He had never spoken such words to a woman before, with the
exception
of his own de- ceased wife, and his feelings toward her had been different.
Musil - Man Without Qualities - v2
" his father instructed him.
And the "pitiable cries of the desires," as Lindner called them, died away. On this particularly manly day Peter did not want to cry, but the necessity of developing the spirit for voluble verbal defense was a terrible burden to him. He could not think ofanything more at all to say, and at this moment he even hated the lie because one had to speak in order to use it. Eagerness for murder alternated in his eyes with howls of complaint. When it had got to this point, Professor Lindner said to him kindly: "You must impose on yourself serious exercises in being silent, so that it is not the careless and ignorant person in you who speaks but the reflective and well-brought-up one, who utters words that bring joy and firmness! " And then, with a friendly expression, he lapsed into reflection. "I have no better an- vice, ifone wants to make others good"-he finally revealed to his son the conclusion he had come to-"than to be good oneself; Mat- thias Claudius says too: 'I can't think of any other way except by being oneself the way one wants children to be'! '' And with these words Professor Lindner amiably but decisively pushed away the dessert, although it was his favorite-rice pudding with sugar and chocolate-without touching it, through such loving inexorability forcing his son, who was gnashing his teeth, to do the same.
At this moment the housekeeper came in to report that Agathe was there. August Lindner straightened up in confusion. "So she did come! " a horribly distinct mute voice said to him. He was prepared to feel indignant, but he was also ready to feel a fraternal gentleness that combined in sympathetic understanding with a delicate sense of moral action, and these two countercurrents, with an enormous train of principles, staged a wild chase through his entire body before he was able to utter the simple command to show the lady into the living
From the Posthumous Papers · 1163
room. "You wait for me here! " he said to Peter severely, and hastily left. But Peter had noticed something unusual about his father's be- havior, he just didn't know what; in any event, it gave him so much rash courage that after the latter's departure, and a brief hesitation, he scooped into his mouth a spoonful ofthe chocolate that was stand- ing ready to be sprinkled, then a spoonful of sugar, and finally a big spoonful of pudding, chocolate, and sugar, a procedure he repeated several times before smoothing out all the dishes to cover his tracks.
And Agathe sat for a while al'? ne in the strange house and waited for Professor Lindner; for he was pacing back and forth in another room, collecting his thoughts before going to encounter the lovely and perilous female. She looked around and suddenly felt anxious, as if she had lost her way climbing among the branches of a dream tree and had to fear not being able to escape in one piece from its world of contorted wood and myriad leaves. A profusion of details confused her, and in the paltry taste they evinced there was a repellent acer- bity intertwined in the most remarkable way with an opposite qual- ity, for which, in her agitation, she could not immediately find words. The repulsion was perhaps reminiscent of the frozen stiffness of chalk drawings, but the room also looked as if it might smell in a grandmotherly, cloying way of medicines and ointments; and old- fashioned and unmanly ghosts, fixated with unpleasant maliciousness upon human suffering, were hovering within its walls. Agathe sniffed. And although the air held nothing more than her imaginings, she gradually found herself being led further and further backward by her feelings, until she remembered the rather anxious "smell of heaven," that aroma of incense half aired and emptied of its spices which clung to the scarves of the habits her teachers had once worn when she was a girl being brought up together with little friends in a pious convent school without at all succumbing to piety herself. For as edifying as this odor may be for people who associate it with what is right, its effect on the hearts of growing, worldly-oriented, and re- sistant girls consisted in a vivid memory of smells of protest, just as ideas and first experiences were associated with a man's mustache or
with his energetic cheeks, pungent with cologne and dusted with talc. God knows, even that odor does not deliver what it promises! And as Agathe sat on one of Lindner's renunciative upholstered chairs and waited, the empty smell of the world closed inescapably
II64 · THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
about her with the empty smell of heaven like two hollow hemi- spheres, and an intimation came over her that she was about to make up for a negligently endured class in the school of life.
She knew now where she was. Afraid yet ready, she tried to adapt to these surroundings and think of the teachings from which she had perhaps let herself be diverted too soon. But her heart reared up at this docility like a horse that refuses to respond to encouragement, and began to run wild with terror, as happens in the presence of feel- ings that would like to warn the ~derstanding but can't find any words. Nevertheless, after a while she tried again, and in support thought of her father, who had been a liberal man and had always exhibited a somewhat superficial Enlightenment style and yet, in total contradiction, had made up his mind to send her to a convent school for her education. She was inclined to regard this as a kind of conciliatory sacrifice, an attempt, propelled by a secret insecurity, to do for once the opposite of what one thinks is one's firm conviction: and because she felt a kinship with any kind of inconsistency, the situation into which she had got herself seemed to her for an instant like a daughter's secret, unconscious act of repetition. But even this second, voluntarily encouraged shudder of piety did not last; ap- parently she had definitively lost her ability to anchor her animated imaginings in a creed when she had been placed under that all-too- clerical care: for all she had to do was inspect her present surround- ings again, and with that cruel instinct youth has for the distance separating the infinitude of a teaching from the finiteness of the teacher, which indeed easily leads one to deduce the master from the servant, the sight of the home surrounding her, in which she had imprisoned herself and settled full of expectation, suddenly and irre- sistibly impelled her to laughter.
Yet she unconsciously dug her nails into the wood of the chair, for she was ashamed of her lack of resolution. What she most wanted to do was suddenly and as quickly as possible fling into the face of this unknown man everything that was oppressing her, if he would only finally deign to show himself: The criminal trafficking with her fa- ther's will-absolutely unpardonable, if one regarded it undefiantly. Hagauer's letters, distorting her image as horribly as a bad mirror without her being quite able to deny the likeness. Then, too, that she wanted to destroy this husband without actually killing him; that she
From the Posthurrwus Papers · 1 1 6 5
had indeed once married him, but not really, only blinded by self- contempt. There were in her life nothing but unusual incompletions; and finally, bringing everything together, she would also have to talk about the presentiment that hovered between herself and Ulrich, and this she could never betray, under any circumstances! She felt as churlish as a child who is constantly expected to perform a task that is too difficult. Why was the light she sometimes glimpsed always im- mediately extinguished again, like a lantern bobbing through a vast darkness, its gleam alternately swallowed up and exposed? She was robbed of all resolution, and superfluously remembered that Ulrich had once said that whoever seeks this light has to cross an abyss that has no bottom and no bridge. Did he himself, therefore, in his in- most soul, not believe in the possibility of what it was they were seek- ing together? This was what she was thinking, and although she did not really dare to doubt, she still felt herself deeply shaken. So no one could help her except the abyss itself! This abyss was God: oh, what did she know! With aversion and contempt she examined the tiny bridge that was supposed to lead across, the humility of the room, the pictures hung piously on the walls, everything feigning a confi- dential relationship with Him. She was just as close to abasing herself as she was to turning away in horror. What she would probably most have liked to do was run away once more; but when she remembered that she always ran away she thought of Ulrich again and seemed to herself "a terrible coward. " The silence at home had been like the calm before a storm, and the pressure ofwhat was approaching had catapulted her here. This was the way she saw it now, not without quite suppressing a smile; and it was also natural that something else Ulrich had said should occur to her, for he had said at some time or other: "A person never finds himself a total coward, because i f some- thing frightens him he runs just far enough away to consider himself a hero again! " And so here she sat!
II66
44
A MIGHTY DISCUSSION
At this moment Lindner entered, having made up his mind to say as much as his visitor would; but once they found themselves face-to- face, things turned out differently. Agathe immediately went on the verbal attack, which to her surprise turned out to be far more ordi- nary than what led up to it would have indicated.
''You will ofcourse recall that I asked you to explain some things to me," she began. "Now I'm here. I still remember quite well what you said against my getting a divorce. Perhaps I've understood it even better since! "
They were sitting at a large round table, separated from each other by the entire span of its diameter. In relation to her final moments alone Agathe first felt herself, at the very beginning of this encoun- ter, deep under water, but then on solid ground; she laid out the word "divorce" like a bait, although her curiosity to learn Lindner's opinion was genuine too.
And Lindner actually answered at almost the same instant: "I know quite well why you are asking me for this explanation. People will have been murmuring to you your whole life long that a belief in the suprahuman, and obeying commandments that have their origin in this belief, belong to the Middle Ages! You have discovered that such fairy tales have been disposed of by science! But are you certain that's really the way it is? "
Agathe noticed to her astonishment that at every third word or so, his lips puffed out like two assailants beneath his scanty beard. She gave no answer.
"Have you thought about it? " Lindner continued severely. "Do you know the vast number of problems it involves? It's clear you don't! But you have a magnificent way of dismissing this with a wave of your hand, and you apparently don't even realize that you're sim- ply acting under the influence of an external compulsion! "
From the Posthumous Papers · 1167
He had plunged into danger. It was not clear what murmurers he had in mind. He felt himself carried away. His speech was a long tunnel he had bored right through a mountain in order to fall upon an idea, "lies of freethinking men," which was sparkling on the other side in a cocksure light. He was not thinking of either Ulrich or Hagauer but meant both ofthem, meant everyone. "And even ifyou had thought about it"-he exclaimed in an assertively rising voice- "and were to be convinced of these mistaken doctrines that the body is nothing but a system of dead corpuscles, and the soul an interplay of glands, and society a ragbag of mechano-economic laws; and even if that were correct-which it is far from being-I would still deny that such a way of thinking knows anything about the truth of life! For what calls itself science doesn't have the slightest qualification to explicate by externals what lives within a human being as spiritual inner certainty. Life's truth is a knowledge with no beginning, and the facts of true life are not communicated by rational proof: who- ever lives and suffers has them within himself as the secret power of higher claims and as the living explanation ofhis self! "
Lindner had stood up. His eyes sparkled like two preachers in the high pulpit formed by his long legs. He looked down on Agathe om- nipotently.
'Why is he talking so much right away? '' she thought. "And what does he have against Ulrich? He hardly knows him, and yet he speaks against him openly. " Then her feminine experience in the arousal of feelings told her more quickly and certainly than reflection would have done that Lindner was speaking this way only because, in some ridiculous fashion, he was jealous. She looked up at him with an en- chanting smile.
He stood before her tall, waveringly supple, and armed, and seemed to her like a bellicose giant grasshopper from some past geo- logic age. "Good heavens! " she thought. "Now I'm going to say something that will annoy him all over again, and he'll chase after me again with his Where am I? What game am I playing? " It confused her that Lindner irritated her to the point of laughter and yet that she was not able to shrug off some of his individual expressions, like "knowledge with no beginning" or "living explanation"; such strange terms at present, but secretly familiar to her, as if she had always
1168 · THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
used them herself without being able to remember ever having heard them before. She thought: "It's gruesome, but he's already planted some of his words in my heart like children! "
Lindner was aware of having made an impression on her, and this satisfaction conciliated him somewhat. He saw before him a young woman in whom agitation seemed to alternate precariously with feigned indifference, even boldness; since he took himself for a scru- pulous expert on the female soul, he did not allow himself to be put off by this, knowing as he did that in beautiful women there was an inordinately great temptation to be arrogant and vain. He could hardly ever observe a beautiful face without an admixture of pity. People so marked were, he was convinced, almost always martyrs to their shining outward aspect, which seduced them to self-conceit and its dragging train of coldheartedness and superficiality. Still, it can also happen that a soul dwells behind a beautiful countenance, and how often has insecurity not taken refuge behind arrogance, or despair beneath frivolity! Often, indeed, this is true of particularly noble people, who are merely lacking the support of proper and un- shakable convictions. And now Lindner was gradually and com- pletely overcome once more with how the successful person has to put himself in the frame of mind of the slighted one; and as he did this he became aware that the form of Agathe's face and body pos- sessed that delightful repose unique to the great and noble; even her knee seemed to him, in the folds of its covering envelope, like the knee of Niobe. He was astonished that this specific image should force itself on him, since so far as he knew there was nothing in the least appropriate about it; but apparently the nobility of his moral pain had unilaterally come together in this image with the suspi- ciousness many children have, for he felt no less attracted than alarmed. He now noticed her breast too, which was breathing in small, rapid waves. He felt hot and bothered, and ifhis knowledge of the world had not come to his aid again he would even have felt at a loss; but at this moment of greatest captiousness it whispered to him that this bosom must enclose something unspoken, and that accord- ing to all he knew, this secret might well be connected with the di- vorce from his colleague Hagauer; and this saved him from embarrassing foolishness by instantaneously offering the possibility of desiring the revelation of this secret instead of the bosom. He de-
From the Posthurrwus Papers · 1 1 6 9
sired this with all his might, while the union of sin with the chivalric slaying of the dragon of sin hovered before his eyes in glowing colors, much as they glowed in the stained glass in his study.
Agathe interrupted this rumination with a question she addressed to him in a temperate, even restrained tone, after she had regained her composure. "You claimed that I was acting on insinuations, on external compulsion; what did you mean by that? "
Disconcerted, Lindner raised the glance that had been resting on her heart to her eyes. This had never happened to him before: he could no longer remember the last thing he had said. He had seen in this young woman a victim ofthe free-minded spirit that was confus- ing the age, and in his victorious joy had forgotten it.
Agathe repeated her question slightly differently: "I confided to you that I want a divorce from Professor Hagauer, and you replied that I was acting under insinuating influences. It might be useful to me to find out what you understand by them. I repeat, none of the customary reasons is entirely apt; even my aversion has not been in- surmountable, as the standards of the world go. I am merely con- vinced that they may not be surmounted but are to be immeasurably enlarged! "
"By whom? "
"That's just the problem you're supposed to help me solve. " She again looked at him with a gentle smile that was a kind of horribly deep decollete and that exposed her inner bosom as if it were cov- ered by a mere wisp of black lace.
Lindner involuntarily protected his eyes from the sight with a mo- tion of his hand feigning some adjustment to his glasses. The truth was that courage played the same timid role in his view of the world as it did in the feelings he harbored toward Agathe. He was one of those people who have recognized that it greatly facilitates the vic- tory ofhumilityifone first flattens arrogance with a blow ofone's fist, and his learned nature bade him fear no arrogance so bitterly as that of open-minded science, which reproaches faith with being unscien- tific. Had someone told him that the saints, with their empty and beseeching raised hands, were outmoded and in today's world would have to be portrayed grasping sabers, pistols, or even newer instru- ments in their fists, he would no doubt have been appalled; but he did not want to see the arms of knowledge withheld from faith. This
II70 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
was almost entirely an error, but he was not alone in committing it; and that was why he had assailed Agathe with words that would have merited an honorable place in his writings-and presumably did- but were out of place directed to the woman who was confiding in him. Since he now saw sitting modestly and reflectively before him the emissary of quarters of the world hostile to him, delivered into his hands by a benevolent or demonic fate, he felt this himself and was embarrassed how to respond. "Ah! " he said, as generally and dis- paragingly as possible, and accidentally hitting not far from the mark: "I meant the spirit that runs everything today and makes young peo- ple afraid they might look stupid, even unscientific, if they don't go along with every modem superstition. How should I know what slo- gans are in their minds: 'live life to the full! ' 'Say yes to life! ' 'Culti- vate your personality! ' 'Freedom of thought and art! ' In any case, everything but the commandments ofsimple and eternal morality. "
The happy intensification "stupid, even unscientific" gladdened him with its subtlety and reinvigorated his combative spirit. "You will be surprised," he continued, "that in conversing with you I am plac- ing such emphasis on science, without knowing whether you have occupied yourselfwith it a little or a lot-"
"Not at all! " Agathe interrupted him. ''I'm just an ignorant woman. " She emphasized it and seemed to be pleased with it, per- haps with a kind ofnonsanctimoniousness.
"But it's the world you move in! " Undner corrected her emphati- cally. "And whether it's freedom in values or freedom in science, they both express the same thing: spirit that has been detached from morality. "
Agathe again felt these words as sober shadows that were, how- ever, cast by something still darker in their vicinity. She was not minded to conceal her disappointment, but revealed it with a laugh: "Last time, you advised me not to think about myself, and now you're the one who is talking about me incessantly," she mockingly offered for the man standing before her to think about.
He repeated: "You're afraid of seeming old-fashioned to your- self! "
Something in Agathe's eyes twitched angrily. "You leave me speechless: this certainly doesn't apply to mel"
"And I say to you: 'You have been bought dear; do not become the
From the Posthumous Papers · 1 1 7 1
servants of man! ' " The way he said this, which was in total contrast to his entire physical appearance, like a too-heavy blossom on a weak stem, made Agathe brighten. She asked urgently and almost coarsely: "So what should I do? I was hoping you would give me a definite answer! "
Lindner swallowed and turned gloomy with earnestness. "Do what is your duty! "
"I don't know what my duty is! "
"Then you must seek duties out! "
"I don't know what duties are! "
Lindner smiled grimly. "There we have it! That's the liberation of
the personality! " he exclaimed. "Vain reflection! You can see it in yourself: when a person is free he is unhappy! When a person is free he's a phantom! " he added, raising his voice somewhat more, out of embarrassment. But then he lowered it again, and concluded with conviction: "Duty is what mankind in proper self-awareness has erected against its own weakness. Duty is one and the same truth that all great personalities have acknowledged or pointed to. Duty is the work ofthe experience ofcenturies and the result ofthe visionary glance of the blessed. But what even the simplest person knows with precision in his inmost being, if only he lives an upright life, is duty too! "
"That was a hymn with quivering candles! " Agathe noted ap- preciatively.
It was disagreeable that Lindner, too, felt that he had sung falsely. He ought to have said something else but didn't trust himself to rec- ognize in what the deviation from the genuine voice ofhis heart con- sisted. He merely allowed himself the thought that this young creature must be deeply disappointed by her husband, since she was raging so impudently and bitterly against herself, and that in spite of all the censure she provoked, she would have been worthy of a stronger man; but he had the impression that a far more dangerous idea was on the point of succeeding this one. Agathe, meanwhile, slowly and very decisively shook her head; and with the spontaneous assurance with which an excited person is seduced by another into doing something that unbalances an already precarious situation completely, she continued: "But we're talking about my divorce! And why aren't you saying anything more about God today? Why don't
1172 • THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
you simply say to me: 'God orders you to stay with Professor Hagauer! ' I can't honestly imagine that He would command such a thing! "
Lindner shrugged his tall shoulders indignantly; indeed, as they rose he himselfactually seemed to hover in the air. "I have never said a word to you about it; you're the only one who has tried to! " He defended himself gruffiy. "And for the rest, don't believe for a min- ute that God bothers Himself with the tiny egoistic antics of our emotions! That's what His law is for, which we must follow! Or doesn't that seem heroic enough for you, since people today are al- ways looking for what's 'personal'? Well, in that case I'll set a higher heroism against your claims: heroic submission! "
Every word of this carried significantly more weight than a layper- son really ought to permit himself, were it only in his thoughts; Agathe, in return, could only go on smiling in the face of such coarse derision ifshe did not want to be forced to stand up and break offthe visit; and she smiled, of course, with such assured adroitness that Lindner felt himselfgoaded into ever-greater confusion. He became aware that his inspirations were ominously rising and increasingly reinforcing a glowing intoxication that was robbing him of reflection and resounded with the will to break the obstinate mind and perhaps save the soul he saw facing him. "Our duty is painful! " he exclaimed. "Our duty may be repulsive and disgusting! Don't think I have any intention of becoming your husband's lawyer, or that my nature is to stand by his side. But you must obey the law, because it is the only thing that bestows lasting peace on us and protects us from our- selves! "
Agathe now laughed at him; she had guessed at the weapon, stem- ming from her divorce, that these effects put in her hand, and she turned the knife in the wound. "I understand so little about all that," she said. "But may I honestly confess an impression I have? When you're angry yQU get a little slippery! "
"Oh, come on! " Lindner retorted. He recoiled, his one desire not to concede such a thing at any price. He raised his voice defensively and entreated the sinning phantom sitting before him: "The spirit must not submit itselfto the flesh and all its charms and horrors! Not even in the form of disgust! And I say to you: Even though you might find it painful to control the reluctance of the flesh, as the school of
From the Posthumous Papers · 1173
marriage has apparently asked of you, you are not simply permitted to run away from it. For there lives in man a desire for liberation, and we can no more be the slaves ofour fleshly disgust than the slaves of our lust! This is obviously what you wanted to hear, since otherwise you would not have come to me! " he concluded, no less grandilo- quently than spitefully. He stood towering before Agathe; the strands of his beard moved around his lips.
He had never spoken such words to a woman before, with the exception of his own de- ceased wife, and his feelings toward her had been different. But now these feelings were intermingled with desire, as i f he were swinging a whip in his fist to chastise the whole earth; yet they were simulta- neously timid, as if he were being lofted like an escaped hat on the crest of the tornado of the sermon of repentance that had taken hold ofhim.
"There you go again, saying such remarkable things! " Agathe noted without passion, intending to shut off his insolence with a few dry words; but then she measured the enormous crash looming up before him and preferred to humble herself gently by holding back, so she continued, in a voice that had apparently suddenly been dark- ened by repentance: "I came only because I wanted you to lead me. "
Lindner went on swinging his whip of words with confused zeal; he had some sense that Agathe was deliberately leading him on, but he could not find a way out, and entrusted himself to the future. "To be chained to a man for a lifetime without feeling any physical attrac- tion is certainly a heavy sentence," he exclaimed. "But hasn't one brought this on oneself, especially if the partner is unworthy, by not having paid enough attention to the signs ofthe inner life? There are many women who allow themselves to be deluded by external cir- cumstances, and who knows if one is not being punished in order to be shaken up? " Suddenly his voice cracked. Agathe had been accom- panying his words with assenting nods of her head; but imagining Hagauer,as a bewitching seducer was too much for her, and her merry eyes betrayed it. Lindner, driven crazy by this, blared in fal- setto: "'For. he that spares the rod hates his child, but whosoever loves it chastises it! ' "
His victim's resistance had now transformed this philosopher of life, dwelling in his lofty watchtower, into a poet of chastisement and the exciting conditions that went with it. He was intoxicated by a
1174 · THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
feeling he did not recognize, which emanated from an inner fusion of the moral reprimand with which he was goading his visitor and a provocation of all his manliness, a fusion that one might symbolically characterize, as he himself now saw, as lustful.
But the "arrogant conquering female," who was finally to have been driven from the empty vanity of her worldly beauty to despair, matter-of-factly picked up on his threats about the rod and quietly asked: "Who is going to punish me? Whom are you thinking of? Are you thinking of God? "
But it was unthinkable to say such a thing! Lindner suddenly lost his courage. His scalp prickled with sweat. It was absolutely impossi- ble that the name of God should be uttered in such a context. His glance, extended like a two-tined fork, slowly withdrew from Agathe. Agathe felt it. "So he can't do it either! " she thought. She felt a reck- less desire to go on tugging at this man until she heard from his mouth what he did not want to yield to her. But for now it was enough: the conversation had reached its outer limit. Agathe under- stood that it had only been a passionate rhetorical subterfuge, heated to the point where it became transparent, and all to avoid mention- ing the decisive point. Besides, Lindner, too, now knew that every- thing he had said, indeed everything that had got him worked up, even the excess itself, was only the product ofhis fear ofexcesses; the most dissolute aspect of which he considered to be the approach with the prying tools of mind and feeling to what ought to remain veiled in lofty abstractions, toward which this excessive young woman was obviously pushing him. He now named this to himself as "an offense against the decency of faith. " For in these moments the blood drained back out of Lindner's head and resumed its normal course; he awoke like a person who finds himself standing naked far from his front door, and remembered that he could not send Agathe away without consolation and instruction. Breathing deeply, he stood back from her, stroked his beard, and said reproachfully: "You have a restless and overimaginative nature! "
"And you have a peculiar idea of gallantry! " Agathe responded coolly, for she had no desire to go on any longer.
Lindner found it necessary to repair his standing by saying something more: "You should learn in the school of reality to take your subjectivity mercilessly in hand, for whoever is incapable of it
From the Posthumous Papers · 1 1 75
will be overtaken by imagination and fantasy, and dragged to the ground . . . ! " He paused, for this strange woman was still drawing the voice from his breast quite against his will. "Woe to him who aban- dons morality; he is abandoning reality! " he added softly.
Agathe shrugged her shoulders. "I hope next time you will come to us! " she proposed.
"To that I must respond: Never! " Lindner protested, suddenly and now totally down to earth. "Your brother and I have differences ofopinion about life that make it preferable for us to avoid contact," he added as excuse.
"So I'm the one who will have to come studiously to the school of reality," Agathe replied quietly.
"No! " Lindner insisted, but then in a remarkable fashion, almost menacingly, he blocked her path; for with those words she had got up to go. "That cannot be! You cannot put me in the ambiguous posi- tion toward my colleague Hagauer of receiving your visits without his knowledge! "
"Are you always as passionate as you are today? '' Agathe asked mockingly, thereby forcing him to make way for her. She now felt, at the end, spiritless but strengthened. The fear Lindner had betrayed drew her toward actions alien to her true condition; but while the demands her brother made demoralized her easily, this man gave her back the freedom to animate her inner self however she wanted, and it comforted her to confuse him.
"Did I perhaps compromise myself a little? '' Lindner asked him- self after she had left. He stiffened his shoulders and marched up and down the room a few times. Finally he decided to continue see- ing her, containing his malaise, which was quite pronounced, in the soldierly words: "One must set oneself to remain gallant in the face of every embarrassment! "
When Agathe got up to leave, Peter had slipped hurriedly away from the keyhole, where he had been listening, not without astonish- ment, to what his father had been up to with the "big goose. "
45
BEGINNING OF A SERIES OF WONDROUS EXPERIENCES
Shortly after this visit there was a repetition of the "impossible" that was already hovering almost physically around Agathe and Ulrich, and it truly came to pass without anything at all actually happening.
Brother and sister were changing to go out for the evening. There was no one in the house to help Agathe aside from Ulrich; they had started late and had thus been in the greatest haste for a quarter ofan hour, when a short pause intervened. Piece by piece, nearly all the ornaments of war a woman puts on for such occasions were strewn on the chair backs and surfaces of the room, and Agathe was in the act of bending over her foot with all the concentration that pulling on a thin silk stocking demands. Ulrich was standing at her back. He saw her head, her neck, her shoulders, and this nearly naked back; her body was curved over her raised knee, slightly to one side, and the tension of this process rounded three folds on her neck, which shot slender and merry through her clear skin like three arrows: the charming physicality of this painting. hom of the momentarily spreading stillness, seemed to have lost its frame and passed so abruptly and directly into Ulrich's body that he moved from the spot and, neither with the involuntariness of a banner being unfurled by the wind nor exactly with deliberate reflection, crept closer on tiptoe, surprised the bent-over figure, and with gentle ferocity bit into one of these arrows, while his arm closed tightly around his sister. Then Ulrich's teeth just as cautiously released his overpowered victim; his right hand had grabbed her knee, and while with his left arm he pressed her body to his, he pulled her upright with him on upward- bounding tendons. Agathe cried out in fright.
Up to this point everything had taken place as playfully and jok- ingly as much that had gone on before, and even ifit was tinged with the colors of love, it was only with the actually shy intention of con- cealing love's unwonted dangerous nature beneath such cheerfully
From the Posthumous Papers · I I 77
intimate dress. But when Agathe got over her fright, and felt herself not so much flying through the air as rather resting in it, suddenly liberated into weightlessness and directed instead by the gentle force of the gradually decelerating motion, it brought about one of those accidents beyond human control, in which she seemed to herself strangely soothed, indeed carried away from all earthly unrest; with a movement changing the balance of her body that she could never have repeated, she also brushed away the last silken thread of com- pulsion, turned in falling to her brother, continued, so to speak, her rise as she fell, until she lay, sinking down, as a cloud of happiness in his arms. Ulrich bore her, gently pressing her body to his, through the darkening room to the window and placed her beside him in the mellow light of the evening, which flowed over her face like tears. Despite the energy everything demanded, and the force Ulrich had exercised on his sister, what they were doing seemed to them re- markably remote from energy and force; one might perhaps have been able, again, to compare it with the wondrous ardor of a paint- ing, which for the hand that invades the frame to grasp it is nothing but a ridiculous painted surface. So, too, they had nothing in mind beyond what was taking place physically, which totally filled their consciousness; and yet, alongside its nature as a harmless, indeed, at the beginning, even coarse joke, which called all their muscles into play, this physical action possessed a second nature, which, with the greatest tenderness, paralyzed their limbs and at the same time en- snared them with an inexpressible sensitivity. Questioningly they flung their arms around each other's shoulders. The fraternal stature of their bodies communicated itself to them as if they were rising up from a single root. They looked into each other's eyes with as much curiosity as if they were seeing such things for the first time. And although they would not have been able to articulate what had really happened, since their part in it had been too pressing, they still be- lieved they knew that they had just unexpectedly found themselves for an instant in the midst of that shared condition at whose border they had long been hesitating, which they had already described to each other so often but had so far only gazed at from outside.
I f they tested it soberly (and surreptitiously they both did), it signi- fied hardly more than a bewitching accident and ought to have dis- solved the next moment, or at least with the return of activity, into
1178 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
nothingness; and yet this did not happen. On the contrary, they left the window, turned on the lights, and resumed their preparations, only soon to relinquish them again, and without their having to say anything to each other, Ulrich went to the telephone and informed the house where they were expected that they were not coming. He was already dressed for the evening, but Agathe's gown was still hanging unfastened around her shoulders and she was just striving to impart some well-bred order to her hair. The technical resonance of his voice in the instrument and the connection to the world that had been established had not sobered Ulrich in the slightest: he sat down opposite his sister, who paused in what she was doing, and when their glances met, nothing was so certain as that the decision had been made and all prohibitions were now a matter of indifference to them. Their understanding announced itself to them with every breath; it was a defiantly endured agreement to finally redeem them- selves from the ill humor of longing, and it was an agreement so sweetly suffered that the notions of making it a reality nearly tore themselves loose from them and united them already in imagination, as a storm whips a veil of foam on ahead of the waves: but a still greater desire bade them be calm, and they were incapable oftouch- ing each other again. They wanted to begin, but the gestures of the flesh had become impossible for them, and they felt an ineffable warning that had nothing to do with the commandments of morality. It seemed that from a more perfect, ifstill shadowy, union, ofwhich they had already had a foretaste as in an ecstatic metaphor, a higher commandment had marked them out, a higher intimation, curiosity, or expectation had breathed upon them.
Brother and sister now remained perplexed and thoughtful, and after they had calmed their feelings they hesitantly began to speak.
Ulrich said, without thinking, the way one talks into thin air: "You are the moon-"
Agathe understood.
Ulrich said: "You have flown to the moon and it has given you back to me again-"
Agathe said nothing: moon conversations so consume one's whole heart.
Ulrich said: "It's a figure of speech. W e were beside ourselves,' W e exchanged bodies without even touching each other,' are meta-
From the Posthumous Papers · 1 1 79
phors too! But what does a metaphor signify? A little something true with a good deal of exaggeration. And yet I was about to swear, im- possible as it may be, that the exaggeration was quite small and the reality was becoming quite large! "
He said no more. He was thinking: "What reality am I talking about? Is there a second one? "
If one here leaves the conversation between brother and sister in order to follow the possibilities of a comparison that had at least some part in determining their talk, it might well be said that this reality was truly most closely related to the quixotically altered reality of moonlit nights. But if one does not comprehend this reality either, if one sees in it merely an opportunity for some ecstatic foolishness that by day were better suppressed, then if one wanted to picture accurately what was actually happening one would have to summon up the totally incredible idea that there's a piece of earth where all feelings really do change like magic as soon a5 the empty busyness of day plunges into the all-experiencing corporeality of night! Not only do external relationships melt away and re-form in the whispering enclosures of light and shadow, but the inner relationships, too, move closer together in a new way: the spoken word loses its self-will and acquires fraternal will. All affirmations express only a single surg- ing experience. The night embraces all contradictions in its shim- mering maternal arms, and in its bosom no word is false and no word true, but each is that incomparable birth of the spirit out of darkness that a person experiences in a new thought. In this way, every pro- cess on moonlit nights partakes of the nature of the unrepeatable. Of the nature ofthe intensified. Ofthe nature ofselfless generosity and a stripping away of the self. Every imparting is a parting without envy. Every giving a receiving. Every conception multifariously in- terwoven in the excitement of the night. To be this way is the only access to the knowledge ofwhat is unfolding. For in these nights the selfholds nothing back; there is no condensation ofpossession on the self's surface, hardly a memory; the intensified self radiates into an unbounded selflessness. And these nights are filled with the insane feeling that something is about to happen that has never happened before, indeed that the impoverished reason ofday can not even con- ceive of. And it is not the mouth that pours out its adoration but the body, which, from head to foot, is stretched taut in exaltation above
1180 • THE MAN WITH 0 UT QUALITIES
the darkness ofthe earth and beneath the light ofthe heavens, oscil- lating between two stars. And the whispering with one's companion is full ofa quite unknown sensuality, which is not the sensuality ofan individual human beingbut ofall that is earthly, ofall that penetrates perception and sensation, the suddenly revealed tenderness of the world that incessantly touches all our senses and is touched by them.
Ulrich had indeed never been aware in himself of a particular preference for mouthing adorations in the moonlight; but as one or- dinarily gulps life down without feeling, one sometimes has, much later, its ghostly taste on one's tongue: and in this way he suddenly felt everything he had missed in that effusiveness, all those nights he had spent heedless and lonely before he had known his sister, as sil- ver poured over an endless l{:hicket, as moon flecks in the grass, as laden apple trees, singing frost, and gilded black waters. These were only details, which did n,ot coalesce and had never found an associa- tion, but which now arose like the commingled fragrance of many herbs from an intoxicating potion. And when he said this to Agathe she felt it too.
Ulrich finally summed up everything he had said with the asser- tion: "What made us turn to each other from the very beginning can really be called a life of moonlit nights! " And Agathe breathed a deep sigh of relief. It did not matter what it meant; evidently it meant: and why don't you know a magic charm against its separating us at the last moment? She sighed so naturally and confidingly that she was not even aware of it herself.
And this again led to a movement that inclined them toward each other and kept them apart. Every strong excitement that two people have shared to the end leaves behind in them the naked intimacy of exhaustion; ifeven arguing does this, then it is infinitely more true of tender feelings that ream out the very marrow to form a flute! So Ulrich, touched, would have almost embraced Agathe when he heard her wordless complaint, as enchanted as a lover on the morn- ing after the first tempests. His hand was already touching her shoul- der, which was still bare, and at this touch she started, smiling; but in her eyes there reappeared immediately the unwished-for dissuasion. Strange images now arose in his mind: Agathe behind bars. Or fear- fully motioning to him from a growing distance, torn from him by the sundering power of alien fists. Then again he was not only the one
From the Posthumous Papers · I IB I
who was powerless and dismissed, but also the one who did this. . . . Perhaps these were the eternal images of the doubts of love, merely consumed in the average life; then again, perhaps not. He would have liked to speak to her about this, but Agathe now looked away from him and toward the open window, and hesitantly stood up. The fever of love was in their bodies, but their bodies dared no repetition, and what was beyond the window, whose drapes stood almost open, had stolen away their imagination, without which the flesh is only brutal or despondent. When Agathe took the first steps in this direction, Ulrich, guessing her assent, turned out the light in order to free their gaze into the night. The moon had come up be- hind the tops of the spruce trees, whose greenly glimmering black stood out phlegmatically against the blue-gold heights and the palely twinkling distance. Agathe resentfully inspected this meaningful sliver of the world.
"So nothing more than moonshine? " she asked.
Ulrich looked at her without answering. Her blond hair flamed in the semidarkness against the whitish night, her lips were parted by shadows, her beauty was painful and irresistible.
But evidently he was standing there in similar fashion before her gaze, with blue eye sockets in his white face, for she went on: "Do you know what you look like now? Like 'Pierrot Lunaire'! It calls for prudence! " She wanted to wrong him a little in her excitement, which almost made her weep. Ages ago, all useless young people had appeared to each other, painfully and peevishly, in the pale mask of the lunarly lonely Pierrot, powdered chalk-white except for the drop- of-blood-red lips and abandoned by a Columbine they had never possessed; this trivialized rather considerably the love for moonlit nights. But to his sister's initially growing grief, Ulrich willingly joined in. "Even 'Laugh, clown, laugh' has already sent a chill of total recognition down the spines of thousands of philistines when they hear it sung," he affirmed bitterly. But then he added softly, whisper- ing: "This whole area of feeling really is highly questionable! And yet I would give all the memories of my life for the way you look right now. " Agathe's hand had found Ulrich's. Ulrich continued softly and passionately: "To our time, the bliss of feeling means only the glut- tony of feelings and has profaned being swept away by the moon into a sentimental debauch. It does not even begin to understand that this
1182 • THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
bliss must be either an incomprehensible mental disturbance or the fragment of another life! "
These words-precisely because they were perhaps an exaggera- tion-had the faith, and with it the wings, of adventure. "Good night! " Agathe said unexpectedly, and took them with her. She had released herself and closed the drapes so hastily that the picture of the two of them standing in the moonlight disappeared as if at one blow; and before Ulrich could tum on the light she succeeded in finding her way out of the room.
And Ulrich gave her yet more time. "Tonight you'll sleep as impa- tiently as before the start of a great outing! " he called after her.
"I hope so too! " was what resounded by way of an answer in the closing of the door.
MOONBEAMS BY SUNLIGHT
When they saw each other again the next morning it was, from a dis- tance, the way one stumbles on an out-of-the-ordinary picture in an ordinary house, or even the way one catches sight of an important outdoor sculpture in the full haphazardness of nature: an island of meaning unexpectedly materializes in the senses, an elevation and condensing of the spirit from the watery fens of existence! But when they came up to each other they were embarrassed, and all that was to be felt in their glances, shading them with tender warmth, was the exhaustion of the previous night.
Who knows, besides, whether love would be so admired if it did not cause fatigue! When they became aware of the unpleasant after- effects of the previous day's excitement it made them happy again, as lovers are proud of having almost died from desire. Still, the joy they found in each other was not only such a feeling but also an arousal of the eye. Colors and shapes presented themselves as dissolved and
From the Posthu11WUS Papers · 1183
unfathomable, and yet were sharply displayed, like a bouquet of flowers drifting on dark water: their boundaries were more emphati- cally marked than usual, but in a way that made it impossible to say whether this lay in the clarity of their appearance or in the underly- ing agitation. The impression was as much part of the concise sphere of perception and attention as it was of the imprecise sphere of emo- tion; and this is just what caused this impression to hover between the internal and the external, the way a held breath hovers between inhalation and exhalation, and made it hard to discern, in peculiar opposition to its strength, whether it was part of the physical world or merely owed its origin to the heightening of inner empathy. Nor did either of them wish to make this distinction, for a kind of shame of reason held them back; and through the longish period that followed it also still forced them to keep their distance from each other, al- though their sensitivity was lasting and might well give rise to the belief that suddenly the course of the boundaries between them, as well as those between them and the world, had changed slightly.
The weather had turned summery again, and they spent a lot of time outdoors: flowers and shrubs were blooming in the garden. When Ulrich looked at a blossom-which was not exactly an in- grained habit ofthis once-impatient man-he now sometimes found no end to contemplation and, to say it all, no beginning either. I f by chance he could name it, it was a redemption from the sea of infinity. Then the little golden stars on a bare cane signified "forsythia," and those early leaves and umbels "lilacs. " But if he did not know the name he would call the gardener over, for then this old man would name an unknown name and everything was all right again, and the primordial magic by which possession of the correct name bestows protection from the untamed wildness of things demonstrated its calming power as it had ten thousand years ago. Still, it could happen differently: Ulrich could find himself abandoned and without a helper as he confronted such a little twig or flower, without even Agathe around to share his ignorance: then it suddenly seemed to him quite impossible to understand the bright green of a young leaf, and the mysteriously outlined fullness of the form of a tiny flower cup became a circle ofinfinite diversion that nothing could interrupt. In addition, it was hardly possible for a man like him, unless he were lying to himself, which on Agathe's account could not be allowed to
II84 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
happen, to believe in an abashed rendezvous with nature, whose whisperings and upward glances, piety and mute music making, are more the privilege of a special simplicity which imagines that hardly has it laid its head in the grass than God is already tickling its neck; although it has nothing against nature being bought and sold on the fruit exchange on weekdays. Ulrich despised this cut-rate mysticism ofthe cheapest price and praise, whose constant preoccupation with God is at bottom exceedingly immoral; he preferred instead to con- tinue abandoning himself to the dizziness of finding the words to characterize a color distinct enough to reach out and take hold of, or to describe one of the shapes that had taken to speaking for them- selves with such mindless compellingness. For in such a condition the word does not cut and the fruit remains on the branch, although one thinks it already in one's mouth: that is probably the first mystery of day-bright mysticism. And Ulrich tried to explain this to his sister, even ifhis ulterior motive was that it should not, someday, disappear like a delusion.
But as he did so, the passionate condition was succeeded by an- other--of a calmer, indeed sometimes almost absentminded conver- sation-which came to permeate their exchange and served each of them as a screen from the other, although they both. saw through it completely. They usually lay in the garden on two large deck chairs, which they were constantly dragging around to follow the sun; this early-summer sun was shining for the millionth time on the magic it works eve:ry year; and Ulrich said many things that just happened to pass through his mind and rounded themselves offcautiously like the moon, which was now quite pale and a little dirty, or like a soap bub- ble: and so it happened, and quite soon, that he came round to speak- ing of the confounded and frequently cursed absurdity that all understanding presupposes a kind of superficiality, a penchant for the surface, which is, moreover, expressed in the root of the word "comprehend," to lay hold of, and has to do with primordial experi- ences having been understood not singly but one by the next and thereby unavoidably connected with one another more on the sur- face than in depth. He then continued: "So if I maintain that this grass in front of us is green, it sounds quite definite, but I haven't actually said much. In truth no more than if I'd told you that some man passing by was a member of the Green family. And for heaven's
From the Posthurrunts Papers · zzBs
sake, there's no end of greens! It would be a lot better if I contented myself with recognizing that this grass is grass-green, or even green like a lawn on which it has just rained a little. . . . " He squinted lan- guidly across the fresh plot of grass illuminated by the sun and thought: "At least this is how you would probably describe it, since you're good at making visual distinctions from judging dress materi- als. But I, on the other hand, could perhaps measure the color as well: I might guess it had a wavelength of five hundred forty mil- lionths of a millimeter; and then this green would apparently be cap- tured and nailed to a specific point! But then it gets away from me again, because this ground color also has something material about it that can't be expressed in words of color at all, since it's different from the same green in silk or wool. And now we're back at the pro- found discovery that green grass is just grass green! "
Called as a witness, Agathe found it quite understandable that one could not understand anything, and responded: "I suggest you t:ry looking at a mirror in the night: it's dark, it's black, you see almost nothing at all; and yet this nothing is something quite distinctly dif- ferent from the nothing of the rest of the darkness. You sense the glass, the doubling of depth, some kind of remnant of the ability to shimmer-and yet you perceive nothing at all! "
Ulrich laughed at his sister's immediate readiness to cut knowl- edge's reputation down to size; he was far from thinking that con- cepts have no value, and knew quite well what they accomplish, even if he did not act accordingly. What he wanted to bring out was the inability to get hold of individual experiences, those experiences that for obvious reasons one has to go through alone and lonely, even when one is with another person. He repeated: "The self never grasps its impressions and utterances singly, but always in context, in real or imagined, similar or dissimilar, harmony with something else; and so everything that has a name leans on everything else in regular rows, as a link in large and incalculable unities, one relying on an- other and all penetrated by a common tension. But for that reason," he suddenly went on, differently, "if for some reason these associa- tions fail and none of them addresses the internal series of orders, one is immediately left again to face an indescribable and inhuman creation, indeed a disavowed and formless one. " With this they were back at their point of departure; but Agathe felt the dark creation
1186 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
above it, the abyss that was the "universe," the God who was to help her!
Her brother said: "Understanding gives way to irrepressible aston- ishment, and the smallest experience-of this tiny blade of grass, or the gentle sounds when your lips over there utter a word-becomes something incomparable, lonely as the world, possessed of an un- fathomable selfishness and radiating a profound narcosis .
And the "pitiable cries of the desires," as Lindner called them, died away. On this particularly manly day Peter did not want to cry, but the necessity of developing the spirit for voluble verbal defense was a terrible burden to him. He could not think ofanything more at all to say, and at this moment he even hated the lie because one had to speak in order to use it. Eagerness for murder alternated in his eyes with howls of complaint. When it had got to this point, Professor Lindner said to him kindly: "You must impose on yourself serious exercises in being silent, so that it is not the careless and ignorant person in you who speaks but the reflective and well-brought-up one, who utters words that bring joy and firmness! " And then, with a friendly expression, he lapsed into reflection. "I have no better an- vice, ifone wants to make others good"-he finally revealed to his son the conclusion he had come to-"than to be good oneself; Mat- thias Claudius says too: 'I can't think of any other way except by being oneself the way one wants children to be'! '' And with these words Professor Lindner amiably but decisively pushed away the dessert, although it was his favorite-rice pudding with sugar and chocolate-without touching it, through such loving inexorability forcing his son, who was gnashing his teeth, to do the same.
At this moment the housekeeper came in to report that Agathe was there. August Lindner straightened up in confusion. "So she did come! " a horribly distinct mute voice said to him. He was prepared to feel indignant, but he was also ready to feel a fraternal gentleness that combined in sympathetic understanding with a delicate sense of moral action, and these two countercurrents, with an enormous train of principles, staged a wild chase through his entire body before he was able to utter the simple command to show the lady into the living
From the Posthumous Papers · 1163
room. "You wait for me here! " he said to Peter severely, and hastily left. But Peter had noticed something unusual about his father's be- havior, he just didn't know what; in any event, it gave him so much rash courage that after the latter's departure, and a brief hesitation, he scooped into his mouth a spoonful ofthe chocolate that was stand- ing ready to be sprinkled, then a spoonful of sugar, and finally a big spoonful of pudding, chocolate, and sugar, a procedure he repeated several times before smoothing out all the dishes to cover his tracks.
And Agathe sat for a while al'? ne in the strange house and waited for Professor Lindner; for he was pacing back and forth in another room, collecting his thoughts before going to encounter the lovely and perilous female. She looked around and suddenly felt anxious, as if she had lost her way climbing among the branches of a dream tree and had to fear not being able to escape in one piece from its world of contorted wood and myriad leaves. A profusion of details confused her, and in the paltry taste they evinced there was a repellent acer- bity intertwined in the most remarkable way with an opposite qual- ity, for which, in her agitation, she could not immediately find words. The repulsion was perhaps reminiscent of the frozen stiffness of chalk drawings, but the room also looked as if it might smell in a grandmotherly, cloying way of medicines and ointments; and old- fashioned and unmanly ghosts, fixated with unpleasant maliciousness upon human suffering, were hovering within its walls. Agathe sniffed. And although the air held nothing more than her imaginings, she gradually found herself being led further and further backward by her feelings, until she remembered the rather anxious "smell of heaven," that aroma of incense half aired and emptied of its spices which clung to the scarves of the habits her teachers had once worn when she was a girl being brought up together with little friends in a pious convent school without at all succumbing to piety herself. For as edifying as this odor may be for people who associate it with what is right, its effect on the hearts of growing, worldly-oriented, and re- sistant girls consisted in a vivid memory of smells of protest, just as ideas and first experiences were associated with a man's mustache or
with his energetic cheeks, pungent with cologne and dusted with talc. God knows, even that odor does not deliver what it promises! And as Agathe sat on one of Lindner's renunciative upholstered chairs and waited, the empty smell of the world closed inescapably
II64 · THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
about her with the empty smell of heaven like two hollow hemi- spheres, and an intimation came over her that she was about to make up for a negligently endured class in the school of life.
She knew now where she was. Afraid yet ready, she tried to adapt to these surroundings and think of the teachings from which she had perhaps let herself be diverted too soon. But her heart reared up at this docility like a horse that refuses to respond to encouragement, and began to run wild with terror, as happens in the presence of feel- ings that would like to warn the ~derstanding but can't find any words. Nevertheless, after a while she tried again, and in support thought of her father, who had been a liberal man and had always exhibited a somewhat superficial Enlightenment style and yet, in total contradiction, had made up his mind to send her to a convent school for her education. She was inclined to regard this as a kind of conciliatory sacrifice, an attempt, propelled by a secret insecurity, to do for once the opposite of what one thinks is one's firm conviction: and because she felt a kinship with any kind of inconsistency, the situation into which she had got herself seemed to her for an instant like a daughter's secret, unconscious act of repetition. But even this second, voluntarily encouraged shudder of piety did not last; ap- parently she had definitively lost her ability to anchor her animated imaginings in a creed when she had been placed under that all-too- clerical care: for all she had to do was inspect her present surround- ings again, and with that cruel instinct youth has for the distance separating the infinitude of a teaching from the finiteness of the teacher, which indeed easily leads one to deduce the master from the servant, the sight of the home surrounding her, in which she had imprisoned herself and settled full of expectation, suddenly and irre- sistibly impelled her to laughter.
Yet she unconsciously dug her nails into the wood of the chair, for she was ashamed of her lack of resolution. What she most wanted to do was suddenly and as quickly as possible fling into the face of this unknown man everything that was oppressing her, if he would only finally deign to show himself: The criminal trafficking with her fa- ther's will-absolutely unpardonable, if one regarded it undefiantly. Hagauer's letters, distorting her image as horribly as a bad mirror without her being quite able to deny the likeness. Then, too, that she wanted to destroy this husband without actually killing him; that she
From the Posthurrwus Papers · 1 1 6 5
had indeed once married him, but not really, only blinded by self- contempt. There were in her life nothing but unusual incompletions; and finally, bringing everything together, she would also have to talk about the presentiment that hovered between herself and Ulrich, and this she could never betray, under any circumstances! She felt as churlish as a child who is constantly expected to perform a task that is too difficult. Why was the light she sometimes glimpsed always im- mediately extinguished again, like a lantern bobbing through a vast darkness, its gleam alternately swallowed up and exposed? She was robbed of all resolution, and superfluously remembered that Ulrich had once said that whoever seeks this light has to cross an abyss that has no bottom and no bridge. Did he himself, therefore, in his in- most soul, not believe in the possibility of what it was they were seek- ing together? This was what she was thinking, and although she did not really dare to doubt, she still felt herself deeply shaken. So no one could help her except the abyss itself! This abyss was God: oh, what did she know! With aversion and contempt she examined the tiny bridge that was supposed to lead across, the humility of the room, the pictures hung piously on the walls, everything feigning a confi- dential relationship with Him. She was just as close to abasing herself as she was to turning away in horror. What she would probably most have liked to do was run away once more; but when she remembered that she always ran away she thought of Ulrich again and seemed to herself "a terrible coward. " The silence at home had been like the calm before a storm, and the pressure ofwhat was approaching had catapulted her here. This was the way she saw it now, not without quite suppressing a smile; and it was also natural that something else Ulrich had said should occur to her, for he had said at some time or other: "A person never finds himself a total coward, because i f some- thing frightens him he runs just far enough away to consider himself a hero again! " And so here she sat!
II66
44
A MIGHTY DISCUSSION
At this moment Lindner entered, having made up his mind to say as much as his visitor would; but once they found themselves face-to- face, things turned out differently. Agathe immediately went on the verbal attack, which to her surprise turned out to be far more ordi- nary than what led up to it would have indicated.
''You will ofcourse recall that I asked you to explain some things to me," she began. "Now I'm here. I still remember quite well what you said against my getting a divorce. Perhaps I've understood it even better since! "
They were sitting at a large round table, separated from each other by the entire span of its diameter. In relation to her final moments alone Agathe first felt herself, at the very beginning of this encoun- ter, deep under water, but then on solid ground; she laid out the word "divorce" like a bait, although her curiosity to learn Lindner's opinion was genuine too.
And Lindner actually answered at almost the same instant: "I know quite well why you are asking me for this explanation. People will have been murmuring to you your whole life long that a belief in the suprahuman, and obeying commandments that have their origin in this belief, belong to the Middle Ages! You have discovered that such fairy tales have been disposed of by science! But are you certain that's really the way it is? "
Agathe noticed to her astonishment that at every third word or so, his lips puffed out like two assailants beneath his scanty beard. She gave no answer.
"Have you thought about it? " Lindner continued severely. "Do you know the vast number of problems it involves? It's clear you don't! But you have a magnificent way of dismissing this with a wave of your hand, and you apparently don't even realize that you're sim- ply acting under the influence of an external compulsion! "
From the Posthumous Papers · 1167
He had plunged into danger. It was not clear what murmurers he had in mind. He felt himself carried away. His speech was a long tunnel he had bored right through a mountain in order to fall upon an idea, "lies of freethinking men," which was sparkling on the other side in a cocksure light. He was not thinking of either Ulrich or Hagauer but meant both ofthem, meant everyone. "And even ifyou had thought about it"-he exclaimed in an assertively rising voice- "and were to be convinced of these mistaken doctrines that the body is nothing but a system of dead corpuscles, and the soul an interplay of glands, and society a ragbag of mechano-economic laws; and even if that were correct-which it is far from being-I would still deny that such a way of thinking knows anything about the truth of life! For what calls itself science doesn't have the slightest qualification to explicate by externals what lives within a human being as spiritual inner certainty. Life's truth is a knowledge with no beginning, and the facts of true life are not communicated by rational proof: who- ever lives and suffers has them within himself as the secret power of higher claims and as the living explanation ofhis self! "
Lindner had stood up. His eyes sparkled like two preachers in the high pulpit formed by his long legs. He looked down on Agathe om- nipotently.
'Why is he talking so much right away? '' she thought. "And what does he have against Ulrich? He hardly knows him, and yet he speaks against him openly. " Then her feminine experience in the arousal of feelings told her more quickly and certainly than reflection would have done that Lindner was speaking this way only because, in some ridiculous fashion, he was jealous. She looked up at him with an en- chanting smile.
He stood before her tall, waveringly supple, and armed, and seemed to her like a bellicose giant grasshopper from some past geo- logic age. "Good heavens! " she thought. "Now I'm going to say something that will annoy him all over again, and he'll chase after me again with his Where am I? What game am I playing? " It confused her that Lindner irritated her to the point of laughter and yet that she was not able to shrug off some of his individual expressions, like "knowledge with no beginning" or "living explanation"; such strange terms at present, but secretly familiar to her, as if she had always
1168 · THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
used them herself without being able to remember ever having heard them before. She thought: "It's gruesome, but he's already planted some of his words in my heart like children! "
Lindner was aware of having made an impression on her, and this satisfaction conciliated him somewhat. He saw before him a young woman in whom agitation seemed to alternate precariously with feigned indifference, even boldness; since he took himself for a scru- pulous expert on the female soul, he did not allow himself to be put off by this, knowing as he did that in beautiful women there was an inordinately great temptation to be arrogant and vain. He could hardly ever observe a beautiful face without an admixture of pity. People so marked were, he was convinced, almost always martyrs to their shining outward aspect, which seduced them to self-conceit and its dragging train of coldheartedness and superficiality. Still, it can also happen that a soul dwells behind a beautiful countenance, and how often has insecurity not taken refuge behind arrogance, or despair beneath frivolity! Often, indeed, this is true of particularly noble people, who are merely lacking the support of proper and un- shakable convictions. And now Lindner was gradually and com- pletely overcome once more with how the successful person has to put himself in the frame of mind of the slighted one; and as he did this he became aware that the form of Agathe's face and body pos- sessed that delightful repose unique to the great and noble; even her knee seemed to him, in the folds of its covering envelope, like the knee of Niobe. He was astonished that this specific image should force itself on him, since so far as he knew there was nothing in the least appropriate about it; but apparently the nobility of his moral pain had unilaterally come together in this image with the suspi- ciousness many children have, for he felt no less attracted than alarmed. He now noticed her breast too, which was breathing in small, rapid waves. He felt hot and bothered, and ifhis knowledge of the world had not come to his aid again he would even have felt at a loss; but at this moment of greatest captiousness it whispered to him that this bosom must enclose something unspoken, and that accord- ing to all he knew, this secret might well be connected with the di- vorce from his colleague Hagauer; and this saved him from embarrassing foolishness by instantaneously offering the possibility of desiring the revelation of this secret instead of the bosom. He de-
From the Posthurrwus Papers · 1 1 6 9
sired this with all his might, while the union of sin with the chivalric slaying of the dragon of sin hovered before his eyes in glowing colors, much as they glowed in the stained glass in his study.
Agathe interrupted this rumination with a question she addressed to him in a temperate, even restrained tone, after she had regained her composure. "You claimed that I was acting on insinuations, on external compulsion; what did you mean by that? "
Disconcerted, Lindner raised the glance that had been resting on her heart to her eyes. This had never happened to him before: he could no longer remember the last thing he had said. He had seen in this young woman a victim ofthe free-minded spirit that was confus- ing the age, and in his victorious joy had forgotten it.
Agathe repeated her question slightly differently: "I confided to you that I want a divorce from Professor Hagauer, and you replied that I was acting under insinuating influences. It might be useful to me to find out what you understand by them. I repeat, none of the customary reasons is entirely apt; even my aversion has not been in- surmountable, as the standards of the world go. I am merely con- vinced that they may not be surmounted but are to be immeasurably enlarged! "
"By whom? "
"That's just the problem you're supposed to help me solve. " She again looked at him with a gentle smile that was a kind of horribly deep decollete and that exposed her inner bosom as if it were cov- ered by a mere wisp of black lace.
Lindner involuntarily protected his eyes from the sight with a mo- tion of his hand feigning some adjustment to his glasses. The truth was that courage played the same timid role in his view of the world as it did in the feelings he harbored toward Agathe. He was one of those people who have recognized that it greatly facilitates the vic- tory ofhumilityifone first flattens arrogance with a blow ofone's fist, and his learned nature bade him fear no arrogance so bitterly as that of open-minded science, which reproaches faith with being unscien- tific. Had someone told him that the saints, with their empty and beseeching raised hands, were outmoded and in today's world would have to be portrayed grasping sabers, pistols, or even newer instru- ments in their fists, he would no doubt have been appalled; but he did not want to see the arms of knowledge withheld from faith. This
II70 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
was almost entirely an error, but he was not alone in committing it; and that was why he had assailed Agathe with words that would have merited an honorable place in his writings-and presumably did- but were out of place directed to the woman who was confiding in him. Since he now saw sitting modestly and reflectively before him the emissary of quarters of the world hostile to him, delivered into his hands by a benevolent or demonic fate, he felt this himself and was embarrassed how to respond. "Ah! " he said, as generally and dis- paragingly as possible, and accidentally hitting not far from the mark: "I meant the spirit that runs everything today and makes young peo- ple afraid they might look stupid, even unscientific, if they don't go along with every modem superstition. How should I know what slo- gans are in their minds: 'live life to the full! ' 'Say yes to life! ' 'Culti- vate your personality! ' 'Freedom of thought and art! ' In any case, everything but the commandments ofsimple and eternal morality. "
The happy intensification "stupid, even unscientific" gladdened him with its subtlety and reinvigorated his combative spirit. "You will be surprised," he continued, "that in conversing with you I am plac- ing such emphasis on science, without knowing whether you have occupied yourselfwith it a little or a lot-"
"Not at all! " Agathe interrupted him. ''I'm just an ignorant woman. " She emphasized it and seemed to be pleased with it, per- haps with a kind ofnonsanctimoniousness.
"But it's the world you move in! " Undner corrected her emphati- cally. "And whether it's freedom in values or freedom in science, they both express the same thing: spirit that has been detached from morality. "
Agathe again felt these words as sober shadows that were, how- ever, cast by something still darker in their vicinity. She was not minded to conceal her disappointment, but revealed it with a laugh: "Last time, you advised me not to think about myself, and now you're the one who is talking about me incessantly," she mockingly offered for the man standing before her to think about.
He repeated: "You're afraid of seeming old-fashioned to your- self! "
Something in Agathe's eyes twitched angrily. "You leave me speechless: this certainly doesn't apply to mel"
"And I say to you: 'You have been bought dear; do not become the
From the Posthumous Papers · 1 1 7 1
servants of man! ' " The way he said this, which was in total contrast to his entire physical appearance, like a too-heavy blossom on a weak stem, made Agathe brighten. She asked urgently and almost coarsely: "So what should I do? I was hoping you would give me a definite answer! "
Lindner swallowed and turned gloomy with earnestness. "Do what is your duty! "
"I don't know what my duty is! "
"Then you must seek duties out! "
"I don't know what duties are! "
Lindner smiled grimly. "There we have it! That's the liberation of
the personality! " he exclaimed. "Vain reflection! You can see it in yourself: when a person is free he is unhappy! When a person is free he's a phantom! " he added, raising his voice somewhat more, out of embarrassment. But then he lowered it again, and concluded with conviction: "Duty is what mankind in proper self-awareness has erected against its own weakness. Duty is one and the same truth that all great personalities have acknowledged or pointed to. Duty is the work ofthe experience ofcenturies and the result ofthe visionary glance of the blessed. But what even the simplest person knows with precision in his inmost being, if only he lives an upright life, is duty too! "
"That was a hymn with quivering candles! " Agathe noted ap- preciatively.
It was disagreeable that Lindner, too, felt that he had sung falsely. He ought to have said something else but didn't trust himself to rec- ognize in what the deviation from the genuine voice ofhis heart con- sisted. He merely allowed himself the thought that this young creature must be deeply disappointed by her husband, since she was raging so impudently and bitterly against herself, and that in spite of all the censure she provoked, she would have been worthy of a stronger man; but he had the impression that a far more dangerous idea was on the point of succeeding this one. Agathe, meanwhile, slowly and very decisively shook her head; and with the spontaneous assurance with which an excited person is seduced by another into doing something that unbalances an already precarious situation completely, she continued: "But we're talking about my divorce! And why aren't you saying anything more about God today? Why don't
1172 • THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
you simply say to me: 'God orders you to stay with Professor Hagauer! ' I can't honestly imagine that He would command such a thing! "
Lindner shrugged his tall shoulders indignantly; indeed, as they rose he himselfactually seemed to hover in the air. "I have never said a word to you about it; you're the only one who has tried to! " He defended himself gruffiy. "And for the rest, don't believe for a min- ute that God bothers Himself with the tiny egoistic antics of our emotions! That's what His law is for, which we must follow! Or doesn't that seem heroic enough for you, since people today are al- ways looking for what's 'personal'? Well, in that case I'll set a higher heroism against your claims: heroic submission! "
Every word of this carried significantly more weight than a layper- son really ought to permit himself, were it only in his thoughts; Agathe, in return, could only go on smiling in the face of such coarse derision ifshe did not want to be forced to stand up and break offthe visit; and she smiled, of course, with such assured adroitness that Lindner felt himselfgoaded into ever-greater confusion. He became aware that his inspirations were ominously rising and increasingly reinforcing a glowing intoxication that was robbing him of reflection and resounded with the will to break the obstinate mind and perhaps save the soul he saw facing him. "Our duty is painful! " he exclaimed. "Our duty may be repulsive and disgusting! Don't think I have any intention of becoming your husband's lawyer, or that my nature is to stand by his side. But you must obey the law, because it is the only thing that bestows lasting peace on us and protects us from our- selves! "
Agathe now laughed at him; she had guessed at the weapon, stem- ming from her divorce, that these effects put in her hand, and she turned the knife in the wound. "I understand so little about all that," she said. "But may I honestly confess an impression I have? When you're angry yQU get a little slippery! "
"Oh, come on! " Lindner retorted. He recoiled, his one desire not to concede such a thing at any price. He raised his voice defensively and entreated the sinning phantom sitting before him: "The spirit must not submit itselfto the flesh and all its charms and horrors! Not even in the form of disgust! And I say to you: Even though you might find it painful to control the reluctance of the flesh, as the school of
From the Posthumous Papers · 1173
marriage has apparently asked of you, you are not simply permitted to run away from it. For there lives in man a desire for liberation, and we can no more be the slaves ofour fleshly disgust than the slaves of our lust! This is obviously what you wanted to hear, since otherwise you would not have come to me! " he concluded, no less grandilo- quently than spitefully. He stood towering before Agathe; the strands of his beard moved around his lips.
He had never spoken such words to a woman before, with the exception of his own de- ceased wife, and his feelings toward her had been different. But now these feelings were intermingled with desire, as i f he were swinging a whip in his fist to chastise the whole earth; yet they were simulta- neously timid, as if he were being lofted like an escaped hat on the crest of the tornado of the sermon of repentance that had taken hold ofhim.
"There you go again, saying such remarkable things! " Agathe noted without passion, intending to shut off his insolence with a few dry words; but then she measured the enormous crash looming up before him and preferred to humble herself gently by holding back, so she continued, in a voice that had apparently suddenly been dark- ened by repentance: "I came only because I wanted you to lead me. "
Lindner went on swinging his whip of words with confused zeal; he had some sense that Agathe was deliberately leading him on, but he could not find a way out, and entrusted himself to the future. "To be chained to a man for a lifetime without feeling any physical attrac- tion is certainly a heavy sentence," he exclaimed. "But hasn't one brought this on oneself, especially if the partner is unworthy, by not having paid enough attention to the signs ofthe inner life? There are many women who allow themselves to be deluded by external cir- cumstances, and who knows if one is not being punished in order to be shaken up? " Suddenly his voice cracked. Agathe had been accom- panying his words with assenting nods of her head; but imagining Hagauer,as a bewitching seducer was too much for her, and her merry eyes betrayed it. Lindner, driven crazy by this, blared in fal- setto: "'For. he that spares the rod hates his child, but whosoever loves it chastises it! ' "
His victim's resistance had now transformed this philosopher of life, dwelling in his lofty watchtower, into a poet of chastisement and the exciting conditions that went with it. He was intoxicated by a
1174 · THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
feeling he did not recognize, which emanated from an inner fusion of the moral reprimand with which he was goading his visitor and a provocation of all his manliness, a fusion that one might symbolically characterize, as he himself now saw, as lustful.
But the "arrogant conquering female," who was finally to have been driven from the empty vanity of her worldly beauty to despair, matter-of-factly picked up on his threats about the rod and quietly asked: "Who is going to punish me? Whom are you thinking of? Are you thinking of God? "
But it was unthinkable to say such a thing! Lindner suddenly lost his courage. His scalp prickled with sweat. It was absolutely impossi- ble that the name of God should be uttered in such a context. His glance, extended like a two-tined fork, slowly withdrew from Agathe. Agathe felt it. "So he can't do it either! " she thought. She felt a reck- less desire to go on tugging at this man until she heard from his mouth what he did not want to yield to her. But for now it was enough: the conversation had reached its outer limit. Agathe under- stood that it had only been a passionate rhetorical subterfuge, heated to the point where it became transparent, and all to avoid mention- ing the decisive point. Besides, Lindner, too, now knew that every- thing he had said, indeed everything that had got him worked up, even the excess itself, was only the product ofhis fear ofexcesses; the most dissolute aspect of which he considered to be the approach with the prying tools of mind and feeling to what ought to remain veiled in lofty abstractions, toward which this excessive young woman was obviously pushing him. He now named this to himself as "an offense against the decency of faith. " For in these moments the blood drained back out of Lindner's head and resumed its normal course; he awoke like a person who finds himself standing naked far from his front door, and remembered that he could not send Agathe away without consolation and instruction. Breathing deeply, he stood back from her, stroked his beard, and said reproachfully: "You have a restless and overimaginative nature! "
"And you have a peculiar idea of gallantry! " Agathe responded coolly, for she had no desire to go on any longer.
Lindner found it necessary to repair his standing by saying something more: "You should learn in the school of reality to take your subjectivity mercilessly in hand, for whoever is incapable of it
From the Posthumous Papers · 1 1 75
will be overtaken by imagination and fantasy, and dragged to the ground . . . ! " He paused, for this strange woman was still drawing the voice from his breast quite against his will. "Woe to him who aban- dons morality; he is abandoning reality! " he added softly.
Agathe shrugged her shoulders. "I hope next time you will come to us! " she proposed.
"To that I must respond: Never! " Lindner protested, suddenly and now totally down to earth. "Your brother and I have differences ofopinion about life that make it preferable for us to avoid contact," he added as excuse.
"So I'm the one who will have to come studiously to the school of reality," Agathe replied quietly.
"No! " Lindner insisted, but then in a remarkable fashion, almost menacingly, he blocked her path; for with those words she had got up to go. "That cannot be! You cannot put me in the ambiguous posi- tion toward my colleague Hagauer of receiving your visits without his knowledge! "
"Are you always as passionate as you are today? '' Agathe asked mockingly, thereby forcing him to make way for her. She now felt, at the end, spiritless but strengthened. The fear Lindner had betrayed drew her toward actions alien to her true condition; but while the demands her brother made demoralized her easily, this man gave her back the freedom to animate her inner self however she wanted, and it comforted her to confuse him.
"Did I perhaps compromise myself a little? '' Lindner asked him- self after she had left. He stiffened his shoulders and marched up and down the room a few times. Finally he decided to continue see- ing her, containing his malaise, which was quite pronounced, in the soldierly words: "One must set oneself to remain gallant in the face of every embarrassment! "
When Agathe got up to leave, Peter had slipped hurriedly away from the keyhole, where he had been listening, not without astonish- ment, to what his father had been up to with the "big goose. "
45
BEGINNING OF A SERIES OF WONDROUS EXPERIENCES
Shortly after this visit there was a repetition of the "impossible" that was already hovering almost physically around Agathe and Ulrich, and it truly came to pass without anything at all actually happening.
Brother and sister were changing to go out for the evening. There was no one in the house to help Agathe aside from Ulrich; they had started late and had thus been in the greatest haste for a quarter ofan hour, when a short pause intervened. Piece by piece, nearly all the ornaments of war a woman puts on for such occasions were strewn on the chair backs and surfaces of the room, and Agathe was in the act of bending over her foot with all the concentration that pulling on a thin silk stocking demands. Ulrich was standing at her back. He saw her head, her neck, her shoulders, and this nearly naked back; her body was curved over her raised knee, slightly to one side, and the tension of this process rounded three folds on her neck, which shot slender and merry through her clear skin like three arrows: the charming physicality of this painting. hom of the momentarily spreading stillness, seemed to have lost its frame and passed so abruptly and directly into Ulrich's body that he moved from the spot and, neither with the involuntariness of a banner being unfurled by the wind nor exactly with deliberate reflection, crept closer on tiptoe, surprised the bent-over figure, and with gentle ferocity bit into one of these arrows, while his arm closed tightly around his sister. Then Ulrich's teeth just as cautiously released his overpowered victim; his right hand had grabbed her knee, and while with his left arm he pressed her body to his, he pulled her upright with him on upward- bounding tendons. Agathe cried out in fright.
Up to this point everything had taken place as playfully and jok- ingly as much that had gone on before, and even ifit was tinged with the colors of love, it was only with the actually shy intention of con- cealing love's unwonted dangerous nature beneath such cheerfully
From the Posthumous Papers · I I 77
intimate dress. But when Agathe got over her fright, and felt herself not so much flying through the air as rather resting in it, suddenly liberated into weightlessness and directed instead by the gentle force of the gradually decelerating motion, it brought about one of those accidents beyond human control, in which she seemed to herself strangely soothed, indeed carried away from all earthly unrest; with a movement changing the balance of her body that she could never have repeated, she also brushed away the last silken thread of com- pulsion, turned in falling to her brother, continued, so to speak, her rise as she fell, until she lay, sinking down, as a cloud of happiness in his arms. Ulrich bore her, gently pressing her body to his, through the darkening room to the window and placed her beside him in the mellow light of the evening, which flowed over her face like tears. Despite the energy everything demanded, and the force Ulrich had exercised on his sister, what they were doing seemed to them re- markably remote from energy and force; one might perhaps have been able, again, to compare it with the wondrous ardor of a paint- ing, which for the hand that invades the frame to grasp it is nothing but a ridiculous painted surface. So, too, they had nothing in mind beyond what was taking place physically, which totally filled their consciousness; and yet, alongside its nature as a harmless, indeed, at the beginning, even coarse joke, which called all their muscles into play, this physical action possessed a second nature, which, with the greatest tenderness, paralyzed their limbs and at the same time en- snared them with an inexpressible sensitivity. Questioningly they flung their arms around each other's shoulders. The fraternal stature of their bodies communicated itself to them as if they were rising up from a single root. They looked into each other's eyes with as much curiosity as if they were seeing such things for the first time. And although they would not have been able to articulate what had really happened, since their part in it had been too pressing, they still be- lieved they knew that they had just unexpectedly found themselves for an instant in the midst of that shared condition at whose border they had long been hesitating, which they had already described to each other so often but had so far only gazed at from outside.
I f they tested it soberly (and surreptitiously they both did), it signi- fied hardly more than a bewitching accident and ought to have dis- solved the next moment, or at least with the return of activity, into
1178 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
nothingness; and yet this did not happen. On the contrary, they left the window, turned on the lights, and resumed their preparations, only soon to relinquish them again, and without their having to say anything to each other, Ulrich went to the telephone and informed the house where they were expected that they were not coming. He was already dressed for the evening, but Agathe's gown was still hanging unfastened around her shoulders and she was just striving to impart some well-bred order to her hair. The technical resonance of his voice in the instrument and the connection to the world that had been established had not sobered Ulrich in the slightest: he sat down opposite his sister, who paused in what she was doing, and when their glances met, nothing was so certain as that the decision had been made and all prohibitions were now a matter of indifference to them. Their understanding announced itself to them with every breath; it was a defiantly endured agreement to finally redeem them- selves from the ill humor of longing, and it was an agreement so sweetly suffered that the notions of making it a reality nearly tore themselves loose from them and united them already in imagination, as a storm whips a veil of foam on ahead of the waves: but a still greater desire bade them be calm, and they were incapable oftouch- ing each other again. They wanted to begin, but the gestures of the flesh had become impossible for them, and they felt an ineffable warning that had nothing to do with the commandments of morality. It seemed that from a more perfect, ifstill shadowy, union, ofwhich they had already had a foretaste as in an ecstatic metaphor, a higher commandment had marked them out, a higher intimation, curiosity, or expectation had breathed upon them.
Brother and sister now remained perplexed and thoughtful, and after they had calmed their feelings they hesitantly began to speak.
Ulrich said, without thinking, the way one talks into thin air: "You are the moon-"
Agathe understood.
Ulrich said: "You have flown to the moon and it has given you back to me again-"
Agathe said nothing: moon conversations so consume one's whole heart.
Ulrich said: "It's a figure of speech. W e were beside ourselves,' W e exchanged bodies without even touching each other,' are meta-
From the Posthumous Papers · 1 1 79
phors too! But what does a metaphor signify? A little something true with a good deal of exaggeration. And yet I was about to swear, im- possible as it may be, that the exaggeration was quite small and the reality was becoming quite large! "
He said no more. He was thinking: "What reality am I talking about? Is there a second one? "
If one here leaves the conversation between brother and sister in order to follow the possibilities of a comparison that had at least some part in determining their talk, it might well be said that this reality was truly most closely related to the quixotically altered reality of moonlit nights. But if one does not comprehend this reality either, if one sees in it merely an opportunity for some ecstatic foolishness that by day were better suppressed, then if one wanted to picture accurately what was actually happening one would have to summon up the totally incredible idea that there's a piece of earth where all feelings really do change like magic as soon a5 the empty busyness of day plunges into the all-experiencing corporeality of night! Not only do external relationships melt away and re-form in the whispering enclosures of light and shadow, but the inner relationships, too, move closer together in a new way: the spoken word loses its self-will and acquires fraternal will. All affirmations express only a single surg- ing experience. The night embraces all contradictions in its shim- mering maternal arms, and in its bosom no word is false and no word true, but each is that incomparable birth of the spirit out of darkness that a person experiences in a new thought. In this way, every pro- cess on moonlit nights partakes of the nature of the unrepeatable. Of the nature ofthe intensified. Ofthe nature ofselfless generosity and a stripping away of the self. Every imparting is a parting without envy. Every giving a receiving. Every conception multifariously in- terwoven in the excitement of the night. To be this way is the only access to the knowledge ofwhat is unfolding. For in these nights the selfholds nothing back; there is no condensation ofpossession on the self's surface, hardly a memory; the intensified self radiates into an unbounded selflessness. And these nights are filled with the insane feeling that something is about to happen that has never happened before, indeed that the impoverished reason ofday can not even con- ceive of. And it is not the mouth that pours out its adoration but the body, which, from head to foot, is stretched taut in exaltation above
1180 • THE MAN WITH 0 UT QUALITIES
the darkness ofthe earth and beneath the light ofthe heavens, oscil- lating between two stars. And the whispering with one's companion is full ofa quite unknown sensuality, which is not the sensuality ofan individual human beingbut ofall that is earthly, ofall that penetrates perception and sensation, the suddenly revealed tenderness of the world that incessantly touches all our senses and is touched by them.
Ulrich had indeed never been aware in himself of a particular preference for mouthing adorations in the moonlight; but as one or- dinarily gulps life down without feeling, one sometimes has, much later, its ghostly taste on one's tongue: and in this way he suddenly felt everything he had missed in that effusiveness, all those nights he had spent heedless and lonely before he had known his sister, as sil- ver poured over an endless l{:hicket, as moon flecks in the grass, as laden apple trees, singing frost, and gilded black waters. These were only details, which did n,ot coalesce and had never found an associa- tion, but which now arose like the commingled fragrance of many herbs from an intoxicating potion. And when he said this to Agathe she felt it too.
Ulrich finally summed up everything he had said with the asser- tion: "What made us turn to each other from the very beginning can really be called a life of moonlit nights! " And Agathe breathed a deep sigh of relief. It did not matter what it meant; evidently it meant: and why don't you know a magic charm against its separating us at the last moment? She sighed so naturally and confidingly that she was not even aware of it herself.
And this again led to a movement that inclined them toward each other and kept them apart. Every strong excitement that two people have shared to the end leaves behind in them the naked intimacy of exhaustion; ifeven arguing does this, then it is infinitely more true of tender feelings that ream out the very marrow to form a flute! So Ulrich, touched, would have almost embraced Agathe when he heard her wordless complaint, as enchanted as a lover on the morn- ing after the first tempests. His hand was already touching her shoul- der, which was still bare, and at this touch she started, smiling; but in her eyes there reappeared immediately the unwished-for dissuasion. Strange images now arose in his mind: Agathe behind bars. Or fear- fully motioning to him from a growing distance, torn from him by the sundering power of alien fists. Then again he was not only the one
From the Posthumous Papers · I IB I
who was powerless and dismissed, but also the one who did this. . . . Perhaps these were the eternal images of the doubts of love, merely consumed in the average life; then again, perhaps not. He would have liked to speak to her about this, but Agathe now looked away from him and toward the open window, and hesitantly stood up. The fever of love was in their bodies, but their bodies dared no repetition, and what was beyond the window, whose drapes stood almost open, had stolen away their imagination, without which the flesh is only brutal or despondent. When Agathe took the first steps in this direction, Ulrich, guessing her assent, turned out the light in order to free their gaze into the night. The moon had come up be- hind the tops of the spruce trees, whose greenly glimmering black stood out phlegmatically against the blue-gold heights and the palely twinkling distance. Agathe resentfully inspected this meaningful sliver of the world.
"So nothing more than moonshine? " she asked.
Ulrich looked at her without answering. Her blond hair flamed in the semidarkness against the whitish night, her lips were parted by shadows, her beauty was painful and irresistible.
But evidently he was standing there in similar fashion before her gaze, with blue eye sockets in his white face, for she went on: "Do you know what you look like now? Like 'Pierrot Lunaire'! It calls for prudence! " She wanted to wrong him a little in her excitement, which almost made her weep. Ages ago, all useless young people had appeared to each other, painfully and peevishly, in the pale mask of the lunarly lonely Pierrot, powdered chalk-white except for the drop- of-blood-red lips and abandoned by a Columbine they had never possessed; this trivialized rather considerably the love for moonlit nights. But to his sister's initially growing grief, Ulrich willingly joined in. "Even 'Laugh, clown, laugh' has already sent a chill of total recognition down the spines of thousands of philistines when they hear it sung," he affirmed bitterly. But then he added softly, whisper- ing: "This whole area of feeling really is highly questionable! And yet I would give all the memories of my life for the way you look right now. " Agathe's hand had found Ulrich's. Ulrich continued softly and passionately: "To our time, the bliss of feeling means only the glut- tony of feelings and has profaned being swept away by the moon into a sentimental debauch. It does not even begin to understand that this
1182 • THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
bliss must be either an incomprehensible mental disturbance or the fragment of another life! "
These words-precisely because they were perhaps an exaggera- tion-had the faith, and with it the wings, of adventure. "Good night! " Agathe said unexpectedly, and took them with her. She had released herself and closed the drapes so hastily that the picture of the two of them standing in the moonlight disappeared as if at one blow; and before Ulrich could tum on the light she succeeded in finding her way out of the room.
And Ulrich gave her yet more time. "Tonight you'll sleep as impa- tiently as before the start of a great outing! " he called after her.
"I hope so too! " was what resounded by way of an answer in the closing of the door.
MOONBEAMS BY SUNLIGHT
When they saw each other again the next morning it was, from a dis- tance, the way one stumbles on an out-of-the-ordinary picture in an ordinary house, or even the way one catches sight of an important outdoor sculpture in the full haphazardness of nature: an island of meaning unexpectedly materializes in the senses, an elevation and condensing of the spirit from the watery fens of existence! But when they came up to each other they were embarrassed, and all that was to be felt in their glances, shading them with tender warmth, was the exhaustion of the previous night.
Who knows, besides, whether love would be so admired if it did not cause fatigue! When they became aware of the unpleasant after- effects of the previous day's excitement it made them happy again, as lovers are proud of having almost died from desire. Still, the joy they found in each other was not only such a feeling but also an arousal of the eye. Colors and shapes presented themselves as dissolved and
From the Posthu11WUS Papers · 1183
unfathomable, and yet were sharply displayed, like a bouquet of flowers drifting on dark water: their boundaries were more emphati- cally marked than usual, but in a way that made it impossible to say whether this lay in the clarity of their appearance or in the underly- ing agitation. The impression was as much part of the concise sphere of perception and attention as it was of the imprecise sphere of emo- tion; and this is just what caused this impression to hover between the internal and the external, the way a held breath hovers between inhalation and exhalation, and made it hard to discern, in peculiar opposition to its strength, whether it was part of the physical world or merely owed its origin to the heightening of inner empathy. Nor did either of them wish to make this distinction, for a kind of shame of reason held them back; and through the longish period that followed it also still forced them to keep their distance from each other, al- though their sensitivity was lasting and might well give rise to the belief that suddenly the course of the boundaries between them, as well as those between them and the world, had changed slightly.
The weather had turned summery again, and they spent a lot of time outdoors: flowers and shrubs were blooming in the garden. When Ulrich looked at a blossom-which was not exactly an in- grained habit ofthis once-impatient man-he now sometimes found no end to contemplation and, to say it all, no beginning either. I f by chance he could name it, it was a redemption from the sea of infinity. Then the little golden stars on a bare cane signified "forsythia," and those early leaves and umbels "lilacs. " But if he did not know the name he would call the gardener over, for then this old man would name an unknown name and everything was all right again, and the primordial magic by which possession of the correct name bestows protection from the untamed wildness of things demonstrated its calming power as it had ten thousand years ago. Still, it could happen differently: Ulrich could find himself abandoned and without a helper as he confronted such a little twig or flower, without even Agathe around to share his ignorance: then it suddenly seemed to him quite impossible to understand the bright green of a young leaf, and the mysteriously outlined fullness of the form of a tiny flower cup became a circle ofinfinite diversion that nothing could interrupt. In addition, it was hardly possible for a man like him, unless he were lying to himself, which on Agathe's account could not be allowed to
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happen, to believe in an abashed rendezvous with nature, whose whisperings and upward glances, piety and mute music making, are more the privilege of a special simplicity which imagines that hardly has it laid its head in the grass than God is already tickling its neck; although it has nothing against nature being bought and sold on the fruit exchange on weekdays. Ulrich despised this cut-rate mysticism ofthe cheapest price and praise, whose constant preoccupation with God is at bottom exceedingly immoral; he preferred instead to con- tinue abandoning himself to the dizziness of finding the words to characterize a color distinct enough to reach out and take hold of, or to describe one of the shapes that had taken to speaking for them- selves with such mindless compellingness. For in such a condition the word does not cut and the fruit remains on the branch, although one thinks it already in one's mouth: that is probably the first mystery of day-bright mysticism. And Ulrich tried to explain this to his sister, even ifhis ulterior motive was that it should not, someday, disappear like a delusion.
But as he did so, the passionate condition was succeeded by an- other--of a calmer, indeed sometimes almost absentminded conver- sation-which came to permeate their exchange and served each of them as a screen from the other, although they both. saw through it completely. They usually lay in the garden on two large deck chairs, which they were constantly dragging around to follow the sun; this early-summer sun was shining for the millionth time on the magic it works eve:ry year; and Ulrich said many things that just happened to pass through his mind and rounded themselves offcautiously like the moon, which was now quite pale and a little dirty, or like a soap bub- ble: and so it happened, and quite soon, that he came round to speak- ing of the confounded and frequently cursed absurdity that all understanding presupposes a kind of superficiality, a penchant for the surface, which is, moreover, expressed in the root of the word "comprehend," to lay hold of, and has to do with primordial experi- ences having been understood not singly but one by the next and thereby unavoidably connected with one another more on the sur- face than in depth. He then continued: "So if I maintain that this grass in front of us is green, it sounds quite definite, but I haven't actually said much. In truth no more than if I'd told you that some man passing by was a member of the Green family. And for heaven's
From the Posthurrunts Papers · zzBs
sake, there's no end of greens! It would be a lot better if I contented myself with recognizing that this grass is grass-green, or even green like a lawn on which it has just rained a little. . . . " He squinted lan- guidly across the fresh plot of grass illuminated by the sun and thought: "At least this is how you would probably describe it, since you're good at making visual distinctions from judging dress materi- als. But I, on the other hand, could perhaps measure the color as well: I might guess it had a wavelength of five hundred forty mil- lionths of a millimeter; and then this green would apparently be cap- tured and nailed to a specific point! But then it gets away from me again, because this ground color also has something material about it that can't be expressed in words of color at all, since it's different from the same green in silk or wool. And now we're back at the pro- found discovery that green grass is just grass green! "
Called as a witness, Agathe found it quite understandable that one could not understand anything, and responded: "I suggest you t:ry looking at a mirror in the night: it's dark, it's black, you see almost nothing at all; and yet this nothing is something quite distinctly dif- ferent from the nothing of the rest of the darkness. You sense the glass, the doubling of depth, some kind of remnant of the ability to shimmer-and yet you perceive nothing at all! "
Ulrich laughed at his sister's immediate readiness to cut knowl- edge's reputation down to size; he was far from thinking that con- cepts have no value, and knew quite well what they accomplish, even if he did not act accordingly. What he wanted to bring out was the inability to get hold of individual experiences, those experiences that for obvious reasons one has to go through alone and lonely, even when one is with another person. He repeated: "The self never grasps its impressions and utterances singly, but always in context, in real or imagined, similar or dissimilar, harmony with something else; and so everything that has a name leans on everything else in regular rows, as a link in large and incalculable unities, one relying on an- other and all penetrated by a common tension. But for that reason," he suddenly went on, differently, "if for some reason these associa- tions fail and none of them addresses the internal series of orders, one is immediately left again to face an indescribable and inhuman creation, indeed a disavowed and formless one. " With this they were back at their point of departure; but Agathe felt the dark creation
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above it, the abyss that was the "universe," the God who was to help her!
Her brother said: "Understanding gives way to irrepressible aston- ishment, and the smallest experience-of this tiny blade of grass, or the gentle sounds when your lips over there utter a word-becomes something incomparable, lonely as the world, possessed of an un- fathomable selfishness and radiating a profound narcosis .
