No More Learning

"Do what is your duty! "
"I don't know what my duty is! "
"Then you must seek duties out! "
"I don't know what duties are! "
Lindner smiled grimly. "There we have it! That's the liberation of
the personality! " he exclaimed. "Vain reflection! You can see it in yourself: when a person is free he is unhappy! When a person is free he's a phantom! " he added, raising his voice somewhat more, out of embarrassment. But then he lowered it again, and concluded with conviction: "Duty is what mankind in proper self-awareness has erected against its own weakness. Duty is one and the same truth that all great personalities have acknowledged or pointed to. Duty is the work ofthe experience ofcenturies and the result ofthe visionary glance of the blessed. But what even the simplest person knows with precision in his inmost being, if only he lives an upright life, is duty too! "
"That was a hymn with quivering candles! " Agathe noted ap- preciatively.
It was disagreeable that Lindner, too, felt that he had sung falsely. He ought to have said something else but didn't trust himself to rec- ognize in what the deviation from the genuine voice ofhis heart con- sisted. He merely allowed himself the thought that this young creature must be deeply disappointed by her husband, since she was raging so impudently and bitterly against herself, and that in spite of all the censure she provoked, she would have been worthy of a stronger man; but he had the impression that a far more dangerous idea was on the point of succeeding this one. Agathe, meanwhile, slowly and very decisively shook her head; and with the spontaneous assurance with which an excited person is seduced by another into doing something that unbalances an already precarious situation completely, she continued: "But we're talking about my divorce! And why aren't you saying anything more about God today? Why don't
1172 • THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
you simply say to me: 'God orders you to stay with Professor Hagauer! ' I can't honestly imagine that He would command such a thing! "
Lindner shrugged his tall shoulders indignantly; indeed, as they rose he himselfactually seemed to hover in the air. "I have never said a word to you about it; you're the only one who has tried to! " He defended himself gruffiy. "And for the rest, don't believe for a min- ute that God bothers Himself with the tiny egoistic antics of our emotions! That's what His law is for, which we must follow! Or doesn't that seem heroic enough for you, since people today are al- ways looking for what's 'personal'? Well, in that case I'll set a higher heroism against your claims: heroic submission! "
Every word of this carried significantly more weight than a layper- son really ought to permit himself, were it only in his thoughts; Agathe, in return, could only go on smiling in the face of such coarse derision ifshe did not want to be forced to stand up and break offthe visit; and she smiled, of course, with such assured adroitness that Lindner felt himselfgoaded into ever-greater confusion. He became aware that his inspirations were ominously rising and increasingly reinforcing a glowing intoxication that was robbing him of reflection and resounded with the will to break the obstinate mind and perhaps save the soul he saw facing him. "Our duty is painful! " he exclaimed. "Our duty may be repulsive and disgusting! Don't think I have any intention of becoming your husband's lawyer, or that my nature is to stand by his side. But you must obey the law, because it is the only thing that bestows lasting peace on us and protects us from our- selves! "
Agathe now laughed at him; she had guessed at the weapon, stem- ming from her divorce, that these effects put in her hand, and she turned the knife in the wound. "I understand so little about all that," she said. "But may I honestly confess an impression I have? When you're angry yQU get a little slippery! "
"Oh, come on! " Lindner retorted. He recoiled, his one desire not to concede such a thing at any price. He raised his voice defensively and entreated the sinning phantom sitting before him: "The spirit must not submit itselfto the flesh and all its charms and horrors! Not even in the form of disgust! And I say to you: Even though you might find it painful to control the reluctance of the flesh, as the school of
From the Posthumous Papers · 1173
marriage has apparently asked of you, you are not simply permitted to run away from it. For there lives in man a desire for liberation, and we can no more be the slaves ofour fleshly disgust than the slaves of our lust! This is obviously what you wanted to hear, since otherwise you would not have come to me! " he concluded, no less grandilo- quently than spitefully. He stood towering before Agathe; the strands of his beard moved around his lips. He had never spoken such words to a woman before, with the exception of his own de- ceased wife, and his feelings toward her had been different. But now these feelings were intermingled with desire, as i f he were swinging a whip in his fist to chastise the whole earth; yet they were simulta- neously timid, as if he were being lofted like an escaped hat on the crest of the tornado of the sermon of repentance that had taken hold ofhim.
"There you go again, saying such remarkable things! " Agathe noted without passion, intending to shut off his insolence with a few dry words; but then she measured the enormous crash looming up before him and preferred to humble herself gently by holding back, so she continued, in a voice that had apparently suddenly been dark- ened by repentance: "I came only because I wanted you to lead me. "
Lindner went on swinging his whip of words with confused zeal; he had some sense that Agathe was deliberately leading him on, but he could not find a way out, and entrusted himself to the future. "To be chained to a man for a lifetime without feeling any physical attrac- tion is certainly a heavy sentence," he exclaimed. "But hasn't one brought this on oneself, especially if the partner is unworthy, by not having paid enough attention to the signs ofthe inner life? There are many women who allow themselves to be deluded by external cir- cumstances, and who knows if one is not being punished in order to be shaken up? " Suddenly his voice cracked. Agathe had been accom- panying his words with assenting nods of her head; but imagining Hagauer,as a bewitching seducer was too much for her, and her merry eyes betrayed it. Lindner, driven crazy by this, blared in fal- setto: "'For. he that spares the rod hates his child, but whosoever loves it chastises it! ' "
His victim's resistance had now transformed this philosopher of life, dwelling in his lofty watchtower, into a poet of chastisement and the exciting conditions that went with it. He was intoxicated by a
1174 · THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
feeling he did not recognize, which emanated from an inner fusion of the moral reprimand with which he was goading his visitor and a provocation of all his manliness, a fusion that one might symbolically characterize, as he himself now saw, as lustful.
But the "arrogant conquering female," who was finally to have been driven from the empty vanity of her worldly beauty to despair, matter-of-factly picked up on his threats about the rod and quietly asked: "Who is going to punish me? Whom are you thinking of? Are you thinking of God? "
But it was unthinkable to say such a thing! Lindner suddenly lost his courage. His scalp prickled with sweat. It was absolutely impossi- ble that the name of God should be uttered in such a context. His glance, extended like a two-tined fork, slowly withdrew from Agathe. Agathe felt it. "So he can't do it either! " she thought. She felt a reck- less desire to go on tugging at this man until she heard from his mouth what he did not want to yield to her. But for now it was enough: the conversation had reached its outer limit. Agathe under- stood that it had only been a passionate rhetorical subterfuge, heated to the point where it became transparent, and all to avoid mention- ing the decisive point. Besides, Lindner, too, now knew that every- thing he had said, indeed everything that had got him worked up, even the excess itself, was only the product ofhis fear ofexcesses; the most dissolute aspect of which he considered to be the approach with the prying tools of mind and feeling to what ought to remain veiled in lofty abstractions, toward which this excessive young woman was obviously pushing him. He now named this to himself as "an offense against the decency of faith. " For in these moments the blood drained back out of Lindner's head and resumed its normal course; he awoke like a person who finds himself standing naked far from his front door, and remembered that he could not send Agathe away without consolation and instruction. Breathing deeply, he stood back from her, stroked his beard, and said reproachfully: "You have a restless and overimaginative nature! "
"And you have a peculiar idea of gallantry! " Agathe responded coolly, for she had no desire to go on any longer.
Lindner found it necessary to repair his standing by saying something more: "You should learn in the school of reality to take your subjectivity mercilessly in hand, for whoever is incapable of it
From the Posthumous Papers · 1 1 75
will be overtaken by imagination and fantasy, and dragged to the ground . . . ! " He paused, for this strange woman was still drawing the voice from his breast quite against his will. "Woe to him who aban- dons morality; he is abandoning reality! " he added softly.
Agathe shrugged her shoulders. "I hope next time you will come to us! " she proposed.
"To that I must respond: Never! " Lindner protested, suddenly and now totally down to earth. "Your brother and I have differences ofopinion about life that make it preferable for us to avoid contact," he added as excuse.
"So I'm the one who will have to come studiously to the school of reality," Agathe replied quietly.
"No! " Lindner insisted, but then in a remarkable fashion, almost menacingly, he blocked her path; for with those words she had got up to go. "That cannot be! You cannot put me in the ambiguous posi- tion toward my colleague Hagauer of receiving your visits without his knowledge! "
"Are you always as passionate as you are today? '' Agathe asked mockingly, thereby forcing him to make way for her. She now felt, at the end, spiritless but strengthened. The fear Lindner had betrayed drew her toward actions alien to her true condition; but while the demands her brother made demoralized her easily, this man gave her back the freedom to animate her inner self however she wanted, and it comforted her to confuse him.
"Did I perhaps compromise myself a little? '' Lindner asked him- self after she had left. He stiffened his shoulders and marched up and down the room a few times. Finally he decided to continue see- ing her, containing his malaise, which was quite pronounced, in the soldierly words: "One must set oneself to remain gallant in the face of every embarrassment! "
When Agathe got up to leave, Peter had slipped hurriedly away from the keyhole, where he had been listening, not without astonish- ment, to what his father had been up to with the "big goose. "
45
BEGINNING OF A SERIES OF WONDROUS EXPERIENCES
Shortly after this visit there was a repetition of the "impossible" that was already hovering almost physically around Agathe and Ulrich, and it truly came to pass without anything at all actually happening.
Brother and sister were changing to go out for the evening. There was no one in the house to help Agathe aside from Ulrich; they had started late and had thus been in the greatest haste for a quarter ofan hour, when a short pause intervened. Piece by piece, nearly all the ornaments of war a woman puts on for such occasions were strewn on the chair backs and surfaces of the room, and Agathe was in the act of bending over her foot with all the concentration that pulling on a thin silk stocking demands. Ulrich was standing at her back. He saw her head, her neck, her shoulders, and this nearly naked back; her body was curved over her raised knee, slightly to one side, and the tension of this process rounded three folds on her neck, which shot slender and merry through her clear skin like three arrows: the charming physicality of this painting. hom of the momentarily spreading stillness, seemed to have lost its frame and passed so abruptly and directly into Ulrich's body that he moved from the spot and, neither with the involuntariness of a banner being unfurled by the wind nor exactly with deliberate reflection, crept closer on tiptoe, surprised the bent-over figure, and with gentle ferocity bit into one of these arrows, while his arm closed tightly around his sister. Then Ulrich's teeth just as cautiously released his overpowered victim; his right hand had grabbed her knee, and while with his left arm he pressed her body to his, he pulled her upright with him on upward- bounding tendons. Agathe cried out in fright.
Up to this point everything had taken place as playfully and jok- ingly as much that had gone on before, and even ifit was tinged with the colors of love, it was only with the actually shy intention of con- cealing love's unwonted dangerous nature beneath such cheerfully
From the Posthumous Papers · I I 77
intimate dress. But when Agathe got over her fright, and felt herself not so much flying through the air as rather resting in it, suddenly liberated into weightlessness and directed instead by the gentle force of the gradually decelerating motion, it brought about one of those accidents beyond human control, in which she seemed to herself strangely soothed, indeed carried away from all earthly unrest; with a movement changing the balance of her body that she could never have repeated, she also brushed away the last silken thread of com- pulsion, turned in falling to her brother, continued, so to speak, her rise as she fell, until she lay, sinking down, as a cloud of happiness in his arms. Ulrich bore her, gently pressing her body to his, through the darkening room to the window and placed her beside him in the mellow light of the evening, which flowed over her face like tears. Despite the energy everything demanded, and the force Ulrich had exercised on his sister, what they were doing seemed to them re- markably remote from energy and force; one might perhaps have been able, again, to compare it with the wondrous ardor of a paint- ing, which for the hand that invades the frame to grasp it is nothing but a ridiculous painted surface. So, too, they had nothing in mind beyond what was taking place physically, which totally filled their consciousness; and yet, alongside its nature as a harmless, indeed, at the beginning, even coarse joke, which called all their muscles into play, this physical action possessed a second nature, which, with the greatest tenderness, paralyzed their limbs and at the same time en- snared them with an inexpressible sensitivity. Questioningly they flung their arms around each other's shoulders. The fraternal stature of their bodies communicated itself to them as if they were rising up from a single root. They looked into each other's eyes with as much curiosity as if they were seeing such things for the first time. And although they would not have been able to articulate what had really happened, since their part in it had been too pressing, they still be- lieved they knew that they had just unexpectedly found themselves for an instant in the midst of that shared condition at whose border they had long been hesitating, which they had already described to each other so often but had so far only gazed at from outside.
I f they tested it soberly (and surreptitiously they both did), it signi- fied hardly more than a bewitching accident and ought to have dis- solved the next moment, or at least with the return of activity, into
1178 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
nothingness; and yet this did not happen. On the contrary, they left the window, turned on the lights, and resumed their preparations, only soon to relinquish them again, and without their having to say anything to each other, Ulrich went to the telephone and informed the house where they were expected that they were not coming. He was already dressed for the evening, but Agathe's gown was still hanging unfastened around her shoulders and she was just striving to impart some well-bred order to her hair. The technical resonance of his voice in the instrument and the connection to the world that had been established had not sobered Ulrich in the slightest: he sat down opposite his sister, who paused in what she was doing, and when their glances met, nothing was so certain as that the decision had been made and all prohibitions were now a matter of indifference to them. Their understanding announced itself to them with every breath; it was a defiantly endured agreement to finally redeem them- selves from the ill humor of longing, and it was an agreement so sweetly suffered that the notions of making it a reality nearly tore themselves loose from them and united them already in imagination, as a storm whips a veil of foam on ahead of the waves: but a still greater desire bade them be calm, and they were incapable oftouch- ing each other again. They wanted to begin, but the gestures of the flesh had become impossible for them, and they felt an ineffable warning that had nothing to do with the commandments of morality. It seemed that from a more perfect, ifstill shadowy, union, ofwhich they had already had a foretaste as in an ecstatic metaphor, a higher commandment had marked them out, a higher intimation, curiosity, or expectation had breathed upon them.
Brother and sister now remained perplexed and thoughtful, and after they had calmed their feelings they hesitantly began to speak.
Ulrich said, without thinking, the way one talks into thin air: "You are the moon-"
Agathe understood.
Ulrich said: "You have flown to the moon and it has given you back to me again-"
Agathe said nothing: moon conversations so consume one's whole heart.
Ulrich said: "It's a figure of speech. W e were beside ourselves,' W e exchanged bodies without even touching each other,' are meta-
From the Posthumous Papers · 1 1 79
phors too! But what does a metaphor signify? A little something true with a good deal of exaggeration. And yet I was about to swear, im- possible as it may be, that the exaggeration was quite small and the reality was becoming quite large! "
He said no more. He was thinking: "What reality am I talking about? Is there a second one? "
If one here leaves the conversation between brother and sister in order to follow the possibilities of a comparison that had at least some part in determining their talk, it might well be said that this reality was truly most closely related to the quixotically altered reality of moonlit nights. But if one does not comprehend this reality either, if one sees in it merely an opportunity for some ecstatic foolishness that by day were better suppressed, then if one wanted to picture accurately what was actually happening one would have to summon up the totally incredible idea that there's a piece of earth where all feelings really do change like magic as soon a5 the empty busyness of day plunges into the all-experiencing corporeality of night! Not only do external relationships melt away and re-form in the whispering enclosures of light and shadow, but the inner relationships, too, move closer together in a new way: the spoken word loses its self-will and acquires fraternal will. All affirmations express only a single surg- ing experience. The night embraces all contradictions in its shim- mering maternal arms, and in its bosom no word is false and no word true, but each is that incomparable birth of the spirit out of darkness that a person experiences in a new thought. In this way, every pro- cess on moonlit nights partakes of the nature of the unrepeatable. Of the nature ofthe intensified. Ofthe nature ofselfless generosity and a stripping away of the self. Every imparting is a parting without envy. Every giving a receiving. Every conception multifariously in- terwoven in the excitement of the night. To be this way is the only access to the knowledge ofwhat is unfolding. For in these nights the selfholds nothing back; there is no condensation ofpossession on the self's surface, hardly a memory; the intensified self radiates into an unbounded selflessness. And these nights are filled with the insane feeling that something is about to happen that has never happened before, indeed that the impoverished reason ofday can not even con- ceive of. And it is not the mouth that pours out its adoration but the body, which, from head to foot, is stretched taut in exaltation above
1180 • THE MAN WITH 0 UT QUALITIES
the darkness ofthe earth and beneath the light ofthe heavens, oscil- lating between two stars. And the whispering with one's companion is full ofa quite unknown sensuality, which is not the sensuality ofan individual human beingbut ofall that is earthly, ofall that penetrates perception and sensation, the suddenly revealed tenderness of the world that incessantly touches all our senses and is touched by them.
Ulrich had indeed never been aware in himself of a particular preference for mouthing adorations in the moonlight; but as one or- dinarily gulps life down without feeling, one sometimes has, much later, its ghostly taste on one's tongue: and in this way he suddenly felt everything he had missed in that effusiveness, all those nights he had spent heedless and lonely before he had known his sister, as sil- ver poured over an endless l{:hicket, as moon flecks in the grass, as laden apple trees, singing frost, and gilded black waters. These were only details, which did n,ot coalesce and had never found an associa- tion, but which now arose like the commingled fragrance of many herbs from an intoxicating potion. And when he said this to Agathe she felt it too.
Ulrich finally summed up everything he had said with the asser- tion: "What made us turn to each other from the very beginning can really be called a life of moonlit nights! " 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
1196 · THE MAN WITH 0 U T QUALITIES
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!