No More Learning

The house was packed up and shrouded. One naked bulb was lit. Some crates, pushed together, served as table and chair. She had them set her table for supper on the edge of a ravine on a terrace of crates. Her father's old factotum juggled a loaded tray through light and shadow; he and his wife had insisted on cooking a dinner in their own kitchen, so that, as they expressed it, "the young lady" should be properly taken care offor her last meal at home. Suddenly Agathe thought, completely outside the state of mind in which she had spent the last few days: "Can they possibly have noticed anything? " She could easily -have neglected to destroy every last scrap of paper on which she had practiced changing the will. She felt cold terror, a nightmarish weight that hung on all her limbs: the miserly dread of reality that holds no nourishment for the spirit but only consumes it. Now she perceived with fierce intensity her newly awakened desire to live; it furiously resisted the possibility of anything getting in her way. When the old servant returned, she scrutinized his face intently. But the old man, with his discreet smile, went about his business unsuspecting, seeming to feel something or other that was mute and ceremonious. She could not see into him any more than she could see into a wall, and did not know what else there might be in him behind his blank polish. Now she, too, felt something muted, ceremonious, and sad. He had always been her
936 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
father's confidant, unfailingly ready to betray to him his children's every secret as soon as he had discovered it. But Agathe had been born in this house, and everything that had happened since was com- ing to an end this day: Agathe was moved to find herself and him here now, solemnly alone. She made up her mind to give him a spe- cial little gift of money, and in a fit of sudden weakness she planned to tell him that it came from Professor Hagauer; not from some cal- culating motive but as an act of atonement, with the intention of leaving nothing undone, even though she realized this was as un- necessary as it was superstitious. Before the old man returned again, she also took out her locket and capsule. The locket with the portrait of her never-forgotten beloved she slipped, after one last frowning look at his face, under the loosely nailed lid of a crate destined to go into storage indefinitely; it appeared to contain kitchen utensils or lamps, for she heard the clink of metal on metal, like branches falling from a tree. Then she placed the capsule with the poison where she had formerly worn the portrait.
"How old-fashioned of me! " she thought with a smile as she did this. 'Tm sure there are things more important than one's love life! " But she did not believe it.
At this moment it would have been as untrue to say that she was disinclined to enter into illicit relations with her brother as that she desired to. That might depend on how things turned out; but in her present state of mind nothing corresponded to the clarity of such a problem.
The light painted the bare boards of the crates between which she was sitting a glaring white and deep black. And a similar tragic mask gave an eerie touch to the otherwise simple thought that she was now spending her last evening in the house where she had been born of a woman she had never been able to remember, who had also given birth to Ulrich. An old impression came to her of clowns with dead- serious faces and strange instruments standing around her. They began to play. Agathe recognized it as a childhood daydream of hers. She could not hear the music, but all the clowns were looking at her. She told herself that at this moment her death would be no loss to anyone or anything, and for herselfit would mean no more than the outward end of an inner dying. So she thought while the clowns were
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 937
sending their music up to the ceiling and she seemed to be sitting on a circus floor strewn with sawdust, tears dropping on her finger. It was a feeling of utter futility she had known often as a girl, and she thought: "I suppose rve remained childish to this day," which did not prevent her from thinking at the same time of something that loomed vastly magnified by her tears: how, in the first hour of their reunion, she and her brother had come face-to-face in just such clown costumes. "What does it mean that it is my brother, of all peo- ple, who seems to hold the key to what's inside me? " she wondered. And suddenly she was really weeping. It seemed to be happening for no other reason she knew of but sheer pleasure, and she shook her head hard, as though there were something here she could neither undo nor put together.
At the same time she was thinking with a native ingenuousness that Ulrich would flnd the answers to all problems . . . until the old man came back again and was moved at seeing her so moved. "Oh my, the dear young lady! " he said, also shaking his head.
Agathe looked at him in confusion, but when she realized the mis- understanding behind this compassion, that it had been aroused by her appearance ofchildlike grief, heryouthful high spirits rose again.
"Cast all thou hast into the fire, even unto thy shoes. When thou has nothing left, think not even on thy shroud, but cast thyself naked into the fire! " she said to him.
It was an ancient saying that Ulrich had read to her delightedly, and the old man showed the stumps of his teeth in a smile at the grave and mellow lilt of the words she recited to him, her eyes aglow with tears; with his eyes he followed her hand pointing at the high- piled crates-she was trying to help his understanding by misleading it-suggesting something like a pyre. He had nodded at the word "shroud," eager to follow even though the path of the words was none too smooth, but he'd stiffened from the word "naked" on, and when she repeated her maxim, his face had reverted to the mask of the well-trained servant whose expression gives assurance that he can be trusted not to hear, see, or judge his betters.
In all his years with his old master that word had never once been uttered in his hearing; "undressed" would have been the closest per- missible. But young people were different nowadays, and he would
938 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
probably not be able to give them satisfaction in any case. Serenely, as one who has earned his retirement, he felt that his career was over. But Agathe's last thought before she left was: 'Would Ulrich really
cast everything into the fire? ''
22
FROM KONIA TOWSK(S CRITIQUE OF DANIELLJ'S THEOREM TO THE FALL OF MAN. FROM THE FALL OF MAN TO THE EMOTIONAL RIDDLE POSED BY A MAN'S SISTER
The state in which Ulrich emerged into the street on leaving the Palais Leinsdorf was rather like the down-to-earth sensation of hun- ger. He stopped in front of a billboard and stilled his hunger for bourgeois normality by taking in the announcements and advertise- ments. The billboard was several yards wide and covered with words.
"Actually," it occurred to him, "one might assume that these par- ticular words, which are met with in every comer of the city, have a great deal to tell us. " The language seemed to him akin to the cliches uttered by the characters in popular novels at important points in their lives. He read: "Have you ever worn anything so flattering yet so durable as Topinam silk stockings? '' "His Excellency Goes Out on the Town! " "Saint Bartholomew's Night-A Brand-New Produc- tion! " "For Fun and Food Come to the Black Pony! " "Hot Sex Show & Dancing at the Red Pony! " Next to this he noticed a political poster: "Criminal Intrigues! " but it referred to the price of bread, not to the Parallel Campaign. He turned away and, a few steps farther along, looked into the window of a bookshop. "The Great Author's Latest Work," said a cardboard sign beside a row of fifteen copies of the same book. In the opposite comer of the display window, a sign accompanying another book read: "Love's Tower ofBabel b y - - - makes gripping reading for men and women. "
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 939
"The Great Author? " Ulrich thought. He remembered having read one book by him and resolved never to read another; but since then the man had nevertheless become famous. Considering the window display of German intellect, Ulrich was reminded of an old army joke: "Mortadella! " During Ulrich's military service this had been the nickname ofan unpopular general, after the popular Italian sausage, and ifanyone wondered why, the answer was: "Part pig, part donkey. " He was prevented from pursuing this stimulating analogy by the voice of a woman asking him:
"Are you waiting for the streetcar too? '' Only then did he realize that he was no longer standing in front of the bookshop. He also had not realized that he was now standing immobile at a streetcar stop. The woman who had called this to his attention wore a knapsack and glasses, and turned out to be an acquaintance from the staff of the Astronomical Institute, one of the few women of accomplishment in this man's profession. He looked at her nose and the bags under her eyes, which the strain of unremitting intellectual effort had turned into something resembling underarm dress shields made of gutta- percha. Then he glanced down and noticed her short tweed skirt, then up and saw a black rooster feather in a green mountaineer's hat that floated over her learned features, and he smiled.
"Are you off to the mountains? '' he asked.
Dr. Strastil was going to the mountains for three days to "relax. " 'What do you think of Koniatowski's paper? '' she asked Ulrich. Ul- rich had nothing to say. "Kneppler will be furious," she said, "but Koniatowski's critique ofKneppler's deduction from Danielli's theo- rem is interesting, don't you agree? Do you think Kneppler's deduc- tion is possible? "
Ulrich shrugged his shoulders.
He was one of those mathematicians called logicians, for whom nothing was ever "correct" and who were working out new theoreti- cal principles. But he was not entirely satisfied with the logic of the logicians either. Had he continued his work, he would have gone right back to Aristotle; he had his own views of all that.
"For my part, I don't think Kneppler's deduction is mistaken, it's just that it's wrong," Dr. Strastil confessed. She might have said with the same firmness that she did consider the deduction mistaken but nevertheless not essentially wrong. She knew what she meant, but in
940 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
ordinary language, where the terms are undefined, one cannot ex- press oneself unequivocally. Using this holiday language under her tourist hat made her feel something of the timid haughtiness that might be aroused in a cloistered monk who was rash enough to let himself come in contact with the sensual world of the laity.
Ulrich got into the streetcar with Fraulein Strastil; he didn't know why. Perhaps it was because she cared so much about Koniatowski's criticism of Kneppler. Perhaps he felt like talking to her about litera- ture, about which she knew nothing.
"What will you do in the mountains? " he asked.
She was going up to the Hochschwab.
"There'll still be too much snow up there. " He knew the moun-
tains. "It's too late for skis, and too early to go up there without them. "
"Then I'll stay down;" Fraulein Strastil declared. "I once spent three days in a cabin at the foot of the Farsenalm. I only want to get back to nature for a bit! "
The expression on the worthy astronomer's face as she uttered the word "nature" provoked Ulrich to ask her what she needed nature for.
Dr. Strastil was sincerely indignant. She could lie on the mountain meadow for three whole days without stirring-"just like a boulder! " she declared.
"That's because you're a scientist," Ulrich pointed out. "A peasant would be bored. "
Dr. Strastil did not see it that way. She spoke ofthe thousands who sought nature every holiday, on foot, on wheels, or by boat.
Ulrich spoke of the peasants deserting the countryside in droves for the attractions of the city.
Fraulein Strastil doubted that he was feeling on a sufficiently ele- mentary level.
Ulrich claimed that the only elementary level, besides eating and love, was to make oneself comfortable, not to seek out an alpine meadow. The natural feeling that was supposed to drive people to do such things was actually a modem Rousseauism, a complicated and sentimental attitude.
He was not at all pleased with the way he was expressing himself, but he did not care what he said, and merely kept on talking because
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 941
he had not yet come to what he wanted to get out ofhis system. Frau- lein Strastil gave him a mistrustful look. She could not make him out. Here her considerable experience in abstract thinking was of no use to her; she could neither keep separate nor fit together the ideas he seemed merely to be juggling so nimbly; she guessed that he was talking without thinking. She took some comfort in listening to him with a rooster feather on her hat, and it reinforced her joy in the solitude she was heading for.
At this point Ulrich's eye happened to light on the newspaper of the man opposite him, and he read the opening line of an advertise- ment, in heavy type: "Our time asks questions-Our time gives an- swers. " It could have been the announcement of a new arch support or of a forthcoming lecture-who could tell these days? -but his mind suddenly leapt onto the track he had been seeking.
His companion struggled to be objective. 'Tm afraid," she admit- ted with some hesitation, "that I don't know much about literature; people like us never have time. Perhaps I don't know the right things, either. But ---"-she mentioned a popular name- "means a great deal to me. A writer who can make us feel things so intensely is surely what we mean by a great writer! "
However, since Ulrich felt he had now profited enough from Dr. Strastil's combination of an exceptionally developed capacity for ab- stract thought and a notably retarded understanding of the soul, he stood up cheerfully, treated his colleague to a bit of outrageous flat- tery, and hastily got off, excusing himself on the grounds that he had gone two stops past his destination. When he stood on the street, raising his hat to her once more, Fraulein Strastil remembered that she had recently heard some disparaging remarks about his own work; but she also felt herself blushing in response to his charming parting words to her, which, to her way ofthinking, was not exactly to his credit. But he now knew, without yet being fully conscious of it, why his thoughts were revolving on the subject ofliterature and what it was they were after, from the interrupted "Mortadella" compari- son to his unintentionally leading the good Strastil on to those confi- dences. After all, literature had been no concern of his since he had
written his last poem, at twenty; still, before that, writing secretly had been a fairly regular habit, which he had given up not because he had grown older or had realized he didn't have enough talent, but for
942 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
reasons that now, with his current impressions, he would have liked to define by some kind of word suggesting much effort culminating in a void.
For Ulrich was one of those book-lovers who do not want to go on reading because they feel that the whole business of reading and writing is a nuisance. "If the sensible Strastil wants to be 'made to feel,'" he thought ("Quite right too! If I had objected she'd have brought up music as her trump card! ")-and as one so often does, he was partly thinking in words, partly carrying on a wordless argument in his head-so if this reasonable Dr. Strastil wants to be made to feel, it only amounts to what everyone wants from art, to be moved, overwhelmed, entertained, surprised, to be allowed a sniff of noble ideas; in short, to be made to experience something "alive," have a "living" experience. Ulrich was certainly not against it. Somewhere at the back of his mind he was thinking something that ended in a mingling of a touch of sentiment and ironic resistance: "Feeling is rare enough. To keep feeling at a certain temperature, to keep it from cooling down, probably means preserving the body warmth from which all intellectual development arises. And whenever a per- son is momentarily lifted out of his tangle of rational intentions, which involve him with countless alien objects, whenever he is raised to a state wholly without purpose, such as listening to music, for in- stance, he is almost in the biological condition of a flower on which the rain and the sunshine fall. " He was willing to admit that there is a more eternal eternity in the mind's pauses and quiescence than in its activity; but he had been thinking first "feeling" and then "experi- encing": a contradiction was implied here. For there were experi- ences of the will! There were experiences of action at its peak! Though one could probably assume that by the time each experience had reached its acme of radiant bitterness it was sheer feeling; which would bring up an even greater contradiction: that in its greatest pu- rity the state offeeling is a quiescence, a dying away ofall activity. Or was it not a contradiction, after all? Was there some curious connec- tion by which the most intense activity was motionless at the core? At this point he realized that this sequence of ideas had begun not so much as a thought at the back of his mind as one that was unwel- come, for with a sudden stiffening of resistance against the sentimen- tal tum it had taken, Ulrich repudiated the whole train of thought
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 943
into which he had slipped. He had absolutely no intention of brood- ing over certain states of mind and, when he was thinking about feel- ing, succumbing to feelings.
He suddenly realized that what he was getting at could best be defined, without much ado, as the futile actuality or the eternal momentariness of literature. Does it lead to anything? Literature is either a tremendous detour from experience to experience, ending back where it came from, or an epitome of sensations that leads to nothing at all definite. "A puddle," he now thought, "has often made a stronger impression of depth on someone than the ocean, for the simple reason that we have more occasion to experience puddles than oceans. " It seemed to him that it was the same with feelings, which was the only reason commonplace feelings are regarded as the deepest. Putting the ability to feel above the feeling itself-the char- acteristic of all sensitive people-like the wanting to make others feel and be made to feel that is the common impulse behind all our arrangements concerning the emotional life, amounts to downgrad- ing the importance and nature of the feelings compared with their fleeting presence as a subjective state, and so leads to that shallow- ness, stunted development, and utter irrelevance, for which there is no lack of examples. "Of course," Ulrich added mentally, "this view will repel all those people who feel as cozy in their feelings as a rooster in his feathers and who even preen themselves on the idea that eternity starts all over again with every separate 'personality'! " He had a clear mental image of an immense perversity of a scope involving all mankind, but he could not find a way to express it that would satisfy him, probably because its ramifications were too intricate.
While busy with all this he was watching the passing trolley cars, waiting for the one that would take him back as close as possible to the center of town. He saw people climbing in and out of the cars, and his technically trained eye toyed distractedly with the interplay of welding and casting, rolling and bolting, of engineering and hand finishing, of historical development and the present state of the art, which combined to make up these barracks-on-wheels that these people were using.
"As a last step, a committee from the municipal transportation de- partment comes to the factory and decides what kind ofwood to use
944 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
as veneer, the color of the paint, upholstery, arms on the seats and straps for standees, ashtrays, and the like," he thought idly, "and it is precisely these trivial details, along with the red or green color of the exterior, and how they swing themselves up the steps and inside, that for tens of thousands of people make up what they remember, all they experience, of all the genius that went into it. This is what fonns their character, endows it with speed or comfort; it's what makes them perceive red cars as home and blue ones as foreign, and adds up to that unmistakable odor of countless details that clings to the clothing of the centuries. " So there was no denying-and this sud- denly rounded out Ulrich's main line of thought-that life itself largely peters out into trivial realities or, to put it technically, that the power of its spiritual coefficient is extremely small.
And suddenly, as he felt himself swinging aboard the trolley, he said to himself: "I shall have to make Agathe see that morality is the subordination of every momentary state in our life to one enduring one! " This principle had come to him all at once in the fonn of a definition. But this highly polished concept had been preceded and was followed by others which, though not so fully developed and ar- ticulated, rounded out its meaning. The innocuous business of feel- ing was here set in an austere conceptual framework, it was given a job to do, with a strict hierarchy of values, vaguely foreshortened, in the offing: feelings must either be functional or refer to a still- undefined condition as immense as the open sea. Should it be called an idea or a longing? Ulrich had to leave it at that, for from the mo- ment his sister's name had occurred to him her shadow had dark- ened his thoughts. As always when he thought ofher, he felt that he had shown himself in her company in a different frame of mind than usual. And he knew, too, that he was longing passionately to get back into that frame of mind. But the same memory overcame him with humiliation when he thought of himselfcarrying on in a presumptu- ous, ludicrous, and drunken fashion, no better than a man who sinks to his knees in a frenzy in front ofpeople he won't be able to look in the face the next day. Considering how balanced and controlled the intellectual exchange between brother and sister had been this was a wild exaggeration, and if it was not completely unfounded, it was probably no more than a reaction to feelings that had not yet taken shape. He knew Agathe was bound to arrive in a few days, and he had
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 945
done nothing to stop her. Had she actually done anything wrong? One might suppose that as she cooled off she had gone back on it all. But a lively premonition assured him that Agathe had not abandoned her scheme. He could have tried to find out by asking her. Again he felt duty bound to write and warn her against it. But instead of giving this even a moment's serious consideration, he tried to imagine what could have prompted Agathe to do something so irregular: he saw it as an incredibly vehement gesture meant to show her trust in him and to put herself entirely in his hands. "She has very little sense of reality," he thought, "but a wonderful way of doing what she wants. Rash, I suppose, but just for that reason spontaneous! When she's angry, she sees red with a vengeance. " He smiled indulgently and looked around at the other passengers. Every one of them had evil thoughts, of course, and every one suppressed them, and nobody blamed himself overmuch; but no one else had these thoughts out- side himself, in another person, who would give them the enchanting inaccessibility of an experience in a dream.
Since Ulrich had left his letter unfinished, he realized for the first time that he no longer had a choice but was already in the state he was still hesitating to enter. According to its Iaws-he indulged him- self in the overweening ambiguity of calling them "holy"-Agathe's misstep could not be undone by repentance but only be made good by actions that followed it, which incidentally was doubtless in keep- ing with the original meaning of repentance as a state of purifying fire, not a state of being impaired. To repair the damage done to Agathe's inconvenient husband, or indemnify him, would have meant only to undo the damage done, that is, it would only have been that double and crippling negation of which ordinary good conduct consists, which inwardly cancels out to zero. But what should be done for Hagauer, how a looming burden should be "lifted," was possible only ifone could marshal a great sympathy for him, a pros- pect Ulrich could not face without dismay. Keeping within the framework of this logic that Ulrich was trying to adapt to, all that could ever be made good was something other than the damage done, and he did not doubt for an instant that this would have to be his and his sister's whole life.
"Putting it presumptuously," he thought, "this means: Saul did not make good each single consequence of his previous sins; he turned
946 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
into Paul! " Against this curious logic, however, both feeling and judgment raised the customary objection that it would nevertheless be more decent-and no deterrent to more romantic future possibil- ities-to straighten out accounts with one's brother-in-law first, and only then to plan one's new life. The kind of morality to which he was so attracted was not, after all, suited in the least to dealing with money matters and business and the resulting conflicts. So insoluble and conflicting situations were bound to arise on the borderline be- tween that other life and everyday life, which it would be better not to allow to develop into borderline cases; they should be dispatched at the outset, in the normal, unemotional way of simple decency. But here again Ulrich felt it was impossible to take one's bearings from the normal conditions of goodness if one wanted to press on into the realm of unconditional goodness. The mission laid upon him, to take the first step into uncharted territory, would apparently suffer no abatement.
His last line of defense was his strong aversion to the terms he had been using so lavishly, such as "self," "feeling," "goodness," "alterna- tive goodness," "evil," for being so subjective and at the same time presumptuous, gauzy abstractions, which really corresponded to the moral ponderings of very much younger people. He found himself doing what any number of those who are following his story are likely to do, irritably picking out individual words and phrases, asking him- self such questions as:" 'Production and results of feelings? ' What a machinelike, rationalistic, humanly unrealistic notion! 'Morality as the problem of a permanent state to which all individual states are subordinate'-and that's all? The inhumanity of it! " Looked at through a rational person's eyes, it all seemed extraordinarily per- verse. "The essence of morality virtually hinges on the important feelings remaining constant," Ulrich thought, "and all the individual has to do is act in accord with them! "
But just at this point the rolling locale that enclosed him and that had been created with T -square and compass came to a halt, at a spot where his eye, peering out from the body of modem transportation and still an involuntary part of it, lit on a stone column that had been standing beside this roadway since the period of the Baroque, so that the engineered comfort of this calculated artifact, unconsciously taken for granted, suddenly clashed with the passion erupting from
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 94 7
the statue's antiquated pose, which suggested something not unlike a petrified bellyache. The effect of this optical collision was to power- fully confinn the ideas from which Ulrich had just been trying to es- cape. Could anything have illustrated life's confusion more clearly than this chance spectacle? Without taking sides with either the Now or the Then in matters of taste, as one usually does when faced with such a juxtaposition, he felt his mind abandoned by both sides with- out an instant's hesitation, and saw in it only the great demonstration of a problem that is at bottom a moral problem. He could not doubt that the transience ofwhat is regarded as style, culture, the will ofthe time, or the spirit of an era, for which it is admired, was a moral weakness. For in the great scale of the ages this instability means ex- actly what it would mean on the smaller scale ofpersonal life: to have developed one's potential one-sidedly, to have dissipated it in extrav- agant exaggerations, never taking the measure of one's own will, never achieving a complete form, and in disjointed passions doing now this, now that. Even the so-called succession or progress of the ages seemed to him to be only another term for the fact that none of these experiments ever reach the point where they would all meet and move on together toward a comprehensive understanding that would at last offer a basis for a coherent development, a lasting en- joyment, and that seriousness of great beauty of which nowadays hardly more than a shadow occasionally drifts across our life.
Ulrich of course saw the preposterous arrogance of assuming that everything had in effect come to nothing. And yet it was nothing. Immeasurable as existence; confusion as meaning. At least, judging by the results, it was no more than the stuff of which the soul of the present is made, which is not much. While Ulrich was thinking this he was nevertheless savoring the "not much," as if it were the last meal at the table of life his outlook would permit him to have. He had left the streetcar and taken a route that would bring him quickly to the city's center. He felt as if he were coming out of a cellar. The streets were screeching with gaiety and filled with unseasonable warmth like a summer day. The sweet poisonous taste of talking to oneself had left his mouth: everything was expansive and out in the sun. Ulrich stopped at almost every shop window. Those tiny bottles in so many colors, stoppered scents, countless variants of nail scis- sors-what quantities of genius there were even in a hairdresser's
948 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
window! A glove shop: what connections, what inventions, before a goat's skin is drawn up on a lady's hand and the animal's pelt has become more refined than her own! He was astonished at the luxu- ries one took for granted, the countless cozy trappings of the good life, as though he were seeing them for the first time. Trap-pings! What a charming word, he felt. And what a boon, this tremendous contract to get along together! Here there was no reminder of life's earth crust, of the unpaved roads of passion, of-he truly felt this- the uncivilized nature of the soul! One's attention, a bright and nar- row beam, glided over a flower garden of fruits, gemstones, fabrics, forms and allurements whose gently persuasive eyes were opened in all the colors of the rainbow. Since at that time a white skin was prized and guarded from the sun, a few colorful parasols were al- ready floating above the crowd, laying silky shadows on women's pale faces. Ulrich's glance was even enchanted by the pale-golden beer seen in passing through the plate-glass windows of a restaurant, on tablecloths so white that they formed blue patches at the edges of shadows. Then the Archbishop's carriage drove by, a gently rocking, heavy carriage, whose dark interior showed red and purple. It had to be the Archbishop's carriage, for this horse-drawn vehicle that Ul- rich followed with his eyes had a wholly ecdesiastical air, and two policemen sprang to attention and saluted this follower of Christ without thinking of their predecessors who had run a lance into his predecessor's side.
He gave himself up with such zest to these impressions, which he had ju~t been calling "life's futile actuality," that little by little, as he sated himself with the world, his earlier revulsion against it began to reassert itself. Ulrich now knew exactly where his speculations fell short. "What's the point, in the face of all this vainglory, of looking for some result beyond, behind, beneath it all? Would that be a phi- losophy? An all-embracing conviction, a law? Or the finger of God? Or, instead of that, the assumption that morality has up to now lacked an 'inductive stance,' that it is much harder to be good than we had believed, and that it will require an endless cooperative ef- fort, like every other science? I think there is no morality, because it cannot be deduced from anything constant; all there are are rules for uselessly maintaining transitory conditions. I also assume that there can be no profound happiness without a profound morality; yet my
Into the Millennium (The. Criminals) · 949
thinking about it strikes me as an unnatural, bloodless state, and it is absolutely not what I want! " Indeed, he might well have asked him- self much more simply, "What is this I have taken upon myself? '' which is what he now did. However, this question touched his sensi- bility more than his intellect; in fact, the question stopped his think- ing and diminished bit by bit his always keen delight in strategic planning before he had even formulated it. It began as a dark tone close to his ear, accompanying him; then it sounded inside him, an octave lower than everything else; finally, Ulrich had merged with his question and felt as though he himself were a strangely deep sound in the bright, hard world, surrounded by a wide interval. So what was it he had really taken on himself, what had he promised?
He thought hard. He knew that he had not merely been joking when he used the expression "the Millennium," even if it was only a figure of speech. If one took this promise seriously, it meant the de- sire to live, with the aid of mutual love, in a secular condition so tran- scendent that one could only feel and do whatever heightened and maintained that condition. He had always been certain that human beings showed hints of such a disposition. It had begun with the "af- fair of the major's wife," and though his subsequent experiences had not amounted to much, they had always been of the same kind. In sum, what it more or less came to was that Ulrich believed in the "Fall of Man" and in "Original Sin. " That is, he was inclined to think that at some time in the past, man's basic attitude had undergone a fundamental change that must have been roughly comparable to the moment when a lover regains his sobriety; he may then see the whole truth, but something greater has been tom to shreds, and the truth appears everywhere as a mere fragment left over and patched up again. Perhaps it was even the apple of "knowledge" that had caused this spiritual change and expelled mankind from a primal state to which it might find its way back only after becoming wise through countless experiences and through sin. But Ulrich believed in such myths not in their traditional form, but only in the way he had discov- ered them; he believed in them like an arithmetician who, with the system of his feelings spread out before him, concludes, from the fact that none of them could be justified, that he would have to intro- duce a fantastic hypothesis whose nature could be arrived at only in- tuitively. That was no trifle! He had turned over such thoughts in his
950 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
mind often enough, but he had never yet been in the situation of having to decide within a few days whether to stake his life on it. A faint sweat broke out under his hat and collar, and he was bothered by the proximity of all the people jostling by him. What he was think- ing amounted to taking leave of most of his living relationships; he had no illusions about that. For today our lives are divided, and parts are entangled with other people; what we dream has to do with dreaming and also with what other people dream; what we do has sense, but more sense in relation with what others do; and what we believe is tied in with beliefs only a fraction ofwhich are our own. It is therefore quite unrealistic to insist upon acting out of the fullness of one's own personal reality. Especially for a man like himself, who had been imbued all his life with the thought that one's beliefs had to be shared, that one must have the courage to live in the midst of moral contradictions, because that was the price of great achieve- ment. Was he at least convinced of what he had just been thinking about the possibility and significance of another kind of life? Not at all! Nevertheless, he could not help being emotionally drawn to it, as though his feelings were facing the unmistakable signs of a reality they had been looking forward to for years.
At this point he did have to ask himself what, if anything, entitled him, like a veritable Narcissus, to wish not to do ever again anything that left his soul unmoved. Such a resolve runs counter to the princi- ples of the active life with which everyone is today imbued, and even if God-fearing times could have fostered such ambitions, they have melted away like the half-light of dawn as the sun grows stronger. There was an odor of something reclusive and syrupy clinging to him that Ulrich found increasingly distasteful. He bied to rein in his un- ruly thoughts as quickly as possible, and told himself-if not quite sincerely-that the promise of a Millennium he had so oddly given his sister, rationally considered, boiled down to no more than a kind of social work: living with Agathe would probably call for all the deli- cacy and selflessness he could muster-qualities that had been all too lacking in him. He recalled, the way one recalls an unusually transparent cloud flitting across the sky, certain moments of their re- cent time together that had already been of this kind. "Perhaps the content of the Millennium is merely the burgeoning of this energy, which at first shows itselfin two people, until it grows into a resound-
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 951
ing universal communion," he wondered in some embarrassment. Again he resorted to his own "affair of the major's wife" for more light on the subject. Leaving aside the delusions oflove, since imma- turity had been at the root ofthat aberration, he focused all his atten- tion on the feelings of tender care and adoration of which he had been capable in his solitude at the time, and it seemed to him that feeling trust and affection, or living for another person, must be a happiness that could move one to tears, as lovely as the lambent sink- ing ofday into the peace ofevening and also, just a little, an impover- ishing of spirit and intellect to the point of tears. For there was also a funny side to their project, as of two elderly bachelors setting up house together, and such twitchings of his imagination warned him how little the notion of a life of service in brotherly love was likely to offer him fulfillment. With some detachment he could see that from the first there had been a large measure of the asocial intermingled in his relationship with Agathe. Not only the business with Hagauer and the will, but the whole emotional tone of their association, pointed to something impetuous, and there was no doubt that what brought them together was not so much love for each other as a re- pelling of the rest of the world.
"No! " Ulrich thought. "Wanting to live for another person is no more than egoism going bankrupt and then opening a new shop next door, with a partner! "
Actually, his inner concentration, despite this brilliantly honed in- sight, had already passed its peak at the moment ~hen he had been tempted to confine the diffuse illumination that filled him inside an earthly lamp, and now that this had shown itself to be a mistake, his thinking had lost the urge to press for a decision and was eager for some distraction. Not far from him two men had just collided and were shouting unpleasant remarks at each other as ifgetting ready to fight; Ulrich watched with a renewed interest, and had hardly turned away when his glance struck that of a woman giving him a look like a fat flower nodding on its stem. In that pleasant mood which is an equal blend of feeling and extroverted attention, he noted that real people pursue the ideal commandment to love one another in two parts, the first consisting in their detesting one another and the sec- ond in making up for it by entering into sexual relations with the half that is excepted. Without stopping to think he too turned, after a few
952 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
steps, to follow the woman; it was a quite mechanical consequence of their eye contact. He could see her body beneath her dress like a big white fish just under the surface of the water. He felt the male urge to harpoon the fish and watch it flap and struggle, and there was in this as much repugnance as desire. Some hardly perceptible signs made him certain this woman lmew he was prowling after her and was interested. He tried to work out her place on the social scale and decided on "upper-middle class," where it is hard to pinpoint the position with precision. "Business family? Government service? " he speculated. Various random images came to him, even including that of a pharmacy: he could feel the pungently sweet smell of the hus- band coming home, the compact atmosphere of the household be- traying no sign of the shifting beam from the burglar's flashlight that had just recently moved through it. It was vile, no doubt, but shame- fully exciting.
As Ulrich kept following the woman, actually afraid that she might stop at some shop window and so force him either to stumble fool- ishly past her or to pick her up, something in him was still undis- tracted and wide awake. "What exactly might Agathe want from me? " he asked himself for the first time. He did not lmow. He as- sumed that it would be something like what he wanted of her, but he had nothing to base this on but intuition. Wasn't it amazing how quickly and unexpectedly it had all happened? Other than a few childhood memories he had lmown nothing about her, and the little he had heard, such as her connection of some years with Hagauer, he found rather dis~teful. He now recalled the curious hesitancy, al- most reluctance, with which he had approached his father's house on his arrival. Suddenly the idea took hold of him: "My feeling for Agathe is just imagination! " In a man who continually wanted some- thing other than what those around him wanted-he was thinking seriously again-in such a man, who always felt strong dislikes and never got as far as liking, the usual kindliness and lukewarm human goodness can easily separate and tum into a cold hardness with a mist of impersonal love floating above it. Seraphic love, he had once named it. It could also, he thought, be called love without a partner. Or, just as well, love without sex. Sexual love was all the love there was nowadays: those alike in gender repelled each other, and in the sexual crossover people loved with a growing resentment of the
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 953
overestimation of this compulsion. But seraphic love was free of both these defects. It was love cleansed of the crosscurrents of social and sexual aversions. This love, which makes itself felt everywhere in company with the cruelty of modem life, could truly be called the sisterly love of an age that has no room for brotherly love, he said to himself, wincing in irritation.
Yet having finally arrived at this conclusion, alongside it and alter- nately with it he went on dreaming of a woman who could not be attained at all. He had a vision of her like late-autumn days in the mountains, when the air is as ifdrained ofits lifeblood to the point of death, while the colors are aflame with fierce passion. He saw the blue vistas, without end in their mysterious gradations. He com- pletely forgot the woman who was actually walking ahead of him; he was far from desire and perhaps close to love.
He was distracted only by the lingering gaze of another woman, like that of the first, yet not so brazen and obvious; this one was well- bred and delicate as a pastel stroke that leaves its stamp in a fraction of a second. He looked up and in a state of utmost emotional exhaus- tion beheld a very beautiful lady in whom he recognized Bonadea.
The glorious day had lured her out for a walk. Ulrich glanced at his watch: he had been strolling along only fifteen minutes, and no more than forty-five had passed since he left the Palais Leinsdorf.
Bonadea said: ''I'm not free today. "
Ulrich thought: "How long, by comparison, is a whole day, a year, not to mention a resolution for a lifetime! " It was beyond calculation.
BONADEA; OR, THE RELAPSE
And so it happened that Ulrich received a visit soon afterward from his abandoned mistress. Their encounter on the street had not pro- vided him with an opportunity to call her to account for misusing his
954 · THE MAN WITH0 UT QUALITIES
name to win Diotima's friendship, nor had it given Bonadea enough time to reproach him for his long silence and not only defend herself from the charge of indiscretion and call Diotima "an ignoble snake" but even make up a story to prove it. Hence she and her retired lover had hurriedly agreed that they must meet once again and have it all out.
The visitor who appeared was no longer the Bonadea who coiled her hair until it gave her head something of a Grecian look when she studied it in the mirror with eyes narrowed, intending to be just as pure and noble as Diotima, nor was she the one who raved in the night, maddened by the withdrawal pains of such a cure for her ad- diction, cursing her exemplar shamelessly and with a woman's in- stinct for the lethal thrust; she was once again the dear old Bonadea whose curls hung down over her none-too-wise brow or were swept back from it, depending on the dictates of fashion, and in whose eyes there was always something reminiscent ofthe air rising above a fire. While Ulrich started to reprove her for having betrayed their rela- tionship to his cousin, she was carefully removing her hat before the mirror, and when he wanted to know exactly how much she had said, she smugly and in great detail told him a story she claimed to have made up for Diotima about having had a letter from him in which he asked her to see that Moosbrugger was not overlooked entirely, whereupon she had thought the best thing to do was to turn to the woman of whose high-mindedness the writer of the letter had so often spoken to her. Then she perched on the arm of Ulrich's chair, kissed his forehead, and meekly insisted that it was all perfectly true, except for the letter.
Her bosom emitted a great warmth.
"Then why did you call my cousin a snake? You were one your- self! " Ulrich said.
Bonadea pensively shifted her gaze from him to the wall. "Oh, I don't know," she answered. "She's so nice to me. She takes so much interest in me! "
"What is that supposed to mean? '' Ulrich asked. "Are you partici- pating in her efforts for the Good, the True, and the Beautiful? ''
Bonadea replied: "She explained to me that no woman can live for her love with all her might, she no more than I. And that is why every woman must do her duty in the place appointed to her by fate. She
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 955
really is so very decent," Bonadea went on, even more thoughtfully. "She keeps telling me to be more patient with my husband, and she insists that a superior woman can find considerable happiness in making the most ofher marriage; she puts far more value in that than in adultery. And after all, it's exactly what I've always thought my-
! " seIf.
It happened to be true, in fact; for Bonadea had never thought otherwise, she had merely always acted otherwise, and so she could agree with a good conscience. When Ulrich said as much to her, it earned him another kiss, this time somewhat lower than the fore- head. "You happen to upset my polygamous balance," she said with a little sigh of apology for the discrepancy that had arisen between her principles and her conduct.
It turned out, after some cross-examination, that she had meant to say "polyglandular balance"- a new physiological term at that time comprehensible only to initiates, which might be translated as bal- ance of secretions, on the assumption that certain glands which af- fected the blood had a stimulating or inhibiting effect, thereby influencing character and, more specifically, a person's tempera- ment, especially the kind of temperament Bonadea had to a degree that caused her much suffering in certain circumstances.
Ulrich raised his eyebrows in curiosity.
"Well, something to do with glands," Bonadea said. "It's rather a relief to know one can't help it! " She gave the lover she had lost a wistful smile. "A person who loses her balance easily is liable to have unsuccessful sexual experiences. "
"My dear Bonadea," Ulrich marveled, "what kind of talk is this? "
"It's what I've been learning to say. You are an unsuccessful sexual experience, your cousin says. But she also says that a person can es- cape the shattering physical and emotional effects by bearing in mind that nothing we do is merely our own personal affair. She's very nice to me. She says that my mistake is that I make too much of a single aspect of love instead of taking in the whole spectrum of the experience. You see, what she means by a single aspect is what she also calls 'the crude mechanics': it's often very interesting to see things in her light. But there's one thing about her I don't like. She may say that a strong woman sees her life's work in monogamy and should love it like an artist, but she does have three men, and, count-
956 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
ing you, possibly four, on her string, and I have none at all now to make me happy! "
The gaze with which she scrutinized her AWOL reservist was warm and questioning. Ulrich did his best to ignore it.
"So the two of you talk about me? " he asked with some forebod- ing.
"Oh, only on and off," Bonadea replied. "When your cousin needs to exemplify something, or when your friend the General is present. "
"I suppose Amheim is in on this too? "
"He lends a dignified ear to what the gracious ladies have to say. " Bonadea made fun of him, not without talent for unobtrusive mim- icry, but she added seriously: "I don't like the way he treats your cousin at all. Most of the time he's off on some trip or other, and when he's present he talks too much to everyone, and when she is quoting Frau von Stem, for example-"
"Frau von Stein? " Ulrich corrected her by asking.
"Of course, I meant Stein: it isn't as if Diotima didn't talk about her often enough. Well, when she talks about Frau von Stein and Goethe's other woman, the Vul . . . What's her name? It sounds a little obscene, I think. . . . "
"Vulpius. "
"Oh yes. You know, I get to hear so many foreign words there that I'm beginning to forget the simplest ones! So when she's making her comparisons between Frau von Stein and the other, Amheim keeps staring at me as if, compared with his idol, I was no better than the kind you just said. "
Now Ulrich insisted on an explanation ofthese new developments.
It turned out that since Bonadea had claimed the status of Ulrich's confidante she had made great strides in her intimacy with Diotima. Her alleged nymphomania, which Ulrich had carelessly men- tioned to Diotima in a moment of pique, had had a far-reaching ef- fect on his cousin. She had begun by inviting the newcomer to her gatherings, in the role of a lady vaguely active in social welfare, and watched her covertly. This intruder, soaking up Diotima's domestic interiors with eyes soft as blotting paper, not only had been down-
right uncanny but had also aroused in her as much feminine curiosity as dread.