No More Learning

Whenever he opened his mouth to make such pronouncements, it was as though an electric contact had been opened, and he flowed in a different circuit. The same thing happens to most people, in fact, when they express themselves in public, and if anyone had reproached Count Leinsdorf with doing in private what he denounced in public, he would, with saintly conviction, have
Pseudoreality Prevails · I o I
102 • THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
branded it the demagogic babble of subversives who lacked even a clue about the extent of life's responsibilities. Nevertheless, he real- ized the prime importance ofestablishing a connection between the eternal verities and the world of business, which is so much more complicated than the lovely simplicity oftradition, and he also recog- nized that such a connection could not be found anywhere but in the profundities ofmiddle-class culture. With its great ideas and ideals in the spheres of law, duty, morality, and beauty, it reached even the common everyday struggles and contradictions oflife, and seemed to him like a bridge made of tangled living plants. It did not, of course, offer as finn and secure a foothold as the dogmas ofthe Church, but it was no less necessary and responsible, which is why Count Leins- dorf was not only a religious idealist but also a passionate civilian idealist.
These convictions of His Grace's corresponded to the composition of Diotima's salons. These gatherings were celebrated for the fact that on her "great days" one ran into people one could not exchange a single word with because they were too well known in some special field or other for small talk, while in many cases one had never even heard the name of the specialty for which they were world-famous. . There were Kenzinists and Canisians, a grammarian of Bo might come up against a partigen researcher, a tokontologist against a quantum physicist, not to mention the representatives of new move- ments in arts and literature that changed their labels every year, all permitted to circulate in limited numbers along with their better- recognized colleagues. In general, things were so arranged that a random mixture blended harmoniously, except for the young intel- lectuals, whom Diotima usually kept apart by means of special invita- tions, and those rare or special guests whom she had a way of unobtrusively singling out and providing with a special setting. What distinguished Diotima's gatherings from all similar affairs was, inci- dentally, ifone may say so, the lay element; people from. the world of applied ideas, the kind who-in Diotima's words-had once spread out around a core of theological studies as a flock of faithful doers, really an entire community of lay brothers and sisters-in short, the element ofactton. But now that theology has been displaced by eco- nomics and physics, and Diotima'~ list of administrators of the spirit on earth who were to be invited had grown with time to resemble the
Catalogue of Scientific Papers of the Royal Society, the new lay brothers and sisters were correspondingly a collection of bank direc- tors, technicians, politicians, high officials, and ladies and gentlemen of society with their hangers-on. .
Diotima made a particular point of cultivating the women, al- though she gave preference to the "ladies" over the "intellectuals" among them. "Ufe is much too overburdened with knowledge these days," she was accustomed to say, "for us to be able to do without the 'unfragmented woman. ' " She was convinced that only the unfrag- mented woman still possessed the fated power to embrace the intel- lect with those vital forces that, in her opinion, it obviously sorely needed for its salvation. This concept of the entwining woman and the power of Being, incidentally, redounded greatly to her credit among the young male nobility who attended regularly because it was considered the thing to do and because TuZzi was not unpopular; for the unfragmented Being is som~thing the nobility really takes to, and more specifically, at the Tuzzis' couples could become deeply absorbed in conversation without attracting attention; so that for ten- der rendezvous and long heart-to-heart talks, her house-though Di- otima had no inkling of this-was even more popular than a church.
His Grace the Uege-Count Leinsdorfsummed up these two social elements, so various in themselves, which mingled at Diotima's- when he did not simply call them "the true elite"-as "capital and culture. " But he liked best of all to think of them in tenns of "official public service," a concept that had pride ofplace in his. thinking. He regarded every accomplishment, that of the factory worker or the concert singer as well as that of the civil servant, as a fonn of official service.
"Every person," he would say, "performs an office within the state; the worker, the prince, the artisan, are all civil servants. " This was an emanation ofhis always and under all circumstances impartial way of thinking, ignorant of bias, and in his eyes even the ladies and gentlemen of the highest society performed a significant if not read- ily definable office when they chatted with learned experts on the Bogazkoy inscriptions or the question of lamellibranchiate mollusks, while eyeing the wives of prominent financiers. This concept of offi- cial public service was his version ofwhat Diotima referred to as the religious unity, lost since the Middle Ages, of all human activity.
Pseudoreality Prevails · 1 o3
l04 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
All enforced sociability, such as that at the Tuzzis', beyond a cer- tain naive and crude level, springs basically from the need to simu- late a unity that cou)d govern all of humanity's highly varied activities and that is never there. This simulation was what Diotima called cul- ture, usually, with special amplification, "our Old Austrian culture. " As her ambition had expanded to embrace intellect, she had learned to use this term more and more often. She understood by it: the great paintings of Vehizquez and Rubens hanging in the Imperial Mu- seum; the fact that Beethoven was, so to speak, an Austrian; Mozart, Haydn, St. Stephen's Cathedral, the Burgtheater; the weighty tradi- tional ceremonials at the Imperial Court; Vienna's central district, where the smartest dress and lingerie shops of an empire with fifty million inhabitants were crowded together; the discreet manners of high officials; Viennese cuisine; the aristocracy, which considered it- self second to none except the English, and their ancient palaces; high society's tone of sometimes genuine, mostly sham, aestheticism. She ~so understood by it the fact that in this country so eminent a gentleman as Count Leinsdorf had taken her under his wing and made her house the center ofhis own cultural endeavors. She did not know that His Grace was also moved by the consideration that it was not quite the thing to open his own noble house to innovations that might easily get out of hand. Count Leinsdorfwas often secretly hor- rified by the freedom and indulgence with which his beautiful friend spoke of human passions and the turmoil they cause, or of revolu- tionary ideas. But Diotima did not notice this. She drew a line, as it were, between public immodesty and private modesty, like a female physician or a social worker. She 'was acutely sensitive to any word that touched her too personally, but impersonally she would talk freely about anything, and could only feel that Count Leinsdorf found the mixture most appealing.
Nothing in life is built, however, without the stones having to be broken out from somewhere else. To Diotima's painful surprise some tiny, dreamy-sweet almond kernel of imagination, once the core of her existence when there was nothing else in it, and which had still been there when she decided to marry Vice-Consul Tuzzi, who looked like a leather steamer trunk with two dark eyes, had van- ished in the years ofsuccess. She realized that much ofwhat she un- derstood by "our Old Austrian culture," like Haydn or the
Habsburgs, had once been only a boring school lesson, while to be actually living in the midst ofit all now seemed enchanting and quite as heroic as the midsummer humming of bees. In time, however, it became not only monotonous but also a strain on her, and even hopeless. Diotima's experience with her famous guests was no differ- ent from that ofCount Leinsdorfwith his banking connections; how- ever much one might try to get them into accord with one's soul, it did not succeed. One can talk about cars and X rays, of cou~se, with a certain amount of feeling, but what else can one do about the count- less other inventions and discoveries that nowadays every single day brings forth, other than to marvel at human inventiveness in general, which in the long run gets to be too tiresome!
His Grace would drop in occasionally, and spoke with a political figure or had himself introduced to a new guest. I t was easy for him to enthuse about the profound reaches of culture, but when you were as closely involved with it as Diotima, the insoluble problem was not its depths but its breadth! Even questions of such immediate concern as the noble simplicity of Greece or the meaning of the Prophets dissolved, in conversation with specialists, into an incalcu- lable multiplicity of doubts and possibilities. Diotima found that even the celebrities always talked in twos, because the time had al- ready come when a person could talk sensibly and to the point with at most one other person-and she herself could not really find any- one at all. At this point Diotima had discovered in herself the well- known suffering caused by that familiar malady of contemporary man known as civilization. It is a frustrating condition, full of soap, radio frequencies, the arrogant sign language of mathematical and chemical formulas, economics, experimental research, and the in- ability of human beings to live together simply but on a high plane. And even the relationship of her own innate·nobility of mind to th~ social nobility, whom she had to handle with great care and who brought her, with all her successes,. many a disappointment, gradu- ally came to seem to her more and more typical of an age not of cul- ture but merely of civilization.
Civilization, then, meant everything that her mind could not con- trol. Including, for a long time now, and first of all, her husband.
Pseudoreality Prevails · 1 o5
106
SUFFERINGS OF A MARRIED SOUL
In her mi~eryshe read a great deal, and discovered that she had lost something she had previously not really known she had: a soul.
What's that? It is easy to define negatively: It is simply that which sneaks off at the mention of algebraic series.
But positively? It seems successfully to elude every effort to pin it down. There may once have been in Diotima something fresh and natural, an intuitive sensibility·wrapped in the propriety she wore like a cloak threadbare from too much brushing, something she now called her soul and rediscovered in Maeterlinck's batik-wrapped metaphysics, or in Novalis, but most of all in the ineffable wave of anemic romanticism and yearning for GOd that, for a while, the ma- chine age squirted out as an expression of its spiritual and artistic misgivings about itself. it might also be that this original freshness in Diotima could be defined more precisely as a blend of quiet, tender- ness, devotion, and kindness that had never found a proper path and in the foundry in which Fate casts our forms had happened to pour itself into the comical mold of her idealism. Perhaps it was imagina- tion; perhaps an intuition of the instinctive vegetative processes at work eyery day beneath the covering of the body, above which the soulful expression of a beautiful woman gazes at us. Possibly it was only the coming of certain indefinable hours when she felt Wllffil and expansive, when her sensations were keener than usual, when ambi- tion and will were becalmed and she was seized by a hushed mpture and fullness of life while her thoughts, even the slightest ones, turned away from the surface and toward the inward depths, leaving the world's events far away, like noise beyond a garden wall. At such times Diotima felt as if she had a direct vision of the truth within herself without having to strain for it; tender experiences that as yet bore no name raised their veils, and she felt-to cite only a few of the many descriptions of it she had found in the litemture on the sub- ject-harmonious, humane, religious, and close to that primal source
that sanctifies everything arising from it and leaves sinful everything that does not. But even though it was all quite lovely to think about, Diotima could never get beyond such hints and intimations of this peculiar condition; nor did the prophetic books she relied on for help, which spoke of the same thing in the same mysterious and im- precise language. Diotima was reduced to blaming this, too, on a pe- riod of civilization that had simply filled up with rubble the access to the soul.
What she called "soul" was probably nothing more than a small amount of capital in love she had possessed at the time of her mar- riage. Section Chief Tuzzi was not the right business opportunity to invest in. His advantage over Diotima~ at first and for a long time, was that of the older man; to this was later added the advantage of the successful man in a mysterious position, who gives his wife little insight into himself even as he looks on indulgently at the trivia that keep her busy. And apart from the tendemesses of courtship, Tuzzi had always been a practical man of common sense who never lost his balance. Even so, the well-cut assurance of his actions and his suits, the-one could say-urbanely grave aroma of his body and his beard, the guardedly firm baritone in which he spoke, all gave him an aura that excited the soul of the girl Diotima as the nearness of his master excites the retriever who lays his muzzle on the mastels knees. And just as the dog trots along behind, his feelings safe and fenced in, so Diotima, too, under such serious-minded, matter-of- fact guidance, entered upon the infinite landscape of love.
Here Section Chief Tuzzi preferred the straight paths. His daily habits were those of an ambitious worker. He rose early, either to ride or, preferably, to take an hour's walk, which not only preserves the body's elasticity but also represents the kind of pedantic, simple routine that, strictly adhered to, consorts perfectly with an image of responsible achievement. It also goes without saying that on those evenings when they were not invited out and had no guests he imme- diately withdrew to his study; for he was forced to maintain his great stock of expert information at the high level that constituted his ad- vantage over his aristocratic colleagues and superiors. Such a life sets firm restraints, and ranges love with the other activities. Like all those whose imagination is not consumed by the erotic, Tuzzi in his bachelor days-apart from having to show himself occasionally be-
Pseudoreality Prevails · 1 o 7
zo8 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
cause of his diplomatic profession in the company of friends taking out little chorus girls-had been a quiet visitor at one brothel or an- other,' and carried the regular rhythm ofthis habit over into his mar- riage. Thus Diotima learned to know love as something violent, assaultive, and brusque that was released only once every week by an even greater power. This change in the nature of two people, which always began promptly on time, to be followed, a few minutes later, by a short exchange on those events of the day that had not come up before and then a sound sleep, and which was never mentioned in the times between, except perhaps in hints and allusions-like mak- ing a diplomatic joke about the "partie honteuse" ofthe body-nev- ertheless had unexpected anq paradoxical consequences for her.
On the one hand, it was the cause of that extravagantly swollen ideality-that officious, outw! ! l'dly-oriented personality-whose power of love, whose spiritual longing, reached out for all things great and noble that turned up in her environment, and that so in- tensely spread itself and bound itself to these that Diotima evoked the impression, so confusing to males, of a mightily blazing yet Pia. : tonic sun of love, the description of which had made Ulrich curious to meet her. On the other hand, however, this broad rhythm of mari- tal contact had developed, purely physiologically, into a habit that asserted itself quite independently and without connection to the loftier parts of her being, like the hunger of a farmhand whose meals are infrequent but heavy. With time, as tiny hairs began to sprout on Diotima's upper lip and the masculine independence of the mature female woman mingled with the traits of the girl, she became aware of this split as something horrible. She loved her husband, but this was mingled with a growing revulsion, a dreadful affront to her soul,
which could only be compared to what Archimedes, deeply absorbed in his mathematical problems, might have felt if the enemy soldier had not killed him but made sexual demands on him. And since her husband was not aware of this-nor would he have thought about it i f h e h a d b e e n - a n d s i n c e h e r b o d y always e n d e d u p b e t r a y i n g h e r t o him against her will, she felt enslaved; it was a slavery that might not be considered unvirtuous but was just as tormenting as she imagined the appearance of a nervous tic or the inescapability of a vice to be. Now, this might perhaps have made Diotima slightly melancholy and_
even more idealistic, but unfortunately it happened just at the time that her salon began to cause her some spiritual difficulties.
Section Chief Tuzzi encouraged his wife's intellectual endeavors because he was not slow to see how they might serve to bolster his own position, but he had never taken part in them, and it is safe to say that he did not take them seriously. For the only things this ex- perienced man too1c seriously were power, duty, high social status, and, at a certain remove, reason. He even warned Diotima repeat- edly against being too ambitious in her aesthetic affairs of state, be- cause even if culture is, so to speak, the spice in the food of life, the best people did not go in for an oversalted diet. He said this quite without irony, as it was what he believed, but Diotima felt belittled. She constantly felt that her husband followed her idealis- tic endeavors with a hovering smile; and whether he was at home or not, and whether this smile-if indeed he did smile; she could never be quite sure-was for her personally or merely part of the facial expression of a man who for professional reasons always had to look superior, as time went on it became increasingly unbearable to her, yet she could not shake off its infamous appearance of being in the right. At times, Diotima would try to blame a materialistic age that had turned the world into an evil, purposeless game in which atheism, socialism, and positivism left no freedom for a per- son with a rich inner life to rise to true being; but even this was not often of much use.
Such was the situation in the Tuzzi household when the great pa- triotic campaign quickened the pace of events. Ever since Count Leinsdorf had established his campaign headquarters in Diotima's house so as not to involve the aristocracy, an unspoken sense of re- sponsibility had reigned there, for Diotima had made up her mind to prove to her husband, now or never, that her salon was no plaything. His Grace had confided in her that the great patriotic campaign needed a crowning idea, and it was her burning ambition to fmd it. The thought of creating something with the resources of an empire and before the attentive eyes ofthe world, an embodiment ofculture at its greatest or, more modestly circumscribed, perhaps something that would reveal the innermost being of Austrian culture-this thought moved Diotima as if the door to her salon had suddenly
Pseudoreality Prevails · 1 og
110 • THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
sprung open and the boundless ocean were lapping at her threshold like an extension of the floor.
There is no denying that her first reaction to this vision was the sense of the momentary gaping of an illimitable void.
First impressions are so often right! Diotima felt sure that some- thing incomparable was going to happen, and she summoned up her many ideals; she mobilized all the pathos of hEtr schoolgirl history lessons, through which she had learned to think in terms of empires and centuries; she did absolutely everything one has to do in such a situation. But after a few weeks had passed in this fashion, she had to face the fact that no inspiration whatsoever had come her way. What Piotima felt toward her husband at this point would have been ha- tred, had she been at all capable of hatred-such a base impulse! Instead, she became depressed, and began to feel a "resentment against everything" such as she had never known before.
It was at this point that Dr. Arnheim arrived, accompanied by his little black servant, and shortly thereafter paid his momentous call on Diotima.
THE UNION OF SOUL AND ECONOMICS. THE MAN WHO CAN ACCOMPLISH THIS WANTS TO ENJOY THE BAROQUE CHARM OF OLD AUSTRIAN CULTURE. AND SO AN IDEA FOR THE PARALLEL CAMPAIGN IS BORN
Diotima never had an improper thought, but on this day there must have been all sorts ofgoings-on in her mind as it dwelled on the inno- cent little black boy, after she had sent "Rachelle" out of the room. She had willingly listened once again to the maid's story after Ulrich had left the house of his "great cousin," and the beautiful, ripe woman was feeling young and as if she were playing with a tinkling
toy. There had once been a time when the aristocracy had kept black sezvants-delightful images of sleigh rides with gaily caparisoned horses, plumed lackeys, and frost-powdered trees passed through her mind-but all this picturesque aspect of high life had perished long ago. ''The soul has gone out of society these days," she thought. Something in her heart sided with the dashing outsider who still dared keep a blackamoor, this improperly aristocratic bourgeois, this intruder who put to shame the propertied heirs of tradition, as the learned Greek slave had once shamed his Roman masters. Cramped as her self-confidence was by all sorts of considerations, it took wing and gladly deserted to his colors as a sister spirit, and this feeling, so natural compared with her other feelings, even made her overlook that Dr. Arnheim-the rumors were still contradictory, nothing was yet known for certain-was presumed to be of Jewish descent; at least on his father's side, it was reported with certainty. His mother had been dead so long that it would take some time for the facts to be established. ·It might even have been possible that a certain cruel Weltschmerz in Diotima's heart was not at all interested in a denial.
She had cautiously permitted her thoughts to stray from the black- amoor and approach his master. Dr. Paul Arnheim was not only a rich man but also a man of notable intellect. His fame went beyond the fact that he was heir to world-spanning business interests; the books he had written in his leisure hours were regarded in advanced circles as extraordinary. The people who form such purely intellec- tual groups are above social and financial considerations, but one must not forget that precisely for that reason they are especially fas- cinated by a rich man who joins their ranks; furthermore, Arnheim's pamphlets and books proclaimed nothing. less than the merger of soul and economics, or of ideas and power. The sensitive minds of the time, those with the finest antennae for what was in the wind, spread the report that he combined these normally opposite poles in his own person, and they encour~ged the rumor that here was a man for the times, who might be called on one day to guide for the better the destinies of the German Reich and perhaps-who could tell? - even the world. For there had long been a widespread feeling that the principles and methods of old-style politics and diplomacy were steering Europe right into the ditch, and besides, the period ofturn- ing away from specialists had already begun.
Pseudoreality Prevails · 1 1 1
112 • THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
Diotima;s condition, too, could have been expressed as rebellion against the thinking of the older school of diplomacy, which is why she instantly grasped the marvelous similarity between her own posi- tion and that of this brilliant outsider. Besides, the famous man had called on her at the first possible moment; her house was the first by far to receive this mark of distinction, and his letter of introduction from a mutual woman friend mentioned the venerable culture of the Habsburg capital and its people, which this hardworking man hoped to enjoy between unavoidable business engagements. Diotima felt singled out like a writer who is being translated into the language ofa foreign country for the frrst time, when she learned from the letter that this renowned foreigner knew the reputation of her intellect. She noted that he did not look in the least Jewish but was a noble- looking, reserved man of the classic-Phoenician type. Amheim, too, was delighted to find in Diotima not only a woman who had read his books but who, as a classical beauty on the plump side, corresponded to his Hellenic ideal of beauty, with a bit more flesh on her, perhaps,
to soften those strict classical lines. It could not long remain con- cealed from Diotima that the impression she was able to make in a twenty-minute conversation on a man of real worldwide connections was enough to completely dispel all those doubts through which her own husband, caught up as he was in his rather dated diplomatic ways, had insulted her importance.
She took quiet satisfaction in repeating that conversation to her- self. It had barely begun when Amheim was already saying that he had come to this ancient city only to recuperate a little, under the baroque spell of the Old Austrian culture, from the calculations, ma- terialism, and bleak rationalism in which a civilized man's busy work- ing life was spent nowadays.
There is such a blithe soulfulness in this city, Diotima had an- swered, as she was pleased to recall.
"Yes," he had said, "we no longer have any inner voices. We know too much these days; reason tyrannizes our lives. "
To which she had replied: "I like the company of women. They don't know anything and are unfragmented. " .
And Amheim had said: "Nevertheless, a beautiful woman under- stands far more than a man, who, for all his logic and psychology, knows nothing at all of life. "
At which point she had told him that a problem similar to that of freeing the soul from civilization, only on a monumental and national scale, was occupying influential circles here.
' W e m u s t - " s h e h a d s a i d , a n d A m h e i m i n t e r r u p t e d w i t h " T h a t is quite wonderfull"-"bring new ideas, or rather, if I may be permit- ted to say so"-here he gave a faint sigh-"bring ideas for the very first time into the domains of power. " And she had gone on: Com- mittees drawn from all sectors of the population were to be set up in order to ascertain what these ideas should be.
But just at this point Arnheim had said something most important, and in such a tone of warm friendship and respect that the warning left a deep mark on Diotima's mind.
It would not be easy, he had explained, to accomplish anything significant in this way. No democracy of committees but only strong individual personalities, with experience in both reality and the realm ofideas, would be able to direct such a campaign!
Up to this point, Diotima had gone over the conversation in her mind word for word; but here it dissolved into splendor-she could no longer remember what she had answered. A vague, thrilling feel- ing of joy and expectancy had been lifting her higher and higher all this time; now her mind resembled a small, brightly colored child's balloon that had broken loose and, shining glorim~sly, was floating upward toward the sun. And in the next instant it burst.
Thus was an idea it had lacked hitherto born to the great Parallel Campaign.
NATURE AND SUBSTANCE OF A GREAT IDEA
It would be easy to say what this idea consisted of, but no one could possibly describe its significance. For what distinguishes a great, stir- ring idea from an ordinary one, possibly e~en from an incredibly or-
Pseudoreality Prevails · 1 1 3
114 • THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
dinary and mistaken one, is that it exists in a kind of molten state through which the self enters an infinite expanse and, inversely, the expanse of the universe enters the self, so that it becomes impossible to differentiate between what belongs to the self and what belongs to the infinite. This is why great, stirring ideas consist of a body, which like the human body is compact yet frail, and of an immortal soul, which constitutes its meaning but is not compact; on the contrary, it dissolves into thin air at every attempt to grab hold of it in cold words. '
After this preamble it must be said that Diotima's great idea am~untedto nothing more than that the Prussian, Aniheim, was the man to assume the spiritual leadership ofthe great Austrian patriotic endeavor, even though this Parallel Campaign contained a barb of jealousy aimed at Prussia-Germany. But this was only the dead ver- bal body of the idea, and whoever finds it incomprehensible or ab- surd is kicking a corpse. As concerns the soul of this idea, it was chaste and proper, and in any case her decision contained, so to speak, a codicil for Ulrich. She did not know that her cousin had also made an impres~ion on her, although on a far deeper level than Am- heim, and overshadowed by the impression Amheim had made; h! ! -d she realized this, she would probably have despised herself for it. But she had instinctively guarded herself against such knowledge by de- claring before her conscious mind that Ulrich was "immature," even though he was older than she was. She took the position that she felt sorry for him, which facilitated her conviction that it was a duty to choose Amheim instead of Ulrich for the responsibilities of leading the campaign. On the other hand, after she had given birth to this resolution, feminine logic dictated that the slighted party now needed and deserved her help. If he felt shortchanged somehow, there was no better way to make up for it than by taking part in the great campaign, where he would have occasion to be much in her and Aniheim's company. So Diotima decided on that, too, but only as one tucks in a loose end.
A CHAPTER THAT MAY BE SKIPPED BY ANYONE NOT P ARTICULARL Y IMPRESSED BY THINKING AS AN OCCUP A TION
Ulrich, meanwhile, was at home, sitting at his desk, wor}W;lg. He had got out the research paper he had interrupted in the middle weeks ago when he had decided to return from abroad; he did not intend to finish it, but it diverted him to see that he could still do that sort of thing. The weather was fine, but in the last few days he had gone out only on brieferrands; he had not even set foot in the garden. He had drawn the curtains and was working in the subdued light like an acro- bat in a dimly lit circus arena rehearsing dangerous new somersaults for a panel of experts before the public has been let in. The preci- sion, vigor, and sureness ofthis mode ofthinking, which has no equal anywhere in life, filled him with something like melancholy.
He now pushed back the sheets of paper covered with symbols and formulas, the last thing he had written down being an equation for the state ofwater as a physical example to illustrate the applica- tion of a new mathematical process; but his thoughts must have strayed a while before.
'Wasn't I telling Clarisse something about water? " he mused, but could not recall the particulars. But it didn't really matter, and his thoughts roamed idly.
Unfortunately, nothing is so hard to achieve as a literary represen- tation of a man thinking. When someone asked a great scientist how he managed to come up with so much that wasnew, he replied: ·"Be- cause I never stop thinking about it. '~ And it is surely safe to say that unexpected insights turn up for no other reason than that they are expected. They are in no small part a success of character, emotional stability, unflagging ambition, and unremitting work. What a bore such constancy must bel Looking at it another way, the solution of an intellectual problem comes about not vety differently from a dog
115
116 · THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
with a stick in his mouth trying to get through a narrow door; he will tum his head left and right until the stick slips through. We do much the same thing, but with the difference that we don't make indis- criminate attempts but already know from experience approximately how it's done. And if a clever fellow naturally has far more skill and experience with these twistings and turnings than a dim one, the slip- ping-through takes the clever fellow just as much by surprise; it is suddenly there, and one perceptibly feels slightly disconcerted be- cause one's ideas seem to have come of their own accord instead of waiting for their creator. This disconcerted feeling is nowadays called intuition by many people who would formerly, believing that it must be regarded as something suprapersonal, have called it inspira- tion; but it is only something impersonal, namely the affinity and co- herence of the things themselves, meeting inside a head.
The better the head, the less evident its presence in this process. As long as the process of thinking is in motion it is a quite wretched state, as if all the brain's convol~tions were suffering from colic; and when it is finished it no longer has the form ofthe thinking process as one experiences it but already that ofwhat has been thought, which is regrettably_ impersonal, for the thought then faces outward and is dressed for communication to the world. When a man is in the pro- cess of thinking, there is no way to catch the moment between the personal and the impersonal, and this is manifestly why thinkitig is such an embarrassment for writers that they gladly avoid it.
But the man without qualities was now thinking. One may draw the conclusion from this that it was, at least in part, not a personal affair. But then what is it? World in, and world out; aspects of world falling into place inside a head. Nothing of any importance had oc- curred to him; after he had thought about water as an example, noth- ing had occurred to·him except that water is something three times the size of the land, even counting only what everyone recognizes as water: rivers, seas, lakes, springs. It was long thought to be akin to air. The great Newton thought so, and yet most ofhis other ideas are still as up-to-date as ifthey had been thought today. The Greeks thought that the world and life had arisen from water. It was a god: Okeanos. Later, water sprites, elves, mermaids, and nymphs were invented. Temples and oracles were built by the water's edge. The cathedrals of Htldesheim, Paderbom, and Bremen were all built over springs,
and behold, are these cathedrals not still standing today? And isn't water still used for baptism? And aren't there devotees of water and apostles of natural healing, whose souls are in such oddly sepulchral health? So there was a place in the world like a blurred spot or grass trodden flat. And of course the man without qualities also had mod- em scientific concepts in his head, whether he happened to be think- ing ofthem or not.
According to them water is a colorless liquid, blue only in thick layers, odorless and tasteless, as you recited over and over in school until you can never forget it, although physiologically it also contains bacteria, vegetable matter, air, iron, calcium sulfate, and calcium bicarbonate, and although physically this archetype of liquids is not basically a liquid at all but, depending on circum- stances, a solid, a liquid, or a gas. Ultimately it all dissolves into sys- tems of formulas, all somehow interlinked, and there were only a few dozen people in the whole wide world who thought alike about even so simple a thing as water; all the rest talk about it in languages that belong somewhere between today and some thousands of years ago. So one must say that as soon as a man begins to reflect even a little, he falls into disorderly company!
Now Ulrich remembered that he had, in fact, told all this to Cla- risse, who was no better educated than a little animal; but notwith- standing the superstitions she was made of, one had a vague feeling of oneness with her. The thought pricked him like a hot needle.
He was annoyed with himself.
The well-known ability of thought as recognized by doctors to dis- solve and dispel those deep-raging, morbidly tangled and matted conflicts generated in the dank regions ofthe selfapparently rests on nothing other than its social and worldly nature, which links the indi- vidual creature to other people and objects. But unfortunately the healing power of thought seems to be the same faculty that dimin- ishes the personal sense of experience. A casual reference to a hair on a nose weighs more than the most important concept, and acts, feelings, and sensations, when reported in words, can make one feel one has been present at a more or less notable personal event, however ordinary and impersonal the acts, feelings, and sensations maybe.
"It's idiotic," Ulrich thought, "but that's how it is. " It made him think of that dumb but deep,· exciting sensation, touching immedi-
Pseudoreality Prevails · 1 1 7
118 • THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
ately on the self, when one sniffs one's own skin. He stood up and pUlled the curtains back from the window. ,
The bark of the trees was still moist from the morning. On the street outside a violet haze ofgasoline fumes hovered. The sun shone through it, and people were moving along briskly. It was an asphalt spring, a seasonless spring day in autumn such as only cities can'con- jure up.
EXPLANA TION AND DISRUPTIONS OF A NORMAL STATE OF AWARENESS
Ulrich and Bonadea had agreed on a signal to let her know that he was at home alone. He was always alone, but he gave no signal. He must have expected for some tiple that Bonadea, hatted and veiled, would show·up unbidden. For Bonadea was madly jealous. When she came to see a man-even ifit was only to tell him how much she despised him-she always arrived full of inner weakness,,what with the impressions of the street and the glances of the men she passed on the way still rocking in her like a faint seasickness. But when the man sensed her weakness and made straight for her body, even though he had callously neglected her for so long, she was hurt, picked a quarrel, delayed with reproachful remarks what she herself could hardly bear to wait for any longer, and had the air of a duck shot through the wings that has fallen into the sea of love and is try- ing to save itself by swimming.
And all of a sudden she really was sitting here, crying and feeling mistreated.
At such moments when she was angry at her lover, she passion- ately begged her husband's forgiveness for her lapses. In accordance with a good old rule of unfaithful women, which they apply so as not to betray . themselves by an untimely slip of the tongue, she had told
her husband about the interesting scholar she sometimes ran into on her visits to a woman friend, although she was not inviting him over because he was too spotled socially to come from his house to hers and she did not find him interesting enough to invite anyway. The half-truth in this story made it an easier lie, and the other half she used as a grievance against her lover.
How was she supposed to explain to her husband, she asked Ul- rich, why she was suddenly visiting her friend less and less? How could she make him understand such fluctuations in her feelings? She cared about the truth because she cared about all ideals, but Ul- rich was dishonoring her by forcing her to deviate further from them than was necessary!
She put on a passionate scene, and when it was over, reproaches, avowals, and kisses flooded the ensuing vacuum. When these, too, were over, nothing had happened; the chitchat gushed back to fill the void, and time blew little bubbles like a glass of stale water.
"How much more· beautiful she is when she ·goes wtld," Ulrich thought, "but how mechanically it all finished again. " The sight of her had excited him and enticed him to make love to her, but now that it was done he felt again how little it had to do with him person- ally. Another abundantly clear demonstration of how a healthy man can be turned with incredible speed into a frothing lunatic. But this erotic transformation of the consciousness seemed only a special in- stance of something much more general: for an evening at the thea- ter, a concert, a church service, all such manifestations of the inner life today are sirntlar, quickly dissolving islands of a second state of consciousness that is sometimes interpolated into the ordinary one.
"Only a little while ago," he thought, "I was still working, and before that I was on the street and bought some paper. I sirld hello to a man I know from the Physics Society, a man with whom I had a serious talk not so long ago. And now, if only Bonadea would hurry up a little, I could look something up in those books I can see from here through the crack in the door. Yet in between we flew through a cloud of insanity, and it is just as uncanny how solid experiences close over this vanishing gap again and assert themselves in all their tenacity. "
But Bonadea did not hurry up, and Ulrich was forced to think of something else. His boyhood friend Waite~, little Clarisse's husband,
Pseudoreality Prevails · 1 1 9
120 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
who had become so odd, had once said of him: "Ulrich always puts tremendous energy into doing only whatever he considers unneces- sary. " He happened to remember it at this moment and thought, "The same thing could be said about all of us nowadays. " He remem- bered quite well! A wooden balcony ran all around the country hotll! e; Ulrich was the guest of Cl~sse's parents; it was a few days before the wedding, and Walter was jealous of him. It was amazing how jealous Walter could be. Ulrich was standing outside in the sun- shine when Clarisse and Walter came into the room that lay behind the balcony. He overheard their conversation without trying to keep out ofsight. All he remembered ofit now was that one sentence. And the scene: the shadowy depths of the room hung like a wrinkled, slightly open pouch on the sunny glare of the outside wall. In the folds of this pouch Walter and Clarisse appeared. Walter's face was painfully drawn and looked as if it had long yellow teeth. Or one could also say that a pair of long yellow teeth lay in a jeweler's box lined with black velvet and that these two people stood spookily by. The jealousy was nonsense, of course; Ulrich did not desire his friends' wives. But Walter had always had a quite special ability to experience intensely. He never got what he was after because he was so swamped by his feelings. He seemed to have a built-in, highly me- lodious amplifier of the minor joys and miseries of life. He was al- ways paying out emotional small change in gold and silver, while Ulrich operated on a larger scale, with, so to speak, intellectual checks made out for vast sums-but it was only paper, after all. When Ulrich visualized Walter at his most characteristic, he saw him reclining at a forest's edge. He was wearing shorts and, oddly enough, black socks. Walter did not have a man's. legs, neither the strong muscular kind nor the skinny sinewy kind, but the legs of a girl; a not particularly attractive girl with soft, plain legs. With his hands behind his head he gazed at the landscape, and heaven forbid he should be disturbed. Ulrich did not remember actually having seen Walter like this on any specified occasion which stamped itself on his mind; it was more of an image that slowly hardened over a decade and a half, like a great seal. And the memory that Walter had been jealous of him at that time was somehow pleasantly stimulating. It had all happened at that time of life when one still takes delight in oneself. It occurred to Ulrich that he had now been to see them sev-
eral times, "and Walter hasn't been to see me once. But what of it? I might just go out there again this evening. "
He planned, after Bonadea at last finished dressing and left, to send them word ofhis coming. It was not advisable to do thafsort of thing in her presence because of the tedious cross-examination that would inevitably follow.
And since thoughts come and go quickly and Bonadea was far from finished, he had yet another idea. 11lis time it was a little the- ory, simple, illuminating, and time-killing. "A young man with an ac- tive mind," Ulrich reflected, probably still thinking of his boyhood friend Walter, "is constantly sending out ideas in every direction. But only those that find a resonance in his environment will be reflected back to him and consolidate, whUe all the other dispatches are scat- tered in space and lost! " Ulrich took it as a matter of course that a man who has intellect has all kinds of intellect, so that intellect is more original than qualities. He himself was a man of many contra- dictions and supposed that all the qualities that have ever manifested themselves in human beings lie close together in every man's mind, if he has a mind at all. This may not be quite right, but what we know about the origin of good and evU suggests that while everyone has a mind of a certain size, he can still probably wear a great variety of clothing in that size, if fate so determines. And so Ulrich felt that what he had just thought was not entirely without significance. For if, in the course of time, commonplace and impersonal ideas are auto- matically reinforced whUe unusual ideas fade away, so that almost everyone, with a mechanical certainty, is bound to become increas- ingly mediocre, this explains why, despite the thousandfold possibili- ties available to everyone, the average human being is in fact average. And it also explains why even among those privUeged persons who make a place for themselves and achieve recognition there will be found a certain mixture of about 51 percent depth and 49 percent shallowness, which is the most successful of all. Ulrich had perceived this for a long time as so intricately senseless and unbearably sad that he would have gladly gone on thinking about it.
He was put off by Bonadea's still giving no sign that she was done. Peering cautiously through the half-open door to the bedroom, he saw that she had stopped dressing. She felt it was indelicate ofhim to be so absentminded when they should be savoring the last drops of
Pseudoreality Prevails · 1 2 1
122 • THE MAN WITH 0 U T QUALITIES
their precious time together; hurt by his silence, she was waiting to see what he would do. She had picked up a book that had in it, luck- ily, beautiful pictures from the history of art.
Ulrich was irritated by her waiting and pursued his meditations in a state of vague impatience.
ULRICH HEARS VOICES
Suddenly his thoughts focused, and as though he were looking through a chink between them, he saw Christian Moosbrugger, the carpenter, and his judges.
In a manner that was painfully ridiculous to anyone not of his mind, the judge spoke:
"Why did you wipe the blood off your hands? -Why did you throw the knife away? --. -Why did you change into a clean suit and underwear and clean clothes afterward? -Because it was Sunday? Not l;>ecause they were bloodstained? -How could you go to a dance that same evening? What you had done did not prevent you from going out for a good time? Did you feel no remorse whatsoever? "
Something flickers in Moosbrugger's mind-old prison wisdom: Feign remorse. The flicker gives a twist to his mouth and he says: "Of course I did! "
"But at the police station you said: 'I feel no remorse at all, only such hate and rage I could explode! ' " the judge caught him out.
"That may be so," Moosbrugger says, recovering himself and his dignity, "it may be that I had no other feelings then. "
"You are a big, strong man," the prosecutor cuts in, "how could you possibly have been afraid of a girl like Hedwig? "
"Your Honor," Moosbrugger answers with a smile, "she was mak- ing up to me. She threatened to be even more treacherous than I usually expected women of her sort to be. I may look strong, and I 3lll-''
"Well then," the presiding judge growls, leafing through his files.
"But in certain situations," Moosbrugger says loudly, "I am very shy, even cowardly. "
The judge's eyes dart up from the file; like two birds taking off from a branch, they abandon the sentence they had just been perch- ing on.
"But the time you picked that fight with the men on the building site you weren't at all cowardly! " the judge says. "You threw one of them down two floors, you pulled a knife on the others-"
"Your Honor," Moosbrugger cries out in a threatening voice, "I still stand today on the standpoint-"
The presiding judge waves this away.
"Injustice," Moosbrugger says, "must be the basis of my brutality. I have stood before the court, a simple man, and thought Your Hon- ors must know everything anyway. But you have let me down! "
The judge's face had long been buried again in the file.
The prosecutor smiles·and says in a kindly tone: "But surely Hed- wig was a perfectly harmless girl? "
"Not to me she wasn't! " Moosbrugger says, still indignant.
"It seems to me," the presiding judge says emphatically, "that you always manage to put the blame on someone else. "
"Now tell me, why did you start stabbing her? " the prosecutor gently begins at the beginning again.
31
WHOSE SIDE ARE YOU ON?
Was it something he had heard at the session ofthe trial he attended, or had he just picked it up from the reports he had read? He remem- bered it all so vividly now, as though he could actually hear these voices. He had never in his life "heard voices"-by God, he was not like that. But if one does hear them, then something descends like
Pseudoreality Prevails · 1 2 3
124 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
the quiet peace of a snowfall. Suddenly walls are there, from the earth to the sky; where before there was air, one strides through thick soft walls, and all the voices that hopped from one place to an- other in the cage of the air now move about freely within the white walls that have fused together down to their inmost essence.
He was probably overstimulated from work and boredom; such things happen sometimes; anyway, he didn't find it half bad, hearing voices. Suddenly he was saying under his breath, "We have a second home, where everything we do is innocent. "
Bonadea was lacing up a string. She had meanwhile come into his room. She was displeased with their conversation; she found it in poor taste. She had long since forgotten the name of the man who had killed that girl, the case the papers had been so full of, and it all came back to mind only reluctantly when Ulrich began to speak of him.
"But if Moosbrugger can evoke this disturbing impression of inno- cence," he said after a while, "how much more innocent that poor, ragged, shivering creature was, with those mouse eyes under that kerchief, that Hedwig, who begged him for a night's shelter in his room and got herself killed for it. " .
"Must you? " Bonadea offered and shrugged her white shoulders. For when Ulrich gave this turn to the conversation, it came at the maliciously chosen moment when the clothes his offended friend had halfput on when she came into his room, thirsting for reconcilia- tion, were once more heaped on the carpet, forming a small, charm- ingly mythological crater of foam like the one that had given birth to Aphrodite. Bonadea was therefore ready to detest Moosbrugger, and to pass over the fate of his victim with a fleeting shudder. But Ulrich
would not let it go at that, and insisted on vividly depicting for her Moosbrugger's impending fate.
"Two men who have no bad feelings against him at all will put the noose around his neck, only because that is what they are paid for. Perhaps a hundred people will be watching, some because it is their job, others because everyone wants to have seen an execution once in his life. A solemn gentleman in a top hat, frock coat, and black gloves will then tighten the noose, while at the same moment his helpers grab hold ofMoosbrugger's legs and pull, to break his neck. Then the . man with the black gloves plays doctor, and lays a hand on Moos-
brugger's heart to check whether it is still beating-because if it is, the whole procedure has to be gone through once again, more impa- tiently and with less solemnity. Now, are you really for Moosbrugger or against him? " Ulrich asked.
Slowly and painfully, like a pe~on awakened at the wrong time, Bonadea had lost "the mood," as slie was accustomed to calling her fits of adultery. Now, after her hands had irresolutely held her slip- ping clothes and open corset for a while, she had to sit down. Like every woman in a similar situation, she had firm confidence in an established public order ofsuch a degree ofjustice that one could go about one's private affairs without having to think about it. But now, reminded of the opposite, compassionate partisanship for Moos- brugger as victim took hold of her, sweeping aside any thought of Moosbrugger the criminal.
"Then you are always for the victim," Ulrich insisted, "and against the act? "
Bonadea expressed the obvious feeling that such a conversation in such a situation was not appropriate.
"But ifyour judgment is so consistent in condemning the act," Ul- rich replied, instead of instantly apologizing, "then how can you jus- tify your adulteries, Bonadea? "
It was the plural that was in such especially bad taste! Bonadea said nothing but sat down, with a disdainful look, in one of the luxuri- ous armchairs and stared up, insulted, at the dividing line between wall and ceiling.
Pseudoreality Prevails · 1 2 5
THE FORGOTTEN, HIGHL Y RELEV ANT STORY . OF THE MA. JOR'S WIFE
It is not advisable to feel kinship with an obvious lunatic, nor did Ul- rich do so. And yet why did one expert maintain that Moosbrugger was a lunatic and the other that he was not? Where had the reporters got their slickly factual account of the work of Moosbrugger's knife? And by what qualities did Moosbrugger arouse that excitement and horror that made half of the two million people who lived in this city react to him as if he were a family quarrel or a broken engagement, something so personally exciting that it stirred normally dormant areas of the soul, while his story was a more indifferent novelty in the country towns·and meant nothing at all in Berlin or Breslau, where from time to time they had their own Moosbruggers, the Moosbrug- gers in their own families, to think about. The awful way society had of toying with its victims preoccupied Ulrich. He felt an echo of it in himselftoo. No impulse stirred in him either to free Moosbrugger or to assist justice, and his feelings stood on end like a eat's fur. For some unknown reason Moosbrugger concerned him more deeply than the life he himselfwas leading. Moosbrugger seized him like an obscure poem in which everything is slightly distorted and displaced, and reveals a drifting meaning fragmented in the depths of the mind.
"Thrill-seeking! " He pulled himself up short. To be fascinated with the gruesome or the taboo, in the admissible form of dreams and neuroses, seemed quite in character for the people of the bour- geois age. "Either/or! " he thought. "Either I like you or I don't. Ei- ther I defend you, freakishness and all, or I ought to punch myself in the jaw for playing around with this monstrosity! " And finally, a cool but energetic compassion would also be appropriate here. There was a lot that could be done in this day and age to prevent suc! t events and su<:h characters from happening, if only society would make half the moral effort it demands of such victims. But then it turned out
that there was yet another angle from which the matter could be con- sidered, and strange memories rose up in Ulrich's mind.
We never judge an act by that aspect of it which is pleasing or dis- pleasing to God. It was Luther, oddly enough, who had said that, probably un'der the influence of one of the mystics with whom he was friends for a while. It could certainly have been said by many another religious. They were, in the bourgeois sense, all immoralists. They distinguished between the sins and the soul, which can remain immaculate despite the sins, almost as Machiavelli distinguished the ends from the means. The "human heart" had been "taken from them. " "In Christ too there was an outer and an inner man, and ev- erything he did with regard to outward things he did as the outer man, while his inner man stood by in immovable solitude," says Eck- hart. Such saints and believers would in the end have been capable of acquitting even Moosbrugger! Mankind has certainly made progress since then, but even though it will kill Moosbrugger, it still has the weakness to venerate those men who might-who knows? -have ac- quitted him.
And now Ulrich remembered a sentence, which was preceded by a wave of uneasiness: "The soul of the Sodomite might pass through the throng without misgiving, and with a child's limpid smile in its eyes; for everything depends on an invisible principle. " This was not so very different from the other sayings, yet in its slight exaggeration it had the sweet, sickly breath of corruption. And as it turned out, a space belonged to this saying, a room with yellow French paperbacks on the tables and glass-bead curtains instead of doors; and a feeling stirred in his chest as when a hand reaches inside the split carcass of a chicken to pull out the heart: It was Diotima who had uttered that sentence the last time he saw her. It came, moreover, from a con- temporary author Ulrich had loved in his youth but whom he had since learned to regard as a parlor philosopher, and aphorisms like this taste like bread doused with perfume, so that for decades one doesn't want to have anything to do with any of it.
Yet however strong the distaste that this aroused in Ulrich, he thought it disgraceful that he had let it keep him all his life from re- turning to the other, authentic statements of that mysterious lan- guage. For he had a special, instinctive understanding for them,
Pseudoreality Prevails · 1 2 7
128 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
which might rather oe called a familiarity that leapt over the under- standing, although he could never make up his mind to embrace them wholeheartedly as tenets of faith. They lay-such statements, which spoke to him with a fraternal sound, with a gentle, dark in- wardness that was the opposite of the hectoring tones of mathemati- cal or scientific language, though otherwise indefinable-like islands scattered among his preoccupations, without connection and rarely visited; yet, when he surveyed them, to the extent that he had come to know them, it seemed to him that he could feel their coherence, as if these islands, only a little separated from each other, were the out- posts of a coast hidden behind them, or represented the remains of a continent that had perished primordial eras ago.
He felt the softness of sea, mist, and low black ridges· of land asleep in a yellowish-gray light. He remembered a little sea voyage, an escape along the lines of "A trip will do you go~dl" or "Try a change of scene! " and he knew precisely what . a strange, absurdly magical experience had superimposed itself by its deterrent f<;>rce once and for all, on all others of its kind. For an instant the heart of a twenty-year-old beat in his breast, whose hairy skin had thickened and coarsened with the years.