No More Learning

" And Agathe breathed a deep sigh of relief. It did not matter what it meant; evidently it meant: and why don't you know a magic charm against its separating us at the last moment? She sighed so naturally and confidingly that she was not even aware of it herself.
And this again led to a movement that inclined them toward each other and kept them apart. Every strong excitement that two people have shared to the end leaves behind in them the naked intimacy of exhaustion; ifeven arguing does this, then it is infinitely more true of tender feelings that ream out the very marrow to form a flute! So Ulrich, touched, would have almost embraced Agathe when he heard her wordless complaint, as enchanted as a lover on the morn- ing after the first tempests. His hand was already touching her shoul- der, which was still bare, and at this touch she started, smiling; but in her eyes there reappeared immediately the unwished-for dissuasion. Strange images now arose in his mind: Agathe behind bars. Or fear- fully motioning to him from a growing distance, torn from him by the sundering power of alien fists. Then again he was not only the one
From the Posthumous Papers · I IB I
who was powerless and dismissed, but also the one who did this. . . . Perhaps these were the eternal images of the doubts of love, merely consumed in the average life; then again, perhaps not. He would have liked to speak to her about this, but Agathe now looked away from him and toward the open window, and hesitantly stood up. The fever of love was in their bodies, but their bodies dared no repetition, and what was beyond the window, whose drapes stood almost open, had stolen away their imagination, without which the flesh is only brutal or despondent. When Agathe took the first steps in this direction, Ulrich, guessing her assent, turned out the light in order to free their gaze into the night. The moon had come up be- hind the tops of the spruce trees, whose greenly glimmering black stood out phlegmatically against the blue-gold heights and the palely twinkling distance. Agathe resentfully inspected this meaningful sliver of the world.
"So nothing more than moonshine? " she asked.
Ulrich looked at her without answering. Her blond hair flamed in the semidarkness against the whitish night, her lips were parted by shadows, her beauty was painful and irresistible.
But evidently he was standing there in similar fashion before her gaze, with blue eye sockets in his white face, for she went on: "Do you know what you look like now? Like 'Pierrot Lunaire'! It calls for prudence! " She wanted to wrong him a little in her excitement, which almost made her weep. Ages ago, all useless young people had appeared to each other, painfully and peevishly, in the pale mask of the lunarly lonely Pierrot, powdered chalk-white except for the drop- of-blood-red lips and abandoned by a Columbine they had never possessed; this trivialized rather considerably the love for moonlit nights. But to his sister's initially growing grief, Ulrich willingly joined in. "Even 'Laugh, clown, laugh' has already sent a chill of total recognition down the spines of thousands of philistines when they hear it sung," he affirmed bitterly. But then he added softly, whisper- ing: "This whole area of feeling really is highly questionable! And yet I would give all the memories of my life for the way you look right now. " Agathe's hand had found Ulrich's. Ulrich continued softly and passionately: "To our time, the bliss of feeling means only the glut- tony of feelings and has profaned being swept away by the moon into a sentimental debauch. It does not even begin to understand that this
1182 • THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
bliss must be either an incomprehensible mental disturbance or the fragment of another life! "
These words-precisely because they were perhaps an exaggera- tion-had the faith, and with it the wings, of adventure. "Good night! " Agathe said unexpectedly, and took them with her. She had released herself and closed the drapes so hastily that the picture of the two of them standing in the moonlight disappeared as if at one blow; and before Ulrich could tum on the light she succeeded in finding her way out of the room.
And Ulrich gave her yet more time. "Tonight you'll sleep as impa- tiently as before the start of a great outing! " he called after her.
"I hope so too! " was what resounded by way of an answer in the closing of the door.
MOONBEAMS BY SUNLIGHT
When they saw each other again the next morning it was, from a dis- tance, the way one stumbles on an out-of-the-ordinary picture in an ordinary house, or even the way one catches sight of an important outdoor sculpture in the full haphazardness of nature: an island of meaning unexpectedly materializes in the senses, an elevation and condensing of the spirit from the watery fens of existence! But when they came up to each other they were embarrassed, and all that was to be felt in their glances, shading them with tender warmth, was the exhaustion of the previous night.
Who knows, besides, whether love would be so admired if it did not cause fatigue! When they became aware of the unpleasant after- effects of the previous day's excitement it made them happy again, as lovers are proud of having almost died from desire. Still, the joy they found in each other was not only such a feeling but also an arousal of the eye. Colors and shapes presented themselves as dissolved and
From the Posthu11WUS Papers · 1183
unfathomable, and yet were sharply displayed, like a bouquet of flowers drifting on dark water: their boundaries were more emphati- cally marked than usual, but in a way that made it impossible to say whether this lay in the clarity of their appearance or in the underly- ing agitation. The impression was as much part of the concise sphere of perception and attention as it was of the imprecise sphere of emo- tion; and this is just what caused this impression to hover between the internal and the external, the way a held breath hovers between inhalation and exhalation, and made it hard to discern, in peculiar opposition to its strength, whether it was part of the physical world or merely owed its origin to the heightening of inner empathy. Nor did either of them wish to make this distinction, for a kind of shame of reason held them back; and through the longish period that followed it also still forced them to keep their distance from each other, al- though their sensitivity was lasting and might well give rise to the belief that suddenly the course of the boundaries between them, as well as those between them and the world, had changed slightly.
The weather had turned summery again, and they spent a lot of time outdoors: flowers and shrubs were blooming in the garden. When Ulrich looked at a blossom-which was not exactly an in- grained habit ofthis once-impatient man-he now sometimes found no end to contemplation and, to say it all, no beginning either. I f by chance he could name it, it was a redemption from the sea of infinity. Then the little golden stars on a bare cane signified "forsythia," and those early leaves and umbels "lilacs. " But if he did not know the name he would call the gardener over, for then this old man would name an unknown name and everything was all right again, and the primordial magic by which possession of the correct name bestows protection from the untamed wildness of things demonstrated its calming power as it had ten thousand years ago. Still, it could happen differently: Ulrich could find himself abandoned and without a helper as he confronted such a little twig or flower, without even Agathe around to share his ignorance: then it suddenly seemed to him quite impossible to understand the bright green of a young leaf, and the mysteriously outlined fullness of the form of a tiny flower cup became a circle ofinfinite diversion that nothing could interrupt. In addition, it was hardly possible for a man like him, unless he were lying to himself, which on Agathe's account could not be allowed to
II84 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
happen, to believe in an abashed rendezvous with nature, whose whisperings and upward glances, piety and mute music making, are more the privilege of a special simplicity which imagines that hardly has it laid its head in the grass than God is already tickling its neck; although it has nothing against nature being bought and sold on the fruit exchange on weekdays. Ulrich despised this cut-rate mysticism ofthe cheapest price and praise, whose constant preoccupation with God is at bottom exceedingly immoral; he preferred instead to con- tinue abandoning himself to the dizziness of finding the words to characterize a color distinct enough to reach out and take hold of, or to describe one of the shapes that had taken to speaking for them- selves with such mindless compellingness. For in such a condition the word does not cut and the fruit remains on the branch, although one thinks it already in one's mouth: that is probably the first mystery of day-bright mysticism. And Ulrich tried to explain this to his sister, even ifhis ulterior motive was that it should not, someday, disappear like a delusion.
But as he did so, the passionate condition was succeeded by an- other--of a calmer, indeed sometimes almost absentminded conver- sation-which came to permeate their exchange and served each of them as a screen from the other, although they both. saw through it completely. They usually lay in the garden on two large deck chairs, which they were constantly dragging around to follow the sun; this early-summer sun was shining for the millionth time on the magic it works eve:ry year; and Ulrich said many things that just happened to pass through his mind and rounded themselves offcautiously like the moon, which was now quite pale and a little dirty, or like a soap bub- ble: and so it happened, and quite soon, that he came round to speak- ing of the confounded and frequently cursed absurdity that all understanding presupposes a kind of superficiality, a penchant for the surface, which is, moreover, expressed in the root of the word "comprehend," to lay hold of, and has to do with primordial experi- ences having been understood not singly but one by the next and thereby unavoidably connected with one another more on the sur- face than in depth. He then continued: "So if I maintain that this grass in front of us is green, it sounds quite definite, but I haven't actually said much. In truth no more than if I'd told you that some man passing by was a member of the Green family. And for heaven's
From the Posthurrunts Papers · zzBs
sake, there's no end of greens! It would be a lot better if I contented myself with recognizing that this grass is grass-green, or even green like a lawn on which it has just rained a little. . . . " He squinted lan- guidly across the fresh plot of grass illuminated by the sun and thought: "At least this is how you would probably describe it, since you're good at making visual distinctions from judging dress materi- als. But I, on the other hand, could perhaps measure the color as well: I might guess it had a wavelength of five hundred forty mil- lionths of a millimeter; and then this green would apparently be cap- tured and nailed to a specific point! But then it gets away from me again, because this ground color also has something material about it that can't be expressed in words of color at all, since it's different from the same green in silk or wool. And now we're back at the pro- found discovery that green grass is just grass green! "
Called as a witness, Agathe found it quite understandable that one could not understand anything, and responded: "I suggest you t:ry looking at a mirror in the night: it's dark, it's black, you see almost nothing at all; and yet this nothing is something quite distinctly dif- ferent from the nothing of the rest of the darkness. You sense the glass, the doubling of depth, some kind of remnant of the ability to shimmer-and yet you perceive nothing at all! "
Ulrich laughed at his sister's immediate readiness to cut knowl- edge's reputation down to size; he was far from thinking that con- cepts have no value, and knew quite well what they accomplish, even if he did not act accordingly. What he wanted to bring out was the inability to get hold of individual experiences, those experiences that for obvious reasons one has to go through alone and lonely, even when one is with another person. He repeated: "The self never grasps its impressions and utterances singly, but always in context, in real or imagined, similar or dissimilar, harmony with something else; and so everything that has a name leans on everything else in regular rows, as a link in large and incalculable unities, one relying on an- other and all penetrated by a common tension. But for that reason," he suddenly went on, differently, "if for some reason these associa- tions fail and none of them addresses the internal series of orders, one is immediately left again to face an indescribable and inhuman creation, indeed a disavowed and formless one. " With this they were back at their point of departure; but Agathe felt the dark creation
1186 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
above it, the abyss that was the "universe," the God who was to help her!
Her brother said: "Understanding gives way to irrepressible aston- ishment, and the smallest experience-of this tiny blade of grass, or the gentle sounds when your lips over there utter a word-becomes something incomparable, lonely as the world, possessed of an un- fathomable selfishness and radiating a profound narcosis . . . ! "
He fell silent, irresolutely twisting a blade of grass in his hand, and at first listened with pleasure as Agathe, apparently as unplagued by introspection as she was by an intellectual education, restored some concreteness to the conversation. For she now responded: "If it weren't so damp, I'd love to lie on the grass! Let's go away! It would be so nice to lie on a meadow and get back to nature as simply as a discarded shoe! "
"But all that means is being released from all feelings," Ulrich ob- jected. "And God alone knows what would become of us if feelings did not appear in swarms, these loves and hates and sufferings and goodnesses that give the illusion of being unique to eve:ry individual. We would be bereft of all capacity to think and act, because our soul was created for whatever repeats itself over and over, and not for what lies outside the order ofthings. . . . " He was oppressed, thought he had stumbled into emptiness, and with an uneasy frown looked questioningly at his sister's face.
But Agathe's face was even clearer than the air that enveloped it and played with her hair, as she gave a response from memory. " 'I know not where I am, nor do I seek myself, nor do I want to know of it, nor will I have tidings. I am as immersed in the flowing spring of His love as ifI were under the surface ofthe sea and could not feel or see from any side any thing except water. ' "
"Where's that from? " Ulrich asked curiously, and only then dis- covered that she was holding in her hands a book she had taken from his own library.
Agathe opened it for him and read aloud, without answering: " 'I have transcended all my faculties up to the dark power. There I heard without sound, saw without light. Then my heart became bot- tomless, my soul loveless, my mind formless, and my nature without being. '"
Ulrich now recognized the volume and smiled, and only then did
From the Posthu11WUs Papers · 1187
Agathe say: "It's one ofyour books. " Then, closing the book, she con- cluded from memory: "'Are you yourself, or are you not? I know nothing of this, I am unaware of it, and I am unaware of myself. I am in love, but I know not with whom; I am neither faithful nor unfaith- ful. Therefore what am I? I am even unaware of my love; my heart is at the same time full oflove and empty oflove! ' "
Even in ordinary circumstances her excellent memory did not eas- ily rework its recollections into ideas but preserved them in sensory isolation, the way one memorizes poems; for which reason there was always in her words an indescribable blending of body and soul, no matter how unobtrusively she uttered them. Ulrich called to mind the scene before his father's funeral, when she had spoken the in- credibly beautiful lines of Shakespeare to him. "How wild her nature is compared to mine! " he thought. "I haven't let myself say much today. " He thought over the explanation of "day-bright mysticism" he had given her: All things considered, it was nothing more than his having conceded the possibility of transitory deviations from the ac- customed and verified order of experience; and looked at this way, her experiences were merely following a basic principle somewhat richer in feelings than that of ordinary experience and resembled small middle-class children who have stumbled into a troupe of ac- tors. So he had not dared say any more, although for days every bit of space between himself and his sister had been filled with uncom- pleted happenings! And he slowly began to concern himselfwith the problem of whether there might not be more things that could be believed than he had admitted to himself.
After the lively climax of their dialogue he and Agathe had let themselves fall back into their chairs, and the stillness of the garden closed over their fading words. Insofar as it has been said that Ulrich had begun to be preoccupied by a question, the correction must be made that many answers precede their questions, the way a person hastening along precedes his open, fluttering coat. What preoc- cupied Ulrich was a surprising notion, one that did not require belief but whose very appearance created astonishment and the impression that such an inspiration must never be allowed to be forgotten, which, considering the claims it asserted, was rather disquieting. Ul- rich was accustomed to thinking not so much godlessly as God-free, which in the manner of science rpeans to leave every possible turning
1188 · THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
to God to the emotions, because such a turning is not capable of fur- thering knowledge but can only seduce it into the impracticable. And even at this moment he did not in the least doubt that the way of science was the only correct way, since the most palpable successes of the human spirit had managed to come into being only since this spirit had got out of God's way. But the notion that had come upon him said: "What ifthis selfsame ungodliness turned out to be nothing but the contemporary path to God? Every age has had its own path- way of thought to Him, corresponding to the energies of its most powerful minds; would it not also be our destiny, the fate of an age of clever and entrepreneurial experience, to deny all dreams, legends, and ingeniously reasoned notions only because we, at the pinnacle of exploring and discovering the world, again turn to Him and will begin to derive a relationship to Him from a kind of experience that is just beginning? "
This conclusion was quite undemonstrable, Ulrich knew that; in- deed, to most people it would appear as perverse, but that did not bother him. He himself really ought not to have thought it either: the scientific procedure-which he had just finished explaining as legiti- mat~onsists, aside from logic, in immersing the concepts it has gained from the surface, from "experience," into the depths of phe- nomena and explaining the phenomena by the concepts, the depths by the surface; everything on earth is laid waste and leveled in order to gain mastery over it, and the objection came to mind that one ought not extend this to the metaphysical. But Ulrich now contested this objection: the desert is ~tan objection, it has always been the birthplace of heavenly visions, and besides, prospects that have not yetbeenattainedcannotbepre ·ctedeither! Butitescapedhimthat he perhaps found himself in a seoond kind of opposition to himself, or had stumbled on a direction leading away from his own: Paul calls faith the expectation of things hoped{or and belief in things ·not seen, a statement thought out to the point of radiant clarity; and Ul- rich's opposition to the Pauline statement, which is one of the basic tenets of the educated person, was among the strongest he bore in his heart. Faith as a diminished form ofknowingwas abhorrent to his being, it is always "against one's better knowl~ge"; on the other hand, it had been given to him to recognize in the "intimation 'to the best of' one's knowledge" a special condition and an area in which
From the Posthumous Papers · 1189
exploring minds could roam. That his opposition had now weakened was later to cost him much effort, but for the moment he did not even notice it, for he was preoccupied and charmed by a swarm of incidental considerations.
He singled out examples. Life was becoming more and more ho- mogeneous and impersonal. Something mechanical, stereotypical, statistical, and serial was insinuating itself into every entertainment, excitement, recreation, even into the passions. The life will was spreading out and becoming shallow, like a river hesitating before its delta. The will to art had already become more or less suspicious, even to itself. It seemed as though the age was beginning to devalue individual life without being able to make up the loss through new collective achievements. This was the face it wore. And this face, which was so hard to understand; which he had once loved and had attempted to remold in the muddy crater of a deeply rumbling vol- cano, because he felt himselfyoung, like a thousand others; and from which he had turned away like these thousands because he could not gain control over this horribly contorted sight-this face was trans- figured, becoming peaceful, deceptively beautiful, and radiant, by a single thought! For what if it were God Himself who was devaluing the world? Would it not then again suddenly acquire meaning and desire? And would He not be forced to devalue it, if He were to come closer to it by the tiniest step? And would not perceiving even the anticipatory shadow of this already be the one real adventure? These considerations had the unreasonable consistency of a series of adventures and were so exotic in Ulrich's head that he thought he was dreaming. Now and then he cast a cautiously reconnoitering glance at his sister, as if apprehensive that she would perceive what he was up to, and several times he caught sight ofher blond head like light on light against the sky, and saw the air that was toying with her hair also playing with the clouds.
When that happened, she too, raising herself up slightly, looked around in astonishment. She tried to imagine how it would be to be set free from all life's emotions. Even space, she thought, this always uniform, empty cube, now seemed changed. If she kept her eyes closed for a while and then opened them again, so that the garden met her glance untouched, as if it had just that moment been cre- ated, she noticed as clearly and disembodiedly as in a vision that the
1190 · THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
course that bound her to her brother was marked out among all the others: the garden "stood" around this line, and without anything having changed about the trees, walks, and other elements of the ac- tual environment-about this she could easily reassure herself-ev- erything had been related to this connection to make an axis and was thereby invisibly changed in a visible way. It may sound paradoxical; but she could just as well have said that the world was sweeter here; perhaps, too, more sorrowful: what was remarkable was that one thought one was seeing it with one's eyes. There was, moreover, something striking in the way all the surrounding shapes stood there eerily abandoned but also, in an eerily ravishing way, full of life, so that they were like a gentle death, or a passionate swoon, as if some- thing unnameable had just left them, and this lent them a distinctly human sensuality and openness. And as with this impression of space, something similar had happened with the feelings of time: that flowing ribbon, the rolling staircase with its uncanny incidental association with death, seemed at many moments to stand still and at many others to flow on without any associations at all. In the space of one single outward instant it might have disappeared into itself, with- out a trace ofwhether it had stopped for an hour or a minute.
Once, Ulrich surprised his sister during these experiments, and probably had an inkling of them, for he said softly, smiling: "The/e is a prophecy that a millennium is to the gods no longer than a blink of the eye! " Then they both leaned back and continued listening to the dream discourse of the silence.
Agathe was thinking: "Having brought all this about is all his doing; and yet he doubts every time he smiles! " But the sun was fall- ing in a constant stream ofwarmth as tenderly as a sleeping potion on his parted lips. Agathe felt it falling on her own, and knew herself at one with him. She tried to put herself in his place and guess his thoughts, which they had really decided they would not do because it was something that came from outside and not from their own cre- ative participation; but as a deviation it was that much more secret. "He doesn't want this to become just another love story," she thought, and added: "That's not my inclination either. " And immedi- ately thereafter she thought: "He will love no other woman after me, for this is no longer a love story; it is the very last love story there can be! " And she added: "We will be something like the Last Mohicans
From the Posthunwus Papers · 1 1 9 1
of love! " At the moment she was also capable of this tone toward herself, for if she summed things up quite honestly, this enchanted garden in which she found herself together with Ulrich was also, of course, more desire than reality. She did not really believe that the Millennium could have begun, in spite of this name Ulrich had once bestowed on it, which had the sound ofstanding on solid ground. She even felt quite deserted by her powers of desire, and, wherever her dreams might have sprung from, she didn't know where it was, bit- terly sobered. She remembered that before Ulrich, she really had more easily been able to imagine a waking sleep, like the one in which her soul was now rocking, which was able to conduct her be- hind life, into a wakefulness after death, into the nearness of God, to powers that came to fetch her, or merely alongside life to a cessation of ideas and a transition into forests and meadows of imaginings: it had never become clear what that was! So now she made an effort to call up these old representations. But all she could remember was a hammock, stretched between two enormous fingers and rocked with an infinite patience; then a calm feeling of being towered over, as if by high trees, between which she felt raised up and removed from sight; and finally a nothingness, which in some incomprehensible way had a tangible content: All these were probably transitory images of suggestion and imagination in which her longing had found solace. But had they really been only passing and half formed? To her aston- ishment, something quite remarkabie slowly began to occur to Agathe. "Truly," she thought, "it's as one says: a light dawns! And it spreads the longer it lasts! " For what she had once imagined seemed to be in almost everything that was now standing around her, calm and enduring, as often as she dispatched her glance to look! What she had imagined had soundlessly entered the world. God, to be sure-<llfferently from the way a literally credulous person might have experienced it-stayed away from her adventure, but to make up for this she was, in this adventure, no longer alone: these were the only two changes that distinguished the fulfillment from the presen- timent, and they were changes in favor of earthly naturalness.
47
W ANDERINGS AMONG PEOPLE
In the time that followed they withdrew from their circle of ac- quaintances, astonishing them by turning down every invitation and not allowing themselves to be contacted in any way. They stayed at home a great deal, and when they went out they avoided places in which they might meet people of their social set, visiting places of entertainment and small theaters where they felt secure from such encounters; and whenever they left the house they generally simply followed the currents of the metropolis, which are an image of peo- ple's needs and, with the precision of tide tables, pile them up in specific places or suck them away, depending on the hour. It amused them to participate in a style of living that differed from their own and relieved them for a time of responsibility for their usual way of life. Never had the city in which they lived seemed to them at once so lovely and so strange. In their totality the houses presented a grand picture, even if singly or in particular they were not handsome at all; diluted by the heat, noise streamed through the air like a river reach- ing to the rooftops; in the strong light, attenuated by the depths of the streets, people looked more passionate and mysterious than they presumably deserved. Everything sounded, looked, and smelled ir- replaceable and unforgettable, as ifit were signaling how it appeared to itself in all its momentariness; and brother and sister not unwill- ingly accepted this invitation to tum toward the world.
In doing so, they came upon an extraordinary discord. The experi- ences that they had not shared openly with each other separated them from other people; but the same problematic passion, which they continued to feel undiminished and which had come to grief not because of a taboo but because of some higher promise, had also transported them to a state that shared a similarity with the sultry intermissions of a physical union. The desire that could not find ex- pression had again sunk back within the body, filling it with a tender- ness as indefinable as one of the last days of autumn or first days of
From the Posthurrwus Papers · I I 93
spring. It was, nonetheless, not at all as if they loved every person they saw, or everything that was going on: they merely felt the lovely shadow of "how it would be" falling on their hearts, and their hearts could neither fully believe in the mild delusion nor quite escape its pull. It seemed that through their conversations and their conti- nence, through their expectation and its provisional limits, they had become sensitive to the barriers reality places before the emotions, and now perceived together the peculiarly double-sided nature of life, which dampens every higher aspiration with a lower one. This two-sided nature combines a retreat with every advance, a weakness with every strength, and gives no one a right that it does not take away from others, straightens out no tangle without creating new disorder, and even appears to evoke the sublime only in order to mis- take it, an hour later, for the stale and trite. An absolutely indissolu- ble and profoundly necessary connection apparently combines all happy and cheerful human endeavors with the materialization of their opposites and makes life for intellectual people, beyond all dis- sension, hard to bear.
The way the plus and minus sides of life adhere to each other has been judged in quite different ways. Pious misanthropists see in it an effluence of earthly decrepitude, bulldog types life's juiciest filet; the man in the street feels as comfortable within this contradiction as he does between his left and right hands, and people who are proper say that the world was not created in order to correspond to human ex- pectations but it is the other way round: these ideas were created in order to correspond to the world, and why is it that they never bring it to pass in the sphere of the just and the beautiful? As mentioned, Ulrich was of the opinion that this state of affairs served the produc- tion and preservation of a middling condition of life, which more or less leaves it up to chance to mix human genius with human stupid- ity, as this condition itself also emerges from such a mixture; a long time ago he had expressed this by saying that the mind has no mind, and just recently, at Diotima's soiree, he had again talked about it at length as the great confusion of the emotions. But whether it had been recently or long ago, and no matter how obvious it might have been to continue the same thought, as soon as Ulrich began to do so he had the feeling that such words were coming from his mouth a few days too late. This time, he frequently found himself lacking in
1194 · THE MAN WITH 0 U T QUALITIES
desire to occupy himself with things that did not directly concern him, for his soul was prepared to submit to the world with all its senses, however this might tum out. His judgment was as good as disconnected from this altogether. Even whether something pleased him or not hardly mattered, for everything simply seized hold of him in a way that surpassed his capacity for understanding. This was as true for every general state of mind as for every particular and indi- vidual one; indeed, at times it was entirely without thought, and cor- poreal; but when it had lasted awhile and reached full measure, it became unpleasant or seemed ridiculous to him, and he was then ready, in a manner just as unfounded as the one in which he had first submitted, to retract that submission.
And Agathe in her fashion was experiencing pretty much the same thing. At times, her conscience was oppressed, and expected or made for itself new oppressions from the world she had left behind but that nonetheless proclaimed itself in all its power all around her.
In the manifold bustle that fills day and night there was probably not a single task in which she could participate with all her heart, and her failure to venture into anything should not be regarded with the cer- tainty of blame or disdain, or even contempt. There was in this a re- markable peace! It might perhaps be said, to alter a proverb, that a bad conscience, as long as it is bad enough, may almost provide a better pillow on which to rest than a good one: the incessant ancillary activity in which the mind engages with a view to acquiring a good individual conscience as the final outcome of all the injustice in which it is embroiled is then abolished, leaving behind in mind and emotions a hectic independence. A tender loneliness, a sky-high ar- rogance, sometimes poured their splendor over these holidays from the world. Alongside one's own feelings the world could then appear clumsily bloated, like a captive balloon circled by swallows, or, muta- tis mutandis, humbled to a background as small as a forest at the periphery of one's field of vision. The offended civic obligations echoed like a distant and crudely intrusive noise; they were insignifi- cant, if not unreal. A monstrous order, which is in the last analysis nothing but a monstrous absurdity: that was the world. And yet every detail Agathe encountered also had the tensed, high-wire-act nature of the once-and-never-again, the nature of discovery, which is magi-
From the Posthumous Papers · 1195
cal and admits of no repetition; and whenever she wanted to speak of this, she did so in the awareness that no word can be uttered twice without changing its meaning.
So the attitude of brother and sister toward the world at this time was a not entirely irreproachable expression of confident benevo- lence, containing its own brand of parallel attraction and repulsion in a state of feeling that hovered like a rainbow, instead of these oppo- sites combining in the stasis that corresponds to the self-confident state of every day. And something else was connected with this: in the days following that strange night, the tone of their conversations changed too; the echo of destiny faded, and the progression became freer and looser; indeed, it sometimes volatilized in a playful flutter- ing of words. Still, this did not indicate a temporizing born of de- spondency as much as it indicated an unregulated broadening of the living foundations of their own adventure. They sought support in observing the ordinary ways in which life was carried on, and were secretly convinced that the equilibrium of this usual form of living was also a pretense. In this way it happened one day that their con- versation took a direction in which, despite some fluctuation, it per- sisted. Ulrich asked: "What does the commandment 'Love thy neighbor as thyself' really mean? "
"Love the person farthest away like thyself is what it means! " Agathe responded with the tenderest forbearance, to which her brother had a right in questions of loving one's fellowmen.
But Ulrich was not satisfied. "And what does it mean to say 'Love what you do not know'? To love someone you don't know, although you might well be convinced that after you got acquainted you wouldn't like each other? So, in the last analysis: to love him although you know him? '' he insisted more explicitly.
"That's clearly the situation most people are in, but they don't let it bother them! " Agathe replied. "They put doubt and confidence in- side each other! "
"They foresee nothing more in the commandment oflove than the reasonable prohibition against hurting each other so long as it seiVes no purpose," Ulrich offered.
But Agathe said that that would be the insipid rule of thumb "What you don't want someone to do to you, don't do to anyone
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else," and it was impossible that the entire purpose of this high- mindedly passionate, cheerfully generous task could be to love a stranger without even asking who he was!
"Perhaps the word 'love' here is only an expression that has taken far too great a swing to overcome the obstacles? '' Ulrich reflected. But Agathe insisted that it really did mean "love him! " and "without any particular reason," and that it was not to be haggled over, so Ul- rich yielded. ''What it means is: Love him in spite ofwhat you know! " he objected. "And before you know him! " Agathe repeated and un- derlined it once again: "At least, without knowing him! "
But she stopped abruptly and looked at her brother, bewildered. "But what is it you really love in a person if you don't know him at all? '' she asked impatiently.
Thus the playful questions took on various forms as they sped back and forth. But Ulrich did not hasten to his sister's aid. He was of the opinion that to love something means to prefer it over other things, and that surely assumed a certain knowing.
"Almost everybody loves himself best, and knows himself least! " Agathe threw in.
"True love is independent of merit and reward," Ulrich con- firmed, mimicking a moralizing tone and shrugging his shoulders.
"Something's wrong here! "
"A lot's wrong! " he ventured.
"And ifyou love everything? Ifyou're supposed to love the whole
world, the way you are today? What is it then that you're loving? You would say: 'Nothing special'! " Agathe laughed.
"Haven't you noticed, too, that today it's downright disturbing if you happen to meet a person who is so beautiful that you have to say something personal about it? '' he asked her.
'Then it's not a feeling about the real world and the real person! " she said firmly.
"So then we have to tackle the question as to what part of this per- son it's true of, or what metamorphosis and transformation of the real person and the real world," Ulrich said, softly but emphatically.
After a short pause, Agathe answered, with a timid conscience: "Perhaps that is the real person? '' But Ulrich hesitantly resisted this, shaking his head.
Shining through the content of this inquiring assertion there was,
From the Posthumous Papers · z197
no doubt, a profound obviousness. The breezes and delights of these days were so tender and merry that the impression arose spontane- ously that man and world must be showing themselves as they really were: this transparency harbored a small, odd, suprasensory shud- der, such as is glimpsed in the flowing transparency of a brook, a transparency that allows the glance to see to the bottom but, when it arrives there, wavering, makes the mysterious colored stones look like fish scales, and beneath them what the glance had thought it was experiencing is truly concealed, without possibility of access. Agathe, surrounded by sunshine, needed only to disengage her glance a little to have the feeling of having stumbled into a supernatural domain; for the shortest interval she could easily imagine that she had come in contact with a higher truth and reality, or at least had come upon an aspect of existence where a little door behind the earth mysteri- ously indicated the way from the earthly garden into the beyond. But when she again limited the range of her glance to an ordinary span and let life's glare stream in on her once more, she saw whatever might actually happen to be there: perhaps a little flag being waved to and fro by a child's hand, merrily and without any kind of puzzled thought; a police wagon with prisoners, its black-green paint spar- kling in the light; or a man with a colorful cap contentedly turning a pile of manure; or finally a company of soldiers, whose shouldered rifles were pointing their barrels at the sky. All this seemed to have had poured over it something related to love, and everyone also seemed more ready to open themselves to this feeling than usual: but to believe that the empire oflove was now really happening would be just as difficult, Ulrich said, as imagining that at this moment no dog could bite or no person do anything evil.
The same happened with all the other attempts at explanation, which had in common with this one that they opposed some kind of person who was far off and true to people who were everyday, earth- bound, and bad and good, but at all events people as we know them. Brother and sister examined these ideal types one after the other, and could not believe in any of them. There was the feeling that on such festive days nature brought forth in her creatures all their hid- den goodness and beauty. Then there were the more psychological explanations, that people in this transparent, nuptial air did not show themselves as different in some magical way, but still displayed
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themselves so as to be as lovable as they would like to be and saw themselves as being: sweating their egotism and inward-turned in- dulgence, as it were, out through their pores. And finally there is also the variation that people were showing their goodwill; to be sure, this cannot prevent them from doing evil, but emerges miraculously and unscathed on days like these from the evil will that usually governs them, like Jonah from the belly of the whale. But the most succinct explanation one heard was that this is the immortal part of man, which shimmers through the mortal part. All these imputations had in common that they located the real person in a part of him that, among the insubstantial remainder, does not come into play; and if the promising contact with this real self was a process clearly di- rected upward, there was also a second, no less abundant group of explanations, which directed this process just as clearly downward: these were all those according to which man is supposed to have lost his natural innocence through intellectual arrogance and all kinds of misfortune brought upon him by civilization. There are, therefore, two genuine people, who appear to the mind with the greatest punc- tuality in the same, constantly recurring situations, yet both these types-the one a divine superman, the other an animal-like infra- man-were on opposite sides of the person as he really is. Finally, Ulrich remarked dryly: "The only trait that remains as common, and also very characteristic, is that even when he is being good, a person does not seek the true person in himself but takes himself to be something else 'plus or minus'! "
But here brother and sister had arrived at a borderline case of that love for another that is so problematic and so gently entwines every- thing within it, and Agathe sighed in vexation, but not without charm. "Then all that remains of all this is just a 'mood'! " she said, disappointed. "The sun is shining. You get into a frame of mind! "
Ulrich added to this: "The social instincts stretch themselves out in the sun like mercury in the thermometer tube, at the expense of the egotistic instincts, which otherwise hold them more or less in bal- ance. Perhaps nothing else. "
"So an 'unconscious craving' like a schoolgirl's or schoolboy's! " Agathe continued. "They would like to kiss the whole world and have no idea why! So we can't say any more than that either? ''
They had suddenly become tired offeeling; and it sometimes hap-
From the Posthumous Papers · 1199
pened that in such a conversation, dealing only with their capacity for feeling, they neglected to use it. Also, because the surfeit of emotions that could nowhere find an outlet actually hurt, they sometimes got back at it with a little ingratitude. But when they had both spoken in this fashion, Agathe quickly looked sidelong at her brother. "That would," she protested, "be saying too little! "
The moment she said this, they both felt once more that they were not just relying on some subjective fantasy but were facing an invisi- ble reality. Truth was hovering in the mood inundating them, reality was under the appearance, transformation of the world gazed out of the world like a shadow! The reality about which they felt so expect- ant was, to be sure, remarkably lacking a nucleus and only half com- prehensible, and it was a long-intimate half-truth, familiar and unfulfillable, that wooed credibility: not an everyday reality and truth for everyone, but a secret one for lovers. Obviously, it was not just caprice or delusion either, and its most mysterious insinuation whis- pered: "Just leave yourself to me without mistrust, and you'll dis- cover the whole truth! " Giving an account of this was so difficult because the language of love is a secret language and in its highest perfection is as silent as an embrace.
The thought "secret language" had the effect of making Agathe dimly recall that it was written somewhere: ''Whosoever abides in love abides in God, and God in him. He who has not love does not know God. " She did not know where.
Ulrich on the other hand, because she had said before that it was "just a mood," was considering an idea as sweetly temperate as the sound of a flute. One had only to assume that such a mood of being in love was not always just a transitory special state but was also, beyond its immediate occasion, capable of enduring and spreading; in other words, all you had to assume was that a person could be a lover alone and in accordance with his enduring being, in exactly the same way that he can be indifferent, and this would lead him to a totally changed way of life: indeed, presumably it would take him to an en- tirely unfamiliar world that would be present in his mind without his having to be considered mentally ill. This thought, that everything could be made different by one small step, indeed just by a move- ment that the mind merely had to let happen, was extremely seduc- tive. And suddenly Ulrich asked his sister with curiosity: ''What do
I. 200 • THE MAN WITH0 UT QUALITIES
you think would happen if we were to stop one of these people and say to him: 'Brother, stay with us! ' or 'Stop, 0 hastening soul'? ''
"He would look at us flabbergasted," Agathe replied.
"And then unobtrusively double his pace, or call a policeman," Ul- rich finished.
"He would probably think he'd fallen in with good-natured mad- men," Agathe added.
"But ifwe were to yell at him: 'You criminal, you piece of nothing! ' he probably wouldn't consider us crazy," Ulrich noted with amuse- ment, "but would merely take us to be 'people who think differently,' or 'members of a different party,' who had turned angry at him. "
Agathe frowned, smiling, and then they both again gazed into the human current that was pulling them along and flowing against them. Together they felt again the self-forgetfulness and power, the happiness and goodness, the deep and elevated constraint, that pre- dominate inside a vital human community, even if it is only the con-, tingent community of a busy street, so that one does not believe that there could also be anything bad or divisive; and their own sense of existence, that sharply bounded and difficult having-been-placed- here, that basic happiness and basic hostility, stood in marvelous contrast to this communal scene. They both thought the same; but they also thought differently, without its being obvious. They guessed each other's meaning; but sometimes they guessed wrongly. And gradually an indolence, indeed a paralysis of thinking, emanated from this double-pearled juxtaposition on the oyster shell of the world, as Ulrich called it rather scornfully, and they then parried it by laughing at each other, or about something.
But when this happened again Agathe said: "It always makes me so sadwhen we're forced to laugh at ourselves; and I don't know why I have to. "
Ulrich replied: "Nothing is funnier than opening one's eyes tore- ality when they're still filled with the inner soul! "
But Agathe did not pick up on this; she repeated: "Everything re- mains so uncertain. It seems to draw itselftogether and then extend itself again, without any shape. It pennits no activity, and the inac- tivity becomes unbearable. I can't even say that I really love these people, or that I love these real people, as they are when we look at them. I'm afraid our own feelings are pretty unreal! "
From the Posthumous Papers · I . 20 I
"But these people respond to each other in exactly the same way! " Ulrich retorted. "They want to love each other, yet at the decisive moment they think antipathy is more natural and healthier! So it's the same for everyone: We feel that real life has snapped off a possi- ble life! "
"But then tell me," Agathe retorted angrily, "why love always needs a church or a bed! "
"For heaven's sake"-Ulrich soothed his companion with a laugh-"don't speak so openly! " He touched her hand with his fin- gertips and went on, joking mysteriously: "All these people can also be called in public what you and I are in private: the unseparated but not united! "
It was not an assertion, merely a cajoling constellation of words, a joke, a candid little cloud of words; and they knew that feeling one- self chosen was the cheapest of all magic formulas and quite adoles- cent. Nevertheless, Ulrich's fraternal words slowly rose from the ground to a position above their heads. Agathe, too, now whispered jokingly: "Sometimes you feel your breath blow back from your veil still hot, like a pair of strange lips: that's how it sometimes seems to me-call it illusion or reality-that I'm you! " was her response, and her gentle smile drew silence closed like a curtain after it as it died away.
In such back-and-forth fashion they came to reproach the millions of loving couples who in their serious desire for certainty ask them- selves a hundred times a day whether they really and truly love each other, and how long it can last: who, however, don't have to fear con- juring up similar oddities.
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LOVE BLINDS. OR DIFFICULTIES WHERE THEY ARE NOT LOOKED FOR
Another of these world-oriented discussions went like this: "Then how would things stand when a love occurs between two so-called persons of different gender, which is as famous as it is gladly experi- enced? " Ulrich objected. "You probably are really partly in love with the person you think you're loving. "
"But what you're mostly doing is simply making a puppet of him! " Agathe interjected resentfully.
"In any event, what he says and thinks in the process also has its charm! "
"As long as you love him! Because you love him! But not the other way round! I f you've once understood how the other person means it, it's not only anger that's disarmed, as one always says, but for the most part love as well! "
Again it was Agathe who gave this passionate answer. Ulrich smiled. She must have banged her head pretty hard against this wall more than once.
"But at first you can like the other person's opinions, that's often involved in the beginning: the well-known marvelous 'agreeing about everything'; later, of course, you no longer understand it at all," he said placatingly, and asked: "But deeds? Does love depend on deeds? ''
"Only insofar as they embody a person's sentiments. Or tum the imagination into a sort of monument! "
"But didn't we just decide it wasn't so much a matter of senti- ments? '' Ulrich recalled teasingly.
"It doesn't depend on anything at alii" Agathe cried. "Not on what the other person is, not on what he thinks, not on what he wants, and not on what he does! There are times when you despise a person but love him all the same. And there are times when you love a person
From the Posthu'TTWUs Papers · 1 2 0 3
and have the secret feeling that this person with the beard (or breasts), whom you think you've known for a long time and . . . trea- sure, and who talks about himself incessantly, is really only visiting love. You could leave aside his sentiments and merits, you could change his destiny, you could give him a new beard or different legs-you could leave aside almost the whole person, and still love him! As far as you happen to love him at all," she added, mitigating her statement.
Her voice had a deep ring, with a restless glitter buried in its depths like a flame. She sat down guiltily, having involuntarily jumped up from her chair in her zeal.
Ulrich summed up the result in balanced fashion: "Both contra- dictions are always present and form a team of four horses: you love a person because you know him and because you don't know him; and you know him because you love him and don't know him because you love him. And sometimes that grows strong enough to become quite palpable. Those are the well-known moments when Venus gazes through Apollo and Apollo through Venus at an empty scare- crow, and each is mightily surprised at having seen something there before. If, furthermore, love is stronger than astonishment, it comes to a struggle between them, and sometimes out of this struggle love emerges-even if it is despairing, exhausted, and mortally wounded-as the victor. But if love is not that strong, it leads to a battle between the people involved, to insults intended to make up for having been played for a simpleton . . . to terrible incursions of reality . . . to utter degradation. . . . " He had participated in this stormy weather of love often enough to be at ease describing it.
Agathe interrupted him. "But I fmd that these marital and extramarital affairs of honor are usually greatly overrated! " she objected.
"Love as a whole is overrated! The maniac who in his delusion pulls a knife and stabs some innocent person who just happens to be standing in for his hallucination-in love he's the normal one! " Ul- rich said, and laughed.
Agathe, too, smiled as she looked at him.
Ulrich became serious. "It's odd enough to have to think that there really are no two people who can agree spontaneously, without
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their opinions and convictions being more or less powerfully in- fluenced," he noted thoughtfully, and for a while this gave the con- versation a somewhat different turn.
Brother and sister were sitting in Ulrich's room, on either side of the long, darkly shining desk of heavy wood, whose center was now empty because apparently Ulrich was not working on anything. Each of them had lazily posed an arm on the desk and was looking at a small papier-mache horse standing in the vacant middle ground be- tween them.
"Even in rational thinking, where everything has logical and objec- tive connections," Ulrich went on, "it's usually the case that you un- reservedly recognize the superior conviction of someone else only if you have submitted to him in some way, whether as a model and guide, or as a friend or teacher. But without such a feeling, which has nothing to do with the case, every time you make someone else's opinion your own, it will only be with the silent reservation that you can do more with it than its originator; if indeed you weren't already out to show this fellow what unsuspected importance his idea really contained! Especially in art, most of us certainly know it would be impossible for us to do ourselves what we read, see, and hear; but we still have the patronizing awareness that ifwe were able to do any of these things, we could of course do them better! And perhaps it has to be that way, and lies in the active nature of the mind, which doesn't allow itself be filled up like an empty pot," Ulrich concluded, "but actively appropriates everything, and literally has to make it part of itself. "
He would gladly have added something more that occurred to him, and it would not let him rest, so he was already giving vent to his scruple before Agathe had any chance to respond. "But we should also ask ourselves," he suggested, "what sort of life would arise if all this were not so unfavorable. Our feelings ultimately want to be han- dled quite roughly, it appears, but in the other borderline case- when we assimilate someone else's sentiments without resistance, when we submit completely to someone else's feelings, indeed, when we reach a pure agreement with a second understanding-is there not a happiness that is pathologically tender, in fact almost anti-intellectual? And how could this light be produced without the shadow? '' This thought made him want to linger over the conversa-
From the Posthurrwus Papers · 1 2 0 5
tion; but although the idea was not entirely alien to Agathe either, she was occupied at the moment with smaller concerns. She looked at her brother for a while without speaking, struggling against what was coming over her, but then made up her mind to ask the offensive question, as casually as possible, whether that meant he had arrived at the considered conviction that "even only two people" could never be of one mind, and lovers under no circumstances whatever?
Ulrich was almost at the point of expressing through a gesture that this was neither to be taken as real nor worth talking about, when he was struck by his sister's misplaced warmth; he had to suppress a smile at this suspicious inquisitiveness, but in doing so lost his own more serious inquisitiveness and fell back again into the interrupted meny flow ofhis initial jokingway oftalking. "You yourselfbegan by belittling love! " he replied.