The sea was like a merci- less beloved and rival; every minute was an annihilating
exploration
of conscience.
Musil - Man Without Qualities - v2
A great, miraculous impetus had seized her heart, with such rapidity that she almost thought she felt the gentle jolt.
At this moment brother and sister looked at each other con- founded.
However much they had been preparing themselves for this every day for weeks, they feared that in this second they had lost their reason. But everything in them was clear. Not a vision. Rather an excessive clarity. And yet they still seemed to have lost and put aside not only their reason but all their capacities; no thoughts stirred in them, they could form no purpose, all words had receded far away, the will lifeless; everything that stirs in the individual was rolled up inertly, like leaves in a burning calm. But this deathlike impotence did not weigh them down; it was as if the lid ofa sarcophagus had been rolled offthem. Whatever was to be heard during the night sobbed without sound or measure, whatever they looked at was without form or mood and yet contained within itself the joyous delight of all forms and moods. It was really strangely simple: as their powers became circumscribed all boundaries had disappeared, and since they no longer felt any kind of distinctions, neither in themselves nor about objects, they had become one.
They gazed around cautiously. It was almost painful. They were quite confused, far away from themselves, set down in a distance in which they lost themselves. They saw without light and heard without sound. Their soul was as excessively stretched as a hand that loses all its power, their tongue was as if cut off. But this pain was as sweet as a strange, living clarity.
? It was like a pain grating on their sensibilities, and yet could be called more a sweetness than a pain, for there was no vexation in it but a pecu- liar, quite supranatural comfort.
And they further perceived that the circumscribing powers in them were not lost at all, but in reality inverted, and with them all boundaries had been inverted. They noticed that they had not become mute at all but were speaking, but they were not choosing words but were being chosen by words; no thought stirred in them, but the whole world was full of marvelous thoughts; they thought that they, and things as well, were no longer mutually displacing and repelling hermetic bodies, but opened and allied forms. Their glances, which in their whole lives had
From the Posthu11U)Us Papers · 1457
followed only the small patterns that objects and people form against the enormous background, had suddenly reversed, and the enormous back- ground played with the patterns of life like an ocean with tiny matches.
Agathe lay half fainting against Ulrich's chest. She felt at this moment embraced by her brother in such a distant, silent, and pure fashion that there was nothing at all like it. Their bodies did not move and were not altered, and yet a sensual happiness flowed through them, the like of which they had never experienced. It was not an idea and not imagined! Wherever they touched each other, whether on their hips, their hands, or a strand of hair, they interpenetrated one another.
They were both convinced at this moment that they were no longer subject to the distinctions of humankind. They had overcome the stage of desire, which expends its energy on an action and a brief intensifica- tion, and their fulfillment impinged on them not only in specific places but in all the places of their bodies, as fire does not become less when other fires kindle from it. They were submerged in this fire that fills up everything; swimming in it as in a sea of desire, and flying in it as in a heaven of rapture.
Agathe wept with happiness. Whenever they moved, the recollection that they were still two dropped like a grain of incense into the sweet fire of life and dissolved in it; these were perhaps the happiest moments, where they were not entirely one.
Originally also supposed to come here: . . . I'm in love and don't know with whom . . . I'm neither faithful, nor unfaithful, what am I then.
For they felt, hovering more strongly over this hour than over others a breath of grief and transitoriness, something shadowy and unreal, a- being robbed, a cruelty, a fearful tension of uncertain forces against the fear of being transformed once more. Finally, when they felt the condi- tion fade, they separated wordlessly and in utter exhaustion.
The next morning, Ulrich and Agathe had separated without having made plans, and did not see each other the entire day; they could not do otherwise; the emotions of the night were still ebbing away and taking them with them; both felt the need to come to terms with themselves alone, without noticing that this entailed a contradiction of the experi- ence that had overpowered them. Involuntarily they went off far across the countryside in opposite directions, stopped in places at different
1458 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
times, sought a resting place in view of the sea, and thought of each other.
It may be called strange that their love immediately involved the need for separation, but this love was so great that they mistrusted it and de- sired this test.
Can they still separate? How can it be done?
Now one can dream. Lie under a bush and the bees buzz; or stare into the weaving heat, the thin air. The senses doze off, and in the body memories shine forth again like the stars after sunset. The body is again touched and kissed, and the magic line of demarcation that otherwise still distinguishes the strongest memories from reality is transcended by these soft I dreaming memories. They push time and space aside like a curtain and unite the lovers not only in thought but physically, not with their heavy bodies but with inwardly altered ones consisting entirely of tender mobility. But only when one thinks that during this union, which is more perfect and blissful than bodily union, one has no idea what the other person has just been doing, or what he will be doing the next mo- ment, does the mystery attain its greatest depth. Ulrich assumed that Agathe had remained behind in the hotel. He saw her standing on the white square in front of the white building, speaking with the manager. It was false. Or perhaps she was standing with the young German pro- fessor who had arrived and introduced himself, or was talking with Luisina, the chambermaid with the lovely eyes, and laughing at her pert, funny answers. That Agathe was now able to laugh! It destroyed the Condition; a smile was just heavy enough to be home by it . . . ! I When Ulrich turned around, Agathe was suddenly really standing there. Re- ally? She had come across the stones in a great arc; her dress was flutter- ing in the wind, she cast a dark shadow on the hot ground and was laughing at Ulrich. Blissfully real reality; it hurt as much as when eyes that have been staring into the distance must quickly adapt to nearness.
Agathe sat down beside him. A lizard sat nearby; it silently darted out its tongue, a small, scurrying flame of life, beside their conversation. Ul- rich had noticed it some time before. Agathe hadn't. But when Agathe, who was afraid of small animals, caught sight of it, she was frightened and, laughing in embarrassment, scared the little creature away with a stone. And to gather courage she ran after it, clapping her hands and chasing the little beast.
Ulrich, who had been staring at the small creature as at a flickering
From the Posthurrwus Papers · 1459
magic mirror, said to himself: That we were now so different is as sad as that we were born at the same time but will die at different times. With his eyes and ears he followed this strange body, Agathe. But then he suddenly fell deeply once again into and was at the bottom of the experi- ence out of which Agathe had startled him.
He was not able to pin it down clearly, but in this flickering brightness above the stones in which everything was transformed, happiness into grief, and also griefinto happiness, the painful moment abruptly took on the secret lust of the hermaphrodite who, separated into two indepen- dent beings, finds itself again, whose secret no one who touches it sus- pects. Yet how glorious it is-Agathe's brother thought-that she is different from me, that she can do things I can't even guess at, which yet also belong to me through our secret empathy. Dreams occurred to him, which he otherwise never recalled but which must have often preoc- cupied him. Sometimes in a dream he had met the sister of a beloved, although she did not have a sister, and this strange familiar person ra- diated all the happiness ofpossession and all the happiness ofdesire. Or he heard a soft voice speaking. Or saw only the fluttering of a skirt, which most definitely belonged to a stranger, but this stranger was most definitely his beloved. As i f a disembodied, completely free attachment was only playing with these people. All at once Ulrich was startled, and thought he saw in the great brightness that the secret of love was pre- cisely this, that lovers are not one.
That belongs to the principles of profane love! Thus really already a game against itself.
"How wonderful it is, Agathe," Ulrich said, "that you can do things I can't guess at. "
"Yes," she answered, "the whole world is full of such things. As I was walking across this plateau I felt that I could now walk in every direc- tion. "
"But why did you come to me? "
Agathe was silent.
"It is so beautiful to be different from the way one was born," Ulrich
continued. "But I was afraid ofjust that. " He told her the dreams that he had remembered, and she knew them too.
"But why are you afraid? " Agathe asked.
"Because it occurred to me that ifit is the sense ofthese dreams-and it might well be that they signify the final memory ofit-that our desires
1460 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
aim not at making one person out of two but, on the contrary, at escap- ing from our prison, our oneness, to become two in a union, but prefera- bly twelve, a thousand, incredibly many, rather, to slip out of ourselves as in a dream, to drink life brewed to the boiling point, to be carried out of ourselves or whatever, for I can't express it vety well; then the world contains as much lust as strangeness, as much tenderness as activity, and is not an opium haze but rather an intoxication of the blood, an orgasm of battle, and the only mistake we could make would be to forget the (lustful contact of) lust of strangeness and imagine doing all sorts of things by dividing up the hurricane of love into scanty creeks flowing back and forth between two people-"
He had jumped up.
"But how would one have to be? " Agathe asked pensively and simply. It pained him that she could immediately appropriate his half-loved and half-cursed idea. "One would have to be able to give," she went on, "without taking away. To be such that love does not become less when it's divided. Then that would be possible too.
Not to treat love as a treasure"-she laughed-"the way it's already laid down in language! "
Ulrich was picking up head-sized stones and flinging them from the cliff into the sea, which squirted up a tiny spray; he had not exercised his muscles for a long time.
"But . . . ? " Agathe said. "Isn't what you're saying simply what one reads fairly often, drinking the world in great drafts of desire? To want to be a thousandfold, because once isn't enough? " She was parodying it a little because she suddenly realized that she did not like it.
"No! " Ulrich shouted back. "It's never what others say! " He flung the large stone he was holding in his hand so angrily to the ground that the loose limestone exploded. "We forgot ourselves," he said gently, grasp- ing Agathe under the arm and pulling her away. "It would still have to be a sister and a brother, even if they're divided into a thousand pieces. -Anyway, it's just an idea. "
Meanwhile days came when only the surface stirred. On the sparkling damp stones in the sea. A silent being: a fish, flowerlike in the water. Agathe romped after it from stone to stone until it dived under, darting into the darkness like an arrow, and disappeared. Well? Ulrich thought. Agathe was standing out on the rocks, he on the shore; a melody of eventfulness broke off, and a new one must carty on: How will she turn around, how smile back to the shore? Beautifully. Like all perfection. With total charm in her motion is how Agathe did it; the insights of the
From the Posthumous Papers · 1461
orchestra of her beauty, though it seemed to be making music without a conductor, were always delightful.
And yet all perfected beauty-an animal, a painting, a woman-is nothing more than the final piece in a circle; an arc is completed, one sees it but would like to know the circle. If it is one of life's familiar circles, for instance that of a great man, then a noble horse or a beauti- ful woman is like the clasp in a belt, which closes it and for a moment seems to contain the entire phenomenon; in the same way one can be smitten with a lovely farm horse, because in him as in a focusing mir- ror the entire heavy-footed beauty of the field and its people is re- peated. But if there is nothing behind it? Nothing more than is behind the rays of the sun dancing on the stones? If this infinitude of water and sky is pitilessly open? Then one might almost believe that beauty is something that secretly negates, something incomplete and incom- pletable, a happiness without purpose, without sense. But what if it lacks everything? Then beauty is a torture, something to laugh and cry over, a tickling to make one roll around in the sand, with Apollo's arrow in one's side.
Hatred of beauty. Sense of urgent sexual desire: to destroy beauty.
The brightness of such days was like smoke, which the clarity of the nights wiped away.
Agathe had somewhat less imagination than Ulrich. Because she had not thought as much as he had her emotions were not as volatile as his, but burned like a flame rising straight out of the particular ground on which she happened to be standing. The daring nature of their flight, the conscience made somewhat anxious by the fear of discovery, and finally this hiding place in a flower basket between the porous limestone wall, sea, and sky, at times gave her a high-spirited and childlike cheerfulness. She then treated even their strange experience as an adventure: a for- bidden space within herself over whose enclosure one spies, or into which one forces one's way, with beating heart, burning neck, and heavy soles weighed down with clods of damp earth from the path one has hurriedly followed in secret.
In this way very indirect suggestion of repeated coitus.
1462 ·THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
She sometimes had a playful way of allowing herself to be touched, with opened-even-when-closed eyes; of reappearing; a tenderness that was not to be stilled. He secretly obseJVed her, saw this play of love with the body, which has the captivation of a smile and the oppressive quality of a force of nature, for the first time, or was moved by it for the first time. Or there were hours when she did not look at him, was cold, al- most angry with him; because she was too agitated; like someone in a boat not daring to move, so it was in her body-afterward, every time. Because the connection does not function. Or afterreactions; at first a blocking and then, for no apparent reason, an afterflood. It was thrilling and charming to let oneself be cradled by these inspirations; they short- ened the hours but they forced an optic of nearness and minute obseJVa- tion. Ulrich resisted this. It was a leftover piece of earth drifting in the liquid fire and clouding it; a temptation to explanations such as that Agathe had never learned the proper connection between love and sex. As with most people, the entire power of the sexual had first come to- gether with a spark of inclination at the time she had married Hagauer, who was not yet abhorrent to her. Instead of stumbling into a storm with someone I almost only in the company of I accompanied by someone almost as impersonal as the elements, and only then noticing as a still nameless surprise that this person's legs are not clothed like one's own and that one's soul is beckoning one to change one's hiding place . . .
But such thoughts, too, were like singing in a false key. Ulrich did not allow himself this kind of understanding. Understanding a person one loves cannot involve spying on that person but must come pouring from an overflow of auspicious inspirations. One may only recognize those things that enrich. One makes a gift of qualities in the unshakable secu- rity of a predetermined harmony, a separation that has never b e e n -
Especially when ethical magnanimity is stimulated by it. Not the see- ing or not seeing of weaknesses, but the large motion in which they float without significance.
An ancient column-thrown down at the time of Venice, Greece, or Rome-lay among the stones and the broom; every groove of its shaft and capital deepened by the ray-sharp graving tool of the midday shad- ows. Lying next to it belonged to the great hours of love.
Four eyes watching. Nothing but noon, column, four eyes. If the glance of two eyes sees one picture, one world: why not the glance of four?
From the Posthumous Papers · 1463
When two pairs of eyes look long into each other, one person crosses over to the other on the bridge of glances, and all that remains is a feel- ing that no longer has a body.
When in a secret hour two pairs of eyes look at an object and come together in it-every object hovering deep down in a feeling, and ob- jects standing only as firmly as they do if this deep ground is hard-then the rigid world begins to move, softly and incessantly. It rises and falls restlessly with the blood. The fraternal twins looked at each other. In the bright light it could not be made out whether they were still breathing or had been lying there for a thousand years like the stones. Whether the stone column was lying there or had risen up in the light without a sound and was floating.
There is a significant difference in the way one looks at people and the way one looks at things. Every time after this when they looked at some- one in the hotel: the play of facial expressions of someone with whom one is talking becomes unspeakably alienating if one observes it as an objective process, and not as an ongoing exchange of signals between two souls; we are accustomed to see things lying mutely where they are, and we consider it a disturbing hallucination if they take on a more dy- namic relation to us. But it is only we ourselves who are looking at them in such a way that the small changes in their physiognomies are not an- swered by any alterations in our emotions, and to change this nothing more is needed, basically, than that we not look at the world intellectu- ally but that objects arouse in us our moral emotions instead of our sense-based surveying equipment. At such moments the excitement in which a glimpse brings us something and enriches us becomes so strong that nothing appears real except for a hovering condition, which, beyond the eyes, condenses into objects, and on this side of the eyes condenses into ideas and feelings, without these two sides being separable from each other. Whatever the soul bestows comes forward; whatever loses this power dissipates before one's eyes.
In this flickering silence among the stones there was a panic horror. The world seemed to be only the outer aspect of a speciflc inner atti- tude, and interchangeable with it. But world and self were not solid; a scaffolding sunk into soft depths; mutually helping each other out of a formlessness. Agathe said softly to Ulrich: "Are you yourself or are you not? I know nothing of it. I am incognizant of it and I am incognizant of myself. "
It was the terror: The world depended on her, and she did not know who she was.
1464 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
Ulrich was silent.
Agathe continued: "I am in love, but I do not know with whom. I am neither faithful nor unfaithful. What am I then? My heart is at once full oflove and emptied oflove . . . ," she whispered. The horror ofa noon- time silence seemed to have clutched her heart.
Over and over the great test was the sea. Time and again, when they had climbed down the narrow slope with its many paths, its quantity of laurel, its broom, its figs, and its many bees, and stepped out onto the powerful surface spread out above the ocean, it was like the first great chord sounding after the tuning up ofan orchestra. How would one have to be to endure this constantly? Ulrich propos. ed that they tty setting up a tent here. But he did not mean it seriously; it would have frightened him. There were no longer any opponents around, up here they were alone; the rebuffs one receives as long as one must contradict the de- mands ofothers and the habits ofone's own conscience were used up; in this final battle it was a matter of their resolve.
The sea was like a merci- less beloved and rival; every minute was an annihilating exploration of conscience. They were afraid of collapsing unconscious before this ex- panse that swallowed up every resistance.
This monstrously extended sight was not to be borne without its becoming somewhat boring. This being responsible for every slightest motion was-they had to confess-rather empty, if one compared it with the cheerfulness of those hours when they made no such claims on themselves and their bodies played with the soul like a beautiful young animal rolling a ball back and forth.
One day Ulrich said: It's broad and pastoral; there's something of a pastor about it! They laughed. Then they were startled by the scorn that they had inflicted upon themselves.
The hotel had a little bell tower; in the middle ofits roof. Around one o'clock this bell rang for lunch. Since they were still almost the only guests, they did not need to respond right away, but the cook was in- dicating that he was ready. The bright sounds sliced into the stillness like a sharp knife contacting skin, which had shuddered beforehand but at this moment becomes calm. "How lovely it is, really," Ulrich said, as they climbed down on one of these days, "to be driven by necessity. The way one drives geese from behind with a stick, or entices hens from in front with feed. And where evetything doesn't happen mysteriously-" The blue-white trembling air really shuddered like goose pimples ifone
From the Posthumous Papers · 1465
stared into it for a long time. At that time memories were beginning to torture Ulrich vividly; he suddenly saw before him every statue and every architectural detail of one of those cities overloaded with such things that he had visited years ago; Niimberg was before him, and Amiens, although they had never captivated him; some large red book or other that he must have seen years earlier in an exhibit would not go away from before his eyes; a slender tanned boy, perhaps only the counter his imagination had conjured up to Agathe, but in such a way as if he had once really met him but did not know where, preoccupied his mind; ideas that he had had at some time and long forgotten; soundless, shadowy things, things properly forgotten, eddied up in this south of stillness and seized possession of the desolate expanse.
The impatience that from the beginning had been mingled with all this beauty began to rage in Ulrich.
He could be sitting before a stone, lost to the world, sunk in contem- plation, and be tortured by this raging impatience. He had come to the end, had assimilated everything into himself and ran the danger of be- ginning, all alone, to speak aloud in order to recite everything to himself once again. "Yes, you're sitting here," his thoughts said, "and you could tell yourself once again what you're looking at. " The stones are of a quite peculiar stone-green, and their image is mirrored in the water. Quite right. Exactly as one says. And the stones are shaped like boxes. . . . But it's all no use, and I'd like to leave. It is so beautiful!
And he remembered: at home, sometimes only years later, and some- times purely by accident, if one no longer has any idea how everything was, suddenly a light falls from behind, from such past things, and the heart does everything as if in a dream. He longed for the past.
"It's quite simple," he said to Agathe, "and everyone knows it, we're the only ones who don't: the imagination is stimulated only by what one does not yet possess or no longer has; the body wants to have, but the soul does not want to have. Now I understand the tremendous efforts people make to this end. How stupid it is for this ordinary fellow, this art traveler, to compare this flower to a jewel, or that stone over there to a flower: as if the truly intelligent thing to do wouldn't be to transform them for a brief moment into something else. And how stupid all our ideals would be, since every ideal, if one takes it seriously, contradicts some other ideal; thou shalt not kill, therefore perish? Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's goods, so live in poverty? As i f their sense did not lie precisely in the impossibility of carrying them out, which ignites the soul! And how good it is for religion that one can neither see nor com- prehend God! But which world? A cold, dark strip between the two fires of the Not-yet and the No-longer! "
1466 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
"A world to be afraid of oneself in," Agathe said. "You're right. " She said this quite seriously, and there was real bitterness in her eyes.
- A n d if it is so! Ulrich laughed. - I t occurs to me for the first time in my life that we would have to be terribly afraid of being tricked if Heaven were not to dangle before us an end of the world that does not exist. Evidently everything absolute, hundred-percent, true, is com- pletely monstrous.
-Between two people as well; you mean between us?
- I now understand so well what visionaries are: food without salt is unbearable, but salt without food is a poison; visionaries are people who want to live from salt alone. Is that right?
Agathe shrugged her shoulders.
- Look at our chambermaid, a cheerful stupid creature smelling of cheap soap. A short time ago I was watching her as she made up the room; she seemed to me as pretty as a freshly washed sky.
It comforted Ulrich to confess this, and a small worm of disgust crawled across Agathe's mouth. Ulrich repeated it; he did not want to drown out this small disharmony with the great peal of the dark bell. "It is a disharmony, isn't it? And any trick will do for the soul to keep itself fruitful. Sometimes it dies from love several times in succession. B u t " - and now he said something he believed to be a consolation, indeed a new love-"if everything is so sad and a deception, and one can no lon- ger believe in anything: isn't that just when we really need one another? The folk song about the little sister"-he smiled-"quiet, pensive music that nothing can drown out; an accompanying music; a love of loveless- ness that softly reaches out its hands . . . ? "
Time is the greatest cynic.
Here sexuality and camaraderie!
A cool, quiet, gray aneroticism?
Agathe was silent. Something had been extinguished. She was inordi- nately tired. Her heart had suddenly been snatched away from her, and she was tortured by an unbearable fear of a vacuum within, of her un- worthiness and her regressive transformation. This is the way ecstatics
From the Posthurrwus Papers · 1467
feel when God withdraws from them and nothing responds any longer to their zealous appeals.
The art traveler, as they called him, was a professor returning from Italian cities, who had the butterfly-net skin and botanizing drum-beat- ing mind of the aspiring art historian. He had stopped over here for a few days to rest before his return and to order his notes. As they were the only guests, he had already introduced himself to the pair on the first day. They chatted briefly after meals, or when they met in the vicinity of the hotel, and there was no denying that although Ulrich made fun of him, at certain moments this man brought them welcome relaxation.
He was strongly convinced of his significance as man and scholar, and from their first encounter, after finding that the couple were not on their honeymoon, he had courted Agathe with great determination. He said to her: You resemble the beautiful--- in the painting b y ---, and all the women who have this expression, which repeats itselfin their hair and in the folds of their gowns, have the quality o f - - : As she was telling this to Ulrich Agathe had already forgotten the names, but for a stranger to know what one was was as pleasant as the firm pressure of a masseur, while one knew oneself to be so diffuse that one could barely distinguish oneself from the noontime silence.
This art traveler said: Women's function is to make us dream; they are a stratagem of nature for the fertilization of the masculine mind. He gleamed with self-satisfaction at his paradox, which inverted the sense of fertilization. Ulrich replied: But there are still distinctions in kind among these dreams!
This man asserted that in embracing a "really great female" one must be able to think of Michelangelo's Creation. "You pull the blanket of the Sistine ceiling over yourself and underneath it you're naked except for the blue stockings," Ulrich ridiculed. No. He admits that canying this out calls for tact, but in principle such people could be "twice as big" as others. "In . the last analysis, the goal of all ethical life is to unite our ac- tions with the highest that we bear within us! " It was not so easy to con- tradict this theoretically, although practically speaking it was ridiculous.
- I have discovered-the art historian said-that there are, and in the course of history always have been, two sorts of people. I call them the static and the dynamic. Or, ifyou prefer, the Imperial and the Faustian. People who are static can feel happiness as something present. They are somehow characterized by balance, equilibrium. What they have done and what they will do blends into what they are doing at the moment, is harmonized, and has a shape like a painting or a melody; has, so to speak, a second dimension, shines in every moment as surface. The Pope, for
1468 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
example, or the Dalai Lama; it is simply unimaginable that they would do something that was not stretched on the frame of their significance. On the other hand, the dynamic people: always tearing themselves loose, merely glancing backward and forward, rolling out of themselves, insensitive people with missions, insatiable, pushy, luckless-whom the static ones conquer over and over in order to keep world history going: in a word, he hinted that he was capable of carrying both strains within himself.
-T ell m e-Ulrich asked, as ifhe were quite serious-are not the dy- namic people also those who in love seem not to feel anything because they have either already loved in their imagination or will only love what has slipped away from them again? Couldn't one say that too?
-Quite right! the professor said.
- T h e y are immoral and dreamers, these people, who can never find the right point between future and past-
It's enough to make them throw up.
- W e l l , I d o n ' t think I ' d claim t h a t -
-Y es, but you do. They would be capable of committing crazy good or bad deeds because the present means nothing to them.
He really ought to say: they could commit crazy deeds out ofimpatience.
The art historian did not quite know how to answer this, and found that Ulrich did not understand him.
The restlessness grew. The summer heat increased. The sun burned like a fire to the edge of the earth. The elements filled existence com- pletely, so that there was hardly anyplace left for anything human.
It happened that toward evening, when the burning air already cast light, cooling folds, they went strolling on the steep banks. Yellow bushes of broom sprang up from the embers of the stones and stood there directly before the soul; the mountains gray as donkeys' backs with the washed-out green that the grass growing on the white limestone cast over them; the laurel's hot dark green. The parched glance resting on the laurel sank into cooler and cooler depths. Countless bees hummed;
From the Posthurrwus Papers · 1 4 6 9
it fused into a deep metallic tone that shot off little arrows whenever, in a sudden turn, they flew by one's ear. Heroic, tremendous, the ap- proaching line of mountains, in three waves one behind the other, smoothly canted, breaking off steeply.
-Heroic? Ulrich asked. -O r is it only what we have always hated because it was supposed to be heroic? Endlessly portrayed, this painted and engraved, this Greek, this Roman, this Nazarene, classicistic land- scape-this virtuous, professorial, idealistic landscape? And ultimately it impresses us only because we've now encountered it in reality? The way one despises an influential man and is nevertheless flattered because one knows him?
But the few things here to which the space belonged respected each other; they kept their distance from each other and did not saturate na- ture with impressions, as they do in Germany. No mocking helped; as only high in the mountains, where everything earthly keeps diminishing, this landscape was no longer a place of human habitation but a piece of the sky, to whose folds a few species of insects still clung.
And on the other side (of this humility) lay the sea. The great beloved, adorned with the peacock's tail. The beloved with the oval mirror. The opened eye of the beloved. The beloved become God. The pitiless chal- lenge. The eyes still hurt and had to look away, pierced by the shattering spears of light speeding back from the sea. But soon the sun will be lower. It will only be a circumscribed sea of liquid silver, with violets floating on it. And then one must look out over the seal Then one has to look at it. Agathe and Ulrich feared this moment. What can one do to prevail against this monstrous, observing, stimulating, jealous rival? How should they love each other? Sink to their knees? As they had done at first? Spread out their arms? Scream? Can they embrace each other? It is all so ridiculous, as if one were trying to shout angrily at someone while nearby all the bells of a cathedral are pealing! The fearful empti- ness again closed in on them from all sides.
So it ends the way it begins!
But at such a moment one can shoot the other, or stab him, since his death cry will be muffled.
Ulrich shook his head. -One must be somewhat limited to find na- ture beautiful. To be someone like that fellow down there, who would
1470 · THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
rather talk himself than listen to someone better. One is forcibly re- minded by nature ofschool exercises and bad poems, and one has to be capable of transforming it at the moment of observation into an anoint- ing. Otherwise one collapses. One must always be stupider than nature in order to stand up to it, and must gossip in order not to lose the language.
Fortunately, their skin could not stand the heat. Sweat broke out. It created a diversion and an excuse; they felt themselves relieved of their mission.
But as they were walking back Agathe noticed that she was looking forward to the certainty ofmeeting the traveling stranger down below in front of the hotel. Ulrich was certainly right, but there was a great conso- lation in the babbling, insistently pushy company ofthis person.
Afternoons, in the room, there were fearful moments. Between the extended red-striped awning and the stone railing of the balcony lay a blue, burning band the width of one's hand. The smooth warmth, the severely attenuated brightness, had dislodged everything from the room that was not fixed. Ulrich and Agathe had not brought along anything to read; that had been their plan; they had left behind ideas, normal cir- cumstances, everything having any connection-no matter how saga- cious-with the ordinary human way of living: now their souls lay there like two hard-baked bricks from which every drop ofwater has escaped. This contemplative natural existence had made them unexpectedly de- pendent on the most primitive elements.
Finally, a day of rain came. The wind lashed. Time became long in a cool way. They straightened up like plants. They kissed each other. The words they exchanged refreshed them. They were happy again. To al- ways be waiting every moment for the next moment is only a habit; dam it up, and time comes forth like a lake. The hours still flow, but they are broader than they are long. Evening falls, but no time has passed.
But then a second rainy day followed; a third. What had seemed a new intensity glided downward as a conclusion. The smallest help, the belief that this weather was a personal dispensation, an extraordinary fate, and the room is full of the strange light from the water, or hollowed out like a die of dark silver. But if no help comes: what can one talk about? One can still smile at the other from far apart-embrace- weaken the other to the point of that fatigue which resembles death, which separates the exhausted like an endless plain; one can call across: I love you, or: You are beautiful, or: I would rather die with you than live without you, or:
From the Posthumous Papers · 1471
What a miracle that you and I, two such separate beings, have been blown together. And one can weep from neJVousness when, quite softly, one begins to fall prey to boredom . . .
Fearful violence of repetition, fearful godhead! Attraction of empti- ness, always sucking in like the funnel of a whirlpool whose walls yield. Kiss me, and I will bite gently and harder and harder and wilder and wilder, ever more drunken, more greedy for blood, listening into your lips for the plea for mercy, climbing down the ravine of pain until at the end we are hanging in the vertical wall and are afraid of ourselves. Then the deep pantings of breath come to our aid, threatening to abandon the body; the gleam in the eye breaks, the glance rolls from side to side, the grimace of dying begins. Astonishment and a thousandfold ecstasy in each other eddy in this rapture. Within a few minutes concentrated flight through bliss and death, ending, renewed, bodies swinging like howling bells. But at the end one knows: it was only a profound Fall into a world in which it drifts downward on a hundred steps of repetition. Agathe moaned: You will leave me! - N o ! Darling! Conspirator! Ulrich was searching for expressions o f enthusiasm, etc. - N o - A g a t h e softly fended him off-I can't feel anything anymore . . . ! Since it had now been spoken, Ulrich became cold and gave up the effort.
-Ifwe had believed in God-Agathe went on-we would have un- derstood what the mountains and flowers were saying.
-Are you thinking ofLindner? Ulrich probedI What? Lindner . . . ! Ulrich immediately interjected jealously.
However much they had been preparing themselves for this every day for weeks, they feared that in this second they had lost their reason. But everything in them was clear. Not a vision. Rather an excessive clarity. And yet they still seemed to have lost and put aside not only their reason but all their capacities; no thoughts stirred in them, they could form no purpose, all words had receded far away, the will lifeless; everything that stirs in the individual was rolled up inertly, like leaves in a burning calm. But this deathlike impotence did not weigh them down; it was as if the lid ofa sarcophagus had been rolled offthem. Whatever was to be heard during the night sobbed without sound or measure, whatever they looked at was without form or mood and yet contained within itself the joyous delight of all forms and moods. It was really strangely simple: as their powers became circumscribed all boundaries had disappeared, and since they no longer felt any kind of distinctions, neither in themselves nor about objects, they had become one.
They gazed around cautiously. It was almost painful. They were quite confused, far away from themselves, set down in a distance in which they lost themselves. They saw without light and heard without sound. Their soul was as excessively stretched as a hand that loses all its power, their tongue was as if cut off. But this pain was as sweet as a strange, living clarity.
? It was like a pain grating on their sensibilities, and yet could be called more a sweetness than a pain, for there was no vexation in it but a pecu- liar, quite supranatural comfort.
And they further perceived that the circumscribing powers in them were not lost at all, but in reality inverted, and with them all boundaries had been inverted. They noticed that they had not become mute at all but were speaking, but they were not choosing words but were being chosen by words; no thought stirred in them, but the whole world was full of marvelous thoughts; they thought that they, and things as well, were no longer mutually displacing and repelling hermetic bodies, but opened and allied forms. Their glances, which in their whole lives had
From the Posthu11U)Us Papers · 1457
followed only the small patterns that objects and people form against the enormous background, had suddenly reversed, and the enormous back- ground played with the patterns of life like an ocean with tiny matches.
Agathe lay half fainting against Ulrich's chest. She felt at this moment embraced by her brother in such a distant, silent, and pure fashion that there was nothing at all like it. Their bodies did not move and were not altered, and yet a sensual happiness flowed through them, the like of which they had never experienced. It was not an idea and not imagined! Wherever they touched each other, whether on their hips, their hands, or a strand of hair, they interpenetrated one another.
They were both convinced at this moment that they were no longer subject to the distinctions of humankind. They had overcome the stage of desire, which expends its energy on an action and a brief intensifica- tion, and their fulfillment impinged on them not only in specific places but in all the places of their bodies, as fire does not become less when other fires kindle from it. They were submerged in this fire that fills up everything; swimming in it as in a sea of desire, and flying in it as in a heaven of rapture.
Agathe wept with happiness. Whenever they moved, the recollection that they were still two dropped like a grain of incense into the sweet fire of life and dissolved in it; these were perhaps the happiest moments, where they were not entirely one.
Originally also supposed to come here: . . . I'm in love and don't know with whom . . . I'm neither faithful, nor unfaithful, what am I then.
For they felt, hovering more strongly over this hour than over others a breath of grief and transitoriness, something shadowy and unreal, a- being robbed, a cruelty, a fearful tension of uncertain forces against the fear of being transformed once more. Finally, when they felt the condi- tion fade, they separated wordlessly and in utter exhaustion.
The next morning, Ulrich and Agathe had separated without having made plans, and did not see each other the entire day; they could not do otherwise; the emotions of the night were still ebbing away and taking them with them; both felt the need to come to terms with themselves alone, without noticing that this entailed a contradiction of the experi- ence that had overpowered them. Involuntarily they went off far across the countryside in opposite directions, stopped in places at different
1458 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
times, sought a resting place in view of the sea, and thought of each other.
It may be called strange that their love immediately involved the need for separation, but this love was so great that they mistrusted it and de- sired this test.
Can they still separate? How can it be done?
Now one can dream. Lie under a bush and the bees buzz; or stare into the weaving heat, the thin air. The senses doze off, and in the body memories shine forth again like the stars after sunset. The body is again touched and kissed, and the magic line of demarcation that otherwise still distinguishes the strongest memories from reality is transcended by these soft I dreaming memories. They push time and space aside like a curtain and unite the lovers not only in thought but physically, not with their heavy bodies but with inwardly altered ones consisting entirely of tender mobility. But only when one thinks that during this union, which is more perfect and blissful than bodily union, one has no idea what the other person has just been doing, or what he will be doing the next mo- ment, does the mystery attain its greatest depth. Ulrich assumed that Agathe had remained behind in the hotel. He saw her standing on the white square in front of the white building, speaking with the manager. It was false. Or perhaps she was standing with the young German pro- fessor who had arrived and introduced himself, or was talking with Luisina, the chambermaid with the lovely eyes, and laughing at her pert, funny answers. That Agathe was now able to laugh! It destroyed the Condition; a smile was just heavy enough to be home by it . . . ! I When Ulrich turned around, Agathe was suddenly really standing there. Re- ally? She had come across the stones in a great arc; her dress was flutter- ing in the wind, she cast a dark shadow on the hot ground and was laughing at Ulrich. Blissfully real reality; it hurt as much as when eyes that have been staring into the distance must quickly adapt to nearness.
Agathe sat down beside him. A lizard sat nearby; it silently darted out its tongue, a small, scurrying flame of life, beside their conversation. Ul- rich had noticed it some time before. Agathe hadn't. But when Agathe, who was afraid of small animals, caught sight of it, she was frightened and, laughing in embarrassment, scared the little creature away with a stone. And to gather courage she ran after it, clapping her hands and chasing the little beast.
Ulrich, who had been staring at the small creature as at a flickering
From the Posthurrwus Papers · 1459
magic mirror, said to himself: That we were now so different is as sad as that we were born at the same time but will die at different times. With his eyes and ears he followed this strange body, Agathe. But then he suddenly fell deeply once again into and was at the bottom of the experi- ence out of which Agathe had startled him.
He was not able to pin it down clearly, but in this flickering brightness above the stones in which everything was transformed, happiness into grief, and also griefinto happiness, the painful moment abruptly took on the secret lust of the hermaphrodite who, separated into two indepen- dent beings, finds itself again, whose secret no one who touches it sus- pects. Yet how glorious it is-Agathe's brother thought-that she is different from me, that she can do things I can't even guess at, which yet also belong to me through our secret empathy. Dreams occurred to him, which he otherwise never recalled but which must have often preoc- cupied him. Sometimes in a dream he had met the sister of a beloved, although she did not have a sister, and this strange familiar person ra- diated all the happiness ofpossession and all the happiness ofdesire. Or he heard a soft voice speaking. Or saw only the fluttering of a skirt, which most definitely belonged to a stranger, but this stranger was most definitely his beloved. As i f a disembodied, completely free attachment was only playing with these people. All at once Ulrich was startled, and thought he saw in the great brightness that the secret of love was pre- cisely this, that lovers are not one.
That belongs to the principles of profane love! Thus really already a game against itself.
"How wonderful it is, Agathe," Ulrich said, "that you can do things I can't guess at. "
"Yes," she answered, "the whole world is full of such things. As I was walking across this plateau I felt that I could now walk in every direc- tion. "
"But why did you come to me? "
Agathe was silent.
"It is so beautiful to be different from the way one was born," Ulrich
continued. "But I was afraid ofjust that. " He told her the dreams that he had remembered, and she knew them too.
"But why are you afraid? " Agathe asked.
"Because it occurred to me that ifit is the sense ofthese dreams-and it might well be that they signify the final memory ofit-that our desires
1460 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
aim not at making one person out of two but, on the contrary, at escap- ing from our prison, our oneness, to become two in a union, but prefera- bly twelve, a thousand, incredibly many, rather, to slip out of ourselves as in a dream, to drink life brewed to the boiling point, to be carried out of ourselves or whatever, for I can't express it vety well; then the world contains as much lust as strangeness, as much tenderness as activity, and is not an opium haze but rather an intoxication of the blood, an orgasm of battle, and the only mistake we could make would be to forget the (lustful contact of) lust of strangeness and imagine doing all sorts of things by dividing up the hurricane of love into scanty creeks flowing back and forth between two people-"
He had jumped up.
"But how would one have to be? " Agathe asked pensively and simply. It pained him that she could immediately appropriate his half-loved and half-cursed idea. "One would have to be able to give," she went on, "without taking away. To be such that love does not become less when it's divided. Then that would be possible too.
Not to treat love as a treasure"-she laughed-"the way it's already laid down in language! "
Ulrich was picking up head-sized stones and flinging them from the cliff into the sea, which squirted up a tiny spray; he had not exercised his muscles for a long time.
"But . . . ? " Agathe said. "Isn't what you're saying simply what one reads fairly often, drinking the world in great drafts of desire? To want to be a thousandfold, because once isn't enough? " She was parodying it a little because she suddenly realized that she did not like it.
"No! " Ulrich shouted back. "It's never what others say! " He flung the large stone he was holding in his hand so angrily to the ground that the loose limestone exploded. "We forgot ourselves," he said gently, grasp- ing Agathe under the arm and pulling her away. "It would still have to be a sister and a brother, even if they're divided into a thousand pieces. -Anyway, it's just an idea. "
Meanwhile days came when only the surface stirred. On the sparkling damp stones in the sea. A silent being: a fish, flowerlike in the water. Agathe romped after it from stone to stone until it dived under, darting into the darkness like an arrow, and disappeared. Well? Ulrich thought. Agathe was standing out on the rocks, he on the shore; a melody of eventfulness broke off, and a new one must carty on: How will she turn around, how smile back to the shore? Beautifully. Like all perfection. With total charm in her motion is how Agathe did it; the insights of the
From the Posthumous Papers · 1461
orchestra of her beauty, though it seemed to be making music without a conductor, were always delightful.
And yet all perfected beauty-an animal, a painting, a woman-is nothing more than the final piece in a circle; an arc is completed, one sees it but would like to know the circle. If it is one of life's familiar circles, for instance that of a great man, then a noble horse or a beauti- ful woman is like the clasp in a belt, which closes it and for a moment seems to contain the entire phenomenon; in the same way one can be smitten with a lovely farm horse, because in him as in a focusing mir- ror the entire heavy-footed beauty of the field and its people is re- peated. But if there is nothing behind it? Nothing more than is behind the rays of the sun dancing on the stones? If this infinitude of water and sky is pitilessly open? Then one might almost believe that beauty is something that secretly negates, something incomplete and incom- pletable, a happiness without purpose, without sense. But what if it lacks everything? Then beauty is a torture, something to laugh and cry over, a tickling to make one roll around in the sand, with Apollo's arrow in one's side.
Hatred of beauty. Sense of urgent sexual desire: to destroy beauty.
The brightness of such days was like smoke, which the clarity of the nights wiped away.
Agathe had somewhat less imagination than Ulrich. Because she had not thought as much as he had her emotions were not as volatile as his, but burned like a flame rising straight out of the particular ground on which she happened to be standing. The daring nature of their flight, the conscience made somewhat anxious by the fear of discovery, and finally this hiding place in a flower basket between the porous limestone wall, sea, and sky, at times gave her a high-spirited and childlike cheerfulness. She then treated even their strange experience as an adventure: a for- bidden space within herself over whose enclosure one spies, or into which one forces one's way, with beating heart, burning neck, and heavy soles weighed down with clods of damp earth from the path one has hurriedly followed in secret.
In this way very indirect suggestion of repeated coitus.
1462 ·THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
She sometimes had a playful way of allowing herself to be touched, with opened-even-when-closed eyes; of reappearing; a tenderness that was not to be stilled. He secretly obseJVed her, saw this play of love with the body, which has the captivation of a smile and the oppressive quality of a force of nature, for the first time, or was moved by it for the first time. Or there were hours when she did not look at him, was cold, al- most angry with him; because she was too agitated; like someone in a boat not daring to move, so it was in her body-afterward, every time. Because the connection does not function. Or afterreactions; at first a blocking and then, for no apparent reason, an afterflood. It was thrilling and charming to let oneself be cradled by these inspirations; they short- ened the hours but they forced an optic of nearness and minute obseJVa- tion. Ulrich resisted this. It was a leftover piece of earth drifting in the liquid fire and clouding it; a temptation to explanations such as that Agathe had never learned the proper connection between love and sex. As with most people, the entire power of the sexual had first come to- gether with a spark of inclination at the time she had married Hagauer, who was not yet abhorrent to her. Instead of stumbling into a storm with someone I almost only in the company of I accompanied by someone almost as impersonal as the elements, and only then noticing as a still nameless surprise that this person's legs are not clothed like one's own and that one's soul is beckoning one to change one's hiding place . . .
But such thoughts, too, were like singing in a false key. Ulrich did not allow himself this kind of understanding. Understanding a person one loves cannot involve spying on that person but must come pouring from an overflow of auspicious inspirations. One may only recognize those things that enrich. One makes a gift of qualities in the unshakable secu- rity of a predetermined harmony, a separation that has never b e e n -
Especially when ethical magnanimity is stimulated by it. Not the see- ing or not seeing of weaknesses, but the large motion in which they float without significance.
An ancient column-thrown down at the time of Venice, Greece, or Rome-lay among the stones and the broom; every groove of its shaft and capital deepened by the ray-sharp graving tool of the midday shad- ows. Lying next to it belonged to the great hours of love.
Four eyes watching. Nothing but noon, column, four eyes. If the glance of two eyes sees one picture, one world: why not the glance of four?
From the Posthumous Papers · 1463
When two pairs of eyes look long into each other, one person crosses over to the other on the bridge of glances, and all that remains is a feel- ing that no longer has a body.
When in a secret hour two pairs of eyes look at an object and come together in it-every object hovering deep down in a feeling, and ob- jects standing only as firmly as they do if this deep ground is hard-then the rigid world begins to move, softly and incessantly. It rises and falls restlessly with the blood. The fraternal twins looked at each other. In the bright light it could not be made out whether they were still breathing or had been lying there for a thousand years like the stones. Whether the stone column was lying there or had risen up in the light without a sound and was floating.
There is a significant difference in the way one looks at people and the way one looks at things. Every time after this when they looked at some- one in the hotel: the play of facial expressions of someone with whom one is talking becomes unspeakably alienating if one observes it as an objective process, and not as an ongoing exchange of signals between two souls; we are accustomed to see things lying mutely where they are, and we consider it a disturbing hallucination if they take on a more dy- namic relation to us. But it is only we ourselves who are looking at them in such a way that the small changes in their physiognomies are not an- swered by any alterations in our emotions, and to change this nothing more is needed, basically, than that we not look at the world intellectu- ally but that objects arouse in us our moral emotions instead of our sense-based surveying equipment. At such moments the excitement in which a glimpse brings us something and enriches us becomes so strong that nothing appears real except for a hovering condition, which, beyond the eyes, condenses into objects, and on this side of the eyes condenses into ideas and feelings, without these two sides being separable from each other. Whatever the soul bestows comes forward; whatever loses this power dissipates before one's eyes.
In this flickering silence among the stones there was a panic horror. The world seemed to be only the outer aspect of a speciflc inner atti- tude, and interchangeable with it. But world and self were not solid; a scaffolding sunk into soft depths; mutually helping each other out of a formlessness. Agathe said softly to Ulrich: "Are you yourself or are you not? I know nothing of it. I am incognizant of it and I am incognizant of myself. "
It was the terror: The world depended on her, and she did not know who she was.
1464 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
Ulrich was silent.
Agathe continued: "I am in love, but I do not know with whom. I am neither faithful nor unfaithful. What am I then? My heart is at once full oflove and emptied oflove . . . ," she whispered. The horror ofa noon- time silence seemed to have clutched her heart.
Over and over the great test was the sea. Time and again, when they had climbed down the narrow slope with its many paths, its quantity of laurel, its broom, its figs, and its many bees, and stepped out onto the powerful surface spread out above the ocean, it was like the first great chord sounding after the tuning up ofan orchestra. How would one have to be to endure this constantly? Ulrich propos. ed that they tty setting up a tent here. But he did not mean it seriously; it would have frightened him. There were no longer any opponents around, up here they were alone; the rebuffs one receives as long as one must contradict the de- mands ofothers and the habits ofone's own conscience were used up; in this final battle it was a matter of their resolve.
The sea was like a merci- less beloved and rival; every minute was an annihilating exploration of conscience. They were afraid of collapsing unconscious before this ex- panse that swallowed up every resistance.
This monstrously extended sight was not to be borne without its becoming somewhat boring. This being responsible for every slightest motion was-they had to confess-rather empty, if one compared it with the cheerfulness of those hours when they made no such claims on themselves and their bodies played with the soul like a beautiful young animal rolling a ball back and forth.
One day Ulrich said: It's broad and pastoral; there's something of a pastor about it! They laughed. Then they were startled by the scorn that they had inflicted upon themselves.
The hotel had a little bell tower; in the middle ofits roof. Around one o'clock this bell rang for lunch. Since they were still almost the only guests, they did not need to respond right away, but the cook was in- dicating that he was ready. The bright sounds sliced into the stillness like a sharp knife contacting skin, which had shuddered beforehand but at this moment becomes calm. "How lovely it is, really," Ulrich said, as they climbed down on one of these days, "to be driven by necessity. The way one drives geese from behind with a stick, or entices hens from in front with feed. And where evetything doesn't happen mysteriously-" The blue-white trembling air really shuddered like goose pimples ifone
From the Posthumous Papers · 1465
stared into it for a long time. At that time memories were beginning to torture Ulrich vividly; he suddenly saw before him every statue and every architectural detail of one of those cities overloaded with such things that he had visited years ago; Niimberg was before him, and Amiens, although they had never captivated him; some large red book or other that he must have seen years earlier in an exhibit would not go away from before his eyes; a slender tanned boy, perhaps only the counter his imagination had conjured up to Agathe, but in such a way as if he had once really met him but did not know where, preoccupied his mind; ideas that he had had at some time and long forgotten; soundless, shadowy things, things properly forgotten, eddied up in this south of stillness and seized possession of the desolate expanse.
The impatience that from the beginning had been mingled with all this beauty began to rage in Ulrich.
He could be sitting before a stone, lost to the world, sunk in contem- plation, and be tortured by this raging impatience. He had come to the end, had assimilated everything into himself and ran the danger of be- ginning, all alone, to speak aloud in order to recite everything to himself once again. "Yes, you're sitting here," his thoughts said, "and you could tell yourself once again what you're looking at. " The stones are of a quite peculiar stone-green, and their image is mirrored in the water. Quite right. Exactly as one says. And the stones are shaped like boxes. . . . But it's all no use, and I'd like to leave. It is so beautiful!
And he remembered: at home, sometimes only years later, and some- times purely by accident, if one no longer has any idea how everything was, suddenly a light falls from behind, from such past things, and the heart does everything as if in a dream. He longed for the past.
"It's quite simple," he said to Agathe, "and everyone knows it, we're the only ones who don't: the imagination is stimulated only by what one does not yet possess or no longer has; the body wants to have, but the soul does not want to have. Now I understand the tremendous efforts people make to this end. How stupid it is for this ordinary fellow, this art traveler, to compare this flower to a jewel, or that stone over there to a flower: as if the truly intelligent thing to do wouldn't be to transform them for a brief moment into something else. And how stupid all our ideals would be, since every ideal, if one takes it seriously, contradicts some other ideal; thou shalt not kill, therefore perish? Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's goods, so live in poverty? As i f their sense did not lie precisely in the impossibility of carrying them out, which ignites the soul! And how good it is for religion that one can neither see nor com- prehend God! But which world? A cold, dark strip between the two fires of the Not-yet and the No-longer! "
1466 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
"A world to be afraid of oneself in," Agathe said. "You're right. " She said this quite seriously, and there was real bitterness in her eyes.
- A n d if it is so! Ulrich laughed. - I t occurs to me for the first time in my life that we would have to be terribly afraid of being tricked if Heaven were not to dangle before us an end of the world that does not exist. Evidently everything absolute, hundred-percent, true, is com- pletely monstrous.
-Between two people as well; you mean between us?
- I now understand so well what visionaries are: food without salt is unbearable, but salt without food is a poison; visionaries are people who want to live from salt alone. Is that right?
Agathe shrugged her shoulders.
- Look at our chambermaid, a cheerful stupid creature smelling of cheap soap. A short time ago I was watching her as she made up the room; she seemed to me as pretty as a freshly washed sky.
It comforted Ulrich to confess this, and a small worm of disgust crawled across Agathe's mouth. Ulrich repeated it; he did not want to drown out this small disharmony with the great peal of the dark bell. "It is a disharmony, isn't it? And any trick will do for the soul to keep itself fruitful. Sometimes it dies from love several times in succession. B u t " - and now he said something he believed to be a consolation, indeed a new love-"if everything is so sad and a deception, and one can no lon- ger believe in anything: isn't that just when we really need one another? The folk song about the little sister"-he smiled-"quiet, pensive music that nothing can drown out; an accompanying music; a love of loveless- ness that softly reaches out its hands . . . ? "
Time is the greatest cynic.
Here sexuality and camaraderie!
A cool, quiet, gray aneroticism?
Agathe was silent. Something had been extinguished. She was inordi- nately tired. Her heart had suddenly been snatched away from her, and she was tortured by an unbearable fear of a vacuum within, of her un- worthiness and her regressive transformation. This is the way ecstatics
From the Posthurrwus Papers · 1467
feel when God withdraws from them and nothing responds any longer to their zealous appeals.
The art traveler, as they called him, was a professor returning from Italian cities, who had the butterfly-net skin and botanizing drum-beat- ing mind of the aspiring art historian. He had stopped over here for a few days to rest before his return and to order his notes. As they were the only guests, he had already introduced himself to the pair on the first day. They chatted briefly after meals, or when they met in the vicinity of the hotel, and there was no denying that although Ulrich made fun of him, at certain moments this man brought them welcome relaxation.
He was strongly convinced of his significance as man and scholar, and from their first encounter, after finding that the couple were not on their honeymoon, he had courted Agathe with great determination. He said to her: You resemble the beautiful--- in the painting b y ---, and all the women who have this expression, which repeats itselfin their hair and in the folds of their gowns, have the quality o f - - : As she was telling this to Ulrich Agathe had already forgotten the names, but for a stranger to know what one was was as pleasant as the firm pressure of a masseur, while one knew oneself to be so diffuse that one could barely distinguish oneself from the noontime silence.
This art traveler said: Women's function is to make us dream; they are a stratagem of nature for the fertilization of the masculine mind. He gleamed with self-satisfaction at his paradox, which inverted the sense of fertilization. Ulrich replied: But there are still distinctions in kind among these dreams!
This man asserted that in embracing a "really great female" one must be able to think of Michelangelo's Creation. "You pull the blanket of the Sistine ceiling over yourself and underneath it you're naked except for the blue stockings," Ulrich ridiculed. No. He admits that canying this out calls for tact, but in principle such people could be "twice as big" as others. "In . the last analysis, the goal of all ethical life is to unite our ac- tions with the highest that we bear within us! " It was not so easy to con- tradict this theoretically, although practically speaking it was ridiculous.
- I have discovered-the art historian said-that there are, and in the course of history always have been, two sorts of people. I call them the static and the dynamic. Or, ifyou prefer, the Imperial and the Faustian. People who are static can feel happiness as something present. They are somehow characterized by balance, equilibrium. What they have done and what they will do blends into what they are doing at the moment, is harmonized, and has a shape like a painting or a melody; has, so to speak, a second dimension, shines in every moment as surface. The Pope, for
1468 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
example, or the Dalai Lama; it is simply unimaginable that they would do something that was not stretched on the frame of their significance. On the other hand, the dynamic people: always tearing themselves loose, merely glancing backward and forward, rolling out of themselves, insensitive people with missions, insatiable, pushy, luckless-whom the static ones conquer over and over in order to keep world history going: in a word, he hinted that he was capable of carrying both strains within himself.
-T ell m e-Ulrich asked, as ifhe were quite serious-are not the dy- namic people also those who in love seem not to feel anything because they have either already loved in their imagination or will only love what has slipped away from them again? Couldn't one say that too?
-Quite right! the professor said.
- T h e y are immoral and dreamers, these people, who can never find the right point between future and past-
It's enough to make them throw up.
- W e l l , I d o n ' t think I ' d claim t h a t -
-Y es, but you do. They would be capable of committing crazy good or bad deeds because the present means nothing to them.
He really ought to say: they could commit crazy deeds out ofimpatience.
The art historian did not quite know how to answer this, and found that Ulrich did not understand him.
The restlessness grew. The summer heat increased. The sun burned like a fire to the edge of the earth. The elements filled existence com- pletely, so that there was hardly anyplace left for anything human.
It happened that toward evening, when the burning air already cast light, cooling folds, they went strolling on the steep banks. Yellow bushes of broom sprang up from the embers of the stones and stood there directly before the soul; the mountains gray as donkeys' backs with the washed-out green that the grass growing on the white limestone cast over them; the laurel's hot dark green. The parched glance resting on the laurel sank into cooler and cooler depths. Countless bees hummed;
From the Posthurrwus Papers · 1 4 6 9
it fused into a deep metallic tone that shot off little arrows whenever, in a sudden turn, they flew by one's ear. Heroic, tremendous, the ap- proaching line of mountains, in three waves one behind the other, smoothly canted, breaking off steeply.
-Heroic? Ulrich asked. -O r is it only what we have always hated because it was supposed to be heroic? Endlessly portrayed, this painted and engraved, this Greek, this Roman, this Nazarene, classicistic land- scape-this virtuous, professorial, idealistic landscape? And ultimately it impresses us only because we've now encountered it in reality? The way one despises an influential man and is nevertheless flattered because one knows him?
But the few things here to which the space belonged respected each other; they kept their distance from each other and did not saturate na- ture with impressions, as they do in Germany. No mocking helped; as only high in the mountains, where everything earthly keeps diminishing, this landscape was no longer a place of human habitation but a piece of the sky, to whose folds a few species of insects still clung.
And on the other side (of this humility) lay the sea. The great beloved, adorned with the peacock's tail. The beloved with the oval mirror. The opened eye of the beloved. The beloved become God. The pitiless chal- lenge. The eyes still hurt and had to look away, pierced by the shattering spears of light speeding back from the sea. But soon the sun will be lower. It will only be a circumscribed sea of liquid silver, with violets floating on it. And then one must look out over the seal Then one has to look at it. Agathe and Ulrich feared this moment. What can one do to prevail against this monstrous, observing, stimulating, jealous rival? How should they love each other? Sink to their knees? As they had done at first? Spread out their arms? Scream? Can they embrace each other? It is all so ridiculous, as if one were trying to shout angrily at someone while nearby all the bells of a cathedral are pealing! The fearful empti- ness again closed in on them from all sides.
So it ends the way it begins!
But at such a moment one can shoot the other, or stab him, since his death cry will be muffled.
Ulrich shook his head. -One must be somewhat limited to find na- ture beautiful. To be someone like that fellow down there, who would
1470 · THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
rather talk himself than listen to someone better. One is forcibly re- minded by nature ofschool exercises and bad poems, and one has to be capable of transforming it at the moment of observation into an anoint- ing. Otherwise one collapses. One must always be stupider than nature in order to stand up to it, and must gossip in order not to lose the language.
Fortunately, their skin could not stand the heat. Sweat broke out. It created a diversion and an excuse; they felt themselves relieved of their mission.
But as they were walking back Agathe noticed that she was looking forward to the certainty ofmeeting the traveling stranger down below in front of the hotel. Ulrich was certainly right, but there was a great conso- lation in the babbling, insistently pushy company ofthis person.
Afternoons, in the room, there were fearful moments. Between the extended red-striped awning and the stone railing of the balcony lay a blue, burning band the width of one's hand. The smooth warmth, the severely attenuated brightness, had dislodged everything from the room that was not fixed. Ulrich and Agathe had not brought along anything to read; that had been their plan; they had left behind ideas, normal cir- cumstances, everything having any connection-no matter how saga- cious-with the ordinary human way of living: now their souls lay there like two hard-baked bricks from which every drop ofwater has escaped. This contemplative natural existence had made them unexpectedly de- pendent on the most primitive elements.
Finally, a day of rain came. The wind lashed. Time became long in a cool way. They straightened up like plants. They kissed each other. The words they exchanged refreshed them. They were happy again. To al- ways be waiting every moment for the next moment is only a habit; dam it up, and time comes forth like a lake. The hours still flow, but they are broader than they are long. Evening falls, but no time has passed.
But then a second rainy day followed; a third. What had seemed a new intensity glided downward as a conclusion. The smallest help, the belief that this weather was a personal dispensation, an extraordinary fate, and the room is full of the strange light from the water, or hollowed out like a die of dark silver. But if no help comes: what can one talk about? One can still smile at the other from far apart-embrace- weaken the other to the point of that fatigue which resembles death, which separates the exhausted like an endless plain; one can call across: I love you, or: You are beautiful, or: I would rather die with you than live without you, or:
From the Posthumous Papers · 1471
What a miracle that you and I, two such separate beings, have been blown together. And one can weep from neJVousness when, quite softly, one begins to fall prey to boredom . . .
Fearful violence of repetition, fearful godhead! Attraction of empti- ness, always sucking in like the funnel of a whirlpool whose walls yield. Kiss me, and I will bite gently and harder and harder and wilder and wilder, ever more drunken, more greedy for blood, listening into your lips for the plea for mercy, climbing down the ravine of pain until at the end we are hanging in the vertical wall and are afraid of ourselves. Then the deep pantings of breath come to our aid, threatening to abandon the body; the gleam in the eye breaks, the glance rolls from side to side, the grimace of dying begins. Astonishment and a thousandfold ecstasy in each other eddy in this rapture. Within a few minutes concentrated flight through bliss and death, ending, renewed, bodies swinging like howling bells. But at the end one knows: it was only a profound Fall into a world in which it drifts downward on a hundred steps of repetition. Agathe moaned: You will leave me! - N o ! Darling! Conspirator! Ulrich was searching for expressions o f enthusiasm, etc. - N o - A g a t h e softly fended him off-I can't feel anything anymore . . . ! Since it had now been spoken, Ulrich became cold and gave up the effort.
-Ifwe had believed in God-Agathe went on-we would have un- derstood what the mountains and flowers were saying.
-Are you thinking ofLindner? Ulrich probedI What? Lindner . . . ! Ulrich immediately interjected jealously.
