UlriCh's conflict was different; he
repressed
nothing and could not help seeing that the image ofa murderer was no stran- ger to him than any other ofthe world's pictures; what they all had in common with hl~ own old images of himself: part crystallization of meaning, part resurgence ofthe nonsense beneath.
Musil - Man Without Qualities - v1
" This twitch that ran across his face all the way to the shoulder betrayed his dissatisfaction, even while his words flowed on as programmed.
Ulrich caught the fleeting grimace, and he was so ready to be provoked by Arnheim tliat he now dropped all restraint .
against bringing everything out into the open.
They had meanwhile risen from their chairs, and Ulrich moved back a few steps to see his effect all the better as he said:
"You have asked me so many pointed questions, and now there is something I would like to know before I make my decision. . . . " When Arnheim nodded he went on in a frank and matter-of-fact tone: ''I've been told that your interest in our Parallel Campaign and everything connected with it, Frau Tuzzi and my humble self thrown in for good measure, has to do with your acquiring major portions of the Galician oil fields. "
Despite the failing light, Arnheim could be seen to have turned pale; he walked slowly up to Ulrich, who thought he had brought some rude answer upon himself and regretted his own rash blunt- ness, which had given the other man a way to break off the conversa- tion when it became inconvenient for him to go on with it. So he said, as affably as he could: "Please don't misunderstand me. I have no wish to offend you, but there is surely no point in our conversation unless we can speak our minds with brutal frankness. "
These few words and the time it took him to cover the short dis- tance enabled Arnheim to regain his composure. As he reached Ul- rich he smiled, placed his hand-actually, his arm--on Ulrich's shoulder, and said reproachfully: "How can you fall for such a typical Stock Exchange rumor? "
"It reached me not as a rumor but as information from someone who knows what he is talking about. "
"Yes, I know, I've heard that such things are being said, but how can you believe it? Ofcourse I'm not here purely for pleasure; it's too bad, but I can never get away entirely from business affairs. And I won't deny that I have talked with some people about these oil fields, though I must ask you to keep this confidential. But what has this to do with anything? "
"My cousin," Ulrich resumed, "hasn't the remotest idea of your interest in oil. She has been asked by her husband to find out what- ever she can about the reasons for your stay here, because you are regarded as a confidant of the Czar, but I am convinced that she is not doing justice to this diplomatic mission because she is so sure that she herself is the one· and only reason for your continued visit with us. "
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"H9w can you be so indelicate? " Arnheim's ann gave Ulrich's shoulder a friendly little nudge. "There are always secondaty strings to everything, everywhere, but despite your sardonic inten- tion you have just expressed yourself with the naked rudeness of a schoolboy. " ·
That ann on his shoulder made Ulrich unsure of himself. To stand there in this quasi embrace was ridiculous and unpleasant, a misera- ble feeling, in fact. Still, it was a long time since Ulrich had known a friend, and perhaps this added an element of bewilderment. He would have likedto shake offthe ann, and he instinctively tried to do so, even while Amheim, for his part, noticed these little signals of Ulrich's restiveness and did his utmost to ignore them. Ulrich, realiz- ing the awkwardness of Arnheim's position, was too polite to move away and forced himself to put up with this physical contact, which felt increasingly like a heavy weight sinking into a loosely mounded dam and breaking it apart. Without meaning to, Ulrich had built up a wall of loneliness around himself, and now life, by way of another man's pulse beat, came pouring in through the breach in that wall, and silly as it was, ridiculous, really, he felt a touch of excitement.
He thought of Gerda. He remembered how even his old friend Walter had aroused in him a. longing to find himself once more in total accord with another human being, wholly and without restraint, as if the whole wide world held no differences other than those be- tween like and dislike. Now that it was too late, this longing welled up in him again, as ifin silvery waves, as the ripples ofwater, air, and light fuse into one silvery stream down the whole width of a river. It was so entrancing that he had to force himself to be on his guard and not 'to give in, lest he cause a misunderstanding in this ambiguous situation. But as his muscles tightened he remembered Bonadea say- ing to him: "Ulrich, you're not a bad man, you merely make it hard for yourself to be good. " Bonadea, who had been so incredibly wise that evening and who had also said: . "After all, in dreams you don't think either, you simply live them. " And he had said: "I was a child, as soft as the air on a moonlit night . . . ," and he now remembered that at the time he had actually had a different image in mind: the tip of a burning magnesium flare, for in the flying sparks that tore this tip to shreds he thought he recognized his heart; but that was a long ti~e ago, and he had not quite ~red to make this comparison and
had succumbed to the other:; not in conversation with Bonadea, inci- dentally, but with Diotima, as he now recalled. All the divergences of life begin close together at their roots, he felt, looking at the man who had just now, for reasons not entirely clear, offered him his friendship. .
Amheim had withdrawn his arm. They were standing once more in the window bay where their conversation had begun; on the street below, the lamps were already giving a peaceful light, though there was still a lingering sense of the excitement of earlier in the day. From time to time clusters of people passed by in heated talk, and here and there a mouth would open to shout a threat or some waver- ing "hoo-hoo," followed l? y guffaws. One had the impression of semi- consciousness. And in the light from this restless street, between the vertical curtains framing the darkened room, he saw Arnheim's fig- ure and felt his own body standing there, half brightly lit up and half dark, a chiaroscuro sharpening the intense effect. Ulrich remem- bered the cheers for Arnheim he thought he had heard, and whether or not the man had anything to do with what had happened, in his Caesar-like calm as he stood pensively, gazing down on the street he projected himself as the dominant figure in this momentary light- painting, and he also seemed to feel the weight of his own presence in every glance cast·upon him. At Arnheim's side one understood the meaning of self-possession. Consciousness alone cannot impose order on all the world's swarm and glow, since the keener it is, the more boundless the world becomes, at least for the moment; but that consciousness ofselfthat is self-possession enters like a film director
who artfully composes a scene into an image of happiness. Ulrich envied the man his happiness. In that instant nothing seemed easier than to do him some violence, for in his need to present an image at center stage this man conjured up all the old tags of melodrama. "Draw your dagger and fulfill his destiny! " Though the words came to mind only in the ranting tone of a ham actor, Ulrich had uncon- sciously moved so that he stood halfway behind Amheim. He saw the dark, broad expanse of neck and shoulders before him. The neck in particular was a provocation. His hand groped in his right pocket for a penknife. He rose up on tiptoe and then once more looked over Arnheim's shoulder down on the street. Out there in the twilight, people were still being swept along like sand by an invisible tide pull-
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ing their bodies onward. Somethingwould ofcourse have to come of this demonstration, and so the future sent a wave ahead, some sort of suprapersonal fecundation of humanity occurred, though as always in an extremely vague and slipshod manner-or so Ulrich perceived it as it briefly held his attention, but he was tired to the point of nau- sea at the thought of stopping to analyze it all. Carefully he lowered his heels again, ashamed ofthe mental byplay that had caused him to raise them just before, though he did not attach too much impor- tance to it, and he now felt greatly tempted to tap Arnheim on the shoulder and say to him: "Thank you. I'm fed up and I would like something new in my life. I accept your offer. " .
But as he did. not really do this, either, the two men let the answer to Arnheim's proposal go by default. Arnheim reverted to an earlier part of their conversation. "Do you ever go to see a film? You should," he said. "In its present form, cinematography may not look like much, but once the big interests get involved-the electro- chemical, say, or the chromochemical concerns-you are likely to see a surging development in just a few decades, which nothing can stop. Every known means of raising and intensifying production will be brought into play, and whatever our writers and aesthetes may suppose to be their own part in it, we will be getting an art based on Associated Electrical or German Dyes, Inc. It's absolutely terrifying; you'll see. Do you write? No, I remember I've asked you that. But why don't you write? Very sensible ofyou. The poet and philosopher ofthe future will emerge out ofjournalism, in any case. Haven't you noticed that our journalists are getting better all the time, while our poets are getting steadily worse? It is unquestionably a process in accordance with the laws of nature. Something is going on, and for my part I haven't the slightest doubt what it is: the age of great in- dividuals is coming to an end. " He leaned forward. "I can't see your face in this light; I'm firing all my shots in the dark. " He gave a little laugh. "You've proposed a general stocktaking of our spiritual condi- tion: Do you believe in that? Do you really suppose that life can be regulated by the mind? Of course you don't; you've said so. But I don't believe you in any case, because you're someone who would embrace the Devil for being a man without his match in the world. "
"Where's that quotation from? "
"From the suppressed preface to The Robbers. "
Naturally from the suppressed preface, Ulrich thought. He wouldn't bother with the one read by everyone else.
" 'Minds that are drawn to the most loathsome vices for their aura of greatness . . . ' " Arnheim continued to quote from his capacious memory. He felt himselfto be the master ofthe situation once more, and that·Ulrich, for whatever reasons, had given ground; the antago- nistic edge was gone; no need to bring up that offer again; what a narrow escape! But just as a wrestler knows when his opponent is slackening off and then gives it all he's got, so he felt he needed to let the full weight of his offer sink in, and said: "I believe you under- stand me better now. Quite frankly, there are times when I am keenly aware of being alone. The new men think too much in purely business terms, and those business families in their second or third generation tend to lose their imagination. They produce nothing but impeccable administrators and army officers, and they go in for cas- tles, hunting parties, and title"d sons-in-law. I know their kind the world over, fine, intelligent individuals among them, but incapable of coming up with,a single idea concomitant with that basic state of restlessness, independence, and possibly unhappiness I referred to with my Schiller quotation just now. "
''I'm sorry I can't stay and talk more," Ulrich said. "Frau Tuzzi is probably waiting in some friend's house for things ·to quiet down out there, but I have to go now. So you suppose me capable, despite my ignorance of business, of that restlessness which is so good for busi- ness by making it so much less narrowly businesslike? " He had turned on the light in preparation for saying good-bye, and waited for an answer. With majestic cameraderie, Amheim laid hiS arm on Ul- rich's shoulder, a gesture that seemed to have proved its usefulness by now, and answered: "Do forgive me if I seem to have said rather too much, in a mood of loneliness. Business and finance are coming into power, and one sometimes asks oneself what to do with this power. I hope you won't take it amiss. "
"On the contrary," Ulrich assured him. "I mean to think your pro- posal over quite seriously. " He said it in a rush, which could be inter- preted as a sign of excitement. This left Arnheim, who was staying on to wait for Diotima, rather disconcerted and worried that it might not be too easy to fmd a face-saving way of making Ulrich forget the offer.
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GOING HOME
Ulrich decided to walk home. It was a fine night, though dark. The houses, tall and compact, formed that strange space "street," open at the top to darkness, wind, and clouds. The road was deserted, as if the earlier unrest had left everything in a deep slumber. Whenever Ulrich did encounter a pedestrian, the sound of his footsteps had preceded him independently for a long time, like some weighty an- nouncement. The night gave one a sense ofimpending events, as in a theater. One had a notion of oneself as a phenomenon in this world, something that appears bigger than it. is, that produces an echo, and, when it passes·lighted surfaces, is accompanied by its shadow like a huge spastic clown, rising to full height and the next moment creep- ing humbly to heel. How happy one can bel he thought.
He walked through a stone archway in a passage some ten paces long, running parallel td the street and separated from it by heavy buttresses; darkness leapt from comers, ambush and sudden death flickered in the dim cloister; a fierce, ancient, grim joy seized the soul. Perhaps this was too much; Ulrich suddenly imagined with what smugness and inward self-dramatization Arnheim would be walking her~ in his place. It killed the pleasure in his shadow and echo, and the spooky music in the walls faded out. He knew that he would not accept Arnheim:s ·offer, but now he merely felt like a phantom stumbling through life's gallery, dismayed at being unable to find the body it should occupy, and was thoroughly relieved when before long he passed into a district less grand and less oppressive.
Wide streets and squares opened out in the blackness, and ,the commonplace buildings, peacefully starred with lighted rows ofwin- dows, laid no further spell on him. Comi,ng into the open, he breathed this peace and remembered for no special reason some childhood photographs he had recently been looking at, pictures showing him with his mother, who had died young; from what a dis-
tance he had regarded the little boy, with the beautiful woman in an old-fashioned dress happily smiling at him. There was that overpow- ering impression of the good, affectionate, bright little boy they all felt him to be; there were hopes for him that were in no way his own; there were the vague expectations of a distinguished, promising fu- ture, like the outspread wings ofa golden net opening to enfold him. And though all this had been invisible at the time, there it was for all to see decades afterward in those old photographs, and from the midst ofthis visible invisibility that could so easily have become real- ity, there was his tender, blank baby face looking back at him with the slightly forced expression of having to hold still. He had felt n? t a trace ofwarmth for that little boy, 'and even ifhe did take some pride in his beautiful mother, he had on the whole the impressi6n of hav- ing narrowly escaped a great horror.
Anyone who has had the experience of seeing some earlier incar- n a t i o n o f h i m s e l f g a z i n g a t him f r o m a n o l d p h o t o g r a p h , w r a p p e d i n a bygone moment of self-satisfaction, as if glue had dried up or fallen out, will understand 'Ulrich's asking himself what sort of glue it was that seemed to hold for other people. He had now reached one of those green spaces bordered by trees, a break in the Ringstrasse, which follows the line of the ancient city walls, and he might have crossed it in a few strides, but the broad strip of sky above the trees made him turn aside and follow where it was leading, seeming to come closer and closer to the festoons of lights so intent upon their privacy in the distant sky above that wintry park, without actually get- ting any nearer to them. It's a kind of foreshortening of the mind's perspective, he thought, that creates the tranquil sense of the eve- n i n g , w h i c h , f r o m o n e d a y t~ t h e n e x t , g i v e s o n e t h i s f i r m s e n s e o f l i f e being in full accord with itself. Happiness, after all, depends for the most part not on one's ability to resolve contradictions but on making them disappear, the way the gaps between trees disappear when we look down a long avenue of them. And just as the visual relationships of things always shift to make a coherent . picture for the eye, one in which the immediate and near at hand looks big, while even the big things at a distance look small and the gaps close up and the scene as a whole ends by rounding itself out, so it is with the invisible c(mnec- tions which our minds and feelings unconsciously arrange for us in
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such a way that we are left to feel we are fully in charge of o~raffairs. And just this is what I don't seem to be able to achieve the way I should, he said to himself.
A wide puddle blocked his way. Perhaps it was this puddle, or per- haps it was the bare, broonilike trees on either side, that conjured up a country road and a village, and awakened in him that monotonous state of the soul halfway between fulfillment and futility which comes with life in the country, a life that had tempted him more than once to repeat the "escape" he had made as a young man.
Everything becomes so simple, he felt. One's feelings get drowsy, one,'s thoughts drift offlike clouds after bad weather, and suddenly a clear sky breaks out of the soul, and under that sky a cow in the mid- dle of the path may begin· to blaze with meaning; things come in- tensely alive as if there were nothing else in the world. A single cloud drifting past may transform the whole region: the grass darkens, then shines with wetness; nothing else has happened, and yet it's been like a voyage from one seashore to another. Or an old man loses his last tooth, and this trifling event may become a landmark in the lives of his neighbors, from which they date their memories. Every evening the birds sing around the village in the same way, in the stillness of the setting sun, but it feels like something·new happening every time, as though·the world were not yet seven days old! In the coun- try, he thought, the gods still come to people. A man matters, his experiences matter, but in the city, where experiences come by the thousands, we can no longer relate them to ourselves; and this is of course the beginning of life's notorious turning into abstraction.
But even as he thought all this, he was also aware of how this ab- straction extended a man's powers a thousandfold and how, even if from the point ofview of any given detail it diluted him tenfold, as a whole it expanded him a hundredfold, and there could be no ques- tion of turning the wheel backward. And in one of those apparently random and abstract thoughts ~at so often assumed importance in his life, it struck him that when one is overburdened and dreams of simplifying one's life, the basic law of this life, the law one longs for, is nothing other than that of narrative order, the simple order that enables one to say: "First this happened and then that happened. . . . " It is the simple sequence of events in which. the overwhelmingly manifold nature of things is represented in a unidimensional order,
as a mathematician would say, stringing all that has occurred in space and time on a single thread, which calms us; that celebrated "thread of the story," which is, it seems, the thread of life itself. Lucky the man who can say "when," "before," and "after"! Terrible things ,nay have happened to him, he may have writhed in pain, but as soon as he can tell what happened in chronological order, he feels as con- tented as ifthe sun were warming his belly. This is the trick the novel artificially turns to account: Whether the wanderer is riding on the highway in pouring rain or crunching through snow and ice at ten below zero, the reader feels a cozy glow, and this would be hard to understand if this eternally dependable narrative device, which even nursemaids can rely on to keep their little charges quiet, this tried- and-true "foreshortening of the mind's perspective," were not al- ready part and parcel of life itself. Most people relate to themselves as storytellers. They usually have no use for poems, and although the occasional "because" or "in order that" gets knotted into the thread oflife, they generally detest any brooding that goes beyond that; they love the orderly sequence of facts because it has·the look of neces- sity, and the impression that their life has a "course" is somehow their refuge from chaos. It now came to Ulrich that he had lost this elementary, narrative mode of thought to which private life still clings, even though everything in public life has already ceased to be. narrative and no longer follows a thread, but instead spreads out as an infinitely interwoven surface.
When he resumed his homeward progress, reflecting on this in- sight, he remembered Goethe writing in an essay on art that "Man is not a teaching animal but one that lives, acts, and influences. " He respectfully shrugged his shoulders. "These days," he thought, "a man can only allow himself to forget the uncertainties on which he must base his life and his actions as much as an actor who forgets the scenery and his makeup, and believes that he is really living his part. " The thought of Goethe, however, brought back the thought of Arn- heim, who was always misusing Goethe as an authority, and Ulrich su~denly remembered with distaste his extraordinary confusion when Arnheim had placed an arm on his shoulder. At this point he had emerged from under the trees and was back on the street, look- ing for the best way home. Peering upward for a street sign, he al- most ran full tilt into a shadowy figure emerging from the darkness,
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and had to pull up short to avoid knocking down the prostitute who had stepped in his way. She held her ground and smiled instead of revealing her annoyance at his having charged into her like a bull, and. Ulrich suddenly felt that her professional smile somehow cre- ated a little aura of warmth in the night. She spoke to him, using the threadbare words commonly thrown out as bait, which are like the dirty leavings of other men. She had a child's sloping shoulders, blond hair was showing under her hat, and her face looked pale, even indefmably appealing under the lamplight; beneath her nighttime makeup there was the suggestion of a young girl's freckled skin. She was much shorter than Ulrich and had to look up into his face, yet she said "baby" to him again, too numb to see anything out of place in this sound she uttered hundreds of times in a night.
Ulrich found it touching somehow. He did not brush her off but stopped and let her repeat her offer, as though he had not under- stood. Here he had unexpectedly found a friend who, for a slight charge, would put herselfentirely at his disposal, ready to do her best to please him and avoid anything to put him off. If he showed himself willing, she would slip her arm in his with a gentle trustfulness and faint hesitation, as when old friends meet again for the frrst time after a separation not of their own making. If he promised to double or
·treble her usual price, and put the money on the table beforehand, so that she need not think about it but could abandon herself to that carefree, obliging state of mind that goes with having made a good deal, it would be shown· that pure indifference has the merit of all pure feeling, which is without personal presumption and functions minus the needless confusion caused by interference from private emotions. Such thoughts went through his mind, half seriously, half flippantly, and he could not bring himself altogether to disappoint the little person, who was waiting for him to strike a deal; he even realized that he wanted her to like him, but clumsily enough, instead of simply exchanging a few words with her in the language of her profession, he fumbled in ~s pocket, slipped approximately the amount she would have asked into her hand, and walked on. For the space of a moment he had briefly pressed her hand-which had oddly resisted, in· her surprise-firmly in his, with a single friendly word. But as he left this willing volunteer behind, he knew that she would rejoin her colleagues, who were whispering nearby in the
dark, show them the money, and finally think of some gibe at him to give vent to feelings she could not understand.
The encounter lived on in his mind for a while as though it had been a tender idyll of a minute's duration. He did not romanticize the poverty of his fleeting friend or her debasement, but when he imagined how she would have turned up her eyes and given the fake little moan she had learned to deliver at the right moment, he couldn't help feeling without knowing why that there was something touching about this deeply vulgar, hopelessly inept private perform- ance for an agreed price; perhaps because it was a burlesque version of the human comedy itself. Even while he was still speaking to the girl he had thought fleetingly of Moosbrugger, the pathological co- median, the pursuer and nemesis of prostitutes, who had been out walking on that other, unlucky night just as Ulrich was this evening. When the housefronts on that street had stopped swaying like stage scenery for a moment, Moosbrugger had bumped into the unknown creature who had awaited him by the bridge the night ofthe murder. What a shock of recognition it must have been, going through him from head to toe: for an . instant, Ulrich thought he could feel it him- self. Something was lifting him off the ground like a wave; he lost his balance but didn't need it, the movement itself carried him along. His heart contracted, but his imaginings became confused and over- ran all bounds, until they dissolved in an almost enervating voluptu- ousness. He made an effort to calm down. He had apparently been living so long without some central purpose that he was actually en- vying a psychopath his obsessions and his faith in the part he was playing! But Moosbrugger was fascinating, after all, not just to him- selfbut to everyone else as well. Ulrich heard Amheim's voice asking him: 'Would you set him free? " and his own answer: "No! Probably not. " Never ever, he now said to himself, and yet he had the hal- lucinatory image of an act in which the movement of reaching out in some extreme state of excitement and that of being moved by it fused into an ineffable communion, in which desire was indistin- guishable from compulsion, meaning from necessity, and the most intense activity from blissful receptiveness. He fleetingly recalled the opinion that sm:h luckless creatures as Moosbrugger were the em- bodiments of repressed instincts common to all, of all the murders and rapes committed in fantasies. Let those who believed this make
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their own peace with Moosbrugger, let them justify him to reestab- lish their own morality, after they had satisfied their dark urges through him!
UlriCh's conflict was different; he repressed nothing and could not help seeing that the image ofa murderer was no stran- ger to him than any other ofthe world's pictures; what they all had in common with hl~ own old images of himself: part crystallization of meaning, part resurgence ofthe nonsense beneath. A nimpant meta- phor oforder, that was what Moosbrugger meant for him. And sud- denly Ulrich said: "All of that-" and made a gesture as though thrusting something aside with the baclc of his hand. He had not merely thought it, he had said it out loud, and reacted to hearing himself speak by pressing his lips together and finishing his state- ment in silence: "All ofthat has to be settled, once and for alii" Never mind what "all of that" was in detail; it was everything he had been preoccupied with, tormented by, sometimes even delighted with, ever since he had taken his "sabbatical"-everything that had tied him up in knots, like a dreamer for whom all things are possible ex- cept getting up and moving about; all that had led him froq1 one im- possible thing to another, from t:P. e very b~ginning until these last minutes of his homeward walk. Ulrich felt that he would now at long last have to either live like everybody else, for some attainable goal, or come to grips with one of his imp<>. ssible possibilities. He had reached his own neighborhood, and he quickened his pace through the last street with a peculiar sense of hovering on some threshold. The feeling lent him wings, it moved him to take action, but as it was unspecific, again he was left with only an incomparable sense of freedom. ·
This might have passed off like so much else, but when he turned the comer into his own street he thought he saw all the windows of his house lit up, and shortly afterward, when he reached his garden gate, he could have no doubt about it. His old servant had asked for permission to spend the night with relatives somewhere; Ulrich had not been home since the episode with Gerda, when it was still day- light, and the gardener couple, who lived on the ground floor, never entered his rooms; yet there were lights on everywhere-intruders must be in the house, burglars he was about to take by surprise. Ul- rich was so bewildered, and so disinclined to shake off the spell he was under, that he walked straight up to the house without hesita-
tion. He had no idea what to expect. He saw shadows on the windows that seemed to indicate there was only one person moving about in- side, but there could be more, and he wondered whether he might be walking into a bullet as he entered-or should he be prepared to shoot first? In a different state of mind Ulrich would probably have gone looking for a policeman or at least investigated the situation before deciding what to do, but he wanted this adventure to himself, and did not even reach for the pistol he sometimes carried since the night he had been knocked down bythe hoodlums. He wanted . . . he didn't know what he wanted; he was willing to see what happened!
But when he pushed open the front door and entered the house, the burglar he had been looking forward to with such mixed feelings was only Clarisse.
12-3
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THE TURNING POINT
Ulrich's recklessness might from the beginning have been motivated in part by an underlying faith in some harmless· explanation for ev- erything, that shying away from believing the worst that always leads one into danger; nevertheless, when his old servant unexpectedly came up to him in the hall, he almost knocked him down. Fortu- nately, he stopped himself in time, and was told that a telegram had come, which Clarisse had signed for and was now holding for him upstairs. The young lady had arrived about an hour ago, just as he, the old man, had been about to leave, and she would not let herself be turned away, so that he had preferred to stay in and give up his night out this once, for if he might be permitted to say so, the young lady seemed to be rather upset.
Ulrich thanked him and went up to his rooms, where he found Clarisse lying on the couch, on her side with her legs drawn up. Her straight, slim figure, her boyish haircut, and the charming oval of her
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face resting on . one hand as she looked at him when he· opened the door all made a most seductive picture. He told her that he had taken her for a burglar.
Clarisse's eyes flashed like rapid bursts of machine-gun fire. "Maybe I am a burglar! " she said. "That old fox your servant did his best to make me leave. I sent him off to bed, but I know he's been lurking out of sight downstairs somewhere. Your house is lovely! " She held out the telegram to him without getting up. "I was curious to see what you're like when you come home to be by yourself," she went on. 'Walter's gone to a concert. He won't be back till after mid- night. But I didn't tell him fwas coming to see you. "
Ulrich ripped open the telegram and read it while only half listen- ing to Clarisse's words. He turned suddenly pale and read the star- tling message over again, unable to take it in. Although he had failed to answer several letters from his father asking him about the prog- ress of the Parallel Campaign and the problem of "diminishe~ re- sponsibility," a longish interval had passed, without his noticing it, since any further reminders had come-and now this telegram, obvi- ously drafted in advance with meticulous care by his father hims~lf, informed him punctiliously, and in a funereal ~one that did not quite succeed in repressing all reproach, ofhis own death. There had been little enough affection between them; in fact, the thought of his fa- ther had almost always been rather disturbing to Ulrich, and yet, as he now read the quaintly sinister text over again, he was thinking: "Now I am all alone in the world. " He did not mean it literally, nor would that have made any sense, considering how things had been between them; what he meant was that he felt, with some amaze- ment, that he was floating free, as though some mooring rope had snapped, or that· his state of alienation from a world to which his fa- ther had been the last link had now become complete and final.
"My father's dead," he said to Clarisse, holding up the telegram with a touch of unintended solemnity.
"Oh! " Clarisse said. "Congratulations! " And after a slight, thoughtful pause she added: "I suppos,e you're going to be very rich now? " and looked around with interest.
"I don't believe he was more than moderatelywell off," Ulrich re- plied distantly. 'Tve been living here quite beyond his means. "
Clarisse acknowledged the rebuke with a tiny smile, a sort of little
curtsy of a smile; many of her expressi~e movements were as abrupt and disproportionate in a small space as the theatrical bow of a boy who must demonstrate before company how well he has been brought up. She was left alone, for a few moments while Ulrich ex- cused himselfto go and make preparations for the trip he would have to take. When she had left Walter after their violent scene she had not gone far; outside the door to their apartment there was a seldom- use~staircase leading up to the attic, and there she had sat, wrapped in a shawl, until she heard him leave the house. It made her think of the lofts in theaters for the stage machinery, where ropes run on pul- leys, and there she sat while Walter made his exit down the stairs. She imagined that actresses might sit on the rafters above the stage between calls, wrapped in shawls, watching the stage from above; en- joying a full view ofeverything that was going on, just as she was now. It fitted in with a favorite notion ofhers, that life was a dramatic role to be played. There was no need to understal)d one's part rationally, she thought; after all, what did anyone know about it, even those who might know tnore than she did? It was a matter of having the right instinct for life, like a storm bird. One simply spread out one's arms-and for her that included words, tears, ldsses-like wings and took off! This fantasy offered some compensation to her for being no longer able to believe in Walter's future. She looked down the steep staircase Walter had just descended, spread her arms, and kept them raised in that position as long as she could; perhaps she could help him in that way! A steep ascent and a steep descent are strong com- plementary opposites and belong together, she thought. "Joyful world aslant" was what she named her wingspread arms and her gaze down the stairwell. She changed her mind about snealdng out to watch the demonstrators in town; what did she care about the com- mon herd; the fantastic drama of the elect had begun! .
And so Clarisse had gone to see Ulrich. On the way a sly smile would sometimes appear on her face, whenever it occurred to her that Walter thought her crazy each time she let slip any sign of her greater insight into what was going on between them. It tickled her vanity to know that he was afraid of having a child by her even while he impatiently longed for it. "Crazy" to her meant being some- thing like summer lightning, or enjoying so extraordinary a degree of health that it frightened people; it was a quality her marriage had
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brought out in her, step by step, as her feelings of superiority and control grew. She did realize, all the same, that there were times when other people did not know what to make of her, and when Ul- rich reappeared she felt she ought to say something to him that would be in keeping with an event that cut so deeply into his life. She leapt up from the couch, paced through the room and the adjoining rooms, and then said: "Well, my sincere condolences, old fellow! "
Ulrich looked at her in astonishment, although he recognized _the tone she fell into when she was nervous. Sometimes she's so hope- lessly conventional, he thought; it;s like coming upon a page from another book bound in with what one is reading. She had not both- ered to watch her words with the appropriate expression but had flung them at him sideways, over her shoulder, which heightened the effect of hearing, not a false note exactly, but the wrong words to the tune, giving the uncanny impression that she herself consisted of many such misplaced texts. ,
When she received no answer from Ulrich, she stopped in front of him and said: "I have to talk with you! "
"May I offer you some refreshment? " Ulrich said.
Clarisse only fluttered her hand at shoulder height to signal no. She pulled her thoughts together and said: "Walter is dead set on having a child. Can you understand that? " She seemed to be waiting for an answer. But what could Ulrich have said to that?
"But I don't want to! " she cried out violently.
"Well, no need to fly into a rage," Ulrich said. "Ifyou don't want to, it can't happen. "
"But it's destroying him! "
"People who are always expecting to die generally live a long time! You and I will be shriveled ancients while Walter will still have his boyish face under his white mane as Director of his Archives. "
Clarisse turned pensively on her heel and walked away from Ul- rich; at a distance, she wheeled to face him again and "fixed him" with her eye.
"Have you ever seen an umbrella with its shaft removed? Walter falls apart when I tum away from him. I'm his shaft and he's . . . " She was about to say "my umbrella" but thought ofsomething much bet- ter: "my shield," she said. "He sees himself as my protector. And the fust thing that means is giving me a big belly. Next will be the lee-
tures on breast-feeding the infant because that is nature's way, and then he'll want to bring up the child in his own image. You know him well enough to know all that. All he wants is to have the rights to everything and a terrific excuse for making bourgeois conformists out of both of us. But if I go on saying no, as I have been, he'll be done for. I mean simply everything to him! "
Ulrich smiled incredulously at this sweeping claim. "He wants to kill you," Clarisse added quickly. "What? I thought that was your suggestion to him. " "I want the child from you! " Clarisse said.
Ulrich whistled through his teeth in surprise.
She smiled like an adolescent who has misbehaved with deliberate provocation.
"I wouldn't do something so underhanded to such an old friend," Ulrich said slowly. "It goes against my grain. " ·
"Oh? So you're a man of high scruple, are you? " Clarisse seemed to attach some special significance of her own to this that Ulrich didn't understand. She gave it some thought and. then retu~ed to the attack: "But if you are my lover, he's got you where he wants you. "
"How do you mean? "
. "It's obvious; I just don't know quite how to put it. You'll be forced
to treat him with consideration. We'll both be feeling sorry for him. You can't just go ahead and cheat on him, of course, so you'll have to try to make it up to him somehow. And so on and so forth. And most important of all, you'll be driving him to bring out the best that's in him. You know perfectly well that we are stuck inside ourselves like statues in a block ofstone. We have to sculpt ourway out! We have to force each other to do it. "
"Maybe so," Ulrich said, "but aren't you getting ahead ofyourself? What makes you think any of this will happen? "
Clarisse was smiling again. "Perhaps I am ahead of myself," she said. She sidled up to him and slipped her arm confidingly under his, which hung limply at his side and made no room for hers. "Don't you find me attractive? Don't you like me? " she asked. And when he did not answer, she went on: "But you do find me attractive, I know it; I've seen it often enough, the way you look at me, when you come to see us. Do you remember if I've ever told you that you're the Devil?
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That's how I feel. Try to understand, I'm not calling you a poor devil: that's the kind who wants to do evil because he doesn't know any better. You are a great devil: you know what's good and you do the opposite of what you'd like to dol You know the life we lead is abomi- nable, and so you say mockingly that we must go on with it. And you say, full ofyour high scruples, 'I won't cheat on a friend,' but you only say that because you've thought a hundred times, 'I'd like to have Clarisse. ' But just because you're a devil you have something ofa god inside you, Ulo! A great god. The kind who lies to try to 'keep from being recognized. You dowant me. . . . "
She had gripped both his arms now, standing before him with her face lifted up to his, her body curving back like a plant responding to a touch on its petals. In a moment her face will be drenched with that look, like the last time, Ulrich thought apprehensively. But nothing of the kind happened; her face remained beautiful. Instead of her usual tight smile there was an open one, which showed a little of her teeth between the rosy flesh ofher lips, as though about to bite. Her mouth took on the shape of a double Cupid's bow, a line echoed in the curve of her eyebrows and again in the translucent cloud of her hair. ·
"For a long time now you've been wanting to pick me up with those teeth in that lying mouth ofyours and carry me off, ifonlyyou could stand to let me see you as you really are," Clarisse had con- tinued. Ulrich gently freed himself from her grip. She dropped down on the couch as if he had put her there, and pulled him down after her.
"You really shouldn't let your imagination run away with you like this," Ulrich said in reproof. ·
Clarisse had let go of him. She closed her eyes and supported her head with both hands, her elbows resting on her knees; now that her second attack had been repelled, she decided to resort to icy logic.
"Don't be so literal-minded," she said. "When I speak of the Devil, or of God, it's only a figure of speech. But when I'm alone at home, or walking in the neighborhood, I often think: If I turn to the left, God will come; if I turn to the right, the Devil. Or when I'm about to pick something up with my hand, I have the same feeling about using the right or the left hand. When I tell Walter about it he puts his hands in his pockets, in real panic. He's happy to see a flower
in bloom, or even a snail, but don't you think the life we lead is terri- bly· sad? No God comes, or the Devil either. I've been waiting for years now, but what is there to wait for? Nothing. That's all there is, unless art can work a miracle and change everything. "
At this moment there was something so gentle and sad about her that Ulrich gave way to an impulse to touch her soft hair wi\:h his hand. "You may be right in the details, Clarisse," he said. "But I. can never follow your leaps from one point to another, or see how it all hangs together. "
"It's quite simple," she said, still in the same posture as before. "As time went on, an idea came to me. Listen! " She straightened up and was suddenly quite vivacious again. "Didn't you once say yourself that the way we live is full of cracks through which we can see the impossible state of affairs underneath, as it were? You needn't say anything, I've known about it for a long time. W e all want to have our lives in order, but nobody has! I play the piano or paint a picture, but it's like putting up a screen to hide a hole in the wall. You and Walter also have ideas, and I don't understand much ofthat, but that doesn't work either, and you said yourself that we avoid looking at the hole out of habit or laziness, or else we let ourselves be distracted from it by bad things. Well, there's a simple answer: That's the hole we have to escape through! And I know how! There are days when I can slip out of myself. Then it's like finding yourself-how shall I put it? - right in the center ofthings as ifpeeled out ofa shell, and the things have had their dirty ri~d peeled off too. Or else one feels connected by the air with everything there is, like a Siamese twin. It's an incred- ible, marvelous feeling; everything turns into music and color and rhythm, and I'm no longer the citizen Clarisse, as I was baptized, but perhaps a shining splinter pressing into some immense unfathom- able happiness. But you know all about that. That's what you meant when you said that there's something impossible about reality, and that one's experiences should not be turned inward, as something personal and real, but must be turned outward, like a song or a paint- ing, and so on and so forth. Oh, I could recite it all exactly the way you said it. " Her "so on and so forth" recurred like some wild refrain as Clarisse's torrent of words flowed on, regularly interspersed with her assertion "You can do it, but you won't, and I don't know why you won't, but I'm going to shake you up! "
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Ulrich had let her go on talking, only shaking his head from time to time when she attributed to him something too unlikely, but he could not bring himselfto argue with her and left his hand resting on her hair, where his fingertips could almost sense the confused pulsa- tion of the thoughts inside her skull. He had never yet seen Clarisse in such a state of sensual excitement and was amazed to see that even in her slim, hard young body there was room for all the loosening and soft expansion of a woman's glowing passion; this sudden, always sur- prising opening up of a woman one has known only as inaccessibly shut away in herself did not fail to have its effect on him. Although they defied all reason, her words did not repel him, for as they came close to touching him in the quick and then again angled off into ab- surdity, their constant rapid movement, like a buzzing or humming, drowned out the quality of the tone, beautiful or ugly, in the intensity of the vibrations. Listening to her seemed to help him make up his mind, like some wild music, and it was only when she seemed to have· lost her way in the maze ofher own words and could not find her way out that he shook her head a little with his outspread hand, as though to call her back and set her straight.
They had meanwhile risen from their chairs, and Ulrich moved back a few steps to see his effect all the better as he said:
"You have asked me so many pointed questions, and now there is something I would like to know before I make my decision. . . . " When Arnheim nodded he went on in a frank and matter-of-fact tone: ''I've been told that your interest in our Parallel Campaign and everything connected with it, Frau Tuzzi and my humble self thrown in for good measure, has to do with your acquiring major portions of the Galician oil fields. "
Despite the failing light, Arnheim could be seen to have turned pale; he walked slowly up to Ulrich, who thought he had brought some rude answer upon himself and regretted his own rash blunt- ness, which had given the other man a way to break off the conversa- tion when it became inconvenient for him to go on with it. So he said, as affably as he could: "Please don't misunderstand me. I have no wish to offend you, but there is surely no point in our conversation unless we can speak our minds with brutal frankness. "
These few words and the time it took him to cover the short dis- tance enabled Arnheim to regain his composure. As he reached Ul- rich he smiled, placed his hand-actually, his arm--on Ulrich's shoulder, and said reproachfully: "How can you fall for such a typical Stock Exchange rumor? "
"It reached me not as a rumor but as information from someone who knows what he is talking about. "
"Yes, I know, I've heard that such things are being said, but how can you believe it? Ofcourse I'm not here purely for pleasure; it's too bad, but I can never get away entirely from business affairs. And I won't deny that I have talked with some people about these oil fields, though I must ask you to keep this confidential. But what has this to do with anything? "
"My cousin," Ulrich resumed, "hasn't the remotest idea of your interest in oil. She has been asked by her husband to find out what- ever she can about the reasons for your stay here, because you are regarded as a confidant of the Czar, but I am convinced that she is not doing justice to this diplomatic mission because she is so sure that she herself is the one· and only reason for your continued visit with us. "
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"H9w can you be so indelicate? " Arnheim's ann gave Ulrich's shoulder a friendly little nudge. "There are always secondaty strings to everything, everywhere, but despite your sardonic inten- tion you have just expressed yourself with the naked rudeness of a schoolboy. " ·
That ann on his shoulder made Ulrich unsure of himself. To stand there in this quasi embrace was ridiculous and unpleasant, a misera- ble feeling, in fact. Still, it was a long time since Ulrich had known a friend, and perhaps this added an element of bewilderment. He would have likedto shake offthe ann, and he instinctively tried to do so, even while Amheim, for his part, noticed these little signals of Ulrich's restiveness and did his utmost to ignore them. Ulrich, realiz- ing the awkwardness of Arnheim's position, was too polite to move away and forced himself to put up with this physical contact, which felt increasingly like a heavy weight sinking into a loosely mounded dam and breaking it apart. Without meaning to, Ulrich had built up a wall of loneliness around himself, and now life, by way of another man's pulse beat, came pouring in through the breach in that wall, and silly as it was, ridiculous, really, he felt a touch of excitement.
He thought of Gerda. He remembered how even his old friend Walter had aroused in him a. longing to find himself once more in total accord with another human being, wholly and without restraint, as if the whole wide world held no differences other than those be- tween like and dislike. Now that it was too late, this longing welled up in him again, as ifin silvery waves, as the ripples ofwater, air, and light fuse into one silvery stream down the whole width of a river. It was so entrancing that he had to force himself to be on his guard and not 'to give in, lest he cause a misunderstanding in this ambiguous situation. But as his muscles tightened he remembered Bonadea say- ing to him: "Ulrich, you're not a bad man, you merely make it hard for yourself to be good. " Bonadea, who had been so incredibly wise that evening and who had also said: . "After all, in dreams you don't think either, you simply live them. " And he had said: "I was a child, as soft as the air on a moonlit night . . . ," and he now remembered that at the time he had actually had a different image in mind: the tip of a burning magnesium flare, for in the flying sparks that tore this tip to shreds he thought he recognized his heart; but that was a long ti~e ago, and he had not quite ~red to make this comparison and
had succumbed to the other:; not in conversation with Bonadea, inci- dentally, but with Diotima, as he now recalled. All the divergences of life begin close together at their roots, he felt, looking at the man who had just now, for reasons not entirely clear, offered him his friendship. .
Amheim had withdrawn his arm. They were standing once more in the window bay where their conversation had begun; on the street below, the lamps were already giving a peaceful light, though there was still a lingering sense of the excitement of earlier in the day. From time to time clusters of people passed by in heated talk, and here and there a mouth would open to shout a threat or some waver- ing "hoo-hoo," followed l? y guffaws. One had the impression of semi- consciousness. And in the light from this restless street, between the vertical curtains framing the darkened room, he saw Arnheim's fig- ure and felt his own body standing there, half brightly lit up and half dark, a chiaroscuro sharpening the intense effect. Ulrich remem- bered the cheers for Arnheim he thought he had heard, and whether or not the man had anything to do with what had happened, in his Caesar-like calm as he stood pensively, gazing down on the street he projected himself as the dominant figure in this momentary light- painting, and he also seemed to feel the weight of his own presence in every glance cast·upon him. At Arnheim's side one understood the meaning of self-possession. Consciousness alone cannot impose order on all the world's swarm and glow, since the keener it is, the more boundless the world becomes, at least for the moment; but that consciousness ofselfthat is self-possession enters like a film director
who artfully composes a scene into an image of happiness. Ulrich envied the man his happiness. In that instant nothing seemed easier than to do him some violence, for in his need to present an image at center stage this man conjured up all the old tags of melodrama. "Draw your dagger and fulfill his destiny! " Though the words came to mind only in the ranting tone of a ham actor, Ulrich had uncon- sciously moved so that he stood halfway behind Amheim. He saw the dark, broad expanse of neck and shoulders before him. The neck in particular was a provocation. His hand groped in his right pocket for a penknife. He rose up on tiptoe and then once more looked over Arnheim's shoulder down on the street. Out there in the twilight, people were still being swept along like sand by an invisible tide pull-
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ing their bodies onward. Somethingwould ofcourse have to come of this demonstration, and so the future sent a wave ahead, some sort of suprapersonal fecundation of humanity occurred, though as always in an extremely vague and slipshod manner-or so Ulrich perceived it as it briefly held his attention, but he was tired to the point of nau- sea at the thought of stopping to analyze it all. Carefully he lowered his heels again, ashamed ofthe mental byplay that had caused him to raise them just before, though he did not attach too much impor- tance to it, and he now felt greatly tempted to tap Arnheim on the shoulder and say to him: "Thank you. I'm fed up and I would like something new in my life. I accept your offer. " .
But as he did. not really do this, either, the two men let the answer to Arnheim's proposal go by default. Arnheim reverted to an earlier part of their conversation. "Do you ever go to see a film? You should," he said. "In its present form, cinematography may not look like much, but once the big interests get involved-the electro- chemical, say, or the chromochemical concerns-you are likely to see a surging development in just a few decades, which nothing can stop. Every known means of raising and intensifying production will be brought into play, and whatever our writers and aesthetes may suppose to be their own part in it, we will be getting an art based on Associated Electrical or German Dyes, Inc. It's absolutely terrifying; you'll see. Do you write? No, I remember I've asked you that. But why don't you write? Very sensible ofyou. The poet and philosopher ofthe future will emerge out ofjournalism, in any case. Haven't you noticed that our journalists are getting better all the time, while our poets are getting steadily worse? It is unquestionably a process in accordance with the laws of nature. Something is going on, and for my part I haven't the slightest doubt what it is: the age of great in- dividuals is coming to an end. " He leaned forward. "I can't see your face in this light; I'm firing all my shots in the dark. " He gave a little laugh. "You've proposed a general stocktaking of our spiritual condi- tion: Do you believe in that? Do you really suppose that life can be regulated by the mind? Of course you don't; you've said so. But I don't believe you in any case, because you're someone who would embrace the Devil for being a man without his match in the world. "
"Where's that quotation from? "
"From the suppressed preface to The Robbers. "
Naturally from the suppressed preface, Ulrich thought. He wouldn't bother with the one read by everyone else.
" 'Minds that are drawn to the most loathsome vices for their aura of greatness . . . ' " Arnheim continued to quote from his capacious memory. He felt himselfto be the master ofthe situation once more, and that·Ulrich, for whatever reasons, had given ground; the antago- nistic edge was gone; no need to bring up that offer again; what a narrow escape! But just as a wrestler knows when his opponent is slackening off and then gives it all he's got, so he felt he needed to let the full weight of his offer sink in, and said: "I believe you under- stand me better now. Quite frankly, there are times when I am keenly aware of being alone. The new men think too much in purely business terms, and those business families in their second or third generation tend to lose their imagination. They produce nothing but impeccable administrators and army officers, and they go in for cas- tles, hunting parties, and title"d sons-in-law. I know their kind the world over, fine, intelligent individuals among them, but incapable of coming up with,a single idea concomitant with that basic state of restlessness, independence, and possibly unhappiness I referred to with my Schiller quotation just now. "
''I'm sorry I can't stay and talk more," Ulrich said. "Frau Tuzzi is probably waiting in some friend's house for things ·to quiet down out there, but I have to go now. So you suppose me capable, despite my ignorance of business, of that restlessness which is so good for busi- ness by making it so much less narrowly businesslike? " He had turned on the light in preparation for saying good-bye, and waited for an answer. With majestic cameraderie, Amheim laid hiS arm on Ul- rich's shoulder, a gesture that seemed to have proved its usefulness by now, and answered: "Do forgive me if I seem to have said rather too much, in a mood of loneliness. Business and finance are coming into power, and one sometimes asks oneself what to do with this power. I hope you won't take it amiss. "
"On the contrary," Ulrich assured him. "I mean to think your pro- posal over quite seriously. " He said it in a rush, which could be inter- preted as a sign of excitement. This left Arnheim, who was staying on to wait for Diotima, rather disconcerted and worried that it might not be too easy to fmd a face-saving way of making Ulrich forget the offer.
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GOING HOME
Ulrich decided to walk home. It was a fine night, though dark. The houses, tall and compact, formed that strange space "street," open at the top to darkness, wind, and clouds. The road was deserted, as if the earlier unrest had left everything in a deep slumber. Whenever Ulrich did encounter a pedestrian, the sound of his footsteps had preceded him independently for a long time, like some weighty an- nouncement. The night gave one a sense ofimpending events, as in a theater. One had a notion of oneself as a phenomenon in this world, something that appears bigger than it. is, that produces an echo, and, when it passes·lighted surfaces, is accompanied by its shadow like a huge spastic clown, rising to full height and the next moment creep- ing humbly to heel. How happy one can bel he thought.
He walked through a stone archway in a passage some ten paces long, running parallel td the street and separated from it by heavy buttresses; darkness leapt from comers, ambush and sudden death flickered in the dim cloister; a fierce, ancient, grim joy seized the soul. Perhaps this was too much; Ulrich suddenly imagined with what smugness and inward self-dramatization Arnheim would be walking her~ in his place. It killed the pleasure in his shadow and echo, and the spooky music in the walls faded out. He knew that he would not accept Arnheim:s ·offer, but now he merely felt like a phantom stumbling through life's gallery, dismayed at being unable to find the body it should occupy, and was thoroughly relieved when before long he passed into a district less grand and less oppressive.
Wide streets and squares opened out in the blackness, and ,the commonplace buildings, peacefully starred with lighted rows ofwin- dows, laid no further spell on him. Comi,ng into the open, he breathed this peace and remembered for no special reason some childhood photographs he had recently been looking at, pictures showing him with his mother, who had died young; from what a dis-
tance he had regarded the little boy, with the beautiful woman in an old-fashioned dress happily smiling at him. There was that overpow- ering impression of the good, affectionate, bright little boy they all felt him to be; there were hopes for him that were in no way his own; there were the vague expectations of a distinguished, promising fu- ture, like the outspread wings ofa golden net opening to enfold him. And though all this had been invisible at the time, there it was for all to see decades afterward in those old photographs, and from the midst ofthis visible invisibility that could so easily have become real- ity, there was his tender, blank baby face looking back at him with the slightly forced expression of having to hold still. He had felt n? t a trace ofwarmth for that little boy, 'and even ifhe did take some pride in his beautiful mother, he had on the whole the impressi6n of hav- ing narrowly escaped a great horror.
Anyone who has had the experience of seeing some earlier incar- n a t i o n o f h i m s e l f g a z i n g a t him f r o m a n o l d p h o t o g r a p h , w r a p p e d i n a bygone moment of self-satisfaction, as if glue had dried up or fallen out, will understand 'Ulrich's asking himself what sort of glue it was that seemed to hold for other people. He had now reached one of those green spaces bordered by trees, a break in the Ringstrasse, which follows the line of the ancient city walls, and he might have crossed it in a few strides, but the broad strip of sky above the trees made him turn aside and follow where it was leading, seeming to come closer and closer to the festoons of lights so intent upon their privacy in the distant sky above that wintry park, without actually get- ting any nearer to them. It's a kind of foreshortening of the mind's perspective, he thought, that creates the tranquil sense of the eve- n i n g , w h i c h , f r o m o n e d a y t~ t h e n e x t , g i v e s o n e t h i s f i r m s e n s e o f l i f e being in full accord with itself. Happiness, after all, depends for the most part not on one's ability to resolve contradictions but on making them disappear, the way the gaps between trees disappear when we look down a long avenue of them. And just as the visual relationships of things always shift to make a coherent . picture for the eye, one in which the immediate and near at hand looks big, while even the big things at a distance look small and the gaps close up and the scene as a whole ends by rounding itself out, so it is with the invisible c(mnec- tions which our minds and feelings unconsciously arrange for us in
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such a way that we are left to feel we are fully in charge of o~raffairs. And just this is what I don't seem to be able to achieve the way I should, he said to himself.
A wide puddle blocked his way. Perhaps it was this puddle, or per- haps it was the bare, broonilike trees on either side, that conjured up a country road and a village, and awakened in him that monotonous state of the soul halfway between fulfillment and futility which comes with life in the country, a life that had tempted him more than once to repeat the "escape" he had made as a young man.
Everything becomes so simple, he felt. One's feelings get drowsy, one,'s thoughts drift offlike clouds after bad weather, and suddenly a clear sky breaks out of the soul, and under that sky a cow in the mid- dle of the path may begin· to blaze with meaning; things come in- tensely alive as if there were nothing else in the world. A single cloud drifting past may transform the whole region: the grass darkens, then shines with wetness; nothing else has happened, and yet it's been like a voyage from one seashore to another. Or an old man loses his last tooth, and this trifling event may become a landmark in the lives of his neighbors, from which they date their memories. Every evening the birds sing around the village in the same way, in the stillness of the setting sun, but it feels like something·new happening every time, as though·the world were not yet seven days old! In the coun- try, he thought, the gods still come to people. A man matters, his experiences matter, but in the city, where experiences come by the thousands, we can no longer relate them to ourselves; and this is of course the beginning of life's notorious turning into abstraction.
But even as he thought all this, he was also aware of how this ab- straction extended a man's powers a thousandfold and how, even if from the point ofview of any given detail it diluted him tenfold, as a whole it expanded him a hundredfold, and there could be no ques- tion of turning the wheel backward. And in one of those apparently random and abstract thoughts ~at so often assumed importance in his life, it struck him that when one is overburdened and dreams of simplifying one's life, the basic law of this life, the law one longs for, is nothing other than that of narrative order, the simple order that enables one to say: "First this happened and then that happened. . . . " It is the simple sequence of events in which. the overwhelmingly manifold nature of things is represented in a unidimensional order,
as a mathematician would say, stringing all that has occurred in space and time on a single thread, which calms us; that celebrated "thread of the story," which is, it seems, the thread of life itself. Lucky the man who can say "when," "before," and "after"! Terrible things ,nay have happened to him, he may have writhed in pain, but as soon as he can tell what happened in chronological order, he feels as con- tented as ifthe sun were warming his belly. This is the trick the novel artificially turns to account: Whether the wanderer is riding on the highway in pouring rain or crunching through snow and ice at ten below zero, the reader feels a cozy glow, and this would be hard to understand if this eternally dependable narrative device, which even nursemaids can rely on to keep their little charges quiet, this tried- and-true "foreshortening of the mind's perspective," were not al- ready part and parcel of life itself. Most people relate to themselves as storytellers. They usually have no use for poems, and although the occasional "because" or "in order that" gets knotted into the thread oflife, they generally detest any brooding that goes beyond that; they love the orderly sequence of facts because it has·the look of neces- sity, and the impression that their life has a "course" is somehow their refuge from chaos. It now came to Ulrich that he had lost this elementary, narrative mode of thought to which private life still clings, even though everything in public life has already ceased to be. narrative and no longer follows a thread, but instead spreads out as an infinitely interwoven surface.
When he resumed his homeward progress, reflecting on this in- sight, he remembered Goethe writing in an essay on art that "Man is not a teaching animal but one that lives, acts, and influences. " He respectfully shrugged his shoulders. "These days," he thought, "a man can only allow himself to forget the uncertainties on which he must base his life and his actions as much as an actor who forgets the scenery and his makeup, and believes that he is really living his part. " The thought of Goethe, however, brought back the thought of Arn- heim, who was always misusing Goethe as an authority, and Ulrich su~denly remembered with distaste his extraordinary confusion when Arnheim had placed an arm on his shoulder. At this point he had emerged from under the trees and was back on the street, look- ing for the best way home. Peering upward for a street sign, he al- most ran full tilt into a shadowy figure emerging from the darkness,
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and had to pull up short to avoid knocking down the prostitute who had stepped in his way. She held her ground and smiled instead of revealing her annoyance at his having charged into her like a bull, and. Ulrich suddenly felt that her professional smile somehow cre- ated a little aura of warmth in the night. She spoke to him, using the threadbare words commonly thrown out as bait, which are like the dirty leavings of other men. She had a child's sloping shoulders, blond hair was showing under her hat, and her face looked pale, even indefmably appealing under the lamplight; beneath her nighttime makeup there was the suggestion of a young girl's freckled skin. She was much shorter than Ulrich and had to look up into his face, yet she said "baby" to him again, too numb to see anything out of place in this sound she uttered hundreds of times in a night.
Ulrich found it touching somehow. He did not brush her off but stopped and let her repeat her offer, as though he had not under- stood. Here he had unexpectedly found a friend who, for a slight charge, would put herselfentirely at his disposal, ready to do her best to please him and avoid anything to put him off. If he showed himself willing, she would slip her arm in his with a gentle trustfulness and faint hesitation, as when old friends meet again for the frrst time after a separation not of their own making. If he promised to double or
·treble her usual price, and put the money on the table beforehand, so that she need not think about it but could abandon herself to that carefree, obliging state of mind that goes with having made a good deal, it would be shown· that pure indifference has the merit of all pure feeling, which is without personal presumption and functions minus the needless confusion caused by interference from private emotions. Such thoughts went through his mind, half seriously, half flippantly, and he could not bring himself altogether to disappoint the little person, who was waiting for him to strike a deal; he even realized that he wanted her to like him, but clumsily enough, instead of simply exchanging a few words with her in the language of her profession, he fumbled in ~s pocket, slipped approximately the amount she would have asked into her hand, and walked on. For the space of a moment he had briefly pressed her hand-which had oddly resisted, in· her surprise-firmly in his, with a single friendly word. But as he left this willing volunteer behind, he knew that she would rejoin her colleagues, who were whispering nearby in the
dark, show them the money, and finally think of some gibe at him to give vent to feelings she could not understand.
The encounter lived on in his mind for a while as though it had been a tender idyll of a minute's duration. He did not romanticize the poverty of his fleeting friend or her debasement, but when he imagined how she would have turned up her eyes and given the fake little moan she had learned to deliver at the right moment, he couldn't help feeling without knowing why that there was something touching about this deeply vulgar, hopelessly inept private perform- ance for an agreed price; perhaps because it was a burlesque version of the human comedy itself. Even while he was still speaking to the girl he had thought fleetingly of Moosbrugger, the pathological co- median, the pursuer and nemesis of prostitutes, who had been out walking on that other, unlucky night just as Ulrich was this evening. When the housefronts on that street had stopped swaying like stage scenery for a moment, Moosbrugger had bumped into the unknown creature who had awaited him by the bridge the night ofthe murder. What a shock of recognition it must have been, going through him from head to toe: for an . instant, Ulrich thought he could feel it him- self. Something was lifting him off the ground like a wave; he lost his balance but didn't need it, the movement itself carried him along. His heart contracted, but his imaginings became confused and over- ran all bounds, until they dissolved in an almost enervating voluptu- ousness. He made an effort to calm down. He had apparently been living so long without some central purpose that he was actually en- vying a psychopath his obsessions and his faith in the part he was playing! But Moosbrugger was fascinating, after all, not just to him- selfbut to everyone else as well. Ulrich heard Amheim's voice asking him: 'Would you set him free? " and his own answer: "No! Probably not. " Never ever, he now said to himself, and yet he had the hal- lucinatory image of an act in which the movement of reaching out in some extreme state of excitement and that of being moved by it fused into an ineffable communion, in which desire was indistin- guishable from compulsion, meaning from necessity, and the most intense activity from blissful receptiveness. He fleetingly recalled the opinion that sm:h luckless creatures as Moosbrugger were the em- bodiments of repressed instincts common to all, of all the murders and rapes committed in fantasies. Let those who believed this make
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their own peace with Moosbrugger, let them justify him to reestab- lish their own morality, after they had satisfied their dark urges through him!
UlriCh's conflict was different; he repressed nothing and could not help seeing that the image ofa murderer was no stran- ger to him than any other ofthe world's pictures; what they all had in common with hl~ own old images of himself: part crystallization of meaning, part resurgence ofthe nonsense beneath. A nimpant meta- phor oforder, that was what Moosbrugger meant for him. And sud- denly Ulrich said: "All of that-" and made a gesture as though thrusting something aside with the baclc of his hand. He had not merely thought it, he had said it out loud, and reacted to hearing himself speak by pressing his lips together and finishing his state- ment in silence: "All ofthat has to be settled, once and for alii" Never mind what "all of that" was in detail; it was everything he had been preoccupied with, tormented by, sometimes even delighted with, ever since he had taken his "sabbatical"-everything that had tied him up in knots, like a dreamer for whom all things are possible ex- cept getting up and moving about; all that had led him froq1 one im- possible thing to another, from t:P. e very b~ginning until these last minutes of his homeward walk. Ulrich felt that he would now at long last have to either live like everybody else, for some attainable goal, or come to grips with one of his imp<>. ssible possibilities. He had reached his own neighborhood, and he quickened his pace through the last street with a peculiar sense of hovering on some threshold. The feeling lent him wings, it moved him to take action, but as it was unspecific, again he was left with only an incomparable sense of freedom. ·
This might have passed off like so much else, but when he turned the comer into his own street he thought he saw all the windows of his house lit up, and shortly afterward, when he reached his garden gate, he could have no doubt about it. His old servant had asked for permission to spend the night with relatives somewhere; Ulrich had not been home since the episode with Gerda, when it was still day- light, and the gardener couple, who lived on the ground floor, never entered his rooms; yet there were lights on everywhere-intruders must be in the house, burglars he was about to take by surprise. Ul- rich was so bewildered, and so disinclined to shake off the spell he was under, that he walked straight up to the house without hesita-
tion. He had no idea what to expect. He saw shadows on the windows that seemed to indicate there was only one person moving about in- side, but there could be more, and he wondered whether he might be walking into a bullet as he entered-or should he be prepared to shoot first? In a different state of mind Ulrich would probably have gone looking for a policeman or at least investigated the situation before deciding what to do, but he wanted this adventure to himself, and did not even reach for the pistol he sometimes carried since the night he had been knocked down bythe hoodlums. He wanted . . . he didn't know what he wanted; he was willing to see what happened!
But when he pushed open the front door and entered the house, the burglar he had been looking forward to with such mixed feelings was only Clarisse.
12-3
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THE TURNING POINT
Ulrich's recklessness might from the beginning have been motivated in part by an underlying faith in some harmless· explanation for ev- erything, that shying away from believing the worst that always leads one into danger; nevertheless, when his old servant unexpectedly came up to him in the hall, he almost knocked him down. Fortu- nately, he stopped himself in time, and was told that a telegram had come, which Clarisse had signed for and was now holding for him upstairs. The young lady had arrived about an hour ago, just as he, the old man, had been about to leave, and she would not let herself be turned away, so that he had preferred to stay in and give up his night out this once, for if he might be permitted to say so, the young lady seemed to be rather upset.
Ulrich thanked him and went up to his rooms, where he found Clarisse lying on the couch, on her side with her legs drawn up. Her straight, slim figure, her boyish haircut, and the charming oval of her
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face resting on . one hand as she looked at him when he· opened the door all made a most seductive picture. He told her that he had taken her for a burglar.
Clarisse's eyes flashed like rapid bursts of machine-gun fire. "Maybe I am a burglar! " she said. "That old fox your servant did his best to make me leave. I sent him off to bed, but I know he's been lurking out of sight downstairs somewhere. Your house is lovely! " She held out the telegram to him without getting up. "I was curious to see what you're like when you come home to be by yourself," she went on. 'Walter's gone to a concert. He won't be back till after mid- night. But I didn't tell him fwas coming to see you. "
Ulrich ripped open the telegram and read it while only half listen- ing to Clarisse's words. He turned suddenly pale and read the star- tling message over again, unable to take it in. Although he had failed to answer several letters from his father asking him about the prog- ress of the Parallel Campaign and the problem of "diminishe~ re- sponsibility," a longish interval had passed, without his noticing it, since any further reminders had come-and now this telegram, obvi- ously drafted in advance with meticulous care by his father hims~lf, informed him punctiliously, and in a funereal ~one that did not quite succeed in repressing all reproach, ofhis own death. There had been little enough affection between them; in fact, the thought of his fa- ther had almost always been rather disturbing to Ulrich, and yet, as he now read the quaintly sinister text over again, he was thinking: "Now I am all alone in the world. " He did not mean it literally, nor would that have made any sense, considering how things had been between them; what he meant was that he felt, with some amaze- ment, that he was floating free, as though some mooring rope had snapped, or that· his state of alienation from a world to which his fa- ther had been the last link had now become complete and final.
"My father's dead," he said to Clarisse, holding up the telegram with a touch of unintended solemnity.
"Oh! " Clarisse said. "Congratulations! " And after a slight, thoughtful pause she added: "I suppos,e you're going to be very rich now? " and looked around with interest.
"I don't believe he was more than moderatelywell off," Ulrich re- plied distantly. 'Tve been living here quite beyond his means. "
Clarisse acknowledged the rebuke with a tiny smile, a sort of little
curtsy of a smile; many of her expressi~e movements were as abrupt and disproportionate in a small space as the theatrical bow of a boy who must demonstrate before company how well he has been brought up. She was left alone, for a few moments while Ulrich ex- cused himselfto go and make preparations for the trip he would have to take. When she had left Walter after their violent scene she had not gone far; outside the door to their apartment there was a seldom- use~staircase leading up to the attic, and there she had sat, wrapped in a shawl, until she heard him leave the house. It made her think of the lofts in theaters for the stage machinery, where ropes run on pul- leys, and there she sat while Walter made his exit down the stairs. She imagined that actresses might sit on the rafters above the stage between calls, wrapped in shawls, watching the stage from above; en- joying a full view ofeverything that was going on, just as she was now. It fitted in with a favorite notion ofhers, that life was a dramatic role to be played. There was no need to understal)d one's part rationally, she thought; after all, what did anyone know about it, even those who might know tnore than she did? It was a matter of having the right instinct for life, like a storm bird. One simply spread out one's arms-and for her that included words, tears, ldsses-like wings and took off! This fantasy offered some compensation to her for being no longer able to believe in Walter's future. She looked down the steep staircase Walter had just descended, spread her arms, and kept them raised in that position as long as she could; perhaps she could help him in that way! A steep ascent and a steep descent are strong com- plementary opposites and belong together, she thought. "Joyful world aslant" was what she named her wingspread arms and her gaze down the stairwell. She changed her mind about snealdng out to watch the demonstrators in town; what did she care about the com- mon herd; the fantastic drama of the elect had begun! .
And so Clarisse had gone to see Ulrich. On the way a sly smile would sometimes appear on her face, whenever it occurred to her that Walter thought her crazy each time she let slip any sign of her greater insight into what was going on between them. It tickled her vanity to know that he was afraid of having a child by her even while he impatiently longed for it. "Crazy" to her meant being some- thing like summer lightning, or enjoying so extraordinary a degree of health that it frightened people; it was a quality her marriage had
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brought out in her, step by step, as her feelings of superiority and control grew. She did realize, all the same, that there were times when other people did not know what to make of her, and when Ul- rich reappeared she felt she ought to say something to him that would be in keeping with an event that cut so deeply into his life. She leapt up from the couch, paced through the room and the adjoining rooms, and then said: "Well, my sincere condolences, old fellow! "
Ulrich looked at her in astonishment, although he recognized _the tone she fell into when she was nervous. Sometimes she's so hope- lessly conventional, he thought; it;s like coming upon a page from another book bound in with what one is reading. She had not both- ered to watch her words with the appropriate expression but had flung them at him sideways, over her shoulder, which heightened the effect of hearing, not a false note exactly, but the wrong words to the tune, giving the uncanny impression that she herself consisted of many such misplaced texts. ,
When she received no answer from Ulrich, she stopped in front of him and said: "I have to talk with you! "
"May I offer you some refreshment? " Ulrich said.
Clarisse only fluttered her hand at shoulder height to signal no. She pulled her thoughts together and said: "Walter is dead set on having a child. Can you understand that? " She seemed to be waiting for an answer. But what could Ulrich have said to that?
"But I don't want to! " she cried out violently.
"Well, no need to fly into a rage," Ulrich said. "Ifyou don't want to, it can't happen. "
"But it's destroying him! "
"People who are always expecting to die generally live a long time! You and I will be shriveled ancients while Walter will still have his boyish face under his white mane as Director of his Archives. "
Clarisse turned pensively on her heel and walked away from Ul- rich; at a distance, she wheeled to face him again and "fixed him" with her eye.
"Have you ever seen an umbrella with its shaft removed? Walter falls apart when I tum away from him. I'm his shaft and he's . . . " She was about to say "my umbrella" but thought ofsomething much bet- ter: "my shield," she said. "He sees himself as my protector. And the fust thing that means is giving me a big belly. Next will be the lee-
tures on breast-feeding the infant because that is nature's way, and then he'll want to bring up the child in his own image. You know him well enough to know all that. All he wants is to have the rights to everything and a terrific excuse for making bourgeois conformists out of both of us. But if I go on saying no, as I have been, he'll be done for. I mean simply everything to him! "
Ulrich smiled incredulously at this sweeping claim. "He wants to kill you," Clarisse added quickly. "What? I thought that was your suggestion to him. " "I want the child from you! " Clarisse said.
Ulrich whistled through his teeth in surprise.
She smiled like an adolescent who has misbehaved with deliberate provocation.
"I wouldn't do something so underhanded to such an old friend," Ulrich said slowly. "It goes against my grain. " ·
"Oh? So you're a man of high scruple, are you? " Clarisse seemed to attach some special significance of her own to this that Ulrich didn't understand. She gave it some thought and. then retu~ed to the attack: "But if you are my lover, he's got you where he wants you. "
"How do you mean? "
. "It's obvious; I just don't know quite how to put it. You'll be forced
to treat him with consideration. We'll both be feeling sorry for him. You can't just go ahead and cheat on him, of course, so you'll have to try to make it up to him somehow. And so on and so forth. And most important of all, you'll be driving him to bring out the best that's in him. You know perfectly well that we are stuck inside ourselves like statues in a block ofstone. We have to sculpt ourway out! We have to force each other to do it. "
"Maybe so," Ulrich said, "but aren't you getting ahead ofyourself? What makes you think any of this will happen? "
Clarisse was smiling again. "Perhaps I am ahead of myself," she said. She sidled up to him and slipped her arm confidingly under his, which hung limply at his side and made no room for hers. "Don't you find me attractive? Don't you like me? " she asked. And when he did not answer, she went on: "But you do find me attractive, I know it; I've seen it often enough, the way you look at me, when you come to see us. Do you remember if I've ever told you that you're the Devil?
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That's how I feel. Try to understand, I'm not calling you a poor devil: that's the kind who wants to do evil because he doesn't know any better. You are a great devil: you know what's good and you do the opposite of what you'd like to dol You know the life we lead is abomi- nable, and so you say mockingly that we must go on with it. And you say, full ofyour high scruples, 'I won't cheat on a friend,' but you only say that because you've thought a hundred times, 'I'd like to have Clarisse. ' But just because you're a devil you have something ofa god inside you, Ulo! A great god. The kind who lies to try to 'keep from being recognized. You dowant me. . . . "
She had gripped both his arms now, standing before him with her face lifted up to his, her body curving back like a plant responding to a touch on its petals. In a moment her face will be drenched with that look, like the last time, Ulrich thought apprehensively. But nothing of the kind happened; her face remained beautiful. Instead of her usual tight smile there was an open one, which showed a little of her teeth between the rosy flesh ofher lips, as though about to bite. Her mouth took on the shape of a double Cupid's bow, a line echoed in the curve of her eyebrows and again in the translucent cloud of her hair. ·
"For a long time now you've been wanting to pick me up with those teeth in that lying mouth ofyours and carry me off, ifonlyyou could stand to let me see you as you really are," Clarisse had con- tinued. Ulrich gently freed himself from her grip. She dropped down on the couch as if he had put her there, and pulled him down after her.
"You really shouldn't let your imagination run away with you like this," Ulrich said in reproof. ·
Clarisse had let go of him. She closed her eyes and supported her head with both hands, her elbows resting on her knees; now that her second attack had been repelled, she decided to resort to icy logic.
"Don't be so literal-minded," she said. "When I speak of the Devil, or of God, it's only a figure of speech. But when I'm alone at home, or walking in the neighborhood, I often think: If I turn to the left, God will come; if I turn to the right, the Devil. Or when I'm about to pick something up with my hand, I have the same feeling about using the right or the left hand. When I tell Walter about it he puts his hands in his pockets, in real panic. He's happy to see a flower
in bloom, or even a snail, but don't you think the life we lead is terri- bly· sad? No God comes, or the Devil either. I've been waiting for years now, but what is there to wait for? Nothing. That's all there is, unless art can work a miracle and change everything. "
At this moment there was something so gentle and sad about her that Ulrich gave way to an impulse to touch her soft hair wi\:h his hand. "You may be right in the details, Clarisse," he said. "But I. can never follow your leaps from one point to another, or see how it all hangs together. "
"It's quite simple," she said, still in the same posture as before. "As time went on, an idea came to me. Listen! " She straightened up and was suddenly quite vivacious again. "Didn't you once say yourself that the way we live is full of cracks through which we can see the impossible state of affairs underneath, as it were? You needn't say anything, I've known about it for a long time. W e all want to have our lives in order, but nobody has! I play the piano or paint a picture, but it's like putting up a screen to hide a hole in the wall. You and Walter also have ideas, and I don't understand much ofthat, but that doesn't work either, and you said yourself that we avoid looking at the hole out of habit or laziness, or else we let ourselves be distracted from it by bad things. Well, there's a simple answer: That's the hole we have to escape through! And I know how! There are days when I can slip out of myself. Then it's like finding yourself-how shall I put it? - right in the center ofthings as ifpeeled out ofa shell, and the things have had their dirty ri~d peeled off too. Or else one feels connected by the air with everything there is, like a Siamese twin. It's an incred- ible, marvelous feeling; everything turns into music and color and rhythm, and I'm no longer the citizen Clarisse, as I was baptized, but perhaps a shining splinter pressing into some immense unfathom- able happiness. But you know all about that. That's what you meant when you said that there's something impossible about reality, and that one's experiences should not be turned inward, as something personal and real, but must be turned outward, like a song or a paint- ing, and so on and so forth. Oh, I could recite it all exactly the way you said it. " Her "so on and so forth" recurred like some wild refrain as Clarisse's torrent of words flowed on, regularly interspersed with her assertion "You can do it, but you won't, and I don't know why you won't, but I'm going to shake you up! "
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Ulrich had let her go on talking, only shaking his head from time to time when she attributed to him something too unlikely, but he could not bring himselfto argue with her and left his hand resting on her hair, where his fingertips could almost sense the confused pulsa- tion of the thoughts inside her skull. He had never yet seen Clarisse in such a state of sensual excitement and was amazed to see that even in her slim, hard young body there was room for all the loosening and soft expansion of a woman's glowing passion; this sudden, always sur- prising opening up of a woman one has known only as inaccessibly shut away in herself did not fail to have its effect on him. Although they defied all reason, her words did not repel him, for as they came close to touching him in the quick and then again angled off into ab- surdity, their constant rapid movement, like a buzzing or humming, drowned out the quality of the tone, beautiful or ugly, in the intensity of the vibrations. Listening to her seemed to help him make up his mind, like some wild music, and it was only when she seemed to have· lost her way in the maze ofher own words and could not find her way out that he shook her head a little with his outspread hand, as though to call her back and set her straight.
