No More Learning

Amheim believed that no one could muster the strength for great financial operations who was incapable of letting go entirely, of abandoning himself altogether,
beyond all desire, far from the madding crowd, with only a loincloth to cover his nakedness, as it were. Still, Amheim was 6. lled with some savage wordless state of satisfaction, because all this was the opposite of what he felt first and last for Diotima. Every time he laid eyes on this Classical beauty with those modem rounded curves, he was thrown into confusion, felt his strength melting away, unequal to his· need to absorb into his own inner being this poised, self-sufficient cre. ature so serenely moving in her own orbit. There was nothing loft- ily humane about this feeling, nothing even merely humane. It was a
taste of the whole cosmic void of eternity. He stared at the beauty of his beloved with a gaze that seem~d to have been seeking her for a thousand ye~s and now, having found her, was suddenly unem- ployed, helpless in a kind ofstupor, an almost idiotic amazement. So excessive a demand on emotion left it nearly incapable of respond- ing; it c~rrespondedto nothing so much as a longing for both ofthem to be shot together from a cannon into intergalactic space!
The tactful Diotima found the right words again even for this con- dition. In one such moment she recalled that even in his day the great Dostoyevsky had noted a connection between love, idiocy, and inner holiness. But people of our own time, lacking the supportive presence of a devout Russia at their shoulders, probably needed a special dispensation to live by such an idea.
Her words might have come straight from Amheim's heart.
The moment when they were spoken was one of those times en- gaged with both self-awareness and object awareness, like a stopped- up trumpet that refuses to emit a sound no matter how hard one blows iiito it, bringing all the blood to one's head; everything in it was charged with significance, from the tiniest cup on a shelf asserting its presence in the room like one of van Gogh's objects, to the humari bodies, swollen and supercharged by the unutterable, which seemed to press into space. ·
Startled by her own words, Diotima said: "I wish we could just talk in fun. Humor is so wonderful; it floats free beyond desire, com- pletely unconcerned with appearances. "
Amheim smiled at this. He had risen from his chair and started to pace the room. What if I tore her to pieces, he wondered, if I started to roar and qance, if I reached down my throat to tear out my heart for her; could I make a miracle happen? But as he cooled down, he came to a stop.
It was this scene that had just come vividly to mind. His glance again rested icily on the street below. It really would take some sort ofredemptive miracle, he thought, the world would have to be popu- lated by a new breed of men, before one could begin to think of put- ting such thoughts into practice. He dropped the effort of determining how and from what the world was to be redeemed; in any case, everything would have had to be different from the way it was. He went back to his desk, which he had abandoned halfan hour
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since, back to his letters and telegrams, and rang for Soliman to fetch his secretary.
A5 he awaited the secretary's'arrival, already engaged in formulat- ing the first sentences of a statement for dictation on economic con- ditions, the remembered experience crystallized into a beautiful, richly significant moral form. After all, Amheim said to. himself firmly, a man who is aware of his responsibilities, even when giving his soul away, sacrifices only the interest, never the capital.
COUNT LEINSDORF ACHIEVES AN UNEXPECTED POLITICAL SUCGESS
When His Grace spoke of a European family of nations that was to throng joyfully around the venerable Emperor Patriarch, he always tacitly excluded Prussia. Perhaps he was now doing it with more feel- ing than ever, for Count Leinsdorf was undeniably bothered by his awareness of Dr. Amheim; every time he arrived at his friend Di- otima's he would find either the man himself or traces of his recent presence, and he knew no more than Section Chief Tuzzi what to make of it. A5 for Diotima, every time she turned her soulful gaze on him, she noticed as never before the swollen veins on_ His Grace's hands and neck and the faded-tobacco colored skin from which ema- nated the characteristic smell of an aging man. Even though she never failed to treat the great nobleman with all due reverence, something had gone out of her radiance toward him, something like the change from a summer sun to a winter sun. Count Leinsdorf was not given to fantasies or to music, but ever since Dr. Amheim had become so persistent a presence it was strange how often he had a faint ringing in his ears, like the kettledrums and cymbals of an Aus- trian military march, or a visual sensation, whenever he closed his eyes, of a great billowing of black-and-yellow flags, vast numbers of
them, in motion. Similar patriotic hallucinations seemed to be afflict- ing other friends ofthe Tuzzis' as well. At least, though Germany was always spoken ofwith the utmost respect whenever he happened to be within earshot, if he· ever dropped a hint that the great patriotic project might eventually take on a certain pointedness against the brother empire, this respect was irradiated with a heartfelt smile.
His Grace had apparently stumbled upon an important phenome- non within his special field of interest. There are certain family feel- ings of a special intensity, and one of these was the widespread dislike of Germany among the European family of states before 1914. Perhaps Germany was spiritually the least unified country, so that everyone could find something there to suit his own distaste; its early culture had been the first to fall under the wheels of the new era, to be shredded into high-flown slogans for the promotion of the bogus and the commercial; it was also grasping, aggressive, full of bluster, and dangerously irresponsible, like every great mass in fer- ment-but all this was ultimately merely European, and might at most have seemed ·ali-too-European to the Europeans. The world apparently needs its negative entities, images of the unwanted, which attract to themselves all the disgust and disharmony, all the slag of a smoldering fire, such as life tends to leave behind. Out of all that "could be" there suddenly crystallizes, to the stunned. amaze- ment of everyone concerned, the "it is," and whatever drops away during this disorderly process, whatever is unsuitable, superfluous, unsatisfying, seems to coagulate into the vibrant universal hatred agi- tating all living creatures that is apparently so . characteristic of our present civilization, which compensates for all our lack of satisfaction with ourselves by allowing us to feel that easy dissatisfaction so read- ily inspired by everyone else. Trying to isolate specific scapegoats for this displeasure is merely part of the oldest psychotechnical bag of tricks known to man. Just as the medicine man drew the carefully prepared fetish from his patient's body, the good Christian projects his own faults onto the good Jew, whom he accuses of seducing him into committing advertisements, high interest rates, newspapers, and all that sort of thing. In the course of time people ha:ve blamed their troubles on bad weather, witches, socialists, intellectuals, generals, and in the years before the Great War, Austrians saw a most wel- come scapegoat of this sort in Prussian Germany. Unfortunately, the
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world has lost not only God but the Devil as well. As it projects its unwanted evil onto the scapegoat, so it projects its desired good onto ad hoc ideal figures, which it rev~res for doing what it finds inconve- ment to do for itself. We let others perform the hard tricks as we. watch from our seats: that is sport. W e let others talk themselves into the most one-sided exaggerations: that's idealism. We shake off evil and make those who are spattered by it our scapegoats. It is one way ofcreating an order in the world, but this technique ofhagiolatry and fattening the scapegoats by projection is not without danger, because it fills the world with all the tensions of unresolved inner conflicts. People alternately kill each other or swear eternal brotherhood with- out quite knowing just how real any of it is, because they have pro- jected part ofthemselves onto the outerworld, and everything seems to be happening partly out there in reality and partly behind the scenes, so that we have an illusory fencing match between love and hate. The ancient belief in demons, which made heavenly-hellish spirits responsible for all the good and bad that came one's way, worked much better, more accurately, more tidily, and we can only hope that, as we advance in psychotechnology, we shall make our way back to it.
Kakania was a country exceptionally well qualified for this game with living symbols ofwhat was Wanted or Unwanted; life in Kakania had a certain unreality anyway, so that the most cultivated persons, who regarded themselves as the heirs and standard-bearers of the celebrated Kakanian culture from Beethoven to LehW",. felt it was quite natural to think of the Germans of the Reich as allies and brothers even while cordially detesting them. Seeing them get their occasional comeuppance did not upset anyone here, while their suc- cesses always left one a bit concerned about affairs at home. Affairs at home mostly meant th'at Kakania, a country that had originally been as good as any ·and sometimes better than most, had in the course of the centuries somewhat lost interest in itself. Several times in the course of the Parallel Campaign it could be perceived that world history is made up much as all other stories are-i. e. , the au- thors seldom come up with anything really new and are rathengiven to copying each other's plots and ideas. But there is also something
else involved which has not yet been mentioned, and that is the de- light in storytelling itself; it takes the shape ofthat conviction so com-
mon to authors that they are working on a good story, that passion of authorship that lengthens an author's ears and makes them glow, so that all criticism simply melts away. Count Leinsdorfhad this convic- tion and this passion, and so did some of his friends, but it had been lost in the farther reaches of Kakania, where the search for a substi- tute had been under way for the longest time now. There the history of Kakania had been replaced by that of the nation; the authors were at work on it even now, formulating it in that European taste that finds historical novels and costume dramas edifying. This resulted in a situation not yet perhaps sufficiently appreciated, which was that persons who had to deal with some commonplace problem such as building a school or appointing astationmaster found themselves dis- cussing this in connection . with the year 16oo or 400, arguing about which candidate was preferable in the light ofwhat settlements arose in the Lower Alps during the great Gothic or Slavic migrations, and about battles fought during the Counter-Reformation, and injecting into all this talk the notions of high-mindedness and rascality, home- Jand, truth, and maiiliness, and so on, which more or less corre- sponded to the sort of stuff the, majority were currently reading. Count Leinsdorf, who attached no importance to literature, never ceased to wonder at this circumstance, especially considering how well off, basically, he found all the peasants, artisans, and townsfolk he encountered on his trips through the countryside to visit his Bo- hemian estates settled by generations of Germans and Czechs. He blamed it on some special virus, the detestable work of agitators, that there would be these sudden outbursts of violent dissatisfaction with each other and with the wisdom of the goyernment, which were all the more puzzling in that these people got on so peacefully and con- tentedly with everyone in the long intervals between such fits, when nothing happened to remind them of. their ideals.
The government's policy, that well-known Kakanian policy for dealing With national minorities, was one of alternating, every six months or so, between taking a punitive line against some mutinous minority and then again wisely giving ground to it; just as the fluid in aU-tube rises on one side when it sinks on the other, so government policy fluctuated vis-a-vis the German minority. This minority played a special part in Kakania, since it tended on the whole to want just one thing: that the State should be powerful. It had clung longer than
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any other minority to the beliefthat the history ofKakania must have some meaning, and it was only after it gradually caught on to the fact that in Kakania a man could begin as a traitor and end as a cabinet minister, and could then continue his ministerial career by going in for high treason, that it, too, began to regard itself as an oppressed nationality. It may be that this sort of thing was going on elsewhere too, but in Kakania it needed no revolutions or other upheavals to produce this effect, because here it came about of its own accord, naturally, like the quiet swinging of a pendulum from side to side, simply by virtue of the general vagueness of the ideas involved, until in the end there was nothing left in Kakania except oppressed na- tionalities, the• oppressors being represented by a supreme circle of personages who saw themselves as being constantly baited and plagued by the oppressed. In this high circle people were deeply troubled because nothing was happening, troubled by an absence of history, so to speak, and a strong feeling that something must be done at long last. And if this meant turning against Germany, as the Parallel Campaign seemed inclined to do, it was not an altogether unwelcome eventuality; ftrst of all,,because there was that feeling of always being put in the shade by the brothers in the Reich, and sec- ond, because persons in government circles were themselves Ger- mans, so there was actually no better way for them to demonstrate Kakania's impartiality than by joining in such a selfless gesture.
It was therefore entirely understandable that in these circum- stances nothing could be farther from His Grace's mind than any suspicion that his undertaking was Pan-Germanic. But that it was so regarded could be deduced from the gradual disappearance of the Slavic groups from among the "officially rec;ognized minorities" whose claims. should command the attention of the Parallel Cam- paign committees, and the foreign envoys came to hear such terrible reports about Amheim, Tuzzi, and a German plot against the Slavic element that some of all this even reached His Grace's ears in the muted form of rumor, confirming his fears that even on those days when nothing special was happening one had to be hard at work to make sure that so many things that were not supposed to happen did not happen. But being a practical politician, he was now slow to make his countermove, though in so doing he unfortunately acted on such a magnanimous calculation that it looked at first like an error in
statesmanship. As the Propaganda Committee, in charge of popular- izing the Parallel Campaign, did not yet have a chairman, Count Leinsdorf decided· to choose Baron Wisnieczky for the post, in spe- cial consideration of the fact that Wisnieczky had some years before been a member of a cabinet brought down by the German nationalist parties on suspicion that it was carrying out an insidious anti-German policy. His Grace was in this instance following a scheme ofhis own. From the very start of the Parallel Campaign it had been one of his ideas to win over precisely those of the German Kakanians who felt less allegiance to their own country than to the German nation. How- ever much the other "ethnic" elements might refer t~Kakania as a prison, and however publicly they avowed their love for France, Italy, or Russia, no serious politician could ever put such quasi-exotic predilections on a level with the predilection of certain German Kakanians for the German Reich, which held Kakania in a geo- graphic stranglehold and had been one with it historically until a mere generation ago. · It was to these German apostates, whose in- trigues hurt Count Leinsdorf most because he was German himself, that he had been referring when he pronounced his well-known dic- tum: "They'll come along of their own accord! " This dictum had meanwhile attained the rank of a political prophecy in which much confidence was placed by members of the patriotic campaign, signi- fying more or less that once the other ethnic groups had been won over to patriotism, the German elements would feel constrained to join in, for as everyone knows, it is much harder to hold aloof from something everyone else is doing than to refuse to be first in line. Therefore the way to get the Germans in was to move against them by favoring the other nationalities. Count Leinsdorf had kllown this for· quite a while, and now that the time had come to act, he carried it through and placed Baron Wisnieczky, who was a Pole by birth but a Kakanian by conviction, at the head of the Propaganda Committee.
It would be hard to say whether His Grace was aware that this choice was an affront to the German cause, as his critics later said; the chances are that he thought he was serving the true German in- terest in this fashion. But the immediate consequence of his move was that the Parallel Campaign was now being intensely attacked in German circles as well, so that it ended up being regarded on the one side as an anti-German plot and being openly resisted as such, while
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on the other side it had long been regarded as pro-German and had therefore been avoided, with diplomatic excuses, from the outset. The unexpected effect did not escape His Grace's attention, of course, and was a matter of intense concern everywhere. This fur- ther tribulation only stiffened Count Leinsdorf's resolve, however, and when Diotima and other leading figures anxious. ly questioned him about it, time after time, he turned an impenetrable but deter- mined face toward such feeble-spirited creatures and said: "This move has not met with immediate success, I know, but you cannot let a great aim depend on whether or not you achieve instant success with any measure along the way. ; meanwhile we have achieved a more widespread interest in the Parallel Campaign, and the rest will fall into place if we simply hold firm. "
108
THE UNREDEEMED NA TIONALITIES AND , GENERAL STUMM'S REFLECTIONS ABOUT THE
TERMINOLOGY OF REDEMPTION
No matter how many words are spoken at every moment in a great city to express the personal concerns of its inhabitants, there is one word that is never among them: "redeem. " All other words, from the most impassioned to the most discriminating, even those dealing with extre~e sitUations, may be assumed to be heard more than once, whether shouted or whispered, expressions such as, for in- stance: "You're the worst crook that ever lived" or "No other woman could be as beautiful as you," so that these most personal sentiments could in fact be charted in sweeping statistical. curves representing their ma$S distribution throughout the city. But no living man ever says to another: "You can redeem me" or "Be my redeemer. " He can be tied to a tree and left to starve, or marooned on a desert island with the woman he had been courting in vain for months, or rescued
from being jailed for forging checks, and every word in the dictionaty may come pouring from his lips, but as long as he is experiencing real emotion he will never utter the words "redeem," "redeemer," or "re- demption," even though these are perfectly acceptable terms ~ such.
And yet the peoples united under the Crown of Kakania called themselves Unredeemed Nations.
General Stumm von Bordwehr was thinking about it. In his posi- tion at the War Office, he had ample knowledge of Kakania's prob- lems with nationalism, because the militaty were the ·first to feel the effects, at the budget hearings, of the seesawing policies resulting from the hundreds of conflicting considerations by which the State was hamstrung. Only a little while ago an urgent money bill had had to be withdrawn, to the War Minister's white fury, because an Un- redeemed Nationality had demanded in return for its support such concessions as the government could not possibly make without dan- gerously arousing the·yearning for redemption ofother nationalities. So Kakania was left naked to its enemies, as the budgetruy outlay had been proposed to replace the army's hopelessly obsolete guns- whose range could be compared with the guns of other powers as a knife compares with a spear-with new guns that would be as a spear to a knife compared with those of the other powers. This necessruy purchase had now once again been prevented, for who knew how long. To say that this setback made General Stumm consider suicide would be going too far, but a deep depression is sometimes heralded by any number of random, trivial symptoms, and Stumm's brooding over the redeemed and the unredeemed was certainly connected with Kakania's defenseless, disarmed state-to which it was con- demned by its intolerable domestic squabbles-the more so because in his semi-civilian status at Diotima's he had been hearing about re- demption until he was sick and tired of it.
His first reaction was that the term was one of those verbal infla- tions not yet classified by linguistic science. So his common sense as a soldier told him, but apart from the fact that his sound instinct had already been disoriented by Diotima-it was after all from her lips that Stumm had heard the word "redemption" for the first time and had been charmed by it, and even today, in spite of the failed artillery bill, the word when uttered by Diotima was still enveloped in a kind
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of magic, so that the General's first reaction could really more prop- erly be described as the second of his life! And there was another reason why the theory ofverbal inflation didn't seem to hold water: it was only necessary to salt the individual units ofthe word group "re-
. demption" with a small, innocent lack of gravity, and they instantly came trippingly from the tongue. "You've just saved my soul! " or some such; who has not said something of the sort at one time or another, provided of course that it refers to nothing more than the relief after a ten-minute wait or some equally slight inconvenience that has been brought to an end. Now the General realized that it was not so much the words that offended a healthy common sense as their absurd claim to being taken literally. When Stumm asked him- selfwhere he had ever come across such talk of redemption or salva- tion, other than at Diotima's or in politics, he realized that it had been in churches or cafes, in art journals, and in the books of Dr. Arnheim, which he had read with admiration. He now realized that such words refer not to a simple, natural human occurrence but to something abstract, some general complication or other; to redeem and to yearn for redemption is definitely a spiritual transaction.
The General nodded with amazement at the fascinating insights this special duty of his seemed to be bringing him. He switched on the red light over his office door as a signal that he was in conference,
·. and while his officers who came bearing files in their arms turned back from his door with a sigh, he went on with his speculations: The intellectual types he kept running into nowadays wherever he went were chronically dissatisfied, finding fault because there was either too little or too much being done about this or that; to hear them tell it, nothing ever seemed to go as it should. He was becoming quite fed up with them. They were in a class with those miserable speci- mens susceptible to cold who always find themselves sitting in a draft. When they were not complaining about the preponderance of scientific attitudes, they were excoriating illiteracy, general boorish- ness or general overrefinement, fanaticism or indifference: which-
. ever way they turned, they found something wrong. Their minds never came to rest, but were fixated on the ceaseless wanderings of that residual element in things. that never finds its proper place any- where. So they ended up convinced that their era was. fated to be a spiritual wasteland that could be redeemed only by some special
event or some very special personage. It was among the so-called in- tellectuals that the word "redemption" and its kin came into vogue at this time. They did not see how things could go on unless a messiah came quickly. Depending on circumstances, he would be a medical messiah who would redeem the art of healing from the specialized research teams that pursued their experiments while human beings sickened and died around them, or a messianic poet capable ofwrit-. ing a drama that would sweep millions of people into the theaters despite its ineffable sublimity; besides the belief that every kind of human endeavor needed a messiah to restore it to its pristine pur- pose, there was of course also the simple and unadulterated longing for a leader sent to put everything to rights with his strong right arm. The age before the Great War was a messianic age, and the fact that entire nations wanted to be redeemed in a lump was really nothing special or unusual for its time.
Not that the General regarded this as something to be taken any more literally than anything else people were saying. "If the Re- deemer were to come again today," he said to himself, "they would bring down his Government just like any other. " Judging by his own personal experience, he supposed that this came of too many people writing too many books and· newspaper articles. "How wise of the army to forbid officers to write books without special permission," he thought, and was startled to feel a hot wave of loyalty for the first time in ages. He was obviously starting to think too muchlit all came of keeping company with the civilian mind, which had evidently lost the advantage of having a firm perspective on the world. The Gen- eral saw this clearly now, and it enabled him to understand all that palaver about redemption from yet another angle. The General's mind strayed back to distant memories of his classes in religion and history for support along this new line of thought, and if his welter of
ideas could have been lifted bodily out of his head and ironed out, it would have looked more or less as follows: T9 begin briefly with the ecclesiastical aspect of things, as long as one believed in religion, one could defenestrate a good Christian or a pious Jew from any story in the castle ofhope or prosperity, and he would always land on his spir- itual feet, as it were, because all religions included in their view of life an irrational, incalculable element they called God's inscrutable will. Whenever a man could not make sense of things, he merely had
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to remember this rogue element in the equation, and his spirit could rub its hands with satisfaction, as it were. This falling on one's feet and rubbing one's hands is called having a working philosophy oflife, and this is what modem man has lost. He must either give up think- ing about his life altogether, which is what many people are quite content to do, or else he finds himself strangely tom between having to think and ye_t never quite seeming to arrive at a satisfactory resolu- tion of his problems. This conflict has in the course of history taken on the form of a total skepticism as often as it has that of a renewed subjection to faith, and its most prevalent form today is probably the conviction that-without a spiritual dimension there can be no human life worthy of the name, but with too much of it there can be none either. It is on this conviction that our civilization as a whole is based. It takes great care to provide for education and research, but never too well, only enough money to keep education and research prop- erly subordinated to the great sums expended on entertainment, cars, and guns. It clears the way for talent but sees to it that it should be a talent for business. Every idea is given due recognition, after some resistance, but this always works out so as to benefit equally the opposite idea. It looks like some tremendous weakness and careless- ness, but it is probably also a quite deliberate effort to put the spiri- tual dimension in its place, for if any one of the ideas that motivate our lives were ever carried out seriously, so seriously that nothing would be left of its opposite, then our civilization would hardly be our civilization.
The General had a pudgy little baby fist; he clenched "it and whacked the top ofhis desk with it as ifit were a padded glove; a man had to have a strong fist. As an officer, he knew what to think! The irrational element was known as honor, obedience, the Supreme Commander in Chief, Part III ofthe Service Regulations, and to sum it all up, the conviction that war is nothing but the continuation of peace by stronger measures, a forceful kind of order, without which the world cannot survive. The gesture with which the General had thumped his desk would have been slightly ludicrous if a· fist were not as much a spiritual manifestation as an athletic one, a kind of indispensable extension of the mind. Stumm von Bordwehr was a bit fed up with the whole civilian nexus. · He had discovered that library attendants were the·only people left who had a sound general over-
view of the civilian mind. He had hit upon the paradox of excessive order, the perfection ofwhich inevitably brought inaction in its train. He had a funny feeling, something like an insight into why it was the army where the greatest order was to be found at the same time as the greatest readiness to lay down one's life. For some indefinable reason, order seems to bring on bloodshed! This worried him, and he decided that he must not go on working at such pressure. Anyway, he wondered mutinously, what is this spiritual dimension? It doesn't walk around in a bedsheet at midnight, so what can it be but a certain order we impose on our impressions and experiences? But in that case, he concluded firmly, on a happy inspiration, ifthe spirit is noth- ing more than the order of our experience, then in a properly or- dered world we don't need it at all!
With a sigh of relief, Stumm von Bordwehr switched off the "in conference" light outside his door, stepped up to the mirror, and smoothed his hair down, in order to efface all signs of emotional stress before his subordinates came in.
109
BONADEA, KAKANIA; SYSTEMS OF HAPPINESS AND BALANCE
If there was anyone in Kakania who understood nothing of politics, and was quite happy that way, it was Bonadea; and yet there was a connection between her and the Unredeemed Nationalities. Bona- dea-not to be confused with Diotima; Bonadea the Good Goddess, Goddess of Chastity, whose temple by one of those twists of fate ended up as the scene of orgies; Bonadea, wife of a presiding county judge or some such legal eminence, and the frustrated mistress of a man who was neither worthy of her nor sufficiently attached to her-had a system, which was more than could be said of Kakanian politics.
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Bonadea's system had so far consisted in leading a double life. Her soci~ status was assured in that she belonged to a family of distinc- tion and enjoyed the reputation of a cultivated and notable woman in her own social circle; that she gave way to certain temptations she could ascribe to being constitutionally overexcitable, or having a heart given to folly, since the follies of the heart, like romantic politi- cal crimes, enjoy a certain esteem, even when committed under du- bious circumstances. Here the heart plays about the same role as honor, obedience, and Service :Regulations, Part III, played in the General's life, or as the irrational element in every well-ordered life that ultimately puts to rights whatever baffles the unaided rational mind.
But Bonadea's system had a flaw, in that it split her life into two different conditions, the transition from one to the other of which could not be achieved without paying a heavy price. For however eloquent her heart could be before one of her lapses, it was equally deflated afteiWard, and she was constantly alternating between a maniacally effervescent state of mind and one that drained away in inky blackness, hardly ever coming into equilibrium. All the same, it was a system, that is, it was no mere play of uncontrolled instincts- the way life used to be seen as the automatic squaring of accounts between pleasure and pain, with a certain profit registered on the side of pleasure, but a system that included quite a number of psy- chological moves designed to fake these accounts.
Everyone has some such method of jockeying one's psychological accounts in one's own favor, aiming at aminimum balance of plea- sure that should ordinarily get one through the day. A person's plea- sure in life can also consist of displeasure; such differences in kind don't matter much, since as everyone knows there are as many con- tented melancholies as there are funeral marches that float as lightly in their element as a dance tune does in its own. The opposite is probably equally valid, in that many normally cheerful persons are no whit happier than many habitually sad ones, because happiness is just as much of a strain as unhappiness, more or less like flying on the principle of lighter or heavier than air. But there is another objection to be made. Would the rich not consider themselves justified in their perennial insistence that the poor need not envy them, because the happiness to be got out of money is illusory? Money merely sets a
man the problem of working out another system of life, the pleasure surplus of which can at best be no greater than any other. ' According to this principle, the family without a roof over its head, provided it survives an icy winter night, should theoretically be just as happy with the first rays of the morning sun as the rich man who has to get out of his warm bed. In practice it comes down to this, that everyone bears his burden with the patience ofa donkey, since a donkey whose strength slightly exceeds the demands of his burden is happy enough. And this is, in fact, the soundest available definition of per- sonal happiness, as long as we restrict ourselves to donkeys. In real- ity, however, personal happiness (or equilibrium, contentment, whatever we may choose to call the innermost reflex aim of the per- sonality) is self-contained only as a stone is in a wall, or a drop of water in a river, which are permeated by the forces and tensions of the whole. What a person does and feels is a negligible part of what he must assume many others normally do and feeL with him. A human being never lives only in his own equilibrium but depends on that of the surrounding strata of humanity, so that the individual's little pleasure factory is affected by a most complicated moral credit system, about which more will have to be said later on, being as much a part of the community's psychic balance sheet as of the individual's.
Since Bonadea's efforts to win her lover back were unsuccessful, making her think that Diotima's intellect and energy had robbed her of Ulrich, she was consumed with jealousy; and yet, as is the way with weak personalities, her admiration for her rival provided a certain justification and compensation for her loss, which partially recon- ciled her to it. In this condition she had managed for some time now to be received by Diotima occasionally, on the pretext of having some modest contribution to offer to the Parallel Campaign, without achieving an entrance into the circles that frequented the house; on this point she imagined there must be a certain understanding be- tween Diotima and Ulrich. So she felt herself to be a victim of their cruelty, and since she also loved them, the illusion of an ineffable purity and selflessness flowered inside her. In the mornings, when her husband had left the house-a moment she could hardly wait for-she often sat down at her mirror like a bird ready to groom its feathers. She tied, curled, and twisted her hair until it took on a form
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not unlike Diotima's Grecian knot. She combed out and brushed lit- tle curls into place, and if the total effect was a bit silly, she never noticed, because the face that smiled back at her from the mirror did bear a faint resemblance to the goddess. The poise and beauty of her idol, and the latter's sense of fulfillment, then rippled upward inside her like the tiny, shallow, warm waves of a mysterious if not yet deeply consummated union, much like sitting at the ocean's rim dab- bling one's feet in the surf. What she did was akin to an act of reli- gious worship-from the times when primitive man crept bodily into the masks of the gods down to the rites and ceremonies of civiliza- tion, so carnal a joy of faithful mimicry has never quite lost its powerl-and had all the greater hold on Bonadea because of·her compulsive love of clothes and adornments. When Bonadea studied her appearance in a new dress in her mirror, she could never have imagined a. time to come when leg-of-mutton sleeves, little curls framing . the fQrehead, and long bell-shaped skirts would be replaced by knee-length skirts and hair cut like a boy's. Nor would she have argued against it; her brain was simply incapable of imagining such a possibility. She had always dressed like a lady and contemplated the latest fashions, every six months, with reverence, as though she were face-to-face with eternity. Even though an appeal to her intelligence could have brought her to admit that such things were transitory, it would in no way have lessened her reverence for them. The tyranny of the mundane entered her bloodstream unnoticed, and the times when one turned down the comer of one's visiting cards, or sent one's friends New Year's greetings, or slipped off one's gloves at a ball, were so long gone by the time one did not do any of these things that they might as well have been a hundred years in: the past: that is, wholly unimaginable, impossible, and outdated.
Which is why Bona- dea without her clothes on was such a comical sight, stripped as she
was ofall her ideological protection too, the naked victim ofan inexo- rable compulsion that was sweeping her off her feet with the inhu- man force of an earthquake.
But her periodic Fall from Civilization amid the vicissitudes of a dull reality had ~een missing from her life of late, and ever since Bonadea had been devoting such ritualistic care to her appearance, the illegitimate portion of her life, for the first time since she was twenty, was be"mg lived as if she were a widow. In general, women
who are overly careful of their appearance may be presumed to be leading relatively chaste lives, because the means become the ends, just as great sports figures often make poor lovers, all-too-martial- looking officers make bad soldiers·, and exceptionally intellectual- looking men are often blockheads. But with Bonadea it was not only a matter of where she chose to invest her energies but the amazing intensity with which she had turned to her new life. She penciled her eyebrows with a painter's loving care and enameled her forehead and cheeks for a heightened effect that reached beyond naturalism and mere reality into the style of religious art. Shaking her body into place inside a pliant corset, she suddenly felt a sisterly affection for her large breasts, which she had hitherto regarded as an embarrass- ing, because overly feminine, handicap. Her husband was quite taken aback when he tickled her neck with a finger and was told: "Please don't, you're spoiling my coiffure! " or when he tried to take her hand and she said: "Not now, I'm wearing my new dress! " But the power of sin had slipped from its physical mooring in the body and was drifting like a nova across the sky in the transfigured new world of a Bonadea who, in this unaccustomed softer radiance, felt released from her "excitability" as though the scales of some leprous disease had fallen away from her. For the first time since they were married, her spouse wondered whether there might be some third party threatening his domestic peace. ,
All that had happened was merely a phenomenon from the realm of vital systems. Clothes, when abstracted from the flow of present time and their transmogrifying function on the human body, and seen as forms in themselves, are strange tubes and excrescences wor- thy of being classed with such facial decorations as the ring through the nose or the lip-stretching disk. But how enchanting they become when seen together with the qualities they bestow on their wearer! What happens then is no less than the infusion, into some tangled lines on a piece of paper, of the meaning of a great word. Imagine a man's invisible kindness and moral excellence suddenly looming as a halo the size of the full moon and golden as an egg yolk right over his head, the way it does in old religious paintings, as he happens to be strolling down the avenue or heaping little tea sandwiches on his plate--what an overwhelming, shattering sensation it would be! And just such a power to make the invisible, and even the nonexistent,
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visible is what a well-made outfit demonstrates every day of the week.
Such things are like debtors who repay our investment in them with fantastic interest, and in that sense all things are indebted to us. For it is not only clothes that have such power, but convictions, prej- udices, theories, hopes, faith in something or other, ideas, even thoughtlessness insofar as it is its quality of self-reflexiveness that gives it a sense of its own rightness. All these, by endowing us with the properties we lend them, serve the aim ofpresenting the world in
·a light that emanates from ourselves, and this is basically the task for which everyone has a method ofhis own. With great and varied skills we create a delusion that enables us to coexist serenely with the most monstrous things, simply because we recognize . these frozen grim- aces of the universe as a table or a chair, a shout or an outstretched arm, a speed or a roast chicken. We are capable of living between one open chasm of sky above our heads and another, slightly camou- flaged chasm of sky beneath our feet; feeling as untroubled on earth as ifwe were in a room with the door closed. We know that our life is ebb'ing away . both outward into the inhuman distances of cosmic space and downward into the inhuman microspace of the atom, while we go on dealing with a middle stratum, the things that make up our world, without troupling ourselves at all over the fact that this proves only a preference for impressions received in the middle dis- tance, as it were. Such an attitude is considerably beneath our intel- lectual level, but that alone proves what a large part our feelings play in our intelligence. Our most important psychological machinery is, in fact, kept in motion to maintain us in a certain equilibrium, and all the emotions, all the passions in the world are nothing compared with the immense but wholly unconscious effort human beings make just to preserve their peace of mind. This works so well that there seems no point in drawing attention to it. But looked at closely, it does seem to be an extremely artificial state of mind that enables a man to walk upright among the circling constellations and permits him, surrounded as he is by an almost infinite unknown, to slip his hand with aplomb between the second and third buttons of his jacket. Not only does every human being, the idiot as much as the sage, apply his special skills to make this happen; all these personal stratagems are also cleverly built into society's moral and mtellectual
systems for maintaining its inner equilibrium, so that they serve the same purpose on a larger scale. This interlocking of systems resem- bles that of nature itself, where all the magnetic fields of the cosmos affect those of the earth without anyone noticing it, because the re- sult is simply whatever happens on earth. The consequent psycho- logical relief is so great that the wisest of men and the most ignorant of little girls, if left undisturbed, feel very clever and pleased with themselves.
But such states of satisfaction that might also be called compulsive states of feeling and volition, in a sense, are sometimes followed by the contrary; to resort again to the terminology of the madhouse, there is a sudden great flight of ideas worldwide, which leaves in its wake a repolarization of all human life around new centers and axes. The final cause of all great revolutions, which lies deeper than their effective cause, is not the accretion of intolerable conditions, but the loss of cohesion that bolstered the society's artificial peace of mind. There is an applicable saying by a famous early scholastic, "Credo ut intelligam,. . which might be freely translated into a prayer for our times as "0 Lord, please grant my spirit a production credit! " since every human creed is probably only a special instance of the credit system. In love as in business, in science as in the long jump, one has to believe before one can win and score, so how can it be otherwise for life as a whole? However well founded an order may be, it always rests in part on a voluntary faith in it, a faith that, in fact, always marks the spot where the new growth begins, as in a plant; once this unaccountable and uninsurable faith is used up, the collapse soon follows; epochs and empires crumble no differently from business concerns when they lose their credit.
And so this reflection on the principle ofpsychic equilibrium leads us from the beautiful example of Bonadea to the sad case of Kakania. For Kakania was the first country in our present historical phase from which God withdrew His credit: the love of life, faith in itself, and the ability of all civilized nations to disseminate the useful illu- sion that they have a mission to fulfill. It was an intelligent country, it housed cultivated people who, like cultivated people all over the globe, ran around in an unsettled state of mind amid a tremendous whirl of noise, speed, innovation, conflict, and whatever goes to make up . the optical-acousticallandscape of our lives; like everybody
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else, they read and heard every day dozens of news items that made their hair stand on end, and were willing to work themselves up over them, even to intervene, but they never got around to it because a few minutes afterward the stimulus had already been displaced in their minds by more. recent ones; like. everyone else, they felt sur- rounded by murder, killings, passion, self-sacrifice, and greatness, all somehow going on within the Gordian knot that was forming around them, but they could never break through to these adventures be- cause they were trapped in an office or somewhere, at work, and by evening, when they were free, their unresolved tensions exploded into forms of relaxation that failed to relax them. There was the spe- cial problem for persons of cultivated sensibilities, at least for those who did not devote themselves so single-mindedly to love as Bona- dea: they no longer had the gift of faith or credit, nor had they learned to fake it. They no longer knew what their smiles, their sighs, their ideas, were for. What exactly was the point of their thoughts, their smiles? Their opinions were haphazard, their inclinations an old story, the scheme of things seemed to be hanging in midair, one ran into it as into a net, and there was nothing to do or leave undone with all one's heart, because there was no unifying principle. And so the cultivated person was someone who felt steadily mounting up a
J debt that he would never be able to pay off, felt bankruptcy inexora- ' bly approaching; and either inveighed against the times in which he was condemned to live, even though he enjoyed living in them like anyone else, or else hurled himself with the courage of those who
have nothing to lose at every idea that promised a change. ·
It was the same as anywhere else in the world, ofcourse, but when God cut off Kakania's credit, He did it in so special a style that whole nations had their eyes opened to the high cost of civilization. like bacteria they had been sitting pretty in their culture medium, with- out bothering their heads about the proper curvature of the sky above or anything, when suddenly things tightened up. Although men are not normally aware of it, they must believe that they are something more than they are in order to be capable of being what they are; they need to feel this something more above and around them, and there are times when they suddenly miss . it. What is missed is something imaginary. Nothing at all had happened in Ka- kania, and formerly it would have been thought of as the old, unob-
trusive Kakanian way of life, but this nothing had become as disturb- ing as getting no sleep or seeing no sense in anything. And so it was easy enough for the intellectuals, once they had persuaded them- selves that an ethnically homogeneous culture was the answer, to make the Kakanian ethnic minorities believe it, as a kind of substi- tute for religion or for the ideal. of the Good Emperor in Vienna, or simply as a way of understanding the incomprehensible fact that there are seven days in the week. There are so many inexplicable things in life, but one loses sight of them when singing the national anthem. It would naturally be at such a moment that a good Kakanian could have joyfully answered the question of what he was by saying: "Nothing," meaning that Something that could make of a Kakanian everything he had never yet been! But the Kakanians were not so stiff-necked a people and contented themselves with a com- promise, in that every nationality tried only to do with every other nationality whatever suited its own purposes. It is naturally hard in these circumstances to empathize with grievances not one's own. After two thousand years of altruistic teachings, we have become so unselfish that even if it means you or I have to suffer, we are bound to take the part of the other fellow. But it would be wrong to think of the notorious Kakanian nationalist rivalries as particularly savage. It was more a historical process than a real one. The people actually quite liked each other; even though they did crack each other's heads and spit in each other's faces, it was done as a matter of higher cul- tural considerations, as when a man who normally wouldn't hurt a fly, for instance, will sit in court under the image of Christ Crucified and condemn another man to death. It is only fair to say that when- ever their higher selves relaxed a bit, the Kakanians breathed a sigh of relief and, born consumers of food and drink as they were, looked with amazement upon their role as the tools of history.
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110
MOOSBRUGGER DISSOLVED AND PRESERVED
Moosbrugger was still in prison, waiting for further psychiatric ex- aminations. It felt like a solid stack of days. Each day made itself dis- tinctly felt when it came, of course, but toward evening it already began to merge with the stack. Moosbrugger certainly registered the presence·ofconvicts, guards, corridors, courtyards, a glimpse ofblue sky, a passing cloud or two, food, water, and now and then an official checking up on him, but these impressions were too feeble to be last- ing. He had no watch, no suri, no work, to tell him the time. He was always hungry. He was always tired, from pacing around his seven square yards>' which is far more tiring than wandering freely for miles. , He was bored·with everything he did, as if he had to keep stir- ring a pot of glue. But when he considered it as a whole, it seemed to him that day and night, his cleamng his plate and again cleaning his plate, inspections and checkups, all droned along one after the other without a break, and he found that entertaining. His life clock had gone out of order; it could be turned ahead or back. He liked that; it was his sort of thing. Things long past and fresh happenings were no longer kept apart artif;lcially, and when it was all the same, then what they called "at different times" no longer stuck to it like the red thread they tie to a twin baby's neck so they can tell it from the other one. All the irrelevancies vanished from his life. When he pondered this life of his, he talked with himself inwardly, slowly, laying equal stress on every syllable; in this way life sang a different tune from the one heard every day. He often let his mind linger on a word for a long time, and when he finally moved on, without quite knowing how, after a while the word would turn up again somewhere else. It tickled him to think how much was happening for him that nobody knew about. The sense of being inwardly at peace with himself that some- times came to him is hard to describe. Anyone can conceive of a man's life flowing along like a brook, but what Moosbrugger felt was his life flowing like a brook through a vast, still lake. As it flowed on-
ward it continued to mingle with what it was leaving behind and be- came almost indistinguishable from the movements on either side of it. Once, in a half-waking dream, he had a sense of having worn this life's. Moosbrugger like an ill-fitting coat on his back; now, when he opened it a bit, the most curious sort of lining came billowing out silkily, endless as a forest.
He no longer cared what was going on outside. Somewhere a war was going on. Somewhere there was a big wedding. Now the King of Belukhastan is coming, he thought. Everywhere soldiers were being drilled, whores were walking their beat, carpenters were standing among rafters. In the taverns of Stuttgart the beer came pouring from the same curving yellow taps as in Belgrade. On the road there were always the police demanding to see your papers. Then they stamped them. Everywhere there are bedbugs or no bedbugs. Work or no work. The women are the same everywhere. The doctors in all the hospitals are the same. When a man leaves his work in the eve- ning the streets are full ofpeople with nothing to do. It's all the same, always and everywhere; nobody has any new ideas. When Moosbrug- ger saw his first plane overhead in the blue sky-now, that was some- thing! But then there was one plane after another, and they all looked alike. ·The sameness ofthings out there was different from the way his thoughts were all alike in being wonderful. He couldn't fig- ure it out, and anyway it had always got in his way. He shook his head. To hell with the world, he thought. Or to hell with him and let them hang him: whatever happened, what did he have to lose . . . ?
And yet he sometimes would walk as if absentmindedly to the door and quietly try the place where the lock was on the outside. Then an eye would glare through the peephole and an angry voice come from the corridor, calling him names. Such insults made Moosbrugger move quickly back into his cell, and it was then that he felt locked up and robbed. Four walls and an iron door are nothing when you can freely walk in and out. Bars on an unfamiliar window are nothing special, and a plank bed or wooden table always in its place is quite in order. It's only when a man can't do what he wants with them that something crazy happens. Here things, made by human beings to serve them, slaves whose appearance one doesn't even bother to no- tice, suddenly get uppity. They block one's way. When Moosbrugger noticed these things giving him orders he had a good-mind to smash
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them, and it was a struggle to convince himself that it was beneath him to fight these minions of the law. But his hands were 'twitching so hard he was afraid he was going to have a fit.
Out of the wh9le wide world they had picked these seven square yards, and Moosbrugger was pacing them, back and forth. The minds of the sane people out there, incidentally, who were not locked up, worked much the same as his own. They who had taken such a lively interest in him not so long ago had quickly forgotten him. He had been put in this place like a nail driven into the wall; once in, nobody notices it anymore. Other Moosbruggers were taking their turn; they were not himself, not even the same person every time, but they served the same purpose. There had been a sex crime, a grim story, a horrible murder, the act of a madman, of a man not quite responsi- ble, the sort of thing to watch out for, but then the police and the courts had done their job. . . . Such vague and vacuous generaliza- tions and memory tags loosely held the now-desiccated remains of the incident somewhere in their wide net. Moosbrugger's name was forgotten, the details were forgotten. He might have been "a squir- rel, a hare, or a fox," the public remembered nothing specific about him, there remained only dim, wide areas of overlapping general no- tions, like the gray shimmer in a telescope focused at too great a dis- tance. This ·failure to make cpnnections, the cruelty of a mind that shuffles concepts around without bothering about the burden of suf- fering and life that weighs down every decision, was what the general mind had in common with that of Moosbrugger; but what was in his crazed brain a dream, a fairy tale, that flawed or odd spot in the mir- ror of consciousness which does not reflect reality but lets the light through, was lacking in society as a whole, unless some individual·, in his obscure excitement, showed a hint of it here and there.
And what did concern Moosbrugger specifically, this particular Moosbrugger and none other, the one temporarily stored on these seven square yards of the world-the feeding, surveillance, autho- rized treatment, final disposal of the case by life or death sentence- was all in the hands ofa relatively small group ofpeople with a wholly different attitude. Here eyes on duty spied on him, voices came down hard on him for the slightest misstep. Never did fewer than two guards enter his cell. He was always handcuffed when they took him through the corridors. They acted with the fear and caution that
had to do with this particular Moosbrugger within this limited area but was in strange contrast with the treatment accorded to him in general. He often complained about these strict measures. But when he did, the captain, the warden, the doctor, the priest, whoever heard him, turned a frozen face on him and told him he was being treated according to regulations. So regulations had taken the place of the interest the world had once taken in him, and Moosbrugger thought: "You've got a long rope around your neck and you can't see who's pulling it. " He was roped to the outside world but, as it were, around the comer,' out of sight. People who mostly never gave him a thought, who did not even know he existed, or to whom he meant at best no more than what some chicken on a village street means to a university professor of zoology-they were all in it together, prepar- ing the doom that he felt tugging at him in some ghostly way. Some skirt in an office was typing a memo for his record. A registrar was ingeniously classifying it for f'Uing. Some high functionary of the court was drawing up the latest directive for implementing his sen- tence. Psychiatrists were debating how to draw the line between the purely psychopathic constitution in certain cases of epilepsy and its manifestations when combined With other syndromes. Jurists were analyzing the factors that mitigated culpability in relation to factors that might modify the sentence. A bishop denounced the unraveling of the moral fabric, and a game warden's complaint to Bonadea's husband, the judge, about the excessive increase in foxes was rein- forcing that eminent legal mind's bias in favor of reinforcing the in- flexibility of the law. ·
It is such impersonal matters that go into the making of personal happenings in a way that for the present eludes description. When Moosbrugger's case was shorn of all its individual romantic elements, of interest only to him and to the few people he had murdered, not much more was left of it than what could be gathered from the list of references to works cited that Ulrich's father had enclosed in are- cent letter to his son. Such a list looks like this: AH. AMP. AAC. AKA. AP. ASZ. BKL. BGK. BUD. CN. DTJ. DJZ. FBvM. GA. GS. JKV. KBSA. MMW. NG. PNW. R. VSvM. WMW. ZGS. ZMB. ZP. ZSS. Addickes ibid. Beling ibid. , and so on. Written out, these \Yould read: Annales d'Hygi~me Publique et de Medicine legal~,% ed. Brouardel, Paris; Annales Medico-Psychologiques, ed. Ritti . . :-~·etc. ,
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582 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
etc. , making a list a page long even when reduced to the briefest of abbreviations. The truth is not a crystal that can be slipped into one's pocket, but an endless current into which one falls headlong. Imag- ine every one of these abbreviations trailing a dozen or hundreds of printed pages, for each page a man with ten fingers writing it, and for each of his ten fingers ten disciples and ten opponents with ten fin- gers each, and at every fingertip a tenth of a personal idea, and you have a dim notion of what the truth is like. Without it not even that well-known sparrow can fall off the roof. Suri, wind, food brought it there, and illness, hunger, cold, or a cat killed it, but none of this col)ld have happened without the operation of laws, biological, psy- chological, meteorological, physical, chemical, sociological, and all the rest, and it is much less of a strain to be mei:ely looking for such laws than to have to make them up, as is done in the moral and judi- cial disciplines.
As for Moosbrugger himself, with his great respect for human knowledge, although he had, unfortunately, so small a portion of it: he never would have understood his situation completely even had he known exactly what it was. He had a dim sense of it. He felt that he was in an unstable condition. His big, powerful body was not as solid as it looked. Sometimes the open sky peered right into his skull. Just as it had, so often, in the old days on the road. And though he sometimes wished he could shake it off, he was never free, these days, of a certain solemn exaltation that streamed toward him, through the prison walls, from all the world.