"
Clarisse smiled, accepting this as a compliment.
Clarisse smiled, accepting this as a compliment.
Musil - Man Without Qualities - v1
.
He had originally served with the cavalry, but his small hands and short legs were ill-suited to clutching and controlling so unrea- sonable a beast as a horse, and he so conspicuously lacked the quali- ties needed for giving military orders that his superiors used to say that if a squadron were positioned on the barracks square with their horses' heads rather than their tails, as usual, toward the stable wall, he would be incapable of getting them out through the gates.
In re- venge, little Stumm grew a beard, dark brown and rounded; he was the only officer in the Emperor's cavalry with a full beard, but regu- lations did not specifically forbid it.
.
Aiid he took to collecting pock- etknives, in a scientific spirit.
On his pay he could not afford a collection of weapons, but of knives, classified according to their make, possession of corkscrew and nail file, grade of steel, place of origin, the casing material and so on, he soon had a large number; in his room stood tall cabinets with many shallow drawers, all neatly labeled, which brought him a reputation for learning.
He could also make verses, and even as a cadet at the military academy he had al-
ways got the best grades in religion and composition; and so one day the colonel called him into the office.
"You'll never make a passable cavalry officer," he said. "If I stuck a suckling babe on a horse and sent it to the front, he'd put up about as much of a show as you do. But it's a long time since the regiment has had anyone at staff college. Why don't you apply, Stumm? "
So Stumm had two glorious years at the staff college in the capital. While he again failed to show the intellectual keenness needed to ride a horse, he attended every military concert, visited the mu- seums, and collected theater programs. He decided to switch to a civilian career but did not know how to go about it. In the end, he was found neither suited nor de. finitely unfit for service on the gen- eral staff; he was regarded as clumsy and unambitious, but some- thing of a philosopher, so for the next two years he was tentatively assigned to the general staff in command of an infantry division, which ended in his belonging, as a captain of cavalry, to the large number of those who~ as the general staff's auxiliary reserve, never get away from the li~e unless something unusual happens. Captain Stumm now served with another regiment, where he passed for an expert in military theory as well. But it did not take his new superiors long to catch on that in practical matters he was a babe-in-the-sad- dle. His career was a martyrdom, all the way up to lieutenant colonel; but even as a major he no longer dreamed of anything but a long furlough on half pay until he could be put on the retired list as an acting colonel, with the title and the uniform but not the pension of a colonel. He was through with giving any thought to promotion, which in line regiments went by seniority, in excruciating slow mo- tion; through with those mornings when, with the sun still rising, a man comes in from the barracks quadrangle, chewed out from head to foot, in dusty boots, and goes into the mess hall to add some empty wine bottles to the long emptiness of the day ahead; through with the so-called social life, the regimental stories, and those regimental amazons who spend their lives at their uniformed husbands' sides, echoing their progress up the ladder of rank on a social scale of sil-
very precision, tones so fuexorably refined as to be only just within range of the human ear. And he was through with those nights when dust, wine, boredom, the expanses of fields crossed on horseback,
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and the tyranny of the endless talk about horses drove every officer, married and unmarried alike, to those parties behind drawn curtains where women were stood on their heads to have champagne poured into their petticoats, and they got the inevitable Jew of those godfor~ saken little Galician garrison towns, who was a one-man institution like some small weather-beaten country store, where'you could get everything from love to saddle soap on credit, with interest-to pro- cure girls trembling with awe, fear, and curiosity. His only self-indul- gence in those days was the studious enrichment of his collection of knives and corkscrews, . many of them brought personally to the crackbrained lieutenant colonel by the same Jew, who polished them on his sleeve before he placeqthem on the table, with a reverent look on his face as though they were-prehistoric relics.
The unexpected breakthrough came when a fellow alumnus from the staff college remembered Stumm and proposed his transfer to the War Office, where the Department ofEducation was looking for an assistant to its chief; they wanted someone with an outstanding grasp ofthe civilian world. Two years later Stumm, by now advanced to colonel, had been entrusted with running the department. Now that he was mounted on a desk chair instead of the beast sacred to the cavalry, he was a different man. He made major general and could be fairly certain of making it to lieutenant general. He had of course shaved offhis beard long ago, but now, with advancing age, he was growing a forehead, and his tendency to tubbiness gave him the look of a well-rounded man in every sense of the term. He even be- came happy, and happiness can do wonders for a man's latent possi- bilities. He had been meant for a life at the top, and it showed in every way. Be it the sight ofa stylishly dressed woman, the showy bad taste of the latest Viennese architecture, the outspread colors of a great produce market, be it the grayish-brown asphalt air of the streets, that mild atmospheric asphalt full of miasmas, smells, and fragrances, or the noise that broke apart for a few seconds to let out one specific sound, be it the endless variety of the civilian world, even those little white restaurant tables that are so incredibly individ- ual although they undeniably all look alike: he took a delight in them all that was like the jingling of spurs in his head. His was a happiness such as civilians find only in taking a train ride into the country, knowing that they will pass a day green, happy, and overarched by
something or other. This feeling included a sense of his own signifi- cance, that of the War Office, of culture, of the meaningfulness of everyone else, and was so intense that Stumm had not once, since his arrival, thought ofvisiting the museums or going to the theater again. It was the sort of feeling of which one is hardly ever fully aware, though it permeates everything, from the general's gold braid to the voices of the carillons, and is itself a kind of music without which the dance of life would instantly come to a dead stop.
What the devil, he had certainly made his way! So Stumm thought as he now stood here, his cup brimming over, in these rooms, a part of this brilliant assemblage of great minds. Here he was, at last! The only uniform, where all else was steeped in intellect! And there was something more to fill him with amazement. Imagine the sky-blue sphere of the earth, slightly brightened by the forget-me-not blue of Stumm's military tunic, filled to bursting with happiness, with signifi- cance, with the mysterious brain-phosphorus of inward illumination, and at the very center ofthis sphere the General's heart, upon which was poised, like the Virgin Mary upon the serpent's head, a goddess of a woman whose smile is interwoven with everything and is in fact the mysterious magnetic center of all things: then you have, more or less, the impression Diotima made on Stumm von Bordwehr from the moment her image first filled his widening eyes. Actually, Gen- eral Stumm cared as little for women as he did for horses. His rather short, plump legs had never felt quite at home on horseback, and when he'd had to talk horses too, even when off duty, he used to dream of nights that he had ridden himself sore, down to the bone, and couldn't dismount; in the same fashion his comfort-loving nature had always disposed him against sexual athleticism, and the daily grind of his duties was sufficiently fatiguing to leave him with no need for letting off excess steam at night. Not that he had been a spoilsport in his day, but when he had to spend his evenings not with his knife collection but with his fellow officers, he usually resorted to a wise expedient; his sense of bodily harmony had soon taught him to drink himself through the riotous state into the sleepy one, which suited him far better than the risks and disappointments of love. It
was only later on, after he had married and soon had two children as well as their ambitious mother to support, that he fully appreciated how sensible his habits had been before he succumbed to the temp-
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tation to marry, lured into it no doubt by the somewhat unmilitary aura attaching to the notion of a married warrior. Since then he had developed a vivid ideal of woman outside rparriage, something that had evidently been germinating in his unconscious long before and consisted in a mild infatuation with the kind of woman by whom he felt intimidated, so that there was no ·question of having to exert him- self in any form of courtship. When he looked over the pictures of women he had clipped from popular periodicals in his bachelor days-never more than a sideline among his activities as a collec- tor-they all had in common that daunting quality, though he had not realized it at the time; and he had· never known such overwhelm- ing adoration until his ftrst meeting with Diotima. Quite apart from the impact of her beauty, he had looked up her name in his encyclo- pedia as soon as he heard that she was a second Diotima, and though he still did not quite understand what a Diotima might' be, he gath- ered it had something to do with that great sphere of civilian culture ofwhich he still knew far too little, sad to say, despite his offtcial posi- tion, and the world's intellectual superiority fused with· this woman's physical grace. Nowadays, when relations between the sexes have
become so simplified, it is probably necessary to point out that this is likely to be the most sublime experience a man can have. General Stumm felt that his arms were too short to embrace Diotima's lofty· voluptuousness, while at the same time his mind felt the same about the world and its culture, so that he experienced everything that came his way in a state of gently pervasive infatuation, just as his rounded body took on something of the suspended roundness of the globe itself.
It was this infatuation that brought Stumm von Bordwehr, soon after Diotima had dismissed him from her presence, irresistibly back to her. He planted himselfclose to the object ofhis admiration, espe- cially as he knew no one else among those present, and listened in on her conversations with the other guests, He would have loved to take notes, for he would hardly have believed the sovereign ease with which she handled such intellectual riches,like someone toying with a string of priceless pearls, had his own ears not borne witness to her skill as she welcomed, one after another, such a variety of celebrities. . It was only when she had given him a look after ungraciously turning away from him several times, that he realized the unseemliness of a
general's eavesdropping on his hostess in that fashion, and backed away. He made a few lonely tours of the overcrowded premises, drank a glass ofwine, and was just about to find a decorative place to stand against a wall when he noticed Ulrich, whom he had seen once before, at the first meeting, and his memory lit up; Ulrich had been a bright, restless lieutenant in one of the two squadrons General Stumm had once gently led as a lieutenant colonel.
"A man of my own sort," Stumm thought. "And to think how young he still is, to have made it to so high a position! " He made a beeline for Ulrich, and after they had shaken hands and compared notes for a while, Stumm indicated the assembled company and said: "An incredible opportunity for me to learn about the most important problems in the civilian world. "
"You'll be amazed, General," Ulrich said.
The General, who needed an ally, warmly shook his hand. "You were a lieutenant in the Ninth Uhlans," he said significantly, "and someday that will tum out to have been a great honor for us, even if the others don't yet realize it as I do. "
COUNT LEINSDORF'S VIEWS OF REALPOLITIK. ULRICH FOSTERS ORGANIZATIONS
While the Council did not yet give the slightest sign of coming up with any answers, the Parallel Campaign was making great strides at the Palais Leinsdorf: it was there that the threads of reality meshed. Ulrich came twice a week.
He had never dreamed that such numbers of organizations ex- isted. Organizations for field sports and water sports, temperance clubs and drinking clubs, were heard from-in short, organizations and counterorganizations of every kind. They worked to promote the interests of their members and to hamper those of the others. Every-
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one in the world seemed to belong to at least one organization. Ul- rich in his amazement said:
"Your Grace, this goes far beyond what we, in our innocence, have always regarded as natural manifestations of the social instinct. We're faced with the monstrous fact that in the kind of state we have invented, with its law and order, everybody is also a member of a gang. . . . "
But Count Leinsdorf was in favor of organizations. "Remember," he said, "that no good has ever come of ideological politics; we must go in for practical polities. I won't deny that I even regard the far too intellectual concerns of your cousin's circle as potentially dangerous! "
"Could you give me some guidelines, sir? " Ulrich asked. ·
Count Leinsdorf looked at him, wondering whether the inex- perienced young man was ready for so daring a disclosure. But then he decided to risk it.
'Well now, you see," he began cautiously, 'Til tell you something that may be new to you, because you are young: realpolitik means not doing the very thing you would love to do; however, you can win people over by letting them have their way in little things! "
His listener's eyes popped; Count Leinsdorfsmiled complacently.
"So you see," he explained, "all I am saying is that in practice, poli- tics must be guided not by the power of an idea but always by some actual need. Of course everyone would like to make the great ideas come true, that goes without saying. So one should never·do what one would like to do. Kant was the first to say so. " .
"Really! " Ulrich exclaimed in amazement. "But one must aim at something, surely? "
"Aim? Bismarck wanted to make the King of Prussia great; that was his aim. He didn't know from the start that to achieve it, he would have to make war on Austria and France, and that he would found the German Empire. "
"Is Your Grace suggesting that we should aim at a great and pow- erful Austria and nothing e~e? "
'W e still have four years to go. In four years all sorts of things can happen. You can put a people on its feet, but it must do its own walk- ing. Do you see what I mean? Put it on its feet-that's what we must
do. But a people's feet are its firm institutions, its political parties, its organizations, and so on, and not a lot of talk. "
"Your Grace! Even if it doesn't exactly sound like it, you have just uttered a truly democratic ideal"
'Well, it may be aristocratic too, even though my fellow peers don't see eye-to-eye with me on this. Old Hennenstein and Tiirck- heim told me they expected nothing but a filthy mess to come of all this. So we must watch our step. We must start building on a small scale, so be very nice to the people who come to us. "
Consequently Ulrich for some time after this turned no one away. One man who came to him talked a great deal about stamp collect- ing. To begin with, he said, it made for international understanding; second, it satisfied the need for property and position on which soci- ety was unquestionably based; third, it not only called for considera- ble knowledge but also required decisions on a level that it was not too much to call artistic. Ulrich looked the man over, with his care- worn and rather shabby appearance; but the man caught the ques- tion in Ulrich's glance and countered it by saying that stamps were also commercially valuable, a factor not to be underrated; millions were made in trading them; the great stamp auctions attracted deal- ers and collectors from all over the world. It was one way to get rich. But as for himself, he was an idealist; he was putting together a spe- cial collection for which there was no commercial interest as yet. All he asked was that a great stamp exhibition be held in the Jubilee Year, when he could be depended upon to bring his specialty to pub- lic attention.
After him came a man with the following story: On his walks through the streets-though it was even more exciting when one rode a trolley-he had for years been in the habit of counting the number of straight strokes in the big block letters of the shop signs (there were three strokes in an A, for instance, and four in an M) and dividing the sum tqtal by the number ofletters counted. His average so far had been consistently two and a half strokes to a letter, but this was obviously not invariable, since it could change with every new street. Now, deviations from the norm could be quite distressing, while there was greatsatisfaction every time the numbers came out right-an effect quite like the catharsis said to be achieved while
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watching classical tragedy on the stage. If you considered the letters themselves, however-anyone could check this out-divisibility by three was a rare bit of luck, which is why most inscriptions tended to leave you with a noticeable sense of frustration, except for those con- sisting of several letters each composed of four strokes, as in M, E, W, for instance, which could be depended upon to leave one feeling remarkably happy. So what to do? the visitor asked. Simply this, an order issued by the Public Health Office favoring four-stroke letter series in shop signs and discouraging as far as possible the use of one- stroke letters, such as 0, S, I, C, which, lead to poor and therefore depressing results.
Ulrich looked the man over and took care to keep a distance be- tween them; yet he did not really look like a mental case, but was a well-dressed person in his thirties with an intelligent and amiable ex- pression. He went on calmly explaining that mental arithmetic was an indispensable skill in every line ofwork, that to teach by means of games was in keeping with modem educational methods, that statis- tics had often revealed deep connections between things long before these could be explained, that everyone knew the damage done by an education based on book learning alone, and, in conclusion, that the excitement his findings had aroused in all those who had chosen to repeat his experiments spoke for itself. If the Public Health Office could be induced to adopt his disrovery, other countries would soon follow suit, and the Jubilee-Year could turn out to be a blessing for all mankind.
Ulrich advised all these people to organize: "You still have almost four years' time, and ifyou succeed, His Grace will be sure to '! ! Se all his influence on your behalf. "
Most of them, however, were already organized, which of course changed matters. It was relatively simple when a soccer club wanted an honorary professorship for its outside right, to demonstrate the importance of modem physical culture; one coul<! always promise to take the matter under consideration. But it was hard in such cases as the following: A man in his fifties presented himself as a senior exec- utive in a government department; his forehead shone with the light of martyrdom when he identified himself as the founder and presi- dent of the Oehl Shorthand Association, hoping to draw the atten-
tion of the great patriotic campaign's Secretary to the Oehl short- hand system.
Oehl shorthand was an Austrian system, he 'Went on to explain, which was all you needed to know to understand why it was not widely adopted or encouraged. Was the Secretary himself a practic- ing stenographer, by any chance? No? Then he was perhaps not aware of the advantages of any stenographic system: the saving in time, in mental energy. Did he have any idea what a tremendous waste of mental effort was entailed by all those curlicues and prolixi- ties, the imprecision and the bewildering repetition of similar parts, and the confusion that arose between truly expressive, significant graphic components and merely ritualistic and· arbitrarily idiosyn- cratic flouri,shes of the pen?
Ulrich was amazed to meet a man so implacably determined to stamp out ordinary, presumably harmless, handwriting. When it came to saving mental effort, shorthand was a vital necessity for a rapidly growing world that had to get things done quickly. But even from a moral standpoint the question of Short or Long was crucial. The long-eared script, as the senior official bitterly"tenned it because of the senseless loops it was full of, encouraged tendencies to im- precision, arbitrariness, and wastefulness, especially the waste of time, while shorthand inculcated precision, willpower, manliness. Shorthand, he said, taught people to do what was necessary and to avoid what was unnecessary and irrelevant. Surely there was a lesson in practical morality here, of the greatest possible significance espe- cially for any Austrian. And then there was the aesthetic side of it. Wasn't prolixity rightly considered an ugly quality? Had not the great classical authors rightly declared economy of means to be an essen- tial element of beauty? But even regarding it from the public-health angle, the senior executive official went on, it was most important to shorten the time spent sitting hunched over one's desk. Mter having in this fashion illuminated the subject of shorthand from various other scientific-scholarly angles as well, to his listener's. edification, the visitor finally began to dilate upon the Oehl system's immense superiority over all other systems of shorthand. He showed that from every one ofthe points ofview under consideration, all other systems ofshorthand were a mere betrayal ofthe veryprinciple ofshorthand.
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He then unfolded the story of his own personal martyrdom to the cause. There were all the older, more powerful systems, which had had time to ally themselves with all sorts of vested interests. All the trade schools were teaching the Vogelbauch system and stood pat against any change, backed up, in accordance with the laws ofinertia, by the business community. The newspapers, which obviously profit enormously from the advertisements of the trade schools, would not hear of any proposals for reform. And the Education Office? What a sad joke that was, according to Herr Oehl. Five years ago, when shorthand was first made a required subject in the secondary schools, the Office of Education had set up a committee of advisers on the system to be chosen; the committee was naturally packed with repre-
sentatives of the trade schools and the business community and with government stenographers, who were of course hand in glove with the press, and that was that! It was all too obvious that the Vogel- bauch system was slated to win! The Oehl Shorthand Association had issued a warning and a protest against such criminal indifference to the public interest. But its delegates could no longer get anyone at the Education Office to see them!
Ulrich took cases of this kind to His Grace. "Oehl? " Count Leins- dorf said. "An official, you say? " His Grace rubbed his nose for a long time but came to no decision. "Perhaps you should see his head of department and find out if there's anything to what he says," he mused after a while, but he was feeling creative and canceled this suggestion. "No, ! 'II tell you what we'll do: we'll draw up a memoran- dum. Let's find out what they have to say for themselves. " And he added confidentially, to give Ulrich an insight into the deeper work- ings of things: 'With any of these things, you can never tell whether
·they are nonsense or not," he said. "But you see, my dear feiiow, you can always depend on something important coming of the fact that somebody attaches importance to it. Take the case of Dr. Amheim, that darling of all the newspapers. The newspapers could just as eas-
. ily pursue some other hare. But given that they pursue him, that makes Amheim important. You said, didn't you, that this man Oehl has an organization behind him? Not that it proves anything, of course, but on the other hand, as I said, we must keep up with the times, and when a good many people are for something, the chances are that something will come of it. "
82
CLARISSE CALLS FOR AN ULRICH YEAR
There was really no reason for Ulrich to pay Clarisse a visit other than his having to give her a good talking-to about the letter she had written to Count Leinsdorf; when she had come to see him a few days earlier, he had forgotten all about it. On his way there, however, it occurred to him that Walter was defmitely jealous of him and would be upset about the visit when he heard of it. But there was nothing Walter could do about it. The majority of men find them- selves in this funny situation if they happen to be jealous: they cannot keep an eye on their women until after office hours.
The time of day Ulrich had chosen to go there made it unlikely that he would find Walter at home. It was quite early in the after- noon. He had phoned to say he was coming. The snowy whiteness of the landscape outside shone so intensely into the room that it was as though there were no curtains at all on the windows. In this
. merciless light that glittered off every object stood Clarisse, greet- ing Ulrich with a laugh from the center of the room. On the side toward the window, the minimal curvature of her boyish body flashed in vivid colors, while the side in shadow was a bluish-brown mist from which her forehead, nose, and chin jutted out like snowy ridges whose edges are blurred by wind and sun. The . impression she gave was less that of a human being than of the meeting of ice and light in the spectral solitude of an Alpine winter. Ulrich caught some of the spell she must cast on Walter at times, and his mixed feelings for his boyhood friend briefly gave way to an insight into the image two people presented to each other, whose life he per- haps knew hardly at all.
"I don't know whether you told Walter anything about the letter you wrote to Count Leinsdorf," he began, "but I've come to speak to you alone, and to warn you never to do that kind of thing again. " Clarisse pushed two chairs together and made him sit down.
"Don't tell Walter," she asked him, "but tell me what you have
382 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
against it. You mean the Nietzsche Year? What did your Count say to that? "
'What do you suppose he could have said? The way you tied it in with Moosbrugger was utterly crazy. And even without that he'd probably have thrown your letter away. "
"Oh, really? " Clarisse was very disappointed. Then she said: "Luckily, you have some say in it tool"
"But don't you see, you're simply out of your mind!
"
Clarisse smiled, accepting this as a compliment. She laid her hand on his arm and asked him: "But an Austrian Year is nonsense, isn't it? "
"Of course it is. "
"But a Nietzsche Year would be a fine thing. Why should it be wrong to want something just because we happen to like the idea ourselves? "
"And what exactly is your idea of a Niemche Year? "
"That's your affair. "
"Very funny. "
"Not at all. Why does it seem funny to you to try to put into prac-
tice something you take seriously as an intellectual matter? Tell me that. "
''I'll be glad to," Ulrich said, freeing his arm from her hand. "After. all, Nietzsche isn't the issue; it could just as well be Christ or Buddha. " ,
"Or you. Why not get to work on an Ulrich Year! " She said this with the same casual air as when she had urged him to free Moos- brugger. This tirp. e, however, his attention had not strayed, and he was looking at her face while he listened to her words. All he saw was Clarisse's usual smile, that funl! y little grimace that was the unin- tended result of the ment;U effort she was making.
"Oh well," he thought, "she doesn't mean any harm. "
But Clarisse drew closer to him again. 'Why don't you make it You Year? You might just be in a position to do it now. Only -don't say anything to Walter about it-I've told you that already-nor about my Moosbrugger letter. Not a word, ever, that I've talked to you about it. But I assure you, this murderer is musical, even though he can't actually compose. Haven't you ever noticed that every human being is the center of a cosmic sphere? When the person moves, the
sphere moves with him. That's the way to make music, without think- ing about it, simple as the cosmic sphere around you. . . . "
"And you feel that I should work on something of that sort for a year of my own, do you? " ·
"No," Clarisse answered, playing it safe. Her fine lips seemed about to say something but held their peace, and the flame blazed silently from her eyes. It was hard to say what it was that emanated from her at such moments. One felt scorched, as if one had come too close to something red hot. Now she smiled, but it was a smile that curled on her lips like an ash left behind in the wake of the burned- out flare from her eyes.
"Still, that is the sort of thing I could do, if I had to," Ulrich went on, "but I'mafraid you think I should make a coup d'etat? "
Clarisse thought it over. "Let's say a Buddha Year, then," she said evasively. "I don't know what Buddha stood for, or only vaguely, but let's accept it, and if we think it matters, then we should do some- thing about it. It either deserves our faith in it or it doesn't! "
"Fine. Now . . . a Nietzsche Year was what you said. But what was it Nietzsche actually wanted? "
Clarisse reconsidered. 'Well, of course I don't mean a Nietzsche monument ·or a Nietzsche street," she said in some embarrassment. "But people should try to live as h e - "
"As he wanted? " he interrupted her. "But what did he want? "
Clarisse started to answer, hesitated, and finally said: "Oh come on, you know all that yourself. . . . "
"I don't know a thing," he teased her. "But I can tell you this: You can set up a Kaiser Franz Josef Soup Kitchen, and you can meet the needs of a Society for the Protection of the House Cat, but you can- not tum great ideas into reality any more than you can do it with music. Why is that? I dmi't know. But that's how it is. "
He had finally found refuge on the little sofa behind the little table; it was a position easier to defend than the chair. In the open space in the middle of the room, on the far bank, as it were, of an illusory prolongation of the shining tabletop, Clarisse was still stand- ing and talking. Her whole slender body was involved; she actually felt everything she wanted to say with her whole body first of all, and was always needing to do something with it. Ulrich had always thought of her body as hard and boyish, but now, as it gently swayed
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on legs pressed close together, he saw Clarisse as a Javanese dancer. Suddenly it occurred to him that he would not be surprised if she fell into a trance. Or was he in a trance himself? He launched into a long speech:
"You want to organize your life around an idea," he began. "And you'd like to know how to do that. But an idea is the most paradoxical thing in the world. The flesh in the grip of an idea is like a fetish. Bonded to an idea, it becomes magical. An ordinary slap in the face, bound up with ideas of honor, or of punishment and the like, can kill a man. And yet ideas can never maintain themselves in the state in which they are most powerful; they're like the kind of substance that, exposed to the air, instantly changes into some other, more lasting, but corrupted form. You've been through this often yourself. Be- cause an idea is what you are: an idea in a particular state. You are touched by a breath of something, and it's like a note suddenly ~mergingfrom the humming ofstrings; in front ofyou there is some- thing like a mirage; out of the confusion of your soul an endless pa- rade is taking shape, with all the world's beauty looking on from the roadside. All this can be the effect of a single idea. But after a while it comes to resemble all your previous ideas, it takes its place among them, becomes part ofyour outlook and your character, your princi- ples or your moods; in the act oftaking shape it has lost its wings and its mystery. "
Clarisse answered: "Walter is jealous of you. Not on my account, I'm sure. It's because you look as though you could do what he wishes he could do. Do you see what I mean? There is something about you that cuts him down. I wish I knew how to put it. " She scrutinized him.
Their two speeches intertwined.
Walter had always been life's special pet, always held on its lap. He transformed everything that happened to him and gave it a tender vitality. Walter had always been the one whose life had been the pcher in experiences. "But having more of a life is one of the earliest and subtlest signs of mediocrity," Ulrich thought. "Seen in context, an experience loses its personal venom or sweetness. " That was how it was, more or less. Even the assertion that this was the case estab- lished a context, and one got no kiss of welcome or good-bye for it.
And despite all that, Walter was jealous of him? He was glad to hear it.
"I told him he ought to kill you," Clarisse reported.
"What? "
"Ext~rminate him! I said. Suppose you're not really all you think
you are, and suppose Walter is the better man and has no other way to gain his peace of mind: it would make sense, wouldn't it? Besides, you can always fight back. "
"No half measures for you, I see," Ulrich said, somewhat shaken.
'Well, we were only talking. How do you feel about it, by the way? Walter says it's wrong even to think such things. "
"Oh no, thinking is quite in order," he replied hesitantly, taking a good look at Clarisse. She had a peculiar charm all her own. Was it as though she were somehow standing side by side with herself? She was not quite there, yet all there, both in close proximity.
"Bah, thinking! " she cut in. Her words were addressed to the wall behind him, as though her eyes were fixed on a point somewhere between. "You're every bit as passive as Walter. " These words, too, fell somewhere midway between them, keeping their distance like an insult, yet sounding conciliatory, because of the confidential closeness they implied. ''What I say is, if you can think something, you should be able to do it too," she insisted dryly.
Then she moved off, walked to the window, and stood there with her hands clasped behind her back.
Ulrich stood up quickly, went over to her, and placed an arm around her shoulders.
"Dear little Clarisse," he said, "you're being a bit strange today, aren't you? But I must put in a good word for myself; you're notre- ally concerned with me anyway, are you? "
Clarisse was staring out the window. But now her gaze sharpened; she was focusing on something specific out there, for support. She felt as if her thoughts had strayed outside and had only just returned. This feeling of being like a room, with the sense of the door just hav- ing shut, was nothing new to her. On and off she had days, even weeks, when everything around her was brighter and lighter than usual, as though it would take hardly any effort to slip out of herself and go traipsing about the world unencumbered; then again there
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were the bad times, when she felt imprisoned, and though these times usually passed quickly, she dreaded them like a punishment, because everything closed in on her and was so sad. Just now she was aware of a lucid, sober peacefulness, and it worried her a little; she was not sure what it was she had wanted just a while ago, and this sense of leaden clarity and quiet control was often a prelude to the time of punishment. She pulled herself together with the feeling that if she could keep this conversation going with conviction, she would be back on safe ground.
"Don't say 'dear little' to me," she said, pouting, "or I might end up killing you myself. " It came out like a joke, so she felt she had made one. She stole a cautious look at him, to see how he was taking it. "Ofcourse, it was only a way of putting it, hut you must realize that I'm serious. Where were we? You said it wasn't possible to live by an idea. There's no real energy in you, neither you nor Walter! "
"You horrified me by calling me a passivist! But there are two kinds. There's a passive passivism, like Walter's and then there's the active kind! "
"What is active passivism? " Clarisse was intrigued. "A prisoner waiting for his chance to break out! " "Bah! " said Clarisse. "Excuses. "
'Well, yes," he conceded. "Maybe. "
Clarisse still held her hands clasped behind her back and stood with her legs wide apart, as though in. riding boots.
"You know what Nietzsch·e says? Wanting to know for sure is like wanting to know where the ground is for your next step, mere cow- ardice. One has to start somewhere to act on one's intentions, not just talk about it. And I've always expected you of all people to do something special someday! "
Suddenly she had taken hold of a button on his vest and started twisting it, her face lifted up to his. Instinctively he laid his hand on hers to save the button.
''I've been thinking for a long time," she went on shyly, "that the really rotten, vile things that go on happen not because someone is doing them but because we are letting them happen. They expand to fill a void! " After this coup she looked at him expectantly. Then she burst out: "Letting things happen is ten times more dangerous than doing them, don't you see? " She struggled inwardly for a more exact
formulation, but then she only added: "You know exactly what I mean, don't you? Even though you are always saying that we have to let things go their own way. But I understand what you're saying. It's occurred to me more than once that you're the Devil himself! " These wordS had slipped out of Clarisse's mouth like a lizard. They frightened her. All she had been thinking of at the outset was Wal- ter's begging her to have a child by him. Ulrich caught a flicker in her eyes; she wanted him. Her upturned face was suffused with some- thing-nothing at all lovely, something ugly but touching. Something like a violent outbreak of sweat blurring the features. But it was disembodied, purely imaginary. He felt infected by it against his will and overcome by a slight absentmindedness. He was losing his power to hold out against her craziness, and so he grabbed her hand to make her sit down on the sofa, and sat down beside her.
"Let me tell you now why I do nothing," he began, and fell silent.
Clarisse, who had become herself again the moment she felt his touch, urged him on.
"There's nothing a man can do, because . . . but I can't really ex- pect you to understand this," he began, then he extracted a cigarette and devoted himself to lighting it.
"Go on," Clarisse prompted him. "What are you trying to say? "
But he kept silent. She pushed her arm behind his back and shook him, like a boy showing how strong he can be. With her, there was no need to say anything; the mere suggestion of something out of the
"ordinary was enough to set her imagination going. "You're really evil! " she said, and tried in vain to hurt him. But at this moment they were unpleasantly interrupted by Walter's return.
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PSEUDOREALITY PREVAILS; OR, WHY DON'T WE-MAKE HISTORY UP AS WE GO ALONG?
What could Ulrich have said to Clarisse anyway? ·
He had kept it to himself because she had somehow brought him
to the verge of actually saying "God. " He had been about to say, more or less: God does not really mean the world literally; it is a met- aphor, an analogy, a figure of speech that He has to resort to for some reason or other, and it never satisfies Him, of course. We are not supposed to take Him at his word, it is we ourselyes who must come up with the answer for the riddle He sets us. He wondered whether Clarisse would have agreed to regard the whole thing as a game of Cowboys and Indians or Cops and Robbers. Of course she would. Whoever took the first step, she would stick by him like a she-wolf and keep a sharp lookout.
But there was something else he had also had on the tip of his tongue, something about mathematical problems that do not admit of a general solution but do allow for particular solutions, which one could combine to come nearer to a general solution. He might have added that he regarded the problem ofhuman life as that kind o( problem. What we call an age-without specifying whether we mean. . centuries, millennia,- or the time span between schoolchild and grandparent-that broad unregulated flow of conditions would come to mean a more or less chaotic succession of unsatisfactory and, .
ways got the best grades in religion and composition; and so one day the colonel called him into the office.
"You'll never make a passable cavalry officer," he said. "If I stuck a suckling babe on a horse and sent it to the front, he'd put up about as much of a show as you do. But it's a long time since the regiment has had anyone at staff college. Why don't you apply, Stumm? "
So Stumm had two glorious years at the staff college in the capital. While he again failed to show the intellectual keenness needed to ride a horse, he attended every military concert, visited the mu- seums, and collected theater programs. He decided to switch to a civilian career but did not know how to go about it. In the end, he was found neither suited nor de. finitely unfit for service on the gen- eral staff; he was regarded as clumsy and unambitious, but some- thing of a philosopher, so for the next two years he was tentatively assigned to the general staff in command of an infantry division, which ended in his belonging, as a captain of cavalry, to the large number of those who~ as the general staff's auxiliary reserve, never get away from the li~e unless something unusual happens. Captain Stumm now served with another regiment, where he passed for an expert in military theory as well. But it did not take his new superiors long to catch on that in practical matters he was a babe-in-the-sad- dle. His career was a martyrdom, all the way up to lieutenant colonel; but even as a major he no longer dreamed of anything but a long furlough on half pay until he could be put on the retired list as an acting colonel, with the title and the uniform but not the pension of a colonel. He was through with giving any thought to promotion, which in line regiments went by seniority, in excruciating slow mo- tion; through with those mornings when, with the sun still rising, a man comes in from the barracks quadrangle, chewed out from head to foot, in dusty boots, and goes into the mess hall to add some empty wine bottles to the long emptiness of the day ahead; through with the so-called social life, the regimental stories, and those regimental amazons who spend their lives at their uniformed husbands' sides, echoing their progress up the ladder of rank on a social scale of sil-
very precision, tones so fuexorably refined as to be only just within range of the human ear. And he was through with those nights when dust, wine, boredom, the expanses of fields crossed on horseback,
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and the tyranny of the endless talk about horses drove every officer, married and unmarried alike, to those parties behind drawn curtains where women were stood on their heads to have champagne poured into their petticoats, and they got the inevitable Jew of those godfor~ saken little Galician garrison towns, who was a one-man institution like some small weather-beaten country store, where'you could get everything from love to saddle soap on credit, with interest-to pro- cure girls trembling with awe, fear, and curiosity. His only self-indul- gence in those days was the studious enrichment of his collection of knives and corkscrews, . many of them brought personally to the crackbrained lieutenant colonel by the same Jew, who polished them on his sleeve before he placeqthem on the table, with a reverent look on his face as though they were-prehistoric relics.
The unexpected breakthrough came when a fellow alumnus from the staff college remembered Stumm and proposed his transfer to the War Office, where the Department ofEducation was looking for an assistant to its chief; they wanted someone with an outstanding grasp ofthe civilian world. Two years later Stumm, by now advanced to colonel, had been entrusted with running the department. Now that he was mounted on a desk chair instead of the beast sacred to the cavalry, he was a different man. He made major general and could be fairly certain of making it to lieutenant general. He had of course shaved offhis beard long ago, but now, with advancing age, he was growing a forehead, and his tendency to tubbiness gave him the look of a well-rounded man in every sense of the term. He even be- came happy, and happiness can do wonders for a man's latent possi- bilities. He had been meant for a life at the top, and it showed in every way. Be it the sight ofa stylishly dressed woman, the showy bad taste of the latest Viennese architecture, the outspread colors of a great produce market, be it the grayish-brown asphalt air of the streets, that mild atmospheric asphalt full of miasmas, smells, and fragrances, or the noise that broke apart for a few seconds to let out one specific sound, be it the endless variety of the civilian world, even those little white restaurant tables that are so incredibly individ- ual although they undeniably all look alike: he took a delight in them all that was like the jingling of spurs in his head. His was a happiness such as civilians find only in taking a train ride into the country, knowing that they will pass a day green, happy, and overarched by
something or other. This feeling included a sense of his own signifi- cance, that of the War Office, of culture, of the meaningfulness of everyone else, and was so intense that Stumm had not once, since his arrival, thought ofvisiting the museums or going to the theater again. It was the sort of feeling of which one is hardly ever fully aware, though it permeates everything, from the general's gold braid to the voices of the carillons, and is itself a kind of music without which the dance of life would instantly come to a dead stop.
What the devil, he had certainly made his way! So Stumm thought as he now stood here, his cup brimming over, in these rooms, a part of this brilliant assemblage of great minds. Here he was, at last! The only uniform, where all else was steeped in intellect! And there was something more to fill him with amazement. Imagine the sky-blue sphere of the earth, slightly brightened by the forget-me-not blue of Stumm's military tunic, filled to bursting with happiness, with signifi- cance, with the mysterious brain-phosphorus of inward illumination, and at the very center ofthis sphere the General's heart, upon which was poised, like the Virgin Mary upon the serpent's head, a goddess of a woman whose smile is interwoven with everything and is in fact the mysterious magnetic center of all things: then you have, more or less, the impression Diotima made on Stumm von Bordwehr from the moment her image first filled his widening eyes. Actually, Gen- eral Stumm cared as little for women as he did for horses. His rather short, plump legs had never felt quite at home on horseback, and when he'd had to talk horses too, even when off duty, he used to dream of nights that he had ridden himself sore, down to the bone, and couldn't dismount; in the same fashion his comfort-loving nature had always disposed him against sexual athleticism, and the daily grind of his duties was sufficiently fatiguing to leave him with no need for letting off excess steam at night. Not that he had been a spoilsport in his day, but when he had to spend his evenings not with his knife collection but with his fellow officers, he usually resorted to a wise expedient; his sense of bodily harmony had soon taught him to drink himself through the riotous state into the sleepy one, which suited him far better than the risks and disappointments of love. It
was only later on, after he had married and soon had two children as well as their ambitious mother to support, that he fully appreciated how sensible his habits had been before he succumbed to the temp-
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tation to marry, lured into it no doubt by the somewhat unmilitary aura attaching to the notion of a married warrior. Since then he had developed a vivid ideal of woman outside rparriage, something that had evidently been germinating in his unconscious long before and consisted in a mild infatuation with the kind of woman by whom he felt intimidated, so that there was no ·question of having to exert him- self in any form of courtship. When he looked over the pictures of women he had clipped from popular periodicals in his bachelor days-never more than a sideline among his activities as a collec- tor-they all had in common that daunting quality, though he had not realized it at the time; and he had· never known such overwhelm- ing adoration until his ftrst meeting with Diotima. Quite apart from the impact of her beauty, he had looked up her name in his encyclo- pedia as soon as he heard that she was a second Diotima, and though he still did not quite understand what a Diotima might' be, he gath- ered it had something to do with that great sphere of civilian culture ofwhich he still knew far too little, sad to say, despite his offtcial posi- tion, and the world's intellectual superiority fused with· this woman's physical grace. Nowadays, when relations between the sexes have
become so simplified, it is probably necessary to point out that this is likely to be the most sublime experience a man can have. General Stumm felt that his arms were too short to embrace Diotima's lofty· voluptuousness, while at the same time his mind felt the same about the world and its culture, so that he experienced everything that came his way in a state of gently pervasive infatuation, just as his rounded body took on something of the suspended roundness of the globe itself.
It was this infatuation that brought Stumm von Bordwehr, soon after Diotima had dismissed him from her presence, irresistibly back to her. He planted himselfclose to the object ofhis admiration, espe- cially as he knew no one else among those present, and listened in on her conversations with the other guests, He would have loved to take notes, for he would hardly have believed the sovereign ease with which she handled such intellectual riches,like someone toying with a string of priceless pearls, had his own ears not borne witness to her skill as she welcomed, one after another, such a variety of celebrities. . It was only when she had given him a look after ungraciously turning away from him several times, that he realized the unseemliness of a
general's eavesdropping on his hostess in that fashion, and backed away. He made a few lonely tours of the overcrowded premises, drank a glass ofwine, and was just about to find a decorative place to stand against a wall when he noticed Ulrich, whom he had seen once before, at the first meeting, and his memory lit up; Ulrich had been a bright, restless lieutenant in one of the two squadrons General Stumm had once gently led as a lieutenant colonel.
"A man of my own sort," Stumm thought. "And to think how young he still is, to have made it to so high a position! " He made a beeline for Ulrich, and after they had shaken hands and compared notes for a while, Stumm indicated the assembled company and said: "An incredible opportunity for me to learn about the most important problems in the civilian world. "
"You'll be amazed, General," Ulrich said.
The General, who needed an ally, warmly shook his hand. "You were a lieutenant in the Ninth Uhlans," he said significantly, "and someday that will tum out to have been a great honor for us, even if the others don't yet realize it as I do. "
COUNT LEINSDORF'S VIEWS OF REALPOLITIK. ULRICH FOSTERS ORGANIZATIONS
While the Council did not yet give the slightest sign of coming up with any answers, the Parallel Campaign was making great strides at the Palais Leinsdorf: it was there that the threads of reality meshed. Ulrich came twice a week.
He had never dreamed that such numbers of organizations ex- isted. Organizations for field sports and water sports, temperance clubs and drinking clubs, were heard from-in short, organizations and counterorganizations of every kind. They worked to promote the interests of their members and to hamper those of the others. Every-
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one in the world seemed to belong to at least one organization. Ul- rich in his amazement said:
"Your Grace, this goes far beyond what we, in our innocence, have always regarded as natural manifestations of the social instinct. We're faced with the monstrous fact that in the kind of state we have invented, with its law and order, everybody is also a member of a gang. . . . "
But Count Leinsdorf was in favor of organizations. "Remember," he said, "that no good has ever come of ideological politics; we must go in for practical polities. I won't deny that I even regard the far too intellectual concerns of your cousin's circle as potentially dangerous! "
"Could you give me some guidelines, sir? " Ulrich asked. ·
Count Leinsdorf looked at him, wondering whether the inex- perienced young man was ready for so daring a disclosure. But then he decided to risk it.
'Well now, you see," he began cautiously, 'Til tell you something that may be new to you, because you are young: realpolitik means not doing the very thing you would love to do; however, you can win people over by letting them have their way in little things! "
His listener's eyes popped; Count Leinsdorfsmiled complacently.
"So you see," he explained, "all I am saying is that in practice, poli- tics must be guided not by the power of an idea but always by some actual need. Of course everyone would like to make the great ideas come true, that goes without saying. So one should never·do what one would like to do. Kant was the first to say so. " .
"Really! " Ulrich exclaimed in amazement. "But one must aim at something, surely? "
"Aim? Bismarck wanted to make the King of Prussia great; that was his aim. He didn't know from the start that to achieve it, he would have to make war on Austria and France, and that he would found the German Empire. "
"Is Your Grace suggesting that we should aim at a great and pow- erful Austria and nothing e~e? "
'W e still have four years to go. In four years all sorts of things can happen. You can put a people on its feet, but it must do its own walk- ing. Do you see what I mean? Put it on its feet-that's what we must
do. But a people's feet are its firm institutions, its political parties, its organizations, and so on, and not a lot of talk. "
"Your Grace! Even if it doesn't exactly sound like it, you have just uttered a truly democratic ideal"
'Well, it may be aristocratic too, even though my fellow peers don't see eye-to-eye with me on this. Old Hennenstein and Tiirck- heim told me they expected nothing but a filthy mess to come of all this. So we must watch our step. We must start building on a small scale, so be very nice to the people who come to us. "
Consequently Ulrich for some time after this turned no one away. One man who came to him talked a great deal about stamp collect- ing. To begin with, he said, it made for international understanding; second, it satisfied the need for property and position on which soci- ety was unquestionably based; third, it not only called for considera- ble knowledge but also required decisions on a level that it was not too much to call artistic. Ulrich looked the man over, with his care- worn and rather shabby appearance; but the man caught the ques- tion in Ulrich's glance and countered it by saying that stamps were also commercially valuable, a factor not to be underrated; millions were made in trading them; the great stamp auctions attracted deal- ers and collectors from all over the world. It was one way to get rich. But as for himself, he was an idealist; he was putting together a spe- cial collection for which there was no commercial interest as yet. All he asked was that a great stamp exhibition be held in the Jubilee Year, when he could be depended upon to bring his specialty to pub- lic attention.
After him came a man with the following story: On his walks through the streets-though it was even more exciting when one rode a trolley-he had for years been in the habit of counting the number of straight strokes in the big block letters of the shop signs (there were three strokes in an A, for instance, and four in an M) and dividing the sum tqtal by the number ofletters counted. His average so far had been consistently two and a half strokes to a letter, but this was obviously not invariable, since it could change with every new street. Now, deviations from the norm could be quite distressing, while there was greatsatisfaction every time the numbers came out right-an effect quite like the catharsis said to be achieved while
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watching classical tragedy on the stage. If you considered the letters themselves, however-anyone could check this out-divisibility by three was a rare bit of luck, which is why most inscriptions tended to leave you with a noticeable sense of frustration, except for those con- sisting of several letters each composed of four strokes, as in M, E, W, for instance, which could be depended upon to leave one feeling remarkably happy. So what to do? the visitor asked. Simply this, an order issued by the Public Health Office favoring four-stroke letter series in shop signs and discouraging as far as possible the use of one- stroke letters, such as 0, S, I, C, which, lead to poor and therefore depressing results.
Ulrich looked the man over and took care to keep a distance be- tween them; yet he did not really look like a mental case, but was a well-dressed person in his thirties with an intelligent and amiable ex- pression. He went on calmly explaining that mental arithmetic was an indispensable skill in every line ofwork, that to teach by means of games was in keeping with modem educational methods, that statis- tics had often revealed deep connections between things long before these could be explained, that everyone knew the damage done by an education based on book learning alone, and, in conclusion, that the excitement his findings had aroused in all those who had chosen to repeat his experiments spoke for itself. If the Public Health Office could be induced to adopt his disrovery, other countries would soon follow suit, and the Jubilee-Year could turn out to be a blessing for all mankind.
Ulrich advised all these people to organize: "You still have almost four years' time, and ifyou succeed, His Grace will be sure to '! ! Se all his influence on your behalf. "
Most of them, however, were already organized, which of course changed matters. It was relatively simple when a soccer club wanted an honorary professorship for its outside right, to demonstrate the importance of modem physical culture; one coul<! always promise to take the matter under consideration. But it was hard in such cases as the following: A man in his fifties presented himself as a senior exec- utive in a government department; his forehead shone with the light of martyrdom when he identified himself as the founder and presi- dent of the Oehl Shorthand Association, hoping to draw the atten-
tion of the great patriotic campaign's Secretary to the Oehl short- hand system.
Oehl shorthand was an Austrian system, he 'Went on to explain, which was all you needed to know to understand why it was not widely adopted or encouraged. Was the Secretary himself a practic- ing stenographer, by any chance? No? Then he was perhaps not aware of the advantages of any stenographic system: the saving in time, in mental energy. Did he have any idea what a tremendous waste of mental effort was entailed by all those curlicues and prolixi- ties, the imprecision and the bewildering repetition of similar parts, and the confusion that arose between truly expressive, significant graphic components and merely ritualistic and· arbitrarily idiosyn- cratic flouri,shes of the pen?
Ulrich was amazed to meet a man so implacably determined to stamp out ordinary, presumably harmless, handwriting. When it came to saving mental effort, shorthand was a vital necessity for a rapidly growing world that had to get things done quickly. But even from a moral standpoint the question of Short or Long was crucial. The long-eared script, as the senior official bitterly"tenned it because of the senseless loops it was full of, encouraged tendencies to im- precision, arbitrariness, and wastefulness, especially the waste of time, while shorthand inculcated precision, willpower, manliness. Shorthand, he said, taught people to do what was necessary and to avoid what was unnecessary and irrelevant. Surely there was a lesson in practical morality here, of the greatest possible significance espe- cially for any Austrian. And then there was the aesthetic side of it. Wasn't prolixity rightly considered an ugly quality? Had not the great classical authors rightly declared economy of means to be an essen- tial element of beauty? But even regarding it from the public-health angle, the senior executive official went on, it was most important to shorten the time spent sitting hunched over one's desk. Mter having in this fashion illuminated the subject of shorthand from various other scientific-scholarly angles as well, to his listener's. edification, the visitor finally began to dilate upon the Oehl system's immense superiority over all other systems of shorthand. He showed that from every one ofthe points ofview under consideration, all other systems ofshorthand were a mere betrayal ofthe veryprinciple ofshorthand.
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He then unfolded the story of his own personal martyrdom to the cause. There were all the older, more powerful systems, which had had time to ally themselves with all sorts of vested interests. All the trade schools were teaching the Vogelbauch system and stood pat against any change, backed up, in accordance with the laws ofinertia, by the business community. The newspapers, which obviously profit enormously from the advertisements of the trade schools, would not hear of any proposals for reform. And the Education Office? What a sad joke that was, according to Herr Oehl. Five years ago, when shorthand was first made a required subject in the secondary schools, the Office of Education had set up a committee of advisers on the system to be chosen; the committee was naturally packed with repre-
sentatives of the trade schools and the business community and with government stenographers, who were of course hand in glove with the press, and that was that! It was all too obvious that the Vogel- bauch system was slated to win! The Oehl Shorthand Association had issued a warning and a protest against such criminal indifference to the public interest. But its delegates could no longer get anyone at the Education Office to see them!
Ulrich took cases of this kind to His Grace. "Oehl? " Count Leins- dorf said. "An official, you say? " His Grace rubbed his nose for a long time but came to no decision. "Perhaps you should see his head of department and find out if there's anything to what he says," he mused after a while, but he was feeling creative and canceled this suggestion. "No, ! 'II tell you what we'll do: we'll draw up a memoran- dum. Let's find out what they have to say for themselves. " And he added confidentially, to give Ulrich an insight into the deeper work- ings of things: 'With any of these things, you can never tell whether
·they are nonsense or not," he said. "But you see, my dear feiiow, you can always depend on something important coming of the fact that somebody attaches importance to it. Take the case of Dr. Amheim, that darling of all the newspapers. The newspapers could just as eas-
. ily pursue some other hare. But given that they pursue him, that makes Amheim important. You said, didn't you, that this man Oehl has an organization behind him? Not that it proves anything, of course, but on the other hand, as I said, we must keep up with the times, and when a good many people are for something, the chances are that something will come of it. "
82
CLARISSE CALLS FOR AN ULRICH YEAR
There was really no reason for Ulrich to pay Clarisse a visit other than his having to give her a good talking-to about the letter she had written to Count Leinsdorf; when she had come to see him a few days earlier, he had forgotten all about it. On his way there, however, it occurred to him that Walter was defmitely jealous of him and would be upset about the visit when he heard of it. But there was nothing Walter could do about it. The majority of men find them- selves in this funny situation if they happen to be jealous: they cannot keep an eye on their women until after office hours.
The time of day Ulrich had chosen to go there made it unlikely that he would find Walter at home. It was quite early in the after- noon. He had phoned to say he was coming. The snowy whiteness of the landscape outside shone so intensely into the room that it was as though there were no curtains at all on the windows. In this
. merciless light that glittered off every object stood Clarisse, greet- ing Ulrich with a laugh from the center of the room. On the side toward the window, the minimal curvature of her boyish body flashed in vivid colors, while the side in shadow was a bluish-brown mist from which her forehead, nose, and chin jutted out like snowy ridges whose edges are blurred by wind and sun. The . impression she gave was less that of a human being than of the meeting of ice and light in the spectral solitude of an Alpine winter. Ulrich caught some of the spell she must cast on Walter at times, and his mixed feelings for his boyhood friend briefly gave way to an insight into the image two people presented to each other, whose life he per- haps knew hardly at all.
"I don't know whether you told Walter anything about the letter you wrote to Count Leinsdorf," he began, "but I've come to speak to you alone, and to warn you never to do that kind of thing again. " Clarisse pushed two chairs together and made him sit down.
"Don't tell Walter," she asked him, "but tell me what you have
382 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
against it. You mean the Nietzsche Year? What did your Count say to that? "
'What do you suppose he could have said? The way you tied it in with Moosbrugger was utterly crazy. And even without that he'd probably have thrown your letter away. "
"Oh, really? " Clarisse was very disappointed. Then she said: "Luckily, you have some say in it tool"
"But don't you see, you're simply out of your mind!
"
Clarisse smiled, accepting this as a compliment. She laid her hand on his arm and asked him: "But an Austrian Year is nonsense, isn't it? "
"Of course it is. "
"But a Nietzsche Year would be a fine thing. Why should it be wrong to want something just because we happen to like the idea ourselves? "
"And what exactly is your idea of a Niemche Year? "
"That's your affair. "
"Very funny. "
"Not at all. Why does it seem funny to you to try to put into prac-
tice something you take seriously as an intellectual matter? Tell me that. "
''I'll be glad to," Ulrich said, freeing his arm from her hand. "After. all, Nietzsche isn't the issue; it could just as well be Christ or Buddha. " ,
"Or you. Why not get to work on an Ulrich Year! " She said this with the same casual air as when she had urged him to free Moos- brugger. This tirp. e, however, his attention had not strayed, and he was looking at her face while he listened to her words. All he saw was Clarisse's usual smile, that funl! y little grimace that was the unin- tended result of the ment;U effort she was making.
"Oh well," he thought, "she doesn't mean any harm. "
But Clarisse drew closer to him again. 'Why don't you make it You Year? You might just be in a position to do it now. Only -don't say anything to Walter about it-I've told you that already-nor about my Moosbrugger letter. Not a word, ever, that I've talked to you about it. But I assure you, this murderer is musical, even though he can't actually compose. Haven't you ever noticed that every human being is the center of a cosmic sphere? When the person moves, the
sphere moves with him. That's the way to make music, without think- ing about it, simple as the cosmic sphere around you. . . . "
"And you feel that I should work on something of that sort for a year of my own, do you? " ·
"No," Clarisse answered, playing it safe. Her fine lips seemed about to say something but held their peace, and the flame blazed silently from her eyes. It was hard to say what it was that emanated from her at such moments. One felt scorched, as if one had come too close to something red hot. Now she smiled, but it was a smile that curled on her lips like an ash left behind in the wake of the burned- out flare from her eyes.
"Still, that is the sort of thing I could do, if I had to," Ulrich went on, "but I'mafraid you think I should make a coup d'etat? "
Clarisse thought it over. "Let's say a Buddha Year, then," she said evasively. "I don't know what Buddha stood for, or only vaguely, but let's accept it, and if we think it matters, then we should do some- thing about it. It either deserves our faith in it or it doesn't! "
"Fine. Now . . . a Nietzsche Year was what you said. But what was it Nietzsche actually wanted? "
Clarisse reconsidered. 'Well, of course I don't mean a Nietzsche monument ·or a Nietzsche street," she said in some embarrassment. "But people should try to live as h e - "
"As he wanted? " he interrupted her. "But what did he want? "
Clarisse started to answer, hesitated, and finally said: "Oh come on, you know all that yourself. . . . "
"I don't know a thing," he teased her. "But I can tell you this: You can set up a Kaiser Franz Josef Soup Kitchen, and you can meet the needs of a Society for the Protection of the House Cat, but you can- not tum great ideas into reality any more than you can do it with music. Why is that? I dmi't know. But that's how it is. "
He had finally found refuge on the little sofa behind the little table; it was a position easier to defend than the chair. In the open space in the middle of the room, on the far bank, as it were, of an illusory prolongation of the shining tabletop, Clarisse was still stand- ing and talking. Her whole slender body was involved; she actually felt everything she wanted to say with her whole body first of all, and was always needing to do something with it. Ulrich had always thought of her body as hard and boyish, but now, as it gently swayed
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on legs pressed close together, he saw Clarisse as a Javanese dancer. Suddenly it occurred to him that he would not be surprised if she fell into a trance. Or was he in a trance himself? He launched into a long speech:
"You want to organize your life around an idea," he began. "And you'd like to know how to do that. But an idea is the most paradoxical thing in the world. The flesh in the grip of an idea is like a fetish. Bonded to an idea, it becomes magical. An ordinary slap in the face, bound up with ideas of honor, or of punishment and the like, can kill a man. And yet ideas can never maintain themselves in the state in which they are most powerful; they're like the kind of substance that, exposed to the air, instantly changes into some other, more lasting, but corrupted form. You've been through this often yourself. Be- cause an idea is what you are: an idea in a particular state. You are touched by a breath of something, and it's like a note suddenly ~mergingfrom the humming ofstrings; in front ofyou there is some- thing like a mirage; out of the confusion of your soul an endless pa- rade is taking shape, with all the world's beauty looking on from the roadside. All this can be the effect of a single idea. But after a while it comes to resemble all your previous ideas, it takes its place among them, becomes part ofyour outlook and your character, your princi- ples or your moods; in the act oftaking shape it has lost its wings and its mystery. "
Clarisse answered: "Walter is jealous of you. Not on my account, I'm sure. It's because you look as though you could do what he wishes he could do. Do you see what I mean? There is something about you that cuts him down. I wish I knew how to put it. " She scrutinized him.
Their two speeches intertwined.
Walter had always been life's special pet, always held on its lap. He transformed everything that happened to him and gave it a tender vitality. Walter had always been the one whose life had been the pcher in experiences. "But having more of a life is one of the earliest and subtlest signs of mediocrity," Ulrich thought. "Seen in context, an experience loses its personal venom or sweetness. " That was how it was, more or less. Even the assertion that this was the case estab- lished a context, and one got no kiss of welcome or good-bye for it.
And despite all that, Walter was jealous of him? He was glad to hear it.
"I told him he ought to kill you," Clarisse reported.
"What? "
"Ext~rminate him! I said. Suppose you're not really all you think
you are, and suppose Walter is the better man and has no other way to gain his peace of mind: it would make sense, wouldn't it? Besides, you can always fight back. "
"No half measures for you, I see," Ulrich said, somewhat shaken.
'Well, we were only talking. How do you feel about it, by the way? Walter says it's wrong even to think such things. "
"Oh no, thinking is quite in order," he replied hesitantly, taking a good look at Clarisse. She had a peculiar charm all her own. Was it as though she were somehow standing side by side with herself? She was not quite there, yet all there, both in close proximity.
"Bah, thinking! " she cut in. Her words were addressed to the wall behind him, as though her eyes were fixed on a point somewhere between. "You're every bit as passive as Walter. " These words, too, fell somewhere midway between them, keeping their distance like an insult, yet sounding conciliatory, because of the confidential closeness they implied. ''What I say is, if you can think something, you should be able to do it too," she insisted dryly.
Then she moved off, walked to the window, and stood there with her hands clasped behind her back.
Ulrich stood up quickly, went over to her, and placed an arm around her shoulders.
"Dear little Clarisse," he said, "you're being a bit strange today, aren't you? But I must put in a good word for myself; you're notre- ally concerned with me anyway, are you? "
Clarisse was staring out the window. But now her gaze sharpened; she was focusing on something specific out there, for support. She felt as if her thoughts had strayed outside and had only just returned. This feeling of being like a room, with the sense of the door just hav- ing shut, was nothing new to her. On and off she had days, even weeks, when everything around her was brighter and lighter than usual, as though it would take hardly any effort to slip out of herself and go traipsing about the world unencumbered; then again there
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were the bad times, when she felt imprisoned, and though these times usually passed quickly, she dreaded them like a punishment, because everything closed in on her and was so sad. Just now she was aware of a lucid, sober peacefulness, and it worried her a little; she was not sure what it was she had wanted just a while ago, and this sense of leaden clarity and quiet control was often a prelude to the time of punishment. She pulled herself together with the feeling that if she could keep this conversation going with conviction, she would be back on safe ground.
"Don't say 'dear little' to me," she said, pouting, "or I might end up killing you myself. " It came out like a joke, so she felt she had made one. She stole a cautious look at him, to see how he was taking it. "Ofcourse, it was only a way of putting it, hut you must realize that I'm serious. Where were we? You said it wasn't possible to live by an idea. There's no real energy in you, neither you nor Walter! "
"You horrified me by calling me a passivist! But there are two kinds. There's a passive passivism, like Walter's and then there's the active kind! "
"What is active passivism? " Clarisse was intrigued. "A prisoner waiting for his chance to break out! " "Bah! " said Clarisse. "Excuses. "
'Well, yes," he conceded. "Maybe. "
Clarisse still held her hands clasped behind her back and stood with her legs wide apart, as though in. riding boots.
"You know what Nietzsch·e says? Wanting to know for sure is like wanting to know where the ground is for your next step, mere cow- ardice. One has to start somewhere to act on one's intentions, not just talk about it. And I've always expected you of all people to do something special someday! "
Suddenly she had taken hold of a button on his vest and started twisting it, her face lifted up to his. Instinctively he laid his hand on hers to save the button.
''I've been thinking for a long time," she went on shyly, "that the really rotten, vile things that go on happen not because someone is doing them but because we are letting them happen. They expand to fill a void! " After this coup she looked at him expectantly. Then she burst out: "Letting things happen is ten times more dangerous than doing them, don't you see? " She struggled inwardly for a more exact
formulation, but then she only added: "You know exactly what I mean, don't you? Even though you are always saying that we have to let things go their own way. But I understand what you're saying. It's occurred to me more than once that you're the Devil himself! " These wordS had slipped out of Clarisse's mouth like a lizard. They frightened her. All she had been thinking of at the outset was Wal- ter's begging her to have a child by him. Ulrich caught a flicker in her eyes; she wanted him. Her upturned face was suffused with some- thing-nothing at all lovely, something ugly but touching. Something like a violent outbreak of sweat blurring the features. But it was disembodied, purely imaginary. He felt infected by it against his will and overcome by a slight absentmindedness. He was losing his power to hold out against her craziness, and so he grabbed her hand to make her sit down on the sofa, and sat down beside her.
"Let me tell you now why I do nothing," he began, and fell silent.
Clarisse, who had become herself again the moment she felt his touch, urged him on.
"There's nothing a man can do, because . . . but I can't really ex- pect you to understand this," he began, then he extracted a cigarette and devoted himself to lighting it.
"Go on," Clarisse prompted him. "What are you trying to say? "
But he kept silent. She pushed her arm behind his back and shook him, like a boy showing how strong he can be. With her, there was no need to say anything; the mere suggestion of something out of the
"ordinary was enough to set her imagination going. "You're really evil! " she said, and tried in vain to hurt him. But at this moment they were unpleasantly interrupted by Walter's return.
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What could Ulrich have said to Clarisse anyway? ·
He had kept it to himself because she had somehow brought him
to the verge of actually saying "God. " He had been about to say, more or less: God does not really mean the world literally; it is a met- aphor, an analogy, a figure of speech that He has to resort to for some reason or other, and it never satisfies Him, of course. We are not supposed to take Him at his word, it is we ourselyes who must come up with the answer for the riddle He sets us. He wondered whether Clarisse would have agreed to regard the whole thing as a game of Cowboys and Indians or Cops and Robbers. Of course she would. Whoever took the first step, she would stick by him like a she-wolf and keep a sharp lookout.
But there was something else he had also had on the tip of his tongue, something about mathematical problems that do not admit of a general solution but do allow for particular solutions, which one could combine to come nearer to a general solution. He might have added that he regarded the problem ofhuman life as that kind o( problem. What we call an age-without specifying whether we mean. . centuries, millennia,- or the time span between schoolchild and grandparent-that broad unregulated flow of conditions would come to mean a more or less chaotic succession of unsatisfactory and, .
