He
remembered
his master's wife, when he was sixteen.
Musil - Man Without Qualities - v1
DIOTIMA DISCOVERS THE STRANGE WAYS OF GREAT IDEAS
Ulrich slipped the letter into his pocket to make it disappear, but in any case it would not have been easy to take it up with Diotima. Ever since the newspaper article about the "Year of Austria" had ap- peared, she had been swept along by a rising tide of incoherent activ- ity. Not only did Ulrich hand over to her, preferably unread, all the files he received from Count Leinsdorf, but every day the mail brought heaps of letters and press clippings, and masses of books on approval came from booksellers; her house swelled with people as the sea swells when moon and wind tug at it together; and the tele- phone never stopped ringing. Had little Rachel not taken charge ofit with seraphic zeal, and given most of the information herself because she said she could not bother her mistress incessantly, Diotima would have collapsed under the burden.
Yet this neiVous breakdown that never happened, even as it kept quivering and pulsating in her body, brought Diotima a kind of hap- piness she had never known before. It was a shudder, a being end- lessly showered with significance, a crackling like that of the pressure in the capstone of the world arch, a prickling like the awareness of nothingness when one stands on the summit ofthe highest mountain peak for iniles around. It was, in short, a sense of position that was awakening in this daughter of a modest secondary-school teacher and this young wife of a middle-class vice-consul, which she had re- mained in the freshness of her heart despite her rise in society. Such a sense of position belongs to the unnoticed but essential conditions of life, like not noticing the revolutions of the earth or the part our personality plays in directing our perceptions. Since man is taught not to bear vanity in his heart, he keeps most of it underfoot, in that he walks on the soil of a great fatherland, religion, or income-tax bracket; or else, lacking such a vantage point, he makes do with a place anyone can have, on the momentarily highest point reached by the pillar of time as ·it rises out of the void; in other words, we take pride in living in and for the present moment, when all our predeces- sors have turned to dust and no successors have yet appeared. But if for some reason this vanity, of which we are usually unconscious, suddenly mounts from the feet to the head, it can cause a mild crazi- ness, like that of those virgins who imagine they are pregnant with the globe of the earth itself.
Even Section Chief Tuzzi now paid Diotima the tribute of inquir- ing how things ~ere going, sometimes even asking her to oversee one minor matter or another; at such times the smile with which he usually referred to her salon was replaced by a dignified seriousness. It was still not known to what extent the idea of finding himself placed in the forefront of an international pacifist movement would be agreeable to His Gracious' Majesty, but on this point Tuzzi repeat- edly asked Diotima not to take the slightest step into the field of for- eign affairs without first consulting him. He even suggested on the
. spot that if ever any serious move should be made toward an interna- tional peace campaign, every precaution first immediately be taken against any po. ssible political complications that might ensue. Such a noble idea should in no way be rejected, he explained to his wife, not even ifthere might be some possibility ofrealizing it, but it was abso-
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lutely necessary to keep open one's options for going ahead or re- treating from the very beginning. He then laid out for Diotima the differences between disarmament, a peace conference, a summit meeting, and so on, all the way down to the already mentioned foun- dation for decorating the Peace Palace at The Hague with murals by Austrian artists; he had never before spoken with his wife in this fac- tual manner. Sometimes he would even come back to the bedroom with his briefcase to supplement his remarks, in case he had forgot- ten to add, for instance, that he personally could regard everything having to do with a Global. Austria as conceivable only, of course, as part of a pacifist or humanitarian undertaking of some kind; anything else could only make one look dangerously irresponsible, or some such thing.
Diotima answered with a patient smile: "I shall do my best to do as you wish, but you should not exaggerate the importance of foreign affairs for us. There is a tremendous upsurge, an inner sense of re- demption, coming from the anonymous depths of the people; you
·can't imagine the floods of petitions and suggestions that oveiWhelm me every day. "
She was admirable, for she gave no hint of the enormous difficul- ties she actually had to contend with. In the deliberations of the great central committee, which was organized under the headings of Reli- gion, Justice, Agriculture, Education, and so forth, all idealistic suggestions met with that icy and timorous reserve so familiar to Di- otima from her husband in the days before he had become so atten-- tive. There were times when she felt quite discou~ged from sheer impatience, when she could not conceal from herself that this iner- tial resistance of the world would be hard to break. However clearly she herself could see the Year of Austria as the Year of a Global Austria, and the Austrian nations as the model for the nations of the world-all it took was to prove that Austria was the true home of the human spirit everywhere-it was equally clear that for the slow- witted this concept would have to be fleshed out with a particular content and supplemented by some. inspired symbol, som. ething less abstract, with more sense-appeal, to help them understand. Diotima pored for hours over many books, searching for the right image, and it would have to be a uniquely Austrian symbolic image, of course.
But now Diotima was having strange experiences with the nature of great ideas.
It appeared that she was living in a great age, since the age was full ~fgreat ideas. But one would not believe how hard it was to translate the greatest and most important ofthem into reality, considering that all the conditions for doing so existed except one: knowing which of them was the greatest and most important. Every time Diotima had almost opted in favor of some idea, she could not help noticing that its opposite was equally great an\l equally worthy of realization. That's the way it is, after all, and she couldn't help it. Ideals have curious properties, and one of them is that they tum into their oppo- sites when one tries to live up to them. Take Tolstoy, for instance, and Bertha Suttner, two write~ whose ideas were about equally dis- cussed at the time-but how, Diotima thought, can mankind even have roast chicken without violence? And if one should not kill, as these two writers demanded, what was to be done with the soldiers? They would be unemployed, poor devils, and the criminals would see the dawn of a golden age. Such proposals had actually been made, and signatures were said to be in the process of being collected. Di-
. otima could never have ima~ned a life without eternal verities, but now she found to her amazement that there are two, or more, of every eternal verity. Which is why every reasonable person-Section Chief Tuzzi, in this case, who was to that extent vindicated-has a deeply rooted mistrust of eternal verities. Of course he will never deny that they are indispensable, but he is convinced that people who take them literally must be mad. According to his way of think- ing-which he helpfully offered to his wife-ideals make excess. ive demands on human nature, with ruinous consequences, unless one refuses at the outset to take them quite seriously. The best proof of this that Tuzzi could offer was that such words as "ideal" and "eter- nal verity" never occur at all in government offices, which deal with serious matters. A civil servant who would think of using such an ex- pression in an official communication would instantly be advised to see a doctor to request a medical leave. But even if Diotima listened to him sadly, she always drew new strength from such moments of
weakness, and plunged back into her researches.
Even Count Leinsdorf marveled at her mental energy when he
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finally found the time to come for a consultation with her. His Grace wanted a spontaneous testimonial arising from the midst of the peo- ple. He sincerely wanted to find out the will of the people and to refine it by cautiously influencing it from above, for he hoped one day to submit it to His Majesty, not as a ritual offering from a Byzan- tine monarchy but as a sign of true self-awareness achieved by na- tions adrift in the ~ortexof democracy. Diotima knew that His Grace still clung to the "Emperor of Peace" concept and that of a splendid testimonial demonstration of the True Austria, even though he did not in principle reject the idea ofa Global Austria, but only so long as it properly expressed the sense of a family of nations gathered around their patriarch. From this political family His Grace covertly and tacitly excluded Prussia, even tho~gh. he had nothing against Dr. Arnheim personally and even made a point ofreferring to him as "an interesting person. "
"We certainly don't want anything patriotic in the outworn sense ofthe word," he offered. 'We must shake up the nation, the world. A Year of Austria is a fine idea, it seems to me, and I have in fact al- ready told the fellows from the press myself that the public imagina- tion should be steered in that direction. But once we've agreed on that, what do we do in this Austrian Year-have you thought ofthat, my dear? That, you see, is the problem! That's what we really need to know. Unless we help things along a little from above, the immature elements will gain the upper hand. And I simply haven't the time to think of anything! " ·
Diotlma thought His Grace seemed worried, and said vivaciously: "The campaign is no good at all unless it culminates in a great sym- bol. That much is certain. It must seize the heart ofthe world, but it also needs some influence from above; there is no denying that. An Austrian Year is a brilliant suggestion, but in my opinion a World Year would be still finer, a World-Austrian Year, in which Europe could recognize Austria as its true spiritual home. "
"Not so fast1 Not so fast! " warned Count Leinsdorf, who had often been startled by his friend's spiritual audacity. "Aren't your ideas al- ways perhaps a little excessive, Diotima? This is not the first time you've brought this up, but one can't be too careful. What have you come up with to do in this World Year? "
With this question, however, Count Leinsdorf, led by the blunt-
ness that made his thinking so full of character, had touched Diotima at precisely her most vulnerable point. "Count," she said after some hesitation, "that is the hardest question in the world to answer. I in- tend as soon as possible to invite a circle of the most distinguished men, poets and philosophers, and I will wait to hear what this group has to say before I say anything. "
"Good! " His Grace exclaimed, instantly won over for a postpone- ment. "How right you are! One can never be careful enough. Ifyou only knew what I have to listen to day in and day out! "
QUALMS ABOUT THE PARALLEL CAMPAIGN. BUT IN THE HISTORY OF MANKIND THERE IS NO VOLUNTARY TURNING BACK
On one occasion His Grace also had time to go into it more deeply with Ulrich.
"I can't say I care too much for this Dr. Arnheim," he said confi- dentially. "A brilliant man, of course; no wonder your cousin is im- pressed with him. But he is; after all, a Prussian. He has a way of looking on. You know, when I was a little boy, in '65 it was, my sainted father had a shooting party at Chrudim Castle and one of the guests had the same way of looking on, and a year later it turned out that no one had the remotest idea who had brought him along and that he was a major on the Prussian general staff! Not, of course, that I'm suggesting anything, but I don't altogether like this fellow Am- heim knowing all about us. "
"Your Grace," Ulrich said, ''I'm glad you offer me a chance to speak my mind on the subject. It's time something was done; things are going on that make me wonder and that aren't suitable for a for- eign observer to see. After all, the Parallel Campaign is supposed to raise everyone's spirits, isn't it? Surely that is what Your Grace intended? "
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''Well of course, naturally. "
"But the opposite is happening! " Ulrich exclaimed. "I have the im- pression it's making all the best people look unusually concerned, even downhearted! "
His Grace shook his head and twiddled his thumbs, as he always did when his mood darkened. He had, in fact, made similar observa- tions himself.
''Ever since it got around that I have some connection with the Parallel Campaign," Ulrich went on, "whenever I get into conversa- tion with someone it doesn't take three minutes before he says to me: 'What is it you're really after with this Parallel Campaign? There's no such thing nowadays as great achievements or great men! ' "
''Well, themselves excepted, of course," Count Leinsdorf inter- jected. "I know all about that; I hear it all the time too. The big indus- trialists grumble that the politicians don't give them enough protective tariffs, and the politicians grumble about industry for not coming up with enough money for their election campaigns. "
"Quite sol" Ulrich proceeded with his exposition. "The surgeons clearly believe that surgery has made progress since the days of Bill- roth, but they say that medicine as a whole, and science in general, are doing too little for surgery. I would even go so far, if you will permit me, as to suppose that the theologians believe theology has made advances. since the time ofChrist-"
Count Leinsdorf raised a hand in mild protest.
"Excuse me if I said something inappropriate, especially as it was quite unnecessary; my point is a quite general one. The surgeons, as I said, claim that scientific research is not fulfilling its promise, but if you talk to a research scientist about the present, he will complain that, much as he would like to broaden his outlook a bit, the theater bores him and he can't find a novel that entertains and stimulates him. Talk to a poet, and he'll tell you that there is no faith. Talk to a painter-since I want to leave the theologians out ofit-and he'll be pretty sure to tell you that painters can't give their best in a period that has such miserable literature and philosophy. Of course the se- quence in which they blame one another is not always the same, but it always reminds one a bit of musical chairs, if you know what I mean, sir, or Puss in the Comer, and I've no idea what the law or the rule is at the bottom ofit. r m afraid it looks as though each individual
may still be satisfied with himself, more or less, but collectively, for some universal reason, mankind seems ill at ease inside its own skin, and the Parallel Campaign seems destined to bring this condition to light. "
"Good heavens," His Grace said in response to this analysis, with- out its being quite clear what he meant by it, "nothing but 'ingrati- tude! "
"I have already, incidentally," Ulrich continued, "two folders full of general proposals, which I've had no previous opportunity to re- turn to Your Grace. One of them I've headed: Back to-! It's amaz- ing how many people tell us that the world was better off in earlier times and want the Parallel Campaign to take us back there. Without counting the understandable slogan, Back to Religion! , we still have a Back to the Baroque, Back to Gothic, Back to Nature, Back to Goe- the, to Ancient Germanic Law, to Moral Purity, and quite a few more. "
"Hmm, yes. But perhaps there is a real idea in there somewhere, which it would be a mistake to discourage? " Count Leinsdorf offered.
"That's possible, but how should one deal with it? 'After careful consideration of your esteemed letter of such-and-such a date, we regret that we do not regard the present moment as suitable . . . '? Or 'We have read your letter with interest, please supply details on how restoration of the world as it was in the Baroque, the Gothic, et cet- era, et cetera, is to be effected . . . and so on'? "
Ulrich was smiling, but Count Leinsdorf felt he was treating the situation with a little too much levity, and twiddled his thumbs with renewed vigor to ward it off. His face, with its handlebar mustache, assumed a hardness reminiscent of the Wallenstein era, and then he came out with a most noteworthy statement:
"Dear Doctor," he said, "in the history of mankind there is no vol- untary turning back! "
This statement surprised no one more than Count Leinsdorfhim- self, who had actually intended to say something quite different. As a conservative, he had been annoyed with Ulrich, and had wanted to point out to him that the middle classes had spumed the universal spirit of the Catholic Church and were now suffering the conse- quences. He was also on the point of praising the times of absolute
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centralism, when the world was still led by persons aware of their responsibilities in accordance with fixed principles. But while he was still groping for words, it suddenly occurred to him what a nasty sur- prise it would be to wake up one morning without a hot bath and trains, with an Imperial town crier riding through the streets instead ofthe morning papers. And so Count Leinsdorfthonght: "Things can never again be what they were, the way they were," and as he thought this he was quite astonished. For one assumed that if there was indeed no voluntary going back in history, then mankind was like a man driven along by some inexplicable wanderlust, a man who could neither go back nor arrive anywhere, and this was a quite re- markable condition.
Now, while His Grace had an extraordinary knack for keeping apart two ideas that might contradict each other. so that they never came together in his consciousness, he should have firmly rejected ~s particular idea, whic~was inimical to all his principles. However, he had taken rather a liking to Ulrich, and as far as time permitted, he enjoyed explaining political matters on a strictly logical basis to this intellectually alert young man who, had come to him so well rec- ommended, whose only drawback was his middle-class status, which made him something of an outsider when it came to the really great issues. But once one begins with logic, where one idea follows from the immediately preceding one, one never knows where it may all come out at the end. And so Count Leinsdorf did not retract his statement but merely gazed at Ulrich in intense sllence.
Ulrich pi~ked up a second folder and took advantage of the pause to hand both files to His Grace.
"I had to head the second one Forward to-/" he began to explain, but His Grace started to his feet and found that his time was up. He urged Ulrich to leave the continuation of their talk for another time, when there would be rp. ore leisure to give it some thought.
"By the way," he said, already on his feet, "your cousin is going to have a gathering of our most distinguished thinkers to discuss all these problems. Do go; please be sw:e to go; I don't know whether I shall be permitted to be there. "
Ulrich put back his folders, and ~ount Leinsdorf, in the shadow of
the open door, turned around once more. "A great experiment natu- rally makes everyone nervous. Butwe'll shake them up! " His sense of propriety would not let him leave Ulrich behind without some word of comfort.
59
MOOSBRUGGER REFLECTS
Moosbrugger had meanwhile settled down in his new prison as best he could. The gate had hardly shut behind him when he was bel- lowed at. He had been threatened with a beating when he protested, if he remembered rightly. lie had been put in solitary. For his walk in the yard he was handcuffed, and the guards' eyes were glued to him. They had shaved his head, even though his sentence was under appeal and not yet legally in force, because, they said, they had to take his measurements. They had lathered him all over with a stink- ing soft soap, on the pretext of disinfecting him. As an old hand, he knew that all this was against regulations, but behind that iron gate it is not so easy to maintain one's dignity. They did as they pleased with him. He demanded to see the warden, and complained. The warden had to admit that some things were not in accordance with regula- tions, but it was not a punishment, he said, only a precaution. Moos- brugger complained to the prison chaplain, but the chaplain was a kindly old man whose amiable ministry was anachronistically flawed by his inability to cope with sexual crimes. He abhorred them with the lack of understanding of a body that had never even touched the periphery of such feelings, and was even dismayed that Moosbrug- ger's honest appearance moved him to the weakness of feeling per- sonally sorry for him. He sent Moosbrugger to the prison doctor, and for his own part, as in all such cases, sent up to the Creator an omni- bus prayer that did not go into detail but dealt in such general terms
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with man's proneness to error that Moosbrugger was included in the · moment of prayer along with the freethinkers and atheists. The prison doctor told Moosbrugger that he was making a mountain out of a molehill, gave him a friendly slap on the back, and absolutely refused to pay any attention to his complaints, on the grounds that- if Moosbrugger understood him right-it was all beside the point as long as the question of whether he was insane or only malingering had not been settled by the medical authorities. Infuriated, Moos- brugger suspected that all these people spoke to suit themselves, and that it was this trick with words that gave them the power to do as they pleased with him. He had the feeling of simple people that the educated ought to have their tongues cut out. He looked at the doc- tor's face with its dueling scars; at the priest's face, withered from the inside; at the austerely tidy office face of the warden; saw each face looking back at him in its own way, and saw in all of them something beyond-his reach that they had in common, which had been his life- long enemy. The constricting pressure that in the outside world forces every person, with all his self-conceit, to wedge himself with effort among all that other flesh, was somewhat eased-despite all the discipline--under the roof of the prison, where everything lived for waiting, and the interaction of the inmates, even when it was coarse and violent, was undermined by a shadow of unreality. Moos- brugger reacted with his whole powerful body to the slackening of
tension after the trial. He felt like a loose tooth. His skin itched. He felt miserable, as if he had caught an infection. It was a self-pitying, tenderly nervous hypersensitivity that came over him sometimes: the woman who lay underground and who had got him into this mess seemed to him a crude, nasty bitch contrasted with a child, ifhe com- pared her to himself.
Just the s~e, Moosbrugger was not altogether dissatisfied. He could tell in many ways that he was a person of some importance here, and it flattered him. Even the attention given to all convicts alikegave him satisfaction. The state had to feed them, bathe them, clothe them, and concern itself with their work, their health, their books, and their songs from the moment they had broken the law; it had never done these things before. Moosbrugger enjoyed this atten- tion, even if it was strict, like a child who has succeeded in forcing its mother to notice it with anger. But he did not want it to continue
·much longer. The idea that his sentence might be commuted to life in prison or in a lunatic asylum sparked in him the resistance we feel when every effort to escape from our circumstances only leads us back to them, time and again. He knew that his lawyer was trying to get the case reopened, that he was to be interrogated all over again, but he made up his mind to oppose that as soon as he could and insist that they kill him.
Above all, he. had to make a dignified exit, for his life had been a battle for his rights. In solitary, Moosbrugger considered what his rights were. He couldn't say. But they were everything he had been cheated of all his life. The moment he thought of that he swelled with emotion. His tongue arched and started to move like a Uppi- zaner stallion in his zeal to pronounce the word nobly enough. "My right," he thought, drawing the word out as long as he could, to real- ize this concept, and thought, as if he were speaking to someone: "If's when you haven't done anything wrong, or something like that, isn't it? " Suddenly he had it: "Right is justice. " That was it. His right was his justice! He looked at his wood-plank bed in order to sit on it, turned awkwardly around to tug at it-in vain, as it was screwed to the floor-then slowly sat down.
He had been cheated of his justice!
He remembered his master's wife, when he was sixteen. He had dreamed that something cold was blowing on his belly, then it had disappeared inside his body; he had yelled and fallen out of bed, and the next morning felt as if he had been beaten black-and-blue. Other apprentices had once told him that you could always get a woman by showing her your fist with the thumb sticking out between the middle and the forefinger. He didn't know what to make of it; they all said they had tried it', but when he thought about it the ground gave way under him, or his head seemed to be screwed on wrong; in short, something was going on inside him that separated him by a hairbreadth from the natural order and was not quite steady. "Missus," he slrld, 'Td like to do something nice to you. . . . " They were alone; she looked into his eyes and must have seen something there; she said: "You just clear out of this kitchen! " He then held up his fist with the thumb sticking out. But the magic worked only halfway: her face turned dark red and she hit him with the wooden ladle in her hand, too fast for him to dodge the blow, right across the face; he realized it only when the blood began to
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trickle over his lips. But he remembered that instant vividly now, for the blood suddenly turned and flowed upward, up above his eyes, and he threw himself on the strapping woman who had so viciously insulted him; the master came in; and what happened then, until the moment he stood in the street with his legs buckling and his things thrown after him, was like a big red cloth being ripped to shreds. That was how they made a mockery and a shambles of his right, and he took to the road again. Can a man fmd his rights on the road? ·All the women were already somebody else's right, and so were all the apples and all the beds. And the police and the judges were worse than the dogs.
But what it really was that always gave people a hold on him, and why they were always throwing him in jails or madhouses, Moos- brugger could never really figure out. He stared long and hard at the floor, at the comers ofhis cell; he felt like a man who has dropped a key on the floor. But he couldn't find it; the floor and the comers turned day-gray and ordinary again,' though just a while ago they had
-been a dreamscape where a thing or a person springs up at the drop of a word.
Moosbrugger mustered all his logic. He could only remember dis- tinctly all the places it began. He could have ticked them off on his fingers and described them. Once, it had been in Linz, another time in Braila. Years had passed between: And the last time it was here in the city. He-could see every stone so sharply outlined, as stones usu- ally aren't. He also remembered the rotten feeling that ! Uways went with it, as ifhe had poison instead of blood in his veins, or something like that. For instance, he was working outdoors and women passed by; he didn't want to look at them, because they bothered him, but new ones kept constantly passing by, so finally his eyes would follow them with loathing, and that slow turning of his eyes this way and that felt as if his eyes were stirring in tar or in setting cement inside him. Then he noticed that his thoughts were growing heavy. He thought slowly anyway, the words gave him trouble, he never had enough words, and sometimes, when he was talking to someone, the other man would look at him in surprise: he wouldn't understand how much was being said in the one word Moosbrugger was uttering so slowly. He envied all those people who had learned to talk easily when they were young. His own words seemed to stick to his gums to
spite him just when he needed them most, and it sometimes took forever to tear out the next syllable so he could go on from there. There was no getting around it: this couldn't be due to natural causes. But when he said in court that it was the Freemasons or the Jesuits or the Socialists who were torturing him this way, nobody un- derstood what he was talking about. Those lawyers and judges could outtalk him, all right, and had all sorts of things to say against him, but none of them had a clue to what was really going on.
When this sort of thing had continued for some time, Moosbrug- ger got frightened. Just try standing in the street with your hands tied, waiting to see what people will do! He knew that his tongue, or something deep inside him, was glued down, and it made him miser- ably unsure of himself, a feeling he had to struggle for days to hide. But then there came a sharp, one could almost say soundless, bound- ary. Suddenly a cold breeze was there. Or eise a big balloon rose up in the air right in front of him and flew into his chest. At the same instant he felt something in his eyes, his lips, the muscles of his face; everything around him seemed to. fade, to tum black, and while the houses lay down on the trees, some cats quickly leapt from the bushes and scurried away. This lasted only for an instant, then it was over.
This was the real beginning of the time they all wanted to know about and never stopped talking about. They pestered him with the most pointless questions; unfortunately, he could remember his ex- periences only dimly, through what they meant to him. Because these periods were all meaning! They sometimes lasted for minutes, sometimes for days on end, and sometimes they changed into other, similar experiences that could last for months. To begin with the lat- ter, because they are simpler, and in Moosbrugger's opinion even a judge could understand then: Moosbrugger heard voices or music or a wind, or a blowing and humming, a whizzing and rattling, or shots, thunder, laughing, shouts, speaking, or whispering. It came at him from every direction; the sounds were in the walls, ill the air, in his clothes, in his body. He had the impression he was carrying it in his body as long as it was silent; once it was out, it hid somewhere hi his surroundings, but never very far from him. When he was work- ing, the voices would speak at him mostly in random words or short phrases, insulting and nagging him, and when he thought of some-
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thing they came out with it before he could, or spitefully said the opposite ofwhat he meant. It was ridiculous to be declared insane on this account; Moosb~gger regarded these voices and visions as mere monkeyshines. It entertained him to hear and see what they did; that was ever so much better than the hard, heavy thoughts he had him- self. But of course he got very angry when they really annoyed him, that was only natural. Moosbrugger knew, because he always paid close attention to all the expressions that were applied to him, that this was called hallucinating, and he was pleased that he had this knack for hallucination that others lacked; it enabled him to see all sorts of things others didn't, such as lovely landscapes and hellish monsters. But he found that they always made far too much of it, and when the stays in mental hospitals became too unpleasant, he main- tained outright that he was only pretending. The know-it-ails would ask him how loud the sounds were; a senseless question, because of course what he heard . was sometimes as loud as a thunderclap, and sometimes the merest whisper. Even the physical pains that some- times plagued him could be unbearable or slight enough to be imagi- nary. That wasn't the important thing. Often he could not have described exactly what he saw, heard, and felt, but he knew what it was. It could be very blurred; the visions came from outside, but a shimmer of observation told him at the same time that they were really something inside himself. The important thing was that it is not at all important whether something is inside or outside; in his condition, it was like clear water on both sides of a transparent sheet of glass.
When he was feeling on top of things Moosbrugger paid no atten- tion at all to his voices and visions but spent his time in thinking. He called it thinking because he had always been impressed with the word. He thought better than other people because he thought both inside and outside. Thinking went on inside him against his will. He said that thoughts were planted in him. He was hypersensitive to the merest trifles, as a woman is when her breasts are tight with milk, but this did not interfere with his slow, manly reflectiveness. At such times his thoughts flowed like a stream running through a lush meadow swelled by hundreds ofleaping brooks.
Now Moosbrugger had let his head drop and was looking down at the wood between his fingers. "A squirrel in these parts is called a
tree kitten," it occurred to him, "but just let somebody try to talk about a tree cat with a straight face! Everyone would prick up their ears as if a real shot had gone off among the farting sound of blanks on maneuvers. In Hesse, on the other hand, it's called a tree fox. Any man who's traveled around knows such things. "
But oh, how curious the psyc. hiatrists got when they showed him a picture of a squirrel and he said: "That's a fox, I guess, or it could be a hare, or maybe a cat or something. " They'd always shoot a question right back at him then: "How much is fourteen plus fourteen? " and he would say in his deliberate way, "Oh, about twenty-eight to forty. " This "about" gave them trouble, which made Moosbrugger grin. It was really so simple. He knew perfectly well that you get twenty- eight when you go on from fourteen to another fourteen; but who says you have to stop there? Moosbrugger's gaze would always range a little farther ahead, like that of a man who has reached the top of a ridge outlined against J. :he sky and fmds that behind it there are other, similar ridges. And if a tree kitten is no cat and no fox, and has teeth like a hare's, and the. fox eats the hare, you don't have to be so partic- ular about what you call it; you just know it's somehow sewntogether out of all those things and goes scampering over the trees. Moos- brugger's experience and conviction were that no thing could be sin- gled out by itself, because things hang together. It had happened that he said to a girl, "Your sweet rose lips," but suddenly the words gave way at their seams and something upsetting happened: her face went gray, like earth veiled in a mist, there was a rose sticking out ofit on a long stem, and the temptation to take a knife and cut it off, or punch it back into the face, was oveiWhelming. Ofcourse, Moosbrugger did not always go for his knife; he only did that when he couldn't get rid of the temptation any other way. Usually he used all his enonnous strength to hold the world together.
In a good mood, he could look a man in the face and see in it his own face, as it might gaze back at him from among the minnows and bright pebbles of a shallow stream; in a bad mood, he could tell by a fleeting glance at a man's face that here was the same man who al- ways gave hl. m trouble, everywhere, no matter how differently he disguised himself each time. How can anyone object to this? W e all have trouble with the same man almost every time. If we were to investigate who the people are we get so idiotically fixated on, it is
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bound to tum out to be the one with the lock to whi<;h we have the key. And in love? How many people look at the same beloved face day in, day out, yet when they shut their eyes can't say what it looks like? Or even aside from love and hate; how incessantly things are subject to change, depending on habit, mood, point of view! How qften joy bums out and an indestructible core of sadness emerges! How often a man calmly beats up another, whom he might as easily leave in peace. Life forms a surface that acts as if it oould not be otherwise, but under its skin things are pounding and pulsing. Moos- brugger always kept his legs solidly planted on real earth, holding them together, sensibly trying to avoid whatever might confuse him. But sometimes a word burst in his mouth, and what a revolution, what a dream ofthings then welled up out ofsuch a cold, burned-out double word as tree kitten or rose lips!
Sitting on that plank in his cell that was both his bed and his table, he deplored his education, which had not taught him to express him- self properly. The little creature with her mouse eyes who was still making so much trouble for him, even though she'd been under- ground for some time, made him angry. They were all on her side. He lumbered to his feet. He felt fragile, like charred wood. He was hungry again; the prison fare fell far short of satisfying a huge man like him, and he had no money for better. In such a state it was im- possible for him to think of everything they wanted to lmow. One of these changes had come on, for days and weeks, the way March comes, or April, and then this business had happened. He lmew nothing more about it than the police already had in their files; he didn't even lmow how it had got into their flles. The reasons, the con- siderations he could remember, he had already stated in court any-
way. But what had really happened seemed to him as if he had suddenly said fluently in a foreign language something that made him feel good but that he could no longer repeat.
"I just want it over and done with as soon as possible! " Moosbrug- ger thought. ·
6o
EXCURSION INTO THE REALM OF LOGIC AND MORALS
Legally, Moosbrugger's case could be summed up in-a sentence. He was one of those borderline cases in law and forensic medicine known even to the layman as a case of diminished responsibility.
These unfortunates typically suffer not only substandard health but also have a substandard disease. Nature has a peculiar prefer- ence for producing such people in droves. Natura non fecit saltus, she makes no jumps but prefers gradual transitions; even on the grand scale she keeps the world in a transitional state between imbe- cility and sanity. But the law takes no notice of this. It says: Non datur tertium sive medium inter duo contradictoria, or in plain language, a person is either capable or not capable of breaking the law; between two contraries there is no third or middle state. It is this ability to choose that makes a person liable to punishment. His liability to pun- ishment makes him legally a person, and as a person in the legal sense he shares in the suprapersonal benefaction of the law. Anyone who cannot grasp this right away should think of the cavalry. A horse that goes berserk every time someone attempts to mount it is treated with special care, given the softest bandages, the best riders, the choicest fodder, and the most patient handling. But ifa cavalryman is guilty of some lapse, he is put in irons, locked in a flea-ridden cage, and deprived of his rations. The reasoning behind this difference is that the horse belongs merely to the empirical animal kingdom, while the dragoon belongs to the logical and moral kingdom. So un- derstood, a person is distinguished from the animals-and, one may add, from the insane-in that he is capable, according to his intellec- tual and moral faculties, ofacting against the law and ofcommitting a
crime. Since a person's liability to punishment is the quality that ele- vates him to the status of a moral being in the first place, it is under- standable that the pillars of the law grimly hang on to it.
There is also the unfortunate complication that court psychiatrists,
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who would be called upon to oppose this situation, are usually far more timid professionally than the jurists. They certify as really in- sane only those persons they cannot cure-which is a modest exag- geration, since they cannot cure the others either. They distinguish between incurable mental diseases, the kind that with God's help will improve after a while of their own accord, and the kind that the doctor cannot cure either but that the patient could have avoided, assuming of course that the right influences and considerations had providentially been brought to bear on him in time. These second and third groups supply those lesser patients whom the angel of medicine treats as sick people when they come to him in his private practice, but whom he shyly leaves to the angel of law when he en- counters them in his forensic practit! e.
Such a case was Moosbrugger. In the course of his life, respectable enough except when interrupted by those unaccountable fits of bloodthirstiness, he had as often been confined in mental institutions as he had been let go, and had been variously diagnosed as a para- lytic, paranoiac, epileptic, and manic-depressive psychotic, until at his recent trial two particularly conscientious forensic psychiatrists had restored his sanity to him. Of course, there was not a single per- son in that vast crowded courtroom, the doctors included, who was not co~vincedthat Moosbrugger was insane, one way or another; but it was not a way that corresponded to the conditions of. insanity laid down by the law, so this insanity could not be acknowledged by con- scientious minds. For if one is partly insane, one is also, juridically, partly sane, and if one is partly sane one is at least partly responsible for one's actions, and if one is partly responsible one is wholly re- sponsible; for responsibility is, as they say, that state in which the individual has the power to devote himself to a specific purpose of his own free will, independently of any compelling necessity, and one cannot simultaneously possess and lack such self-determination.
Not that this excludes the eXistence of persons whose circum- stances and predispositions make it hard for them to "resist immoral impulses" and "opt for the good," as the lawyers put it, and Moos- brugger was such a person, in whom circumstances that would have no effect at all on others were enough to trigger the "inten"t'' to com- mit an offense. First, however, his powers of reasoning and judgment were sufficiently intact, in the view of the court, so that an effort on
his part could just as well have left the crime uncommitted, and there was no reason to exclude him from the moral estate of responsibility. Second, a well-ordered judicial system demands that every culpable act that is wittingly and willingly performed be punished. And third, judicial logic assumes that in all insane persons-with the exception of the most unfortunate, who when asked to multiply 7 times 7 stick out their tongue, or answer "Me" when asked to name His Imperial and Royal Majesty-there is still present a minimal power of dis- crimination and self-control and that it would only have taken a spe- cial effort of intelligence and willpower to recognize the criminal nature of the deed and to resist the criminal impulses. It is surely the least one has a right to expect from such dangerous persons!
Law courts resemble wine cellars in which the wisdom of our forefathers lies in bottles. One opens them and could weep at how unpalatable the highest, most effervescent, degree of the human striving for precision can be before it reaches perfection. And yet it seems to intoxicate the insufficiently seasoned mind. It is a well- known phenomenon that the angel of medicine, if he has listened too long to lawyers' arguments, too often forgets his own mission. He then folds his wings with a clatter and conducts himself in court like a reserve angel of law.
THE lDEAL OF THE THREE TREA TISES, OR THE UTOPIA OF EXACT LIVING
This is how Moosbrugger had come by his death sentence. It was only thanks to the influence of Count Leinsdorf and His Grace's fri(mdship for Ulrich that there was now a chance to review Moos- brugger's mental condition one more time. Ulrich actually had no intention of taking any further interest in Moosbrugger's fate, theb. or later. The depressing mixture of brutality and suffering that is the
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nature of such people was as distasteful to him as the blend of preci- sion and sloppiness that characterized the judgments usually pro- nounced upon them. He lmew precisely what he had to think of Moosbrugger, if he took a sober view of the case, and what measures one might try with such people who belong neither in prison nor in freedom and for whom the mental hospitals were not the answer ei- ther. He also realized that thousands of other people lmew this, too, and were constantly discussing every such problem from the aspects that each ofthem was interested in; he also knew that the state would eventually kill Moosbrugger because in the present state of incom- pleteness this was simply the cleanest, cheapest, and safest solution. It may be callous to resign oneself to this; but then, our speeding traffic claims more victims than all the tigers of India, yet the ruth- less, unscrupulous, and casual state of mind in which we put up with it is what also enables us to achieve our undeniable successes.
This state of mind, so perceptive in detail and so blind to the total picture, finds its most telling expression in a certain ideal that might be called the ideal of a life's work and that consists of no more than three treatises. There are intellectual activities where it is not the big books but the short monographs or articles that constitute a man's proud achievement. If someone were to discover, for instance, that under hitherto unobserved circumstances stones were able to speak, it would take only a few pages to describe and explain so earth-shat- tering a phenomenon. On the other hand, one can always write yet another book about positive thinking, and this is far from being of only academic interest, since it involves a method that makes it im- possible ever to arrive at a clear resolution of life's most important questions. Human activities might be graded by the quantity of words required: the more words, the worse their character. All the bowledge that has led our species from wearing animal skins to peo- ple flying, complete with proofs, would fill a hand~ of reference books, but a bookcase the size of the earth would not suffice to hold all the rest, quite apart from the vast discussions that are conducted not with the pen but with the sword and chains. The thought sug- gests itself that we carry on our human business in a most irrational manner when we do not use those methods by which the exact sciences have forged ahead in such exemplary fashion. .
Such had in fact been the mood and the tendency of a period-a
number of years, hardly of decades-of which Ulrich was just old enough to have lmown something. At that time people were think- ing-"people" is a deliberately vague way of putting it, as no one could say who and how many thought that way; let us say it was in the air-that perhaps life could be lived with precision. Today one won- ders what they could have meant by that. The answer would possibly be that a life's work can as easily be imagined as consisting of three poems or three actions as of three treatises, in which the individual's capacity for achievement is intensified to its highest degree. It would more or less come down to keeping silent when one has nothing to say, doing only the necessary where one has nothing special to do, and, most important, remaining indifferent unless one has that inef- fable sense of spreading one's arms wide, borne aloft on a wave of creation. One will observe that this would be the end of most of our inner life, but that might not be such a painful loss. The thesis that the huge quantities of soap sold testify to our great cleanliness need not ~pply to the moral life, where the more recent principle seems more accurate, that a strong compulsion to wash suggests a dubious state of inner hygiene. It would be a useful experiment to try to cut down to the minimum the moral expenditure (ofwhatever kind) that accompanies all our actions, to satisfy ourselves with being moral only in those exceptional cases where it really counts, but otherwise not to think differently from the way we do about standardizing pen- cils or screws. Perhaps not much good would be done that way, but some things would be done better; there would be no talent left, only genius; the washed-out prints that develop from the pallid resem- blance ofactions to virtues would disappear from the image oflife; in their place we would have these virtues' intoxicating fusion in holi- ness. In short, from every ton of morality a milligram of an essence would be left over, a millionth part of which is enough to yield an enchanting joy.
But the objection will be raised that this is a utopia. Of course it is. Utopias are much the same as possibilities; that a possibility is not a reality means nothing more than that the circumstances in which it is for the moment entangled prevent it from being realized-otherwise it would be only an impossibility. If this possibility is disentangled from its restraints and allowed to develop, a utopia arises. It is like what happens when a scientist observes the change of an element
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within a compound and draws his conclusions. Utopia is the experi- ment in which the possible change of an element may be obsezved, along with the effects of such a change on the compound phenome- non we call life. If the element under obsezvation is precision itself, one isolates it and allows it to develop, considering it as an intellec- tual habit and way of life, allowed to exert its exemplary influence on everything it touches. The logical outcome of this should be a human being full of the· paradoxical interplay of exactitude and indefinite- ness. He is incorruptibly, deliberately cold, as required by the tem- perament of precision; but beyond this quality, everything else in him is indefinite. The stable internal conditions guaranteed by a sys- tem of morality have little value for a man whose imagination is geared to change. Ultimately, when the demand for the greatest and most exact fulfillment is transferred from the intellectual realm to that of the passions, it becomes evident-as alfeady indicated-that the passions disappear and that in their place arises something like a primordial fire of goodness.
Such is the utopia ofprecision. One doesn't know how such a man will spend the day, since he cannot continually be poised in the act of creation and will have sacrificed the domestic hearth fire of limited sensations to some imaginary cmlflagration. But this man of preci- sion exists already! He is the inner man who inhabits not only the scientist but the businessman, the administrator, the sportsman, and the technician, though for the present only during those daytime h~urs they call not their life but their profession. This man, given to taking everything seriously and without bias, is biased to the point of abhorrence against the idea of taking himself seriously, and there is, alas, no doubt that he would regard the utopia of himself as an im- moral experiment on persons engaged in serious business.
Which is why Ulrich, in his concern with the question of whether everything else should be subordinated to the most powerful forms ofinner achievement-in other words, whether a goal and a meaning can be found for what is happening and has happened to us-had . always, all his life, been quite alone.
THE EARTH TOO, BUT ESPECIALLY ULRICH, PAYS HOMAGE TO THE UTOPIA OF ESSAYISM
Precision, as a human attitude, demands precise action and precise being. It makes maximal demands on the doer and on life. But here a distinction must be made.
In reality, as we all know, there is not only an imaginary precision (not yet present in reality at all) but also a pedantic kind, the differ- ence being that the imaginary kind sticks to the facts and the pedan- tic kind to imaginary constructs. The precision, for instance, with which Moosbrugger's peculiar mentality was fitted into a two-thou- sand-year-old system of legal concepts resembled a madman's pe- dantic insistence on trying to spear a free-flying bird with a pin; this precision was concerned not at all with the facts but only with the imaginary concept of cumulative law.
Ulrich slipped the letter into his pocket to make it disappear, but in any case it would not have been easy to take it up with Diotima. Ever since the newspaper article about the "Year of Austria" had ap- peared, she had been swept along by a rising tide of incoherent activ- ity. Not only did Ulrich hand over to her, preferably unread, all the files he received from Count Leinsdorf, but every day the mail brought heaps of letters and press clippings, and masses of books on approval came from booksellers; her house swelled with people as the sea swells when moon and wind tug at it together; and the tele- phone never stopped ringing. Had little Rachel not taken charge ofit with seraphic zeal, and given most of the information herself because she said she could not bother her mistress incessantly, Diotima would have collapsed under the burden.
Yet this neiVous breakdown that never happened, even as it kept quivering and pulsating in her body, brought Diotima a kind of hap- piness she had never known before. It was a shudder, a being end- lessly showered with significance, a crackling like that of the pressure in the capstone of the world arch, a prickling like the awareness of nothingness when one stands on the summit ofthe highest mountain peak for iniles around. It was, in short, a sense of position that was awakening in this daughter of a modest secondary-school teacher and this young wife of a middle-class vice-consul, which she had re- mained in the freshness of her heart despite her rise in society. Such a sense of position belongs to the unnoticed but essential conditions of life, like not noticing the revolutions of the earth or the part our personality plays in directing our perceptions. Since man is taught not to bear vanity in his heart, he keeps most of it underfoot, in that he walks on the soil of a great fatherland, religion, or income-tax bracket; or else, lacking such a vantage point, he makes do with a place anyone can have, on the momentarily highest point reached by the pillar of time as ·it rises out of the void; in other words, we take pride in living in and for the present moment, when all our predeces- sors have turned to dust and no successors have yet appeared. But if for some reason this vanity, of which we are usually unconscious, suddenly mounts from the feet to the head, it can cause a mild crazi- ness, like that of those virgins who imagine they are pregnant with the globe of the earth itself.
Even Section Chief Tuzzi now paid Diotima the tribute of inquir- ing how things ~ere going, sometimes even asking her to oversee one minor matter or another; at such times the smile with which he usually referred to her salon was replaced by a dignified seriousness. It was still not known to what extent the idea of finding himself placed in the forefront of an international pacifist movement would be agreeable to His Gracious' Majesty, but on this point Tuzzi repeat- edly asked Diotima not to take the slightest step into the field of for- eign affairs without first consulting him. He even suggested on the
. spot that if ever any serious move should be made toward an interna- tional peace campaign, every precaution first immediately be taken against any po. ssible political complications that might ensue. Such a noble idea should in no way be rejected, he explained to his wife, not even ifthere might be some possibility ofrealizing it, but it was abso-
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lutely necessary to keep open one's options for going ahead or re- treating from the very beginning. He then laid out for Diotima the differences between disarmament, a peace conference, a summit meeting, and so on, all the way down to the already mentioned foun- dation for decorating the Peace Palace at The Hague with murals by Austrian artists; he had never before spoken with his wife in this fac- tual manner. Sometimes he would even come back to the bedroom with his briefcase to supplement his remarks, in case he had forgot- ten to add, for instance, that he personally could regard everything having to do with a Global. Austria as conceivable only, of course, as part of a pacifist or humanitarian undertaking of some kind; anything else could only make one look dangerously irresponsible, or some such thing.
Diotima answered with a patient smile: "I shall do my best to do as you wish, but you should not exaggerate the importance of foreign affairs for us. There is a tremendous upsurge, an inner sense of re- demption, coming from the anonymous depths of the people; you
·can't imagine the floods of petitions and suggestions that oveiWhelm me every day. "
She was admirable, for she gave no hint of the enormous difficul- ties she actually had to contend with. In the deliberations of the great central committee, which was organized under the headings of Reli- gion, Justice, Agriculture, Education, and so forth, all idealistic suggestions met with that icy and timorous reserve so familiar to Di- otima from her husband in the days before he had become so atten-- tive. There were times when she felt quite discou~ged from sheer impatience, when she could not conceal from herself that this iner- tial resistance of the world would be hard to break. However clearly she herself could see the Year of Austria as the Year of a Global Austria, and the Austrian nations as the model for the nations of the world-all it took was to prove that Austria was the true home of the human spirit everywhere-it was equally clear that for the slow- witted this concept would have to be fleshed out with a particular content and supplemented by some. inspired symbol, som. ething less abstract, with more sense-appeal, to help them understand. Diotima pored for hours over many books, searching for the right image, and it would have to be a uniquely Austrian symbolic image, of course.
But now Diotima was having strange experiences with the nature of great ideas.
It appeared that she was living in a great age, since the age was full ~fgreat ideas. But one would not believe how hard it was to translate the greatest and most important ofthem into reality, considering that all the conditions for doing so existed except one: knowing which of them was the greatest and most important. Every time Diotima had almost opted in favor of some idea, she could not help noticing that its opposite was equally great an\l equally worthy of realization. That's the way it is, after all, and she couldn't help it. Ideals have curious properties, and one of them is that they tum into their oppo- sites when one tries to live up to them. Take Tolstoy, for instance, and Bertha Suttner, two write~ whose ideas were about equally dis- cussed at the time-but how, Diotima thought, can mankind even have roast chicken without violence? And if one should not kill, as these two writers demanded, what was to be done with the soldiers? They would be unemployed, poor devils, and the criminals would see the dawn of a golden age. Such proposals had actually been made, and signatures were said to be in the process of being collected. Di-
. otima could never have ima~ned a life without eternal verities, but now she found to her amazement that there are two, or more, of every eternal verity. Which is why every reasonable person-Section Chief Tuzzi, in this case, who was to that extent vindicated-has a deeply rooted mistrust of eternal verities. Of course he will never deny that they are indispensable, but he is convinced that people who take them literally must be mad. According to his way of think- ing-which he helpfully offered to his wife-ideals make excess. ive demands on human nature, with ruinous consequences, unless one refuses at the outset to take them quite seriously. The best proof of this that Tuzzi could offer was that such words as "ideal" and "eter- nal verity" never occur at all in government offices, which deal with serious matters. A civil servant who would think of using such an ex- pression in an official communication would instantly be advised to see a doctor to request a medical leave. But even if Diotima listened to him sadly, she always drew new strength from such moments of
weakness, and plunged back into her researches.
Even Count Leinsdorf marveled at her mental energy when he
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finally found the time to come for a consultation with her. His Grace wanted a spontaneous testimonial arising from the midst of the peo- ple. He sincerely wanted to find out the will of the people and to refine it by cautiously influencing it from above, for he hoped one day to submit it to His Majesty, not as a ritual offering from a Byzan- tine monarchy but as a sign of true self-awareness achieved by na- tions adrift in the ~ortexof democracy. Diotima knew that His Grace still clung to the "Emperor of Peace" concept and that of a splendid testimonial demonstration of the True Austria, even though he did not in principle reject the idea ofa Global Austria, but only so long as it properly expressed the sense of a family of nations gathered around their patriarch. From this political family His Grace covertly and tacitly excluded Prussia, even tho~gh. he had nothing against Dr. Arnheim personally and even made a point ofreferring to him as "an interesting person. "
"We certainly don't want anything patriotic in the outworn sense ofthe word," he offered. 'We must shake up the nation, the world. A Year of Austria is a fine idea, it seems to me, and I have in fact al- ready told the fellows from the press myself that the public imagina- tion should be steered in that direction. But once we've agreed on that, what do we do in this Austrian Year-have you thought ofthat, my dear? That, you see, is the problem! That's what we really need to know. Unless we help things along a little from above, the immature elements will gain the upper hand. And I simply haven't the time to think of anything! " ·
Diotlma thought His Grace seemed worried, and said vivaciously: "The campaign is no good at all unless it culminates in a great sym- bol. That much is certain. It must seize the heart ofthe world, but it also needs some influence from above; there is no denying that. An Austrian Year is a brilliant suggestion, but in my opinion a World Year would be still finer, a World-Austrian Year, in which Europe could recognize Austria as its true spiritual home. "
"Not so fast1 Not so fast! " warned Count Leinsdorf, who had often been startled by his friend's spiritual audacity. "Aren't your ideas al- ways perhaps a little excessive, Diotima? This is not the first time you've brought this up, but one can't be too careful. What have you come up with to do in this World Year? "
With this question, however, Count Leinsdorf, led by the blunt-
ness that made his thinking so full of character, had touched Diotima at precisely her most vulnerable point. "Count," she said after some hesitation, "that is the hardest question in the world to answer. I in- tend as soon as possible to invite a circle of the most distinguished men, poets and philosophers, and I will wait to hear what this group has to say before I say anything. "
"Good! " His Grace exclaimed, instantly won over for a postpone- ment. "How right you are! One can never be careful enough. Ifyou only knew what I have to listen to day in and day out! "
QUALMS ABOUT THE PARALLEL CAMPAIGN. BUT IN THE HISTORY OF MANKIND THERE IS NO VOLUNTARY TURNING BACK
On one occasion His Grace also had time to go into it more deeply with Ulrich.
"I can't say I care too much for this Dr. Arnheim," he said confi- dentially. "A brilliant man, of course; no wonder your cousin is im- pressed with him. But he is; after all, a Prussian. He has a way of looking on. You know, when I was a little boy, in '65 it was, my sainted father had a shooting party at Chrudim Castle and one of the guests had the same way of looking on, and a year later it turned out that no one had the remotest idea who had brought him along and that he was a major on the Prussian general staff! Not, of course, that I'm suggesting anything, but I don't altogether like this fellow Am- heim knowing all about us. "
"Your Grace," Ulrich said, ''I'm glad you offer me a chance to speak my mind on the subject. It's time something was done; things are going on that make me wonder and that aren't suitable for a for- eign observer to see. After all, the Parallel Campaign is supposed to raise everyone's spirits, isn't it? Surely that is what Your Grace intended? "
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''Well of course, naturally. "
"But the opposite is happening! " Ulrich exclaimed. "I have the im- pression it's making all the best people look unusually concerned, even downhearted! "
His Grace shook his head and twiddled his thumbs, as he always did when his mood darkened. He had, in fact, made similar observa- tions himself.
''Ever since it got around that I have some connection with the Parallel Campaign," Ulrich went on, "whenever I get into conversa- tion with someone it doesn't take three minutes before he says to me: 'What is it you're really after with this Parallel Campaign? There's no such thing nowadays as great achievements or great men! ' "
''Well, themselves excepted, of course," Count Leinsdorf inter- jected. "I know all about that; I hear it all the time too. The big indus- trialists grumble that the politicians don't give them enough protective tariffs, and the politicians grumble about industry for not coming up with enough money for their election campaigns. "
"Quite sol" Ulrich proceeded with his exposition. "The surgeons clearly believe that surgery has made progress since the days of Bill- roth, but they say that medicine as a whole, and science in general, are doing too little for surgery. I would even go so far, if you will permit me, as to suppose that the theologians believe theology has made advances. since the time ofChrist-"
Count Leinsdorf raised a hand in mild protest.
"Excuse me if I said something inappropriate, especially as it was quite unnecessary; my point is a quite general one. The surgeons, as I said, claim that scientific research is not fulfilling its promise, but if you talk to a research scientist about the present, he will complain that, much as he would like to broaden his outlook a bit, the theater bores him and he can't find a novel that entertains and stimulates him. Talk to a poet, and he'll tell you that there is no faith. Talk to a painter-since I want to leave the theologians out ofit-and he'll be pretty sure to tell you that painters can't give their best in a period that has such miserable literature and philosophy. Of course the se- quence in which they blame one another is not always the same, but it always reminds one a bit of musical chairs, if you know what I mean, sir, or Puss in the Comer, and I've no idea what the law or the rule is at the bottom ofit. r m afraid it looks as though each individual
may still be satisfied with himself, more or less, but collectively, for some universal reason, mankind seems ill at ease inside its own skin, and the Parallel Campaign seems destined to bring this condition to light. "
"Good heavens," His Grace said in response to this analysis, with- out its being quite clear what he meant by it, "nothing but 'ingrati- tude! "
"I have already, incidentally," Ulrich continued, "two folders full of general proposals, which I've had no previous opportunity to re- turn to Your Grace. One of them I've headed: Back to-! It's amaz- ing how many people tell us that the world was better off in earlier times and want the Parallel Campaign to take us back there. Without counting the understandable slogan, Back to Religion! , we still have a Back to the Baroque, Back to Gothic, Back to Nature, Back to Goe- the, to Ancient Germanic Law, to Moral Purity, and quite a few more. "
"Hmm, yes. But perhaps there is a real idea in there somewhere, which it would be a mistake to discourage? " Count Leinsdorf offered.
"That's possible, but how should one deal with it? 'After careful consideration of your esteemed letter of such-and-such a date, we regret that we do not regard the present moment as suitable . . . '? Or 'We have read your letter with interest, please supply details on how restoration of the world as it was in the Baroque, the Gothic, et cet- era, et cetera, is to be effected . . . and so on'? "
Ulrich was smiling, but Count Leinsdorf felt he was treating the situation with a little too much levity, and twiddled his thumbs with renewed vigor to ward it off. His face, with its handlebar mustache, assumed a hardness reminiscent of the Wallenstein era, and then he came out with a most noteworthy statement:
"Dear Doctor," he said, "in the history of mankind there is no vol- untary turning back! "
This statement surprised no one more than Count Leinsdorfhim- self, who had actually intended to say something quite different. As a conservative, he had been annoyed with Ulrich, and had wanted to point out to him that the middle classes had spumed the universal spirit of the Catholic Church and were now suffering the conse- quences. He was also on the point of praising the times of absolute
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centralism, when the world was still led by persons aware of their responsibilities in accordance with fixed principles. But while he was still groping for words, it suddenly occurred to him what a nasty sur- prise it would be to wake up one morning without a hot bath and trains, with an Imperial town crier riding through the streets instead ofthe morning papers. And so Count Leinsdorfthonght: "Things can never again be what they were, the way they were," and as he thought this he was quite astonished. For one assumed that if there was indeed no voluntary going back in history, then mankind was like a man driven along by some inexplicable wanderlust, a man who could neither go back nor arrive anywhere, and this was a quite re- markable condition.
Now, while His Grace had an extraordinary knack for keeping apart two ideas that might contradict each other. so that they never came together in his consciousness, he should have firmly rejected ~s particular idea, whic~was inimical to all his principles. However, he had taken rather a liking to Ulrich, and as far as time permitted, he enjoyed explaining political matters on a strictly logical basis to this intellectually alert young man who, had come to him so well rec- ommended, whose only drawback was his middle-class status, which made him something of an outsider when it came to the really great issues. But once one begins with logic, where one idea follows from the immediately preceding one, one never knows where it may all come out at the end. And so Count Leinsdorf did not retract his statement but merely gazed at Ulrich in intense sllence.
Ulrich pi~ked up a second folder and took advantage of the pause to hand both files to His Grace.
"I had to head the second one Forward to-/" he began to explain, but His Grace started to his feet and found that his time was up. He urged Ulrich to leave the continuation of their talk for another time, when there would be rp. ore leisure to give it some thought.
"By the way," he said, already on his feet, "your cousin is going to have a gathering of our most distinguished thinkers to discuss all these problems. Do go; please be sw:e to go; I don't know whether I shall be permitted to be there. "
Ulrich put back his folders, and ~ount Leinsdorf, in the shadow of
the open door, turned around once more. "A great experiment natu- rally makes everyone nervous. Butwe'll shake them up! " His sense of propriety would not let him leave Ulrich behind without some word of comfort.
59
MOOSBRUGGER REFLECTS
Moosbrugger had meanwhile settled down in his new prison as best he could. The gate had hardly shut behind him when he was bel- lowed at. He had been threatened with a beating when he protested, if he remembered rightly. lie had been put in solitary. For his walk in the yard he was handcuffed, and the guards' eyes were glued to him. They had shaved his head, even though his sentence was under appeal and not yet legally in force, because, they said, they had to take his measurements. They had lathered him all over with a stink- ing soft soap, on the pretext of disinfecting him. As an old hand, he knew that all this was against regulations, but behind that iron gate it is not so easy to maintain one's dignity. They did as they pleased with him. He demanded to see the warden, and complained. The warden had to admit that some things were not in accordance with regula- tions, but it was not a punishment, he said, only a precaution. Moos- brugger complained to the prison chaplain, but the chaplain was a kindly old man whose amiable ministry was anachronistically flawed by his inability to cope with sexual crimes. He abhorred them with the lack of understanding of a body that had never even touched the periphery of such feelings, and was even dismayed that Moosbrug- ger's honest appearance moved him to the weakness of feeling per- sonally sorry for him. He sent Moosbrugger to the prison doctor, and for his own part, as in all such cases, sent up to the Creator an omni- bus prayer that did not go into detail but dealt in such general terms
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with man's proneness to error that Moosbrugger was included in the · moment of prayer along with the freethinkers and atheists. The prison doctor told Moosbrugger that he was making a mountain out of a molehill, gave him a friendly slap on the back, and absolutely refused to pay any attention to his complaints, on the grounds that- if Moosbrugger understood him right-it was all beside the point as long as the question of whether he was insane or only malingering had not been settled by the medical authorities. Infuriated, Moos- brugger suspected that all these people spoke to suit themselves, and that it was this trick with words that gave them the power to do as they pleased with him. He had the feeling of simple people that the educated ought to have their tongues cut out. He looked at the doc- tor's face with its dueling scars; at the priest's face, withered from the inside; at the austerely tidy office face of the warden; saw each face looking back at him in its own way, and saw in all of them something beyond-his reach that they had in common, which had been his life- long enemy. The constricting pressure that in the outside world forces every person, with all his self-conceit, to wedge himself with effort among all that other flesh, was somewhat eased-despite all the discipline--under the roof of the prison, where everything lived for waiting, and the interaction of the inmates, even when it was coarse and violent, was undermined by a shadow of unreality. Moos- brugger reacted with his whole powerful body to the slackening of
tension after the trial. He felt like a loose tooth. His skin itched. He felt miserable, as if he had caught an infection. It was a self-pitying, tenderly nervous hypersensitivity that came over him sometimes: the woman who lay underground and who had got him into this mess seemed to him a crude, nasty bitch contrasted with a child, ifhe com- pared her to himself.
Just the s~e, Moosbrugger was not altogether dissatisfied. He could tell in many ways that he was a person of some importance here, and it flattered him. Even the attention given to all convicts alikegave him satisfaction. The state had to feed them, bathe them, clothe them, and concern itself with their work, their health, their books, and their songs from the moment they had broken the law; it had never done these things before. Moosbrugger enjoyed this atten- tion, even if it was strict, like a child who has succeeded in forcing its mother to notice it with anger. But he did not want it to continue
·much longer. The idea that his sentence might be commuted to life in prison or in a lunatic asylum sparked in him the resistance we feel when every effort to escape from our circumstances only leads us back to them, time and again. He knew that his lawyer was trying to get the case reopened, that he was to be interrogated all over again, but he made up his mind to oppose that as soon as he could and insist that they kill him.
Above all, he. had to make a dignified exit, for his life had been a battle for his rights. In solitary, Moosbrugger considered what his rights were. He couldn't say. But they were everything he had been cheated of all his life. The moment he thought of that he swelled with emotion. His tongue arched and started to move like a Uppi- zaner stallion in his zeal to pronounce the word nobly enough. "My right," he thought, drawing the word out as long as he could, to real- ize this concept, and thought, as if he were speaking to someone: "If's when you haven't done anything wrong, or something like that, isn't it? " Suddenly he had it: "Right is justice. " That was it. His right was his justice! He looked at his wood-plank bed in order to sit on it, turned awkwardly around to tug at it-in vain, as it was screwed to the floor-then slowly sat down.
He had been cheated of his justice!
He remembered his master's wife, when he was sixteen. He had dreamed that something cold was blowing on his belly, then it had disappeared inside his body; he had yelled and fallen out of bed, and the next morning felt as if he had been beaten black-and-blue. Other apprentices had once told him that you could always get a woman by showing her your fist with the thumb sticking out between the middle and the forefinger. He didn't know what to make of it; they all said they had tried it', but when he thought about it the ground gave way under him, or his head seemed to be screwed on wrong; in short, something was going on inside him that separated him by a hairbreadth from the natural order and was not quite steady. "Missus," he slrld, 'Td like to do something nice to you. . . . " They were alone; she looked into his eyes and must have seen something there; she said: "You just clear out of this kitchen! " He then held up his fist with the thumb sticking out. But the magic worked only halfway: her face turned dark red and she hit him with the wooden ladle in her hand, too fast for him to dodge the blow, right across the face; he realized it only when the blood began to
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trickle over his lips. But he remembered that instant vividly now, for the blood suddenly turned and flowed upward, up above his eyes, and he threw himself on the strapping woman who had so viciously insulted him; the master came in; and what happened then, until the moment he stood in the street with his legs buckling and his things thrown after him, was like a big red cloth being ripped to shreds. That was how they made a mockery and a shambles of his right, and he took to the road again. Can a man fmd his rights on the road? ·All the women were already somebody else's right, and so were all the apples and all the beds. And the police and the judges were worse than the dogs.
But what it really was that always gave people a hold on him, and why they were always throwing him in jails or madhouses, Moos- brugger could never really figure out. He stared long and hard at the floor, at the comers ofhis cell; he felt like a man who has dropped a key on the floor. But he couldn't find it; the floor and the comers turned day-gray and ordinary again,' though just a while ago they had
-been a dreamscape where a thing or a person springs up at the drop of a word.
Moosbrugger mustered all his logic. He could only remember dis- tinctly all the places it began. He could have ticked them off on his fingers and described them. Once, it had been in Linz, another time in Braila. Years had passed between: And the last time it was here in the city. He-could see every stone so sharply outlined, as stones usu- ally aren't. He also remembered the rotten feeling that ! Uways went with it, as ifhe had poison instead of blood in his veins, or something like that. For instance, he was working outdoors and women passed by; he didn't want to look at them, because they bothered him, but new ones kept constantly passing by, so finally his eyes would follow them with loathing, and that slow turning of his eyes this way and that felt as if his eyes were stirring in tar or in setting cement inside him. Then he noticed that his thoughts were growing heavy. He thought slowly anyway, the words gave him trouble, he never had enough words, and sometimes, when he was talking to someone, the other man would look at him in surprise: he wouldn't understand how much was being said in the one word Moosbrugger was uttering so slowly. He envied all those people who had learned to talk easily when they were young. His own words seemed to stick to his gums to
spite him just when he needed them most, and it sometimes took forever to tear out the next syllable so he could go on from there. There was no getting around it: this couldn't be due to natural causes. But when he said in court that it was the Freemasons or the Jesuits or the Socialists who were torturing him this way, nobody un- derstood what he was talking about. Those lawyers and judges could outtalk him, all right, and had all sorts of things to say against him, but none of them had a clue to what was really going on.
When this sort of thing had continued for some time, Moosbrug- ger got frightened. Just try standing in the street with your hands tied, waiting to see what people will do! He knew that his tongue, or something deep inside him, was glued down, and it made him miser- ably unsure of himself, a feeling he had to struggle for days to hide. But then there came a sharp, one could almost say soundless, bound- ary. Suddenly a cold breeze was there. Or eise a big balloon rose up in the air right in front of him and flew into his chest. At the same instant he felt something in his eyes, his lips, the muscles of his face; everything around him seemed to. fade, to tum black, and while the houses lay down on the trees, some cats quickly leapt from the bushes and scurried away. This lasted only for an instant, then it was over.
This was the real beginning of the time they all wanted to know about and never stopped talking about. They pestered him with the most pointless questions; unfortunately, he could remember his ex- periences only dimly, through what they meant to him. Because these periods were all meaning! They sometimes lasted for minutes, sometimes for days on end, and sometimes they changed into other, similar experiences that could last for months. To begin with the lat- ter, because they are simpler, and in Moosbrugger's opinion even a judge could understand then: Moosbrugger heard voices or music or a wind, or a blowing and humming, a whizzing and rattling, or shots, thunder, laughing, shouts, speaking, or whispering. It came at him from every direction; the sounds were in the walls, ill the air, in his clothes, in his body. He had the impression he was carrying it in his body as long as it was silent; once it was out, it hid somewhere hi his surroundings, but never very far from him. When he was work- ing, the voices would speak at him mostly in random words or short phrases, insulting and nagging him, and when he thought of some-
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thing they came out with it before he could, or spitefully said the opposite ofwhat he meant. It was ridiculous to be declared insane on this account; Moosb~gger regarded these voices and visions as mere monkeyshines. It entertained him to hear and see what they did; that was ever so much better than the hard, heavy thoughts he had him- self. But of course he got very angry when they really annoyed him, that was only natural. Moosbrugger knew, because he always paid close attention to all the expressions that were applied to him, that this was called hallucinating, and he was pleased that he had this knack for hallucination that others lacked; it enabled him to see all sorts of things others didn't, such as lovely landscapes and hellish monsters. But he found that they always made far too much of it, and when the stays in mental hospitals became too unpleasant, he main- tained outright that he was only pretending. The know-it-ails would ask him how loud the sounds were; a senseless question, because of course what he heard . was sometimes as loud as a thunderclap, and sometimes the merest whisper. Even the physical pains that some- times plagued him could be unbearable or slight enough to be imagi- nary. That wasn't the important thing. Often he could not have described exactly what he saw, heard, and felt, but he knew what it was. It could be very blurred; the visions came from outside, but a shimmer of observation told him at the same time that they were really something inside himself. The important thing was that it is not at all important whether something is inside or outside; in his condition, it was like clear water on both sides of a transparent sheet of glass.
When he was feeling on top of things Moosbrugger paid no atten- tion at all to his voices and visions but spent his time in thinking. He called it thinking because he had always been impressed with the word. He thought better than other people because he thought both inside and outside. Thinking went on inside him against his will. He said that thoughts were planted in him. He was hypersensitive to the merest trifles, as a woman is when her breasts are tight with milk, but this did not interfere with his slow, manly reflectiveness. At such times his thoughts flowed like a stream running through a lush meadow swelled by hundreds ofleaping brooks.
Now Moosbrugger had let his head drop and was looking down at the wood between his fingers. "A squirrel in these parts is called a
tree kitten," it occurred to him, "but just let somebody try to talk about a tree cat with a straight face! Everyone would prick up their ears as if a real shot had gone off among the farting sound of blanks on maneuvers. In Hesse, on the other hand, it's called a tree fox. Any man who's traveled around knows such things. "
But oh, how curious the psyc. hiatrists got when they showed him a picture of a squirrel and he said: "That's a fox, I guess, or it could be a hare, or maybe a cat or something. " They'd always shoot a question right back at him then: "How much is fourteen plus fourteen? " and he would say in his deliberate way, "Oh, about twenty-eight to forty. " This "about" gave them trouble, which made Moosbrugger grin. It was really so simple. He knew perfectly well that you get twenty- eight when you go on from fourteen to another fourteen; but who says you have to stop there? Moosbrugger's gaze would always range a little farther ahead, like that of a man who has reached the top of a ridge outlined against J. :he sky and fmds that behind it there are other, similar ridges. And if a tree kitten is no cat and no fox, and has teeth like a hare's, and the. fox eats the hare, you don't have to be so partic- ular about what you call it; you just know it's somehow sewntogether out of all those things and goes scampering over the trees. Moos- brugger's experience and conviction were that no thing could be sin- gled out by itself, because things hang together. It had happened that he said to a girl, "Your sweet rose lips," but suddenly the words gave way at their seams and something upsetting happened: her face went gray, like earth veiled in a mist, there was a rose sticking out ofit on a long stem, and the temptation to take a knife and cut it off, or punch it back into the face, was oveiWhelming. Ofcourse, Moosbrugger did not always go for his knife; he only did that when he couldn't get rid of the temptation any other way. Usually he used all his enonnous strength to hold the world together.
In a good mood, he could look a man in the face and see in it his own face, as it might gaze back at him from among the minnows and bright pebbles of a shallow stream; in a bad mood, he could tell by a fleeting glance at a man's face that here was the same man who al- ways gave hl. m trouble, everywhere, no matter how differently he disguised himself each time. How can anyone object to this? W e all have trouble with the same man almost every time. If we were to investigate who the people are we get so idiotically fixated on, it is
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bound to tum out to be the one with the lock to whi<;h we have the key. And in love? How many people look at the same beloved face day in, day out, yet when they shut their eyes can't say what it looks like? Or even aside from love and hate; how incessantly things are subject to change, depending on habit, mood, point of view! How qften joy bums out and an indestructible core of sadness emerges! How often a man calmly beats up another, whom he might as easily leave in peace. Life forms a surface that acts as if it oould not be otherwise, but under its skin things are pounding and pulsing. Moos- brugger always kept his legs solidly planted on real earth, holding them together, sensibly trying to avoid whatever might confuse him. But sometimes a word burst in his mouth, and what a revolution, what a dream ofthings then welled up out ofsuch a cold, burned-out double word as tree kitten or rose lips!
Sitting on that plank in his cell that was both his bed and his table, he deplored his education, which had not taught him to express him- self properly. The little creature with her mouse eyes who was still making so much trouble for him, even though she'd been under- ground for some time, made him angry. They were all on her side. He lumbered to his feet. He felt fragile, like charred wood. He was hungry again; the prison fare fell far short of satisfying a huge man like him, and he had no money for better. In such a state it was im- possible for him to think of everything they wanted to lmow. One of these changes had come on, for days and weeks, the way March comes, or April, and then this business had happened. He lmew nothing more about it than the police already had in their files; he didn't even lmow how it had got into their flles. The reasons, the con- siderations he could remember, he had already stated in court any-
way. But what had really happened seemed to him as if he had suddenly said fluently in a foreign language something that made him feel good but that he could no longer repeat.
"I just want it over and done with as soon as possible! " Moosbrug- ger thought. ·
6o
EXCURSION INTO THE REALM OF LOGIC AND MORALS
Legally, Moosbrugger's case could be summed up in-a sentence. He was one of those borderline cases in law and forensic medicine known even to the layman as a case of diminished responsibility.
These unfortunates typically suffer not only substandard health but also have a substandard disease. Nature has a peculiar prefer- ence for producing such people in droves. Natura non fecit saltus, she makes no jumps but prefers gradual transitions; even on the grand scale she keeps the world in a transitional state between imbe- cility and sanity. But the law takes no notice of this. It says: Non datur tertium sive medium inter duo contradictoria, or in plain language, a person is either capable or not capable of breaking the law; between two contraries there is no third or middle state. It is this ability to choose that makes a person liable to punishment. His liability to pun- ishment makes him legally a person, and as a person in the legal sense he shares in the suprapersonal benefaction of the law. Anyone who cannot grasp this right away should think of the cavalry. A horse that goes berserk every time someone attempts to mount it is treated with special care, given the softest bandages, the best riders, the choicest fodder, and the most patient handling. But ifa cavalryman is guilty of some lapse, he is put in irons, locked in a flea-ridden cage, and deprived of his rations. The reasoning behind this difference is that the horse belongs merely to the empirical animal kingdom, while the dragoon belongs to the logical and moral kingdom. So un- derstood, a person is distinguished from the animals-and, one may add, from the insane-in that he is capable, according to his intellec- tual and moral faculties, ofacting against the law and ofcommitting a
crime. Since a person's liability to punishment is the quality that ele- vates him to the status of a moral being in the first place, it is under- standable that the pillars of the law grimly hang on to it.
There is also the unfortunate complication that court psychiatrists,
262 • THE MAN WITH0 UT QUALITIES
who would be called upon to oppose this situation, are usually far more timid professionally than the jurists. They certify as really in- sane only those persons they cannot cure-which is a modest exag- geration, since they cannot cure the others either. They distinguish between incurable mental diseases, the kind that with God's help will improve after a while of their own accord, and the kind that the doctor cannot cure either but that the patient could have avoided, assuming of course that the right influences and considerations had providentially been brought to bear on him in time. These second and third groups supply those lesser patients whom the angel of medicine treats as sick people when they come to him in his private practice, but whom he shyly leaves to the angel of law when he en- counters them in his forensic practit! e.
Such a case was Moosbrugger. In the course of his life, respectable enough except when interrupted by those unaccountable fits of bloodthirstiness, he had as often been confined in mental institutions as he had been let go, and had been variously diagnosed as a para- lytic, paranoiac, epileptic, and manic-depressive psychotic, until at his recent trial two particularly conscientious forensic psychiatrists had restored his sanity to him. Of course, there was not a single per- son in that vast crowded courtroom, the doctors included, who was not co~vincedthat Moosbrugger was insane, one way or another; but it was not a way that corresponded to the conditions of. insanity laid down by the law, so this insanity could not be acknowledged by con- scientious minds. For if one is partly insane, one is also, juridically, partly sane, and if one is partly sane one is at least partly responsible for one's actions, and if one is partly responsible one is wholly re- sponsible; for responsibility is, as they say, that state in which the individual has the power to devote himself to a specific purpose of his own free will, independently of any compelling necessity, and one cannot simultaneously possess and lack such self-determination.
Not that this excludes the eXistence of persons whose circum- stances and predispositions make it hard for them to "resist immoral impulses" and "opt for the good," as the lawyers put it, and Moos- brugger was such a person, in whom circumstances that would have no effect at all on others were enough to trigger the "inten"t'' to com- mit an offense. First, however, his powers of reasoning and judgment were sufficiently intact, in the view of the court, so that an effort on
his part could just as well have left the crime uncommitted, and there was no reason to exclude him from the moral estate of responsibility. Second, a well-ordered judicial system demands that every culpable act that is wittingly and willingly performed be punished. And third, judicial logic assumes that in all insane persons-with the exception of the most unfortunate, who when asked to multiply 7 times 7 stick out their tongue, or answer "Me" when asked to name His Imperial and Royal Majesty-there is still present a minimal power of dis- crimination and self-control and that it would only have taken a spe- cial effort of intelligence and willpower to recognize the criminal nature of the deed and to resist the criminal impulses. It is surely the least one has a right to expect from such dangerous persons!
Law courts resemble wine cellars in which the wisdom of our forefathers lies in bottles. One opens them and could weep at how unpalatable the highest, most effervescent, degree of the human striving for precision can be before it reaches perfection. And yet it seems to intoxicate the insufficiently seasoned mind. It is a well- known phenomenon that the angel of medicine, if he has listened too long to lawyers' arguments, too often forgets his own mission. He then folds his wings with a clatter and conducts himself in court like a reserve angel of law.
THE lDEAL OF THE THREE TREA TISES, OR THE UTOPIA OF EXACT LIVING
This is how Moosbrugger had come by his death sentence. It was only thanks to the influence of Count Leinsdorf and His Grace's fri(mdship for Ulrich that there was now a chance to review Moos- brugger's mental condition one more time. Ulrich actually had no intention of taking any further interest in Moosbrugger's fate, theb. or later. The depressing mixture of brutality and suffering that is the
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nature of such people was as distasteful to him as the blend of preci- sion and sloppiness that characterized the judgments usually pro- nounced upon them. He lmew precisely what he had to think of Moosbrugger, if he took a sober view of the case, and what measures one might try with such people who belong neither in prison nor in freedom and for whom the mental hospitals were not the answer ei- ther. He also realized that thousands of other people lmew this, too, and were constantly discussing every such problem from the aspects that each ofthem was interested in; he also knew that the state would eventually kill Moosbrugger because in the present state of incom- pleteness this was simply the cleanest, cheapest, and safest solution. It may be callous to resign oneself to this; but then, our speeding traffic claims more victims than all the tigers of India, yet the ruth- less, unscrupulous, and casual state of mind in which we put up with it is what also enables us to achieve our undeniable successes.
This state of mind, so perceptive in detail and so blind to the total picture, finds its most telling expression in a certain ideal that might be called the ideal of a life's work and that consists of no more than three treatises. There are intellectual activities where it is not the big books but the short monographs or articles that constitute a man's proud achievement. If someone were to discover, for instance, that under hitherto unobserved circumstances stones were able to speak, it would take only a few pages to describe and explain so earth-shat- tering a phenomenon. On the other hand, one can always write yet another book about positive thinking, and this is far from being of only academic interest, since it involves a method that makes it im- possible ever to arrive at a clear resolution of life's most important questions. Human activities might be graded by the quantity of words required: the more words, the worse their character. All the bowledge that has led our species from wearing animal skins to peo- ple flying, complete with proofs, would fill a hand~ of reference books, but a bookcase the size of the earth would not suffice to hold all the rest, quite apart from the vast discussions that are conducted not with the pen but with the sword and chains. The thought sug- gests itself that we carry on our human business in a most irrational manner when we do not use those methods by which the exact sciences have forged ahead in such exemplary fashion. .
Such had in fact been the mood and the tendency of a period-a
number of years, hardly of decades-of which Ulrich was just old enough to have lmown something. At that time people were think- ing-"people" is a deliberately vague way of putting it, as no one could say who and how many thought that way; let us say it was in the air-that perhaps life could be lived with precision. Today one won- ders what they could have meant by that. The answer would possibly be that a life's work can as easily be imagined as consisting of three poems or three actions as of three treatises, in which the individual's capacity for achievement is intensified to its highest degree. It would more or less come down to keeping silent when one has nothing to say, doing only the necessary where one has nothing special to do, and, most important, remaining indifferent unless one has that inef- fable sense of spreading one's arms wide, borne aloft on a wave of creation. One will observe that this would be the end of most of our inner life, but that might not be such a painful loss. The thesis that the huge quantities of soap sold testify to our great cleanliness need not ~pply to the moral life, where the more recent principle seems more accurate, that a strong compulsion to wash suggests a dubious state of inner hygiene. It would be a useful experiment to try to cut down to the minimum the moral expenditure (ofwhatever kind) that accompanies all our actions, to satisfy ourselves with being moral only in those exceptional cases where it really counts, but otherwise not to think differently from the way we do about standardizing pen- cils or screws. Perhaps not much good would be done that way, but some things would be done better; there would be no talent left, only genius; the washed-out prints that develop from the pallid resem- blance ofactions to virtues would disappear from the image oflife; in their place we would have these virtues' intoxicating fusion in holi- ness. In short, from every ton of morality a milligram of an essence would be left over, a millionth part of which is enough to yield an enchanting joy.
But the objection will be raised that this is a utopia. Of course it is. Utopias are much the same as possibilities; that a possibility is not a reality means nothing more than that the circumstances in which it is for the moment entangled prevent it from being realized-otherwise it would be only an impossibility. If this possibility is disentangled from its restraints and allowed to develop, a utopia arises. It is like what happens when a scientist observes the change of an element
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266 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
within a compound and draws his conclusions. Utopia is the experi- ment in which the possible change of an element may be obsezved, along with the effects of such a change on the compound phenome- non we call life. If the element under obsezvation is precision itself, one isolates it and allows it to develop, considering it as an intellec- tual habit and way of life, allowed to exert its exemplary influence on everything it touches. The logical outcome of this should be a human being full of the· paradoxical interplay of exactitude and indefinite- ness. He is incorruptibly, deliberately cold, as required by the tem- perament of precision; but beyond this quality, everything else in him is indefinite. The stable internal conditions guaranteed by a sys- tem of morality have little value for a man whose imagination is geared to change. Ultimately, when the demand for the greatest and most exact fulfillment is transferred from the intellectual realm to that of the passions, it becomes evident-as alfeady indicated-that the passions disappear and that in their place arises something like a primordial fire of goodness.
Such is the utopia ofprecision. One doesn't know how such a man will spend the day, since he cannot continually be poised in the act of creation and will have sacrificed the domestic hearth fire of limited sensations to some imaginary cmlflagration. But this man of preci- sion exists already! He is the inner man who inhabits not only the scientist but the businessman, the administrator, the sportsman, and the technician, though for the present only during those daytime h~urs they call not their life but their profession. This man, given to taking everything seriously and without bias, is biased to the point of abhorrence against the idea of taking himself seriously, and there is, alas, no doubt that he would regard the utopia of himself as an im- moral experiment on persons engaged in serious business.
Which is why Ulrich, in his concern with the question of whether everything else should be subordinated to the most powerful forms ofinner achievement-in other words, whether a goal and a meaning can be found for what is happening and has happened to us-had . always, all his life, been quite alone.
THE EARTH TOO, BUT ESPECIALLY ULRICH, PAYS HOMAGE TO THE UTOPIA OF ESSAYISM
Precision, as a human attitude, demands precise action and precise being. It makes maximal demands on the doer and on life. But here a distinction must be made.
In reality, as we all know, there is not only an imaginary precision (not yet present in reality at all) but also a pedantic kind, the differ- ence being that the imaginary kind sticks to the facts and the pedan- tic kind to imaginary constructs. The precision, for instance, with which Moosbrugger's peculiar mentality was fitted into a two-thou- sand-year-old system of legal concepts resembled a madman's pe- dantic insistence on trying to spear a free-flying bird with a pin; this precision was concerned not at all with the facts but only with the imaginary concept of cumulative law.
