No More Learning

Diotima received him with the indulgent smile of an eminent lady who knows that she is also beautiful and has to forgive men, superficial creatures that they are, for always thinking of her beauty first.
"I've been expecting you," she said, leaving Ulrich uncertain whether she meant this as a kindness or a rebuke. The hand she gave him was plump and weightless.
He held it a moment too long. his thoughts unable to let go of this hand at once. It rested in his own like a fleshy petal; its pointed nails, like beetle wings, seemed poised to fly offwith her at any moment into the improbable. He was overwhelmed by the exaltation of this female hand, basically a rather shameless human organ that, like a dog's muzzle, will tquch anything and yet is publicly considered the seat of fidelity, nobility, and tenderness. During these few seconds, he noted that there were several rolls of fat on Diotima's neck, cov- ered with the finest skin; her hair was wound into a Grecian knot,
which stood out stiffly and in its perfection resembled a wasp's nest. •
Ulrich felt a hostile impulse, an urge to offend this smiling ~man, and yet he could not quite resist her beauty.
Diotima, fur her part, also gave him a long and almost searching gaze. She had heard things about this cousin that to her ear had a slight tinge of the scandalous, and besides, he was related to her. Ulrich noticed that she, too, could not quite resist the impression of his physical appearance. He was used to this. He was clean- shaven, tall, well-built, and supplely muscular; his face was bright but impenetrable; in a word, he sometimes regarded himself as the preconceived idea most women have of an impressive and still young man; he simply did not always have the energy to disabuse them. Diotima resisted this impression by deciding to feel compas- sion for him. Ulrich could see that she was constantly studying his appearance and, obviously not moved by unfavorable feelings, was probably telling herself that the noble qualities he so palpably seemed to possess must be suffocated by a vicious life and could be saved. Although she was not much younger than Ulrich and physi- cally in full open bloom, her appearance emanated something with- held and virginal that formed a strange contrast to her self-confidence. So they went on surveying each other even after they had begun to talk. .
Diotima began by calling the Parallel Campaign a unique, never- to-recur opportunity to bring into existence what must be regarded as the greatest and most important thing in the ~rld. "We must and will bring to life a truly great idea. We have the opportunity, and we must not fail to use it. "
"Do you have something specific in mind? " Ulrich asked naively.
No, Diotima did not have anything specific in mind. How could she? No one who speaks of the greatest and most important thing in the world means anything that really exists. What peculiar quality of the world would it be equivalent to? It all amounts to one thing being greater and more important, or more beautiful and sadder, than an- other; in other words, the existence of a hierarchy of values and the comparative mode, which surely implies an end point and a superla- tive? But ifyou point this out to someone who happens at that very moment to be speaking of the greatest and most important thing in the world, that person will suspect that she is dealing with an individ-
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ual devoid offeelings and ideals. This was Diotima's reaction, and so had Ulrich spoken. .
As a woman admired for her intellect, Diotima found Ulrich's ob- jection irreverent. After a moment she smiled and replied: "There is so much that is great and good that has not yet been realized that the choice will not be easy. But we will set up committees from all sec- tors of the population, which will help us in our work. Or don't you think, Herr von , that it is an incredible privilege to be in a position to call on a whole nation-indeed, on the whole world-on such an occasion, to awaken it in the midst ofits materialistic preoc- cupations to the life ofthe spirit? You must not assume that we have in mind something 'patriotic' in the long-outdated sense. " -
Ulrich was humorously evasive.
Diotima did not laugh, but barely smiled. She was accustomed to witty men, but they were all something else pesides. Paradox for the sake ofparadox struck her as immature, and aroused the need to re- mind her cousin ofthe seriousness ofthe reality that lent to this great national undertaking dignity as well as responsibility. In a tone of fi- nality, she made a fresh start. Ulrich involuntarily sought between her words those black-and-yellow tapes that are used for interleaving and fastening official papers in Austrian government offices; but what came from Diotima's lips were by no means only bureaucr. atic formul~ but also such cultural code words as "soulless age, domi- nated only by logic and psychology" or "the present and eternity," and suddenly there was mention of Berlin, too, and the "treasure of feeling" Austria had still preserved, in contrast to Prussia.
Ulrich attempted several times to interrupt these ex cathedra pro- nouncements, but the vestry incense of high bureaucracy instantly clouded over the interruption, gently veiling its tactlessness. Ulrich was astonished. He rose. His first visit was clearly at an end.
During these moments of his retreat Diotima treated him with that bland courtesy, carefully and pointedly a little overdone, which she had learned by imitating her husband. He used it in his dealings with young aristocrats who were his subordinates but might one day be his ministers. There was, in her manner of inviting him to come again, a touch ofthat supercilious uneasiness ofthe intellectual when faced with a ruder vitality. When he held her gentle, weightless hand ip his own once more, they looked into each other's eyes. Ulrich had
the distinct impression that they were destined to cause each other considerable annoyance through love.
"Truly," he thought, "a hydra of a beauty. " He had meant to let the great patriotic campaign wait for him in vain, but it seemed to have become incarnate in the person of Diotima and stood ready to swallow him up. It was a semi-comical feeling: despite his maturity and experience, he felt like a destructive little worm being eyed at- tentively by a large chicken. "For heaven's sake," he thought, "I can't let myself be provoked to petty derelictions by this giantess of the soul! " He had had enough ofhis affair with Bonadea, and he commit- ted himself to exercise the utmost restraint.
As he was leaving the apartment, he was cheered by a pleasant impression he had already had on his arrival. A little chambermaid with dreamy eyes showed him out. In the darkness of the entrance hall her eyes, fluttering up to his for the first time, had been like black butterflies; now, as he left, they floated down through the dark- ness like black snowflakes. There was something Arabian or Al- gerian-Jewish about the little girl, something so unobtrusively sweet that Ulrich again forgot to take a good look at her. It was only when he was out in the street again that he felt what an uncommonly alive and refreshing sight the little maid was after Diotima's presence.
A. GREAT MAN'S INITIAL INTERVENTION
Ulrich's departure had left both Diotima and her maid in a state of vague excitement. But while the little black lizard always felt as though she had been allowed to flit up a high, shimmering wall whenever she saw a distinguished visitor to the door, Diotima han- dled her impression ofUlrich with the conscientiousness ofa woman who doesn't really mind feeling touched though she should because she has the ability to keep herself gently in check. Ulrich did not
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know that on that same day another man had entered her life to lift her up like a giant mountain offering a tremendous view.
Dr. Paul Arnheim had called on her soon after arriving in town.
He was immeasurably rich. His father was the mightiest mogul of "Iron Germany," that is, Bismarck's Germany, to which even Section Chief Tuzzi had condescended. Tuzzi was laconic on principle. He . felt that puns and the like, even ifone could not do entirely without them in witty conversation, had better not be too good, because that would be middle-class. He had advised his wife to treat this visitor with marked distinction, for even ifhis kind were not yet on top in the German Reich, and their influence at Court was not to be com- pared with that of the Krupps, they might, in his opinion, be on top tomorrow. He also passed on to her a confidential rumor that the son-a man well into his forties, incidentally-was aiming not merely at his father's position but was preparing himself, based on the trend of the times and his international connections, to become a Reichsminister someday. Tuzzi ofcourse regarded this as completely out of the question, unless a world cataclysm were to pave the way.
He had no idea what a tempest his words unleashed in his wife's imagination. In her circle it was a matter ofprinciple not to think too highly of "men in trade," but like every person of bourgeois outlook, she admired wealth in those depths of the heart that are quite im- mune to convictions, and the prospect of actually meeting so incredi- bly rich a man made her feel as if golden angel's wings had come down to her from on high. Ever since her husband's rise, Ermelinda Tuzzi was not entirely unaccustomed to consorting with fame and riches. But fame based on intellectual achievements melts away with surprising speed as one becomes socially involved with its bearers, and feudal wealth manifests itselfeither in the foolish debts ofyoung attaches or is constrained by a traditional style of living without ever attaining the brimming profusion of freely piled-up mountains of money and the brilliant cascading showers of gold with which the great banks and industrial combines fuel their business. All Diotima knew of banks was that even their middle-echelon executives trav- eled first-class on business, while she always had to go second-class unless accompanied by her husband. This was the standard by which she imagined the luxury that must surround the top despots offinan- cial operations on so oriental a scale.
Her little maid, Rachel-it goes without saying that Diotima pro- nounced it in the French style-had heard fantastic things. The least she had to report was that the nabob had arrived in his own private train, had reserved an entire hotel, and had brought a little black slave with him. The truth. was considerably more modest, if only be- cause Paul Arnheim never acted conspicuously. Only the little black- amoor was real. Some years ago, on a trip in southernmost Italy, Amheim had picked him out of a traveling dance troupe, partly for show and partly from an impulse to raise a fellow creature from the depths and carry out God's work by opening up the life of the mind to him. He soon enough lost interest and used the now sixteen-year- old boy only as a servant, even though before the boy was fourteen Arnheim had been giving him Stendhal and Dumas to read.
But even though the rumors her maid brought home were so childish in their extravagance that Diotima had to smile, she made her repeat them word for word, because she found it charming and unspoiled, as was only possible in this one great city, which was "rife with culture to the point of innocence. " And the little black boy sur- prisingly caught even her imagination.
Diotima was the eldest of three daughters of a secondary-school teacher without private means, so that Tuzzi had been considered a good catch for her even before he had been anything but an as yet unknown middle-class vice-consul. In her girlhood she had had noth- ing but her pride, and since her pride had nothing to be proud about, it was only a . rolled-up propriety bristling with feelers of sensitivity. But even such a posture may conceal ambition and daydreams, and can be an unpredictable force.
If Diotima had at first been lured by the prospect of distant entan- glements in distant lands, she was soon disappointed. After a few years her experience served only as a discreetly exploited advantage over women friends who envied her her slight aura of the exotic, and it could not ward off the realization that at such foreign posts life remains, by and large, the life one has brought along with the rest of one's baggage. For a long time, Diotima's ambitions had been close to ending up in the genteel hopelessness of the fifth service grade, until by chance her husband's career took a sudden up\vard turn when a benevolent minister of a "progressive" cast of mind took this bourgeois into the central office of the ministry itself. In this posi-
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tion, Tuzzi was now approached by many people who wanted some- thing from him, and from this moment something came alive in Di- otima, almost to her own amazement, a treasure of memories of "spiritual beauty and grandeur" ostensibly gathered in a cultured home and the great world centers, but whi~hin fact she had probably acquired in a girls' private school as a model student, and this she began turning cautiously to account. Her husband's sober but un- commonly dependable intelligence inevitably attracted attention to her as well, and as soon as she noticed that her cultural advantages were being appreciated, she joyfully began to slip little "high- minded" ideas into the conversation in the right places, as com- pletely guileless as a damp little sponge releasing the moisture it had previously soaked up for no particular purpose. And gradually, as her husband rose further in rank, more ancl more people were drawn into association with him, and her home became a "salon" which en- joyed a reputation as a place where "society and intellect" met. Now that she was seeing persons of consequence in many fields, Diotima began as well to seriously discover herself. Her feeling for what was
correct, still on the alert as it had been in school, still adept at re- membering its lessons and at bringing things together into an amia- ble unity,- simply by extension, turned into a form ofintellect in itself, and the Tuzzi house won a recognized position.
CAPITAL AND CULl'URE. DIOTIMA'S FRIENDSHIP WITH COUNT LEINSDORF, AND THE OFFICE OF BRINGING DISTINGUISHED VISITORS INTO ACCORD WITH THE SOUL
But it took Diotima's friendship with Count Leinsdorf to make her salon an institution.
Among the parts of the body after which friends are named, Count
Leinsdorf's was so situated between the head and the heart that Di- otima would have to be considered a bosom friend, if such a term were still in use. His Grace revered Diotima's mind and beauty with- out permitting himself any unseemly intentions. His patronage not only gave Diotima's salon an unassailable position but conferred on it-as he liked to say-an official status.
For his own person, His Grace the Imperial liege-Count Leins- dorf was "nothing but a patriot. " But the state does not consist only of the Crown and the people, with the administrative machinery in between; there is something else besides: thought, morality, princi- ple! Devout as His Grace was, as a man permeated with a sense of responsibility who, incidentally, also ran factories on his estates, he never closed his mind to the realization that the human mind these days has in many respects freed itself from the tutelage of the Church. He could not imagine how a factory, for example, or a stock- exchange deal in wheat or sugar could be conducted on religious principles; nor was there any conceivable way to run a modem, large- scale landed estate rationally without the stock exchange and indus- try. When His Grace's business manager showed him how a certain
. deal could be made more profitably with a group of foreign specula- tors than i~ partnership with the local landed nobility, in most cases His Grace had to choose the former, because objective conditions have a rationale of their own, and this cannot be defied for sentimen- tal reasons by the head of a huge economic enterprise who bears the responsibility not only for himself but for countless other lives as well. There is such a thing as a professional conscience that in some cases contradicts the religious conscience, and Count Leinsdorf was convinced that in such a case even the Cardinal Archbishop would not act differently than he. Of course, Count Leinsdorf was always willing to deplore this state of affairs at public sessions of the Upper House and to express the hope that life would find its way back to the simplicity, naturalness, supernaturalness, soundness, and necessity of Christian principles. Whenever he opened his mouth to make such pronouncements, it was as though an electric contact had been opened, and he flowed in a different circuit. The same thing happens to most people, in fact, when they express themselves in public, and if anyone had reproached Count Leinsdorf with doing in private what he denounced in public, he would, with saintly conviction, have
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branded it the demagogic babble of subversives who lacked even a clue about the extent of life's responsibilities. Nevertheless, he real- ized the prime importance ofestablishing a connection between the eternal verities and the world of business, which is so much more complicated than the lovely simplicity oftradition, and he also recog- nized that such a connection could not be found anywhere but in the profundities ofmiddle-class culture. With its great ideas and ideals in the spheres of law, duty, morality, and beauty, it reached even the common everyday struggles and contradictions oflife, and seemed to him like a bridge made of tangled living plants. It did not, of course, offer as finn and secure a foothold as the dogmas ofthe Church, but it was no less necessary and responsible, which is why Count Leins- dorf was not only a religious idealist but also a passionate civilian idealist.
These convictions of His Grace's corresponded to the composition of Diotima's salons. These gatherings were celebrated for the fact that on her "great days" one ran into people one could not exchange a single word with because they were too well known in some special field or other for small talk, while in many cases one had never even heard the name of the specialty for which they were world-famous. . There were Kenzinists and Canisians, a grammarian of Bo might come up against a partigen researcher, a tokontologist against a quantum physicist, not to mention the representatives of new move- ments in arts and literature that changed their labels every year, all permitted to circulate in limited numbers along with their better- recognized colleagues. In general, things were so arranged that a random mixture blended harmoniously, except for the young intel- lectuals, whom Diotima usually kept apart by means of special invita- tions, and those rare or special guests whom she had a way of unobtrusively singling out and providing with a special setting. What distinguished Diotima's gatherings from all similar affairs was, inci- dentally, ifone may say so, the lay element; people from. the world of applied ideas, the kind who-in Diotima's words-had once spread out around a core of theological studies as a flock of faithful doers, really an entire community of lay brothers and sisters-in short, the element ofactton. But now that theology has been displaced by eco- nomics and physics, and Diotima'~ list of administrators of the spirit on earth who were to be invited had grown with time to resemble the
Catalogue of Scientific Papers of the Royal Society, the new lay brothers and sisters were correspondingly a collection of bank direc- tors, technicians, politicians, high officials, and ladies and gentlemen of society with their hangers-on. .
Diotima made a particular point of cultivating the women, al- though she gave preference to the "ladies" over the "intellectuals" among them. "Ufe is much too overburdened with knowledge these days," she was accustomed to say, "for us to be able to do without the 'unfragmented woman. ' " She was convinced that only the unfrag- mented woman still possessed the fated power to embrace the intel- lect with those vital forces that, in her opinion, it obviously sorely needed for its salvation. This concept of the entwining woman and the power of Being, incidentally, redounded greatly to her credit among the young male nobility who attended regularly because it was considered the thing to do and because TuZzi was not unpopular; for the unfragmented Being is som~thing the nobility really takes to, and more specifically, at the Tuzzis' couples could become deeply absorbed in conversation without attracting attention; so that for ten- der rendezvous and long heart-to-heart talks, her house-though Di- otima had no inkling of this-was even more popular than a church.
His Grace the Uege-Count Leinsdorfsummed up these two social elements, so various in themselves, which mingled at Diotima's- when he did not simply call them "the true elite"-as "capital and culture. " But he liked best of all to think of them in tenns of "official public service," a concept that had pride ofplace in his. thinking. He regarded every accomplishment, that of the factory worker or the concert singer as well as that of the civil servant, as a fonn of official service.
"Every person," he would say, "performs an office within the state; the worker, the prince, the artisan, are all civil servants. " This was an emanation ofhis always and under all circumstances impartial way of thinking, ignorant of bias, and in his eyes even the ladies and gentlemen of the highest society performed a significant if not read- ily definable office when they chatted with learned experts on the Bogazkoy inscriptions or the question of lamellibranchiate mollusks, while eyeing the wives of prominent financiers. This concept of offi- cial public service was his version ofwhat Diotima referred to as the religious unity, lost since the Middle Ages, of all human activity.
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All enforced sociability, such as that at the Tuzzis', beyond a cer- tain naive and crude level, springs basically from the need to simu- late a unity that cou)d govern all of humanity's highly varied activities and that is never there. This simulation was what Diotima called cul- ture, usually, with special amplification, "our Old Austrian culture. " As her ambition had expanded to embrace intellect, she had learned to use this term more and more often. She understood by it: the great paintings of Vehizquez and Rubens hanging in the Imperial Mu- seum; the fact that Beethoven was, so to speak, an Austrian; Mozart, Haydn, St. Stephen's Cathedral, the Burgtheater; the weighty tradi- tional ceremonials at the Imperial Court; Vienna's central district, where the smartest dress and lingerie shops of an empire with fifty million inhabitants were crowded together; the discreet manners of high officials; Viennese cuisine; the aristocracy, which considered it- self second to none except the English, and their ancient palaces; high society's tone of sometimes genuine, mostly sham, aestheticism. She ~so understood by it the fact that in this country so eminent a gentleman as Count Leinsdorf had taken her under his wing and made her house the center ofhis own cultural endeavors. She did not know that His Grace was also moved by the consideration that it was not quite the thing to open his own noble house to innovations that might easily get out of hand. Count Leinsdorfwas often secretly hor- rified by the freedom and indulgence with which his beautiful friend spoke of human passions and the turmoil they cause, or of revolu- tionary ideas. But Diotima did not notice this. She drew a line, as it were, between public immodesty and private modesty, like a female physician or a social worker. She 'was acutely sensitive to any word that touched her too personally, but impersonally she would talk freely about anything, and could only feel that Count Leinsdorf found the mixture most appealing.
Nothing in life is built, however, without the stones having to be broken out from somewhere else. To Diotima's painful surprise some tiny, dreamy-sweet almond kernel of imagination, once the core of her existence when there was nothing else in it, and which had still been there when she decided to marry Vice-Consul Tuzzi, who looked like a leather steamer trunk with two dark eyes, had van- ished in the years ofsuccess. She realized that much ofwhat she un- derstood by "our Old Austrian culture," like Haydn or the
Habsburgs, had once been only a boring school lesson, while to be actually living in the midst ofit all now seemed enchanting and quite as heroic as the midsummer humming of bees. In time, however, it became not only monotonous but also a strain on her, and even hopeless. Diotima's experience with her famous guests was no differ- ent from that ofCount Leinsdorfwith his banking connections; how- ever much one might try to get them into accord with one's soul, it did not succeed. One can talk about cars and X rays, of cou~se, with a certain amount of feeling, but what else can one do about the count- less other inventions and discoveries that nowadays every single day brings forth, other than to marvel at human inventiveness in general, which in the long run gets to be too tiresome!
His Grace would drop in occasionally, and spoke with a political figure or had himself introduced to a new guest. I t was easy for him to enthuse about the profound reaches of culture, but when you were as closely involved with it as Diotima, the insoluble problem was not its depths but its breadth! Even questions of such immediate concern as the noble simplicity of Greece or the meaning of the Prophets dissolved, in conversation with specialists, into an incalcu- lable multiplicity of doubts and possibilities. Diotima found that even the celebrities always talked in twos, because the time had al- ready come when a person could talk sensibly and to the point with at most one other person-and she herself could not really find any- one at all. At this point Diotima had discovered in herself the well- known suffering caused by that familiar malady of contemporary man known as civilization. It is a frustrating condition, full of soap, radio frequencies, the arrogant sign language of mathematical and chemical formulas, economics, experimental research, and the in- ability of human beings to live together simply but on a high plane. And even the relationship of her own innate·nobility of mind to th~ social nobility, whom she had to handle with great care and who brought her, with all her successes,. many a disappointment, gradu- ally came to seem to her more and more typical of an age not of cul- ture but merely of civilization.
Civilization, then, meant everything that her mind could not con- trol. Including, for a long time now, and first of all, her husband.
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SUFFERINGS OF A MARRIED SOUL
In her mi~eryshe read a great deal, and discovered that she had lost something she had previously not really known she had: a soul.
What's that? It is easy to define negatively: It is simply that which sneaks off at the mention of algebraic series.
But positively? It seems successfully to elude every effort to pin it down. There may once have been in Diotima something fresh and natural, an intuitive sensibility·wrapped in the propriety she wore like a cloak threadbare from too much brushing, something she now called her soul and rediscovered in Maeterlinck's batik-wrapped metaphysics, or in Novalis, but most of all in the ineffable wave of anemic romanticism and yearning for GOd that, for a while, the ma- chine age squirted out as an expression of its spiritual and artistic misgivings about itself. it might also be that this original freshness in Diotima could be defined more precisely as a blend of quiet, tender- ness, devotion, and kindness that had never found a proper path and in the foundry in which Fate casts our forms had happened to pour itself into the comical mold of her idealism. Perhaps it was imagina- tion; perhaps an intuition of the instinctive vegetative processes at work eyery day beneath the covering of the body, above which the soulful expression of a beautiful woman gazes at us. Possibly it was only the coming of certain indefinable hours when she felt Wllffil and expansive, when her sensations were keener than usual, when ambi- tion and will were becalmed and she was seized by a hushed mpture and fullness of life while her thoughts, even the slightest ones, turned away from the surface and toward the inward depths, leaving the world's events far away, like noise beyond a garden wall. At such times Diotima felt as if she had a direct vision of the truth within herself without having to strain for it; tender experiences that as yet bore no name raised their veils, and she felt-to cite only a few of the many descriptions of it she had found in the litemture on the sub- ject-harmonious, humane, religious, and close to that primal source
that sanctifies everything arising from it and leaves sinful everything that does not. But even though it was all quite lovely to think about, Diotima could never get beyond such hints and intimations of this peculiar condition; nor did the prophetic books she relied on for help, which spoke of the same thing in the same mysterious and im- precise language. Diotima was reduced to blaming this, too, on a pe- riod of civilization that had simply filled up with rubble the access to the soul.
What she called "soul" was probably nothing more than a small amount of capital in love she had possessed at the time of her mar- riage. Section Chief Tuzzi was not the right business opportunity to invest in. His advantage over Diotima~ at first and for a long time, was that of the older man; to this was later added the advantage of the successful man in a mysterious position, who gives his wife little insight into himself even as he looks on indulgently at the trivia that keep her busy. And apart from the tendemesses of courtship, Tuzzi had always been a practical man of common sense who never lost his balance. Even so, the well-cut assurance of his actions and his suits, the-one could say-urbanely grave aroma of his body and his beard, the guardedly firm baritone in which he spoke, all gave him an aura that excited the soul of the girl Diotima as the nearness of his master excites the retriever who lays his muzzle on the mastels knees. And just as the dog trots along behind, his feelings safe and fenced in, so Diotima, too, under such serious-minded, matter-of- fact guidance, entered upon the infinite landscape of love.
Here Section Chief Tuzzi preferred the straight paths. His daily habits were those of an ambitious worker. He rose early, either to ride or, preferably, to take an hour's walk, which not only preserves the body's elasticity but also represents the kind of pedantic, simple routine that, strictly adhered to, consorts perfectly with an image of responsible achievement. It also goes without saying that on those evenings when they were not invited out and had no guests he imme- diately withdrew to his study; for he was forced to maintain his great stock of expert information at the high level that constituted his ad- vantage over his aristocratic colleagues and superiors. Such a life sets firm restraints, and ranges love with the other activities. Like all those whose imagination is not consumed by the erotic, Tuzzi in his bachelor days-apart from having to show himself occasionally be-
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cause of his diplomatic profession in the company of friends taking out little chorus girls-had been a quiet visitor at one brothel or an- other,' and carried the regular rhythm ofthis habit over into his mar- riage. Thus Diotima learned to know love as something violent, assaultive, and brusque that was released only once every week by an even greater power. This change in the nature of two people, which always began promptly on time, to be followed, a few minutes later, by a short exchange on those events of the day that had not come up before and then a sound sleep, and which was never mentioned in the times between, except perhaps in hints and allusions-like mak- ing a diplomatic joke about the "partie honteuse" ofthe body-nev- ertheless had unexpected anq paradoxical consequences for her.
On the one hand, it was the cause of that extravagantly swollen ideality-that officious, outw! ! l'dly-oriented personality-whose power of love, whose spiritual longing, reached out for all things great and noble that turned up in her environment, and that so in- tensely spread itself and bound itself to these that Diotima evoked the impression, so confusing to males, of a mightily blazing yet Pia. : tonic sun of love, the description of which had made Ulrich curious to meet her.
On the other hand, however, this broad rhythm of mari- tal contact had developed, purely physiologically, into a habit that asserted itself quite independently and without connection to the loftier parts of her being, like the hunger of a farmhand whose meals are infrequent but heavy. With time, as tiny hairs began to sprout on Diotima's upper lip and the masculine independence of the mature female woman mingled with the traits of the girl, she became aware of this split as something horrible. She loved her husband, but this was mingled with a growing revulsion, a dreadful affront to her soul,
which could only be compared to what Archimedes, deeply absorbed in his mathematical problems, might have felt if the enemy soldier had not killed him but made sexual demands on him. And since her husband was not aware of this-nor would he have thought about it i f h e h a d b e e n - a n d s i n c e h e r b o d y always e n d e d u p b e t r a y i n g h e r t o him against her will, she felt enslaved; it was a slavery that might not be considered unvirtuous but was just as tormenting as she imagined the appearance of a nervous tic or the inescapability of a vice to be. Now, this might perhaps have made Diotima slightly melancholy and_
even more idealistic, but unfortunately it happened just at the time that her salon began to cause her some spiritual difficulties.
Section Chief Tuzzi encouraged his wife's intellectual endeavors because he was not slow to see how they might serve to bolster his own position, but he had never taken part in them, and it is safe to say that he did not take them seriously. For the only things this ex- perienced man too1c seriously were power, duty, high social status, and, at a certain remove, reason. He even warned Diotima repeat- edly against being too ambitious in her aesthetic affairs of state, be- cause even if culture is, so to speak, the spice in the food of life, the best people did not go in for an oversalted diet. He said this quite without irony, as it was what he believed, but Diotima felt belittled. She constantly felt that her husband followed her idealis- tic endeavors with a hovering smile; and whether he was at home or not, and whether this smile-if indeed he did smile; she could never be quite sure-was for her personally or merely part of the facial expression of a man who for professional reasons always had to look superior, as time went on it became increasingly unbearable to her, yet she could not shake off its infamous appearance of being in the right. At times, Diotima would try to blame a materialistic age that had turned the world into an evil, purposeless game in which atheism, socialism, and positivism left no freedom for a per- son with a rich inner life to rise to true being; but even this was not often of much use.
Such was the situation in the Tuzzi household when the great pa- triotic campaign quickened the pace of events. Ever since Count Leinsdorf had established his campaign headquarters in Diotima's house so as not to involve the aristocracy, an unspoken sense of re- sponsibility had reigned there, for Diotima had made up her mind to prove to her husband, now or never, that her salon was no plaything. His Grace had confided in her that the great patriotic campaign needed a crowning idea, and it was her burning ambition to fmd it. The thought of creating something with the resources of an empire and before the attentive eyes ofthe world, an embodiment ofculture at its greatest or, more modestly circumscribed, perhaps something that would reveal the innermost being of Austrian culture-this thought moved Diotima as if the door to her salon had suddenly
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sprung open and the boundless ocean were lapping at her threshold like an extension of the floor.
There is no denying that her first reaction to this vision was the sense of the momentary gaping of an illimitable void.
First impressions are so often right! Diotima felt sure that some- thing incomparable was going to happen, and she summoned up her many ideals; she mobilized all the pathos of hEtr schoolgirl history lessons, through which she had learned to think in terms of empires and centuries; she did absolutely everything one has to do in such a situation. But after a few weeks had passed in this fashion, she had to face the fact that no inspiration whatsoever had come her way. What Piotima felt toward her husband at this point would have been ha- tred, had she been at all capable of hatred-such a base impulse! Instead, she became depressed, and began to feel a "resentment against everything" such as she had never known before.
It was at this point that Dr. Arnheim arrived, accompanied by his little black servant, and shortly thereafter paid his momentous call on Diotima.
THE UNION OF SOUL AND ECONOMICS. THE MAN WHO CAN ACCOMPLISH THIS WANTS TO ENJOY THE BAROQUE CHARM OF OLD AUSTRIAN CULTURE. AND SO AN IDEA FOR THE PARALLEL CAMPAIGN IS BORN
Diotima never had an improper thought, but on this day there must have been all sorts ofgoings-on in her mind as it dwelled on the inno- cent little black boy, after she had sent "Rachelle" out of the room. She had willingly listened once again to the maid's story after Ulrich had left the house of his "great cousin," and the beautiful, ripe woman was feeling young and as if she were playing with a tinkling
toy. There had once been a time when the aristocracy had kept black sezvants-delightful images of sleigh rides with gaily caparisoned horses, plumed lackeys, and frost-powdered trees passed through her mind-but all this picturesque aspect of high life had perished long ago. ''The soul has gone out of society these days," she thought. Something in her heart sided with the dashing outsider who still dared keep a blackamoor, this improperly aristocratic bourgeois, this intruder who put to shame the propertied heirs of tradition, as the learned Greek slave had once shamed his Roman masters. Cramped as her self-confidence was by all sorts of considerations, it took wing and gladly deserted to his colors as a sister spirit, and this feeling, so natural compared with her other feelings, even made her overlook that Dr. Arnheim-the rumors were still contradictory, nothing was yet known for certain-was presumed to be of Jewish descent; at least on his father's side, it was reported with certainty. His mother had been dead so long that it would take some time for the facts to be established. ·It might even have been possible that a certain cruel Weltschmerz in Diotima's heart was not at all interested in a denial.
She had cautiously permitted her thoughts to stray from the black- amoor and approach his master. Dr. Paul Arnheim was not only a rich man but also a man of notable intellect. His fame went beyond the fact that he was heir to world-spanning business interests; the books he had written in his leisure hours were regarded in advanced circles as extraordinary. The people who form such purely intellec- tual groups are above social and financial considerations, but one must not forget that precisely for that reason they are especially fas- cinated by a rich man who joins their ranks; furthermore, Arnheim's pamphlets and books proclaimed nothing. less than the merger of soul and economics, or of ideas and power. The sensitive minds of the time, those with the finest antennae for what was in the wind, spread the report that he combined these normally opposite poles in his own person, and they encour~ged the rumor that here was a man for the times, who might be called on one day to guide for the better the destinies of the German Reich and perhaps-who could tell? - even the world. For there had long been a widespread feeling that the principles and methods of old-style politics and diplomacy were steering Europe right into the ditch, and besides, the period ofturn- ing away from specialists had already begun.
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Diotima;s condition, too, could have been expressed as rebellion against the thinking of the older school of diplomacy, which is why she instantly grasped the marvelous similarity between her own posi- tion and that of this brilliant outsider. Besides, the famous man had called on her at the first possible moment; her house was the first by far to receive this mark of distinction, and his letter of introduction from a mutual woman friend mentioned the venerable culture of the Habsburg capital and its people, which this hardworking man hoped to enjoy between unavoidable business engagements. Diotima felt singled out like a writer who is being translated into the language ofa foreign country for the frrst time, when she learned from the letter that this renowned foreigner knew the reputation of her intellect. She noted that he did not look in the least Jewish but was a noble- looking, reserved man of the classic-Phoenician type. Amheim, too, was delighted to find in Diotima not only a woman who had read his books but who, as a classical beauty on the plump side, corresponded to his Hellenic ideal of beauty, with a bit more flesh on her, perhaps,
to soften those strict classical lines. It could not long remain con- cealed from Diotima that the impression she was able to make in a twenty-minute conversation on a man of real worldwide connections was enough to completely dispel all those doubts through which her own husband, caught up as he was in his rather dated diplomatic ways, had insulted her importance.
She took quiet satisfaction in repeating that conversation to her- self. It had barely begun when Amheim was already saying that he had come to this ancient city only to recuperate a little, under the baroque spell of the Old Austrian culture, from the calculations, ma- terialism, and bleak rationalism in which a civilized man's busy work- ing life was spent nowadays.
There is such a blithe soulfulness in this city, Diotima had an- swered, as she was pleased to recall.
"Yes," he had said, "we no longer have any inner voices. We know too much these days; reason tyrannizes our lives. "
To which she had replied: "I like the company of women. They don't know anything and are unfragmented. " .
And Amheim had said: "Nevertheless, a beautiful woman under- stands far more than a man, who, for all his logic and psychology, knows nothing at all of life. "
At which point she had told him that a problem similar to that of freeing the soul from civilization, only on a monumental and national scale, was occupying influential circles here.
' W e m u s t - " s h e h a d s a i d , a n d A m h e i m i n t e r r u p t e d w i t h " T h a t is quite wonderfull"-"bring new ideas, or rather, if I may be permit- ted to say so"-here he gave a faint sigh-"bring ideas for the very first time into the domains of power. " And she had gone on: Com- mittees drawn from all sectors of the population were to be set up in order to ascertain what these ideas should be.
But just at this point Arnheim had said something most important, and in such a tone of warm friendship and respect that the warning left a deep mark on Diotima's mind.
It would not be easy, he had explained, to accomplish anything significant in this way. No democracy of committees but only strong individual personalities, with experience in both reality and the realm ofideas, would be able to direct such a campaign!
Up to this point, Diotima had gone over the conversation in her mind word for word; but here it dissolved into splendor-she could no longer remember what she had answered. A vague, thrilling feel- ing of joy and expectancy had been lifting her higher and higher all this time; now her mind resembled a small, brightly colored child's balloon that had broken loose and, shining glorim~sly, was floating upward toward the sun. And in the next instant it burst.
Thus was an idea it had lacked hitherto born to the great Parallel Campaign.
NATURE AND SUBSTANCE OF A GREAT IDEA
It would be easy to say what this idea consisted of, but no one could possibly describe its significance. For what distinguishes a great, stir- ring idea from an ordinary one, possibly e~en from an incredibly or-
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dinary and mistaken one, is that it exists in a kind of molten state through which the self enters an infinite expanse and, inversely, the expanse of the universe enters the self, so that it becomes impossible to differentiate between what belongs to the self and what belongs to the infinite. This is why great, stirring ideas consist of a body, which like the human body is compact yet frail, and of an immortal soul, which constitutes its meaning but is not compact; on the contrary, it dissolves into thin air at every attempt to grab hold of it in cold words. '
After this preamble it must be said that Diotima's great idea am~untedto nothing more than that the Prussian, Aniheim, was the man to assume the spiritual leadership ofthe great Austrian patriotic endeavor, even though this Parallel Campaign contained a barb of jealousy aimed at Prussia-Germany. But this was only the dead ver- bal body of the idea, and whoever finds it incomprehensible or ab- surd is kicking a corpse. As concerns the soul of this idea, it was chaste and proper, and in any case her decision contained, so to speak, a codicil for Ulrich. She did not know that her cousin had also made an impres~ion on her, although on a far deeper level than Am- heim, and overshadowed by the impression Amheim had made; h! ! -d she realized this, she would probably have despised herself for it. But she had instinctively guarded herself against such knowledge by de- claring before her conscious mind that Ulrich was "immature," even though he was older than she was. She took the position that she felt sorry for him, which facilitated her conviction that it was a duty to choose Amheim instead of Ulrich for the responsibilities of leading the campaign. On the other hand, after she had given birth to this resolution, feminine logic dictated that the slighted party now needed and deserved her help. If he felt shortchanged somehow, there was no better way to make up for it than by taking part in the great campaign, where he would have occasion to be much in her and Aniheim's company. So Diotima decided on that, too, but only as one tucks in a loose end.
A CHAPTER THAT MAY BE SKIPPED BY ANYONE NOT P ARTICULARL Y IMPRESSED BY THINKING AS AN OCCUP A TION
Ulrich, meanwhile, was at home, sitting at his desk, wor}W;lg. He had got out the research paper he had interrupted in the middle weeks ago when he had decided to return from abroad; he did not intend to finish it, but it diverted him to see that he could still do that sort of thing. The weather was fine, but in the last few days he had gone out only on brieferrands; he had not even set foot in the garden. He had drawn the curtains and was working in the subdued light like an acro- bat in a dimly lit circus arena rehearsing dangerous new somersaults for a panel of experts before the public has been let in. The preci- sion, vigor, and sureness ofthis mode ofthinking, which has no equal anywhere in life, filled him with something like melancholy.
He now pushed back the sheets of paper covered with symbols and formulas, the last thing he had written down being an equation for the state ofwater as a physical example to illustrate the applica- tion of a new mathematical process; but his thoughts must have strayed a while before.
'Wasn't I telling Clarisse something about water? " he mused, but could not recall the particulars. But it didn't really matter, and his thoughts roamed idly.
Unfortunately, nothing is so hard to achieve as a literary represen- tation of a man thinking. When someone asked a great scientist how he managed to come up with so much that wasnew, he replied: ·"Be- cause I never stop thinking about it. '~ And it is surely safe to say that unexpected insights turn up for no other reason than that they are expected. They are in no small part a success of character, emotional stability, unflagging ambition, and unremitting work. What a bore such constancy must bel Looking at it another way, the solution of an intellectual problem comes about not vety differently from a dog
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with a stick in his mouth trying to get through a narrow door; he will tum his head left and right until the stick slips through. We do much the same thing, but with the difference that we don't make indis- criminate attempts but already know from experience approximately how it's done. And if a clever fellow naturally has far more skill and experience with these twistings and turnings than a dim one, the slip- ping-through takes the clever fellow just as much by surprise; it is suddenly there, and one perceptibly feels slightly disconcerted be- cause one's ideas seem to have come of their own accord instead of waiting for their creator. This disconcerted feeling is nowadays called intuition by many people who would formerly, believing that it must be regarded as something suprapersonal, have called it inspira- tion; but it is only something impersonal, namely the affinity and co- herence of the things themselves, meeting inside a head.
The better the head, the less evident its presence in this process. As long as the process of thinking is in motion it is a quite wretched state, as if all the brain's convol~tions were suffering from colic; and when it is finished it no longer has the form ofthe thinking process as one experiences it but already that ofwhat has been thought, which is regrettably_ impersonal, for the thought then faces outward and is dressed for communication to the world. When a man is in the pro- cess of thinking, there is no way to catch the moment between the personal and the impersonal, and this is manifestly why thinkitig is such an embarrassment for writers that they gladly avoid it.
But the man without qualities was now thinking. One may draw the conclusion from this that it was, at least in part, not a personal affair. But then what is it? World in, and world out; aspects of world falling into place inside a head. Nothing of any importance had oc- curred to him; after he had thought about water as an example, noth- ing had occurred to·him except that water is something three times the size of the land, even counting only what everyone recognizes as water: rivers, seas, lakes, springs. It was long thought to be akin to air. The great Newton thought so, and yet most ofhis other ideas are still as up-to-date as ifthey had been thought today. The Greeks thought that the world and life had arisen from water. It was a god: Okeanos. Later, water sprites, elves, mermaids, and nymphs were invented. Temples and oracles were built by the water's edge. The cathedrals of Htldesheim, Paderbom, and Bremen were all built over springs,
and behold, are these cathedrals not still standing today? And isn't water still used for baptism? And aren't there devotees of water and apostles of natural healing, whose souls are in such oddly sepulchral health? So there was a place in the world like a blurred spot or grass trodden flat. And of course the man without qualities also had mod- em scientific concepts in his head, whether he happened to be think- ing ofthem or not. According to them water is a colorless liquid, blue only in thick layers, odorless and tasteless, as you recited over and over in school until you can never forget it, although physiologically it also contains bacteria, vegetable matter, air, iron, calcium sulfate, and calcium bicarbonate, and although physically this archetype of liquids is not basically a liquid at all but, depending on circum- stances, a solid, a liquid, or a gas. Ultimately it all dissolves into sys- tems of formulas, all somehow interlinked, and there were only a few dozen people in the whole wide world who thought alike about even so simple a thing as water; all the rest talk about it in languages that belong somewhere between today and some thousands of years ago. So one must say that as soon as a man begins to reflect even a little, he falls into disorderly company!
Now Ulrich remembered that he had, in fact, told all this to Cla- risse, who was no better educated than a little animal; but notwith- standing the superstitions she was made of, one had a vague feeling of oneness with her. The thought pricked him like a hot needle.
He was annoyed with himself.
The well-known ability of thought as recognized by doctors to dis- solve and dispel those deep-raging, morbidly tangled and matted conflicts generated in the dank regions ofthe selfapparently rests on nothing other than its social and worldly nature, which links the indi- vidual creature to other people and objects. But unfortunately the healing power of thought seems to be the same faculty that dimin- ishes the personal sense of experience. A casual reference to a hair on a nose weighs more than the most important concept, and acts, feelings, and sensations, when reported in words, can make one feel one has been present at a more or less notable personal event, however ordinary and impersonal the acts, feelings, and sensations maybe.
"It's idiotic," Ulrich thought, "but that's how it is. " It made him think of that dumb but deep,· exciting sensation, touching immedi-
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ately on the self, when one sniffs one's own skin. He stood up and pUlled the curtains back from the window. ,
The bark of the trees was still moist from the morning. On the street outside a violet haze ofgasoline fumes hovered. The sun shone through it, and people were moving along briskly. It was an asphalt spring, a seasonless spring day in autumn such as only cities can'con- jure up.
EXPLANA TION AND DISRUPTIONS OF A NORMAL STATE OF AWARENESS
Ulrich and Bonadea had agreed on a signal to let her know that he was at home alone. He was always alone, but he gave no signal. He must have expected for some tiple that Bonadea, hatted and veiled, would show·up unbidden. For Bonadea was madly jealous. When she came to see a man-even ifit was only to tell him how much she despised him-she always arrived full of inner weakness,,what with the impressions of the street and the glances of the men she passed on the way still rocking in her like a faint seasickness. But when the man sensed her weakness and made straight for her body, even though he had callously neglected her for so long, she was hurt, picked a quarrel, delayed with reproachful remarks what she herself could hardly bear to wait for any longer, and had the air of a duck shot through the wings that has fallen into the sea of love and is try- ing to save itself by swimming.
And all of a sudden she really was sitting here, crying and feeling mistreated.
At such moments when she was angry at her lover, she passion- ately begged her husband's forgiveness for her lapses. In accordance with a good old rule of unfaithful women, which they apply so as not to betray . themselves by an untimely slip of the tongue, she had told
her husband about the interesting scholar she sometimes ran into on her visits to a woman friend, although she was not inviting him over because he was too spotled socially to come from his house to hers and she did not find him interesting enough to invite anyway. The half-truth in this story made it an easier lie, and the other half she used as a grievance against her lover.
How was she supposed to explain to her husband, she asked Ul- rich, why she was suddenly visiting her friend less and less? How could she make him understand such fluctuations in her feelings? She cared about the truth because she cared about all ideals, but Ul- rich was dishonoring her by forcing her to deviate further from them than was necessary!
She put on a passionate scene, and when it was over, reproaches, avowals, and kisses flooded the ensuing vacuum. When these, too, were over, nothing had happened; the chitchat gushed back to fill the void, and time blew little bubbles like a glass of stale water.
"How much more· beautiful she is when she ·goes wtld," Ulrich thought, "but how mechanically it all finished again. " The sight of her had excited him and enticed him to make love to her, but now that it was done he felt again how little it had to do with him person- ally. Another abundantly clear demonstration of how a healthy man can be turned with incredible speed into a frothing lunatic. But this erotic transformation of the consciousness seemed only a special in- stance of something much more general: for an evening at the thea- ter, a concert, a church service, all such manifestations of the inner life today are sirntlar, quickly dissolving islands of a second state of consciousness that is sometimes interpolated into the ordinary one.
"Only a little while ago," he thought, "I was still working, and before that I was on the street and bought some paper. I sirld hello to a man I know from the Physics Society, a man with whom I had a serious talk not so long ago. And now, if only Bonadea would hurry up a little, I could look something up in those books I can see from here through the crack in the door. Yet in between we flew through a cloud of insanity, and it is just as uncanny how solid experiences close over this vanishing gap again and assert themselves in all their tenacity. "
But Bonadea did not hurry up, and Ulrich was forced to think of something else. His boyhood friend Waite~, little Clarisse's husband,
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who had become so odd, had once said of him: "Ulrich always puts tremendous energy into doing only whatever he considers unneces- sary. " He happened to remember it at this moment and thought, "The same thing could be said about all of us nowadays. " He remem- bered quite well! A wooden balcony ran all around the country hotll! e; Ulrich was the guest of Cl~sse's parents; it was a few days before the wedding, and Walter was jealous of him. It was amazing how jealous Walter could be. Ulrich was standing outside in the sun- shine when Clarisse and Walter came into the room that lay behind the balcony. He overheard their conversation without trying to keep out ofsight. All he remembered ofit now was that one sentence. And the scene: the shadowy depths of the room hung like a wrinkled, slightly open pouch on the sunny glare of the outside wall. In the folds of this pouch Walter and Clarisse appeared. Walter's face was painfully drawn and looked as if it had long yellow teeth. Or one could also say that a pair of long yellow teeth lay in a jeweler's box lined with black velvet and that these two people stood spookily by. The jealousy was nonsense, of course; Ulrich did not desire his friends' wives. But Walter had always had a quite special ability to experience intensely. He never got what he was after because he was so swamped by his feelings. He seemed to have a built-in, highly me- lodious amplifier of the minor joys and miseries of life. He was al- ways paying out emotional small change in gold and silver, while Ulrich operated on a larger scale, with, so to speak, intellectual checks made out for vast sums-but it was only paper, after all. When Ulrich visualized Walter at his most characteristic, he saw him reclining at a forest's edge. He was wearing shorts and, oddly enough, black socks. Walter did not have a man's. legs, neither the strong muscular kind nor the skinny sinewy kind, but the legs of a girl; a not particularly attractive girl with soft, plain legs. With his hands behind his head he gazed at the landscape, and heaven forbid he should be disturbed. Ulrich did not remember actually having seen Walter like this on any specified occasion which stamped itself on his mind; it was more of an image that slowly hardened over a decade and a half, like a great seal. And the memory that Walter had been jealous of him at that time was somehow pleasantly stimulating. It had all happened at that time of life when one still takes delight in oneself. It occurred to Ulrich that he had now been to see them sev-
eral times, "and Walter hasn't been to see me once. But what of it? I might just go out there again this evening. "
He planned, after Bonadea at last finished dressing and left, to send them word ofhis coming. It was not advisable to do thafsort of thing in her presence because of the tedious cross-examination that would inevitably follow.
And since thoughts come and go quickly and Bonadea was far from finished, he had yet another idea. 11lis time it was a little the- ory, simple, illuminating, and time-killing. "A young man with an ac- tive mind," Ulrich reflected, probably still thinking of his boyhood friend Walter, "is constantly sending out ideas in every direction. But only those that find a resonance in his environment will be reflected back to him and consolidate, whUe all the other dispatches are scat- tered in space and lost! " Ulrich took it as a matter of course that a man who has intellect has all kinds of intellect, so that intellect is more original than qualities. He himself was a man of many contra- dictions and supposed that all the qualities that have ever manifested themselves in human beings lie close together in every man's mind, if he has a mind at all. This may not be quite right, but what we know about the origin of good and evU suggests that while everyone has a mind of a certain size, he can still probably wear a great variety of clothing in that size, if fate so determines. And so Ulrich felt that what he had just thought was not entirely without significance. For if, in the course of time, commonplace and impersonal ideas are auto- matically reinforced whUe unusual ideas fade away, so that almost everyone, with a mechanical certainty, is bound to become increas- ingly mediocre, this explains why, despite the thousandfold possibili- ties available to everyone, the average human being is in fact average. And it also explains why even among those privUeged persons who make a place for themselves and achieve recognition there will be found a certain mixture of about 51 percent depth and 49 percent shallowness, which is the most successful of all. Ulrich had perceived this for a long time as so intricately senseless and unbearably sad that he would have gladly gone on thinking about it.