Of course, such a moment was like a piece of earthly thread running among
mysterious
flowers, but it was at the same time moving, like a woolen thread that one places around one's beloved's neck when one has nothing else to give her.
Musil - Man Without Qualities - v2
He had to stop, collect his will, and tell himself that he had no other recourse than to see this stupid adventure through.
He stumbled onto a path and de- duced which direction would lead to the building most quickly, but was suddenly overcome by the problem of whether he should walk on the crunching gravel or go on working his way through the bushes.
That damned Biziste ought to have waited for him, but at the same time he longed for him as ifhe were a stronger brother. Ifhe would not have been ashamed ofhimself because ofthe fellow on the other side of the wall, Ulrich would have turned around. But he did not even know what signal he was supposed to give to find out whether all was clear on the other side. He realized that he was a fool, and gained some respect for these rogues. But he was not a man to let himself be defeated so easily; it would have been ridiculous for an intellectual not to be able to cope with this too. Ulrich marched forward straight through the shrub- bery; the excitement he was in and the self-control his progress required (entirely without reflection; it was simply moral pains) made him ruth- lessly crack, break, and rustle the bushes. To have slunk forward like an Indian seemed to him just then incredibly silly and childish, and this was the moment in which the normal person in him began to reawaken.
When he came to the edge, Biziste, as Ulrich really might have ex- pected from the first, was squatting there observing the building, and he turned a witheringly punitive glance toward his noisy arrival. Moosbrug- ger's window was dimly lit; Biziste whistled through his teeth. The huge shoulders of the murderer filled the rectangle of the window, the rope fashioned from the sheets rolled down; but Moosbrugger was not skilled in crime and had underestimated the strength of the rescue line re- quired for his enormous weight; hardly had he suspended himself from it when it broke, and the force ofhis landing exploded the stillness with a muflled detonation. At this moment two guards materialized in the half- light that illuminated the wall.
Two days earlier, two mentally ill prisoners had escaped from another observation clinic, but Ulrich had neither heard nor read about it. And so he had not known that since yesterday security had been generally
1420 • THE MAN WITH 0 U T QUALITIES
tightened and old, long-forgotten measures were again being enforced for a while. Among these was the two-man patrol, which, perhaps drawn by the noises Ulrich had made and now alarmed by the muffied fall, stopped, looked around, recognized in the sand a heavy body that with great effort was trying to get up, rushed over, saw a rope hanging from the window, and with all their lung power signaled for help through shrill little whistles. Moosbrugger had dislocated his shoulder and bro- ken an ankle, otherwise it would have been an unhappy encounter for the guards who jumped on him; as it was, he knocked one bleeding into the sand, but when he tried to straighten up to shake off the second, pain deprived him of his footing. The guard hung on his neck and whistled piercingly; the second man, full of pain and rage, pounced on him, and at this moment Biziste sprang out of the bushes. With a powerful blow of his fist, he smashed one guard's whistle between his teeth so that he tumbled off Moosbrugger, but now the other whistled like mad and rushed at Biziste. Such guards are strong men, and Biziste was not ex- ceptionally powerful. If at this instant Ulrich had come fmward to help, with his considerable trained strength, they would no doubt have suc- ceeded in rendering both attackers mute and motionless for a while, but Ulrich did not feel the slightest desire to do so. In the tangle before him his sympathies lay quite honestly with the men unexpectedly set upon, who were fighting for their duty, and if he had only followed his emo- tions, he would have grabbed this Biziste by the collar and given him a solid hook to the chin. But perhaps that was also merely the somewhat comical maternal voice of bourgeois order in him, and as the situation tensed his muscles and nerves, so his mind ebbed, filling him with dis- gust at contradictions whose resolution was not worth the effort. An- other semi-event, Ulrich said to himself. A very painful sensation of the awful ludicrousness of his situation came over him.
Biziste reached for his knife. But before he raised it to thrust, his glance, practiced in weighing risk and advantage, revealed to him the hopelessness of the outcome: Moosbrugger could not stand up without assistance, the noise of the alarmed people on night duty was already coming out of the darkness from the wing of the building, flight was the only recourse. The guard, who would not let him go, screamed, hit by a stab in the arm. Biziste disappeared, leaving Ulrich behind, as Ulrich ascertained with cheerful satisfaction in spite of the quite awkward situ- ation. He had meantime been thinking how he himself might get out of this stupid business. The way over the wall was blocked, for he hadn't the slightest desire to meet Herr Biziste and his friend ever again in his life, nor did he feel like climbing over the wall alone and perhaps being
From the Posthumous Papers · 1 4 2 1
detained by the curious drawn to the scene by the shouts of the guards, who would certainly be chasing after Biziste. He settled on the only thing that occurred to him, a very stupid thing: to run a little farther, quickly find a bench, and pretend to be asleep in case he was found. He raised the collar of his coat so his bare neck could not be seen, took off his cap, and "awoke" with as much surprise as possible when, sur- rounded by a maze of lights, he was knocked from the bench by an in- credible fist and his arms grabbed by six men. He did not know whether he gave a good performance as the righteous person drunk with sleep; it was his good fortune that one of the guards immediately recognized him, upon which he was released with reluctant respect. He was taken for a doctor who was doing studies at the clinic. He now tried to make credible that after a visit he had been walking in the grounds and had fallen asleep here. To this end, he involuntarily looked at his watch, re- membered that he had left it at home but could no longer take back the gesture and therefore found it missing; reached into his jacket and pants pockets and immediately found his money missing too, for he had of course also not brought it along; and as stupid as this comedy was, as he told himself, there was an even stupider guard who believed it, or really just one whose servile officiousness and desire to please Ulrich sug- gested what Ulrich wanted him to believe, so that he immediately called out: The rascals have also robbed the Herr Doktor. Ulrich did not say either yes or no, but only went on like someone who missed his belong- ings without knowing anything about what had happened and now found out the entire drama backward and in snatches. As an object of respect and the remaining center of interest, he left the clinic in this feigned role as quickly as he could; he was not to enter it again as long as it sheltered Moosbrugger.
For after this attempted flight Moosbrugger was placed under heavy guard, and Ulrich, on the orders of the head of the clinic, was no longer allowed to visit him. Nor did Ulrich have the slightest desire to. Still, the unpleasant uncertainty, whether the doctor . . .
The very unpleasant doubt remained whether, upon investigating the circumstances, they had not come to suspect him, which of course they would not express but were just as little ready to abandon.
In mania, this would be a depressive cycle ofshort duration.
1422 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
LATE 1920s
Her brother's conduct, the restlessness that the visit to Lindner had intensified in her, stimulated Agathe to a degree that remained hidden even from herself. She did not know how it had happened, or when; suddenly her soul was transported out of her body and looked around curiously in the alien world. This world pleased her soul uncommonly. Anything that might have disturbed it was lost in the completeness of its pleasure.
Agathe dreamed.
Her body lay on the bed without stirring, though it was breathing. She looked at it and felt a joy like polished marble at the sight. Then she observed the objects that stood farther back in her room; she recognized them all, but they were not exactly the things that otherwise were hers. For the objects lay outside her in the same way as her body, which she saw resting among them. That gave her a sweet pain!
Why did it hurt? Apparently because there was something deathlike about it; she could not act and could not stir, and her tongue was as ifcut off, so that she was also unable to say anything about it. But she felt a great energy. Whatever her senses lit upon she grasped immediately, for everything was visible and shone the way sun, moon, and stars are re- flected in water. Agathe said to herself: "You have wounded my body with a rose"-and turned to the bed in order to take refuge in her body.
Then she discovered that it was her brother's body. He, too, was lying in the reflecting glorious light as in a crypt; she saw him not distinctly but more penetratingly than usual, and touched him in the secrecy of the night. She raised him up; he was a heavy burden in her arms, but she nevertheless had the strength to carry and hold him, and this embrace had a supranatural charm. Her brother's body nestled so lovably and in- dulgently against her that she rested in him; as he in her; nothing stirred in her, not even now the beautiful desire. And because in this suspen- sion they were one and without distinctions, and also without distinc- tions within themselves, so that her understanding was as iflost and her memory thought of nothing and her will had no activity, she stood in this calm as if facing a sunrise, and melted into it with her earthly details. But while this was happening, joyously, Agathe perceived surrounding her a wild crowd of people who, as it appeared, found themselves around her in great fear. They were running excitedly back and forth, and gesturing
From the Posthunwus Papers · 1423
warningly and resentfully with increasing din. In the manner of a dream, this was happening quite close to her but without involving her, but only until the noise and fright suddenly intruded violently into her mind. Then Agathe was afraid, and quickly stepped back into her sleeping body; she had no idea at all how everything might have been changed, and for a time left off dreaming.
But after a while she began again. Again she left her body, but this time met her brother immediately. And again her body was lying naked on the bed; they both looked at it, and indeed the hair over the genitals of this unconscious body that had been left behind burned like a small golden fire on a marble tomb. Because there was no "I" or "you" be- tween them, this being three did not surprise her. Ulrich was looking at her softly and earnestly in a way she did not recognize as his. They also looked at their surroundings together, and it was their house in which they found themselves, but although Agathe knew all the objects quite well, she could not have said in which room this was happening, and that again had a peculiar charm, for there was neither right nor left, earlier nor later, but when they looked at something together they were united like water and wine, a union that was more golden or silver, depending on whichever was poured in in greater quantity. Agathe knew immedi- ately: "This is what we have so often talked of, total love," and paid close attention so as not to miss anything. But she still missed how it was hap- pening. She looked at her brother, but he was looking in front of him with a stiff and embarrassed smile. At this moment she heard a voice somewhere, a voice so exceedingly beautiful that it had nothing to com- pare with earthly things, and it said: "Cast everything you have into the fire, down to your shoes; and when you no longer have anything don't even think of a shroud, but cast yourself naked into the fire! " And while she was listening to this voice and remembering that she knew this sen- tence, a splendor rose into her eyes and radiated from them, a splendor that took away precise earthly definition even from Ulrich, though she had no impression that anything was missing from him, and her every limb received from it in the manner of its special pleasure great grace and bliss. Involuntarily she took some steps toward her brother. He was coming toward her from the other side in the same way.
Now there was only a narrow chasm between their bodies, and Agathe felt that something must be done. At this place in her dream she began, too, with the greatest effort, to think again. "If he loves something and receives and enjoys it," she said to herself, "then he is no longer he, but his love is my love! " She doubtless sensed that this sentence, the way she had uttered it, was somehow distorted and emasculated, but still she un- derstood it through and through, and it took on a significance that clari-
1424 ·THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
fied everything. "In the dream," she explained it to herself, "one must not think about things, then everything will happen! " For everything she was thinking she believed to see transpiring, or rather, what happened and partook of the desire of matter also partook of the desire of the spirit, which penetrated it as thought in the profoundest possible way. This seemed to her to give her a great superiority over Ulrich; for while he was now standing there helplessly, without stirring, not only did the same splendor as before rise into her eyes and fill them, but its moist fire suddenly broke out from her breasts and veiled everything that faced her in an indescribable sensation. Her brother was now seized by this fire and began to burn in it, without the fire growing more or less. "Now you see! " Agathe thought. 'We've always done it wrong! One always builds a bridge of hard material and always crosses over to the other at a single place: but one must cross the abyss at every place! " She had seized her brother by the hands and tried to draw him to her; but as she pulled, the burning naked male body, without really being changed, dissolved into a bush or a wall of glorious flowers and, in this form, came loosely closer. All intentions and thoughts vanished in Agathe; she lay fainting with desire in her bed, and as the wall strode through her she also be- lieved that she had to wander through large brooks of soft-skinned flow- ers, and she walked without being able to make the spell vanish. "I am in love! " she thought, as someone finds a moment when he is able to draw breath, for she could hardly still bear this incredible excitement that did not want to end. Since the last transformation she also no longer saw her brother, but he had not disappeared.
And looking for him, she woke up; but she felt that she wanted to go back once more, for her happiness had attained such an intensification that it went on increasing. She was quite confused as she got out of bed: the beginnings of wakefulness were in her mind, and all the ll'est of her body held the not-yet-ended dream that apparently wanted to have no end.
Since the dream, there had been in Agathe an intention to lead her brother astray on some mad experiment. It was not clear even to herself. Sometimes the air was like a net in which something invisible had got caught. It spread the web apart but was not able to break through it. All impressions had somewhat too great a weight. When they greeted each other in the morning, the first impression was of a quite sharply sensual
From the Posthumous Papers · 1425
delimitation. They emerged from the ocean of sleep onto the islands of "you" and "I. " The body's color and shape drifted like a bouquet offlow- ers on the depths of space. Their glances, their movements, seemed to reach farther than usual; the inhibition that otherwise catches and stops them in the secret mechanism of the world must have grown weaker. But words were often suppressed by the fear that they would be too weak to utter this.
In order to understand such a passion, one must remember the habits of consciousness. Not long ago, for example, a woman wearing glasses not only was considered ridiculous, but really looked it; today is a time in which they make her look enterprising and young: those are habitual attitudes of consciousness; they change but are always present in some connection, forming a scaffolding through which perception enters into consciousness. The image is always present before its component parts are, and is what first gives significance to the meaningless daubings of sense impressions. Polonius's cloud, which appears sometimes as a ship, sometimes as a camel, is not the weakness of a servile courtier but com- pletely characterizes the way God has created us. The play between self and external world is not like the die and the stamping but is reciprocal and capable of extremely fine motions, to the extent that it is freed from the cruder mechanisms of utility. One rarely imagines how far this ex- tends. In truth it reaches from beautiful, ugly, good, and evil, where it still seems natural to everyone that one man's morning cloud should be another man's camel, through bitter and sweet, fragrant and stinking, as far as the apparently most precise and least subjective impressions of colors and forms. Herein lies perhaps the deepest sense of the support that one person seeks in another; but Ulrich and Agathe were like two people who, hand in hand, had stepped out of this circle. What they felt for each other was by no means simply to be called love. Something lay in their relationship to each other that could not be included among the ordinary notions of living together; they had undertaken to live like brother and sister, ifone takes this expression in the sense not ofan offi- cial marriage-bureau document but of a poem; they were neither brother and sister nor man and wife, their desires like white mist in which a fire bums. But that sufficed at times to remove their hold on the world from what they were for each other. The result was that what they were became senselessly strong. Such moments contained a tenderness without goals or limits. And also without names or aid. To do something for someone's sake contains in the doing a thousand connections to the world; to give someone pleasure contains in the giving all considerations that bind us to other people. A passion, on the other hand, is an emotion
1426 • THE MAN WITH 0 U T QUALITIES
that, free from all contaminants, can never do enough for itself. It is simultanously the emotion of a powerlessness in the person and that of a movement proceeding from it, which seizes the entire world.
And it is not to be denied that in the company of her brother Agathe tasted the bitter sweetness of a passion. Today one often confuses pas- sion and vice. Cigarette smoking, cocaine, and the vigorously esteemed recurrent need for coitus are, God knows, no passions. Agathe knew that; she knew the substitutes for passion, and recognized passion at the first moment in that not only the self bums, but the world as well; it is as if all things were behind the air just above the tip of a flame. She would have liked to thank the Creator on her knees that she was experiencing it again, although it is just as much a feeling ofdevastation as ofhappiness. Agathe felt, too, that this life is like a ship gliding along in infinite seclu- sion. The sounds on the shore become ever weaker, and objects lose their voice: they no longer say, now you should do this or that with me; movement dies away; the nimble words die away. At times in the morn- ings there already lay, between the house they were living in and the street, a nothingness that neither Ulrich nor Agathe could penetrate; life's charms lost their power to evoke the ridiculous little decisions that are so vital: putting on a hat, inserting a key, those small touches of the rudder by means of which one moves forward. But the space in the rooms was as if polished, and everything was full of a soft music, which ceased only when one strained to hear it more clearly. And that was why the loving anxiety was there; the silence behind the sound of a word, behind a handshake, a movement, could often suddenly detach itself for a moment from a series of others, divest itself of the chains of temporal and spatial connections and send the sound out onto an infinite deep, above which it rested motionless. Life then stood still. The eye, in sweet torment, could not withdraw itselffrom the image. It sank into existence as into a wall of flowers. It sank ever deeper and ever more slowly. It reached no bottom; it could not tum around! What might the clocks be doing now? Agathe thought; the idiotic little second hand she remem- bered, with its precise forward movement around its little circle: with what longing for salvation she now thought of it! And should a glance be absorbed in the other, how painful it was to withdraw it; as if their souls had linked together! It was very nearly comical, this silence. A heavy mountain of soulfulness. Ulrich often struggled to find a word, a jest; it would not matter in the least what one y. ill<ed about, it only needed to be something indifferent and real that is domesticated in life and has a right to a home. That puts souls back into connection with reality. One can just as well start talking about the lawyer as come up with any clever observation. All it had to be was a betrayal of the moment; the word falls
FromthePosthumousPapers · 1427
into the silence then, and in the next moment other corpses of words gleam around it, risen up in great crowds like dead fish when one throws poison into the water! Agathe hung on Ulrich's lips while he was search- ing for such a word, and when his lips could no longer find it and no longer part, she sank back exhausted into the silence that burned her too, like a pallet consisting of nothing but little tips of flame.
Whenever Ulrich resisted: - B u t we do have a mission, an activity in the world! Agathe answered: - N o t I, and you are certainly only imagin- ing yours. We have some idea ofwhat we have to do: be together! What difference does it make what progress is made in the world? Ulrich dis- agreed, and attempted to convince her ironically of the impossibility of what it was that kept him bound in chains. -There's only one explana- tion for our inactivity that is to some degree satisfactory: to rest in God and be subsumed in God. You can use another word instead of God: the Primal One, Being, the Unconditional . . . there are a few dozen words, all powerless. They all oppose assurance to the terror at the sweet cessa- tion of being human: you have arrived at the edge of something that is more than being human. Philosophical prejudices then take care of the rest. Agathe replied: - I understand nothing of philosophy. But let's just stop eating! Let's see what comes of that?
Ulrich noticed that in the bright childishness of this proposal there was a fine black line.
-W hat would come of that? He answered in detail: -First hunger, then exhaustion, then hunger again, raging fantasies about eating, and finally either eating or dying!
- Y o u can't know without having tried it!
- B u t , Agathe! It's been tried and tested a thousand times!
-By professors! Or by bankrupt speculators. Do you know, dying
must be not at all like one says. I nearly died once: it was different. Ulrich shrugged his shoulders. He had no idea how close together in Agathe the two feelings were, to impulsively ignore all her lost years or, if that failed, to want to stop. She had never, like Ulrich, felt the need of making the world better than it is; she was happy lying around some- where, while Ulrich was always on the go. This had been a difference between them since childhood, and it remained a difference until death. Ulrich did not so much fear death as regard it as a disgrace that is set as a final price on all striving. Agathe had always been afraid of death when she imagined it, as every young and healthy person does, in the unbeara- ble and incomprehensible form: Now you are, but at some point you will no longer be! But at the same time she had, in her early youth, already become acquainted with the gradual process of separation that is capa- ble ofinserting itselfinto the tiniest span oftime, that hurtlingly rapid-
1428 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
in spite of all its slowness-being turned away from life and becoming tired of and indifferent to it, and striving trustingly into the approaching nothingness that sets in when the body is grievously harmed by an illness without the senses being affected. She had confidence in death. Perhaps it's not so bad, she thought. It's always, in any case, natural and pleasant to stop, in everything one does. But decay, and the rest of those horrible things: for heaven's sake, isn't one used to everything happening to one while one has nothing to do with it? You know, Ulrich-she terminated the conversation-you're like this: ifyou're given leaves and branches, you always sew them together into a tree; but I would like to see what would happen if we would once, for instance, sew the leaves finnly onto ourselves.
And yet Ulrich, too, felt they had nothing else to do but be together. Whenever Agathe called through the rooms: -Leave the light onl-a quick call, before Ulrich on his way out darkened the room to which Agathe wished to return once more, Ulrich thought: A request, hasty, what more? Oh, what more? No less than Buddha running to catch a tram. An impossible gait! A collapse of absurdity. But still, how lovely Agathe's voice was! What trust lay in the brief request, what happiness that one person can call out something like that to another without being misunderstood.
Of course, such a moment was like a piece of earthly thread running among mysterious flowers, but it was at the same time moving, like a woolen thread that one places around one's beloved's neck when one has nothing else to give her. And when they then stepped out into the street and, walking side by side, could not see much of each other but only felt the tender force of unintended contact, they be- longed together like an object that stands in an immense space.
It lies in the nature of such experiences that they urge their own tell- ing. Within the tiniest amount of happening they contain an extreme of inner processes that needs to break a path for itself to the outside. And as in music or a poem, at a sickbed or in a church, the circle of what can be uttered in such circumstances is peculiarly circumscribed. Not, as one might believe, through solemnity or some other subjective mood, but through something that has far more the appearance of an objective thing. This can be compared with the remarkable process through which one assimilates intellectual influences in one's youth; there, too, one takes in not every truth that comes along but really only a truth that comes to meet it from one's own mind, a truth that therefore, in a cer- tain sense, has only to be awakened, so that one already knows it in the moment one comes across it. There are at that age the truths that are destined for us and those that aren't; bits of knowledge are true today and false tomorrow, ideas light up or go out-not because we change
From the Posthumous Papers · 1429
our minds but because with our thoughts we are still connected to our life as a whole and, fed by the same invisible springs, rise and sink with them. They are true when we feel ourselves rising at the moment of thinking them, and they are false when we feel ourselves falling. There is something inexpressible in ourselves and the world that is increased or diminished in the process. In later years this changes; the disposition of the emotions becomes less flexible, and the understanding becomes that extraordinarily flexible, firm, doughty tool which we know it to be when we refuse to allow ourselves to be swayed by emotion. At this point the world has already divided itself: on the one side into the world of things and dependable sensations of them, of judgments and, as it can also be put, recognized emotions or will; on the other side into the world ofsub- jectivity, that is of caprice, of faith, taste, intimation, prejudices, and all those uncertainties, taking an attitude in regard to which, whatever it may be, there remains a kind of private right of the individual, without any claims to public status. When that happens, individual industry may sniff out and take in everything or nothing;-it rarely happens in the steeled soul that in the fire of the impression the walls, too, stretch and move.
But does this attitude really permit one to feel as secure in the world as it might lead one to think? Does not the whole solid world, with all our sensations, buildings, landscapes, deeds, drift on countless tiny clouds? Beneath every perception lies music, poem, feeling. But this feeling is tied down, made invariable, excluded, because we want to per- ceive things truly, that is, without emotion, in order to let them guide us, instead of our guiding them, which, as one knows, amounts to meaning that we finally, quite suddenly, have really learned to fly instead of merely dreaming about flying, as the millennia before us did. To this emotion imprisoned in objects there corresponds, on the individual side, that spirit of objectivity which has pushed all passion back into a condi- tion where it is no longer perceptible, so that in every person there slum- bers a sense ofhis value, his usefulness, and his significance that cannot be touched, a basic feeling of equilibrium between himself and the world. Yet this equilibrium need only be disturbed at any point, and ev- erywhere the imprisoned little clouds escape. A little fatigue, a little poi- son, a little excess of excitement, and a person sees and hears things he doesn't want to believe; emotion rises, the world slides out of its mid- dling condition into an abyss or rises up energetically, solitary, like a vi- sion and no longer comprehensible!
Often everything that he and Agathe undertook, or what they saw and experienced, seemed to Ulrich only a simile. This tree and that smile are reality, because they have the quite specific quality of not merely being
1430 · THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
illusion; but are there not many realities? Was it not just yesterday that we were wearing wigs with long locks, possessed very imperfect ma- chines, but wrote splendid books? And only the day before yesterday that we carried bows and arrows and put on gold hoods at festivals, over cheeks that were painted with the blue of the night sky, and orange- yellow eye sockets? Some kind of vague sympathy for these things still quivers within us today. So much was like today and so much was differ- ent, as if it was trying to be one of many hieroglyphic languages. Does not this mean that one should also not set too much store in present things? What is bad today will perhaps in part be good tomorrow, and the beautiful ugly; disregarded thoughts will have become great ideas, and dignified ideas decay to indifference. Every order is somehow ab- surd and like a wax figure, if one takes it too seriously; every thing is a frozen individual instance of its possibilities. But those are not doubts, rather a dynamic, elastic, undefined quality that feels itself capable of anything.
But it is a peculiarity of these experiences that they are almost always experienced only in a state of nonpossession. Thus the world changes when the impassioned person yearns for God, who does not reveal Him- self, or the lover for his distant beloved, who has been snatched from him. Agathe as well as Ulrich had known these things, and to experience them reciprocally when they were together sometimes gave them real difficulty. Involuntarily they pushed the present away, by telling each other for the first time the stories of their past in which this had hap- pened. But these stories again reinforced the miraculousness of their coming together, and ended in the half-light, in a hesitant touching of hands, silences, and the trembling ofa current that flowed through their arms.
And sometimes there were violent rebellions.
Let's make an assumption-[Ulrich] said to himself, for example, in order to exclude it again later-and let's suppose that Agathe would feel loathing at the love of men. In that case, in order to please her as a man, I would have to behave like a woman. I would have to be tender toward her without desiring her. I would have to be good in the same way to all things in order not to frighten her love. I could not lift a chair unfeel- ingly, in order to move it to some other place in unsentient space; for I may not touch it out of some random idea; whatever I do must be some- thing, and it is involved with this spiritual existence, the way an actor
From the Posthumous Papers · 1431
lends his body to an idea. Is that ridiculous? No, it's nothing other than festive. For that's the sense of sacred ceremonies, where every gesture has its significance. That is the sense of all things when they emerge again before our eyes for the first time with the morning sun. No, the object is not a means for us. It is a detail, the little nail, a smile, a curly hair of our third sister. o "I" and "you" are only objects too. But we are objects that are engaged in exchanging signals with each other; that is what gives us the miraculous: something is flowing back and forth be- tween us, I cannot look at your eyes as if at some dead object, we are burning at both ends. But if I want to do something for your sake, the thing is not a dead object either. I love it, that means that something is happening between me and it; I don't want to exaggerate, I have no in- tention of maintaining that the object is alive like me (and has feeling and talks with me), but it does live with me, we always stand in some relationship to each other.
I have said we are sisters. You have nothing against my loving the world, but I must love it like a sister, not like a man or the way a man loves a woman. A little sentimentally; you and it and I give one another presents. I take nothing away from the tenderness that I present you with if I also make a present to the world; on the contrary, every prodi- gality increases our wealth. We know that each of us has our separate relations to one another that one could not totally reveal even if one wanted to, but these secrets do not arouse any jealousy. Jealousy as- sumes that one wishes to tum love into a possession. However, I can lie in the grass, pressed to the lap of earth, and you will feel the sweetness of this moment along with me. But I may not regard the earth as an artist or a researcher: then I would be making it my own, and we would form a couple that would exclude you as a third.
What, then, in everyday life really distinguishes the most primitive af- fect oflove from mere sexual desire? Mixed in with the desire to rape is a dread, a tenderness, one might almost say something feminine mixed in with the masculine. And that's the way it is with all emotions; they are peculiarly pitted of their seeds and magnified.
"Ulrich elsewhere defines the three sisters as himself, Agathe, and the Other Condi- tion. -TRANs.
1432 • THE MAN WITH 0 U T QUALITIES
Morality? Morality is an insult in a condition in which every move- ment finds its justification in contributing to the honor of that condition.
But the more vividly Ulrich imagined this assumed sisterly feeling, the more . . .
To previous page: One could variously call the cardinal sin in this par- adise: having, wanting, possessing, knowing. Round about it gather the smaller sins: envying, being offended.
They all come from one's wanting to put oneself and the other in an exclusive relationship. From the selfwanting to have its way like a crystal separating from a liquid. Then there is a nodal point, and nothing but nodal points collect around it.
But ifwe are sisters, then you will want not the man, nor any thing or thought but yours. You do not say: I say. For everything will be said by everything. You do not say: I love. For love is the beloved of all of us, and when it embraces you it smiles at me. . . .
When Agathe next entered Lindner's house, he seemed to have fled in a hurry a short time before. The inviolable order in hall and rooms had been thrown into disorder, which admittedly did not take much, for quite a few of the objects that were not in their usual places in these rooms were quite upsetting to look at anyway. Hardly had Agathe sat down to wait for Lindner when Peter came rushing through the room; he had no idea that she had come in. He seemed bent on smashing to pieces everything in his path, and his face was bloated, as if everywhere beneath the pink skin tears were hiding, preparing themselves for an eruption.
-Peter? Agathe asked in dismay. -What's the mat;ter?
He wanted to go right by, but suddenly stopped and stuck out his tongue at her with such a comical expression of disgust that she had to laugh.
From the Posthumous Papers · 1433
Agathe had a soft spot for Peter. She understood that it could be no fun for a young man to have Professor Lindner for a father, and when she imagined that Peter perhaps suspected her of being his father's fu- ture wife, his antagonistic attitude toward her met with her secret ap- plause. Somehow she felt him to be a hostile ally. Perhaps only because she remembered her own youth as a pious convent-school girl. He had as yet no roots anywhere; was seeking himself, and seeking to grow up; growing up with the same pains and anomalies inside as outside. She understood that so well. What could wisdom, faith, miracles, and princi- ples mean to a young person who is still locked up in himself and not yet opened up by life to assimilate such things! She had a strange sympathy for him; for his being undisciplined and recalcitrant, for his being young, and apparently, too, simply for the badness of his way of thinking. She would gladly have been his playmate, at least here; these surroundings gave her this childish thought, but she sadly noticed that he usually treated her like an old woman.
-Peter! Peter! What's the matter? he aped her. -He'll tell you any- how. You soul-sister of his!
Agathe laughed even more and caught him by the hand.
- D o you like that? Peter went after her unabashedly. - D o you like me to howl? How old are you anyway? Not so much older than I am, I should think: but he treats you the way he treats the sublime Plato! He had disengaged himself and examined her, looking for an advantage.
- W h a t has he really done to you? Agathe asked.
-What's he done? He's punished me! I'm not at all ashamed in front of you, as you see. Soon he's going to pull down my pants, and you'll be allowed to hold me!
-Peter! For shame! Agathe warned innocently. -D id he really beat you?
- D i d he? Peter? Maybe you'd like that?
-Shame on you, Peter!
- N o t at all! Why don't you call me Herr Peter? Anyway, what do you
think: there! He stretched out his tensed leg and grasped his upper thigh, strengthened from playing soccer. -Have a look for yourself; I could murder him with one hand. He doesn't have as much strength in both legs as I have in one arm. It's not me, it's you who ought to be ashamed, instead of prattling wisdom with him! Do you want to know what he's done to me?
- N o , Peter, you can't talk to me that way.
-Why not?
-Because your father's heart is in the right place. And because- But
here Agathe could not find the right way to proceed; she was no good at
1434 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
preaching, although the youth was indeed in the wrong, and she sud- denly had to laugh again. - S o what did he do to you?
- H e took away my allowance!
-Wait! Agathe asked. Without stopping to think, she fished out a banknote and handed it to Peter. She herself did not know why she did this; perhaps she thought the first thing to do was to get rid of Peter's anger before she could have an effect on him, perhaps it only gave her pleasure to thwart Lindner's pedagogy. And with the same suddenness she had addressed Peter with the familiar Du. Peter looked at her in astonishment. Behind his lovely misted eyes something quite new awoke. -The second thing he imposed on me-he continued, grinning cynically, without thanking her-is also broken: the school of silence! Do you know it? Man learns through silence to remove his speech from all inner and outer irritations and make it the handmaid ofhis innermost personal considerations!
- Y o u surely said some improper things, said Agathe, falling back on the normal pronoun of address.
-This is how it was! "The first response of man to all interventions and attacks from without happens by means of the vocal cords," he quoted his father. -That's why he's ruined today and my day off from school tomorrow with room arrest, observes total silence toward me, and has forbidden me to speak a single word with anybody in the house. The third thing-he mocked-is control ofthe instinct for food-
-But, Peter, you must now really tell me-Agathe interrupted him, amused-what did you do to set him off?
The conversation in which he was mocking his father through his fu- ture mother had put the youth in the best ofspirits. -That's not so sim- ple, Agathe, he replied shamelessly. -There is, you ought to know, something that the old man fears the way the devil fears holy water: jokes. The tickling ofjokes and humor, he says, comes from idle fantasy and malice. I always have to swallow them. That's exemplary for one's character. Because, ifwe look at the joke more closely-
-Enough! Agathe commanded. -What was your forbidden joke about?
- A b o u t you! said Peter, his eyes boring into hers in challenge. But at this moment he shrank back, because the doorbell rang, and both recog- nized from the sound of the ring that it was Professor Lindner. Before Agathe could make any reproaches, Peter pressed his fingernails with painful violence into her hand and stole out of the room.
From the Posthumous Papers · 1435
There were also violent rebellions.
Agathe owned a piano. She was sitting at it in the twilight, playing.
The uncertainty of her frame of mind played along with the notes. Ul- rich came in. His voice sounded cold and mute as he greeted her. She interrupted her playing. When the words had died away, her fingers went a few steps further through the boundless land of music.
-Stay where you are! ordered Ulrich, who had stepped back, draw- ing a pistol from his pocket. -Nothing's going to happen to you. He spoke altogether differently, a stranger. Then he fired at the piano, shooting into the center of its long black flank. The first bullet cut through the dry, tender wood and howled across the strings. A second churned up leaping sounds. As shot followed shot, the keys began to hop. The jubilantly sharp reports of the pistol drove with increasing frenzy into a splintering, screaming, tearing, drumming, and singing up- roar. When the magazine was empty, Ulrich let it drop to the carpet-he only noticed it when he futilely tried to get off two more shots. He gave the impression of a madman, pale, his hair hanging down over his fore- head; a fit had seized him and carried him far away from himself. Doors slammed in the house, people were listening; slowly, in such impres- sions, reason again took possession of him.
Agathe had neither lifted her hand nor uttered the slightest sound to prevent the destruction of the expensive piano or flee the danger. She felt no fear, and although the beginning of her brother's outbreak could have seemed insane, this thought did not frighten her. She accepted it as a pleasant end. The strange cries of the wounded instrument aroused in her the idea that she would have to leave the earth in a swarm of fantasti- cally fluttering birds.
Ulrich pulled himself together and asked if she was angry with him; Agathe denied it with radiant eyes. His face again assumed its usual ex- pression. - I don't know-he said-why I did it. I couldn't resist the impulse.
Agathe reflectively tried out a few isolated strings that had survived.
- I feel like a fool . . . , Ulrich pleaded, and cautiously ran his hand through his sister's hair, as if his fingers could find refuge from them- selves there.
That damned Biziste ought to have waited for him, but at the same time he longed for him as ifhe were a stronger brother. Ifhe would not have been ashamed ofhimself because ofthe fellow on the other side of the wall, Ulrich would have turned around. But he did not even know what signal he was supposed to give to find out whether all was clear on the other side. He realized that he was a fool, and gained some respect for these rogues. But he was not a man to let himself be defeated so easily; it would have been ridiculous for an intellectual not to be able to cope with this too. Ulrich marched forward straight through the shrub- bery; the excitement he was in and the self-control his progress required (entirely without reflection; it was simply moral pains) made him ruth- lessly crack, break, and rustle the bushes. To have slunk forward like an Indian seemed to him just then incredibly silly and childish, and this was the moment in which the normal person in him began to reawaken.
When he came to the edge, Biziste, as Ulrich really might have ex- pected from the first, was squatting there observing the building, and he turned a witheringly punitive glance toward his noisy arrival. Moosbrug- ger's window was dimly lit; Biziste whistled through his teeth. The huge shoulders of the murderer filled the rectangle of the window, the rope fashioned from the sheets rolled down; but Moosbrugger was not skilled in crime and had underestimated the strength of the rescue line re- quired for his enormous weight; hardly had he suspended himself from it when it broke, and the force ofhis landing exploded the stillness with a muflled detonation. At this moment two guards materialized in the half- light that illuminated the wall.
Two days earlier, two mentally ill prisoners had escaped from another observation clinic, but Ulrich had neither heard nor read about it. And so he had not known that since yesterday security had been generally
1420 • THE MAN WITH 0 U T QUALITIES
tightened and old, long-forgotten measures were again being enforced for a while. Among these was the two-man patrol, which, perhaps drawn by the noises Ulrich had made and now alarmed by the muffied fall, stopped, looked around, recognized in the sand a heavy body that with great effort was trying to get up, rushed over, saw a rope hanging from the window, and with all their lung power signaled for help through shrill little whistles. Moosbrugger had dislocated his shoulder and bro- ken an ankle, otherwise it would have been an unhappy encounter for the guards who jumped on him; as it was, he knocked one bleeding into the sand, but when he tried to straighten up to shake off the second, pain deprived him of his footing. The guard hung on his neck and whistled piercingly; the second man, full of pain and rage, pounced on him, and at this moment Biziste sprang out of the bushes. With a powerful blow of his fist, he smashed one guard's whistle between his teeth so that he tumbled off Moosbrugger, but now the other whistled like mad and rushed at Biziste. Such guards are strong men, and Biziste was not ex- ceptionally powerful. If at this instant Ulrich had come fmward to help, with his considerable trained strength, they would no doubt have suc- ceeded in rendering both attackers mute and motionless for a while, but Ulrich did not feel the slightest desire to do so. In the tangle before him his sympathies lay quite honestly with the men unexpectedly set upon, who were fighting for their duty, and if he had only followed his emo- tions, he would have grabbed this Biziste by the collar and given him a solid hook to the chin. But perhaps that was also merely the somewhat comical maternal voice of bourgeois order in him, and as the situation tensed his muscles and nerves, so his mind ebbed, filling him with dis- gust at contradictions whose resolution was not worth the effort. An- other semi-event, Ulrich said to himself. A very painful sensation of the awful ludicrousness of his situation came over him.
Biziste reached for his knife. But before he raised it to thrust, his glance, practiced in weighing risk and advantage, revealed to him the hopelessness of the outcome: Moosbrugger could not stand up without assistance, the noise of the alarmed people on night duty was already coming out of the darkness from the wing of the building, flight was the only recourse. The guard, who would not let him go, screamed, hit by a stab in the arm. Biziste disappeared, leaving Ulrich behind, as Ulrich ascertained with cheerful satisfaction in spite of the quite awkward situ- ation. He had meantime been thinking how he himself might get out of this stupid business. The way over the wall was blocked, for he hadn't the slightest desire to meet Herr Biziste and his friend ever again in his life, nor did he feel like climbing over the wall alone and perhaps being
From the Posthumous Papers · 1 4 2 1
detained by the curious drawn to the scene by the shouts of the guards, who would certainly be chasing after Biziste. He settled on the only thing that occurred to him, a very stupid thing: to run a little farther, quickly find a bench, and pretend to be asleep in case he was found. He raised the collar of his coat so his bare neck could not be seen, took off his cap, and "awoke" with as much surprise as possible when, sur- rounded by a maze of lights, he was knocked from the bench by an in- credible fist and his arms grabbed by six men. He did not know whether he gave a good performance as the righteous person drunk with sleep; it was his good fortune that one of the guards immediately recognized him, upon which he was released with reluctant respect. He was taken for a doctor who was doing studies at the clinic. He now tried to make credible that after a visit he had been walking in the grounds and had fallen asleep here. To this end, he involuntarily looked at his watch, re- membered that he had left it at home but could no longer take back the gesture and therefore found it missing; reached into his jacket and pants pockets and immediately found his money missing too, for he had of course also not brought it along; and as stupid as this comedy was, as he told himself, there was an even stupider guard who believed it, or really just one whose servile officiousness and desire to please Ulrich sug- gested what Ulrich wanted him to believe, so that he immediately called out: The rascals have also robbed the Herr Doktor. Ulrich did not say either yes or no, but only went on like someone who missed his belong- ings without knowing anything about what had happened and now found out the entire drama backward and in snatches. As an object of respect and the remaining center of interest, he left the clinic in this feigned role as quickly as he could; he was not to enter it again as long as it sheltered Moosbrugger.
For after this attempted flight Moosbrugger was placed under heavy guard, and Ulrich, on the orders of the head of the clinic, was no longer allowed to visit him. Nor did Ulrich have the slightest desire to. Still, the unpleasant uncertainty, whether the doctor . . .
The very unpleasant doubt remained whether, upon investigating the circumstances, they had not come to suspect him, which of course they would not express but were just as little ready to abandon.
In mania, this would be a depressive cycle ofshort duration.
1422 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
LATE 1920s
Her brother's conduct, the restlessness that the visit to Lindner had intensified in her, stimulated Agathe to a degree that remained hidden even from herself. She did not know how it had happened, or when; suddenly her soul was transported out of her body and looked around curiously in the alien world. This world pleased her soul uncommonly. Anything that might have disturbed it was lost in the completeness of its pleasure.
Agathe dreamed.
Her body lay on the bed without stirring, though it was breathing. She looked at it and felt a joy like polished marble at the sight. Then she observed the objects that stood farther back in her room; she recognized them all, but they were not exactly the things that otherwise were hers. For the objects lay outside her in the same way as her body, which she saw resting among them. That gave her a sweet pain!
Why did it hurt? Apparently because there was something deathlike about it; she could not act and could not stir, and her tongue was as ifcut off, so that she was also unable to say anything about it. But she felt a great energy. Whatever her senses lit upon she grasped immediately, for everything was visible and shone the way sun, moon, and stars are re- flected in water. Agathe said to herself: "You have wounded my body with a rose"-and turned to the bed in order to take refuge in her body.
Then she discovered that it was her brother's body. He, too, was lying in the reflecting glorious light as in a crypt; she saw him not distinctly but more penetratingly than usual, and touched him in the secrecy of the night. She raised him up; he was a heavy burden in her arms, but she nevertheless had the strength to carry and hold him, and this embrace had a supranatural charm. Her brother's body nestled so lovably and in- dulgently against her that she rested in him; as he in her; nothing stirred in her, not even now the beautiful desire. And because in this suspen- sion they were one and without distinctions, and also without distinc- tions within themselves, so that her understanding was as iflost and her memory thought of nothing and her will had no activity, she stood in this calm as if facing a sunrise, and melted into it with her earthly details. But while this was happening, joyously, Agathe perceived surrounding her a wild crowd of people who, as it appeared, found themselves around her in great fear. They were running excitedly back and forth, and gesturing
From the Posthunwus Papers · 1423
warningly and resentfully with increasing din. In the manner of a dream, this was happening quite close to her but without involving her, but only until the noise and fright suddenly intruded violently into her mind. Then Agathe was afraid, and quickly stepped back into her sleeping body; she had no idea at all how everything might have been changed, and for a time left off dreaming.
But after a while she began again. Again she left her body, but this time met her brother immediately. And again her body was lying naked on the bed; they both looked at it, and indeed the hair over the genitals of this unconscious body that had been left behind burned like a small golden fire on a marble tomb. Because there was no "I" or "you" be- tween them, this being three did not surprise her. Ulrich was looking at her softly and earnestly in a way she did not recognize as his. They also looked at their surroundings together, and it was their house in which they found themselves, but although Agathe knew all the objects quite well, she could not have said in which room this was happening, and that again had a peculiar charm, for there was neither right nor left, earlier nor later, but when they looked at something together they were united like water and wine, a union that was more golden or silver, depending on whichever was poured in in greater quantity. Agathe knew immedi- ately: "This is what we have so often talked of, total love," and paid close attention so as not to miss anything. But she still missed how it was hap- pening. She looked at her brother, but he was looking in front of him with a stiff and embarrassed smile. At this moment she heard a voice somewhere, a voice so exceedingly beautiful that it had nothing to com- pare with earthly things, and it said: "Cast everything you have into the fire, down to your shoes; and when you no longer have anything don't even think of a shroud, but cast yourself naked into the fire! " And while she was listening to this voice and remembering that she knew this sen- tence, a splendor rose into her eyes and radiated from them, a splendor that took away precise earthly definition even from Ulrich, though she had no impression that anything was missing from him, and her every limb received from it in the manner of its special pleasure great grace and bliss. Involuntarily she took some steps toward her brother. He was coming toward her from the other side in the same way.
Now there was only a narrow chasm between their bodies, and Agathe felt that something must be done. At this place in her dream she began, too, with the greatest effort, to think again. "If he loves something and receives and enjoys it," she said to herself, "then he is no longer he, but his love is my love! " She doubtless sensed that this sentence, the way she had uttered it, was somehow distorted and emasculated, but still she un- derstood it through and through, and it took on a significance that clari-
1424 ·THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
fied everything. "In the dream," she explained it to herself, "one must not think about things, then everything will happen! " For everything she was thinking she believed to see transpiring, or rather, what happened and partook of the desire of matter also partook of the desire of the spirit, which penetrated it as thought in the profoundest possible way. This seemed to her to give her a great superiority over Ulrich; for while he was now standing there helplessly, without stirring, not only did the same splendor as before rise into her eyes and fill them, but its moist fire suddenly broke out from her breasts and veiled everything that faced her in an indescribable sensation. Her brother was now seized by this fire and began to burn in it, without the fire growing more or less. "Now you see! " Agathe thought. 'We've always done it wrong! One always builds a bridge of hard material and always crosses over to the other at a single place: but one must cross the abyss at every place! " She had seized her brother by the hands and tried to draw him to her; but as she pulled, the burning naked male body, without really being changed, dissolved into a bush or a wall of glorious flowers and, in this form, came loosely closer. All intentions and thoughts vanished in Agathe; she lay fainting with desire in her bed, and as the wall strode through her she also be- lieved that she had to wander through large brooks of soft-skinned flow- ers, and she walked without being able to make the spell vanish. "I am in love! " she thought, as someone finds a moment when he is able to draw breath, for she could hardly still bear this incredible excitement that did not want to end. Since the last transformation she also no longer saw her brother, but he had not disappeared.
And looking for him, she woke up; but she felt that she wanted to go back once more, for her happiness had attained such an intensification that it went on increasing. She was quite confused as she got out of bed: the beginnings of wakefulness were in her mind, and all the ll'est of her body held the not-yet-ended dream that apparently wanted to have no end.
Since the dream, there had been in Agathe an intention to lead her brother astray on some mad experiment. It was not clear even to herself. Sometimes the air was like a net in which something invisible had got caught. It spread the web apart but was not able to break through it. All impressions had somewhat too great a weight. When they greeted each other in the morning, the first impression was of a quite sharply sensual
From the Posthumous Papers · 1425
delimitation. They emerged from the ocean of sleep onto the islands of "you" and "I. " The body's color and shape drifted like a bouquet offlow- ers on the depths of space. Their glances, their movements, seemed to reach farther than usual; the inhibition that otherwise catches and stops them in the secret mechanism of the world must have grown weaker. But words were often suppressed by the fear that they would be too weak to utter this.
In order to understand such a passion, one must remember the habits of consciousness. Not long ago, for example, a woman wearing glasses not only was considered ridiculous, but really looked it; today is a time in which they make her look enterprising and young: those are habitual attitudes of consciousness; they change but are always present in some connection, forming a scaffolding through which perception enters into consciousness. The image is always present before its component parts are, and is what first gives significance to the meaningless daubings of sense impressions. Polonius's cloud, which appears sometimes as a ship, sometimes as a camel, is not the weakness of a servile courtier but com- pletely characterizes the way God has created us. The play between self and external world is not like the die and the stamping but is reciprocal and capable of extremely fine motions, to the extent that it is freed from the cruder mechanisms of utility. One rarely imagines how far this ex- tends. In truth it reaches from beautiful, ugly, good, and evil, where it still seems natural to everyone that one man's morning cloud should be another man's camel, through bitter and sweet, fragrant and stinking, as far as the apparently most precise and least subjective impressions of colors and forms. Herein lies perhaps the deepest sense of the support that one person seeks in another; but Ulrich and Agathe were like two people who, hand in hand, had stepped out of this circle. What they felt for each other was by no means simply to be called love. Something lay in their relationship to each other that could not be included among the ordinary notions of living together; they had undertaken to live like brother and sister, ifone takes this expression in the sense not ofan offi- cial marriage-bureau document but of a poem; they were neither brother and sister nor man and wife, their desires like white mist in which a fire bums. But that sufficed at times to remove their hold on the world from what they were for each other. The result was that what they were became senselessly strong. Such moments contained a tenderness without goals or limits. And also without names or aid. To do something for someone's sake contains in the doing a thousand connections to the world; to give someone pleasure contains in the giving all considerations that bind us to other people. A passion, on the other hand, is an emotion
1426 • THE MAN WITH 0 U T QUALITIES
that, free from all contaminants, can never do enough for itself. It is simultanously the emotion of a powerlessness in the person and that of a movement proceeding from it, which seizes the entire world.
And it is not to be denied that in the company of her brother Agathe tasted the bitter sweetness of a passion. Today one often confuses pas- sion and vice. Cigarette smoking, cocaine, and the vigorously esteemed recurrent need for coitus are, God knows, no passions. Agathe knew that; she knew the substitutes for passion, and recognized passion at the first moment in that not only the self bums, but the world as well; it is as if all things were behind the air just above the tip of a flame. She would have liked to thank the Creator on her knees that she was experiencing it again, although it is just as much a feeling ofdevastation as ofhappiness. Agathe felt, too, that this life is like a ship gliding along in infinite seclu- sion. The sounds on the shore become ever weaker, and objects lose their voice: they no longer say, now you should do this or that with me; movement dies away; the nimble words die away. At times in the morn- ings there already lay, between the house they were living in and the street, a nothingness that neither Ulrich nor Agathe could penetrate; life's charms lost their power to evoke the ridiculous little decisions that are so vital: putting on a hat, inserting a key, those small touches of the rudder by means of which one moves forward. But the space in the rooms was as if polished, and everything was full of a soft music, which ceased only when one strained to hear it more clearly. And that was why the loving anxiety was there; the silence behind the sound of a word, behind a handshake, a movement, could often suddenly detach itself for a moment from a series of others, divest itself of the chains of temporal and spatial connections and send the sound out onto an infinite deep, above which it rested motionless. Life then stood still. The eye, in sweet torment, could not withdraw itselffrom the image. It sank into existence as into a wall of flowers. It sank ever deeper and ever more slowly. It reached no bottom; it could not tum around! What might the clocks be doing now? Agathe thought; the idiotic little second hand she remem- bered, with its precise forward movement around its little circle: with what longing for salvation she now thought of it! And should a glance be absorbed in the other, how painful it was to withdraw it; as if their souls had linked together! It was very nearly comical, this silence. A heavy mountain of soulfulness. Ulrich often struggled to find a word, a jest; it would not matter in the least what one y. ill<ed about, it only needed to be something indifferent and real that is domesticated in life and has a right to a home. That puts souls back into connection with reality. One can just as well start talking about the lawyer as come up with any clever observation. All it had to be was a betrayal of the moment; the word falls
FromthePosthumousPapers · 1427
into the silence then, and in the next moment other corpses of words gleam around it, risen up in great crowds like dead fish when one throws poison into the water! Agathe hung on Ulrich's lips while he was search- ing for such a word, and when his lips could no longer find it and no longer part, she sank back exhausted into the silence that burned her too, like a pallet consisting of nothing but little tips of flame.
Whenever Ulrich resisted: - B u t we do have a mission, an activity in the world! Agathe answered: - N o t I, and you are certainly only imagin- ing yours. We have some idea ofwhat we have to do: be together! What difference does it make what progress is made in the world? Ulrich dis- agreed, and attempted to convince her ironically of the impossibility of what it was that kept him bound in chains. -There's only one explana- tion for our inactivity that is to some degree satisfactory: to rest in God and be subsumed in God. You can use another word instead of God: the Primal One, Being, the Unconditional . . . there are a few dozen words, all powerless. They all oppose assurance to the terror at the sweet cessa- tion of being human: you have arrived at the edge of something that is more than being human. Philosophical prejudices then take care of the rest. Agathe replied: - I understand nothing of philosophy. But let's just stop eating! Let's see what comes of that?
Ulrich noticed that in the bright childishness of this proposal there was a fine black line.
-W hat would come of that? He answered in detail: -First hunger, then exhaustion, then hunger again, raging fantasies about eating, and finally either eating or dying!
- Y o u can't know without having tried it!
- B u t , Agathe! It's been tried and tested a thousand times!
-By professors! Or by bankrupt speculators. Do you know, dying
must be not at all like one says. I nearly died once: it was different. Ulrich shrugged his shoulders. He had no idea how close together in Agathe the two feelings were, to impulsively ignore all her lost years or, if that failed, to want to stop. She had never, like Ulrich, felt the need of making the world better than it is; she was happy lying around some- where, while Ulrich was always on the go. This had been a difference between them since childhood, and it remained a difference until death. Ulrich did not so much fear death as regard it as a disgrace that is set as a final price on all striving. Agathe had always been afraid of death when she imagined it, as every young and healthy person does, in the unbeara- ble and incomprehensible form: Now you are, but at some point you will no longer be! But at the same time she had, in her early youth, already become acquainted with the gradual process of separation that is capa- ble ofinserting itselfinto the tiniest span oftime, that hurtlingly rapid-
1428 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
in spite of all its slowness-being turned away from life and becoming tired of and indifferent to it, and striving trustingly into the approaching nothingness that sets in when the body is grievously harmed by an illness without the senses being affected. She had confidence in death. Perhaps it's not so bad, she thought. It's always, in any case, natural and pleasant to stop, in everything one does. But decay, and the rest of those horrible things: for heaven's sake, isn't one used to everything happening to one while one has nothing to do with it? You know, Ulrich-she terminated the conversation-you're like this: ifyou're given leaves and branches, you always sew them together into a tree; but I would like to see what would happen if we would once, for instance, sew the leaves finnly onto ourselves.
And yet Ulrich, too, felt they had nothing else to do but be together. Whenever Agathe called through the rooms: -Leave the light onl-a quick call, before Ulrich on his way out darkened the room to which Agathe wished to return once more, Ulrich thought: A request, hasty, what more? Oh, what more? No less than Buddha running to catch a tram. An impossible gait! A collapse of absurdity. But still, how lovely Agathe's voice was! What trust lay in the brief request, what happiness that one person can call out something like that to another without being misunderstood.
Of course, such a moment was like a piece of earthly thread running among mysterious flowers, but it was at the same time moving, like a woolen thread that one places around one's beloved's neck when one has nothing else to give her. And when they then stepped out into the street and, walking side by side, could not see much of each other but only felt the tender force of unintended contact, they be- longed together like an object that stands in an immense space.
It lies in the nature of such experiences that they urge their own tell- ing. Within the tiniest amount of happening they contain an extreme of inner processes that needs to break a path for itself to the outside. And as in music or a poem, at a sickbed or in a church, the circle of what can be uttered in such circumstances is peculiarly circumscribed. Not, as one might believe, through solemnity or some other subjective mood, but through something that has far more the appearance of an objective thing. This can be compared with the remarkable process through which one assimilates intellectual influences in one's youth; there, too, one takes in not every truth that comes along but really only a truth that comes to meet it from one's own mind, a truth that therefore, in a cer- tain sense, has only to be awakened, so that one already knows it in the moment one comes across it. There are at that age the truths that are destined for us and those that aren't; bits of knowledge are true today and false tomorrow, ideas light up or go out-not because we change
From the Posthumous Papers · 1429
our minds but because with our thoughts we are still connected to our life as a whole and, fed by the same invisible springs, rise and sink with them. They are true when we feel ourselves rising at the moment of thinking them, and they are false when we feel ourselves falling. There is something inexpressible in ourselves and the world that is increased or diminished in the process. In later years this changes; the disposition of the emotions becomes less flexible, and the understanding becomes that extraordinarily flexible, firm, doughty tool which we know it to be when we refuse to allow ourselves to be swayed by emotion. At this point the world has already divided itself: on the one side into the world of things and dependable sensations of them, of judgments and, as it can also be put, recognized emotions or will; on the other side into the world ofsub- jectivity, that is of caprice, of faith, taste, intimation, prejudices, and all those uncertainties, taking an attitude in regard to which, whatever it may be, there remains a kind of private right of the individual, without any claims to public status. When that happens, individual industry may sniff out and take in everything or nothing;-it rarely happens in the steeled soul that in the fire of the impression the walls, too, stretch and move.
But does this attitude really permit one to feel as secure in the world as it might lead one to think? Does not the whole solid world, with all our sensations, buildings, landscapes, deeds, drift on countless tiny clouds? Beneath every perception lies music, poem, feeling. But this feeling is tied down, made invariable, excluded, because we want to per- ceive things truly, that is, without emotion, in order to let them guide us, instead of our guiding them, which, as one knows, amounts to meaning that we finally, quite suddenly, have really learned to fly instead of merely dreaming about flying, as the millennia before us did. To this emotion imprisoned in objects there corresponds, on the individual side, that spirit of objectivity which has pushed all passion back into a condi- tion where it is no longer perceptible, so that in every person there slum- bers a sense ofhis value, his usefulness, and his significance that cannot be touched, a basic feeling of equilibrium between himself and the world. Yet this equilibrium need only be disturbed at any point, and ev- erywhere the imprisoned little clouds escape. A little fatigue, a little poi- son, a little excess of excitement, and a person sees and hears things he doesn't want to believe; emotion rises, the world slides out of its mid- dling condition into an abyss or rises up energetically, solitary, like a vi- sion and no longer comprehensible!
Often everything that he and Agathe undertook, or what they saw and experienced, seemed to Ulrich only a simile. This tree and that smile are reality, because they have the quite specific quality of not merely being
1430 · THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
illusion; but are there not many realities? Was it not just yesterday that we were wearing wigs with long locks, possessed very imperfect ma- chines, but wrote splendid books? And only the day before yesterday that we carried bows and arrows and put on gold hoods at festivals, over cheeks that were painted with the blue of the night sky, and orange- yellow eye sockets? Some kind of vague sympathy for these things still quivers within us today. So much was like today and so much was differ- ent, as if it was trying to be one of many hieroglyphic languages. Does not this mean that one should also not set too much store in present things? What is bad today will perhaps in part be good tomorrow, and the beautiful ugly; disregarded thoughts will have become great ideas, and dignified ideas decay to indifference. Every order is somehow ab- surd and like a wax figure, if one takes it too seriously; every thing is a frozen individual instance of its possibilities. But those are not doubts, rather a dynamic, elastic, undefined quality that feels itself capable of anything.
But it is a peculiarity of these experiences that they are almost always experienced only in a state of nonpossession. Thus the world changes when the impassioned person yearns for God, who does not reveal Him- self, or the lover for his distant beloved, who has been snatched from him. Agathe as well as Ulrich had known these things, and to experience them reciprocally when they were together sometimes gave them real difficulty. Involuntarily they pushed the present away, by telling each other for the first time the stories of their past in which this had hap- pened. But these stories again reinforced the miraculousness of their coming together, and ended in the half-light, in a hesitant touching of hands, silences, and the trembling ofa current that flowed through their arms.
And sometimes there were violent rebellions.
Let's make an assumption-[Ulrich] said to himself, for example, in order to exclude it again later-and let's suppose that Agathe would feel loathing at the love of men. In that case, in order to please her as a man, I would have to behave like a woman. I would have to be tender toward her without desiring her. I would have to be good in the same way to all things in order not to frighten her love. I could not lift a chair unfeel- ingly, in order to move it to some other place in unsentient space; for I may not touch it out of some random idea; whatever I do must be some- thing, and it is involved with this spiritual existence, the way an actor
From the Posthumous Papers · 1431
lends his body to an idea. Is that ridiculous? No, it's nothing other than festive. For that's the sense of sacred ceremonies, where every gesture has its significance. That is the sense of all things when they emerge again before our eyes for the first time with the morning sun. No, the object is not a means for us. It is a detail, the little nail, a smile, a curly hair of our third sister. o "I" and "you" are only objects too. But we are objects that are engaged in exchanging signals with each other; that is what gives us the miraculous: something is flowing back and forth be- tween us, I cannot look at your eyes as if at some dead object, we are burning at both ends. But if I want to do something for your sake, the thing is not a dead object either. I love it, that means that something is happening between me and it; I don't want to exaggerate, I have no in- tention of maintaining that the object is alive like me (and has feeling and talks with me), but it does live with me, we always stand in some relationship to each other.
I have said we are sisters. You have nothing against my loving the world, but I must love it like a sister, not like a man or the way a man loves a woman. A little sentimentally; you and it and I give one another presents. I take nothing away from the tenderness that I present you with if I also make a present to the world; on the contrary, every prodi- gality increases our wealth. We know that each of us has our separate relations to one another that one could not totally reveal even if one wanted to, but these secrets do not arouse any jealousy. Jealousy as- sumes that one wishes to tum love into a possession. However, I can lie in the grass, pressed to the lap of earth, and you will feel the sweetness of this moment along with me. But I may not regard the earth as an artist or a researcher: then I would be making it my own, and we would form a couple that would exclude you as a third.
What, then, in everyday life really distinguishes the most primitive af- fect oflove from mere sexual desire? Mixed in with the desire to rape is a dread, a tenderness, one might almost say something feminine mixed in with the masculine. And that's the way it is with all emotions; they are peculiarly pitted of their seeds and magnified.
"Ulrich elsewhere defines the three sisters as himself, Agathe, and the Other Condi- tion. -TRANs.
1432 • THE MAN WITH 0 U T QUALITIES
Morality? Morality is an insult in a condition in which every move- ment finds its justification in contributing to the honor of that condition.
But the more vividly Ulrich imagined this assumed sisterly feeling, the more . . .
To previous page: One could variously call the cardinal sin in this par- adise: having, wanting, possessing, knowing. Round about it gather the smaller sins: envying, being offended.
They all come from one's wanting to put oneself and the other in an exclusive relationship. From the selfwanting to have its way like a crystal separating from a liquid. Then there is a nodal point, and nothing but nodal points collect around it.
But ifwe are sisters, then you will want not the man, nor any thing or thought but yours. You do not say: I say. For everything will be said by everything. You do not say: I love. For love is the beloved of all of us, and when it embraces you it smiles at me. . . .
When Agathe next entered Lindner's house, he seemed to have fled in a hurry a short time before. The inviolable order in hall and rooms had been thrown into disorder, which admittedly did not take much, for quite a few of the objects that were not in their usual places in these rooms were quite upsetting to look at anyway. Hardly had Agathe sat down to wait for Lindner when Peter came rushing through the room; he had no idea that she had come in. He seemed bent on smashing to pieces everything in his path, and his face was bloated, as if everywhere beneath the pink skin tears were hiding, preparing themselves for an eruption.
-Peter? Agathe asked in dismay. -What's the mat;ter?
He wanted to go right by, but suddenly stopped and stuck out his tongue at her with such a comical expression of disgust that she had to laugh.
From the Posthumous Papers · 1433
Agathe had a soft spot for Peter. She understood that it could be no fun for a young man to have Professor Lindner for a father, and when she imagined that Peter perhaps suspected her of being his father's fu- ture wife, his antagonistic attitude toward her met with her secret ap- plause. Somehow she felt him to be a hostile ally. Perhaps only because she remembered her own youth as a pious convent-school girl. He had as yet no roots anywhere; was seeking himself, and seeking to grow up; growing up with the same pains and anomalies inside as outside. She understood that so well. What could wisdom, faith, miracles, and princi- ples mean to a young person who is still locked up in himself and not yet opened up by life to assimilate such things! She had a strange sympathy for him; for his being undisciplined and recalcitrant, for his being young, and apparently, too, simply for the badness of his way of thinking. She would gladly have been his playmate, at least here; these surroundings gave her this childish thought, but she sadly noticed that he usually treated her like an old woman.
-Peter! Peter! What's the matter? he aped her. -He'll tell you any- how. You soul-sister of his!
Agathe laughed even more and caught him by the hand.
- D o you like that? Peter went after her unabashedly. - D o you like me to howl? How old are you anyway? Not so much older than I am, I should think: but he treats you the way he treats the sublime Plato! He had disengaged himself and examined her, looking for an advantage.
- W h a t has he really done to you? Agathe asked.
-What's he done? He's punished me! I'm not at all ashamed in front of you, as you see. Soon he's going to pull down my pants, and you'll be allowed to hold me!
-Peter! For shame! Agathe warned innocently. -D id he really beat you?
- D i d he? Peter? Maybe you'd like that?
-Shame on you, Peter!
- N o t at all! Why don't you call me Herr Peter? Anyway, what do you
think: there! He stretched out his tensed leg and grasped his upper thigh, strengthened from playing soccer. -Have a look for yourself; I could murder him with one hand. He doesn't have as much strength in both legs as I have in one arm. It's not me, it's you who ought to be ashamed, instead of prattling wisdom with him! Do you want to know what he's done to me?
- N o , Peter, you can't talk to me that way.
-Why not?
-Because your father's heart is in the right place. And because- But
here Agathe could not find the right way to proceed; she was no good at
1434 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
preaching, although the youth was indeed in the wrong, and she sud- denly had to laugh again. - S o what did he do to you?
- H e took away my allowance!
-Wait! Agathe asked. Without stopping to think, she fished out a banknote and handed it to Peter. She herself did not know why she did this; perhaps she thought the first thing to do was to get rid of Peter's anger before she could have an effect on him, perhaps it only gave her pleasure to thwart Lindner's pedagogy. And with the same suddenness she had addressed Peter with the familiar Du. Peter looked at her in astonishment. Behind his lovely misted eyes something quite new awoke. -The second thing he imposed on me-he continued, grinning cynically, without thanking her-is also broken: the school of silence! Do you know it? Man learns through silence to remove his speech from all inner and outer irritations and make it the handmaid ofhis innermost personal considerations!
- Y o u surely said some improper things, said Agathe, falling back on the normal pronoun of address.
-This is how it was! "The first response of man to all interventions and attacks from without happens by means of the vocal cords," he quoted his father. -That's why he's ruined today and my day off from school tomorrow with room arrest, observes total silence toward me, and has forbidden me to speak a single word with anybody in the house. The third thing-he mocked-is control ofthe instinct for food-
-But, Peter, you must now really tell me-Agathe interrupted him, amused-what did you do to set him off?
The conversation in which he was mocking his father through his fu- ture mother had put the youth in the best ofspirits. -That's not so sim- ple, Agathe, he replied shamelessly. -There is, you ought to know, something that the old man fears the way the devil fears holy water: jokes. The tickling ofjokes and humor, he says, comes from idle fantasy and malice. I always have to swallow them. That's exemplary for one's character. Because, ifwe look at the joke more closely-
-Enough! Agathe commanded. -What was your forbidden joke about?
- A b o u t you! said Peter, his eyes boring into hers in challenge. But at this moment he shrank back, because the doorbell rang, and both recog- nized from the sound of the ring that it was Professor Lindner. Before Agathe could make any reproaches, Peter pressed his fingernails with painful violence into her hand and stole out of the room.
From the Posthumous Papers · 1435
There were also violent rebellions.
Agathe owned a piano. She was sitting at it in the twilight, playing.
The uncertainty of her frame of mind played along with the notes. Ul- rich came in. His voice sounded cold and mute as he greeted her. She interrupted her playing. When the words had died away, her fingers went a few steps further through the boundless land of music.
-Stay where you are! ordered Ulrich, who had stepped back, draw- ing a pistol from his pocket. -Nothing's going to happen to you. He spoke altogether differently, a stranger. Then he fired at the piano, shooting into the center of its long black flank. The first bullet cut through the dry, tender wood and howled across the strings. A second churned up leaping sounds. As shot followed shot, the keys began to hop. The jubilantly sharp reports of the pistol drove with increasing frenzy into a splintering, screaming, tearing, drumming, and singing up- roar. When the magazine was empty, Ulrich let it drop to the carpet-he only noticed it when he futilely tried to get off two more shots. He gave the impression of a madman, pale, his hair hanging down over his fore- head; a fit had seized him and carried him far away from himself. Doors slammed in the house, people were listening; slowly, in such impres- sions, reason again took possession of him.
Agathe had neither lifted her hand nor uttered the slightest sound to prevent the destruction of the expensive piano or flee the danger. She felt no fear, and although the beginning of her brother's outbreak could have seemed insane, this thought did not frighten her. She accepted it as a pleasant end. The strange cries of the wounded instrument aroused in her the idea that she would have to leave the earth in a swarm of fantasti- cally fluttering birds.
Ulrich pulled himself together and asked if she was angry with him; Agathe denied it with radiant eyes. His face again assumed its usual ex- pression. - I don't know-he said-why I did it. I couldn't resist the impulse.
Agathe reflectively tried out a few isolated strings that had survived.
- I feel like a fool . . . , Ulrich pleaded, and cautiously ran his hand through his sister's hair, as if his fingers could find refuge from them- selves there.
