"
Diotima answered at random: "What lovely ideas you indulge in.
Diotima answered at random: "What lovely ideas you indulge in.
Musil - Man Without Qualities - v1
"
"I thought his friendship distresses you a little. "
"What nonsense! " Diotima pulled herself up and recovered her ladylike poise. "Do you know who really distresses me? " she asked, trying for an easy, chatty tone. "Your friend the General. What does that man want? Why does he keep coming here? Why is he always staring at me? "
"He's in love with you," her cousin replied.
Diotima gave a nervous laugh. She went on: "Do you realize that I shudder from head to foot when I set eyes on him? He makes me think of death. " ·
"An uncommonly life-loving figure of Death, if you look at him without prejudice. "
"Evidently I'm not unprejudiced. I don't know why, but I go into a panic every time he comes up to me and informs me that I make 'outstanding' ideas 'stand out' on an 'outstanQing occasion. ' He makes my skin crawl with an indescribable, incomprehensible, dreamlike fear. "
"Of him? ''
"Who else? The man's a hyena. "
Her cousin had to laugh. She went on with her scolding like a child
out ofcontrol. "H~goes creeping around, just waiting to see our best efforts come to nothing! "
"Which is probably exactly what you are so afraid of. Dear cousin, don't you remember that I foretold the collapse of your undertaking from the first? It can't be helped; you simply have to face it. "
Diotima looked at him haughtily. She remembered only too well, even to the words she had spoken to him the first time he came to see her, words that it now hurt her to think about. She had lectured him on what a privilege it was to call upon a whole nation, indeed upon the world, to take up its spiritual mission in the midst of its material- istic concerns. She had wanted nothing outworn, nothing of the old mind-sets, and yet the look she was now giving her cousin was more that of someone who had risen above all that, than of someone who had got above herself. She had considered a Year of the World, a universal rebirth, s9mething to crown all of Western culture; there
were times when she had come close, others when her goal seemed to recede from her grasp; she had gone through many ups and downs, and she had suffered. The last. few months had been like a long sea voyage, first lifted up by huge waves, then dropped into
Pseudoreality Prevails · . 5o7
508 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
deep troughs, over and over again, so that by now she could hardly tell what had come first and what later. Now she was sitting here, after her immense efforts, glad that the bench she sat on was not moving, content to do nothing but perhaps watch the smoke curling upward from a man's pipe; so intensely did she feel this that she had, in fact, chosen the image hers~lf-an old man:S pipe smoke in the light of the sinking sun. She seemed to herself like someone with great frenzied battles behind him. In a weary tone, she said to her cousin: "I have been through such a great deal; I have changed, I'm afraid. "
"In my favor, I hope? " ,
Diotima shook her head and smiled without looking at him.
"In that case you should know that it's Amheim who's behind the
General, not me! " Ulrich said suddenly. ''You've been putting all the blame for bringing in the General on me, all along. But don't you remember what I told you the first time you called me on the carpet about it? "
Diotima remembered. "Keep him away," her cousin had said. But Arnheim had told her to make the General feel welcome. She felt something she could not put into words, as if she were sitting inside a cloud that was quickly rising above her eyes. But the next instant the settee again felt hard and solid under her body, and she said: "I don't know how this General came to us in the first place. I never invited him. And Dr. Arnheim, whom I asked about it, naturally knows noth- ing about it either. Something must have gone wrong. "
Her cousin was not very helpful. "I knew the General years ago, but this is the first time I've seen him in ages," he said. "Of course, he's probably spying her~ a-little for the War Office, but he's sincere about wanting to help you, to. o. And I have it from his own lips that Amheim makes quite a point of being attentive to him. "
"Because Arnheim takes an interest in everything! " Diotiina re- torted. "He advised me not to rebuff the General, because he be- lieves in the man's good faith and because he may be useful to us, in his influential position. "
Ulrich vehemently shook his head. "Just listen to all the cackling going on around him! " he burst out so sharply that guests nearby turned their heads, to his hostess's embarrassment. "He can take i t -
he's rich! He has money, he agrees with evety one of them, and he knows that they're all acting as his unpaid press agents. "
"Why should he bother? " Diotima asked critically.
"Because of his vanity. He's a monster of vanity. How can I make you see the full extent of it? I mean vanity in the biblical sense: all cymbals and sounding brass to hide a vacuum. A man is vain when he prides himself on having seen the moon rise over Asia on his left while on his right Europe fades away in the sunset-this is how he once described to me his crossing of the Sea of Marmara. The moon probably rises far more beautifully behind the flowerpot on the win- dowsill of a lovesick young girl than it does over Asia. "
Diotima was thinking about where they might go to talk without being overheard. "You find his popularity irritating," she said in a low voice as she led him away through the various rooms, all filled with guests, until she had deftly maneuvered him into the foyer. Here she resumed the conversation with: "Why are you so set against him? You make it so hard for me. "
"I make it hard for you? " Ulrich asked with raised eyebrows.
"How can I talk freely with you about everything, as long as you persist in this attitude? " They had come to a stop in the middle ofthe foyer.
"Please feel free to tell me anything, whatever it is," he said warmly. "You two are in love, I know that much. Will he marry you? " "He has asked me," Diotima replied without regard to their ex- posed position as they stood there. She was overcome by her feelings
and took no offense at her cousin's bluntness.
"And what about you? " he asked.
She blushed like a schoolgirl. "Oh, for me it's a heavy responsibil-
ity," she said hesitantly. "I can't let myself be rushed into doing something unfair. Arid where the really great things in life are con- cerned, it doesn't matter so much what one does. "
Ulrich was mystified by these words, since he knew nothing of the long nights in which Diotima had learned to overcome the voice of passion and attained that serene evenhandedness of the soul where love floats in the horizontal position of a seesaw equally weighted at both ends. But he sensed that for the moment it would be best to abandon the direct line or'straight talk, and took a diplomatic turn:
Pseudorealtty Prevails · 509
510 • THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
'Tdbe glad to tell you aboutmy attitude to Arnheim, because in the circumstances I shouldn't want you to feel that I'm against him in any way. I think I understand Arnheim quite well. You must realize that whatever is happening in your house-let's call it a kind of synthe- sis-it is something he has already experienced many times before. Wherever you have intellectual ferment taking the form of convic- tions, it also appears almost immediately in the form of the opposing convictions. And where it is embodied in a so-called leading intellec- tual personality, then the moment that personality is not freely saluted on all sides, it feels as insecure as ifit were in a cardboard box tossed into the water. We have a tendency in this country to fall in love with noted personalities, like the drunks who throw their arms around a stranger's neck, only to push him away again after a while, for equally obscure reasons. So I have a vivid idea of what Arnheim must be feeling-a form of seasickness, . I'd say. And when he remembers in such circumstances what money can do if you know how to use it, he feels firm ground under his feet for the first time after a long sea voyage. He is bound to notice how each suggestion, proposal, wish, service, accomplishment, struggles to enter the orbit of wealth, which is in that sense an image of the mind itself. Idea'> striving for power tend to attach themselves to ideas that already have power. I hardly know how to put it to you; the mff:erence be- tween ideas that aim high and those that are merely ambitious is hard to pin down. But once the genuinely great, with its usual material poverty and purity of spirit, is displaced by the mere label of great- ness, all sorts of spurious candidates for the label push their way in-:- quite understandably-and then you also get the kind of greatness
that can be conferred by publicity and business acumen. And there you have your Arnheim in all his innpcence and guilt. "
"You're being very holy all of a sudden," Diotima said acidly.
"You're right, it's none of my business, but that way he has of ac- cepting the mixed effects ofinward and outward greatness and trying to make it all look like a model ofhumanitarianism could in fact exas- perate me to a frantic degree of holiness. "
"Oh, you are so wrong! " Diotima broke in. "You see hiin only as a blase rich man. But Arnheim sees wealth as an absolutely all-perva- sive responsibility. He devotes himself to his business as another
man might give himself over to a human being entrusted to his care. He deeply needs to make a real difference in the world. If he makes himself available to people, it is because, as he says, a man must keep moving if he wants to be moved. Or was it Goethe who said that? He once explained it to me at length. His point is that to do good, you must, to begin with, do something. Of course, l admit that I have also been known· to feel that he sometimes mixes too freely with all sorts of people. "
As they talked, they were walking back and forth in the empty foyer, with its mirrors and all the coats on the racks. Now Diotima stopped a. nd ptit her hand on her cousin's arm, saying:
"This man, ·so highly favored by fate in every way, has the modest notion that a man alone is no stronger than a sick person left on his own. Don't yoti agree with him there? To be alone is to fall prey to a thousand fantasies. " She dropped her eyes as though she were searching the floor for something, even as she felt her cousin's eyes on her lowered eyelids.
"Oh, I suppose I might be talking about myself. I have been so lonely oflate. But so are yo~! I can tell. You have an embittered look; you're not at all happy, are you? Everything you say shows that you're on bad terms with everything in your own life. You're jealous by na- ture, and you have a chip on your shoulder, you're against every- thing. I don't mind telling you that Amheim has complained to me that you refuse to be friends with him. "
"Has he actually told you that he wants us to be. friends? If so, he's lying! "
Diotima looked up at him and laughed. "There you go again, mak- ing a mountain out of a molehill. W e both want your friendship. Per- haps we do because you are just as you are. But I'd have to go back a bit to explain: Amheim came up with such examples as . . . " She hesi- tated, then thought better ofit. "No, that would take us too far afield. In brief, Amheim says that we have to make use of whatever means our times afford us. The thing is to act on the basis of two different attitudes, never quite revolutionary and never quite antirevolution- ary, never quite out of love or out of hate nor out of some particular inclination of our own, but always trying to develop every possibility one has. But that isn't being clever, as you see. it; it merely shows a
Pseudoreality Prevails · 51 1
512 • THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
simple, all-embracing character, someone with a gift for bringing dis- parate things together by seeing through their superficial differ- ences-the personality of a born leader! "
"And what has that to do with me? " Ulrich asked.
His challenge had the effect of tearing through her reminiscences of a long conversation about scholasticism, ~e Church, Goethe and Napoleon, and the whole fog of cultural ambiguities that had thick- ened around Diotima's head, and she suddenly saw herself clearly, sitting beside her cousin on the long shoe cupboard where, in the heat of argument, she had made him sit down with her; his back was stubbornly avoiding the coats hanging in rows behind them, which had badly mussed her hair. As she patted it in place, she replied:
"But you're his exact opposite! You'd like to re-create the whole world in your own image. You're always opposing everything with that passive resistance of yours, or whatever that horrid expression is. " She was delighted to tell him just what she thought, for once. But all this while she kept thinking that they had better not stay where they were, in case other guests started leaving or coming through the foyer for some reason.
"You're always so hypercritical," she went on. "I don't recall you ever having a good word to say about anything, except to praise ev- erything that's intolerable nowadays, out ofsheer contrariness. EVery time one tries to hold on to a feeling or an intuition in the midst of this desert of our godless age, one can count on your fervent defense ofspecialization, disorder, all the negative side oflife. " So saying, she stood up and gave him to understand, with a smile, that they must fin~a better place to sit. It was either rejoining the others or finding a hiding place where they could go on with their talk. The Tuzzis' bedroom could be entered even from here; through a door covered with wallpaper, but Diotima felt it was too intimate a place to take her cousin, especially as every time the apartment was rearranged for a reception there was no telling how much of a mess the bedroom had been left in. So there was no refuge left but one ofthe two maids' rooms. The thought that it would be a funny mixture of taking liber- ties and ofher housewifely duty to subject Rachel's room, where she never set foot, to an impromptu inspection decided her. As they went there, and even as she apologized for taking him there, and
once they were inside the little room, she intently went on talking to Ulrich:
"I get the feeling that you are always out to undermine Arnheim, every chance you get. Your opposition hurts him. He is an outstand- ing contemporary, which is why he is and needs to be in touch with present-day realities. While you are always on the point of taking a leap into the impossible. He is all affirmation and perfect balance; you are, frankly, asocial. He strives for unity, intent to his fingertips upon achieving some clear decision; you oppose him with nothing but your formless outlook. He has a feeling for everything that has taken a long time to become what it is;. and you? What about you? You act as though the world were about to begin tomorrow. Why don't you an- swerme? Fromtheveryfirstday,whenItoldyouwehadbeengivena chance to do something truly great, your attitude ha5 been the same. And when I see this chance as a predestined moment that has brought us all together for a purpose, waiting, as it were, with an unspoken question in our eyes, for an answer, you carry on like a brat who wants only to disrupt everything. " She was choosing her words with care to gloss over their awkward situation in the maid's room, fortifying her position by giving her cousin the most elaborate scolding.
"If that's how I am, how can I possibly be of any use to you? " Ul- rich asked. He had sat down on Rachel's little iron bedstead, an arm's length from Diotima, facing him on the little wicker chair. The an- swer she gave him was admirable.
"If you ever saw me doing something horrible, something really awful," she said unexpectedly, ''I'm sure you'd be an angel about it. " She was startled to hear herselfsay it. She had only meant to point up his love of contradiction by joking that he could be expected to be most kind and considerate when she least deserved it; but a spring had suddenly bubbled up in her unco~scious, making her say things that sounded rather silly, and. yet it was amazing how they seemed to apply to her and her relationship to this cousin of hers!
Ulrich sensed it. He looked at her without speaking; then, after a pause, he responded with a question: "Are you very much . . . are you madly in love with him? " ·
Diotima looked at the floor. "What an absurd way to put it! I'm not a schoolgirl with a crush, you know. "
Pseudoreality Prevails · 513
514 · THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
But her. cousin would not be put off. "I am asking you this for a reason: I am wondering whether you have already come to know that longing that we all have-including even the most detestable crea- tures among tonight's guests next door-to strip off our clothes, put our arms around each other's shoulders, and sing instead of talking; then you would have to go from one of us to the other and kiss him like a sister on the lips. If this is a bit much, I might let them wear nightshirts.
"
Diotima answered at random: "What lovely ideas you indulge in. "
"But don~tyou see, I have known what it feels like, myself, though it was a long time ago. And there have been very respectable persons who claimed that this was precisely the way life should be on earth. "
"Then it's your own fault ·if you dmi't act accordingly;: Diotima interrupted. "Besides, there's no need to make it look so ridiculous. " She had remembered that her adventure with Amheim eluded clas- sification and made one long for a life without social differences, where action, soul, mind, and body would all be one.
Ulrich did not answer. . He offered his cousin a cigarette. She ac- cepted it. & the cramped little room filled with smoke, Diotima wondered what Rachel would think when she sniffed the evidence of this intrusion. Should they open the Window? Or should she explain to the little servant in the morning? Oddly enough, it was precisely the thought of Rachel that decided her to stay; she had been on the point of putting an end to this ihcreasingly awkward tete-~-tete, but the sense of her intellectual superiority and the cigarette smoke that would mystify her maid somehow coalesced into something she was rather enjoying.
Ulrich was watchj. ng her. He was surprised at himself for having spoken to her as he did, but he went on with it~ he felt a need for companionship. 'Tll tell you," he resumed, "under what conditions I might be so seraphic-seraphic . is probably not too grand a term for not merely enduring another person but feeling that person if I may put it like this-under his psychological loincloth, without a shudder. "
"Unless the other is a woman," Diotima said, in view of her cousin's dubiaus reputation in the family.
"Not eve~ excepting that. "
"You're right. What I call loving the hu. man being in a woman is a
great rarity. " Diotima felt that Ulrich had been, for some time now, expressing views closer to her own, and yet there was always some- thing amiss and whatever he said never came quite close enough.
"Seriously now," he said stubbornly, leaning forward, his forearm resting on his muscular thighs, his gloomy gaze fixed on the floor. "We still say, nowadays, I love this woman, and I hate this man, in- stead ofsaying I find that person attractive or repellent. It would be a step closer to the truth to say that it is I, myself, who arouses in the other the capacity for attracting or repelling me, and even more ac- curate to say that the other somehow brings out in me the requisite qualities, and so on. We can never know where it begins; the whole thing is a functional interdependence, like the one between two bouncing balls or two electric circuits. We've known all that for a long time now, but we still prefer to regard ourselves ·as the cause, the primal cause, in the magnetic fields of emotion around us; even when someone admits that he is merely imitating someone else, he makes it sound like an active achievement ofhis own. And this is why I ask you again whether you have ever been uncontrollably in love, or furious, . or desperate. Because it is at such times that you can see clearly, ifyou are at all perceptive, that in such an overwrought state we behave no differently from a bee on a windowpane or an amoeba in poisoned water: we are. caught in a storm of movement, we dash offblindly in every direction at once, we beat our brains out against brick walls, until, by some lucky chance, we find an opening to free- dom, which we promptly attribute, as s. oon as our consciousness has crystallized again, to a calculated plan of action. "
"I must say," Diotima objected, "that this is a dismal and demean- ing view of emotions that have the power to decide a person's whole life. "
"Are you thinking of the boring old argument about whether or not we are masters of our own fate? " Ulrich replied, with a quick glance upward. "If everything is determined by a cause, then no one is responsible for anything, and so on? I must confess that I've never given as much as fifteen minutes of thought to that question in my whole life. It belongs to a period that became obsolete while nobody was looking. It comes from theology, and apart from jurists, who still have a lot of theology and the smell of burning heretics in their nos- trils, the only people who still think in terms of causation are those
Pseudoreality Prevails · 515
516 · THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
members of your family who are likely to say: 'You are the cause of my sleepless nights' or 'The sudden drop in the price of wheat was the cause of his misfortune. ' "
Diotima drew herself up. "Why are you always talking about crimi- nals? Crime seems to hold a special fascination for you. What do you suppose that means? "
"Oh no," her cousin said. "It doesn't mean a thing. A certain de- gree of excitement, at ~ost. Our ordinary state is an averaging out of all the crimes ofwhich we are capable. But now that the word 'theol- ogy' has come up, let me ask you something. . . . "
"Whether I've ever been madly in love or jealous, again? "
"No. Think about this: I f God has ordained whatever happens and always knows what will happen, how can a human being commit a sin? It's an old question, but it's still as good as new. What kind of trickster God would it be who sets us up to commit offenses against him, with his own prior knowledge and consent? He doesn't merely know in advance what we are likely to do: there are plenty of exam- ples of such resigned love; oh no, he mak~s us do wrong! That's the situation in which we find ourselves today, with respectJo each other. The self is losing its status as a sovereign making its own laws. W e are learning to know the rules by which it develops, the influence ofits environment, its structural types, its disappearance in moments ofthe most intense activity: in short, the laws regulating its formation and its conduct. Think of it, cousin, the laws of personality! It's like talking of a trade union for lonely rattlesnakes or a robbers' chamber ofcommerce. What with laws being the most impersonal thing in the world, the personality becomes no more than the imaginary meeting point ofall that's impersonal, so that it's hard to fmd for it that honor- able standpoint you don't want to relinquish. . . . "
So he spoke, and Diotima took occasion to object: "But, my dear friend, surely one ought to do everything as personally as one can. . . . " Finally, she said: "You really are being very theological today; I've never known that side of your character. " Again she sat there like a tired dancer. Such a strong and handsome woman! She somehow felt this herself, in all her bones. She had been avoiding her cousin for weeks, perhaps even months by now. But she rather liked this man ofher own age. He looked dashing in evening dress, in the dimly lit room, black and white like a knight templar; there was
I
something of the passion of the Cross in this black and white. She glanced around the modest little bedroom. The Parallel Campaign was far away, she had gone through a great emotional struggle, and here she was in this little room, as plain as duty itself, with only the grace notes of some pussy willows and the unused picture postcards stuck in the frame of the mirror-so it was between these, framed by images ofthe great city, that the little maid saw her face in the glass! Where did she wash, come to think of it? Ah, in that narrow cup- board, there ·must be a basin under the lid, Diotima now remem- bered, and then the thought crossed her mind: "This man wants to and yet he doesn't want to. "
She looked at him calmly, with the air of a friendly listener. "Does Arnheim really want to many me? " she asked herself. He had said so. But then he had not persisted. There was always so much else to talk about. But her cousin too, instead of going on and on in that impersonal fashion, should have asked her: How are you doing, then? Why didn't he ask? She felt that he would understand if she could tell him all about her inner struggles. "Is it a good thing for me? " he had asked her, all too predictably, when she told him how she had changed. The insolence! Diotima smiled.
Both ofthese men were a bit peculiar, come to think ofit. Why did her cousin never have a good word to say for Arnheim? She knew that Arnheim wanted his friendship; but Ulrich too, judging by his own irritable remarks, had Amheim much on his mind. "And how totally he misunderstands him! " she thought again. There was noth- ing to be done about it. Besides, at this point it was not only her soul that mutinied against her body, married as it was to Section Chief Tuzzi, but at times her body mutinied against her soul, made to lan- guish, by Arnheim's hesitant and high-strung love, at the rim of a desert where what she saw ahead was perhaps a mirage, only the quivering reflection of her yearning. She would have liked to confide her misery and her helplessness to her cousin, She liked the decisive, one-track mind he usually showed on such occasions. Amheim's bal- anced many-sidedness certainly rated higher, but at a moment of de- cision Ulrich would not waver so much, despite his theorizing, which tended toward an absolute suspension in uncertainty. She sensed this, without knowing why; it was probably part of what she had felt for him from their first encounter. If at this moment Amheim felt
Pseudoreality Prevails · 51 7
518 • THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES . I
like a huge effort, a royal burden laid upon her soul, too much to bear in every sense, then everything Ulrich was saying tended toward a single effect, that _of losing responsibility as one contemplated hun- dreds of interactions, so that she felt suspiciously free. She suddenly needed to make herself heavier than she was; she couldn't say how, but was immediately reminded of an incident when, as a young girl, she had carried a little boy away from some danger, and how he had kept hitting her in the belly with his knees to make her let him go. The force of this memory-which had occurred to her as . unexpect- edly as if it had suddenly come down the chimney into this lon~ly little room~uite threw her off balance. "Madly in love? " she thought. Why did he keep asking her that? As if she were incapable of really letting herself go. Her mind had wandered from what he was saying, so, without any idea whether it would be apropos or not, she simply interrupted him and told him once and for all, without regard to anything he might have been saying, with a laugh (unless her sense of laughing as she spoke was not quite reliable in the sud- den, heedless excitement of it): "But I am madly in love! "
Ulrich openly smiled at this. "You're quite incapable of it," he said.
She had stood up, her hands on her hair, staring at him in amazement.
"In order to lose control," he specified calmly, "one has to be quite precise and objective. Two selves, aware ofhow dubious a thing it is these days to be a self, cling to each other-or so I imagine, ifit's love at any price and not merely the usual kind of thing and they become so enmeshed with each other that the one feels like the cause for the other one's existence; as they feel themselves changing into great- ness and begin to float like a veil. It is incredibly hard,-in such a state, to make no false moves, even though one has been making all the right moves for some time. It is simply very hard to feel the right thing in this world! Quite contrary to the general preconception, it almost calls for a certain pedantry. Incidentally, that's just what I wanted to say to you. You flatter me, you know, when you say I could be expected to behave like an angel. A human being would have to be wholly objective-which is almost the same as being impersonal, after all-to be wholly a personification oflove. This means being all feeling and sensibility and thought. Now, all the elements that make up a human being are tender, since they yearn toward each other;
only the human being itself is not. So being madly in love is some- thing you might not even want for yourself. . . . " .
He had done his best to speak as casually as possible; he even lit another cigarette to keep his face from looking too solemn as he spoke, and Diotima also accepted another from him to hide her em- barrassment. She made a comically defiant face and blew the smoke high into the air, to show her independence, because she hadn't quite understood what he was talking about. But their situation as a whole was having a strong effect on her: that her cousin was suddenly saying all these things to her, in this room where they were alone together, without making the slightest move to take her hand or touch her hair, a move so natural in the circumstances, even though they were feeling the magnetic attraction their two bodies exerted on each other in this confmed space. What·if they . . . , she wondered. But what could one do in this maid's room? She looked around. Act like a whore? But how does one do that? Suppose she started blub- bering? Blubbering: that was a schoolgirl expression that had sud- denly come back to her. Suppose she suddenly did what he had talked about before, took off her clothes, put her arm around his shoulder, and sang . . . sang what? Played the harp? She looked at him, smiling. It was like being with a wayward brother, in whose company one could do anything that came into one's head. Ulrich was smiling too. But his smile was like a blind window, because now that he had indulged himself in this sort of talk with Diotima he merely felt. ashamed of himself. Still, she had an intimation of the possibility of loving this man; it would be something like her idea of modem music, that is, quite unsatisfying and yet full of something excitingly different. '
And even though she took it for granted that she was more aware ofall this than he was, the thought ofit as she stood there facing him sent a hidden glow up her legs, which made her say rather abruptly to her cousin, with the face of a woman who feels the conversation has been running on too long: "My dear, we're really being quite im- possible. Do stay here. a bit longer while I go ahead and show myself to our guests again. "
Pseudoreality Prevails · 519
520
10. 2
LOVE AND W AR AMONG THE . FISCHELS
Gerda waited in vain for Ulrich's visit. He had, in fact, forgotten his promise to see her, or remembered it only when he had other things to do.
"Forget about him," Clementine said, whenever Director Fischel grumbled about it. 'We used to be good enough for him, but he's probably setting his social sights higher these days. I f you go after him you'll only make matterS worse; you're much too clumsy to carry it off. "
Gerda missed this older friend. She wished he would come and knew that if he did come, she would wish him away. For all her twenty-three years, nothiD. g had yet happened in her life other than the cautious wooing of a certain Herr Glanz, who had her father on his side, and her Christian-Germanic friends, whom she sometimes regarded as schoolboys rather than real men. "Why doesn't he ever come to see me? " she wondered, whenever she thought of Ulrich. Among her friends, the Parallel Campaign was see~ as beyond any doubt the opening salvo in the spiritual destruction of the German people, and she felt embarrassed by Ulrich's involvement in it; she longed to hear his side ofit, however, hoping that he would be able to exonerate himself.
Her mother said to her father: "You missed your chance to be in this affair. It would have been a good thing for Gerda, and she'd have had something else to think about; a lot ofpeople go to the Tuzzis'. " It had come to light that he had neglected to respond to His Grace's invitation. Now he had to suffer for it.
The young men whom Gerda called her spiritual comrades in arms had settled down in his house like Penelope's suitors, debating what a young man of German blood should do about the Parallel Campaign.
"A fmancier must be able, at times, to act in the spirit of a Mae- cenas," Frau Clementine exhorted her husband when he fumed that
he had not hired Hans Sepp, Gerda's "spiritual guide," as a tutor, for good money, only to have thts situation come of it.
Hans Sepp, the graduate student, who had not the slightest pros- pect of being able to keep a wife, had come into the household as a tutor but, owing to the conflicts that were tearing the family apart, had become its tyrant. Now he was discussing with his friends, who had become Gerda's friends, at the Fischels', how to save the Ger- man aristocracy from being ensnared by Diotima-of whom it was said that she made no distinction between persons of her own race and those of an alien race-and caught up in the nets of the Jewish spirit. While in the presence of Leo Fischel this sort of talk was usu- ally tempered with a· certain philosophic objectivity, he still heard enough of certain terms and principles for it to get on his neiVes. They worried that such a campaign, which was bound to lead to total catastrophe, should have surfaced in an era not destined to bring forth great symbols, and the recurrent expressio~s "deeply meaning- ful," "upward humanization," and "free personhood" were enough by themselves to make the pince-nez quiver on Fischel's nose every time he heard them. He had to stand by while there proliferated in his own house such concepts as "the art of living thought," "the graph of spiritual growth," and "action on the wing. " He discovered that a biweekly "hour of purification" was held regularly under his roof. He demanded an explanation. It turned out that what they meant by this was reading the poems of Stefan George together. Leo Fischel searched his old encyclopedia in vain for the poet's name. But what irritated him most of all, old-style liberal that he was, was that these green pups referred to all the high government officials, bank presidents, and leading university figures in the Parallel Cam- paign as "puffed-up little men"; then there were the world-weary airs they gave themselves, complaining that the times had become devoid ofgreat ideas, ifthere was anyone left who was ready for great ideas; that even "humanity" had become a mere buzzword, as far as they were concerned, and that only "the nation" or, as they called it, "folk and folkways" still really had any meaning.
"The word 'humanity' is meaningless to me, Papa," Gerda said, when he tried to reason with her. "The life seems to have gone out of it. But 'my nation'-now, that's a physical reality. "
"Your nation! " Leo Fischel began, meaning to say something
Pseudoreality Prevails · 52 1
522 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
about the biblical prophets and his own father, who had been a law- yer in Trieste.
"I know," Gerda interrupted, "but my nation in a spiritual sense is what I am talking about. "
'Tm going to lock you up in your room till you come to your senses! " Papa Leo said. "And I won't have those friends of yours in my house.
"I thought his friendship distresses you a little. "
"What nonsense! " Diotima pulled herself up and recovered her ladylike poise. "Do you know who really distresses me? " she asked, trying for an easy, chatty tone. "Your friend the General. What does that man want? Why does he keep coming here? Why is he always staring at me? "
"He's in love with you," her cousin replied.
Diotima gave a nervous laugh. She went on: "Do you realize that I shudder from head to foot when I set eyes on him? He makes me think of death. " ·
"An uncommonly life-loving figure of Death, if you look at him without prejudice. "
"Evidently I'm not unprejudiced. I don't know why, but I go into a panic every time he comes up to me and informs me that I make 'outstanding' ideas 'stand out' on an 'outstanQing occasion. ' He makes my skin crawl with an indescribable, incomprehensible, dreamlike fear. "
"Of him? ''
"Who else? The man's a hyena. "
Her cousin had to laugh. She went on with her scolding like a child
out ofcontrol. "H~goes creeping around, just waiting to see our best efforts come to nothing! "
"Which is probably exactly what you are so afraid of. Dear cousin, don't you remember that I foretold the collapse of your undertaking from the first? It can't be helped; you simply have to face it. "
Diotima looked at him haughtily. She remembered only too well, even to the words she had spoken to him the first time he came to see her, words that it now hurt her to think about. She had lectured him on what a privilege it was to call upon a whole nation, indeed upon the world, to take up its spiritual mission in the midst of its material- istic concerns. She had wanted nothing outworn, nothing of the old mind-sets, and yet the look she was now giving her cousin was more that of someone who had risen above all that, than of someone who had got above herself. She had considered a Year of the World, a universal rebirth, s9mething to crown all of Western culture; there
were times when she had come close, others when her goal seemed to recede from her grasp; she had gone through many ups and downs, and she had suffered. The last. few months had been like a long sea voyage, first lifted up by huge waves, then dropped into
Pseudoreality Prevails · . 5o7
508 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
deep troughs, over and over again, so that by now she could hardly tell what had come first and what later. Now she was sitting here, after her immense efforts, glad that the bench she sat on was not moving, content to do nothing but perhaps watch the smoke curling upward from a man's pipe; so intensely did she feel this that she had, in fact, chosen the image hers~lf-an old man:S pipe smoke in the light of the sinking sun. She seemed to herself like someone with great frenzied battles behind him. In a weary tone, she said to her cousin: "I have been through such a great deal; I have changed, I'm afraid. "
"In my favor, I hope? " ,
Diotima shook her head and smiled without looking at him.
"In that case you should know that it's Amheim who's behind the
General, not me! " Ulrich said suddenly. ''You've been putting all the blame for bringing in the General on me, all along. But don't you remember what I told you the first time you called me on the carpet about it? "
Diotima remembered. "Keep him away," her cousin had said. But Arnheim had told her to make the General feel welcome. She felt something she could not put into words, as if she were sitting inside a cloud that was quickly rising above her eyes. But the next instant the settee again felt hard and solid under her body, and she said: "I don't know how this General came to us in the first place. I never invited him. And Dr. Arnheim, whom I asked about it, naturally knows noth- ing about it either. Something must have gone wrong. "
Her cousin was not very helpful. "I knew the General years ago, but this is the first time I've seen him in ages," he said. "Of course, he's probably spying her~ a-little for the War Office, but he's sincere about wanting to help you, to. o. And I have it from his own lips that Amheim makes quite a point of being attentive to him. "
"Because Arnheim takes an interest in everything! " Diotiina re- torted. "He advised me not to rebuff the General, because he be- lieves in the man's good faith and because he may be useful to us, in his influential position. "
Ulrich vehemently shook his head. "Just listen to all the cackling going on around him! " he burst out so sharply that guests nearby turned their heads, to his hostess's embarrassment. "He can take i t -
he's rich! He has money, he agrees with evety one of them, and he knows that they're all acting as his unpaid press agents. "
"Why should he bother? " Diotima asked critically.
"Because of his vanity. He's a monster of vanity. How can I make you see the full extent of it? I mean vanity in the biblical sense: all cymbals and sounding brass to hide a vacuum. A man is vain when he prides himself on having seen the moon rise over Asia on his left while on his right Europe fades away in the sunset-this is how he once described to me his crossing of the Sea of Marmara. The moon probably rises far more beautifully behind the flowerpot on the win- dowsill of a lovesick young girl than it does over Asia. "
Diotima was thinking about where they might go to talk without being overheard. "You find his popularity irritating," she said in a low voice as she led him away through the various rooms, all filled with guests, until she had deftly maneuvered him into the foyer. Here she resumed the conversation with: "Why are you so set against him? You make it so hard for me. "
"I make it hard for you? " Ulrich asked with raised eyebrows.
"How can I talk freely with you about everything, as long as you persist in this attitude? " They had come to a stop in the middle ofthe foyer.
"Please feel free to tell me anything, whatever it is," he said warmly. "You two are in love, I know that much. Will he marry you? " "He has asked me," Diotima replied without regard to their ex- posed position as they stood there. She was overcome by her feelings
and took no offense at her cousin's bluntness.
"And what about you? " he asked.
She blushed like a schoolgirl. "Oh, for me it's a heavy responsibil-
ity," she said hesitantly. "I can't let myself be rushed into doing something unfair. Arid where the really great things in life are con- cerned, it doesn't matter so much what one does. "
Ulrich was mystified by these words, since he knew nothing of the long nights in which Diotima had learned to overcome the voice of passion and attained that serene evenhandedness of the soul where love floats in the horizontal position of a seesaw equally weighted at both ends. But he sensed that for the moment it would be best to abandon the direct line or'straight talk, and took a diplomatic turn:
Pseudorealtty Prevails · 509
510 • THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
'Tdbe glad to tell you aboutmy attitude to Arnheim, because in the circumstances I shouldn't want you to feel that I'm against him in any way. I think I understand Arnheim quite well. You must realize that whatever is happening in your house-let's call it a kind of synthe- sis-it is something he has already experienced many times before. Wherever you have intellectual ferment taking the form of convic- tions, it also appears almost immediately in the form of the opposing convictions. And where it is embodied in a so-called leading intellec- tual personality, then the moment that personality is not freely saluted on all sides, it feels as insecure as ifit were in a cardboard box tossed into the water. We have a tendency in this country to fall in love with noted personalities, like the drunks who throw their arms around a stranger's neck, only to push him away again after a while, for equally obscure reasons. So I have a vivid idea of what Arnheim must be feeling-a form of seasickness, . I'd say. And when he remembers in such circumstances what money can do if you know how to use it, he feels firm ground under his feet for the first time after a long sea voyage. He is bound to notice how each suggestion, proposal, wish, service, accomplishment, struggles to enter the orbit of wealth, which is in that sense an image of the mind itself. Idea'> striving for power tend to attach themselves to ideas that already have power. I hardly know how to put it to you; the mff:erence be- tween ideas that aim high and those that are merely ambitious is hard to pin down. But once the genuinely great, with its usual material poverty and purity of spirit, is displaced by the mere label of great- ness, all sorts of spurious candidates for the label push their way in-:- quite understandably-and then you also get the kind of greatness
that can be conferred by publicity and business acumen. And there you have your Arnheim in all his innpcence and guilt. "
"You're being very holy all of a sudden," Diotima said acidly.
"You're right, it's none of my business, but that way he has of ac- cepting the mixed effects ofinward and outward greatness and trying to make it all look like a model ofhumanitarianism could in fact exas- perate me to a frantic degree of holiness. "
"Oh, you are so wrong! " Diotima broke in. "You see hiin only as a blase rich man. But Arnheim sees wealth as an absolutely all-perva- sive responsibility. He devotes himself to his business as another
man might give himself over to a human being entrusted to his care. He deeply needs to make a real difference in the world. If he makes himself available to people, it is because, as he says, a man must keep moving if he wants to be moved. Or was it Goethe who said that? He once explained it to me at length. His point is that to do good, you must, to begin with, do something. Of course, l admit that I have also been known· to feel that he sometimes mixes too freely with all sorts of people. "
As they talked, they were walking back and forth in the empty foyer, with its mirrors and all the coats on the racks. Now Diotima stopped a. nd ptit her hand on her cousin's arm, saying:
"This man, ·so highly favored by fate in every way, has the modest notion that a man alone is no stronger than a sick person left on his own. Don't yoti agree with him there? To be alone is to fall prey to a thousand fantasies. " She dropped her eyes as though she were searching the floor for something, even as she felt her cousin's eyes on her lowered eyelids.
"Oh, I suppose I might be talking about myself. I have been so lonely oflate. But so are yo~! I can tell. You have an embittered look; you're not at all happy, are you? Everything you say shows that you're on bad terms with everything in your own life. You're jealous by na- ture, and you have a chip on your shoulder, you're against every- thing. I don't mind telling you that Amheim has complained to me that you refuse to be friends with him. "
"Has he actually told you that he wants us to be. friends? If so, he's lying! "
Diotima looked up at him and laughed. "There you go again, mak- ing a mountain out of a molehill. W e both want your friendship. Per- haps we do because you are just as you are. But I'd have to go back a bit to explain: Amheim came up with such examples as . . . " She hesi- tated, then thought better ofit. "No, that would take us too far afield. In brief, Amheim says that we have to make use of whatever means our times afford us. The thing is to act on the basis of two different attitudes, never quite revolutionary and never quite antirevolution- ary, never quite out of love or out of hate nor out of some particular inclination of our own, but always trying to develop every possibility one has. But that isn't being clever, as you see. it; it merely shows a
Pseudoreality Prevails · 51 1
512 • THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
simple, all-embracing character, someone with a gift for bringing dis- parate things together by seeing through their superficial differ- ences-the personality of a born leader! "
"And what has that to do with me? " Ulrich asked.
His challenge had the effect of tearing through her reminiscences of a long conversation about scholasticism, ~e Church, Goethe and Napoleon, and the whole fog of cultural ambiguities that had thick- ened around Diotima's head, and she suddenly saw herself clearly, sitting beside her cousin on the long shoe cupboard where, in the heat of argument, she had made him sit down with her; his back was stubbornly avoiding the coats hanging in rows behind them, which had badly mussed her hair. As she patted it in place, she replied:
"But you're his exact opposite! You'd like to re-create the whole world in your own image. You're always opposing everything with that passive resistance of yours, or whatever that horrid expression is. " She was delighted to tell him just what she thought, for once. But all this while she kept thinking that they had better not stay where they were, in case other guests started leaving or coming through the foyer for some reason.
"You're always so hypercritical," she went on. "I don't recall you ever having a good word to say about anything, except to praise ev- erything that's intolerable nowadays, out ofsheer contrariness. EVery time one tries to hold on to a feeling or an intuition in the midst of this desert of our godless age, one can count on your fervent defense ofspecialization, disorder, all the negative side oflife. " So saying, she stood up and gave him to understand, with a smile, that they must fin~a better place to sit. It was either rejoining the others or finding a hiding place where they could go on with their talk. The Tuzzis' bedroom could be entered even from here; through a door covered with wallpaper, but Diotima felt it was too intimate a place to take her cousin, especially as every time the apartment was rearranged for a reception there was no telling how much of a mess the bedroom had been left in. So there was no refuge left but one ofthe two maids' rooms. The thought that it would be a funny mixture of taking liber- ties and ofher housewifely duty to subject Rachel's room, where she never set foot, to an impromptu inspection decided her. As they went there, and even as she apologized for taking him there, and
once they were inside the little room, she intently went on talking to Ulrich:
"I get the feeling that you are always out to undermine Arnheim, every chance you get. Your opposition hurts him. He is an outstand- ing contemporary, which is why he is and needs to be in touch with present-day realities. While you are always on the point of taking a leap into the impossible. He is all affirmation and perfect balance; you are, frankly, asocial. He strives for unity, intent to his fingertips upon achieving some clear decision; you oppose him with nothing but your formless outlook. He has a feeling for everything that has taken a long time to become what it is;. and you? What about you? You act as though the world were about to begin tomorrow. Why don't you an- swerme? Fromtheveryfirstday,whenItoldyouwehadbeengivena chance to do something truly great, your attitude ha5 been the same. And when I see this chance as a predestined moment that has brought us all together for a purpose, waiting, as it were, with an unspoken question in our eyes, for an answer, you carry on like a brat who wants only to disrupt everything. " She was choosing her words with care to gloss over their awkward situation in the maid's room, fortifying her position by giving her cousin the most elaborate scolding.
"If that's how I am, how can I possibly be of any use to you? " Ul- rich asked. He had sat down on Rachel's little iron bedstead, an arm's length from Diotima, facing him on the little wicker chair. The an- swer she gave him was admirable.
"If you ever saw me doing something horrible, something really awful," she said unexpectedly, ''I'm sure you'd be an angel about it. " She was startled to hear herselfsay it. She had only meant to point up his love of contradiction by joking that he could be expected to be most kind and considerate when she least deserved it; but a spring had suddenly bubbled up in her unco~scious, making her say things that sounded rather silly, and. yet it was amazing how they seemed to apply to her and her relationship to this cousin of hers!
Ulrich sensed it. He looked at her without speaking; then, after a pause, he responded with a question: "Are you very much . . . are you madly in love with him? " ·
Diotima looked at the floor. "What an absurd way to put it! I'm not a schoolgirl with a crush, you know. "
Pseudoreality Prevails · 513
514 · THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
But her. cousin would not be put off. "I am asking you this for a reason: I am wondering whether you have already come to know that longing that we all have-including even the most detestable crea- tures among tonight's guests next door-to strip off our clothes, put our arms around each other's shoulders, and sing instead of talking; then you would have to go from one of us to the other and kiss him like a sister on the lips. If this is a bit much, I might let them wear nightshirts.
"
Diotima answered at random: "What lovely ideas you indulge in. "
"But don~tyou see, I have known what it feels like, myself, though it was a long time ago. And there have been very respectable persons who claimed that this was precisely the way life should be on earth. "
"Then it's your own fault ·if you dmi't act accordingly;: Diotima interrupted. "Besides, there's no need to make it look so ridiculous. " She had remembered that her adventure with Amheim eluded clas- sification and made one long for a life without social differences, where action, soul, mind, and body would all be one.
Ulrich did not answer. . He offered his cousin a cigarette. She ac- cepted it. & the cramped little room filled with smoke, Diotima wondered what Rachel would think when she sniffed the evidence of this intrusion. Should they open the Window? Or should she explain to the little servant in the morning? Oddly enough, it was precisely the thought of Rachel that decided her to stay; she had been on the point of putting an end to this ihcreasingly awkward tete-~-tete, but the sense of her intellectual superiority and the cigarette smoke that would mystify her maid somehow coalesced into something she was rather enjoying.
Ulrich was watchj. ng her. He was surprised at himself for having spoken to her as he did, but he went on with it~ he felt a need for companionship. 'Tll tell you," he resumed, "under what conditions I might be so seraphic-seraphic . is probably not too grand a term for not merely enduring another person but feeling that person if I may put it like this-under his psychological loincloth, without a shudder. "
"Unless the other is a woman," Diotima said, in view of her cousin's dubiaus reputation in the family.
"Not eve~ excepting that. "
"You're right. What I call loving the hu. man being in a woman is a
great rarity. " Diotima felt that Ulrich had been, for some time now, expressing views closer to her own, and yet there was always some- thing amiss and whatever he said never came quite close enough.
"Seriously now," he said stubbornly, leaning forward, his forearm resting on his muscular thighs, his gloomy gaze fixed on the floor. "We still say, nowadays, I love this woman, and I hate this man, in- stead ofsaying I find that person attractive or repellent. It would be a step closer to the truth to say that it is I, myself, who arouses in the other the capacity for attracting or repelling me, and even more ac- curate to say that the other somehow brings out in me the requisite qualities, and so on. We can never know where it begins; the whole thing is a functional interdependence, like the one between two bouncing balls or two electric circuits. We've known all that for a long time now, but we still prefer to regard ourselves ·as the cause, the primal cause, in the magnetic fields of emotion around us; even when someone admits that he is merely imitating someone else, he makes it sound like an active achievement ofhis own. And this is why I ask you again whether you have ever been uncontrollably in love, or furious, . or desperate. Because it is at such times that you can see clearly, ifyou are at all perceptive, that in such an overwrought state we behave no differently from a bee on a windowpane or an amoeba in poisoned water: we are. caught in a storm of movement, we dash offblindly in every direction at once, we beat our brains out against brick walls, until, by some lucky chance, we find an opening to free- dom, which we promptly attribute, as s. oon as our consciousness has crystallized again, to a calculated plan of action. "
"I must say," Diotima objected, "that this is a dismal and demean- ing view of emotions that have the power to decide a person's whole life. "
"Are you thinking of the boring old argument about whether or not we are masters of our own fate? " Ulrich replied, with a quick glance upward. "If everything is determined by a cause, then no one is responsible for anything, and so on? I must confess that I've never given as much as fifteen minutes of thought to that question in my whole life. It belongs to a period that became obsolete while nobody was looking. It comes from theology, and apart from jurists, who still have a lot of theology and the smell of burning heretics in their nos- trils, the only people who still think in terms of causation are those
Pseudoreality Prevails · 515
516 · THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
members of your family who are likely to say: 'You are the cause of my sleepless nights' or 'The sudden drop in the price of wheat was the cause of his misfortune. ' "
Diotima drew herself up. "Why are you always talking about crimi- nals? Crime seems to hold a special fascination for you. What do you suppose that means? "
"Oh no," her cousin said. "It doesn't mean a thing. A certain de- gree of excitement, at ~ost. Our ordinary state is an averaging out of all the crimes ofwhich we are capable. But now that the word 'theol- ogy' has come up, let me ask you something. . . . "
"Whether I've ever been madly in love or jealous, again? "
"No. Think about this: I f God has ordained whatever happens and always knows what will happen, how can a human being commit a sin? It's an old question, but it's still as good as new. What kind of trickster God would it be who sets us up to commit offenses against him, with his own prior knowledge and consent? He doesn't merely know in advance what we are likely to do: there are plenty of exam- ples of such resigned love; oh no, he mak~s us do wrong! That's the situation in which we find ourselves today, with respectJo each other. The self is losing its status as a sovereign making its own laws. W e are learning to know the rules by which it develops, the influence ofits environment, its structural types, its disappearance in moments ofthe most intense activity: in short, the laws regulating its formation and its conduct. Think of it, cousin, the laws of personality! It's like talking of a trade union for lonely rattlesnakes or a robbers' chamber ofcommerce. What with laws being the most impersonal thing in the world, the personality becomes no more than the imaginary meeting point ofall that's impersonal, so that it's hard to fmd for it that honor- able standpoint you don't want to relinquish. . . . "
So he spoke, and Diotima took occasion to object: "But, my dear friend, surely one ought to do everything as personally as one can. . . . " Finally, she said: "You really are being very theological today; I've never known that side of your character. " Again she sat there like a tired dancer. Such a strong and handsome woman! She somehow felt this herself, in all her bones. She had been avoiding her cousin for weeks, perhaps even months by now. But she rather liked this man ofher own age. He looked dashing in evening dress, in the dimly lit room, black and white like a knight templar; there was
I
something of the passion of the Cross in this black and white. She glanced around the modest little bedroom. The Parallel Campaign was far away, she had gone through a great emotional struggle, and here she was in this little room, as plain as duty itself, with only the grace notes of some pussy willows and the unused picture postcards stuck in the frame of the mirror-so it was between these, framed by images ofthe great city, that the little maid saw her face in the glass! Where did she wash, come to think of it? Ah, in that narrow cup- board, there ·must be a basin under the lid, Diotima now remem- bered, and then the thought crossed her mind: "This man wants to and yet he doesn't want to. "
She looked at him calmly, with the air of a friendly listener. "Does Arnheim really want to many me? " she asked herself. He had said so. But then he had not persisted. There was always so much else to talk about. But her cousin too, instead of going on and on in that impersonal fashion, should have asked her: How are you doing, then? Why didn't he ask? She felt that he would understand if she could tell him all about her inner struggles. "Is it a good thing for me? " he had asked her, all too predictably, when she told him how she had changed. The insolence! Diotima smiled.
Both ofthese men were a bit peculiar, come to think ofit. Why did her cousin never have a good word to say for Arnheim? She knew that Arnheim wanted his friendship; but Ulrich too, judging by his own irritable remarks, had Amheim much on his mind. "And how totally he misunderstands him! " she thought again. There was noth- ing to be done about it. Besides, at this point it was not only her soul that mutinied against her body, married as it was to Section Chief Tuzzi, but at times her body mutinied against her soul, made to lan- guish, by Arnheim's hesitant and high-strung love, at the rim of a desert where what she saw ahead was perhaps a mirage, only the quivering reflection of her yearning. She would have liked to confide her misery and her helplessness to her cousin, She liked the decisive, one-track mind he usually showed on such occasions. Amheim's bal- anced many-sidedness certainly rated higher, but at a moment of de- cision Ulrich would not waver so much, despite his theorizing, which tended toward an absolute suspension in uncertainty. She sensed this, without knowing why; it was probably part of what she had felt for him from their first encounter. If at this moment Amheim felt
Pseudoreality Prevails · 51 7
518 • THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES . I
like a huge effort, a royal burden laid upon her soul, too much to bear in every sense, then everything Ulrich was saying tended toward a single effect, that _of losing responsibility as one contemplated hun- dreds of interactions, so that she felt suspiciously free. She suddenly needed to make herself heavier than she was; she couldn't say how, but was immediately reminded of an incident when, as a young girl, she had carried a little boy away from some danger, and how he had kept hitting her in the belly with his knees to make her let him go. The force of this memory-which had occurred to her as . unexpect- edly as if it had suddenly come down the chimney into this lon~ly little room~uite threw her off balance. "Madly in love? " she thought. Why did he keep asking her that? As if she were incapable of really letting herself go. Her mind had wandered from what he was saying, so, without any idea whether it would be apropos or not, she simply interrupted him and told him once and for all, without regard to anything he might have been saying, with a laugh (unless her sense of laughing as she spoke was not quite reliable in the sud- den, heedless excitement of it): "But I am madly in love! "
Ulrich openly smiled at this. "You're quite incapable of it," he said.
She had stood up, her hands on her hair, staring at him in amazement.
"In order to lose control," he specified calmly, "one has to be quite precise and objective. Two selves, aware ofhow dubious a thing it is these days to be a self, cling to each other-or so I imagine, ifit's love at any price and not merely the usual kind of thing and they become so enmeshed with each other that the one feels like the cause for the other one's existence; as they feel themselves changing into great- ness and begin to float like a veil. It is incredibly hard,-in such a state, to make no false moves, even though one has been making all the right moves for some time. It is simply very hard to feel the right thing in this world! Quite contrary to the general preconception, it almost calls for a certain pedantry. Incidentally, that's just what I wanted to say to you. You flatter me, you know, when you say I could be expected to behave like an angel. A human being would have to be wholly objective-which is almost the same as being impersonal, after all-to be wholly a personification oflove. This means being all feeling and sensibility and thought. Now, all the elements that make up a human being are tender, since they yearn toward each other;
only the human being itself is not. So being madly in love is some- thing you might not even want for yourself. . . . " .
He had done his best to speak as casually as possible; he even lit another cigarette to keep his face from looking too solemn as he spoke, and Diotima also accepted another from him to hide her em- barrassment. She made a comically defiant face and blew the smoke high into the air, to show her independence, because she hadn't quite understood what he was talking about. But their situation as a whole was having a strong effect on her: that her cousin was suddenly saying all these things to her, in this room where they were alone together, without making the slightest move to take her hand or touch her hair, a move so natural in the circumstances, even though they were feeling the magnetic attraction their two bodies exerted on each other in this confmed space. What·if they . . . , she wondered. But what could one do in this maid's room? She looked around. Act like a whore? But how does one do that? Suppose she started blub- bering? Blubbering: that was a schoolgirl expression that had sud- denly come back to her. Suppose she suddenly did what he had talked about before, took off her clothes, put her arm around his shoulder, and sang . . . sang what? Played the harp? She looked at him, smiling. It was like being with a wayward brother, in whose company one could do anything that came into one's head. Ulrich was smiling too. But his smile was like a blind window, because now that he had indulged himself in this sort of talk with Diotima he merely felt. ashamed of himself. Still, she had an intimation of the possibility of loving this man; it would be something like her idea of modem music, that is, quite unsatisfying and yet full of something excitingly different. '
And even though she took it for granted that she was more aware ofall this than he was, the thought ofit as she stood there facing him sent a hidden glow up her legs, which made her say rather abruptly to her cousin, with the face of a woman who feels the conversation has been running on too long: "My dear, we're really being quite im- possible. Do stay here. a bit longer while I go ahead and show myself to our guests again. "
Pseudoreality Prevails · 519
520
10. 2
LOVE AND W AR AMONG THE . FISCHELS
Gerda waited in vain for Ulrich's visit. He had, in fact, forgotten his promise to see her, or remembered it only when he had other things to do.
"Forget about him," Clementine said, whenever Director Fischel grumbled about it. 'We used to be good enough for him, but he's probably setting his social sights higher these days. I f you go after him you'll only make matterS worse; you're much too clumsy to carry it off. "
Gerda missed this older friend. She wished he would come and knew that if he did come, she would wish him away. For all her twenty-three years, nothiD. g had yet happened in her life other than the cautious wooing of a certain Herr Glanz, who had her father on his side, and her Christian-Germanic friends, whom she sometimes regarded as schoolboys rather than real men. "Why doesn't he ever come to see me? " she wondered, whenever she thought of Ulrich. Among her friends, the Parallel Campaign was see~ as beyond any doubt the opening salvo in the spiritual destruction of the German people, and she felt embarrassed by Ulrich's involvement in it; she longed to hear his side ofit, however, hoping that he would be able to exonerate himself.
Her mother said to her father: "You missed your chance to be in this affair. It would have been a good thing for Gerda, and she'd have had something else to think about; a lot ofpeople go to the Tuzzis'. " It had come to light that he had neglected to respond to His Grace's invitation. Now he had to suffer for it.
The young men whom Gerda called her spiritual comrades in arms had settled down in his house like Penelope's suitors, debating what a young man of German blood should do about the Parallel Campaign.
"A fmancier must be able, at times, to act in the spirit of a Mae- cenas," Frau Clementine exhorted her husband when he fumed that
he had not hired Hans Sepp, Gerda's "spiritual guide," as a tutor, for good money, only to have thts situation come of it.
Hans Sepp, the graduate student, who had not the slightest pros- pect of being able to keep a wife, had come into the household as a tutor but, owing to the conflicts that were tearing the family apart, had become its tyrant. Now he was discussing with his friends, who had become Gerda's friends, at the Fischels', how to save the Ger- man aristocracy from being ensnared by Diotima-of whom it was said that she made no distinction between persons of her own race and those of an alien race-and caught up in the nets of the Jewish spirit. While in the presence of Leo Fischel this sort of talk was usu- ally tempered with a· certain philosophic objectivity, he still heard enough of certain terms and principles for it to get on his neiVes. They worried that such a campaign, which was bound to lead to total catastrophe, should have surfaced in an era not destined to bring forth great symbols, and the recurrent expressio~s "deeply meaning- ful," "upward humanization," and "free personhood" were enough by themselves to make the pince-nez quiver on Fischel's nose every time he heard them. He had to stand by while there proliferated in his own house such concepts as "the art of living thought," "the graph of spiritual growth," and "action on the wing. " He discovered that a biweekly "hour of purification" was held regularly under his roof. He demanded an explanation. It turned out that what they meant by this was reading the poems of Stefan George together. Leo Fischel searched his old encyclopedia in vain for the poet's name. But what irritated him most of all, old-style liberal that he was, was that these green pups referred to all the high government officials, bank presidents, and leading university figures in the Parallel Cam- paign as "puffed-up little men"; then there were the world-weary airs they gave themselves, complaining that the times had become devoid ofgreat ideas, ifthere was anyone left who was ready for great ideas; that even "humanity" had become a mere buzzword, as far as they were concerned, and that only "the nation" or, as they called it, "folk and folkways" still really had any meaning.
"The word 'humanity' is meaningless to me, Papa," Gerda said, when he tried to reason with her. "The life seems to have gone out of it. But 'my nation'-now, that's a physical reality. "
"Your nation! " Leo Fischel began, meaning to say something
Pseudoreality Prevails · 52 1
522 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
about the biblical prophets and his own father, who had been a law- yer in Trieste.
"I know," Gerda interrupted, "but my nation in a spiritual sense is what I am talking about. "
'Tm going to lock you up in your room till you come to your senses! " Papa Leo said. "And I won't have those friends of yours in my house.
