Examined close up, our history looks rather vague and messy, like a morass only partially made safe for pedestrian·traffic, though oddly enough in the end
there does seem to be a path across it, that very "path of history" of which nobody knows the starting ·point.
there does seem to be a path across it, that very "path of history" of which nobody knows the starting ·point.
Musil - Man Without Qualities - v1
" he interrupted her.
"But what did he want?
"
Clarisse started to answer, hesitated, and finally said: "Oh come on, you know all that yourself. . . . "
"I don't know a thing," he teased her. "But I can tell you this: You can set up a Kaiser Franz Josef Soup Kitchen, and you can meet the needs of a Society for the Protection of the House Cat, but you can- not tum great ideas into reality any more than you can do it with music. Why is that? I dmi't know. But that's how it is. "
He had finally found refuge on the little sofa behind the little table; it was a position easier to defend than the chair. In the open space in the middle of the room, on the far bank, as it were, of an illusory prolongation of the shining tabletop, Clarisse was still stand- ing and talking. Her whole slender body was involved; she actually felt everything she wanted to say with her whole body first of all, and was always needing to do something with it. Ulrich had always thought of her body as hard and boyish, but now, as it gently swayed
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on legs pressed close together, he saw Clarisse as a Javanese dancer. Suddenly it occurred to him that he would not be surprised if she fell into a trance. Or was he in a trance himself? He launched into a long speech:
"You want to organize your life around an idea," he began. "And you'd like to know how to do that. But an idea is the most paradoxical thing in the world. The flesh in the grip of an idea is like a fetish. Bonded to an idea, it becomes magical. An ordinary slap in the face, bound up with ideas of honor, or of punishment and the like, can kill a man. And yet ideas can never maintain themselves in the state in which they are most powerful; they're like the kind of substance that, exposed to the air, instantly changes into some other, more lasting, but corrupted form. You've been through this often yourself. Be- cause an idea is what you are: an idea in a particular state. You are touched by a breath of something, and it's like a note suddenly ~mergingfrom the humming ofstrings; in front ofyou there is some- thing like a mirage; out of the confusion of your soul an endless pa- rade is taking shape, with all the world's beauty looking on from the roadside. All this can be the effect of a single idea. But after a while it comes to resemble all your previous ideas, it takes its place among them, becomes part ofyour outlook and your character, your princi- ples or your moods; in the act oftaking shape it has lost its wings and its mystery. "
Clarisse answered: "Walter is jealous of you. Not on my account, I'm sure. It's because you look as though you could do what he wishes he could do. Do you see what I mean? There is something about you that cuts him down. I wish I knew how to put it. " She scrutinized him.
Their two speeches intertwined.
Walter had always been life's special pet, always held on its lap. He transformed everything that happened to him and gave it a tender vitality. Walter had always been the one whose life had been the pcher in experiences. "But having more of a life is one of the earliest and subtlest signs of mediocrity," Ulrich thought. "Seen in context, an experience loses its personal venom or sweetness. " That was how it was, more or less. Even the assertion that this was the case estab- lished a context, and one got no kiss of welcome or good-bye for it.
And despite all that, Walter was jealous of him? He was glad to hear it.
"I told him he ought to kill you," Clarisse reported.
"What? "
"Ext~rminate him! I said. Suppose you're not really all you think
you are, and suppose Walter is the better man and has no other way to gain his peace of mind: it would make sense, wouldn't it? Besides, you can always fight back. "
"No half measures for you, I see," Ulrich said, somewhat shaken.
'Well, we were only talking. How do you feel about it, by the way? Walter says it's wrong even to think such things. "
"Oh no, thinking is quite in order," he replied hesitantly, taking a good look at Clarisse. She had a peculiar charm all her own. Was it as though she were somehow standing side by side with herself? She was not quite there, yet all there, both in close proximity.
"Bah, thinking! " she cut in. Her words were addressed to the wall behind him, as though her eyes were fixed on a point somewhere between. "You're every bit as passive as Walter. " These words, too, fell somewhere midway between them, keeping their distance like an insult, yet sounding conciliatory, because of the confidential closeness they implied. ''What I say is, if you can think something, you should be able to do it too," she insisted dryly.
Then she moved off, walked to the window, and stood there with her hands clasped behind her back.
Ulrich stood up quickly, went over to her, and placed an arm around her shoulders.
"Dear little Clarisse," he said, "you're being a bit strange today, aren't you? But I must put in a good word for myself; you're notre- ally concerned with me anyway, are you? "
Clarisse was staring out the window. But now her gaze sharpened; she was focusing on something specific out there, for support. She felt as if her thoughts had strayed outside and had only just returned. This feeling of being like a room, with the sense of the door just hav- ing shut, was nothing new to her. On and off she had days, even weeks, when everything around her was brighter and lighter than usual, as though it would take hardly any effort to slip out of herself and go traipsing about the world unencumbered; then again there
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were the bad times, when she felt imprisoned, and though these times usually passed quickly, she dreaded them like a punishment, because everything closed in on her and was so sad. Just now she was aware of a lucid, sober peacefulness, and it worried her a little; she was not sure what it was she had wanted just a while ago, and this sense of leaden clarity and quiet control was often a prelude to the time of punishment. She pulled herself together with the feeling that if she could keep this conversation going with conviction, she would be back on safe ground.
"Don't say 'dear little' to me," she said, pouting, "or I might end up killing you myself. " It came out like a joke, so she felt she had made one. She stole a cautious look at him, to see how he was taking it. "Ofcourse, it was only a way of putting it, hut you must realize that I'm serious. Where were we? You said it wasn't possible to live by an idea. There's no real energy in you, neither you nor Walter! "
"You horrified me by calling me a passivist! But there are two kinds. There's a passive passivism, like Walter's and then there's the active kind! "
"What is active passivism? " Clarisse was intrigued. "A prisoner waiting for his chance to break out! " "Bah! " said Clarisse. "Excuses. "
'Well, yes," he conceded. "Maybe. "
Clarisse still held her hands clasped behind her back and stood with her legs wide apart, as though in. riding boots.
"You know what Nietzsch·e says? Wanting to know for sure is like wanting to know where the ground is for your next step, mere cow- ardice. One has to start somewhere to act on one's intentions, not just talk about it. And I've always expected you of all people to do something special someday! "
Suddenly she had taken hold of a button on his vest and started twisting it, her face lifted up to his. Instinctively he laid his hand on hers to save the button.
''I've been thinking for a long time," she went on shyly, "that the really rotten, vile things that go on happen not because someone is doing them but because we are letting them happen. They expand to fill a void! " After this coup she looked at him expectantly. Then she burst out: "Letting things happen is ten times more dangerous than doing them, don't you see? " She struggled inwardly for a more exact
formulation, but then she only added: "You know exactly what I mean, don't you? Even though you are always saying that we have to let things go their own way. But I understand what you're saying. It's occurred to me more than once that you're the Devil himself! " These wordS had slipped out of Clarisse's mouth like a lizard. They frightened her. All she had been thinking of at the outset was Wal- ter's begging her to have a child by him. Ulrich caught a flicker in her eyes; she wanted him. Her upturned face was suffused with some- thing-nothing at all lovely, something ugly but touching. Something like a violent outbreak of sweat blurring the features. But it was disembodied, purely imaginary. He felt infected by it against his will and overcome by a slight absentmindedness. He was losing his power to hold out against her craziness, and so he grabbed her hand to make her sit down on the sofa, and sat down beside her.
"Let me tell you now why I do nothing," he began, and fell silent.
Clarisse, who had become herself again the moment she felt his touch, urged him on.
"There's nothing a man can do, because . . . but I can't really ex- pect you to understand this," he began, then he extracted a cigarette and devoted himself to lighting it.
"Go on," Clarisse prompted him. "What are you trying to say? "
But he kept silent. She pushed her arm behind his back and shook him, like a boy showing how strong he can be. With her, there was no need to say anything; the mere suggestion of something out of the
"ordinary was enough to set her imagination going. "You're really evil! " she said, and tried in vain to hurt him. But at this moment they were unpleasantly interrupted by Walter's return.
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What could Ulrich have said to Clarisse anyway? ·
He had kept it to himself because she had somehow brought him
to the verge of actually saying "God. " He had been about to say, more or less: God does not really mean the world literally; it is a met- aphor, an analogy, a figure of speech that He has to resort to for some reason or other, and it never satisfies Him, of course. We are not supposed to take Him at his word, it is we ourselyes who must come up with the answer for the riddle He sets us. He wondered whether Clarisse would have agreed to regard the whole thing as a game of Cowboys and Indians or Cops and Robbers. Of course she would. Whoever took the first step, she would stick by him like a she-wolf and keep a sharp lookout.
But there was something else he had also had on the tip of his tongue, something about mathematical problems that do not admit of a general solution but do allow for particular solutions, which one could combine to come nearer to a general solution. He might have added that he regarded the problem ofhuman life as that kind o( problem. What we call an age-without specifying whether we mean. . centuries, millennia,- or the time span between schoolchild and grandparent-that broad unregulated flow of conditions would come to mean a more or less chaotic succession of unsatisfactory and, .
in themselves, false answers out of which there might emerge the right and whole solution only when mankind had learned to put all the pieces together.
On his way home in the streetcar, it all came back to ·him, but he was rather ashamed of such thoughts in the presence of the other passengers riding into town with him. One could tell by looking at them that they were on their way home from definite occupations or setting out toward definite entertainments; even just by looking at their clothes one could tell where they had come from or were going.
He studied the woman next to him; clearly a wife and mother, forty- ish, probably the wife of an academic, and she had small opera glasses on her lap. Sitting beside her, toying with those ideas, he felt like a little boy at play, and playing something slightly improper, at that.
For to think without pursuing some practical purpose is surely an improper, furtive occupation; especially those thoughts that take huge ~trides on stilts, touching experience only with tiny soles, are automatically suspect of having disreputable origins. There was a time when people talked of their thoughts taking wing; in Schiller's time such intellectual highfliers would have been widely esteemed, but in our own day such a person seems to have something the mat- ter with him, unless it happens to be his profession and source of income. There has obviously been a shift in our priorities. Certain concerns have been taken out of people's hearts. For high-flown thoughts a kind of poultry farm has been set up, called philosophy, theology, or literature, where they proliferate in their own way beyond anyone's ability to keep track of them, which is just as well, because in the face of such expansion no one need feel guilty about not bothering with them personally. With his respect for profession- alism and expertise, Ulrich was basically determined to go along with any such division oflabor. Nevertheless, he still indulged in thinking for himself, even though he was no professional philosopher, and at the moment he could see that to do otherwise was to take the road leading to the beehive state. The queen would lay her eggs, the drones would devote themselves to lust and the life of the mind, and the specialists would toil. It was quite possible to imagine the world so organized; total productivity might even go up as a result. For the present, every human being is still a microcosm of all humanity, as it were, but this has clearly become too much to bear and it no longer works, so that the humane element has become a transparent fraud. For the new division of labor to succeed, it might be necessary to arrange for at least one set ofworkers to evolve an intellectual syn- thesis. After all, without mind . . . What Ulrich meant was that it would give him nothing to look forward to. But this was of course a
prejudice. No one really knows what life depends on. He shifted in his seat and studied the reflection ofhis face in the windowpane op- posite, looking for something else to think about. But there was his
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head floating along in the fluid glass, midway between the inside and the outside, becoming remarkably compelling after a while in its in- sistence on some kind of completion.
Was there a war actually going on in the Balkans or not? Some sort of intervention was undoubtedly going on, but whether it was war was hard to tell. So much was astir in the world. There was another new record for high-altitude flight; something to be proud of. If he was not mistaken, the record now stood at 3,700 meters and the man's name was Jouhoux. A black boxer had beaten the white cham- pion; the new holder ofthe world title was Johnson. The President of France was going to Russia; there was talk of world peace being at stake. A newly discovered tenor was garnering fees in South America that had never been equaled even in North America. A terrible earthquake had devastated Japan-the poor Japanese. In short, much was happening, there was great excitement everywhere around the tum of 1913-1914. But two years or five years earlier there had also been much excitement, every day had had its sensa- tions, and yet it was hard, not to say impossible, to remember what it was that had actually happened. A possible synopsis: The new,cure for syphilis was making . . . Research into plant metabolism was mov- ing . . . The conquest of the South Pole seemed . . . Professor Stei- nach's experiments with monkey glands were arousing . . . Half the details could easily be left out without making much difference. What a strange business history was! We could safely say of this or that event that it had already . found its place in history, or certainly would find it; but whether this event had actually taken place was not so sure! Because for anything to happen, it has to happen at a certain date and not at some other date or even not at all; also, the thing itself has to happen illld not by chance something merely approximating it or something related. But this is precisely what no one can· say of history, unless he happens to have written it down at the time, as the newspapers do, or it's a matter of one's professional or financial af- fairs, since it is of course important to know how many years one has to go till retirement or when one will come into a certain sum of money or when one will have spent it, and in such a context even wars can become memorable occurrences.
Examined close up, our history looks rather vague and messy, like a morass only partially made safe for pedestrian·traffic, though oddly enough in the end
there does seem to be a path across it, that very "path of history" of which nobody knows the starting ·point. This business of serving as "the stuffofhistory" infuriated Ulrich. The luminous, swaying box in which he was riding seemed to be a machine in which several hun- dred kilos of people were being rattled around, by way of being pro- cessed into "the future. " A hundred years earlier they had sat in a mail coach with the same look on their faces, and a hundred years hence, whatever was going on, they would be sitting as new people in exactly the same way in their updated transport machines-he was revolted by this lethargic acceptance of changes and conditions, this helpless contemporaneity, this mindlessly submissive, truly demean- ing stringing along with the centuries, just as if he were suddenly rebelling against the hat, curious enough in shape, that was sitting on his head.
Instinctively he got to his feet and made the rest of his way on foot. In the more generous human confines of the city, in which he now found himself, his uneasiness gave way to good humor again. What a crazy notion of little Clarisse's, to want a year of the mind. He con- centrated his attention on this point. What made it so senseless? One might just as well ask why Diotima's patriotic campaign was senseless.
Answer Number One: Because world history undoubtedly comes into being like all the other stories. Authors can never think of any- thing new, and they all copy from each other. This is why ail politi- cians study history instead of biology or whatever. So much for authors.
Answer Number Two: For the most part, however, history is made without authors. It evolves not from some inner center but from the periphery. Set in motion by trifling causes. It probably doesn't take nearly as much as one would think to tum Gothic man or the ancient Greek into modem civilized man. Human nature is as capable of cannibalism as it is of the Critique ofPure Reason; the same convic- tions and qualities will serve to tum out either one, depending on circumstances, and very great external differences in the results cor- respond to very slight internal ones.
Digression One:. Ulrich recalled a similar experience dating from his army days. The squadron rides in double file, and "Passing on orders" is the drill; each man in tum whispers the given order to the
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next man. So ifthe order given up front is: "Sergeant major move·to the head of the column," it comes out the other end as "Eight troop- ers to be shot at orice," or something like that. And this is just how world history is made.
Answer Number Three: If, therefore, we were to transplant a gen- eration of present-day Europeans at a tender age into the Egypt of 5000 B. C. , world history would begin afresh in. the year 5000 B. C. , repeat itself for a while, and then, for reasons nobody could fathom, gradually begin to deviate from its established course.
Digression Two: The law of world history-it now occurred to him-was none other than the fundamental principle of government in old Kakania: "muddling through. " Kakania was an incredibly clever state.
Digression Three or Answer Number Four: The course of history was therefore not that of a billiard ball-which, once it is hit, takes a definite line-but resembles the movement of clouds, or the path of a man sauntering through the streets, turned aside by a shadow here, a crowd there, an unusual architectural outcrop, until at last he ar- rives at a place he never knew or meant to go to. Inherent in the course of history is a certain going off course. The present is always like the last house of a town, which somehow no longer counts as a house in town. Each generation wonders "Who am I, and what were my forebears? " It would make more sense to ask ''Where am I? " and to assume that one's predecessors were not different in kind but merely in a different place; that would be a move in the right direc- tion, he thought.
He had been numbering his own answers and digressions as he went along, while glancing now into some passing face, now into a shop window, to keep his thoughts from running away with him en- tirely, but had nevertheless gone slightly astray and had to stop for a moment to see where he was and find the best way home. Before taking this route, he tried once more to get his question straight in his mind. Crazy little Clarisse was quite right in saying that we should make history, make it up, even though he had argued against it with her. But why didn't we?
All that occurred to him in answer at the moment was Director Fischel of lloyd's Bank, his friend Leo Fischel, with whom years ago he had sometimes sat outside a cafe in the summer. For if Ulrich had
been talking to Fischel instead of to himself, Fischel would typically have said: "I should only have your worries! " Ulrich appreciated this refreshing answer Fischel would have given. "My dear Fischel," he immediately replied in his mind, "it's not that simple. When I say history, I mean, ifyou recall, our life. And I did admit from the start that it's in very bad taste for me to ask: Why don't people create his- tory-that is, why do they attack history like so many beasts only when they are wounded, when their shirttails are on fire, in short, only in an emergency? So why is this question in such bad taste? What do \'Ve have against it, when all it means is that people shouldn't let their lives drift as they do? ""'
"Everybody knows the answer," Director Fischel would retort. "We're lucky when the politicians and the clergy and the big shots with nothing to do, and everybody else who runs around with all the answers, keep their hands off our daily lives. Besides which, we're a civilized people. I f only so many people nowadays weren't so uncivi- lized! " And of course Director Fischel was right. A man is lucky if he knows his way around stocks and bonds, and other people refrain from dabbling so much in history just because they think they know how it works. We couldn't live without ideas, God forbid, but we have to aim at a certain equilibrium among them, a balance ofpower, an armed truce of ideas, so that none of the contending parties can get too much done. Fischel's sedative was civilization. It was the fun- damental sentiment of civilization, in fact. And yet there is also the contrary sentiment, asserting itself more and more, that the times of heroic-political history, made by chance and its champions, have become largely obsolete and must be replaced by a planned solu- tion to all problems, a solution in which all those concerned must participate.
At this point the Ulrich Year came to an end with Ulrich's arrival on his own doorstep.
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ASSERTION THA T ORDINARY LIFE, TOO, IS UTOPIAN
At home he found the usual stack of mail fmwarded from Count Leinsdorf's. An industrialist was offering an outsize cash award for the best results in the military trainirlg of young civilians. The arch- bishopric opposed the founding ofa great orphanage, on the grounds that it had to be on guard against creeping interdenominationalism. The Committee on Public Worship and Education reported on the progress of the defmitive suggestion, tentatively announced, to erect a great Emperor of Peace and Austrian Peoples Monument near the Imperial Residence; after consultation with the Imperial and Royal Office for Public Worship and Education, and after sounding out the leading art, engineering, and architectural associations, the Commit- tee had found the differences of opinion such that it saw itself con- strained-without prejudice to eventual future requirements and subject to the Central Executive Committee's. consent-to announce a competition for the best plan for a competition with regard to such an eventual monument. The Chamberlain's Office, having taken due cognizance of the proposals submitted three weeks earlier, was re- turning them to the Central Executive Committee with regrets that no decision thereon by His Most Gracious Majesty could be passed on at this time, but that it was in any case desirable for the time being to let public opinion continue to crystallize on these as well as other points. The Imperial and Royal Office for Public Worship and Edu- cation stated in response to the Committee's communication ref. no. so-and-so that it was not in a position to favor any special action in support ofthe Oehl Shorthand Association. The Block Letter Society for Mental Health announced its foundation and applied for a grant.
And so it went. Ulrich pushed aside this packet of "realities" and brooded on it for a while. Suddenly he got to his feet, called for his hat and coat, left word that he would be back in an hour or so, phoned for a cab, and returned to Clarisse.
Darkness had fallen. A little light fell onto the road from only one window of her house; footprints in the snow had frozen, making holes to stumble over; the outer door was locked and the visitor un- expected, so that' his shouts, knocking, and hand clapping went un- heard for the longest time. When at last Ulrich was back inside, it did not seem to be the same room he had left such a short time ago but seemed another world, surprised to see him, with a table laid for a simple private meal for two, every chair occupied by something that had settled down on it, and walls that offered the intruder a certain resistance.
Clarisse was wearing a plain woolen bathrobe and laughing. Wal- ter, who had let the latecomer in, blinked his eyes and slipped the huge house key into a table drawer. Without beating about the bush, Ulrich said, ''I'm back because I owe Clarisse an answer. " Then he resumed talking at the point where Walter's arrival had interrupted their conversation. After a while, the room, the house, and all sense oftime had vanished, and the conversation ~ hanging somewhere up in the blue of space, in the net of the starS.
Ulrich presented them with his scheme for living the history of ideas instead of the history of the world. The difference, he said to begin with, would have less to do with what was happening than with the interpretation one gave it, with the purpose it was meant to serve, with the system of which the individual events were a part. The pre- vailing system was that of reality, and it was just like a bad play. It's not for nothing that we speak of a "theater of world events"-the same roles, complications, and plots keep turning up in life. People make love because there is love to be made, and the)' do it in the prevailing mode; people are proud as the Noble Savage, or as a Span- iard, a virgin, or a lion; in ninety out of a hundred cases even murder is committed only because it is perceived as tragic or grandiose. Apart from the truly notable exceptions, the successful political molders of the world in particular have a lot in common with the hacks who write for the commercial theater; the lively scenes they create bore us by their lack of ideas and novelty, but by the same token they lull us into that sleepy state oflowered resistance in which
we acquiesce in everything put before us. Seen in this light, history arises out of routine ideas, out of indifference to ideas, ·SO that reality comes primarily of nothing being done for ideas. This might be
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briefly summed up, he claimed, by saying that we care too little about what is happening and too much about to whom, when, and where it is happening, so that it is not the essence of what happens that matters to us but only the plot; not the opening up of some new experience oflife but only the pattern ofwhat we already lmow, cor- responding precisely to the difference between good plays and merely successful plays. Which means that we must do the opposite of what we do, and first of all give up being possessive about our ex- periences. We should look upon our experiences less as something personal and real and more as something general and abstract, or with the detachment with which we look at a painting or listen to a song. They should not be turned in upon ourselves but upward and outward. And if this was true on the personal plane, something more
would have to be done on the collective plane, something that Ulrich could not quite pin down and that he called a pressing of the grapes, cellaring the wine, concentrating the spiritual juices, and without all of which the individual could not feel other than helpless, of course, abandoned to his own resources. As he talked on in this vein, he re- membered the moment when he had told Diotima that reality ought to be done away with.
Almost as a matter of course, Walter began by declaring all this to be an obvious commonplace. As if the whole world, literature, art, science, religion, were. not already a "pressing and cellaring" in any easel As ifany literate person denied the value ofideas or failed to pay homage to the spirit, to beauty and goodness! As if education were anything other than an initiation into the world ofthe human spirit!
Ulrich clarified his position by suggesting that education was merely an initiation into the contemporary and prevalent modes and manners, which are random creations, so that those who seek to ac- quire a mind oftheir own must first ofall realize that they have none as yet. An entirely open mind, poetically creative and morally experi- mental on a grand scale, was what he called it.
Now Walter said that Ulrich was being impossible. ''You paint a charming picture," he said, "as though we had any choice . between living our ideas or living our lives. But you may remember the lines
I am no syllogism nor afiction-
! am a man, with all his contradtcttonl
Why not go a step further? Why not demand that we get rid of the belly to make space for the mind? But I say to you: A man is made of common clay! That we stretch out an arm and draw it back again, that we have to decide whether to tum right or left, that we are made of habits, prejudices, and earth, and nevertheless make our way as best we can-that is what makes us fully human. What you are say- ing, tested even slightly against reality, shows it up as being, at best, mere literature. "
"Ifyou will let me include all the other arts under that heading too," Ulrich conceded, "all the teachings on how to live, the reli- gions, and so on, then I do mean something like that: namely, that our existence should consist wholly of literature. "
"Really? You call the Savior's mercy or the life of Napoleon litera- ture? " Walter exclaimed. But then he had a better idea, and he turned -to his friend with all the aplomb of the man holding trumps and said: "You are the kind of man who regards can'ned vegetables as the raison d'etre of fresh greens. "
"You're absolutely right. And you could also say that I am one of those who will only cook with salt," Ulrich coolly admitted. He was tired of talking about it.
At this point Clarisse joined in, turning to Walter:
"Why do you contradict him? Aren't you the one who always says, whenever something special happens: Here is something we should be able to put on the stage, for everyone to see. and understand? " And turning to Ulrich in agreement, she said: "What we really ought to do is sing! We ought to sing ourselves! "
She had stood up and entered the little circle formed by the chairs. She held herself with a certain awkwardness, as though about to demonstrate her idea by going into a dance. Ulrich, who found such displays of naked emotion distasteful, remembered at this point that most people or, bluntly speaking, the average sort, whose minds are stimulated without their being able to create, long to act out their own selves. These are ofcourse the same people who are so likely to find, going on inside them, something "unutterable"-truly a word that says it all for them and that is the clouded screen upon which whatever they say appears vaguely magnified, so that they can never tell its real value. To put a stop to this, he said: "This was not what I meant, but Clarisse is right; the theater proves that intense personal
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feelings may serve an impersonal purpose, a complex of meaning and metaphor that makes them more or less transcend the merely personal. "
"I know exactly what Ulrich means," Clarisse chimed in again. "I can't remember ever getting a special pleasure out of something be- cause it was happeni,ng to me. It was happening, that was the thing! Uke music, for instance," she s! rld, turning to her husband. "You don't want to own it; the joy ofit is that it's there! We absorb our experiences and expand them into something beyond ourselves in a single movement; we seek to realize ourselves, yes, but not the way a shopkeeper realizes a profit! "
Walter clutched his head, but for Clarisse's sake he switched to another argument. He did his best to make his words come with the force of a steady, cold jet. "If you value an experience only to the degree that it generates spiritual energy," he said to Ulrich, "then let me ask you this: Doesn't that presuppose a life that has no other aim than to produce spiritual energy and power? "
"It is the life that all existing societies claim as their goal," Ulrich replied.
"In such a world the people would presumably lead their lives under the influence of great passions and ideas, philosophies and novels," Walter continued. "Let me take it a step further: Would they live . so as to make great philosophy and poetry possible, or would their lives be philosophy and poetry in the flesh, as it were? I'm sure I know which you mean, since the first case would be exactly what we mean by a civilization in the first place. But ifyou mean the second, aren't you overlooking the fact that such a life-as--art, or whatever you'd call it, unimaginable as it is to begin with, would make philosophy and art quite superfluous; it means one thing only, the end of art! " He flashed this trump card for Clarisse's benefit.
It took the trick. Even Ulrich needed a while to marshal his forces. Then he laughed and said: "Don't you know that every perfect life would be the end of art? It seems to me that you yourself are on the way to perfecting your life at the expense ofyour art. "
He had intended no sarcasm, but Clarisse pricked up her ears.
Ulrich went on: "Every great book breathes this spirit of love for the fate of individuals at odds with the forms the community tries to impose on them. It leads to decisions that cannot be decided; there is
nothing to be done but to give a true account of their lives. Extract the meaning out of all literature, and what you will get is a denial, however incomplete, but nonetheless an endless series of individual examples all based on experience, which refute all the accepted rules, principles, and prescriptions underpinning the very society that loves these works of art! In the end, a poem, with its mystery, cuts through to the point where the meaning of the world is tied to thousands ofwords in constant use, severs all these strings, and turns it into a balloon floating offinto space. Ifthis is what we call beauty, as we usually do, then beauty is 'an indescribably more ruthless and cruel upheaval than any political revolution ever was. "
Walter had turned pale to the lips. He hated this view of art as a negation of life, of art against life. He regarded it as offensively bohe- mian, the dregs of an outdated impulse to shock the conventional mind. He caught the irony of the self-evident fact that in a perfect world there would be no more beauty because it would be superflu- ous, but he did not hear his friend's unspoken question. For Ulrich was aware of having oversimplified his case. He could just as easily have said the opposite, that ·art is subversive because art is love; it beautifies its object by loving it, and there may be no other way in this world to beautify a thing or a creature than by loving it. And it is only because even our love consists of mere fragments that beauty works by intensification and contrast. And it is only in the sea of love that the concept of perfection, beyond all intensification, fuses with the concept of beauty, which depends on intensification. Once again Ulrich's thoughts had brushed against "the realm," and he stopped short, annoyed with himself. Walter had meanwhile pulled himself together, and after having rejected his friend's suggestion that peo- ple should live more or less as they read, as a commonplace idea as well as an impossible one, he proceeded to prove it evil and vulgar too.
"If a man," he began in the same artfully controlled fashion as before, "were to live his life as you suggest, he would have to ac- cept-not to mention other impossible implications-everything that gave him a good idea, in fact everything even capable of doing so. This would of course mean universal decadence, but since you don't mind that side of it, presumably-unless you are thinking of those vague general arrangements about which you haven't gone into
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detail-let me ask you only about the personal consequences. It seems to me that such a man is bound to be, in every case in which he doesn't happen to be the poet of his own life, worse off than an ani- mal; if he couldn't come up with an idea, then he couldn't come to any decision either, so that for a great part of his life he wot,Ud simply be at the mercy ofall his impulses, moods, the usual banal passions- in short, at the mercy of all the most impersonal elements of which a man consists, and for as long as the channel leading upward re- mained blocked, he would have to let himself be the toy of every- thing that came into his head! " ·
"Then he would have to refuse to do anything," Clarisse answered in Ulrich's stead. "This is the active passivism ofwhich a person must be capable in some circum~tances. "
Walter could not make himselflook at her. Her capacity for refusal was, after all, a major factor in their life together; Clarisse, looking like a little angel in the long nightgown that covered her feet, had stood on her bed declaiming Nietzschean sentiments, with her teeth flashing: "I toss my question like a plumb line into your soul! You want a child and marriage, but I ask you: Are you the man to have a child? Are you the victorious' master of his own powers? Or is it merely the voice oftlle animal in you, the slave ofnature, speaking? " In the twilight of the bedroom this had made a rather gruesome spectacle, while Walter had tried in vain to coax her back down under the bedclothes. And now here she was, armed for the future with a new slogan: active passivism, ofwhich a person had to be capa- ble ifneed be-a phrase that clearly smacked ofa man without quali- ties. Had she been confiding in Ulrich? Was he encouraging her in her eccentricities? These questions were writhing like worms in Wal- ter's heart, so that he almost felt sick to his stomach. His face turned ashen and all the tension went out of it, leaving it a mass of helpless wrinkles.
Ulrich saw this and asked him warmly if anything was wrong?
With an effort, Walter said no and brightly smiling, invited Ulrich to go on with his nonsense.
"Oh well," Ulrich conceded, "you're not so wrong there. But in a spirit of good sportsmanship we often tolerate actions that are harm- ful to ourselves, ifour opponent performs them in an attractive way;
the quality ofthe performance somehow contends with the quality of \
the damage done. Very often, too, we have an idea that takes us a step farther along, but all too soon habit, inertia, selfish promptings, and so on take its place, because that's the way things go. So I may have been describing a condition that can never be carried to its proper conclusion, but there's no denying that it is wholly the condi- tion of the world in which we live. ,
Walter had regained his equanimity. "Ifyou tum the truth upside down, you can always say something that is just as true as it is topsy- turvy," he said gently, without disguising his reluctance for any fur- ther argument. "It's just like you to call something impossible but real. "
Clarisse, however, was rubbing her nose hard. "And yet it seems very important to me," she said, "that there's something impossible in every one of us. It explains so many things. While I was listening to you both, it seemed to me that ifwe could be cut open our entire life might look like a ring, just something that goes around something. " She had already, earlier on, pulled off her wedding ring, and now she peered through it at the lamplit wall. "There's nothing inside, and yet it looks as 'though that were precisely what matters most. Ulrich can't be expected to express this perfectly the flrst time he tries. "
And so this discussion ended after all, sad to say, with Walter get- ting hurt once again.
ss
· GENERAL STUMM TRIES TO BRING SOME ORDER INTO THE CIVILIAN MIND
Ulrich had probably been out an hour longer than he had indicated on leaving, and was told on his return that a military gentleman had been waiting for him for quite some time. Upstairs, to his surprise, he found General Stumm, who greeted him as an old comrade in arms.
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"Do forgive me, old friend," the General called out to him in wel- come, "for barging in on you so late, but I couldn't get off duty any sooner, so I've been sitting here for a good two hours, surrounded by your books-what terrifying heaps of them you've got!
Clarisse started to answer, hesitated, and finally said: "Oh come on, you know all that yourself. . . . "
"I don't know a thing," he teased her. "But I can tell you this: You can set up a Kaiser Franz Josef Soup Kitchen, and you can meet the needs of a Society for the Protection of the House Cat, but you can- not tum great ideas into reality any more than you can do it with music. Why is that? I dmi't know. But that's how it is. "
He had finally found refuge on the little sofa behind the little table; it was a position easier to defend than the chair. In the open space in the middle of the room, on the far bank, as it were, of an illusory prolongation of the shining tabletop, Clarisse was still stand- ing and talking. Her whole slender body was involved; she actually felt everything she wanted to say with her whole body first of all, and was always needing to do something with it. Ulrich had always thought of her body as hard and boyish, but now, as it gently swayed
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on legs pressed close together, he saw Clarisse as a Javanese dancer. Suddenly it occurred to him that he would not be surprised if she fell into a trance. Or was he in a trance himself? He launched into a long speech:
"You want to organize your life around an idea," he began. "And you'd like to know how to do that. But an idea is the most paradoxical thing in the world. The flesh in the grip of an idea is like a fetish. Bonded to an idea, it becomes magical. An ordinary slap in the face, bound up with ideas of honor, or of punishment and the like, can kill a man. And yet ideas can never maintain themselves in the state in which they are most powerful; they're like the kind of substance that, exposed to the air, instantly changes into some other, more lasting, but corrupted form. You've been through this often yourself. Be- cause an idea is what you are: an idea in a particular state. You are touched by a breath of something, and it's like a note suddenly ~mergingfrom the humming ofstrings; in front ofyou there is some- thing like a mirage; out of the confusion of your soul an endless pa- rade is taking shape, with all the world's beauty looking on from the roadside. All this can be the effect of a single idea. But after a while it comes to resemble all your previous ideas, it takes its place among them, becomes part ofyour outlook and your character, your princi- ples or your moods; in the act oftaking shape it has lost its wings and its mystery. "
Clarisse answered: "Walter is jealous of you. Not on my account, I'm sure. It's because you look as though you could do what he wishes he could do. Do you see what I mean? There is something about you that cuts him down. I wish I knew how to put it. " She scrutinized him.
Their two speeches intertwined.
Walter had always been life's special pet, always held on its lap. He transformed everything that happened to him and gave it a tender vitality. Walter had always been the one whose life had been the pcher in experiences. "But having more of a life is one of the earliest and subtlest signs of mediocrity," Ulrich thought. "Seen in context, an experience loses its personal venom or sweetness. " That was how it was, more or less. Even the assertion that this was the case estab- lished a context, and one got no kiss of welcome or good-bye for it.
And despite all that, Walter was jealous of him? He was glad to hear it.
"I told him he ought to kill you," Clarisse reported.
"What? "
"Ext~rminate him! I said. Suppose you're not really all you think
you are, and suppose Walter is the better man and has no other way to gain his peace of mind: it would make sense, wouldn't it? Besides, you can always fight back. "
"No half measures for you, I see," Ulrich said, somewhat shaken.
'Well, we were only talking. How do you feel about it, by the way? Walter says it's wrong even to think such things. "
"Oh no, thinking is quite in order," he replied hesitantly, taking a good look at Clarisse. She had a peculiar charm all her own. Was it as though she were somehow standing side by side with herself? She was not quite there, yet all there, both in close proximity.
"Bah, thinking! " she cut in. Her words were addressed to the wall behind him, as though her eyes were fixed on a point somewhere between. "You're every bit as passive as Walter. " These words, too, fell somewhere midway between them, keeping their distance like an insult, yet sounding conciliatory, because of the confidential closeness they implied. ''What I say is, if you can think something, you should be able to do it too," she insisted dryly.
Then she moved off, walked to the window, and stood there with her hands clasped behind her back.
Ulrich stood up quickly, went over to her, and placed an arm around her shoulders.
"Dear little Clarisse," he said, "you're being a bit strange today, aren't you? But I must put in a good word for myself; you're notre- ally concerned with me anyway, are you? "
Clarisse was staring out the window. But now her gaze sharpened; she was focusing on something specific out there, for support. She felt as if her thoughts had strayed outside and had only just returned. This feeling of being like a room, with the sense of the door just hav- ing shut, was nothing new to her. On and off she had days, even weeks, when everything around her was brighter and lighter than usual, as though it would take hardly any effort to slip out of herself and go traipsing about the world unencumbered; then again there
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were the bad times, when she felt imprisoned, and though these times usually passed quickly, she dreaded them like a punishment, because everything closed in on her and was so sad. Just now she was aware of a lucid, sober peacefulness, and it worried her a little; she was not sure what it was she had wanted just a while ago, and this sense of leaden clarity and quiet control was often a prelude to the time of punishment. She pulled herself together with the feeling that if she could keep this conversation going with conviction, she would be back on safe ground.
"Don't say 'dear little' to me," she said, pouting, "or I might end up killing you myself. " It came out like a joke, so she felt she had made one. She stole a cautious look at him, to see how he was taking it. "Ofcourse, it was only a way of putting it, hut you must realize that I'm serious. Where were we? You said it wasn't possible to live by an idea. There's no real energy in you, neither you nor Walter! "
"You horrified me by calling me a passivist! But there are two kinds. There's a passive passivism, like Walter's and then there's the active kind! "
"What is active passivism? " Clarisse was intrigued. "A prisoner waiting for his chance to break out! " "Bah! " said Clarisse. "Excuses. "
'Well, yes," he conceded. "Maybe. "
Clarisse still held her hands clasped behind her back and stood with her legs wide apart, as though in. riding boots.
"You know what Nietzsch·e says? Wanting to know for sure is like wanting to know where the ground is for your next step, mere cow- ardice. One has to start somewhere to act on one's intentions, not just talk about it. And I've always expected you of all people to do something special someday! "
Suddenly she had taken hold of a button on his vest and started twisting it, her face lifted up to his. Instinctively he laid his hand on hers to save the button.
''I've been thinking for a long time," she went on shyly, "that the really rotten, vile things that go on happen not because someone is doing them but because we are letting them happen. They expand to fill a void! " After this coup she looked at him expectantly. Then she burst out: "Letting things happen is ten times more dangerous than doing them, don't you see? " She struggled inwardly for a more exact
formulation, but then she only added: "You know exactly what I mean, don't you? Even though you are always saying that we have to let things go their own way. But I understand what you're saying. It's occurred to me more than once that you're the Devil himself! " These wordS had slipped out of Clarisse's mouth like a lizard. They frightened her. All she had been thinking of at the outset was Wal- ter's begging her to have a child by him. Ulrich caught a flicker in her eyes; she wanted him. Her upturned face was suffused with some- thing-nothing at all lovely, something ugly but touching. Something like a violent outbreak of sweat blurring the features. But it was disembodied, purely imaginary. He felt infected by it against his will and overcome by a slight absentmindedness. He was losing his power to hold out against her craziness, and so he grabbed her hand to make her sit down on the sofa, and sat down beside her.
"Let me tell you now why I do nothing," he began, and fell silent.
Clarisse, who had become herself again the moment she felt his touch, urged him on.
"There's nothing a man can do, because . . . but I can't really ex- pect you to understand this," he began, then he extracted a cigarette and devoted himself to lighting it.
"Go on," Clarisse prompted him. "What are you trying to say? "
But he kept silent. She pushed her arm behind his back and shook him, like a boy showing how strong he can be. With her, there was no need to say anything; the mere suggestion of something out of the
"ordinary was enough to set her imagination going. "You're really evil! " she said, and tried in vain to hurt him. But at this moment they were unpleasantly interrupted by Walter's return.
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What could Ulrich have said to Clarisse anyway? ·
He had kept it to himself because she had somehow brought him
to the verge of actually saying "God. " He had been about to say, more or less: God does not really mean the world literally; it is a met- aphor, an analogy, a figure of speech that He has to resort to for some reason or other, and it never satisfies Him, of course. We are not supposed to take Him at his word, it is we ourselyes who must come up with the answer for the riddle He sets us. He wondered whether Clarisse would have agreed to regard the whole thing as a game of Cowboys and Indians or Cops and Robbers. Of course she would. Whoever took the first step, she would stick by him like a she-wolf and keep a sharp lookout.
But there was something else he had also had on the tip of his tongue, something about mathematical problems that do not admit of a general solution but do allow for particular solutions, which one could combine to come nearer to a general solution. He might have added that he regarded the problem ofhuman life as that kind o( problem. What we call an age-without specifying whether we mean. . centuries, millennia,- or the time span between schoolchild and grandparent-that broad unregulated flow of conditions would come to mean a more or less chaotic succession of unsatisfactory and, .
in themselves, false answers out of which there might emerge the right and whole solution only when mankind had learned to put all the pieces together.
On his way home in the streetcar, it all came back to ·him, but he was rather ashamed of such thoughts in the presence of the other passengers riding into town with him. One could tell by looking at them that they were on their way home from definite occupations or setting out toward definite entertainments; even just by looking at their clothes one could tell where they had come from or were going.
He studied the woman next to him; clearly a wife and mother, forty- ish, probably the wife of an academic, and she had small opera glasses on her lap. Sitting beside her, toying with those ideas, he felt like a little boy at play, and playing something slightly improper, at that.
For to think without pursuing some practical purpose is surely an improper, furtive occupation; especially those thoughts that take huge ~trides on stilts, touching experience only with tiny soles, are automatically suspect of having disreputable origins. There was a time when people talked of their thoughts taking wing; in Schiller's time such intellectual highfliers would have been widely esteemed, but in our own day such a person seems to have something the mat- ter with him, unless it happens to be his profession and source of income. There has obviously been a shift in our priorities. Certain concerns have been taken out of people's hearts. For high-flown thoughts a kind of poultry farm has been set up, called philosophy, theology, or literature, where they proliferate in their own way beyond anyone's ability to keep track of them, which is just as well, because in the face of such expansion no one need feel guilty about not bothering with them personally. With his respect for profession- alism and expertise, Ulrich was basically determined to go along with any such division oflabor. Nevertheless, he still indulged in thinking for himself, even though he was no professional philosopher, and at the moment he could see that to do otherwise was to take the road leading to the beehive state. The queen would lay her eggs, the drones would devote themselves to lust and the life of the mind, and the specialists would toil. It was quite possible to imagine the world so organized; total productivity might even go up as a result. For the present, every human being is still a microcosm of all humanity, as it were, but this has clearly become too much to bear and it no longer works, so that the humane element has become a transparent fraud. For the new division of labor to succeed, it might be necessary to arrange for at least one set ofworkers to evolve an intellectual syn- thesis. After all, without mind . . . What Ulrich meant was that it would give him nothing to look forward to. But this was of course a
prejudice. No one really knows what life depends on. He shifted in his seat and studied the reflection ofhis face in the windowpane op- posite, looking for something else to think about. But there was his
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head floating along in the fluid glass, midway between the inside and the outside, becoming remarkably compelling after a while in its in- sistence on some kind of completion.
Was there a war actually going on in the Balkans or not? Some sort of intervention was undoubtedly going on, but whether it was war was hard to tell. So much was astir in the world. There was another new record for high-altitude flight; something to be proud of. If he was not mistaken, the record now stood at 3,700 meters and the man's name was Jouhoux. A black boxer had beaten the white cham- pion; the new holder ofthe world title was Johnson. The President of France was going to Russia; there was talk of world peace being at stake. A newly discovered tenor was garnering fees in South America that had never been equaled even in North America. A terrible earthquake had devastated Japan-the poor Japanese. In short, much was happening, there was great excitement everywhere around the tum of 1913-1914. But two years or five years earlier there had also been much excitement, every day had had its sensa- tions, and yet it was hard, not to say impossible, to remember what it was that had actually happened. A possible synopsis: The new,cure for syphilis was making . . . Research into plant metabolism was mov- ing . . . The conquest of the South Pole seemed . . . Professor Stei- nach's experiments with monkey glands were arousing . . . Half the details could easily be left out without making much difference. What a strange business history was! We could safely say of this or that event that it had already . found its place in history, or certainly would find it; but whether this event had actually taken place was not so sure! Because for anything to happen, it has to happen at a certain date and not at some other date or even not at all; also, the thing itself has to happen illld not by chance something merely approximating it or something related. But this is precisely what no one can· say of history, unless he happens to have written it down at the time, as the newspapers do, or it's a matter of one's professional or financial af- fairs, since it is of course important to know how many years one has to go till retirement or when one will come into a certain sum of money or when one will have spent it, and in such a context even wars can become memorable occurrences.
Examined close up, our history looks rather vague and messy, like a morass only partially made safe for pedestrian·traffic, though oddly enough in the end
there does seem to be a path across it, that very "path of history" of which nobody knows the starting ·point. This business of serving as "the stuffofhistory" infuriated Ulrich. The luminous, swaying box in which he was riding seemed to be a machine in which several hun- dred kilos of people were being rattled around, by way of being pro- cessed into "the future. " A hundred years earlier they had sat in a mail coach with the same look on their faces, and a hundred years hence, whatever was going on, they would be sitting as new people in exactly the same way in their updated transport machines-he was revolted by this lethargic acceptance of changes and conditions, this helpless contemporaneity, this mindlessly submissive, truly demean- ing stringing along with the centuries, just as if he were suddenly rebelling against the hat, curious enough in shape, that was sitting on his head.
Instinctively he got to his feet and made the rest of his way on foot. In the more generous human confines of the city, in which he now found himself, his uneasiness gave way to good humor again. What a crazy notion of little Clarisse's, to want a year of the mind. He con- centrated his attention on this point. What made it so senseless? One might just as well ask why Diotima's patriotic campaign was senseless.
Answer Number One: Because world history undoubtedly comes into being like all the other stories. Authors can never think of any- thing new, and they all copy from each other. This is why ail politi- cians study history instead of biology or whatever. So much for authors.
Answer Number Two: For the most part, however, history is made without authors. It evolves not from some inner center but from the periphery. Set in motion by trifling causes. It probably doesn't take nearly as much as one would think to tum Gothic man or the ancient Greek into modem civilized man. Human nature is as capable of cannibalism as it is of the Critique ofPure Reason; the same convic- tions and qualities will serve to tum out either one, depending on circumstances, and very great external differences in the results cor- respond to very slight internal ones.
Digression One:. Ulrich recalled a similar experience dating from his army days. The squadron rides in double file, and "Passing on orders" is the drill; each man in tum whispers the given order to the
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next man. So ifthe order given up front is: "Sergeant major move·to the head of the column," it comes out the other end as "Eight troop- ers to be shot at orice," or something like that. And this is just how world history is made.
Answer Number Three: If, therefore, we were to transplant a gen- eration of present-day Europeans at a tender age into the Egypt of 5000 B. C. , world history would begin afresh in. the year 5000 B. C. , repeat itself for a while, and then, for reasons nobody could fathom, gradually begin to deviate from its established course.
Digression Two: The law of world history-it now occurred to him-was none other than the fundamental principle of government in old Kakania: "muddling through. " Kakania was an incredibly clever state.
Digression Three or Answer Number Four: The course of history was therefore not that of a billiard ball-which, once it is hit, takes a definite line-but resembles the movement of clouds, or the path of a man sauntering through the streets, turned aside by a shadow here, a crowd there, an unusual architectural outcrop, until at last he ar- rives at a place he never knew or meant to go to. Inherent in the course of history is a certain going off course. The present is always like the last house of a town, which somehow no longer counts as a house in town. Each generation wonders "Who am I, and what were my forebears? " It would make more sense to ask ''Where am I? " and to assume that one's predecessors were not different in kind but merely in a different place; that would be a move in the right direc- tion, he thought.
He had been numbering his own answers and digressions as he went along, while glancing now into some passing face, now into a shop window, to keep his thoughts from running away with him en- tirely, but had nevertheless gone slightly astray and had to stop for a moment to see where he was and find the best way home. Before taking this route, he tried once more to get his question straight in his mind. Crazy little Clarisse was quite right in saying that we should make history, make it up, even though he had argued against it with her. But why didn't we?
All that occurred to him in answer at the moment was Director Fischel of lloyd's Bank, his friend Leo Fischel, with whom years ago he had sometimes sat outside a cafe in the summer. For if Ulrich had
been talking to Fischel instead of to himself, Fischel would typically have said: "I should only have your worries! " Ulrich appreciated this refreshing answer Fischel would have given. "My dear Fischel," he immediately replied in his mind, "it's not that simple. When I say history, I mean, ifyou recall, our life. And I did admit from the start that it's in very bad taste for me to ask: Why don't people create his- tory-that is, why do they attack history like so many beasts only when they are wounded, when their shirttails are on fire, in short, only in an emergency? So why is this question in such bad taste? What do \'Ve have against it, when all it means is that people shouldn't let their lives drift as they do? ""'
"Everybody knows the answer," Director Fischel would retort. "We're lucky when the politicians and the clergy and the big shots with nothing to do, and everybody else who runs around with all the answers, keep their hands off our daily lives. Besides which, we're a civilized people. I f only so many people nowadays weren't so uncivi- lized! " And of course Director Fischel was right. A man is lucky if he knows his way around stocks and bonds, and other people refrain from dabbling so much in history just because they think they know how it works. We couldn't live without ideas, God forbid, but we have to aim at a certain equilibrium among them, a balance ofpower, an armed truce of ideas, so that none of the contending parties can get too much done. Fischel's sedative was civilization. It was the fun- damental sentiment of civilization, in fact. And yet there is also the contrary sentiment, asserting itself more and more, that the times of heroic-political history, made by chance and its champions, have become largely obsolete and must be replaced by a planned solu- tion to all problems, a solution in which all those concerned must participate.
At this point the Ulrich Year came to an end with Ulrich's arrival on his own doorstep.
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At home he found the usual stack of mail fmwarded from Count Leinsdorf's. An industrialist was offering an outsize cash award for the best results in the military trainirlg of young civilians. The arch- bishopric opposed the founding ofa great orphanage, on the grounds that it had to be on guard against creeping interdenominationalism. The Committee on Public Worship and Education reported on the progress of the defmitive suggestion, tentatively announced, to erect a great Emperor of Peace and Austrian Peoples Monument near the Imperial Residence; after consultation with the Imperial and Royal Office for Public Worship and Education, and after sounding out the leading art, engineering, and architectural associations, the Commit- tee had found the differences of opinion such that it saw itself con- strained-without prejudice to eventual future requirements and subject to the Central Executive Committee's. consent-to announce a competition for the best plan for a competition with regard to such an eventual monument. The Chamberlain's Office, having taken due cognizance of the proposals submitted three weeks earlier, was re- turning them to the Central Executive Committee with regrets that no decision thereon by His Most Gracious Majesty could be passed on at this time, but that it was in any case desirable for the time being to let public opinion continue to crystallize on these as well as other points. The Imperial and Royal Office for Public Worship and Edu- cation stated in response to the Committee's communication ref. no. so-and-so that it was not in a position to favor any special action in support ofthe Oehl Shorthand Association. The Block Letter Society for Mental Health announced its foundation and applied for a grant.
And so it went. Ulrich pushed aside this packet of "realities" and brooded on it for a while. Suddenly he got to his feet, called for his hat and coat, left word that he would be back in an hour or so, phoned for a cab, and returned to Clarisse.
Darkness had fallen. A little light fell onto the road from only one window of her house; footprints in the snow had frozen, making holes to stumble over; the outer door was locked and the visitor un- expected, so that' his shouts, knocking, and hand clapping went un- heard for the longest time. When at last Ulrich was back inside, it did not seem to be the same room he had left such a short time ago but seemed another world, surprised to see him, with a table laid for a simple private meal for two, every chair occupied by something that had settled down on it, and walls that offered the intruder a certain resistance.
Clarisse was wearing a plain woolen bathrobe and laughing. Wal- ter, who had let the latecomer in, blinked his eyes and slipped the huge house key into a table drawer. Without beating about the bush, Ulrich said, ''I'm back because I owe Clarisse an answer. " Then he resumed talking at the point where Walter's arrival had interrupted their conversation. After a while, the room, the house, and all sense oftime had vanished, and the conversation ~ hanging somewhere up in the blue of space, in the net of the starS.
Ulrich presented them with his scheme for living the history of ideas instead of the history of the world. The difference, he said to begin with, would have less to do with what was happening than with the interpretation one gave it, with the purpose it was meant to serve, with the system of which the individual events were a part. The pre- vailing system was that of reality, and it was just like a bad play. It's not for nothing that we speak of a "theater of world events"-the same roles, complications, and plots keep turning up in life. People make love because there is love to be made, and the)' do it in the prevailing mode; people are proud as the Noble Savage, or as a Span- iard, a virgin, or a lion; in ninety out of a hundred cases even murder is committed only because it is perceived as tragic or grandiose. Apart from the truly notable exceptions, the successful political molders of the world in particular have a lot in common with the hacks who write for the commercial theater; the lively scenes they create bore us by their lack of ideas and novelty, but by the same token they lull us into that sleepy state oflowered resistance in which
we acquiesce in everything put before us. Seen in this light, history arises out of routine ideas, out of indifference to ideas, ·SO that reality comes primarily of nothing being done for ideas. This might be
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briefly summed up, he claimed, by saying that we care too little about what is happening and too much about to whom, when, and where it is happening, so that it is not the essence of what happens that matters to us but only the plot; not the opening up of some new experience oflife but only the pattern ofwhat we already lmow, cor- responding precisely to the difference between good plays and merely successful plays. Which means that we must do the opposite of what we do, and first of all give up being possessive about our ex- periences. We should look upon our experiences less as something personal and real and more as something general and abstract, or with the detachment with which we look at a painting or listen to a song. They should not be turned in upon ourselves but upward and outward. And if this was true on the personal plane, something more
would have to be done on the collective plane, something that Ulrich could not quite pin down and that he called a pressing of the grapes, cellaring the wine, concentrating the spiritual juices, and without all of which the individual could not feel other than helpless, of course, abandoned to his own resources. As he talked on in this vein, he re- membered the moment when he had told Diotima that reality ought to be done away with.
Almost as a matter of course, Walter began by declaring all this to be an obvious commonplace. As if the whole world, literature, art, science, religion, were. not already a "pressing and cellaring" in any easel As ifany literate person denied the value ofideas or failed to pay homage to the spirit, to beauty and goodness! As if education were anything other than an initiation into the world ofthe human spirit!
Ulrich clarified his position by suggesting that education was merely an initiation into the contemporary and prevalent modes and manners, which are random creations, so that those who seek to ac- quire a mind oftheir own must first ofall realize that they have none as yet. An entirely open mind, poetically creative and morally experi- mental on a grand scale, was what he called it.
Now Walter said that Ulrich was being impossible. ''You paint a charming picture," he said, "as though we had any choice . between living our ideas or living our lives. But you may remember the lines
I am no syllogism nor afiction-
! am a man, with all his contradtcttonl
Why not go a step further? Why not demand that we get rid of the belly to make space for the mind? But I say to you: A man is made of common clay! That we stretch out an arm and draw it back again, that we have to decide whether to tum right or left, that we are made of habits, prejudices, and earth, and nevertheless make our way as best we can-that is what makes us fully human. What you are say- ing, tested even slightly against reality, shows it up as being, at best, mere literature. "
"Ifyou will let me include all the other arts under that heading too," Ulrich conceded, "all the teachings on how to live, the reli- gions, and so on, then I do mean something like that: namely, that our existence should consist wholly of literature. "
"Really? You call the Savior's mercy or the life of Napoleon litera- ture? " Walter exclaimed. But then he had a better idea, and he turned -to his friend with all the aplomb of the man holding trumps and said: "You are the kind of man who regards can'ned vegetables as the raison d'etre of fresh greens. "
"You're absolutely right. And you could also say that I am one of those who will only cook with salt," Ulrich coolly admitted. He was tired of talking about it.
At this point Clarisse joined in, turning to Walter:
"Why do you contradict him? Aren't you the one who always says, whenever something special happens: Here is something we should be able to put on the stage, for everyone to see. and understand? " And turning to Ulrich in agreement, she said: "What we really ought to do is sing! We ought to sing ourselves! "
She had stood up and entered the little circle formed by the chairs. She held herself with a certain awkwardness, as though about to demonstrate her idea by going into a dance. Ulrich, who found such displays of naked emotion distasteful, remembered at this point that most people or, bluntly speaking, the average sort, whose minds are stimulated without their being able to create, long to act out their own selves. These are ofcourse the same people who are so likely to find, going on inside them, something "unutterable"-truly a word that says it all for them and that is the clouded screen upon which whatever they say appears vaguely magnified, so that they can never tell its real value. To put a stop to this, he said: "This was not what I meant, but Clarisse is right; the theater proves that intense personal
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feelings may serve an impersonal purpose, a complex of meaning and metaphor that makes them more or less transcend the merely personal. "
"I know exactly what Ulrich means," Clarisse chimed in again. "I can't remember ever getting a special pleasure out of something be- cause it was happeni,ng to me. It was happening, that was the thing! Uke music, for instance," she s! rld, turning to her husband. "You don't want to own it; the joy ofit is that it's there! We absorb our experiences and expand them into something beyond ourselves in a single movement; we seek to realize ourselves, yes, but not the way a shopkeeper realizes a profit! "
Walter clutched his head, but for Clarisse's sake he switched to another argument. He did his best to make his words come with the force of a steady, cold jet. "If you value an experience only to the degree that it generates spiritual energy," he said to Ulrich, "then let me ask you this: Doesn't that presuppose a life that has no other aim than to produce spiritual energy and power? "
"It is the life that all existing societies claim as their goal," Ulrich replied.
"In such a world the people would presumably lead their lives under the influence of great passions and ideas, philosophies and novels," Walter continued. "Let me take it a step further: Would they live . so as to make great philosophy and poetry possible, or would their lives be philosophy and poetry in the flesh, as it were? I'm sure I know which you mean, since the first case would be exactly what we mean by a civilization in the first place. But ifyou mean the second, aren't you overlooking the fact that such a life-as--art, or whatever you'd call it, unimaginable as it is to begin with, would make philosophy and art quite superfluous; it means one thing only, the end of art! " He flashed this trump card for Clarisse's benefit.
It took the trick. Even Ulrich needed a while to marshal his forces. Then he laughed and said: "Don't you know that every perfect life would be the end of art? It seems to me that you yourself are on the way to perfecting your life at the expense ofyour art. "
He had intended no sarcasm, but Clarisse pricked up her ears.
Ulrich went on: "Every great book breathes this spirit of love for the fate of individuals at odds with the forms the community tries to impose on them. It leads to decisions that cannot be decided; there is
nothing to be done but to give a true account of their lives. Extract the meaning out of all literature, and what you will get is a denial, however incomplete, but nonetheless an endless series of individual examples all based on experience, which refute all the accepted rules, principles, and prescriptions underpinning the very society that loves these works of art! In the end, a poem, with its mystery, cuts through to the point where the meaning of the world is tied to thousands ofwords in constant use, severs all these strings, and turns it into a balloon floating offinto space. Ifthis is what we call beauty, as we usually do, then beauty is 'an indescribably more ruthless and cruel upheaval than any political revolution ever was. "
Walter had turned pale to the lips. He hated this view of art as a negation of life, of art against life. He regarded it as offensively bohe- mian, the dregs of an outdated impulse to shock the conventional mind. He caught the irony of the self-evident fact that in a perfect world there would be no more beauty because it would be superflu- ous, but he did not hear his friend's unspoken question. For Ulrich was aware of having oversimplified his case. He could just as easily have said the opposite, that ·art is subversive because art is love; it beautifies its object by loving it, and there may be no other way in this world to beautify a thing or a creature than by loving it. And it is only because even our love consists of mere fragments that beauty works by intensification and contrast. And it is only in the sea of love that the concept of perfection, beyond all intensification, fuses with the concept of beauty, which depends on intensification. Once again Ulrich's thoughts had brushed against "the realm," and he stopped short, annoyed with himself. Walter had meanwhile pulled himself together, and after having rejected his friend's suggestion that peo- ple should live more or less as they read, as a commonplace idea as well as an impossible one, he proceeded to prove it evil and vulgar too.
"If a man," he began in the same artfully controlled fashion as before, "were to live his life as you suggest, he would have to ac- cept-not to mention other impossible implications-everything that gave him a good idea, in fact everything even capable of doing so. This would of course mean universal decadence, but since you don't mind that side of it, presumably-unless you are thinking of those vague general arrangements about which you haven't gone into
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detail-let me ask you only about the personal consequences. It seems to me that such a man is bound to be, in every case in which he doesn't happen to be the poet of his own life, worse off than an ani- mal; if he couldn't come up with an idea, then he couldn't come to any decision either, so that for a great part of his life he wot,Ud simply be at the mercy ofall his impulses, moods, the usual banal passions- in short, at the mercy of all the most impersonal elements of which a man consists, and for as long as the channel leading upward re- mained blocked, he would have to let himself be the toy of every- thing that came into his head! " ·
"Then he would have to refuse to do anything," Clarisse answered in Ulrich's stead. "This is the active passivism ofwhich a person must be capable in some circum~tances. "
Walter could not make himselflook at her. Her capacity for refusal was, after all, a major factor in their life together; Clarisse, looking like a little angel in the long nightgown that covered her feet, had stood on her bed declaiming Nietzschean sentiments, with her teeth flashing: "I toss my question like a plumb line into your soul! You want a child and marriage, but I ask you: Are you the man to have a child? Are you the victorious' master of his own powers? Or is it merely the voice oftlle animal in you, the slave ofnature, speaking? " In the twilight of the bedroom this had made a rather gruesome spectacle, while Walter had tried in vain to coax her back down under the bedclothes. And now here she was, armed for the future with a new slogan: active passivism, ofwhich a person had to be capa- ble ifneed be-a phrase that clearly smacked ofa man without quali- ties. Had she been confiding in Ulrich? Was he encouraging her in her eccentricities? These questions were writhing like worms in Wal- ter's heart, so that he almost felt sick to his stomach. His face turned ashen and all the tension went out of it, leaving it a mass of helpless wrinkles.
Ulrich saw this and asked him warmly if anything was wrong?
With an effort, Walter said no and brightly smiling, invited Ulrich to go on with his nonsense.
"Oh well," Ulrich conceded, "you're not so wrong there. But in a spirit of good sportsmanship we often tolerate actions that are harm- ful to ourselves, ifour opponent performs them in an attractive way;
the quality ofthe performance somehow contends with the quality of \
the damage done. Very often, too, we have an idea that takes us a step farther along, but all too soon habit, inertia, selfish promptings, and so on take its place, because that's the way things go. So I may have been describing a condition that can never be carried to its proper conclusion, but there's no denying that it is wholly the condi- tion of the world in which we live. ,
Walter had regained his equanimity. "Ifyou tum the truth upside down, you can always say something that is just as true as it is topsy- turvy," he said gently, without disguising his reluctance for any fur- ther argument. "It's just like you to call something impossible but real. "
Clarisse, however, was rubbing her nose hard. "And yet it seems very important to me," she said, "that there's something impossible in every one of us. It explains so many things. While I was listening to you both, it seemed to me that ifwe could be cut open our entire life might look like a ring, just something that goes around something. " She had already, earlier on, pulled off her wedding ring, and now she peered through it at the lamplit wall. "There's nothing inside, and yet it looks as 'though that were precisely what matters most. Ulrich can't be expected to express this perfectly the flrst time he tries. "
And so this discussion ended after all, sad to say, with Walter get- ting hurt once again.
ss
· GENERAL STUMM TRIES TO BRING SOME ORDER INTO THE CIVILIAN MIND
Ulrich had probably been out an hour longer than he had indicated on leaving, and was told on his return that a military gentleman had been waiting for him for quite some time. Upstairs, to his surprise, he found General Stumm, who greeted him as an old comrade in arms.
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"Do forgive me, old friend," the General called out to him in wel- come, "for barging in on you so late, but I couldn't get off duty any sooner, so I've been sitting here for a good two hours, surrounded by your books-what terrifying heaps of them you've got!
