No More Learning

Agathe hesitated.
Ulrich said: "You must formally examine it yourself. "
The lawyer smiled politely and added: "I beg your pardon, not only
formally. "
Agathe let her glance dip twice into the pages, pulled a wry face, and
slapped the file shut again.
The lawyer was satisfied. "These allusions are meaningless," he as-
sured her. "That's what I assumed from the start. My colleague simply should not have given in to his client's unpleasant irritability. But it would ofcourse be embarrassingifduring the civil procedure a criminal indictment should suddenly be entered. If that happens, one would im- mediately have to respond with a countercomplaint on grounds of slan- der, or something similar. " Seemingly without his wishing it, what he was saying again passed from the unreal to the possible, and it seemed to ULrich that in these assurances a question was still lurking.
1510 • THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
"Ofcourse it would be extremely embarrassing," he confirmed dryly, and thought he would consult, aside from this celebrated divorce lawyer, a proper criminal lawyer, one with whom one could speak more openly in order to address all the possibilities contained in such an unfortunate story. But he did not know how to find such a man. "A battle of this dirty kind is always embarrassing for people who are clean," he added. "But is there something else one can do besides wait? "
The lawyer acted as if he needed to think this over for a moment, smiled, and said that he was sorry, but he must very strongly advise that they go back to his original proposal and show that their adversary had transgressed marital fidelity. The length of time the separation had al- ready lasted gave grounds for assuming the factual basis of such a com- plaint; there was no lack of investigators who took care of these things dependably and discreetly, and with this, as it were, classical ground for divorce, one would inevitably and most rapidly arrive at their goal, which would be of the greatest advantage in a struggle where one must not leave the adversary any time to develop his intrigues.
Ulrich also seemed to see the necessity of this.
But Agathe, who had completely lost the confidence she had once had in her dealings with lawyers and other persons of the law, said no. Whether she had imagined that one orders a divorce from a lawyer the way one orders a cake from the baker, which is selected and delivered to one's house, or whether it happened that she held it against Ulrich for having put her in a situation where her sense of responsibility for the embarrassments being visited upon the innocent Hagauer was awak- ened, or whether she simply could not bear the collapse of her world in the continuance of such conferences; enough, she refused vehemently.
She also considered this proposal to be a convenience on the part of the lawyer, and might perhaps have let herself be talked out of it; but Ulrich did not do so, merely excusing her smilingly with the jest that even through a detective she had no desire to find out any more about her husband, and the divorce lawyer suddenly gave a sigh of chivalric defeat, for he wanted to bring the conference to an end. He now assured them that they would try to attain their goal this way, and pushed over to Agathe the power of attorney for her to sign.
Addendum. Possibly: Ulrich asks whether there were any proposals from Hagauer for an amicable settlement, and declares the continuation of the conference in this sense otherwise undesirable.
From the Posthumous Papers · 1 5 1 1
Even as they were descending the steps, Ulrich took Agathe's arm in his, and in that moment they involuntarily stopped.
"We were in reality for an hour! " he said.
Agathe looked at him. Pain closed off the background of her light eyes like a stone wall.
"Are you very depressed? '' he asked sympathetically.
"It involves such humiliation that we must withdraw from it," she re- plied slowly.
'That's very much the question," Ulrich said.
"A real humiliation, like falling with one's mouth in the dust! Some- thing we have forgotten how to imagine lately! " Agathe added in a soft, urgent voice.
"I mean, the question is whether we will be allowed to withdraw from this humiliation," Ulrich responded. "Perhaps there are even greater ones threatening us. I must confess to you that my sense of our situation today is that it's bad. For, granted we give in: perhaps we could claim it had been an error, hastily repair it, cover things up. But it would be up to him to accept it or not, and he isn't going to give you up; indeed, now that he's become suspicious, he won't put down his weapons until you've submitted to him unconditionally. That's simply his sense of order! " Ul- rich said, since Agathe did not seem to want to wait for him to finish. "On the other hand, we could of course follow our lawyer's proposal or some similar plan and try to wear him down. But what does that get us? Increased danger, for the enemy will feel himself absolved from all re- straint by our attack, and in the best case our success would be that be- sides the divorce we would have maliciously harmed a person to whom we are profoundly indifferent. "
"And the guilt of existence? " Agathe objected passionately, although she violently forced herself to make a jest of it. "What you yourself have often said, that the only woman who remains pure is the one who has her lover's head chopped off? ''
"Did I say that? One would have to blow up the planet," Ulrich said calmly, "if one wanted to get rid of all the witnesses to one's mistakes! " And he added seriously: "You're still misjudging the degree of ordinari- ness, the tangible difficulty, of the situation we're in: one way or the other, we're threatened with disaster and have only the choice of re- maining so o r - "
"Killing ourselves! " Agathe said curtly and decisively.
"Oh come on! How that echoes in the stones ofsuch a staircase! I hope no one heard it! " he rebuked her angrily, and looked cautiously around. "You're so stupid! It's not even sure that death is better than prison. But we could remove ourselves from the choice by running away. "
1512 • THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
Agathe looked at him, and in this split second her eyes involuntarily resembled those of a child who has been romping wildly and been picked up.
"To an island in the South Seas," Ulrich said, and smiled. "But per- haps an island in the Adriatic would do as well. Where once a week a boat will bring us what we need. "
When they stood below at the gateway, they were benumbed and struck by the shock of the summery street. A whitish fire in which bright shadows lived seemed to be waiting for them. People, animals, curbs, even they themselves lost something of their bodily constraints in the hot rays of light. Agathe had said: ''You've never wanted to! For that I mean too little to you? " Ulrich responded: "Oh, let's not talk about it this way! It's harder than the resolve to deny the world. For once we've run away, everything here in the real world, which was imposed on us as ours, will tum really bad, and there's hardly any turning back, although we have no idea whether where we want to go there's solid ground on which people can stand differently from the way they do in dreams. If I still keep thinking about it, it's because I have doubts not about you or myself but about what's possible! "
? But on the other hand it's also quite practical! The lawyer has his in- structions, the client is away: either both attorneys will come to an agree- ment in order to wind it up, or they'll procrastinate.
When they finally do come back, everything is in quite good shape: the automatism of life that protects itself against catastrophes. They were merely on a trip, the lawyers were still procrastinating, etc.
c. 193. 2 5. 2
THE THREE SISTERS
Ulrich asked: "What is it you want from me: my clothes, my books, my house, my views about the future? What should I give you? I'd like to give you everything I have. "
Agathe replied: "Cut offyour arm for me, or at least a finger! "
They were in the reception room on the ground floor, whose high, narrow windows, arched at the top, let in the soft new morning light, which mingled with the shade of trees as it fell into its own reflection on the floor. If one looked down at oneself it was like seeing beneath one's feet the discolored sky with its brightness and clouds through a brownish glass. Brother and sister had so retired from the world that there was hardly danger any longer of their being disturbed by a visit.
''You're too modest! " Ulrich went on. "Go ahead, ask for my life! I believe I could discard it for you. But a finger? I must confess: a finger is of no importance to me at all! "
He laughed, his sister along with him; but her face retained the ex- pression of someone who sees another joking about something that is serious to him.
Now Ulrich turned the tables: "When one loves one bestows, one 'keeps nothing for oneself,' one doesn't want to possess anything by one- self: why do you want to possess Lindner for yourself? '' he asked.
"But I don't possess him at all! " Agathe retorted.
''You possess your secret emotions for him and your secret thoughts about him. Your error about him! "
"And why don't you cut off an arm? '' Agathe challenged.
"We will cut it off," was Ulrich's response. "But for the moment I'm still asking myself what kind of life would result if I really gave up my sense of self, and others did likewise? Everyone would have a self in common with everyone else; not only the feeding bowl and the bed would be shared, but truly the self, so that every one would love his neighbor as himself and no one would be his own neighbor. "
Agathe said: "That must somehow be possible. "
"Can you imagine sharing a lover with another woman? '' Ulrich asked.
1514 · THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
"I could," Agathe asserted. "I can even imagine it being quite beauti- ful! I just can't imagine the other woman. "
Ulrich laughed.
Agathe made a parrying gesture. "I have a particular personal dislike of women," she said.
"Of course, of course! And I don't like men! "
Agathe felt his mockery was somewhat insulting because she felt that it was not unjustified, and she did not go on to say what she had in- tended.
In the resulting pause Ulrich, to encourage her, began to relate some- thing he had recently dreamed up in the distracted condition of shaving. "You know that there were times when aristocratic women," he said, "if a slave pleased them, could have him castrated so that they might have their pleasure of him without endangering the aristocracy of their prog- eny. "
Agathe did not know it, but she gave no sign. On the other hand, she now recalled having once read that among some uncivilized tribes every woman married all her husband's brothers along with him and had to serve them all, and every time she imagined such servile humiliation, an involuntary and yet not quite unwelcome shudder made her shrink. But she did not reveal any of this to her brother either.
". . . whether something like that happened often, or only exception- ally, I don't know, nor does it matter," Ulrich had meanwhile been say- ing. "For, as I must confess, I was thinking only of the slave. More precisely, I was thinking of the moment when he left his sickbed for the first time and encountered the world again. At first, ofcourse, the will to resist and defend himself, which had been paralyzed at the start of what happened, rouses and thaws out again. But then the awareness must set in that it's too late. Anger wants to rebel, but there follow one after the other the memory of the pain suffered, the cowardly awakening of a fear from which only consciousness was removed, and finally that humility signifying a now irrevocable humiliation, and these emotions now hold down the anger, the way the slave himselfwas held down while the oper- ation was being performed. " Ulrich interrupted this odd recital and searched for words; his eyelids were lowered in meditation. "Physically, he could doubtless still pull himself together," he continued, "but a strange feeling of shame will keep him from doing so, for he must recog- nize its futility in a way that embraces everything; he is no longer a man, he has been debased to a girl-like existence, to the existence ofa towel, a handkerchief, a cup, of some kind of being that, not without affection, is allowed to serve. I would like to know the moment when he is then
From the Posthumous Papers · 1515
called for the first time before the lady who tortured him and reads in her eyes what she proposes to do with him. . . . "
Agathe laughed mockingly. "You've been thinking some really strange thoughts, Ulo! And when I think that before he was castrated your slave was perhaps a butcher or a stylish domestic . . . "
Ulrich laughed innocently along with her. "Then I myself would prob- ably find my depiction of the awakening of his soul disturbingly comi- cal," he admitted. He himself was happy that this disreputable emotional report was brought to an end. For without his noticing, vari- ous things must have come into his mind that didn't belong there: as if something of the mythological goddesses who consume their devotees, or the Siamese twins, up to masochism or the castration complex, had been drawn with fingernails across the dubious keyboard of contempo- rary psychology! When he had stopped laughing he immediately made an embittered face.
Agathe laid her hand on his ann. The tiny shadows of a concealed excitement twitched in her gray eyes. "But why did you tell me that? '' she asked.
"I don't know," Ulrich said.
"I believe you were thinking of me," she asserted.
"Nonsense! " Ulrich retorted, but after a while he asked: "Do you
know that another letter from Hagauer came today? " and so apparently began talking about something else.
The letters from Hagauer that were then arriving became more threatening from one to the next. "I don't understand why, under these circumstances, he doesn't get on the train and come here to confront us," Ulrich went on.
"He won't find the time," Agathe said.
And that was indeed how it was. At the beginning Hagauer had re- solved several times to do just that, but every time something inter- vened, and then he had become rather accustomed to being alone. It seemed to him not a bad thing to live for a while without his wife: man ought not to be too happy or too comfortable-that is a heroic concep- tion of life. So Hagauer confronted his misfortune energetically, and was able to note the compensation that not only time can heal wounds, but lack of time as well. Of course this did not prevent him from continuing to insist that Agathe return; indeed, he could dedicate himself to this question of order with the unruffled mind of a man who has shipped the children of his emotions off to bed. Once again he thoroughly reviewed all the documents, which he preseiVed in careful order, and evening after evening read through all the personal papers of his deceased
1516 · THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
father-in-law without finding in a single one any indication of the sur- prise that had been visited upon him. That a man whom he had always revered as a model could have changed his mind at the last minute, or out of negligence not adapted his will to changed circumstances over the years, seemed the more improbable to Hagauer the more often he un- tied the ribbons and removed the labeled covers with which he kept his correspondence and other papers in order. He avoided thinking about how, then, the result had come about that finally had come about, and reconciled himself by saying that some error, some carelessness, some guilty or innocent negligence, some lawyer's stratagem, must lie behind it. In this opinion, which permitted him to spare his feelings without wasting his time over it, he contented himself with demanding precise statements and documents, and, when these did not come, calling upon a lawyer for advice; for as an order-loving person, he assumed that in their spiteful endeavor Agathe and Ulrich must obviously have done the same, and he did not want to lag behind them. The lawyer now took over the writing ofletters and repeated the demand for an explanation, com- bining with it the demand that Agathe return: in part because that was the preference of Hagauer, who imputed his wife's conduct to her brother's influence, and in part because it seemed a requisite in this ob- scure and perhaps shaqy affair that one should first stick to the estab- lished factual basis of"malicious abandonment"; the rest was to be left to the future, and to cautious evaluation of whatever points of attack might develop. From then on Ulrich started reading the antagonistic let- ters again and did not burn them. But no matter how often since then he had argued with his sister that anning themselves likewise for the legal struggle could not be put off, she would hear nothing of it; indeed, she did not even want to listen to his reports, and finally he had had to un- dertake the first steps without her, until at last his own lawyer insisted on hearing Agathe himself and receiving his power of attorney from her. This was what Ulrich now informed her of all at once, adding that what he had first, out of consideration, called merely a "communication from Hagauer" was actually a singularly unpleasant legal letter. "It's appar- ently unavoidable, and without our realizing it it's become high time that we confide to our lawyer, as cautiously and with as much reserve as we can, something about the dangerous business with the will," he finished.
Agathe looked at him for a long time and irresolutely, with a look hooded from within, before she softly answered him with the words: "I did not want that! "
Ulrich made a gesture of excuse and smiled. It was possible to live in the fire ofgoodness without the necessity ofarson, and the criminal trick they had carried out on their father's will had long since become super-
From the Posthumous Papers · 1 5 1 7
fluous: but it had happened, and nothing could be done about it without their being exposed. Ulrich understood the connection between resist- ance and despondency in his sister's answer. Agathe had meanwhile stood up and was moving back and forth among the objects in the room without speaking; she sat down on a chair some distance off and went on looking at her brother in silence. Ulrich knew that she wanted to draw him back into the silence, which was like a bed of rest consisting of tiny points of flame, and a sweet martyrdom demanded his heart back.
As in music or in a poem, by a sickbed or in a church, the circle of what could be uttered was oddly circumscribed, and in their dealings with each other a clear distinction had formed between those conversa- tions that were permissible and those they could not have. But this did not happen through solemnity or any other kind of elevated expectation, but appeared to have its origin outside the personal. They both hesi- tated. What should the next word be, what should they do? The uncer- tainty resembled a net in which all unspoken words had been caught: the web was stretched taut, but they were not able to break through it, and in this want of words glances and movements seemed to reach further than usual, and outlines, colors, and surfaces to have an unstoppable weight: A secret inhibition, which usually resides in the arrangement of the world and sets limits to the depth of the senses, had become weaker, or from time to time disappeared entirely. And inevitably the moment came when the house they were in resembled a ship gliding outward on an infinite waste reflecting only this ship: the sounds of the shore grow fainter and fainter, and finally all motion ceases; objects become com- pletely mute and lose the inaudible voices with which they speak to man; before they are even thought, words fall like sick birds from the air and die; life no longer has even the energy to produce the small, nimble
resolutions that are as important as they are insignificant: getting up, picking up a hat, opening a door, or saying something. Between the house and the street lay a nothingness that neither Agathe nor Ulrich could cross, but in the room space was polished to an utmost luster, which was intensified and fragile like all highly perfected things, even if the eye did not directly perceive it. This was the anxiety of the lovers, who at the height of their emotion no longer knew which direction led upward and which downward. If they looked at each other, their eyes, in sweet torment, could not draw back from the sight they saw, and sank as in a wall of flowers without striking bottom. "What might the clocks be doing now? " suddenly occurred to Agathe, and reminded her of the small, idiotic second hand of Ulrich's watch, with its precise forward mo- tions along its narrow circle; the watch was in the pocket under the bot- tommost rib, as ifthat were where reason's last place ofsalvation lay, and
1518 · THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
Agathe yearned to draw it out. Her glance loosened itself from her brother's: a painful retreat! They both felt that it bordered on the comic, this shared silence under the pressure of a heavy mountain of bliss or powerlessness.
And suddenly Ulrich said, without having previously thought of saying exactly this: "Polonius's cloud, which sometimes appears as a ship, sometimes as a camel, is not the weakness of a seiVile courtier but char- acterizes completely the way God has created us! "
Agathe could not know what he meant; but does one always know what a poem means? When it pleases us it opens its lips and causes a smile, and Agathe smiled. She was lovely with her bowed lips, but this gave Ulrich time, and he gradually recalled what it was he had been thinking before he had broken the silence. He had imagined as an exam- ple that Agathe was wearing glasses. At that time, a woman with glasses was still regarded as comical and looked quite risible, or pitiable; but a time was already coming when a woman wearing glasses, as is still true today, looked enterprising, indeed positively young. There are finnly in- herited habits of consciousness behind this, which change but which in some connection or another are always present and form the pattern through which all perceptions pass before they arrive at consciousness, so that in a certain sense the whole that one thinks one is experiencing is always the cause of what it is that one experiences.
And one rarely imag- ines to oneself how far this extends, that it extends from ugly and beauti- ful, good and evil, where it still seems natural that one man's morning cloud should be another man's camel, through bitter and sweet or fra- grant and noisome, which still have something material about them, to the things themselves with their precise and impersonally attributed qualities, the perception ofwhich is apparently quite independent ofin- tellectual prejudices but in truth is so only in the main. In reality, the relation of the outer to the inner world is not that of a die which im- presses its image on a receptive material, but that of a matrix which is deformed in the process, so that its diagram, without its coherence being destroyed, can produce remarkably diverse images. So that Ulrich too, if he was able to think that he was seeing Agathe before him wearing glasses, could think just as well that she loved Lindner or Hagauer, that she was his "sister" or "the being half united with him in twinlike fash- ion," and it was not a different Agathe each time that was sitting before him but a different sitting there, a different world surrounding her, like a transparent ball dipping into an indescribable light. And it seemed to them both that here lay the deepest sense of the support which they sought in each other and which one person always seeks in another.
From the Posthumous Papers · 1519
They were like two people who, hand in hand, have stepped out of the circle that had flnnly enclosed them, without being at home in another one. There was in this something that could not be accounted for in or- dinary notions of living together.
c. 1934
THE SUN SHINES ON JUST AND UNJUST
The sun shines with one and the same merciful glance on just and un- just; for some reason Ulrich would have found it more comprehensible if it did so with two: one after the other, first on the just and then on the unjust, or vice versa. "Sequentially, man too is living and dead, child and adult, he punishes and pardons; indeed this ability of only being able to do contradictory things in sequence could really be used to define the essence of the individual, for supra-individual entities, like humanity or a people or the population of a village, are able to commit their contra- dictions not only one after the other, but also simultaneously and all mixed up with each other. So the higher a being stands on the scale of capabilities, the lower he stands on the scale of morality? In any case: you can rely on a tiger, but not on mankind! " This was what Ulrich said.
If his friendship with Stumm had been flourishing, how fruitful such conversations might have been! With Agathe they always ended in a plea to excuse their superfluity and led to new and vain resistance. "There's no sense in talking that way," he conceded, and began from the begin- ning. "For there are many problems," he instructed, "that make no sense, and they ought always to be suspected of being important ones. There are questions of the kind: Why do I have two ears but only one tongue? Or: Why is man symmetrical only frontally and not hexagonally? Sometimes these questions come straight from the nursery or the mad- house, but sometimes, too, they later achieve scientific respectability. " It's different, and yet basically the same, with the problem: Why do peo- ple die? We already find in textbooks of logic this model of a reasoned
I520 • THE MAN WITH0 UT QUALITIES
conclusion: "All men are mortal. Caius is a man. Therefore Caius is mor- tal. " But one can also give a scientific answer, and all such answers would leave such a problem in exceptionally rational condition: and yet the irrational way we stare at this problem, Ulrich maintained, an irratio- nal, indeed entirely shameless way of refusing to understand nature, is itself almost morality, philosophy, and literature!
Agathe, by nature easygoing, tolerant, and averse to cloud castles of thought, responded: "Nature has no morality! "
Ulrich said: "Nature has two moralities! "
Agathe said: "I don't care how many it has. It's not a problem. You're only trying to needle and upset me! "
"But it's all the same! " Ulrich answered. "Because since we surely call that good which pleases us and to which we give preference-that's not morality, but it is the beginning and end of morality! -wouldn't evil then have to die out in due course, the way snakes or diseases are more or less stamped out and the jungle dies? Why does it survive and thrive so mightily? "
"That's no concern of mine! " Agathe declared, thereby defending her intention of not taking the conversation seriously when it was conducted in this fashion.
But Ulrich replied: "We simply can't do without evil. And what does concern you is even more absurd and profound! For mustn't something exist that is worse than the rest, if only for the reason that we wouldn't know what to do with ourselves if one of our feelings were just as beauti- ful as any other one, or even if each of our actions were better than its predecessors? "
Agathe looked up, for this was serious. This was the way it often hap- pened now; they were uncertain about where their adventuresome plans were leading them, and avoided talking about it because they did not know how to begin; but suddenly they were to some extent in the midst ofit. At that time Ulrich was receiving letters from Professor Schwung, his deceased father's old enemy, entreating him on the head of the re- vered departed to engage himselfin bringing about greater accountabil- ity in the world; and he was receiving letters from Professor Hagauer, his embittered brother-in-law, in which his sister and he were sternly sus- pected of being guilty of profoundly dubious conduct. At first he had answered these letters evasively, then not at all; finally, Agathe even asked him to burn them without opening them. She explained this by saying that it was impossible to read such letters, and in the condition in which they found themselves, that was the truth. But to burn them un- read, and not even to listen to what other people were complaining
From the Posthumous Papers · 1 5 2 1
about: how did it happen that this did not move her conscience, al- though at that time it was so sensitive in every other respect?
That was the time when they were beginning to comprehend what an equivocal role other people played in their feelings. They knew that they were not in accord with the general public; in the thousand kinds of busyness that filled up night and day there was not a single activity in which they could have participated wholeheartedly, and whatever they might venture upon themselves would most certainly have been met with contempt and disdain. There was a remarkable peace in this. Ap- parently one can (probably) say that a bad conscience, if it is big enough, provides almost a better pillow than a good one: the mind's incidental activity, incessantly expanding with a view to ultimately deriving a good individual conscience from all the wrong that surrounds it and in which it is implicated, is then shut down, leaving a boundless independence in the emotions. At times this caused a tender loneliness, a limitless arro- gance, to pour its splendor on the pair's excursions through the world. Alongside their ideas the world could just as easily appear clumsily bloated, like a captive balloon circled by swallows, as it could be hum- bled to a background as tiny as a forest at the rim of the sky by the inten- sification of the solipsistic condition of their egos. Their social obligations sounded like a shouting that was reaching them, sometimes rude, sometimes from far away; they were trivial, if not unreal. An enor- mous arrangement, which is finally nothing but a monstrous absurdity: that was the world. On the other hand, everything they encountered on the plane of ideas had the tensed, tightrope-walking nature of the once- and-never-again, and whenever they talked about it they did so in the awareness that no single word could be used twice without changing its meaning. Likewise, everything that happened to them was connected with the impression of being a discovery that permitted of no repetition, or it happened on precisely the right occasion, as ifit had been conjured up by magic.
This gentle mania, which was nothing but an extremely elevated form of the involvement of two people with each other, also unleashed a deepened sympathy, a sinking into togetherness; the change also be- came apparent in their relation to the world, but in such a manner that along with the arrogance there began to predominate at times a peculiar immersion in the nature and doings of other people, and in the claim this involved to recognition and love. A temperate explanation, such as that this was merely the expression of an overflowing mood, sometimes amicable, sometimes arrogant, did not suffice. For the happy person is no doubt friendly, and with cheerful complaisance wants to let everyone
I522 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
lmow it, and Ulrich or Agathe, too, felt lifted up at times by such gaiety, like a person being carried on someone's shoulders and waving at every- one: yet this actively outward-striving amicability seemed to them harm- less beside the kind that overcame them passively and almost hauntingly at the sight of others as soon as they made room to be ready for what they had called "walking two miles with them. " Ulrich might also have wondered that he had often seen himself approaching other people as if they were a generality, with theories and emotions that applied to them all; but now it was happening even in a constrained way on a small indi- vidual scale, with that silent insatiability of his which had once made Agathe herself suspect that it was more a longing for empathy on the part of a nature that never involves itself with others than it was the ex- pression of confident benevolence. To be sure, Agathe was now reacting as he did: although she had, for the most part, spent her life without either love or hate, but merely with indifference, she felt the same incli- nation toward others, quite divorced from any possibility of action, in- deed from any idea that might have given comprehensible shape to her almost oppressive empathy.
Ulrich analyzed it: "Ifyou like, you can just as well call it a bifurcated egotism as the start ofloving everyone. "
Agathe joked: "As love, ifs still rather timid at the start. "
Ulrich went on: "In truth, it has as little to do with egotism as with its opposite. Those are later concepts, indispensable for decocted souls. In the Eudemian ethics, however, it still runs: Self-love is not selfishness but a higher condition of the self, with the consequence that one loves others, too, in a higher way. Also, more than two thousand years ago the notion was formulated, apparently just for us, and then lost again, a link- ing of goal and cause into a 'goal-cause' that motivates 'what is loved as it does the lover. ' An unreal idea, and yet as if created in order to distin- guish the sympathetic awareness of the emotions from the dead truth of reason! "
He touched her hand with his fingertips. Agathe looked around her shyly; they were in one of the busiest streets; there probably weren't many other people roaming around whose concerns reached back to the fourth century B. C. "Don't you think that we're behaving extremely strangely? " Agathe asked. She saw women in the latest fashions, and of- ficers with red, green, yellow, and blue necks and legs; many necks and legs stopped suddenly behind her and turned to look at her or some other woman, expecting an "advance. " A ray of light from the heavenly vaults of truth had fallen on all this activity, and it looked somewhat pre- carious.
"I think so," Ulrich said dryly. "Even ifI might have been mistaken. ''
FromthePosthumousPapers · 1523
For he could no longer recall exactly the passage that had once made an impression on him.
Agathe laughed at him. "You're always so truth-loving," she mocked, but secretly she admired him.
But Ulrich knew that what they were commanded to seek had as little to do with truth in the ordinary sense as it did with egotism or altruism, so he replied: "Love of truth is really one of the most contradictory for- mulations there is. For you can revere truth in God knows how many ways, but the one thing you can't do is love it. If you do, it begins to waver. Love dissolves truth like wine the pearl. "
"Do pearls really dissolve in wine? " Agathe asked.
"I have no idea," Ulrich conceded with a sigh. 'Tm pretty far gone. I'm already using expressions I can't account for! I meant to say: To the person who loves, truth and deception are equally trivial! "
This observation, that truth is dissolved by love-the opposite of the more fainthearted assertion that love cannot bear the truth! -contains nothing new. The moment a person encounters love not as an experi- ence but as life itself, or at least as a kind of life, he understands that there are several truths about everything. The person who judges with- out love calls this "opinions" and "subjectivity"; the person who loves denies that with the sage's saying: "We can't know the meaning of even the simplest words ifwe don't love! " He is not being insensitive to truth, but oversensitive. He finds himself in a kind of enthusiasm of thinking, in which words open up to their very core. The person judging without love calls something an illusion that is merely the consequence of the excited involvement of the emotions. He himself is free of passion, and truth is free of passion; an emotion is injurious to its truth, and to expect to find truth where something is "a matter of the emotions" seems to him just as wrongheaded as demanding justice from wrath. And yet it is precisely the general content of existence and truth that distinguishes love as an experiencing of the world from love as an experience of the individual. In the special world oflove, contradictions do not raise each other to nothing and cancel each other out, but raise each other to the heights. They don't adapt to each other, either, but are in advance a part of a higher unity, which, the moment they come into contact, rises from them as a transparent cloud. Therefore, in love as in life itself, every word is an event and none is a complete notion, and no assertion is needed, nor any mere whim.
It is hard to account for this, because the language of love is a secret language, and in its ultimate perfection as silent as an embrace. Ulrich was capable of walking beside Agathe and seeing the reliable line of her profile in sparkling clarity before the swarm of his thoughts; then he per-
1524 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
haps recalled that in every delimitation there resides a tyrannical happi- ness. This is apparently the basic happiness of all works of art, of all beauty, of whatever is fonned by earth at all. But it is perhaps, too, the basic hostility, the annor between all beings. And Agathe looked away from Ulrich into the stream of people and sought to imagine what can- not be imagined, what happiness it would be to do away with all limits. In thought they contradicted each other, but they would also have been able to change sides, since on earlier occasions they had, at times alone, at times together, experienced one side as well as the other. But they did not speak about this at all. They smiled. That was enough. They each guessed what the other meant. And if they guessed wrongly, it was just as good as if it were right. If, on the contrary, they said something that cohered more finnly, they almost felt it as a disturbance. They had al- ready spoken so much about it. A certain indolence, indeed paralysis, of thought was part of their silent insatiability as they now observed people and sought to enclose them within the magic circle that surrounded themselves, just as fluid and fleeting mobility belonged to this thinking. They were like the two halves of the shell of a mussel opening itself to the sea.
And at times they suddenly laughed at each other.
"It's not as simple as one would like to think, loving one's fellow man like oneself! " Ulrich sighed mockingly once again.
Agathe took a deep breath and told him with satisfaction that it was his fault. "You're the one who's always destroying it! " she complained.
"They're the ones! Look at them! " Ulrich countered. "Look how they're watching us! They'd say Thanks a lot! ' to our love! "
And in truth this made them laugh with a kind of abashed shame, for unfortunately nothing is more amusing than raising one's eyes when they are still tender with sentiment. So Agathe laughed beforehand. But then she replied: "And yet what we're lookin~for can't be far away. Sometimes one feels one's own breath against a\rei! as wann as a pair of strange lips. This seems to me that close too. "
Ulrich added: "And there is a circumstance that could lead one to be- lieve that we're not simply chasing chimeras. For even an enemy can be divined only if you're able to feel what he feels. So there is a 'love your neighbor'; it even has a postscript: so you get a cleaner shot at him! And quite generally, you never understand people entirely through knowing and observing them; it also calls for understanding of a kind you have with yourself; you must already have that understanding when you ap- proach them. "
"But I usually don't understand them at all," Agathe said, surveying the people.
From the Posthumous Papers · 1525
"You believe in them," Ulrich replied. "At least you want to. You 'lend' them credence. That's what makes them seem worthy of loving. "
"No," Agathe said. "I don't believe in them in the least. "
"No," Ulrich said. " 'Belief' isn't an accurate expression for it. "
"But then what should it really be called," Agathe asked, "when you
think you understand people without knowing anything about them, and when you have an irresistible inclination for them, although you can be almost certain that you wouldn't like to know them? "
"One usually lives in the cautious balance between inclination and aversion one keeps ready for one's fellowmen," her brother responded slowly. "If, for whatever reason, the aversion seems to be dormant, then only a desire to yield must remain, a desire that cannot be compared to anything one knows. But it's no longer an attitude that corresponds to reality. "
"But you've said so often that it's the possibility of another life! " Agathe reproached him.
"An awareness of the world as it could be is what it is," Ulrich said, "shot through with an awareness of the world as it is! "
"No, that's too little! " Agathe exclaimed.
"But I can't say that I really love these people," Ulrich defended him- self. "Or that I love the real people. These people are real when they're in uniform and civilian clothes; that's the norm, so it's our attitude that's unreal! "
"But among themselves they think of it the same way! " Agathe re- sponded, on the attack. "Because they don't love each other in a real way, or really don't love each other, in exactly the same way you're claiming about our relation to them: their reality consists in part of fanta- sies, but why should that degrade ours? "
"You're thinking with such strenuous sharpness today! " Ulrich fended her off, laughing.
'Tm so sad," Agathe replied. "Everything is so uncertain. It all seems to shrink to nothing and expand again endlessly. It won't let you do any- thing, but the inactivity is also unbearable because it really presses in all directions against closed walls. "
And in this or similar fashion the preoccupation of brother and sister with their surroundings always broke off. Their involvement remained unarticulated: there was nowhere an accord in opinion or activity in which it could have expressed itself; the feeling grew all the more, the less it found a way of acting that corresponded to it, and the desire to contradict appeared as well: the sun shone on the just and unjust, but Ulrich found that one might better say, on the unseparated and not united, as the real origin of mankind's being evil as well as good.
1526 · THE MAN WITH0 UT QUALITIES
Agathe concurred in this opinion: ''I'm always so sad whenever we have to laugh at ourselves," she asserted, and laughed, because along with everything else an old saying had occurred to her, which sounded quite strange, as idle as it was prophetic. For it proclaimed: "Then the eyes of the soul were opened, and I saw love coming toward me. And I saw the beginning, but its end I did not see, only its progression. "
49
SPECIAL MISSION OF A GARDEN FENCE
Another time Agathe asked: "By what right can you speak so glibly of an 'image of the world,' or even of a 'world' of love? Of love as 'life itself'? You're being frivolous! " She felt as if she were swinging back and forth on a high branch that was threatening to break under the exertion at any moment; but she went on to ask: "If one can speak of a cosmic image of love, could one not also finally speak of an image of anger, envy, pride, or hardness? "
"All other emotions last for a shorter period,'' Ulrich replied. "None of them even claims to last forever. "
"But don't you find it somewhat odd of love that it should make that claim? " Agathe asked.
Ulrich countered: "I believe one might well say that it also ought to be possible for other emotions to shape their own images ofthe world: as it were, one-sided or monochrome ones; but among them love has always enjoyed an obscure advantage and has been accorded a special claim to the power of shaping the world. "
During this exchange they sought out a place in their garden where they could look through the fence at the street, with its rich variety of human content, without exposing themselves, as far as possible, to the glances of strangers. This usually led them to a low, sunny rise whose dry soil gave footing to several larches, and where ifthey lay down they were camouflaged by the play of light and shadow; in this half hiding place they were on the one hand so near the street that the people passing by gave them the peculiar impression ofbeing alive in that merely animalis- tic way that attaches to all of us when we believe ourselves unobserved and alone with our demeanor, and on the other hand any eyes that were raised could see brother and sister and draw them into the events that
From the Posthumous Papers · 152 7
they were observing with interest and a reserve for which the fence, a solid barrier but transparent to the glance, served as a positively ideal image.
"Now let's try whether we really love them or not," Agathe proposed, and smiled mockingly or impatiently.
Her brother shrugged his shoulders.
"Stop, 0 you hastening past, and bestow for a moment your precious soul upon two people who intend to love you! " Ulrich said, pushing it to absurdity.
''You can't bestow yourself for a moment; you have to do it without end! " Agathe corrected him threateningly.
"A park. A mighty fence. Us behind it," Ulrich affirmed. "And what might he be thinking when we called him, after he had involuntarily slowed his steps and before he timidly doubles them? That he's walking by the garden fence of a private madhouse! "
Agathe nodded.
"And we," Ulrich went on, "wouldn't even dare! Don't you absolutely know we won't do it? Our inmost harmony with the world warns us that we're not allowed to do such a thing! "
Agathe said: "If we were to address the brother hastening past, in- stead of as 'our good friend' or 'dear soul,' as 'dog' or 'criminal,' he prob- ably wouldn't consider us mad but would merely take us for people who 'think differently' and are mad at him! "
Ulrich laughed and was pleased with his sister.