely unbearable. It's just lucky that one doesn't quite trust the person one admires. The confusion through which one is always robbed of vitality by the other has obviously become a means of preserving life. The inclination for each other holds together through a delicate remnant of disinclination against the third person. And alto- gether, of course, it's nothing but the soul of the pharisee, which, once it's got inside a body, imagines that every other body has secret defects!
- I started out by saying-Walter exclaimed indignantly-that ifCla- risse really loved Meingast I could not forbid it.
- T h e n why don't you permit her to love me? Ulrich asked, laughing. -Because you don't like me. And you don't like me because when we were children I beat you up a couple of times. As if I had never run into stronger boys who beat me up! That's so absurd, so narrow-minded and petty. I'm not reproaching you; we all have this weakness of not being able to shake off such things, indeed that such idiotic chance happenings actually form the inner building blocks of our personalities, while our
From the Posthumous Papers · 16og
knowledge is no more than the breeze that blows around them. Who's stronger, then: you or I? Engineer Short or Art Historian Long? A mas- ter wrestler or a sprinter? I think that (the individual) this business has lost a lot of its meaning today. None of us are isolated or individual. To speak in your language: We're instrumentalists who have come together in expectation of playing a marvelous piece, the score for which has not yet been located. So what would happen if Clarisse were to fall in love with me? The idea that one can love only one other person is nothing but a legal (civil law) prejudice that has totally overrun us. She would love you, too, and in those circumstances precisely in the way that suits you best, because she would be free of the gnawing anger that you don't have certain qualities which she also considers important. The only con- dition would be that you would really have to behave toward me as a friend; that doesn't mean you have to understand me, for I don't under- stand the cells in my brain either, although something far more intimate exists between us than understanding! . . . And you could contradict me with all your emotions and thoughts, but only in a certain way: for there are contradictions that are continuations, for example those within our- selves; we love ourselves along with them.
This seemed to Walter like a bucket being emptied down a flight of steps. What Ulrich said spread out and at some point had to stop; he, meanwhile, paced back and forth in the room but couldn't wait for that to happen. He stopped and said: - I must interrupt you. I don't want to either contradict you or agree with you. I have no idea why you're saying these things; it seems to me that you're talking into the air. Both of us are some thirty years old, everything isn't hovering in the air the way it was when we were nineteen, one is something, one has something, and ev- erything you're saying is infinitely humdrum. But what's horrible is that I've had to promise Clarisse to send you out to see her today. Promise me that you'll speak less unreasonably with her than with me!
- B u t for that I'd have to first promise that I'll go. Today I don't have the slightest desire to! Excuse me, I don't feel well either.
-But you must say yes! It doesn't matter to you, you can put up with it; but for days Clarisse has been in an alarming state. And on top of that I've let myself be guilty of a great mistake, repulsive, I assure you; one is sometimes like an animal. I'm worried about her! For a moment the memory overwhelmed him. He had tears in his eyes and looked at Ul- rich angrily through the tears. Ulrich placated him and promised to go.
-G o right now, Walter begged. - I had to leave her all upset. And he hurriedly told Ulrich that Meingast's unexpected departure, which had strangely affected him too, had obviously shaken Clarisse, because since then she was strikingly changed. -You know what she's like-Walter
1610 • THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
said, a veil of tears again and again running over his eyes-her whole nature keeps her from allowing something she doesn't think right to pre- vail; letting things happen, which our whole civilization is full of, is for her a cardinal sin! He reported the incident with the newspaper, which he himself suddenly saw in a new light. Then he added softly that after Meingast's departure, Clarisse had confessed to him that while he had been there she had often suffered from obsessive ideas, which all added up to her regarding the entire peculiar progression to greatness that Meingast had gone through, since he had left them long ago as an ordi- nary young Lothario, as having their basis in his taking upon himself the sins ofall the people with whom he came into contact and, it turned out, also the sins of Clarisse and Walter himself.
Ulrich must have looked involuntarily at his childhood friend in in- quiry, for Walter instantaneously added a defense. -That only sounds unsettling, he asserted, but it hasn't by any means gone too far. Every- one rises by taking on other people's mistakes and improving them in himself. It was only that Clarisse had an unusually vehement intensity when such problems suddenly got hold of her, and a way of expressing t h e m w i t h o u t m a k i n g a n y c o n c e s s i o n s . - B u t i f y o u k n e w h e r as w e l l as I do, you would find that behind everything that seems strange in her there is an incomparable feeling for the deepest questions of life! Love made him blind, while it made Clarisse transparent for him, all the way to the bottom, where one's thoughts lie, while all distinctions between bright and stupid, healthy and sick minds take place in the shallower layers of what one says and does.
After the scene with her husband, Clarisse had washed her whole body and run out of the house. The blue line of the edge of the woods attracted her; she wanted to crawl in. And while she was running, the sparkling, shining, drop-spraying of the white water was around her, like a hedgehog with outward-pointing needles. She was pursued by an obsessively irritating need for cleanliness. But when she had reached the woods, she plopped down between the first tree trunks behind the bushes at the edge. From there she looked straight into the small, dark, nostril-like open windows of her house, and this already made her feel much better. The smell of herbs burned in the morning sun; growths tickled her; she was comforted by nature's sticking, hard, hot inconsider- ateness.