No More Learning

"More or less. It has an unpleasant feeling of dilettantism about it. "
"But I'll grant you something quite different," Ulrich went on after some thought. "The experts never finish anything. Not only are they not finished today, but they are incapable of conceiving an end to their activities. Even incapable, perhaps, of wishing for one. Can you imagine that man will still have a soul, for instance, once he has learned to understand it and control it biologically and psychologi- cally? Yet this is precisely the condition we are aiming for! That's the trouble. Knowledge is a mode of conduct, a passion. At bottom, an impermissible mode ofconduct: like dipsomania, sex mania, homici- dal mania, the compulsion to know forms its own character that is off-balance. It is simply not so that the researcher pursues the truth; it pursues him. He suffers it. What is true is true, and a fact is real, without concerning itself about him: he's the one who has a passion for it, a·dipsomania for the factual, which marks his character, and he doesn't give a damn whether his findings will lead to something human, perfect, or anything at all. Such a man is full of contradic- tions and misery, and yet he is a monster of energy! "
"And-? " Walter asked.
"What do you mean, 'And-? ' "
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"Surely you're not suggesting that we can leave it at that? "
"I would like to leave it at that," Ulrich said calmly. "Our concep- tion of our environment, and also of ourselves, changes every day. We live in a time ofpassage. It maygo on like this until the end ofthe planet if we don't learn to tackle our deepest problems better. than we have so far. Even so, when one is placed in the dark, one should not begin to sing out of fear, like a child. And it is mere singing in the dark to act as though we knew how we are supposed to conduct our- selves down here; you can shout your head off, it's still nothing but terror. All I know for sure is: we're galloping! We're still a long way from our goals, they're not getting any closer, we can't even see them, we're likely to go on taking wrong turns, and we'll have to change horses; but one day-the day after tomorrow, or two thou- sand years from now-the horizon will begin to flow and come roar- ing toward us! " ·
Dusk had fallen. "No one can see my face now," Ulrich thought. "I don't even know myself whether I'm lying. " He spoke as one does when making an uncertain snap judgment about the results of decades of certainty. It occurred to him that this youthful dream he had just unfurled for Walter had long since turned hollow. He didn't want to go on talking.
"Meaning," Walter said sharply, "that we should give up trying to make any sense of life? "
Ulrich asked him why he needed to make sense ofit. It seemed to be doing nicely without that, it seemed to him.
Clarisse giggled. She didn't mean to mock Walter; Ulrich's ques- tion had struck her as funny.
Walter turned on the light, as he saw no reason why Ulrich should exploit the advantage, with Clarisse, of being the dark man. An irri- tating glare enveloped the three of them.
Ulrich stubbornly expanded on his point: 'What one needs in life is merely the conviction that one's business is doing better than one's neighbor's. Your pictures, my· mathematics, somebody else's wife and children-everything that can assure a person that he is in no way unusual but that in this way of being in no way unusual he will not so easily flnd his equal! "
Walter had not yet sat down again. He was full of unrest. Triumph.
"Do you realize what you're talking about? " he shouted. "Muddling through! You're simply an Austrian, and you're expounding the Aus- trian national philosophy of muddling through! " ·
"That may not be as bad as you think," Ulrich replied. "A passion- ate longing for keenness and precision, or beauty, may very well bring one to prefer muddling through to all those exertions in the modern spirit. I congratulate you on having discovered Austria's world mission. "
Walter wanted to make some retort. But it turned out that the un- rest that had kept him on his feet was not only a sense of triumph but-how to put it? -also the need to leave the room. He hesitated between the two impulses, but they were irreconcilable, and his gaze slid away from Ulrich's eyes toward the door.
When they were alone, Clarisse said: "This murderer is musical. I mean . . . " She paused, then went on mysteriously: "I can't explain it, but you must do something for him. "
"But what can I do? "
"Set him free. "
"You must be dreaming. "
"You can't mean all those things you say tq Walter? " Clarisse
asked,· and her eyes seemed to be urging him to an answer whose content he could not guess.
"I don't know what you want," he said.
Clarisse kept her eyes stubbornly on his lips; then she came back to her point: "You ought to do what I said, anyway; you would be transformed. "
Ulrich observed her, trying to understand. He must have missed something-an analogy, or some "as if" that might have given a meaning to what she was saying. It sounded strange to hear her speaking so naturally without making sense, as though referring to some commonplace experience she had had.
But Walter was back. ''I'm prepared to admit-" he began. The interruption had taken the edge offthe argument.
He perched on his piano stool again and noticed with satisfaction some soil clinging to his shoes. "Why is there no dirt on Ulrich's shoes? '' he thought. "It's the last hope of salvation for European man. "
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But Ulrich was looking above Walter's shoes at his legs, sheathed in black cotton, with their unlovely shape of the soft legs of young girls.
"A man today who still aspires to integrity deserves a lot of credit," Walter said.
"There's no such thing anymore," Ulrich countered. "You only have to look in a newspaper. It's filled with an immeasurable opacity. So many things are being talked about, it would surpass the intellec- tual capacity of a Leibniz. But we don't even notice; we have changed. There's no longer a whole man confronting·a whole world, only a human something moving about in a general culture- medium. "
"Quite so," Walter shot back. "There is in fact no complete educa- tion anymore, in Goethe's sense. Which is why today every idea has its opposite. Every action and its opposite are accompanied by the subtlest arguments, which can be defended or attacked with equal ease. How on earth can you champion such a state ofaffairs? "
Ulrich shrugged. '
"One has to withdraw completely," Walter said softly.
"Or just go along," his friend replied. "Perhaps we're on our way
to the termite state, or some other un-Christian ~vision of labor. " Ulrich thought privately that it would be just as easy to agree as to argue. Contempt showed as clearly throughthe politeness as a tidbit in aspic. He knew that Walter would again be annoyed with what he had just said, but he was beginning to long for a conversation with someone with whom he could agree completely, for once. There had been a time when he and Walter had had such conversations: the words are drawn from the breast by some mysterious power, and not one word misses its mark. But when one talks with antipathy the words rise like fog froll). an icy plain. He looked at Walter without resentment, certain that Walter also felt that the further this conver- sation went the more it was deforming his inner convictions, but that he was blaming Ulrich for it. "Everything we think is either-sympathy or antipathy! " Ulrich thought. At this moment he was so vividly struck by the truth ofthis that he felt it as a physical pressure, like the bodily contact of people swaying in unison when they are jammed together. He looked around for Clarisse.
But Clarisse seemed to have stopped listening some time ago; at some point she had picked up the newspaper that had lain in front of her on the table and had begun asking herself why she found this so pleasurable. She feit herself looking at the boundless opacity Ulrich had spoken of before, with the paper between her hands. Her anns unfolded the darkness and opened out. Her anns formed two cross- beams with the trunk of her body, with the newspaper hanging be- tween them. That was the pleasure, but the words to describe it were nowhere within her. She knew only that she was looking at the paper without reading it, and that it seemed to her there must be some savage mystery inside Ulrich, a power akin to her own, though she could not pin it down. Her lips had opened as if she were about to smile, but it was unconscious, a loosening ofa still-frozen tension.
Walter continued in a low voice: "You're right when you say there's nothing serious, rational, or even intelligible left; but why can't you see that it is precisely this growing rationality, infecting ev- erything like a disease, that is to blame? Everyone's brain is seized with this craving to become more and more rational, to rationalize and compartmentalize life more than ever, but unable to imagine what's to become of us when we know everything and have it all analyzed, classified, mechanized, standardized. It can't go on like this. "
"Well," Ulrich said with composure, "when the monks were in charge, a Christian had to be a believer, even though the only heaven he could conceive of, with its clouds and harps, was rather boring; and now we are confro~ted with the Heaven of Reason, which re- minds us of our school days with its rulers, hard benches, and horri- ble chalk figures. " .
"I have the feeling there will be a reaction of an unbridled excess of fantasy," Walter added thoughtfully. There was a hint of coward- ice and cunning in this remark. He was thinking ofClarisse's mysteri- ous irrationality, and as he spoke of reason threatening to drive the irrational to excess he was thinking of Ulrich. The two others did not catch on, which made him feel, in triumph and pain, that they did not under$tand him. He would have loved to ask Ulrich not to set foot in this house so long as he stayed in town, if only he could have done so without provoking Clarisse to mutiny. ·
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The two men watched Clarisse in silence.
Clarisse suddenly noticed that they were no longer arguing; rubbed her eyes, and blinked amiably at Ulrich and Walter, who sat in the rays ofyellowlight against the dusky blue ofthe windowpanes like exhibits in a glass case.
55
SOLIMAN AND ARNHEIM
Meanwhile Christian Moosbrugger, the murderer of the young woman, had acquired yet another female admirer. The question of his guilt or his affliction had captured her heart a few weeks before as vividly as it had those of many others, and she had her own view of the case, which diverged somewhat from that of the court. . The name "Christian Moosbrugger" appealed to her, evoking a tall, lonely man sitting by a mill overgrown with moss, listening to the roar of the water. She firmly believed that the accusations against him would be cleared up in some entirely unexpected way. As she sat in the kitchen or the dining room with her needlework, a Moosbrugger who had somehow shaken off his chains would app~ar beside her-and wild fantasies spun themselves out. It was far from impossible that Chris- tian, had he only met Rachel in time, would have given up his career as a killer of girls and revealed himself as a robber chieftain with an immense future.
The poor man in his prison never dreamed of the heart that was beating for him as it bent over the m~ndingof Diotima's underwear. Itwas no great distance from the apartment ofSection ChiefTuzzi to the court building. From one roof to the other an eagle would have needed only a few wingbeats, but for the modem soul, which play- fully spans oceans and continents, nothing is as impossible as finding its way to ~oulswho live just around the comer.
And so the magnetic currents had. dissipated again, and for some
time Rachel had loved the Parallel Campaign instead of Moosbrug- ger. Even if things were not going as well as they might inside the reception rooms, a great deal was going on in the antechambers. Ra- chel, who had . always managed to read the newspapers that passed from her employer's quarters to the kitchen, no longer had the time, since she was standing from dawn to dusk as a small guard post in front of the Parallel Campaign. She loved Diotima, Section Chief T. uzzi, His Grace Count Leinsdorf, the nabob, and, once she had no- ticed that he was beginning to play a role in the household, even Ul- rich, as a dog loves his master's friends with a single love, though excitingly varied by their different smells. But Rachel was intelligent. In Ulrich's case, for instance, she was well aware that he was always somewhat at variance with the others, and her imagination started trying to think up some special, unexplained part he must play in the Parallel Campaign. He always looked at her in a friendly fashion, and little Rachel noticed that he kept on looktng at her most particularly when he thought she was not aware ofit. She felt sure that he wanted something from her; well, she had nothing against it; her little white pelt twitched with expectation, and a tiny gol<len dart would shoot at him out of her fine black eyes from time to time. Ulrich, without being able to figure it out, sensed the sparks flying from this little person as she flitted around the furniture and the stately visitors, and it offered him some distraction. ·
He owed his place in Rachel's attention not least to certain secret talks in the antechamber, which tended to undermine Amheim's dominant position. That dazzling figure was quite unaware that he had a third enemy, besides Ulrich and Tuzzi, in the person of his little page Soliman. This small black fellow was the glittering buckle on the magic belt with which the Parallel Campaign had engirdled Rachel. A funny little creature, who had followed his master from magic climes to the street where Rachel worked, he was simply ap- propriated by her as that part of the fairy tale intended for her, in accordance with the social law that made the nabob the sun who be- longed to Diotima, while Soliman, an enchanting colorful fragment of stained glass sparkling in that sun, was Rachel's booty. The boy, however, saw things somewhat differently. Although physically small he was sixteen going on seventeen, a creature full of romantic no- tions, malice, and personal pretension. Amheim had plucked him
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out of a traveling dance troupe in southern ItiUy and taken him into his household. The strangely restless little fellow with -the mournful monkey's eyes had touched his heart, andthe rich man decided to open higher vistas to him. It was a longing for a close, faithful com- panionship, such as not infrequently overcame the solitary man-a weakness he usually hid behind increased activity. And so Arnheim treat. ed Soliman, until his fourteenth year, on more or less those same terms of equality as rich families once casually brought up th~ir wet nurse's offspring side by side with their own, letting them share the games and fun, until the moment when it appears that the same milk is of a lower grade when it is a mother's milk compared with that of a wet nurse. Soliman used to crouch day and night at his master's desk or at his feet, behind his back or on his knees, during Amheim's long hours of conversation with famous visitors. He had read Scott, Shakespeare, and Dumas when Scott, Shakespeare, and Dumas had happened to be lying aroupd on the tables, and had learned to spell from the Handbook on the Humanities. He ate his master's sweets, and when no one was looking soon took to smoking his cigarettes as well. A private tutor came and gave him-though somewhat errati- cally, because of all the traveling they did-an elementary education. It was all terribly boring to Soliman, who loved nothing more than serving as a valet, which he was also allowed to do, and which was serious, grown-up work, satisfying his need for action. But one day- not so long ago either-his master had called him in and told him, in a friendly way, that he had not quite fulfilled the hopes set on him. Now he was no longer a child, and Arnheim, his master, was respon- sible for seeing that Soliman, the little seJVant, turned into a decent citizen; which is why he had decided to treat him henceforth as ex- actly what he would have to be, so that he could learn to get used to it. Many successful men, Arnheim added, had begun as bootblacks and dishwashers; this beginning had indeed been the source of their strength, because the most important thing in life was to do whatever one does with all one's heart.
That hour, when he was promoted from the undefined status of a pet kept in luxury to that of a seiVant with free board and lodging and a small wage, ravaged Soliman's heart to a degree of which Amheim had no notion at all. Arnheim's statements had gone clear over Soli- man's head, but Soliman's feelings made him guess what they meant,
and he had hated his master ever since the change had been imposed on him. Not that he stopped helping himself to books, sweets, and cigarettes, but while he had formerly taken merely what gave him pleasure, he now deliberately stole from Arnheim, with so insatiable a vengefulness that he sometimes simply broke things, or hid them, or threw them away-things Arnheim obscurely thought he remem- bered, puzzled that they never turned up again. While Soliman was revenging himself like a goblin, he pulled himself together remark- ably in carrying out his duties and presenting a pleasing appearance. He continued to be a sensation with all the cooks, housemaids, hotel staff, and female visitors; was spoiled by their glances and smiles, gaped at by jeering ragamuffins on the street; and generally felt like a fascinating and important personage, even when oppressed. His master, too, occasionally favored him with a pleased or complacent glance, or with a kind, wise word. Everyone praised Soliman as a handy, obliging boy, and if it happened that such praise came just after he had got something especially awful on his conscience he grimied obsequiously, enjoying his triumph as if he had swallowed a searingly cold lump of ice.
Rachel had won this boy's trust the moment she told him that what was going on in the house might be preparations for war; ever since, she had been subjected by him to the most scandalous revelations about her idol, Amheim. Despite Soliman's blase airs, his imagina- tion was like a pincushion bristling with swords and daggers, and the tales he poured into Rachel's ear about Arnheim were full of thun- dering horses' hooves and swaying torches and rope ladders. He re- vealed that his name was not really Soliman, rattling off a long exotic name with such speed that she could never catch it. He later im- parted the secret that he was the son of an African prince, kidnapped
. as a baby from his father, whose warriors, cattle, slaves, and jewels numbered in the thousands. Arnheim had bought him only in order to sell him back to his father for a staggering sum, but Soliman was going to run away, and would have done it sooner were his father not so far away.
Rachel was not fooled by these stories, but she believed them be- cause nothing connected with the Parallel Campaign could be in- credible enough. She would also have liked to forbid Soliman such talk about Arnheim, but had to stop short of regarding his presump-
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tion with horrified mistrust because his assurance that his master was not to be trusted promised, for all her doubts, a tremendous immi- nent, thrilling complication for the Parallel Campaign.
Such were the storm clouds behind which the tall man brooding by the moss-grown millrace disappeared, and a pallid light gathered in the wrinkled grimaces of Soliman's little monkey face.
THE PARALLEL CAMPAIGN COMMITTEES SEETHE WITH ACTIVITY. CLARISSE WRITES TO HIS GRACE PROPOSING A NIETZSCHE YEAR
At about this time Ulrich had to report to His Grace two or three times a week. A high-ceilinged, shapely room, delightful in its very proportions, had been set aside for him. At the window stood a large Maria Theresa desk. On the wall hung a dark picture, mutely glowing with patches of red, blue, and yellow, of some horsemen or other driving their lances into the bellies of other, fallen horsemen. On the opposite wall hung the portrait of a solitary lady whose vulnerable body was carefully armored in a gold-embroidered, wasp-waisted corset. There seemed no reason why she had been banished all by herself to this wall, as she was obviously a Leinsdorf; her young, pow- dered face resembled the Liege-Count's as closely as a footprint in dry snow matches one in wet loam. Ulrich, incidentally, had little op- portunity to study Count Leinsdorf's face. Since the last meeting, the Parallel Campaign had received such a boost that His Grace never found leisure to devote to the great ideas anymore. but had to spend his time reading correspondence, receiving people, discus- sions, and expeditions. He had already had a consultation with the Prime Minister, a talk with the Archbishop, a conference at the Chamberlain's office, and had more than once sounded out a num- ber of the high aristocr~cy and the ennobled commoners in the
Upper House. Ulrich had not been invited to these discussions and gathered only that all sides expected strong political resistance from the opposition, so they all declared they would be able to support the Parallel Campaign the more vigorously the less their names were linked with it, and for the time being only sent obseJVers to represent them at the committee meetings.
The good news was that these committees were making great strides from week to week. As agreed at the inaugural sessions, they had divided up the world according to the major aspects of religion, education, commerce, agriculture, and so on; every committee al- ready contained a representative of the corresponding ministry, and all committees were already devoting themselves to their task, to wit, that every committee in accord with all the other committees was waiting for the representatives of the respective organizations and sectors of the population to present their wishes, suggestions, and petitions, which would be screened and passed on to the executive committee. In this fashion it was hoped that a steady stream of the country's principal moral forces could be channeled, in an ordered and concentrated way, to the executive committee, an expectation already gratified by the swelling tide of written communications.
Very shortly the flood of memoranda from the various committees to the executive committee were able to refer to their own earlier memoranda, previously transmitted to the executive committee, so that they took to beginning with a sentence that gained in impor- tance from one instance to the next and started with the words: "With reference to our mem. no. so-and-so, ref. to no. such-and- such! XYZ, no. this-and-that"; all these numbers grew larger with each communication. This in itself was already a sign of healthy growth. In addition, even the embassies began to report through semi-official channels on the impression being made abroad by this vigorous display of Austrian patriotism; the foreign ambassadors were already sending out cautious feelers for information; alerted deputies were asking questions in Parliament; and private enterprise manifested itself by way of inquiries from business firms that took the liberty of making suggestions or seeking a way in which they could link their firms with patriotism. The apparatus was set up, and because it was there it had to function, and once it was functioning, it began to accelerate; once a car starts rolling in an open field, even if
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no one. is at the wheel, it will always take a definite, even a very im- pressive ·and remarkable course o f its own.
And so a great force had been set in motion, and Count Leinsdorf began to feel it. He put on his piil. ce-nez and read all the incoming mail with great seriousness from beginning to end. It was no longer the proposals and desires ofunknown, passionate individuals, such as had inundated him at the. outset, before things had been set on a regular course, and even though these applications or inquiries still came from the heart of the people, they were now signed by the chairmen of alpine clubs, leagues for free thought, girls' welfare asso- ciations, workingmen's organizations, social groups, citizens' clubs, and other such nondescript clusterings that run aheadof the transi- tion from individualism to· collectivism like little heaps of street sweepings before a stiff breeze. And even if His Grace was not in sympathy with everything they asked for, he felt that, all in all, im- portant progress had been made. He took off his pince-nez, handed the communication back to the official who had presented it to him, and nodded his satisfaction without saying a word; he felt that the Parallel Campaign was in good order and clearly on its way, and in due time would fmd its proper form.
The ministry official who took the letter back usually placed it on a pile of other letters, and when the last one of the day lay on top, he read for His Grace's eyes. Then His Grace's mouth would speak: "Excellent, but we can't say yes and we can't say no as long as we have no really firm idea what our central goal is. " But this was just what the official had read in His Grace's eyes after every previous letter, and it was precisely what he thought himself, and he had his gold-plated pocket pencil ready to write what he had already written at the bottom of every previous letter, the magic formula: "Fi. " This magic formula, widely used in the Kakanian civil service, stood for "Filed for later decision," and was a model of that circumspection that loses sight of nothing, and rushes into no~g. "Fi," for in- stance, took care of a minor civil servant's application for an emer- gency grant-in-aid to pay for his wife's impending confmement by filing it away until the child was grown and old enough to earn a liv- ing, simply because the matter might be in the process ofbeing dealt with by pending legislation, and in the meantime the senior official did not have the heart to turn down his subordinate's petition out of
hand. The same treatment iwould also be accorded an application from an influential personage or a government bureau that one could not afford to offend by a refusal, even though one knew some other influential quarter was opposed to this application. And basically, ev- erything that came to the department's attention for the first time was kept on file on principle, until a similar case came up to serve as a precedent.
But it would be quite wrong to make fun of this administrative custom, since a great deal more is ftled for later decision in the world outside government offices. How little it means that monarchs on their accession still take an oath to make war on Turks or other infi- dels, considering that in all the history of mankind no sentence has ever been completely crossed out or quite completed, which at times gives rise to that bewildering tempo of progress exactly resembling a flying ox. In gove~ment offices, at least, a few things get lost, but nothing ever gets lost in the world. "Fi" is indeed one of the basic formulas of the structure of our life. When, however, something struck His Grace as· particularly urgent, he had to choose another method. He would then send the proposal to Court, to his friend Count Stallburg, with the query whether it might be regarded as "tentatively definitive," as he put it. After some time he would re- ceive a reply, always to the effect that His Majesty's wishes on this point could not as of now be conveyed, but in the meantime it seemed desirable to begin by letting public opinion follow its own direction and then to reconsider the proposal in due course, depend- ing on how it had been received and on any other contingencies that might arise in the meantime. This reply caused the proposal to become a duly constituted file, and as such it was passed on to the proper ministerial department, whence it returned with the note that the department did not consider itself authorized to arrive at an in- dependent decision in the matter, and when this happened Count Leinsdorf made a note to propose at one of the next meetings of the executive committee that an interdepartmental subcommittee be set up to study the problem.
In only one case was His Grace's mind inexorably made up, that of a letter not signed by the chairman of any society or any officially recognized religious, scientific, or artistic body. Such a letter had come recently from Clarisse, using Ulrich's name as a reference, and
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proposing the proclamation of an Austrian Nietzsche Year, in con- junction with which something would have to be done for the mur- derer of women, Moosbrugger. She wrote that, as a woman, she felt called upon to make this suggestion, and also because ofthe signifi- cant coincidence that Nietzsche had been a mental case and so was Moosbrugger. Ulrich barely managed a joke to conceal his annoy- ance when Count Leinsdorf showed him this letter, which he had already recognized by its oddly immature handwriting crisscrossed with heavy horizontal T-bar strokes and underlinings. Count Leins- dorf, however, sensing his embarrassment, said seriously and kindly: "This is not without interest. One might say that it shows ardor and energy, but I'm afraid we must shelve all such personal suggestions, or we shall never get anywhere. As you know the writer personally, perhaps you would like to pass this letter on . to your cousin? "
57
GREA T UPSURGE. DIOTIMA DISCOVERS THE STRANGE WAYS OF GREAT IDEAS
Ulrich slipped the letter into his pocket to make it disappear, but in any case it would not have been easy to take it up with Diotima. Ever since the newspaper article about the "Year of Austria" had ap- peared, she had been swept along by a rising tide of incoherent activ- ity. Not only did Ulrich hand over to her, preferably unread, all the files he received from Count Leinsdorf, but every day the mail brought heaps of letters and press clippings, and masses of books on approval came from booksellers; her house swelled with people as the sea swells when moon and wind tug at it together; and the tele- phone never stopped ringing. Had little Rachel not taken charge ofit with seraphic zeal, and given most of the information herself because she said she could not bother her mistress incessantly, Diotima would have collapsed under the burden.
Yet this neiVous breakdown that never happened, even as it kept quivering and pulsating in her body, brought Diotima a kind of hap- piness she had never known before. It was a shudder, a being end- lessly showered with significance, a crackling like that of the pressure in the capstone of the world arch, a prickling like the awareness of nothingness when one stands on the summit ofthe highest mountain peak for iniles around. It was, in short, a sense of position that was awakening in this daughter of a modest secondary-school teacher and this young wife of a middle-class vice-consul, which she had re- mained in the freshness of her heart despite her rise in society. Such a sense of position belongs to the unnoticed but essential conditions of life, like not noticing the revolutions of the earth or the part our personality plays in directing our perceptions. Since man is taught not to bear vanity in his heart, he keeps most of it underfoot, in that he walks on the soil of a great fatherland, religion, or income-tax bracket; or else, lacking such a vantage point, he makes do with a place anyone can have, on the momentarily highest point reached by the pillar of time as ·it rises out of the void; in other words, we take pride in living in and for the present moment, when all our predeces- sors have turned to dust and no successors have yet appeared. But if for some reason this vanity, of which we are usually unconscious, suddenly mounts from the feet to the head, it can cause a mild crazi- ness, like that of those virgins who imagine they are pregnant with the globe of the earth itself.
Even Section Chief Tuzzi now paid Diotima the tribute of inquir- ing how things ~ere going, sometimes even asking her to oversee one minor matter or another; at such times the smile with which he usually referred to her salon was replaced by a dignified seriousness. It was still not known to what extent the idea of finding himself placed in the forefront of an international pacifist movement would be agreeable to His Gracious' Majesty, but on this point Tuzzi repeat- edly asked Diotima not to take the slightest step into the field of for- eign affairs without first consulting him. He even suggested on the
. spot that if ever any serious move should be made toward an interna- tional peace campaign, every precaution first immediately be taken against any po. ssible political complications that might ensue. Such a noble idea should in no way be rejected, he explained to his wife, not even ifthere might be some possibility ofrealizing it, but it was abso-
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lutely necessary to keep open one's options for going ahead or re- treating from the very beginning. He then laid out for Diotima the differences between disarmament, a peace conference, a summit meeting, and so on, all the way down to the already mentioned foun- dation for decorating the Peace Palace at The Hague with murals by Austrian artists; he had never before spoken with his wife in this fac- tual manner. Sometimes he would even come back to the bedroom with his briefcase to supplement his remarks, in case he had forgot- ten to add, for instance, that he personally could regard everything having to do with a Global. Austria as conceivable only, of course, as part of a pacifist or humanitarian undertaking of some kind; anything else could only make one look dangerously irresponsible, or some such thing.
Diotima answered with a patient smile: "I shall do my best to do as you wish, but you should not exaggerate the importance of foreign affairs for us. There is a tremendous upsurge, an inner sense of re- demption, coming from the anonymous depths of the people; you
·can't imagine the floods of petitions and suggestions that oveiWhelm me every day. "
She was admirable, for she gave no hint of the enormous difficul- ties she actually had to contend with. In the deliberations of the great central committee, which was organized under the headings of Reli- gion, Justice, Agriculture, Education, and so forth, all idealistic suggestions met with that icy and timorous reserve so familiar to Di- otima from her husband in the days before he had become so atten-- tive. There were times when she felt quite discou~ged from sheer impatience, when she could not conceal from herself that this iner- tial resistance of the world would be hard to break. However clearly she herself could see the Year of Austria as the Year of a Global Austria, and the Austrian nations as the model for the nations of the world-all it took was to prove that Austria was the true home of the human spirit everywhere-it was equally clear that for the slow- witted this concept would have to be fleshed out with a particular content and supplemented by some. inspired symbol, som. ething less abstract, with more sense-appeal, to help them understand. Diotima pored for hours over many books, searching for the right image, and it would have to be a uniquely Austrian symbolic image, of course.
But now Diotima was having strange experiences with the nature of great ideas.
It appeared that she was living in a great age, since the age was full ~fgreat ideas. But one would not believe how hard it was to translate the greatest and most important ofthem into reality, considering that all the conditions for doing so existed except one: knowing which of them was the greatest and most important. Every time Diotima had almost opted in favor of some idea, she could not help noticing that its opposite was equally great an\l equally worthy of realization. That's the way it is, after all, and she couldn't help it. Ideals have curious properties, and one of them is that they tum into their oppo- sites when one tries to live up to them. Take Tolstoy, for instance, and Bertha Suttner, two write~ whose ideas were about equally dis- cussed at the time-but how, Diotima thought, can mankind even have roast chicken without violence? And if one should not kill, as these two writers demanded, what was to be done with the soldiers? They would be unemployed, poor devils, and the criminals would see the dawn of a golden age. Such proposals had actually been made, and signatures were said to be in the process of being collected. Di-
. otima could never have ima~ned a life without eternal verities, but now she found to her amazement that there are two, or more, of every eternal verity. Which is why every reasonable person-Section Chief Tuzzi, in this case, who was to that extent vindicated-has a deeply rooted mistrust of eternal verities. Of course he will never deny that they are indispensable, but he is convinced that people who take them literally must be mad. According to his way of think- ing-which he helpfully offered to his wife-ideals make excess. ive demands on human nature, with ruinous consequences, unless one refuses at the outset to take them quite seriously. The best proof of this that Tuzzi could offer was that such words as "ideal" and "eter- nal verity" never occur at all in government offices, which deal with serious matters. A civil servant who would think of using such an ex- pression in an official communication would instantly be advised to see a doctor to request a medical leave. But even if Diotima listened to him sadly, she always drew new strength from such moments of
weakness, and plunged back into her researches.
Even Count Leinsdorf marveled at her mental energy when he
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finally found the time to come for a consultation with her. His Grace wanted a spontaneous testimonial arising from the midst of the peo- ple. He sincerely wanted to find out the will of the people and to refine it by cautiously influencing it from above, for he hoped one day to submit it to His Majesty, not as a ritual offering from a Byzan- tine monarchy but as a sign of true self-awareness achieved by na- tions adrift in the ~ortexof democracy. Diotima knew that His Grace still clung to the "Emperor of Peace" concept and that of a splendid testimonial demonstration of the True Austria, even though he did not in principle reject the idea ofa Global Austria, but only so long as it properly expressed the sense of a family of nations gathered around their patriarch. From this political family His Grace covertly and tacitly excluded Prussia, even tho~gh. he had nothing against Dr. Arnheim personally and even made a point ofreferring to him as "an interesting person. "
"We certainly don't want anything patriotic in the outworn sense ofthe word," he offered. 'We must shake up the nation, the world. A Year of Austria is a fine idea, it seems to me, and I have in fact al- ready told the fellows from the press myself that the public imagina- tion should be steered in that direction. But once we've agreed on that, what do we do in this Austrian Year-have you thought ofthat, my dear? That, you see, is the problem! That's what we really need to know. Unless we help things along a little from above, the immature elements will gain the upper hand. And I simply haven't the time to think of anything! " ·
Diotlma thought His Grace seemed worried, and said vivaciously: "The campaign is no good at all unless it culminates in a great sym- bol. That much is certain. It must seize the heart ofthe world, but it also needs some influence from above; there is no denying that. An Austrian Year is a brilliant suggestion, but in my opinion a World Year would be still finer, a World-Austrian Year, in which Europe could recognize Austria as its true spiritual home. "
"Not so fast1 Not so fast! " warned Count Leinsdorf, who had often been startled by his friend's spiritual audacity. "Aren't your ideas al- ways perhaps a little excessive, Diotima? This is not the first time you've brought this up, but one can't be too careful. What have you come up with to do in this World Year? "
With this question, however, Count Leinsdorf, led by the blunt-
ness that made his thinking so full of character, had touched Diotima at precisely her most vulnerable point. "Count," she said after some hesitation, "that is the hardest question in the world to answer. I in- tend as soon as possible to invite a circle of the most distinguished men, poets and philosophers, and I will wait to hear what this group has to say before I say anything. "
"Good! " His Grace exclaimed, instantly won over for a postpone- ment. "How right you are! One can never be careful enough. Ifyou only knew what I have to listen to day in and day out! "
QUALMS ABOUT THE PARALLEL CAMPAIGN. BUT IN THE HISTORY OF MANKIND THERE IS NO VOLUNTARY TURNING BACK
On one occasion His Grace also had time to go into it more deeply with Ulrich.
"I can't say I care too much for this Dr. Arnheim," he said confi- dentially. "A brilliant man, of course; no wonder your cousin is im- pressed with him. But he is; after all, a Prussian. He has a way of looking on. You know, when I was a little boy, in '65 it was, my sainted father had a shooting party at Chrudim Castle and one of the guests had the same way of looking on, and a year later it turned out that no one had the remotest idea who had brought him along and that he was a major on the Prussian general staff! Not, of course, that I'm suggesting anything, but I don't altogether like this fellow Am- heim knowing all about us. "
"Your Grace," Ulrich said, ''I'm glad you offer me a chance to speak my mind on the subject. It's time something was done; things are going on that make me wonder and that aren't suitable for a for- eign observer to see. After all, the Parallel Campaign is supposed to raise everyone's spirits, isn't it? Surely that is what Your Grace intended? "
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250 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
''Well of course, naturally. "
"But the opposite is happening! " Ulrich exclaimed. "I have the im- pression it's making all the best people look unusually concerned, even downhearted! "
His Grace shook his head and twiddled his thumbs, as he always did when his mood darkened. He had, in fact, made similar observa- tions himself.
''Ever since it got around that I have some connection with the Parallel Campaign," Ulrich went on, "whenever I get into conversa- tion with someone it doesn't take three minutes before he says to me: 'What is it you're really after with this Parallel Campaign? There's no such thing nowadays as great achievements or great men! ' "
''Well, themselves excepted, of course," Count Leinsdorf inter- jected. "I know all about that; I hear it all the time too. The big indus- trialists grumble that the politicians don't give them enough protective tariffs, and the politicians grumble about industry for not coming up with enough money for their election campaigns. "
"Quite sol" Ulrich proceeded with his exposition. "The surgeons clearly believe that surgery has made progress since the days of Bill- roth, but they say that medicine as a whole, and science in general, are doing too little for surgery. I would even go so far, if you will permit me, as to suppose that the theologians believe theology has made advances. since the time ofChrist-"
Count Leinsdorf raised a hand in mild protest.
"Excuse me if I said something inappropriate, especially as it was quite unnecessary; my point is a quite general one. The surgeons, as I said, claim that scientific research is not fulfilling its promise, but if you talk to a research scientist about the present, he will complain that, much as he would like to broaden his outlook a bit, the theater bores him and he can't find a novel that entertains and stimulates him. Talk to a poet, and he'll tell you that there is no faith. Talk to a painter-since I want to leave the theologians out ofit-and he'll be pretty sure to tell you that painters can't give their best in a period that has such miserable literature and philosophy. Of course the se- quence in which they blame one another is not always the same, but it always reminds one a bit of musical chairs, if you know what I mean, sir, or Puss in the Comer, and I've no idea what the law or the rule is at the bottom ofit. r m afraid it looks as though each individual
may still be satisfied with himself, more or less, but collectively, for some universal reason, mankind seems ill at ease inside its own skin, and the Parallel Campaign seems destined to bring this condition to light. "
"Good heavens," His Grace said in response to this analysis, with- out its being quite clear what he meant by it, "nothing but 'ingrati- tude! "
"I have already, incidentally," Ulrich continued, "two folders full of general proposals, which I've had no previous opportunity to re- turn to Your Grace. One of them I've headed: Back to-! It's amaz- ing how many people tell us that the world was better off in earlier times and want the Parallel Campaign to take us back there. Without counting the understandable slogan, Back to Religion! , we still have a Back to the Baroque, Back to Gothic, Back to Nature, Back to Goe- the, to Ancient Germanic Law, to Moral Purity, and quite a few more. "
"Hmm, yes. But perhaps there is a real idea in there somewhere, which it would be a mistake to discourage? " Count Leinsdorf offered.
"That's possible, but how should one deal with it? 'After careful consideration of your esteemed letter of such-and-such a date, we regret that we do not regard the present moment as suitable . . . '? Or 'We have read your letter with interest, please supply details on how restoration of the world as it was in the Baroque, the Gothic, et cet- era, et cetera, is to be effected . . . and so on'? "
Ulrich was smiling, but Count Leinsdorf felt he was treating the situation with a little too much levity, and twiddled his thumbs with renewed vigor to ward it off. His face, with its handlebar mustache, assumed a hardness reminiscent of the Wallenstein era, and then he came out with a most noteworthy statement:
"Dear Doctor," he said, "in the history of mankind there is no vol- untary turning back! "
This statement surprised no one more than Count Leinsdorfhim- self, who had actually intended to say something quite different. As a conservative, he had been annoyed with Ulrich, and had wanted to point out to him that the middle classes had spumed the universal spirit of the Catholic Church and were now suffering the conse- quences. He was also on the point of praising the times of absolute
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252 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
centralism, when the world was still led by persons aware of their responsibilities in accordance with fixed principles. But while he was still groping for words, it suddenly occurred to him what a nasty sur- prise it would be to wake up one morning without a hot bath and trains, with an Imperial town crier riding through the streets instead ofthe morning papers. And so Count Leinsdorfthonght: "Things can never again be what they were, the way they were," and as he thought this he was quite astonished. For one assumed that if there was indeed no voluntary going back in history, then mankind was like a man driven along by some inexplicable wanderlust, a man who could neither go back nor arrive anywhere, and this was a quite re- markable condition.
Now, while His Grace had an extraordinary knack for keeping apart two ideas that might contradict each other. so that they never came together in his consciousness, he should have firmly rejected ~s particular idea, whic~was inimical to all his principles. However, he had taken rather a liking to Ulrich, and as far as time permitted, he enjoyed explaining political matters on a strictly logical basis to this intellectually alert young man who, had come to him so well rec- ommended, whose only drawback was his middle-class status, which made him something of an outsider when it came to the really great issues. But once one begins with logic, where one idea follows from the immediately preceding one, one never knows where it may all come out at the end. And so Count Leinsdorf did not retract his statement but merely gazed at Ulrich in intense sllence.
Ulrich pi~ked up a second folder and took advantage of the pause to hand both files to His Grace.
"I had to head the second one Forward to-/" he began to explain, but His Grace started to his feet and found that his time was up. He urged Ulrich to leave the continuation of their talk for another time, when there would be rp. ore leisure to give it some thought.
"By the way," he said, already on his feet, "your cousin is going to have a gathering of our most distinguished thinkers to discuss all these problems. Do go; please be sw:e to go; I don't know whether I shall be permitted to be there. "
Ulrich put back his folders, and ~ount Leinsdorf, in the shadow of
the open door, turned around once more. "A great experiment natu- rally makes everyone nervous. Butwe'll shake them up! " His sense of propriety would not let him leave Ulrich behind without some word of comfort.
59
MOOSBRUGGER REFLECTS
Moosbrugger had meanwhile settled down in his new prison as best he could. The gate had hardly shut behind him when he was bel- lowed at. He had been threatened with a beating when he protested, if he remembered rightly. lie had been put in solitary.