No More Learning

"What a glorious feeling it must have been for those Swedish ad- venturers to reach such a place after trotting relentlessly for weeks, and then from their saddles catch sight oftheir quarry," he said to his sister after telling her the story of the place. "It is only at such mo- ments that the weight of life, the burden of our secret grievance- that we must all die, that it's all been so brief and probably for nothing-is ever really lifted from us. "
"What moments do you mean? "
Ulrich did not know what to answer. He did not want to answer at all. He remembered that as a young man he had always felt the need in this place to clench his teeth and keep silent. Finally, he replied: "Those romantic moments when events run away with us-the senseless moments! " He felt as if his head were a hollow nut on his neck, full of old saws like "Death be not proud" or "I care for no- body, no, not I," and with them the faded fortissimo of those years when there was not yet a boundary between life's expectations and life itself. He thought: "What single-minded and happy experiences have I had since then? None. "
Agathe responded: ''I've always acted senselessly, and it only makes one unhappy. "
She had walked ahead, to the very edge. Her ears were deaf to her brother's words; she did not understand them, and saw a somber, barren landscape before her whose sadness harmonized with her own. When she turned around she said: "It's a place to kill oneself," and smiled. "The emptiness in my head could melt with sweet peace
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into the emptiness of this view! " She took a few steps back to Ulrich. "All my life," she went on, "''ve been reproached with having no willpower, with loving nothing, respecting nothing; in short, for being a person with no real will to live. Papa used to scold me for it, and Hagauer blamed me for it. So now I wish you would tell me, for God's sake, tell me at long last, in which moments does something in life strike us as necessary? ''
"When one turns over in bed! " Ulrich said gruffly.
"What does that mean? ''
"Excuse the mundane example," he said. "But it's a fact: You're in
an uncomfortable position; you incessantly think of changing it and decide on one move and then another, without doing anything; fi- nally, you give up; and then all at once you've turned over! One really should say you've been turned over. That's the one pattern we act on, whether in a fit of passion or after long reflection. " He did not look at her as he spoke; he was answering himself. He still had the feeling: Here I stood and longed for something that has never been satisfied.
Agathe smiled again, but the smile twisted her mouth as ifin pain. She returned to where she had been standing and stared silently into the romantic distance. Her fur coat made a dark outline against the sky, and her slender form presented a sharp contrast to the broad silence ofthe landscape and the shadows ofthe clouds flying over it. Looking at her, Ulrich had an indescribably strong sense that some- thing was happening. He was almost ashamed to be standing there in the company of a woman instead of beside a saddled horse. And al- though he was perfectly aware that the cause of this was the tranquil image emanating at this moment from his sister, he had the impres- sion that something was happening, not to him, but somewhere in the world, and he was missing it. He felt he was being ridiculous. And yet there had been something true in his blurting out that he regretted the way he had lived his life. He sometimes longed to be wholly involved in events as in a wrestling match, even if they were meaningless or criminal, as long as they were valid, absolute, without the everlasting tentativeness they have when a person is superior to his experiences. "Something an end in itself, authentic," Ulrich thought, seriously looking for the right expression, and, unawares, his thoughts stopped pursuing imaginary events and focused on the sight that Agathe herselfnow presented, as nothing but the mirror of
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her self. So brother and sister stood for quite a while, apart and soli- tary, immobilized by a hesitancy filled with conflicting feelings. Most curious of all, perhaps, was that it never occurred to Ulrich that something had indeed already happened when, at Agathe's behest and in his own desire to get rid of him, he had palmed off on his unsuspecting brother-in-law the lie that there was a sealed testament that could not be opened for several days, and had assured him, also against his better knowledge, that Agathe would look after his inter- ests: something Hagauer would subsequently refer to as "aiding and abetting. "
Eventually they did move away from this spot, where each had been sunk in thought, and walked on together without having talked things out. The wind had freshened again, and because Agathe seemed fatigued, Ulrich suggested stopping to rest at a shepherd's cottage he knew of nearby. They soon found the stone cabin, and they had to duck their heads as they went in, while the shepherd's wife, . staring, fended them off in embarrassment. In the mixture of German and Slavic that prevailed in this part of the country and that he still vaguely remembered, Ulrich asked ifthey might come in for a while to warm themselves and eat their provisions indoors, and sup- ported this request with a tip so generous that the involuntary host- ess broke out into horrified lamentations that her wretched poverty did not enable her to offer better hospitality to such "fine gentry. " She wiped off the greasy table by the window, fanned a fire of twigs on the hearth, and put on some goat's milk to heat. Agathe had im- mediately squeezed past the table to the window without paying any attention to these efforts, as if it were a matter of course that one would find shelter somewhere, no matter where. She looked out through the dim little square offour panes at the landscape here, on the far side ofthe rampart, which without the wide extent ofthe view they had had from the top was more reminiscent of what a swimmer sees, surrounded by green crests. Though it was not yet evening, the day had passed its zenith and the light was fading.
Suddenly Agathe asked: "Why don't you ever talk to me seri- ously? "
How could Ulrich have found a better answer to this other than to glance up at her with an air ofinnocence and surprise? He was busy
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laying out ham, sausage, and boiled eggs on a piece of paper between himself and his sister.
But Agathe continued: "If one accidentally bumps into you it hurts, and one feels a shock at the terrific difference. But when I try to ask you something crucial you dissolve into thin air! "
She did not touch the food he pushed toward her-indeed, in her aversion to winding up the day with a rural picnic, her back was so straight that she was not even touching the table. And now some- thing recurred that was like their climb up the country road. Ulrich shoved aside the mugs of goat's milk that had just been brought to the table from the stove and were emitting a very disagreeable smell to noses unaccustomed to it; the faint nausea it produced in him had a sobering, stimulating effect such as comes from a sudden rush of bitterness.
"I've always spoken seriously to you," he retorted. "If you don't like what I say, it's not my fault; what you don't like in my responses is the morality of our time. " He suddenly realized that he wanted to explain to his sister as completely as possible all she would have to know in order to understand herself, and to some extent her brother as well. And with the firmness of a man who will brook no idle inter- ruptions, he launched on a lengthy speech.
"The morality ofour time, whatever else may be claimed, is that of achievement. Five more or less fraudulent bankruptcies are accept- able provided the fifth leads to a time of prosperity and patronage. Success can cause everything else to be forgotten. When you reach the point where your money helps win elections and buys paintings, the State is prepared to look the other way too. There are unwritten rules: ifyou donate to church, charities, and political parties, it needs to be no more than one tenth of the outlay required for someone to demonstrate his goodwill by patronizing the arts. And even success still has its limits; one cannot yet acquire everything in every way; some principles of the Crown, the aristocracy, and society can still to some extent restrain the social climber. On the other hand, the State, for its own suprapersonal person, quite openly countenances the principle that one may rob, steal, and murder ifit will provide power, civilization, and glory. Of course, I'm not saying that all this is ac- knowledged even in theory; on the contrary, the theory of it is quite
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obscure. I just wanted to sum up the most mundane facts for you. The moral argumentation is just one more means to an end, a weapon used in much the same way as lies. This is the world that men have made, and it would make me want to be a woman-if only women did not love men!
"Nowadays we call good whatever gives us the illusion that it will get us somewhere, but this is precisely what you just called the flying man without remorse, and what I've called a problem we have no method for solving. As a scientifically trained person I feel in every situation that my knowledge is incomplete, no more than a pointer, and that perhaps tomorrow I will have new knowledge that will cause me to think differently. On the other hand, even a person wholly gov- erned by his feelings, 'a person on the way up,' as you have depicted him, will see everything he does as a step upward, from which he is raised to the next step. So there is something in our minds and in our souls, a morality ofthe 'next-step'-but is that simply the morality of the five bankruptcies, is the entrepreneurial morality of our time so deeply rooted in our inner life? Or is there only the illusion of a con- nection? Or is the morality of the careerists a monstrosity prema- turely born from deeper currents? At this point I really don't know the answer! "
Ulrich's short pause for breath was only rhetorical, for he intended to develop his views further. Agathe, however, who had so far been listening with the curiously passive alertness that was sometimes characteristic of her, switched the conversation onto a totally differ- ent track with the simple remark that she wasn't interested in this answer because all she wanted to know was where Ulrich himself stood; she was not in a position to grasp what everyone might think.
"But ifyou expect me to accomplish anything in any form whatso- ever, I'd rather have no principles at all," she added.
"Thank God for that! " Ulrich said. "It's always a pleasure for me, every time I look at your youth, beauty, and strength, to hear from you that you have no energy at all! Our era is dripping with the en- ergy of action. It's not interested in ideas, only in deeds. This fearful activity stems from the single fact that people have nothing to do. Inwardly, I mean. But even outwardly, in the last analysis, everyone spends his whole life repeating the same thing over and over: he gets into some occupation and then goes on with it. I think this brings us
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back to the question you raised before, out there in the open air. It's so simple to have the energy to act, and so hard to make any sense of it! Almost nobody understands that these days. That's why our men of action look like men bowling; they manage to knock down their nine pins with all the gestures of a Napoleon. It wouldn't even sur- prise me to see them ending up by assaulting each other in a frenzy, because of their inability to comprehend why all action is inade- quate. . . . " He had spoken energetically at first but lapsed again, first into pensiveness, then into silence for a while. At last he just glanced up with a smile and contented himself with saying: "You say that if I expect any moral effort from you, you are bound to disappoint me. I say that if you expect any moral counsel from me, I am bound to disappoint you. I think that we have nothing definite to demand of one another-all of us, I mean; we really shouldn't demand action from one another; we should create the conditions that make action possible; that's how I feel about it. "
"But how is that to be done? " Agathe said. She realized that Ulrich had abandoned the big pronouncements he had begun with and had drifted into something closer to himself, but even this was too gen- eral for her taste. She had, as we know, no use for general analysis and regarded every effort that extended beyond her own skin, as it were, as more or less hopeless; she was sure of this for her own part, and believed it was probably true of the general assertions of others too. Still, she understood Ulrich quite well. She noticed that as he sat there with his head down, speaking softly against the energy of ac- tion, her brother kept absentmindedly carving notches and lines into the table with his pocketknife, and all the sinews of his hand were tense. The unthinking but almost impassioned motion of his hand, and the frank way he had spoken of Agathe's youth and beauty, made for an absurd duet above the orchestra of the other words; nor did she try to give it a meaning other than that she was sitting here watching.
"What's to be done? " Ulrich replied in the same tone as before. "At our cousin's I once proposed to Count Leinsdorf that he should found a World Secretariat for Precision and Soul, so that even the people who don't go to church would know what they had to do. Nat- urally, I only said it in fun, for while we created science a long time ago for truth, asking for something similar to cope with everything
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else would still appear so foolish today as to be embarrassing. And yet everything the two of us have been talking about so far would logi- cally call for such a secretariat! " He had dropped the speech and leaned back against his bench. "I suppose I'm dissolving into thin air again if I add: But how would that turn out today? ''
Since Agathe did not reply, there was a silence. After a while Ul- rich said: "Anyway, I sometimes think that I can't really stand believ- ing that myself! When I saw you before, standing on the rampart," he added in an undertone, "I suddenly had a wild urge to do some- thing! I don't know why. I really have done some rash things some- times. The magic lay in the fact that when it was over, there was something more besides me. Sometimes I'm inclined to think that a person could be happy even as a result of a crime, because it gives him a certain ballast and perhaps keeps him on a steadier course. "
This time, too, his sister did not answer right away. He looked at her quietly, perhaps even expectantly, but without reexperiencing the surge he had just described, indeed without thinking of anything at all. After a little while, she asked him: 'Would you be angry with me if I committed a crime? ''
'What do you expect me to say to that? '' Ulrich said; he had bent over his knife again.
"Is there no answer? "
"No; nowadays there is no real answer. "
At this point Agathe said: 'Td like to kill Hagauer. "
Ulrich forced himself not to look up. The words had entered his
ear lightly and softly, but when they had passed they left behind something like broad wheel marks in his mind. He had instantly for- gotten her tone; he would have had to see her face to know how to take her words, but he did not want to accord them even that much importance.
"Fine," he said. 'Why shouldn't you? Is there anyone left today who hasn't wanted to do something of the kind? Do it, if you really can! It's just as if you had said: 'I would like to love him for his faults! ' " Now he straightened up again and looked his sister in the face. It was stubborn and swprisingly excited. Keeping his eyes on her, he said slowly:
"There's something wrong here, you see; on this frontier between what goes on inside us and what goes on outside, some kind of com-
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munication is missing these days, and they adapt to each other only with tremendous losses. One might almost say that our evil desires are the dark side of the life we lead in reality, and the life we lead in reality is the dark side ofour good desires. Imagine ifyou actually did it: it wouldn't at all be what you meant, and you'd be horribly disap- pointed, to say the least. . . . "
"Perhaps I could suddenly be a different person-you admitted that yourself! " Agathe interrupted him.
As Ulrich at this moment looked around, he was reminded that they were not alone; two people were listening to their conversation. The old woman-hardly over forty, perhaps, but her rags and the traces of her humble life made her look older-had sat down socia- bly near the stove, and sitting beside her was the shepherd, who had come home to his hut during their conversation without their notic- ing him, absorbed in themselves as they were. The two old people sat with their hands on their knees and listened, or so it appeared, in wonder and with pride to the conversation that filled their hut, greatly pleased even though they did not understand a single word. They saw that the milk went undrunk, the sausage uneaten; it was all a spectacle and, for all anyone knew, an edifying one. They were not even whispering to each other. Ulrich's glance dipped into their wide-open eyes, and he smiled at them in embarrassment, but of the two only the woman smiled back, while the man maintained his seri- ous, reverential propriety.
"We must eat," Ulrich said to his sister in English. "They're won- dering about us. "
She obediently toyed with some bread and meat, and he for his part ate resolutely and even drank a little of the milk. Meanwhile Agathe went on, aloud and unembarrassed: "The idea of actually hurting him is repugnant to me when I come to think of it. So maybe I don't want to kill him. But I do want to wipe him out! Tear him into little pieces, pound them in a mortar, flush it down the drain; that's what I'd like to do! Root out everything that's happened! "
"This is a funny way for us "to be talking," Ulrich remarked.
Agathe was silent for a while. But then she said: "But you prom- ised me the first day you'd stand by me against Hagauer! "
"Ofcourse I will. But not like that. "
Again she was silent. Then she said suddenly: "If you bought or
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rented a car we could drive to my house by way of Iglau and come back the longer way around, through Tabor, I think. It would never occur to anyone that we'd been there in the night. "
"And the servants? Fortunately, I can't drive! " Ulrich laughed, but then he shook his head in annoyance. "Such up-to-date ideas! "
"So you say," Agathe answered. Pensively, she pushed a bit of bacon back and forth on her plate with a fingernail, and it looked as though the fingernail, which had a greasy spot from the bacon, was doing it on its own. "But you've also said that the virtues of society are vices to the saint! "
"But I didn't say that the vices of society are virtues to the saint! " Ulrich pointed out. He laughed, caught hold of Agathe's hand, and cleaned it with his handkerchief.
"You always take everything back! " Agathe scolded him with a dis- satisfied smile, the blood rushing to her face as she tried to free her finger.
The two old people by the stove, still watching exactly as before, now smiled broadly in echo.
'When you talk with me first one way, then another," Agathe said in a low but impassioned voice, "it's as if I were seeing myself in a splintered mirror. With you, one never sees oneself from head to toe! "
"No," Ulrich answered without letting go of her hand. "One never sees oneselfas awhole nowadays, and one never moves as awhole- that's just it! "
Agathe gave in and suddenly stopped withdrawing her hand. ''I'm certainly the opposite of holy," she said softly. "I may have been worse than a kept woman with my indifference. And I'm certainly not spoiling for action, and maybe I'll never be able to kill anyone. But when you first said that about the saint-and it was quite a while ago-it made me see something 'as a whole. ' " She bowed her head, in thought or possibly to hide her face. "I saw a saint-maybe a fig- ure on a fountain. To tell the truth, maybe I didn't see anything at all, but I felt something that has to be expressed this way. The water flowed, and what the saint did also came flowing over the rim, as ifhe were a fountain gently brimming over in all directions. That's how one ought to be, I think; then one would always be doing what was right and yet it wouldn't matter at all what one did. "
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. .
Agathe sees herself standing in the world overflowing with holi- ness and trembling for her sins, and sees with incredulity how the snakes and rhinoceroses, mountains and ravines, silent and even smaller than she is, lie down at her feet," he said, gently teasing her. . . But what of Hagauer? "
. . That's just it. He doesn't fit in. He has to go. "
. . Now I have something to tell you," her brother said. . . Every time I've had to take part in anything with other people, something ofgen- uine social concern, I've been like a man who steps outside the thea- ter before the final act for a breath of fresh air, sees the great dark void with all those stars, and walks away, abandoning hat, coat, and play. "
Agathe gave him a searching look. It was and wasn't an adequate answer.
Ulrich met her gaze. . . You, too, are often plagued by a sense that there's always a 'dislike' before there's a 'like,'" he said, and thought: . . Is she really like me? " Again he thought: . . Perhaps the way a pastel resembles a woodcut. " He regarded himself as the more stable. And she was more beautiful than he. Such a pleasing beauty! He shifted his grip from her finger to her whole hand, a wann, long hand full of life, which up to now he had held in his own only long enough for a greeting. His young sister was upset, and while there were no actual tears in her eyes, he saw a moist shimmer there.
. . In a few days you'll be leaving me too," she said, . . and how can I cope with everything then? "
'W e can stay together; you can follow me. "
. . How do you suppose that would work? " Agathe asked, with the little thoughtful furrow on her forehead.
. . 1 don't suppose at all; it's the first I've thought of it. "
He stood up and gave the sheepherders some more money, . . for the carved-up table. "
Through a haze Agathe saw the country folk grinning, bobbing, and saying something about how glad they were, in short, incompre- hensible words. As she went past them, she felt their four hospitable eyes, staring with naked emotion at her face, and realized that she and Ulrich had been taken for lovers who had quarreled and made up.
. . They took us for lovers! " she said. Impetuously she slid her ann
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in his, and a wave ofjoy welled up in her. "You must give me a kiss! " she demanded, laughing, and pressed her arm in her brother's as they stood on the threshold of the hut and the low door opened into the darkness ofevening.
11
HOL Y DISCOURSE: BEGINNING
For the rest of Ulrich's stay little more was said about Hagauer; nor for a long time did they again refer to the idea that they should make their reunion permanent and take up life together. Nevertheless, the fire that had flamed up in Agathe's unrestrained desire to do away with her husband still smoldered under the ashes. It spread out in conversations that reached no end and yet burst out again; perhaps one should say: Agathe's feelings were seeking another possibility of burning freely.
She usually began such conversations with a definite, personal question, the inner form of which was: "May I, or may I not . . . ? " The lawlessness of her nature had until now rested on the sad and dispirited principle that 'Tm allowed to do anything, but I don't want to anyway," and so his young sister's questions sometimes seemed to Ulrich, not inappropriately, like the questions of a child, which are as warm as the little hands of these helpless beings.
His own answers were different in kind, though no less character- istic: he always enjoyed sharing the yield of his experience and his reflections, and as was his custom expressed himself in a fashion as frank as it was intellectually enterprising. He always arrived quickly at the "moral of the story" his sister was talking about, summed things up in formulas, liked to use himself for illustration, and managed in this fashion to tell Agathe a great deal about himself, especially about his earlier, more eventful life. Agathe told him noth- ing about herself, but she admired his ability to speak about his own
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life like that, and his way of subjecting every point she raised to moral scrutiny suited her very well. For morality is nothing more than an ordering that embraces both the soul and things, so it is not strange that young people, whose zeal for life has not yet been blunted on every side, talk ~bout it a good deal. But with a man of Ulrich's age and experience some explanation is called for, because men talk of morality only in their working lives, if it happens to be part of their professional jargon; otherwise, the word has been swallowed by the business of living and never manages to regain its freedom. So when Ulrich spoke of morality it was a sign of some profound disorder, which attracted Agathe because it corresponded to something in her- self. She was ashamed, now that she heard what complicated precon- ditions would have to be met, of her naYve proclamation that she intended to live "in complete harmony" with herself, and yet she was impatient for her brother to come more quickly to a conclusion; for it often seemed to her that everything he said brought him closer to it, and with greater precision the further he went, but he always stopped at the last step, just at the threshold, where, every time, he gave up the attempt.
The locus of this deflection and of these last steps-and their par- alyzing effect did not escape Ulrich-can most generally be indi- cated by noting that every proposition in European morality leads to such a point, which one cannot get beyond, so that a person taking stock ofhimselfhas first the gestures ofwading in shallows, as long as he feels firm convictions underfoot, succeeded by the sudden ges- tures of horribly drowning when he goes a little farther, as though the solid ground of life had abruptly fallen off from the shallows into a completely imponderable abyss. This had a particular way of mani- festing itself as well when brother and sister were talking: Ulrich could speak calmly and clearly on any subject he brought up, so long as his reason was involved, and Agathe felt a similar eagerness in lis- tening; but when they stopped and fell silent, a much greater tension came over their faces. And so it happened once that they were car- ried across the frontier they had hitherto unconsciously respected. Ulrich had maintained that "the only basic characteristic of our mo- rality is that its commandments contradict each other. The most moral of all propositions is: The exception proves the rule! " He had apparently been moved to this assertion only by his distaste for a sys-
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tern that claims to be unyielding, but in practice must yield to every deflection, which makes it the opposite of a precise procedure that first bases itself on experience and then derives the general law from these observations. He was of course aware of the distinction be- tween natural and moral laws, that the first are derived from observ- ing amoral nature, while the second have to be imposed on less stubborn human nature; but being of the opinion that something about this opposition was today no longer accurate, he had been just about to say that the moral system was intellectually a hundred years behind the times, which was why it was so hard to adapt it to changed conditions. But before he could get that far with his explanation Agathe interrupted him with an answer that seemed very simple, but for the moment took him aback.
"Isn't it good to be good? " she asked her brother, with a gleam in her eye like the one she'd had when she was fiddling with her father's medals, which presumably not everybody would have considered good.
"You're right," he replied eagerly. "One really has to formulate some such proposition ifone wants to feel the original meaning again! But children still like being 'good' as ifit were some tidbit. . . . "
"And being 'bad' as well," Agathe added.
"But does being good have any part in the passions of adults? " Ul- rich asked. "It certainly is part of their principles. Not that they are good-they would regard that as childish-but that their behavior is good. A good person is one who has good principles and who does good things: it's an open secret that he can be quite disgusting as well. "
"See Hagauer," Agathe volunteered.
"There's an absurd paradox inherent in those good people," Ul- rich said. "They turn a condition into an imperative, a state of grace into a norm, a state of being into a purpose! In a whole lifetime this household of good people never serves up anything but leftovers, while keeping up a rumor that these are the scraps from a great feast day that was celebrated once. It's true that from time to time a few virtues come back into fashion, but as soon as that happens they lose their freshness again. "
"Didn't you once say that the same act may be either good or bad, depending on circumstances? " Agathe asked.
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Ulrich agreed. That was his theory, that moral values were not ab- solutes but functional concepts. But when we moralize or generalize we separate them out from their natural context: "And that is pre- sumably the point where something goes wrong on the path to virtue. "
"OtheiWise, how could virtuous people be so dreary," Agathe added, "when their intention to be good ought to be the most de- lightful, challenging, and enjoyable thing anyone could imagine! "
Her brother hesitated, but suddenly he let slip a remark that was soon to bring them into a most unusual relationship.
"Our morality," he declared, "is the crystallization of an inner movement that is completely different from it. Not one thing we say is right! Take any statement, like the one that just occurred to me: 'Prison is a place for repentance. ' It's something we can say with the best conscience in the world, but no one takes it literally, because it would mean hellfue for the prisoners! So how is one to take it? Surely few people know what repentance is, but everybody can tell you where it should reign. Or imagine that something is uplifting- how did that ever get to be part of our morals? When did we ever lie with our faces in the dust, so that it was bliss to be uplifted? Or try to imagine literally being seized by an idea-the moment you were to feel such a thing physically you'd have crossed the border into insan- ity! Every word demands to be taken literally, otheiWise it decays into a lie; but one can't take words literally, or the world would turn into a madhouse! Some kind of grand intoxication rises out of this as a dim memory, and one sometimes wonders whether everything we experience may not be fragmented pieces tom from some ancient entity that was once put together wrong. "
The conversation in which this remark occurred took place in the library-study, and while Ulrich sat over several books he had taken along on his trip, his sister was rummaging through the legal and philosophical books, a bequest ofwhich she was the co-inheritor and out of which she picked the notions that led to her questions. Since their outing the pair had rarely left the house. This was how they spent most of their time. Sometimes they strolled in the garden, where winter had peeled the leaves from the bare shrubbery, expos- ing the earth beneath, swollen with rain. The sight was agonizing. The air was pallid, like something left too long under water. The gar-
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den was not large. The paths soon turned back upon themselves. The state of mind induced in both of them by walking on these paths edd- ied in circles, as a rising current does behind a dam. When they re- turned to the house the rooms were dark and sheltered, and the windows resembled deep lighting shafts through which the day ar- rived with all the brittle delicacy of thinnest ivory.
Now, after Ulrich's last, vehement words, Agathe descended from the library ladder on which she had been sitting and put her arms around his shoulders without a word. It was an unaccustomed show of tenderness, for apart from the two kisses, the first on the evening of their first encounter and the other a few days ago when they had set out on their way home from the shepherd's hut, the siblings' nat- ural reserve had released itself in nothing more than words or little acts of attentiveness, and on both those occasions, too, the effect of the intimate contact had been concealed by its unexpectedness and exuberance. But this time Ulrich was instantly reminded of the still- warm garter that his sister had given the deceased as a parting gift instead of a flood of words. The thought shot through his head: "She certainly must have a lover; but she doesn't seem too attached to him, otherwise she wouldn't be staying on here so calmly. " Clearly, she was a woman, who had led her life as a woman independently of him and would go on doing so. His shoulder felt the beauty of her arm from the distribution of its resting weight, and on the side turned toward his sister he had a shadowy sense of the nearness of her blond armpit and the outline of her breast. So as not to go on sitting there in mute surrender to that quiet embrace, he placed his hand over her fingers close to his neck, with this contact drowning out the other.
"You know, it's rather childish, talking the way we do," he said, not without some ill humor. "The world is full of energetic resolution, and here we sit in luxuriant idleness, talking about the sweetness of being good and the theoretical pots we could fill with it. "
Agathe freed her fingers but let her hand go back to its place. 'What's that you've been reading all this time? " she asked.
"You know what it is," he said. "You've been looking at the book behind my back often enough! "
"But I don't know what to make of it. "
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He could not bring himselfto talk about it. Agathe, who had drawn up a chair, was crouching behind him and had simply nestled her face peacefully in his hair as though she were napping. Ulrich was strangely reminded of the moment when his enemy Amheim had thrown an arm around him and the unregulated current of physical contact with another being had invaded him as through a breach. But this time his own nature did not repel the alien one; on the contrary, something in him advanced toward her, something that had been buried under the rubble of mistrust and resentment that fills the heart of a man who has lived a fairly long time. Agathe's relationship to him, which hovered between sister and wife, stranger and friend, without being equatable to any one of them, was not even based on a far-reaching accord between their thoughts or feelings, as he had often told himself, yet it was in complete accord-as he was now al- most astonished to note-with the fact, which had crystallized after relatively few days full of countless impressions not easy to review in a moment, that Agathe's mouth was bedded on his hair with no fur- ther claim, and that his hair was becoming warm and moist from her breath. This was as spiritual as it was physical, for when Agathe re- peated her question Ulrich was overcome with a seriousness such as he had not felt since the credulous days of his youth; and before this cloud of imponderable seriousness fled again, a cloud that extended from the space behind his back to the book before him, on which his thoughts were resting, he had given an answer that astonished him more for the total absence of irony in its tone than for its meaning:
''I'm instructing myself about the ways of the holy life. "
He stood up; not to move away from his sister but in order to be able to see her better from a few steps away.
"You needn't laugh," he said. ''I'm not religious; I'm studying the road to holiness to see ifit might also be possible to drive a car on it! " "I only laughed," she replied, "because I'm so curious to hear what you're going to say. The books you brought along are new to me, but I have a feeling that I would find them not entirely incomprehensi-
ble. "
''You understand that? " her brother asked, already convinced that
she did understand. "One may be caught up in the most intense feel- ing, when suddenly one's eye is seized by the play of some godfor-
816 • THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
saken, man-forsaken thing and one simply can't tear oneself away. Suddenly one feels borne up by its puny existence like a feather float- ing weightlessly and powerlessly on the wind. "
"Except for the intense feeling you make such a point of, I think I know what you mean," Agathe said, and could not help smiling at the almost ferocious glare of embarrassment on her brother's face, not at all in keeping with the tenderness ofhis words. "One sometimes for- gets to see and to hear, and is struck completely dumb. And yet it's precisely in minutes like these that one feels one has come to oneself for a moment. "
"I would say," Ulrich went on eagerly, "that it's like looking out over a wide shimmering sheet ofwater-so bright it seems like dark- ness to the eye, and on the far bank things don't seem to be standing on solid ground but float in the air with a delicately exaggerated dis- tinctness that's almost painful and hallucinatory. The impression one gets is as much ofintensification as ofloss. One feels linked with ev- erything but can't get close to anything. You stand here, and the world stands there, overly subjective and overly objective, but both almost painfully clear, and what separates and unites these normally fused elements is a blazing darkness, an overflowing and extinction, a swinging in and out. You swim like a fish in water or a bird in air, but there's no riverbank and no branch, only this floating! " Ulrich had slipped into poetry, but the fire and firmness of his language stood out in relief against its tender and airy meaning like metal. He seemed to have cast off the caution that usually controlled him, and Agathe looked at him astonished, but also with an uneasy gladness.
"So you think," she asked, "that there's something behind it? More than a 'fit,' or whatever hateful, placating words are used? "
"I should say I do! " He sat down again at his earlier place and leafed through the books that lay there, while Agathe got up to make room for him. Then he opened one ofthem, with the words: "This is how the saints describe it," and read aloud:
"'During those days I was exceeding restless. Now I sat awhile, now I wandered back and forth through the house'. It was like a tor- ment, and yet it can be called more a sweetness than a torment, for there was no vexation in it, only a strange, quite supernatural con- tentment. I had transcended all my faculties and reached the ob- scure power. There I heard without sound, there I saw without light.
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And my heart became bottomless, my spirit formless, and my nature immaterial. ' "
It seemed to them both that this description resembled the rest- lessness with which they themselves had been driven through house and garden, and Agathe in particular was surprised that the saints also called their hearts bottomless and their spirits formless. But Ul- rich seemed to be caught up again in his irony.
He explained: "The saints say: Once I was imprisoned, then I was drawn out of myself and immersed in God without knowledge. The emperors out hunting, as we read about them in our storybooks, de- scribe it differently: They tell how a stag appeared to them with a cross between its antlers, causing the murderous spear to drop from their hands; and then they built a chapel on the spot so they could get on with their hunting. The rich, clever ladies in whose circles I move will answer immediately, ifyou should ask them about it, that the last artist who painted such experiences was van Gogh. Or perhaps in- stead of a painter they might mention Rilke's poetry, but in general they prefer van Gogh, who is a superb investment and who cut his ear offbecause his painting didn't do enough when measured against the rapture ofthings. But the great majority ofour people will say, on the contrary, that cutting your ear offis not a German way of express- ing deep feelings; a German way is that unmistakable vacuousness of the elevated gaze one experiences on a mountaintop. For them the essence of human sublimity lies in solitude, pretty little flowers, and murmuring little brooks; and yet even in that bovine exaltation, with its undigested delight in nature, there lurks the misunderstood last echo of a mysterious other life. So when all is said and done, there must be something of the sort, or it must have existed at some time! "
"Then you shouldn't make fun of it," Agathe objected, grim with curiosity and radiant with impatience.
"I only make fun of it because I love it," Ulrich said curtly.
BIB
12
HOL Y DISCOURSE: ERRA TIC PROGRESS
In the following days there were always many books on the table, some ofwhich he had brought from home, others that he had bought since, and he would either talk extemporaneously or cite a passage, one ofmany he had marked with little slips ofpaper, to prove a point or quote the exact wording. The books before him were mostly lives of the mystics, their writings, or scholarly works about them, and he usually deflected the conversation from them by saying: "Now let's take a good hard look and see what's really going on here. " This was a cautious attitude he was not prepared to give up easily, and so he said to her once:
"If you could read right through all these accounts that men and women of past centuries have left us, describing their state of divine rapture, you would find much truth and reality in among the printed words, and yet the statements made of these words would go wholly against the grain ofyour present-day mind. " And he went on: "They speak of an overflowing radiance. Of an infinite expanse, a boundless opulence of light. Of an overarching oneness of all things and all the soul's energies. Of an awesome and indescribable uplifting of the heart. Of insights coming so swiftly that it's all simultaneous and like drops of fire falling into the world. And then again they speak of a forgetting and no longer understanding, even of everything falling utterly away. They speak of an immense serenity far removed from all passion. Of growing mute. A vanishing of thoughts and inten- tions. A blindness in which they see clearly, a clarity in which they are dead and supernaturally alive. They call it a shedding of their being, and yet they claim to be more fully alive than ever.