No More Learning

The pre- vailing system was that of reality, and it was just like a bad play. It's not for nothing that we speak of a "theater of world events"-the same roles, complications, and plots keep turning up in life. People make love because there is love to be made, and the)' do it in the prevailing mode; people are proud as the Noble Savage, or as a Span- iard, a virgin, or a lion; in ninety out of a hundred cases even murder is committed only because it is perceived as tragic or grandiose. Apart from the truly notable exceptions, the successful political molders of the world in particular have a lot in common with the hacks who write for the commercial theater; the lively scenes they create bore us by their lack of ideas and novelty, but by the same token they lull us into that sleepy state oflowered resistance in which
we acquiesce in everything put before us. Seen in this light, history arises out of routine ideas, out of indifference to ideas, ·SO that reality comes primarily of nothing being done for ideas. This might be
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briefly summed up, he claimed, by saying that we care too little about what is happening and too much about to whom, when, and where it is happening, so that it is not the essence of what happens that matters to us but only the plot; not the opening up of some new experience oflife but only the pattern ofwhat we already lmow, cor- responding precisely to the difference between good plays and merely successful plays. Which means that we must do the opposite of what we do, and first of all give up being possessive about our ex- periences. We should look upon our experiences less as something personal and real and more as something general and abstract, or with the detachment with which we look at a painting or listen to a song. They should not be turned in upon ourselves but upward and outward. And if this was true on the personal plane, something more
would have to be done on the collective plane, something that Ulrich could not quite pin down and that he called a pressing of the grapes, cellaring the wine, concentrating the spiritual juices, and without all of which the individual could not feel other than helpless, of course, abandoned to his own resources. As he talked on in this vein, he re- membered the moment when he had told Diotima that reality ought to be done away with.
Almost as a matter of course, Walter began by declaring all this to be an obvious commonplace. As if the whole world, literature, art, science, religion, were. not already a "pressing and cellaring" in any easel As ifany literate person denied the value ofideas or failed to pay homage to the spirit, to beauty and goodness! As if education were anything other than an initiation into the world ofthe human spirit!
Ulrich clarified his position by suggesting that education was merely an initiation into the contemporary and prevalent modes and manners, which are random creations, so that those who seek to ac- quire a mind oftheir own must first ofall realize that they have none as yet. An entirely open mind, poetically creative and morally experi- mental on a grand scale, was what he called it.
Now Walter said that Ulrich was being impossible. ''You paint a charming picture," he said, "as though we had any choice . between living our ideas or living our lives. But you may remember the lines
I am no syllogism nor afiction-
! am a man, with all his contradtcttonl
Why not go a step further? Why not demand that we get rid of the belly to make space for the mind? But I say to you: A man is made of common clay! That we stretch out an arm and draw it back again, that we have to decide whether to tum right or left, that we are made of habits, prejudices, and earth, and nevertheless make our way as best we can-that is what makes us fully human. What you are say- ing, tested even slightly against reality, shows it up as being, at best, mere literature. "
"Ifyou will let me include all the other arts under that heading too," Ulrich conceded, "all the teachings on how to live, the reli- gions, and so on, then I do mean something like that: namely, that our existence should consist wholly of literature. "
"Really? You call the Savior's mercy or the life of Napoleon litera- ture? " Walter exclaimed. But then he had a better idea, and he turned -to his friend with all the aplomb of the man holding trumps and said: "You are the kind of man who regards can'ned vegetables as the raison d'etre of fresh greens. "
"You're absolutely right. And you could also say that I am one of those who will only cook with salt," Ulrich coolly admitted. He was tired of talking about it.
At this point Clarisse joined in, turning to Walter:
"Why do you contradict him? Aren't you the one who always says, whenever something special happens: Here is something we should be able to put on the stage, for everyone to see. and understand? " And turning to Ulrich in agreement, she said: "What we really ought to do is sing! We ought to sing ourselves! "
She had stood up and entered the little circle formed by the chairs. She held herself with a certain awkwardness, as though about to demonstrate her idea by going into a dance. Ulrich, who found such displays of naked emotion distasteful, remembered at this point that most people or, bluntly speaking, the average sort, whose minds are stimulated without their being able to create, long to act out their own selves. These are ofcourse the same people who are so likely to find, going on inside them, something "unutterable"-truly a word that says it all for them and that is the clouded screen upon which whatever they say appears vaguely magnified, so that they can never tell its real value. To put a stop to this, he said: "This was not what I meant, but Clarisse is right; the theater proves that intense personal
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feelings may serve an impersonal purpose, a complex of meaning and metaphor that makes them more or less transcend the merely personal. "
"I know exactly what Ulrich means," Clarisse chimed in again. "I can't remember ever getting a special pleasure out of something be- cause it was happeni,ng to me. It was happening, that was the thing! Uke music, for instance," she s! rld, turning to her husband. "You don't want to own it; the joy ofit is that it's there! We absorb our experiences and expand them into something beyond ourselves in a single movement; we seek to realize ourselves, yes, but not the way a shopkeeper realizes a profit! "
Walter clutched his head, but for Clarisse's sake he switched to another argument. He did his best to make his words come with the force of a steady, cold jet. "If you value an experience only to the degree that it generates spiritual energy," he said to Ulrich, "then let me ask you this: Doesn't that presuppose a life that has no other aim than to produce spiritual energy and power? "
"It is the life that all existing societies claim as their goal," Ulrich replied.
"In such a world the people would presumably lead their lives under the influence of great passions and ideas, philosophies and novels," Walter continued. "Let me take it a step further: Would they live . so as to make great philosophy and poetry possible, or would their lives be philosophy and poetry in the flesh, as it were? I'm sure I know which you mean, since the first case would be exactly what we mean by a civilization in the first place. But ifyou mean the second, aren't you overlooking the fact that such a life-as--art, or whatever you'd call it, unimaginable as it is to begin with, would make philosophy and art quite superfluous; it means one thing only, the end of art! " He flashed this trump card for Clarisse's benefit.
It took the trick. Even Ulrich needed a while to marshal his forces. Then he laughed and said: "Don't you know that every perfect life would be the end of art? It seems to me that you yourself are on the way to perfecting your life at the expense ofyour art. "
He had intended no sarcasm, but Clarisse pricked up her ears.
Ulrich went on: "Every great book breathes this spirit of love for the fate of individuals at odds with the forms the community tries to impose on them. It leads to decisions that cannot be decided; there is
nothing to be done but to give a true account of their lives. Extract the meaning out of all literature, and what you will get is a denial, however incomplete, but nonetheless an endless series of individual examples all based on experience, which refute all the accepted rules, principles, and prescriptions underpinning the very society that loves these works of art! In the end, a poem, with its mystery, cuts through to the point where the meaning of the world is tied to thousands ofwords in constant use, severs all these strings, and turns it into a balloon floating offinto space. Ifthis is what we call beauty, as we usually do, then beauty is 'an indescribably more ruthless and cruel upheaval than any political revolution ever was. "
Walter had turned pale to the lips. He hated this view of art as a negation of life, of art against life. He regarded it as offensively bohe- mian, the dregs of an outdated impulse to shock the conventional mind. He caught the irony of the self-evident fact that in a perfect world there would be no more beauty because it would be superflu- ous, but he did not hear his friend's unspoken question. For Ulrich was aware of having oversimplified his case. He could just as easily have said the opposite, that ·art is subversive because art is love; it beautifies its object by loving it, and there may be no other way in this world to beautify a thing or a creature than by loving it. And it is only because even our love consists of mere fragments that beauty works by intensification and contrast. And it is only in the sea of love that the concept of perfection, beyond all intensification, fuses with the concept of beauty, which depends on intensification. Once again Ulrich's thoughts had brushed against "the realm," and he stopped short, annoyed with himself. Walter had meanwhile pulled himself together, and after having rejected his friend's suggestion that peo- ple should live more or less as they read, as a commonplace idea as well as an impossible one, he proceeded to prove it evil and vulgar too.
"If a man," he began in the same artfully controlled fashion as before, "were to live his life as you suggest, he would have to ac- cept-not to mention other impossible implications-everything that gave him a good idea, in fact everything even capable of doing so. This would of course mean universal decadence, but since you don't mind that side of it, presumably-unless you are thinking of those vague general arrangements about which you haven't gone into
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detail-let me ask you only about the personal consequences. It seems to me that such a man is bound to be, in every case in which he doesn't happen to be the poet of his own life, worse off than an ani- mal; if he couldn't come up with an idea, then he couldn't come to any decision either, so that for a great part of his life he wot,Ud simply be at the mercy ofall his impulses, moods, the usual banal passions- in short, at the mercy of all the most impersonal elements of which a man consists, and for as long as the channel leading upward re- mained blocked, he would have to let himself be the toy of every- thing that came into his head! " ·
"Then he would have to refuse to do anything," Clarisse answered in Ulrich's stead. "This is the active passivism ofwhich a person must be capable in some circum~tances. "
Walter could not make himselflook at her. Her capacity for refusal was, after all, a major factor in their life together; Clarisse, looking like a little angel in the long nightgown that covered her feet, had stood on her bed declaiming Nietzschean sentiments, with her teeth flashing: "I toss my question like a plumb line into your soul! You want a child and marriage, but I ask you: Are you the man to have a child? Are you the victorious' master of his own powers? Or is it merely the voice oftlle animal in you, the slave ofnature, speaking? " In the twilight of the bedroom this had made a rather gruesome spectacle, while Walter had tried in vain to coax her back down under the bedclothes. And now here she was, armed for the future with a new slogan: active passivism, ofwhich a person had to be capa- ble ifneed be-a phrase that clearly smacked ofa man without quali- ties. Had she been confiding in Ulrich? Was he encouraging her in her eccentricities? These questions were writhing like worms in Wal- ter's heart, so that he almost felt sick to his stomach. His face turned ashen and all the tension went out of it, leaving it a mass of helpless wrinkles.
Ulrich saw this and asked him warmly if anything was wrong?
With an effort, Walter said no and brightly smiling, invited Ulrich to go on with his nonsense.
"Oh well," Ulrich conceded, "you're not so wrong there. But in a spirit of good sportsmanship we often tolerate actions that are harm- ful to ourselves, ifour opponent performs them in an attractive way;
the quality ofthe performance somehow contends with the quality of \
the damage done. Very often, too, we have an idea that takes us a step farther along, but all too soon habit, inertia, selfish promptings, and so on take its place, because that's the way things go. So I may have been describing a condition that can never be carried to its proper conclusion, but there's no denying that it is wholly the condi- tion of the world in which we live. ,
Walter had regained his equanimity. "Ifyou tum the truth upside down, you can always say something that is just as true as it is topsy- turvy," he said gently, without disguising his reluctance for any fur- ther argument. "It's just like you to call something impossible but real. "
Clarisse, however, was rubbing her nose hard. "And yet it seems very important to me," she said, "that there's something impossible in every one of us. It explains so many things. While I was listening to you both, it seemed to me that ifwe could be cut open our entire life might look like a ring, just something that goes around something. " She had already, earlier on, pulled off her wedding ring, and now she peered through it at the lamplit wall. "There's nothing inside, and yet it looks as 'though that were precisely what matters most. Ulrich can't be expected to express this perfectly the flrst time he tries. "
And so this discussion ended after all, sad to say, with Walter get- ting hurt once again.
ss
· GENERAL STUMM TRIES TO BRING SOME ORDER INTO THE CIVILIAN MIND
Ulrich had probably been out an hour longer than he had indicated on leaving, and was told on his return that a military gentleman had been waiting for him for quite some time. Upstairs, to his surprise, he found General Stumm, who greeted him as an old comrade in arms.
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"Do forgive me, old friend," the General called out to him in wel- come, "for barging in on you so late, but I couldn't get off duty any sooner, so I've been sitting here for a good two hours, surrounded by your books-what terrifying heaps of them you've got! "
After an exchange of courtesies, it turned out that Stumm had come for help with an urgent problem. Sitting there with one leg flung jauntily over the other, not an easy posture for a man with his waistline, and holding out his arm with its little hand, he said: "Ur- gent? When one of my aides comes along with an urgent piece of business I usually tell him there's nothing urgent in this world except making it in time to a certain closet. But jokes aside, I had to come and see you about something most important. I've already told you that I regard your cousin's house as a special opportunity for me to learn more about the civilian world and its major concerns. Some- thing nonmilitary, for a change, and I can assure you that I am enor- mously impressed. On the other hand, while we brass hats may have our weaknesses, we're not nearly as stupid as most people seem . to think. I hope you'll agree that when we get something done, we make a good job of it. You do agree? I knew I could trust you to see that,' which is why I can confess to you frankly that even so, I am ashamed of our army mentality. Ashamed, I say! Other than our Chaplain General, I seem to be the man in our army who has most to do with the spiritual and mental side of things. But I don't mind telling you that ifyou take a good look at the military mind, outstanding as it is, it seems to me like a morning roll call. You do remember what a morn- ing roll call is like? The duty officer puts down on his report: So many men and horses present, so many men and horses absent, sick or whatever, Uhlan Leitomischl absent without leave, and so on. B'ut why such and such numbers of men and horses are present or sick or whatever, that he never puts down. And it's precisely the sort of thing you need to know when dealing with a civilian administration. When a· soldier has something to say, he keeps it short, simple, and to the point, but I often have to confer with those civilian types from the various ministries, and they always want to know, at every tum, the whys and wherefores of every proposal I make, with refer- ence to considerations and interactions on a higher plane. So what I did-this is just between ourselves, you understand-! proposed to my chief, His Excellency General Frost von Aufbruch, or rather I
hope to surprise him with it . . . anyhow, my idea is t<? use my oppor- tunities at your cousin's to get the hang ofit all, all these higher con- siderations and significations, and put them to use, if I may say so without blowing my own hom, to upgrade our military mentality. After all, the army has its doctors, vets, pharmacists, clergy, auditors, commissary officers, engineers, and bandmasters, but what it hasn't got yet is a Central Liaison for the civilian mind.
Only now did Ulrich notice that Stumm von Bordwehr had brought along a briefcase, which he had propped against the desk, one of those leather bags with a shoulder strap for carrying official files through the mazes of government corridors and from one gov- ernment building to another. The General must have come with an orderly who was waiting for him downstairs, although Ulrich had not seen anyone, for it was costing Stumm quite an effort to pull the heavy bag onto his knees, so as to spring the little steel lock with its imposing air of battlefield technology.
"I haven't been wasting any time since I started attending your meetings"-he smiled, while the light-blue tunic of his uniform tightened around its gold buttons as he stooped-"but there are things, you see, I'm still not quite sure about. " He fished out of the bag a number of sheets covered with odd-looking notes and lines.
"Your cousin," he elucidated, "your cousin and I had a quite ex- haustive talk about it, and what she wants, understandably enough, is that her efforts to raise a spiritual monument to our Gracious Sover- eign should lead to an idea, an idea outranking: as it were, all of the current ideas. But I've noticed already, much as I admire all these people she's invited to work on it, that it's a very tall order. The min- ute one man says something, another will come up with the oppo- site-haven't you noticed it? -but what strikes me, for one, as even worse is that the civilian mind seems to be what we call, speaking of a horse, a poor feeder. You remember, don't you? You c;m stuff that kind of beast with double rations, but it never gets any fatter! Or if it does," he qualified, in response to a mild objection from his host, "even ifit does gain weight, its bones don't develop, and its coat stays dull; all it gets is a grass belly. I fmd that fascinating, you see, and I've made up my mind to look into it, to figure out why we can't get some order into this business. "
Sttimm smiled as he handed his former lieutenant the first of his
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papers. "They can say what they like about us," he said, "but we anny men have always known how to get things in order. Here's my out- line ofthe main ideas I gotout ofthose fellows at your cousin's meet- ings. As you'll see, every one of them, when you ask him privately, places top priority on something different. " Ulrich looked at the paper in astonishment. It was drawn up like a registration form or, in fact, a military list, divided by horizontal and vertical lines into sec- tions, with entries in words that somehow resisted the format, for what he read here, written in military calligraphy, were the names of Jesus Christ; Buddha, Gautama, aka Siddhartha; Lao-tzu; Luther, Martin; Goethe, Wolfgang; Ganghofer, Ludwig; Chamberlain, and evidently many more, running on to another page. In a second col- umn he read the words "Christianity,'' "Imperialism," "Century of Interchange," and so on, with yet more columns ofwords beyond.
"I might even call it a page from the Domesday Book of modem culture," Stumm commented, "because we have expanded it further, and it now contains the names of the ideas, plus their originators, that have moved us in the last twenty-five years. I had no idea what a job it would bel" When Ulrich asked him how he had got this inven- tory together, he was glad to explain his system.
"I had to commandeer a captain, two lieutenants, and five non- coms to get it done in such short order. Ifwe'd been able to do it in a really up-to-date fashion, we'd simply have sent around a question- naire to all the regiments: 'Who do you think is the greatest man? ' The way it's done nowadays when the papers take a poll and all that, you know, together with an order to report the results in percent- ages. But of course you can't do that sort of thing in the army, be- cause no unit would be allowed to report any answer other than 'His Majesty the Emperor. ' So then . I thought of going into which books are the most widely read and have the biggest printings, but there we soon found out that next to the Bible it's the Post Office New Year's booklet, with the new postal rates and the old jokes, which every 'oc- cupant' gets free from his postman in return for his annual tip, which again made us realize what a tricky thing the civilian mind is, since those books that appeal to everyone are gene~y rated the best, or at least, as they tell me, an author in Germanymust have an awful lot of like-minded readers before he can pass for an impressive thinker. So we couldn't take that route either, and how we finally did it I couldn't
tell you right now; it was an idea of Corporal Hirsch's, together with Lieutenant Melichar, but we did it. "
General Stumm put the sheet of paper aside and, with an expres- sion eloquent with disappointment, pulled out another. After taking -inventory of the Central European stock of ideas, he had not only discovered to his regret that it consisted of nothing but contradic- tions but also been amazed to find that these contradictions, on
closer scrutiny, tended to merge into one another.
"By now I'm used to being told something different by each of the
famous men at your cousin's when I ask them to enlighten me about something," he said, "but every time I've been talking to them for a while, they still seem to be saying the same thing-that's what I can't get into my head, and it could be that my army-issue brain isn't up to it. " The problem that was worrying General Stumm was no trifle and actually should not have been left in the War Office's lap, even though it could be shown that it was intimately related to war. Our times rejoice in a number of great ideas, and by a special kindness of fate each idea is paired with its opposite, so that individualism and collectivism, nationalism and internationalism, socialism and capital- ism, imperialism and pacifism, rationalism and superstition, are all equally at home in them, together with the unused remnants of countless opposites of an equal or lesser contemporary value. By now this seems as natural as day and night, hot and cold, love and hate, and, for every tensor muscle in the body, the pi:esence ofits opposing extensor muscle, nor would it have occurred to General Stumm---or anyone else--to see anything unusual in any of this, had his ambition not taken the plunge into this adventure because of his love _for Di- otima. Love cannot settle for a unity of Nature based upon opposites; its need for tenderness demands a unity without contradictions, and so the General had tried in every possible way to establish such a unity. .
"Here I have," he told Ulrich as he showed him the relevant pages of his report, "a list I've made up of all the Commanders in Chief of Ideas, i. e. , all the names in recent times that have led sizable battal- ions of ideas to victory. On this other page here you see the battle order; this one is a strategical plan; and this last one is an attempt to establish depots or ordnance bases from which to move further sup-' plies of ideas up to the front. Now, I'm sure you can se&-I've made
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certain that the drawing shows this clearly-when looking at any set of ideas in action, that it draws its supplies of additional troops and intellectual maMriel not only from its own depots but also from those of its opponents; you see how it keeps shifting positions and how it suddenly turns unaccountably against its own backup forces; you can see ideas constantly crossing over to the other side and back again, so that you will find them now in one line of battle, now in the other. In short, there's no way to draw up a decent plan of communications or line of demarcation or anything else, and the whole thing is-though I can't actually believe what I'm sayingl-what any one of our com- manding officers would be bound to·call one hell of a mess! "
Stumm slipped several dozen pages into Ulrich's hands. They were covered with strategic plans, railway lines, networks of roads, charts of range and firing power, symbols for different units and for brigade headquarters, circles, squares, crosshatched areas; just like a regular General Staff's plan of operations, it had red, green, yellow, and blue lines running this way and that, with all sorts of little flags, meaning a variety of things (such as were to become so popular the following year), painted in all over the place.
"It's no use," Stumm sighed. "I've tried doing it differently, by representing the problem from a military-geographical angle instead ofa strategic one, in the hope ofgetting at least a clearly defined field ofoperations, but that didn't work either. Have a look at the oro- and hydrographic sketches. " Ulrich saw symbols for mountain peaks branching out and massing together again elsewhere, . and for springs, networks of streams, lakes. ''I've experimented with all sorts ofother ways oftrying to pull the whole thing together," the General said, with a gleam of irritation or panic in his normally rp. eny gaze. "But do you know what it's like? It's like traveling second class in Galicia and picking up ctab. lice. I've never felt so fllthy helpless! When you spend a lot of time with ideas you end up itching all over, and you can scratch till you bleed, without getting any relief.
" His vivid description made Ulrich laugh.
"No, no, don't laugh! " the General pleaded. "I've been thinking that you, now that you've become a leading civilian, would under- stand this stuff and that you'd understand my problem too. So I've come to you for help. I have far too much respect for the world ofthe intellect to believe that I can be right about all this. "
"You take thinking far too seriously, Colonel," Ulrich said to com- fort him. The "Colonel" had just slipped out, and he apologized: "Sorry, General; for a minute you had me back in the days when you sometimes ordered me to join you in a philosophical chat in the cor- ner ofthe mess hall. I can only repeat, a man shouldn't take the art of thinking as seriously as you are doing. "
"Not take it seriously! " Stumm groaned. "But I can't go back to just getting along in the mindless way I used to live. Don't you see that? It makes me shudder to think how long I lived between the parade ground and the barracks, with nothing but my messmates' dirty jokes and their stories about their sexual exploits. "
They sat down to supper. Ulrich was touched by the General's childlike ideas, on which he then acted with such manly courage, and by the inexhaustible youthfulness that comes from having lived in small garrison towns at the right time of life. He had invited his companion of those years long gone to share his evening meal, and the General was so obsessed by his desire to enter into Ulrich's arcane world that he picked up each slice of sausage with utmost ~oncentration.
"Your cousin," he said, raising his wineglass, "is the most marvel- ous woman I know. They rightly call her a second Diotima; I've never known anyone like her. You know, my wife . . . you haven't met her. I've nothing to complain of, and then we have the children, but a woman like Diotima . . . well, there's no comparison! When she's receiving I sometimes position myself behind her-what majestic feminine curvesl-while at the same time she's talking up front with some ou'tstanding civilian on so high a level that I honestly wish I could take notes! And that Section Chief she's married to has abso- lutely no idea how lucky he is to have her! I'm sorry if this fellow Tuzzi happens to be someone you like, but I personally can't stand him! All he ever does is slink around with a smirk on his face as if he knew all the answers and won't tell. But I'm not buying that, because with all my respect for the civilian world, government officials are the lowest on my totem pole; they're nothing but a kind of civilian army that try to get the better of us every chance they have, with the outra- geous politeness of a cat sitting high up in a tree and looking down at a dog. Your Dr. Amheim now, that's a man of a different caliber en- tirely," Stumm went on, "though he may be a bit conceited too, but
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there's no denying his superiority. " He had evidently been drinking too fast, after so much talking, because he was now warming up and growing confidential.
"I don't know what it is," he said. "Maybe the reason I don't un- derstand is that a fellow's mind gets so oomplicated nowadays, but even though I admire your cousin myselfas if-I must say, as if I had a great lump sticking in my throat-still, it's a relief to me that she's in love with Amheim. "
"What? Are you sure there's something going on between them? " Ulrich burst out, although it should not really have been any concern of his; Stumm goggled at him mistrustfully with his shortsighted eyes, still misty with emotion, and snapped on his pince-nez.
"I never said he'd had her," was his straight,. soldierly retort. He put his pince-nez back in his pocket and added in quite unsoldierly fashion: "But I wouldn't mind if he had either; devil take me, I've told you already that a man's mind gets complicated in that company. I'm certainly no lover boy, but when I imagine the tenderness Di- otima could offer this man I feel a tenderness for him myself, and vice versa, as if th~ kisses he gave her were my own. "
"He gives her kisses? "
"How do I know? I don't go around spying ori them. I only mean, if he did. I don't really know what I meari. But I did see him once catching her hand, when they thought nobody was looking, and then for a·while they were so quiet together, the kind of stillness you get on the command 'All helmets off, kneel for prayer! ' and then she whispered something, it sounded like an appeal, and he answered something. I remember what they said word for word, because it was so hard to understand; what she said was: 'If only we could flnd the right idea to save us,' and he said: 'Only a pure, unflawed idea of love can save us. ' He seemed to have taken her words too personally, be- cause she must have meant the saving idea she needs for her great campaign-What are you laughing at? But feel free to laugh; I've always had my own funny ways, I guess, and now I've made up my mind to help her. There must be something one can do; there are so many ideas floating around, one of them will have to be the saving idea in the end. But I'll need you to give me a hand! "
"My dear General," Ulrich said, "I can only tell you again that you take thinking too seriously. But since you care so much, I'll try to
explain as best I can how the civilian mind works. " By now they had lighted their cigars, and he began: "First of all, General, you're on the wrong track. The civilian world has no more of a monopoly on the spiritual life than the military has on the physical side, as you think. If anything, it's exactly the other way around. The mind stands for order, and where will you find more order than in the army, where every collar is exactly four centimeters high, the number of buttons on your tunic never varies, and even on nights made for dreams the beds are lined up straight along the wall? The deployment of a squadron in battle formation, the lining up of a regiment, the proper position of bridle and bit-if all these are not significant spiritual achievements, there is no such thing as spiritual achievement! "
"Go teach your grandmother to suck eggs," the General growled warily, uncertain whether to mistrust his ears or the wine.
"Just a minute," Ulrich persisted. "Science is possible only where situations repeat themselves, or where you have some control over them, and where do you have more repetition and control than in the army? A cube would not be a cube ifit were not just as rectangular at nine o'clock as at seven. The same kind of rules work for keeping the planets in orbit as in ballistics. We'd have no way ofunderstanding or judging anything if things flitted past us only once. Anything that has to be valid and have a name must be repeatable, it must be repre- sented by many specimens, and if you had never seen the moon before, you·athink it was a flashlight. Incidentally, the reason God is such an embarrassment to science is that he was seen only once, at the Creation, before there were any trained observers around. "
But Stumm von Bordwehr, whose entire life had been prescribed for him since his military-school days, from the shape of his cap to permission to marry, was hardly inclined to listen to such doctrines with an open mind.
"My dear fellow," he said craftily. "Maybe so, but what. has that to do with me? Very witty ofyou to S'IJ. ggest that science was invented by us army men, but I wasn't speaking of science at all but, as your cousin says, of the soul, and when she speaks of the soul I feel like taking off all my clothes because the uniform clashes so with it! "
"Stumm, old man," Ulrich went on doggedly, "a great many peo- ple accuse science of being soulless and mechanical and of making everything it touches the same. Yet they don't notice that there's
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much more mechanical or predictable regularity in sentimental mat- ters than in intellectual ones. For when is a feeling really natural and simple? When it can be automatically expected to manifest itself in everybody, given the same circumstances. How could we expect peo- ple to behave . in a virtuous manner if a virtuous act were not repeata- ble at will? I could give you many more examples, and ifyou escape from this drab repetitiveness into the darkest recesses ofyour being, where the uncontrolled impulses live, those sticky animal depths that save us from evaporating under the glare of reason, what do you find? Stimuli and strings of reflexes, entrenched habits and skills, re- iteration, fixation, imprints, series, monotony! That's the same as uni- forms, barracks, and regulations, my dear Stumm; and the civilian soul shows an amazing kinship to the military. You might say that it desperately clings to this model, though it can never quite equal it. And where it can't do that, it feels like a child left entirely on its own. Take a woman's beauty, for instance: the beauty that takes you by surprise and howls you over as ifyou were seeing it for the first time in your life is really something you have known and sought forever, an image your eyes have long since anticipated, which now comes into full daylight, as it were. But when it's really a case of love at first sight, a kind of beauty you have never perceived before, you simply don't know what to do about it. Nothing like it has ever come your way, you have no name for it, you are not prepared to respond to it, you're hopelessly bewildered, dazzled, reduced to a state of blind amazement, a kind of idiocy that seems to have very little to do with happiness. . . . " ·
The General could no longer contain his exciten:tent. He had been listening with that expertise one acquired during military exercises when subjected to critical and edifying remarks by superior officers that one must be able to repeat at command but should not really take to heart, or else one might just as well ride home bareback on a porcupine. But now Ulrich had touched him to the quick, and he broke in: "I must say, what you're describing is amazingly on target! When I lose myself in admiration for your cousin, everything inside me seems just to dissolve! And when I do my utmost to pull myself together and come up with some useful idea, my mind turns into an agonizing blank again-'idiotic' may be too strong a word for it, but it's close enough. And so you're saying, as I understand it, that we
army men do use our heads, that the civilian mind . . . of course I can't accept your suggestion that they model their thinking on ours; that's just one ofyour jokes . . . but that we have just as good a mind, well, that's what I sometimes think too. And everything that goes above and bey~nd thinking, as you say, all that stuff we soldiers re- gard as so notably civilian, such as the soul, virtue, deep feeling, sen- timent-the kind of thing this fellow Amheim handles with such flair-anyway, you're saying that it's of course part of the human spirit and in fact involves those so. :. called considerations of a higher sort we've been talking about, but you're also saying that it's quite stupefying, and I must say I totally agree with you, but when all's said and done, the civilian intellect is indisputably the superior one, and so I must ask you, how does it all add up? "
''What I said just now was,first ofall-you forgot that-first of all, I said, the military life is intellectual by nature, and second, the civil- ian life is physical by nature. . . ::
"But that's nonsense, surely? " Stumm objected mistrustfully. The physical superiority of the military was a dogma, like the conviction that the officer caste stands nearest to the throne, and even though Stumm had never regarded himself as an athlete, the moment any doubt was cast upon his physical superiority he felt sure that a com- parable civilian paunch had to be several degrees flabbier than his own.
"No more and no less nonsense than everything else," Ulrich de- fended himself. "But let me finish. About a hundred years ago, you see, the leading brains in German civilian life believed that a man using his head could deduce the world's laws while sitting at his desk, like so many geometric theorems about triangles. And the typical thinker· was a Irian in homespun who tossed his long hair back from his forehead and hadn't even heard of the oil lamp, much less of elec- tricity and the phonograph. Such arrogance has been purged out of our system since then; in these last hundred years we've become much better acquainted with ourselves and with nature and every- thing, but as a result, the better we understand things in detail, the le. ss we understand the whole, as it were, so what we get is a great many more systems of order and much less order over all. ''
"That fits in with my own findings," Stumm agreed.
"Only most peopl. e aren't as keen as you are on making sense ofit,"
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Ulrich continued. "After so many struggles, we're on a downward slide now. Just think what's happening today: As soon as some lead- ing thinker comes up with an idea it is immediately pulled apart by the sympathies and antipathies generated: first its admirers rip large chunks out of it to suit themselves, wrenching. their masters' minds out of shape the way a fox savages his kill, and then his opponents destroy the weak links so that soon there's nothing left but a stock of aphorisms from which friend and foe alike help themselves at will. The result is a general ambiguity. There's no Yes without a No dan- gling from it. Whatever you do, you can find twenty of the finest ideas in support and another twenty against it. It's much like love or hatred or hunger, where tastes have to differ so that each can find his own. "
''You've said it! " Stumm exclaimed, in wholehearted agreement again. "I myself have already put something like it to Diotima. But don't you think that all this confusion seems to justify the military position-though I'd be mortified to have to believe it even for a minute! " .
''I'd advise you," Ulrich said, "to tip offDiotima that God, for rea- sons still unknown to us, seems to be leading us into an era of physi- cal culture, for the only thing that gives ideas some sort of foothold is the body to which they belong-which gives you, as an army officer, something of an advantage. "
The tubby little General winced. "On the plane of physical culture I look about as beautiful as a peeled peach," he said after a while, with bitter satisfaction. "And I'd better make it clear that I think of Diotima only in an honorable way, and hope to pass muster in her eyes in the same fashion. "
"Too bad," Ulrich said. ''Your aims would be worthy of a Napo- leon, but you won't find this the right century for them. "
The General swallowed this gentle gibe with the dignity of a man conscious of suffering for the lady of his heart, and only said, after a moment's thought: "Thank you, in any case, for your interesting advice. "
86
THE INDUSTRIAL POTENTATE AND THE MERGER OF SOUL WITH. BUSINESS. ALSO, ALL ROADS TO THE MIND START FROM THE SOUL, BUT NONE LEAD BACK AGAIN
At this time, when the General's love for Diotima. took a back seat to his admiration for Diotima and Amheim as a pair, Amheim should long since have made up his mind never to come back. Instead, he made arrangements to prolong his stay; he kept his suite at the hotel, and the great mobility of his life seemed to have come to a standstill. It was a time when the world was behig shaken up in various ways, and those who kept themselves well infonned toward the end of the year 1913 lived on the edge of a seething volcano, although the peaceful processes of production everywhere suggested that it could never really erupt again: The power of this suggestion was not equally strong everywhere. The windows of the handsome old palace on the Ballhausplatz where Section Chief Tuzzi held sway often lit up the bare trees in the gardens across the way until late into the night, giving a thrill of awe to the better class of strollers who might be passing by in the darkness. For just as his sainthood penneates the figure of the humble carpenter Joseph, so the name Ballhausplatz penneated that palace with the aura of being one of a half-dozen mysterious kitchens where, behind drawn curtains, the fate of man- kind was being dished up. Dr. Arnheim was quite well infonned of. what was goiilg on. He received coded telegrams and, from time to time, a visit from one of his managers, bringing confidential informa7 tion from company headquarters; the windows of his hotel suite, too, were often lit up till all hours, and an imaginative observer might easily have thought that a secondary or counter-government was here in nightly session, a modem, apocryphal battle station of eco- nomic diplomacy.
Nor did Amheim for his part ever neglect to produce such an im-
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pression; without the power ofsuggestion in his appearance, a man i~ only a sweet watery fruit without a peel. Even at breakfast, which for this reason he never took in private but in. the hotel restaurant, open to all, he dictated his orders for the day to his shorthand-scribbling secretary with the authoritative air of the experienced ruler and the courteous poise of a man who knpws all eyes are upon him. Arnheim would have found none of the details inspiring in themselves, but since they not only combined to lay claim to his attention but also made room for the charms ofbreakfast, they produced a heightened sense of things. Human talent, he liked to think, probably,needs to be somewhat restricted ifit is to unfold to its best potential; the really fertile borderland between reckless freedom ofthought and a dispir- ited blankness of mind is, as everyone who knows life is aware, a very narrow strip of territory. Besides, he never doubted that it made all the difference who had an idea. Everyone knows that new and im- portant ideas seldom arise in only one· mind at a time, while, on the other hand, the brain of a mail who is accustomed to thinking is con- stantly breeding thoughts of unequal value, so that the end result, its final effective form, always comes to an idea from the outside, not merely from the thinker's mind but from the whole concatenation of his circumstances. A question from the secretary, a glance at a nearby table, a greeting from someone entering the room, or some such thing would always remind Amheim, at just the right moment,
. that he must keep up an imposing presence, and this perfecting of his appearance carried over to his thinking as well. It all culminated in his conviction, suiting his needs, that the thinking man must al- ways be simultaneously a man of action.
Nevertheless, he attached no great importance to his present oc- cupation; even though it was designed to achieve something that might, under certain circumstances, be remarkably profitable, he still felt that he was overstaying his time here. He repeatedly re- minded himself of that cold breath of ancient wisdom, Divide et im- pera, which applies to every transaction and calls for a certain subordination of each individual instance to the whole, for the secret of the successful approach to any undertaking is the same as that of the man who is loved by many women while himself careful to play no favorites. But it was no use. Fully mindful of the demands the world imposes on a man born to action on a grand scale, and no mat-
ter how often he took pains to search his soul, he could not close his eyes to the fact that he was·in love. It was an awkward fix, because a heart turned fifty is a tough muscle, not so easily stretched as that of a twenty-year-old in love's springtime, and it caused him considerable vexation. ·
It troubled him, to begin with, that his interest in his far-flung in- ternational concerns was withering like a flower cut off at the root, while everyday trivia like a sparrow on his windowsill or a waiter's smile positively blossomed into significance for him. As to his moral concepts, normally a comprehensive system for being always in the right, without any loopholes, he saw them shrinking in scope while taking on a certain physical quality. It could be called devotion, but this again was a word that usually had a much wider and anyway a quite different. meaning, for without devotion nothing can be achieved in any sphere: devotion to duty, to a superior or a leader, even devotion to life itself, in all its richness and variety, seen as a manly quality, had always seemed to him to be uprightness itself, which for all its openness had more to do with restraint than with a yielding up of the self. And the same might be said of faithfulness, which, confined to a woman, smacks of limitation, as was true of chivalry and gentleness, unselfishness and delicacy, all of them vir- tues usually thought of in association with her but losing their richest quality thereby, so that it is hard to say whether a man's experience of love only flows toward a woman as water tends to collect in the low- est, generally not the most acceptable spot, or whether the love of a woman is the volcanic center whose warmth sustains all life on earth. A supreme degree of male vanity therefore feels more at ease in male rather than female company, and when Amheim compared the wealth of ideas he had brought to the spheres of power with the state of bliss he owed to Diotima, he could not shake off the sense of hav- ing slipped somehow.
At times he longed for embraces and kisses like a boy ready to fling himself passionately at the feet o( the coldhearted beloved refusing him, or else he caught himselfwanting to burst out sobbing, or hurl a challenge to the world and, finally, carry off the beloved in his arms. Now, we all know that the irresponsible margin ofthe conscious per- sonality that breeds stories and poems is also the home base of all sorts of childish memories that surface on those rare occasions when
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the intoxication of fatigue, the release of alcohol, or some other dis- turbance brings them to light. Arnheim's bursts of feeling were no more substantial than these phantoms, so that he need not have been upset by them (thereby considerably increasing his original agita- tion), ifthese infantile regressions had not forced him to realize that his inner life was swarming with faded moral stereotypes. The stamp of general validity he was always at pains to give to his actions, as a man conscious of living with the eyes of all Europe upon him, sud- denly showed itself as having nothing to do with his inner life. This may be quite natural for anything supposed to be valid for everyone, but what troubled him was the implication that if what is generally valid is not the inward truth, then contrariwise the inward man is not generally valid. And so Amheim now felt haunted at every step not only by the urge to sound some deafening wrong note, or perfonn some foolishly illegitimate·act, but. also by the annoying thought that on some irrational level this. would be the right thing to do. Ever since he had come to know again the fire that makes the tongue go dry in the mouth, he was overcome with the sense of having lost a path he had always followed, the feeling that the whole ideology of the great man he lived by was only an emergency substitute for something that was missing.
This naturally brought his childhood to mind. In his early portraits he had big, dark, round eyes, like the paintings of the boy Jesus dis- puting With the doctors in the Temple, and he saw all his governesses and tutors standing around him in a circle, marveling at his precocity, because he had been a clever boy who had always had clever teach- ers. He had also proved himself to be a warmhearted, sensitive child who would tolerate no unfairness; since his life was far too sheltered to let any unfairness come his way, he made the wrongs ofothers his own where he came across them, and got himselfinto fights on their account. This was quite an achievement, considering what obstacles were put in his way to prevent this very thing, so that it never took more than a minute for someone to come rushing up to pry him loose from his opponent. Because such fights lasted just long enough to give him a taste of some painful experience but were always inter- rupted in time to leave him with the impression of his own unflinch- ing courage, Arnheim still remembered them with self-satisfaction; and this lordly quality of courage that would shrink from nothing
passed later into his books and his principles, as becomes a man who needs to tell his contemporaries how to conduct themselves for self- respect and happiness.
This childhood state was still vividly present to his mind, while an- other condition, of a somewhat later period, that had succeeded and partly transformed it now appeared to be dormant or on the verge of petrifaction-ifthis is understood as turning not to stone, in the ordi- nary sense, but to diamonds. It was love, now startled into a new life by his contact with Diotima, and it was characteristic of Arnheim that his first youthful experience of love had nothing to do with women, or indeed any specific persons; this was a rather perplexing business he had never quite resolved for himself, even though in the course of time he had come to learn the most up-to-date explanations for it.
"What he meant was perhaps only the baffling manifestation of something still absent, like those rare expressions that appear on faces with which they have no connection, belonging rather to other, different faces suddenly intuited beyond the horizon of the visible; simple melodies in the midst of mere noise, feelings inside people, feelings he sensed inside himself, in fact, that were not yet real feel- ings when he tried to capture them in wor. ds, but only something inside him reaching outward, its tips already breaking the surface, getting wet, as things sometimes do reach out on fever-bright spring days when their shadows creep beyond them and come to rest so quietly, all flowing in one direction, like reflections in a stream. "
This was how it was expressed, much later on and in other accents, by a poet Arnheim esteemed because to know of this reclusive man ' who avoided all notoriety made one an insider; not that Arnheirn un- derstood him, for he associated such allusions with the talk about the awakening of a new soul that had been in fashion during his youth, or with the then popular pictures of reedy girls, painted with ·a pair of lips that looked like fleshy flower buds.
At that time, around the year 1887'-"good heavens, almost a gen- eration ago! " Amheim thought-he appeared in photographs as the "new man" of the period, in a high-buttoned black satin waistcoat with a wide, heavy silk cravat deriving from the Biedermeier style but meant to suggest the Baudelairean, with the help of an orchid (the latest thing) in his buttonhole, exerting a malevolent fascination on all who saw Arnheim junior on his way to dine and impress his youth-
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ful person on some robust businessmen friends of his father's. Por- traits of young Amheim at work ran to a slide rule peeping decora- tively from the breast pocket of a tweedy English sport jacket, worn quite comically with a towering stiff collar, which nevertheless heightened the effect of the head. That was how Amheim had looked, and he still could not keep from looking at his image with a certain approval. He had played good tennis when it was still played on laWns, with all the ~eal of a passion as yet reserved for the few; surprised his father by openly attending workers' meetings, after a student year in Zurich where he had become unsuitably acquainted with socialist ideas, which did not prevent 'him from galloping his horse recklessly through a working-class quarter of town on another day. In short, it had all been a whirl of contradictory but challenging new experiences which gave him the enchanting illusion of having been born at just the right time, an illusion so important to a young man, even though he realizes later on that its value does not lie in its rarity, exactly.