No More Learning

"I've tried doing it differently, by representing the problem from a military-geographical angle instead ofa strategic one, in the hope ofgetting at least a clearly defined field ofoperations, but that didn't work either. Have a look at the oro- and hydrographic sketches. " Ulrich saw symbols for mountain peaks branching out and massing together again elsewhere, . and for springs, networks of streams, lakes. ''I've experimented with all sorts ofother ways oftrying to pull the whole thing together," the General said, with a gleam of irritation or panic in his normally rp. eny gaze. "But do you know what it's like? It's like traveling second class in Galicia and picking up ctab. lice. I've never felt so fllthy helpless! When you spend a lot of time with ideas you end up itching all over, and you can scratch till you bleed, without getting any relief. " His vivid description made Ulrich laugh.
"No, no, don't laugh! " the General pleaded. "I've been thinking that you, now that you've become a leading civilian, would under- stand this stuff and that you'd understand my problem too. So I've come to you for help. I have far too much respect for the world ofthe intellect to believe that I can be right about all this. "
"You take thinking far too seriously, Colonel," Ulrich said to com- fort him. The "Colonel" had just slipped out, and he apologized: "Sorry, General; for a minute you had me back in the days when you sometimes ordered me to join you in a philosophical chat in the cor- ner ofthe mess hall. I can only repeat, a man shouldn't take the art of thinking as seriously as you are doing. "
"Not take it seriously! " Stumm groaned. "But I can't go back to just getting along in the mindless way I used to live. Don't you see that? It makes me shudder to think how long I lived between the parade ground and the barracks, with nothing but my messmates' dirty jokes and their stories about their sexual exploits. "
They sat down to supper. Ulrich was touched by the General's childlike ideas, on which he then acted with such manly courage, and by the inexhaustible youthfulness that comes from having lived in small garrison towns at the right time of life. He had invited his companion of those years long gone to share his evening meal, and the General was so obsessed by his desire to enter into Ulrich's arcane world that he picked up each slice of sausage with utmost ~oncentration.
"Your cousin," he said, raising his wineglass, "is the most marvel- ous woman I know. They rightly call her a second Diotima; I've never known anyone like her. You know, my wife . . . you haven't met her. I've nothing to complain of, and then we have the children, but a woman like Diotima . . . well, there's no comparison! When she's receiving I sometimes position myself behind her-what majestic feminine curvesl-while at the same time she's talking up front with some ou'tstanding civilian on so high a level that I honestly wish I could take notes! And that Section Chief she's married to has abso- lutely no idea how lucky he is to have her! I'm sorry if this fellow Tuzzi happens to be someone you like, but I personally can't stand him! All he ever does is slink around with a smirk on his face as if he knew all the answers and won't tell. But I'm not buying that, because with all my respect for the civilian world, government officials are the lowest on my totem pole; they're nothing but a kind of civilian army that try to get the better of us every chance they have, with the outra- geous politeness of a cat sitting high up in a tree and looking down at a dog. Your Dr. Amheim now, that's a man of a different caliber en- tirely," Stumm went on, "though he may be a bit conceited too, but
Pseudoreality Prevails · 4o7
408 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
there's no denying his superiority. " He had evidently been drinking too fast, after so much talking, because he was now warming up and growing confidential.
"I don't know what it is," he said. "Maybe the reason I don't un- derstand is that a fellow's mind gets so oomplicated nowadays, but even though I admire your cousin myselfas if-I must say, as if I had a great lump sticking in my throat-still, it's a relief to me that she's in love with Amheim. "
"What? Are you sure there's something going on between them? " Ulrich burst out, although it should not really have been any concern of his; Stumm goggled at him mistrustfully with his shortsighted eyes, still misty with emotion, and snapped on his pince-nez.
"I never said he'd had her," was his straight,. soldierly retort. He put his pince-nez back in his pocket and added in quite unsoldierly fashion: "But I wouldn't mind if he had either; devil take me, I've told you already that a man's mind gets complicated in that company. I'm certainly no lover boy, but when I imagine the tenderness Di- otima could offer this man I feel a tenderness for him myself, and vice versa, as if th~ kisses he gave her were my own. "
"He gives her kisses? "
"How do I know? I don't go around spying ori them. I only mean, if he did. I don't really know what I meari. But I did see him once catching her hand, when they thought nobody was looking, and then for a·while they were so quiet together, the kind of stillness you get on the command 'All helmets off, kneel for prayer! ' and then she whispered something, it sounded like an appeal, and he answered something. I remember what they said word for word, because it was so hard to understand; what she said was: 'If only we could flnd the right idea to save us,' and he said: 'Only a pure, unflawed idea of love can save us. ' He seemed to have taken her words too personally, be- cause she must have meant the saving idea she needs for her great campaign-What are you laughing at? But feel free to laugh; I've always had my own funny ways, I guess, and now I've made up my mind to help her. There must be something one can do; there are so many ideas floating around, one of them will have to be the saving idea in the end. But I'll need you to give me a hand! "
"My dear General," Ulrich said, "I can only tell you again that you take thinking too seriously. But since you care so much, I'll try to
explain as best I can how the civilian mind works. " By now they had lighted their cigars, and he began: "First of all, General, you're on the wrong track. The civilian world has no more of a monopoly on the spiritual life than the military has on the physical side, as you think. If anything, it's exactly the other way around. The mind stands for order, and where will you find more order than in the army, where every collar is exactly four centimeters high, the number of buttons on your tunic never varies, and even on nights made for dreams the beds are lined up straight along the wall? The deployment of a squadron in battle formation, the lining up of a regiment, the proper position of bridle and bit-if all these are not significant spiritual achievements, there is no such thing as spiritual achievement! "
"Go teach your grandmother to suck eggs," the General growled warily, uncertain whether to mistrust his ears or the wine.
"Just a minute," Ulrich persisted. "Science is possible only where situations repeat themselves, or where you have some control over them, and where do you have more repetition and control than in the army? A cube would not be a cube ifit were not just as rectangular at nine o'clock as at seven. The same kind of rules work for keeping the planets in orbit as in ballistics. We'd have no way ofunderstanding or judging anything if things flitted past us only once. Anything that has to be valid and have a name must be repeatable, it must be repre- sented by many specimens, and if you had never seen the moon before, you·athink it was a flashlight. Incidentally, the reason God is such an embarrassment to science is that he was seen only once, at the Creation, before there were any trained observers around. "
But Stumm von Bordwehr, whose entire life had been prescribed for him since his military-school days, from the shape of his cap to permission to marry, was hardly inclined to listen to such doctrines with an open mind.
"My dear fellow," he said craftily. "Maybe so, but what. has that to do with me? Very witty ofyou to S'IJ. ggest that science was invented by us army men, but I wasn't speaking of science at all but, as your cousin says, of the soul, and when she speaks of the soul I feel like taking off all my clothes because the uniform clashes so with it! "
"Stumm, old man," Ulrich went on doggedly, "a great many peo- ple accuse science of being soulless and mechanical and of making everything it touches the same. Yet they don't notice that there's
Pseudoreality Prevails · 409
410 • THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
much more mechanical or predictable regularity in sentimental mat- ters than in intellectual ones. For when is a feeling really natural and simple? When it can be automatically expected to manifest itself in everybody, given the same circumstances. How could we expect peo- ple to behave . in a virtuous manner if a virtuous act were not repeata- ble at will? I could give you many more examples, and ifyou escape from this drab repetitiveness into the darkest recesses ofyour being, where the uncontrolled impulses live, those sticky animal depths that save us from evaporating under the glare of reason, what do you find? Stimuli and strings of reflexes, entrenched habits and skills, re- iteration, fixation, imprints, series, monotony! That's the same as uni- forms, barracks, and regulations, my dear Stumm; and the civilian soul shows an amazing kinship to the military. You might say that it desperately clings to this model, though it can never quite equal it. And where it can't do that, it feels like a child left entirely on its own. Take a woman's beauty, for instance: the beauty that takes you by surprise and howls you over as ifyou were seeing it for the first time in your life is really something you have known and sought forever, an image your eyes have long since anticipated, which now comes into full daylight, as it were. But when it's really a case of love at first sight, a kind of beauty you have never perceived before, you simply don't know what to do about it. Nothing like it has ever come your way, you have no name for it, you are not prepared to respond to it, you're hopelessly bewildered, dazzled, reduced to a state of blind amazement, a kind of idiocy that seems to have very little to do with happiness. . . . " ·
The General could no longer contain his exciten:tent. He had been listening with that expertise one acquired during military exercises when subjected to critical and edifying remarks by superior officers that one must be able to repeat at command but should not really take to heart, or else one might just as well ride home bareback on a porcupine. But now Ulrich had touched him to the quick, and he broke in: "I must say, what you're describing is amazingly on target! When I lose myself in admiration for your cousin, everything inside me seems just to dissolve! And when I do my utmost to pull myself together and come up with some useful idea, my mind turns into an agonizing blank again-'idiotic' may be too strong a word for it, but it's close enough. And so you're saying, as I understand it, that we
army men do use our heads, that the civilian mind . . . of course I can't accept your suggestion that they model their thinking on ours; that's just one ofyour jokes . . . but that we have just as good a mind, well, that's what I sometimes think too. And everything that goes above and bey~nd thinking, as you say, all that stuff we soldiers re- gard as so notably civilian, such as the soul, virtue, deep feeling, sen- timent-the kind of thing this fellow Amheim handles with such flair-anyway, you're saying that it's of course part of the human spirit and in fact involves those so. :. called considerations of a higher sort we've been talking about, but you're also saying that it's quite stupefying, and I must say I totally agree with you, but when all's said and done, the civilian intellect is indisputably the superior one, and so I must ask you, how does it all add up? "
''What I said just now was,first ofall-you forgot that-first of all, I said, the military life is intellectual by nature, and second, the civil- ian life is physical by nature. . . ::
"But that's nonsense, surely? " Stumm objected mistrustfully. The physical superiority of the military was a dogma, like the conviction that the officer caste stands nearest to the throne, and even though Stumm had never regarded himself as an athlete, the moment any doubt was cast upon his physical superiority he felt sure that a com- parable civilian paunch had to be several degrees flabbier than his own.
"No more and no less nonsense than everything else," Ulrich de- fended himself. "But let me finish. About a hundred years ago, you see, the leading brains in German civilian life believed that a man using his head could deduce the world's laws while sitting at his desk, like so many geometric theorems about triangles. And the typical thinker· was a Irian in homespun who tossed his long hair back from his forehead and hadn't even heard of the oil lamp, much less of elec- tricity and the phonograph. Such arrogance has been purged out of our system since then; in these last hundred years we've become much better acquainted with ourselves and with nature and every- thing, but as a result, the better we understand things in detail, the le. ss we understand the whole, as it were, so what we get is a great many more systems of order and much less order over all. ''
"That fits in with my own findings," Stumm agreed.
"Only most peopl. e aren't as keen as you are on making sense ofit,"
Pseudoreality Prevails · 4 1 1
412 • THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
Ulrich continued. "After so many struggles, we're on a downward slide now. Just think what's happening today: As soon as some lead- ing thinker comes up with an idea it is immediately pulled apart by the sympathies and antipathies generated: first its admirers rip large chunks out of it to suit themselves, wrenching. their masters' minds out of shape the way a fox savages his kill, and then his opponents destroy the weak links so that soon there's nothing left but a stock of aphorisms from which friend and foe alike help themselves at will. The result is a general ambiguity. There's no Yes without a No dan- gling from it. Whatever you do, you can find twenty of the finest ideas in support and another twenty against it. It's much like love or hatred or hunger, where tastes have to differ so that each can find his own. "
''You've said it! " Stumm exclaimed, in wholehearted agreement again. "I myself have already put something like it to Diotima. But don't you think that all this confusion seems to justify the military position-though I'd be mortified to have to believe it even for a minute! " .
''I'd advise you," Ulrich said, "to tip offDiotima that God, for rea- sons still unknown to us, seems to be leading us into an era of physi- cal culture, for the only thing that gives ideas some sort of foothold is the body to which they belong-which gives you, as an army officer, something of an advantage. "
The tubby little General winced. "On the plane of physical culture I look about as beautiful as a peeled peach," he said after a while, with bitter satisfaction. "And I'd better make it clear that I think of Diotima only in an honorable way, and hope to pass muster in her eyes in the same fashion. "
"Too bad," Ulrich said. ''Your aims would be worthy of a Napo- leon, but you won't find this the right century for them. "
The General swallowed this gentle gibe with the dignity of a man conscious of suffering for the lady of his heart, and only said, after a moment's thought: "Thank you, in any case, for your interesting advice. "
86
THE INDUSTRIAL POTENTATE AND THE MERGER OF SOUL WITH. BUSINESS. ALSO, ALL ROADS TO THE MIND START FROM THE SOUL, BUT NONE LEAD BACK AGAIN
At this time, when the General's love for Diotima. took a back seat to his admiration for Diotima and Amheim as a pair, Amheim should long since have made up his mind never to come back. Instead, he made arrangements to prolong his stay; he kept his suite at the hotel, and the great mobility of his life seemed to have come to a standstill. It was a time when the world was behig shaken up in various ways, and those who kept themselves well infonned toward the end of the year 1913 lived on the edge of a seething volcano, although the peaceful processes of production everywhere suggested that it could never really erupt again: The power of this suggestion was not equally strong everywhere. The windows of the handsome old palace on the Ballhausplatz where Section Chief Tuzzi held sway often lit up the bare trees in the gardens across the way until late into the night, giving a thrill of awe to the better class of strollers who might be passing by in the darkness. For just as his sainthood penneates the figure of the humble carpenter Joseph, so the name Ballhausplatz penneated that palace with the aura of being one of a half-dozen mysterious kitchens where, behind drawn curtains, the fate of man- kind was being dished up. Dr. Arnheim was quite well infonned of. what was goiilg on. He received coded telegrams and, from time to time, a visit from one of his managers, bringing confidential informa7 tion from company headquarters; the windows of his hotel suite, too, were often lit up till all hours, and an imaginative observer might easily have thought that a secondary or counter-government was here in nightly session, a modem, apocryphal battle station of eco- nomic diplomacy.
Nor did Amheim for his part ever neglect to produce such an im-
413
414 • THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
pression; without the power ofsuggestion in his appearance, a man i~ only a sweet watery fruit without a peel. Even at breakfast, which for this reason he never took in private but in. the hotel restaurant, open to all, he dictated his orders for the day to his shorthand-scribbling secretary with the authoritative air of the experienced ruler and the courteous poise of a man who knpws all eyes are upon him. Arnheim would have found none of the details inspiring in themselves, but since they not only combined to lay claim to his attention but also made room for the charms ofbreakfast, they produced a heightened sense of things. Human talent, he liked to think, probably,needs to be somewhat restricted ifit is to unfold to its best potential; the really fertile borderland between reckless freedom ofthought and a dispir- ited blankness of mind is, as everyone who knows life is aware, a very narrow strip of territory. Besides, he never doubted that it made all the difference who had an idea. Everyone knows that new and im- portant ideas seldom arise in only one· mind at a time, while, on the other hand, the brain of a mail who is accustomed to thinking is con- stantly breeding thoughts of unequal value, so that the end result, its final effective form, always comes to an idea from the outside, not merely from the thinker's mind but from the whole concatenation of his circumstances. A question from the secretary, a glance at a nearby table, a greeting from someone entering the room, or some such thing would always remind Amheim, at just the right moment,
. that he must keep up an imposing presence, and this perfecting of his appearance carried over to his thinking as well. It all culminated in his conviction, suiting his needs, that the thinking man must al- ways be simultaneously a man of action.
Nevertheless, he attached no great importance to his present oc- cupation; even though it was designed to achieve something that might, under certain circumstances, be remarkably profitable, he still felt that he was overstaying his time here. He repeatedly re- minded himself of that cold breath of ancient wisdom, Divide et im- pera, which applies to every transaction and calls for a certain subordination of each individual instance to the whole, for the secret of the successful approach to any undertaking is the same as that of the man who is loved by many women while himself careful to play no favorites. But it was no use. Fully mindful of the demands the world imposes on a man born to action on a grand scale, and no mat-
ter how often he took pains to search his soul, he could not close his eyes to the fact that he was·in love. It was an awkward fix, because a heart turned fifty is a tough muscle, not so easily stretched as that of a twenty-year-old in love's springtime, and it caused him considerable vexation. ·
It troubled him, to begin with, that his interest in his far-flung in- ternational concerns was withering like a flower cut off at the root, while everyday trivia like a sparrow on his windowsill or a waiter's smile positively blossomed into significance for him. As to his moral concepts, normally a comprehensive system for being always in the right, without any loopholes, he saw them shrinking in scope while taking on a certain physical quality. It could be called devotion, but this again was a word that usually had a much wider and anyway a quite different. meaning, for without devotion nothing can be achieved in any sphere: devotion to duty, to a superior or a leader, even devotion to life itself, in all its richness and variety, seen as a manly quality, had always seemed to him to be uprightness itself, which for all its openness had more to do with restraint than with a yielding up of the self. And the same might be said of faithfulness, which, confined to a woman, smacks of limitation, as was true of chivalry and gentleness, unselfishness and delicacy, all of them vir- tues usually thought of in association with her but losing their richest quality thereby, so that it is hard to say whether a man's experience of love only flows toward a woman as water tends to collect in the low- est, generally not the most acceptable spot, or whether the love of a woman is the volcanic center whose warmth sustains all life on earth. A supreme degree of male vanity therefore feels more at ease in male rather than female company, and when Amheim compared the wealth of ideas he had brought to the spheres of power with the state of bliss he owed to Diotima, he could not shake off the sense of hav- ing slipped somehow.
At times he longed for embraces and kisses like a boy ready to fling himself passionately at the feet o( the coldhearted beloved refusing him, or else he caught himselfwanting to burst out sobbing, or hurl a challenge to the world and, finally, carry off the beloved in his arms. Now, we all know that the irresponsible margin ofthe conscious per- sonality that breeds stories and poems is also the home base of all sorts of childish memories that surface on those rare occasions when
Pseudoreality Prevails · 41 5
416 • THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
the intoxication of fatigue, the release of alcohol, or some other dis- turbance brings them to light. Arnheim's bursts of feeling were no more substantial than these phantoms, so that he need not have been upset by them (thereby considerably increasing his original agita- tion), ifthese infantile regressions had not forced him to realize that his inner life was swarming with faded moral stereotypes. The stamp of general validity he was always at pains to give to his actions, as a man conscious of living with the eyes of all Europe upon him, sud- denly showed itself as having nothing to do with his inner life. This may be quite natural for anything supposed to be valid for everyone, but what troubled him was the implication that if what is generally valid is not the inward truth, then contrariwise the inward man is not generally valid. And so Amheim now felt haunted at every step not only by the urge to sound some deafening wrong note, or perfonn some foolishly illegitimate·act, but. also by the annoying thought that on some irrational level this. would be the right thing to do. Ever since he had come to know again the fire that makes the tongue go dry in the mouth, he was overcome with the sense of having lost a path he had always followed, the feeling that the whole ideology of the great man he lived by was only an emergency substitute for something that was missing.
This naturally brought his childhood to mind. In his early portraits he had big, dark, round eyes, like the paintings of the boy Jesus dis- puting With the doctors in the Temple, and he saw all his governesses and tutors standing around him in a circle, marveling at his precocity, because he had been a clever boy who had always had clever teach- ers. He had also proved himself to be a warmhearted, sensitive child who would tolerate no unfairness; since his life was far too sheltered to let any unfairness come his way, he made the wrongs ofothers his own where he came across them, and got himselfinto fights on their account. This was quite an achievement, considering what obstacles were put in his way to prevent this very thing, so that it never took more than a minute for someone to come rushing up to pry him loose from his opponent.
Because such fights lasted just long enough to give him a taste of some painful experience but were always inter- rupted in time to leave him with the impression of his own unflinch- ing courage, Arnheim still remembered them with self-satisfaction; and this lordly quality of courage that would shrink from nothing
passed later into his books and his principles, as becomes a man who needs to tell his contemporaries how to conduct themselves for self- respect and happiness.
This childhood state was still vividly present to his mind, while an- other condition, of a somewhat later period, that had succeeded and partly transformed it now appeared to be dormant or on the verge of petrifaction-ifthis is understood as turning not to stone, in the ordi- nary sense, but to diamonds. It was love, now startled into a new life by his contact with Diotima, and it was characteristic of Arnheim that his first youthful experience of love had nothing to do with women, or indeed any specific persons; this was a rather perplexing business he had never quite resolved for himself, even though in the course of time he had come to learn the most up-to-date explanations for it.
"What he meant was perhaps only the baffling manifestation of something still absent, like those rare expressions that appear on faces with which they have no connection, belonging rather to other, different faces suddenly intuited beyond the horizon of the visible; simple melodies in the midst of mere noise, feelings inside people, feelings he sensed inside himself, in fact, that were not yet real feel- ings when he tried to capture them in wor. ds, but only something inside him reaching outward, its tips already breaking the surface, getting wet, as things sometimes do reach out on fever-bright spring days when their shadows creep beyond them and come to rest so quietly, all flowing in one direction, like reflections in a stream. "
This was how it was expressed, much later on and in other accents, by a poet Arnheim esteemed because to know of this reclusive man ' who avoided all notoriety made one an insider; not that Arnheirn un- derstood him, for he associated such allusions with the talk about the awakening of a new soul that had been in fashion during his youth, or with the then popular pictures of reedy girls, painted with ·a pair of lips that looked like fleshy flower buds.
At that time, around the year 1887'-"good heavens, almost a gen- eration ago! " Amheim thought-he appeared in photographs as the "new man" of the period, in a high-buttoned black satin waistcoat with a wide, heavy silk cravat deriving from the Biedermeier style but meant to suggest the Baudelairean, with the help of an orchid (the latest thing) in his buttonhole, exerting a malevolent fascination on all who saw Arnheim junior on his way to dine and impress his youth-
Pseudoreality Prevails · 41 7
418 · THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
ful person on some robust businessmen friends of his father's. Por- traits of young Amheim at work ran to a slide rule peeping decora- tively from the breast pocket of a tweedy English sport jacket, worn quite comically with a towering stiff collar, which nevertheless heightened the effect of the head. That was how Amheim had looked, and he still could not keep from looking at his image with a certain approval. He had played good tennis when it was still played on laWns, with all the ~eal of a passion as yet reserved for the few; surprised his father by openly attending workers' meetings, after a student year in Zurich where he had become unsuitably acquainted with socialist ideas, which did not prevent 'him from galloping his horse recklessly through a working-class quarter of town on another day. In short, it had all been a whirl of contradictory but challenging new experiences which gave him the enchanting illusion of having been born at just the right time, an illusion so important to a young man, even though he realizes later on that its value does not lie in its rarity, exactly. As time went on and Amheim came to think more and more conservatively, he did wonder whether this ever-renewed feel- ing of being the last word wasn't part of nature's wastefulness; but he never gave it up, because he never did like to give up anything that had ever belonged to him, and his collector's nature had carefully preserved within him all there was at the time. But today it seemed to him, however rounded and various his life appeared to be, that he had been most particularly moved and most lastingly influenced by what had seemed at first the most unreal element of all: precisely that romantically expectant state of mind whispering to him that he belonged not only to the world of bustling activity but to yet another
world, suspended inside it, as if holding its breath.
This dreamy expectancy, restored to him in its full original fresh-
ness· by Diotima's influence, becalmed all activity and busyness now; the tumult of youthful conflict and hopeful, ever-changing vistas gave way to a daydream in which all words, events, and needs were basically the same deep down, away from their surface differences. At such moments even ambition was hushed; the world was a distant noise beyond the garden wall, as though his soul had overflowed its banks and was truly present to him for the flrst time. It cannot be top strongly emphasized that this was not a philosophy but as physical an experience as seeing the moon, though oveiWhelmed by daylight,.
hovering mutely in the morning sky. In such a state of mind even the young Paul Arnheim had calmly dined at select restaurants, dressed with care to attend all the social functions, done everything that had to be done but always, as it were, with no greater or lesser distance from one part of himself to the other than to or from the. next person or object; somehow the outer world did not leave off at his skin, and his inner world did not merely shine out through the window of re- flection, but both blended into a single undivided state of separate- ness and presence, as mild, calm, and lofty as a dreamless sleep. Morally it felt like a truly great indifference, a sense of all values being equal; nothing was minor or major: a poem and a kiss on a woman's hand were the equal in significance of a scholarly work in several volumes or some great act of statesmanship, and just as ev- erything eVil was meaningless, so, basically, everything good had become superfluous in this immersion in the tender primal kinship of all created things. Arnheim behaved quite normally, except that he was doing it in an intangible atmosphere of special significance, behind the tremulous flame of which the inner man stood motion- less, watching the outer man eating an apple or being measured for a new suit.
Was it illusion, then, or the shadow of a reality never to be quite understood? The only possible answer is that all religions, at certain stages of their development, have asserted the reality of this shadow, and so have all lovers, all romantics, all those with a hankering for the moon, for springtime, and the blissful dying of the days in early fall. Eventually it fades away, however, it evaporates and dries up, one cannot say which-until one day something else has taken its place and it is instantly forgotten as only unreal experiences, dreams, and illusions are forgotten. Since this primal and cosmic love experience is normally encountered the first time one falls in love, one usually thinks even later in life that one knows just what to make of it, re- garding it as part of the foolishness one may indulge in before one is old enough to vote. So this was how it was with him, but since for Arnheim it had never been associated with a woman, it could never quite leave his heart in the usual way, along with her; instead, it was overlaid by impressions received, after completing hi! s schooling, when he entered his father's business. Since he did nothing by halves, he soon discovered here that the productive and well-
Pseudoreality Prevails · 419
420 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
balanced life is a poem greater by far than any hatched out by a poet in his garret, and a different sort of thing altogether.
Now for the first time he showed his talent for being an exemplary character. The poem of life has this advantage over all other poems, that it is set in all capital letters, as it were, no matter what its content may be. Even the youngest trainee in a firm of world rank has the whole world circling around him, with continents peering over his shoulder, so that nothing he does is without significance, while the
· lone writer in his seclusion has at most flies circling around him _no matter how hard he tries to get something done. This is so obvious that many people, from the moment they begin to work in the me-
. dium of life itself, regard everything that used to move them before as "mere literature," meaning that the effect it has is at best weak and muddled, generally contradictory so that it cancels itSelf out, and anyway not in proportion to the fuss made over it. Arnheim was not quite like that, of course; he neither denied the noble influence ofart nor was capable of regarding anything that had once strongly moved him as foolishness or a delusion. When he recognized the superiority of his adult responsibilities over the dreamy outlook of his youth he took steps, guided by his new mature. insights, to effect a fusion of both kinds of experience. He did, in fact, what so many, certainly the majority of the professional classes, do after beginning their careers: far from wishing to turn their backs entirely on their former inter- ests, they find themselves for the first time in a serene, mature rela- tionship to the enthusiastic impulses of their younger years. Discovering the great poem of life, knowing their own part in it, re- stores to them the courage of the dilettante they had lost when they burned their own poems. Working on the poem of their own life, they can at last regard themselves as hom expert~ and set about per- meating their daily round with a sense of intellectual responsibility, feeling themselves faced with a thousand small decisions in making it moral and attractive, modeling themselves on their notion of how Goethe led his life and giving everyone to understand that without music, without the beauties of nature and the sight of animals and children at play, and without a good book, life would not be worth having. This soulful middle class is still, among Germans, the leading consumer of the arts and of all literature that is not too heavy; but its members understandably look down upon art and literature, which
they once regarded as the ultimate fulfillment, as upon an earlier stage of development, even though it may have been more perfect in its way than what fate allotted to them; or else they regard it much as a manufacturer of sheet metal, say, might regard a sculptor of plaster statues if he were weak enough to see any beauty in that sort of product.
Now Arnheim resembled this cultural middle class as a glorious hothouse double carnation resembles a weedy little pink growing wild at the roadside. He never thought in terms of a cultural revolu- tion or radical innovation, but thought only of the interweaving of the new into the traditional, a taking over, with gentle modifications and a moral reanimation, of the faded privileges of the powers that were. He was no snob, no worshiper ofthose who outranked him in society. Received at court and on terms with the high nobility and the leading government officialdom, he adjusted himselfto this environment not at all as an imitator but only as an amateur of the conservative feudal manner, one·who never forgets or seeks to make others forget his patrician, quasi-Goethean-Frankfurt, origins. But with this conces- sion his capacity for resistance was exhausted, and any greater dis- tanc~g of himself from greatness would have seemed to him untrue to life. He was deeply convinced that the creators of wealth-led by the businessmen who directed life and would be shaping a new e r a - were destined to take over at some point from the ruling powers, and this gave him a certain quiet arrogance, which had been proved valid enough by the subsequent course of events. But taking money's claim to power as a given, the question was still how the desired power was to be rightly used. The bank directors' and industrial mag- nates' predecessors had no problem; they were feudal knights who made literal mincemeat of their enemies, leaving the clergy to han- dle the morals. But while contemporary man has in money, as Arn- heim saw it, the surest control of society, a means as tough and
precise as the guillotine, it can also be as vulnerable as an arthritic- how painfully the money market limps and aches all over at the slightest draftl-and is most ·delicately involved with everything it controls. Because he understood this subtle interdependence of all the forms of life, which only the blind arrogance of the ideologue can overlook, Arnheim came to see the regal man of business as the syn- thesis of change and permanence, power and civility, sensible risk-
Pseudoreality Prevails · 4 2 1
422 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
taking and strong-minded reliance on information, but essentially as the symbolic figure of democracy-in-the-making. By the persistent and disciplined honing of his own personality, by his intellectual grasp of the economic and social complexes at hand,' and by giving thought to the leadership and structure of the state as a whole, he hoped to help bring the new era to birth, that age where the social forces made unequal by fate and nature would be properly and fruit- fully organized and where the ideal would not be shattered by the inevitable limitations of reality, but be purified and strengthened in- stead. Objectively put, he had brought about the fusion of interests between business and the soul by working out the overall concept of the Business King, and that feeling of love that had once taught him the unity of all things now formed the nucleus of his conviction that culture'and all human interests formed a harmonious whole.
It was at about this time, too, that Arnlieim began to publish his writings, and in them surfaced the term "soul. " He presumably re- sorted to it as a device, a flying start, a royal motto, since princes and generals certainly have no souls, and as for financiers, he was the very first to have one. It undoubtedly also played a part in his need to set up defenses that could not be breached by the business· mentality of those forming his intimate circle, and more specifically by the impe- rious nature and greater business sense of his father, beside whom he was beginning to assume the role ofthe aging crown prince. And it is equally certain that his ambition to master all worthwhile knowl- edge-a taste for polyhistory so consuming that no single man could have lived up to the goals he set himself-found in the soul a means to rise above all that his intellect could not encompass. In this he was a man of his time, which had recently developed a strong religious bent, not because it had a call to religion but only, it seems, out of an irritable feminine revolt against money, science, and calculation, to all ofwhich it succumbed with a passion. What was questionable and uncertain, however, was whether Arnheim, in speaking of the soul, believed in it; whether it was real to him, like his stock portfolio. He used the word to express something for which he had no other term. Driven by his need to use it in conversation-Arnheim was a talker who did not easily let anyone else get a word in-and finding that he made an impression, he came to use it more and more in his writings, referring to it as though its existence were as assured as that of one's
own back, even though one never gets to see it. And so he wrote with real fervor of something vague and portentous that is intetwoven with the all-too-factual world ofbusiness affairs as a profound silence is intetwoven with vivid speech. He did not deny the usefulness of knowledge; quite the contrary, he was himself an impressively busy compiler of data, as only a man who has all the resources at his com- mand can be, but once he had proved himself in that arena he would say that above and beyond this level of keenness and precision there was a higher realm of wisdom that was accessible only to the vision- ary. He spoke of the will by which nation-states and international business giants are founded, so as to let it be understood that with all his greatness he was nothing but an arm that could be moved only by a heart beating somewhere beyond the range of human vision. He held forth on technological advances or moral values in the most down-to-earth fashion, in terms familiar to the man in the street, only to add that such exploitation of nature and man's spiritual ener- gies amounted to nothing more than a fatal ignorance if the sense was lacking that they were merely the surface ripples of an ocean the immense depths of which were hardly touched by them. He deliv- ered such sentiments in the manner of the regent of an exiled queen who had received her personal instructions and orders the world accordingly.
This keeping the world in order was perhaps his truest and fiercest passion, a craving for power far surpassing everything even a man in his position could afford, which drove this man who was so powerful in the real world to withdraw at least once a year to his castle in East Prussia, where he dictated a whole book to his secretary. The strange sense of mission that had surfaced first and most vividly in his early days ofyouthful enthusiasm and still affiicted him from time to time, though with lessened intensity, had found this outlet for itself. In the thick of his global undertakings it came over him like a sweet trance, a longing for the cloister, murmuring to him that all the contradic- tions, all the great ideas, all worldly experience and effort, were a unity, not only as vaguely understood by what we call culture and humanity but also in a wildly literal and shimmeringly passive sense, as when on a morbidly lovely day one might gaze out over river and meadows, hands crossed in one's lap, unwilling to tear oneself away, evermore. In this sense, his writing was a compromise. And because
Pseudoreality Prevails · 423
424 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
there is only one soul, not within reach but in exile, from which it has only one way to make itself known to us in all its hazy ambiguity, while there are such countless, endless problems in the world to which its royal message can be applied, so, as the years went by, he found himselfin that grave embarrassment suffered by all legitimists and prophets when it is all taking too long to happen. Arnheim had only to sit down alone to write for his pen to start leading him, with a truly uncanny flow of words, from the soul to the problems of the mind, the moral life, economics, and politics, all brilliantly lighted from some invisible source and appearing in a clear and magically unifying illumination. There was something intoxicating in this ex- pansiveness, but it. depended on that split consciousness which alone makes creative composition possible for so many writers, in that the mind shuts out and forgets whatever does not happen to fit into its sc~eme. Speaking to another person, whose presence was a link to the rest of the world, Arnheim would never have let himself go so recklessly; but bent over a sheet of paper·that was ready to reflect his views, he joyfully abandoned himself to a metaphoric expression of his convictions, only a small portion of which had any basis in fact, while the greater part was a billowing cloud ofwords whose sole- and incidentally not inconsiderable-claim to reality was that it al- ways arose spontaneously in the same places.
Anyone inclined to find fault should remember that having a split personality has long since ceased to be a trick reserved for lunatics; at the present-day tempo, our capacity for political insight, for writing a piece for the newspapers, for faith in the new movements in art and literature, and for countless other things, depends wholly on a knack for being, at times, convinced against our own convictions, splitting off a part of our mind and stretching it to form a brand-new whole- hearted conviction. So it was another point in Amheim's favor that he never quite honestly believed what he was saying. As a man in his prime he had already had his say on anything and everything; he had his convictions, which covered much ground, and saw no barriers to going on spinning new convictions smoothly out of the old ones, in- definitely. A man whose mind worked to such good effect and who could switch it in other states of consciousness to checking balance sheets and estimating profits to be made on his deals could not fail to notice that there was no shape or set course to his activity, though it
continued·to expand almost inexhaustibly in every direction; it was bounded only by the unity of his person, and although Amheim could hold a large amount of self-esteem, this was not for him an intellectually satisfactory state of affairs. He tried blaming it on the residual element of irrationality that the informed observer can de- tect everywhere in life; he tried to. shrug it offon the grounds that in our time everything tends to overflow its borders, and since no man can quite transcend the weaknesses of his century, he saw in this a welcome chance to practice that modesty typical of all great men by setting up above himself, quite unenviously, such figures as Homer and Buddha, because they had lived in more favorable eras. But as time went on and his literary success peaked without making any real difference to his crown-princely state, that element of irrationality, the absence of tangible results, and his troubling sense of having missed his target and lost his original resolve became more oppres- sive. He surveyed his work, and even though he saw that it was good, he felt as though all these ideas were setting up a barrier between some haunting primal home and him. self, like a wall of diamonds growing daily more encrusted.
Something unpleasant of this sort had happened and left its mark on him just recently. · He had made use of the leisure he currently indulged himself in more frequently than was his habit, to dictate to his secretary an essay on the essential accord between government architecture and the concept of the state, and he had broken off a sentence intended to run "Contemplating this edifice, we see the si- lence of the walls" after the word ''silence," in order to linger for a moment over the image of the Cancelleria in Rome, whiph had just risen up unbidden before his inner eye. But as he looked at the type- script over his secretary's shoulder he noticed that,· anticipating him as usual, the secretary had already written: ". . . we see the silence of the soul. " That day Arnheim dictated no more, and on the following day he had the sentence deleted.
Compared with experiences that reached so far and so deep, what price the ordinary physical love for a woman? Sadly, Amheim had to admit to himself that it mattered just as much as the realization, sum- ming up·his life, that all roads to the mind start in the soul, but none lead back there again. There were of course many women who had enjoyed close relations with him; but other than the parasitic species
Pseudoreality Prevails · 425.
426 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
they tended to be professionally engaged, educated women or artists, for :with these two kinds, the kept women and the self-sustaining types, it was possible to have a clear-cut understanding. His moral nature had always guided him into relationships where instinct and the consequent inevitable arrangements with women could some- how be dealt with rationally. But. Diotima was the first woman to penetrate into his pre-moral, secret inner life, and this almost made him look at her askance. She was only the wife of a government offi- cial, after all, socially most presentable, of course, but without that supreme degree of cultivation that comes only with power, while Arnheim could marry a daughter of American high finance or of an English duke. He had moments of recoiling with a primitive nursery antagonism, the naYvely cruel arrogance and dismay of the well-bred child taken for the first time to a city school, so that his growing infat- uation seemed to threaten him with disgrace. When at such mo- ments he resumed his business activities with the icy superiority of a spirit that had died to the world and been reborn to it, then the cool rationality of money, immune to contamination, seemed an extraor- dinarily clean force compared with love.
But this only meant that for him the time had come when the pris- oner wonders how he could have let himself be robbed of his free- dom without putting up a life-and-death struggle. For when Diotima said: ''What do the affairs of the world amount to? Un peu de bruit autour de notre dme . . . ," he felt a tremor go through the edifice of his life.
MOOSBRUGGER DANCES
Meanwhile Moosbrugger was still sitting in a detention cell at the district courthouse while his case was under study. His counsel had got fresh wind in his sails and was using delaying tactics with the au- thorities to keep the case from coming to a final conclusion:
Moosbrugger smiled at all this. He smiled from boredom.
Boredom rocked his mind like a cradle. Ordinarily boredom blots out the mind, but his was rocked by it, this time anyway. He felt like an actor in his dressing room, waiting for his cue.
If Moosbrugger had had a big sword, he'd have drawn it and chopped the head off his chair. He would have chopped the head off the table and the window, the slop bucket, the door. Then he would have set his own head on everything, because in this cell there was only one head, his own, and that was as it should be. He could imag- ine his head sitting on top ofthings, with its broad skull, its hair like a fur cap pulled down over his forehead; he liked that.
If only the room were bigger and the food better!
He was quite glad not to see people. People were hard to take. They often had a way of spitting, or of hunching up a shoulder, that made a man feel down in the mouth and ready to drive a fist through their back, like punching a hole in the wall. Moosbrugger did not believe in God, only in what he could figure out for himself. His con- temptuous terms for the eternal truths were: the cop, the bench, the preacher. He knew he could count on no one but himselfto take care of things, and such a man sometimes feels that others are there only to get in his way. He saw what he had seen so often: the inkstands, the green baize, the pencils, the Emperor's portrait on the wall, the way they all sat there around him: a booby trap camouflaged, not with grass and green leaves, just with the feeling: That's how it is. Then remembered things would pop into his head-the way a bush stood at the river bend, the creak of a pump handle, bits of different landscapes all jumbled up, an endless stock of memories of things he hadn't realized he'd noticed at the time. "I bet I could tell them a thing or two," he thought. He was daydreaming like a youngster: a man they had locked up so often he never grew older. "Next time I'll have to take a closer look at it," Moosbrugger thought, "otherwise they'll never understand. " Then he smiled sternly and spoke to the judges about himself, like a father saying about his son: "Just you lock him up, that good-for-nothing, he needs to be taught a lesson. "
Sometimes he felt annoyed, ofcourse, with the prison regulations. Or he was hurting somewhere. But then he could ask to see the prison doctor or the warden, and things fell into place again, like water closing over a dead rat that had fallen in. Not that he thought
Pseudoreality Prevails · 427
428 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
of it quite in these terms, but he kept having the sense almost con- stantly these days, even if he did not have the words for it, that he was like a great shining sheet of water, not to be disturbed by anything.
The words he did have were: hm-hm, uh-uh.
The table was Moosbrugger.
The chair was Moosbrugger.
The barred window and the bolted door were himself.
There was nothing at all crazy or out of the ordinary in what he
meant. It was just that the rubber bands were gone. Behind every thing or creature, when it tries to get really close to another, is a rub- ber band, pulling. Otherwise, things might fmally go right through one another. Every movement is reined in by a rubber b~d that won't let a person do quite what he wants. Now, suddenly, all those rubber bands were gone. Or was it just the feeling of being held in check, as if by rubber bands?
Maybe one just can't cut it so fine? . "For instance, women keep their stockings up with elastic. There it is! " Moosbrugger thought. "They wear garters on their legs like amulets. Under their skirts. Just like the rings they paint around fruit trees to stop the worms from crawling up. " .
But we mention this only in passing. Lest anyone suppose that Moosbrugger felt he had to stay on good terms with everything. It wasn't really like that. It was only that he was both inside and outside.
He was the boss now, and he acted bossy. He was putting things in order before they killed him off. The moment he thought of any- thing, anything . he pleased, it obeyed him like a well-trained dog to whom you say: "Down, boy! " Locked up though he was, he had a tremendous sense of power.
On the dot, his soup was brought. On the dot, he was awakened and taken out for his walk. Everything in his cell was on the mark, strict and immovable. This sometimes seemed incredible to him. He had the strangely topsy-turvy impression that all this order emanated from him, even though he knew that it was being imposed on him.
Other people have this sort of experience when they are stretched out in the summery shade of a hedge, the bees are buzzing, and the sun rides small and hard in the milky sky: the world revolves around them like a mechanical toy. Moosbrugger felt it when he merely looked at the geometric scene presented by his cell.
At such times he noticed that he had a mad craving for good food; he dreamed of it, and by day the outlines of a good plate of roast pork kept rising up before his eyes with an uncanny persistence the mo- ment his mind turned back from other preoccupations. "Two por- tions! " Moosbrugger then ordered. "No, make it three! " He thought this so hard, and heaped up his imaginary plate so greedily, that he instantly felt full to bursting, to the point of nausea; he gorged him- self in his imagination. "Why," he won~ered, wagging his head, "why do I feel so stuffed, so soon after wanting to eat? Between eating and bursting lie all the pleasures of this world! Hell, what a world! There are hundreds of examples to prove how little space it gives you. To take just one, for instance: a woman you don't have is like the moon at night climbing higher and higher, sucking and sucking at your heart; but once you've had her, you feel like trampling on her face with your boots. Why is it like that? " He remembered being asked about it lots of times. One could answer: Women are women and men too, because men chase after them. But it was only one more thing that the people who asked all the questions wouldn't·really un- derstand. So they asked him why he thought that people were in ca- hoots against him. As if even his own body wasn't in cahoots with them! This was quite obvious where women were concerned, of course, but even with men his body understood things better than he did himself. One word leads to another, you know what's what,
you're in each other's pocket all day long, and then, in a flash, you've somehow crossed that narrow borderline where you get along with them without any trouble. But ifhis body had got him into this, it had better get him out of it again! All Moosbrugger could remember was that he'd been vexed or frightened, and his chest with its arms flailing had rushed at them like a big dog on command. That was all Moos- brugger could understand anyway; between getting along and being fed up there's only a thin line, . that's all, and once something gets started it soon gets scary and tight.
Those people who were always using those foreign words and were always sitting in judgment on him would keep throwing this up to him: "But you don't go and kill a man just for that, surely! " Moos- brugger only shrugged. People have been done in for a few pennies, or for nothing at all, when someone happened to feel like it. But he had more self-respect than that, he wasn't one of that kind. In time
Pseudoreality Prevails · 429
430 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
the rebuke registered with him; he found himselfwondering why he felt the world closing in on him, or whatever you might call it, time and again, so that he had to clear a space for himself by force, in order that the blood could drain out of his head again. He thought it over. But wasn't it just the same with thinking too? Whenever he felt in the right mood for doing some thinking, the pleasure of it made him want to smile. Then his thoughts stopped itching under the skull, and suddenly there was just one idea there.