Country road, then
extended
city street.
Musil - Man Without Qualities - v2
Now I can also say what "motif" is.
Motif is what leads me from significance to significance.
Something hap- pens, or something is said, and that increases the meaning of two human lives and unites them through its meaning, and what happens, which physical or legal concept it represents, is quite unimportant, plays abso- lutely no role in it.
But can I imagine what that means in its fullest extent, can I even imagine what it means in its smallest? I must try. A person does some- thing . . . no, I can't duck it: Professor Lindner does something! He arouses Agathe's inclination. I feel this event, want to spoil it and negate it - and the moment I yield to my dislike, I step out of the sphere of significance. What I feel can never become a motif for Agathe. My breast may be full of vexation or anger, my head an arsenal of sharp and ready objections-my heart is empty! My condition is then suddenly negative! My state is no longer positive! There's another marvelous pair of notions I've got hold of! What makes me think of the characteriza- tions "positive" and "negative"? I unexpectedly recall a day when I was also sitting with some paper in front of me and trying to write--at the time it was to be a letter to Agathe. And gradually it comes to mind: a
From the Posthumous Papers · 1719
condition of "do" and a condition of "don't" as the two component ele- ments of every morality, the "do" prevailing during its rise, the "don't" during the satiety of its reign-is not this relationship between "chal- lenge" and "prohibition" the same as what I am now calling positive and negative? The connection between Agathe and me characterized by ev- erything being challenge and nothing prohibition? I recall speaking at that time of Agathe's passionate, affinning goodness, which in an age in which things of that sort are no longer understood looks like a primitive vice. I said: It's like returning home after the longest time and drinking water from the well of one's village! And challenge of course does not mean that we demand but means that everything we do demands the utmost from us.
Not leaving the sphere of the significant would therefore be the same as a life in pure positiveness? The thought that it is also the same as "living essentially" alarms me, although it was to be expected. For what else should "essentially" signify? The word probably comes from mysti- cism or metaphysics, and characterizes the opposition to all earthly hap- penings that are without peace and full of doubts; but since we have separated ourselves from Heaven, it lives on on earth as the longing to find among thousands of moral convictions the one that gives life a meaning that does not change. Endless conversations between Agathe and me on the subject! Her youthful desire for moral instruction along- side the defiance in which she wanted to kill Hagauer and has at least really injured him in a material way! And the same search for conviction everywhere in the world; the intimation that man can't live without mo- rality, and the deep disquiet at how his own emotions undermine every one of them! Where is the possibility of a "whole" life, a "complete" conviction, a love that is without any admixture of not-love, without a shred of self-seeking and selfishness? What that means is: only living positively. And it means: not wanting to admit any happening without "significance" whenever I speak of a "never-ending condition," in con- trast to the "eternally futile moment-to-moment quality" of our usual way of acting, or of the alliance of every momentary state with a "lasting state" of the emotions, which restores our "responsibility. " I could go on repeating such expressions for pages, expressions that characterized what we meant from one side or another. We summarized it as "living essentially," always somewhat embarrassed by the term's bombastic- transcendental overtones, but we had no other that would have been simpler to use. So it is no small surprise for me to suddenly find almost in my hands what I was seeking in the clouds!
Of course it is part of the peculiarity of our condition that every new observation assimilates all the earlier ones, so that there is no hierarchy
1720 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
among them; they seem, rather, to be infinitely entangled. I could just as well go on to call OUI condition magnanimous, which in fact I did some days ago, as I could characterize it as creative, for creating and creation are possible only in an attitude that is positive through and through, and so that, too, would be in accord; ultimately such a life, in which every moment is to be as significant as possible, is also that "life in the sense of the maximal challenge" which I sometimes imagined as the spiritual complement to the laconic resolve of true science. But whether maxi- mal, magnanimous, creative, or significant, essential or whole, how do I account for my feelings for Professor Lindner being what they are? That's the problem I am drawn back to, the crux of the experiment, the crossroads! It occurs to me that I have deprived him of the possibility of having part of Agathe. Why? Because having part of, indeed even under- standing, is never possible through "putting oneself in the place of the other," but is possible only if both mutually take part in something greater. It's impossible for me to feel my sister's headaches; but I find myself transported with her in a state in which there is no pain, or where pain has the hovering wings of bliss!
I have doubts about this, I see the exaggeration in it. But perhaps that's only because I'm not capable of ecstasy?
Toward Lindner I would have to conduct myselfas ifI were somehow united with him in God. Even a smaller whole, like "nation" or some other confraternity, would suffice. At least it would suffice to prescribe my conduct. Even an idea in common would be enough. It merely has to be something new and dynamic that is not merely Lindner and I. So the answer to Agathe's question, what a contradiction signifies between two books both of which one loves, is: it never signifies a calculation or a balance, but signifies a third, dynamic thing, which envelops both as- pects in itself. And that's how the life was that was always before my eyes, even if rarely clearly: the people united, I united with people through something that makes us renounce our hundred dislikes. The contradictions and hostilities that exist between us cannot be denied, but one can also imagine them "suspended," the way the strong current of a liquid picks up and suspends whatever it encounters in its path. There would then not be certain feelings among people, but there would be others. All impossible feelings could be summarized as neutral and negative; as petty, gnawing, constricting, base, but also as indifferent or merely rooted in connections that were necessary. So what remains would be great, increasing, demanding, encumbered, affirming, rising: in my hurry I can't describe it adequately, but it lay in the depths of my body like a dream, and isn't what I ultimately wanted simply to love life and everyone in it? I, with my arms, my muscles, trained to the point of
From the Posthumous Papers · 1 7 2 1
malignity, basically nothing but crazy for love and lacking love? Is this the secret fonnula of my life?
I can conceive of that when I fantasize and think of the world and people, but not when I think of Lindner, that specific, ridiculous person, the man Agathe will perhaps see again tomorrow in order to discuss with him what she does not discuss with me. So what's left? That there are two groups of emotions which can be separated to some extent, which I would now again like to characterize only as positive and negative condi- tions, without placing a value on them, but merely according to a pecu- liarity of their appearance; although I love one of these two overall conditions from the depths (that also means: well hidden) of my soul. And the reality is left that I now find myself almost constantly in this condition, and Agathe too! Perhaps this is a great experiment that fate intends with me. Perhaps everything I have attempted was there only so that I could experience this. But I also fear that there's a vicious circle lurking in everything that I think I have understood up to now. For I don't want-if I now go back to my original motif-to leave the state of "significance," and if I try to tell myself what significance is, all I come back to again and again is the state I'm in, which is that I don't want to leave a specific state! So I don't believe I'm looking at the truth, but what I experience is certainly not simply subjective, either; it reaches out for the truth with a thousand anns. For that reason it could truly seem to me to be a hypnotic suggestion. All my emotions happen to be remarkably homogeneous or harmonized, and the resistive ones are excluded, and such a condition of the emotions, which regulates action in a unified way, is precisely what is regarded as the centerpiece of a hypnosis. But can something be hypnotic whose premonition, whose first traces, I can follow back through almost my entire life?
So there remains . . . ? It isn't imagination and it isn't reality; even ifit is not hypnotic suggestion, I would almost have to conclude that it is the beginning of suprareality.
SKETCHES AND NOTES ABOUT THE NOVEL
Preface:
This novel takes place before 1914, a time that young people will no longer know at all. And the novel does not describe this time the way it really was, so that one could learn about it from this book. But it de- scribes the time as it is mirrored in a person outside the mainstream. Then what does this novel have to do with people of today? Why don't I write a novel about today instead? This has to be established, as best it can.
But that it concerns an (invented) story should also become part of the manner of its telling. The path of history is to be applied not only in the novel but to it.
From the perspective of the book, the portrayal of the time has to be abridged. But I'm not capable of that. The Parallel Campaign, for in- stance, ought to connect with the Eucharistic Congress and other things about which I know too little. Absolute necessity of creating the tech- nique from this error!
Preface
Ulrich considers himself a person who has a message to bring the world. Fragments are to be found here.
Later he judges [. . . ]: In one's lifetime one must have presented a good front and the like if one wants to have even a posthumous effect. He is not bad, just gives up.
That is also his development in the novel. He does not write hts book but ts present in all the events.
The narrator is, in a way, his friend.
Present Ulrich not as the "true-strong" person but as an important statement that has gone astray.
Mood: This is the tragedy of the failed person (more properly: the
From the Posthumous Papers · 1723
person who in questions of emotion and understanding is always aware of a further possibility. For he is not simply a failure) who is always alone, in contradiction with everything, and cannot change anything. All the rest is logically consistent.
Preface
People will find the excuse-because they don't want to explore the idea-that what is offered here is as much essay as novel.
Query: Why is it that people today don't pay attention to ideas in art, while in other respects they demonstrate an absolutely ridiculous inter- est in "doctrines"?
1st section before Agathe
An athletic young man-very intellectual-attempts normal life-has
ideas that don't seem to fit in-suspicious of the transparent humbug with ideals-tries to find a way out by means of functional morality-is himself morally indifferent-but unhappy about it-is arrogant toward his time but always looking for a way out of his arrogance-and from this an emotion crystallizes: swimming through a space-jagged stage sets loom up--Ulrich was good. As a child. He simply saw that this "good" could not become the desiccated commonly accepted one. If among his ideas there are some that are right, then he is a precursor. But appar- ently evil develops the way he doesn't imagine it ala journalism. He is interested in evil and despises the common.
Preface
I dedicate this novel to German youth. Not the youth of today-intel- lectual vacuum after the war-quite amusing frauds-but the youth that will come after a time and that will have to begin exactly where we stopped before the war, etc. (On this also rests my justification for writ- ing a prewar novel today! )
Preface
"Superfluous," "wandering" discussions: that's a reproach that's often been made against me, in which it was perhaps graciously conceded that I could tell a story. But these discussions are for me the most important thing!
I could have depicted many things more realistically. For instance,
1724 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
Hans Sepp and National Socialist politics. But there is already enough of the ridiculous in the book, and I then would not have been able to coun- terbalance it, which was what I was trying to do.
Preface
Where one speaks of relative originality:
The phenomenon that a relatively or entirely original writer-com- pletely inaccessible to the average critic-who in desperation analyzes him only in isolated, dependent particles-as has happened to me.
Preface
Why Vienna instead ofan invented metropolis. Because it would have been more effort to invent one than a "crossed-out" Vienna.
Manner ofrepresentation to befrequently used
Assemble a composite person, but with cards faceup! From settled ideas and a few obsessive linkages of ideas, e. g. , the way Hagauer is. All the intellectual characters this way: Arnheim, Diotima, etc. Whatever is added that is human and personal, particularly to those characters who are "only people," is accidental; moreover, from the psychological point ofview also characteristic, frequently repellent, like Arnheim's predilec- tion for the behind, or wishy-washy psychology like Schnitzler's.
events } depictions•
conversations interweavings
. are the only bearers of the narration
•ofthe nature ofthe person, ofchanges in the physical and moral landscape
From the Posthumous Papers · 1725
Theories, halfironic, chiefly in the agitations ofthe unsympathetic and halfsympathetic figpres
Journey with Agathe
Trip across. Seasickness. Burgeoning awareness of a fearful passion for each other because they see each other in this state, bear it, feel it appropriate, with mouths agape, vomiting. The whole ship an orgy.
Ancona. Exhaustion. Taken for a married couple, room with double bed; they don't want to reject it; fear almost amounting to a feeling of persecution, sweetness.
Only the terrible things about Rome. The smoothed and polished, the ravinelike streets with green window shutters. The being tortured from before.
That was the first trip. On the second, with Clarisse, he recalls it. In Venice, where Clarisse is confined on the way back, meeting with Gus- tav [the model for Walter-TRANs. ]. Rather fat paunch, deep devotion to Clarisse. Forced back to Vienna; meeting with Agathe, beginning of the spy story. The inner city entwined around St. Stephen's Cathedral like a ball of tangled yarn. Yellow-gray darkness. Air like down.
On the trip: They really don't do anything at all; they only suffer the fear that they could be accused, and the desire.
Someplace or other, memory from Esslingen. Second floor of the mu- seum. He is sitting at the window; it mirrors nothing, reflects the room. But ifone bends closer, then from all sides the blackness plunges in, and then the church, the jagged black houses with their caps of snow.
First trip. It's boringly different; we're traveling as man and wife. Nothing else; everything only in the hesitation that they have to over- come inwardly to do so. They are traveling without passports. Morning in Budapest. Conference with a lawyer. The square before the Parlia- ment: something breaks under their feet like thin sheets of ice; gusts of
wind sweep the square clean of people, mere existence makes itself pal- pable as an exertion. Impatience to get on the train. Just ten minutes before departure, resistance against order. Reacting to some kind of feeling, they buy second-class tickets; some pleasant thought or other of
I726 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
black leather. Tip, alone. Everywhere they are taken for a young married couple. It's boring, Agathe lies down to nap. It turns fine; white plain like a sea, forests buried in snow, heavy pillows of snow on the branches ofthe firs. Achilles [earlier name for Ulrich-TRANs. ] wakes Agathe up; this white and black, perhaps a white and mysteriously bottle-green landscape rushes through their eyes-lovely, she says, presses his hand-and melts into sleep; he stares at the strange countryside, sees in the darkness of the compartment Agathe's shoulders and hips as she lies on her side, like hills, mysterious. . . .
Morning near Fiume. Through the opened window damp, warm air. Speckled flanks of the bowl of the valley they are descending into.
In Fiume rain, storm. Somebody in the train says that the steamer left already this morning; someone else: it will still be there. Going across the harbor square the storm turns their umbrella inside out-laughter on the flagstones, the rain soaks their clothes so that they are wading in their shoes.
Walk in the sunshine, palm trees, a street like a ribbon tied in bows.
What is an execution compared to an operation?
He drives back with someone else, who is horrified. When they get to where the pavement begins, the carriage jolts so that they don't continue talking. Trees are tom past, sometimes the glance is flung through a hole into sand, pines. . . .
The man: walks, looks around. Achilles feels an inexpressible link to him. Dostoyevskian. Laughs at it. Yields voluntarily.
At his execution, Moosbrugger is simply embarrassed. Execution like a fire-brigade drill. The solemn flourishes at the end don't move Ulrich. On his way out he nods vaguely and politely. Feels that it is perhaps out of place. Only when he looks into the face of his driver does he notice a difference of brightness and warmth in the surround- ings as opposed to before. This face seems to him quite hard, he sees every single hair of the beard stubble. A man who was there to do a journalistic study, whom he had invited to share his carriage and for- gotten, gets in with him. Out of some vague feeling he remains sitting on the right.
Country road, then extended city street. Pubs, people in black skirts and shirtsleeves. Ulrich feels a vague, scornful hatred for these people.
From the Posthumous Papers · 1727 Study for Conclusion
Ulrich, to begin with without irony:
Reversal ofa feeling about life with hard, bright, challenging . . . into soft, dark, smeared . . . What was so important to one a moment ago becomes completely indifferent.
One has the feeling that this passivity is not entirely without activity, but this activity is something quite different from the disputatious pas- sivity of before. Ulrich remembers having felt something similar in [chapter] 30. He was dissatisfied with himself and (1) his house made him shudder. He recalled once more his feeling of the "ahistorical," the world new with every day. In addition: accidental and essential qualities, possibly being broken in spirit from strength; one's being is still strength, but the object being seized is always simply larger.
(1) I was born, abandoned into this world; from one protective dark- ness into another. Mother? Ulrich had not had a mother. The world my mother? He stood up and stretched his muscles.
[Fragment]
I did not answer my father's letter. An odd destiny had led me into the same aristocratic circles to which he owed his rise in life, the naYve lack of dignity of which irritated me; I had resolved to look around in these circles as in a room into which one had stumbled by some secret chance, and ifin doing so I would have had to have the least thought ofa resem- blance, this would have been impossible for me. It was no doubt for this reason that I refrained from giving my father the satisfaction of having his wish fulfilled. He took it amiss, and I received no more letters from him, so that not long after, I was completely surprised by a message re- porting his demise. I cannot say I was shaken; we had little fondness for each other. Also, I was totally lacking in the feeling for that continuity which, it is claimed, binds ancestors and posterity; the inheritance of certain dispositions and qualities, while certainly present, did not seem to me any more important than that the most disparate melodies can be constructed from the same notes, and the generally prevailing demand for pious respect is a con game; at least that's how most unconstrained young people feel it, although later they deny it. Besides, I was in a great hurry to complete the arrangements for my trip.
1728 • THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
I remember that while I was overseeing the packing, the barbaric ideas ofpatriarchy that are dinned into shrinking children went through my head; the hand that strikes out at the father grows from the grave, the disobedient child is afflicted with its parents' tears when they are dead, and many such techniques from the wild primitive era of mankind. Pri- mal epochs come to life again in the nursery, where nannies let them- selves go. Somewhat later I was overcome by the desolate feeling that the entire atmosphere surrounding the ultimate questions and their phi- losophy, which I had involuntarily been seeking in my memory, are of a pronounced banality. Just as when you look up at the starry sky for the space of five minutes. We know nothing, and what we feel is warmed- over cabbage. I did not even know whether I ought to give myself over to my distaste or whether I should set it straight; the beginnings of both were in me. Whatever the philosophers may have contributed, no mat- ter how enormous it might be as an intellectual accomplishment, from the human point of view we have remained in these questions undeni- ably limited and boring. Of course my own ideas shared in this too, ex- cept that it suddenly seemed to me incredibly remarkable that one lives with this quite contentedly. The well-known feeling of extraterritoriality rose up in me: even if I do not presume to be able to order things and thoughts any better, in the order that they have found for themselves they are for me immensely alien. And I gradually noticed that I had fallen into a quite specific stream of ideas and emotions that I had al- most forgotten.
The thought of my father, whom I did not esteem, was unpleasant for me, the way a plant might feel whose roots have been burned by acid. I remembered once having said to someone: The founders of empires have no ancestors! That, too, was now unpleasant to me, because it sounded so childishly arrogant, if I had meant just then that everyone ought to be such a founder ofkingdoms. That person was my
Or: I had hardly begun to look around in my new circle when I re- ceived a telegram from my father that reported . . . I was now completely master of my life. When I stepped out onto the square in front of the railroad station . . .
From the Posthurrwus Papers · 1729 August 16, 1929, evening
The man without qualities thought through consistently First considerations
Don't give him a name. Explain briefly in Part I. It's not hard to say what a man without qualities looks like: like most other people.
There is only at times a shimmer in him, as in a solution that is trying to crystallize but always drops back.
Clarisse says and sees: You look like Satan. Colossal energy, etc.
Walter says: Your appearance is falling apart, etc. More or less what could be said about him.
Amheim and Diotima are troubled. Amheim says: The "cousin. "
It's only for the police that he has qualities. For General Stumm: The old comrade.
For Count Leinsdorf he is something definite (true).
For Bonadea he is splendid, mean, etc.
I say: the or a man without qualities (and this is without overvaluing
him, as would be the case with a "hero" Ulrich) is an object to be de- picted. I constantly ask myself: what would a man without qualities say, think, do, in such a situation.
The ideas are such as present themselves to any clever person today. They could also be different; it doesn't amount to the formation of a will or a conviction, beyond a given point or a paranoid system.
By this means one gains relations to the characters, the situative dia- logue.
Of course they are all without qualities, but in Ulrich it is somehow visible.
He is tall, etc. , sympathetic but also unsympathetic.
The other people, on the other hand, have their stories told properly.
Possibly: Everything about the man without qualities in the present tense, everything else that is narrated in the imperfect.
Characterize Ulrich as unsympathetically as myself.
Amheim calls him: The young doctor.
Diotima: My learned cousin (with ironic undertone).
Bring out more strongly the leave from life: resolve to commit suicide (instead of that, then the war); don't give reasons. They were neither
I730 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
concrete ones nor a disdain for life; on the contrary, although he found life abominable he made an effort to love it, felt himself somehow obli- gated to.
Ocean trip: the way it was. To hang on to it, grab hold of it as con- cretely as possible.
For the first time as man and wife beside each other in this weakness afteiWard. Their bodies are as insubstantial as silk ribbons. Nothing hap- pens. Only afteiWard the timorous walking among the loud people.
Railroad journey: their muscles are tossed back and forth, back and forth. Their bodies sway. The weak smile that was yesterday's day pales. Here and there a glance. Or a closing ofthe eyes. Need for the schedule, for a sturdy compartment conversation. But between silence, fatigue, gliding through a strange landscape, and even boredom, still a hanging on to the possession of something different.
First attempt to strip naked. Above rocks on an inaccessible rock ter- race. Even undressing has no effect. Here the charming play of clothes in the room has no force. The naked body like a line. If at least it were burned by the sun.
Union. Like two one-celled animals. Consciously-in a pause when the moon is gone-sexuality as concentration on a goal and a way. There must be this penetration. (Conversation) The moon is there again and the penetration begins. Until they release each other fatigued and sa- tiated. Lying on their beds like flour dust in human shape. Happy, con- fused; but all human content was blown away. Can that be repeated? Only if an intellectual system is involved, such as unio mystica or the like. This system might perhaps be possible. Tragedy: an unborn world.
Normal desire in Ulrich. Also in Agathe. But repressed again and again until the longing for ordinary obstacles like rivals etc. comes.
Diotima-Arnheim: Sitting knee-to-knee holding hands. Diotima's knees make a motion to open. She presses them together. She stands up, Amheim kisses the curled hair on her neck. (He is unaware of this nes- tling up from behind. ) The kiss down her back, through her legs, comes out at her breasts.
Diotima-Ulrich afteiWard. Diotima just looks at him, upset. Every- thing in her is destroyed. He has put her feelings back on track again.
Meingast. Is democracy a system that picks out leaders? No.
Does it further the intellectual and spiritual? No.
It drags down whatever is outstanding, while raising the general level
only a tiny bit.
From the Posthurrwus Papers · 1731
My view of, or task I would set for, literature: partial solution, contri- bution to the solution, investigation, or the like. I feel exempted from having to give an unequivocal response. I have, after all, also postulated the morality of individual cases, etc.
A justified objection: That was from the period before the war. There was no way of shaking up the totality. It went further too: everyone had this feeling. Whether one wanted it that way or not, there was a finn system of coordinates. A floating ball, which one pushed and turned every which way. One's interest exhausted itself in the variations. The tacit assumption was probably not the solidity of the environment but one's lack of concern for it, without one's being aware of it.
Disposition to understanding the way I am in, for instance, Martha [Musil's wife-TRANs. ]: because she paid no attention to the totality in any event.
This situation has now changed. The whole person has been flung into uncertainty. Discussions are of no use to him, he needs the solidity that has been lost. Hence the desire for resolution, for yes and no. In this sense, a person with as little substance as Brecht is exemplary through the form of his behavior. He moves people because he demonstrates their own experience to them. One has to understand this completely.
Therefore the didactic element in the book must be strengthened. A practical formula must be advanced.
Not further thought out: apparently this gives the practical-theoreti- cal opposition, the original spy concept, new content.
LATE 1920s
a. Loving fear
It was spring. The air like a net. Behind it something that stretched the weave. But was not able to break through. They [Ulrich and Agathe-TRANs. ] both knew it but no longer trusted themselves to talk about it. They knew, in the moment when they would seek words for it . . . it would be dead. Fear made them tender. Their eyes and hands (often) brushed each other, a trembling around the lips sought its reflec-
1732 · THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
tion, one second seemed to separate itself from the ranks of the others and sink into the depths.
The second time, such a movement was a massive mountain of bliss. The third time, very nearly comical.
Then the loving fear came over them.
They looked for a jest, a cynical word; just something unimportant but
real; something that is at home in life and has a right to a home. I t makes no difference what one talks about. Every word falls into the silence, and the next moment the corpses of other words are shining in a circle around it, the way masses of dead fish rise to the surface when one casts poison into the water. The order of words in a real connection destroys the deep reflective luster with which, unspoken, they lie above the un- utterable, and one could just as well speak about lawyers as philosophy.
b.
Ulrich comes in, a book in his hand; it is Emerson, whom he loves. He heard only at the last moment that Agathe was making music. What he hates: music as subterfuge, music as intoxicant deadening the life-form- ing will. He becomes gloomy, wants to turn around, but nevertheless reads aloud to Agathe the place he wanted to show her.
Can be applied to the description of the nature of an idea:
"'In common hours, society sits cold and statuesque. We all stand waiting, empty-knowing, possibly, that we can be full, surrounded by mighty symbols which are not symbols to us, but prose and trivial toys. Then cometh the god and converts the statues into fiery men, and by a flash of his eye burns up the veil which shrouded all things, and the meaning of the very furniture, of cup and saucer, of chair and clock and tester, is manifest. The facts which loomed so large in the fogs of yester- day-property, climate, breeding, personal beauty, and the like-have strangely changed their proportions. All that we reckoned solid shakes and rattles. . . . ' "
His voice sounds despondently "cold and silent" as he reads with lost confidence. Agathe has interrupted her playing; when the words, too, have died away, her fingers take a few acoustic steps through the bound- less land of music, stop, and she listens. "Lovely," she says, but does not know what she means.
Agathe is playing the piano.
From the Posthurrwus Papers · 1733
To her surprise Ulrich says: ''Yes; it can drive one mad. " Agathe, who knows that Ulrich does not like it when she plays music, abandons the instrument.
- P a y attention! Ulrich says, having stepped back and drawn a pistol from his pocket. He fires at the piano, shooting into the center of its long black flank. The bullet cuts through the dty, tender wood and howls across the strings. A second churns up jumping sounds. The keys begin to hop. The jubilantly sharp reports of the pistol drive with increasing frenzy into a splintering, screaming, tearing, drumming, and singing up- roar. He does not know why he is shooting. Certainly not because of anger at the piano, or to express anything at all symbolically. When the magazine is empty Ulrich lets it drop to the carpet, and his cheeks are still hollowed out from tension.
Agathe had neither lifted her hand nor uttered the slightest sound to prevent the destruction of the expensive instrument. She felt no fear, and although the way her brother began must have been quite incom- prehensible to her, the thought that he had gone mad did not seem terri- fying to her, caught up as she was by the pathos of the shots and the strange wounded cries of the struck instrument.
When her brother then asked whether she was angry at him, she de- nied it with radiant eyes.
But can I imagine what that means in its fullest extent, can I even imagine what it means in its smallest? I must try. A person does some- thing . . . no, I can't duck it: Professor Lindner does something! He arouses Agathe's inclination. I feel this event, want to spoil it and negate it - and the moment I yield to my dislike, I step out of the sphere of significance. What I feel can never become a motif for Agathe. My breast may be full of vexation or anger, my head an arsenal of sharp and ready objections-my heart is empty! My condition is then suddenly negative! My state is no longer positive! There's another marvelous pair of notions I've got hold of! What makes me think of the characteriza- tions "positive" and "negative"? I unexpectedly recall a day when I was also sitting with some paper in front of me and trying to write--at the time it was to be a letter to Agathe. And gradually it comes to mind: a
From the Posthumous Papers · 1719
condition of "do" and a condition of "don't" as the two component ele- ments of every morality, the "do" prevailing during its rise, the "don't" during the satiety of its reign-is not this relationship between "chal- lenge" and "prohibition" the same as what I am now calling positive and negative? The connection between Agathe and me characterized by ev- erything being challenge and nothing prohibition? I recall speaking at that time of Agathe's passionate, affinning goodness, which in an age in which things of that sort are no longer understood looks like a primitive vice. I said: It's like returning home after the longest time and drinking water from the well of one's village! And challenge of course does not mean that we demand but means that everything we do demands the utmost from us.
Not leaving the sphere of the significant would therefore be the same as a life in pure positiveness? The thought that it is also the same as "living essentially" alarms me, although it was to be expected. For what else should "essentially" signify? The word probably comes from mysti- cism or metaphysics, and characterizes the opposition to all earthly hap- penings that are without peace and full of doubts; but since we have separated ourselves from Heaven, it lives on on earth as the longing to find among thousands of moral convictions the one that gives life a meaning that does not change. Endless conversations between Agathe and me on the subject! Her youthful desire for moral instruction along- side the defiance in which she wanted to kill Hagauer and has at least really injured him in a material way! And the same search for conviction everywhere in the world; the intimation that man can't live without mo- rality, and the deep disquiet at how his own emotions undermine every one of them! Where is the possibility of a "whole" life, a "complete" conviction, a love that is without any admixture of not-love, without a shred of self-seeking and selfishness? What that means is: only living positively. And it means: not wanting to admit any happening without "significance" whenever I speak of a "never-ending condition," in con- trast to the "eternally futile moment-to-moment quality" of our usual way of acting, or of the alliance of every momentary state with a "lasting state" of the emotions, which restores our "responsibility. " I could go on repeating such expressions for pages, expressions that characterized what we meant from one side or another. We summarized it as "living essentially," always somewhat embarrassed by the term's bombastic- transcendental overtones, but we had no other that would have been simpler to use. So it is no small surprise for me to suddenly find almost in my hands what I was seeking in the clouds!
Of course it is part of the peculiarity of our condition that every new observation assimilates all the earlier ones, so that there is no hierarchy
1720 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
among them; they seem, rather, to be infinitely entangled. I could just as well go on to call OUI condition magnanimous, which in fact I did some days ago, as I could characterize it as creative, for creating and creation are possible only in an attitude that is positive through and through, and so that, too, would be in accord; ultimately such a life, in which every moment is to be as significant as possible, is also that "life in the sense of the maximal challenge" which I sometimes imagined as the spiritual complement to the laconic resolve of true science. But whether maxi- mal, magnanimous, creative, or significant, essential or whole, how do I account for my feelings for Professor Lindner being what they are? That's the problem I am drawn back to, the crux of the experiment, the crossroads! It occurs to me that I have deprived him of the possibility of having part of Agathe. Why? Because having part of, indeed even under- standing, is never possible through "putting oneself in the place of the other," but is possible only if both mutually take part in something greater. It's impossible for me to feel my sister's headaches; but I find myself transported with her in a state in which there is no pain, or where pain has the hovering wings of bliss!
I have doubts about this, I see the exaggeration in it. But perhaps that's only because I'm not capable of ecstasy?
Toward Lindner I would have to conduct myselfas ifI were somehow united with him in God. Even a smaller whole, like "nation" or some other confraternity, would suffice. At least it would suffice to prescribe my conduct. Even an idea in common would be enough. It merely has to be something new and dynamic that is not merely Lindner and I. So the answer to Agathe's question, what a contradiction signifies between two books both of which one loves, is: it never signifies a calculation or a balance, but signifies a third, dynamic thing, which envelops both as- pects in itself. And that's how the life was that was always before my eyes, even if rarely clearly: the people united, I united with people through something that makes us renounce our hundred dislikes. The contradictions and hostilities that exist between us cannot be denied, but one can also imagine them "suspended," the way the strong current of a liquid picks up and suspends whatever it encounters in its path. There would then not be certain feelings among people, but there would be others. All impossible feelings could be summarized as neutral and negative; as petty, gnawing, constricting, base, but also as indifferent or merely rooted in connections that were necessary. So what remains would be great, increasing, demanding, encumbered, affirming, rising: in my hurry I can't describe it adequately, but it lay in the depths of my body like a dream, and isn't what I ultimately wanted simply to love life and everyone in it? I, with my arms, my muscles, trained to the point of
From the Posthumous Papers · 1 7 2 1
malignity, basically nothing but crazy for love and lacking love? Is this the secret fonnula of my life?
I can conceive of that when I fantasize and think of the world and people, but not when I think of Lindner, that specific, ridiculous person, the man Agathe will perhaps see again tomorrow in order to discuss with him what she does not discuss with me. So what's left? That there are two groups of emotions which can be separated to some extent, which I would now again like to characterize only as positive and negative condi- tions, without placing a value on them, but merely according to a pecu- liarity of their appearance; although I love one of these two overall conditions from the depths (that also means: well hidden) of my soul. And the reality is left that I now find myself almost constantly in this condition, and Agathe too! Perhaps this is a great experiment that fate intends with me. Perhaps everything I have attempted was there only so that I could experience this. But I also fear that there's a vicious circle lurking in everything that I think I have understood up to now. For I don't want-if I now go back to my original motif-to leave the state of "significance," and if I try to tell myself what significance is, all I come back to again and again is the state I'm in, which is that I don't want to leave a specific state! So I don't believe I'm looking at the truth, but what I experience is certainly not simply subjective, either; it reaches out for the truth with a thousand anns. For that reason it could truly seem to me to be a hypnotic suggestion. All my emotions happen to be remarkably homogeneous or harmonized, and the resistive ones are excluded, and such a condition of the emotions, which regulates action in a unified way, is precisely what is regarded as the centerpiece of a hypnosis. But can something be hypnotic whose premonition, whose first traces, I can follow back through almost my entire life?
So there remains . . . ? It isn't imagination and it isn't reality; even ifit is not hypnotic suggestion, I would almost have to conclude that it is the beginning of suprareality.
SKETCHES AND NOTES ABOUT THE NOVEL
Preface:
This novel takes place before 1914, a time that young people will no longer know at all. And the novel does not describe this time the way it really was, so that one could learn about it from this book. But it de- scribes the time as it is mirrored in a person outside the mainstream. Then what does this novel have to do with people of today? Why don't I write a novel about today instead? This has to be established, as best it can.
But that it concerns an (invented) story should also become part of the manner of its telling. The path of history is to be applied not only in the novel but to it.
From the perspective of the book, the portrayal of the time has to be abridged. But I'm not capable of that. The Parallel Campaign, for in- stance, ought to connect with the Eucharistic Congress and other things about which I know too little. Absolute necessity of creating the tech- nique from this error!
Preface
Ulrich considers himself a person who has a message to bring the world. Fragments are to be found here.
Later he judges [. . . ]: In one's lifetime one must have presented a good front and the like if one wants to have even a posthumous effect. He is not bad, just gives up.
That is also his development in the novel. He does not write hts book but ts present in all the events.
The narrator is, in a way, his friend.
Present Ulrich not as the "true-strong" person but as an important statement that has gone astray.
Mood: This is the tragedy of the failed person (more properly: the
From the Posthumous Papers · 1723
person who in questions of emotion and understanding is always aware of a further possibility. For he is not simply a failure) who is always alone, in contradiction with everything, and cannot change anything. All the rest is logically consistent.
Preface
People will find the excuse-because they don't want to explore the idea-that what is offered here is as much essay as novel.
Query: Why is it that people today don't pay attention to ideas in art, while in other respects they demonstrate an absolutely ridiculous inter- est in "doctrines"?
1st section before Agathe
An athletic young man-very intellectual-attempts normal life-has
ideas that don't seem to fit in-suspicious of the transparent humbug with ideals-tries to find a way out by means of functional morality-is himself morally indifferent-but unhappy about it-is arrogant toward his time but always looking for a way out of his arrogance-and from this an emotion crystallizes: swimming through a space-jagged stage sets loom up--Ulrich was good. As a child. He simply saw that this "good" could not become the desiccated commonly accepted one. If among his ideas there are some that are right, then he is a precursor. But appar- ently evil develops the way he doesn't imagine it ala journalism. He is interested in evil and despises the common.
Preface
I dedicate this novel to German youth. Not the youth of today-intel- lectual vacuum after the war-quite amusing frauds-but the youth that will come after a time and that will have to begin exactly where we stopped before the war, etc. (On this also rests my justification for writ- ing a prewar novel today! )
Preface
"Superfluous," "wandering" discussions: that's a reproach that's often been made against me, in which it was perhaps graciously conceded that I could tell a story. But these discussions are for me the most important thing!
I could have depicted many things more realistically. For instance,
1724 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
Hans Sepp and National Socialist politics. But there is already enough of the ridiculous in the book, and I then would not have been able to coun- terbalance it, which was what I was trying to do.
Preface
Where one speaks of relative originality:
The phenomenon that a relatively or entirely original writer-com- pletely inaccessible to the average critic-who in desperation analyzes him only in isolated, dependent particles-as has happened to me.
Preface
Why Vienna instead ofan invented metropolis. Because it would have been more effort to invent one than a "crossed-out" Vienna.
Manner ofrepresentation to befrequently used
Assemble a composite person, but with cards faceup! From settled ideas and a few obsessive linkages of ideas, e. g. , the way Hagauer is. All the intellectual characters this way: Arnheim, Diotima, etc. Whatever is added that is human and personal, particularly to those characters who are "only people," is accidental; moreover, from the psychological point ofview also characteristic, frequently repellent, like Arnheim's predilec- tion for the behind, or wishy-washy psychology like Schnitzler's.
events } depictions•
conversations interweavings
. are the only bearers of the narration
•ofthe nature ofthe person, ofchanges in the physical and moral landscape
From the Posthumous Papers · 1725
Theories, halfironic, chiefly in the agitations ofthe unsympathetic and halfsympathetic figpres
Journey with Agathe
Trip across. Seasickness. Burgeoning awareness of a fearful passion for each other because they see each other in this state, bear it, feel it appropriate, with mouths agape, vomiting. The whole ship an orgy.
Ancona. Exhaustion. Taken for a married couple, room with double bed; they don't want to reject it; fear almost amounting to a feeling of persecution, sweetness.
Only the terrible things about Rome. The smoothed and polished, the ravinelike streets with green window shutters. The being tortured from before.
That was the first trip. On the second, with Clarisse, he recalls it. In Venice, where Clarisse is confined on the way back, meeting with Gus- tav [the model for Walter-TRANs. ]. Rather fat paunch, deep devotion to Clarisse. Forced back to Vienna; meeting with Agathe, beginning of the spy story. The inner city entwined around St. Stephen's Cathedral like a ball of tangled yarn. Yellow-gray darkness. Air like down.
On the trip: They really don't do anything at all; they only suffer the fear that they could be accused, and the desire.
Someplace or other, memory from Esslingen. Second floor of the mu- seum. He is sitting at the window; it mirrors nothing, reflects the room. But ifone bends closer, then from all sides the blackness plunges in, and then the church, the jagged black houses with their caps of snow.
First trip. It's boringly different; we're traveling as man and wife. Nothing else; everything only in the hesitation that they have to over- come inwardly to do so. They are traveling without passports. Morning in Budapest. Conference with a lawyer. The square before the Parlia- ment: something breaks under their feet like thin sheets of ice; gusts of
wind sweep the square clean of people, mere existence makes itself pal- pable as an exertion. Impatience to get on the train. Just ten minutes before departure, resistance against order. Reacting to some kind of feeling, they buy second-class tickets; some pleasant thought or other of
I726 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
black leather. Tip, alone. Everywhere they are taken for a young married couple. It's boring, Agathe lies down to nap. It turns fine; white plain like a sea, forests buried in snow, heavy pillows of snow on the branches ofthe firs. Achilles [earlier name for Ulrich-TRANs. ] wakes Agathe up; this white and black, perhaps a white and mysteriously bottle-green landscape rushes through their eyes-lovely, she says, presses his hand-and melts into sleep; he stares at the strange countryside, sees in the darkness of the compartment Agathe's shoulders and hips as she lies on her side, like hills, mysterious. . . .
Morning near Fiume. Through the opened window damp, warm air. Speckled flanks of the bowl of the valley they are descending into.
In Fiume rain, storm. Somebody in the train says that the steamer left already this morning; someone else: it will still be there. Going across the harbor square the storm turns their umbrella inside out-laughter on the flagstones, the rain soaks their clothes so that they are wading in their shoes.
Walk in the sunshine, palm trees, a street like a ribbon tied in bows.
What is an execution compared to an operation?
He drives back with someone else, who is horrified. When they get to where the pavement begins, the carriage jolts so that they don't continue talking. Trees are tom past, sometimes the glance is flung through a hole into sand, pines. . . .
The man: walks, looks around. Achilles feels an inexpressible link to him. Dostoyevskian. Laughs at it. Yields voluntarily.
At his execution, Moosbrugger is simply embarrassed. Execution like a fire-brigade drill. The solemn flourishes at the end don't move Ulrich. On his way out he nods vaguely and politely. Feels that it is perhaps out of place. Only when he looks into the face of his driver does he notice a difference of brightness and warmth in the surround- ings as opposed to before. This face seems to him quite hard, he sees every single hair of the beard stubble. A man who was there to do a journalistic study, whom he had invited to share his carriage and for- gotten, gets in with him. Out of some vague feeling he remains sitting on the right.
Country road, then extended city street. Pubs, people in black skirts and shirtsleeves. Ulrich feels a vague, scornful hatred for these people.
From the Posthumous Papers · 1727 Study for Conclusion
Ulrich, to begin with without irony:
Reversal ofa feeling about life with hard, bright, challenging . . . into soft, dark, smeared . . . What was so important to one a moment ago becomes completely indifferent.
One has the feeling that this passivity is not entirely without activity, but this activity is something quite different from the disputatious pas- sivity of before. Ulrich remembers having felt something similar in [chapter] 30. He was dissatisfied with himself and (1) his house made him shudder. He recalled once more his feeling of the "ahistorical," the world new with every day. In addition: accidental and essential qualities, possibly being broken in spirit from strength; one's being is still strength, but the object being seized is always simply larger.
(1) I was born, abandoned into this world; from one protective dark- ness into another. Mother? Ulrich had not had a mother. The world my mother? He stood up and stretched his muscles.
[Fragment]
I did not answer my father's letter. An odd destiny had led me into the same aristocratic circles to which he owed his rise in life, the naYve lack of dignity of which irritated me; I had resolved to look around in these circles as in a room into which one had stumbled by some secret chance, and ifin doing so I would have had to have the least thought ofa resem- blance, this would have been impossible for me. It was no doubt for this reason that I refrained from giving my father the satisfaction of having his wish fulfilled. He took it amiss, and I received no more letters from him, so that not long after, I was completely surprised by a message re- porting his demise. I cannot say I was shaken; we had little fondness for each other. Also, I was totally lacking in the feeling for that continuity which, it is claimed, binds ancestors and posterity; the inheritance of certain dispositions and qualities, while certainly present, did not seem to me any more important than that the most disparate melodies can be constructed from the same notes, and the generally prevailing demand for pious respect is a con game; at least that's how most unconstrained young people feel it, although later they deny it. Besides, I was in a great hurry to complete the arrangements for my trip.
1728 • THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
I remember that while I was overseeing the packing, the barbaric ideas ofpatriarchy that are dinned into shrinking children went through my head; the hand that strikes out at the father grows from the grave, the disobedient child is afflicted with its parents' tears when they are dead, and many such techniques from the wild primitive era of mankind. Pri- mal epochs come to life again in the nursery, where nannies let them- selves go. Somewhat later I was overcome by the desolate feeling that the entire atmosphere surrounding the ultimate questions and their phi- losophy, which I had involuntarily been seeking in my memory, are of a pronounced banality. Just as when you look up at the starry sky for the space of five minutes. We know nothing, and what we feel is warmed- over cabbage. I did not even know whether I ought to give myself over to my distaste or whether I should set it straight; the beginnings of both were in me. Whatever the philosophers may have contributed, no mat- ter how enormous it might be as an intellectual accomplishment, from the human point of view we have remained in these questions undeni- ably limited and boring. Of course my own ideas shared in this too, ex- cept that it suddenly seemed to me incredibly remarkable that one lives with this quite contentedly. The well-known feeling of extraterritoriality rose up in me: even if I do not presume to be able to order things and thoughts any better, in the order that they have found for themselves they are for me immensely alien. And I gradually noticed that I had fallen into a quite specific stream of ideas and emotions that I had al- most forgotten.
The thought of my father, whom I did not esteem, was unpleasant for me, the way a plant might feel whose roots have been burned by acid. I remembered once having said to someone: The founders of empires have no ancestors! That, too, was now unpleasant to me, because it sounded so childishly arrogant, if I had meant just then that everyone ought to be such a founder ofkingdoms. That person was my
Or: I had hardly begun to look around in my new circle when I re- ceived a telegram from my father that reported . . . I was now completely master of my life. When I stepped out onto the square in front of the railroad station . . .
From the Posthurrwus Papers · 1729 August 16, 1929, evening
The man without qualities thought through consistently First considerations
Don't give him a name. Explain briefly in Part I. It's not hard to say what a man without qualities looks like: like most other people.
There is only at times a shimmer in him, as in a solution that is trying to crystallize but always drops back.
Clarisse says and sees: You look like Satan. Colossal energy, etc.
Walter says: Your appearance is falling apart, etc. More or less what could be said about him.
Amheim and Diotima are troubled. Amheim says: The "cousin. "
It's only for the police that he has qualities. For General Stumm: The old comrade.
For Count Leinsdorf he is something definite (true).
For Bonadea he is splendid, mean, etc.
I say: the or a man without qualities (and this is without overvaluing
him, as would be the case with a "hero" Ulrich) is an object to be de- picted. I constantly ask myself: what would a man without qualities say, think, do, in such a situation.
The ideas are such as present themselves to any clever person today. They could also be different; it doesn't amount to the formation of a will or a conviction, beyond a given point or a paranoid system.
By this means one gains relations to the characters, the situative dia- logue.
Of course they are all without qualities, but in Ulrich it is somehow visible.
He is tall, etc. , sympathetic but also unsympathetic.
The other people, on the other hand, have their stories told properly.
Possibly: Everything about the man without qualities in the present tense, everything else that is narrated in the imperfect.
Characterize Ulrich as unsympathetically as myself.
Amheim calls him: The young doctor.
Diotima: My learned cousin (with ironic undertone).
Bring out more strongly the leave from life: resolve to commit suicide (instead of that, then the war); don't give reasons. They were neither
I730 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
concrete ones nor a disdain for life; on the contrary, although he found life abominable he made an effort to love it, felt himself somehow obli- gated to.
Ocean trip: the way it was. To hang on to it, grab hold of it as con- cretely as possible.
For the first time as man and wife beside each other in this weakness afteiWard. Their bodies are as insubstantial as silk ribbons. Nothing hap- pens. Only afteiWard the timorous walking among the loud people.
Railroad journey: their muscles are tossed back and forth, back and forth. Their bodies sway. The weak smile that was yesterday's day pales. Here and there a glance. Or a closing ofthe eyes. Need for the schedule, for a sturdy compartment conversation. But between silence, fatigue, gliding through a strange landscape, and even boredom, still a hanging on to the possession of something different.
First attempt to strip naked. Above rocks on an inaccessible rock ter- race. Even undressing has no effect. Here the charming play of clothes in the room has no force. The naked body like a line. If at least it were burned by the sun.
Union. Like two one-celled animals. Consciously-in a pause when the moon is gone-sexuality as concentration on a goal and a way. There must be this penetration. (Conversation) The moon is there again and the penetration begins. Until they release each other fatigued and sa- tiated. Lying on their beds like flour dust in human shape. Happy, con- fused; but all human content was blown away. Can that be repeated? Only if an intellectual system is involved, such as unio mystica or the like. This system might perhaps be possible. Tragedy: an unborn world.
Normal desire in Ulrich. Also in Agathe. But repressed again and again until the longing for ordinary obstacles like rivals etc. comes.
Diotima-Arnheim: Sitting knee-to-knee holding hands. Diotima's knees make a motion to open. She presses them together. She stands up, Amheim kisses the curled hair on her neck. (He is unaware of this nes- tling up from behind. ) The kiss down her back, through her legs, comes out at her breasts.
Diotima-Ulrich afteiWard. Diotima just looks at him, upset. Every- thing in her is destroyed. He has put her feelings back on track again.
Meingast. Is democracy a system that picks out leaders? No.
Does it further the intellectual and spiritual? No.
It drags down whatever is outstanding, while raising the general level
only a tiny bit.
From the Posthurrwus Papers · 1731
My view of, or task I would set for, literature: partial solution, contri- bution to the solution, investigation, or the like. I feel exempted from having to give an unequivocal response. I have, after all, also postulated the morality of individual cases, etc.
A justified objection: That was from the period before the war. There was no way of shaking up the totality. It went further too: everyone had this feeling. Whether one wanted it that way or not, there was a finn system of coordinates. A floating ball, which one pushed and turned every which way. One's interest exhausted itself in the variations. The tacit assumption was probably not the solidity of the environment but one's lack of concern for it, without one's being aware of it.
Disposition to understanding the way I am in, for instance, Martha [Musil's wife-TRANs. ]: because she paid no attention to the totality in any event.
This situation has now changed. The whole person has been flung into uncertainty. Discussions are of no use to him, he needs the solidity that has been lost. Hence the desire for resolution, for yes and no. In this sense, a person with as little substance as Brecht is exemplary through the form of his behavior. He moves people because he demonstrates their own experience to them. One has to understand this completely.
Therefore the didactic element in the book must be strengthened. A practical formula must be advanced.
Not further thought out: apparently this gives the practical-theoreti- cal opposition, the original spy concept, new content.
LATE 1920s
a. Loving fear
It was spring. The air like a net. Behind it something that stretched the weave. But was not able to break through. They [Ulrich and Agathe-TRANs. ] both knew it but no longer trusted themselves to talk about it. They knew, in the moment when they would seek words for it . . . it would be dead. Fear made them tender. Their eyes and hands (often) brushed each other, a trembling around the lips sought its reflec-
1732 · THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
tion, one second seemed to separate itself from the ranks of the others and sink into the depths.
The second time, such a movement was a massive mountain of bliss. The third time, very nearly comical.
Then the loving fear came over them.
They looked for a jest, a cynical word; just something unimportant but
real; something that is at home in life and has a right to a home. I t makes no difference what one talks about. Every word falls into the silence, and the next moment the corpses of other words are shining in a circle around it, the way masses of dead fish rise to the surface when one casts poison into the water. The order of words in a real connection destroys the deep reflective luster with which, unspoken, they lie above the un- utterable, and one could just as well speak about lawyers as philosophy.
b.
Ulrich comes in, a book in his hand; it is Emerson, whom he loves. He heard only at the last moment that Agathe was making music. What he hates: music as subterfuge, music as intoxicant deadening the life-form- ing will. He becomes gloomy, wants to turn around, but nevertheless reads aloud to Agathe the place he wanted to show her.
Can be applied to the description of the nature of an idea:
"'In common hours, society sits cold and statuesque. We all stand waiting, empty-knowing, possibly, that we can be full, surrounded by mighty symbols which are not symbols to us, but prose and trivial toys. Then cometh the god and converts the statues into fiery men, and by a flash of his eye burns up the veil which shrouded all things, and the meaning of the very furniture, of cup and saucer, of chair and clock and tester, is manifest. The facts which loomed so large in the fogs of yester- day-property, climate, breeding, personal beauty, and the like-have strangely changed their proportions. All that we reckoned solid shakes and rattles. . . . ' "
His voice sounds despondently "cold and silent" as he reads with lost confidence. Agathe has interrupted her playing; when the words, too, have died away, her fingers take a few acoustic steps through the bound- less land of music, stop, and she listens. "Lovely," she says, but does not know what she means.
Agathe is playing the piano.
From the Posthurrwus Papers · 1733
To her surprise Ulrich says: ''Yes; it can drive one mad. " Agathe, who knows that Ulrich does not like it when she plays music, abandons the instrument.
- P a y attention! Ulrich says, having stepped back and drawn a pistol from his pocket. He fires at the piano, shooting into the center of its long black flank. The bullet cuts through the dty, tender wood and howls across the strings. A second churns up jumping sounds. The keys begin to hop. The jubilantly sharp reports of the pistol drive with increasing frenzy into a splintering, screaming, tearing, drumming, and singing up- roar. He does not know why he is shooting. Certainly not because of anger at the piano, or to express anything at all symbolically. When the magazine is empty Ulrich lets it drop to the carpet, and his cheeks are still hollowed out from tension.
Agathe had neither lifted her hand nor uttered the slightest sound to prevent the destruction of the expensive instrument. She felt no fear, and although the way her brother began must have been quite incom- prehensible to her, the thought that he had gone mad did not seem terri- fying to her, caught up as she was by the pathos of the shots and the strange wounded cries of the struck instrument.
When her brother then asked whether she was angry at him, she de- nied it with radiant eyes.
