No More Learning

as smooth as a pear, had flushed over the cheekbones, He had succumbed to a curious urge Diotima had been arousing in him for some time now to let down his guard and confide in her totally, down to the last hidden detail. Now he locked himself up again, picked up a book from the table, read its title without taking it in, impatiently laid it down again, and said in his usual voice-it moved Diotima as deeply a~ this moment as the gesture of a man who, in gathering up his clothes, reveals that he has been naked-"! have wandered from the point. What I have to say to you about the General is that you could do nothing better than to realize your plan as quickly as possi- ble and raise the level of our campaign with the help of humanistic ideas and their recognized representatives. But there's no need to
tum the General away on principle. Personally he may be a man of goodwill, and you know my principle of not missing any opportunity to bring the life of the spirit into a sphere of mere power. "
Diotima seized his hand and summed up the conversation in her good-bye: "Thank you for being so frank with me. "
Amheim irresolutely let that gentle hand rest in his own for a mo- ment, staring down at it thoughtfully as though there were some- thing he had forgotten to say.
66
ALL IS NOT WELL BETWEEN ULRICH AND ARNHEIM
Her cousin often took pleasure, at that time, in reporting to Diotima his experiences as His Grace's aide-de-camp, and always made a spe- cial point of showing her the files with all the proposals that kept pouring into Count Leinsdorf's office.
"Almighty cousin," he reported, with a fat folder in his hand, "I can no longer handle this alone. The whole world seems to expect improvements from us. Half of them begin with the words 'No more of . . . ' and the other half with 'Fotward to . . . ' Here is a batch of demands starting with 'No more Rome! ' and going all the way to 'Fotward to kitchen gardens! ' What would you want to choose? "
It was not easy to sort out all the petitions the world was address- ing to Count Leinsdorf, but two kinds surpassed all the rest in vol- ume. One blamed the troubles of the times on one particular detail and demanded its abolition; such details were nothing less than the Jews or the Church of Rome, socialism or capitalism, mechanistic thinking or the neglect of technical possibilities, miscegenation or segregation, big landed estates or big cities, overemphasis on intel- lect or inadequate popular education. The second 'group, on the other hand, pointed to a goal just ahead that, when reached, would suffice to take care ofeverything. These desirable goals ofthe second persuasion differed from the specific evils denounced by the first mostly by nothing more than the emotional plus or minus signs at- tached, obviously because the world is made up of both critical and affirming temperaments. So there were letters of the second cate- gory that joyfully took the negative line that it was high time to break with the ridiculous cult of the arts, because life was a far greater poet than all the scribblers. These letters demanded courtroom reports and travel books for general use; while letters on the same subject · from the first category would be joyfully positive in maintaining that the mountaineer's ecstasy upon reaching the summit outdid all the
293
294 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
sublimities of art, philosophy, and religion, so instead of these one should support mountain-climbing clubs. In this double-jointed fashion the public demanded a slowing·down of the tempo of the times just as much as a competition for the best short essay, because life was unbearably/exquisitely short, and there was a desperate need for the liberation of mankind from/by garden apartments, the eman- cipation of women, dancing, sports, interior decoration, and from any number of other burdens by any number of other panaceas.
Ulrich closed his folder and spoke privately.
"Mighty cousin," he said, "it is amazing that half of them seek sal- vation in the future and the other half in the past. I don't know what we are to make of that. His Grace would say that the present is with- out salvation. "
"Is His Grace thinking in terms of the Church? " Diotima asked.
"He has only just come up with the discovery that in the history of mankind there is no turning back voluntarily. What makes it difficult is that going forward is riot much use either. Permit me to say that we're in a very peculiar situation, unable to move either forward or backward, whtle the present moment is felt to be unbearable too. "
When Ulrich talked like this Diotima barricaded herself in her tall body as in a tower marked with three stars in Baedeker.
"Do you believe, dear lady, that anyone fighting for or against a cause today," Ulrich asked, "who tomorrow by some miracle were to become the all-powerful ruler of the world, would instantly do what he had been clamoring for all his life? I am convinced he would grant himself a few days' delay. "
Ulrich paused. Diotima suddenly turned to him without respond- ing and asked him sternly:
"Why did you encourage the General about our campaign? " "What general? "
"General von Stumm! "
"Do you mean that round little general from the first big meeting?
Me? I haven't even seen him since, let alone encouraged him! " Ulrich's astonishment was convincing and called for an explana- tion on her part. Since it was impossible that a man like Arnheim should be guilty of a falsehood, there had to be a misunderstanding
somewhere, and Diotima gave him the reason for her assumption. "So I am supposed to have spoken with Arnheim about General
von Stumm? I never did that either," Ulrich assured her. "I did talk with Arnheim-just a moment . . . " He searched his memory, then broke into a laugh. "It would be very flattering if Amheim attached so much importance to every word I say. W e have had several discus- sions lately-if that's the word for our differences-and I did once say something about a general, but not any particular one, only inci- dentally to illustrate a point. I maintained that a general who for stra- tegic reasons sends his battalions to certain doom is a murderer, if you think ofthem as thousands ofmothers' sons, but that he immedi- ately becomes something else seen from some other perspective, such as, for example, the necessity of sacrifice, or the insignificance of life's short span. I used a lot. of other examples. But here you must allow me to digress. For quite obvious reasons, every generation treats the life into which it is born as firmly established, except for those few things it is interested in changing. This is practical, but it's wrong. The world can be changed in all directions at any moment, or at least in any direction it chooses; it's in the world's nature. Wouldn't it be more original to try to live, not as a definite person in a definite world where only a few buttons need adjusting-what we call evolution-but rather to behave from the start as someone born to change surrounded by a world created to change, roughly like a drop of water inside a cloud? Are you annoyed with me for being so obscure again? "
''I'm not annoyed with you, but I can't understand you. " Diotima commanded: "Do tell me the whole conversation! "
'Well, Arnheim started it. He stopped me and formally challenged me to a conversation," Ulrich began. " W e businessmen,' he said to me with a rather puckish smile, quite in contrast to his usual quiet pose, but still very majestic, 'we businessmen are not as calculating as you might think. Actually, we-I mean the leading men, ofcourse; the small fry may spend all their time calculating-we come to re- gard our really successful ideas as something that defies all calcula- tion, like the personal success ofa politician, and, in the last analysis, like the artist's too. ' Then he asked me to judge what he was going to say next with the indulgence we grant the irrational: from the first day he saw me, he confided, he'd had certain ideas about me-and it seems, gracious cousin, that you also told him many things about me, which he assured me he had not needed to hear to form his opinion,
Pseudoreality Prevails · 295
296 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
which was that strangely enough I had made a mistake in choosing a purely abstract, conceptual profession, because no matter how gifted I was in that direction, I was basically a scientist, and no matter how surprised I might be to hear it, my real talent lay in the field of action and personal effectiveness! "
"Oh really? " Diotima said.
"I quite agree with you," Ulrich hastened to say. "There is nothing I am less fit for than being myself. "
"You are always making fun of things instead of devoting yourself to life," Diotima said, still annoyed with him over the files.
"Amheim maintains the opposite. I am under a compulsion to think my way to excessively thorough conclusions about life-he says. "
"You're always sardonic and negative, always leaping into the im- possible and avoiding every real decision," Diotima maintained.
"It is simply my conviction," Ulrich replied, "that thinking is a world of its own, and real life is another. The difference between their respective levels of development at the present time is too great. Our brain is some thousands of years old, but if it had worked out only half of everything and forgotten the other half, its true image would be our reality. All one can do is refuse intellectual par- ticipation in it. "
"Aren't you making things much too easy for yourself? " Diotima asked, without any offensive intention, rather like a mountain look- ing down on a little brook at its foot. "Amheim enjoys theorizing too, but I think he lets hardly anything pass without examining all its as- pects. Don't you feel that the point of thinking is to be a concen- trated capacity for applying-"
"No," Ulrich said.
''I'd like to hear what answer Amheim gave you. "
"He told me that the intellect today is the helpless spectator of real
developments because it is dodging the great tasks of life. He asked me to look at what subjects the arts treat, at what trivia the churches concern themselves with, at how narrow even the perspective of the scholars is-and I should consider that all the while, the earth is being literally carved up! Then he said that this was precisely what he wanted to talk with me about. "
"And what was your answer? " Diotima asked eagerly, supposing
that Amheim had been trying to appeal to her cousin's conscience about his indifferent attitude to the problems of the Parallel Campaign. ·
':I told him that realizing a potential always attracts me less than the unrealized, and I mean not only the future but also the past and missed opportunities. -It seems to me our history has been that every time we have fulfilled some small part of an idea, we are so pleased that we leave the much greater remainder unfinished. Magnificent institutions are usually the bungled drafts of their ideas; so, inciden- tally, are magnificent personalities. That's what I answered. A differ- ence in the angle of perspective, so to speak. "
"How argumentative of you! " said Diotima, with a sense of injury.
"He retaliated by telling me his impression of me when I resist the active life because of some unfulfilled intellectual element in the general scheme. Would you like to hear it? Like a man who lies down on the ground beside a bed that has been prepared for him. A squandering of energy, something physically immoral, is what he called it, to make sure I didn't miss the point. He kept at me to make me see that great goals can be reached only by using the existing eco- nomic, political, and, not least, intellectual structure of power. For his own part, he considers it more ethical to make use of it than to neglect it. He really hammered away at me. He called me a man of action in a defensive stance, a cramped defensive stance. I think he has some sinister reason for wanting to gain my respect. "
"He wants to be helpful! " Diotima cried out in reproof.
"Oh no," Ulrich said. "I may be only a little pebble, and he is a splendid, puffed-out glass ball. But I have the impression he's afraid of me. "
Diotima made no answer. Wh~t Ulrich had said might be pre- sumptuous, but it had occurred to her that the conversation he had just recounted was not at all what it should have been according to the impression she had got from Arnheim. It even worried her a bit. Although she thought Amheim quite incapable of intrigue, Ulrich was gaining her confidence, and so she asked him what she should do about the case of General Stumm.
"Keep him off! " was Ulrich's answer, and Diotima could not spare herself the reproach that she was well pleased with it.
' Pseudoreality Prevails · 2 9 7
:zg8
DIOTIMA AND ULRICH
Diotima's relationship to Ulrich had much improved, now that they had formed the habit of getting together regularly. They often had to drive out together to call on people, and he came to see her several times a week, often unannounced and at unconventional hours. In the circumstances, their being related was convenient for a domestic relaxation of the strict social code. DiotiJ;Ila did not always receive him in the drawing room armored in full panoply from chignon to skirt hem, but sometimes in slight domestic disarray, even if only a. very cautious· disarray. A kind of fellowship had grown up between them that lay mainly in the form of their association, but forms have their inward effects, and the emotions that create them can also be awakened by them.
Ulrich sometimes felt with great intensity that Diotima was very beautiful. On these occasions he saw her as a young, tall, plump heifer of good stock, surefooted and studying with a deep gaze the dry grasses she was feeding on. In other words, even then he did not look on her without the malice and irony that revenged themselves on her spiritual nobility by drawing on images from the animal king- · dom and that arose from a deep annoyance less against this foolish paragon than against the school where her performances were a suc- cess. "How likable she could be," he thought, "if she were. unedu- cated and careless· and as good-natured as a big warm female body always is when it doesn't flatter itself that it has any special ideas! " The celebrated wife of the much-whispered-about Section Chief Tuzzi evaporated from her body, leaving it behind like a dream that, together with pillows, bed, and dreamer, turned into a white cloud all alone in the world with its tenderness.
But when Ulrich came back to earth from such a flight of the imagination, what he found before him was an ambitious middle- class mind eager to associate with aristocratic ideas. Physical kinship together with a strong difference in temperament, incidentally, is
disturbing; sometimes the mere idea of kinship is enough, the con- sciousness of self; siblings often cannot bear each other in a way that goes far beyond anything that might be justified; it derives merely from the existence of the one throwing into doubt the existence of the other, from the slightly distorted mirror image they have of each other. Sometimes Diotima's being about the same height as Ulrich was enough to remind him that they were related and made him feel repugnance for her body. He had transferred to her, with some dif- ferences, a function usually reserved for his boyhood friend Wal- ter-that of humbling and irritating his pride, much as seeing ourselves again in certain unpleasant old photographs has the power
·to humiliate us and at the same time challenge our pride. It followed that even in the mistrust Ulrich felt for Diotima there had to be something of a bond and a drawing together, in short a touch of gen- uine affection, just as his old warm allegiance with Walter still sur- vived in the fonn of mistrust. But since he did not like Diotima, this baffled him for a long time without his being able to get to the bot- tom of it. They sometimes set off on little expeditions together. With Tuzzi's encouragement they took advantage of the fine weather, de- spite the unfavorable time of year, to show Amheim "the lovely sights around Vienna"-Diotima never used any other expression but this cliche-and Ulrich always felt that he was being taken along in the role of an elderly female relation serving as chaperone because Section ChiefTuzzi<! ould not spare the time. Later it happened that Ulrich also drove out alone with Diotima when Amheim was out of town. For such expeditions, as well as for the immediate purposes of the campaign, Amheim had made available as many automobiles as might be needed, since His Grace's carriage, ornate with its coat of arms, was too well known about town and too conspicuous. These cars, incidentally, were not necessarily Amheim's own; the rich al- ways can find others who are only too pleased to oblige.
Such excursions served not merely for diversion but also served the purpose ofwinning support for the campaign from influential or wealthy persons, so they took place more often within the city limits than in the countryside. The cousins saw many beautiful things to- gether: Maria Theresa furniture, Baroque palaces, people still borne through life on the hands of their many servants, modem houses with great suites of rooms, palatial banks, and the blend of Spanish
Pseudoreality Prevails · 299
300 · THE. MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
austerity and middle-class domestic habits in the homes of high- ranking civil seiVants. All in all, it was, for the aristocracy, what was left of the grand manner with no running water, repeated in paler imitation in the houses and conference rooms of the wealthy middle class with improved hygiene and, on the whole, better taste. A rulhig caste always remains slightly barbaric. In the castles of the nobility, cind~rs and leftovers not burned away by the slow smoldering of time were still lying where they had fallen. Close beside magnificent staircases one stepped on boards of soft wood, and hideous new fur- niture stood carelessly alongside magnificent old pieces. The new rich, on the other hand, in love with the imposing and grandiose mo- ments of their predecessors, had instinctively made a fastidious and refined selection. Wherever a castle had passed into middle-class hands, was it not merely seen to be provided with modem comfort, like ah heirloom chandelier through which electric wiring had been threaded, but the inferior furnishings had also been cleared out and valuable pieces brought in, chosen either by the owner or according to the unassailable recommendation of experts. It was not, inciden- tally, in the castles where this refinement showed itself most impres- sively but in the town houses that, in keeping with the times, had been furnished with all the impersonal luxury of an ocean liner and yet had preseiVed, in this country of subtly refined social ambition, through some ineffable breath, some hardly perceptible widening of the space between the pieces of furniture or the dominant position of a painting on a wall, the tender, clear echo of a great sound that had faded away.
Diotima was enchanted by so much "culture. " She had always known that her native country harbored such treasures, but even she was amazed at their abundance. They would be invited together to visit in the country, and Ulrich noticed, among other things, that the fruit here was not infrequently picked up in the fingers and eaten unpeeled, whereas in the houses of the upper bourgeoisie the cere- monial of knife and fork was strictly obseiVed. The same could also be said about conversation, which tended to be flawlessly distin- guished only in the middle-class homes, while among the nobility the well-known, relaxed idiom reminiscent of cabdrivers prevailed. Di- otima presented her cousin with an enthusiastic defense of all this. She conceded that the bourgeois estates had better plumbing and
showed more intelligence in their appointments, while at the nobil- ity's countzy seats one froze in winter, there were often narrow, worn stairs, stuffy, low-ceilinged bedrooms were the behind-the-scenes counterpart of magnificent public rooms, and there were no dumb-. waiters or bathrooms for the servants. But that was just what made it all, in a sense, more heroic, this feeling for tradition and this splendid nonchalance! she wound up ecstatically.
Ulrich used these excursions to examine the feeling that bound him to Diotima. But there were so many digressions along the way that it is necessary to follow them awhile before coming to the point.
At that time, women were encased in clothes from tlu:oat to ankle. Men's clothes today are like what they were then, but they used to be more appropriate because they still represented an organic outward sign of the flawless cohesion and strict reserve that marked a man of the world. In those days, even a person of few prejudices, unham- pered by shame in appreciating the undraped human body, would have regarded a display of nudity as a relapse into the animal state, not because of the nakedness but because of the loss of the civilized aphrodisiac of clothing. Actually, it would then have been considered below the animal state, for a three-year-old Thoroughbred and a playing greyhound are far more expressive in their nakedness than a human body can ever be. But animals can't wear clothes; they have
orily the one skin, while human beings in those days had many skins. In full dress, with frills, puffs, bell skirts, cascading draperies, laces, and gathered pleats, they had created a surface five times the size of the original one, forming a many-petaled chalice heavy with an erotic charge, difficult of access, and hiding at its core the slim white animal that had to be searched out and that made itselfterribly desirable. It was the prescribed process Nature herself uses when she bids her creatures fluff out their plumage or spray out clouds of ink, so that desire and terror raised to a degree of unearthly frenzy will mask the matter-of-fact proceedings that are the heart of the matter.
For the first time in her life Diotima felt herself more than S\! per- ficially affected by this game, though in the most decorous way. Co- quetry was not wholly unknown to her, since it was one of the social accomplishments a lady had to master. Nor had she ever failed to notice when a young man looked at her with a glance that expressed something besides respect; in fact she rather liked it, because it made
Pseudoreality Prevails · 3 0 1
302 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
her feel the gentle power of feminine reproof when she forced the eyes of a man, intent on her like the horns of a bull, to turn away by uttering high-minded sentiments. But Ulrich, in the security of their kinship and his selfless services to the Parallel Campaign, and pro- tected, too, by the codicil established in his favor, permitted himself liberties that pierced straight through the tangled weavings of her idealism. On one occasion, for instance, as they were driving thro~gh the countryside, they passed some delightful valleys where hillsides covered with dark pine woods sloped down toward the road, and Di- otima pointed to them with the lines "Who planted you, 0 lovely woods, so high up there above? '' She of course quoted these lines as poetry, without any hint of the·tune that went along with them; she would have considered that old hat and inane. Ulrich was quick to answer: "The Landbank of Lower Austria. Don't you know, cousin, that all the forests hereabouts belong to the Landbank? The master you are about to praise in the next line is a forester on the bank's payroll. Nature in these parts is a planned product of the forestry industry, a storehouse of serried ranks of cellulose for the manufac- turers, as you can see at a glance. "
His answers were quite often like that. When she spoke of beauty, he spoke of the fatty tissue supporting the epidermis. When she mentioned love, he responded with the statistical curve that indi- cates the automatic rise and fall in the annual birthrate. When she spoke of the great figures in art, he traced the chain of borrowings that links these figures to one another. Somehow it always began with Diotima talking as if on the sixth day of Creation God had placed man as a pearl in the shell of'the world, whereupon Ulrich reminded her that mankind was a tiny pile of'dots on the outermost crust of a dwarf globe. She was not quite sure what Ulrich was up to, though it was obviously an attack on that sphere of greatness with which Diotima felt allied, and most of all she felt that he was rudely showing off. She found it hard to take that her cousin, whom she reg~ded as an intellectual enfant terrible, imagined he knew more than she did, and his materialistic arguments, which meant nothing to her, drawn as they were from the lower culture of facts and fig- ures, annoyed her mightily.
"Thank heaven," she once came back at him sharply, "there are
still people capable of believing in simple things, no matter how great their experience! "
"Your husband, for instance," Ulrich said. "I've been meaning to tell you for a long time that I much prefer him to Arnheim. "
They had got into the habit of exchanging ideas by speaking about Arnheim. For like all people in love, Diotima derived pleasure from talking about the object of her love without, at least so she believed, betraying herself; and since Ulrich found this insufferable, as does any man who has no ulterior·motive in yielding the stage to another, it often happened on such occasions that he lashed out against Arn- heim. Between Arnheim and himselfa relationship ofa peculiar kind had developed. When Arnheim was not traveling, they met almost every day. Ulrich knew that Section Chief Tuzzi regarded the Pros- sian with suspicion, as he did himself from observing Arnheim's ef- fect on Diotima since the very beginning. Not that there was yet anything improper between them, so far as could be judged by a third party who was confirmed in this judgment by the revolting ex- cess of propriety between these lovers, who were evidently emulat- ing the loftiest examples of a Platonic union of souls.
Yet Arnheim showed a striking inclination to draw his friend's cousin (or was she his lover after all? , Ulrich wondered, but considered it most probably something like lover plus friend divided by two) into this intimate relationship. He often addressed Ulrich in the manner of an older friend, a tone made permissible by the difference in age between them but that became unpleasantly tainted with condescension be- cause of the difference in . their position. Ulrich's response was al- most always standoffish in a rather challenging way: he made a point of not seeming in the least impressed by speaking with a man who might just as easily have been speaking with kings and chancellors instead. Annoyed with himself because of his lack of propriety, he contradicted Arnheim with impolite frequency and unseemly irony, as a substitute for which he would have done better to enjoy himself as a silent observer. He was astonished that Arnheim irritated him so violently. Ulrich saw in him, fattened by favorable circumstances, the model example ofan intellectual development he hated. For this cel- ebrated writer was shrewd enough to grasp the questionable situa- tion man had got himself into ever since he ceased looking for his
Pst:Udoreality Prevails · 3o3
304 • THE MAN WITH0 UT QUALITIES
image in the mirror of a stream, and sought it instead in the sharp, broken surfaces of his intelligence; but this writing iron magnate blamed the predicament on intelligence itself and not on its imper- fections. There was a con game in this union between the soul. and the price of coal, a union that at the same time purposefully setved to keep apart what Amheim did with his eyes wide open and what he said and wrote in his cloud of intuition. Added to this, to exacerbate Ulrich's uneasiness, was something new to him, the combination of intellect and wealth. When Amheim talked about some particular subject almost like a specialist and then suddenly, with a casual wave of his hand, made all the details disappear in the light of a "great thought," he might be acting on some not unjustified need of his own, but at the same time this manner of freely disposing of things in two directions at once was too suggestive of the rich man who can afford the best and most expensive of everything. He had a wealth of ideas that was always slightly reminiscent of the ways of real wealth. But perhaps it was not even this ~at most provoked Ulrich into creating difficulties for the celebrated man; perhaps it was rather the inclination of Arnheim's mind toward a dignified mode of holding court and keeping house that of itself led to an asso-ciation with the best brands of the traditional as well as of the unusual. For in the mirror of this Epicurean connoisseurship Ulrich saw the affected grimace that is the face of the times, if one subtracts the few really strong lines of passion and thought in it; all this left him with hardly a chance to reach a better understanding of the m. an, who could proba- bly be credited with all sorts of merits as well. U was, of course, an utterly senseless battle he was waging, in an environment predis- posed in Amheim's favor, and in a cause that had no importance at all; the most that could be said for it was that this senselessness gave the sense of the total expenditure of his own energies. It was also a quite hopeless struggle, for if Ulrich actually once managed to wound his opponent, he had to recognize that he had hit the wrong Arnheim; if Amheim the thinker lay defeated on the ground, Am- heim the master of reality rose like a winged being with an indulgent smile, and hastened from the idle games of such conversations to Baghdad or Madrid.
This invulner~bility made it possible for him to counter the younger man's bad manners with that amiable camaraderie the
source of which Ulrich could never quite pinpoint. Besides, Ulrich was himself concerned not to go too far in tearing Arnheim down, because he was determined not to slip again into one of those half- baked and demeaning adventures in which his past had been far too rich; and the progress he observed between Arnheim and Diotima served as an effective insurance against weakening. So he generally directed the points of his attacks like the points of a foil, which yield on impact and are shielded with a friendly little rubber button to soften the blow. It was Diotima who had come up with this compari- son. She found herself mystified by this cousin of hers. His candid face with the clear brow, his quietly breathing chest, the ease in all his movements, all clearly indicated to her that no malicious, spiteful, sadistic-libidinous impulses could dwell in such a body. Nor was she quitewithoutprideiiisopersonableamemberofherfamily; shehad made up her mind from the beginning of their acquaintance to take him under her wing. Had he had black hair, a crooked shoulder, a muddy skin, or a low forehead, she would have said that his views accorded with his looks. But as it was, she was struck by a certain discrepancy between his looks and his ideas that made itself felt as an inexplicable uneasiness. The antennae of her famed intuition groped in vain for the cause, hut she enjoyed the groping at the other end of the antennae. In a sense, though not of course seriously, she some- times even preferred Ulrich's company to Arnheim's. Her need to f e e l s u p e r i o r was m o r e g r a t i f i e d b y h i m , s h e f e l t m o r e s u r e o f h e r s e l f , and to regard him as frivolous, eccentri~. or immature gave her a cer- tain satisfaction that balanced the idealism, becoming increasingly dangerous from day to day, that she saw taking on incalculable di- mensions in her feelings for Amheim. Soul is a terribly grave affair, and materialism by eontrast is lighthearted. The conduct of her rela- tionship with Amheim was sometimes as much of a strain as her salon, and her contempt for Ulrich made her life easier. She did not understand herself, but she noticed this effect, and this enabled her whenever she was annoyed with her cousin over one of his remarks to give him a sideways look that was only a tiny smile in the comer of her eye, while the eye itself, idealistically untouched and indeed even slightly disdainful, gazed straight ahead.
Anyway, whatever their reasons may have been, Diotima ~d Am- heim behaved toward Ulrich like two fighters clinging to athird per-
Pseudoreality Prevails · 305
306 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
son whom in their alternating fear they shove back and forth be- tween themselves; a situation not without its dangers for Ulrich, for through Diotima the question arose: Must people be in accord with their bodies or not?
68
A DIGRESSiON: MUST PEOPLE BE IN ACCORD WITH THEIR BODIES?
Independently of what their faces were talking about, the motion of the car on those long drives rocked the two cousins so that their clothes touched, overlapped a·bit, and moved apart again. One could only see this from their shoulders, because the rest of them was en- veloped by a shared blanket, but the bodies felt this contact, muffled by their clothing, as delicately indistinct as things seen ~ moonlight. Ulrich was n'ot unreceptive to this kind of flirting, without taking it too seriously. The overrefined transmission of desire from the body to the clothes, from the embrace to the obstacles, or, in short, from the goal to the approach, answered to his nature, whose sensuality drove him toward the woman; but its critical faculties held him back from the alien, uncongenial person it suddenly, with relentless lucid- ity, perceived her to be, and this made for a lively tug-of-war be- tween inclination and aversion. But this meant that the body's sublime beauty, its human beauty, the moment when the spirit's song rises from nature's instrument, or that other moment when the body is like a goblet filling up with a mystic potion, was something he had never known, leaving aside those dreams ofthe major's wife that had for the longest time put an end to such inclinations in him.
All his relationships with women, since then, had somehow not been right. With a certain amount of goodwill on both sides that hap- pens, unfortunately, all too easily. From the moment they first began to think about it, a man and a woman find a ready-made matriX of
feelings, acts, and complications waiting to take them in charge, and beneath this matrix the process takes its course in reverse; the stream no longer flows from the spring; the last things to happen push their way to the front of consciousness; the pure pleasure two people have in each other, this simplest and deepest of all feelings in love, and the natural source of all the rest, disappears completely in this psychic reversal.
So on his trips with Diotima, Ulrich not infrequently remembered their leave-taking after his first visit. He had taken her mild hand, an ·artfully and nobly perfected weightless hand, in his own as they gazed into each other's eyes. They both undoubtedly felt some aver- sion, and yet it occurred to them that they might nevertheless fuse to the point of extinction. Something of this vision had remained be- tween them. Thus two heads above cast a horrible chill on each other while the bodies below helplessly melt together at white heat. There is in this something nastily mythical, as in a two-headed god or the devil's cloven hoof, and it had often led Ulrich astray in his youth, when he had experienced it fairly often; but with the years it had proved to be no more than a very bourgeois aphrodisiac, in exactly the same way that the unclothed body substitutes for the nude. Nothi. rrg so inflames the middle-class lover as the flattering discovery of the power to drive another person into an ecstasy so wild that to be the cause of such changes by any other means one would have to
become a murderer.
And truly, that there can be such changes in civilized people, that
we actually can produce such effectsl-isn't this the question and the amazement in . the bold, glazed eyes of all those who dock at the lonely island of lust, where they are murderer, destiny, and God, and experience the maximum irrationality and adventurousness in the greatest comfort?
The repugnance he came to acquire with time against this kind of love eventually extended to his own body too, which had always en- couraged these misbegotten affairs by giving women the illusion of a reliable virility, for which Ulrich was too cerebral and too conflicted. At times he was as downright jealous of his own appearance as if it were a rival using cheap tricks against him. . :. . _in which a contradiction emerged that is also present in others who are not aware of it. For he was the one who kept his body trim by exercising it, giving it the
Pseudoreality Prevails · 307
308 • THE. MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
shape, expression, and readiness for action that influence the mind no less than an ever-smiling or an ever-solemn face can. Oddly e~ough, the majority of people have either a neglected body, formed and deformed by chance circumstances, which seems to have almost no relation at all to their mind and character, or else a body disguised by th~ mask of sports, giving it the look of those hours when it is on vacation from itself. Those are the hours when a person spins out the daydream of his appearance, casually picked up from the magazines of the smart, great world. All those bronzed and muscular tennis players, horsemen, and race-car drivers, who look like world-record holders though usually they are merely competent; those ladies all dressed up or all undressed; they are all daydreamers, differing from common daydreamers only in that their dream doesn't stay in their brain but comes out into the open air as a projection of the mass soul-physically, dramatically, and (as one might say in the idiom of more-than-dubious occult phenomena) ideoplastically. But in com- mon with the usual spinners of fantasies they have a certain shallow-
ness of the dream, both as to its content and its nearness to the waking state. The problem of the integral physiognomy still eludes us, even though we have learned to draw conclusions about man's nature, sometimes even amazingly correct conclusions, from his handwriting, voice, sleeping position, and God knows what else; yet for the body as a whole we have only the fashionable models on which it forms itself, or at most a kind of nature-cure philosophy.
But is this the body ofour mind, our ideas, intimations, plans,. or- the pretty ones included-the body of our follies? That Ulrich had loved those follies and still to soine extent had them Pid not prevent him from feeling not at home in the body they had created.
6g
DIOTIMA AND ULRICH, CONTINUED
And it was above all Diotima who confirmed in a new way his sense that the surface and depths of his person were not one and the same. This came through clearly for him on these trips with her, which sometimes felt like drives through moonlight, when the young woman's beauty detached itself from her person altogether and mo- mentarily veiled his eyes like gossamer spun by a dream. He knew, of course, that Diotima compared everything he said with the conven- tional wisdom on the subject-the higher conventional wisdom, to be sure-and was pleased that she found it "immature," so that he constantly sat there as ifhe were before the wrong end of a telescope trained on him. He became smaller and smaller, and believed when he spoke with her (or at least was not far from believing) in his role'of devil's advocate and materialist that he could hear in his own words conversations from his last terms at school, when he and his class- mates had idolized all the villains and monsters of world history be- cause the teachers had presented them in tones of idealistic abhorrence. And when Diotima looked at him indignantly he grew smaller still, regressing from the morality of heroism and the drive for expansion to the defiant lies, callousness, and wavering excesses of adolescence-only quite figuratively, of course, as one can detect in a gesture or a word some distant ·similarity with gestures and words one has long since discarded, or only dreamed, or seen and disliked in others. In any event, this all resonated in his delight in shocking Diotima. The mind of this woman, who would have been so beautiful without her mind, aroused an inhuman feeling in him, per- haps a fear of mind itself, an aversion for all great things, a feeling that was quite faint, hardly detectable-and perhaps feeling was a much too pretentious expression for something that was but a mere breath. But if one magnified it into words, they would have gone something like this: at times he saw not only this woman's idealism but all the idealism in the world, in all its extent and ramifications,
310 · THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
appear bodily in the form of an image hovering just above that Gre- cian head-it only just missed being the horns of the Devil! Then . Ulrich grew even smaller still and-again figuratively speaking-re- gressed to the first hotly moral state of childhood, in whose eyes temptation and terror lie as in the stare of a gazelle. The tender emo- tions of that age can in a single moment of yielding cause the whole, still-tiny world to burst into flames, since they have neither an aim nor the ability to make anything happen, but are a completely boundless fire. It was quite unlike him, and yet in Diotima's com- pany Ulrich ended up longing for these cb. ildhood feelings, though he could barely imagine them because they have so l\ttle in common with the conditions under which an adult lives.
At one point he very nearly confessed it to her. On one of their trips they had left the car to walk into a small valley that was like a river delta of meadows with steep forested banks and that formed a crooked triangle with a winding brook in its center stilled by a light frost. The slopes had been partly cleared of timber, with a few trees left standing like feather dusters stuck in the bare hillsides and hill- tops. This scene had tempted them to take a walk. It was one of those wistful, snowless days that seem in the middle ofwinter like a faded, no-longer-fashionable summer gown. Diotima abruptly asked her cousin: "Why does Amheim call you an activist? He says that you're always full of ideas how to do things differently and better. " She had suddenly remembered that her talk with Arnheim. about Ulrich and the General had ended inconclusively.
"I don't understand," she went on. "It always seems to me that you hardly ever mean anything seriously. But I must ask you, because we are involved together in such a responsible task. Do you remember our last conversation? There was something you said: you maintained that nobody, if he had the necessary power, would do what he wants to do. Now I would like to know what you meant by that. Wasn't it a horrible idea? "
Ulrich did not reply at once. And during this silence, after she had spoken as impudently as possible, she realized how much she had been preoccupied with the forbidden question of whether Amheim and she would do what each of them secretly wanted. She suddenly thought she had given herself away to Ulrich. She blushed, tried to stop herself, blushed even more, and did her best to gaze out over
the valley, away from him, with the most unconcerned expression she could muster.
Ulrich had observed the process. ''I'm very much afraid that the only reason Arnheim, as you say, calls me an activist is that he over- estimates my influence with the Tuzzi family," he answered. "You know yourself how little attention you pay to what I say. But now that you have asked me, I realize what my influence on you ought to be. May I tell you without your instantly criticizing me again? "
Diotima nodded silently as a sign of assent and tried to pull herself together behind an appearance of absentmindedness.
"So I said," Ulrich began, "that nobody would tum his dreams into realities even if he could. You remember our file folders full of suggestions? And now I ask you: Is there anyone who would not be embarrassed if something he had passionately demanded all his life were suddenly to come true? If, for instance, the Kingdom of God were suddenly to burst on the Catholics, or the classless society of the future on the socialists? But perhaps this doesn't prove anything. We get used to demanding things and aren't quite ready to have our wishes realized; it'fonly natural, many people would say. Let me go on: Music must be the most important thing in the world to a musi- cian, and painting to a painter, and probably even the building of cement houses to a cement specialist. Do you think that this will in- duce him to imagine God as a specialist in reinforced concrete and that the others will prefer a painted world, or a world blown on the bugle, to the real one? You'll call it a silly question, but what makes it serious is that we are expected to insist on just this kind of silliness!
"Now please don't think," he said, turning to her in all seriousness, "that all I mean by this is that everyone wants what is hard to get, and despises the attainable. What I mean is this: Within reality there is a senseless craving for unreality. "
He had inconsiderately led Diotima a long way into the little val- ley; the snow trickling down the slopes was perhaps what made the ground wetter the higher they went, and they had to hop from one small clump of grass to the next, which punctuated their talk and forced Ulrich to go on with it by fits and starts. There were, as a re- sult, so many obvious objections to what he was saying that Diotima did not know where to begin. She had got her feet wet and stood still on a grassy mound, led astray and anxious, clutching at her skirts.
Pseudoreality Prevails · 3 1 1
312 • THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
Ulrich turned back and laughed. "You've started something ex- ceedingly dangerous, great cousin. People are vastly relieved to be left in a position where they can't put their ideas into practice. "
"And wh-at would you do," Diotima asked irritably, "ifyou could rule the world for a day? "
"I suppose I would have no choice but to abolish reality. "
''I'd love to know how you'd go about it. "
"I don't know either. I hardly know what I mean by it. We wildly
overestimate the present, the sense ofthe present, the here and now; like you and me being here in this valley, as if we'd been put in a basket and the lid of the present had fallen on it. W e make too much of it. We'll remember it. Even a year from now we may be able to describe how we were standing here. But what really moves us-;-me anyway-is always-putting it cautiously; I don't want to look for an explanation or a name for it-opposed in a sense to this way of expe- riencing things. It is displaced by so much here and now, so much Present. So it can't become the present in its tum. "
In the narrow valley Ulrich's words sounded loud and confused. Diotima suddenly felt uneasy and moved to get back to the car. But Ulrich made her stay and look at the landscape.
"Some thousands of years ago this was a glacier," he explained. "Even the earth isn't altogether what it's pretending to be for the moment. This well-rounded character is a hysteric. Today it is acting the good middle-class mother feeding her children. Back then the world was frigid and icy, like a spiteful girl. Several thousand years before that it luxuriated in hot fern forests, sultry swamps, and de- monic beasts. We can't say that it has evolved toward perfection, nor what its true condition is. And the same goes for its. daughter, man- kind. Imagine the clothes in which people have stood here through the ages, right where we are standing now. Expressed in terms of the madhouse, it suggests long-standing obsessions with suddenly erupt- ing manic ideas; after these run their course, a new concept of life is there. So you see, reality does away with itself!
"There's something else I'd like to tell you"-Ulrich made a fresh start after a while. "That sense of having firm ground underfoot and a firm skin all around, which appears so natural to most people, is not very strongly developed in me. T};llnk back to how you were as a
child; all gentle glow. And then a teenager, lips burning with longing. Something in me rebels against the idea that so-called mature adult- hood is the peak of such a development. In a sense it is, and in a sense it isn't. If I were a myrmeleonina, the ant predator that resem- bles a dragonfly, I'd be horrified to think that the year before I had been the squat gray myrmeleon, the ant lion, running backward and living at the edge of the forest, dug in at the bottom of a funnel- shaped hole in the sand, catching ants by the waist with invisible pincers after first exhausting them by somehow bombarding them with grains of sand. There are times when the thought of my youth horrifies me in quite the same way, even though I may have been a dragonfly then and may be a monster now. "
He did not really know what he was aiming at. With his myr- meleon and myrmeleonina he had only been aping Arnheim's cul- tured omniscience a little. But he had it on the tip of his tongue to say: "Please, won't you make love to me, just to be nice? We are kin- dred, not wholly separate, certainly not one; in any case, the polar opposite of a dignified and formal relationship. "
But Ulrich was mistaken. Diotima was the kind of person who is satisfied with herself and therefore regards each age she passes through as a step on a stairway leading upward from below. She had no way of understanding what Ulrich was talking about, especially as she did not know what he had left unsaid. But they had meanwhile returned to the car, so she felt serene again, taking in what he was saying as his usual kind of chatter, somewhere between amusing and irritating, commanding no more of her attention than at most the comer of an eye. At this moment he really had no influence whatso- ever on her except that of bringing her down to earth. A fUmy cloud of shyness, risen from some hidden comer of her heart, had dis- sipated in a dry void. For the first time, perhaps, she had a hard, clear glimpse of the fact that her relations with Arnheim would force her, sooner or later, to make a choice that could change her whole life. One could not say that she was happy about this just now, but it had the weighty presence of a real mountain range. A weak moment had passed. That "not to do what one wants to do" had had for an instant an absurd glow she no longer understood.
"Amheim is altogether the opposite of me. He is always overesti-
Pseudoreality Prevails · 31 3
314 · THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
mating the happiness with which time and space rendezvous with him to. form the present moment," Ulrich sighed with a smile, moved to bring what he had been saying to an orderly conclusion. But he said nothing further about childhood, so it never came to the point where Diotima would have found out that he had a tender side.
· CLARISSE VISITS ULRICH TO TELL HIM A STORY
Redecorating old castles was the specialty of the well-known painter van Helmond, whose masterpiece was his daughter Clarisse, and one day she unexpectedly walked in on Ulrich.
"Papa sends me," she informed him, "to find out whether you couldn't use your splendid aristocratic connections just a little for him too. " She eyed the room with interest, threw herself into one chair and her hat onto another. Then she held out her hand to Ulrich.
"Your Papa overestimates me," he started to say, but she cut him short.
"Nonsense. You know perfectly well the old man always ·needs money. Business simply isn't what it used to be! " She laughed. "Ele- gant place you've got here. Nice! " She scrutinized her surroundings again and then looked at Ulrich. Her whole bearing had something of the endearing shyness of a pet dog whose bad conscience makes its skin twitch.
"Anyway, if you can do it, you will. If not, then you won't. Of course, I promised him you would. But I came for another reason. His asking me to see you put an idea into my head. It's about a cer- tain problem in my family. I'd like to hear what you think. " Her mouth and eyes hesitated and flickered for an instant; then she took her leap over the initial hurdle.