It will only be a
circumscribed
sea of liquid silver, with violets floating on it.
Musil - Man Without Qualities - v2
If it is one of life's familiar circles, for instance that of a great man, then a noble horse or a beauti- ful woman is like the clasp in a belt, which closes it and for a moment seems to contain the entire phenomenon; in the same way one can be smitten with a lovely farm horse, because in him as in a focusing mir- ror the entire heavy-footed beauty of the field and its people is re- peated.
But if there is nothing behind it?
Nothing more than is behind the rays of the sun dancing on the stones?
If this infinitude of water and sky is pitilessly open?
Then one might almost believe that beauty is something that secretly negates, something incomplete and incom- pletable, a happiness without purpose, without sense.
But what if it lacks everything?
Then beauty is a torture, something to laugh and cry over, a tickling to make one roll around in the sand, with Apollo's arrow in one's side.
Hatred of beauty. Sense of urgent sexual desire: to destroy beauty.
The brightness of such days was like smoke, which the clarity of the nights wiped away.
Agathe had somewhat less imagination than Ulrich. Because she had not thought as much as he had her emotions were not as volatile as his, but burned like a flame rising straight out of the particular ground on which she happened to be standing. The daring nature of their flight, the conscience made somewhat anxious by the fear of discovery, and finally this hiding place in a flower basket between the porous limestone wall, sea, and sky, at times gave her a high-spirited and childlike cheerfulness. She then treated even their strange experience as an adventure: a for- bidden space within herself over whose enclosure one spies, or into which one forces one's way, with beating heart, burning neck, and heavy soles weighed down with clods of damp earth from the path one has hurriedly followed in secret.
In this way very indirect suggestion of repeated coitus.
1462 ·THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
She sometimes had a playful way of allowing herself to be touched, with opened-even-when-closed eyes; of reappearing; a tenderness that was not to be stilled. He secretly obseJVed her, saw this play of love with the body, which has the captivation of a smile and the oppressive quality of a force of nature, for the first time, or was moved by it for the first time. Or there were hours when she did not look at him, was cold, al- most angry with him; because she was too agitated; like someone in a boat not daring to move, so it was in her body-afterward, every time. Because the connection does not function. Or afterreactions; at first a blocking and then, for no apparent reason, an afterflood. It was thrilling and charming to let oneself be cradled by these inspirations; they short- ened the hours but they forced an optic of nearness and minute obseJVa- tion. Ulrich resisted this. It was a leftover piece of earth drifting in the liquid fire and clouding it; a temptation to explanations such as that Agathe had never learned the proper connection between love and sex. As with most people, the entire power of the sexual had first come to- gether with a spark of inclination at the time she had married Hagauer, who was not yet abhorrent to her. Instead of stumbling into a storm with someone I almost only in the company of I accompanied by someone almost as impersonal as the elements, and only then noticing as a still nameless surprise that this person's legs are not clothed like one's own and that one's soul is beckoning one to change one's hiding place . . .
But such thoughts, too, were like singing in a false key. Ulrich did not allow himself this kind of understanding. Understanding a person one loves cannot involve spying on that person but must come pouring from an overflow of auspicious inspirations. One may only recognize those things that enrich. One makes a gift of qualities in the unshakable secu- rity of a predetermined harmony, a separation that has never b e e n -
Especially when ethical magnanimity is stimulated by it. Not the see- ing or not seeing of weaknesses, but the large motion in which they float without significance.
An ancient column-thrown down at the time of Venice, Greece, or Rome-lay among the stones and the broom; every groove of its shaft and capital deepened by the ray-sharp graving tool of the midday shad- ows. Lying next to it belonged to the great hours of love.
Four eyes watching. Nothing but noon, column, four eyes. If the glance of two eyes sees one picture, one world: why not the glance of four?
From the Posthumous Papers · 1463
When two pairs of eyes look long into each other, one person crosses over to the other on the bridge of glances, and all that remains is a feel- ing that no longer has a body.
When in a secret hour two pairs of eyes look at an object and come together in it-every object hovering deep down in a feeling, and ob- jects standing only as firmly as they do if this deep ground is hard-then the rigid world begins to move, softly and incessantly. It rises and falls restlessly with the blood. The fraternal twins looked at each other. In the bright light it could not be made out whether they were still breathing or had been lying there for a thousand years like the stones. Whether the stone column was lying there or had risen up in the light without a sound and was floating.
There is a significant difference in the way one looks at people and the way one looks at things. Every time after this when they looked at some- one in the hotel: the play of facial expressions of someone with whom one is talking becomes unspeakably alienating if one observes it as an objective process, and not as an ongoing exchange of signals between two souls; we are accustomed to see things lying mutely where they are, and we consider it a disturbing hallucination if they take on a more dy- namic relation to us. But it is only we ourselves who are looking at them in such a way that the small changes in their physiognomies are not an- swered by any alterations in our emotions, and to change this nothing more is needed, basically, than that we not look at the world intellectu- ally but that objects arouse in us our moral emotions instead of our sense-based surveying equipment. At such moments the excitement in which a glimpse brings us something and enriches us becomes so strong that nothing appears real except for a hovering condition, which, beyond the eyes, condenses into objects, and on this side of the eyes condenses into ideas and feelings, without these two sides being separable from each other. Whatever the soul bestows comes forward; whatever loses this power dissipates before one's eyes.
In this flickering silence among the stones there was a panic horror. The world seemed to be only the outer aspect of a speciflc inner atti- tude, and interchangeable with it. But world and self were not solid; a scaffolding sunk into soft depths; mutually helping each other out of a formlessness. Agathe said softly to Ulrich: "Are you yourself or are you not? I know nothing of it. I am incognizant of it and I am incognizant of myself. "
It was the terror: The world depended on her, and she did not know who she was.
1464 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
Ulrich was silent.
Agathe continued: "I am in love, but I do not know with whom. I am neither faithful nor unfaithful. What am I then? My heart is at once full oflove and emptied oflove . . . ," she whispered. The horror ofa noon- time silence seemed to have clutched her heart.
Over and over the great test was the sea. Time and again, when they had climbed down the narrow slope with its many paths, its quantity of laurel, its broom, its figs, and its many bees, and stepped out onto the powerful surface spread out above the ocean, it was like the first great chord sounding after the tuning up ofan orchestra. How would one have to be to endure this constantly? Ulrich propos. ed that they tty setting up a tent here. But he did not mean it seriously; it would have frightened him. There were no longer any opponents around, up here they were alone; the rebuffs one receives as long as one must contradict the de- mands ofothers and the habits ofone's own conscience were used up; in this final battle it was a matter of their resolve. The sea was like a merci- less beloved and rival; every minute was an annihilating exploration of conscience. They were afraid of collapsing unconscious before this ex- panse that swallowed up every resistance.
This monstrously extended sight was not to be borne without its becoming somewhat boring. This being responsible for every slightest motion was-they had to confess-rather empty, if one compared it with the cheerfulness of those hours when they made no such claims on themselves and their bodies played with the soul like a beautiful young animal rolling a ball back and forth.
One day Ulrich said: It's broad and pastoral; there's something of a pastor about it! They laughed. Then they were startled by the scorn that they had inflicted upon themselves.
The hotel had a little bell tower; in the middle ofits roof. Around one o'clock this bell rang for lunch. Since they were still almost the only guests, they did not need to respond right away, but the cook was in- dicating that he was ready. The bright sounds sliced into the stillness like a sharp knife contacting skin, which had shuddered beforehand but at this moment becomes calm. "How lovely it is, really," Ulrich said, as they climbed down on one of these days, "to be driven by necessity. The way one drives geese from behind with a stick, or entices hens from in front with feed. And where evetything doesn't happen mysteriously-" The blue-white trembling air really shuddered like goose pimples ifone
From the Posthumous Papers · 1465
stared into it for a long time. At that time memories were beginning to torture Ulrich vividly; he suddenly saw before him every statue and every architectural detail of one of those cities overloaded with such things that he had visited years ago; Niimberg was before him, and Amiens, although they had never captivated him; some large red book or other that he must have seen years earlier in an exhibit would not go away from before his eyes; a slender tanned boy, perhaps only the counter his imagination had conjured up to Agathe, but in such a way as if he had once really met him but did not know where, preoccupied his mind; ideas that he had had at some time and long forgotten; soundless, shadowy things, things properly forgotten, eddied up in this south of stillness and seized possession of the desolate expanse.
The impatience that from the beginning had been mingled with all this beauty began to rage in Ulrich.
He could be sitting before a stone, lost to the world, sunk in contem- plation, and be tortured by this raging impatience. He had come to the end, had assimilated everything into himself and ran the danger of be- ginning, all alone, to speak aloud in order to recite everything to himself once again. "Yes, you're sitting here," his thoughts said, "and you could tell yourself once again what you're looking at. " The stones are of a quite peculiar stone-green, and their image is mirrored in the water. Quite right. Exactly as one says. And the stones are shaped like boxes. . . . But it's all no use, and I'd like to leave. It is so beautiful!
And he remembered: at home, sometimes only years later, and some- times purely by accident, if one no longer has any idea how everything was, suddenly a light falls from behind, from such past things, and the heart does everything as if in a dream. He longed for the past.
"It's quite simple," he said to Agathe, "and everyone knows it, we're the only ones who don't: the imagination is stimulated only by what one does not yet possess or no longer has; the body wants to have, but the soul does not want to have. Now I understand the tremendous efforts people make to this end. How stupid it is for this ordinary fellow, this art traveler, to compare this flower to a jewel, or that stone over there to a flower: as if the truly intelligent thing to do wouldn't be to transform them for a brief moment into something else. And how stupid all our ideals would be, since every ideal, if one takes it seriously, contradicts some other ideal; thou shalt not kill, therefore perish? Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's goods, so live in poverty? As i f their sense did not lie precisely in the impossibility of carrying them out, which ignites the soul! And how good it is for religion that one can neither see nor com- prehend God! But which world? A cold, dark strip between the two fires of the Not-yet and the No-longer! "
1466 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
"A world to be afraid of oneself in," Agathe said. "You're right. " She said this quite seriously, and there was real bitterness in her eyes.
- A n d if it is so! Ulrich laughed. - I t occurs to me for the first time in my life that we would have to be terribly afraid of being tricked if Heaven were not to dangle before us an end of the world that does not exist. Evidently everything absolute, hundred-percent, true, is com- pletely monstrous.
-Between two people as well; you mean between us?
- I now understand so well what visionaries are: food without salt is unbearable, but salt without food is a poison; visionaries are people who want to live from salt alone. Is that right?
Agathe shrugged her shoulders.
- Look at our chambermaid, a cheerful stupid creature smelling of cheap soap. A short time ago I was watching her as she made up the room; she seemed to me as pretty as a freshly washed sky.
It comforted Ulrich to confess this, and a small worm of disgust crawled across Agathe's mouth. Ulrich repeated it; he did not want to drown out this small disharmony with the great peal of the dark bell. "It is a disharmony, isn't it? And any trick will do for the soul to keep itself fruitful. Sometimes it dies from love several times in succession. B u t " - and now he said something he believed to be a consolation, indeed a new love-"if everything is so sad and a deception, and one can no lon- ger believe in anything: isn't that just when we really need one another? The folk song about the little sister"-he smiled-"quiet, pensive music that nothing can drown out; an accompanying music; a love of loveless- ness that softly reaches out its hands . . . ? "
Time is the greatest cynic.
Here sexuality and camaraderie!
A cool, quiet, gray aneroticism?
Agathe was silent. Something had been extinguished. She was inordi- nately tired. Her heart had suddenly been snatched away from her, and she was tortured by an unbearable fear of a vacuum within, of her un- worthiness and her regressive transformation. This is the way ecstatics
From the Posthurrwus Papers · 1467
feel when God withdraws from them and nothing responds any longer to their zealous appeals.
The art traveler, as they called him, was a professor returning from Italian cities, who had the butterfly-net skin and botanizing drum-beat- ing mind of the aspiring art historian. He had stopped over here for a few days to rest before his return and to order his notes. As they were the only guests, he had already introduced himself to the pair on the first day. They chatted briefly after meals, or when they met in the vicinity of the hotel, and there was no denying that although Ulrich made fun of him, at certain moments this man brought them welcome relaxation.
He was strongly convinced of his significance as man and scholar, and from their first encounter, after finding that the couple were not on their honeymoon, he had courted Agathe with great determination. He said to her: You resemble the beautiful--- in the painting b y ---, and all the women who have this expression, which repeats itselfin their hair and in the folds of their gowns, have the quality o f - - : As she was telling this to Ulrich Agathe had already forgotten the names, but for a stranger to know what one was was as pleasant as the firm pressure of a masseur, while one knew oneself to be so diffuse that one could barely distinguish oneself from the noontime silence.
This art traveler said: Women's function is to make us dream; they are a stratagem of nature for the fertilization of the masculine mind. He gleamed with self-satisfaction at his paradox, which inverted the sense of fertilization. Ulrich replied: But there are still distinctions in kind among these dreams!
This man asserted that in embracing a "really great female" one must be able to think of Michelangelo's Creation. "You pull the blanket of the Sistine ceiling over yourself and underneath it you're naked except for the blue stockings," Ulrich ridiculed. No. He admits that canying this out calls for tact, but in principle such people could be "twice as big" as others. "In . the last analysis, the goal of all ethical life is to unite our ac- tions with the highest that we bear within us! " It was not so easy to con- tradict this theoretically, although practically speaking it was ridiculous.
- I have discovered-the art historian said-that there are, and in the course of history always have been, two sorts of people. I call them the static and the dynamic. Or, ifyou prefer, the Imperial and the Faustian. People who are static can feel happiness as something present. They are somehow characterized by balance, equilibrium. What they have done and what they will do blends into what they are doing at the moment, is harmonized, and has a shape like a painting or a melody; has, so to speak, a second dimension, shines in every moment as surface. The Pope, for
1468 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
example, or the Dalai Lama; it is simply unimaginable that they would do something that was not stretched on the frame of their significance. On the other hand, the dynamic people: always tearing themselves loose, merely glancing backward and forward, rolling out of themselves, insensitive people with missions, insatiable, pushy, luckless-whom the static ones conquer over and over in order to keep world history going: in a word, he hinted that he was capable of carrying both strains within himself.
-T ell m e-Ulrich asked, as ifhe were quite serious-are not the dy- namic people also those who in love seem not to feel anything because they have either already loved in their imagination or will only love what has slipped away from them again? Couldn't one say that too?
-Quite right! the professor said.
- T h e y are immoral and dreamers, these people, who can never find the right point between future and past-
It's enough to make them throw up.
- W e l l , I d o n ' t think I ' d claim t h a t -
-Y es, but you do. They would be capable of committing crazy good or bad deeds because the present means nothing to them.
He really ought to say: they could commit crazy deeds out ofimpatience.
The art historian did not quite know how to answer this, and found that Ulrich did not understand him.
The restlessness grew. The summer heat increased. The sun burned like a fire to the edge of the earth. The elements filled existence com- pletely, so that there was hardly anyplace left for anything human.
It happened that toward evening, when the burning air already cast light, cooling folds, they went strolling on the steep banks. Yellow bushes of broom sprang up from the embers of the stones and stood there directly before the soul; the mountains gray as donkeys' backs with the washed-out green that the grass growing on the white limestone cast over them; the laurel's hot dark green. The parched glance resting on the laurel sank into cooler and cooler depths. Countless bees hummed;
From the Posthurrwus Papers · 1 4 6 9
it fused into a deep metallic tone that shot off little arrows whenever, in a sudden turn, they flew by one's ear. Heroic, tremendous, the ap- proaching line of mountains, in three waves one behind the other, smoothly canted, breaking off steeply.
-Heroic? Ulrich asked. -O r is it only what we have always hated because it was supposed to be heroic? Endlessly portrayed, this painted and engraved, this Greek, this Roman, this Nazarene, classicistic land- scape-this virtuous, professorial, idealistic landscape? And ultimately it impresses us only because we've now encountered it in reality? The way one despises an influential man and is nevertheless flattered because one knows him?
But the few things here to which the space belonged respected each other; they kept their distance from each other and did not saturate na- ture with impressions, as they do in Germany. No mocking helped; as only high in the mountains, where everything earthly keeps diminishing, this landscape was no longer a place of human habitation but a piece of the sky, to whose folds a few species of insects still clung.
And on the other side (of this humility) lay the sea. The great beloved, adorned with the peacock's tail. The beloved with the oval mirror. The opened eye of the beloved. The beloved become God. The pitiless chal- lenge. The eyes still hurt and had to look away, pierced by the shattering spears of light speeding back from the sea. But soon the sun will be lower.
It will only be a circumscribed sea of liquid silver, with violets floating on it. And then one must look out over the seal Then one has to look at it. Agathe and Ulrich feared this moment. What can one do to prevail against this monstrous, observing, stimulating, jealous rival? How should they love each other? Sink to their knees? As they had done at first? Spread out their arms? Scream? Can they embrace each other? It is all so ridiculous, as if one were trying to shout angrily at someone while nearby all the bells of a cathedral are pealing! The fearful empti- ness again closed in on them from all sides.
So it ends the way it begins!
But at such a moment one can shoot the other, or stab him, since his death cry will be muffled.
Ulrich shook his head. -One must be somewhat limited to find na- ture beautiful. To be someone like that fellow down there, who would
1470 · THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
rather talk himself than listen to someone better. One is forcibly re- minded by nature ofschool exercises and bad poems, and one has to be capable of transforming it at the moment of observation into an anoint- ing. Otherwise one collapses. One must always be stupider than nature in order to stand up to it, and must gossip in order not to lose the language.
Fortunately, their skin could not stand the heat. Sweat broke out. It created a diversion and an excuse; they felt themselves relieved of their mission.
But as they were walking back Agathe noticed that she was looking forward to the certainty ofmeeting the traveling stranger down below in front of the hotel. Ulrich was certainly right, but there was a great conso- lation in the babbling, insistently pushy company ofthis person.
Afternoons, in the room, there were fearful moments. Between the extended red-striped awning and the stone railing of the balcony lay a blue, burning band the width of one's hand. The smooth warmth, the severely attenuated brightness, had dislodged everything from the room that was not fixed. Ulrich and Agathe had not brought along anything to read; that had been their plan; they had left behind ideas, normal cir- cumstances, everything having any connection-no matter how saga- cious-with the ordinary human way of living: now their souls lay there like two hard-baked bricks from which every drop ofwater has escaped. This contemplative natural existence had made them unexpectedly de- pendent on the most primitive elements.
Finally, a day of rain came. The wind lashed. Time became long in a cool way. They straightened up like plants. They kissed each other. The words they exchanged refreshed them. They were happy again. To al- ways be waiting every moment for the next moment is only a habit; dam it up, and time comes forth like a lake. The hours still flow, but they are broader than they are long. Evening falls, but no time has passed.
But then a second rainy day followed; a third. What had seemed a new intensity glided downward as a conclusion. The smallest help, the belief that this weather was a personal dispensation, an extraordinary fate, and the room is full of the strange light from the water, or hollowed out like a die of dark silver. But if no help comes: what can one talk about? One can still smile at the other from far apart-embrace- weaken the other to the point of that fatigue which resembles death, which separates the exhausted like an endless plain; one can call across: I love you, or: You are beautiful, or: I would rather die with you than live without you, or:
From the Posthumous Papers · 1471
What a miracle that you and I, two such separate beings, have been blown together. And one can weep from neJVousness when, quite softly, one begins to fall prey to boredom . . .
Fearful violence of repetition, fearful godhead! Attraction of empti- ness, always sucking in like the funnel of a whirlpool whose walls yield. Kiss me, and I will bite gently and harder and harder and wilder and wilder, ever more drunken, more greedy for blood, listening into your lips for the plea for mercy, climbing down the ravine of pain until at the end we are hanging in the vertical wall and are afraid of ourselves. Then the deep pantings of breath come to our aid, threatening to abandon the body; the gleam in the eye breaks, the glance rolls from side to side, the grimace of dying begins. Astonishment and a thousandfold ecstasy in each other eddy in this rapture. Within a few minutes concentrated flight through bliss and death, ending, renewed, bodies swinging like howling bells. But at the end one knows: it was only a profound Fall into a world in which it drifts downward on a hundred steps of repetition. Agathe moaned: You will leave me! - N o ! Darling! Conspirator! Ulrich was searching for expressions o f enthusiasm, etc. - N o - A g a t h e softly fended him off-I can't feel anything anymore . . . ! Since it had now been spoken, Ulrich became cold and gave up the effort.
-Ifwe had believed in God-Agathe went on-we would have un- derstood what the mountains and flowers were saying.
-Are you thinking ofLindner? Ulrich probedI What? Lindner . . . ! Ulrich immediately interjected jealously.
It ends in excrement and vomiting like the first time!
-No. I was thinking of the art historian. His thread never breaks. Agathe gave a pained and wan smile. She was lying on the bed; Ulrich had torn open the door to the balcony, the wind flung water in. "What difference does it make," he said harshly. "Think ofwhomever you want. We have to look around for a third person. Who'll obseiVe us, envy us, or reproach us. " He remained standing before her and said slowly: "There is no such thing as love between two people alone! " Agathe propped herself on an elbow and lay there, wide-eyed, as if she were expecting death. -W e have yielded to an impulse against order, Ulrich repeated. - A love can grow out of defiance, but it can't consist of defiance. On the contrary, it can only exist when it is integrated into a society. It's not the content of life. But a negation of, an exception to, all life's contents.
1472 • THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
But an exception needs whatever it is the exception to. One can't live from a negation alone. -Close the door, Agathe asked. Then she stood up and arranged her dress. - S o shall we leave?
Ulrich shrugged his shoulders. - W e l l , it's all over.
-Don't you remember any more our proviso when we came here? Ashamed, Ulrich answered: We wanted to find the entrance to para-
dise!
-And killourselves-Agathesaid-ifwe didn't!
Ulrich looked at her calmly. - D o you want to?
Agathe might perhaps have said yes. She did not know why it seemed
more honest to slowly shake her head and say no.
-W e've lost that resolve too, Ulrich stated.
She stood up in despair. Spoke with her hands on her temples, listen-
ing to her own words: I was waiting. ~ . I was almost decadent and ridicu- lous . . . Because in spite ofthe life I've led I was still waiting. I could not name it or describe it. It was like a melody without notes, a picture with- out form. I knew that one day it will come up to me from outside and will be what treats me tenderly and what will hold no harm for me anymore, either in life or in death. . . .
Ulrich, who had turned violently toward her, cut in, parodying her with a spitefulness that was a torture to himself: -It's a longing, some- thing that's missing: the form is there, only the matter is missing. Then some bank official or professor comes along, and this little beastie slowly fills up the emptiness that was stretched out like an evening sky.
- M y love, all movement in life comes from the evil and brutal; good- ness dozes off. Is a drop of some fragrance; but every hour is the same hole and yawning child of death, which has to be filled up with heavy ballast. You said before: If we could believe in God! But a game of pa- tience will do as well, a game ofchess, a book. Today man has discovered that he can console himselfwith these things just as well. It just has to be something where board is joined to board in order to span the empty depths.
- B u t don't we love each other any longer, then? Agathe exclaimed.
Now they are again talking as they had earlier. It is very lovely.
-Y ou can't overlook-Ulrich answered-how much this feeling de- pends on its surroundings. How it derives its content from imagining a life together, that is, a line between and through other people. From
From the Posthumous Papers · 1 4 7 3
good conscience, because everyone else is so pleased at the way these two love each other, or from bad conscience as well. . . .
-W hat is it then that we experienced? We mustn't pretend to some- thing untrue: I wasn't a fool for wanting to seek paradise. I could deter- mine it the way one can deduce an invisible planet from certain effects. And what happened? It dissolved into a spiritual and optical illusion and into a physiological mechanism that is repeatable. As with all people!
-It's true, Agathe said. -For the longest time we've been living from what you call evil; from restlessness, small distractions, the hunger and satiety of the body.
-And yet-Ulrich answered, as in an extremely painful vision- when it's forgotten, you'll be waiting again. Days will come where be- hind many doors someone will beat on a drum. Muffied and insistently: beat, beat. Days, as if you were waiting in a brothel for the creaking of the stairs; it will be some corporal or bank official. Whom fate has sent you. To keep your life in motion. And yet you remain my sister.
- B u t what is to become of us? Agathe saw nothing before her. -Y ou must marry or find a lover-! said that before.
- B u t are we no longer one person? she asked sadly.
- O n e person also has both within himself.
-But ifI love you? Agathe shouted.
-W e must live. Without each other-for each other. Do you want the art historian? Ulrich said this with the coldness of great effort. Agathe dismissed it with a small shrug of her shoulder. -Thank you, Ulrich said. He tried to grasp her slack hand and stroke it. -I'm not so-so firmly convinced either. . . .
Once again, almost the great union. But it seems to Agathe that Ulrich does not have sufficient courage.
They were silent for a while. Agathe opened and closed drawers and began to pack. The storm shook at the doors. Then Agathe turned around and asked her brother calmly and in a different voice:
- B u t can you imagine that tomorrow or the next day we'll get home and find the rooms the way we left them, and begin to make visits? . . .
Ulrich did not notice with what enormous resistance Agathe struggled against this idea. He could not imagine all that either. But he felt some new kind of tension, even if it was a melancholy task. At this moment he was not paying enough attention to Agathe.
1474 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
Continuation: The day after this dismal conversation Clarisse arrived.
WORKED-OUT SKETCHES FROM THE 1920S NEW SKETCHES, 1930l31-1933l34
On Kakania
A digression on Kakania. The crucible ofthe World War is also the birthplace ofthe poet Feuermaul
It may be assumed that the expression "Crucible of the World War" has, since this object existed, been used often enough, yet always with a cer- tain imprecision as to the question of where it is located. Older people who still have personal memories of those times will probably think of Sarajevo, yet they themselves will feel that this small Bosnian city can only have been the oven vent through which the wind blew in. Educated people will direct their thoughts to political nodal points and world capi- tals. Those even more highly educated will, moreover, have the names of Essen, Creuzot, Pilsen, and the other centers of the armaments industry confidently in mind. And the most highly educated will add to these something from the geography of oil, potash, and other raw materials, for that's the way one often reads about it. But what follows from all this is merely that the crucible of the World War was no ordinruy crucible,
for it was located in several places simultaneously.
Perhaps one might say to this that the expression is to be understood
only metaphorically. But this is to be assented to so completely that it immediately gives rise to even greater difficulties. For, granting that "crucible" is intended to mean metaphorically approximately the same thing that "origin" or "cause" means nonmetaphorically, while on the one hand one knows that the origin of all things and events is God, on the other it leaves one empty-handed. For "origins" and "causes" are like a person who goes searching for his parents: in the first instance he has two, that is indisputable; but with grandparents it's the square of two, with great-grandparents two to the third, and so on in a powerfully unfolding series, which is totally unassailable but which yields the re- markable result that at the beginning of time there must have been an almost infinite number ofpeople whose purpose was merely to produce a single one of today's individuals. However flattering this may be, and
From the Posthumous Papers · 1475
however it may correspond to the significance that the individual feels within himself, today one calculates too precisely for anyone to believe it. Therefore, with heavy heart, one must give up a personal series of ancestors and assume that "starting from someplace" one must have a common descent as a group. And this has a variety of consequences. Such as that people consider themselves in part "brothers," in part "from alien tribes," without a person knowing how to determine where the boundary is, for what is called "nation" and "race" is results and not causes. Another consequence, no less influential even if not as obvious, is that Mr.
Hatred of beauty. Sense of urgent sexual desire: to destroy beauty.
The brightness of such days was like smoke, which the clarity of the nights wiped away.
Agathe had somewhat less imagination than Ulrich. Because she had not thought as much as he had her emotions were not as volatile as his, but burned like a flame rising straight out of the particular ground on which she happened to be standing. The daring nature of their flight, the conscience made somewhat anxious by the fear of discovery, and finally this hiding place in a flower basket between the porous limestone wall, sea, and sky, at times gave her a high-spirited and childlike cheerfulness. She then treated even their strange experience as an adventure: a for- bidden space within herself over whose enclosure one spies, or into which one forces one's way, with beating heart, burning neck, and heavy soles weighed down with clods of damp earth from the path one has hurriedly followed in secret.
In this way very indirect suggestion of repeated coitus.
1462 ·THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
She sometimes had a playful way of allowing herself to be touched, with opened-even-when-closed eyes; of reappearing; a tenderness that was not to be stilled. He secretly obseJVed her, saw this play of love with the body, which has the captivation of a smile and the oppressive quality of a force of nature, for the first time, or was moved by it for the first time. Or there were hours when she did not look at him, was cold, al- most angry with him; because she was too agitated; like someone in a boat not daring to move, so it was in her body-afterward, every time. Because the connection does not function. Or afterreactions; at first a blocking and then, for no apparent reason, an afterflood. It was thrilling and charming to let oneself be cradled by these inspirations; they short- ened the hours but they forced an optic of nearness and minute obseJVa- tion. Ulrich resisted this. It was a leftover piece of earth drifting in the liquid fire and clouding it; a temptation to explanations such as that Agathe had never learned the proper connection between love and sex. As with most people, the entire power of the sexual had first come to- gether with a spark of inclination at the time she had married Hagauer, who was not yet abhorrent to her. Instead of stumbling into a storm with someone I almost only in the company of I accompanied by someone almost as impersonal as the elements, and only then noticing as a still nameless surprise that this person's legs are not clothed like one's own and that one's soul is beckoning one to change one's hiding place . . .
But such thoughts, too, were like singing in a false key. Ulrich did not allow himself this kind of understanding. Understanding a person one loves cannot involve spying on that person but must come pouring from an overflow of auspicious inspirations. One may only recognize those things that enrich. One makes a gift of qualities in the unshakable secu- rity of a predetermined harmony, a separation that has never b e e n -
Especially when ethical magnanimity is stimulated by it. Not the see- ing or not seeing of weaknesses, but the large motion in which they float without significance.
An ancient column-thrown down at the time of Venice, Greece, or Rome-lay among the stones and the broom; every groove of its shaft and capital deepened by the ray-sharp graving tool of the midday shad- ows. Lying next to it belonged to the great hours of love.
Four eyes watching. Nothing but noon, column, four eyes. If the glance of two eyes sees one picture, one world: why not the glance of four?
From the Posthumous Papers · 1463
When two pairs of eyes look long into each other, one person crosses over to the other on the bridge of glances, and all that remains is a feel- ing that no longer has a body.
When in a secret hour two pairs of eyes look at an object and come together in it-every object hovering deep down in a feeling, and ob- jects standing only as firmly as they do if this deep ground is hard-then the rigid world begins to move, softly and incessantly. It rises and falls restlessly with the blood. The fraternal twins looked at each other. In the bright light it could not be made out whether they were still breathing or had been lying there for a thousand years like the stones. Whether the stone column was lying there or had risen up in the light without a sound and was floating.
There is a significant difference in the way one looks at people and the way one looks at things. Every time after this when they looked at some- one in the hotel: the play of facial expressions of someone with whom one is talking becomes unspeakably alienating if one observes it as an objective process, and not as an ongoing exchange of signals between two souls; we are accustomed to see things lying mutely where they are, and we consider it a disturbing hallucination if they take on a more dy- namic relation to us. But it is only we ourselves who are looking at them in such a way that the small changes in their physiognomies are not an- swered by any alterations in our emotions, and to change this nothing more is needed, basically, than that we not look at the world intellectu- ally but that objects arouse in us our moral emotions instead of our sense-based surveying equipment. At such moments the excitement in which a glimpse brings us something and enriches us becomes so strong that nothing appears real except for a hovering condition, which, beyond the eyes, condenses into objects, and on this side of the eyes condenses into ideas and feelings, without these two sides being separable from each other. Whatever the soul bestows comes forward; whatever loses this power dissipates before one's eyes.
In this flickering silence among the stones there was a panic horror. The world seemed to be only the outer aspect of a speciflc inner atti- tude, and interchangeable with it. But world and self were not solid; a scaffolding sunk into soft depths; mutually helping each other out of a formlessness. Agathe said softly to Ulrich: "Are you yourself or are you not? I know nothing of it. I am incognizant of it and I am incognizant of myself. "
It was the terror: The world depended on her, and she did not know who she was.
1464 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
Ulrich was silent.
Agathe continued: "I am in love, but I do not know with whom. I am neither faithful nor unfaithful. What am I then? My heart is at once full oflove and emptied oflove . . . ," she whispered. The horror ofa noon- time silence seemed to have clutched her heart.
Over and over the great test was the sea. Time and again, when they had climbed down the narrow slope with its many paths, its quantity of laurel, its broom, its figs, and its many bees, and stepped out onto the powerful surface spread out above the ocean, it was like the first great chord sounding after the tuning up ofan orchestra. How would one have to be to endure this constantly? Ulrich propos. ed that they tty setting up a tent here. But he did not mean it seriously; it would have frightened him. There were no longer any opponents around, up here they were alone; the rebuffs one receives as long as one must contradict the de- mands ofothers and the habits ofone's own conscience were used up; in this final battle it was a matter of their resolve. The sea was like a merci- less beloved and rival; every minute was an annihilating exploration of conscience. They were afraid of collapsing unconscious before this ex- panse that swallowed up every resistance.
This monstrously extended sight was not to be borne without its becoming somewhat boring. This being responsible for every slightest motion was-they had to confess-rather empty, if one compared it with the cheerfulness of those hours when they made no such claims on themselves and their bodies played with the soul like a beautiful young animal rolling a ball back and forth.
One day Ulrich said: It's broad and pastoral; there's something of a pastor about it! They laughed. Then they were startled by the scorn that they had inflicted upon themselves.
The hotel had a little bell tower; in the middle ofits roof. Around one o'clock this bell rang for lunch. Since they were still almost the only guests, they did not need to respond right away, but the cook was in- dicating that he was ready. The bright sounds sliced into the stillness like a sharp knife contacting skin, which had shuddered beforehand but at this moment becomes calm. "How lovely it is, really," Ulrich said, as they climbed down on one of these days, "to be driven by necessity. The way one drives geese from behind with a stick, or entices hens from in front with feed. And where evetything doesn't happen mysteriously-" The blue-white trembling air really shuddered like goose pimples ifone
From the Posthumous Papers · 1465
stared into it for a long time. At that time memories were beginning to torture Ulrich vividly; he suddenly saw before him every statue and every architectural detail of one of those cities overloaded with such things that he had visited years ago; Niimberg was before him, and Amiens, although they had never captivated him; some large red book or other that he must have seen years earlier in an exhibit would not go away from before his eyes; a slender tanned boy, perhaps only the counter his imagination had conjured up to Agathe, but in such a way as if he had once really met him but did not know where, preoccupied his mind; ideas that he had had at some time and long forgotten; soundless, shadowy things, things properly forgotten, eddied up in this south of stillness and seized possession of the desolate expanse.
The impatience that from the beginning had been mingled with all this beauty began to rage in Ulrich.
He could be sitting before a stone, lost to the world, sunk in contem- plation, and be tortured by this raging impatience. He had come to the end, had assimilated everything into himself and ran the danger of be- ginning, all alone, to speak aloud in order to recite everything to himself once again. "Yes, you're sitting here," his thoughts said, "and you could tell yourself once again what you're looking at. " The stones are of a quite peculiar stone-green, and their image is mirrored in the water. Quite right. Exactly as one says. And the stones are shaped like boxes. . . . But it's all no use, and I'd like to leave. It is so beautiful!
And he remembered: at home, sometimes only years later, and some- times purely by accident, if one no longer has any idea how everything was, suddenly a light falls from behind, from such past things, and the heart does everything as if in a dream. He longed for the past.
"It's quite simple," he said to Agathe, "and everyone knows it, we're the only ones who don't: the imagination is stimulated only by what one does not yet possess or no longer has; the body wants to have, but the soul does not want to have. Now I understand the tremendous efforts people make to this end. How stupid it is for this ordinary fellow, this art traveler, to compare this flower to a jewel, or that stone over there to a flower: as if the truly intelligent thing to do wouldn't be to transform them for a brief moment into something else. And how stupid all our ideals would be, since every ideal, if one takes it seriously, contradicts some other ideal; thou shalt not kill, therefore perish? Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's goods, so live in poverty? As i f their sense did not lie precisely in the impossibility of carrying them out, which ignites the soul! And how good it is for religion that one can neither see nor com- prehend God! But which world? A cold, dark strip between the two fires of the Not-yet and the No-longer! "
1466 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
"A world to be afraid of oneself in," Agathe said. "You're right. " She said this quite seriously, and there was real bitterness in her eyes.
- A n d if it is so! Ulrich laughed. - I t occurs to me for the first time in my life that we would have to be terribly afraid of being tricked if Heaven were not to dangle before us an end of the world that does not exist. Evidently everything absolute, hundred-percent, true, is com- pletely monstrous.
-Between two people as well; you mean between us?
- I now understand so well what visionaries are: food without salt is unbearable, but salt without food is a poison; visionaries are people who want to live from salt alone. Is that right?
Agathe shrugged her shoulders.
- Look at our chambermaid, a cheerful stupid creature smelling of cheap soap. A short time ago I was watching her as she made up the room; she seemed to me as pretty as a freshly washed sky.
It comforted Ulrich to confess this, and a small worm of disgust crawled across Agathe's mouth. Ulrich repeated it; he did not want to drown out this small disharmony with the great peal of the dark bell. "It is a disharmony, isn't it? And any trick will do for the soul to keep itself fruitful. Sometimes it dies from love several times in succession. B u t " - and now he said something he believed to be a consolation, indeed a new love-"if everything is so sad and a deception, and one can no lon- ger believe in anything: isn't that just when we really need one another? The folk song about the little sister"-he smiled-"quiet, pensive music that nothing can drown out; an accompanying music; a love of loveless- ness that softly reaches out its hands . . . ? "
Time is the greatest cynic.
Here sexuality and camaraderie!
A cool, quiet, gray aneroticism?
Agathe was silent. Something had been extinguished. She was inordi- nately tired. Her heart had suddenly been snatched away from her, and she was tortured by an unbearable fear of a vacuum within, of her un- worthiness and her regressive transformation. This is the way ecstatics
From the Posthurrwus Papers · 1467
feel when God withdraws from them and nothing responds any longer to their zealous appeals.
The art traveler, as they called him, was a professor returning from Italian cities, who had the butterfly-net skin and botanizing drum-beat- ing mind of the aspiring art historian. He had stopped over here for a few days to rest before his return and to order his notes. As they were the only guests, he had already introduced himself to the pair on the first day. They chatted briefly after meals, or when they met in the vicinity of the hotel, and there was no denying that although Ulrich made fun of him, at certain moments this man brought them welcome relaxation.
He was strongly convinced of his significance as man and scholar, and from their first encounter, after finding that the couple were not on their honeymoon, he had courted Agathe with great determination. He said to her: You resemble the beautiful--- in the painting b y ---, and all the women who have this expression, which repeats itselfin their hair and in the folds of their gowns, have the quality o f - - : As she was telling this to Ulrich Agathe had already forgotten the names, but for a stranger to know what one was was as pleasant as the firm pressure of a masseur, while one knew oneself to be so diffuse that one could barely distinguish oneself from the noontime silence.
This art traveler said: Women's function is to make us dream; they are a stratagem of nature for the fertilization of the masculine mind. He gleamed with self-satisfaction at his paradox, which inverted the sense of fertilization. Ulrich replied: But there are still distinctions in kind among these dreams!
This man asserted that in embracing a "really great female" one must be able to think of Michelangelo's Creation. "You pull the blanket of the Sistine ceiling over yourself and underneath it you're naked except for the blue stockings," Ulrich ridiculed. No. He admits that canying this out calls for tact, but in principle such people could be "twice as big" as others. "In . the last analysis, the goal of all ethical life is to unite our ac- tions with the highest that we bear within us! " It was not so easy to con- tradict this theoretically, although practically speaking it was ridiculous.
- I have discovered-the art historian said-that there are, and in the course of history always have been, two sorts of people. I call them the static and the dynamic. Or, ifyou prefer, the Imperial and the Faustian. People who are static can feel happiness as something present. They are somehow characterized by balance, equilibrium. What they have done and what they will do blends into what they are doing at the moment, is harmonized, and has a shape like a painting or a melody; has, so to speak, a second dimension, shines in every moment as surface. The Pope, for
1468 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
example, or the Dalai Lama; it is simply unimaginable that they would do something that was not stretched on the frame of their significance. On the other hand, the dynamic people: always tearing themselves loose, merely glancing backward and forward, rolling out of themselves, insensitive people with missions, insatiable, pushy, luckless-whom the static ones conquer over and over in order to keep world history going: in a word, he hinted that he was capable of carrying both strains within himself.
-T ell m e-Ulrich asked, as ifhe were quite serious-are not the dy- namic people also those who in love seem not to feel anything because they have either already loved in their imagination or will only love what has slipped away from them again? Couldn't one say that too?
-Quite right! the professor said.
- T h e y are immoral and dreamers, these people, who can never find the right point between future and past-
It's enough to make them throw up.
- W e l l , I d o n ' t think I ' d claim t h a t -
-Y es, but you do. They would be capable of committing crazy good or bad deeds because the present means nothing to them.
He really ought to say: they could commit crazy deeds out ofimpatience.
The art historian did not quite know how to answer this, and found that Ulrich did not understand him.
The restlessness grew. The summer heat increased. The sun burned like a fire to the edge of the earth. The elements filled existence com- pletely, so that there was hardly anyplace left for anything human.
It happened that toward evening, when the burning air already cast light, cooling folds, they went strolling on the steep banks. Yellow bushes of broom sprang up from the embers of the stones and stood there directly before the soul; the mountains gray as donkeys' backs with the washed-out green that the grass growing on the white limestone cast over them; the laurel's hot dark green. The parched glance resting on the laurel sank into cooler and cooler depths. Countless bees hummed;
From the Posthurrwus Papers · 1 4 6 9
it fused into a deep metallic tone that shot off little arrows whenever, in a sudden turn, they flew by one's ear. Heroic, tremendous, the ap- proaching line of mountains, in three waves one behind the other, smoothly canted, breaking off steeply.
-Heroic? Ulrich asked. -O r is it only what we have always hated because it was supposed to be heroic? Endlessly portrayed, this painted and engraved, this Greek, this Roman, this Nazarene, classicistic land- scape-this virtuous, professorial, idealistic landscape? And ultimately it impresses us only because we've now encountered it in reality? The way one despises an influential man and is nevertheless flattered because one knows him?
But the few things here to which the space belonged respected each other; they kept their distance from each other and did not saturate na- ture with impressions, as they do in Germany. No mocking helped; as only high in the mountains, where everything earthly keeps diminishing, this landscape was no longer a place of human habitation but a piece of the sky, to whose folds a few species of insects still clung.
And on the other side (of this humility) lay the sea. The great beloved, adorned with the peacock's tail. The beloved with the oval mirror. The opened eye of the beloved. The beloved become God. The pitiless chal- lenge. The eyes still hurt and had to look away, pierced by the shattering spears of light speeding back from the sea. But soon the sun will be lower.
It will only be a circumscribed sea of liquid silver, with violets floating on it. And then one must look out over the seal Then one has to look at it. Agathe and Ulrich feared this moment. What can one do to prevail against this monstrous, observing, stimulating, jealous rival? How should they love each other? Sink to their knees? As they had done at first? Spread out their arms? Scream? Can they embrace each other? It is all so ridiculous, as if one were trying to shout angrily at someone while nearby all the bells of a cathedral are pealing! The fearful empti- ness again closed in on them from all sides.
So it ends the way it begins!
But at such a moment one can shoot the other, or stab him, since his death cry will be muffled.
Ulrich shook his head. -One must be somewhat limited to find na- ture beautiful. To be someone like that fellow down there, who would
1470 · THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
rather talk himself than listen to someone better. One is forcibly re- minded by nature ofschool exercises and bad poems, and one has to be capable of transforming it at the moment of observation into an anoint- ing. Otherwise one collapses. One must always be stupider than nature in order to stand up to it, and must gossip in order not to lose the language.
Fortunately, their skin could not stand the heat. Sweat broke out. It created a diversion and an excuse; they felt themselves relieved of their mission.
But as they were walking back Agathe noticed that she was looking forward to the certainty ofmeeting the traveling stranger down below in front of the hotel. Ulrich was certainly right, but there was a great conso- lation in the babbling, insistently pushy company ofthis person.
Afternoons, in the room, there were fearful moments. Between the extended red-striped awning and the stone railing of the balcony lay a blue, burning band the width of one's hand. The smooth warmth, the severely attenuated brightness, had dislodged everything from the room that was not fixed. Ulrich and Agathe had not brought along anything to read; that had been their plan; they had left behind ideas, normal cir- cumstances, everything having any connection-no matter how saga- cious-with the ordinary human way of living: now their souls lay there like two hard-baked bricks from which every drop ofwater has escaped. This contemplative natural existence had made them unexpectedly de- pendent on the most primitive elements.
Finally, a day of rain came. The wind lashed. Time became long in a cool way. They straightened up like plants. They kissed each other. The words they exchanged refreshed them. They were happy again. To al- ways be waiting every moment for the next moment is only a habit; dam it up, and time comes forth like a lake. The hours still flow, but they are broader than they are long. Evening falls, but no time has passed.
But then a second rainy day followed; a third. What had seemed a new intensity glided downward as a conclusion. The smallest help, the belief that this weather was a personal dispensation, an extraordinary fate, and the room is full of the strange light from the water, or hollowed out like a die of dark silver. But if no help comes: what can one talk about? One can still smile at the other from far apart-embrace- weaken the other to the point of that fatigue which resembles death, which separates the exhausted like an endless plain; one can call across: I love you, or: You are beautiful, or: I would rather die with you than live without you, or:
From the Posthumous Papers · 1471
What a miracle that you and I, two such separate beings, have been blown together. And one can weep from neJVousness when, quite softly, one begins to fall prey to boredom . . .
Fearful violence of repetition, fearful godhead! Attraction of empti- ness, always sucking in like the funnel of a whirlpool whose walls yield. Kiss me, and I will bite gently and harder and harder and wilder and wilder, ever more drunken, more greedy for blood, listening into your lips for the plea for mercy, climbing down the ravine of pain until at the end we are hanging in the vertical wall and are afraid of ourselves. Then the deep pantings of breath come to our aid, threatening to abandon the body; the gleam in the eye breaks, the glance rolls from side to side, the grimace of dying begins. Astonishment and a thousandfold ecstasy in each other eddy in this rapture. Within a few minutes concentrated flight through bliss and death, ending, renewed, bodies swinging like howling bells. But at the end one knows: it was only a profound Fall into a world in which it drifts downward on a hundred steps of repetition. Agathe moaned: You will leave me! - N o ! Darling! Conspirator! Ulrich was searching for expressions o f enthusiasm, etc. - N o - A g a t h e softly fended him off-I can't feel anything anymore . . . ! Since it had now been spoken, Ulrich became cold and gave up the effort.
-Ifwe had believed in God-Agathe went on-we would have un- derstood what the mountains and flowers were saying.
-Are you thinking ofLindner? Ulrich probedI What? Lindner . . . ! Ulrich immediately interjected jealously.
It ends in excrement and vomiting like the first time!
-No. I was thinking of the art historian. His thread never breaks. Agathe gave a pained and wan smile. She was lying on the bed; Ulrich had torn open the door to the balcony, the wind flung water in. "What difference does it make," he said harshly. "Think ofwhomever you want. We have to look around for a third person. Who'll obseiVe us, envy us, or reproach us. " He remained standing before her and said slowly: "There is no such thing as love between two people alone! " Agathe propped herself on an elbow and lay there, wide-eyed, as if she were expecting death. -W e have yielded to an impulse against order, Ulrich repeated. - A love can grow out of defiance, but it can't consist of defiance. On the contrary, it can only exist when it is integrated into a society. It's not the content of life. But a negation of, an exception to, all life's contents.
1472 • THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
But an exception needs whatever it is the exception to. One can't live from a negation alone. -Close the door, Agathe asked. Then she stood up and arranged her dress. - S o shall we leave?
Ulrich shrugged his shoulders. - W e l l , it's all over.
-Don't you remember any more our proviso when we came here? Ashamed, Ulrich answered: We wanted to find the entrance to para-
dise!
-And killourselves-Agathesaid-ifwe didn't!
Ulrich looked at her calmly. - D o you want to?
Agathe might perhaps have said yes. She did not know why it seemed
more honest to slowly shake her head and say no.
-W e've lost that resolve too, Ulrich stated.
She stood up in despair. Spoke with her hands on her temples, listen-
ing to her own words: I was waiting. ~ . I was almost decadent and ridicu- lous . . . Because in spite ofthe life I've led I was still waiting. I could not name it or describe it. It was like a melody without notes, a picture with- out form. I knew that one day it will come up to me from outside and will be what treats me tenderly and what will hold no harm for me anymore, either in life or in death. . . .
Ulrich, who had turned violently toward her, cut in, parodying her with a spitefulness that was a torture to himself: -It's a longing, some- thing that's missing: the form is there, only the matter is missing. Then some bank official or professor comes along, and this little beastie slowly fills up the emptiness that was stretched out like an evening sky.
- M y love, all movement in life comes from the evil and brutal; good- ness dozes off. Is a drop of some fragrance; but every hour is the same hole and yawning child of death, which has to be filled up with heavy ballast. You said before: If we could believe in God! But a game of pa- tience will do as well, a game ofchess, a book. Today man has discovered that he can console himselfwith these things just as well. It just has to be something where board is joined to board in order to span the empty depths.
- B u t don't we love each other any longer, then? Agathe exclaimed.
Now they are again talking as they had earlier. It is very lovely.
-Y ou can't overlook-Ulrich answered-how much this feeling de- pends on its surroundings. How it derives its content from imagining a life together, that is, a line between and through other people. From
From the Posthumous Papers · 1 4 7 3
good conscience, because everyone else is so pleased at the way these two love each other, or from bad conscience as well. . . .
-W hat is it then that we experienced? We mustn't pretend to some- thing untrue: I wasn't a fool for wanting to seek paradise. I could deter- mine it the way one can deduce an invisible planet from certain effects. And what happened? It dissolved into a spiritual and optical illusion and into a physiological mechanism that is repeatable. As with all people!
-It's true, Agathe said. -For the longest time we've been living from what you call evil; from restlessness, small distractions, the hunger and satiety of the body.
-And yet-Ulrich answered, as in an extremely painful vision- when it's forgotten, you'll be waiting again. Days will come where be- hind many doors someone will beat on a drum. Muffied and insistently: beat, beat. Days, as if you were waiting in a brothel for the creaking of the stairs; it will be some corporal or bank official. Whom fate has sent you. To keep your life in motion. And yet you remain my sister.
- B u t what is to become of us? Agathe saw nothing before her. -Y ou must marry or find a lover-! said that before.
- B u t are we no longer one person? she asked sadly.
- O n e person also has both within himself.
-But ifI love you? Agathe shouted.
-W e must live. Without each other-for each other. Do you want the art historian? Ulrich said this with the coldness of great effort. Agathe dismissed it with a small shrug of her shoulder. -Thank you, Ulrich said. He tried to grasp her slack hand and stroke it. -I'm not so-so firmly convinced either. . . .
Once again, almost the great union. But it seems to Agathe that Ulrich does not have sufficient courage.
They were silent for a while. Agathe opened and closed drawers and began to pack. The storm shook at the doors. Then Agathe turned around and asked her brother calmly and in a different voice:
- B u t can you imagine that tomorrow or the next day we'll get home and find the rooms the way we left them, and begin to make visits? . . .
Ulrich did not notice with what enormous resistance Agathe struggled against this idea. He could not imagine all that either. But he felt some new kind of tension, even if it was a melancholy task. At this moment he was not paying enough attention to Agathe.
1474 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
Continuation: The day after this dismal conversation Clarisse arrived.
WORKED-OUT SKETCHES FROM THE 1920S NEW SKETCHES, 1930l31-1933l34
On Kakania
A digression on Kakania. The crucible ofthe World War is also the birthplace ofthe poet Feuermaul
It may be assumed that the expression "Crucible of the World War" has, since this object existed, been used often enough, yet always with a cer- tain imprecision as to the question of where it is located. Older people who still have personal memories of those times will probably think of Sarajevo, yet they themselves will feel that this small Bosnian city can only have been the oven vent through which the wind blew in. Educated people will direct their thoughts to political nodal points and world capi- tals. Those even more highly educated will, moreover, have the names of Essen, Creuzot, Pilsen, and the other centers of the armaments industry confidently in mind. And the most highly educated will add to these something from the geography of oil, potash, and other raw materials, for that's the way one often reads about it. But what follows from all this is merely that the crucible of the World War was no ordinruy crucible,
for it was located in several places simultaneously.
Perhaps one might say to this that the expression is to be understood
only metaphorically. But this is to be assented to so completely that it immediately gives rise to even greater difficulties. For, granting that "crucible" is intended to mean metaphorically approximately the same thing that "origin" or "cause" means nonmetaphorically, while on the one hand one knows that the origin of all things and events is God, on the other it leaves one empty-handed. For "origins" and "causes" are like a person who goes searching for his parents: in the first instance he has two, that is indisputable; but with grandparents it's the square of two, with great-grandparents two to the third, and so on in a powerfully unfolding series, which is totally unassailable but which yields the re- markable result that at the beginning of time there must have been an almost infinite number ofpeople whose purpose was merely to produce a single one of today's individuals. However flattering this may be, and
From the Posthumous Papers · 1475
however it may correspond to the significance that the individual feels within himself, today one calculates too precisely for anyone to believe it. Therefore, with heavy heart, one must give up a personal series of ancestors and assume that "starting from someplace" one must have a common descent as a group. And this has a variety of consequences. Such as that people consider themselves in part "brothers," in part "from alien tribes," without a person knowing how to determine where the boundary is, for what is called "nation" and "race" is results and not causes. Another consequence, no less influential even if not as obvious, is that Mr.
