No More Learning

- O h , my dear friend, don't call me Colonel!
There was something new in her voice. Ulrich stepped close to her. She had taken off her mask. He noticed two tears that fell slowly from her eyes. This tall, weeping officer was totally ridiculous, but also very
1438 • THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
beautiful. He seized her hands and gently asked what the matter was. Diotima could not answer; a sob she was trying to suppress stirred the bright sheen of the white riding breeches that reached far up beneath her flung-back coat. They stood thus in the half-darkness of the light sinking into the lawns. - W e can't talk here, Ulrich whispered. - C o m e with me somewhere else. If you permit, I'll take you to my house. Di- otima tried to draw her hand away from his, but when this didn't work she let it be. Ulrich felt by this gesture what he. could hardly believe, that his hour with this woman had come. He grasped Diotima respectably around the waist and led her, supporting her tenderly, deeper into the shadows and then around to the exit. I A kiss right here?
Before they again emerged into the light, Diotima had ofcourse dried her tears and mastered her excitement, at least outwardly. -You've never noticed, Ulrich-she said in a low voice-that I've loved you for a long time; like a brother. I don't have anyone I can talk to. Since there were people nearby, Ulrich only murmured: -Come, we'll talk. But in the taxi he did not say a word, and Diotima, anxiously holding her coat closed, moved away from him into the comer. She had made up her mind to confess her woes to him, and when Diotima resolved to do something it was done; although in her whole life she had never been with another man at night than Section ChiefTuzzi, she followed Ulrich because before she had run into him she had made up her mind to have a long talk with him if he was there, and felt/had a great, melancholy longing for such a talk. The excitement ofcarrying out this firm resolve had an unfortunate physical effect on her; it was literally true that her resolve lay in her stomach like some indigestible food, and when (in ad- dition) the excitement suppressed all the juices that could dissolve it, Diotima felt cold sweat on her forehead and neck as iffrom nausea. She was diverted from herself only by the impression that arriving at Ulrich's made on her; the small grounds, where the electric bulbs on the tree trunks formed an alley, seemed to her charming as they strolled through; the entry hall with the antlers and the small baroque staircase reminded her of hunting horns, packs of hounds, and horsemen, a n d - since nighttime reinforces such impressions and conceals their weak- nesses-out of admiration for her cousin she could not understand why he had never showed off this house but had, as it always seemed, only made fun of it.
Ulrich laughed, and got something warm to drink. -Looked at more closely, it's a stupid frivolity-he said-but let's not talk about me. Tell me what's been happening to you. Diotima could not utter a word; this had never happened to her before; she sat in her uniform and felt il- luminated by the many lights that Ulrich had turned on. It confused her.
From the Posthurrwus Papers · 1439
- S o Arnheim has acted badly? Ulrich tried to help.
Diotima nodded. Then she began. Arnheim was free to do as he pleased. Nothing had ever happened between her and him that would, in the ordinary sense, have imposed any obligations on him or given him any privileges.
-But ifI've observed rightly, the situation between you had already gone so far that you were to get a divorce and many him? Ulrich inter- jected.
- O h , many? the Colonel said. - W e might perhaps have got mar- ried, ifhe had behaved himselfbetter; that can come like a ring that one finally slips on loosely, but it ought not to be a band that binds!
- B u t what did Arnheim do? Do you mean his escapade with Leona? - D o you know this person?
-Barely.
- I s she beautiful?
-One might call her that.
-Does she have charm? Intelligence? What sort ofintelligence does she have?
-But, my dear cousin, she has no intelligence of any kind whatso- ever!
Diotima crossed one leg over the other and allowed herself to be handed a cigarette; she had gathered a little courage. -W as it out of protest that you appeared at the party in this outfit? Ulrich asked. - A m I right? Nothing else would have moved you to do such a thing. A kind of Overman in you enticed you, after men failed you: I can't find the right words.
-But, my dear friend, Diotima began, and suddenly behind the smoke of the cigarette tears were again running down her face. - I was the oldest of three daughters. All my youth I had to play the mother; we had no mother; I always had to answer all the questions, know every- thing, watch over everything. I married Section ChiefTuzzi because he was a good deal older than I and already beginning to lose his hair. I wanted a person I could finally subject myself to, from whose hand my brow would receive grace or displeasure. I am not unfeminine. I am not so proud as you know me. I confess to you that during the early years I felt bliss in Tuzzi's arms, like a little girl that death abducts to God the father. But for . . . years I've had to despise him. He's a vulgar utilitarian. He doesn't see or understand anything about anything else. Do you know what that means!
Diotima had jumped up; her coat remained lying in the chair; her hair hung over her cheeks like a schoolgirl's; her left hand rested now in manly fashion on the pommel of her saber, now in womanly fashion
1440 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
went through her hair; her right arm made large oratorical flourishes; she advanced one leg or closed her legs tightly together, and the round belly in the white riding breeches had-and this lent a remarkably comic effect-not the slightest irregularity such as a man betrays. Ulrich now first noticed that Diotima was slightly drunk. In her doleful mood she had, at the party, tossed off several glasses of hard spirits one after an- other, and now, after Ulrich, too, had offered her alcohol, the tipsiness had been freshly touched up. But her intoxication was only great enough to erase the inhibitions and fantasies of which she normally consisted, and really only exposed something like her natural nature: not all ofit, to be sure, for as soon as Diotima came to speak of Arnheim, she began to talk about her soul.
She had given her entire soul to this man. Did Ulrich believe that in such questions an Austrian has a finer sensibility, more culture?
-No.
-But perhaps he does! - Arnheim was certainly an important per- son. But he had failed ignominiously. Ignominiouslyi-I gave him ev- erything, he exploited me, and now I'm miserable!
It was clear that the suprahuman and suggestive love play with Arn- heim, rising physically to no more than a kiss but mentally to a bound- less, floating duet of souls (a love play that had lasted many weeks, during which Diotima's quarrel with her husband had kept it pure), had so stirred up Diotima's natural fire that, to put it crudely, someone ought to be kicking it out from under the kettle to prevent some kind of acci- dent of exploding nerves. This was what Diotima, consciously or not, wanted from Ulrich. She had sat down on a sofa; her sword lay across her knees, the sulfurous mist of gentle rapture over her eyes, as she said: -Listen, Ulrich: you're the only person before whom I'm not ashamed. Because you're so bad. Because you're so much worse than I am.
Ulrich was in despair. The circumstances reminded him of the scene with Gerda that had taken place here weeks ago, like this one the result of a preceding overstimulation. But Diotima was no girl overstimulated by forbidden embraces. Her lips were large and open, her body damp and breathing like turned-up garden soil, and under the veil of desire her eyes were like two gates that opened into a dark corridor. But Ulrich was not thinking of Gerda at all; he saw Agathe before him, and wanted to scream with jealousy at the sight ofthis feminine inability to resist any longer, although he felt his own resistance fading from second to sec- ond. His expectation was already a mirror in which he saw the breaking of these eyes, their growing dull, as only death and love can achieve, the parting in a faint of lips between which the last breath steals away, and he could hardly still expect to feel this person sitting there before him
From the Posthumous Papers · I 44 I
collapsing completely and looking at him as he turned away in decay, like a Capuchin monk descending into the catacombs. Apparently his thoughts were already heading in a direction in which he hoped to find salvation, for with all his strength he was fighting his own collapse. He had clenched his fists and was drilling his eyes, from Diotima's view- point, into her face in a horrible way. At this moment she felt nothing but fear and approval of him. Then a distorted thought occurred to Ul- rich, or he read it from the distortion of the face into which he was look- ing. Softly and emphatically he replied: - Y o u have no idea how bad I am. I can't love you; I'd have to be able to beat you to love you!
Diotima gazed stupidly into his eyes. Ulrich hoped to wound her pride, her vanity, her reason; but perhaps it was only his natural feelings of animosity against her that had mounted up in him and to which he was giving expression. He went on: - F o r months I haven't been able to think of anything but beating you until you howl like a little child! And he suddenly seized her by the shoulders, near the neck. The imbecility ofsacrifice in her face grew. Beginnings ofwanting to say something still twitched in this face, to save the situation through some kind of de- tached comment. Beginnings of standing up twitched in her thighs, but reversed themselves before reaching their goal. Ulrich had seized her saber and half drawn it from its scabbard. - F o r God's sake! he felt. - I f nothing intervenes I'll hit her over the head with it until she gives no more signs of her damned life! He did not notice that in the meantime a decisive change had been taking place in the Napoleonic colonel. Di- otima sighed heavily as if the entire woman that she had been since her twelfth year was escaping from her bosom, and then she leaned over to the side so as to let Ulrich's desire pour itself over her in whatever way he liked.
If her face had not been there, Ulrich would at this moment have laughed out loud. But this face was indescribable the way insanity is, and just as infectious. He threw away the saber and gave her, twice, a rough smack. Diotima had expected it to be different, but the physical concus- sion nevertheless had its effect. Something started going the way clocks sometimes start when they are roughly treated, and in the ordinary course that events took from that point on something unusual was also mingled, a scream and rattle of the emotions.
Childish words and gestures from long ago mingled with it, and the few hours until morning were filled with a kind of dark, childish, and blissful dream state that freed Diotima from her character and brought her back to the time when one does not yet think about anything and everything is good. When day shone through the panes she was lying on her knees, her uniform was scattered over the floor, her hair had fallen
1442 · THE MAN WITH0 UT QUALITIES
over her face, and her cheeks were full of saliva. She could not recall how she had come to be in this position, and her awakening reason was horrified at her fading ecstasy. There was no sign of Ulrich.
[Valerie]
A young person tells himself: I'm in love. For the first time. He tells himself, he doesn't just do it; for there is in him still a little ofthe childish pride ofwanting to possess the world ofgrownups, the whole world.
He might have previously desired and possessed beautiful women. He might also have been in love before; in various ways: impatiently, boldly, cynically, passionately; and yet the moment may still come when he tells himself for the first time: I'm in love. Ulrich had at the time immediately loosened the bonds that tied him to the woman with whom this happened, so that it was almost like a breaking up. He left from one day to the next; said, We won't write much. Then wrote letters that were like the revelation of a religion, but hesitated to mail them. The more powerfully the new experience grew in him, the less he let any of it show.
He suddenly began to recall this vividly. At that time he had been quite young, an army officer, on leave in the countryside. Perhaps that was what had brought about his shift in mood. He was spiritedly court- ing a woman, older than he, the wife of a cavalry captain, his superior; she had for a long time been favorably inclined toward him, but seemed to be avoiding an adventure with this beardless little man who confused her with his unusual philosophical and passionate speeches, which came from beyond her circle. On a stroll, he suddenly seized her hand; fate had it that the woman left her hand for a moment in his as ifpowerless, and the next instant a fire blazed from arms to knees and the lightning bolt oflove felled both ofthem, so that they almost fell by the side ofthe path, to sit on its moss and passionately embrace.
The night that followed was sleepless. Ulrich had said good-bye in the evening and said: tomorrow we run away. Desire aroused and not yet satisfied threw the woman back and forth in her bed, dry as thirst, but at the same time she feared the stream that was to moisten her lips in the morning, because of its overflowing suddenness. The entire night she
From the Posthurrwus Papers · 1443
reproached herselfbecause of the other's youth, and also on account of her husband, for she was a good wife, and in the morning wept tears of reliefwhen she had handed to her Ulrich's letter, in which he took such an abrupt departure amid piled-up protestations.
Valerie had been the name of this good-natured woman, Ulrich re- membered, and at that time, in spite of his inexperience, he must have already been clearly aware that she was only the impetus, but not the content, of his sudden experience. For during that sleepless night, shot through with passionate ideas, he had been borne farther and farther away from her, and before morning came, without his rightly knowing why, his resolve was fixed to do something the like ofwhich he had never done before. He took nothing but a rucksack along, traveled a quite short stretch on the train, and then wandered, his first step already in unknown territory, through a completely isolated valley to a tiny shrine hidden high in the mountains, which at this season no one visited and where hardly anyone lived.
What he did there was, if one were to make a story of it to someone, absolutely nothing. It was fall, and in the mountains the early-autumn sun has a power of its own; mornings it lifted him up and bore him to some tree high up on the slopes, from beneath which one looked into the far distance, for in spite of his heavy hiking boots he was really not conscious ofwalking. In the same self-forgetful way he changed his loca- tion several times during the day and read a little in a few books he had with him. Nor was he really thinking, although he felt his mind more deeply agitated than usual, for his thoughts did not shake themselves up as they usually do, so that a new idea is always landing on top of the pyramid of the earlier ones while the ones at the bottom are becoming more and more compacted until finally they fuse with flesh, blood, skull case, and the tendons supporting the muscles, but his insights came like a jet into a full vessel, in endless overflowing and renewal, or they passed in an everlasting progression like clouds through the sky in which noth- ing changes, not the blue depths and not the soundless swimming of those mother-of-pearl fish. It could happen that an animal came out of the woods, observed Ulrich, and slowly bounded away without anything changing; that a cow grazed nearby, or a person went past, without any more happening than a beat of the pulse, twin to all the others of the stream of life that softly pounds without end against the walls of the un- derstanding.
Ulrich had stumbled into the heart of the world. From there it was as far to his beloved as to the blade of grass beside his feet or to the distant tree on the sky-bare heights across the valley. Strange thought: space, the nibbling in little bites, distance dis-stanced, replaces the warm husk
1444 · THE MAN WITH 0 U T QUALITIES
and leaves behind a cadaver; but here in the heart they were no longer themselves, everything was connected with him the way the foot is no farther from the heart than the breast is. Ulrich also no longer felt that the landscape in which he was lying was outside him; nor was it within; that had dissolved or permeated everything. The sudden idea that some- thing might happen to him while he was lying there-a wild animal, a robber, some brute-was almost impossible of accomplishment, as far away as being frightened by one's own thoughts. I Later: Nature itself is hostile. The observer need only go into the water. I And the beloved, the person for whose sake he was experiencing all this, was no closer than some unknown traveler would have been. Sometimes his thoughts strained like eyes to imagine what they might do now, but then he gave it up again, for when he tried to approach her this way it was as if through alien territory that he imagined her in her surroundings, while he was linked to her in subterranean fashion in a quite different way.
"You're working . . . ? "She did not conceal her disappointment, for with remarkable certainty she felt it as disloyalty whenever Ulrich leafed through books in his hand and his forehead became stiff as bone.
"I have to. I can't bear the uncertainty ofwhat we're going through. And we're not the first people it's happening to either. "
"Twin siblings? "
''That's perhaps something especially elect. But I don't believe in such mysteries as being chosen-" He quickly corrected himself. "Hundreds of people have had the experience of believing that they were seeing another world open up before them. Just as we do. "
"And what came of it? "
"Books. "
"But it can't have been just books? "
"Madness. Superstition. Essays. Morality. And religion. The five
things. "
"You're in a bad mood. "
"I could read to you or talk with you for hours about things from these
books. What I began yesterday was an attempt to do that. You can go back as far as you like from this moment in which we're now talking, millennia or as far as human memory can reach, and you will always find described the existence of another world that at times rises up like a deep sea floor when the restless floods ofour ordinary life have receded from it.
"Since we've been together I've been comparing as much of this as I
From the Posthu11WUS Papers · 1445
could get hold of. All the descriptions state, in odd agreement, that in that condition there is in the world neither measure nor precision, which have made our world of the intellect great, neither purpose nor cause, neither good nor bad, no limit, no greed, and no desire to kill, but only an incomparable excitement and an altered thinking and willing. For as objects and our emotions lose all the limitations that we otherwise im- pose on them, they flow together in a mysterious swelling and ebbing, a happiness that fills everything, an agitation that is in the true sense boundless, one and multiple in shape as in a dream. One might perhaps add that the ordinary world, with its apparently so real people and things that lord it over everything like fortresses on cliffs, ifone looks back at it, together with all its evil and impoverished relationships, appears only as the consequence of a moral error from which we have already with- drawn our organs of sense.
"That describes exactly as much as we ourselves experienced when we looked into each other's eyes for the first time.
"The condition in which one perceives this has been given many names: the condition of love, goodness, turning away from the world, contemplation, seeing, moving away, returning home, willlessness, intu- ition, union with God, all names that express a vague harmony and char- acterize an experience that has been described with as much passion as vagueness. Insane peasant women have come to know it, and dogmatic professors of theology; Catholics, Jews, and atheists, people of our time and people oftens ofthousands ofyears ago; and as amazingly similar as the ways are in which they have described it, these descriptions have remained remarkably undeveloped; the greatest intellect has not told us any more about it than the smallest, and it appears that you and I will not learn any more from the experience of millennia than we know by our- selves.
"What does this mean? "
Agathe looked at him questioningly. "Lindner," she said, "when I once asked him about the significance of such experiences-and by the way, he dismisses them-maintains that they go back to the difference between faith and knowledge, and that for the rest, they're neurotic ex- aggerations-"
"Very good," Ulrich interrupted her. "Ifyou had reminded me of that yesterday, it might perhaps have spared my despair at my lack of results. But we'll come back to Lindner later! Of course that's fibbing; if I be- lieve something, I at least want to have the hope that under favorable circumstances I could also experience it, but not keep stopping after the same first steps all the time.
"No, Agathe, it means something quite different. What would you say
1446 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
if I maintain that it signifies nothing other than the lost paradise. It is a message. A message in a bottle that has been drifting for thousands of years.
Paradise is perhaps no fairy tale; it really exists. "
Up till then he had spoken with such rational decisiveness that these words had a quite remarkable sound. If he had said: I've done some reconnoitering, come along, we have to go out by the window and then through a dark corridor, and so on, then we'll get there . . . it would not have seemed strange to Agathe to set off immediately.
He really ought to explain it twice: once with yearning, then the way one explains it as prelogical, etc.
But Ulrich merely went on reporting the results of his inquiries.
"From what I've found," he said with the same calm as before, "two things emerge. First, that paradise has been placed where it is unattaina- ble. Even in the first legendary beginnings of the human race it is sup- posed to have been lost, and what people claim to have experienced of it later is described as ecstasy, trance, madness: in short, as pathological delirium; but it is quite striking that something is simultaneously being denied as illness and considered a paradise: this leads me to suppose that it must also be attainable for healthy and rational people, but on a path that is presumed to be forbidden and dangerous.
"But that then leads me to understand the second point, that this con- dition of paradise in life, which is supposed to be taboo as a whole, breaks into pieces and is inextricably mingled in with common life, that is, what people consider the highest values.
"In other words: the ideals of humanity. Think about it: they are all unattainable. But not only, as people pretend, because of human frailty but because, were one to fulfill them absolutely, they would become ab- surd. They are, therefore, the remains of a condition which as a whole is not capable of life, of which our life is not capable.
"One might be tempted to see in this shadowy doppelganger of an- other world only a daydream, had it not left behind its still warm traces in countless details of our lives. Religion, art, love, morality . . . these are attempts to follow this other spirit, they project into our lives with enor- mous power, but they have lost their origin and meaning, and this has made them totally confused and corrupt. "
They are bays but not the ocean.
From the Posthurrwus Papers · 1447
"And that brings us to Lindner.
"He would go mad if he were to follow the emotions that he has de- clared to be the decisive ones in his life. That's why he rations them and dilutes them with convictions.
"You want to be good-like a lake without a shore-and its individual drops, which he carefully stores up in himself, are what draw you to him. "You therefore only have some inkling, and he is convinced (believes) that you feel something is good, feel it like the smell of a field; while he makes a firm distinction between good and evil, but by separating them
he mixes them together hopelessly.
"That makes you feel abandoned, even by yourself, because you have
an intimation of a togetherness as never before. Your experience is hard to communicate, private, almost unsocial. He ties his soul to experiences that can be repeated and understood, for the unequivocal is repeatable and therefore comprehensible, but the mutuality of the ideals he dis- seminates is like the shadowy realm that is neither life nor death. He knows the virtue oflimitation, you the sin oflimitation. You are deprived of power, he is active. His God is nothing but an initial association or the like.
"In a word: You would like to live in God, even if only as His worst creature, while he livesfor Him. But in doing so he is following the same tried-and-true course as everyone else. "
Agathe had found a hairpin. In the period following Bonadea's visit, which Ulrich had not told her about. She was sitting on the sofa and talking with her brother, her hands, full ofidle security, supported in the pillows on both sides, when she suddenly felt the small steel object be- tween her fingers. It quite confused her hands before she drew it out. She looked at the pin, which was that of a strange woman, and the blood rose to her cheeks.
It might have been a small occasion for laughter that Agathe, like any jealous woman, hit upon the truth with such uncanny accuracy. But al- though it would have been easy to explain the discovery in some other fashion, Ulrich made no attempt to do so. Blood had risen to his cheeks too.
Finally, Agathe regained her composure, but her smile was discon- certed.
1448 · THE MAN WITH0 UT QUALITIES
Ulrich mumbled a confession about Bonadea's assault.
She listened to him restlessly. - I ' m not jealous, she said. - 1 have no right to be. B u t -
She sought to find this "but"; the demonstration was meant to cover the wildness that rose up in her against another woman taking Ulrich away from her.
Women are peculiarly nai've when they talk about a man's "needs. " They have let themselves be persuaded that these needs are inexorable violent forces, a kind of sullied but still grandiose suffering on the part of men, and they seem to know neither that they themselves become just as crazy through long abstinence, nor that after a period of transition it is not much more difficult for men to accustom themselves to it than it is for them; the distinction is, in truth, more a moral than a physiological one, a distinction of the habit of granting or denying oneself one's desires. But for many women, who believe they have grounds for not letting their desires gain control over them, this idea, that the man is not allowed to control himself without doing harm to himself, serves as a welcome opportunity to enclose the suffering man-child in their arms, and Agathe too-put in the role of a rather frigid woman through the taboo against otherwise following toward her brother the unambiguous voice of her heart-unconsciously applied this stratagem in her mind.
-1 believe I do understand you-she said-but-but you have hurt me.
When Ulrich tried to ask her pardon and attempted to stroke her hair or her shoulders, she said: -I'm stupid-trembled a little, and moved away.
- I f you were reading a poem aloud to me-she tried to explain-and I wasn't able to keep from looking at the latest newspaper the while, you would be disappointed too. That's just the way it hurt. On your account.
Ulrich was silent. The vexation of again experiencing through explana- tions what had happened sealed his lips.
- O f course I have no right to set rules for you, Agathe repeated. - W h a t is it then that I do give you! But why are you throwing yourself away on such a person! I could imagine your loving a woman I admire. I don't know how to express it, but isn't every caress a person gives some- one somehow taken away from everyone else?
She felt that she would want it that way if she were to abandon this dream and have a husband again.
-Inwardly, more than two people can embrace, and everything ex- ternal is only- She stopped short, but suddenly the comparison oc- curred to her: - 1 could imagine that the person who embraces the body is only the butterfly uniting two flowers-
From the Posthumous Papers · 1449
The comparison seemed to her somewhat too poetic. While she voiced it, she felt vividly the warm and ordinary feeling women have: I must give him something and compensate him.
Ulrich shook his head. "I have," he said seriously, "committed a grave error. But it was not the way you think. What you say is beautiful. This bliss that arises from the skin through mechanical stimulation, this sud- den being seized and changed by God: to ascribe this to a person who is just the instrument, to give him a privileged place through adoration or hate, is basically as primitive as being angry at the bullet that hits you. But I have too little faith to imagine that one could find such people. " Holds her hand-it is a mood borne far away.
When his hand sought pardon on her, Agathe enclosed her brother in her arms and kissed him. And involuntarily, shaken, in a sisterly-com- forting way and then no longer able to control it, she opened her lips for the first time on his with that complete, undiminished womanliness that opens up the ripe fruit oflove to its core.
In the Parallel Campaign everyone declared themselves for Amheim. Clarisse preferred Meingast.
Ulrich came home embittered. Faced with that powerlessness that cannot find a single point from which to express its opposition to the perfecting of an inadequate world.
He felt: They're doing everything I want, it's just that they're doing it badly.
They don't even understand me enough to contradict me; they be- lieve that I'm saying what they're saying, only worse.
Whenever you talk with them you start vomiting from nervousness.
They have goodness, love, soul; chopped into little pieces and mixed in with large chunks of the opposite; this keeps them healthy and makes them idealists, while I end up on the margin of the absurd and the criminal.
Oh, how unbearable they are, these chatterers at Diotima's! But it would be just as nonsensical not to confess that there are many people who feel it as much as I do and who accomplish better things: Why do I
feel so excluded?
He went through Agathe's room and straight to his study. His face mirrored the strain and silence of a hard struggle.
Believers squabble with God when they get to feel isolated among their fellowmen; that's when unbelievers get to know Him for the first
1450 · THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
time. If it were possible to ron out into the empty, chilly universe, that would have been the right expression for Ulrich's despair, anger, and unquiet temperament. His flames had inverted themselves and were burning inwardly. It nearly made him suffocate.
Suddenly he stopped. He took paper and pencil, which were lying under the heap of scribbled papers on his desk, and wrote down an idea. Read it through, walked up and down, read it once more, and added something to it.
There is no necessity behind it! This was the first idea, which, still obscure, contained everything. This world is only one ofcountless possi- ble experiments?
Then: In mathematics there are problems that admit of no general solutions but only case-by-case ones. But under certain given conditions these partial solutions are summarized to give relative total solutions. Thus God gives partial solutions; these are the creative people; they con- tradict one another; we are condemned again and again to derive from this relative total solutions that don't correspond to anything!
Finally: Like molten ore I am poured into the mold that the world has shaped during my lifetime. For that reason I am never entirely what I think and do. For that reason this self always remains strange to me. One attemptedform in an attemptedform ofthe totality.
Acting without reflecting: for a man never gets further than when he doesn't know where he's going.
When he read over this last idea, he tore up the piece of paper and went in to Agathe; for then there is only one thing: not to listen to the bad masters, who have erected one of His possible lives as if for eter- nity, according to God's plan, but to confide oneself to Him humbly and defiantly.
ULRICH-AGA THE JOURNEY
1.
Below lay a narrow stretch of coast with some sand. Boats drawn up on it, seen from above, like blue and green spots of sealing wax. If one looked more closely, oil jugs, nets, men with vertically-striped pants and
From the Posthumous Papers · 1451
brown legs; the smell of fish and garlic; patched-up, shaky little houses. The activity on the warm sand was as small and far away as the bustling of beetles. It was framed on both sides by boulders as by stone pegs on which the bay hung, and farther along, as far as the eye could see, the steep coast with its crinkled details simply plunged into the southern sea. If one cautiously clambered down, one could, over the ruins of fallen rocks, venture out a little into the ocean, which filled tubs and troughs among the stones with a warm bath and strange animal com- rades.
Ulrich and Agathe felt as if a tremendous din had been raised from them and had flown off. They stood out there in the ocean, swaying white flames, almost sucked up and extinguished by the hot air. It was somewhere in ! stria, or the eastern edge of Italy, or on the Tyrrhenian Sea. They hardly knew themselves. They had got on the train and trav- eled; it seemed to them as if they had been crisscrossing at random I in a way . . . that would prevent them from ever finding their way back.
2.
On their mad journey, Ancona was firmly fixed in their memory. They had arrived dead tired and in need of sleep. They got in early in the forenoon and asked for a room. Ate zabaglione in bed and drank strong coffee, whose heaviness was as if lifted to the skies by the foam of whipped cream. Rested, dreamed. When they had gone to sleep it seemed to them that the white curtains in front of the windows were constantly lifting and sinking in an enchanting current of refreshing air; it was their breathing. When they awoke, they saw through the opening slats ore-blue sea, and the red and yellow sails of the barks entering and leaving the harbor were as shrill as floating whistles.
They understood nothing in this new world; it was all like the words of a poem.
They had left without passports and had a mild fear of some sort of discovery and punishment. When they registered at the hotel they had been taken for a young married couple and offered this lovely room with a wide bed meant for two, a letto matri11Wniale, which in Germany has fallen into disuse. They had not dared reject it. After the sufferings of the body, the longing for primitive happiness.
Lying in this bed, they noticed an oval window the size of a cabin port- hole, high up to the right of the door and near a comer of the room, in a
1452 · THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
totally incomprehensible place; it had opaque-colored glass, disquiet- ingly like a secret observation post, but surrounded by a casual wreath of painted roses.
In comparison with the enormous tension that had gone before, it was nothing. And afteJWard there was a conspiratorial happiness in every de- tail, and at the moment when their resistance wavered and melted Ul- rich said: It also makes most sense not to resist; we have to get this behind us so that this tension doesn't debase what we have before us.
And they traveled.
They had stayed three days.
It has to be this way too: charmed by each other again and again. Tra-
versing the scale of the sexual with variations.
For three days they never talked about soul. Only then did they bring it up again.
3·
When they went out on the street for the first time: buzzing ofpeople. Like a flock of sparrows happily dusting themselves in the sand. Curious glances without timidity, which felt themselves at home. At the backs of the brother and sister as they cautiously glided through this crowd lay the room, lay the wakefulness drifting deep over sleep like a eat's paw over water, the blissful exhaustion in which one can ward off nothing, and also not oneself, but hears the world as a pale noise outside the infi- nitely deep corridors of the ear.
The exhaustion of excessive enjoyment in the body, the consumed mar- row. It is shaming and joyful.
4·
They went on. Apparently suitcase nomads. In truth driven by the restlessness of finding a place worth living and dying in.
Much was beautiful and held them enticingly fast. But nowhere did the inner voice say: this is the place.
From the Posthumous Papers · 1453
Finally here. Actually some insignificant chance had brought them here, and they did not notice anything special. Then this voice made itself heard, softly but distinctly.
Perhaps, without knowing it, they had become tired of their random traveling.
5·
Here, where they stayed, a piece of gardenlike nature rose up to the small white hotel, empty at this season, which was concealed on the slope; rose from the narrow beach between the rocky arms of the coast, like a posy of flowers and shrubs pressed against the breast, with narrow paths winding around it in a very gentle, slow climb up to the hotel. A little higher there was nothing but dazzling stone glittering in the sun, between one's feet yellow broom and red thistles that ran from the feet toward the sky, the enormous hard straightness of the plateau's edge, and, if one had climbed up with eyes closed and now opened them: sud- denly, like a thunderously opened fan, the motionless sea.
It is probably the size of the arc in the line of the contour, this far- reaching security enclosed by an arm, a security that is more than human? Or only the enormous desert of the dark-blue color, hostile to life? Or that the bowl ofthe sky never lies so directly over life? Or air and water, of which one never thinks? Otherwise colorless, good-natured messengers, but here where they were at home suddenly rearing up unapproachably like a pair of royal parents.
The legends of almost all peoples report that mankind came from the water and that the soul is a breath of air. Strange: science has deter- mined that the human body consists almost entirely of water. One be- comes small. When they got off the train in which they had crisscrossed the dense network of European energies and, still trembling from the motion, had hastened up here, brother and sister stood before the calm of the sea and the sky no differently than they would have stood a hun- dred thousand years ago. Tears came to Agathe's eyes, and Ulrich low- ered his head.
What is this whole exposition for? Can it be retracted? Something's not right here.
1454 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
Arm on ann, their hands intertwined, they climbed down again in the blue of evening to their new home. In the small dining room the white- ness of the tablecloths sparkled and the glasses stood as soft splendor. Ulrich ordered fish, wine, and fruit, speaking at length and in detail about it with the ma! tre d'hOtel; it did not interfere. The black figures glided around them or stood against the walls. SilveiWare and teeth functioned. The pair even carried on a conversation so as not to attract notice. Ulrich almost came to speak of the impression they had had up above. As if the people of a hundred thousand years ago had really had a direct revelation: it was like that; if one considers how tremendous the experience of these first myths is, and how little since . . . ; it did not interfere; everything that happened was embedded as in the murmuring ofa fountain.
Ulrich looked at his sister for a long time; she was now not even beau- tiful; there was not that either. On an island they had not seen in the daylight a chain of houses shone: that was lovely but far away; the eyes looked at it only fleetingly and then directly in front of themselves again.
They asked for two rooms.
6.
The sea in summer and the high mountains in autumn are the two real tests of the soul. In their silence lies a music greater than anything else on earth; there is a blissful torture in the inability to follow their rhythms, to make the rhythm ofword and gesture so broad that it would join with theirs; mankind cannot keep in step with the breath of the gods.
The next morning, Ulrich and Agathe found a tiny pocket of sand up among the rocks beneath the edge of the plateau; when they stumbled onto it they had the feeling as if a creature that lived there had expected them and was looking at them: here no one knows anything about us anymore. They had been following a small, natural path; the coast curved away, they actually convinced themselves that the shining white hotel had disappeared. It was a long, narrow sunlit step of rock, with sand and bits and pieces of stone. They undressed. They felt the need to bend their knees and stretch their anns, naked, unprotected, small as children before the greatness of the sea and the solitude. They did not say this to each other, and were ashamed before each other, but hidden
From the Posthumous Papers · 1455 behind the motions of their clothing and of searching for a place to lie
down, each tried it for himself.
They were both ashamed because it is so nudist-camp natural and health-conscious, but expected it necessarily had to lead to something else . .