Was it not alien, almost hostile things that fused
together
in the kiss of two lives?
Musil - Man Without Qualities - v2
If you do, it begins to waver.
Love dissolves truth like wine the pearl.
"
"Do pearls really dissolve in wine? " Agathe asked.
"I have no idea," Ulrich conceded with a sigh. 'Tm pretty far gone. I'm already using expressions I can't account for! I meant to say: To the person who loves, truth and deception are equally trivial! "
This observation, that truth is dissolved by love-the opposite of the more fainthearted assertion that love cannot bear the truth! -contains nothing new. The moment a person encounters love not as an experi- ence but as life itself, or at least as a kind of life, he understands that there are several truths about everything. The person who judges with- out love calls this "opinions" and "subjectivity"; the person who loves denies that with the sage's saying: "We can't know the meaning of even the simplest words ifwe don't love! " He is not being insensitive to truth, but oversensitive. He finds himself in a kind of enthusiasm of thinking, in which words open up to their very core. The person judging without love calls something an illusion that is merely the consequence of the excited involvement of the emotions. He himself is free of passion, and truth is free of passion; an emotion is injurious to its truth, and to expect to find truth where something is "a matter of the emotions" seems to him just as wrongheaded as demanding justice from wrath. And yet it is precisely the general content of existence and truth that distinguishes love as an experiencing of the world from love as an experience of the individual. In the special world oflove, contradictions do not raise each other to nothing and cancel each other out, but raise each other to the heights. They don't adapt to each other, either, but are in advance a part of a higher unity, which, the moment they come into contact, rises from them as a transparent cloud. Therefore, in love as in life itself, every word is an event and none is a complete notion, and no assertion is needed, nor any mere whim.
It is hard to account for this, because the language of love is a secret language, and in its ultimate perfection as silent as an embrace. Ulrich was capable of walking beside Agathe and seeing the reliable line of her profile in sparkling clarity before the swarm of his thoughts; then he per-
1524 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
haps recalled that in every delimitation there resides a tyrannical happi- ness. This is apparently the basic happiness of all works of art, of all beauty, of whatever is fonned by earth at all. But it is perhaps, too, the basic hostility, the annor between all beings. And Agathe looked away from Ulrich into the stream of people and sought to imagine what can- not be imagined, what happiness it would be to do away with all limits. In thought they contradicted each other, but they would also have been able to change sides, since on earlier occasions they had, at times alone, at times together, experienced one side as well as the other. But they did not speak about this at all. They smiled. That was enough. They each guessed what the other meant. And if they guessed wrongly, it was just as good as if it were right. If, on the contrary, they said something that cohered more finnly, they almost felt it as a disturbance. They had al- ready spoken so much about it. A certain indolence, indeed paralysis, of thought was part of their silent insatiability as they now observed people and sought to enclose them within the magic circle that surrounded themselves, just as fluid and fleeting mobility belonged to this thinking. They were like the two halves of the shell of a mussel opening itself to the sea.
And at times they suddenly laughed at each other.
"It's not as simple as one would like to think, loving one's fellow man like oneself! " Ulrich sighed mockingly once again.
Agathe took a deep breath and told him with satisfaction that it was his fault. "You're the one who's always destroying it! " she complained.
"They're the ones! Look at them! " Ulrich countered. "Look how they're watching us! They'd say Thanks a lot! ' to our love! "
And in truth this made them laugh with a kind of abashed shame, for unfortunately nothing is more amusing than raising one's eyes when they are still tender with sentiment. So Agathe laughed beforehand. But then she replied: "And yet what we're lookin~for can't be far away. Sometimes one feels one's own breath against a\rei! as wann as a pair of strange lips. This seems to me that close too. "
Ulrich added: "And there is a circumstance that could lead one to be- lieve that we're not simply chasing chimeras. For even an enemy can be divined only if you're able to feel what he feels. So there is a 'love your neighbor'; it even has a postscript: so you get a cleaner shot at him! And quite generally, you never understand people entirely through knowing and observing them; it also calls for understanding of a kind you have with yourself; you must already have that understanding when you ap- proach them. "
"But I usually don't understand them at all," Agathe said, surveying the people.
From the Posthumous Papers · 1525
"You believe in them," Ulrich replied. "At least you want to. You 'lend' them credence. That's what makes them seem worthy of loving. "
"No," Agathe said. "I don't believe in them in the least. "
"No," Ulrich said. " 'Belief' isn't an accurate expression for it. "
"But then what should it really be called," Agathe asked, "when you
think you understand people without knowing anything about them, and when you have an irresistible inclination for them, although you can be almost certain that you wouldn't like to know them? "
"One usually lives in the cautious balance between inclination and aversion one keeps ready for one's fellowmen," her brother responded slowly. "If, for whatever reason, the aversion seems to be dormant, then only a desire to yield must remain, a desire that cannot be compared to anything one knows. But it's no longer an attitude that corresponds to reality. "
"But you've said so often that it's the possibility of another life! " Agathe reproached him.
"An awareness of the world as it could be is what it is," Ulrich said, "shot through with an awareness of the world as it is! "
"No, that's too little! " Agathe exclaimed.
"But I can't say that I really love these people," Ulrich defended him- self. "Or that I love the real people. These people are real when they're in uniform and civilian clothes; that's the norm, so it's our attitude that's unreal! "
"But among themselves they think of it the same way! " Agathe re- sponded, on the attack. "Because they don't love each other in a real way, or really don't love each other, in exactly the same way you're claiming about our relation to them: their reality consists in part of fanta- sies, but why should that degrade ours? "
"You're thinking with such strenuous sharpness today! " Ulrich fended her off, laughing.
'Tm so sad," Agathe replied. "Everything is so uncertain. It all seems to shrink to nothing and expand again endlessly. It won't let you do any- thing, but the inactivity is also unbearable because it really presses in all directions against closed walls. "
And in this or similar fashion the preoccupation of brother and sister with their surroundings always broke off. Their involvement remained unarticulated: there was nowhere an accord in opinion or activity in which it could have expressed itself; the feeling grew all the more, the less it found a way of acting that corresponded to it, and the desire to contradict appeared as well: the sun shone on the just and unjust, but Ulrich found that one might better say, on the unseparated and not united, as the real origin of mankind's being evil as well as good.
1526 · THE MAN WITH0 UT QUALITIES
Agathe concurred in this opinion: ''I'm always so sad whenever we have to laugh at ourselves," she asserted, and laughed, because along with everything else an old saying had occurred to her, which sounded quite strange, as idle as it was prophetic. For it proclaimed: "Then the eyes of the soul were opened, and I saw love coming toward me. And I saw the beginning, but its end I did not see, only its progression. "
49
SPECIAL MISSION OF A GARDEN FENCE
Another time Agathe asked: "By what right can you speak so glibly of an 'image of the world,' or even of a 'world' of love? Of love as 'life itself'? You're being frivolous! " She felt as if she were swinging back and forth on a high branch that was threatening to break under the exertion at any moment; but she went on to ask: "If one can speak of a cosmic image of love, could one not also finally speak of an image of anger, envy, pride, or hardness? "
"All other emotions last for a shorter period,'' Ulrich replied. "None of them even claims to last forever. "
"But don't you find it somewhat odd of love that it should make that claim? " Agathe asked.
Ulrich countered: "I believe one might well say that it also ought to be possible for other emotions to shape their own images ofthe world: as it were, one-sided or monochrome ones; but among them love has always enjoyed an obscure advantage and has been accorded a special claim to the power of shaping the world. "
During this exchange they sought out a place in their garden where they could look through the fence at the street, with its rich variety of human content, without exposing themselves, as far as possible, to the glances of strangers. This usually led them to a low, sunny rise whose dry soil gave footing to several larches, and where ifthey lay down they were camouflaged by the play of light and shadow; in this half hiding place they were on the one hand so near the street that the people passing by gave them the peculiar impression ofbeing alive in that merely animalis- tic way that attaches to all of us when we believe ourselves unobserved and alone with our demeanor, and on the other hand any eyes that were raised could see brother and sister and draw them into the events that
From the Posthumous Papers · 152 7
they were observing with interest and a reserve for which the fence, a solid barrier but transparent to the glance, served as a positively ideal image.
"Now let's try whether we really love them or not," Agathe proposed, and smiled mockingly or impatiently.
Her brother shrugged his shoulders.
"Stop, 0 you hastening past, and bestow for a moment your precious soul upon two people who intend to love you! " Ulrich said, pushing it to absurdity.
''You can't bestow yourself for a moment; you have to do it without end! " Agathe corrected him threateningly.
"A park. A mighty fence. Us behind it," Ulrich affirmed. "And what might he be thinking when we called him, after he had involuntarily slowed his steps and before he timidly doubles them? That he's walking by the garden fence of a private madhouse! "
Agathe nodded.
"And we," Ulrich went on, "wouldn't even dare! Don't you absolutely know we won't do it? Our inmost harmony with the world warns us that we're not allowed to do such a thing! "
Agathe said: "If we were to address the brother hastening past, in- stead of as 'our good friend' or 'dear soul,' as 'dog' or 'criminal,' he prob- ably wouldn't consider us mad but would merely take us for people who 'think differently' and are mad at him! "
Ulrich laughed and was pleased with his sister. "But you see how it is," he declared. "General rudeness is unbearable today. But because it is, goodness too must be false! It's not that rudeness and goodness de- pend on each other as on a scale, where too much on one side equals too little on the other; they depend on each other like two parts of a body that are healthy and sick together. So nothing is more erroneous," he went on, "than to imagine, as people generally do, that an excess of bad convictions is to blame for a lack of good ones; on the contrary, evil evi- dently increases through the growth ofa false goodness! "
'We've heard that often," Agathe replied with pleasantly dry irony. "But it's apparently not simple to be good in the good way! "
"No, loving is not simple! " Ulrich echoed, laughing.
They lay there looking into the blue heights of the sun; then again through the fence at the street, which, to their eyes dazzled by the sunny sky, was spinning in a hazily excited gray. Silence descended. The feel- ings of self-confidence that the conversation had raised were slowly transformed into an undercutting, indeed an abduction, of the self. Ul- rich related softly: "I've invented a magnificent sham pair of concepts: 'egocentric and allocentric. ' The world oflove is experienced either ego-
1528 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
centrically or allocentrically; but the ordinary world knows only egotism and altruism, a coupled pair that, by comparison, are quarrelsomely ra- tional. Being egocentric means feeling as ifone were carrying the center of the world in the center of one's self. Being allocentric means not hav- ing a center at all anymore. Participating totally in the world and not laying anything by for oneself. At its highest stage, simply ceasing to be. I could also say: turning the world inward and the self outward. They are the ecstasies of selfishness and selflessness. And although ecstasy ap- pears to be an outgrowth of healthy life, one can evidently say as well that the moral notions of healthy life are a stunted vestige of what were originally ecstatic ones. "
Agathe thought: "Moonlit night . . . two miles . . . " And much else drifted through her mind as well. What Ulrich was telling her was one more version of all that; she did not have the impression that she would be losing anything if she did not pay really close attention, although she lis\ened gladly. Then she thought of Lindner's asserting that one had to live for something and could not think of oneself, and she asked herself whether that, too, would be "allocentric. " Losing oneself in a task, as he demanded? She was skeptical. Pious people have enthusiastically pressed their lips to lepers' sores: a loathsome idea! an "exaggeration that is an affront to life," as Lindner liked to call it. But what he did consider pleasing to God, erecting a hospital, left her cold. Thus it hap- pened that she now plucked her brother by the sleeve and interrupted him with the words: "Our man has shown up again! " For partly out of fun, partly from habit, they had fastened on a particularly unpleasant man to use for their mental experiment. This was a beggar who con- ducted his business for a while every day in front of their garden fence. He treated the stone base as a bench that was awaiting him; every day he first spread out beside himself a greasy paper with some leftover food on it, with which he casually regaled himself before putting on his business expression and packing away the rest. He was a stocky man with thick, iron-gray hair, had the pasty, spiteful face of an alcoholic, and had de- fended his location a number of times with great rudeness when other beggars unsuspectingly came near: Ulrich and Agathe hated this para- site who offended against their property-and further refined what was proper to them, their loneliness-hated him with a primitive instinct of possessiveness that made them laugh, because it seemed to them totally illicit; and for just that reason they used this ugly, spiteful guest for their boldest and most dubious conjurations of loving one's neighbor.
Hardly had they caught sight ofhim than Ulrich said, laughing: "Ire- peat: I f you just, as people say, imagine yourself in this situation or feel any kind of vague sense of social responsibility for him-indeed, even if
From the Posthurrwus Papers · 1529
you only see him as a picturesque, tattered painting-there's already a small percentage of the genuine 'putting oneself in another's place. ' Now you have to try it one hundred percent! "
With a smile, Agathe shook her head.
"Imagine you were in accord with this man about everything the way you are with yourself," Ulrich proposed.
Agathe protested. "I've never been in accord with myself! "
"But you will be then," Ulrich said. He took her hand.
Agathe let it happen and looked at the beggar. She became strangely
serious and after a while declared: "He's stranger to me than death. " Ulrich enclosed her hand in his more completely and asked again:
"Please try! "
After a while Agathe said: "I feel as if I'm hanging on this figure; I
myself, and not just my curiosity! " From the tension of concentration, and its focus on a single object, her face had taken on the involuntary expression of a sleepwalker.
Ulrich helped out: "It's like in a dream? Raw-sweet, alien-self, en- countering oneself in the shape of another? "
Agathe dismissed this with a smile. "No, it's certainly not as enchant- ingly sensual as it is in such dreams," she said.
Ulrich's eyes rested on her face. "Try, as it were, to dream him! " he counseled persuadingly. "Cautious hoarders, in our waking state we consist mostly of giving out and taking back; we participate, and in doing so preserve ourselves. But in dreams we have a trembling intimation of how glorious a world is that consists entirely of prodigality! "
"That may be so," Agathe answered hesitantly and distractedly. Her eyes remained fixed on the man. "Thank God," she said slowly after a while, "he's become an ordinary monster again! " The man had got up, gathered his things together, and left. "He was getting uncomfortable! " Ulrich claimed, laughing. When he fell silent, the constant noise of the street rose and mingled with the sunshine in a peculiar feeling of still- ness. After a while Ulrich asked pensively: "Isn't it strange that almost every single person knows himself least of all and loves himself most? It's evidently a protective mechanism. And 'Love thy neighbor as thy- self' means in this fashion too: love him without knowing him, before you know him, although you know him. I can understand one's taking this merely for an extreme expression, but I doubt that it will satisfy the challenge; for, pursued seriously, it asks: love him without your reason. And so an apparently everyday demand, if taken literally, turns into an ecstatic one! "
Agathe responded: "Truly, the 'monster' was almost beautiful! " Ulrich said: "I think one not only loves something because it's beauti-
1530 · THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
ful, but it's also beautiful because one loves it. Beauty is nothing but a way of saying that something has been loved; the beauty of all art and of the world has its origin in the power of making a love comprehensible. "
Agathe thought of the men with whom she had spent her life. The feeling offirst being overshadowed by a strange being, and then opening one's eyes in this shadow, is strange. She pictured it to herself.
Was it not alien, almost hostile things that fused together in the kiss of two lives? The bodies remained unitedly separated. Thinking of them, you feel the repulsive and ugly with undiminished force. As horror, even. You are also certain that spiritually you have nothing to do with each other. The disparity and separation of the persons involved is painfully clear. If there had been some illusion of a secret accord, a sameness or likeness, this was the moment it vanished like a mist. No, you weren't under the least illusion, Agathe thought to herself. And yet the sense of an inde- pendent self is partially extinguished, the self is broken; and amid signs signifying an act of violence no less than a sweet sacrifice, it submits to its new state. All of that causes a "skin rash"? Doubtless the other ways ofloving are not able to do as much. Perhaps Agathe had so often felt the inclination to love men she didn't like because this is when this remark- able transformation happens most irrationally. And the remarkable power of attraction that Lindner had lately exercised on her signified nothing else, that she did not doubt. But she haidly knew that this was what she was thinking about; Ulrich, too, had once confessed that he often loved what he didn't like, and she thought she was thinking of him. She recalled that all her life she had believed only in surroundings that rushed past, with the hopeless hope that they could remain the same; she had never been able to change herself by her own volition, and yet now, as a gift, a hovering borne by the forces of summer had taken the place of vexation and disgust. She said to Ulrich gratefully: "You have made me what I am because you love mel"
Their hands, which had been intertwined, had disengaged themselves and were now just touching with their fingertips; these hands awakened to consciousness again, and Ulrich grasped his sister's with his own. "You have changed me completely," he responded. "Perhaps I have had some influence on you, but it was only you who were, so to speak, flow- ing through mel"
Agathe nestled her hand in the hand that embraced it. "You really don't know me at all! " she said.
"Knowing people is of no consequence to me," Ulrich replied. "The only thing one ought to know about a person is whether he makes our thoughts fruitful. There shouldn't be any other way of knowing people! "
Agathe asked: "But then how am I real? "
FromthePosthurrwusPapers · 1531
"You're not real at all! " Ulrich said with a laugh. "I see you the way I need you, and you make me see what I need. Who can say so casually where the first and fundamental impulse lies? We are a ribbon floating in the air. "
Agathe laughed, and asked: "So if I disappoint you it will be your fault? "
"No doubt! " Ulrich said. "For there are heights where it makes no sense to discriminate between 'I have been mistaken in you' and 'I have been mistaken in myself. ' For instance, the heights of faith, of love, of magnanimity. Whoever acts from magnanimity, or, as it can also be called, from greatness, doesn't ask about illusion, or about certainty ei- ther. There are some things he may even not want to know; he dares the leap over falsehood. "
"Couldn't you also be magnanimous toward Professor Lindner? " Agathe asked rather surprisingly, for ordinarily she never spoke o f Lind- ner unless her brother brought up his name. Ulrich knew that she was holding something back. It was not exactly that she was concealing that she had some sort of relationship with Undner, but she did not say what it was. He more or less guessed it and, with some displeasure, ac- quiesced in the necessity of allowing Agathe to go her own way. The instant that, for God knows what reasons, such a question sprang from her lips, Agathe had immediately realized once more how ill the term "Professor Lindner" accorded with the term "magnanimity. " She felt that in some way or other, magnanimity could not be professed, much as she felt that Lindner was good in some unpleasant way. Ulrich was si- lent. She sought to look into his face, and when he turned it away as far as he could, she plucked his sleeve. She used his sleeve as a bell rope until Ulrich's laughing countenance again appeared in the domway of grief and he delivered a small admonishing speech on how the person who in his magnanimity too soon abandons the firm ground of reality can easily become ridiculous. But that not only related to Agathe's readi- ness for magnanimity in relation to the dubious Lindner, but also di- rected a scruple at that true and not-to-be-deceived sensibility in which truth and error signify far less than the enduring emanation of the emo- tions and their power to seize everything for themselves.
1532
49
MUSINGS
Since that scene, Ulrich thought he was being borne fmward; but really all that could be said was that something new and incomprehensible had been added, which he perceived, however, as an increase in reality. He was acting perhaps a little like a person who has seen his opinions in print and is ever after convinced of their incontrovertibility; however he might smile at this, he was incapable of changing it. And just as he had been about to draw his conclusions from the millennia! book, or perhaps he merely wanted once more to express his astonishment, Agathe had retaliated and cut offthe discussion by exclaiming: 'We've already spent enough time talking about this! " How Ulrich felt that Agathe was always in the right, even when she wasn't! For although nothing could be less the case than that there had been enough discussion between them- not to mention anything true or decisive--indeed, precisely such a sav- ing event or magic formula for which one might have initially hoped had not materialized; yet he knew, too, that the problems that had domi- nated his life for the better part of a year were now bunched together dense and compact around him, and not in a rational but in a dynamic fashion. Just as if there would soon be enough talk about them, even if the answer did not happen to come out in words.
He could not even altogether remember what he had thought and said about these problems over the course of time; indeed, he was far from being able to do so. He had doubtless set out to converse about them with all mankind; but it lay, too, in the nature ofthe reproach itself that nothing one could say about it was joined in a forward-looking way to anything else but that everything was as widely scattered as it was connected. The same movement of the mind, clearly distinguished from the ordinary, arose again and again, and the treasure of the things it reached out to include grew; but no matter what Ulrich might remind himself of, it was always as far from one inspiration to a second as it would have been to a third, and nowhere did a dominant assertion emerge. In this way he recalled, too, that a similar "equally far," of the kind that was now almost burdensomely and depressingly affecting his thoughts, had once existed in the most inspiring way between himself and the whole world around him: an apparent or actual suspension of the spirit of separation, indeed almost of the spirit of space. That had
From the Posthurrwus Papers · 1 5 3 3
been in the very first years of his manhood, on the island where he had taken refuge from the major's wife but with her image in his heart. He had probably described it in almost the same words too. Everything had been changed in an incomprehensibly visual way through a condition of fullness oflove, as if all he had known previously had been a condition of impoverishment. Even pain was happiness. His happiness, too, almost pain. Everything was leaning toward him, suspended. It seemed that all things knew about him, and he about them; that all beings knew about each other, and yet that there was no such thing as knowing at all, but that love, with its attributes of swelling fullness and ripening promise, ruled this island as the one and perfect law. He had later used this often enough as a model, with slight changes, and in recent weeks, too, he might have been able to refresh this description to some extent; it was by no means difficult to go on in it, and the more one did so without think- ing, the more fruitful it turned out to be. But it was precisely this indefi- niteness that now meant the most to him. For if his thoughts were connected in such a way that nothing of substance could be added to them which they would not have absorbed, the way an arriving person disappears into a crowd, still that only proved their similarity to the emo- tions by which they had been summoned into Ulrich's life the first time; and this correspondence of an alteration of the sphere of the senses, ex- perienced now a second time through Agathe, which seemed to affect the world with an altered way of thinking-of which it might also be said that it catches the wind in infinite dreams without stirring from the spot and had already exhausted itself once in the process! -this remarkable correspondence, to which Ulrich was only today fully attentive, inspired in him courage and apprehension. He still recalled that on that earlier occasion he had used the expression of having come to the heart of the world. Was there such a thing? Was it really anything more than a cir- cumlocution? Only by excluding his brain was he inclined to mysticism's claim that one must give up one's self; but did he not have to admit to himself just for that reason that he did not know much more about this than he had before?
He walked farther along these expanses, which nowhere seemed to offer access to their depths. Another time he had called this "the right life"; probably not long ago, if he was not mistaken; and certainly if he had been asked earlier what he was up to, even when he was busy with his most precise work he would ordinarily not have found any answer except to say that it was a preliminary study for the right life. Not to think about it was simply impossible. Of course one could not say what it should look like-indeed, not even if there was such a thing-and per- haps it was just one of those ideas that are more a badge of truth than a
1534 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
truth; but a life without meaning, a life that obeyed only the so-called necessities, and their contingency disguised as necessity, in other words a life lived eternally moment to moment-and here again an expression occurred to him that he had once made up: the futility of the centu- ries! -such a life was for him a simply unbearable idea! But no less un- bearable than a life "for something," that sterility of highways shaded by milestones amid unsurveyed expanses. He might call all that a life preceding the discovery of morality. For that, too, was one of his views, that morality is not made by people and does not change with them but is revealed; that it unfolds in seasons and zones and can actually be dis- covered. This idea, which was as out of fashion as it was current, ex- pressed perhaps nothing but the demand that morality, too, have a morality, or the expectation that it have one hidden away, and that mo- rality was not simply tittle-tattle revolving on itself on a planet circling to the point ofimplosion. Ofcourse he had never believed that what such a demand contained could be discovered all at once; it merely seemed to him desirable to think ofit at times, which is to say at a time that seemed propitious and relatively accommodating, after some thousands of cen- turies of aimless circling of the question, whether there was not some experience that might be derived from it. But then, what did he really know about it even now? On the whole, nothing more than that this group of problems, too, had in the course of his life been subjected to the same law or fate as the other groups, which closed ranks in all direc- tions without forming a center.
Ofcourse he knew more about it! For instance, that to philosophize as he was doing was considered horribly facile, and at this moment he fer- vently wished to be able to refute this error. He knew, too, how one goes about such a thing: he had some acquaintance with the history of thought; he could have found in it similar efforts and how they had been contested, with bitterness or mockingly or calmly; he could have or- dered his material, arranged it, he could have secured a firm footing and reached beyond himself. For a while he painfully recalled his earlier in- dustriousness, and especially that frame of mind that came to him so naturally that it had once even earned him the derisive appellation of "activist. " Was he then no longer the person constantly haunted by the idea that one must work toward the "ordering of the whole"? Had he not, with a certain stubbornness, compared the world to a "laboratory," an "experimental community"; had he never spoken of"mankind's neg- ligent condition ofconsciousness," which needed to be transformed into will; demanded that one had to "make" history; had he not, finally, even ifit had been only ironically, actually called for a "General Secretariat of Precision and Soul"? That was not forgotten, for one cannot suddenly
From the Posthumous Papers · 1535
change oneself; it was merely suspended for the moment! There was also no mistaking where the reason lay. Ulrich had never kept accounts on his ideas; but even if he had been able to remember them all at the same time, he knew that it would have been impossible for him to simply take them up, compare them, test them for possible explanations, and so, ultimately, bring forth from the vapors the little tissue-thin metal leaf oftruth. It was a peculiarity ofthis way ofthinking that it did not contain any progress toward truth; and although Ulrich basically assumed that such progress might sometime, through a slow and infinite process, be brought about in the totality, this did not console him, for he no longer had the patience to let himself be outlived by whatever it was to which he was contributing something, like an ant. For the longest time his ideas had not stood on the best footing with truth, and this now seemed to him again the question most urgently in need of illumination.
But this brought him back once again to the opposition between truth and love, which for him was nothing new. It occurred to him how often in recent weeks Agathe had laughed at his, for her taste much too pe- dantic, love of truth; and sometimes it must also have caused her grief! And suddenly he found himself thinking that there is really no more contradictory term than "love oftruth. " "For one can raise truth up high in God knows how many ways, but love it you can't, because truth dis- solves in love," he thought. And this assertion, by no means the same as the fainthearted one that love cannot bear the truth, was for him as fa- miliar and unachievable as everything else. The moment a person en- counters love not as an experience but as life itself, or at least as a kind of life, he knows several truths. The person who judges without love calls this opinions, personal views, subjectivity, caprice; but the person who loves knows that he is not insensitive to truth, but oversensitive. He finds himselfin a kind ofenthusiasm ofthinking, where the words open them- selves up to their very core. Ofcourse that can be an illusion, the natural consequence of an all too excitedly involved emotion, and Ulrich took that into account. Truth arises when the blood is cold; emotion is to be deducted from it; and to expect to find truth where something is "a mat- ter offeeling" is, according to all experience, just as perverse as demand- ing justice from wrath. Nevertheless, there was incontestably some general content, a participation in being and truth, that distinguished love "as life itself" from love as individual experience. And Ulrich now reflected on how clearly the difficulties that ordering his life presented to him were always connected with this notion of a superpowerful love that, so to speak, overstepped its bounds. From the lieutenant who sank into the heart of the world to the Ulrich of this past year, with his more or less assertive conviction that there are two fundamentally distinct and
1536 · THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
badly integrated conditions oflife, conditions ofthe self, indeed perhaps even conditions of the world, the fragments of recollection, so far as he was able to call them to mind, were all in some form connected with the desire for love, tenderness, and gardenlike, struggle-free fields of the soul. In these expanses lay, too, the idea of the "right life"; as empty as it might be in the bright light of reason, it was richly filled by the emotions with half-hom shadows.
It was not at all pleasant for him to encounter so unequivocally this preference for love in his thinking; he had really expected that there were more and different things his thinking would have absorbed, and that shocks such as those of the past year would have carried their vibra- tions in different directions; indeed, it seemed to him really strange that the conqueror, then the engineer of morality, that he had expected him- selfto be in his energetic years should have finally matured into a moon- ing seeker of love.
CLARISSE I WALTER I ULRICH MID 1920S
CL A RISSE
Ulrich did not think about Walter and Clarisse. Then one morning he was urgently called to the telephone: Walter. Why didn't he come out to see them; they knew he was back. A lot had changed, they were waiting for his visit.
Ulrich declined with the curt excuse that after his long absence he had a lot ofwork to do.
To his surprise, Walter appeared soon afterward; he had taken off from work. The manner in which he inquired after Agathe and the expe- riences of the trip gave the impression of uncertainty or embarrassment; he seemed to know more than he wanted to let on. Finally, the words came out. He had only now realized that it is insanity to doubt the faith- fulness of a woman one loves. One has to be able to let oneself be de- ceived but know how to be deceived in a fruitful way; for example: he had been wrong to be jealous of Ulrich-
- A h , so he's talking about Clarisse, Ulrich said to himself, suddenly breathing easier.
-W rong-W alter went on---even if of course he had never thought of it in any terms other than as mental unfaithfulness; but it hurt so much to have to admit the simple bodily empathy.
- O f course, of course. Ulrich nodded.
-Meingast has left, Walter added.
Ulrich looked up; it really didn't interest him, but he had the feeling
that this was something new. "Why? "
Simply, it had been time. But for several days afterward Clarisse had
been out of sorts in a way that gave grounds for anxiety. A real depres- sion. But that was just it; that was what first made him grasp the whole business. Imagine--Walter said-that you love a woman, and you meet
1538 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
a man you admire, and you see that your wife loves and admires him too; and both ofyou feel that this man is far superior to you, unreachable-
-That I can't imagine. Ulrich raised his shoulders with a laugh. Wal- ter looked at him with annoyance; both friends felt that they were simu- lating an old game they had often played with each other.
-Don't pretend, Walter said. -You're not so swellheaded to the point of insensitivity that you believe no one is better than you!
-A ll right. The formulation is false. Who is objectively superior? En- gineer A or Aesthetician B, a master wrestler or a sprinter? Let's drop that. So you're saying that a person becomes emotionally dependent on someone and the beloved does too: then what happens? You would have to play along with her role as well as your own. The man plays the man's role and the woman's role; the woman has womanly feelings for the su- perior man and a more manly inclination for her earlier and still-loved lover. So this gives rise to something hermaphroditic, doesn't it? Assum- ing that no jealousy is involved. A spiritual intertwining of three people, which appears mysterious, and at times almost mystic? God on six legs.
Ulrich had improvised this reflection and was himself astonished at the conclusion it had involuntarily reached. Walter looked at him in sur- prise. He did not agree-again there was too much intellect in it-but Ulrich had come surprisingly close to the truth, and Walter admired the rightness of Clarisse's instinct when she had asked that Ulrich be let in on what was going on. He now began to talk a little. -Y es, Clarisse had been swept away by Meingast, and quite rightly, since only a new com- munity of wills and hearts that embraced more than just one couple would be capable of again forging a humanity out of chaos. These ideas had had a powerful effect on her. After Meingast had left she had con- fessed to Walter: the whole time he had been there-he had really changed in a strange way-she had continually been bothered by the idea that he had taken her and Walter's sins upon himself and overcome them; it only sounds crazy, Walter said defensively, but it isn't at all, for he and Clarisse . . . behind their conflicts one finds everywhere a patho- logical disorder of the age. She would now like to speak to Ulrich on Moosbrugger's account.
Ulrich was astonished. What brings the two ofyou to Moosbrugger?
Well. Moosbrugger is of course only a chance encounter. But when one has once come into contact with something like that one can't at the same time just ignore it.
Look, you talked with Clarisse about it yourself a couple of times. Before. How can you forget something like that?
Ulrich shrugged his shoulders, but the next morning went to see Clarisse.
From the Posthumous Papers · 1539
He felt that one of the two things was not to his taste. He had not thought of Moosbrugger for weeks; yet earlier Moosbrugger had for a time been a point of orientation in his thinking! And after he had thought this over for a while he noticed that once again Clarisse had suddenly managed to fasten onto him with this delicate claw, although he had already become indifferent to her, indeed even found her repul- sive. He was curious about what it was Clarisse wanted. \Vhen he saw her, he knew that he would do something for Moosbrugger in order to get out of the anxious, reproachful, and unsettled state he was in on ac- count of Agathe. \Vhen Ulrich came in she was standing at the window, her hands crossed in front ofher hips, legs spread apart as ifplaying ball. It was a habitual stance ofhers, from which her smile emerged with par- adoxical charm.
-Our destinies are interwoven-she said-yours and mine. Did Walter tell you? she began. Ulrich replied that he had not quite under- stood what Walter was after. I must see Moosbrugger! Clarisse said. After greeting him she held his hand in hers, moving his index finger downward, as if unintentionally. - I can influence such destinies, she added vaguely.
In the intervening time some quite specific constellation ofideas must have formed in her; one felt it by the way the walls pulsated. With no other person Ulrich knew did everything internal become so physical as with Clarisse, and this, too, doubtless explained her extraordinary ability to impart her excitement to others.
Her brother had already been won over to the idea, Clarisse related. He was a physician. Ulrich could not stand him. Because as a child of the Wagner craze he had been baptized "Wotan" [Siegfried], he be- lieved everyone would think he was Jewish, and emphasized in equal measure his distaste for Jews and music. He had another peculiarity. Since he had grown up among their other friends, he had found him- self when young compelled to read Baudelaire, Dostoyevsky, Huys- mans, and Peter Altenberg, to whom at that time the spiritual expressiveness of youth was attuned, and when in later years this style eroded and his own nature came to the fore, there arose a quite pecu- liar mishmash ofjleurs du TTUZl and provincial hymns to the Alps. He had come to visit his sister today too, and Clarisse said that he was working somewhere in the garden or in the (adjoining) vineyards. Since even his proximity was enough to put Ulrich out of sorts, he re- sponded with some disappointment. But Clarisse seemed to have been expecting this. "We need him," she said, and tried to give this sen- tence an emphasis from the back of her eyes, as if to mean: it's really too bad he's bothering us, even if we're lucky that Walter isn't here
1540 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
(but it has to be! ) -Be reasonable, Ulrich said: -Why do you want to see Moosbrugger?
Clarisse went and shut the door, which was open. Then she asked a question: Do you understand railway accidents? (One never happens because a locomotive engineer deliberately rams his engine into another train. ) Well, they all happen because in the confusing network of tracks, switches, signals, and commands, fatigue makes a person lose the power of conscience. He would only have needed to check one more time whether he was doing the right thing .
"Do pearls really dissolve in wine? " Agathe asked.
"I have no idea," Ulrich conceded with a sigh. 'Tm pretty far gone. I'm already using expressions I can't account for! I meant to say: To the person who loves, truth and deception are equally trivial! "
This observation, that truth is dissolved by love-the opposite of the more fainthearted assertion that love cannot bear the truth! -contains nothing new. The moment a person encounters love not as an experi- ence but as life itself, or at least as a kind of life, he understands that there are several truths about everything. The person who judges with- out love calls this "opinions" and "subjectivity"; the person who loves denies that with the sage's saying: "We can't know the meaning of even the simplest words ifwe don't love! " He is not being insensitive to truth, but oversensitive. He finds himself in a kind of enthusiasm of thinking, in which words open up to their very core. The person judging without love calls something an illusion that is merely the consequence of the excited involvement of the emotions. He himself is free of passion, and truth is free of passion; an emotion is injurious to its truth, and to expect to find truth where something is "a matter of the emotions" seems to him just as wrongheaded as demanding justice from wrath. And yet it is precisely the general content of existence and truth that distinguishes love as an experiencing of the world from love as an experience of the individual. In the special world oflove, contradictions do not raise each other to nothing and cancel each other out, but raise each other to the heights. They don't adapt to each other, either, but are in advance a part of a higher unity, which, the moment they come into contact, rises from them as a transparent cloud. Therefore, in love as in life itself, every word is an event and none is a complete notion, and no assertion is needed, nor any mere whim.
It is hard to account for this, because the language of love is a secret language, and in its ultimate perfection as silent as an embrace. Ulrich was capable of walking beside Agathe and seeing the reliable line of her profile in sparkling clarity before the swarm of his thoughts; then he per-
1524 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
haps recalled that in every delimitation there resides a tyrannical happi- ness. This is apparently the basic happiness of all works of art, of all beauty, of whatever is fonned by earth at all. But it is perhaps, too, the basic hostility, the annor between all beings. And Agathe looked away from Ulrich into the stream of people and sought to imagine what can- not be imagined, what happiness it would be to do away with all limits. In thought they contradicted each other, but they would also have been able to change sides, since on earlier occasions they had, at times alone, at times together, experienced one side as well as the other. But they did not speak about this at all. They smiled. That was enough. They each guessed what the other meant. And if they guessed wrongly, it was just as good as if it were right. If, on the contrary, they said something that cohered more finnly, they almost felt it as a disturbance. They had al- ready spoken so much about it. A certain indolence, indeed paralysis, of thought was part of their silent insatiability as they now observed people and sought to enclose them within the magic circle that surrounded themselves, just as fluid and fleeting mobility belonged to this thinking. They were like the two halves of the shell of a mussel opening itself to the sea.
And at times they suddenly laughed at each other.
"It's not as simple as one would like to think, loving one's fellow man like oneself! " Ulrich sighed mockingly once again.
Agathe took a deep breath and told him with satisfaction that it was his fault. "You're the one who's always destroying it! " she complained.
"They're the ones! Look at them! " Ulrich countered. "Look how they're watching us! They'd say Thanks a lot! ' to our love! "
And in truth this made them laugh with a kind of abashed shame, for unfortunately nothing is more amusing than raising one's eyes when they are still tender with sentiment. So Agathe laughed beforehand. But then she replied: "And yet what we're lookin~for can't be far away. Sometimes one feels one's own breath against a\rei! as wann as a pair of strange lips. This seems to me that close too. "
Ulrich added: "And there is a circumstance that could lead one to be- lieve that we're not simply chasing chimeras. For even an enemy can be divined only if you're able to feel what he feels. So there is a 'love your neighbor'; it even has a postscript: so you get a cleaner shot at him! And quite generally, you never understand people entirely through knowing and observing them; it also calls for understanding of a kind you have with yourself; you must already have that understanding when you ap- proach them. "
"But I usually don't understand them at all," Agathe said, surveying the people.
From the Posthumous Papers · 1525
"You believe in them," Ulrich replied. "At least you want to. You 'lend' them credence. That's what makes them seem worthy of loving. "
"No," Agathe said. "I don't believe in them in the least. "
"No," Ulrich said. " 'Belief' isn't an accurate expression for it. "
"But then what should it really be called," Agathe asked, "when you
think you understand people without knowing anything about them, and when you have an irresistible inclination for them, although you can be almost certain that you wouldn't like to know them? "
"One usually lives in the cautious balance between inclination and aversion one keeps ready for one's fellowmen," her brother responded slowly. "If, for whatever reason, the aversion seems to be dormant, then only a desire to yield must remain, a desire that cannot be compared to anything one knows. But it's no longer an attitude that corresponds to reality. "
"But you've said so often that it's the possibility of another life! " Agathe reproached him.
"An awareness of the world as it could be is what it is," Ulrich said, "shot through with an awareness of the world as it is! "
"No, that's too little! " Agathe exclaimed.
"But I can't say that I really love these people," Ulrich defended him- self. "Or that I love the real people. These people are real when they're in uniform and civilian clothes; that's the norm, so it's our attitude that's unreal! "
"But among themselves they think of it the same way! " Agathe re- sponded, on the attack. "Because they don't love each other in a real way, or really don't love each other, in exactly the same way you're claiming about our relation to them: their reality consists in part of fanta- sies, but why should that degrade ours? "
"You're thinking with such strenuous sharpness today! " Ulrich fended her off, laughing.
'Tm so sad," Agathe replied. "Everything is so uncertain. It all seems to shrink to nothing and expand again endlessly. It won't let you do any- thing, but the inactivity is also unbearable because it really presses in all directions against closed walls. "
And in this or similar fashion the preoccupation of brother and sister with their surroundings always broke off. Their involvement remained unarticulated: there was nowhere an accord in opinion or activity in which it could have expressed itself; the feeling grew all the more, the less it found a way of acting that corresponded to it, and the desire to contradict appeared as well: the sun shone on the just and unjust, but Ulrich found that one might better say, on the unseparated and not united, as the real origin of mankind's being evil as well as good.
1526 · THE MAN WITH0 UT QUALITIES
Agathe concurred in this opinion: ''I'm always so sad whenever we have to laugh at ourselves," she asserted, and laughed, because along with everything else an old saying had occurred to her, which sounded quite strange, as idle as it was prophetic. For it proclaimed: "Then the eyes of the soul were opened, and I saw love coming toward me. And I saw the beginning, but its end I did not see, only its progression. "
49
SPECIAL MISSION OF A GARDEN FENCE
Another time Agathe asked: "By what right can you speak so glibly of an 'image of the world,' or even of a 'world' of love? Of love as 'life itself'? You're being frivolous! " She felt as if she were swinging back and forth on a high branch that was threatening to break under the exertion at any moment; but she went on to ask: "If one can speak of a cosmic image of love, could one not also finally speak of an image of anger, envy, pride, or hardness? "
"All other emotions last for a shorter period,'' Ulrich replied. "None of them even claims to last forever. "
"But don't you find it somewhat odd of love that it should make that claim? " Agathe asked.
Ulrich countered: "I believe one might well say that it also ought to be possible for other emotions to shape their own images ofthe world: as it were, one-sided or monochrome ones; but among them love has always enjoyed an obscure advantage and has been accorded a special claim to the power of shaping the world. "
During this exchange they sought out a place in their garden where they could look through the fence at the street, with its rich variety of human content, without exposing themselves, as far as possible, to the glances of strangers. This usually led them to a low, sunny rise whose dry soil gave footing to several larches, and where ifthey lay down they were camouflaged by the play of light and shadow; in this half hiding place they were on the one hand so near the street that the people passing by gave them the peculiar impression ofbeing alive in that merely animalis- tic way that attaches to all of us when we believe ourselves unobserved and alone with our demeanor, and on the other hand any eyes that were raised could see brother and sister and draw them into the events that
From the Posthumous Papers · 152 7
they were observing with interest and a reserve for which the fence, a solid barrier but transparent to the glance, served as a positively ideal image.
"Now let's try whether we really love them or not," Agathe proposed, and smiled mockingly or impatiently.
Her brother shrugged his shoulders.
"Stop, 0 you hastening past, and bestow for a moment your precious soul upon two people who intend to love you! " Ulrich said, pushing it to absurdity.
''You can't bestow yourself for a moment; you have to do it without end! " Agathe corrected him threateningly.
"A park. A mighty fence. Us behind it," Ulrich affirmed. "And what might he be thinking when we called him, after he had involuntarily slowed his steps and before he timidly doubles them? That he's walking by the garden fence of a private madhouse! "
Agathe nodded.
"And we," Ulrich went on, "wouldn't even dare! Don't you absolutely know we won't do it? Our inmost harmony with the world warns us that we're not allowed to do such a thing! "
Agathe said: "If we were to address the brother hastening past, in- stead of as 'our good friend' or 'dear soul,' as 'dog' or 'criminal,' he prob- ably wouldn't consider us mad but would merely take us for people who 'think differently' and are mad at him! "
Ulrich laughed and was pleased with his sister. "But you see how it is," he declared. "General rudeness is unbearable today. But because it is, goodness too must be false! It's not that rudeness and goodness de- pend on each other as on a scale, where too much on one side equals too little on the other; they depend on each other like two parts of a body that are healthy and sick together. So nothing is more erroneous," he went on, "than to imagine, as people generally do, that an excess of bad convictions is to blame for a lack of good ones; on the contrary, evil evi- dently increases through the growth ofa false goodness! "
'We've heard that often," Agathe replied with pleasantly dry irony. "But it's apparently not simple to be good in the good way! "
"No, loving is not simple! " Ulrich echoed, laughing.
They lay there looking into the blue heights of the sun; then again through the fence at the street, which, to their eyes dazzled by the sunny sky, was spinning in a hazily excited gray. Silence descended. The feel- ings of self-confidence that the conversation had raised were slowly transformed into an undercutting, indeed an abduction, of the self. Ul- rich related softly: "I've invented a magnificent sham pair of concepts: 'egocentric and allocentric. ' The world oflove is experienced either ego-
1528 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
centrically or allocentrically; but the ordinary world knows only egotism and altruism, a coupled pair that, by comparison, are quarrelsomely ra- tional. Being egocentric means feeling as ifone were carrying the center of the world in the center of one's self. Being allocentric means not hav- ing a center at all anymore. Participating totally in the world and not laying anything by for oneself. At its highest stage, simply ceasing to be. I could also say: turning the world inward and the self outward. They are the ecstasies of selfishness and selflessness. And although ecstasy ap- pears to be an outgrowth of healthy life, one can evidently say as well that the moral notions of healthy life are a stunted vestige of what were originally ecstatic ones. "
Agathe thought: "Moonlit night . . . two miles . . . " And much else drifted through her mind as well. What Ulrich was telling her was one more version of all that; she did not have the impression that she would be losing anything if she did not pay really close attention, although she lis\ened gladly. Then she thought of Lindner's asserting that one had to live for something and could not think of oneself, and she asked herself whether that, too, would be "allocentric. " Losing oneself in a task, as he demanded? She was skeptical. Pious people have enthusiastically pressed their lips to lepers' sores: a loathsome idea! an "exaggeration that is an affront to life," as Lindner liked to call it. But what he did consider pleasing to God, erecting a hospital, left her cold. Thus it hap- pened that she now plucked her brother by the sleeve and interrupted him with the words: "Our man has shown up again! " For partly out of fun, partly from habit, they had fastened on a particularly unpleasant man to use for their mental experiment. This was a beggar who con- ducted his business for a while every day in front of their garden fence. He treated the stone base as a bench that was awaiting him; every day he first spread out beside himself a greasy paper with some leftover food on it, with which he casually regaled himself before putting on his business expression and packing away the rest. He was a stocky man with thick, iron-gray hair, had the pasty, spiteful face of an alcoholic, and had de- fended his location a number of times with great rudeness when other beggars unsuspectingly came near: Ulrich and Agathe hated this para- site who offended against their property-and further refined what was proper to them, their loneliness-hated him with a primitive instinct of possessiveness that made them laugh, because it seemed to them totally illicit; and for just that reason they used this ugly, spiteful guest for their boldest and most dubious conjurations of loving one's neighbor.
Hardly had they caught sight ofhim than Ulrich said, laughing: "Ire- peat: I f you just, as people say, imagine yourself in this situation or feel any kind of vague sense of social responsibility for him-indeed, even if
From the Posthurrwus Papers · 1529
you only see him as a picturesque, tattered painting-there's already a small percentage of the genuine 'putting oneself in another's place. ' Now you have to try it one hundred percent! "
With a smile, Agathe shook her head.
"Imagine you were in accord with this man about everything the way you are with yourself," Ulrich proposed.
Agathe protested. "I've never been in accord with myself! "
"But you will be then," Ulrich said. He took her hand.
Agathe let it happen and looked at the beggar. She became strangely
serious and after a while declared: "He's stranger to me than death. " Ulrich enclosed her hand in his more completely and asked again:
"Please try! "
After a while Agathe said: "I feel as if I'm hanging on this figure; I
myself, and not just my curiosity! " From the tension of concentration, and its focus on a single object, her face had taken on the involuntary expression of a sleepwalker.
Ulrich helped out: "It's like in a dream? Raw-sweet, alien-self, en- countering oneself in the shape of another? "
Agathe dismissed this with a smile. "No, it's certainly not as enchant- ingly sensual as it is in such dreams," she said.
Ulrich's eyes rested on her face. "Try, as it were, to dream him! " he counseled persuadingly. "Cautious hoarders, in our waking state we consist mostly of giving out and taking back; we participate, and in doing so preserve ourselves. But in dreams we have a trembling intimation of how glorious a world is that consists entirely of prodigality! "
"That may be so," Agathe answered hesitantly and distractedly. Her eyes remained fixed on the man. "Thank God," she said slowly after a while, "he's become an ordinary monster again! " The man had got up, gathered his things together, and left. "He was getting uncomfortable! " Ulrich claimed, laughing. When he fell silent, the constant noise of the street rose and mingled with the sunshine in a peculiar feeling of still- ness. After a while Ulrich asked pensively: "Isn't it strange that almost every single person knows himself least of all and loves himself most? It's evidently a protective mechanism. And 'Love thy neighbor as thy- self' means in this fashion too: love him without knowing him, before you know him, although you know him. I can understand one's taking this merely for an extreme expression, but I doubt that it will satisfy the challenge; for, pursued seriously, it asks: love him without your reason. And so an apparently everyday demand, if taken literally, turns into an ecstatic one! "
Agathe responded: "Truly, the 'monster' was almost beautiful! " Ulrich said: "I think one not only loves something because it's beauti-
1530 · THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
ful, but it's also beautiful because one loves it. Beauty is nothing but a way of saying that something has been loved; the beauty of all art and of the world has its origin in the power of making a love comprehensible. "
Agathe thought of the men with whom she had spent her life. The feeling offirst being overshadowed by a strange being, and then opening one's eyes in this shadow, is strange. She pictured it to herself.
Was it not alien, almost hostile things that fused together in the kiss of two lives? The bodies remained unitedly separated. Thinking of them, you feel the repulsive and ugly with undiminished force. As horror, even. You are also certain that spiritually you have nothing to do with each other. The disparity and separation of the persons involved is painfully clear. If there had been some illusion of a secret accord, a sameness or likeness, this was the moment it vanished like a mist. No, you weren't under the least illusion, Agathe thought to herself. And yet the sense of an inde- pendent self is partially extinguished, the self is broken; and amid signs signifying an act of violence no less than a sweet sacrifice, it submits to its new state. All of that causes a "skin rash"? Doubtless the other ways ofloving are not able to do as much. Perhaps Agathe had so often felt the inclination to love men she didn't like because this is when this remark- able transformation happens most irrationally. And the remarkable power of attraction that Lindner had lately exercised on her signified nothing else, that she did not doubt. But she haidly knew that this was what she was thinking about; Ulrich, too, had once confessed that he often loved what he didn't like, and she thought she was thinking of him. She recalled that all her life she had believed only in surroundings that rushed past, with the hopeless hope that they could remain the same; she had never been able to change herself by her own volition, and yet now, as a gift, a hovering borne by the forces of summer had taken the place of vexation and disgust. She said to Ulrich gratefully: "You have made me what I am because you love mel"
Their hands, which had been intertwined, had disengaged themselves and were now just touching with their fingertips; these hands awakened to consciousness again, and Ulrich grasped his sister's with his own. "You have changed me completely," he responded. "Perhaps I have had some influence on you, but it was only you who were, so to speak, flow- ing through mel"
Agathe nestled her hand in the hand that embraced it. "You really don't know me at all! " she said.
"Knowing people is of no consequence to me," Ulrich replied. "The only thing one ought to know about a person is whether he makes our thoughts fruitful. There shouldn't be any other way of knowing people! "
Agathe asked: "But then how am I real? "
FromthePosthurrwusPapers · 1531
"You're not real at all! " Ulrich said with a laugh. "I see you the way I need you, and you make me see what I need. Who can say so casually where the first and fundamental impulse lies? We are a ribbon floating in the air. "
Agathe laughed, and asked: "So if I disappoint you it will be your fault? "
"No doubt! " Ulrich said. "For there are heights where it makes no sense to discriminate between 'I have been mistaken in you' and 'I have been mistaken in myself. ' For instance, the heights of faith, of love, of magnanimity. Whoever acts from magnanimity, or, as it can also be called, from greatness, doesn't ask about illusion, or about certainty ei- ther. There are some things he may even not want to know; he dares the leap over falsehood. "
"Couldn't you also be magnanimous toward Professor Lindner? " Agathe asked rather surprisingly, for ordinarily she never spoke o f Lind- ner unless her brother brought up his name. Ulrich knew that she was holding something back. It was not exactly that she was concealing that she had some sort of relationship with Undner, but she did not say what it was. He more or less guessed it and, with some displeasure, ac- quiesced in the necessity of allowing Agathe to go her own way. The instant that, for God knows what reasons, such a question sprang from her lips, Agathe had immediately realized once more how ill the term "Professor Lindner" accorded with the term "magnanimity. " She felt that in some way or other, magnanimity could not be professed, much as she felt that Lindner was good in some unpleasant way. Ulrich was si- lent. She sought to look into his face, and when he turned it away as far as he could, she plucked his sleeve. She used his sleeve as a bell rope until Ulrich's laughing countenance again appeared in the domway of grief and he delivered a small admonishing speech on how the person who in his magnanimity too soon abandons the firm ground of reality can easily become ridiculous. But that not only related to Agathe's readi- ness for magnanimity in relation to the dubious Lindner, but also di- rected a scruple at that true and not-to-be-deceived sensibility in which truth and error signify far less than the enduring emanation of the emo- tions and their power to seize everything for themselves.
1532
49
MUSINGS
Since that scene, Ulrich thought he was being borne fmward; but really all that could be said was that something new and incomprehensible had been added, which he perceived, however, as an increase in reality. He was acting perhaps a little like a person who has seen his opinions in print and is ever after convinced of their incontrovertibility; however he might smile at this, he was incapable of changing it. And just as he had been about to draw his conclusions from the millennia! book, or perhaps he merely wanted once more to express his astonishment, Agathe had retaliated and cut offthe discussion by exclaiming: 'We've already spent enough time talking about this! " How Ulrich felt that Agathe was always in the right, even when she wasn't! For although nothing could be less the case than that there had been enough discussion between them- not to mention anything true or decisive--indeed, precisely such a sav- ing event or magic formula for which one might have initially hoped had not materialized; yet he knew, too, that the problems that had domi- nated his life for the better part of a year were now bunched together dense and compact around him, and not in a rational but in a dynamic fashion. Just as if there would soon be enough talk about them, even if the answer did not happen to come out in words.
He could not even altogether remember what he had thought and said about these problems over the course of time; indeed, he was far from being able to do so. He had doubtless set out to converse about them with all mankind; but it lay, too, in the nature ofthe reproach itself that nothing one could say about it was joined in a forward-looking way to anything else but that everything was as widely scattered as it was connected. The same movement of the mind, clearly distinguished from the ordinary, arose again and again, and the treasure of the things it reached out to include grew; but no matter what Ulrich might remind himself of, it was always as far from one inspiration to a second as it would have been to a third, and nowhere did a dominant assertion emerge. In this way he recalled, too, that a similar "equally far," of the kind that was now almost burdensomely and depressingly affecting his thoughts, had once existed in the most inspiring way between himself and the whole world around him: an apparent or actual suspension of the spirit of separation, indeed almost of the spirit of space. That had
From the Posthurrwus Papers · 1 5 3 3
been in the very first years of his manhood, on the island where he had taken refuge from the major's wife but with her image in his heart. He had probably described it in almost the same words too. Everything had been changed in an incomprehensibly visual way through a condition of fullness oflove, as if all he had known previously had been a condition of impoverishment. Even pain was happiness. His happiness, too, almost pain. Everything was leaning toward him, suspended. It seemed that all things knew about him, and he about them; that all beings knew about each other, and yet that there was no such thing as knowing at all, but that love, with its attributes of swelling fullness and ripening promise, ruled this island as the one and perfect law. He had later used this often enough as a model, with slight changes, and in recent weeks, too, he might have been able to refresh this description to some extent; it was by no means difficult to go on in it, and the more one did so without think- ing, the more fruitful it turned out to be. But it was precisely this indefi- niteness that now meant the most to him. For if his thoughts were connected in such a way that nothing of substance could be added to them which they would not have absorbed, the way an arriving person disappears into a crowd, still that only proved their similarity to the emo- tions by which they had been summoned into Ulrich's life the first time; and this correspondence of an alteration of the sphere of the senses, ex- perienced now a second time through Agathe, which seemed to affect the world with an altered way of thinking-of which it might also be said that it catches the wind in infinite dreams without stirring from the spot and had already exhausted itself once in the process! -this remarkable correspondence, to which Ulrich was only today fully attentive, inspired in him courage and apprehension. He still recalled that on that earlier occasion he had used the expression of having come to the heart of the world. Was there such a thing? Was it really anything more than a cir- cumlocution? Only by excluding his brain was he inclined to mysticism's claim that one must give up one's self; but did he not have to admit to himself just for that reason that he did not know much more about this than he had before?
He walked farther along these expanses, which nowhere seemed to offer access to their depths. Another time he had called this "the right life"; probably not long ago, if he was not mistaken; and certainly if he had been asked earlier what he was up to, even when he was busy with his most precise work he would ordinarily not have found any answer except to say that it was a preliminary study for the right life. Not to think about it was simply impossible. Of course one could not say what it should look like-indeed, not even if there was such a thing-and per- haps it was just one of those ideas that are more a badge of truth than a
1534 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
truth; but a life without meaning, a life that obeyed only the so-called necessities, and their contingency disguised as necessity, in other words a life lived eternally moment to moment-and here again an expression occurred to him that he had once made up: the futility of the centu- ries! -such a life was for him a simply unbearable idea! But no less un- bearable than a life "for something," that sterility of highways shaded by milestones amid unsurveyed expanses. He might call all that a life preceding the discovery of morality. For that, too, was one of his views, that morality is not made by people and does not change with them but is revealed; that it unfolds in seasons and zones and can actually be dis- covered. This idea, which was as out of fashion as it was current, ex- pressed perhaps nothing but the demand that morality, too, have a morality, or the expectation that it have one hidden away, and that mo- rality was not simply tittle-tattle revolving on itself on a planet circling to the point ofimplosion. Ofcourse he had never believed that what such a demand contained could be discovered all at once; it merely seemed to him desirable to think ofit at times, which is to say at a time that seemed propitious and relatively accommodating, after some thousands of cen- turies of aimless circling of the question, whether there was not some experience that might be derived from it. But then, what did he really know about it even now? On the whole, nothing more than that this group of problems, too, had in the course of his life been subjected to the same law or fate as the other groups, which closed ranks in all direc- tions without forming a center.
Ofcourse he knew more about it! For instance, that to philosophize as he was doing was considered horribly facile, and at this moment he fer- vently wished to be able to refute this error. He knew, too, how one goes about such a thing: he had some acquaintance with the history of thought; he could have found in it similar efforts and how they had been contested, with bitterness or mockingly or calmly; he could have or- dered his material, arranged it, he could have secured a firm footing and reached beyond himself. For a while he painfully recalled his earlier in- dustriousness, and especially that frame of mind that came to him so naturally that it had once even earned him the derisive appellation of "activist. " Was he then no longer the person constantly haunted by the idea that one must work toward the "ordering of the whole"? Had he not, with a certain stubbornness, compared the world to a "laboratory," an "experimental community"; had he never spoken of"mankind's neg- ligent condition ofconsciousness," which needed to be transformed into will; demanded that one had to "make" history; had he not, finally, even ifit had been only ironically, actually called for a "General Secretariat of Precision and Soul"? That was not forgotten, for one cannot suddenly
From the Posthumous Papers · 1535
change oneself; it was merely suspended for the moment! There was also no mistaking where the reason lay. Ulrich had never kept accounts on his ideas; but even if he had been able to remember them all at the same time, he knew that it would have been impossible for him to simply take them up, compare them, test them for possible explanations, and so, ultimately, bring forth from the vapors the little tissue-thin metal leaf oftruth. It was a peculiarity ofthis way ofthinking that it did not contain any progress toward truth; and although Ulrich basically assumed that such progress might sometime, through a slow and infinite process, be brought about in the totality, this did not console him, for he no longer had the patience to let himself be outlived by whatever it was to which he was contributing something, like an ant. For the longest time his ideas had not stood on the best footing with truth, and this now seemed to him again the question most urgently in need of illumination.
But this brought him back once again to the opposition between truth and love, which for him was nothing new. It occurred to him how often in recent weeks Agathe had laughed at his, for her taste much too pe- dantic, love of truth; and sometimes it must also have caused her grief! And suddenly he found himself thinking that there is really no more contradictory term than "love oftruth. " "For one can raise truth up high in God knows how many ways, but love it you can't, because truth dis- solves in love," he thought. And this assertion, by no means the same as the fainthearted one that love cannot bear the truth, was for him as fa- miliar and unachievable as everything else. The moment a person en- counters love not as an experience but as life itself, or at least as a kind of life, he knows several truths. The person who judges without love calls this opinions, personal views, subjectivity, caprice; but the person who loves knows that he is not insensitive to truth, but oversensitive. He finds himselfin a kind ofenthusiasm ofthinking, where the words open them- selves up to their very core. Ofcourse that can be an illusion, the natural consequence of an all too excitedly involved emotion, and Ulrich took that into account. Truth arises when the blood is cold; emotion is to be deducted from it; and to expect to find truth where something is "a mat- ter offeeling" is, according to all experience, just as perverse as demand- ing justice from wrath. Nevertheless, there was incontestably some general content, a participation in being and truth, that distinguished love "as life itself" from love as individual experience. And Ulrich now reflected on how clearly the difficulties that ordering his life presented to him were always connected with this notion of a superpowerful love that, so to speak, overstepped its bounds. From the lieutenant who sank into the heart of the world to the Ulrich of this past year, with his more or less assertive conviction that there are two fundamentally distinct and
1536 · THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
badly integrated conditions oflife, conditions ofthe self, indeed perhaps even conditions of the world, the fragments of recollection, so far as he was able to call them to mind, were all in some form connected with the desire for love, tenderness, and gardenlike, struggle-free fields of the soul. In these expanses lay, too, the idea of the "right life"; as empty as it might be in the bright light of reason, it was richly filled by the emotions with half-hom shadows.
It was not at all pleasant for him to encounter so unequivocally this preference for love in his thinking; he had really expected that there were more and different things his thinking would have absorbed, and that shocks such as those of the past year would have carried their vibra- tions in different directions; indeed, it seemed to him really strange that the conqueror, then the engineer of morality, that he had expected him- selfto be in his energetic years should have finally matured into a moon- ing seeker of love.
CLARISSE I WALTER I ULRICH MID 1920S
CL A RISSE
Ulrich did not think about Walter and Clarisse. Then one morning he was urgently called to the telephone: Walter. Why didn't he come out to see them; they knew he was back. A lot had changed, they were waiting for his visit.
Ulrich declined with the curt excuse that after his long absence he had a lot ofwork to do.
To his surprise, Walter appeared soon afterward; he had taken off from work. The manner in which he inquired after Agathe and the expe- riences of the trip gave the impression of uncertainty or embarrassment; he seemed to know more than he wanted to let on. Finally, the words came out. He had only now realized that it is insanity to doubt the faith- fulness of a woman one loves. One has to be able to let oneself be de- ceived but know how to be deceived in a fruitful way; for example: he had been wrong to be jealous of Ulrich-
- A h , so he's talking about Clarisse, Ulrich said to himself, suddenly breathing easier.
-W rong-W alter went on---even if of course he had never thought of it in any terms other than as mental unfaithfulness; but it hurt so much to have to admit the simple bodily empathy.
- O f course, of course. Ulrich nodded.
-Meingast has left, Walter added.
Ulrich looked up; it really didn't interest him, but he had the feeling
that this was something new. "Why? "
Simply, it had been time. But for several days afterward Clarisse had
been out of sorts in a way that gave grounds for anxiety. A real depres- sion. But that was just it; that was what first made him grasp the whole business. Imagine--Walter said-that you love a woman, and you meet
1538 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
a man you admire, and you see that your wife loves and admires him too; and both ofyou feel that this man is far superior to you, unreachable-
-That I can't imagine. Ulrich raised his shoulders with a laugh. Wal- ter looked at him with annoyance; both friends felt that they were simu- lating an old game they had often played with each other.
-Don't pretend, Walter said. -You're not so swellheaded to the point of insensitivity that you believe no one is better than you!
-A ll right. The formulation is false. Who is objectively superior? En- gineer A or Aesthetician B, a master wrestler or a sprinter? Let's drop that. So you're saying that a person becomes emotionally dependent on someone and the beloved does too: then what happens? You would have to play along with her role as well as your own. The man plays the man's role and the woman's role; the woman has womanly feelings for the su- perior man and a more manly inclination for her earlier and still-loved lover. So this gives rise to something hermaphroditic, doesn't it? Assum- ing that no jealousy is involved. A spiritual intertwining of three people, which appears mysterious, and at times almost mystic? God on six legs.
Ulrich had improvised this reflection and was himself astonished at the conclusion it had involuntarily reached. Walter looked at him in sur- prise. He did not agree-again there was too much intellect in it-but Ulrich had come surprisingly close to the truth, and Walter admired the rightness of Clarisse's instinct when she had asked that Ulrich be let in on what was going on. He now began to talk a little. -Y es, Clarisse had been swept away by Meingast, and quite rightly, since only a new com- munity of wills and hearts that embraced more than just one couple would be capable of again forging a humanity out of chaos. These ideas had had a powerful effect on her. After Meingast had left she had con- fessed to Walter: the whole time he had been there-he had really changed in a strange way-she had continually been bothered by the idea that he had taken her and Walter's sins upon himself and overcome them; it only sounds crazy, Walter said defensively, but it isn't at all, for he and Clarisse . . . behind their conflicts one finds everywhere a patho- logical disorder of the age. She would now like to speak to Ulrich on Moosbrugger's account.
Ulrich was astonished. What brings the two ofyou to Moosbrugger?
Well. Moosbrugger is of course only a chance encounter. But when one has once come into contact with something like that one can't at the same time just ignore it.
Look, you talked with Clarisse about it yourself a couple of times. Before. How can you forget something like that?
Ulrich shrugged his shoulders, but the next morning went to see Clarisse.
From the Posthumous Papers · 1539
He felt that one of the two things was not to his taste. He had not thought of Moosbrugger for weeks; yet earlier Moosbrugger had for a time been a point of orientation in his thinking! And after he had thought this over for a while he noticed that once again Clarisse had suddenly managed to fasten onto him with this delicate claw, although he had already become indifferent to her, indeed even found her repul- sive. He was curious about what it was Clarisse wanted. \Vhen he saw her, he knew that he would do something for Moosbrugger in order to get out of the anxious, reproachful, and unsettled state he was in on ac- count of Agathe. \Vhen Ulrich came in she was standing at the window, her hands crossed in front ofher hips, legs spread apart as ifplaying ball. It was a habitual stance ofhers, from which her smile emerged with par- adoxical charm.
-Our destinies are interwoven-she said-yours and mine. Did Walter tell you? she began. Ulrich replied that he had not quite under- stood what Walter was after. I must see Moosbrugger! Clarisse said. After greeting him she held his hand in hers, moving his index finger downward, as if unintentionally. - I can influence such destinies, she added vaguely.
In the intervening time some quite specific constellation ofideas must have formed in her; one felt it by the way the walls pulsated. With no other person Ulrich knew did everything internal become so physical as with Clarisse, and this, too, doubtless explained her extraordinary ability to impart her excitement to others.
Her brother had already been won over to the idea, Clarisse related. He was a physician. Ulrich could not stand him. Because as a child of the Wagner craze he had been baptized "Wotan" [Siegfried], he be- lieved everyone would think he was Jewish, and emphasized in equal measure his distaste for Jews and music. He had another peculiarity. Since he had grown up among their other friends, he had found him- self when young compelled to read Baudelaire, Dostoyevsky, Huys- mans, and Peter Altenberg, to whom at that time the spiritual expressiveness of youth was attuned, and when in later years this style eroded and his own nature came to the fore, there arose a quite pecu- liar mishmash ofjleurs du TTUZl and provincial hymns to the Alps. He had come to visit his sister today too, and Clarisse said that he was working somewhere in the garden or in the (adjoining) vineyards. Since even his proximity was enough to put Ulrich out of sorts, he re- sponded with some disappointment. But Clarisse seemed to have been expecting this. "We need him," she said, and tried to give this sen- tence an emphasis from the back of her eyes, as if to mean: it's really too bad he's bothering us, even if we're lucky that Walter isn't here
1540 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
(but it has to be! ) -Be reasonable, Ulrich said: -Why do you want to see Moosbrugger?
Clarisse went and shut the door, which was open. Then she asked a question: Do you understand railway accidents? (One never happens because a locomotive engineer deliberately rams his engine into another train. ) Well, they all happen because in the confusing network of tracks, switches, signals, and commands, fatigue makes a person lose the power of conscience. He would only have needed to check one more time whether he was doing the right thing .
