No More Learning

" But when it was all over she had stood up in amazement, and without thinking or believing anything in particu- lar, acting simply from a solitary nature's stubbornness and capacity to dream, she had from that moment on inwardly treated this empty astonishment at what had happened as though it were not final. We see the onset of something similar in everyone who cannot bring himself to believe bad news, or finds a way to soften the irrevocable, but Agathe's attitude was unique in the force and extent of this reac- tion, which marked the sudden outburst of her disdain for the world. Since then she had conscientiously assimilated anything new as something less actual than extremely uncertain, an attitude greatly facilitated by the mistrust with which she had always confronted real- ity; the past, on the other hand, was petrified by the blow she had suffered, and eroded by time much more slowly than usually hap- pens with memories. But it had none of the swirl of dreams, the one- sidedness or the skewed sense of proportion that brings the doctor on the scene. On the contrary, Agathe went on living in perfect lucid- ity, quietly virtuous and merely a little bored, slightly inclined to that reluctance about life that was really like the fever she had suffered so willingly as a child. In her memory, which in any case never let its impressions dissolve into generalizations, every hour of what had been and still was fearful remained vivid, like a corpse under a white
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 823
sheet; despite all the anguish of remembering so exactly, it made her happy, for it had the effect of a secret, belated indication that all was not yet over, and it preserved in her, despite the decay of her emo- tional life, a vague but high-minded tension. In truth, all it meant was that she had again lost the sense of meaning in her life and had con- sciously put herself in a state of mind that did not suit her years; for only old people live by dwelling on the experiences and achieve- ments of a time that is gone and remain untouched by the present. But at the age Agathe was then, fortunately, while resolves are made for eternity a single year feels like half an eternity, and so it was only to be expected that after a time a repressed nature and a fettered imagination would violently free themselves. The details of how it happened are of no consequence in themselves; a man whose ad- vances would in other circumstances never have succeeded in dis- turbing her equilibrium succeeded, and became her lover, but this attempt at reliving something ended, after a brief period of manic hope, in passionate disenchantment. Agathe now felt herself cast out by both her real life and her unreal life, and unworthy of her own high hopes. She was one ofthose intense people who can keep them- selves motionless and in reserve for a long time, until at some point they suddenly fall prey to total confusion; and so, in her disappoint- ment, she soon took another rash step, which was, in short, to punish herself in a way opposite to the way she had sinned, condemning her- self to share her life with a man who inspired in her a mild aversion. And this man whom she had picked out as a penance was Gottlieb Hagauer.
"It was certainly both unfair to him and inconsiderate," Agathe ad- mitted to herself-and it must be admitted that this was the first time she had ever faced up to it, because fairness and consideration are not virtues in high favor with the young. Still, her self-punish- ment in this marriage was not inconsiderable either, and Agathe now gave it some more thought. She had strayed far from their conversa- tion, and Ulrich, too, was leafing through his books for something and seemed to have forgotten the conversation. "In earlier centu- ries," she thought, "a person in my state of mind would have entered a convent," and the fact that she had got married instead was not without an innocently comical side, which had previously escaped her. This comedy, which she had then been too young to notice, was
824 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
simply that of the present day, which satisfies its need for a refuge from the world at worst in some tourist accommodation but usually in an Alpine hotel, and even strives to furnish its prisons tastefully. It expresses the profound European need not to overdo anything. No European any longer scourges himself, smears himself with ashes, cuts out his tongue, really takes part in things or totally withdraws from society, swoons with passion, breaks people on the wheel or im- pales them, but everyone sometimes feels the need to do so, so that it's hard to say which is more to be avoided: wanting to do it or not doing it. Why should an ascetic, ofall people, starve himself? It only gives him disturbing fantasies. A sensible asceticism consists of an aversion to eating while being constantly well nourished. Such an as- ceticism promises longevity and offers the mind a freedom that is unattainable so long as it remains enslaved to the body in passionate rebellion. Such bitterly humorous reflections, which she had learned from her brother, were now doing Agathe a world of good, for they dissected the "tragic"-a rigid beliefthat in her inexperience she had long assumed to be a duty-into irony and a passion that had neither name nor aim, and for that reason alone were not bracketed with what she had experienced previously.
It was in this way above all that she had begun to realize, ever since being with her brother, that something was happening to the great split she had suffered between irresponsible living and a spectral fan- tasy life; there was a movement of release and of recombining what had been released. Now, for instance, in this silence between herself and her brother, which was deepened by the presence of books and memories, she thought ofthe description Ulrich had given her ofhis wandering aimlessly into town, and ofhow the town had entered him as he entered it. It reminded her very exactly ofthe few weeks ofher happiness. And it had also been right for her to laugh, wildly and for no reason, when he told her about it, because it struck her that there was something of this turning of the world inside out, this delicious and funny inversion he was speaking of, even in Hagauer's thick lips when they pursed for a kiss. It made her shudder, of course, but there is a shudder, she thought, even in the bright light of noon, and it made her feel that somehow there was still hope for her. Some mere nothing, some break that had always lain between past and present, had recently vanished. She glanced around covertly. The
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 825
room she was in had formed part of the space in which her fate had taken shape: it was the first time since her arrival that this had occurred to her. For it was here that she had met with her childhood friend when her father was out, and they made the great decision to love each other; here, too, she had sometimes received her "un- worthy" suitor, standing at the window hiding tears of rage or des- peration, and here, finally, Hagauer's courting had run its course, with her father's blessing. After having been for so long merely the unnoticed other side ofevents, the furniture and walls, the peculiarly confined light, now became in this moment of recognition strangely tangible, and the quixotic things that had occurred here assumed a physical and completelyunambiguous pastness, as ifthey were ashes or burned charcoal. What remained, and became almost unbearably powerful, was that funny, shadowy sense of things done with-that strange tickling one feels when confronted with old traces, dried to dust, of one's self-which, the moment one feels it, one can neither grasp nor banish.
Agathe made sure that Ulrich was not paying attention, and care- fully opened the top ofher dress, where she kept next to her skin the locket with the tiny picture that she had never taken off through the years. She went to the window and pretended to look out. Cau- tiously, she snapped open the sharp edge of the tiny golden scallop and gazed furtively at her dead love. He had full lips and soft, thick hair, and the cocky expression ofthe twenty-one-year-old flashed out at her from a face still half in its eggshell. For a long time she did not know what she thought, but then suddenly the thought came: "My God, a twenty-one-year-old! "
What do such youngsters talk about with each other? What mean- ing do they give to their concerns? How funny and arrogant they often are! How the intensity of their ideas misleads them about the worth of those ideas! Curious, Agathe unwrapped from the tissue paper of memory some sayings that she-thank goodness for her cleverness-had preserved in it. My God, that was almost worth say- ing, she thought, but she could not really be sure of even that unless she also recalled the garden in which it had been spoken, with the strange flowers whose names she did not know, the butterflies that settled on them like weary drunkards, and the light that flowed over their faces as if heaven and earth were dissolved in it. By that mea-
826 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
sure she was today an old, experienced woman, even though not that many years had passed. With some confusion she noted the incon- gruity that she, at twenty-seven, still loved the boy of twenty-one: he had grown much too young for her! She asked herself: "What feel- ings would I have to have if, at my age, this boyish man were really to be the most important thing in the world to me? " They would cer- tainly have been odd feelings, but she was not even able to imagine them clearly. It all dissolved into nothing.
Agathe recognized in a great upsurge offeeling that the one proud passion of her life had been a mistake, and the heart of this error consisted of a fie:ry mist she could neither touch nor grasp, no matter whether one were to say that faith could not live more than an hour, or something else. It was always this that her brother had been talk- ing about since they had been together, and it was always herself he was speaking of, even though he hedged it about in his intellectual fashion and his diplomacy was much too slow for her impatience. They kept coming back to the same conversation, and Agathe herself blazed with desire that his flame should not diminish.
When she now spoke to Ulrich he had not even noticed how long the interruption had lasted. But whoever has not already picked up the clues to what was going on between this brother and sister should lay this account aside, for it depicts an adventure of which he will never be able to approve: a journey to the edge ofthe possible, which led past-and perhaps not always past-the dangers of the impossi- ble and unnatural, even of the repugnant: a "borderline case," as Ul- rich later called it, of limited and special validity, reminiscent of the freedom with which mathematics sometimes resorts to the absurd in order to arrive at the truth. He and Agathe happened upon a path that had much in common with the business of those possessed by God, but they walked it without piety, without believing in God or the soul, nor even in the beyond or in reincarnation. They had come upon it as people ofthis world, and pursued it as such-this was what was remarkable about it. Though at the moment Agathe spoke again Ulrich was still absorbed in his books and the problems they set him, he had not for an instant forgotten their conversation, which had bro- ken off at the moment of her resistance to the devoutness of her teachers and his own insistence on "precise visions," and he immedi- ately answered:
Into the Millennium (The CriminaLs) · 827
"There's no need to be a saint to experience something of the kind! You could be sitting on a fallen tree or a bench in the moun- tains, watching a herd of grazing cows, and experience something amounting to being transported into another life! You lose yourself and at the same time suddenly find yourself-you talked about it yourself! "
"But what actually happens? " Agathe asked.
"To know that, you first have to decide what is normal, sister human," Ulrich joked, trying to brake the much too rapid rush of the idea. "What's normal is that a herd of cattle means nothing to us but grazing beef. Or else a subject for a painting, with background. Or it hardly registers at all. Herds ofcattle beside mountain paths are part of the mountain paths, and we would only notice what we experience when we see them if a big electric clock or an apartment house were to stand there in their place. For the rest, we wonder whether to get up or stay put; we're bothered by the flies swarming around the cat- tle; we wonder whether there's a bull in the herd; we wonder where the path goes from here-there are any number of minor delibera- tions, worries, calculations, and observations that make up the paper, as it were, that has the picture of the cows on it. We have no aware- ness of the paper, only of the cows! "
"And suddenly the paper tears! " Agathe broke in.
"Right. That is, some tissue of habit in us tears. There's no longer something edible grazing out there, or something paintable; nothing blocks your way. You can't even form the word 'grazing,' because a host of purposeful, practical connotations go along with it, which you have suddenly lost. What is left on the pictorial plane might best be called an ocean swell of sensations that rises and falls, breathes and shimmers, as though it 61led your whole field ofview without a hori- zon. Of course, there are still countless individual perceptions con- tained within it: colors, horns, movements, smells, and all the details of reality; but none of them are acknowledged any longer, even if they should still be recognized. Let me put it this way: the details no longer have their egoism, which they use to capture our attention, but they're all linked with each other in a familiar, literally 'inward' way. And of course the 'pictorial plane' is no longer there either; but everything somehow flows over into you, all boundaries gone. "
Again Agathe picked up the description eagerly. "So instead of the
828 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
egoism of the details, you only need to say the egoism of human be- ings," she exclaimed, "and you've got what is so hard to put into words. 'Love thy neighbor! ' doesn't mean love him on the basis of what you both are; it characterizes a dream state! "
"All moral propositions," Ulrich agreed, "characterize a sort of dream state that has already flown the coop of rules in which we tether it. "
"Then there's really no such thing as good and evil, but only faith-or doubt! " cried Agathe, to whom a self-supporting primal condition offaith now seemed so close, as did its disappearance from the morality her brother had spoken ofwhen he said that faith could not live past the hour.
''Yes, the moment one slips away from a life ofinessentials, every- thing enters into a new relationship with everything else," Ulrich agreed. "I would almost go so far as to say into a nonrelationship. For it's an entirely unknown one, ofwhich we have no experience, and all other relationships are blotted out. But despite its obscurity, this one is so distinct that its existence is undeniable. It's strong, but impalpa- bly strong. One might put it this way: ordinarily, we look at some- thing, and our gaze is like a fine wire or a taut thread with two supports-one being the eye and the other what it sees, and there's some such great support structure for every second that passes; but at this particular second, on the contrary, it is rather as though some- thing painfully sweet were pulling our eye beams apart.
"One possesses nothing in the world, one holds on to nothing, one is not held by anything," Agathe said. "It's all like a tall tree on which not a leaf is stirring. And in that condition one could not do anything mean. "
"They say that nothing can happen in that condition which is not in harmony with it," Ulrich added. "A desire to 'belong to' it is the only basis, the loving vocation, and the sole form of all acting and thinking that have their place in it. It is something infinitely serene and all-encompassing, and everything that happens in it adds to its quietly growing significance; or it doesn't add to it, in which case it's a bad thing, but nothing bad can happen, because ifit did the stillness and clarity would be torn and the marvelous condition would end. " Ulrich gave his sister a probing look she was not meant to notice; he
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 829
had a nagging feeling that it was about time to stop. But Agathe's face was impassive; she was thinking of things long past.
"It makes me wonder at myself," she answered, "but there really was a brief period when I was untouched by envy, malice, vanity, greed, and things like that. It seems incredible now, but it seems to me that they had all suddenly disappeared, not only out of my heart but out of the world! In that state it isn't only oneself who can't be- have badly; the others can't either. A good person makes everything that touches him good, no matter what others may do to him; the instant it enters his sphere it becomes transformed. "
"No," Ulrich cut in, "not quite. On the contrary, put that way, this would be one of the oldest misconceptions. A good person doesn't make the world good in any way; he has no effect on it whatsoever; all he does is separate himself from it. "
"But he stays right in the midst ofit, doesn't he? ''
"He stays right in its midst, but he feels as if the space were being drawn out of things, or something or other imaginary were happen- ing; it's hard to say. "
"All the same, I have the idea that a 'highhearted' person-the word just occurred to me! -never comes in contact with anything base. It may be nonsense, but it does happen. "
"It may happen," Ulrich replied, "but the opposite happens too! Or do you suppose that the soldiers who crucified Jesus didn't feel they were doing something base? And they were God's instrument! Incidentally, the mystics themselves testify to the existence of bad feelings-they complain about falling from the state of grace and then enduring unspeakable misery, knowing fear, pain, shame, and perhaps even hatred. Only when the quiet burning begins again do remorse, anger, fear, and misery turn into bliss. It's so hard to know what to make of all this! "
"When were you that much in love? '' Agathe asked abruptly.
"Me? Oh . . . I've already told you about that: I fled a thousand miles away from the woman I loved, and once I felt safe from any possibility of really embracing her, I howled for her like a dog at the moon! "
Now Agathe confided to him the story of her love. She was ex- cited. Her last question had snapped from her like an overly tight-
830 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
ened violin string, and the rest followed in the same vein. She was trembling inwardly as she revealed what had been concealed for many years.
But her brother was not particularly moved. "Memories usually age along with people," he pointed out, "and with time the most pas- sionate experiences take on a comic perspective, as though one were seeing them at the end of ninety-nine doors opened in succession. Still, sometimes certain memories that were tied to strong emotions don't age, but keep a tight grip on whole layers of one's being. That was your case. There are such points in almost everyone, which dis- tort the psychic balance a little. One's behavior flows over them like a river over an invisible boulder-in your case this was very strong, so that it almost amounted to a dam. But you've freed yourself after all; you're moving again! "
He said this with the calm of an almost professional opinion; how easily he was diverted! Agathe was unhappy. Stubbornly she said: "Of course I'm in motion, but that's not what I'm talking about! I want to know where I almost got to back then. " She was irritated too, without meaning to be, but simply because her excitement had to express itself somehow. She went on talking, nevertheless, in her original direction and was quite dizzy between the tenderness of her words and the irritation behind them. She was talking about that pe- culiar condition of heightened receptivity and sensitivity that brings about a rising and falling tide of impressions and creates the feeling of being connected with all things as in the gentle mirror of a sheet of water, giving and receiving without will: that miraculous feeling of the lifting of all bounds, the boundlessness of the outer and inner that love and mysticism have in common. Agathe did not, of course, put it in such terms, which already contain an explanation; she was merely making passionate fragments of her memories into a se- quence. But even Ulrich, although he had often thought about it, could not offer any explanation of these experiences; indeed, he did not even know whether he should attempt to deal with such an expe- rience in its own way or according to the usual procedures of ratio- nality; both came naturally to him, but not to the obvious passion of his sister. And so what he said in reply was merely a mediation, a kind oftesting ofthe possibilities. He pointed out how in the exalted state they were speaking of, thought and the moral sense went hand in
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 831
hand, so that each thought was felt as happiness, event, and gift, and neither lost itself in the storerooms of the brain nor formed attach- ments to feelings of appropriation and power, of retention and ob- smvation; thus in the head no less than in the heart the delight of self-possession is replaced by a boundless self-giving and bonding.
"Once in a lifetime," Agathe replied with passionate decisiveness, "everything one does is done for someone else. One sees the sun shining for him. He is everywhere, oneself nowhere. But there is no egoism adeux, because the same thing must be happening with the other person. In the end, they hardly exist for each other anymore, and what's left is a world for nothing but couples, a world consisting of appreciation, devotion, friendship, and selflessness! "
In the darkness of the room her face glowed with eagerness like a rose standing in the shade.
"Let's be a little more sober again," Ulrich gently proposed. "There can be too much fakery in these matters. " There was nothirlg wrong with that either, she thought. Perhaps it was the irritation, still not quite gone, that somewhat dampened her delight over the reality he was invoking. But this vague trembling of the borderline was a not unpleasant feeling.
Ulrich began by speaking of the mischief of interpreting the kind of experiences they were talking about not as if what was going on in them was merely a peculiar change in thinking, but as if superhuman thinking was taking the place of the ordinary kind. Whether one called it divine illumination or, in the modem fashion, merely intui- tion, he considered it the main hindrance to real understanding. In his opinion, nothing was to be gained by yielding to notions that would not stand up under careful investigation. That would only be like Icarus's wax wings, which melted with the altitude, he ex- claimed. Ifone wished to fly other than in dreams, one must master it on metal wings.
He paused for a moment, then went on, pointing to his books: "Here you have testimony, Christian, Judaic, Indian, Chinese, some separated by more than a thousand years. Yet one recognizes in all of them the same uniform structure of inner movement, divergent from the ordinary. Almost the only way they differ from each other comes from the various didactic superstructures of theology and cos- mic wisdom under whose protective roofthey have taken shelter. We
832 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
therefore may assume the existence of a certain alternative and un- common condition of great importance, which man is capable of achieving and which has deeper origins than religions.
"On the other hand," he added, qualifying what he had said, "the churches, that is, civilized communities of religious people, have al- ways treated this condition with the kind of mistrust a bureaucrat feels for the spirit of private enterprise. They've never accepted this riotous experience without reservations; on the contrary, they've di- rected great and apparently justified efforts toward replacing it with a properly regulated and intelligible morality. So the history of this alternative condition resembles a progressive denial and dilution, something like the draining of a swamp.
"And when confessional authority over the spirit and its vocabu- lary became outmoded, our condition understandably came to be re- garded as nothing more than a chimera. Why should bourgeois culture, in replacing the old religious culture, be more religious than its predecessor? Bourgeois culture has reduced this other condition to the status of a dog fetching intuitions. There are hordes of people today who find fault with rationality and would like us to believe that in their wisest moments they were doing their thinking with the help of some special, suprarational faculty. That's the final public vestige of it all, itself totally rationalistic. What's left of the drained swamp is rubbish! And so, except for its uses in poetry, this old condition is excusable only in uneducated people in the first weeks of a love af- fair, as a temporary aberration, like green leaves that every so often sprout posthumously from the wood of beds and lecterns; but if it threatens to revert to its original luxuriant growth, it is unmercifully dug up and rooted out! "
Ulrich had been talking for about as long as it takes a surgeon to wash his arms and hands so as not to carry any germs into the field of operation, and also with all the patience, concentration, and even- handedness it paradoxically takes to cope with the excitement at- tendant on the task ahead. But after he had completely disinfected himself he almost yearned for a little fever or infection-after all, he did not love sobriety for its own sake. Agathe was sitting on the li- brary ladder, and even when her brother fell silent she gave no sign of participation. She gazed out into the endless oceanic gray of the
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 833
sky and listened to the silence just as she had been listening to the words. So Ulrich took up the thread again, with a slight obstinacy that he barely managed to mask by his lighthearted tone.
"Let's get back to our bench on the mountain, with that herd of cows," he suggested. "Imagine some high bureaucrat sitting there in his brand-new leather shorts with 'Gruss Gott' embroidered on his green suspenders. He represents 'real life' on vacation. Of course, this temporarily alters his consciousness of his existence. When he looks at the herd ofcows he neither counts them, classifies them, nor estimates the weight on the hoof of the animals grazing before him; he forgives his enemies and thinks indulgently of his family. For him the herd has been transformed from a practical object into a moral one, as it were. He may also, ofcourse, be estimating and counting a little and not forgiving a whole lot, but then at least it is bathed in woodland murmurs, purling brooks, and sunshine. In a word, what otherwise forms the content of his life seems 'far away' and 'not all that important. ' "
"It's a holiday mood," Agathe agreed mechanically.
"Exactly! I f he regards his nonvacation life as 'not all that impor- tant,' it means only as long as his vacation lasts. So that is the truth today: a man has two modes of existence, of consciousness, and of thought, and saves himself from being frightened to death by ghosts-which this prospect would of necessity induce-by regard- ing one condition as a vacation from the other, an interruption, a rest, or anything else he thinks he can recognize. Mysticism, on the other hand, would be connected with the intention of going on vaca- tion permanently. Our high official is bound to regard such an idea as disgraceful and instantly feel-as in fact he always does toward the end of his vacation-that real life lies in his tidy office. And do we feel any differently? Whether something needs to be straightened out or not will always eventually decide whether one takes it com- pletely seriously, and here these experiences have not had much luck, for over thousands of years they have never got beyond their primordial disorder and incompleteness. And for this we have the ready label of Mania-religious mania, erotomania, take your choice.
You can be assured that in our day even most religious people are so infected with the scientific way of thinking that they don't trust
834 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
themselves to look into what is burning in their inmost hearts but are always ready to speak of this ardor in medical terms as a mania, even though officially they take a different line! "
Agathe gave her brother a look in which something crackled like fire in the rain. "So now you've managed to maneuver us out of it! " she accused him, when he didn't go on.
"You're right," he admitted. "But what's peculiar is that though we've covered it all up like a suspect well, some remaining drop of this unholy holy water bums a hole in all our ideals. None of our ideals is quite right, none of them makes us happy: they all point to something that's not there-we've said enough about that today. Our civilization is a temple ofwhat would be called unsecured mania, but
it is also its asylum, and we don't know if we are suffering from an . ,I
excess or a defic1ency.
"Perhaps you've never dared surrender yourself to it all the way,"
Agathe said wistfully, and climbed down from her ladder; for they were supposed to be busy sorting their father's papers and had let themselves be distracted from what had gradually become a pressing task, first by the books and then by their conversation. Now they went back to checking the dispositions and notes referring to the di- vision of their inheritance, for the day of reckoning with Hagauer was imminent. But before they had seriously settled down to this, Agathe straightened up from her papers and asked him once more: "Just how much do you yourself believe everything you've been telling
? " me.
Ulrich answered without looking up. "Suppose that while your heart had turned away from the world, there was a dangerous bull among the herd. Try to believe absolutely that the deadly disease you were telling me about would have taken another course if you had not allowed your feelings to slacken for a single instant. " Then he raised his head and pointed to the papers he had been sorting: "And law, justice, fair play? Do you really think they're entirely superfluous? "
"So just how much do you believe? " Agathe reiterated.
"Yes and no," Ulrich said.
"That means no," Agathe concluded.
Here chance intervened in their talk. As Ulrich, who neither felt
inclined to resume the discussion nor was calm enough to get on with
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 835
the business at hand, rounded up the scattered papers, something fell to the floor. It was a loose bundle of all kinds of things that had inad- vertently been pulled out with the will from a corner of the desk drawer where it might have lain for decades without its owner know- ing. Ulrich looked at it distractedly as he picked it up and recognized his father's handwriting on several pages; but it was not the script of his old age but that ofhis prime. Ulrich took a closer look and saw that in addition to written pages there were playing cards, snapshots, and all sorts of odds and ends, and quickly realized what he had found. It was the desk's "poison drawer. " Here were painstakingly recorded jokes, mostly dirty; nude photographs; postcards, to be sent sealed, of buxom dairy maids whose panties could be opened behind; packs of cards that looked quite normal but showed some awful things when held up to the light; mannequins that voided all sorts of stuff when pressed on the belly; and more of the same. The old gentleman had undoubtedly long since forgotten the things lying in that drawer, or he would certainly have destroyed them in good time. They obviously dated from those mid-life years when quite a few aging bachelors and widowers warm themselves with such obscenities, but Ulrich blushed at this exposure of his father's unguarded fantasies, now released from the flesh by death. Their relevance to the discussion just broken off was instantly clear to him. Nevertheless, his first impulse was to destroy this evidence before Agathe could see it. But she had already noticed that something unusual had fallen into his hands, so he changed his mind and asked her to come over.
He was going to wait and hear what she would say. Suddenly the realization possessed him again that she was, after all, a woman who must have had her experiences, a point he had totally lost sight of while they were deep in conversation. But her face gave no sign of what she was thinking; she looked at her father's illicit relics seriously and calmly, at times smiling openly, though not animatedly. So Ul- rich, despite his resolve, began.
"Those are the dregs of mysticism! " he said wryly. "The strict moral admonitions of the will in the same drawer as this swill! "
He had stood up and was pacing back and forth in the room. And once he had begun to talk, his sister's silence spurred him on.
"You asked me what I believe," he began. "I believe that all our moral injunctions are concessions to a society of savages.
836 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
"I believe none of them are right.
"There's a different meaning glimmering behind them. An alche- mist's fire.
"I believe that nothing is ever done with.
"I believe that nothing is in balance but that everything is trying to raise itself on the fulcrum of everything else.
"That's what i believe. It was born with me, or I with it. "
He had stood still after each of these sentences, for he spoke softly and had somehow or other to give emphasis to his credo. Now his eye was caught by the classical busts atop the bookshelves; he saw a plas- ter Minerva, a Socrates; he remembered that Goethe had kept an over-lifesize plaster head of Juno in his study. This predilection seemed alarmingly distant to him; what had once been an idea in full bloom had since withered into a dead classicism. Turned into the rearguard dogmatism of rights and duties of his father's contempo- raries. All in vain.
"The morality that has been handed down to us," he s3. id, "is like being sent out on a swaying high wire over an abyss, with no other advice than: 'Hold yourself as stiff as you can! '
"I seem, without having had a say in the matter, to have been born with another kind of morality.
"You asked me what I believe. I believe there are valid reasons you can use to prove to me a thousand times that something is good or beautiful, and it will leave me indifferent; the only mark I shall go by is whether its presence makes me ·rue or sink.
''Whether it rouses me to life or not.
''Whether it's only my tongue and my brain that speak of it, or the radiant shiver in my fingertips.
"But I can't prove anything, either.
"And I'm even convinced that a person who yields to this is lost. He stumbles into twilight. Into fog and nonsense. Into unarticulated boredom.
"Ifyou take the unequivocal out ofour life, what's left is a sheep- fold without a wolf.
"I believe that bottomless vulgarity can even be the good angel that protects us.
"And so, I don't believe!
"And above all, I don't believe in the domestication of evil by
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 837
good as the characteristic of our hodgepodge civilization. I find that repugnant.
"So I believe and don't believe!
"But maybe I believe that the time is coming when people will on the one hand be very intelligent, and on the other hand be mystics. Maybe our morality is already splitting into these two components. I might also say into mathematics and mysticism. Into practical im- provements and unknown adventure! "
He had not been so openly excited about anything in years. The "maybe"s in his speech did not trouble him; they seemed only natural.
Agathe had meanwhile knelt down before the stove; she had the bundle of pictures and papers on the floor beside her. She looked at everything once more, piece by piece, before pushing it into the fire. She was not entirely unsusceptible to the vulgar sensuality of the ob- scenities she was looking at. She felt her body being aroused by them. This seemed to her to have as little to do with her self as the feeling of being on a deserted heath and somewhere a rabbit scutters past. She did not know whether she would be ashamed to tell her brother this, but she was profoundly fatigued and did not want to talk anymore. Nor did she listen to what he was saying; her heart had by now been too shaken by these ups and downs, and could no longer keep up. Others had always known better than she what was right; she thought about this, but she did so, perhaps because she was ashamed, with a secret defiance. To walk a forbidden or secret path: in that she felt superior to Ulrich. She heard him time and again cau- tiously taking back everything he had let himself be carried away into saying, and his words beat like big drops of joy and sadness against her ear.
13
ULRICH RETURNS AND LEARNS FROM THE GENERAL WHA T HE HAS MISSED
Forty-eight hours later Ulrich was standing in his abandoned house. It was early in the morning. The house was meticulously tidy, dusted and polished; his books and papers lay on the tables precisely as he had left them at his hasty departure, carefully preserved by hisser- vant, open or bristling with markers that had become incomprehen- sible, this or that paper still with a pencil stuck between the pages. But everything had cooled off and hardened like the contents of a melting pot under which one has forgotten to stoke the fire. Painfully disillusioned, Ulrichstaredblanklyatthesetracesofavanishedhour, matrix of the intense excitement and ideas that had filled it. He felt repelled beyond words at this encounter with his own debris. "It spreads through the doors and the rest of the house all the way down to those idiotic antlers in the hall. What a life I've been leading this last year! " He shut his eyes where he stood, so as not to have to see it. "What a good thing she'll soon be following me," he thought. "We'll change everything! " Then he was tempted after all to visualize the last hours he had spent here; it seemed to him that he had been away for a very long time, and he wanted to compare.
Clarisse: that was nothing. But before and after: the strange tur- moil in which he had hurried home, and then that nocturnal melting of the world! "Like iron softening under some great pressure," he mused. "It begins to flow, and yet it is still iron. A man forces his way into the world," he thought, "but it suddenly closes in around him, and everything looks different. No more connections. No road on which he came and which he must pursue. Something shimmering enveloping him on the spot where a moment ago he had seen a goal, or actually the sober void that lies before every goal. " Ulrich kept his eyes closed. Slowly, as a shadow, his feeling returned. It happened as if it were returning to the spot where he had stood then and was again standing now, this feeling that was more out there in the room
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 839
than in his consciousness-it was really neither a feeling nor a thought, but some uncanny process. If one were as overstimulated and lonely as he had been then, one could indeed believe that the essence of the world was turning itself inside out; and suddenly it dawned on him-how was it possible that it was happening only now? -and lay there like a peaceful backward glance, that even then his feelings had announced the encounter with his sister, because from that moment on his spirit had been guided by strange forces, until . . . but before he could think "yesterday," Ulrich turned away, awakened as abruptly and palpably from his memories as if he had bumped against some solid edge. There was something here he was not yet ready to think about.
He went over to his desk and without taking off his coat looked through the mail lying there. He was disappointed not to find a tele- gram from his sister, although he had no reason to expect one. A huge pile of condolence mail lay intermingled with scientific com- munications and booksellers' catalogs. Two letters had come from Bonadea; both so thick that he did not bother to open them. There was also an urgent request from Count Leinsdorfthat he come to see him, and two fluting notes from Diotima, also inviting him to put in an appearance immediately upon his return; perused more closely, one of them, the later one, revealed unofficial overtones of a very warm, wistful, almost tender cast. Ulrich turned to the telephone messages that had come during his absence: General Stumm von Bordwehr, Section ChiefTuzzi, Count Leinsdorf's private secretary (twice), several calls from a lady who would not leave her name, probably Bonadea; Bank Director Leo Fischel; and, for the rest, business calls. While Ulrich was reading all this, still standing at his desk, the phone rang, and when he lifted the receiver a voice said: "War Ministry, Culture and Education, Corporal Hirsch," clearly taken aback at finding itself unexpectedly ricocheting off Ulrich's own voice, but hastening to explain that His Excellency the General had given orders to ring Ulrich every morning at ten, and that His Excellency would speak to him right away.
Five minutes later Stumm was assuring him that he had to attend some "supremely important meetings" that very morning, but abso- lutely had to speak to Ulrich first. When Ulrich asked what about, and why it could not be taken care of over the phone, Stumm sighed
840 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
into the receiver and proclaimed "news, worries, problems," but could not be made to say anything more specific. Twenty minutes later a War Ministry carriage drew up at the gate and General Stumm entered the house, followed by an orderly with a large leather briefcase slung from his shoulder. Ulrich, who well remem- bered this receptacle for the General's intellectual problems from the battle plans and ledger pages of Great Ideas, raised his eyebrows interrogatively. Stumm von Bordwehr smiled, sent the orderly back to the carriage, unbuttoned his tunic to get out the little key for the security lock, which he wore on a fine chain around his neck, un- locked the case, and wordlessly exhumed its sole contents, two loaves of regulation army bread.
"Our new bread," he declared after a dramatic pause. "I've brought you some for a taste! "
"How nice of you," Ulrich said, "bringing me bread after I've spent a night traveling, instead of letting me get some sleep. "
"Ifyou have some schnapps in the house, which one may assume," the General retorted, "then there's no better breakfast than bread and schnapps after a sleepless night. You once told me that our regu- lation bread was the only thing you liked about the Emperor's ser- vice, and I'll go so far as to say that the Austrian Army beats any other army in the world at making bread, especially since our Commis- sariat brought out this new loaf, Model1914! So I brought you one, though that's not the only reason. The other is that I always do this now on principle. Not that I have to spend every minute at my desk, or account for every step I take out of the room, you understand, but you know that our General Staff isn't called the Jesuit Corps for nothing, and there's always talk when a man is out of the office a lot; also my chief, His Excellency von Frost, may not, perhaps, have a completely accurate idea· of the scope of the mind-the civilian mind, I mean-and that's why for some time now I've been taking along this official bag and an orderly whenever I want to go out for a bit; and since I don't want the orderly to think that the bag is empty, I always put two loaves ofbread in it. "
Ulrich could not help laughing, and the General cheerfully joined in.
"You seem to be less enchanted with the great ideas of mankind than you were? " Ulrich asked.
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"Everyone is less enchanted with them," Stumm declared while he sliced the bread with his pocketknife. "The new slogan that's been handed out is 'Action! ' "
"You'll have to explain that to me. "
"That's what I came for. You're not the true man of action. " "I'm not? "
"Well, I don't know about that. "
"Maybe I don't either. But that's what they say. "
"Who's 'they'? "
"Amheim, for one. "
"You're on good terms with Amheim? "
"Well, ofcourse. We get along famously. Ifhe weren't such a high-
brow we could be on a first-name basis by now! "
"Are you involved with the oil fields too? "
To gain time, the General drank some ofthe schnapps Ulrich had
had brought in and chewed on the bread. "Great taste," he brought out laboriously, and kept on chewing.
"Of course you're involved with the oil fields! " Ulrich burst out, suddenly seeing the light. "It's a problem that concerns your naval branch because it needs fuel for its ships, and if Amheim wants the drilling fields he'll have to concede a favorable price for you. Besides, Galicia is deployment territory and a buffer against Russia, so you have to provide special safeguards in case ofwar for the oil supply he wants to develop there. So his munitions works will supply you with the cannons you want! Why didn't I see this before? You're positively born for each other! "
The General had taken the precaution of munching on a second piece of bread, but now he could contain himself no longer, and making strenuous efforts to gulp down the whole mouthful at once, he said: "It's easy for you to talk so glibly about an accommodation; you've no idea what a skinflint he is! Sorry-1 mean, you have no idea," he amended himself, "what moral dignity he brings to a busi- ness deal like this. I never dreamed, for example, that ten pennies per ton per railway mile is an ethical problem you have to read up on in Goethe or the history of philosophy. "
"You're conducting these negotiations? ''
The General took another gulp of schnapps. "I never said that
842 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
negotiations were going on! You could call it an exchange ofviews, if you like. "
"And you're empowered to conduct them? "
"Nobody's empowered! We're talking, that's all. Surely one can talk now and then about something besides the Parallel Campaign? And if anyone were empowered, it certainly wouldn't be me; that's no job for the Culture and Education Department, it's a matter for the higher-ups, even the Chiefs of Staff. If I had anything at all to do with it, it would be only as a kind of technical adviser on civilian intel- lectual questions, an interpreter, so to speak, because of Arnheim being so educated. "
"And because you're always running into him, thanks to me and Diotima! My dear Stumm, ifyou want me to go on being your stalk- ing horse, you'll have to tell me the truth! "
But Stumm had had time to prepare himself for this. "Why are you asking, if you know it already? " he countered indignantly. "Do you think you can nail me down and that I don't know that Arnheim takes you into his confidence? "
"I don't know a thing! "
"But you've just been telling me that you do know. "
"I know about the oil fields. "
"And then you said that we have a common interest with Arnheim
in those oil fields. Give me your word of honor that you know this, then I can tell you everything. " Stumm von Bordwehr seized Ulrich's reluctant hand, looked him in the eye, and then said slyly:
"All right, since you're giving me yourword ofhonor that you knew everything already, I give you mine that you know all there is. Agreed? There isn't anything more. Arnheim is trying to use us, and we him. I sometimes have the most complicated spiritual conflicts over Di- otima! " he exclaimed. "But you mustn't say a word to anyone; it's a military secret! " The General waxed cheerful. "Do you know, inciden- tally, what a military secret is?