No More Learning

"Oh, you demand a great deal more! You demand that we live our lives in a scientific, experimental way," Amheim said with energy and warmth. "You want responsible leaders to regard their job not as making history but as a mandate to draw up reports on experiments as a basis for further experiments. A perfectly delightful idea, of course. But how do wars and revolutions-for instance-fit in with that? Can you raise the dead when your experiment has been carried out and taken off the schedule? "
Ulrich now succumbed after all to the temptation to talk, which is not so very different from the temptation to go on smoking, and conceded that one probably had to tackle everything one wanted to do effectively with the utmost seriousness, even when one knew that in fifty years every experiment would tum out not to have been worthwhile. But such a "punctured seriousness" ~as nothing so very unusual, after all; people risked their lives every day in sport and for
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nothing at all. Psychologically, there was nothing impossible about a life conducted as an experiment; all that was needed was the deter- mination to assume a certain unlimited responsibility. "That's the crucial difference," he concluded. "In the old days, people felt as it were deductively, starting from certain assumptions. Those days are gone. Today we live without a guiding principle, but also without any method of conscious, inductive thinking; we simply go on trying this and that like a band of monkeys. "
"Splendid! " Amheim admitted freely. "But allow me one last question. Your cousin tells me that you're taking a great interest in the case of a dangerous psychopath. I happen to understand this very well, incidentally. We really don't know how to handle such cases, and society's method of dealing with them is disgracefully hit-or- miss. But in the circumstances-which leave us no choice but either to kill an 'innocent' man or to let him go on killing innocent people- would you let him escape the night before his execution, if you could? " .
"No! " Ulrich said.
"No? Really not? " Arnheim asked with sudden animation.
"I don't know. I don't think so. I might ofcourse talk myselfout of
it by claiming that in a malfunctioning world I have no right to act freely on my own personal convictions; but I shall simply admit that I don't know what I would do. "
"That man must surely be stopped from doing ft. uther harm," Am- heim said pensively. "And yet, when he is having one of his seizures, he is certainly a man possessed by the demonic, which in all virile epochs has been felt to be akin to the divine. In the old days such a man would have been sent into the wilderness. Even then he might have committed murder, but perhaps in a visionary state, like Abra- ham about to slaughter his son Isaac. There it is! We no longer have any idea of how to deal with such things, and there is no sincerity in what we do. "
Arnheim might have let himself be carried away in uttering these last words without quite knowing what he meant by them; his ambi- tion might have been spurred on by Ulrich's not mustering up enough "heart and rashness" to answer with an unqualified "yes". when asked whether he would save Moosbrugger. But although Ul- rich felt this tum of the conversation to be almost an omen, an unex-
pected reminder of his "resolve" at Count Leinsdorf's, he resented Amheim's flamboyance in making the most of the Moosbrugger problem, and both factors made him ask dryly, but intently: 'Would you set him free? "
"No," Amheim replied with a smile, "but I'd like to propose some- thing else. . " And without giving him time to put up resistance, he added: "It's a suggestion I've been wanting to make to you for some time, to make you give up your suspicions of me, which, frankly, hurt my feelings; I want you on my side, in fact. Do you have any concep- tion ofwhat a great industrial enterprise looks like from the inside? It is controlled by two bodies, the top management and the board of directors, usually capped by a third body, the executive committee, as you in Austria call it, made up of representatives of the first two, which meets almost every day. The board of directors naturally consists of men who enjoy the confidence ofthe majority share- holders. . . . " Here he paused for the first time, to give Ulrich a chance to speak if he wished, as though testing to see whether Ulrich had already noticed something. "As I was saying, the majority share- holders have their representatives on the board and the executive committee. " He prompted Ulrich. "Have you any idea who this ma- jority is? "
Ulrich had none. He had only a vague general concept of finance, which to him meant clerks, counterS, coupons, and certificates that looked like ancient documents.
Arnheim cued him in again. "Have you ever helped to elect a board of directors? No, you haven't," he answered his own question. "There would be no point in trying to imagine it, since you will never own the majority of shares in a company. " He said this so firmly that Ulrich very nearly felt ashamed of being found wanting in so impor- tant a respect; and it was in fact just like Amheim to move in one easy stride from his demons to his board of directors. Smiling, he con- tinued: "There is one person I haven't mentioned yet, the most im- portant of all, in a sense. I spoke of the majority shareholders, which sounds like a harmless plural but is in fact nearly always a single per- son, a chief shareholder, unnamed and unknown to the . general pub- lic, hidden behind those he sends out front in his place. "
Ulrich now realized that he was being told things he could read in the papers every day; still, Arnheim knew how to create suspense.
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He was sufficiently htterested to ask who was the majority share- holder in Lloyd's of London.
"No one knows," Amheim replied quietly. "That is to say, there are those in the know, of course, but one doesn't usually hear it spo- ken of. But let me get to the point. Wherever you find two such forces, a person who really gives the orders and an administrative body that executes them, what automatically happens is that every possible means ofincreasing profits is used, whe~eror not it is mor- ally or aesthetically attractive. When I say automatically I mean just that, because the way it works is to a high degree independent of any personal factor. The person who really wields the power takes no hand in carrying out his directives, while the managers are covered by the fact that they are acting not on their own behalf but as func- tionaries. You will find such arrangements everywhere these days, and by no means exclusively in the world of finance. You may depend on it that our friend Tuzzi would give the signal for war with the clearest conscience in the world, even if as a man he may be incapa- ble of shooting down an old dog, and your friend Moosbrugger will be sent to his death by thousands of people because only three of them need have a hand in it personally. This system' of indirection elevated to an art is what nowadays enables the indiVidual and society as a whole to function with a clear conscience; the button to be pres~edis always clean and shiny, and what happens at the other end of the line is the business of others, who, for their part, don't press the button. Do you find this revolting? It is how we let thousands die or vegetate, set in motion whole avalanches of suffering, but we al- ways get things done. I might go so far as to say that what we're see- ing here, in this form of the social division of labor, is nothing else than the ancient dualism of conscience between the end that is ap- proved and the means that are tolerated, though here we have it in a grandiose and dangerous form. "
In answer to Arnheim's question whether he found all this revolt- ing Ulrich had shrugged his shoulders. The split in the moral con- sciousness that Amheim spoke of, this most horrifying phenomenon of modem life, was an ancient fact of human history, but it had won its appalling good conscience only in recent times, as a consequence of the universal division of labor with all its magnificent inevitability.
Ulrich did not care to wax indignant over it, especially as it gave him, paradoxically, the funny and gratifying sensation one can get from tearing along at a hundred miles an hour past a dust-bespattered moralist who is standing by the wayside, cursing. When Arnheim came to a stop, Ulrich's first words were: "Every kind of division of ·tabor can be developed further. The question is not whether it repels me but whether I believe that we can attain more acceptable condi- tions without having to tum back the clock. "
"Aha, your general inventory! " Amheim interjected. 'W e have or- ganized the division of labor brilliantly but neglected to find ways of correlating the results. We are continuously destroying the old mo- rality and the soul in accordance with the latest patents, and think we can patch them up by resorting to the old household remedies of our religious and philosophical traditions. Levity on such a subject"-he backed off-"is really quite distasteful to me, and I :regard jokes on the whole as in dubious taste anyway. But then, I never thought of the suggestion you made to us all in the presence of Count Leins- dorf, that we need to reorganize the conscience itself, as a mere joke. "
"It was a joke," Ulrich said gruffiy. "I don't believe in such a possi- bility. I would sooner be inclined to believe that the Devil himself built up the European world and that God is willing to let the compe- tition show what he can do. "
"A pretty conceit," Amheim said. "But in that case, why were yot,~ so annoyed with me for not wanting to believe you? "
Ulrich did not answer.
"What you said just now," Amheim calmly persisted, "also contra- dicts those adventurous remarks of yours, some time ago, about the means toward attaining the right way in life. Besides, quite apart from wheth. er I can agree with you on the details, I can't help notic- ing the extent to which you are a compound ofactive tendencies and indifference. "
When Ulrich saw no need to reply even on this point, Arnheim said in the civil tone with which such rudeness must be met: "I merely wished to draw your attention to the degree to which we are expected, even in. making economic decisions, on which after all ev- erything depends, to work out the problem of our moral responsibil-
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ity on our own, and how fascinating this makes such decisions. " Even in the restraint with which this reproofwas expressed there was a faint suggestion of trying to win him over. · •·
''I'm sony," Ulrich said, "I was totally caught up in what you've been saying. " And as though he were still pursuing the same line of thought, he added: "I wonder whether you also regard it as a form of indirect dealing and divided consciousness in keeping with the spirit of the times to fill a woman's soul with mystical feelings while sensi- bly leaving her body to her husband? "
These words made Arnheim color a little, but he did not lose con- trol of the situation. ''I'm not sure I know what you mean," he said quietly, "but ifyou were speaking of a woman you love, you couldn't say this, because the body of reality is always richer than the mere outline sketch we call principles. " He had moved away from the win- dow and invited Ulrich to sit down with him. ''You don't give in eas- ily," he went on in a tone of mingled appreciation and regret. "But I know that I represent to you more of ail opposing principle than a personal opponent. And those who are privately the bitterest oppo- nents ofcapitalism are often enough its best servants in the business world; I may even say that to some extent I count myself among them, or I wouldn't presume to say this to you. Uncompromising, passionately committed persons, once they have seen that a conces- sion must be made, usually become its most brilliant champions. And so I want in any case to go ahead with my intended proposal: Will you accept a position in my finn? "
He took care to say this as casually as he could, trying by speaking rapidly and without emphasis to lessen the cheap surprise effect he could be only too sure ofcausing. Avoiding Ulrich's astonished gaze, he simply proceeded to go into the details without making any effort to indicate his own position.
"You wouldn't, of course, have the necessary training and qualifi- cations at first," he said smoothly, "to assume a leading position, nor would you feel inclined to do so, therefore I would offer you a posi- tion at my side, let us say that of my executive secretary, which I would create especially for you. I hope you won't take offense at this: it is not a position I can see as carrying an irresistible salary, to begin with; however, in time, you should be able to aim for any income you
mightwish. In a year or so, I am sure that you will understand me quite differently from now. "
When Arnheim had finished, he felt moved in spite ofhimself. Ac- tually, he had surprised himself by going so far in making this offer to Ulrich, who only had to refuse in order to put Arnheim at a disadvan- tage, whUe if he accepted, there wasn't much in it for Amheim. Any idea that this man he was talking to could accomplish something that he himself could not do on his own had vanished even as he spoke, and the need to charm Ulrich and get him into his power had become absurd in the very process of fmding articulate expression. That he had been afraid ofsomething he called this man's "wit" now seemed unnatural. He, Arnheim, was a man of some consequence, and for such a man life has to be simple! Such a man lives on good terms with other great men and circumstances, he does not act the romantic rebel or cast doubt on existing realities; it would be against his nature. On the other hand, there are, of course, all the things of beauty and ambiguity one wants in one's life as much as possible. Arnheim had never felt as intensely as he did at this moment the permanence of Western civilization, that ma. rVelous network of forces and disciplines. If Ulrich did not recognize this he was nothing but an adventurer, and the fact that Amheim had almost let himself be tempted to think of him a s - At this point words failed him, un- formulated as they still were at the back of his mind; he could not bring himself to articulate clearly, even in secret, the fact that he had considered taking Ulrich on as an adopted son. Not that it really mat- tered; it was only an idea like countless others one need not answer for, probably inspired by the kind of moodiness that afflicts every man ofaction, because a man is never really satisfied, and perhaps he had not had this idea at all, in so dubious a form, but only some vague
impulse that could be so interpreted; still, he shied away from the memory, and only kept painfully in mind that the difference between Ulrich's age and his own was not all that great; and behind this there was a secondary, shadowy sense that Ulrich might serve him as a warning against Diotima! How often he had already felt that his rela- tionship to Ulrich was somehow comparable to a secondary volcanic crater that emits the occasional warning or clue to the strange go- ings-on in the main crater, and he was somewhat troubled that the
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eruption had now occurred and his words had come pouring out and were making their way into real life. "What's to be done," flashed through his mind, "if this fellow accepts? " It was in such suspense that an Arnheim had to wait for the decision of a younger man who mattered only insofar as Arnheim's own imagination had lent him significance. Arnheim sat there stiffiy, his lips parted in a hostile ex- pression, thinking: "There'll be a way of handling it, in case there's still not a way of getting out of it. "
Even while his feelings and thoughts were running their course in this fashion the situation had not come to a standstill; question and answer followed each other without pause.
"And to what qualities of my own," Ulrich asked dryly, "do I owe this offer, which can hardly be justified from a businessman's point of view? "
"You always misjudge this sort of thing," Arnheim replied. "To be businesslike in my position is not the same as counting pennies. What I stand to lose on you is quite immaterial compared to what I hope to gain. "
"You certainly pique my curiosity," Ulrich remarked. "Very sel- dom am I told I represent a gain of any kind. I might perhaps have developed into a minor asset in my special subject, but even there, as you know, I have been a disappointment. "
"That you are a man of exceptional intelligence,L' Amheim an- swered, in the same quiet tone of unshakable confidence to which he was outwardly clinging, "is surely something of which you are fully aware ~thout my having to tell you. Still, we may have keener and more dependable minds already working for us. It is actually your character, your human qualities, that, for certain reasons, I wish to have constantly at my side. '. '
"My qualities? " Ulrich could not help smiling at this. "That's funny: I have friends who call me a man without qualities. ''
Arnheim let slip a faint gesture of impatience that said, more or less: "Tell me about it, as if I didn't know. " This twitch that ran across his face all the way to the shoulder betrayed his dissatisfaction, even while his words flowed on as programmed. Ulrich caught the fleeting grimace, and he was so ready to be provoked by Arnheim tliat he now dropped all restraint . against bringing everything out into the open.
They had meanwhile risen from their chairs, and Ulrich moved back a few steps to see his effect all the better as he said:
"You have asked me so many pointed questions, and now there is something I would like to know before I make my decision. . . . " When Arnheim nodded he went on in a frank and matter-of-fact tone: ''I've been told that your interest in our Parallel Campaign and everything connected with it, Frau Tuzzi and my humble self thrown in for good measure, has to do with your acquiring major portions of the Galician oil fields. "
Despite the failing light, Arnheim could be seen to have turned pale; he walked slowly up to Ulrich, who thought he had brought some rude answer upon himself and regretted his own rash blunt- ness, which had given the other man a way to break off the conversa- tion when it became inconvenient for him to go on with it. So he said, as affably as he could: "Please don't misunderstand me. I have no wish to offend you, but there is surely no point in our conversation unless we can speak our minds with brutal frankness. "
These few words and the time it took him to cover the short dis- tance enabled Arnheim to regain his composure. As he reached Ul- rich he smiled, placed his hand-actually, his arm--on Ulrich's shoulder, and said reproachfully: "How can you fall for such a typical Stock Exchange rumor? "
"It reached me not as a rumor but as information from someone who knows what he is talking about. "
"Yes, I know, I've heard that such things are being said, but how can you believe it? Ofcourse I'm not here purely for pleasure; it's too bad, but I can never get away entirely from business affairs. And I won't deny that I have talked with some people about these oil fields, though I must ask you to keep this confidential. But what has this to do with anything? "
"My cousin," Ulrich resumed, "hasn't the remotest idea of your interest in oil. She has been asked by her husband to find out what- ever she can about the reasons for your stay here, because you are regarded as a confidant of the Czar, but I am convinced that she is not doing justice to this diplomatic mission because she is so sure that she herself is the one· and only reason for your continued visit with us. "
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"H9w can you be so indelicate? " Arnheim's ann gave Ulrich's shoulder a friendly little nudge. "There are always secondaty strings to everything, everywhere, but despite your sardonic inten- tion you have just expressed yourself with the naked rudeness of a schoolboy. " ·
That ann on his shoulder made Ulrich unsure of himself. To stand there in this quasi embrace was ridiculous and unpleasant, a misera- ble feeling, in fact. Still, it was a long time since Ulrich had known a friend, and perhaps this added an element of bewilderment. He would have likedto shake offthe ann, and he instinctively tried to do so, even while Amheim, for his part, noticed these little signals of Ulrich's restiveness and did his utmost to ignore them. Ulrich, realiz- ing the awkwardness of Arnheim's position, was too polite to move away and forced himself to put up with this physical contact, which felt increasingly like a heavy weight sinking into a loosely mounded dam and breaking it apart. Without meaning to, Ulrich had built up a wall of loneliness around himself, and now life, by way of another man's pulse beat, came pouring in through the breach in that wall, and silly as it was, ridiculous, really, he felt a touch of excitement.
He thought of Gerda. He remembered how even his old friend Walter had aroused in him a. longing to find himself once more in total accord with another human being, wholly and without restraint, as if the whole wide world held no differences other than those be- tween like and dislike. Now that it was too late, this longing welled up in him again, as ifin silvery waves, as the ripples ofwater, air, and light fuse into one silvery stream down the whole width of a river. It was so entrancing that he had to force himself to be on his guard and not 'to give in, lest he cause a misunderstanding in this ambiguous situation. But as his muscles tightened he remembered Bonadea say- ing to him: "Ulrich, you're not a bad man, you merely make it hard for yourself to be good. " Bonadea, who had been so incredibly wise that evening and who had also said: . "After all, in dreams you don't think either, you simply live them. " And he had said: "I was a child, as soft as the air on a moonlit night . . . ," and he now remembered that at the time he had actually had a different image in mind: the tip of a burning magnesium flare, for in the flying sparks that tore this tip to shreds he thought he recognized his heart; but that was a long ti~e ago, and he had not quite ~red to make this comparison and
had succumbed to the other:; not in conversation with Bonadea, inci- dentally, but with Diotima, as he now recalled. All the divergences of life begin close together at their roots, he felt, looking at the man who had just now, for reasons not entirely clear, offered him his friendship. .
Amheim had withdrawn his arm. They were standing once more in the window bay where their conversation had begun; on the street below, the lamps were already giving a peaceful light, though there was still a lingering sense of the excitement of earlier in the day. From time to time clusters of people passed by in heated talk, and here and there a mouth would open to shout a threat or some waver- ing "hoo-hoo," followed l? y guffaws. One had the impression of semi- consciousness. And in the light from this restless street, between the vertical curtains framing the darkened room, he saw Arnheim's fig- ure and felt his own body standing there, half brightly lit up and half dark, a chiaroscuro sharpening the intense effect. Ulrich remem- bered the cheers for Arnheim he thought he had heard, and whether or not the man had anything to do with what had happened, in his Caesar-like calm as he stood pensively, gazing down on the street he projected himself as the dominant figure in this momentary light- painting, and he also seemed to feel the weight of his own presence in every glance cast·upon him. At Arnheim's side one understood the meaning of self-possession. Consciousness alone cannot impose order on all the world's swarm and glow, since the keener it is, the more boundless the world becomes, at least for the moment; but that consciousness ofselfthat is self-possession enters like a film director
who artfully composes a scene into an image of happiness. Ulrich envied the man his happiness. In that instant nothing seemed easier than to do him some violence, for in his need to present an image at center stage this man conjured up all the old tags of melodrama. "Draw your dagger and fulfill his destiny!
" Though the words came to mind only in the ranting tone of a ham actor, Ulrich had uncon- sciously moved so that he stood halfway behind Amheim. He saw the dark, broad expanse of neck and shoulders before him. The neck in particular was a provocation. His hand groped in his right pocket for a penknife. He rose up on tiptoe and then once more looked over Arnheim's shoulder down on the street. Out there in the twilight, people were still being swept along like sand by an invisible tide pull-
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ing their bodies onward. Somethingwould ofcourse have to come of this demonstration, and so the future sent a wave ahead, some sort of suprapersonal fecundation of humanity occurred, though as always in an extremely vague and slipshod manner-or so Ulrich perceived it as it briefly held his attention, but he was tired to the point of nau- sea at the thought of stopping to analyze it all. Carefully he lowered his heels again, ashamed ofthe mental byplay that had caused him to raise them just before, though he did not attach too much impor- tance to it, and he now felt greatly tempted to tap Arnheim on the shoulder and say to him: "Thank you. I'm fed up and I would like something new in my life. I accept your offer. " .
But as he did. not really do this, either, the two men let the answer to Arnheim's proposal go by default. Arnheim reverted to an earlier part of their conversation. "Do you ever go to see a film? You should," he said. "In its present form, cinematography may not look like much, but once the big interests get involved-the electro- chemical, say, or the chromochemical concerns-you are likely to see a surging development in just a few decades, which nothing can stop. Every known means of raising and intensifying production will be brought into play, and whatever our writers and aesthetes may suppose to be their own part in it, we will be getting an art based on Associated Electrical or German Dyes, Inc. It's absolutely terrifying; you'll see. Do you write? No, I remember I've asked you that. But why don't you write? Very sensible ofyou. The poet and philosopher ofthe future will emerge out ofjournalism, in any case. Haven't you noticed that our journalists are getting better all the time, while our poets are getting steadily worse? It is unquestionably a process in accordance with the laws of nature. Something is going on, and for my part I haven't the slightest doubt what it is: the age of great in- dividuals is coming to an end. " He leaned forward. "I can't see your face in this light; I'm firing all my shots in the dark. " He gave a little laugh. "You've proposed a general stocktaking of our spiritual condi- tion: Do you believe in that? Do you really suppose that life can be regulated by the mind? Of course you don't; you've said so. But I don't believe you in any case, because you're someone who would embrace the Devil for being a man without his match in the world. "
"Where's that quotation from? "
"From the suppressed preface to The Robbers. "
Naturally from the suppressed preface, Ulrich thought. He wouldn't bother with the one read by everyone else.
" 'Minds that are drawn to the most loathsome vices for their aura of greatness . . . ' " Arnheim continued to quote from his capacious memory. He felt himselfto be the master ofthe situation once more, and that·Ulrich, for whatever reasons, had given ground; the antago- nistic edge was gone; no need to bring up that offer again; what a narrow escape! But just as a wrestler knows when his opponent is slackening off and then gives it all he's got, so he felt he needed to let the full weight of his offer sink in, and said: "I believe you under- stand me better now. Quite frankly, there are times when I am keenly aware of being alone. The new men think too much in purely business terms, and those business families in their second or third generation tend to lose their imagination. They produce nothing but impeccable administrators and army officers, and they go in for cas- tles, hunting parties, and title"d sons-in-law. I know their kind the world over, fine, intelligent individuals among them, but incapable of coming up with,a single idea concomitant with that basic state of restlessness, independence, and possibly unhappiness I referred to with my Schiller quotation just now. "
''I'm sorry I can't stay and talk more," Ulrich said. "Frau Tuzzi is probably waiting in some friend's house for things ·to quiet down out there, but I have to go now. So you suppose me capable, despite my ignorance of business, of that restlessness which is so good for busi- ness by making it so much less narrowly businesslike? " He had turned on the light in preparation for saying good-bye, and waited for an answer. With majestic cameraderie, Amheim laid hiS arm on Ul- rich's shoulder, a gesture that seemed to have proved its usefulness by now, and answered: "Do forgive me if I seem to have said rather too much, in a mood of loneliness. Business and finance are coming into power, and one sometimes asks oneself what to do with this power. I hope you won't take it amiss. "
"On the contrary," Ulrich assured him. "I mean to think your pro- posal over quite seriously. " He said it in a rush, which could be inter- preted as a sign of excitement. This left Arnheim, who was staying on to wait for Diotima, rather disconcerted and worried that it might not be too easy to fmd a face-saving way of making Ulrich forget the offer.
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GOING HOME
Ulrich decided to walk home. It was a fine night, though dark. The houses, tall and compact, formed that strange space "street," open at the top to darkness, wind, and clouds. The road was deserted, as if the earlier unrest had left everything in a deep slumber. Whenever Ulrich did encounter a pedestrian, the sound of his footsteps had preceded him independently for a long time, like some weighty an- nouncement. The night gave one a sense ofimpending events, as in a theater. One had a notion of oneself as a phenomenon in this world, something that appears bigger than it. is, that produces an echo, and, when it passes·lighted surfaces, is accompanied by its shadow like a huge spastic clown, rising to full height and the next moment creep- ing humbly to heel. How happy one can bel he thought.
He walked through a stone archway in a passage some ten paces long, running parallel td the street and separated from it by heavy buttresses; darkness leapt from comers, ambush and sudden death flickered in the dim cloister; a fierce, ancient, grim joy seized the soul. Perhaps this was too much; Ulrich suddenly imagined with what smugness and inward self-dramatization Arnheim would be walking her~ in his place. It killed the pleasure in his shadow and echo, and the spooky music in the walls faded out. He knew that he would not accept Arnheim:s ·offer, but now he merely felt like a phantom stumbling through life's gallery, dismayed at being unable to find the body it should occupy, and was thoroughly relieved when before long he passed into a district less grand and less oppressive.
Wide streets and squares opened out in the blackness, and ,the commonplace buildings, peacefully starred with lighted rows ofwin- dows, laid no further spell on him. Comi,ng into the open, he breathed this peace and remembered for no special reason some childhood photographs he had recently been looking at, pictures showing him with his mother, who had died young; from what a dis-
tance he had regarded the little boy, with the beautiful woman in an old-fashioned dress happily smiling at him. There was that overpow- ering impression of the good, affectionate, bright little boy they all felt him to be; there were hopes for him that were in no way his own; there were the vague expectations of a distinguished, promising fu- ture, like the outspread wings ofa golden net opening to enfold him. And though all this had been invisible at the time, there it was for all to see decades afterward in those old photographs, and from the midst ofthis visible invisibility that could so easily have become real- ity, there was his tender, blank baby face looking back at him with the slightly forced expression of having to hold still. He had felt n? t a trace ofwarmth for that little boy, 'and even ifhe did take some pride in his beautiful mother, he had on the whole the impressi6n of hav- ing narrowly escaped a great horror.
Anyone who has had the experience of seeing some earlier incar- n a t i o n o f h i m s e l f g a z i n g a t him f r o m a n o l d p h o t o g r a p h , w r a p p e d i n a bygone moment of self-satisfaction, as if glue had dried up or fallen out, will understand 'Ulrich's asking himself what sort of glue it was that seemed to hold for other people. He had now reached one of those green spaces bordered by trees, a break in the Ringstrasse, which follows the line of the ancient city walls, and he might have crossed it in a few strides, but the broad strip of sky above the trees made him turn aside and follow where it was leading, seeming to come closer and closer to the festoons of lights so intent upon their privacy in the distant sky above that wintry park, without actually get- ting any nearer to them. It's a kind of foreshortening of the mind's perspective, he thought, that creates the tranquil sense of the eve- n i n g , w h i c h , f r o m o n e d a y t~ t h e n e x t , g i v e s o n e t h i s f i r m s e n s e o f l i f e being in full accord with itself. Happiness, after all, depends for the most part not on one's ability to resolve contradictions but on making them disappear, the way the gaps between trees disappear when we look down a long avenue of them. And just as the visual relationships of things always shift to make a coherent . picture for the eye, one in which the immediate and near at hand looks big, while even the big things at a distance look small and the gaps close up and the scene as a whole ends by rounding itself out, so it is with the invisible c(mnec- tions which our minds and feelings unconsciously arrange for us in
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such a way that we are left to feel we are fully in charge of o~raffairs. And just this is what I don't seem to be able to achieve the way I should, he said to himself.
A wide puddle blocked his way. Perhaps it was this puddle, or per- haps it was the bare, broonilike trees on either side, that conjured up a country road and a village, and awakened in him that monotonous state of the soul halfway between fulfillment and futility which comes with life in the country, a life that had tempted him more than once to repeat the "escape" he had made as a young man.
Everything becomes so simple, he felt. One's feelings get drowsy, one,'s thoughts drift offlike clouds after bad weather, and suddenly a clear sky breaks out of the soul, and under that sky a cow in the mid- dle of the path may begin· to blaze with meaning; things come in- tensely alive as if there were nothing else in the world. A single cloud drifting past may transform the whole region: the grass darkens, then shines with wetness; nothing else has happened, and yet it's been like a voyage from one seashore to another. Or an old man loses his last tooth, and this trifling event may become a landmark in the lives of his neighbors, from which they date their memories. Every evening the birds sing around the village in the same way, in the stillness of the setting sun, but it feels like something·new happening every time, as though·the world were not yet seven days old! In the coun- try, he thought, the gods still come to people. A man matters, his experiences matter, but in the city, where experiences come by the thousands, we can no longer relate them to ourselves; and this is of course the beginning of life's notorious turning into abstraction.
But even as he thought all this, he was also aware of how this ab- straction extended a man's powers a thousandfold and how, even if from the point ofview of any given detail it diluted him tenfold, as a whole it expanded him a hundredfold, and there could be no ques- tion of turning the wheel backward. And in one of those apparently random and abstract thoughts ~at so often assumed importance in his life, it struck him that when one is overburdened and dreams of simplifying one's life, the basic law of this life, the law one longs for, is nothing other than that of narrative order, the simple order that enables one to say: "First this happened and then that happened. . . . " It is the simple sequence of events in which. the overwhelmingly manifold nature of things is represented in a unidimensional order,
as a mathematician would say, stringing all that has occurred in space and time on a single thread, which calms us; that celebrated "thread of the story," which is, it seems, the thread of life itself. Lucky the man who can say "when," "before," and "after"! Terrible things ,nay have happened to him, he may have writhed in pain, but as soon as he can tell what happened in chronological order, he feels as con- tented as ifthe sun were warming his belly. This is the trick the novel artificially turns to account: Whether the wanderer is riding on the highway in pouring rain or crunching through snow and ice at ten below zero, the reader feels a cozy glow, and this would be hard to understand if this eternally dependable narrative device, which even nursemaids can rely on to keep their little charges quiet, this tried- and-true "foreshortening of the mind's perspective," were not al- ready part and parcel of life itself. Most people relate to themselves as storytellers. They usually have no use for poems, and although the occasional "because" or "in order that" gets knotted into the thread oflife, they generally detest any brooding that goes beyond that; they love the orderly sequence of facts because it has·the look of neces- sity, and the impression that their life has a "course" is somehow their refuge from chaos. It now came to Ulrich that he had lost this elementary, narrative mode of thought to which private life still clings, even though everything in public life has already ceased to be. narrative and no longer follows a thread, but instead spreads out as an infinitely interwoven surface.
When he resumed his homeward progress, reflecting on this in- sight, he remembered Goethe writing in an essay on art that "Man is not a teaching animal but one that lives, acts, and influences. " He respectfully shrugged his shoulders. "These days," he thought, "a man can only allow himself to forget the uncertainties on which he must base his life and his actions as much as an actor who forgets the scenery and his makeup, and believes that he is really living his part. " The thought of Goethe, however, brought back the thought of Arn- heim, who was always misusing Goethe as an authority, and Ulrich su~denly remembered with distaste his extraordinary confusion when Arnheim had placed an arm on his shoulder. At this point he had emerged from under the trees and was back on the street, look- ing for the best way home. Peering upward for a street sign, he al- most ran full tilt into a shadowy figure emerging from the darkness,
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and had to pull up short to avoid knocking down the prostitute who had stepped in his way. She held her ground and smiled instead of revealing her annoyance at his having charged into her like a bull, and. Ulrich suddenly felt that her professional smile somehow cre- ated a little aura of warmth in the night. She spoke to him, using the threadbare words commonly thrown out as bait, which are like the dirty leavings of other men. She had a child's sloping shoulders, blond hair was showing under her hat, and her face looked pale, even indefmably appealing under the lamplight; beneath her nighttime makeup there was the suggestion of a young girl's freckled skin. She was much shorter than Ulrich and had to look up into his face, yet she said "baby" to him again, too numb to see anything out of place in this sound she uttered hundreds of times in a night.
Ulrich found it touching somehow. He did not brush her off but stopped and let her repeat her offer, as though he had not under- stood. Here he had unexpectedly found a friend who, for a slight charge, would put herselfentirely at his disposal, ready to do her best to please him and avoid anything to put him off. If he showed himself willing, she would slip her arm in his with a gentle trustfulness and faint hesitation, as when old friends meet again for the frrst time after a separation not of their own making. If he promised to double or
·treble her usual price, and put the money on the table beforehand, so that she need not think about it but could abandon herself to that carefree, obliging state of mind that goes with having made a good deal, it would be shown· that pure indifference has the merit of all pure feeling, which is without personal presumption and functions minus the needless confusion caused by interference from private emotions. Such thoughts went through his mind, half seriously, half flippantly, and he could not bring himself altogether to disappoint the little person, who was waiting for him to strike a deal; he even realized that he wanted her to like him, but clumsily enough, instead of simply exchanging a few words with her in the language of her profession, he fumbled in ~s pocket, slipped approximately the amount she would have asked into her hand, and walked on. For the space of a moment he had briefly pressed her hand-which had oddly resisted, in· her surprise-firmly in his, with a single friendly word. But as he left this willing volunteer behind, he knew that she would rejoin her colleagues, who were whispering nearby in the
dark, show them the money, and finally think of some gibe at him to give vent to feelings she could not understand.
The encounter lived on in his mind for a while as though it had been a tender idyll of a minute's duration. He did not romanticize the poverty of his fleeting friend or her debasement, but when he imagined how she would have turned up her eyes and given the fake little moan she had learned to deliver at the right moment, he couldn't help feeling without knowing why that there was something touching about this deeply vulgar, hopelessly inept private perform- ance for an agreed price; perhaps because it was a burlesque version of the human comedy itself. Even while he was still speaking to the girl he had thought fleetingly of Moosbrugger, the pathological co- median, the pursuer and nemesis of prostitutes, who had been out walking on that other, unlucky night just as Ulrich was this evening. When the housefronts on that street had stopped swaying like stage scenery for a moment, Moosbrugger had bumped into the unknown creature who had awaited him by the bridge the night ofthe murder. What a shock of recognition it must have been, going through him from head to toe: for an . instant, Ulrich thought he could feel it him- self. Something was lifting him off the ground like a wave; he lost his balance but didn't need it, the movement itself carried him along. His heart contracted, but his imaginings became confused and over- ran all bounds, until they dissolved in an almost enervating voluptu- ousness. He made an effort to calm down. He had apparently been living so long without some central purpose that he was actually en- vying a psychopath his obsessions and his faith in the part he was playing! But Moosbrugger was fascinating, after all, not just to him- selfbut to everyone else as well. Ulrich heard Amheim's voice asking him: 'Would you set him free? " and his own answer: "No! Probably not. " Never ever, he now said to himself, and yet he had the hal- lucinatory image of an act in which the movement of reaching out in some extreme state of excitement and that of being moved by it fused into an ineffable communion, in which desire was indistin- guishable from compulsion, meaning from necessity, and the most intense activity from blissful receptiveness. He fleetingly recalled the opinion that sm:h luckless creatures as Moosbrugger were the em- bodiments of repressed instincts common to all, of all the murders and rapes committed in fantasies. Let those who believed this make
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their own peace with Moosbrugger, let them justify him to reestab- lish their own morality, after they had satisfied their dark urges through him! UlriCh's conflict was different; he repressed nothing and could not help seeing that the image ofa murderer was no stran- ger to him than any other ofthe world's pictures; what they all had in common with hl~ own old images of himself: part crystallization of meaning, part resurgence ofthe nonsense beneath. A nimpant meta- phor oforder, that was what Moosbrugger meant for him. And sud- denly Ulrich said: "All of that-" and made a gesture as though thrusting something aside with the baclc of his hand. He had not merely thought it, he had said it out loud, and reacted to hearing himself speak by pressing his lips together and finishing his state- ment in silence: "All ofthat has to be settled, once and for alii" Never mind what "all of that" was in detail; it was everything he had been preoccupied with, tormented by, sometimes even delighted with, ever since he had taken his "sabbatical"-everything that had tied him up in knots, like a dreamer for whom all things are possible ex- cept getting up and moving about; all that had led him froq1 one im- possible thing to another, from t:P. e very b~ginning until these last minutes of his homeward walk. Ulrich felt that he would now at long last have to either live like everybody else, for some attainable goal, or come to grips with one of his imp<>. ssible possibilities. He had reached his own neighborhood, and he quickened his pace through the last street with a peculiar sense of hovering on some threshold. The feeling lent him wings, it moved him to take action, but as it was unspecific, again he was left with only an incomparable sense of freedom. ·
This might have passed off like so much else, but when he turned the comer into his own street he thought he saw all the windows of his house lit up, and shortly afterward, when he reached his garden gate, he could have no doubt about it. His old servant had asked for permission to spend the night with relatives somewhere; Ulrich had not been home since the episode with Gerda, when it was still day- light, and the gardener couple, who lived on the ground floor, never entered his rooms; yet there were lights on everywhere-intruders must be in the house, burglars he was about to take by surprise. Ul- rich was so bewildered, and so disinclined to shake off the spell he was under, that he walked straight up to the house without hesita-
tion. He had no idea what to expect. He saw shadows on the windows that seemed to indicate there was only one person moving about in- side, but there could be more, and he wondered whether he might be walking into a bullet as he entered-or should he be prepared to shoot first? In a different state of mind Ulrich would probably have gone looking for a policeman or at least investigated the situation before deciding what to do, but he wanted this adventure to himself, and did not even reach for the pistol he sometimes carried since the night he had been knocked down bythe hoodlums. He wanted . . . he didn't know what he wanted; he was willing to see what happened!
But when he pushed open the front door and entered the house, the burglar he had been looking forward to with such mixed feelings was only Clarisse.
12-3
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THE TURNING POINT
Ulrich's recklessness might from the beginning have been motivated in part by an underlying faith in some harmless· explanation for ev- erything, that shying away from believing the worst that always leads one into danger; nevertheless, when his old servant unexpectedly came up to him in the hall, he almost knocked him down. Fortu- nately, he stopped himself in time, and was told that a telegram had come, which Clarisse had signed for and was now holding for him upstairs. The young lady had arrived about an hour ago, just as he, the old man, had been about to leave, and she would not let herself be turned away, so that he had preferred to stay in and give up his night out this once, for if he might be permitted to say so, the young lady seemed to be rather upset.
Ulrich thanked him and went up to his rooms, where he found Clarisse lying on the couch, on her side with her legs drawn up. Her straight, slim figure, her boyish haircut, and the charming oval of her
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face resting on . one hand as she looked at him when he· opened the door all made a most seductive picture. He told her that he had taken her for a burglar.
Clarisse's eyes flashed like rapid bursts of machine-gun fire. "Maybe I am a burglar! " she said. "That old fox your servant did his best to make me leave. I sent him off to bed, but I know he's been lurking out of sight downstairs somewhere. Your house is lovely! " She held out the telegram to him without getting up. "I was curious to see what you're like when you come home to be by yourself," she went on. 'Walter's gone to a concert. He won't be back till after mid- night. But I didn't tell him fwas coming to see you. "
Ulrich ripped open the telegram and read it while only half listen- ing to Clarisse's words. He turned suddenly pale and read the star- tling message over again, unable to take it in. Although he had failed to answer several letters from his father asking him about the prog- ress of the Parallel Campaign and the problem of "diminishe~ re- sponsibility," a longish interval had passed, without his noticing it, since any further reminders had come-and now this telegram, obvi- ously drafted in advance with meticulous care by his father hims~lf, informed him punctiliously, and in a funereal ~one that did not quite succeed in repressing all reproach, ofhis own death. There had been little enough affection between them; in fact, the thought of his fa- ther had almost always been rather disturbing to Ulrich, and yet, as he now read the quaintly sinister text over again, he was thinking: "Now I am all alone in the world. " He did not mean it literally, nor would that have made any sense, considering how things had been between them; what he meant was that he felt, with some amaze- ment, that he was floating free, as though some mooring rope had snapped, or that· his state of alienation from a world to which his fa- ther had been the last link had now become complete and final.
"My father's dead," he said to Clarisse, holding up the telegram with a touch of unintended solemnity.
"Oh! " Clarisse said. "Congratulations! " And after a slight, thoughtful pause she added: "I suppos,e you're going to be very rich now? " and looked around with interest.
"I don't believe he was more than moderatelywell off," Ulrich re- plied distantly. 'Tve been living here quite beyond his means. "
Clarisse acknowledged the rebuke with a tiny smile, a sort of little
curtsy of a smile; many of her expressi~e movements were as abrupt and disproportionate in a small space as the theatrical bow of a boy who must demonstrate before company how well he has been brought up. She was left alone, for a few moments while Ulrich ex- cused himselfto go and make preparations for the trip he would have to take. When she had left Walter after their violent scene she had not gone far; outside the door to their apartment there was a seldom- use~staircase leading up to the attic, and there she had sat, wrapped in a shawl, until she heard him leave the house. It made her think of the lofts in theaters for the stage machinery, where ropes run on pul- leys, and there she sat while Walter made his exit down the stairs.