No More Learning

It made a tenderness rise up for him, though she violently fought it down. She had forgotten that she meant to go looking for Walter. There was something going on in her body. Her breasts were fllling up, the blood flow~d thickly through the veins in her arms and legs, there was a vague pressure on her bladder and bowels. Her slim body deepened inside, grew sensitive, alive, strange, step by step; a child lay bright and smiling in her arms; from her shoulders the Mother of God's golden cloak fell in radiant folds to the floor, and the congregation was singing. It was out of her hands: the Lord had been born unto the world!
But no sooner had this happened than her body snapped shut, closing the gap over the image, like a split log ejecting the entering wedge; she was her own slim self again, feeling disgust and a cruel merriment. She was not going to make it so easy for Walter. "Let it be thy victory and thy freedom that long for offspring": she recited Nietzsche to herself. ''Thou shalt build living memorials to thyself. But before that, thou must build up thine own body and soul. " Cla- risse smiled; it was her special smile, licking upward like a slender flame from a fire under a great stone.
Then she remembered that her father had been afraid of Walter. Her mind went back to years ago. It was something she was in the habit of doing; she and Walter would ask each other: "Do you re- member . . . ? " and the light ofthe past flowed magically from the far distance into the present. It was fun, they enjoyed it. It was perhaps like turning around, after having doggedly trudged along a road for hours, to see all the empty distance one has covered transformed into a grand vista, to one's genuine satisfaction; but they never saw it in that light; they took their reminiscing very seriously. And so it seemed to her incredibly titillating and curious that her father, the aging painter, at that time an authority figure in her life, had been afraid of Walter, who had brought a new era into his house, while
Walter was afraid of her. It was like putting her arm around her friend Lucy Pachhofen and having to say "Papa" to him, while know- ing that Papa was Lucy's lover, for that was going on during that same period.
Again Clarisse's cheeks flushed. She was intens·ely absorbed in try- ing to bring to mind that peculiar whimpering sound, that strange whimpering she had told Ulrich about. She picked up her mirror and tried to make the face, with lips pressed together in fear, that she must have made the night her father came to her bed. She couldn't manage to imitate the sound that had escaped from her breast in that state of temptation. She thought that the same sound must still be there, inside her chest, as it was then. It was a sound without re- straint or scruple, but it had never surfaced again. She put down the mirror and looked around warily, touching everything with her eyes to assure herself that she was alone. Then she felt with her fingertips through her robe, searching for that velvety-black birthmark that had so strange a power. There it wac;, in the hollow of her groin, half hid- den on the inside of the thigh and close to where the pubic hairs somewhat raggedly made room for it; she let her hand rest on it, made her mind a blank, and waited for the sensation she remem- bered. She felt it at once. It was not the gentle streaming of lust, but her arm grew stiff and taut like a man's arm; she felt that if she could just lift it high enough she would be able to smash everything with it! She called this spot on her body the Devil's Eye. It was the spot at which her father had stopped and turned back. The Devil's Eye had a gaze that pierced through any clothing and "caught" men's eyes and drew them to her, spellbound but unable to move as long as Cla- risse willed it. Clarisse thought certain words in quotation marks, with special emphasis, just as she heavily underlined them in writing; the words thus emphasized tensed up with meaning, just as her arm·
was tensed up now; who would even have supposed that one could really "catch" something, someone, with the eye? Well, she was the first person who held this word in her hand like a stone to be flung at a target. It was all part ofthe smashing force in her arm. All this had made her forget the whimpering sound she had started out to con- sider; instead, she thought about her younger sister, Marion. When she was four years old, Marion's hands had to be tied up at night, to keep them from slipping, in all inn? cence, under the covers, only be-
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. cause they were drawn toward a pleasing sensation like two baby bears drawn to a honeycomb in a hollow tree. And some time later Clarisse had once had to tear Walter away from Marion. Her family was possessed by sensuality as vintners are by wine. It was fated, a heavy burden she had to bear. Just the same, her thoughts went on wandering in the past, the tension in her arm relaxed, and her hand rested obliviously in her lap. In those days she had still been on terms of formality with Walter. Actually, she owed him a lot. It was he who had brought the news that there were modem people who insisted on plain, cool furniture and hung pictures on their walls that showed the truth. He read new things to her, Peter Altenberg, little stories of young girls who rolled their hoops in the love-crazed tulip beds and had eyes that shone with sweet innocence like glazed chestnuts. From that time on Clarisse knew that her slender legs, still a child's legs, she had thought, were quite as important as a scherzo by "some- one or other. "
At the time, they were all staying in a summer place together, a large group; several families of their acquaintance had rented cot- tages by a lake, and all. the bedrooms were fllled up with invited friends, male and female. Clarisse had to double up with Marion, and around eleven Dr. Meingast sometimes dropped by ~n his secret moonlight rounds, for a chat. He--who was now a famous man in Switzerland-had then been the life of the party and the idol of all the mothers. How old was she then? -between fifteen and sixteen, or maybe fourteen and fifteen? -when he had brought his student George Grosch! along, who was only a little older than Marion and Clarisse. Dr. Meingast had been somewhat absentminded that eve- ning, rambling a little about moonbeams, parents who slept through everything and didn't care, and people with a modem outlook; sud- denly he was gone, as if he had come only to leave stocky little George, his great admirer, behind with the girls. George was silent, probably too shy to talk, and the girls, who had been talking to Mein- gast, also kept quiet. But George n:tust have clenched his teeth in the dark and stepped over to Marion's bed. A little light fell into the room from outside, but in the comers, where the qed stood, impene- trable masses of shadow loomed, so Clarisse could not make out
what was going on, except that George seemed to be standing up- right beside the bed, looking down at Marion; but he had his back to
Clarisse, and there was not a sound from Marion, as though she were not in the room at all. A long time went by. But in the end, while Marion remained motionless, George detached himself from the shadows like a murderer; for a moment his shoulder and side showed pale in the bright patch ofmoonlight in the middle ofthe room, as he moved toward Clarisse, who had quickly lain down again and pulled the covers up to her chin. She knew that the secret thing that had been going on at Marion's bed would now happen again and was rigid with suspense as George stood silently by her bedside. His lips seemed pressed unnaturally tight together. Finally his hand came, like a snake, and busied itself with Clarisse. What else he was doing she had no idea, and could make no sense of the little she perceived of his movements, despite her excitement. She herself did not feel aroused-that came later-but at the moment felt only a strong, in- definable, anxious excitement; she kept still like a trembling stone in a bridge over which a heavy vehicle is passing so slowly there seems no end to it; she felt unable to speak, and let it all be done to her. After George had let her go he disappeared without a word, and nei- ther of the two sisters could be sure that the other had experienced the same thing as herself; they had not called to each other for help or asked for sympathy, and years went by before they exchanged a word about the incident.
Clarisse had recovered her apple, gnawed off a little piece, and chewed on it. George had never given himself away or made any ac- knowledgment of what had happened, except perhaps at first to make stonily portentous eyes now and then. By this time he had turned into a smart rising young lawyer in government service, and Marion was married. Much more, however, had happened with Dr. Meingast. On going abroad, he had shed his cynicism and become what is called, outside the universities, a famous philosopher, always surrounded by a throng of students of both sexes. Walter and Cla- risse had recently received a letter from him to the effect that he was about to visit his nativ. e land in order to get some work done, undis- turbed by his followers. Would they be able to put him up? He had heard that they were living "on the border between nature and the big city. "
This news might in fact have been what had triggered Clarisse's line of thought that day. "Oh Lord, what a weird time it was! " she
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thought, and realized, too, that it had been the summer before the summer with Lucy. Meingast had taken to kissing her whenever he felt like it. "Ifyou please, I shall kiss you now," he said politely before he did it, and he also kissed every one of her girlfriends; there was one ofthem whose skirt Clarisse had never again been able to look at without having to think of eyelids lowered in false modesty. Meingast had told her about it himself, and Clarisse, who was only fifteen, after all, had said to the fully adult Dr. Meingast, when he told her of his exploits with her young friends: ''You're a pig! " She got a kick out of calling him such a crude name to his face-if felt like being booted and spurred-though it did not prevent her from being afraid that she would not be able to resist him either, in the end, and when he asked her- for a kiss she did not dare refuse, for fear of seeming silly.
But when Walter kissed her for the first time, she said gravely: "I promised Mama never to do this kind of thing. " And that was the difference in a nutshell. Walter talked like an angel and he talked a lot, he was swathed in art and philosophy like the moon swathed in a broad bank of clouds. He read aloud to her. But what he mostly did was look at her constantly, only at her among all her friends, that was all there was between them at first; it was just like having the moon look down on you: all you do is fold your hands. Actually, holding hands was the next step, quietly clasping hands without a word spo- ken, and what an amazingly strong bond it was! Clarisse felt her whole body purified by the touch ofhis hand; ifhe happened to seem absentminded and cool in taking her hand, she felt destroyed. "You can't imagine what it means to mel" she said pleadingly. By that time they were very close, in secret. He taught her a new appreciation of mountains and beetles; all she had ever seen in nature before was a landscape that Papa or one of his colleagues would,. paint and sell. Now all of a sudden she began to regard her family with a critical eye; she felt all new and different. ·
Suddenly she had a clear recollection of that business with the scherzo. ''Your legs, Miss Clarisse," Walter had said, "have more to do with real art than all of your papa's paintings. " There was a piano in the house where they were staying that summer, on which they used to play duets. Clarisse was learning things from him; she wanted to rise above her girlfriends and her family; none of them understood how anyone could spend such lovely summer days playing the piano
instead of going out boating or swimming; but she had pinned her hopes on Walter, she had already, even then, decided she would be "his mate," she would marry him, and when he snapped at her for playing a wrong note, she would be boiling inwardly, but her plea- sure outweighed the hurt. Walter did snap at her sometimes, in fact, because the spirit is uncompromising; but only at the piano. Music apart, it still happened sometimes that Meingast kissed her, and on one moonlight expedition, when Walter was rowing, she nestled her head on Meingast's chest quite of her own accord as they. sat in the stem together. Meingast had such a way with him in these matters, she had no way of knowing what would come of it, while Walter, the second time he grabbed her, right after their piano lesson, at the very last moment when they had already reached the doorway and he pounced on her from behind and kissed her hard, had only given her the unpleasant feeling that she had to struggle for air, to tear herself away from him. Nevertheless, her mind was made up; no matter what happened between her and the other one, she must never let go ofthis one.
It was a funny thing, all that, anyway; there was something about Meingast's breath that made all resistance melt away-it was like pure, light air that makes you feel happy for no reason-while Wal- ter, who suffered from a halting digestion, as Clarisse had known for some time, just like the halting way he had of making up his mind about anything, had a stuffy kind of breath, a little too hot, a little musty and paralyzing. Such psychosomatic factors had played a
strange part all along, and Clarisse could take it in stride, because nothing seemed more natural to her than Nietzsche's saying that a person's body is the soul. Her legs had no more genius than her head, they had exactly as much, they were her genius; her hand, at Walter's touch, instantly released a stream of intentions and assur- ances that flowed from head to toe, without a word; and her youth- once it had come to know itself-rebelled against all the convictions and other foolishness of her parents with the simple freshness of a hard young body that despises all the feelings remotely connected with the voluptuous marriage beds and lush Turkish carpets so popu- lar with the morally strict older generation. And so the physical con- tinued to play a part she understood differently from the way others might see it.
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But here Clarisse broke off her reminiscences, or it was rather her reminiscences that on the instant, with~ut the bump of a landing, dropped her back into the present. It was all this, and what was to follow, -that she had wanted to tell her friend, the Man Without Qualities. Perhaps there was too much of Meingast in it, who had after all disappeared soon after that exciting summer. He had fled abroad; that incredible inward transformation of his had begun ·that was to make a famous philosopher out of the frivolous womanizer; and thereafter Clarisse had seen him only in passing, when neither of them had been reminded of the past. But as she saw it, her own part in his transformation was perfectly clear to her. A good deal more had happened between them in the weeks before his disappearance. In Walter's absence--and in his jealous presence too, cutting Walter out and driving him to outdo himself-she and Meingast went through emotional storms and even crazier times, in those hours before a storm that can drive a man and a woman out of their minds,, followed by the hours after the storm, all passion spent, that are like green meadows after a rain, in the pure air offriendship. Clarisse had let a lot of things be done to her, not unwillingly, but, eager as she was to know everything, the child had fought back in her own way afterward, by telling her licentious friend exactly what she thought of him. And because, in that last period before he left, Meingast's mood had already sobered into friendship and_a noble resignation in his rivalry with Walter, she was now convinced that she had drawn onto herself all that had troubled his spirit before he went off to Switzer- land, helping him toward that unexpected self-transformation. She was confirmed in this idea by what had happened between Walter and herself immediately afterward. Clarisse could no longer distin- guish between those long-gone years and months, but what did it matter just when one thing or another had happened? The point was that when she and Walter had grown close, despite much resistance on her part, there came a dreamy time of long walks and confessions, of taking spiritual possession of one another with countless agonizing yet blissful little orgies of soul-probi. Ilg to which lovers are tempted when they are still lacking that very amount of resolute courage which they have already lost in chastity. It was just as if Meingast had bequeathed them his sins, to be relived on a higher plane, until their ultimate meaning had been extracted by exhausting it; and they both
perceived it thus. And now, when Clarisse cared so little for Walter's love that she often found herself repelled by it, she saw even more clearly that the ecstatic thirst for love that had driven her out of her mind to such a degree could have been nothing other than an incar- nation, that is, she knew, a mailifestation in the flesh of something not of the flesh: a meaning, a mission, a destiny, such as is written in the stars for the elect.
She was not ashamed, she felt more like crying when she com- pared the Then and Now, but Clarisse could never cry but pressed her lips together hard, and it turned into something that looked
-rather more like her smile. Her arm, covered wit;h kisses up to the armpit; her leg, guarded by the Devil's Eye; her pliant body, twisted over and over by her lover's yearning and twisting back like a rope, all harbored. the marvelous feeling that goes with love: the sense that every movement is of mysterious importance. Clarisse sat there feel- ing like an actress during intermission. To be sure, she did not know what lay ahead, but she felt it was the unremitting duty of lovers to always be to each other what they had been in their finest moments. And here was her arm, here were her legs, her head was poised on her body, in awesome readiness to be the first in recognizing the sign that could not fail to appear.
It may be hard to understand what Clarisse meant, but it was all perfectly plain to her. She had written a letter to Count Leinsdorf calling for a Nietzsche Year and also asking for the release of the sex murderer and perhaps his exhibition before the public as a reminder of the calvaries endured by those who are doomed to take upon themselves the widespread sins of all mankind; and now she also knows why she did it. Someone must be the first to speak. She may not have expressed it too well, but no matter, the point was to make a start and end this putting up with everything and letting things take their course. History proves that the world needs such people from time to time-the words eon to eon echoed in her mind like two bells one can't see, although they are nearby-people who simply cannot fall into line and go on lying like all the rest and who have to make a nuisance of themselves. So much was clear.
It was also clear that people who make a nuisance of themselves are going to feel the pressure ofthe world. Clarisse knows that man- kind's great geniuses have always had to suffer, and she doesn't won-
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der that many days and weeks in her life pass under some leaden weight, as if a heavy slab had . been laid on them, but she has come through every time so far, and it's the same for everybody; the Church in its wisdom has even instituted formal times of mourning and mortification so as to concentrate all the sadness into a day or a week rather than let a half century be flooded with hopelessness and callousness, as has also been known to happen. More of a problem in Clarisse's life have been certain other phases, all too buoyant and un- restrained, when a word may sometimes be enough to make her go off. the rails altogether. At such times she is so beside herself that she can't tell where she is, except that she ~s defmitely not absent; on the contrary, she could be said to be ~ore inwardly present than ever, inside some deep inner space somehow contained inside the space her body occupies in the world, something indefinable in ordinary words-but then, why struggle for words where words don't. apply; she will soon be back with the others again in any case, with only a little tickle left in her head, like after a nosebleed. Clarisse realizes that these phases she sometimes goes through are dangerous. Evi- dently she is being tested and prepared for something special. She tends to think of several things at a tinie anyway, like a fan opening and shutting, with one fold partly beside, partly underneath the other, and when. this gets too confusing it is only natural to wish one could just pull out altogether, with one jerk; lots of people feel like that; they just don't make it, that's all. _
So Clarisse enjoys intimations and forebodings as other people pride themselves on their memory or on their strong stomach when they say they could eat splintered glass. Besides, Clarisse has already proved more than once that she has what it takes; she has tested her strength against her· father, against Meingast, against George Groschl. With Walter her struggle was still ongoing, things were still in movement, albeit haltingly. But for some time now Clarisse had been meaning to try her strength on the Man Without Qualities. She could not have said exactly since when; perhaps since the time Wal- ter had come up with that name and Ulrich had accepted it; before that, she had to admit, in those early years, she had never paid him any serious attention, though they had been good enough friends. But "Man Without Qualities" reminded her, for instance, of playing the piano, that is, of all those blue moods, leaps of joy, fits of anger,
one races through on the keyboard without their quite being real passions. She felt a kinship with all that. From this point one could only move straight as an arrow to refusing to do anything one could not do wholeheartedly, which took her light back to the deep turbu- lence in her marriage. A man without qualities doesn't say No to life, he says Not yeti and saves himself for the right moment; she had understood this with her whole body. What if the meaning of all those times when she moved outside herself was that she was meant to become the Mother of God? She remembered the vision that had come to her, not Hfteen minutes. ago. "Maybe every mother could become the Mother of God," she thought, "if she refuses to give in, to lie, to take action, but only brings out what is deepest inside her as her child? Provided she gets nothing for herself out of it," she added sadly. For the idea was far from being altogether attractive; it was more like having that sense, split between torment and bliss, of serv- ing as a sacrifice for something. For her vision had been like an image appearing between the branches of a tree, with the leaves sud- denly flickering like candle flames, but gone in an instant as the branches snap together again; but now her mood was changed for good. The very next moment it occurred to her by chance that the word "birth" was contained in the word "birthmark"-a point that woUld have been lost on anyone else, but to Clarisse portended no less than that her destiny was written in the stars. The wondrous thought that a woman, both as a lover and as a mother, must take a man into herself made her feel at once yielding and excited. Without knowing its source, she felt it melt away her resistance even as she sensed her power.
But she was still far from trusting the Man Without Qualities. He didn't always mean everything he said. When he insisted that ideas could not be carried out, or that he took nothing quite seriotisly, he was only covering up; she understood that clearly; they had sniffed each other out and recognized each other by secret signs, while Wal- ter was thinking that Clarisse had her crazy spells. Still, there was something bitterly evil in Ulrich, a devilish bent for going the world's self-indulgent way. He had to be set free. She had to go and get him.
She had said to Walter: Kill him. It didn't really mean anything, she didn't really know what she meant by it, but if anything, it meant that something had to be done to tear him out of himself, at any cost.
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. She would have to wrestle with him for his soul.
She laughed, rubbed her nose, paced back and forth in the dark.
Something had to be done about the Parallel Campaign. What? she
didn't know.
·
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FROM A COUNTRY THAT CAME TO GRIEF BECAUSE OF A DEFECT IN LANGUAGE
The train of events is a train that lays down its own tracks as it goes along. The river of time carries its own banks along with it. The trav- eler moves on a solid floor between solid walls, but the floor and the walls are strongly influenced by the movements of the travelers, though they do not notice it. What a stroke of luck for Clarisse's peace of mind that along with all her other notions, this one had not yet occurred to her.
But Count Leinsdorf was also safe from it. He was shielded from this notion by his view of himself as a practitioner of realpolitik.
The days rocked along and turned into weeks. The weeks did not stop moving, either, but formed links in a chain. Something was hap- pening every minute.
And when something is happening every min- ute, it is easy to imagine that one is actually getting real things done. The sumptuous reception rooms at the Leinsdorftown residence, for instance, were to be thrown open to the public invited to a festival for the benefit of consumptive children, an event preceded by exhaus- tive conferences between His Grace and His Grace's majordomo, fixing certain dates by which certain preparations had to be com- pleted. The police simultaneously organized an anniversary exhibi- tion, to which all of high society was invited, and the High Commissioner had called on His Grace personally to deliver the invi- tation. When Count Leinsdorf arrived, the High Commissioner rec- ognized his volunteer assistant and honorary secretary, who was
quite superfluously introduced to him again, giving the High Com- missioner a chance to show off his legendary memory for faces; he was said to be acquainted personally with every tenth citizen, or at least to be informed about him. Diotima also came, accompanied by her husband, and all those present awaited the arrival of a member of the Royal and Imperial House, to whom some of them were to be presented, and everyone without exception agreed that the exhibi- tion was a huge success and simply fascinating. It consisted of a great many pictures crowded together on the walls, and mementos ofgreat crimes arrapged in glass-fronted cabinets and showcases. These in- cluded burglars' tools, forgers' apparatus, lost buttons that had pro- vided clues, and the tragic weapons of notorious murderers, captioned with their respective stories, while the pictures on the walls contrasted with this arsenal of horror by showing edifying scenes of police activities. Here you could see the kindly policeman guiding the little old lady across the street, the solemn policeman looking down at a corpse washed up from the river, the brave police- man flinging himself at the bridle of a shying horse, an allegorical painting of the Police Force as Guardian Angel to the City, the lost child surrounded by motherly policemen at the station, the police- man in flames carrying a young girl out of a burning house, and many, many more, such as "First Aid" and "Alone on the Beat," as well as the portraits ofpolicemen with years ofservice dating back to 186g, captioned with inspiring accounts of their careers, and framed poems extolling the work of the police force as a whole or its individ- ual functionaries. Its highest official, the ministerial head of the po- lice division that was called, in Kakania, by the psychological designation Ministry for Inner Concerns, in his welcoming speech drew his listeners' attention to these pictures, which, he said, showed the spirit of the police as a true manifestation of the people. The nat- ural admiration for a spirit of such helpfulness and discipline was a fountain of moral renewal in an age such as this, when art and life only too often sank into mindless sensuality and self-indulgence. Di- otima, standing beside Count Leinsdorf, felt uneasily that this ran counter to her own efforts on behalf of modem art, and was gazing intently into the art with a gentle yet unyielding expression on her face, to register upon the general atmosphere her dissent from this particuhrr Kakanian official's point ofview. Her cousin, watching her
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from a slight distance with the sentiment~ proper to an honorary sec- retary of the Parallel Campaign, suddenly within all this packed crowd felt a gingerly touch on his arm and was surprised to find at his side Bonadea, who had arrived with her husband, the eminent judge, and was using the moment when all necks were craned toward the august speaker, with the Archduke by his side, to work her way close to her fickle lover. This bold move was the fruit of long scheming. Hard hit by her lover's desertion at a time when she was sadly strug- gling to tie down, as it were, even the freely fluttering fringes of the banner of her lust, all her thoughts in these last weeks had been focused on winning him back. He had been avoiding her, and forcing him to "have it out" with her only put her in the unbecoming role of the pursuer of someone who would rather be left alone, so she had decided te force her way into the circle where he was to be found day after . day. She had in her favor, after all, her husband's professional connection with the case of the loathsome killer Moosbrugger, as well as her friend's intention to do· something for that murderer, which made her a natural factor in effecting a liaison. She had conse- quently been making quite a nuisance of herself to her husband lately, with her references to concern in influential circles for the
welfare of the criminally insane, and had made him take her along to the opening of the police exhibition, where, something told her, she would at last get to meet Diotima. When the Minister had concluded his speech and the mass of visitors 'began to circulate, she never budged from the side of her reluctant lover, accompanying him on a tour of the awful bloodstained weapons despite her nearly insur- mountable horror of them.
"You said all this sort of thing could be prevented if people only wanted to," she whispered, like an obedient child showing off how earnestly it has been paying attention to something once explained to her. Letting the crowd press her close to him a while later, she smiled and used the opportunity to murmur in his ear: "You once said that in the right circumstances anyone is capable of any weakness. "
Her ostentatious insistence on clinging to his side was a great em- barrassment to Ulrich, whom she was purposefully steering, despite all he could do to distract her from this aim, toward Diotima, and since he couldn't lecture her in front of all these people on the im-
propriety of what ·she was up to, he realized that the day had come when he had no choice but to bring about just what he had always tried to prevent, the acquaintance of these two women with each other. They were already close to a group of which Diotima and His Grace formed the center when Bonadea cried out, in front of a dis- play case: "Oh look, there's Moosbrugger's knife! " And so it was. Bonadea stared at it joyfully, as if she had just come upon Grandma's first party favor in some drawer at home. So Ulrich quickly made up his mind and found a suitable pretext for asking his cousin's permis- sion to present a lady who longed to meet her and whom he knew to be passionately interested in all efforts on behalf of the good, the true, and the beautiful.
So no one could really say that nothing much was happening as the days and weeks rocked along; actually, the police exhibit and all that went with it was the least of it. In England, for instance, they had something far more magnificent, much talked of in society here- abouts: a doll's house that was presented to the Queen, built by a famous architect, with a dining room three feet long, its walls hung with miniature portraits by famous contemporary painters, with bed- rooms where hot and cold water came from real taps, and a library that included a little album made entirely of gold, in which the Queen could paste tiny photographs of the royal famUy, a micro- scopically printed raUway timetable and shipping schedule, and about two hundred tiny volumes in which famous authors had with their own hands written poems and stories for the Queen. Diotima had a two-vplume set ofthe deluxe edition ofthe English book about it that had only just appeared, with expensive color prints of every- thing worth seeing, to which rarity she owed an increased participa- tion in her soirees by the highest-ranking personages in society. And there was more, one thing coming so quickly on the heels of another that it was hard to find words to keep up with it all, so that it felt like a flurry of drumbeats in the soul preceding something just around the-comer that had not yet come into view. There was, for instance, the first strike ever of the Imperial and Royal Telegraph, conducted in a most disquieting fashion that came to be known as passive resist- ance, and consisted simply of everyone involved going about their work punctiliously by the book; it turned out that everything could be brought to a standstill far more speedUy by the strictest observ-
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ance of all the official regulations than by the most ruthless anarchy. Like tlie story of the Captain of Kopenick in Prussia-a man still re- membered for conferring that military rank on himself by dint of putting on a secondhand uniform, then stopping a patrol in the street and using it, together with the Prussian virtue of unconditional obe- dience to orders from anyone in uniform, te liberate the municipal treasury-passive resistance was something that tickled the imagina- tion, but it also subliminally undermined the principles that inspired the disapproval one felt obliged to express. The newspapers reported among other items that His Majesty's Government had signed an agreement with another majesty's government to keep the peace, re- vive the economy, and work sincerely together to establish and re- spect the rights of all, and listed the measures to be taken if these were or might be threatened. Section Chief Tuzzi's superior, the Foreign Minister, made a speech, a few days afterward, in which he urged the need for close collaboration among the three continental empires, which eould not afford to ignore modern social develop- ments but must, in the joint interests of the dynasties, make common cause against social innovations. 'Italy was involved in a military cam- paign in Libya. Germany and England had a problem in Baghdad. Kakania was making certain military preparations in the south, to show the world that it would not allow Serbia to expand to the sea but would permit it only a railway:Jine to the coast. And reported on a par with all the events of this magnitude was the world-fa. mous Swedish actress Vogelsang's confession that she had never in all her life slept as well as on this, her first night in Kakania, andher delight at the policeman who had rescued her from the delirious crowd and then asked permission to press her hand in both of his.
This, then, brings us back to the police exhibition. A great deal was happening everyWhere, and people were certainly aware ofit. It was regarded as a good thing when we were the ones doing it, and aroused apprehensiveness when it was done by others. · Every school- boy could understand each thing as it happened, but as to what it all meant in general, nobody really knew except for a very few persons, and even they were not sure. Only a short time later it might as well have happened in a different sequence, or the other way ai"Qund, and nobody would have known the difference, except for a few changes
that inexplicably establish themselves in the course of time and so constitute the slimy track made by the snail of history.
In such circumstances a foreign embassy may well be facing a hard task when trying to find out what is actually going on. The diplomatic representatives would gladly have drawn their wisdom from Count Leinsdorf, but His Grace placed obstacles in their way. In his work he found anew day by day the contentment that solid achievement leaves in its wake, and what foreign observers beheld in his counte- nance was the beaming serenity that comes from operations pro- ceeding in good order. Department One sent a memorandum; Department Two replied; when Department One had been notified of Department Two's reply, it was usually advisable to suggest talking it over in person, and when an agreement had been reached in this fashion, it was decided that nothing could be done about the matter; and so there was always something to do. In addition there were those countless minor considerations that must not be overlooked. After all, one was always working. hand in glove with all the varioUs ministries; one did not want tp give offense to the Church; one had to take account of certain persons and social considerations; in short, even on those days when one wasn't doing anything in particular, there were so many things one had to guard against doing that one had the sense of being kept frantically busy at all times. His Grace fully appreciated these facts of life.
"The higher a man is placed by destiny," he used to say, "the bet- t'er he sees that everything depends on only a few simple principles, but above all on a fli111 will and well-planned activity. " Once, when speaking to his "young friend," he went even more deeply into this subject. Apropos of the German struggle for national unity, he ad- mitted that between 1848 and 1866 quite a number of the best brains in the country had had their say in politics. "But then," he went on, "that fellow Bismarck came along, and there was one good thing he did if he did nothing else: he showed them how politics should be done. It isn't done with a lot of talk and clever ideas! Despite his seamy side, he did see to it that ever since his time, wherever the German tongue is spoken, everyone knows that in politics there is no hope to be had from cleverness and speechmaking, only from silent thought and action. "
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Count Leinsdorf also expressed himself along these lines at Di- otima's Council meetings, and the representatives of foreign powers that sometimes sent along their observers had a hard time trying to fathom his meaning. Amheim's part in it was regarded as worth watching, and so was the position of Section Chief Tuzzi, and there came to be a general consensus that there was a secret understand- ing between these two men and Count Leinsdorf, the political aim of which was for the present concealed behind lively attention-stealing devices such as Frau Section Chief Tuzzi's pancultural endeavors. Considering how Count Leinsdorf succeeded in hoodwinking even those hardened observers without even trying, there is no denying the gift he felt he had for realism in politics.
But even those gentlemen who on festive occasions wear gold- embroidered foliage and other rank growths on their tailcoats held to the realpolttisch prejudices of their game, and since they could dis- cover no solid clues behind the scenes of the Parallel Campaign, they soon turned their attention to something that was the cause of most of the obscure phenomena in Kakania, called "the unliberated na- tional minorities. " We all talk as ifnationalism were purely the inven- tion of the arms dealers, but we really should tty for a more comprehensive explanation, and to this end Kakania makes an im- portant contribution. The inhabitants of this Imperial and Royal Imperial-Royal Dual Monarchy had a serious problem: they were supposed to feel like Imperial and Royal Austro-Hungarian patriots, while at the same time being Royal Hungarian or Imperial Royal Austrian patriots. Their understandable motto in the face of such complexities wa5 "United we stand" (from vtribus unttis, "with forces joined"). But the Austrians needed to takea far stronger stand than the Hungarians, because the Hungarians were, first and last, simply Hungarians ancl were regarded only incidentally, by foreign- ers who did not know their language, as Austro-Hungarians too; the Austrians, however, were, to begin with and primarily, nothing at all, and yet they were supposed by their leaders to feel Austro- Hungarian and be Austrian-Hungarians-they didn't even have a proper word for it. Nor was there an Austria. Its two components, Hungary and Austria; made a match like a red-white-and-green jacket with black-and-yellow trousers. The jacket was a jacket, but the trousers were the relic of an extinct black-and-yellow outfit that
had. been ripped apart in the year 1867. The trousers, or Austria, were since then officially referred to as "the kingdoms and countries . represented in the Imperial Council of the Realm," meaning nothing at all, of course, because it was only a phrase concocted from various names, for even those kingdoms referred to, such wholly Shake- spearean kingdoms as Lodomeria and Illyria, were long gone, even when there was still a complete black-and-yellow outfit worn by ac- tual soldiers. So if you asked an Austrian where he was from, of course he couldn't say: I am a man from one of those nonexistent kingdoms and countries; so for that reason alone he preferred to say: I am a Pole, a Czech, an Italian, Friulian, Ladino, Slovene, Croat, Serb, Slovak, Ruthenian, or Wallachian-and this was his so-called nationalism. Imagine a squirrel that doesn't know whether it is a squirrel or a chipmunk, a creature with no concept of'itself, and you will understand that in some circumstances it could be thrown into fits of terror by catching sight of its own tail. So this was the way IUlkanians related to each other, with the panic oflimbs so united as they stood that they hindered each other from being anything at all. Since the world began, no creature has as yet died of a language defect, and yet the Austrian and Hungarian Austro-Hungarian Dual Monarchy can nevertheless be said to have perished from its inexpressibility.
A stranger to Kakanian history might be interested to learn just how so seasoned and eminent a Kakanian as Count Leinsdorf coped with this problem. He began by excising Hungary altogether from his watchful mind; as a wise diplomat, he si! Jlply never mentioned it, just as parents avoid speaking of a son who has struck out for inde- pendence against their wish and who, they keep expecting, will yet live to regret it; the rest he referred to as the "nationalities," or else as the "Austrian ethnic stocks. " This was a most subtle device. His Grace had studied constitutional law and had found a definition ac- cepted more or less worldwide, to the effect that a people could claim to count as a nation only if it had its own constitutional state, from which he deduced that the Kakanian nations were simply na- tional minorities, at most. On the other hand, Count Leinsdorfknew that man finds his full, true destiny only within the overarching com- munal framework of a nation, and since he did not like the thought of anyone being deprived in thi's respect, he concluded that it was nee-
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essary to subordinate the nationalities and ethnic breeds to an all- embracing State. Besides, he believed in a divine ordei:, even if that order was not always discernible to the human eye, and in the revolu- tionary modernist moods that sometimes overcame him he was even capable of thinking that the idea of the State, which was coming so strongly into its own these days, was perhaps nothing other than the Divine Right of Kings just beginning to manifest itself in a rejuve- nated form. However that might be-as a realist in politics he took good care never to overdo the theorizing, and would even have set- tled for Diotima's view that the idea of the Kakanian State was syn- onymous with that ofWorld Peactr--the point was that there was a Kakanian State, even if its name was a dubious one, and that a Kakanian nation had to be invented to go with it. He liked to illus- trate this by pointing out, for instance, that nobody was a schoolboy if he didn't go to school, but that the school remained a school even
when it stood empty. The more the minorities balked against the Kakanian school's efforts to bind them into one nation, the more necessary the school, in the given circumstances. The more they in- sisted that they were s~parate nations," the more they demanded the restoration of their so-called long-lost historic rights, the more they flirted with their ethnic brothers and cousins across the borders and openly called the Empire a prison from which they must be released, the more Count Leinsdorf tried to calm them down by calling them ethnic stocks and agreed with their own emphasis on their under- developed state; only he offered to improve it by raising them up to be part of one Austrian nation. Whatever they wanted that did not fit in with his plan or that was overly mutinous, he blamed in his familiar diplomatic way on their failure so far to transcend their political im- maturity, which was to be dealt with by a wise blend of shrewd toler- ance and gently punitive restraints.
And so when Count Leinsdorfcreated the Parallel Campaign, the various ethnicities immediately perceived it as a covert Pan- Germanic plot. His Grace's participation in the police exhibition was linked with the secret police and interpreted as proof positive of his sympathies with that politically repressive body. This was all known to the foreign observers, who had heard all the horror stories about the Parallel Campaign they could want. They kept it in mind while listening to the stories about the reception of the actr~ss Vogelsang,
the English Queen's dollhouse, and the striking telegraphers, or when they were asked what they thought of the recently published international agreements; and although the Minister's praise of the disciplinary spirit could be taken as an announcement of a policy if one so desired, they probably felt that to the unprejudiced eye the opening of the police exhibition, despite all the talk about it, had pro- duced nothing worth noticing, though they also had the impression like everyone else that something was brewing in a general way, though it could not yet be pinned down.
99
OF THE MIDDLING INTELLIGENCE AND ITS FRUITFUL COUNTERPART, THE HALFWIT; THE RESEMBLANCE BETWEEN TWO ERAS; LOV ABLE AUNT JANE; AND THE DISORDER CALLED MODERN TIMES
It really was impossible to gain a clear idea of what went on when Diotima's Council was in session. The general tendency among the avant-garde in those days was in favor of taking action; people who lived by their brains felt it incumbent upon themselves to take over the leadership from those who lived for their bellies. There was also something known as Expressionism. Nobody could say just what it was, but the word suggests some kind of squeezing-out; constructive visions, perhaps, but inasmuch as the contrast with traditional art re- vealed them as being destructive, too, we might simply call them structive, which commits one to nothing either way, and a structive outlook sounds pretty good. Nor is that all.
The general orientation was toward the Now and the real world, the inside turning toward the outside, but there was also a movement turning from the outside inward; the intellect and individualism were already seen as outmoded and egocentric, love was once again dis-
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credited, and the salutary effect of artistic trash on the masses, when injected into the cleansed souls of men of action, was about to be rediscovered. "What people are" evidently keeps changing as rapidly as "What people are wearing," and both have in common the fact that no one, not even those in the fashion business, knows the real secret ofwho "these people" are. But anyone trying to run counter to this would look silly, like a person caught between the opposing cur- rents of an electric therapy machine, wildly twitching and jerking without anyone's being able to see his attacker. For the enemy is not those quick-witted enough to take advantage of the given business situation; it's the gaseous fluidity and instability of the general state of affairs itself, the confluence of innumerable currents from all di- rections that constitute it, its unlimited capacity for new combina- tions and permutations, plus, on the receiving end, the absence or breakdown of valid, sustaining, and ordering principles.
To fmd a secure foothold in this flow of phenomena is like trying to hammer a nail into a fountain's jet ofwater; and yet there is a cer- tain constant in it. What. is actually going on when that agile species man calls a tennis player a genius? Something unstated is at work here. And when they attribute genius to a racehorse? Something more is left unsaid. Whether they call a football player a scientist of the game, or admire a fencer's intellectual style, or speak of a boxer's tragic defeat, there is always something undeclared going on. They exaggerate, but the exaggeration is a form of imprecision, the sort C? f fuzziness of mind that makes the denizens of a small town regard the son of the department store owner as aman of the world. There is bound to be a grain of truth in it, and anyway, why shouldn't the sur- prises an athletic champion pulls off suggest those we get from a ge- nius, or his strategies seem analogous to those ofa seasoned explorer ofthe unknown? Even though there is something else, something far more important, that is quite wrong with such analogies, of course, this is not perceived, or perceived only with reluctance, by those given to making them. At bottom there is an uncertainty of values, passed over and ignored; it is probably less its idea of genius that makes this era attribute genius to a tennis player or a racehorse than its general distrust for the world of the mind, of the intellect, to which the term rightly belongs.
This might be the moment to bring up Aunt Jane, ofwhom Ulrich
was reminded when he was leafing through some old family albums Diotima had lent him, comparing the faces he saw in them with the faces seen in her house. As a boy, Ulrich had often stayed with a great-aunt who'd had a friend, Aunt Jane, from time immemorial. Jane was not really an aunt, originally. She had come into the house as the children's piano teacher and had not exactly achieved any won- ders in that line, either, but she had won their love because it was a principle with her that there was not much point in doing one's piano practice if one was not born for music, as she put it. She got more . enjoyment out of seeing the children climb trees, and in this fashion she became an aunt to two generations as well as-through the re- troactive effect ofthe passage ofyears-her disappointed employer's lifelong friend. ·
"Ah yes, dear Muckil" Aunt Jane would say, for instance, full of feeling impervious to time, her voice. so charged with indulgence and admiration for little Nepomuk, who was by then an uncle in his for- ties, that it still lived for anyone who had heard it once. That voice of Aunt Jane's sounded as if it had been dusted with·flour; absolutely as if one had dipped one's bare arm into the finest flour. It was a husky voice, crumb-coated, all because she drank lots of black coffee· and smoked long, thin, strong Virginia cigars, which, as she aged, ·had blackened and eroded her teeth. When you looked at her face you
(lllight also feel that the sound of her voice had something to do with those innumerable little fine lines that covered her skin like the lines of an etching. Her face was long and gentle, and to the later genera- tions seemed never to have changed, like everything else about Aunt Jane. She wore one and the same dress all her life, even if, as seems likely, it was a series of reproductions of the original; it was a long, tight casing of black ribbed silk from neck to toe, making no allow- ance for any excessive mobility of the body, With an endless row of little black buttons, like a priest's cass(i)ck. At the top there was a low, stiff stand-up collar with turned-down corners, between which her Adam's apple formed active gullies in the fleshless skin of her neck every time she pulled on her cigar; the tight sleeves ended in stiff white cuffs, and for a roof she had a reddish-blond slightly curly man's wig, parted in the middle. With the passing of the years that part showed a little more of the canvas, but more affecting than that were the two spots where the gray temples could be seen from under
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the bright wig, the only sign that Aunt Jane had not remained the same age all her life.
She might seem to have anticipated by many decades the mascu- line kind· of woman who has since come into fashion, but that is not really the case, because in her manly breast there beat a most femi- nine heart. She might also be thought to have once been a famous pianist who later lost touch with her time, for that is how she looked. But this was not so either, because she had never been more than a piano teacher, and both that mannish hairdo and her priestly garb could be traced to the fact that as a girl Aunt Jane had been in- fatuated with the Abbe Franz Liszt, whom she had met socially sev- eral times during one short period, and that was when her name had somehow assumed its English form. With that encounter she kept faith, like a lovesick knight wearing his lady's colors into his gray old age without ever having asked for more, and in Aunt Jane's case this was more touching than ifit had been some uniform ofher own great days she had worn in her retirement.
When the children were considered old enough, they were made privy te Aunt Jane's deep secret, after many solemn admonitions to respect it; much as if it had been a rite of passage. Jane had no longer been a young girl (a fastidious soul takes its time in making such . a choice) when she found the man she loved and married, against her family's will; he had ofcourse been~ artist, although, because ofthe rotten luck of small-town, proyin. cial circumstances, only a photogra- pher. But a short time after they were married he was already run- ning up debts like a genius and 'drinking furiously. Aunt Jane made sacrifices for him, she fetched him home from the tavern, she wept in secret and openly at his knees. He looked like a genius, with an imperious mouth and flamboyant hair, and if Aunt Jane had been able to infect him with the pas~ion of her despair, he would have become, with his disastrous vices, as great as Lord Byron. But the photographer proved recalcitrant to such a transfer of feeling, aban- doned Jane after a year of marriage, leaving with her maid, a peasant. girl who was pregnant by him, and he died not much later, in misery. Jane cut a lock of hair from his superb head and kept it; she took the child born to him out of wedlock and raised it as her own, under great deprivation; she rarely spoke of her past; a life given over to passion is not an easy one, or easy to talk about.
Aunt Jane's life had held its share of romantic eccentricity. But later on, when the photographer in his earthly imperfection had long ceased to hold h~r under his spell, the imperfect substance of her love for him had somehow also moldered away, leaving behind only the eternal form of love and inspiration, so that at a great remove in time her experience had become indistinguishable from a truly earthshaking kind of emotion. Aunt Jane's mind was probably not supercharged intellectually, but its form was beautiful. Her attitude was heroic, but such a stance is unattractive only as long as it is falsely motivated; once it has become quite empty of content, it again turns to flickering flames and true faith. Aunt Jane lived on tea, black cof- fee, and two cups ofbeefbouillon a day, but no one in that little town stopped and stared after her on the streets when she passed by in her black cassock, because the people knew her, they lmew she was a proper lady, they even looked up to her for being a proper lady and having the determination to dress as she pleased, even though they did not know the reasons for it.
So this is more or less the story of Aunt Jane, who died a long time ago, at a great age, and my great-aunt is dead too, and so is Uncle Nepomuk, and what were their lives all about anyway? Ulrich asked himself. But just then he would have given a lot to be able to talk with Aunt Jane again. He turned the pages of the thick old albums with those family photographs that had somehow ended up in Diotima's possession, and the closer he came to the beginnings of that new art of picture-taking, the more proudly, it seemed to him, the subjects faced the camera. There they were, with one foot placed on a pile of cardboard boulders wreathed in paper ivy or, if they were officers, with a saber posed between their straddled legs; the girls had their hands folded in their laps and their eyes opened wide; the eman- cipated men stood their ground in creaseless trousers that rose up like curling smoke, in coats with a bold romantic sweep to them, as though a gale had blown away the dignified stiffness of the bourgeois frock coat. The time must have been somewhere between 186o and 1870, when photography had emerged from its earliest stages, when the revolutionary forties were remembered as a wild, chaotic time long gone·and life had become subtly different, though no one could say exactly what the new elements were; even the tears, embraces, and confessions in which the new middle class had tried to find its
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soul in its early days w~re no more, but a5 a wave runs out over the sands, this noble impulse had now come to express itself in the way people dressed and in a certain personal buoyancy for which there may be a better word, but for the moment all we have is the photo- graphs. The photographers then wore velvet jackets and handlebar mustaches, to make them look like painters, and the painters de- signed huge cartoons on which they put whole regiments of impor- tant figures through their paces; people in general felt it was just the right time for a technology capable ofimmortalizing them as well. All that remains to be said is that at no other time could they all have felt so full of genius and stature as the people of this particular period, which produced fewer uncommon individuals-unless it was harder for such individuals to become visible in the midst of so many? - than ever before.
As he turned the pages, Ulrich wondered whether there was some connection between that era, when a photographer could feel like a _genius because he drank, wore an open-necked shirt, and, with the aid of the latest techniques, was able to project his sense of his own greatness of spirit onto all those of his contemporaries who posed before his lens, and Ulrich's own time, when only racehorses were truly felt to have genius because of their all-surpassing ability to stretch their legs and contract them ~gaiil. The two periods look dif- ferent. The present looks proudly down upon the past, which, if it had happened to occur later, would have looked proudly down upon the present. Yet it mainly amounted to the same thing, because in both cases the major role is played by muddled thinking and an ig- noring of the telling differences. A single aspect of greatness is taken for the whole, a distant analogy for a truth, and the flayed hide of a significant word is stuffed with something modish. It works, though not for long. The talkers in Diotima's salon were never entirely wrong about anything, for their concepts were as misty as the out- lines of bodies in a steambath. "These ideas, on which life hangs as the eagle hangs on his wings," Ulrich thought, "our countless moral
and artistic notions of life, by nature as delicate as ~ountain ranges of granite blurred by distance. " On such tongues as these the ideas multiplied by being turned over and over; it was impossible to dis- cuss one of them for any length of time without suddenly finding oneself caught up in the next.
These were the kind of people who had throughout history re- garded themselves as the New Era, a term like a sack in which to catch all the winds of the compass, always seiVing as an ex<:use for not placing things in their own objective order but fitting them into an illusory compound with a chimera. And yet it holds a confession of faith, the oddly living conviction that it is up to them to bring order into the world. If we were to judge what they were trying to do along those lines as halfway intelligent, it might be worth saying that"it is precisely the other half, the unnamed or-to come straight out with it-the stupid, never exact or complementary part of that middling intelligence that held an inexhaustible power of self-renewal and fruitfulness. There was life in it, mutability, restlessness, freedom to adopt a fresh perspective. They probably had their own sense of how it was with them. They were shaken up by it, it blew in gusts through their heads, those children of a nerve-racked age, aware that some- thing was wrong, each feeling intelligent enough and yet all of them together feeling somehow barren. Ifthey also happened to have tal- ent-and their intellectual woolliness certainly did not exclude this possibility-then what was going on in their heads was like seeing the weather, the clouds, trains, telegraph wires, trees and animals and the whole moving panorama of our dear world, through a nar- row, dirt-encrusted window; and no one was very quick to notice the state of his own window, but everyone noticed it about the window next door.
Ulrich had once asked them, for the fun ofit, jwt what they meant by what they were saying. They gave hiih jaundiced looks, told him he had a mechanistic view of life and was too skeptical, and stated that the most complicated problems must be made to yield the sim- plest solutions, so that the New Era-once it had shucked the con- fusing present-would turn out to be simplicity itself. Compared with Arnheim, Ulrich did not strike them as impressive at all, and Aunt Jane would have patted him on the cheek, saying, "I know just how they feel. You put them offwith your seriousness. "
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100
GENERAL STUMM INVADES THE STATE LIBRARY AND LEARNS ABOUT THE WORLD OF BOOKS, THE LIBRARIANS GUARDING IT, AND INTELLECTUAL ORDER
General Stumm had noticed the rebuff to his "comrade in arms" and undertook to comfort him. "What a lot of useless palaver," he said in indignant dismissal of the Council members; then, without any en- couragement from Ulrich, he started to talk about himself, with a certain excitement mixed with self-satisfaction:
"You remember, don't you," he said, "that I'd made up my mind to find that great redeeming idea Diotima wants and lay it at her feet. It turns out that there are lots of great ideas, but only one of them can be the greatest-that's only logical, isn't itP-so it's a matter of put- ting them in order. You said yourself that this is a resolve worthy of a Napoleon, right? You even gave me a number of excellent sugges- tions, as was to be expected of you, but I never got to the point of using them. In short, I have to go about it my own way. "
He took his hom-rimmed glasses out of his pocket and put them on in place of the pince-nez, a. sign that he wanted to look closely at someone or something.
"One of the foremost rules for a good general is to fmd out the enemy's strength," he said. "So I asked them to get me a card to our world-famous Imperial Library, and with the help of a librarian who very charmingly put himself at my disposal when I told him who I was, I have now penetrated the enemy's lines. We marched down the ranks in that colossal storehouse of books, and I don't mind telling you I was not particularly ovetwhelmed; those rows of books are no worse than a garrison on parade. Still, after a while I couldn't help starting to do some figuring in my head, and I got an unexpected answer. You see, I had been thinking that if I read a book a day, it would naturally be exhausting, but I would be bound to get to ·the
end sometime and then, even if I ·had to skip a few, I could claim a certain position in the world of the intellect. But what d'you suppose that librarian said to me, as we walked on and on, without an end in sight, and I asked him how many books they li'ad in this crazy library? Three and a half million, he tells me. We had just got to the seven hundred thousands or so, but I kept on doing these figures in my head; I'll spare you the details, but I checked it out later at the office, with pencil and paper: it would take me ten thousand years to carry out my plan.
"I felt nailed to the spot-the whole world seemed to be one enor- mous practical joke! And I'm t~lling you, even though I'm feeling a bit calmer about it, there's something radically wrong somewhere!
"You may say that it isn't necessary to read every last book. Well, it's also true that in war you don't have to kill every last soldier, but we still need every one of them. You may say to me that every book is needed too. But there, you see, you wouldn't be quite right, because that isn't so. I asked the librarian.
"It occurred.