by Robert Musil
“Well, yes-in other words, you mean to say that you had a natural abhorrence of the particular error of your class-mate's ways, and that the sight of vice held you as it were spellbound, just as the gaze of the serpent is said to hold its victims.”
The form-master and the mathematics master hastened to express their appreciation of the simile by means of lively gestures.
But Törless said: “No, it wasn't actually abhorrence. It was like this: sometimes I told myself he had done wrong and ought to be reported to those in authority. . .
“And that is the way you should have acted.”
“But then at other times he struck me as so peculiar that I simply didn't think about his being punished, I looked at him from quite a different point of view. It always gave me a jolt when I thought of him in that way..
“You must express yourself a little more clearly, my dear Törless.”
“There isn't any other way of saying it, sir.”
“Oh yes. there is, there is. “You are excited. We can see that. You are perplexed and confused. What you said just now was very obscure.”
“Well yes, I do feel perplexed. l have had much better ways of putting it. But it all comes to the same thing in the end-there was something quite weird in me....”
“H'm, yes. But after all that is only natural in a matter like this.”
Törless reflected for a moment.
“Perhaps one can put it like this: there are certain things that are destined to affect our lives in, as it were, two different ways. In my case they have been people, events, dark dusty corners, a high, cold, silent wall that suddenly came alive.
“Good gracious, Törless, what is all this rambling talk?”
But Törless had suddenly begun to enjoy talking and getting it all off his chest.
“...imaginary numbers...”
They all glanced now at one another, now at Törless. The mathematics master cleared his throat and said:
“I should like to interpolate, for the elucidation of these obscure allusions, that Törless here one day came to see me, asking for an explanation of certain fundamental mathematical concepts-with particular reference to that of imaginary numbers-things that are in fact very likely to be a cause of difficulty to the as yet insufficiently instructed intellect. I must indeed confess that he unquestionably displayed acuity of mind. On the other hand, he showed a really morbid insistence on singling out the very things which, so to speak, seemed-at least to him-to indicate a lacuna in the causality of thought.
“Do you remember what you said on that occasion, Törless?”
“Yes. I said it seemed to me that at these points we couldn't get across merely by the aid of thought, and we needed another and more inward sort of certainty to get us to the other side, as you might say. We can't manage solely by means of thinking, I felt that in the case of Basini too.”
The headmaster was becoming impatient with this philosophical deviation from the direct line of the enquiry. But the chaplain was very satisfied with Törless's answer.
“So what you feel is that you are drawn away from science towards the religious aspect of things?” he asked, and then, turning to the others, went on: “Clearly it was really similar where Basini was concerned. The boy seems to have a receptive sensibility for the finer aspects, or as I should rather say, for the divine essence of morality that transcends the limits of our intellect.”
Now the headmaster felt he was really obliged to take up the point.
“Well now, tell me, Törless, is it as the Reverend Father says? Have you an inclination to look behind events or things-as you yourself have put it, in-a rather general way-seeking the religious background?”
He himself would have been heartily glad if Törless had at long last given an affirmative answer and thus provided a solid basis on which to judge his case.
But Törless said: “No, it wasn't that either.”
“Well, then for heaven's sake, boy, will you please tell us plainly what it was!” the headmaster burst out. “After all, we cannot possibly settle down to a philosophical discussion with you!” But now Törless became stubborn. He himself felt that he had not put his case well, but both the antagonism and the misguided approval he had met with gave him a sense of haughty superiority over these older men who seemed to know so little about the inner life of a human being.
“I can't help its not being all these things you meant. But I myself can't explain properly what I felt each time. Still, if I say what l think about it now, you may understand why it took me so long to tear myself away from it.”
He was standing very straight, as proudly as if he were the judge here; and he looked straight ahead, past the men facing him-he could not bear the sight of this ridiculous assembly.
There outside the window was a crow, perching on a branch. Apart from that there was nothing but the vast white plain.
He felt that the moment had come when he would talk clearly, coherently, and triumphantly of the things that had at first been vague and tormenting within him, and later had been lifeless, without force.
It was not that any new idea had come to him, lending him this confidence and lucidity. He simply felt it throughout his being, as he stood there drawn up to his full height and as though standing in the middle of an empty room-felt it with the whole of his being, just like that time when he had let his astonished gaze stray over his class-mates as they sat there writing or memorising, all busily at work.
For it is strange how it is with thoughts. They are often no more than accidentals that fade out again without leaving any trace; and thoughts have their dead and their vital seasons. We sometimes have a flash of understanding that amounts to the insight of genius, and yet it slowly withers, even in our hands-like a flower. The form remains, but the colours and the fragrance are gone. That is to say, we still remember it all, word for word, and the logical value of the proposition, the discovery, remains entirely unimpaired, and nevertheless it merely drifts aimlessly about on the surface of our mind, and we do not feel ourselves any the richer for it. And then, perhaps years later-all at once there is again a moment when we see that in the meantime we have known nothing of it, although in terms of logic we have known it all.
Yes, there are dead and living thoughts. The process of thinking that takes place on the illumined surface, and which can always be checked and tested by means of the thread of causality, is not necessarily the living one. A thought that one encounters in this way remains as much a matter of indifference as any given man in a column of marching soldiers. Although a thought may have entered our brain a long time earlier, it comes to life only in the moment when something that is no longer thought, something that is not merely logical, combines with it and makes us feel its truth beyond the realm of all justification, as though it had dropped an anchor that tore into the blood-warm, living flesh.... Any great flash of understanding is only half completed in the illumined circle of the conscious mind; the other half takes place in the dark loam of our innermost being. It is primarily a state of soul, and uppermost, as it were at the extreme tip of it, there the thought is-poised like a flower.
Törless had needed only one great shock to his soul at this time to bring this out in him at last, flowering in the light.
Without paying any attention to the disconcerted faces round about him, and as though soliloquizing, he started out from this point and spoke right on without a pause, his eyes fixed on some far distance.
“Perhaps I don't know enough yet to find the right words for it, but I think I can describe it. It happened again just a moment ago. I don't know how to put it except by saying that I see things in two different ways-everything, ideas included. If I make an effort to find any difference in them, each of them is the same today as it was yesterday, but as soon as I shut my eyes they're suddenly transformed, in a different light. Perhaps I went wrong about the imaginary numbers. If I get to them by going straight along inside mathematics, so to speak, they seem quite natural. It's only if I look at th
em directly, in all their strangeness, that they seem impossible. But of course I may be all wrong about this, I know too little about it. But I wasn't wrong about Basini. I wasn't wrong when I couldn't turn my ear away from the faint trickling sound in the high wall or my eye from the silent, swirling dust going up in the beam of light from a lamp. No, I wasn't wrong when I talked about things having a second, secret life that nobody takes any notice of! I-I don't mean it literally-it's not that things are alive, it's not that Basini seemed to have two faces-it was more as if I had a sort of second sight and saw all this not with the eyes of reason. Just as I can feel an idea coming to life in my mind, in the same way I feel something alive in me when I look at things and stop thinking. There's something dark in me, deep under all my thoughts, something I can't measure out with thoughts, a sort of life that can't be expressed in words and which is my life, all the same.
“That silent life oppressed me, harassed me. Something kept on making me stare at it. I was tormented by the fear that our whole life might be like that and that I was only finding it out here and there, in bits and pieces. . . . Oh, I was dreadfully afraid! I was out of my mind.. .”
These words and these figures of speech, which were far beyond what was appropriate to Törless's age, flowed easily and naturally from his lips in this state of vast excitement he was in, in this moment of almost poetic inspiration. Then he lowered his voice and, as though moved by his own suffering, he added:
“Now it's all over. I know now I was wrong after all. I'm not afraid of anything any more. I know that things are just things and will probably always be so. And I shall probably go on for ever seeing them sometimes this way and sometimes that, sometimes with the eyes of reason, and sometimes with those other eyes. . . . And I shan't ever try again to compare one with the other. .”
He fell silent. He took it quite as a matter or course that now he could go, and nobody tried to stop him.
* *
When he had left the room, the masters looked at each other with baffled expressions.
The headmaster wagged his head irresolutely. It was the form-master who first found something to say.
“Dear me, it strikes me that this little prophet was trying to give us a lecture! it's the very dickens to know what to make of him! Such excitement! And at the same time this bewilderment, this perplexity, about quite simple things!”
“Receptivity and spontaneity of mind,” the mathematics master concurred. “Apparently he has been attaching too much importance to the subjective factor in all our experience, and this is what perplexed him and drove him to use those obscure metaphors.”
Only the chaplain was silent. In all Törless's talk it was the often recurring word 'soul' that had caught his attention, and he would gladly have taken the boy under his wing.
But then, again, he was not entirely sure what had been meant by it.
However, the headmaster put an end to the situation. “I do not know what is really going on in this boy Törless, but there is no doubt about it that he is in such an extreme state of nervous tension that boarding-school is in all probability no longer what is most suitable for him. What he needs is a more thorough supervision of his intellectual diet than we are in a position to provide. I do not think that we can continue to bear the responsibility. Törless ought to be educated privately. I shall write to his father along these lines.”
All hastened to agree to this excellent suggestion on the part of the worthy headmaster.
“He was really so odd that I could almost believe he has some predisposition to hysteria,” the mathematics master said to the colleague at his side.
* * *
At the same time that Törless's parents received the headmaster's letter they also received one from Törless himself, in which he asked them to take him away from the school, since he no longer felt it was the right place for him.
Meanwhile Basini had been expelled, and things at school had resumed their normal course.
It had been decided that Törless was to be fetched away by his mother. It was with indifference that he said good-bye to his classmates. He was almost beginning to forget their names already.
He had never again gone up to the little red room. All that seemed to lie far, far behind him.
Since Basini's expulsion it all seemed dead. It was almost as if that boy, in whom all those relationships had intertwined, had broken the circuit with his departure.
A sort of quietness and skepticism had come over Törless; his desperation had gone. 'I suppose it was just those furtive goings-on with Basini that made everything seem so frantic,' he thought to himself. Otherwise there did not seem to be anything to account for it.
But he was ashamed-just as one is ashamed in the morning after a feverish night during which, from all the corners of the dark room, one has seen dreadful threats looming up and about to over-whelm one.
His behavior at the interview in the headmaster's room now struck him as unspeakably ridiculous. What a fuss! Hadn't they been quite right? Such a fuss about a little thing like that! But still, there was something in him that robbed this humiliation of its sting. 'I suppose I did behave unreasonably,' he reflected. 'All the same, the whole thing seems altogether to have had very little to do with my reason.' For this was his new feeling about it. He had the memory of a tremendous storm that had raged within him, but all he could muster by way of explanation for it now was entirely inadequate. 'So I suppose it must have been something much more fundamental and inevitable,' he concluded, 'than anything that can be dealt with by means of reasoned argument.
And the thing that had been there even before passion seized him, the thing that had only been overgrown by that passion-the real thing, the problem itself-was still firmly lodged in him. It was this mental perspective that he had experienced, which alternated according to whether he was considering what was distant or what was near by; it was this incomprehensible relationship that according to our shifts of standpoint gives happenings and objects sudden values that are quite incommensurable with each other, strange to each other.
All this, and the rest besides, he saw remarkably clear and pure-and small. It was as one sees things in the morning, when the first pure rays of sunlight have dried the sweat of terror, when table and cupboard, enemy and fate, all shrink again, once more assuming their natural dimensions.
But just as then there remains a faint, brooding lassitude, so too it was with Törless. He now knew how to distinguish between day and night; actually he had always known it, and it was only that a monstrous dream had flowed like a tide over those frontiers, blotting them out. He was ashamed of the perplexity he had been in. But still there was also the memory that it could be otherwise, that there were fine and easily effaced boundary-lines around each human being, that feverish dreams prowled around the soul, gnawing at the solid walls and tearing open weird alleys-and this memory had sunk deep into him, sending out its wan and shadowy beams.
He could not quite have explained this. But his inability to find words for it, this near-dumbness, was in itself delightful, like the certainty of a teeming body that can already feel in all its veins the faint tugging of new life. Confidence and weariness intermingled in Törless. .
So it was that he waited quietly and meditatively for the moment of departure.
His mother, who had expected to find an overwrought and desperately perplexed boy, was struck by his cool composure.
When they drove out to the railway station, they passed, on the right, the little wood with the house in it where Bozena lived. It looked utterly insignificant and harmless, merely a dusty thicket of willow and alder.
And Törless remembered how impossible it had been for him then to imagine the life his parents led. He shot a sidelong glance at his mother.
“What is it, my dear boy?”
“Nothing, Mamma. I was just thinking.”
And, drawing a deep breath, he considered the faint whiff of scent that rose from his mother's corseted waist.
/> Translated by Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser
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