- 1 would just as gladly have shot at a mirror ifyou'd
happened
to be looking in it.
Musil - Man Without Qualities - v2
Does not the whole solid world, with all our sensations, buildings, landscapes, deeds, drift on countless tiny clouds?
Beneath every perception lies music, poem, feeling.
But this feeling is tied down, made invariable, excluded, because we want to per- ceive things truly, that is, without emotion, in order to let them guide us, instead of our guiding them, which, as one knows, amounts to meaning that we finally, quite suddenly, have really learned to fly instead of merely dreaming about flying, as the millennia before us did.
To this emotion imprisoned in objects there corresponds, on the individual side, that spirit of objectivity which has pushed all passion back into a condi- tion where it is no longer perceptible, so that in every person there slum- bers a sense ofhis value, his usefulness, and his significance that cannot be touched, a basic feeling of equilibrium between himself and the world.
Yet this equilibrium need only be disturbed at any point, and ev- erywhere the imprisoned little clouds escape.
A little fatigue, a little poi- son, a little excess of excitement, and a person sees and hears things he doesn't want to believe; emotion rises, the world slides out of its mid- dling condition into an abyss or rises up energetically, solitary, like a vi- sion and no longer comprehensible!
Often everything that he and Agathe undertook, or what they saw and experienced, seemed to Ulrich only a simile. This tree and that smile are reality, because they have the quite specific quality of not merely being
1430 · THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
illusion; but are there not many realities? Was it not just yesterday that we were wearing wigs with long locks, possessed very imperfect ma- chines, but wrote splendid books? And only the day before yesterday that we carried bows and arrows and put on gold hoods at festivals, over cheeks that were painted with the blue of the night sky, and orange- yellow eye sockets? Some kind of vague sympathy for these things still quivers within us today. So much was like today and so much was differ- ent, as if it was trying to be one of many hieroglyphic languages. Does not this mean that one should also not set too much store in present things? What is bad today will perhaps in part be good tomorrow, and the beautiful ugly; disregarded thoughts will have become great ideas, and dignified ideas decay to indifference. Every order is somehow ab- surd and like a wax figure, if one takes it too seriously; every thing is a frozen individual instance of its possibilities. But those are not doubts, rather a dynamic, elastic, undefined quality that feels itself capable of anything.
But it is a peculiarity of these experiences that they are almost always experienced only in a state of nonpossession. Thus the world changes when the impassioned person yearns for God, who does not reveal Him- self, or the lover for his distant beloved, who has been snatched from him. Agathe as well as Ulrich had known these things, and to experience them reciprocally when they were together sometimes gave them real difficulty. Involuntarily they pushed the present away, by telling each other for the first time the stories of their past in which this had hap- pened. But these stories again reinforced the miraculousness of their coming together, and ended in the half-light, in a hesitant touching of hands, silences, and the trembling ofa current that flowed through their arms.
And sometimes there were violent rebellions.
Let's make an assumption-[Ulrich] said to himself, for example, in order to exclude it again later-and let's suppose that Agathe would feel loathing at the love of men. In that case, in order to please her as a man, I would have to behave like a woman. I would have to be tender toward her without desiring her. I would have to be good in the same way to all things in order not to frighten her love. I could not lift a chair unfeel- ingly, in order to move it to some other place in unsentient space; for I may not touch it out of some random idea; whatever I do must be some- thing, and it is involved with this spiritual existence, the way an actor
From the Posthumous Papers · 1431
lends his body to an idea. Is that ridiculous? No, it's nothing other than festive. For that's the sense of sacred ceremonies, where every gesture has its significance. That is the sense of all things when they emerge again before our eyes for the first time with the morning sun. No, the object is not a means for us. It is a detail, the little nail, a smile, a curly hair of our third sister. o "I" and "you" are only objects too. But we are objects that are engaged in exchanging signals with each other; that is what gives us the miraculous: something is flowing back and forth be- tween us, I cannot look at your eyes as if at some dead object, we are burning at both ends. But if I want to do something for your sake, the thing is not a dead object either. I love it, that means that something is happening between me and it; I don't want to exaggerate, I have no in- tention of maintaining that the object is alive like me (and has feeling and talks with me), but it does live with me, we always stand in some relationship to each other.
I have said we are sisters. You have nothing against my loving the world, but I must love it like a sister, not like a man or the way a man loves a woman. A little sentimentally; you and it and I give one another presents. I take nothing away from the tenderness that I present you with if I also make a present to the world; on the contrary, every prodi- gality increases our wealth. We know that each of us has our separate relations to one another that one could not totally reveal even if one wanted to, but these secrets do not arouse any jealousy. Jealousy as- sumes that one wishes to tum love into a possession. However, I can lie in the grass, pressed to the lap of earth, and you will feel the sweetness of this moment along with me. But I may not regard the earth as an artist or a researcher: then I would be making it my own, and we would form a couple that would exclude you as a third.
What, then, in everyday life really distinguishes the most primitive af- fect oflove from mere sexual desire? Mixed in with the desire to rape is a dread, a tenderness, one might almost say something feminine mixed in with the masculine. And that's the way it is with all emotions; they are peculiarly pitted of their seeds and magnified.
"Ulrich elsewhere defines the three sisters as himself, Agathe, and the Other Condi- tion. -TRANs.
1432 • THE MAN WITH 0 U T QUALITIES
Morality? Morality is an insult in a condition in which every move- ment finds its justification in contributing to the honor of that condition.
But the more vividly Ulrich imagined this assumed sisterly feeling, the more . . .
To previous page: One could variously call the cardinal sin in this par- adise: having, wanting, possessing, knowing. Round about it gather the smaller sins: envying, being offended.
They all come from one's wanting to put oneself and the other in an exclusive relationship. From the selfwanting to have its way like a crystal separating from a liquid. Then there is a nodal point, and nothing but nodal points collect around it.
But ifwe are sisters, then you will want not the man, nor any thing or thought but yours. You do not say: I say. For everything will be said by everything. You do not say: I love. For love is the beloved of all of us, and when it embraces you it smiles at me. . . .
When Agathe next entered Lindner's house, he seemed to have fled in a hurry a short time before. The inviolable order in hall and rooms had been thrown into disorder, which admittedly did not take much, for quite a few of the objects that were not in their usual places in these rooms were quite upsetting to look at anyway. Hardly had Agathe sat down to wait for Lindner when Peter came rushing through the room; he had no idea that she had come in. He seemed bent on smashing to pieces everything in his path, and his face was bloated, as if everywhere beneath the pink skin tears were hiding, preparing themselves for an eruption.
-Peter? Agathe asked in dismay. -What's the mat;ter?
He wanted to go right by, but suddenly stopped and stuck out his tongue at her with such a comical expression of disgust that she had to laugh.
From the Posthumous Papers · 1433
Agathe had a soft spot for Peter. She understood that it could be no fun for a young man to have Professor Lindner for a father, and when she imagined that Peter perhaps suspected her of being his father's fu- ture wife, his antagonistic attitude toward her met with her secret ap- plause. Somehow she felt him to be a hostile ally. Perhaps only because she remembered her own youth as a pious convent-school girl. He had as yet no roots anywhere; was seeking himself, and seeking to grow up; growing up with the same pains and anomalies inside as outside. She understood that so well. What could wisdom, faith, miracles, and princi- ples mean to a young person who is still locked up in himself and not yet opened up by life to assimilate such things! She had a strange sympathy for him; for his being undisciplined and recalcitrant, for his being young, and apparently, too, simply for the badness of his way of thinking. She would gladly have been his playmate, at least here; these surroundings gave her this childish thought, but she sadly noticed that he usually treated her like an old woman.
-Peter! Peter! What's the matter? he aped her. -He'll tell you any- how. You soul-sister of his!
Agathe laughed even more and caught him by the hand.
- D o you like that? Peter went after her unabashedly. - D o you like me to howl? How old are you anyway? Not so much older than I am, I should think: but he treats you the way he treats the sublime Plato! He had disengaged himself and examined her, looking for an advantage.
- W h a t has he really done to you? Agathe asked.
-What's he done? He's punished me! I'm not at all ashamed in front of you, as you see. Soon he's going to pull down my pants, and you'll be allowed to hold me!
-Peter! For shame! Agathe warned innocently. -D id he really beat you?
- D i d he? Peter? Maybe you'd like that?
-Shame on you, Peter!
- N o t at all! Why don't you call me Herr Peter? Anyway, what do you
think: there! He stretched out his tensed leg and grasped his upper thigh, strengthened from playing soccer. -Have a look for yourself; I could murder him with one hand. He doesn't have as much strength in both legs as I have in one arm. It's not me, it's you who ought to be ashamed, instead of prattling wisdom with him! Do you want to know what he's done to me?
- N o , Peter, you can't talk to me that way.
-Why not?
-Because your father's heart is in the right place. And because- But
here Agathe could not find the right way to proceed; she was no good at
1434 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
preaching, although the youth was indeed in the wrong, and she sud- denly had to laugh again. - S o what did he do to you?
- H e took away my allowance!
-Wait! Agathe asked. Without stopping to think, she fished out a banknote and handed it to Peter. She herself did not know why she did this; perhaps she thought the first thing to do was to get rid of Peter's anger before she could have an effect on him, perhaps it only gave her pleasure to thwart Lindner's pedagogy. And with the same suddenness she had addressed Peter with the familiar Du. Peter looked at her in astonishment. Behind his lovely misted eyes something quite new awoke. -The second thing he imposed on me-he continued, grinning cynically, without thanking her-is also broken: the school of silence! Do you know it? Man learns through silence to remove his speech from all inner and outer irritations and make it the handmaid ofhis innermost personal considerations!
- Y o u surely said some improper things, said Agathe, falling back on the normal pronoun of address.
-This is how it was! "The first response of man to all interventions and attacks from without happens by means of the vocal cords," he quoted his father. -That's why he's ruined today and my day off from school tomorrow with room arrest, observes total silence toward me, and has forbidden me to speak a single word with anybody in the house. The third thing-he mocked-is control ofthe instinct for food-
-But, Peter, you must now really tell me-Agathe interrupted him, amused-what did you do to set him off?
The conversation in which he was mocking his father through his fu- ture mother had put the youth in the best ofspirits. -That's not so sim- ple, Agathe, he replied shamelessly. -There is, you ought to know, something that the old man fears the way the devil fears holy water: jokes. The tickling ofjokes and humor, he says, comes from idle fantasy and malice. I always have to swallow them. That's exemplary for one's character. Because, ifwe look at the joke more closely-
-Enough! Agathe commanded. -What was your forbidden joke about?
- A b o u t you! said Peter, his eyes boring into hers in challenge. But at this moment he shrank back, because the doorbell rang, and both recog- nized from the sound of the ring that it was Professor Lindner. Before Agathe could make any reproaches, Peter pressed his fingernails with painful violence into her hand and stole out of the room.
From the Posthumous Papers · 1435
There were also violent rebellions.
Agathe owned a piano. She was sitting at it in the twilight, playing.
The uncertainty of her frame of mind played along with the notes. Ul- rich came in. His voice sounded cold and mute as he greeted her. She interrupted her playing. When the words had died away, her fingers went a few steps further through the boundless land of music.
-Stay where you are! ordered Ulrich, who had stepped back, draw- ing a pistol from his pocket. -Nothing's going to happen to you. He spoke altogether differently, a stranger. Then he fired at the piano, shooting into the center of its long black flank. The first bullet cut through the dry, tender wood and howled across the strings. A second churned up leaping sounds. As shot followed shot, the keys began to hop. The jubilantly sharp reports of the pistol drove with increasing frenzy into a splintering, screaming, tearing, drumming, and singing up- roar. When the magazine was empty, Ulrich let it drop to the carpet-he only noticed it when he futilely tried to get off two more shots. He gave the impression of a madman, pale, his hair hanging down over his fore- head; a fit had seized him and carried him far away from himself. Doors slammed in the house, people were listening; slowly, in such impres- sions, reason again took possession of him.
Agathe had neither lifted her hand nor uttered the slightest sound to prevent the destruction of the expensive piano or flee the danger. She felt no fear, and although the beginning of her brother's outbreak could have seemed insane, this thought did not frighten her. She accepted it as a pleasant end. The strange cries of the wounded instrument aroused in her the idea that she would have to leave the earth in a swarm of fantasti- cally fluttering birds.
Ulrich pulled himself together and asked if she was angry with him; Agathe denied it with radiant eyes. His face again assumed its usual ex- pression. - I don't know-he said-why I did it. I couldn't resist the impulse.
Agathe reflectively tried out a few isolated strings that had survived.
- I feel like a fool . . . , Ulrich pleaded, and cautiously ran his hand through his sister's hair, as if his fingers could find refuge from them- selves there. Agathe withdrew them again by the wrist and pushed them away. - W h a t came over you? she asked.
- I have no idea, Ulrich said, making an unconscious motion with his arms as if he wanted to brush off the embrace of something tenacious and kick it away.
Agathe said: If you wished to repeat that, it would turn into a quite
I436 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
ordinary target practice. Suddenly she stood up and laughed. -Now you'll have to have the piano completely rebuilt. What won't that all lead to: orders, explanations, bills . . . ! For that reason alone something like this can't happen again.
- 1 had to do it, Ulrich explained shyly.
- 1 would just as gladly have shot at a mirror ifyou'd happened to be looking in it.
- A n d now you're upset that one can't do such a thing twice. But it was beautiful just as it was. She pushed her arm in his and drew close to him. - T h e rest of the time you're never willing to do anything unless you know where it will lead!
On the same evening, Ulrich had to put in an appearance at a garden party. He could not very well beg off, although he would have done so had not his despair I depression impelled him to go. But he arrived late; it was near midnight. The greater part of the guests had already laid aside their masks. Among the trees of the old grounds torches flamed, rammed into the ground like burning spears or fastened with brackets to the trunks of trees. Gigantic tables had been set up, covered with white cloths. A flickering fire reddened the bark of the trees, the silently sway- ing canopy of leaves overhead, and the faces of countless people crowded together, which from a little distance seemed to consist only of such red and black spots. It seemed to have been the watchword among the ladies to appear in men's costumes. Ulrich recognized a Frau Maya Sommer as a soldier from the army of Maria Theresa, the painter von Hartbach as a Tyrolean with bare knees, and Frau Clara Kahn, the wife ofthe famous physician, in a Beardsley costume. He also discovered that even among the younger women of the upper nobility, so far as he knew them by sight, many had chosen a mannish or boyish disguise; there were jockeys and elevator boys, half-mannish Dianas, female Hamlets, and corpulent Turks. The fashion of slacks for women, advocated just recently, seemed, although no one had followed it, to have had some effect upon the imagination nonetheless; for that time, in which women belonged to the world at most from ground level to halfway up their calves, but between there and the neck only to their husbands and lov- ers, to be seen like that at a party where one might expect to see mem- bers of the Imperial House was something unheard of, a revolution, even if only a revolution of caprice, and the precursor of the vulgar cus- toms that the older and stouter ladies were already privileged to predict, while the others noticed nothing but exuberance. Ulrich thought he
From the Posthumous Papers · 1437
could excuse himself from greeting the old prince, around whom as mas- ter of the house a group of people was in constant attendance, while he- barely knew him; he looked for [his valet] Tzi to ask him to do some- thing, but when he could not find him anywhere assumed that the indus- trious man had already gone home, and sauntered away from the center of activity to the edge of a grove of trees, from which, over an enormous grass lawn, one could catch a glimpse of the castle. This magnificent old castle had had fastened to it long rows of electric lights like footlights, which shone from under cornices or ran up pillars and liquefied, as it were, the forms of the architecture from out of the shadows, as if the stem old master who had devised them was among the guests and a little tipsy beneath a blanched paper hat. Below, one could see the servants running in and out through the dark door openings, while above, the ugly reddish-gray night sky of the city arched forward like an umbrella into the other, pure dark night sky, which one glimpsed, with its stars, whenever one lifted one's eyes. Ulrich did so, and was as if drunk from a combination of disgust and joy. As he let his glance fall, he perceived a nearby figure that had previously escaped his notice.
It was a tall woman in the costume of a Napoleonic colonel, and she was wearing a mask; by which Ulrich recognized immediately that it was Diotima. She acted as if she did not notice him, looking at the shining castle, sunk in thought. -Good evening, cousin! he addressed her. -Don't try to deny it; I recognize you unmistakably because you're the only person still wearing a mask.
- W h a t do you mean? the mask asked.
-Very simple: You feel ashamed. Tell me why so many women showed up in trousers?
Diotima vehemently shrugged her shoulders. -The word went around beforehand. My God, I can understand it: the old ideas are al- ready so worn out. But I really must confess to you that I'm annoyed; it was a tactless idea; you think you've stumbled into a theatrical fancy- dress ball.
-The whole thing is impossible, Ulrich said. -Such parties don't work anymore because their time is past.
-Hmph! Diotima answeredperfunctorily. She found the sight ofthe castle romantic.
-W ould the Colonel command where one might find a better opin- ion? Ulrich asked, with a challenging look at Diotima's body.
- O h , my dear friend, don't call me Colonel!
There was something new in her voice. Ulrich stepped close to her. She had taken off her mask. He noticed two tears that fell slowly from her eyes. This tall, weeping officer was totally ridiculous, but also very
1438 • THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
beautiful. He seized her hands and gently asked what the matter was. Diotima could not answer; a sob she was trying to suppress stirred the bright sheen of the white riding breeches that reached far up beneath her flung-back coat. They stood thus in the half-darkness of the light sinking into the lawns. - W e can't talk here, Ulrich whispered. - C o m e with me somewhere else. If you permit, I'll take you to my house. Di- otima tried to draw her hand away from his, but when this didn't work she let it be. Ulrich felt by this gesture what he. could hardly believe, that his hour with this woman had come. He grasped Diotima respectably around the waist and led her, supporting her tenderly, deeper into the shadows and then around to the exit. I A kiss right here?
Before they again emerged into the light, Diotima had ofcourse dried her tears and mastered her excitement, at least outwardly. -You've never noticed, Ulrich-she said in a low voice-that I've loved you for a long time; like a brother. I don't have anyone I can talk to. Since there were people nearby, Ulrich only murmured: -Come, we'll talk. But in the taxi he did not say a word, and Diotima, anxiously holding her coat closed, moved away from him into the comer. She had made up her mind to confess her woes to him, and when Diotima resolved to do something it was done; although in her whole life she had never been with another man at night than Section ChiefTuzzi, she followed Ulrich because before she had run into him she had made up her mind to have a long talk with him if he was there, and felt/had a great, melancholy longing for such a talk. The excitement ofcarrying out this firm resolve had an unfortunate physical effect on her; it was literally true that her resolve lay in her stomach like some indigestible food, and when (in ad- dition) the excitement suppressed all the juices that could dissolve it, Diotima felt cold sweat on her forehead and neck as iffrom nausea. She was diverted from herself only by the impression that arriving at Ulrich's made on her; the small grounds, where the electric bulbs on the tree trunks formed an alley, seemed to her charming as they strolled through; the entry hall with the antlers and the small baroque staircase reminded her of hunting horns, packs of hounds, and horsemen, a n d - since nighttime reinforces such impressions and conceals their weak- nesses-out of admiration for her cousin she could not understand why he had never showed off this house but had, as it always seemed, only made fun of it.
Ulrich laughed, and got something warm to drink. -Looked at more closely, it's a stupid frivolity-he said-but let's not talk about me. Tell me what's been happening to you. Diotima could not utter a word; this had never happened to her before; she sat in her uniform and felt il- luminated by the many lights that Ulrich had turned on. It confused her.
From the Posthurrwus Papers · 1439
- S o Arnheim has acted badly? Ulrich tried to help.
Diotima nodded. Then she began. Arnheim was free to do as he pleased. Nothing had ever happened between her and him that would, in the ordinary sense, have imposed any obligations on him or given him any privileges.
-But ifI've observed rightly, the situation between you had already gone so far that you were to get a divorce and many him? Ulrich inter- jected.
- O h , many? the Colonel said. - W e might perhaps have got mar- ried, ifhe had behaved himselfbetter; that can come like a ring that one finally slips on loosely, but it ought not to be a band that binds!
- B u t what did Arnheim do? Do you mean his escapade with Leona? - D o you know this person?
-Barely.
- I s she beautiful?
-One might call her that.
-Does she have charm? Intelligence? What sort ofintelligence does she have?
-But, my dear cousin, she has no intelligence of any kind whatso- ever!
Diotima crossed one leg over the other and allowed herself to be handed a cigarette; she had gathered a little courage. -W as it out of protest that you appeared at the party in this outfit? Ulrich asked. - A m I right? Nothing else would have moved you to do such a thing. A kind of Overman in you enticed you, after men failed you: I can't find the right words.
-But, my dear friend, Diotima began, and suddenly behind the smoke of the cigarette tears were again running down her face. - I was the oldest of three daughters. All my youth I had to play the mother; we had no mother; I always had to answer all the questions, know every- thing, watch over everything. I married Section ChiefTuzzi because he was a good deal older than I and already beginning to lose his hair. I wanted a person I could finally subject myself to, from whose hand my brow would receive grace or displeasure. I am not unfeminine. I am not so proud as you know me. I confess to you that during the early years I felt bliss in Tuzzi's arms, like a little girl that death abducts to God the father. But for . . . years I've had to despise him. He's a vulgar utilitarian. He doesn't see or understand anything about anything else. Do you know what that means!
Diotima had jumped up; her coat remained lying in the chair; her hair hung over her cheeks like a schoolgirl's; her left hand rested now in manly fashion on the pommel of her saber, now in womanly fashion
1440 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
went through her hair; her right arm made large oratorical flourishes; she advanced one leg or closed her legs tightly together, and the round belly in the white riding breeches had-and this lent a remarkably comic effect-not the slightest irregularity such as a man betrays. Ulrich now first noticed that Diotima was slightly drunk. In her doleful mood she had, at the party, tossed off several glasses of hard spirits one after an- other, and now, after Ulrich, too, had offered her alcohol, the tipsiness had been freshly touched up. But her intoxication was only great enough to erase the inhibitions and fantasies of which she normally consisted, and really only exposed something like her natural nature: not all ofit, to be sure, for as soon as Diotima came to speak of Arnheim, she began to talk about her soul.
She had given her entire soul to this man. Did Ulrich believe that in such questions an Austrian has a finer sensibility, more culture?
-No.
-But perhaps he does! - Arnheim was certainly an important per- son. But he had failed ignominiously. Ignominiouslyi-I gave him ev- erything, he exploited me, and now I'm miserable!
It was clear that the suprahuman and suggestive love play with Arn- heim, rising physically to no more than a kiss but mentally to a bound- less, floating duet of souls (a love play that had lasted many weeks, during which Diotima's quarrel with her husband had kept it pure), had so stirred up Diotima's natural fire that, to put it crudely, someone ought to be kicking it out from under the kettle to prevent some kind of acci- dent of exploding nerves. This was what Diotima, consciously or not, wanted from Ulrich. She had sat down on a sofa; her sword lay across her knees, the sulfurous mist of gentle rapture over her eyes, as she said: -Listen, Ulrich: you're the only person before whom I'm not ashamed. Because you're so bad. Because you're so much worse than I am.
Ulrich was in despair. The circumstances reminded him of the scene with Gerda that had taken place here weeks ago, like this one the result of a preceding overstimulation. But Diotima was no girl overstimulated by forbidden embraces. Her lips were large and open, her body damp and breathing like turned-up garden soil, and under the veil of desire her eyes were like two gates that opened into a dark corridor. But Ulrich was not thinking of Gerda at all; he saw Agathe before him, and wanted to scream with jealousy at the sight ofthis feminine inability to resist any longer, although he felt his own resistance fading from second to sec- ond. His expectation was already a mirror in which he saw the breaking of these eyes, their growing dull, as only death and love can achieve, the parting in a faint of lips between which the last breath steals away, and he could hardly still expect to feel this person sitting there before him
From the Posthumous Papers · I 44 I
collapsing completely and looking at him as he turned away in decay, like a Capuchin monk descending into the catacombs. Apparently his thoughts were already heading in a direction in which he hoped to find salvation, for with all his strength he was fighting his own collapse. He had clenched his fists and was drilling his eyes, from Diotima's view- point, into her face in a horrible way. At this moment she felt nothing but fear and approval of him. Then a distorted thought occurred to Ul- rich, or he read it from the distortion of the face into which he was look- ing. Softly and emphatically he replied: - Y o u have no idea how bad I am. I can't love you; I'd have to be able to beat you to love you!
Diotima gazed stupidly into his eyes. Ulrich hoped to wound her pride, her vanity, her reason; but perhaps it was only his natural feelings of animosity against her that had mounted up in him and to which he was giving expression. He went on: - F o r months I haven't been able to think of anything but beating you until you howl like a little child! And he suddenly seized her by the shoulders, near the neck. The imbecility ofsacrifice in her face grew. Beginnings ofwanting to say something still twitched in this face, to save the situation through some kind of de- tached comment. Beginnings of standing up twitched in her thighs, but reversed themselves before reaching their goal. Ulrich had seized her saber and half drawn it from its scabbard. - F o r God's sake! he felt. - I f nothing intervenes I'll hit her over the head with it until she gives no more signs of her damned life! He did not notice that in the meantime a decisive change had been taking place in the Napoleonic colonel. Di- otima sighed heavily as if the entire woman that she had been since her twelfth year was escaping from her bosom, and then she leaned over to the side so as to let Ulrich's desire pour itself over her in whatever way he liked.
If her face had not been there, Ulrich would at this moment have laughed out loud. But this face was indescribable the way insanity is, and just as infectious. He threw away the saber and gave her, twice, a rough smack. Diotima had expected it to be different, but the physical concus- sion nevertheless had its effect. Something started going the way clocks sometimes start when they are roughly treated, and in the ordinary course that events took from that point on something unusual was also mingled, a scream and rattle of the emotions.
Childish words and gestures from long ago mingled with it, and the few hours until morning were filled with a kind of dark, childish, and blissful dream state that freed Diotima from her character and brought her back to the time when one does not yet think about anything and everything is good. When day shone through the panes she was lying on her knees, her uniform was scattered over the floor, her hair had fallen
1442 · THE MAN WITH0 UT QUALITIES
over her face, and her cheeks were full of saliva. She could not recall how she had come to be in this position, and her awakening reason was horrified at her fading ecstasy. There was no sign of Ulrich.
[Valerie]
A young person tells himself: I'm in love. For the first time. He tells himself, he doesn't just do it; for there is in him still a little ofthe childish pride ofwanting to possess the world ofgrownups, the whole world.
He might have previously desired and possessed beautiful women. He might also have been in love before; in various ways: impatiently, boldly, cynically, passionately; and yet the moment may still come when he tells himself for the first time: I'm in love. Ulrich had at the time immediately loosened the bonds that tied him to the woman with whom this happened, so that it was almost like a breaking up. He left from one day to the next; said, We won't write much. Then wrote letters that were like the revelation of a religion, but hesitated to mail them. The more powerfully the new experience grew in him, the less he let any of it show.
He suddenly began to recall this vividly. At that time he had been quite young, an army officer, on leave in the countryside. Perhaps that was what had brought about his shift in mood. He was spiritedly court- ing a woman, older than he, the wife of a cavalry captain, his superior; she had for a long time been favorably inclined toward him, but seemed to be avoiding an adventure with this beardless little man who confused her with his unusual philosophical and passionate speeches, which came from beyond her circle. On a stroll, he suddenly seized her hand; fate had it that the woman left her hand for a moment in his as ifpowerless, and the next instant a fire blazed from arms to knees and the lightning bolt oflove felled both ofthem, so that they almost fell by the side ofthe path, to sit on its moss and passionately embrace.
The night that followed was sleepless. Ulrich had said good-bye in the evening and said: tomorrow we run away. Desire aroused and not yet satisfied threw the woman back and forth in her bed, dry as thirst, but at the same time she feared the stream that was to moisten her lips in the morning, because of its overflowing suddenness. The entire night she
From the Posthurrwus Papers · 1443
reproached herselfbecause of the other's youth, and also on account of her husband, for she was a good wife, and in the morning wept tears of reliefwhen she had handed to her Ulrich's letter, in which he took such an abrupt departure amid piled-up protestations.
Valerie had been the name of this good-natured woman, Ulrich re- membered, and at that time, in spite of his inexperience, he must have already been clearly aware that she was only the impetus, but not the content, of his sudden experience. For during that sleepless night, shot through with passionate ideas, he had been borne farther and farther away from her, and before morning came, without his rightly knowing why, his resolve was fixed to do something the like ofwhich he had never done before. He took nothing but a rucksack along, traveled a quite short stretch on the train, and then wandered, his first step already in unknown territory, through a completely isolated valley to a tiny shrine hidden high in the mountains, which at this season no one visited and where hardly anyone lived.
What he did there was, if one were to make a story of it to someone, absolutely nothing. It was fall, and in the mountains the early-autumn sun has a power of its own; mornings it lifted him up and bore him to some tree high up on the slopes, from beneath which one looked into the far distance, for in spite of his heavy hiking boots he was really not conscious ofwalking. In the same self-forgetful way he changed his loca- tion several times during the day and read a little in a few books he had with him. Nor was he really thinking, although he felt his mind more deeply agitated than usual, for his thoughts did not shake themselves up as they usually do, so that a new idea is always landing on top of the pyramid of the earlier ones while the ones at the bottom are becoming more and more compacted until finally they fuse with flesh, blood, skull case, and the tendons supporting the muscles, but his insights came like a jet into a full vessel, in endless overflowing and renewal, or they passed in an everlasting progression like clouds through the sky in which noth- ing changes, not the blue depths and not the soundless swimming of those mother-of-pearl fish. It could happen that an animal came out of the woods, observed Ulrich, and slowly bounded away without anything changing; that a cow grazed nearby, or a person went past, without any more happening than a beat of the pulse, twin to all the others of the stream of life that softly pounds without end against the walls of the un- derstanding.
Ulrich had stumbled into the heart of the world. From there it was as far to his beloved as to the blade of grass beside his feet or to the distant tree on the sky-bare heights across the valley. Strange thought: space, the nibbling in little bites, distance dis-stanced, replaces the warm husk
1444 · THE MAN WITH 0 U T QUALITIES
and leaves behind a cadaver; but here in the heart they were no longer themselves, everything was connected with him the way the foot is no farther from the heart than the breast is. Ulrich also no longer felt that the landscape in which he was lying was outside him; nor was it within; that had dissolved or permeated everything. The sudden idea that some- thing might happen to him while he was lying there-a wild animal, a robber, some brute-was almost impossible of accomplishment, as far away as being frightened by one's own thoughts. I Later: Nature itself is hostile. The observer need only go into the water. I And the beloved, the person for whose sake he was experiencing all this, was no closer than some unknown traveler would have been. Sometimes his thoughts strained like eyes to imagine what they might do now, but then he gave it up again, for when he tried to approach her this way it was as if through alien territory that he imagined her in her surroundings, while he was linked to her in subterranean fashion in a quite different way.
"You're working . . .
Often everything that he and Agathe undertook, or what they saw and experienced, seemed to Ulrich only a simile. This tree and that smile are reality, because they have the quite specific quality of not merely being
1430 · THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
illusion; but are there not many realities? Was it not just yesterday that we were wearing wigs with long locks, possessed very imperfect ma- chines, but wrote splendid books? And only the day before yesterday that we carried bows and arrows and put on gold hoods at festivals, over cheeks that were painted with the blue of the night sky, and orange- yellow eye sockets? Some kind of vague sympathy for these things still quivers within us today. So much was like today and so much was differ- ent, as if it was trying to be one of many hieroglyphic languages. Does not this mean that one should also not set too much store in present things? What is bad today will perhaps in part be good tomorrow, and the beautiful ugly; disregarded thoughts will have become great ideas, and dignified ideas decay to indifference. Every order is somehow ab- surd and like a wax figure, if one takes it too seriously; every thing is a frozen individual instance of its possibilities. But those are not doubts, rather a dynamic, elastic, undefined quality that feels itself capable of anything.
But it is a peculiarity of these experiences that they are almost always experienced only in a state of nonpossession. Thus the world changes when the impassioned person yearns for God, who does not reveal Him- self, or the lover for his distant beloved, who has been snatched from him. Agathe as well as Ulrich had known these things, and to experience them reciprocally when they were together sometimes gave them real difficulty. Involuntarily they pushed the present away, by telling each other for the first time the stories of their past in which this had hap- pened. But these stories again reinforced the miraculousness of their coming together, and ended in the half-light, in a hesitant touching of hands, silences, and the trembling ofa current that flowed through their arms.
And sometimes there were violent rebellions.
Let's make an assumption-[Ulrich] said to himself, for example, in order to exclude it again later-and let's suppose that Agathe would feel loathing at the love of men. In that case, in order to please her as a man, I would have to behave like a woman. I would have to be tender toward her without desiring her. I would have to be good in the same way to all things in order not to frighten her love. I could not lift a chair unfeel- ingly, in order to move it to some other place in unsentient space; for I may not touch it out of some random idea; whatever I do must be some- thing, and it is involved with this spiritual existence, the way an actor
From the Posthumous Papers · 1431
lends his body to an idea. Is that ridiculous? No, it's nothing other than festive. For that's the sense of sacred ceremonies, where every gesture has its significance. That is the sense of all things when they emerge again before our eyes for the first time with the morning sun. No, the object is not a means for us. It is a detail, the little nail, a smile, a curly hair of our third sister. o "I" and "you" are only objects too. But we are objects that are engaged in exchanging signals with each other; that is what gives us the miraculous: something is flowing back and forth be- tween us, I cannot look at your eyes as if at some dead object, we are burning at both ends. But if I want to do something for your sake, the thing is not a dead object either. I love it, that means that something is happening between me and it; I don't want to exaggerate, I have no in- tention of maintaining that the object is alive like me (and has feeling and talks with me), but it does live with me, we always stand in some relationship to each other.
I have said we are sisters. You have nothing against my loving the world, but I must love it like a sister, not like a man or the way a man loves a woman. A little sentimentally; you and it and I give one another presents. I take nothing away from the tenderness that I present you with if I also make a present to the world; on the contrary, every prodi- gality increases our wealth. We know that each of us has our separate relations to one another that one could not totally reveal even if one wanted to, but these secrets do not arouse any jealousy. Jealousy as- sumes that one wishes to tum love into a possession. However, I can lie in the grass, pressed to the lap of earth, and you will feel the sweetness of this moment along with me. But I may not regard the earth as an artist or a researcher: then I would be making it my own, and we would form a couple that would exclude you as a third.
What, then, in everyday life really distinguishes the most primitive af- fect oflove from mere sexual desire? Mixed in with the desire to rape is a dread, a tenderness, one might almost say something feminine mixed in with the masculine. And that's the way it is with all emotions; they are peculiarly pitted of their seeds and magnified.
"Ulrich elsewhere defines the three sisters as himself, Agathe, and the Other Condi- tion. -TRANs.
1432 • THE MAN WITH 0 U T QUALITIES
Morality? Morality is an insult in a condition in which every move- ment finds its justification in contributing to the honor of that condition.
But the more vividly Ulrich imagined this assumed sisterly feeling, the more . . .
To previous page: One could variously call the cardinal sin in this par- adise: having, wanting, possessing, knowing. Round about it gather the smaller sins: envying, being offended.
They all come from one's wanting to put oneself and the other in an exclusive relationship. From the selfwanting to have its way like a crystal separating from a liquid. Then there is a nodal point, and nothing but nodal points collect around it.
But ifwe are sisters, then you will want not the man, nor any thing or thought but yours. You do not say: I say. For everything will be said by everything. You do not say: I love. For love is the beloved of all of us, and when it embraces you it smiles at me. . . .
When Agathe next entered Lindner's house, he seemed to have fled in a hurry a short time before. The inviolable order in hall and rooms had been thrown into disorder, which admittedly did not take much, for quite a few of the objects that were not in their usual places in these rooms were quite upsetting to look at anyway. Hardly had Agathe sat down to wait for Lindner when Peter came rushing through the room; he had no idea that she had come in. He seemed bent on smashing to pieces everything in his path, and his face was bloated, as if everywhere beneath the pink skin tears were hiding, preparing themselves for an eruption.
-Peter? Agathe asked in dismay. -What's the mat;ter?
He wanted to go right by, but suddenly stopped and stuck out his tongue at her with such a comical expression of disgust that she had to laugh.
From the Posthumous Papers · 1433
Agathe had a soft spot for Peter. She understood that it could be no fun for a young man to have Professor Lindner for a father, and when she imagined that Peter perhaps suspected her of being his father's fu- ture wife, his antagonistic attitude toward her met with her secret ap- plause. Somehow she felt him to be a hostile ally. Perhaps only because she remembered her own youth as a pious convent-school girl. He had as yet no roots anywhere; was seeking himself, and seeking to grow up; growing up with the same pains and anomalies inside as outside. She understood that so well. What could wisdom, faith, miracles, and princi- ples mean to a young person who is still locked up in himself and not yet opened up by life to assimilate such things! She had a strange sympathy for him; for his being undisciplined and recalcitrant, for his being young, and apparently, too, simply for the badness of his way of thinking. She would gladly have been his playmate, at least here; these surroundings gave her this childish thought, but she sadly noticed that he usually treated her like an old woman.
-Peter! Peter! What's the matter? he aped her. -He'll tell you any- how. You soul-sister of his!
Agathe laughed even more and caught him by the hand.
- D o you like that? Peter went after her unabashedly. - D o you like me to howl? How old are you anyway? Not so much older than I am, I should think: but he treats you the way he treats the sublime Plato! He had disengaged himself and examined her, looking for an advantage.
- W h a t has he really done to you? Agathe asked.
-What's he done? He's punished me! I'm not at all ashamed in front of you, as you see. Soon he's going to pull down my pants, and you'll be allowed to hold me!
-Peter! For shame! Agathe warned innocently. -D id he really beat you?
- D i d he? Peter? Maybe you'd like that?
-Shame on you, Peter!
- N o t at all! Why don't you call me Herr Peter? Anyway, what do you
think: there! He stretched out his tensed leg and grasped his upper thigh, strengthened from playing soccer. -Have a look for yourself; I could murder him with one hand. He doesn't have as much strength in both legs as I have in one arm. It's not me, it's you who ought to be ashamed, instead of prattling wisdom with him! Do you want to know what he's done to me?
- N o , Peter, you can't talk to me that way.
-Why not?
-Because your father's heart is in the right place. And because- But
here Agathe could not find the right way to proceed; she was no good at
1434 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
preaching, although the youth was indeed in the wrong, and she sud- denly had to laugh again. - S o what did he do to you?
- H e took away my allowance!
-Wait! Agathe asked. Without stopping to think, she fished out a banknote and handed it to Peter. She herself did not know why she did this; perhaps she thought the first thing to do was to get rid of Peter's anger before she could have an effect on him, perhaps it only gave her pleasure to thwart Lindner's pedagogy. And with the same suddenness she had addressed Peter with the familiar Du. Peter looked at her in astonishment. Behind his lovely misted eyes something quite new awoke. -The second thing he imposed on me-he continued, grinning cynically, without thanking her-is also broken: the school of silence! Do you know it? Man learns through silence to remove his speech from all inner and outer irritations and make it the handmaid ofhis innermost personal considerations!
- Y o u surely said some improper things, said Agathe, falling back on the normal pronoun of address.
-This is how it was! "The first response of man to all interventions and attacks from without happens by means of the vocal cords," he quoted his father. -That's why he's ruined today and my day off from school tomorrow with room arrest, observes total silence toward me, and has forbidden me to speak a single word with anybody in the house. The third thing-he mocked-is control ofthe instinct for food-
-But, Peter, you must now really tell me-Agathe interrupted him, amused-what did you do to set him off?
The conversation in which he was mocking his father through his fu- ture mother had put the youth in the best ofspirits. -That's not so sim- ple, Agathe, he replied shamelessly. -There is, you ought to know, something that the old man fears the way the devil fears holy water: jokes. The tickling ofjokes and humor, he says, comes from idle fantasy and malice. I always have to swallow them. That's exemplary for one's character. Because, ifwe look at the joke more closely-
-Enough! Agathe commanded. -What was your forbidden joke about?
- A b o u t you! said Peter, his eyes boring into hers in challenge. But at this moment he shrank back, because the doorbell rang, and both recog- nized from the sound of the ring that it was Professor Lindner. Before Agathe could make any reproaches, Peter pressed his fingernails with painful violence into her hand and stole out of the room.
From the Posthumous Papers · 1435
There were also violent rebellions.
Agathe owned a piano. She was sitting at it in the twilight, playing.
The uncertainty of her frame of mind played along with the notes. Ul- rich came in. His voice sounded cold and mute as he greeted her. She interrupted her playing. When the words had died away, her fingers went a few steps further through the boundless land of music.
-Stay where you are! ordered Ulrich, who had stepped back, draw- ing a pistol from his pocket. -Nothing's going to happen to you. He spoke altogether differently, a stranger. Then he fired at the piano, shooting into the center of its long black flank. The first bullet cut through the dry, tender wood and howled across the strings. A second churned up leaping sounds. As shot followed shot, the keys began to hop. The jubilantly sharp reports of the pistol drove with increasing frenzy into a splintering, screaming, tearing, drumming, and singing up- roar. When the magazine was empty, Ulrich let it drop to the carpet-he only noticed it when he futilely tried to get off two more shots. He gave the impression of a madman, pale, his hair hanging down over his fore- head; a fit had seized him and carried him far away from himself. Doors slammed in the house, people were listening; slowly, in such impres- sions, reason again took possession of him.
Agathe had neither lifted her hand nor uttered the slightest sound to prevent the destruction of the expensive piano or flee the danger. She felt no fear, and although the beginning of her brother's outbreak could have seemed insane, this thought did not frighten her. She accepted it as a pleasant end. The strange cries of the wounded instrument aroused in her the idea that she would have to leave the earth in a swarm of fantasti- cally fluttering birds.
Ulrich pulled himself together and asked if she was angry with him; Agathe denied it with radiant eyes. His face again assumed its usual ex- pression. - I don't know-he said-why I did it. I couldn't resist the impulse.
Agathe reflectively tried out a few isolated strings that had survived.
- I feel like a fool . . . , Ulrich pleaded, and cautiously ran his hand through his sister's hair, as if his fingers could find refuge from them- selves there. Agathe withdrew them again by the wrist and pushed them away. - W h a t came over you? she asked.
- I have no idea, Ulrich said, making an unconscious motion with his arms as if he wanted to brush off the embrace of something tenacious and kick it away.
Agathe said: If you wished to repeat that, it would turn into a quite
I436 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
ordinary target practice. Suddenly she stood up and laughed. -Now you'll have to have the piano completely rebuilt. What won't that all lead to: orders, explanations, bills . . . ! For that reason alone something like this can't happen again.
- 1 had to do it, Ulrich explained shyly.
- 1 would just as gladly have shot at a mirror ifyou'd happened to be looking in it.
- A n d now you're upset that one can't do such a thing twice. But it was beautiful just as it was. She pushed her arm in his and drew close to him. - T h e rest of the time you're never willing to do anything unless you know where it will lead!
On the same evening, Ulrich had to put in an appearance at a garden party. He could not very well beg off, although he would have done so had not his despair I depression impelled him to go. But he arrived late; it was near midnight. The greater part of the guests had already laid aside their masks. Among the trees of the old grounds torches flamed, rammed into the ground like burning spears or fastened with brackets to the trunks of trees. Gigantic tables had been set up, covered with white cloths. A flickering fire reddened the bark of the trees, the silently sway- ing canopy of leaves overhead, and the faces of countless people crowded together, which from a little distance seemed to consist only of such red and black spots. It seemed to have been the watchword among the ladies to appear in men's costumes. Ulrich recognized a Frau Maya Sommer as a soldier from the army of Maria Theresa, the painter von Hartbach as a Tyrolean with bare knees, and Frau Clara Kahn, the wife ofthe famous physician, in a Beardsley costume. He also discovered that even among the younger women of the upper nobility, so far as he knew them by sight, many had chosen a mannish or boyish disguise; there were jockeys and elevator boys, half-mannish Dianas, female Hamlets, and corpulent Turks. The fashion of slacks for women, advocated just recently, seemed, although no one had followed it, to have had some effect upon the imagination nonetheless; for that time, in which women belonged to the world at most from ground level to halfway up their calves, but between there and the neck only to their husbands and lov- ers, to be seen like that at a party where one might expect to see mem- bers of the Imperial House was something unheard of, a revolution, even if only a revolution of caprice, and the precursor of the vulgar cus- toms that the older and stouter ladies were already privileged to predict, while the others noticed nothing but exuberance. Ulrich thought he
From the Posthumous Papers · 1437
could excuse himself from greeting the old prince, around whom as mas- ter of the house a group of people was in constant attendance, while he- barely knew him; he looked for [his valet] Tzi to ask him to do some- thing, but when he could not find him anywhere assumed that the indus- trious man had already gone home, and sauntered away from the center of activity to the edge of a grove of trees, from which, over an enormous grass lawn, one could catch a glimpse of the castle. This magnificent old castle had had fastened to it long rows of electric lights like footlights, which shone from under cornices or ran up pillars and liquefied, as it were, the forms of the architecture from out of the shadows, as if the stem old master who had devised them was among the guests and a little tipsy beneath a blanched paper hat. Below, one could see the servants running in and out through the dark door openings, while above, the ugly reddish-gray night sky of the city arched forward like an umbrella into the other, pure dark night sky, which one glimpsed, with its stars, whenever one lifted one's eyes. Ulrich did so, and was as if drunk from a combination of disgust and joy. As he let his glance fall, he perceived a nearby figure that had previously escaped his notice.
It was a tall woman in the costume of a Napoleonic colonel, and she was wearing a mask; by which Ulrich recognized immediately that it was Diotima. She acted as if she did not notice him, looking at the shining castle, sunk in thought. -Good evening, cousin! he addressed her. -Don't try to deny it; I recognize you unmistakably because you're the only person still wearing a mask.
- W h a t do you mean? the mask asked.
-Very simple: You feel ashamed. Tell me why so many women showed up in trousers?
Diotima vehemently shrugged her shoulders. -The word went around beforehand. My God, I can understand it: the old ideas are al- ready so worn out. But I really must confess to you that I'm annoyed; it was a tactless idea; you think you've stumbled into a theatrical fancy- dress ball.
-The whole thing is impossible, Ulrich said. -Such parties don't work anymore because their time is past.
-Hmph! Diotima answeredperfunctorily. She found the sight ofthe castle romantic.
-W ould the Colonel command where one might find a better opin- ion? Ulrich asked, with a challenging look at Diotima's body.
- O h , my dear friend, don't call me Colonel!
There was something new in her voice. Ulrich stepped close to her. She had taken off her mask. He noticed two tears that fell slowly from her eyes. This tall, weeping officer was totally ridiculous, but also very
1438 • THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
beautiful. He seized her hands and gently asked what the matter was. Diotima could not answer; a sob she was trying to suppress stirred the bright sheen of the white riding breeches that reached far up beneath her flung-back coat. They stood thus in the half-darkness of the light sinking into the lawns. - W e can't talk here, Ulrich whispered. - C o m e with me somewhere else. If you permit, I'll take you to my house. Di- otima tried to draw her hand away from his, but when this didn't work she let it be. Ulrich felt by this gesture what he. could hardly believe, that his hour with this woman had come. He grasped Diotima respectably around the waist and led her, supporting her tenderly, deeper into the shadows and then around to the exit. I A kiss right here?
Before they again emerged into the light, Diotima had ofcourse dried her tears and mastered her excitement, at least outwardly. -You've never noticed, Ulrich-she said in a low voice-that I've loved you for a long time; like a brother. I don't have anyone I can talk to. Since there were people nearby, Ulrich only murmured: -Come, we'll talk. But in the taxi he did not say a word, and Diotima, anxiously holding her coat closed, moved away from him into the comer. She had made up her mind to confess her woes to him, and when Diotima resolved to do something it was done; although in her whole life she had never been with another man at night than Section ChiefTuzzi, she followed Ulrich because before she had run into him she had made up her mind to have a long talk with him if he was there, and felt/had a great, melancholy longing for such a talk. The excitement ofcarrying out this firm resolve had an unfortunate physical effect on her; it was literally true that her resolve lay in her stomach like some indigestible food, and when (in ad- dition) the excitement suppressed all the juices that could dissolve it, Diotima felt cold sweat on her forehead and neck as iffrom nausea. She was diverted from herself only by the impression that arriving at Ulrich's made on her; the small grounds, where the electric bulbs on the tree trunks formed an alley, seemed to her charming as they strolled through; the entry hall with the antlers and the small baroque staircase reminded her of hunting horns, packs of hounds, and horsemen, a n d - since nighttime reinforces such impressions and conceals their weak- nesses-out of admiration for her cousin she could not understand why he had never showed off this house but had, as it always seemed, only made fun of it.
Ulrich laughed, and got something warm to drink. -Looked at more closely, it's a stupid frivolity-he said-but let's not talk about me. Tell me what's been happening to you. Diotima could not utter a word; this had never happened to her before; she sat in her uniform and felt il- luminated by the many lights that Ulrich had turned on. It confused her.
From the Posthurrwus Papers · 1439
- S o Arnheim has acted badly? Ulrich tried to help.
Diotima nodded. Then she began. Arnheim was free to do as he pleased. Nothing had ever happened between her and him that would, in the ordinary sense, have imposed any obligations on him or given him any privileges.
-But ifI've observed rightly, the situation between you had already gone so far that you were to get a divorce and many him? Ulrich inter- jected.
- O h , many? the Colonel said. - W e might perhaps have got mar- ried, ifhe had behaved himselfbetter; that can come like a ring that one finally slips on loosely, but it ought not to be a band that binds!
- B u t what did Arnheim do? Do you mean his escapade with Leona? - D o you know this person?
-Barely.
- I s she beautiful?
-One might call her that.
-Does she have charm? Intelligence? What sort ofintelligence does she have?
-But, my dear cousin, she has no intelligence of any kind whatso- ever!
Diotima crossed one leg over the other and allowed herself to be handed a cigarette; she had gathered a little courage. -W as it out of protest that you appeared at the party in this outfit? Ulrich asked. - A m I right? Nothing else would have moved you to do such a thing. A kind of Overman in you enticed you, after men failed you: I can't find the right words.
-But, my dear friend, Diotima began, and suddenly behind the smoke of the cigarette tears were again running down her face. - I was the oldest of three daughters. All my youth I had to play the mother; we had no mother; I always had to answer all the questions, know every- thing, watch over everything. I married Section ChiefTuzzi because he was a good deal older than I and already beginning to lose his hair. I wanted a person I could finally subject myself to, from whose hand my brow would receive grace or displeasure. I am not unfeminine. I am not so proud as you know me. I confess to you that during the early years I felt bliss in Tuzzi's arms, like a little girl that death abducts to God the father. But for . . . years I've had to despise him. He's a vulgar utilitarian. He doesn't see or understand anything about anything else. Do you know what that means!
Diotima had jumped up; her coat remained lying in the chair; her hair hung over her cheeks like a schoolgirl's; her left hand rested now in manly fashion on the pommel of her saber, now in womanly fashion
1440 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
went through her hair; her right arm made large oratorical flourishes; she advanced one leg or closed her legs tightly together, and the round belly in the white riding breeches had-and this lent a remarkably comic effect-not the slightest irregularity such as a man betrays. Ulrich now first noticed that Diotima was slightly drunk. In her doleful mood she had, at the party, tossed off several glasses of hard spirits one after an- other, and now, after Ulrich, too, had offered her alcohol, the tipsiness had been freshly touched up. But her intoxication was only great enough to erase the inhibitions and fantasies of which she normally consisted, and really only exposed something like her natural nature: not all ofit, to be sure, for as soon as Diotima came to speak of Arnheim, she began to talk about her soul.
She had given her entire soul to this man. Did Ulrich believe that in such questions an Austrian has a finer sensibility, more culture?
-No.
-But perhaps he does! - Arnheim was certainly an important per- son. But he had failed ignominiously. Ignominiouslyi-I gave him ev- erything, he exploited me, and now I'm miserable!
It was clear that the suprahuman and suggestive love play with Arn- heim, rising physically to no more than a kiss but mentally to a bound- less, floating duet of souls (a love play that had lasted many weeks, during which Diotima's quarrel with her husband had kept it pure), had so stirred up Diotima's natural fire that, to put it crudely, someone ought to be kicking it out from under the kettle to prevent some kind of acci- dent of exploding nerves. This was what Diotima, consciously or not, wanted from Ulrich. She had sat down on a sofa; her sword lay across her knees, the sulfurous mist of gentle rapture over her eyes, as she said: -Listen, Ulrich: you're the only person before whom I'm not ashamed. Because you're so bad. Because you're so much worse than I am.
Ulrich was in despair. The circumstances reminded him of the scene with Gerda that had taken place here weeks ago, like this one the result of a preceding overstimulation. But Diotima was no girl overstimulated by forbidden embraces. Her lips were large and open, her body damp and breathing like turned-up garden soil, and under the veil of desire her eyes were like two gates that opened into a dark corridor. But Ulrich was not thinking of Gerda at all; he saw Agathe before him, and wanted to scream with jealousy at the sight ofthis feminine inability to resist any longer, although he felt his own resistance fading from second to sec- ond. His expectation was already a mirror in which he saw the breaking of these eyes, their growing dull, as only death and love can achieve, the parting in a faint of lips between which the last breath steals away, and he could hardly still expect to feel this person sitting there before him
From the Posthumous Papers · I 44 I
collapsing completely and looking at him as he turned away in decay, like a Capuchin monk descending into the catacombs. Apparently his thoughts were already heading in a direction in which he hoped to find salvation, for with all his strength he was fighting his own collapse. He had clenched his fists and was drilling his eyes, from Diotima's view- point, into her face in a horrible way. At this moment she felt nothing but fear and approval of him. Then a distorted thought occurred to Ul- rich, or he read it from the distortion of the face into which he was look- ing. Softly and emphatically he replied: - Y o u have no idea how bad I am. I can't love you; I'd have to be able to beat you to love you!
Diotima gazed stupidly into his eyes. Ulrich hoped to wound her pride, her vanity, her reason; but perhaps it was only his natural feelings of animosity against her that had mounted up in him and to which he was giving expression. He went on: - F o r months I haven't been able to think of anything but beating you until you howl like a little child! And he suddenly seized her by the shoulders, near the neck. The imbecility ofsacrifice in her face grew. Beginnings ofwanting to say something still twitched in this face, to save the situation through some kind of de- tached comment. Beginnings of standing up twitched in her thighs, but reversed themselves before reaching their goal. Ulrich had seized her saber and half drawn it from its scabbard. - F o r God's sake! he felt. - I f nothing intervenes I'll hit her over the head with it until she gives no more signs of her damned life! He did not notice that in the meantime a decisive change had been taking place in the Napoleonic colonel. Di- otima sighed heavily as if the entire woman that she had been since her twelfth year was escaping from her bosom, and then she leaned over to the side so as to let Ulrich's desire pour itself over her in whatever way he liked.
If her face had not been there, Ulrich would at this moment have laughed out loud. But this face was indescribable the way insanity is, and just as infectious. He threw away the saber and gave her, twice, a rough smack. Diotima had expected it to be different, but the physical concus- sion nevertheless had its effect. Something started going the way clocks sometimes start when they are roughly treated, and in the ordinary course that events took from that point on something unusual was also mingled, a scream and rattle of the emotions.
Childish words and gestures from long ago mingled with it, and the few hours until morning were filled with a kind of dark, childish, and blissful dream state that freed Diotima from her character and brought her back to the time when one does not yet think about anything and everything is good. When day shone through the panes she was lying on her knees, her uniform was scattered over the floor, her hair had fallen
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over her face, and her cheeks were full of saliva. She could not recall how she had come to be in this position, and her awakening reason was horrified at her fading ecstasy. There was no sign of Ulrich.
[Valerie]
A young person tells himself: I'm in love. For the first time. He tells himself, he doesn't just do it; for there is in him still a little ofthe childish pride ofwanting to possess the world ofgrownups, the whole world.
He might have previously desired and possessed beautiful women. He might also have been in love before; in various ways: impatiently, boldly, cynically, passionately; and yet the moment may still come when he tells himself for the first time: I'm in love. Ulrich had at the time immediately loosened the bonds that tied him to the woman with whom this happened, so that it was almost like a breaking up. He left from one day to the next; said, We won't write much. Then wrote letters that were like the revelation of a religion, but hesitated to mail them. The more powerfully the new experience grew in him, the less he let any of it show.
He suddenly began to recall this vividly. At that time he had been quite young, an army officer, on leave in the countryside. Perhaps that was what had brought about his shift in mood. He was spiritedly court- ing a woman, older than he, the wife of a cavalry captain, his superior; she had for a long time been favorably inclined toward him, but seemed to be avoiding an adventure with this beardless little man who confused her with his unusual philosophical and passionate speeches, which came from beyond her circle. On a stroll, he suddenly seized her hand; fate had it that the woman left her hand for a moment in his as ifpowerless, and the next instant a fire blazed from arms to knees and the lightning bolt oflove felled both ofthem, so that they almost fell by the side ofthe path, to sit on its moss and passionately embrace.
The night that followed was sleepless. Ulrich had said good-bye in the evening and said: tomorrow we run away. Desire aroused and not yet satisfied threw the woman back and forth in her bed, dry as thirst, but at the same time she feared the stream that was to moisten her lips in the morning, because of its overflowing suddenness. The entire night she
From the Posthurrwus Papers · 1443
reproached herselfbecause of the other's youth, and also on account of her husband, for she was a good wife, and in the morning wept tears of reliefwhen she had handed to her Ulrich's letter, in which he took such an abrupt departure amid piled-up protestations.
Valerie had been the name of this good-natured woman, Ulrich re- membered, and at that time, in spite of his inexperience, he must have already been clearly aware that she was only the impetus, but not the content, of his sudden experience. For during that sleepless night, shot through with passionate ideas, he had been borne farther and farther away from her, and before morning came, without his rightly knowing why, his resolve was fixed to do something the like ofwhich he had never done before. He took nothing but a rucksack along, traveled a quite short stretch on the train, and then wandered, his first step already in unknown territory, through a completely isolated valley to a tiny shrine hidden high in the mountains, which at this season no one visited and where hardly anyone lived.
What he did there was, if one were to make a story of it to someone, absolutely nothing. It was fall, and in the mountains the early-autumn sun has a power of its own; mornings it lifted him up and bore him to some tree high up on the slopes, from beneath which one looked into the far distance, for in spite of his heavy hiking boots he was really not conscious ofwalking. In the same self-forgetful way he changed his loca- tion several times during the day and read a little in a few books he had with him. Nor was he really thinking, although he felt his mind more deeply agitated than usual, for his thoughts did not shake themselves up as they usually do, so that a new idea is always landing on top of the pyramid of the earlier ones while the ones at the bottom are becoming more and more compacted until finally they fuse with flesh, blood, skull case, and the tendons supporting the muscles, but his insights came like a jet into a full vessel, in endless overflowing and renewal, or they passed in an everlasting progression like clouds through the sky in which noth- ing changes, not the blue depths and not the soundless swimming of those mother-of-pearl fish. It could happen that an animal came out of the woods, observed Ulrich, and slowly bounded away without anything changing; that a cow grazed nearby, or a person went past, without any more happening than a beat of the pulse, twin to all the others of the stream of life that softly pounds without end against the walls of the un- derstanding.
Ulrich had stumbled into the heart of the world. From there it was as far to his beloved as to the blade of grass beside his feet or to the distant tree on the sky-bare heights across the valley. Strange thought: space, the nibbling in little bites, distance dis-stanced, replaces the warm husk
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and leaves behind a cadaver; but here in the heart they were no longer themselves, everything was connected with him the way the foot is no farther from the heart than the breast is. Ulrich also no longer felt that the landscape in which he was lying was outside him; nor was it within; that had dissolved or permeated everything. The sudden idea that some- thing might happen to him while he was lying there-a wild animal, a robber, some brute-was almost impossible of accomplishment, as far away as being frightened by one's own thoughts. I Later: Nature itself is hostile. The observer need only go into the water. I And the beloved, the person for whose sake he was experiencing all this, was no closer than some unknown traveler would have been. Sometimes his thoughts strained like eyes to imagine what they might do now, but then he gave it up again, for when he tried to approach her this way it was as if through alien territory that he imagined her in her surroundings, while he was linked to her in subterranean fashion in a quite different way.
"You're working . . .
