by Robert Musil
He was by no means oblivious to the aura of absurdity that hovered around such examples, but he called it the laughter of the spiritual rabble, and he had two solid reasons for this. First, not only did he maintain that every occasion could be equally well exploited for the strengthening or weakening of human nature, but it seemed to him that occasions of the smaller kind were better suited for strengthening it than the large ones, since the human inclination to arrogance and vanity is involuntarily encouraged by the shining exercise of virtue, while its inconspicuous everyday exercise consists simply of pure, unsalted virtue. And second, systematic management of the people’s moral good (an expression Lindner loved, along with the military expression “breeding and discipline,” with its overtones of both peasantry and being fresh from the factory) would also not despise the “small occasions,” for the reason that the godless belief advanced by “liberals and Freemasons” that great human accomplishments arise so to speak out of nothing, even if it is called Genius, was already at that time going out of fashion. The sharpened focus of public attention had already caused the “hero,” whom earlier times had made into a phenomenon of arrogance, to be recognized as a tireless toiler over details who prepares himself to be a discoverer through unremitting diligence in learning, as an athlete who must handle his body as cautiously as an opera singer his voice, and who as political rejuvenator of the people must always repeat the same thing at countless meetings. And of this Goethe, who all his life had remained a comfortable citizen-aristocrat, had had no idea, while he, Lindner, saw it coming! So it was comprehensible, too, that Lindner thought he was protecting Goethe’s better part against the ephemeral part when he preferred the considerate and companionable, which Goethe had possessed in such gratifying measure, to the tragic Goethe; it might also be argued that it did not happen without reflection when, for no other reason than that he was a pedant, he considered himself a person threatened by dangerous passions.
Truly, it shortly afterward became one of the most popular human possibilities to subject oneself to a “regimen,” which may be applied with the same success to overweight as it is to politics and intellectual life. In a regimen, patience, obedience, regularity, equanimity, and other highly respectable qualities become the major components of the individual in his private, personal capacity, while everything that is unbridled, violent, addictive, and dangerous, which he, as a crazy romantic, cannot dispense with either, has its admirable center in the “regimen.” Apparently this remarkable inclination to submit oneself to a regimen, or lead a fatiguing, unpleasant, and sorry life according to the prescription of a doctor, athletic coach, or some other tyrant (although one could just as well ignore it with the same failure rate), is a result of the movement toward the worker-warrior-anthill state toward which the world is moving: but here lay the boundary that Lindner was not able to cross, nor could he see that far, because his Goethean heritage blocked it.
To be sure, his piety was not of a sort that could not have been reconciled to this movement; he did leave the divine to God, and undiluted saintliness to the saints; but he could not grasp the thought of renouncing his personality, and there hovered before him as an ideal for the world a community of fully responsible moral personalities, which as God’s civil army would certainly have to struggle against the inconstancy of baser nature and make everyday life a shrine, but would also decorate this shrine with the masterpieces of art and science. Had someone counted Lindner’s division of the day, it would have struck him that whatever the version, it added up to only twenty-three hours; sixty minutes of a full day were lacking, and of these sixty minutes, forty were invariably set aside for conversation and kindly investigation into the striving and nature of other people, as part of which he also counted visits to art exhibitions, concerts, and entertainments. He hated these events. Almost every time, their content affronted his mind; as he saw it, it was the infamous overwrought nerves of the age that were letting off steam in these overblown and aimless constructions, with their superfluous stimulants and genuine suffering, with their insatiability and inconstancy, their inquisitiveness and unavoidable moral decay. He even smiled disconcertedly into his scanty beard when on such occasions he saw “ordinary men and women” idolize culture with flushed cheeks. They did not know that the life force is enhanced by being circumscribed, not by being fragmented. They all suffered from the fear of not having time for everything, not knowing that having time means nothing more than not having any time for everything. Lindner had realized that the bad nerves did not come from work and its pressure, which in our age are blamed for them, but that on the contrary they came from culture and humanitarianism, from breaks in routine, the interruption of work, the free minutes in which the individual would like to live for himself and seek out something he can regard as beautiful, or fun, or important: these are the moments out of which the miasmas of impatience, unhappiness, and meaninglessness arise. This was what he felt, and if he had had his way—that is, according to the visions he had at such moments—he would sweep away all these art workshops with an iron broom, and festivals of labor and edification, tightly tied to daily activity, would take the place of such so-called spiritual events; it really would require no more than excising from an entire age those few minutes a day that owed their pathological existence to a falsely understood liberality. But beyond making a few allusions, he had never summoned up the decisiveness to stand up for this seriously and in public.
Lindner suddenly looked up, for during these dreamy thoughts he had still been riding in the trolley; he felt irritated and depressed, as one does from being irresolute and blocked, and for a moment he had the confused impression that he had been thinking about Agathe the entire time. She was accorded the additional honor that an annoyance that had begun innocently as pleasure in Goethe now fused with her, although no reason for this could be discerned. From habit, Lindner now admonished himself. “Dedicate part of your isolation to quiet reflection about your fellowman, especially if you should not be in accord with him; perhaps you will then learn to better understand and utilize what repels you, and will know how to be indulgent toward his weaknesses and encourage his virtue, which may simply be overawed,” he whispered with mute lips. This was one of the formulas he had coined against the dubious activities of so-called culture and in which he usually found the composure to bear them; but this did not happen, and this time it was apparently not righteousness that was missing. He pulled out his watch, which confirmed that he had accorded Agathe more time than was allotted. But he would not have been able to do so if in his daily schedule there had not been those twenty leftover minutes set aside for unavoidable slippage. He discovered that this Loss Account, this emergency supply of time, whose precious drops were the oil that lubricated his daily works, even on this unusual day, would still hold ten spare minutes when he walked into his house. Did this cause his courage to grow? Another of his bits of wisdom occurred to him, for the second time this day: “The more unshakable your patience becomes,” said Lindner to Lindner, “the more surely you will strike your opponent to the heart!” And to strike to the heart was a pleasurable sensation, which also corresponded to the heroic in his nature; that those so struck never strike back was of no importance.
41
BROTHER AND SISTER THE NEXT MORNING
Ulrich and his sister came to speak of this man once more when they saw each other again the morning after Agathe’s sudden disappearance from their cousin’s party. On the previous day Ulrich had left the excited and quarrelsome gathering soon after she had, but had not got around to asking her why she had up and left him; for she had locked herself in, and was either already sleeping or purposely ignoring the listener with his soft inquiry as to whether she was still awake. Thus the day she had met the curious stranger had closed just as capriciously as it had begun. Nor was any information to be had from her this morning. She herself did not know what her real feelings were. When she thought of her husband’s letter, which had forced its way to h
er and which she had not been able to bring herself to read again, although from time to time she noticed it lying beside her, it seemed to her incredible that not even a day had passed since she had received it; so often had her condition changed in the meantime. Sometimes she thought the letter deserved the horror tag “ghosts from the past”; still, it really frightened her, too. And at times it aroused in her merely a slight unease of the kind that can be aroused by the unexpected sight of a clock that has stopped; at other times, she was plunged into futile brooding that the world from which this letter came was claiming to be the real world for her. That which inwardly did not so much as touch her surrounded her outwardly in an invisible web that was not yet broken. She involuntarily compared this with the things that had happened between her and her brother since the arrival of this letter. Above all they had been conversations, and despite the fact that one of them had even brought her to think of suicide, its contents had been forgotten, though they were evidently still ready to reawaken, and not surmounted. So it really did not matter much what the subject of a conversation was, and pondering her heart-stopping present life against the letter, she had the impression of a profound, constant, incomparable, but powerless movement. From all this she felt this morning partly exhausted and disillusioned, and partly tender and restless, like a fever patient after his temperature has gone down.
In this state of animated helplessness she said suddenly: “To empathize in such a way that one truly experiences another person’s mood must be indescribably difficult!” To her surprise, Ulrich replied immediately: “There are people who imagine they can do it.” He said this ill-humoredly and offensively, having only half understood her. Her words caused something to move aside and make room for an annoyance that had been left behind the day before, although he ought to find it contemptible. And so this conversation came to an end for the time being.
The morning had brought a day of rain and confined brother and sister to their house. The leaves of the trees in front of the windows glistened desolately, like wet linoleum; the roadway behind the gaps in the foliage was as shiny as a rubber boot. The eyes could hardly get a hold on the wet view. Agathe was sorry for her remark, and no longer knew why she had made it. She sighed and began again: “Today the world reminds me of our nursery.” She was alluding to the bare upper rooms in their father s house and the astonishing reunion they had both celebrated with them. That might be farfetched; but she added: “It’s a person’s first sadness, surrounded by his toys, that always keeps coming back!” After the recent stretch of good weather, expectations had automatically been directed toward a lovely day, and this filled the mind with frustrated desire and impatient melancholy. Ulrich, too, now looked out the window. Behind the gray, streaming wall of water, will-o’-the-wisps of outings never taken, open green, and an endless world beckoned; and perhaps, too, the ghost of a desire to be alone once more and free again to move in any direction, the sweet pain of which is the story of the Passion and also the Resurrection of love. He turned to his sister with something of this still in the expression on his face, and asked her almost vehemently: “I’m surely not one of those people who can respond empathically to others?”
“No, you really aren’t!” she responded, and smiled at him.
“But just what such people presume,” he went on, for it was only now that he understood how seriously her words had been meant, “namely, that people can suffer together, is as impossible for them as it is for anyone else. At most they have a nursing skill in guessing what someone in need likes to hear—”
“In which case they must know what would help him,” Agathe objected.
“Not at all!” Ulrich asserted more stubbornly. “Apparently the only comfort they give is by talking: whoever talks a lot discharges another person’s sorrow drop by drop, the way rain discharges the electricity in a cloud. That’s die well-known alleviation of every grief through talking!”
Agathe was silent.
“People like your new friend,” Ulrich now said provocatively, “perhaps work the way many cough remedies do: they don’t get rid of the sore throat but soothe its irritation, and then it often heals by itself!”
In any other situation he could have expected his sisters assent, but Agathe, who since yesterday had been in a peculiar frame of mind because of her sudden weakness for a man whose worth Ulrich doubted, smiled unyieldingly and played with her fingers. Ulrich jumped up and said urgently: “But I know him, even if only fleetingly; I’ve heard him speak several times!”
“You even called him a Vacuous fool,” Agathe interjected.
“And why not?” Ulrich defended it. “People like him know less than anyone about how to empathize with another person! They don’t even know what it means. They simply don’t feel the difficulty, the terrible equivocation, of this demand!”
Agathe then asked: “Why do you think the demand is equivocal?”
Now Ulrich was silent. He even lit a cigarette to underline that he was not going to answer; they had, after all, talked about it enough yesterday. Agathe knew this too. She did not want to provoke any new explanations. These explanations were as enchanting and as devastating as looking at the sky when it forms gray, pink, and yellow cities of marble cloud. She thought, “How fine it would be if he would only say: 1 want to love you as myself, and I can love you that way better than any other woman because you are my sister!’ “ But because he was not about to say it, she took a small pair of scissors and carefully cut off a thread that was sticking out somewhere, as if this were at that moment the only thing in the entire world that deserved her full attention. Ulrich observed this with the same attention. She was at this instant more seductively present to all his senses than ever, and he guessed something of what she was hiding, even if not everything. For she meanwhile had had time to resolve: if Ulrich could forget that she herself was laughing at the stranger who presumed he could be of help here, he was not going to find it out from her now. Moreover, she had a happy presentiment about Lindner. She did not know him. But that he had offered his assistance selflessly and wholeheartedly must have inspired confidence in her, for a joyous melody of the heart, a hard trumpet blast of will, confidence, and pride, which were in salutary opposition to her own state, now seemed to be playing for her and refreshing her beyond all the comedy of the situation. “No matter how great difficulties may be, they mean nothing if one seriously wills oneself to deal with them!” she thought, and was unexpectedly overcome by remorse, so that she now broke the silence in something of the way a flower is broken off so that two heads can bend over it, and added as a second question to her first: “Do you still remember that you always said that love thy neighbor is as different from an obligation as a cloudburst of bliss is from a drop of satisfaction?”
She was astonished at the vehemence with which Ulrich answered her: “I’m not unaware of the irony of my situation. Since yesterday, and apparently always, I have done nothing but raise an army of reasons why this love for one’s neighbor is no joy but a terribly magnificent, half-impossible task! So nothing could be more understandable than that you’re seeking protection with a person who has no idea about any of this, and in your position I’d do the same!”
“But it’s not true at all that I’m doing that!” Agathe replied curtly.
Ulrich could not keep himself from throwing her a glance that held as much gratitude as mistrust. “It’s hardly worth the bother of talking about,” he assured her. “I really didn’t want to either.” He hesitated a moment and then went on: “But look, if you do have to love someone else the way you love yourself, however much you love him it really remains a self-deceiving lie, because you simply can’t feel along with him how his head or his finger hurts. It is absolutely unbearable that one really can’t be part of a person one loves, and it’s an absolutely simple thing. That’s the way the world is organized. We wear our animal skin with the hair inside and cannot shake it out. And this horror within the tenderness, this nightmare of coming to a
standstill in getting close to one another, is something that the people who are conventionally correct, the let’s be precise’ people, never experience. What they call their empathy is actually a substitute for it, which they use to make sure they didn’t miss anything!”
Agathe forgot that she had just said something that was as close to a lie as a non-lie. She saw illuminated in Ulrich’s words the disillusion over the vision of sharing in each other, before which the usual proofs of love, goodness, and sympathy lost their meaning; and she understood that this was the reason he spoke of the world more often than of himself, for if it was to be more than idle dreaming, one must remove oneself along with reality like a door from its hinges. At this moment she was far away from the man with the sparse beard and timid severity who wanted to do her good. But she couldn’t say it. She merely looked at Ulrich and then looked away, without speaking. Then she did something or other, then they looked at each other again. After the shortest time the silence gave the impression of having lasted for hours.
