No More Learning

This, then, brings us back to the police exhibition. A great deal was happening everyWhere, and people were certainly aware ofit. It was regarded as a good thing when we were the ones doing it, and aroused apprehensiveness when it was done by others. · Every school- boy could understand each thing as it happened, but as to what it all meant in general, nobody really knew except for a very few persons, and even they were not sure. Only a short time later it might as well have happened in a different sequence, or the other way ai"Qund, and nobody would have known the difference, except for a few changes
that inexplicably establish themselves in the course of time and so constitute the slimy track made by the snail of history.
In such circumstances a foreign embassy may well be facing a hard task when trying to find out what is actually going on. The diplomatic representatives would gladly have drawn their wisdom from Count Leinsdorf, but His Grace placed obstacles in their way. In his work he found anew day by day the contentment that solid achievement leaves in its wake, and what foreign observers beheld in his counte- nance was the beaming serenity that comes from operations pro- ceeding in good order. Department One sent a memorandum; Department Two replied; when Department One had been notified of Department Two's reply, it was usually advisable to suggest talking it over in person, and when an agreement had been reached in this fashion, it was decided that nothing could be done about the matter; and so there was always something to do. In addition there were those countless minor considerations that must not be overlooked. After all, one was always working. hand in glove with all the varioUs ministries; one did not want tp give offense to the Church; one had to take account of certain persons and social considerations; in short, even on those days when one wasn't doing anything in particular, there were so many things one had to guard against doing that one had the sense of being kept frantically busy at all times. His Grace fully appreciated these facts of life.
"The higher a man is placed by destiny," he used to say, "the bet- t'er he sees that everything depends on only a few simple principles, but above all on a fli111 will and well-planned activity. " Once, when speaking to his "young friend," he went even more deeply into this subject. Apropos of the German struggle for national unity, he ad- mitted that between 1848 and 1866 quite a number of the best brains in the country had had their say in politics. "But then," he went on, "that fellow Bismarck came along, and there was one good thing he did if he did nothing else: he showed them how politics should be done. It isn't done with a lot of talk and clever ideas! Despite his seamy side, he did see to it that ever since his time, wherever the German tongue is spoken, everyone knows that in politics there is no hope to be had from cleverness and speechmaking, only from silent thought and action. "
Pseudoreality Prevails · 489
490 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
Count Leinsdorf also expressed himself along these lines at Di- otima's Council meetings, and the representatives of foreign powers that sometimes sent along their observers had a hard time trying to fathom his meaning. Amheim's part in it was regarded as worth watching, and so was the position of Section Chief Tuzzi, and there came to be a general consensus that there was a secret understand- ing between these two men and Count Leinsdorf, the political aim of which was for the present concealed behind lively attention-stealing devices such as Frau Section Chief Tuzzi's pancultural endeavors. Considering how Count Leinsdorf succeeded in hoodwinking even those hardened observers without even trying, there is no denying the gift he felt he had for realism in politics.
But even those gentlemen who on festive occasions wear gold- embroidered foliage and other rank growths on their tailcoats held to the realpolttisch prejudices of their game, and since they could dis- cover no solid clues behind the scenes of the Parallel Campaign, they soon turned their attention to something that was the cause of most of the obscure phenomena in Kakania, called "the unliberated na- tional minorities. " We all talk as ifnationalism were purely the inven- tion of the arms dealers, but we really should tty for a more comprehensive explanation, and to this end Kakania makes an im- portant contribution. The inhabitants of this Imperial and Royal Imperial-Royal Dual Monarchy had a serious problem: they were supposed to feel like Imperial and Royal Austro-Hungarian patriots, while at the same time being Royal Hungarian or Imperial Royal Austrian patriots. Their understandable motto in the face of such complexities wa5 "United we stand" (from vtribus unttis, "with forces joined"). But the Austrians needed to takea far stronger stand than the Hungarians, because the Hungarians were, first and last, simply Hungarians ancl were regarded only incidentally, by foreign- ers who did not know their language, as Austro-Hungarians too; the Austrians, however, were, to begin with and primarily, nothing at all, and yet they were supposed by their leaders to feel Austro- Hungarian and be Austrian-Hungarians-they didn't even have a proper word for it. Nor was there an Austria. Its two components, Hungary and Austria; made a match like a red-white-and-green jacket with black-and-yellow trousers. The jacket was a jacket, but the trousers were the relic of an extinct black-and-yellow outfit that
had. been ripped apart in the year 1867. The trousers, or Austria, were since then officially referred to as "the kingdoms and countries . represented in the Imperial Council of the Realm," meaning nothing at all, of course, because it was only a phrase concocted from various names, for even those kingdoms referred to, such wholly Shake- spearean kingdoms as Lodomeria and Illyria, were long gone, even when there was still a complete black-and-yellow outfit worn by ac- tual soldiers. So if you asked an Austrian where he was from, of course he couldn't say: I am a man from one of those nonexistent kingdoms and countries; so for that reason alone he preferred to say: I am a Pole, a Czech, an Italian, Friulian, Ladino, Slovene, Croat, Serb, Slovak, Ruthenian, or Wallachian-and this was his so-called nationalism. Imagine a squirrel that doesn't know whether it is a squirrel or a chipmunk, a creature with no concept of'itself, and you will understand that in some circumstances it could be thrown into fits of terror by catching sight of its own tail. So this was the way IUlkanians related to each other, with the panic oflimbs so united as they stood that they hindered each other from being anything at all. Since the world began, no creature has as yet died of a language defect, and yet the Austrian and Hungarian Austro-Hungarian Dual Monarchy can nevertheless be said to have perished from its inexpressibility.
A stranger to Kakanian history might be interested to learn just how so seasoned and eminent a Kakanian as Count Leinsdorf coped with this problem. He began by excising Hungary altogether from his watchful mind; as a wise diplomat, he si! Jlply never mentioned it, just as parents avoid speaking of a son who has struck out for inde- pendence against their wish and who, they keep expecting, will yet live to regret it; the rest he referred to as the "nationalities," or else as the "Austrian ethnic stocks. " This was a most subtle device. His Grace had studied constitutional law and had found a definition ac- cepted more or less worldwide, to the effect that a people could claim to count as a nation only if it had its own constitutional state, from which he deduced that the Kakanian nations were simply na- tional minorities, at most. On the other hand, Count Leinsdorfknew that man finds his full, true destiny only within the overarching com- munal framework of a nation, and since he did not like the thought of anyone being deprived in thi's respect, he concluded that it was nee-
Pseudoreality Prevails · 491
492 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
essary to subordinate the nationalities and ethnic breeds to an all- embracing State. Besides, he believed in a divine ordei:, even if that order was not always discernible to the human eye, and in the revolu- tionary modernist moods that sometimes overcame him he was even capable of thinking that the idea of the State, which was coming so strongly into its own these days, was perhaps nothing other than the Divine Right of Kings just beginning to manifest itself in a rejuve- nated form. However that might be-as a realist in politics he took good care never to overdo the theorizing, and would even have set- tled for Diotima's view that the idea of the Kakanian State was syn- onymous with that ofWorld Peactr--the point was that there was a Kakanian State, even if its name was a dubious one, and that a Kakanian nation had to be invented to go with it. He liked to illus- trate this by pointing out, for instance, that nobody was a schoolboy if he didn't go to school, but that the school remained a school even
when it stood empty. The more the minorities balked against the Kakanian school's efforts to bind them into one nation, the more necessary the school, in the given circumstances. The more they in- sisted that they were s~parate nations," the more they demanded the restoration of their so-called long-lost historic rights, the more they flirted with their ethnic brothers and cousins across the borders and openly called the Empire a prison from which they must be released, the more Count Leinsdorf tried to calm them down by calling them ethnic stocks and agreed with their own emphasis on their under- developed state; only he offered to improve it by raising them up to be part of one Austrian nation. Whatever they wanted that did not fit in with his plan or that was overly mutinous, he blamed in his familiar diplomatic way on their failure so far to transcend their political im- maturity, which was to be dealt with by a wise blend of shrewd toler- ance and gently punitive restraints.
And so when Count Leinsdorfcreated the Parallel Campaign, the various ethnicities immediately perceived it as a covert Pan- Germanic plot. His Grace's participation in the police exhibition was linked with the secret police and interpreted as proof positive of his sympathies with that politically repressive body. This was all known to the foreign observers, who had heard all the horror stories about the Parallel Campaign they could want. They kept it in mind while listening to the stories about the reception of the actr~ss Vogelsang,
the English Queen's dollhouse, and the striking telegraphers, or when they were asked what they thought of the recently published international agreements; and although the Minister's praise of the disciplinary spirit could be taken as an announcement of a policy if one so desired, they probably felt that to the unprejudiced eye the opening of the police exhibition, despite all the talk about it, had pro- duced nothing worth noticing, though they also had the impression like everyone else that something was brewing in a general way, though it could not yet be pinned down.
99
OF THE MIDDLING INTELLIGENCE AND ITS FRUITFUL COUNTERPART, THE HALFWIT; THE RESEMBLANCE BETWEEN TWO ERAS; LOV ABLE AUNT JANE; AND THE DISORDER CALLED MODERN TIMES
It really was impossible to gain a clear idea of what went on when Diotima's Council was in session. The general tendency among the avant-garde in those days was in favor of taking action; people who lived by their brains felt it incumbent upon themselves to take over the leadership from those who lived for their bellies. There was also something known as Expressionism. Nobody could say just what it was, but the word suggests some kind of squeezing-out; constructive visions, perhaps, but inasmuch as the contrast with traditional art re- vealed them as being destructive, too, we might simply call them structive, which commits one to nothing either way, and a structive outlook sounds pretty good. Nor is that all.
The general orientation was toward the Now and the real world, the inside turning toward the outside, but there was also a movement turning from the outside inward; the intellect and individualism were already seen as outmoded and egocentric, love was once again dis-
Pseudoreality Prevails · 493
494 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
credited, and the salutary effect of artistic trash on the masses, when injected into the cleansed souls of men of action, was about to be rediscovered. "What people are" evidently keeps changing as rapidly as "What people are wearing," and both have in common the fact that no one, not even those in the fashion business, knows the real secret ofwho "these people" are. But anyone trying to run counter to this would look silly, like a person caught between the opposing cur- rents of an electric therapy machine, wildly twitching and jerking without anyone's being able to see his attacker. For the enemy is not those quick-witted enough to take advantage of the given business situation; it's the gaseous fluidity and instability of the general state of affairs itself, the confluence of innumerable currents from all di- rections that constitute it, its unlimited capacity for new combina- tions and permutations, plus, on the receiving end, the absence or breakdown of valid, sustaining, and ordering principles.
To fmd a secure foothold in this flow of phenomena is like trying to hammer a nail into a fountain's jet ofwater; and yet there is a cer- tain constant in it. What. is actually going on when that agile species man calls a tennis player a genius? Something unstated is at work here. And when they attribute genius to a racehorse? Something more is left unsaid. Whether they call a football player a scientist of the game, or admire a fencer's intellectual style, or speak of a boxer's tragic defeat, there is always something undeclared going on. They exaggerate, but the exaggeration is a form of imprecision, the sort C? f fuzziness of mind that makes the denizens of a small town regard the son of the department store owner as aman of the world. There is bound to be a grain of truth in it, and anyway, why shouldn't the sur- prises an athletic champion pulls off suggest those we get from a ge- nius, or his strategies seem analogous to those ofa seasoned explorer ofthe unknown? Even though there is something else, something far more important, that is quite wrong with such analogies, of course, this is not perceived, or perceived only with reluctance, by those given to making them. At bottom there is an uncertainty of values, passed over and ignored; it is probably less its idea of genius that makes this era attribute genius to a tennis player or a racehorse than its general distrust for the world of the mind, of the intellect, to which the term rightly belongs.
This might be the moment to bring up Aunt Jane, ofwhom Ulrich
was reminded when he was leafing through some old family albums Diotima had lent him, comparing the faces he saw in them with the faces seen in her house. As a boy, Ulrich had often stayed with a great-aunt who'd had a friend, Aunt Jane, from time immemorial. Jane was not really an aunt, originally. She had come into the house as the children's piano teacher and had not exactly achieved any won- ders in that line, either, but she had won their love because it was a principle with her that there was not much point in doing one's piano practice if one was not born for music, as she put it. She got more . enjoyment out of seeing the children climb trees, and in this fashion she became an aunt to two generations as well as-through the re- troactive effect ofthe passage ofyears-her disappointed employer's lifelong friend. ·
"Ah yes, dear Muckil" Aunt Jane would say, for instance, full of feeling impervious to time, her voice. so charged with indulgence and admiration for little Nepomuk, who was by then an uncle in his for- ties, that it still lived for anyone who had heard it once. That voice of Aunt Jane's sounded as if it had been dusted with·flour; absolutely as if one had dipped one's bare arm into the finest flour. It was a husky voice, crumb-coated, all because she drank lots of black coffee· and smoked long, thin, strong Virginia cigars, which, as she aged, ·had blackened and eroded her teeth. When you looked at her face you
(lllight also feel that the sound of her voice had something to do with those innumerable little fine lines that covered her skin like the lines of an etching. Her face was long and gentle, and to the later genera- tions seemed never to have changed, like everything else about Aunt Jane. She wore one and the same dress all her life, even if, as seems likely, it was a series of reproductions of the original; it was a long, tight casing of black ribbed silk from neck to toe, making no allow- ance for any excessive mobility of the body, With an endless row of little black buttons, like a priest's cass(i)ck. At the top there was a low, stiff stand-up collar with turned-down corners, between which her Adam's apple formed active gullies in the fleshless skin of her neck every time she pulled on her cigar; the tight sleeves ended in stiff white cuffs, and for a roof she had a reddish-blond slightly curly man's wig, parted in the middle. With the passing of the years that part showed a little more of the canvas, but more affecting than that were the two spots where the gray temples could be seen from under
Pseudoreality Prevails · 495
496 ··THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
the bright wig, the only sign that Aunt Jane had not remained the same age all her life.
She might seem to have anticipated by many decades the mascu- line kind· of woman who has since come into fashion, but that is not really the case, because in her manly breast there beat a most femi- nine heart. She might also be thought to have once been a famous pianist who later lost touch with her time, for that is how she looked. But this was not so either, because she had never been more than a piano teacher, and both that mannish hairdo and her priestly garb could be traced to the fact that as a girl Aunt Jane had been in- fatuated with the Abbe Franz Liszt, whom she had met socially sev- eral times during one short period, and that was when her name had somehow assumed its English form. With that encounter she kept faith, like a lovesick knight wearing his lady's colors into his gray old age without ever having asked for more, and in Aunt Jane's case this was more touching than ifit had been some uniform ofher own great days she had worn in her retirement.
When the children were considered old enough, they were made privy te Aunt Jane's deep secret, after many solemn admonitions to respect it; much as if it had been a rite of passage. Jane had no longer been a young girl (a fastidious soul takes its time in making such . a choice) when she found the man she loved and married, against her family's will; he had ofcourse been~ artist, although, because ofthe rotten luck of small-town, proyin. cial circumstances, only a photogra- pher. But a short time after they were married he was already run- ning up debts like a genius and 'drinking furiously. Aunt Jane made sacrifices for him, she fetched him home from the tavern, she wept in secret and openly at his knees. He looked like a genius, with an imperious mouth and flamboyant hair, and if Aunt Jane had been able to infect him with the pas~ion of her despair, he would have become, with his disastrous vices, as great as Lord Byron. But the photographer proved recalcitrant to such a transfer of feeling, aban- doned Jane after a year of marriage, leaving with her maid, a peasant. girl who was pregnant by him, and he died not much later, in misery. Jane cut a lock of hair from his superb head and kept it; she took the child born to him out of wedlock and raised it as her own, under great deprivation; she rarely spoke of her past; a life given over to passion is not an easy one, or easy to talk about.
Aunt Jane's life had held its share of romantic eccentricity. But later on, when the photographer in his earthly imperfection had long ceased to hold h~r under his spell, the imperfect substance of her love for him had somehow also moldered away, leaving behind only the eternal form of love and inspiration, so that at a great remove in time her experience had become indistinguishable from a truly earthshaking kind of emotion. Aunt Jane's mind was probably not supercharged intellectually, but its form was beautiful. Her attitude was heroic, but such a stance is unattractive only as long as it is falsely motivated; once it has become quite empty of content, it again turns to flickering flames and true faith. Aunt Jane lived on tea, black cof- fee, and two cups ofbeefbouillon a day, but no one in that little town stopped and stared after her on the streets when she passed by in her black cassock, because the people knew her, they lmew she was a proper lady, they even looked up to her for being a proper lady and having the determination to dress as she pleased, even though they did not know the reasons for it.
So this is more or less the story of Aunt Jane, who died a long time ago, at a great age, and my great-aunt is dead too, and so is Uncle Nepomuk, and what were their lives all about anyway? Ulrich asked himself. But just then he would have given a lot to be able to talk with Aunt Jane again. He turned the pages of the thick old albums with those family photographs that had somehow ended up in Diotima's possession, and the closer he came to the beginnings of that new art of picture-taking, the more proudly, it seemed to him, the subjects faced the camera. There they were, with one foot placed on a pile of cardboard boulders wreathed in paper ivy or, if they were officers, with a saber posed between their straddled legs; the girls had their hands folded in their laps and their eyes opened wide; the eman- cipated men stood their ground in creaseless trousers that rose up like curling smoke, in coats with a bold romantic sweep to them, as though a gale had blown away the dignified stiffness of the bourgeois frock coat. The time must have been somewhere between 186o and 1870, when photography had emerged from its earliest stages, when the revolutionary forties were remembered as a wild, chaotic time long gone·and life had become subtly different, though no one could say exactly what the new elements were; even the tears, embraces, and confessions in which the new middle class had tried to find its
Pseudoreality Prevails · 497
498 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
soul in its early days w~re no more, but a5 a wave runs out over the sands, this noble impulse had now come to express itself in the way people dressed and in a certain personal buoyancy for which there may be a better word, but for the moment all we have is the photo- graphs. The photographers then wore velvet jackets and handlebar mustaches, to make them look like painters, and the painters de- signed huge cartoons on which they put whole regiments of impor- tant figures through their paces; people in general felt it was just the right time for a technology capable ofimmortalizing them as well. All that remains to be said is that at no other time could they all have felt so full of genius and stature as the people of this particular period, which produced fewer uncommon individuals-unless it was harder for such individuals to become visible in the midst of so many? - than ever before.
As he turned the pages, Ulrich wondered whether there was some connection between that era, when a photographer could feel like a _genius because he drank, wore an open-necked shirt, and, with the aid of the latest techniques, was able to project his sense of his own greatness of spirit onto all those of his contemporaries who posed before his lens, and Ulrich's own time, when only racehorses were truly felt to have genius because of their all-surpassing ability to stretch their legs and contract them ~gaiil. The two periods look dif- ferent. The present looks proudly down upon the past, which, if it had happened to occur later, would have looked proudly down upon the present. Yet it mainly amounted to the same thing, because in both cases the major role is played by muddled thinking and an ig- noring of the telling differences. A single aspect of greatness is taken for the whole, a distant analogy for a truth, and the flayed hide of a significant word is stuffed with something modish. It works, though not for long. The talkers in Diotima's salon were never entirely wrong about anything, for their concepts were as misty as the out- lines of bodies in a steambath. "These ideas, on which life hangs as the eagle hangs on his wings," Ulrich thought, "our countless moral
and artistic notions of life, by nature as delicate as ~ountain ranges of granite blurred by distance. " On such tongues as these the ideas multiplied by being turned over and over; it was impossible to dis- cuss one of them for any length of time without suddenly finding oneself caught up in the next.
These were the kind of people who had throughout history re- garded themselves as the New Era, a term like a sack in which to catch all the winds of the compass, always seiVing as an ex<:use for not placing things in their own objective order but fitting them into an illusory compound with a chimera. And yet it holds a confession of faith, the oddly living conviction that it is up to them to bring order into the world. If we were to judge what they were trying to do along those lines as halfway intelligent, it might be worth saying that"it is precisely the other half, the unnamed or-to come straight out with it-the stupid, never exact or complementary part of that middling intelligence that held an inexhaustible power of self-renewal and fruitfulness. There was life in it, mutability, restlessness, freedom to adopt a fresh perspective. They probably had their own sense of how it was with them. They were shaken up by it, it blew in gusts through their heads, those children of a nerve-racked age, aware that some- thing was wrong, each feeling intelligent enough and yet all of them together feeling somehow barren. Ifthey also happened to have tal- ent-and their intellectual woolliness certainly did not exclude this possibility-then what was going on in their heads was like seeing the weather, the clouds, trains, telegraph wires, trees and animals and the whole moving panorama of our dear world, through a nar- row, dirt-encrusted window; and no one was very quick to notice the state of his own window, but everyone noticed it about the window next door.
Ulrich had once asked them, for the fun ofit, jwt what they meant by what they were saying. They gave hiih jaundiced looks, told him he had a mechanistic view of life and was too skeptical, and stated that the most complicated problems must be made to yield the sim- plest solutions, so that the New Era-once it had shucked the con- fusing present-would turn out to be simplicity itself. Compared with Arnheim, Ulrich did not strike them as impressive at all, and Aunt Jane would have patted him on the cheek, saying, "I know just how they feel. You put them offwith your seriousness. "
Pseudoreality Prevails · 499
soo
100
GENERAL STUMM INVADES THE STATE LIBRARY AND LEARNS ABOUT THE WORLD OF BOOKS, THE LIBRARIANS GUARDING IT, AND INTELLECTUAL ORDER
General Stumm had noticed the rebuff to his "comrade in arms" and undertook to comfort him. "What a lot of useless palaver," he said in indignant dismissal of the Council members; then, without any en- couragement from Ulrich, he started to talk about himself, with a certain excitement mixed with self-satisfaction:
"You remember, don't you," he said, "that I'd made up my mind to find that great redeeming idea Diotima wants and lay it at her feet. It turns out that there are lots of great ideas, but only one of them can be the greatest-that's only logical, isn't itP-so it's a matter of put- ting them in order. You said yourself that this is a resolve worthy of a Napoleon, right? You even gave me a number of excellent sugges- tions, as was to be expected of you, but I never got to the point of using them. In short, I have to go about it my own way. "
He took his hom-rimmed glasses out of his pocket and put them on in place of the pince-nez, a. sign that he wanted to look closely at someone or something.
"One of the foremost rules for a good general is to fmd out the enemy's strength," he said. "So I asked them to get me a card to our world-famous Imperial Library, and with the help of a librarian who very charmingly put himself at my disposal when I told him who I was, I have now penetrated the enemy's lines. We marched down the ranks in that colossal storehouse of books, and I don't mind telling you I was not particularly ovetwhelmed; those rows of books are no worse than a garrison on parade. Still, after a while I couldn't help starting to do some figuring in my head, and I got an unexpected answer. You see, I had been thinking that if I read a book a day, it would naturally be exhausting, but I would be bound to get to ·the
end sometime and then, even if I ·had to skip a few, I could claim a certain position in the world of the intellect. But what d'you suppose that librarian said to me, as we walked on and on, without an end in sight, and I asked him how many books they li'ad in this crazy library? Three and a half million, he tells me. We had just got to the seven hundred thousands or so, but I kept on doing these figures in my head; I'll spare you the details, but I checked it out later at the office, with pencil and paper: it would take me ten thousand years to carry out my plan.
"I felt nailed to the spot-the whole world seemed to be one enor- mous practical joke! And I'm t~lling you, even though I'm feeling a bit calmer about it, there's something radically wrong somewhere!
"You may say that it isn't necessary to read every last book. Well, it's also true that in war you don't have to kill every last soldier, but we still need every one of them. You may say to me that every book is needed too. But there, you see, you wouldn't be quite right, because that isn't so. I asked the librarian.
"It occurred. to me, you see, that the fellow lives among those mil- lions ofbooks, he knows each one, he knows where to find them, he ought to be able to help me. Of course I wasn't going to ask him point-blank: Where do I find the finest idea in the world? That sounds too much like the opening of a fairy tale, even I know that much; besides, I never liked fairy tales, even as a child. But what to do? I had to ask him something of the sort in the end anyway. But I never told him why I wanted to know, not a worc;l about our Cam- paign and having to find the most inspiring aim for it-discretion, you know; I didn't feel I was authorized to go that far. So I fmally tri. ed a little stratagem. 'By the way,' I said casually, 'how on earth do you go about finding the right book somewhere in this immense col- lection . . . ? ' I tried to say it as I imagined Oiotima might, and I dropped a few pennies' worth of admiration into my voice, and sure enough, he started to purr and fell all over himself with helpfulness, and what was the Herr General interested in finding out?
" 'Oh, all sorts of things,' I said, as if he were prying into state se- crets; I was playing for time.
" 'I only meant what subject or what author,' he asked. 'Is it mili- tary history? '
" 'Oh no,' I said, 'more on the lines ofthe history ofpeace. '
Pseudoreality Prevails · 5o1
502 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
" 'History as such? Or current pacifiSt literature? '
"No, I said, it wasn't that simple. 'Might there be, for instance, something like a compendium of all the great humanitarian ideas or anything like that? ' You remember how much research I've already got my people to do on those lines. He didn't say a word. 'Or a book on realizing the most important aims of all? ' I say to him.
"'Something in theological ethics? ' he suggests. .
" 'Theological ethics too,' I said, 'but it would have to include something about our old Austrian culture and a bit about Grill- parzer,' I specified. My eyes must have been blazing with such a thirst for knowledge that the fellow suddenly took fright, as if I was about to suck him dry altogether. I went on a little longer about needing a kind of timetable that would enable me to make connec- tions among all kinds of ideas in every direction-at which point he turns so polite it's absolutely unholy, and offers to take me into the catalog room and let me do. my own searching, even though it's against the rules, because it's only for the use of the librarians. So I actually found myselfinside the holy ofholies. It felt like being inside an enormous brain. Imagine being totally surrounded . by those shelves, full of "books in their compartments, ladders all" over the place, all those book stands and library tables piled high with catalogs and bibliographies, the concentrate of all knowledge, don't you know, and not one sensible book to read, ·only books about books. It positively reeked of brain phosphon. ts, and I felt that I must have really got somewhere. But of course a funny feeling .
came over me when the man was going to leave me there on my own-1 felt both awestruck and uneasy as hell. Up the ladder he scoots, like a monkey, aiming straight at a book from below, fetches it down, and says: · 'Here it is, General, a bibljography of bibliographies for you'-you know about that? In short, the alphabetical list ofalphabetical lists of the titles ofall the books and papers ofthe last five years dealing with ethical problems, exclusive of moral theology and literature, or how~ ever he put it, and he tries to slip away. I barely had time to grab his lapel and hang on to him.
"'Just a moment, sir,' I cried, 'you can't leave me here without telling me your secret, how you manage to . . . · I'm afraid I let slip the word 'madhouse,' because that's how I suddenly felt about it. 'How do you find your way in this madhouse of books? ' He must have got
the wrong impression-it occurred to me later that crazy people are . given to calling others crazy-anyway, he just kept staring at my saber, and I could hardly keep hold of him. And then he gave me a real shock. When I didn't let go of him he suddenly pulled himself up, rearing up in those wobbly pants of his, and said in a slow, very emphatic way, as though the time had come to give away the ultimate secret: 'General,' he said, 'if you want to know how I know about
every book here, I can tell you: Because I never read any of them. ' "It was almost too much, I tell you! But when he saw how stunned I was, he explained himself. The secret of a good librarian is that he never reads anything more of the literature in his charge than the titles and the tables . of contents. 'Anyone who lets himself go and starts reading a book is lost as a librarian,' he explained. 'He's bound
to lose perspective. '
" 'So,' I said, trying to catch my breath, 'you never read a single
book? ' · • "'Never. Only the t! atalogs. '
"'But aren't you aPh. D. ? '
"'Certainly I am. I teach at the university, as a special lecturer in Ubrary Science. Library S~ience is a special field leading to a de- gree, you know,' he explained. 'How many systems do you suppose there are, General, for the arrangement and preservation of books, cataloging of titles, oorrecting misprints and misinfqrmation on title pages, and the like? '
"I must admit that when he left me there alone, after that, I felt like doing one of two things: bursting into tears, or lighting a ci~­ rette--neither of which I was allowed to do there. But what do you think happened? As I'm standing there, totally at a loss, an old at- tendant who must have been watching us all along pads around me respectfully a few times, then he stops, looks me in the face, and starts speaking to me in a voice quite velvety, from either the dust on the books or the foretaste ofa tip: 'Is there anything in particular, sir, you are looking for? ' he asks me. I try to shake my head, but the old fellow goes on: 'We get lots of gentlemen from the Staff College in here. I f you'll just tell me, sir, what subject you're interested in at the moment, sir . . . Julius Caesar, Prince Eugene ofSavoy, Count Daun? Or is it something contemporary? Military statutes? The budget? ' I swear the man sounded so sensible and kneW so much about what
Pseudoreality Prevails · 503
504 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
was inside those books that I gave him a tip and asked him how he did it. And what do you think? He tells me again that the students at the Staff College come to him when they have a paper to write, 'And when I bring the books,' he goes on, 'they often cuss a bit, and gripe about all the nonsense they have to learn, and that's how the likes of us pick up all sorts of things. <;>r else it's the Deputy who has to draw up the budget for the Department of Education, and he asks me what material was used by the Deputy the year before. Or it might be the Bishop, who's been writing about certain types of beetles for the last fifteen years, or one of the university professors, who complains that he's been waiting three weeks to get a certain book, and we have to look for it on all the adjoinilig shelves, in case it's been misplaced, and then it turns out he's had it at home for the last two years. That's the way it's been, sir, for nigh on forty years; you develop an instinct for what people want, and what they read for it. '
· "'Well,' I said, 'be that as it may, my friend, it still isn't so simple for me to tell. you-what I'm looking for. '
"And what do you think he comes back with? He gives me a quiet look, and nods, and says: 'That happens all the time too, General, if I may say so. There was a lady who came in, not so long ago, who :;aid exactly the same thing to me. Perhaps you know her, sir, she's the wife of Section ChiefTuzzi, of the Foreign Office? '
"Now, what do you think ofthat? You could have knocked me over with a feather. And when the old fellow caught on, he just went and fetched all the books Diotima has on reserve there, so now, when I come to the library, it's practically like a secret mystical marriage; now and then I make a discreet pencil mark in the margin, or I write a word in, and I know she'll see it the very next day, and she won't have a clue who it is that's inside her own head, when she wonders what's going on. ''
The General paused blissfully. But then he pulled himself to- gether, his face took on a look of grim seriousness, and he continued: "Now brace yourself and give me your full attention, because I'm going to ask you something. We're all convinced-aren't we? -that we're living in the best-ordered times the world has ever seen. I know I once said in Diotima's presence that it's a prejudice, but it's a prejudice I naturally share. And now I have to face the fact that the
only people with a really reliable intellectual order are the library at- tendants, and I ask you-no, I don't ask you; after all, we've talked about this before, and naturally I've thought it over again in the light of my recent experiences. So let me put it this way: Suppose you're drinking brandy, right? A good thing to do in some circumstances. But you keep on, and on, and on, drinking brandy-are you with me? -and the first thing is, you get drunk; next, you get the d. t. 's; and finaily, you get conducted with military honors to your last rest- ing place, where the chaplain testifies to your unflinching devotion to duty and so on. Do you get the picture? Good, you've got it, nothing to it. So now let's take water. Imagine drinking water until you drown in it. Or imagine going on eating until your intestines are tied into knots. Or you go on taking drugs-quinine, arsenic, opium. What for? you ask. Well, my friend, I'm coming to the most extraordinary proposition: Take order. Or rather, start imagining a great idea, and then another still greater, and then another even greater than that one, and so on; and in the same style, try to increase the concept of order in your head. At first it's as neat and tidy as an old maid's room and as clean as a Horse Guards stable. Then it's as splendid as a bri- gade in battle formation. Next, it's crazy, like coming out of the ca- sino late at night and commanding the stars: 'Universe, 'tenshun, eyes right! ' Or let's put it this way: At first order is like a new recruit still falling over his own feet, and you straighten him out. Then it's like dreaming you've suddenly been promoted, over everybody's head, to Minister of War. Next, just imagine a total universal order embracing all mankind-in short, the perfect civilian state of order: that, I say, is death by freezing, it's rigor mortis, a moonscape, a geo- metric plague!
"I discussed that with my library attendant. He suggested that I read Kant or somebody, all about the limits ofideas and perceptions. But frankly, I don't want to go on reading. I have a funny feeling that I now imderstand why those of us in the army, where we have the highest degree of order, also have to be prepared to lay down our lives at any moment. I can't exactly explain why. Somehow or other, order, once it reaches a certain stage, calls for bloodshed. And now I am honestly worried that your cousin is carrying all her efforts too far, to the point where she is likely to go and do something that might
Pseudorealtty Prevails · sos
506 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
do her a lot of hann-and I'll be less able than ever to help her! Do you see what I mean? As for the arts and sciences and all they can offer in terms of great and admirable ideas, of course I have nothing but the greatest respect for all that; I wouldn't dream of saying any- thing against it. "
101
- COUSINS IN CONFLICT
At about this time . Diotima turned to her cousin again. She did it at one of her evenings, coming like a tired dancer through the eddies swirling persistently, unremittingly, through. her rooms, to sit down beside him in a pool of quiet where he had parked himself on a little settee against the wall. It was a long time since she had done any- thing like it. She had avoided seeing him "off duty" ever since those drives in the country together, and as if because of them.
From heat or fatigue, her face looked slightly blotchy.
She propped her hands on the settee, said, "How are you? " and nothing more, even though there was clearly something more need- ing to be said, and stared straight ahead, with her head slightly bowed. She looked a bit groggy, to borrow a term from the boxing ring, not even bothering to smooth down her dress properly as she sat there, hunched over.
It made her cousin think of tousled hair and bare legs under a peasant skirt. Strip away the frosting, and what was left was a hand- some, sturdy creature, and he had to restrain himself from simply taking her hand in his fist, like a peasant. ·
"So Arnheim isn't making you happy," he said evenly.
Perhaps she should have put him in his place, but she felt strangely moved; after a while, she said: "His friendship makes me very happy. "
"I thought his friendship distresses you a little. "
"What nonsense! " Diotima pulled herself up and recovered her ladylike poise. "Do you know who really distresses me? " she asked, trying for an easy, chatty tone. "Your friend the General. What does that man want? Why does he keep coming here? Why is he always staring at me? "
"He's in love with you," her cousin replied.
Diotima gave a nervous laugh. She went on: "Do you realize that I shudder from head to foot when I set eyes on him? He makes me think of death. " ·
"An uncommonly life-loving figure of Death, if you look at him without prejudice. "
"Evidently I'm not unprejudiced. I don't know why, but I go into a panic every time he comes up to me and informs me that I make 'outstanding' ideas 'stand out' on an 'outstanQing occasion. ' He makes my skin crawl with an indescribable, incomprehensible, dreamlike fear. "
"Of him? ''
"Who else? The man's a hyena. "
Her cousin had to laugh. She went on with her scolding like a child
out ofcontrol. "H~goes creeping around, just waiting to see our best efforts come to nothing! "
"Which is probably exactly what you are so afraid of. Dear cousin, don't you remember that I foretold the collapse of your undertaking from the first? It can't be helped; you simply have to face it. "
Diotima looked at him haughtily. She remembered only too well, even to the words she had spoken to him the first time he came to see her, words that it now hurt her to think about. She had lectured him on what a privilege it was to call upon a whole nation, indeed upon the world, to take up its spiritual mission in the midst of its material- istic concerns. She had wanted nothing outworn, nothing of the old mind-sets, and yet the look she was now giving her cousin was more that of someone who had risen above all that, than of someone who had got above herself. She had considered a Year of the World, a universal rebirth, s9mething to crown all of Western culture; there
were times when she had come close, others when her goal seemed to recede from her grasp; she had gone through many ups and downs, and she had suffered. The last. few months had been like a long sea voyage, first lifted up by huge waves, then dropped into
Pseudoreality Prevails · . 5o7
508 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
deep troughs, over and over again, so that by now she could hardly tell what had come first and what later. Now she was sitting here, after her immense efforts, glad that the bench she sat on was not moving, content to do nothing but perhaps watch the smoke curling upward from a man's pipe; so intensely did she feel this that she had, in fact, chosen the image hers~lf-an old man:S pipe smoke in the light of the sinking sun. She seemed to herself like someone with great frenzied battles behind him. In a weary tone, she said to her cousin: "I have been through such a great deal; I have changed, I'm afraid. "
"In my favor, I hope? " ,
Diotima shook her head and smiled without looking at him.
"In that case you should know that it's Amheim who's behind the
General, not me! " Ulrich said suddenly. ''You've been putting all the blame for bringing in the General on me, all along. But don't you remember what I told you the first time you called me on the carpet about it? "
Diotima remembered. "Keep him away," her cousin had said. But Arnheim had told her to make the General feel welcome. She felt something she could not put into words, as if she were sitting inside a cloud that was quickly rising above her eyes. But the next instant the settee again felt hard and solid under her body, and she said: "I don't know how this General came to us in the first place. I never invited him. And Dr. Arnheim, whom I asked about it, naturally knows noth- ing about it either. Something must have gone wrong. "
Her cousin was not very helpful. "I knew the General years ago, but this is the first time I've seen him in ages," he said. "Of course, he's probably spying her~ a-little for the War Office, but he's sincere about wanting to help you, to. o. And I have it from his own lips that Amheim makes quite a point of being attentive to him. "
"Because Arnheim takes an interest in everything! " Diotiina re- torted. "He advised me not to rebuff the General, because he be- lieves in the man's good faith and because he may be useful to us, in his influential position. "
Ulrich vehemently shook his head. "Just listen to all the cackling going on around him! " he burst out so sharply that guests nearby turned their heads, to his hostess's embarrassment. "He can take i t -
he's rich! He has money, he agrees with evety one of them, and he knows that they're all acting as his unpaid press agents. "
"Why should he bother? " Diotima asked critically.
"Because of his vanity. He's a monster of vanity. How can I make you see the full extent of it? I mean vanity in the biblical sense: all cymbals and sounding brass to hide a vacuum. A man is vain when he prides himself on having seen the moon rise over Asia on his left while on his right Europe fades away in the sunset-this is how he once described to me his crossing of the Sea of Marmara. The moon probably rises far more beautifully behind the flowerpot on the win- dowsill of a lovesick young girl than it does over Asia. "
Diotima was thinking about where they might go to talk without being overheard. "You find his popularity irritating," she said in a low voice as she led him away through the various rooms, all filled with guests, until she had deftly maneuvered him into the foyer. Here she resumed the conversation with: "Why are you so set against him? You make it so hard for me. "
"I make it hard for you? " Ulrich asked with raised eyebrows.
"How can I talk freely with you about everything, as long as you persist in this attitude? " They had come to a stop in the middle ofthe foyer.
"Please feel free to tell me anything, whatever it is," he said warmly. "You two are in love, I know that much. Will he marry you? " "He has asked me," Diotima replied without regard to their ex- posed position as they stood there. She was overcome by her feelings
and took no offense at her cousin's bluntness.
"And what about you? " he asked.
She blushed like a schoolgirl. "Oh, for me it's a heavy responsibil-
ity," she said hesitantly. "I can't let myself be rushed into doing something unfair. Arid where the really great things in life are con- cerned, it doesn't matter so much what one does. "
Ulrich was mystified by these words, since he knew nothing of the long nights in which Diotima had learned to overcome the voice of passion and attained that serene evenhandedness of the soul where love floats in the horizontal position of a seesaw equally weighted at both ends.