No More Learning

"Is that a confession? " Agathe asked dryly, unabashed.
"How so, a confession? " Lindner exclaimed. And he added: "What an arrogant way of looking at things you have! What megalomania! And be- sides: What do you think of me? " But he fled, quit the field, he actually physically retreated before Agathe.
One discovers nothing so quickly as another's inner insecurity, and pounces on it like a cat on a grubbing beetle: it was really the capricious technique of the girls' boarding school, with its passions between the admired "big ones" and adoring smaller ones, the eternal basic form of spiritual dependency, which Agathe was using against Lindner by ap- pearing to respond understandingly and ardently to his words as often as she fell upon him coldly and frightened him just when he thought he was secure in a shared feeling.
From the corner of the room his voice now boomed like an organ, with an artificially fearless bass; he acted as ifhe were the aggressor by proposing: "Let's talk about this, for once, freely and frankly. Realize how inadequate and unsatisfying the entire process of procreation is as a mere natural process. Even motherhood! Is its physiological mechanism really so indescribably manrelous and perfect? How much horrible suf- fering it involves, how much senseless and unbearable contingency! So let's just leave the deification of nature to those who don't know what life is, and open our eyes to reality: the process of procreation is ennobled and raised above apathetic servitude only by being endowed with loyalty and responsibility, and subordinated to spiritual ideals! "
Agathe seemed to be reflecting silently. Then she asked relentlessly: "Why are you talking to me about the process of procreation? "
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Lindner had to take a deep breath: "Because I am your friend! Scho- penhauer has shown us that what we would like to think of as our most intimate experience is the most impersonal of arousals. But the higher emotions are exempted from this deception of the drive to procreate: loyalty, for instance, pure, selfless love, admiration and serving. "
"Why? " Agathe asked. "Certain feelings that suit you are supposed to have some supernatural origin, and others to be mere nature? "
Lindner hesitated; he struggled. "I can't marry again," he said softly and hoarsely. "I owe that to my son Peter. "
"But who's asking that of you? Now I don't understand you," Agathe replied.
Lindner shrank back. "I meant to say that even if I could do it, I wouldn't," he said defensively. "Moreover, in my opinion friendship be- tween man and wife demands an even more elevated frame of mind than love! " He made another try: "You know my principles, so you must also understand that in accord with them I would like nothing better than to offer to serve you as a brother, even to awaken, so to speak, in the woman the counterweight to the woman: I'd like to reinforce the Mary in the Eve! " He was close to breaking out in a sweat, so strenuous was it to pursue the strict line of his reasoning.
"So you're offering me a kind of eternal friendship," Agathe said qui- etly. "That's lovely of you. And you surely know that your present was accepted in advance. "
She seized his hand, as is appropriate at such a moment, and was a little taken aback at this epidermal piece ofstrange person that lay in the lap of her hand. Lindner was not able to withdraw his fingers either: it seemed to him that he should, and yet also that he didn't have to. Even Ulrich's lack of resolution sometimes exercised this natural impulse to flirt with her, but Agathe also despaired if she saw that she was doing it successfully herself, for the power of flirtation is united with the notion of bribery, cunning, and compulsion, and no longer with love; and while she was reminded of Ulrich, she looked at this unsteady creature, who was now bobbing up and down inwardly like a cork, in a mood, shot through with evil thoughts, that was close to tears.
"I would like you to open your refractory and taciturn heart to me," Lindner said timorously, warmly, and comically. "Don't think of me as a man. You've missed having a mother! " ·
"Fine," Agathe responded. "But can you stand it? Would you be pre- pared to entrust me with your friendship"-she withdrew her hand- "even if I were to tell you that I had stolen and that I had incest on my conscience? " therefore (or) something on account of which one is ruth- lessly expelled from the community of others?
From the Posthumous Papers · 1505
Lindner forced himself to smile. "What you're saying is strong, of course; it's even extremely unfeminine to venture such a jest," he scolded. "Honestly! Do you know what you remind me of at such mo- ments? Of a child who's made up its mind to annoy a grownup! But this isn't the moment for that," he added, offended because he was just now reminding himself of it.
But suddenly Agathe had something in her voice that cut through the conversation to the bottom when she asked: "You believe in God; reveal to me: In what way does He answer when you ask Him for advice and a decision about a heavy sin? "
Lindner rejected this question with the appalled severity that a decor- ous palace employee shows I puts on when asked about the married life of the Royal Couple.
Agathe: God in association with crime, specifically the Augustinian God, the abyss. Maybe really as Augustinian as possible: I see no possi- bility of being good on my own. I don't understand when I am doing good or evil. Only His grace can tear me away, or something similar. Seems to assume that she had recently been worrying about this. For the moment remains open.
Lindner did feel something of the passion of her words, therefore his answer gentle and father-confessorial: I don't know your life, you've only given me a few hints. But I consider it possible that you could act in a way similar to the way a bad person would act. You haven't learned in the small things to take life seriously, and therefore you perhaps won't hit it right when it comes to big decisions. You're probably capable of doing evil and disregarding all standards for no other reason than that it's a matter of indifference to you what the other person feels, but that only because, while you feel the impulse to the good, you don't know how much wisdom and obedience it involves. He seized her hand and asked: "Tell me the truth. "
"The truth is more or less what I've already told you," Agathe re- peated soberly and emphatically.
"No! "
"Yes. " There was something in this simple "yes" that made Lindner suddenly push away her hand.
Agathe said: "You wanted to make me better, didn't you? If I'm like a gold piece twisted out of shape that you'd like to bend back, I'm still a gold piece, aren't I? But you're losing your courage. The challenge (from God? ) presented to you in my person collides with your conventional division of actions into light and darkness. And I say to you: to identify God with a human morality is blasphemy! "
The voice in which she exclaimed this had, at least for Lindner, the
1506 · THE MAN WITH0 UT QUALITIES
sound of trumpets, something oddly arousing; he also felt Agathe's wild youthful beauty, and suffered enough as it was, whenever he reproached her, from an unuttemble anxiety and insinuation. For his principles, where were his principles? They were round about him, but far off. And in the empty space whose innermost vacuum was now his breast, some- thing stirred that was despicable but as alive as a basket full of puppies. Certainly, the only reason he wanted to strike to the heart of this obdu- mte young woman was in order to do her a seiVice, but the heart he was aiming at looked like a piece offlower flesh. Since Lindner had become a widower he had lived ascetically and avoided prostitutes and frivolous women on principle, but, to say it straight out, the more ardent he was about saving Agathe, the more grounded his fear became that in the pro- cess he would one day experience himself in a state of impermissible arousal. For this reason he often rapidly counted to fifty inwardly, in moments of anger as well as love. But his success was a remarkable one: the more this enabled him to drive his arousal from the point of threat- ened breach, the more it gathered in his whole body, until his body seemed to shine inside. He chose words of blame, but inwardly they were, ultimately, as soft as dying candles. He himself simply no longer believed what he was saying, for while externally he separated good from evil, inwardly everything was as mixed up together as it had been in Par- adise before the Fall. And with a horrifying clarity for which there are no words, he was reminded of that grimly edifying experience which, in his adolescence, had warned him once and for all against the power of the emotions. Lindner felt punished by a bitter self-contempt when he had to think that what at that time had clothed itselfwith devilish cunning in the appearance of God was now emerging in his mature years as com- mon lust ofthe flesh, precisely in the way that the Enlightener's shallow view had said it would.
-Get away from me with this lie! he begged.
-The will? Agathe said. -It's not a lie. I've falsified a will.
Lindner seized her by the arm in sudden anger as ifshe were a pupil
and shouted: "Out! "
"No," Agathe replied. "In our struggle against each other we have a
secret pact to drive out each other's devils! "
- Y o u are arrogant and vain! Lindner exclaimed. - B u t behind it lies
suffering and disappointment and humiliation! And again he nearly had it right.
But he only nearly had it right, and Agathe suddenly became tired ofit (him) and left him standing.
From the Posthumous Papers · 1507 Museum pre-chapter
At the lawyer's
Were their souls two doves in a world of hawks and owls? Ulrich would never have been able to contemplate letting such a view prevail, and he was therefore fond of remarking, and even found a kind of secu- rity in doing so, that external events took no account of the ravishments and anxieties of the soul but followed their own logic. Since Hagauer's letters had compelled him to consult a lawyer, Hagauer too had turned to a counselor, and since both attorneys were now exchanging letters, a "case" had begun, independent of personal origins and furnished, as it were, with suprapersonal powers of attorney. This case compelled Ul- rich's lawyer to ask for a personal consultation with Agathe and to be surprised when she did not appear and, later, when she still did not ap- pear, to raise serious questions that finally put Ulrich in the extreme po- sition of having to overcome his sister's resistance by painting the unpleasant consequences. When they appeared at their adviser's, this already put the course of events on a certain path. They found before them a secure and adroit man not much older than they, who was accus- tomed to smiling and preserving a polite composure even in the halls of the court and who, in consulting with his clients, proceeded from the principle that the first thing to do was gain his own picture of all things and people and take care to let himself be influenced as little as possible by the client, who was always undependable and wasted time.
And indeed Agathe did declare afterward that the whole time, she had felt like a "law patient," and this was true to the extent that all her answers to the introductory and basic questions of her lawyer were of a nature to reinforce the latter's doubts. His task was difficult. A departure from "bed and board," the easily arranged "separation," did not suffice for his client's wishes, and a divorce "of the conjugal bond," the true annulment of the Catholic marriage concluded with Hagauer, was, ac- cording to the laws of the land, impossible; it could be managed only by a roundabout route through various other countries and their legal inter- connections, as well as through complicated acquisitions and renuncia- tions of citizenship, which did open a path that ought to lead safely to the goal but was by no means without difficulty or easily surveyed in ad- vance. So Agathe's lawyer had undertaken to substitute a more valid rea- son for her all too ordinary grounds for divorce, which she indicated simply as aversion.
"Insurmountable aversion wouldn't be enough; don't you have some- thing else against your husband? " he probed.
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Agathe said, curtly, no. There was much she could have reproached Hagauer with, but she became red and pale, for it all belonged in this place as little as she did herself. She was angry with Ulrich.
The lawyer looked at her attentively. "Impolite treatment, frivolous management of property, flagrant neglect of conjugal obligations . . . how about those? " He tried to get her to have an idea. "The surest grounds for divorce, ofcourse, is always marital infidelity! "
Agathe looked at her interlocutor and answered in a clear, composed, low voice: "I have none of those grounds! "
Perhaps she ought to have smiled. Then the man who sat opposite her, in impeccably correct clothes that in no way contradicted his capac- ity for high spirits, would have been convinced that he had before him a lovely and undefinably captivating woman. But the seriousness of her expression left him no room at all, and his lawyer's brain became dull. He recalled from the files, which contained not only the correspondence of the opposing attorney but also the letters from Hagauer to Ulrich, Hagauer's carefully documented complaints that the desire for a divorce was unjustified and capriciously frivolous, and the thought went through his mind that he would much rather be representing this apparently rea- sonable and dependable man. Then it occurred to him that somewhere the term "psychopathic woman" occurred, but he rejected it not so much on account of Agathe as because it might have prevented him from taking on this rewarding commission. "Nervous, of course: The kind ofnervousness that's capable ofanything, not at all uncommon! " he thought, and cautiously began to direct his questioning at the point that had impressed him as most in need of explanation when he had gone over the situation. In the correspondence in the files there were-both in Hagauer's letters to Ulrich and, more significantly, in the correspon- dence of the opposing lawyer-more or less clear allusions that gave the sense that the two men might know of irregularities which had taken place in the management of the estate, or might even be of a mind to suspect the relations that had since ensued between brother and sister: these results, noted from the point-by-point checklist of Ulrich's brother-in-law's reflections, were intended to be understood as indicat- ing that the pair might well consider whether it would not be better to change their resolve before they went too far in an affair that held all sorts of danger for them. Agathe's new adviser now brought up these unambiguous allusions by turning to Ulrich, as the person more familiar to him, with the politeness of a man who cannot spare another the repe- tition of a superfluous unpleasantness; but every so often he turned to Agathe and gave her to understand that although it was only a question of pure formality, still she, too, as his client, had to give him some assur-
From the Posthumous Papers · 1 5 0 9
ance about these objections, which in certain circumstances, when brought unscrupulously out into the open, could weigh so heavily, an assurance on which he could base his further actions.
But Agathe had neither read Hagauer's letters nor informed Ulrich of what she had been doing during the time she had been alone following the "so-called falsifying of the will"-involuntarily, at this moment, he was speaking thus cautiously to himself! This led to a short, embarrassed pause that had a quite peculiar effect. Ulrich sought to bring it to an end by a gesture whose calm superciliousness sought to characterize the law- yer's request as superfluous and already accommodated, but his sister disturbed this plan somewhat by asking the lawyer out of curiosity what her husband really thought he knew. The lawyer looked from one to the other. "My sister will, ofcourse, give you the assurance you desire in any form," Ulrich declared quickly and with the greatest indifference. "I have informed her of the precise content of the letters, but for quite personal reasons she herself has read them only in part. " Agathe now smiled in time, having caught her error, and confirmed that this was so. "I was too out of sorts," she asserted calmly.
The attorney reflected for a moment. It went through his mind that this incident could quite well be an unwished-for confirmation of the adversary's assertion that Agathe was under her brother's baleful influ- ence. Of course he did not believe this to be the case, but felt, even so, a slight aversion toward Ulrich. This moved him to answer Agathe with the greatest politeness: "I must sincerely beg your pardon, madame, but my profession compels me to insist on the request that you examine the matter for yourself. " And with these words, gently insisting, he handed the file over to her.
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. "
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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.
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"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.