No More Learning

these frozen grim- aces of the universe as a table or a chair, a shout or an outstretched arm, a speed or a roast chicken. We are capable of living between one open chasm of sky above our heads and another, slightly camou- flaged chasm of sky beneath our feet; feeling as untroubled on earth as ifwe were in a room with the door closed. We know that our life is ebb'ing away . both outward into the inhuman distances of cosmic space and downward into the inhuman microspace of the atom, while we go on dealing with a middle stratum, the things that make up our world, without troupling ourselves at all over the fact that this proves only a preference for impressions received in the middle dis- tance, as it were. Such an attitude is considerably beneath our intel- lectual level, but that alone proves what a large part our feelings play in our intelligence. Our most important psychological machinery is, in fact, kept in motion to maintain us in a certain equilibrium, and all the emotions, all the passions in the world are nothing compared with the immense but wholly unconscious effort human beings make just to preserve their peace of mind. This works so well that there seems no point in drawing attention to it. But looked at closely, it does seem to be an extremely artificial state of mind that enables a man to walk upright among the circling constellations and permits him, surrounded as he is by an almost infinite unknown, to slip his hand with aplomb between the second and third buttons of his jacket. Not only does every human being, the idiot as much as the sage, apply his special skills to make this happen; all these personal stratagems are also cleverly built into society's moral and mtellectual
systems for maintaining its inner equilibrium, so that they serve the same purpose on a larger scale. This interlocking of systems resem- bles that of nature itself, where all the magnetic fields of the cosmos affect those of the earth without anyone noticing it, because the re- sult is simply whatever happens on earth. The consequent psycho- logical relief is so great that the wisest of men and the most ignorant of little girls, if left undisturbed, feel very clever and pleased with themselves.
But such states of satisfaction that might also be called compulsive states of feeling and volition, in a sense, are sometimes followed by the contrary; to resort again to the terminology of the madhouse, there is a sudden great flight of ideas worldwide, which leaves in its wake a repolarization of all human life around new centers and axes. The final cause of all great revolutions, which lies deeper than their effective cause, is not the accretion of intolerable conditions, but the loss of cohesion that bolstered the society's artificial peace of mind. There is an applicable saying by a famous early scholastic, "Credo ut intelligam,. . which might be freely translated into a prayer for our times as "0 Lord, please grant my spirit a production credit! " since every human creed is probably only a special instance of the credit system. In love as in business, in science as in the long jump, one has to believe before one can win and score, so how can it be otherwise for life as a whole? However well founded an order may be, it always rests in part on a voluntary faith in it, a faith that, in fact, always marks the spot where the new growth begins, as in a plant; once this unaccountable and uninsurable faith is used up, the collapse soon follows; epochs and empires crumble no differently from business concerns when they lose their credit.
And so this reflection on the principle ofpsychic equilibrium leads us from the beautiful example of Bonadea to the sad case of Kakania. For Kakania was the first country in our present historical phase from which God withdrew His credit: the love of life, faith in itself, and the ability of all civilized nations to disseminate the useful illu- sion that they have a mission to fulfill. It was an intelligent country, it housed cultivated people who, like cultivated people all over the globe, ran around in an unsettled state of mind amid a tremendous whirl of noise, speed, innovation, conflict, and whatever goes to make up . the optical-acousticallandscape of our lives; like everybody
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else, they read and heard every day dozens of news items that made their hair stand on end, and were willing to work themselves up over them, even to intervene, but they never got around to it because a few minutes afterward the stimulus had already been displaced in their minds by more. recent ones; like. everyone else, they felt sur- rounded by murder, killings, passion, self-sacrifice, and greatness, all somehow going on within the Gordian knot that was forming around them, but they could never break through to these adventures be- cause they were trapped in an office or somewhere, at work, and by evening, when they were free, their unresolved tensions exploded into forms of relaxation that failed to relax them. There was the spe- cial problem for persons of cultivated sensibilities, at least for those who did not devote themselves so single-mindedly to love as Bona- dea: they no longer had the gift of faith or credit, nor had they learned to fake it. They no longer knew what their smiles, their sighs, their ideas, were for. What exactly was the point of their thoughts, their smiles? Their opinions were haphazard, their inclinations an old story, the scheme of things seemed to be hanging in midair, one ran into it as into a net, and there was nothing to do or leave undone with all one's heart, because there was no unifying principle. And so the cultivated person was someone who felt steadily mounting up a
J debt that he would never be able to pay off, felt bankruptcy inexora- ' bly approaching; and either inveighed against the times in which he was condemned to live, even though he enjoyed living in them like anyone else, or else hurled himself with the courage of those who
have nothing to lose at every idea that promised a change. ·
It was the same as anywhere else in the world, ofcourse, but when God cut off Kakania's credit, He did it in so special a style that whole nations had their eyes opened to the high cost of civilization. like bacteria they had been sitting pretty in their culture medium, with- out bothering their heads about the proper curvature of the sky above or anything, when suddenly things tightened up. Although men are not normally aware of it, they must believe that they are something more than they are in order to be capable of being what they are; they need to feel this something more above and around them, and there are times when they suddenly miss . it. What is missed is something imaginary. Nothing at all had happened in Ka- kania, and formerly it would have been thought of as the old, unob-
trusive Kakanian way of life, but this nothing had become as disturb- ing as getting no sleep or seeing no sense in anything. And so it was easy enough for the intellectuals, once they had persuaded them- selves that an ethnically homogeneous culture was the answer, to make the Kakanian ethnic minorities believe it, as a kind of substi- tute for religion or for the ideal. of the Good Emperor in Vienna, or simply as a way of understanding the incomprehensible fact that there are seven days in the week. There are so many inexplicable things in life, but one loses sight of them when singing the national anthem. It would naturally be at such a moment that a good Kakanian could have joyfully answered the question of what he was by saying: "Nothing," meaning that Something that could make of a Kakanian everything he had never yet been! But the Kakanians were not so stiff-necked a people and contented themselves with a com- promise, in that every nationality tried only to do with every other nationality whatever suited its own purposes. It is naturally hard in these circumstances to empathize with grievances not one's own. After two thousand years of altruistic teachings, we have become so unselfish that even if it means you or I have to suffer, we are bound to take the part of the other fellow. But it would be wrong to think of the notorious Kakanian nationalist rivalries as particularly savage. It was more a historical process than a real one. The people actually quite liked each other; even though they did crack each other's heads and spit in each other's faces, it was done as a matter of higher cul- tural considerations, as when a man who normally wouldn't hurt a fly, for instance, will sit in court under the image of Christ Crucified and condemn another man to death. It is only fair to say that when- ever their higher selves relaxed a bit, the Kakanians breathed a sigh of relief and, born consumers of food and drink as they were, looked with amazement upon their role as the tools of history.
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110
MOOSBRUGGER DISSOLVED AND PRESERVED
Moosbrugger was still in prison, waiting for further psychiatric ex- aminations. It felt like a solid stack of days. Each day made itself dis- tinctly felt when it came, of course, but toward evening it already began to merge with the stack. Moosbrugger certainly registered the presence·ofconvicts, guards, corridors, courtyards, a glimpse ofblue sky, a passing cloud or two, food, water, and now and then an official checking up on him, but these impressions were too feeble to be last- ing. He had no watch, no suri, no work, to tell him the time. He was always hungry. He was always tired, from pacing around his seven square yards>' which is far more tiring than wandering freely for miles. , He was bored·with everything he did, as if he had to keep stir- ring a pot of glue. But when he considered it as a whole, it seemed to him that day and night, his cleamng his plate and again cleaning his plate, inspections and checkups, all droned along one after the other without a break, and he found that entertaining. His life clock had gone out of order; it could be turned ahead or back. He liked that; it was his sort of thing. Things long past and fresh happenings were no longer kept apart artif;lcially, and when it was all the same, then what they called "at different times" no longer stuck to it like the red thread they tie to a twin baby's neck so they can tell it from the other one. All the irrelevancies vanished from his life. When he pondered this life of his, he talked with himself inwardly, slowly, laying equal stress on every syllable; in this way life sang a different tune from the one heard every day. He often let his mind linger on a word for a long time, and when he finally moved on, without quite knowing how, after a while the word would turn up again somewhere else. It tickled him to think how much was happening for him that nobody knew about. The sense of being inwardly at peace with himself that some- times came to him is hard to describe. Anyone can conceive of a man's life flowing along like a brook, but what Moosbrugger felt was his life flowing like a brook through a vast, still lake. As it flowed on-
ward it continued to mingle with what it was leaving behind and be- came almost indistinguishable from the movements on either side of it. Once, in a half-waking dream, he had a sense of having worn this life's. Moosbrugger like an ill-fitting coat on his back; now, when he opened it a bit, the most curious sort of lining came billowing out silkily, endless as a forest.
He no longer cared what was going on outside. Somewhere a war was going on. Somewhere there was a big wedding. Now the King of Belukhastan is coming, he thought. Everywhere soldiers were being drilled, whores were walking their beat, carpenters were standing among rafters. In the taverns of Stuttgart the beer came pouring from the same curving yellow taps as in Belgrade. On the road there were always the police demanding to see your papers. Then they stamped them. Everywhere there are bedbugs or no bedbugs. Work or no work. The women are the same everywhere. The doctors in all the hospitals are the same. When a man leaves his work in the eve- ning the streets are full ofpeople with nothing to do. It's all the same, always and everywhere; nobody has any new ideas. When Moosbrug- ger saw his first plane overhead in the blue sky-now, that was some- thing! But then there was one plane after another, and they all looked alike. ·The sameness ofthings out there was different from the way his thoughts were all alike in being wonderful. He couldn't fig- ure it out, and anyway it had always got in his way. He shook his head. To hell with the world, he thought. Or to hell with him and let them hang him: whatever happened, what did he have to lose . . . ?
And yet he sometimes would walk as if absentmindedly to the door and quietly try the place where the lock was on the outside. Then an eye would glare through the peephole and an angry voice come from the corridor, calling him names. Such insults made Moosbrugger move quickly back into his cell, and it was then that he felt locked up and robbed. Four walls and an iron door are nothing when you can freely walk in and out. Bars on an unfamiliar window are nothing special, and a plank bed or wooden table always in its place is quite in order. It's only when a man can't do what he wants with them that something crazy happens. Here things, made by human beings to serve them, slaves whose appearance one doesn't even bother to no- tice, suddenly get uppity. They block one's way. When Moosbrugger noticed these things giving him orders he had a good-mind to smash
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them, and it was a struggle to convince himself that it was beneath him to fight these minions of the law. But his hands were 'twitching so hard he was afraid he was going to have a fit.
Out of the wh9le wide world they had picked these seven square yards, and Moosbrugger was pacing them, back and forth. The minds of the sane people out there, incidentally, who were not locked up, worked much the same as his own. They who had taken such a lively interest in him not so long ago had quickly forgotten him. He had been put in this place like a nail driven into the wall; once in, nobody notices it anymore. Other Moosbruggers were taking their turn; they were not himself, not even the same person every time, but they served the same purpose. There had been a sex crime, a grim story, a horrible murder, the act of a madman, of a man not quite responsi- ble, the sort of thing to watch out for, but then the police and the courts had done their job. . . . Such vague and vacuous generaliza- tions and memory tags loosely held the now-desiccated remains of the incident somewhere in their wide net. Moosbrugger's name was forgotten, the details were forgotten. He might have been "a squir- rel, a hare, or a fox," the public remembered nothing specific about him, there remained only dim, wide areas of overlapping general no- tions, like the gray shimmer in a telescope focused at too great a dis- tance. This ·failure to make cpnnections, the cruelty of a mind that shuffles concepts around without bothering about the burden of suf- fering and life that weighs down every decision, was what the general mind had in common with that of Moosbrugger; but what was in his crazed brain a dream, a fairy tale, that flawed or odd spot in the mir- ror of consciousness which does not reflect reality but lets the light through, was lacking in society as a whole, unless some individual·, in his obscure excitement, showed a hint of it here and there.
And what did concern Moosbrugger specifically, this particular Moosbrugger and none other, the one temporarily stored on these seven square yards of the world-the feeding, surveillance, autho- rized treatment, final disposal of the case by life or death sentence- was all in the hands ofa relatively small group ofpeople with a wholly different attitude. Here eyes on duty spied on him, voices came down hard on him for the slightest misstep. Never did fewer than two guards enter his cell. He was always handcuffed when they took him through the corridors. They acted with the fear and caution that
had to do with this particular Moosbrugger within this limited area but was in strange contrast with the treatment accorded to him in general. He often complained about these strict measures. But when he did, the captain, the warden, the doctor, the priest, whoever heard him, turned a frozen face on him and told him he was being treated according to regulations. So regulations had taken the place of the interest the world had once taken in him, and Moosbrugger thought: "You've got a long rope around your neck and you can't see who's pulling it. " He was roped to the outside world but, as it were, around the comer,' out of sight. People who mostly never gave him a thought, who did not even know he existed, or to whom he meant at best no more than what some chicken on a village street means to a university professor of zoology-they were all in it together, prepar- ing the doom that he felt tugging at him in some ghostly way. Some skirt in an office was typing a memo for his record. A registrar was ingeniously classifying it for f'Uing. Some high functionary of the court was drawing up the latest directive for implementing his sen- tence. Psychiatrists were debating how to draw the line between the purely psychopathic constitution in certain cases of epilepsy and its manifestations when combined With other syndromes. Jurists were analyzing the factors that mitigated culpability in relation to factors that might modify the sentence. A bishop denounced the unraveling of the moral fabric, and a game warden's complaint to Bonadea's husband, the judge, about the excessive increase in foxes was rein- forcing that eminent legal mind's bias in favor of reinforcing the in- flexibility of the law. ·
It is such impersonal matters that go into the making of personal happenings in a way that for the present eludes description. When Moosbrugger's case was shorn of all its individual romantic elements, of interest only to him and to the few people he had murdered, not much more was left of it than what could be gathered from the list of references to works cited that Ulrich's father had enclosed in are- cent letter to his son. Such a list looks like this: AH. AMP. AAC. AKA. AP. ASZ. BKL. BGK. BUD. CN. DTJ. DJZ. FBvM. GA. GS. JKV. KBSA. MMW. NG. PNW. R. VSvM. WMW. ZGS. ZMB. ZP. ZSS. Addickes ibid. Beling ibid. , and so on. Written out, these \Yould read: Annales d'Hygi~me Publique et de Medicine legal~,% ed. Brouardel, Paris; Annales Medico-Psychologiques, ed. Ritti . . :-~·etc. ,
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etc. , making a list a page long even when reduced to the briefest of abbreviations. The truth is not a crystal that can be slipped into one's pocket, but an endless current into which one falls headlong. Imag- ine every one of these abbreviations trailing a dozen or hundreds of printed pages, for each page a man with ten fingers writing it, and for each of his ten fingers ten disciples and ten opponents with ten fin- gers each, and at every fingertip a tenth of a personal idea, and you have a dim notion of what the truth is like. Without it not even that well-known sparrow can fall off the roof. Suri, wind, food brought it there, and illness, hunger, cold, or a cat killed it, but none of this col)ld have happened without the operation of laws, biological, psy- chological, meteorological, physical, chemical, sociological, and all the rest, and it is much less of a strain to be mei:ely looking for such laws than to have to make them up, as is done in the moral and judi- cial disciplines.
As for Moosbrugger himself, with his great respect for human knowledge, although he had, unfortunately, so small a portion of it: he never would have understood his situation completely even had he known exactly what it was. He had a dim sense of it. He felt that he was in an unstable condition. His big, powerful body was not as solid as it looked. Sometimes the open sky peered right into his skull. Just as it had, so often, in the old days on the road. And though he sometimes wished he could shake it off, he was never free, these days, of a certain solemn exaltation that streamed toward him, through the prison walls, from all the world. So there he sat, the wild, captive threat of a dreaded act, like an uninhabited coral island in a boundless sea of scientific papers that surrounded him invisibly on all sides.
111
To THE LEGAL MIND, INSANITY IS AN ALL-OR-NOTHING PROPOSITION
Still, a criminal's life can often be a picnic compared with the strenu- ous brainwork he imposes on the pundits of the law. The offender simply takes advantage of the fact that the transitions in nature from health to sickness are smooth and imperceptible, while to the jurist it is a case of "The arguments pro and contra freedom of the will or insight into the wrongful nature of the act so tend to cut across and cancel each other out that no system of logic can lead to other than a problematic verdict. " A jurist has logical reasons for bearing in mind that "in regard to one and the same act there is no admissible possi- bility that it can arise from a mixture of two different mental states," and he will not permit "the principle of moral freedom in relation to physically conditioned states of mind to be lost in a vague mist of empirical thought. " He is not beholden to Nature for his concepts, but penetrates NatUre with the flame of his thinking and the sword of moral law. A heated debate on this point had broken out in the committee, of which Ulrich's father was a member, convoked by the Ministry of Justice to update the penal code; however, it had taken some time and several reminders from his father to bring Ulrich to the point of studying, like a good son, his father's position paper with all its enclosed documentation.
Ulrich's "affectionate father," as he signed even the most embit- tered ofhis letters, had declared and proposed that a partially insane person should be acquitted only when there was sufficient evidence that his delusory system contained ideas that, were they not delusory, would justify the act or exempt it from liability to punishment. Pro- fessor Schwung, on the other hand-possibly because he had been the old man's friend and colleague for forty years, which must after all lead to a violent difference of opinion sooner or later-had de- clared and proposed that such an individual, in whom the state of being responsible for his actions and not being responsible for his
S84 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
actions must occur in constant alternation, since from a legal point of view they could not coexist simultaneously, should be acquitted only if and when there was evidence, with respect to that specific act of the will, that at the precise moment ofthis act ofthe will the offender had been unable to control himself. So much for the point at issue. The layman can readily see that it may be no less difficult for the criminal not to overlook any moment ofsane volition at the instant he performs the act in question than not to overlook any thought that might perhaps make him liable to punishment; but the law is not obliged to make thinking and moral conduct a bed of roses! And as both these learned jurists were equally zealous on behalf of the law's dignity, and neither could win a majority ofthe committee over to his side, they began by charging each other with error, and then in swift succession with illogical thinking, deliberate misunderstanding, and a lapse of standards. They did this at first within the privacy of the irresolute committee, but then, when the meetings came to a halt, had to be adjourned, and finally suspended indefinitely, Ulrich's fa- ther wrote two pamphlets, entitled "Paragraph 318 of the Penal Code and the True Spirit of'the Law" and "Par. 318 of the Penal Code and the Muddied Wellsprings of Our Jurisprudence," which Ulrich found among the enclosures with his father's letter, together with the critical review of them published by Professor Schwung in the journal The Legal Scholar. ·
These pamphlets were full of"and"s and "or"s, because the ques- tion of whether these two views could be combined by an "and" or must be kept apart by an "or" had to· be "cleared up. " When after a long interval the committee finally reassembled, it, too, had split into an "and" and an "or" faction. There was also another fraction, which supported the simple proposal to let the degree of culpability and responsibility rise and fall in proportion to the rise and fall in the degree of the psychological effort that would suffice, in the given pathological circumstances, to maintain self-control. This grouping was opposed by a fourth faction, which insisted that before all else there must be a clear and definite decision as to wheth(')r a criminal could be said to be responsible for his actions at all; logically, where there was a lessened responsibility for an action, there had first to be a responsibility, and even if the criminal was only in part responsible for his actions he must still suffer the penalty with his entire person,
because the guilty part was not otherwise accessible to the workings of the law. This met with opposition from yet another faction, which, while granting the principle, pointed out that nature did not follow it, in that nature produced half-crazy people upon whom the benefits of the law could be conferred only by modifying their punishment, in view of the circumstances, without at all condoning their guilt. This led to the formation ofa "soundness ofmind" faction as opposed to a "full responsibility" faction, and it was only when these also had split up into enough splinter groups that· those ·aspects of the problem came to light which had not yet occasioned a difference of opinion.
Naturally, no professional man ofour time bases his arguments on those of philosophy and theology, but as perspectives~mpty, like space, and yet, like space, telescoping the objects in it-these two rivals for the last word ofwisdom persist everywhere in invading the optics of each special field of knowledge. And so here, too, the care- fully avoided question of whether a human being could be regarded as a free agent, that good old problem of the freedom of the will, provided the focus for all the differences of opinion, although it was not under consideration. For if a man is morally free, he must, in practice, be subjected by punishment to a compulsion in which no one, in theory, believes. If, on the other hand, he is regarded not as free but as the meeting ground for inexorably interlocking natural processes, then one cannot consider him morally accountable for what he does, even though one can effectively discourage him from doing it by inflicting punishment on him. This problem gave rise to still another faction, which proposed that the culprit be divided into two parts: a zoologic-psychological entity, which did not concern the judge, and a juridical entity, which, though only a fiction, was legally free and accountable. :Fortunately, this proposal remained confined to theory.
It is hard to be brief in doing justice to justice. The commission consisted of about twenty legal pundits who were capable of adopt- ing several thousand different points of view among themselves, . as can easily be calculated. The laws to be updated had been in opera- tion since the year 1852, so that on top of everything else they had proved highly durable, not lightly to be replaced by anything else. In any case, the fixed institution of the law cannot keep up with every brain wave of currently fashionable tendencies, as one participant
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rightly pointed out. The conscientiousness with which the commis- sion's task had to be performed is best appreciated in the light of the fact that statistically, about seventy out of every hundred people who commit crimes that damage society may be sure of slipping through the meshes of the law. How clear this makes our duty to give all the more rigorous thought to the 25 percent or so who get caught! This situation may of course have improved slightly, and besides, it would be wrong to see the real purpose of this report as making fun of the ice flowers that logic brings so exquisitely to bloom in the heads·of our legal pundits; this has been done already by innumerable people whose mental climate tends toward slush. On the contrary, it was masculine strictness,. arrogance, moral soundness, impregnability, and complacency, all qualities of temperament and largely virtues that, as we say, we hope never to lose, which prevented the learned members of the commission from making an unprejudiced use of their ~telligence. They dealt with men as boys, in· the manner of el~ derly schoolteachers in charge of a pupil who needed only to be will- ing to learn and pay attention in order to "do well"-and·thereby simply evoked the prerevolutionary sentiments of. the generation before their own, that of 1848. No doubt their understanding ofpsy- chology was about fifty years out of date; that easily happens when one has to till one's own fields of expertise with the borrowed tools of a neighbor, and the deficiency is usually made good as soon as cir- cumstances permit. The one thing that remains permanently behind the times, especially because it prides itself on its steadfastness, is the human heart, most of all that of the conscientious nian. The mind is never so hard, dry, and twisted as when it has a slight chronic heart condition.
This ultimately led to a furious outburst. When the various skir- mishes had worn down all the participants and kept the work from getting on, more and more voices were ·raised to suggest a compro- mise, which would look much as all formulas do when designed to cover up an unbridgeable gap with fine phrases. There was a tend- ency to agree on the familiar definition that termed "of sound mind" those criminals whose mental and moral qualities make them capa- ble of committing a crime, but·not those who lacked such qualities; a most extraordinary definition, which has the advantage of making it
very hard for criminals to qualify, so that those who do would almost be entitled to wear their convict's uniform with the aura of an aca- demic degree.
But at this point Ulrich's father, facing the threatening lull of the Jubilee Year, and a definition as round as an egg, which he regarded as a hand grenade aimed at his own person, took what he called his sensational tum to the social school of thought. The social view holds that the criminally "degenerate" individual must be judged not mor- ally but only insofar as he is likely to harm society as a whole. Hence the more dangerous he is, the more responsible he is for his actions, with the inescapable logical consequence that those criminals who seem to be the most innocent, the mentally sick, who are by nature least susceptible to correction by punishment, must be threatened with the harshest penalties, harsher than those for sane persons, so that the deterrent factor ofthe punishment be equal for all. It might fairly be expected that Professor Schwung would have a hard time finding an objection to this social view of the matter. This expecta- tion was borne out, which was why he resorted to expedients that drove Ulrich's father in tum to leave the path of jurisprudence, which was threateningto lose itselfin the sands ofcontroversywithin the committee, and appeal to his son to tum to account those con- nections with high and even the highest circles, which he owed to his father, in his father's good cause. For instead of making any attempt at a sober refutation, his colleague Schwung had at once fastened maliciously on the term "social" to denounce it, in a new publication, as "materialistic" and suspect of being infected with "the Prussian idea of the State. "
"My dear son," Ulrich's father wrote, "of course I immediately pointed out the Roman precedent for the social school of legal the- ory, which is by no means Prussian in origin, but this may be of no use against such a denunciation and defamation calculated with diabolical malice to create in high quarters the predictably loath- some impression only too easily linked there with the thought of ma- terialism and Prussia. These are no longer the kind or'allegations against which a man can defend himself. Rumors are being spread, so vague that they are hardly likely toibe carefully scrutinized in high quarters, where being forced to deal with them at all may be held
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against their innocent victim quite as much as against the unscrupu- lous slanderer. I, who have all my life scorned to use backstairs meth- ods, now see myself driven to ask you . . . "And so on, and so the
letter ended.
112
ARNHEIM SETS HIS FA THER, SAMUEL, AMONG THE GODS·AND DECIDES TO GET ULRICH INTO HIS POWER. SOLIMAN WANTS TO FIND OUT MORE ABOUT HIS OWN ROYAL FATHER
Arnheim had rung for Soliman. It was a long time since he had felt like talking with the boy, and now that he did, the rascal seemed to be wandering around in the hotel somewhere.
Ulrich's opposition had finally suceeeded in wounding Arnheim.
Arnheim had of course not been blind to the fact that Ulrich was working against him. Ulrich did it impersonally, with an effect like that ofwater on fire, salt on sugar, undermining Arnheim's influence almost without conscious intent. Arnheim felt sure that Ulrich even took advantage of Diotima's reliance on him to drop unfavorable or satiric remarks about Amheim.
Nothing of the kind had happened to him in ages. His usual method for keeping the upper hand failed him here. The effect of a great man who is his own man is like that of a great beauty; deny· it, and it is a punctured balloon, or a Greek statue on which someone has put a hat. A beautiful woman loses her looks when she ceases to please, and a great man when ignored may become an even greater one but ceases to be a great public figure. Not that Arnheim realized it in these terms, but he thought: "I can't stand opposition, because only the intellect thrives on it, and I despise anyone who is all intellect. "
Amheim took it for granted that he could find a way to neutralize
his opponent. But he wanted to win Ulrich over, to influence him, teach him, compel his admiration. In order to make this easier, he had talked himself into feeling a deep and paradoxical affection for Ulrich, though he would not have known how to account for this. He had nothing to fear from Ulrich, and there was nothing he wanted from him; he knew that neither Count Leinsdorf nor Section Chief Tuzzi was a friend, and otherwise things were going, if slowly, just as he wanted them to go. Ulrich's countereffect paled beside Amheiin's effect; all that was left of it was a wispy protest, which seemed to accomplish nothing except perhaps to delay Diotima's resolve by faintly paralyzing that marvelous woman's purpose. Amheim had subtly pried it out of her and now could not help smiling when he thought of it. Was it a wistful smile or a malicious one? Such distinc- tions, in matters of this kind, are of no consequence. It was only fair, he thought, that his enemy's criticism and resistance should work un- consciously in his, Amheim's, favor. It was the victory of the deeper cause, one of those marvelously lucid, self-resolving complications of life. It was destiny, Amheim felt, that seemed to bring him and the younger man together and made him yield points to Ulrich, who did not understand. For Ulrich resisted all his blandishments; he seemed moronically insensitive to his own social advantage, either not notic- ing or not appreciating this offer of friendship.
There was something that Amheim called Ulrich's wit. What he meant by it was, in part, this failure of a brilliant man to recognize his own advantage and to adjust his mind to the grea~ aims and oppor- tunities that would bring him status and a solid footing in life. Ulrich acted on the absurd contrary idea that life had to adjust itself to suit his mind. Amheim called Ulrich's image to mind: as tall as himself, younger, without the softening of contour he could not fail to notice on his own body; something unconditionally independent in his look-something Amheim attributed, not without envy, to Ulrich's coming of ascetic-scholarly stock, which was his idea of Ulrich's ori- gins. The face showed less concern about money and appearances than a rising dynasty of experts in the processing of waste had per- mitted their descendants to feel. Yet there was something missing in this face. It was life that was missing here; the marks of experience were shockingly absent! As Amheim perceived this in a flash of sur- real clarity, he was so disturbed by it that it made him realize all over
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again how much he cared about Ulrich-why, here was a face almost visibly headed for disaster! He brooded over the conflictingsense of envy and anxiety this made him feel; there was a sad satisfaction in it, as when ·someone has taken a coward's refuge in a safe port. A sud- den violent upsurge of envy and disapproval drove to the surface the thought he had been both seeking and avoiding, that Ulrich probably was a man capable ofsacrificing not only the interest but all the capi- tal of his soul, if circumstances called for it. Strangely enough, it was this, in fact, that Arnheim also meant by Ulrich's wit. At this moment, recalling th. e expression he had coined, it became perfectly clear to him: the idea that a man could let himself be swept away by passion, beyond the limits of the atmosphere where he could breathe, struck Arnheim as. a witty notion, a joke.
When Soliman at last came sidling into the room and stood facing his master, Arnheim had almost forgotten ~hyhe had sent for him, but he found it soothing to have a living and devoted creature close by. He paced up and down the room, with a stern expression, and the black disk of the boy's face turned this way and that, watching him. .
"Sit down! " Arnheim ordered; he had turned on his heel when he reached the corner and kept standing there as he spoke: "The great Goethe, somewhere in Wilhelm Meister, has a maxim charged with much feeling to guide our conduct in life: 'Think in order to act, act in order to think. ' Can you unde,stand this? No, I don't suppose you can understand it. . . . " He answered his own question and fell silent again. This prescription holds all of life's wisdom, he thought, and the man who wants to oppose me knows only half of it: namely, thinking. This, too, could be what he had meant by "merely witty. " He recognized Ulrich's weakness. Wit comes from witting, or know- ing; the wisdom of language itself here pointed to the intellectual origins of this quality, its ghostly, emotionally impoverished nature. The witty man is inclined to. outsmart himself, to ignore those natural limits the man oftrue feeling respects. This insight brought the mat- ter of Diotima and the soul's capital substance into a more pleasing light, and as he was thinking this, Arnheim said to Soliman: "This maxim holds all the wisdom life can give, and it has led me to take away your books and make you go to work. "
Soliman said nothing and made a solemn face.
"You have seen my father several times," Arnheim said suddenly. "Do you remember him? '' ·
Soliman responded to this by rolling his eyes so that the whites showed, and Arnheim said pensively, "You see, my father almost never reads a book. How old do you think my father is? '' Again he did not wait for an answer and added: "He is already over seventy and still has a hand in everything in the world that might concern our firm. " Arnheim resumed pacing the room in silence. He felt an irrepressible urge to talk about his father, but could not say everything that was on his mind. No one knew better than he that even his father sometimes lost out in a business deal; but nobody would have believed him, be- cause once a man has the reputation of being Napoleon, even his lost battles count as victories. So there had never been any Way for Arn- heim of holding his own beside his father other than the one he had chosen, that of making culture, politics, and society serve business. Old Arnheim seemed pleased enough at the younger Arnheim's great knowledge and accomplishments, but whenever an important deci- sion had to be made, and the problem had been discussed and analyzed for days on end, from the production angle and the financial angle and for its impact on the world economy and civilization, he thanked everyone, not infrequently ordered the exact opposite of what had been proposed, and responded to all objections with only a helpless, stubborn smile. Even the directors often shook their heads dubiously over this way he had, but then sooner or later it would al- ways tum out that the old man had somehow been right. It was more or less like an old hunter or mountain guide having to listen to a meteorologists' conference but then always ending up in favor of the prophecies delivered by his own rheumatism; not so very odd, basi- cally, since there are so many problems where one's rheumati~m hap- pens to be a surer ·guide than science, nor does having an exact forecast matter all that much in a world where things always tum out differently from what one had expected, anyway, and the thing is to be shrewd and tough in adapting oneself to their waywardness. . So Paul Amheim should have had no trouble in understanding that an old hand at the game knows a great deal that cannot be foreseen theoreti- cally, and can do a great deal because of his knowledge; still, it was a fateful day for him when he discovered that old Samuel had intuition.
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"Do you know what is meant by intuition? " Arnheim asked, from deep in his thoughts, as though groping fpr the shadow of an excuse to speak of it. Soliman blinked hard, as he always did when he was being cross-examined about something he had forgotten to do, and Arnheim again caught himself up. 'Tm feeling a bit on edge today," he said, ''as you can't be expected to know, of course. But please pay close attention to what I am about to tell you: Making money often gets us into situations in which we don't look too good, as you can imagine. All this having to watch your arithmetic and make sure you get a profit out of everything, all the time, runs strictly counter to the ideal ofa great and noble life such as was possible for a man to aim at in happier times long ago. In those days they could make of murder the noble viitue of bravery, but it seems doubtful to me that some- thing of the sort can be done with bookkeeping: there is no real goodness, no dignity, no depth of feeling in it. Money turns every- thing into an abstraction, it is so coldly rational; whenever I see money I can't help thinking-! don't know whether you can follow me here-thinking of mistrustful fingers testing it, of loud argu- ments and much shrewd manipulation, all equally repulsive to me. " , He broke offand fell back into his solitary musing, as he thought of those uncles who had patted him on the head when he was a child, saying what a good little head he pad on his shoulders. A good little head for figures. How he hated that kind of attitude! Those shining gold coins reflected the mind of a family that had worked its way up in the world. Feeling ashame~ of his family was beneath him; on the contrary, he made a point of ijeknowledging his origins with a fine modesty, especially in the highest circles, but he dreaded any show of the calculating family mind as though it were a taint, like speaking with too much intensity and gesturing with hands aflutter, which would make him impossible among the best people.
This was probably the. root of his reverence for the irrational. The aristocracy was irrational-this might be taken as a witticism reflect- ing on the intellectual limitations ofthe nobility, but not as Arnheim meant it. It had to do with the fact that as a Jew he could not be appointed an officer in the Army Reserve, nor could he, as an Am- heim, occupy the lowly position of a noncom, so he was simply de- clared unfit for military service, and to this day he refused to see only the absurdity of this without duly appreciating the code of hon_or be-
hind it. This recollection moved him to enrich his speech to Soliman with some further remarks.
"It is possible"-he picked up the thread, for despite his distaste for pedantry he was a methodical man, even in his digressions-"it is possible, even probable, that our noble families were not always paragons ofwhat we today consider a noble bearing. To assemble all those huge landed estates upon which their titles of nobility came to be based, their forebears must have been no less calculating and sharp in their dealings than today's men of business; it is even possi- ble that the modem businessman conducts his affairs with far more honesty. But there is a force in the earth itself, you know, something in the soil, in hunting, in warfare, in faith, in tilling the Iand-in short, in the physical life of people who used their heads far less than their arms and legs; it was nature itself that gave them the strength to which they ultimately owed their dignity, their nobility, their disincli- nation to demean themselves in any way whatsoever. "
He wondered whether he had not allowed his mood to trick him into going too far. What if Soliman missed his master's meaning and misunderstood the words to suggest that he was entitled to think less highly of the upper classes? But something unexpected happened. Soliman had been fidgeting on his seat for a while, and he now inter- t:Upted his master with a question.
"Ifyou please, sir," Soliman asked, "about my father: is he a king? "
Amheim gave him a startled look. "I don't know anything about that," he said, still somewhat sternly, though inwardly a little amused. But as he gazed at Soliman's serious, almost resentful face, he found it touching. It pleased him to see the boy taking everything so seriously. He is a dimwit, he thought, and really a tragic case. Someh~w he equated witlessness with a heavy feeling of well-being. In a gently didactic manner, he went on to give the boy something more of an answer to his question. · "There is hardly any reason to assume that your father is a king. More likely he had a hard living to earn, because I found you in a troupe ofjugglers on a beach. "
"How much did I cost? " Soliman persisted.
"My dear boy, how can you expect me to remember that today? It couldn't. have been much. But why worry about that now? W e are born to create our own kingdom. Next year sometime I may let you take a commercial course, and then you could make a start as a
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trainee in one of our offices. Of course it will depend on you what you make of it, but I shall keep an eye on you. You might, for in- stance, aim at eventually ·representing our interests in places where the colored people already have some influence. We'd have to move with care, of course, but being a black man might tum out to have certain advantages for you. It is only in doing such work that you can come to understand fully how much -these years under my immedi- ate supervision have done for you already, and I can tell you one thing now: you belong to a race that still bears some of nature's own nobility. In our medieval tales of chivalry, black kings always played a distinguished role. If you cultivate what you have of spiritual qual- ity-,-your dignity, your goodness of heart, your openness, your coura- geous love of the truth, and the even greater courage ·to resist intolerance, jealousy, resentment, and all the petty nervous spiteful- ness that stigmatizes most people nowadays-ifyou can do that, you will certainly make your way as a man of business, because we are called upon to bring the world not only our wares but a better life. "
Arnheim had not ~alked so intimately with Soliman in a long time, and the idea that any onlooker might think him a fool inade him un- easy, but there was no onlooker, and besides, what he was saying to Soliman was only the surface ·layer covering far deeper currents of thought he was keeping to himself. What he was saying about the aristocratic mind and· the historic rise of the nobility was moving, deep inside him, in the opposite direction to his· spoken words. In- wardly he could not repress the thought that never since the begin- ning ofthe world had anything sprung from spiritual purity and good intentions alone; everything was far more likely to spring from the common dirt, which in time sheds its crudeness and cleans itself up and eventually even gives rise to greatness and purity ofthought. The rise of the nobility was not based on conditions pregnant with a lofty humanism, he thought,. any more than was the growth of the gar- bage-moving business into a worldwide corporation, and yet the one had blossomed into the silver age of the eighteenth ·century, and the other had led directly to Arnheim. Life was facing him, in short, with an inescapable problem best formulated in the dilemma: How much common dirt. is necessary and acceptable as the soil in which to prop- agate high-mindedness? ,
On another. level, his thoughts had meanwhile intermittently pur-
sued what he had been saying to Soliman about intuition and reason, and he suddenly had a vivid memory of the first time he had told his father that he-the ·old man-did business by intuition. Intuition was fashionable at the time with all those who could not justify what they did by logic; it was playing th~ same role, more or less, as is played today by having "flair. " Every false or ultimately unsatisfac- tory move was credited to intuition, and intuition was used for every- thing from cooking to writing books, but the elder Arnheim had not heard of it, and he actually let himself go so far as to look up in sur- prise at his son, for whom it was a moment of triumph. "Making money," he said to his father, "forces us to think along lines that are not always in the best style. Still, it will probably be up to us men of big business to take over. the leadership of the masses the next time there's a turning point in history, whether we are spiritually ready or not. But if there is anything in the world that can give me the courage to face such a burden, it is you; you have the vision and willpower of the kings and prophets ofthe great old days, who were still guided by God. Your way of tackling a deal is ineffable, a mystery, and I must say· that all mysteries that elude calculation are in the same class, w h e t h e r i t is t h e m y s t e r y o f c o u r a g e o r o f i n v e n t i o n o r o f t h e s t a r s ! " I t was humiliating to see oid Arnheim, who had been looking up at him, drop his eyes again, after his son's first sentences, back to his newspa- per, 'from which he did not raise them on any subsequent occasion when the younger man talked of business and intuition. Such was the characteristic relationship between father. and son, and on a third level ofhis thoughts,. on the same screen with these remembered im- ages, as it were, Arnheim was analyzing it even now. He regarded his father's superior gift for business, though it always depressed him to think of it, as a kind of primitive force that would forever elude the son, a more complicated man; this relieved him of having to keep striving in vain to emulate the inimitable, and at the same time pro- vided him with letters patent ofhis own noble descent. This brilliant double maneuver turned money into a suprapersonal, mythical force for which only the most primitive originality could be a match;and it also set his forebear among the gods, quite as had the ancient heroes, who undoubtedly also thought of their mythical forefather, with all the awe he inspired, as just a shade more primitive than themselves.
B u t o n a f o u r t h l e v e l o f h i s m i n d h e knew n o t h i n g o f t h e s m i l e t h a t
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hovered over. that third level, and rethought the same idea in a seri- ous vein, as he considered the role he still hoped to play on this earth. Such levels of thought are of course not to be taken literally, as if superimposed on each other like actual layers of the ,soil, but are merely meant to suggest currents of thought, flowing from various directions and perpetually crisscrossing under the influence of strong emotional conflicts. All his life, Arnheim had felt an almost morbidly sensitive dislike of wit and irony, a dislike probably moti- vated by a not inconsiderable hereditary tendency to both. He had suppressed this tendency because he felt it to be ignoble, a quality of the intellectual riffraff, yet it unaccountably popped up at this very moment, when he was feeling his most aristocratic and anti-intellec- tual, with regard to Diotima: just when his feelings were on tiptoe, ready to take flight, as it were, he felt a devilish temptation to give sublimity the slip by making one of those pointed lethal jokes about love he had heard often enough from the lips of law-ranking or coarse characters.
As his mind rose again to the surface through all these strata of thought, he abruptly found himself gazing at Soliman's gloomily lis- te~g face, like a black punchball on which unintelligible words of wisdom had come raining down like so many blows. What an absurd position I am getting myself into! Arnheim thought.
Soliman looked as if he had fallen asleep on his chair with his eyes wide open; as his master reached the end ofthat one-sided conversa- tion, the eyes set themselves in motion, while the body refused to stir, as though still waiting for the word to wake up. Arnheim saw it and saw in the black boy's gaze the craving to hear more about what- ever intrigues could have brought a king's son to be a valet. This gaze, lunging at. him like claws outstretched for their prey, momen- tarily reminded Arnheim of that gardener's helper who had made off with pieces from his collection, and he said to himself with a sigh that he would probably always be lacking in the natural acquisitive in- stinct. It suddenly occurred to him that this would also sum up, in a word, his relation to Diotima. Painfully moved, he felt how, at the very summit of his life, a cold shadow separated him from everything he had ever touched. It was not an easy thought for a man who had just stated the principle that a man must think in order to act, and who had always striven to make all greatness his own and to trans-
form whatever was less than great with the stamp of his own distin- guished imprint. But the shadow had slipped between him and the objects of his desire, despite the willpower he had never lacked, and Arnheim surprised himself by thinking that he could see a connec- tion between that shadow and those shimmers of awe that had cast their veils over his youth, as if, mishandled in some way, they had turned into an almost imperceptible skin of ice. Why this ice did not melt even·when confronted with Diotima's un~orldlyheart he could not tell; but, like a most unwelcome jab of a pain that had only been waiting for a touch to awaken it, there came the sudden thought of Ulrich. It came with the realization that the same shadow rested on the other man's life, but with so different an effect! Within the range of human passions, that of a man jealous of another man's personality is seldom accorded the recognition its intensity has earned for it, and th~ discovery that his uncontrollable irritation with Ulrich resem- bled, on a deeper 'level, the hostile encounter of two brothers un- aware of each other's identity gave him a rather pleasant jolt.