No More Learning

- I ' d cheat on you, Ulrich said.
-Being cheated is meaningless to us. We have to give everything
we've got. We can only cheat ourselves. Her fingers snaked around his hand. -Music either is or it isn't.
-You'll run out on me with somebody from the circus, Ulrich said pensively. He stared gloomily into the confusing tangle of people. -Y ou'll be disappointed. For me it's all a tissue ofcontradictions among
From the Posthumous Papers · 1547
which there is no resolution. But perhaps you're right. A few blasts on the trumpet. Fantasized ones. Run to them.
Evening was coming on. Wandering dark-blue clouds were in the sky beyond the studio windows. The tips ofa tree reached up from below- houses stood with the backs of their roofs turned upward. - H o w should they stand otherwise? Ulrich thought, and yet there are moments when the small sorrow that one feels falls into the world as ifonto a muffled giant drum. He thought of Agathe and was unspeakably sad. This small creature at his side was rushing forward at an unnatural speed. As if under the pressure ofsome kind ofprogram. That wasn't the natural way for love to develop. And anyway, there could be no talk oflove. He was quite clear about that. And yet he yielded without resistance. He was consoled by a vague thought; something like this: a person is insulted and makes a great invention; that's how the real deeds of the human will come about. Never in a straight line. I love Agathe and am letting myself be seduced by Clarisse. Clarisse believes that the small stir she makes is her will, but mine lies motionless beneath it like the water beneath the waves.
The music, which kindled people's eyes like lights in the darkening room and blew their bodies through each other like smoke, had started up again.
The cleaning woman had already left; Walter was in the middle of his day in the office; Ulrich now chose such hours. for his visits, without thinking about the significance of his choice. Yet until a particular Sun- day, nothing happened. Walter had received an invitation that called him into town until evening, and half an hour before, after lunch, Ulrich had shown up without suspecting anything and in a bad mood, for the prospect of an afternoon in the presence of his friend had enticed him so little that he really only started out from habit. But when Walter imme- diately began to say good-bye, Ulrich felt it as a signal. Clarisse had the same thought. They both knew it.
She would play for him, Clarisse said. Clarisse began. From the win- dow Ulrich waved to Walter, who waved back. Keeping his eyes in the room, he leaned farther and farther out, after the vanishing figure. Cla- risse suddenly broke off and came to the window too: Walter was no longer to be seen. Clarisse returned to playing. Ulrich now turned his back to her, as if it did not concern him; leaning into the window frame. Clarisse again stopped playing, ran into the hall; Ulrich heard her put- ting the chain on the door. When she came back he slowly turned
1548 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
around; said nothing; swayed for a moment. She played on. He went up to her and laid his hand on her shoulder. Without turning her head, she pushed his hand away with her shoulder. -Scoundrel! she said; played on. -Strange? he thought. -Does she want to feel force? The idea that urged itself upon him, that he ought to seize her by both shoulders and pull her down off the piano stool, seemed to him as comical as rocking a loose tooth. This constrained him. He went into the middle of the room. Alerted his hearing and sought an opening. But before anything oc- curred to him his mouth said: "Clarisse! " That had cut loose, detached itself gurgling from his throat, had grown out of his throat like a strange creature. Clarisse obediently stood up and came over to him. Her eyes were wide open. At this moment he understood for the first time that Clarisse was trying artificially, perhaps without knowing it, to evoke the excitement ofa tremendous sacrificial act. Since she was standing beside him, the decision had to be made in an instant, but Ulrich was overcome by all the force of these inhibitions; his legs would no longer support him, he could not utter a word, and threw himself on the sofa.
This excitement infecting him really ought to be made more appealing.
At the same instant, Clarisse threw herselfon his lap. Her lizard arms slung themselves around his head and neck. She seemed to be tearing at her arms, but without being able to loosen them from the embrace. Heated air came from her mouth and burned words into his face that he could not understand. There were tears in her eyes. Then everything of which he was normally constituted collapsed. He, too, uttered some- thing that had no meaning, but before the eyes ofthem both; veins shiv- ered and stood out like bars on a cage, their souls went at each other like bulls, and this riot was accompanied by the feeling of a tremendous moral decision. Now neither ofthem restrained words, faces, hands any longer. Their faces pressed themselves on ea~ other, wet with tears and sweat, as pure flesh; all the words oflove that were to be rehearsed tum- bled over each other, as if the contents of a marriage had been shaken out upside down; the lascivious, hardened words that come only with long intimacy came first, unmediated, inciting, and yet bringing horror with them. Ulrich had half sat up; everything was so slippery (from their faces to their words) that their gliding into each other no longer made a sound.
From the Posthunwus Papers · 1549
Clarisse tore her hat from the hook and stormed out. He with her. Wordless. Where to? This question was ridiculously lonely in his brain, swept clean by the storm.
Clarisse rushed over paths, across meadows, through hedges, through woods. She was not one of those women who are broken softly, but be- came hard and angry after the fall. They finally found themselves in a quiet remote comer of the zoo that adjoined the woods. A small rococo summerhouse stood there. Empty. Here she presented herself to him once again. This time with many words and confessions. Driven by the impatience of desire and the fear that people might come by. It was hor- rible. This time Ulrich became quite cold and hard with remorse. Ulrich left her there. He did not care how she would get home, but rushed off.
When Ulrich got back to the house later, he found Walter there. Cla- risse was still angry, and making a gentle show of marital concord. But with a single pouting look she made Ulrich feel that the two of them still belonged together. Only afteiWard did it occur to him how strange the expression ofher eyes had been twice that afternoon: delirious and mad.
In the excitement, Ulrich had agreed to participate in freeing Moos- brugger. Now he fell in with this idea because it had already gone so far. He did not believe in it, and made the preparations convinced that it would not be possible to cany them out.
Attending physician: Stay in a sanatorium advised; a little rest-and- diet cure. It's not good for the nerves to lie there without any fat-after he had observed Clarisse's body, which had become totally boyish.
To Walter's joyful surprise, Clarisse offered no resistance. (She felt: None ofthem amount to much: Walter, Ulrich, Meingast. ) I have to take it upon myself alone. Her head felt like the peak of a mountain around which clouds gather; she felt a longing for the horizontal, to stretch out, lie down, in a more bracing air than that of the city. Greenness, vine- twistingness, light-dapplingness hovered before her; countryside, like a strong hand compelling sleep.
1550 · THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
She has come through the first phase; now it is a good idea for her to rest and strengthen herself. Moreover, she had the feeling: "I have to do everything by myself. "
Wotan had offered to take her; Walter couldn't get away from work; suffered as under a knife when he saw the two of them leave. Suffered as if his heart had been put through a meat grinder I stone crusher.
When Clarisse entered the sanatorium, she inspected it like a general. A feeling of mission and divinity was already mingling again with her depression; she confidently tested the arrangements and the doctors on the question of whether they would be able to shelter and protect the revolution in world ideas that would now be emanating from this place.
So it was also the need to collect herself that had led her there.
The diagnosis put fmward for her was general exhaustion and neuras- thenia; Clarisse lived quietly and was solicitously cared for. The persist- ent blows that had shaken her body like a railway journey ceased; she suddenly came to realize that she had been ill, while the ground beneath her feet was becoming firmer and more elastic again; she felt tenderness for her healing body, which was also now "solicitously caring for" her mind, as she ascertained, delighted at this unity of events.
Previously lack of appetite, diarrhea, etc.
But the most recent events suddenly appeared problematical to her.
She got hold of writing materials and proceeded to write down her experiences.
She wrote for a whole day, almost from morning to evening. Without the need for fresh air or food; it struck her that her bodily activities receded almost entirely, and only a certain timidity about the strict house rules of the sanatorium moved her to go to the dining hall. Some time earlier she had read somewhere an article on Francis of Assisi; he
From the Posthumous Papers · 1551
showed up again in the notebook she was working on, in whole para- graphs that were repeated with trivial individual changes without this bothering her. The originality of intellectual achievements is judged falsely even today. The traditional idea of the hero still battles for prior- ity with every new idea and new invention, although we have long known from the history ofthese controversies that every new idea arises in sev- eral minds at the same time, but that for some reason the heroic sense finds it more fitting to imagine genius as a bubbling spring instead of a broad current made up of many tributaries and combinations, although the greatest ideas ofgenius are nothing more than modifications ofother ideas of genius, with minor additions. That is why on the one hand "we no longer have any geniuses"-because we think we see the point of origin all too clearly and will not abandon ourselves to believing in the genius of an accomplishment composed of nothing but ideas, emotions, and other elements that, taken singly, we must have unavoidably already encountered here and there. On the other hand, we exaggerate our imag- inings about the nature of genius's originality-especially where the testing by facts and by success is lacking; in short, wherever it is a ques- tion of nothing less than our soul-in such a senseless and perverted way that we have a great many geniuses whose heads have no more content than the page ofa newspaper, but a flashy and original makeup by way of compensation. This makeup-allied with the false belief in the inescap- able originality of genius, at odds with the obscure feeling of there being nothing behind it, which climaxes in a total incapacity to take the count- less elements of an age and create structures of intellectual life that are nothing more than experiments, yet have the full seriousness of impar-
tiality-belongs to that tepid mood full of doubts about the possibility of genius and the adoration of many ersatz geniuses that prevails today.
In spite of her many weaknesses, Clarisse, for whom genius was a matter of the will, belonged neither to the shrilly got-up people nor to the disheartened ones. She wrote down with great energy what she had read, and in doing so had the right feeling of originality in assimilating this material and feeling it mysteriously becoming part of her inmost being, as in the vividly leaping flames of an immolation. "By accident," she wrote, "while I was already thinking of my departure, memories clashed in my head. That the Sienese (Perugia? ) in the year . . . carried a portrait . . . into the church, that Dante . . . names the fountain that is still standing today in the Piazza . . . And that Dante said about the piety of Francis of Assisi, who was canonized shortly afterward: It rose among us like a shining star. "
Where she no longer remembered the names she put in periods. There was time for that later. But the words "rose like a shining star" she
1552 · THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
felt in her body. That she-incidentally-had hit upon the article she had read had come about because she longed for better times; not as an escape, but because-as she felt-something active had to happen.
This Francis of Assisi-she wrote-was the son ofprosperous Sienese citizens, a draper, and before that a smart young man about town. Peo- ple of today like Ulrich, who have access to science, are reminded by his later behavior (after his religious awakening) ofcertain manic states, and it cannot be denied that they are right in doing so. But what in 1913 is mental illness can in 13 . . . (periodic insanity, hysteria, of course not illnesses with an anatomical course, only those that coexist with health! ! ) merely have been seen as a one-sided debit of health. The etiology of certain diseases is not only a personal but also a social phenomenon- she underlined this sentence. In parentheses she threw in a few addi- tional words: (Hysteria. Freud. Delirium: its forms are different according to the society. Mass psychology offers images that do not dif- fer greatly from the clinical). Then came a sentence that she also under- lined: It is by no means excluded that what today becomes mere inner destruction will one day again have constructive value.
If the healthy person is a social phenomenon, then so is the sick person.
It went through her mind that Dante and Francis of Assisi were actu- ally one and the same person; it was a tremendous discovery. She did not, however, write it down but undertook to look into this problem later, and the next moment her splendor, too, was extinguished. The de- cisive thing is-she wrote-that at that time a person, whom today we would in good conscience put in a sanatorium, could live, teach, and lead his contemporaries! That the best of his contemporaries saw him as an honor and an illumination! That at that time Siena was a center of cul- ture. But she wrote in the margin: All people are one person? Then she went on more calmly: It fascinates me to imagine how things looked then. That age did not have much intelligence. It did not test things; it believed like a good child, without bothering itself about what was im- probable. Religion went along with local patriotism; it was not the indi- vidual Sienese who would enter into heaven, but one day the whole city of Siena that would be transplanted there as a unit. For one loved heaven by loving the city. (The cheerfulness, the sense of ornament, the broad vistas of small Italian cities! ) Religious eccentrics were few; peo- ple were proud of their city; what they shared was a common experi- ence. Heaven belonged to this city, how should it be otherwise? The
From the Posthumous Papers · 1553
priests were considered not particularly religious people but merely a kind of official; for in all religions God was always something far away and uncertain, but the faith that the Son of God had come to visit, that one still had the writings of those who had seen Him with their own eyes, imparted an enormous vitality, nearness, and security to the expe- rience, which the priests were there to confirm. The officer corps of God.
Ifin the midst ofthis one is brushed by God, as Saint Francis was, it is only a new reassurance, which does not disturb the civic cheerfulness of the experience. Because everyone believed, a few could do so in a partic- ular way, and thus intellectual wealth was added to simple, legitimate security. For in sum more energies flow from opposition than from agreement. . . .
Here deep furrows formed on Clarisse's forehead. Nietzsche oc- curred to her, the enemy of religion: here there were still some difficult things for her to reconcile. -1 do not presume to know the enormous history of these emotions-she told herself-but one thing is certain: today the religious experience is no longer the action of all, of a commu- nity, but only of individuals. And apparently that is why this experience is sick.
Feeling of solitude in the sea of the spirit, which is in motion in all direc- tions.
I Note: Mass experience connected with Meingast. I
She stopped writing and walked slowly up and down the room, excit- edly rubbing her hands against each other or rubbing her forehead with a finger. It was not from despondency that she fled into past and remote times; it was absolutely clear to her that she, striding up and down in this room, was connected with the Siena of the past. Thoughts of recent days were intermingled with this: she was in some fashion or other not only destined but already actually involved in taking over the mission that re- curred over the centuries, like God in every new Host. But she was not thinking of God; remarkably enough, this was the only idea she did not think of, as if it had no role in it at all; perhaps it would have disturbed her, for everything else was as vivid as ifshe had to get on a train tomor- row to travel there. By the windows great masses of green leaves waved in at her; tree balls; they steeped the whole room in a watery green. This
1554 ·THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
color, "with which at that time my soul was filled," as she said later,
played a great role in her as the chief color of these ideas.
This connection to the past, which Ulrich lacks.
Feeling! Pealing of bells.
Processions march with banners to the Vir- gin and gorgeous robes. She was walking in the middle. When they stopped, however, the crowd did not stop. But that was not upsetting.
[Clarisse flees to Italy, where she joins Ulrich on the "Island of Health":]
-In Pompeii-Ulrich said-the cast of a woman has been found sealed in a fraction of a second into the cooling lava like a statue by the gases into which her body dissolved when the terrible stream of fire en- veloped her. This nearly naked woman, whose shift had slid up to her back, had been overtaken as she was running and fallen facedown with her arms outstretched, while her small hair-knot, untidily put up, still sat fumly on the back of her head; she was neither ugly nor beautiful, nei- ther voluptuous from living well nor gnawed by poverty, neither twisted by horror nor unwittingly overpowered without fear; but just because of all that, this woman, who many centuries ago jumped out of bed and was thrown on her stomach, has remained as incredibly alive as ifat any sec- ond she could stand up again and run on. Clarisse understood exactly what he meant. Whenever she scratched her thoughts and emotions in the sand, with some mark or other that was as charged with them as a boat that can hardly stay afloat for the multiplicity of its cargo, and the wind then blew on it for a day, animal tracks ran over it, or rain made pockmarks in it and eroded the sharpness of the outlines the way the cares of life erode a face, but most especially when one had forgotten it completely and only through some chance stumbled on it again and sud- denly confronted oneself, confronted an instant compressed and full of emotions and thoughts that had become sunken, faded, small, and barely recognizable, overgrown from left to right but not vanished, with
grasses and animals living around it without shyness, when it had become world, earth: then . . . ? Hard to say what then; the island be- came populated with many Clarisses; they slept on the sand, flew on the light through the air, called from the throats of birds; it was a lust to
From the Posthumous Papers · 1 555
touch oneself everywhere, to run into oneself everywhere, an unuttera- ble sensitivity: a giddiness escaped from the eyes of this woman and was able to infect Ulrich, the way one person's lustful glance can ignite the greatest lust in another. God knows what it is-Ulrich thought-that causes lovers to scratch the mystery of their initials into the bark of trees, so that they grow along with it; that has invented the seal and the coat of arms, the magic of portraits gazing out of their frames: to end ultimately in the trace ofthe photographic plate, which has lost all mystery because it is already nearly reality again.
But it was not only that. It was also the multiplicity of meaning. Some- thing was a stone and signified Ulrich; but Clarisse knew that it was more than Ulrich and a stone, that it was everything in Ulrich that was hard as stone and everything heavy that was oppressing her, and all in- sight into the world that one acquired, once one had understood that the stones were like Ulrich. Exactly as if one says: This is Max, but he is a genius. Or the fork ofa branch and a hole in the sand say: this is Clarisse, but at the same time she is a witch and is riding her heart. Many emo- tions that are otherwise separate crowd around such a sign, one never quite knew which ones, but gradually Ulrich also recognized such an uncertainty in the world in his own feelings. It threw into relief some of Clarisse's peculiarly invented trains ofthought, which he almost learned to understand.
I The uncertainty: I For a while Clarisse saw things that one otherwise does not see. Ulrich could explain that splendidly. Perhaps it was insan- ity. But a forester out walking sees a different world from the one a bota- nist or a murderer sees. One sees many invisible things. A woman sees the material of a dress, a painter a lake of liquid colors in its stead. I see through the window whether a hat is hard or soft. If I glance into the street I can likewise see whether it is warm or cold outside, whether people are happy, sad, healthy, or ailing; in the same way, the taste of a fruit is sometimes already in the fingertips that touch them. Ulrich re- membered: if one looks at something upside down-for instance, be- hind the lens ofa small camera--one notices things one had overlooked. A waving back and forth of trees or shrubs or heads that to the nonnal eye appear motionless. Or one becomes conscious of the peculiar hop- ping quality of the way people walk. One is astonished at the persistent restlessness of things. In the same way, there are unperceived double images in the field ofvision, for one eye sees something differently from the other; afterimages crystallize from still pictures like the most deli- cate-colored fogs; the brain suppresses, supplements, fonns the sup- posed reality; the ear does not hear the thousand sounds of one's own body: skin, joints, muscles, the innermost self, broadcast a contrapuntal
1556 · THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
composition ofinnumerable sensations that, mute, blind, and deaf, per- form the subterranean dance of the so-called waking state. Ulrich re- membered how once, not even very high up in the mountains, he had been overtaken by a snowstorm early in the year; he was on his way to meet some friends who were supposed to be coming down a path, and was surprised at not yet having met up with them, when the weather suddenly changed; the clarity darkened, a howling storm came up, and thick clouds of snow flung sharp icy needles at the solitary wanderer, as iffor him it were a matter oflife and death. Although after a few minutes Ulrich reached the shelter of an abandoned hut, the wind and the tor- rents of snow had gone right through him, and the icy cold as well as the exertions of his struggle against the storm and the force of the snow had exhausted him within a very brief period. When the storm passed as quickly as it had come, he of course set out on his way again; he was not the sort ofperson to let himselfbe intimidated by such an event, at least his conscious selfwas totally free ofexcitement and any kind of overesti- mation of the danger he had come through; indeed, he felt himself in the highest of spirits. But he still must have been shaken, for he sud- denly heard his party coming toward him and cheerfully called to them. But no one answered. He again called out loudly-for it is easy to get off the path in the snow and miss each other-and ran, as well as he could, in the direction indicated, for the snow was deep and he had not been prepared for it, having undertaken the climb without either skis or snowshoes. After some twenty-five paces, at every one ofwhich he sank in up to his hips, exhaustion forced him to stop, but just then he again heard voices in animated conversation, and so near that he absolutely should have seen the speakers, whom there was nothing to conceal. And yet no one was there except the soft, bright-gray snow. Ulrich collected his senses, and the conversation became more distinct. I'm hallucinat- ing, he said to himself. Yet he called out again; without success. He began to fear for himself and checked himself in every way he could think of; spoke loudly and coherently, calculated small sums in his mind, and carried out movements of arms and fingers whose execution de- manded total control. All these things worked, without the phenomenon vanishing. He heard whole conversations full of surprising import and a harmonious multiplicity of voices. Then he laughed, found the experi- ence interesting, and began to observe it. But that did not make the phe- nomenon disappear either; it faded only when he turned around and had already climbed down several hundred yards, while his friends had not taken this way back at all and there was no human soul in the vicin- ity. So unreliable and extensive is the boundary between insanity and health. It really did not surprise him when in the middle of the night
From the Posthunwus Papers · 1557
Clarisse, trembling, woke him up and claimed she was hearing a voice. When he asked her, she said it was not a human voice and not an animal voice, but a "voice of something," and then he, too, suddenly heard a noise that could in no way be ascribed to a material being; and the next instant, while Clarisse was trembling more and more violently and opened her eyes wide like a night bird, something invisible seemed to glide around the room, bumping into the mirror in its glass frame and exerting a disembodied pressure, and in Ulrich, too, fears-not one fear, a bundle offears, a world offears-poured out in panic, so that he had to bring all his reason to bear in order to resist and to calm Clarisse down.
Dramatize! Make all this present!
But he was reluctant to apply his reason. One could feel strangely happy in this uncertainty that the world assumed in Clarisse's vicinity. The sketchings in the sand and the models made ofstones, feathers, and branches now took on meaning for him too, as if here, on this Island of Health, something was trying to come to fulfillment that his life had al- ready touched on several times. The foundation of human life seemed to him a monstrous fear of some kind, indeed really a fear of the indetermi- nate. He lay on the white sand between the blue of the air and the blue of the water on the small, hot sandy platform of the island between the cold depths of sea and sky. }Je lay as in snow. If he were to have been blown away then, this is the way it could have happened. Clarisse was romping and playing like a child behind the thistly dunes. He was not afraid. He saw life from above. This island had flown away with him. He understood his past. Hundreds of human orders have come and gone: from the gods to brooch pins, and from psychology to the record player, every one ofthem an obscure unit, every one an obscure conviction that it was the ultimate, ascendant one, and every one of them mysteriously sinking after a few hundred or a few thousand years and passing into rubble and building sitet what else is this but a climbing up out of noth- ingness, each attempt on a different wall? Like one of those dunes blown by the wind, which for a while forms its own weight and then is blown away again by the wind? What is everything we do other than a nervous fear of being nothing: beginning with our pleasures, which are no plea- sures but only a din, a chattering instigated to kill time, because a dark certainty admonishes us that it will in the end annihilate us, all the way to those inventions that outdo each other, the senseless mountains of
money that kill the spirit, whether one is suffocated or borne up by
1558 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
them, to the continually changing fashions of the mind, of clothes that change incessantly, to murder, assassination, war, in which a profound mistrust of whatever is stable and created explodes: what is all that but the restlessness of a man shoveling himself down to his knees out of a grave he will never escape, a being that will never entirely climb out of nothingness, who fearfully flings himself into shapes but is, in some se- cret place that he is hardly aware of himself, vulnerable and nothing?
To here: Role of human experiences that spread not through rational transmission but through contagion. A social (humanity's) experience in two people.
And no way at all of framing this in cycles!
Ulrich remembered the man he had observed with Clarisse and Meingast in the green circle of the lantern. Here on the Island of Health even this distorted human creation, this exhibitionist, this despairing creature, this sexual desire stealing forth in a crouch out of the darkness when a woman passed by, was not basically different from other people. What else but a solitary exhibitionism were Walter's sentimental music, or Meingast's political thoughts about the common will of the many? What is even the success of a statesman standing in the midst of human bustle other than an anesthetizing exercise that has the appearance of a gratification? In love, in art, in greed, in politics, in work, and in play, we seek to articulate our painful secret: A person only half belongs to him- self, the other half is expression. I This quotation from Emerson is I think word for word! I In the travail of their souls, all people yearn for expression. The dog sprays a stone with himself and sniffs his excre- ment: to leave a trace in the world, to erect in the world a monument to oneself, a deed that will still be celebrated after hundreds of years, is the meaning of all heroism. I have done something: that is a trace, a dis- similar but immortal portrait. "I have done something" binds parts of the material world to myself. Even just expressing something already means having one sense more with which to appropriate the world. Even wheedling someone into something the way Walter does has this sense. Ulrich laughed, because it occurred to him that Walter would walk around in despair with the thought: Oh, I could say a thing or two about that . . . ! It is the profound basic feeling ofthe bourgeois, a feeling that is steadily being silenced and pacified. But on the Island of Health
From the Posthumous Papers · 1559
Ulrich ended by taking back all the ambition of his life. What are even theories, other than wheedling? Discussions. And at the conclusion of such hours Ulrich was no longer thinking of anything but Agathe, the distant, inseparable sister, of whom he did not even know what she was doing. And he sadly recalled her favorite expression: ''What can I do for my soul, which lives in me like an unsolved riddle? Which leaves visible man free to make any kind ofchoice because it cannot govern him in any way? "
Here a settlement ofaccounts about Ulrich's mood in regard to heroism.
The dog, which after long association with man involuntarily caricatures him so splendidly in many ways.
The feeling of never being allowed to leave here again.
Clarisse meanwhile was playing out her game of signs; sometimes he saw her scurrying over the dunes like a fluttering cloth. . . We are playing our story here," she claimed, . . on the stage of this island. " Basically it was only the exaggerated form of this having to imprint oneself on un- certainty. Formerly, when Clarisse had still been going to the opera with Walter, she had often said: ''What is all art! Ifwe could act out our sto- ries! " She was now doing this as well. All lovers ought to do it. All lovers have the feeling that what we are experiencing is something miraculous, we are chosen people; but they ought to play it before a large orchestra and a dark hall-real lovers on the stage, and not people who are paid: not only a new theater would arise but also an entirely new kind of love, which would spread, lighting up human gestures like a fine network of branches, instead of, like today, creeping into the child's darkness. That was what Clarisse said. Please, no child! Instead of accomplishing some- thing, people have children! Sometimes she called the small keepsakes she put in the sand for Ulrich her secret children, or so she called every impression she received, for the impression melted into her like fruit. Between her and things there existed a continual exchanging of signs and understandings, a conspiracy, a heightened thinking I heightened correspondence I a burning, spirited life process. Sometimes this be- came so intense that Clarisse thought she was being tom out of her slen- der body and flying like a veil over the island, without rest, until her eyes
1560 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
were transfixed by a small stone or a shell and a credulous astonishment rooted her to the spot, because she had already been here once and al- ways, and had lain quietly as a trace in the sand, while a second Clarisse had flown over the island like a witch.
At times, her person seemed to her only an obstacle, unnaturally in- serted in the dynamic exchange between the world that affected her and the world she affected. In its most intense moments, this selfseemed to tear apart and disintegrate. I Cf. piano scene. Beethoven-Nietzsche quotation. Even then Clarisse was serious about tearing apart. I Even if she was unfaithful to Walter with this body and this . . soul fastened to her skin," it did not mean anything: there were many hours in which the frigid, rejecting Clarisse transformed herself into a vampire, insatiable, as if an obstacle had fallen away and for the first time she could yield to this heretofore forbidden pleasure. She sometimes seemed to plan things to suck Ulrich dry: . . There's still one more devil in you I have to exorcise! " she said. He owned a red sport jacket, and she sometimes made him put it on in the middle ofthe night and did not let up until he turned pale under his tanned skin. Her passion for him, and in general all the emotions she expressed, were not deep--Ulrich felt that dis- tinctly-but somehow at times passed by depth on their precipitous fall into the abyss.
Nor did she entirely trust Ulrich. He did not completely understand the greatness of what she was experiencing. During these days she had of course recognized and seen through everything that had previously been inaccessible to her. Formerly, she had experienced infinite heavi- ness, the enterprising spirit's fall from almost-attained heights of great- ness to the deepest anxiety and anguish. It seems that a person can be driven out from the ordinary real world we all know by processes that take place not in her but above or below the earth, and in the same way the person can intensify them into the incommensurable. On the island she explained it to Ulrich like this: One day everything around Clarisse had been enhanced: colors, smells, straight and crooked lines, noises, her emotions or thoughts, and the ones she aroused in others; what was taking place might have been causal, necessary, mechanical, and psycho- logical, but aside from that it was moved by a secret driving force; it might have happened precisely that way the day before, but today, in some indescribable and fortunate way, it was different. -Oh---Clarisse immediately said to herself-! am freed from the law of necessity,
From the Posthumous Papers · 1561
where every thing depends on some other thing. For things depended on her emotions. Or rather, what was at work was a continual activity of the self and of things penetrating and yielding to each other, as if they were on opposite sides of the same elastic membrane. Clarisse discov- ered that what she was acting from was a veil of emotions, with things on the other side. A little later she received the most terrible confirmation: she perceived everything going on around her just as correctly as before, but it had become totally dissociated and alienated. Her own emotions seemed foreign to her, as ifsomeone else were feeling them, or as ifthey were drifting around in the world. It was as ifshe and things were badly fitted to each other. She no longer found any support in the world, did not find the necessary minimum of satisfaction and self-moderation, was no longer able to maintain through inner action the equilibrium with the events of the world, and felt with unspeakable anguish how she was being inexorably squeezed out of the world and could no longer escape suicide (or perhaps madness). Again she was exempted from ordinary necessity and subjected to a secret law; but then she discovered, at the last moment when she could possibly be saved, the law that no one before her had noticed:
W e-that is, people lacking Clarisse's insight-imagine that the world is unambiguous, whatever the relationship between the things out there and inner processes may be; and what we call an emotion is a personal matter that is added to our own pleasure or uneasiness but does not oth- erwise change anything in the world. Not just the way we see red when we get angry-that too, moreover; it is only erroneously that one consid- ers it something that is an occasional exception, without suspecting what deep and general law one has touched upon! -but rather like this: things swim in emotions the way water lilies consist not only of leaves and flowers and white and green but also of "gently lying there. " Ordi- narily, they are so quiet about this that one does not notice the totality; the emotions have to be calm for the world to be orderly and for merely rational associations to be dominant in it.
But assuming for instance that a person suffers some really serious and annihilating humiliation that would have to lead to his destruction, it does happen that instead of this shame a surpassing pleasure in the hu- miliation sets in, a holy or smiling feeling about the world, and this is then not merely an emotion like any other or a deliberation, not even the reflection that we might perchance console ourselves that humility is vir- tuous, but a sinking or rising of the whole person on another level, a "sinking on the rise," and all things change in harmony with this; one might say they remain the same but now find themselves in some other space, or that everything is tinged with another sense. At such moments
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one recognizes that aside from everyone's world, that solid world that can be investigated and managed by reason, there is a second world, dy- namic, singular, visionary, irrational, which is only apparently congruent with the first and which we do not, as people think, merely cany in our hearts or our minds, but which exists externally with precisely the same reality as the prevailing world. It is an uncanny mystery, and like every- thing mysterious it becomes, whenever one tries to articulate it, easily confused with what is most banal. Clarisse herself had experienced- when she was unfaithful to Walter, and although she had to be, on which account she did not recognize any remorse--how the world became black; however, it was not a real color but a quite indescribable one, and later this "sense color" of the world, as Clarisse called it, became a hard, burnt brown.
Clarisse was very happy on the day when she grasped that her new understanding was the continuation of her efforts on the subject of ge- nius. For what distinguishes the genius from the healthy, ordinary per- son, other than the secret involvement of the emotions in everything that happens, which in the healthy person is stable and unnoticed but in the genius, on the other hand, is subject to incessant irritations? More- over, Ulrich too said that there are many possible worlds. Rational, rea- sonable people adapt themselves to the world, but strong people adapt the world to themselves. As long as the "sense color" of the world, as Clarisse called it, remained stable, equilibrium in the world also had something stable. Its unnoticed stability might even be considered healthy and ordinarily indispensable, the way the body, too, is not per- mitted to feel all the organs that maintain its equilibrium. Also un- healthy is a labile equilibrium, which tips over at the first chance and falls into the inferior position. Those are the mentally ill, Clarisse told herself, of whom she was afraid. But on top, conquerors in the realm of humanity, are those whose equilibrium is just as vulnerable but full of strength and, constantly disturbed, is constantly inventing new forms of equilibrium.
Itisanuncannybalance,andClarissehadneverfeltherselfas mucha creature perched on the razor's edge between annihilation and health as she did now. But whoever has followed the development of Clarisse's thoughts up to this point will already know that she had now come upon the traces of the "secret of redemption. " This had entered her life as the mission to liberate the genius that was inhibited by all sorts of relations in herself, Walter, and their surroundings, and it is easy to see that this inhibition comes about because one is forced to yield to the repression the world practices against every person of genius, and is submerged in obscurity; but here, on the other side, it throws the world into relief in a
From the Posthumous Papers · 1563
new color. This was for her the significance of the soul color dark red, a marvelous, indescribable, and transparent shade in which air, sand, and vegetation were immersed, so that she moved everywhere as in a red chamher of light.
She once called this the "darkroom," herself surprised by its similarity to a room in which in the midst of acrid vapors one bends tense and excited over the delicate, barely recognizable images that appear on the negative. It was her task to prefigure the redemption, and Ulrich seemed to her to be her apostle, who would after a while leave her and go out into the world, and whose first task would be to liberate Walter and Meingast. From this point on, her progress was much more rapid.
The blows of confused and anarchic ideas that Ulrich received every day, and the movement of these thoughts in an imprudent but clearly palpable direction, had in fact gradually swept him up, and the only thing that still differentiated his life from that of the insane was a consciousness of his situation, which he could interrupt by an effort. But for a long time he did not do so. For while he had always felt only like a guest among rational people and those effectively engaged in life, at least with one part of his being, and as alien or meaningless as a poem would be were he suddenly to start reciting one at the general meeting ofa corporation, he felt here in this nothingness ofcertainty an enhanced security, and lived with precisely this part of his being among the structures of absurdity in the air, but as securely as on solid ground. Happiness is in truth not some- thing rational, which depends once and for all on a specific action or the possession of specific things, but much more a mood of the nerves through which everything becomes happiness or doesn't; to this extent Clarisse was right. And the beauty, goodness, and quality of genius in a woman, the fire she kindles and sustains, is not to be settled by any legal determination of truth but is a mutual delirium. One could maintain, Ulrich told himself, that our entire being-which we basically cannot find a basis for but complacently accept on the whole as God, while, acting from this assumption, it is easy for us to deduce the details-is nothing but the delirium of many; but if order is reason, then every sim- ple fact, if we observe it outside of any order, is already the germ of a madness. For what do facts have to do with our mind? The mind governs itself by them, but they stand there, responsible to no one, like mountain peaks or clouds or the nose on a person's face; there were times when it would have been a pleasure to crush the nose on the face of the lovely Diotima with two fingers; Clarisse's nose sniffed, alert, like the nose of a pointer, and was able to impart all the excitement of the invisible.
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But soon he was no longer able to follow Clarisse's idea of order. You scratch a sign in a stone at the spot where you happen to be: that this is art, just as the greatest is, was a feeling one could sympathize with. And Clarisse did not want to possess Ulrich, but-each time in a new leap- live with him. - I don't perceive truly-she said-but I perceive fruit- fully. Her ideas scintillated, things scintillated. One does not gather up one's insights in order to form a self out of them, like a cold snowman, when like her one is growing into ever-new catastrophes; her ideas grew "in the open"; one weakens oneself by scattering everything, but spurs oneself on to new, strange growth. Clarisse began to express her life in poems; on the Island of Health Ulrich found this quite natural. In our poems there is too much rigid reason; the words are burned-out notions, the syntax holds out sticks and ropes as if for the blind, the meaning never gets off the ground everyone has trampled; the awakened soul cannot walk in such iron garments. Clarisse discovered that one would have to choose words that are not ideas; but since there don't seem to be any, she chose instead the word pair. Ifshe said "I," this word was never able to shoot up as vertically as she felt it; but "I-red" is not yet impris- oned by anything, and flew upward. Just as beneficial is freeing words from their grammatical bonds, which are quite impoverished. For exam- ple, Clarisse gave Ulrich three words and asked him to read them in any order he chose. If they were "God," "red," and "goes," he read "God goes red," or "God, red, goes"-that is, his brain immediately either un- derstood them as a sentence or separated them by commas in order to underline that it was not making them into a sentence. Clarisse called this the chemistry of words, that they always cohere in groups, and showed how to counter this. Her favorite bit of information was that she worked with exclamation points or underlining. God! ! red! ! ! goes! Such accumulations slow one down, and the word dams up behind them to its full meaning. She also underlined words from one to ten times, and at times a page she had written this way looked like a cryptic musical score.