The Man Without Qualities, Volume 2

by Robert Musil

  The way the plus and minus sides of life adhere to each other has been judged in quite different ways. Pious misanthropists see in it an effluence of earthly decrepitude, bulldog types life’s juiciest filet; the man in the street feels as comfortable within this contradiction as he does between his left and right hands, and people who are proper say that the world was not created in order to correspond to human expectations but it is the other way round: these ideas were created in order to correspond to the world, and why is it that they never bring it to pass in the sphere of the just and the beautiful? As mentioned, Ulrich was of the opinion that this state of affairs served the production and preservation of a middling condition of life, which more or less leaves it up to chance to mix human genius with human stupidity, as this condition itself also emerges from such a mixture; a long time ago he had expressed this by saying that the mind has no mind, and just recently, at Diotima’s soirée, he had again talked about it at length as the great confusion of the emotions. But whether it had been recently or long ago, and no matter how obvious it might have been to continue the same thought, as soon as Ulrich began to do so he had the feeling that such words were coming from his mouth a few days too late. This time, he frequently found himself lacking in desire to occupy himself with things that did not directly concern him, for his soul was prepared to submit to the world with all its senses, however this might turn out. His judgment was as good as disconnected from this altogether. Even whether something pleased him or not hardly mattered, for everything simply seized hold of him in a way that surpassed his capacity for understanding. This was as true for every general state of mind as for every particular and individual one; indeed, at times it was entirely without thought, and corporeal; but when it had lasted awhile and reached full measure, it became unpleasant or seemed ridiculous to him, and he was then ready, in a manner just as unfounded as the one in which he had first submitted, to retract that submission.

  And Agathe in her fashion was experiencing pretty much the same thing. At times, her conscience was oppressed, and expected or made for itself new oppressions from the world she had left behind but that nonetheless proclaimed itself in all its power all around her. In the manifold bustle that fills day and night there was probably not a single task in which she could participate with all her heart, and her failure to venture into anything should not be regarded with the certainty of blame or disdain, or even contempt. There was in this a remarkable peace! It might perhaps be said, to alter a proverb, that a bad conscience, as long as it is bad enough, may almost provide a better pillow on which to rest than a good one: the incessant ancillary activity in which the mind engages with a view to acquiring a good individual conscience as the final outcome of all the injustice in which it is embroiled is then abolished, leaving behind in mind and emotions a hectic independence. A tender loneliness, a sky-high arrogance, sometimes poured their splendor over these holidays from the world. Alongside one’s own feelings the world could then appear clumsily bloated, like a captive balloon circled by swallows, or, mutatis mutandis, humbled to a background as small as a forest at the periphery of one’s field of vision. The offended civic obligations echoed like a distant and crudely intrusive noise; they were insignificant, if not unreal. A monstrous order, which is in the last analysis nothing but a monstrous absurdity: that was the world. And yet every detail Agathe encountered also had the tensed, high-wire-act nature of the once-and-never-again, the nature of discovery, which is magical and admits of no repetition; and whenever she wanted to speak of this, she did so in the awareness that no word can be uttered twice without changing its meaning.

  So the attitude of brother and sister toward the world at this time was a not entirely irreproachable expression of confident benevolence, containing its own brand of parallel attraction and repulsion in a state of feeling that hovered like a rainbow, instead of these opposites combining in the stasis that corresponds to the self-confident state of every day. And something else was connected with this: in the days following that strange night, the tone of their conversations changed too; the echo of destiny faded, and the progression became freer and looser; indeed, it sometimes volatilized in a playful fluttering of words. Still, this did not indicate a temporizing born of despondency as much as it indicated an unregulated broadening of the living foundations of their own adventure. They sought support in observing the ordinary ways in which life was carried on, and were secretly convinced that the equilibrium of this usual form of living was also a pretense. In this way it happened one day that their conversation took a direction in which, despite some fluctuation, it persisted. Ulrich asked: ‘What does the commandment ‘Love thy neighbor as thyself really mean?”

  “Love the person farthest away like thyself is what it means!” Agathe responded with the tenderest forbearance, to which her brother had a right in questions of loving one’s fellowmen.

  But Ulrich was not satisfied. “And what does it mean to say ‘Love what you do not know? To love someone you don’t know, although you might well be convinced that after you got acquainted you wouldn’t like each other? So, in the last analysis: to love him although you know him?” he insisted more explicitly.

  “That’s clearly the situation most people are in, but they don’t let it bother them!” Agathe replied. “They put doubt and confidence inside each other!”

  “They foresee nothing more in the commandment of love than the reasonable prohibition against hurting each other so long as it serves no purpose,” Ulrich offered.

  But Agathe said that that would be the insipid rule of thumb “What you don’t want someone to do to you, don’t do to anyone else,” and it was impossible that the entire purpose of this high-mindedly passionate, cheerfully generous task could be to love a stranger without even asking who he was!

  “Perhaps the word love’ here is only an expression that has taken far too great a swing to overcome the obstacles?” Ulrich reflected. But Agathe insisted that it really did mean “love him!” and “without any particular reason,” and that it was not to be haggled over, so Ulrich yielded. “What it means is: Love him in spite of what you know!” he objected. “And before you know him!” Agathe repeated and underlined it once again: “At least, without knowing him!”

  But she stopped abruptly and looked at her brother, bewildered. “But what is it you really love in a person if you don’t know him at all?” she asked impatiently.

  Thus the playful questions took on various forms as they sped back and forth. But Ulrich did not hasten to his sister’s aid. He was of the opinion that to love something means to prefer it over other things, and that surely assumed a certain knowing.

  “Almost everybody loves himself best, and knows himself least!” Agathe threw in.

  “True love is independent of merit and reward,” Ulrich confirmed, mimicking a moralizing tone and shrugging his shoulders.

  “Something’s wrong here!”

  “A lot’s wrong!” he ventured.

  “And if you love everything? If you’re supposed to love the whole world, the way you are today? What is it then that you’re loving? You would say: ‘Nothing special’!” Agathe laughed.

  “Haven’t you noticed, too, that today it’s downright disturbing if you happen to meet a person who is so beautiful that you have to say something personal about it?” he asked her.

  “Then it’s not a feeling about the real world and the real person!” she said firmly.

  “So then we have to tackle the question as to what part of this person it’s true of, or what metamorphosis and transformation of the real person and the real world,” Ulrich said, softly but emphatically.

  After a short pause, Agathe answered, with a timid conscience: “Perhaps that is the real person?” But Ulrich hesitantly resisted this, shaking his head.

  Shining through the content of this inquiring assertion there was, no doubt, a profound obviousness. The breezes and delights of these days were so tender and merry that the impression arose spontaneously
that man and world must be showing themselves as they really were: this transparency harbored a small, odd, suprasensory shudder, such as is glimpsed in the flowing transparency of a brook, a transparency that allows the glance to see to the bottom but, when it arrives there, wavering, makes the mysterious colored stones look like fish scales, and beneath them what the glance had thought it was experiencing is truly concealed, without possibility of access. Agathe, surrounded by sunshine, needed only to disengage her glance a little to have the feeling of having stumbled into a supernatural domain; for the shortest interval she could easily imagine that she had come in contact with a higher truth and reality, or at least had come upon an aspect of existence where a little door behind the earth mysteriously indicated the way from the earthly garden into the beyond. But when she again limited the range of her glance to an ordinary span and let life’s glare stream in on her once more, she saw whatever might actually happen to be there: perhaps a little flag being waved to and fro by a child’s hand, merrily and without any kind of puzzled thought; a police wagon with prisoners, its black-green paint sparkling in the light; or a man with a colorful cap contentedly turning a pile of manure; or finally a company of soldiers, whose shouldered rifles were pointing their barrels at the sky. All this seemed to have had poured over it something related to love, and everyone also seemed more ready to open themselves to this feeling than usual: but to believe that the empire of love was now really happening would be just as difficult, Ulrich said, as imagining that at this moment no dog could bite or no person do anything evil.

  The same happened with all the other attempts at explanation, which had in common with this one that they opposed some land of person who was far off and true to people who were everyday, earth-bound, and bad and good, but at all events people as we know them. Brother and sister examined these ideal types one after the other, and could not believe in any of them. There was the feeling that on such festive days nature brought forth in her creatures all their hidden goodness and beauty. Then there were the more psychological explanations, that people in this transparent, nuptial air did not show themselves as different in some magical way, but still displayed themselves so as to be as lovable as they would like to be and saw themselves as being: sweating their egotism and inward-turned indulgence, as it were, out through their pores. And finally there is also the variation that people were showing their goodwill; to be sure, this cannot prevent them from doing evil, but emerges miraculously and unscathed on days like these from the evil will that usually governs them, like Jonah from the belly of the whale. But the most succinct explanation one heard was that this is the immortal part of man, which shimmers through the mortal part. All these imputations had in common that they located the real person in a part of him that, among the insubstantial remainder, does not come into play; and if the promising contact with this real self was a process clearly directed upward, there was also a second, no less abundant group of explanations, which directed this process just as clearly downward: these were all those according to which man is supposed to have lost his natural innocence through intellectual arrogance and all lands of misfortune brought upon him by civilization. There are, therefore, two genuine people, who appear to the mind with the greatest punctuality in the same, constantly recurring situations, yet both these types—the one a divine superman, the other an animal-like infra-man—were on opposite sides of the person as he really is. Finally, Ulrich remarked dryly: “The only trait that remains as common, and also very characteristic, is that even when he is being good, a person does not seek the true person in himself but takes himself to be something else plus or minus*!”

  But here brother and sister had arrived at a borderline case of that love for another that is so problematic and so gently entwines everything within it, and Agathe sighed in vexation, but not without charm. “Then all that remains of all this is just a ‘mood’!” she said, disappointed. “The sun is shining. You get into a frame of mind!”

  Ulrich added to this: “The social instincts stretch themselves out in the sun like mercury in the thermometer tube, at the expense of the egotistic instincts, which otherwise hold them more or less in balance. Perhaps nothing else.”

  “So an ‘unconscious craving’ like a schoolgirl’s or schoolboys!” Agathe continued. “They would like to kiss the whole world and have no idea why! So we can’t say any more than that either?”

  They had suddenly become tired of feeling; and it sometimes happened that in such a conversation, dealing only with their capacity for feeling, they neglected to use it. Also, because the surfeit of emotions that could nowhere find an outlet actually hurt, they sometimes got back at it with a little ingratitude. But when they had both spoken in this fashion, Agathe quickly looked sidelong at her brother. “That would,” she protested, “be saying too little!”

  The moment she said this, they both felt once more that they were not just relying on some subjective fantasy but were facing an invisible reality. Truth was hovering in the mood inundating them, reality was under the appearance, transformation of the world gazed out of the world like a shadow! The reality about which they felt so expectant was, to be sure, remarkably lacking a nucleus and only half comprehensible, and it was a long-intimate half-truth, familiar and unfulfillable, that wooed credibility: not an everyday reality and truth for everyone, but a secret one for lovers. Obviously, it was not just caprice or delusion either, and its most mysterious insinuation whispered: “Just leave yourself to me without mistrust, and you’ll discover the whole truth!” Giving an account of this was so difficult because the language of love is a secret language and in its highest perfection is as silent as an embrace.

  The thought “secret language” had the effect of making Agathe dimly recall that it was written somewhere: “Whosoever abides in love abides in God, and God in him. He who has not love does not know God.” She did not know where.

  Ulrich on the other hand, because she had said before that it was “just a mood,” was considering an idea as sweetly temperate as the sound of a flute. One had only to assume that such a mood of being in love was not always just a transitory special state but was also, beyond its immediate occasion, capable of enduring and spreading; in other words, all you had to assume was that a person could be a lover alone and in accordance with his enduring being, in exactly the same way that he can be indifferent, and this would lead him to a totally changed way of life: indeed, presumably it would take him to an entirely unfamiliar world that would be present in his mind without his having to be considered mentally ill. This thought, that everything could be made different by one small step, indeed just by a movement that the mind merely had to let happen, was extremely seductive. And suddenly Ulrich asked his sister with curiosity: “What do you think would happen if we were to stop one of these people and say to him: ‘Brother, stay with us!’ or ‘Stop, O hastening soul’?”

  “He would look at us flabbergasted,” Agathe replied.

  “And then unobtrusively double his pace, or call a policeman,” Ulrich finished.

  “He would probably think he’d fallen in with good-natured madmen,” Agathe added.

  “But if we were to yell at him: ‘You criminal, you piece of nothing!’ he probably wouldn’t consider us crazy,” Ulrich noted with amusement, “but would merely take us to be people who think differently,’ or ‘members of a different party,’ who had turned angry at him.”

  Agathe frowned, smiling, and then they both again gazed into the human current that was pulling them along and flowing against them. Together they felt again the self-forgetfulness and power, the happiness and goodness, the deep and elevated constraint, that predominate inside a vital human community, even if it is only the contingent community of a busy street, so that one does not believe that there could also be anything bad or divisive; and their own sense of existence, that sharply bounded and difficult having-been-placed-here, that basic happiness and basic hostility, stood in marvelous contrast to this communal scene. They both t
hought the same; but they also thought differently, without its being obvious. They guessed each other’s meaning; but sometimes they guessed wrongly. And gradually an indolence, indeed a paralysis of thinking, emanated from this double-pearled juxtaposition on the oyster shell of the world, as Ulrich called it rather scornfully, and they then parried it by laughing at each other, or about something.

  But when this happened again Agathe said: “It always makes me so sad when we’re forced to laugh at ourselves; and I don’t know why I have to.”

  Ulrich replied: “Nothing is funnier than opening one’s eyes to reality when they’re still filled with the inner soul!”

  But Agathe did not pick up on this; she repeated: “Everything remains so uncertain. It seems to draw itself together and then extend itself again, without any shape. It permits no activity, and the inactivity becomes unbearable. I can’t even say that I really love these people, or that I love these real people, as they are when we look at them. I’m afraid our own feelings are pretty unreal!”

  “But these people respond to each other in exactly the same way!” Ulrich retorted. “They want to love each other, yet at the decisive moment they think antipathy is more natural and healthier! So it’s the same for everyone: We feel that real life has snapped off a possible life!”

  “But then tell me,” Agathe retorted angrily, “why love always needs a church or a bed!”

  “For heaven’s sake”—Ulrich soothed his companion with a laugh—”don’t speak so openly!” He touched her hand with his fingertips and went on, joking mysteriously: “All these people can also be called in public what you and I are in private: the unseparated but not united!”

  It was not an assertion, merely a cajoling constellation of words, a joke, a candid little cloud of words; and they knew that feeling oneself chosen was the cheapest of all magic formulas and quite adolescent. Nevertheless, Ulrich’s fraternal words slowly rose from the ground to a position above their heads. Agathe, too, now whispered jokingly: “Sometimes you feel your breath blow back from your veil still hot, like a pair of strange lips: that’s how it sometimes seems to me—call it illusion or reality—that I’m you!” was her response, and her gentle smile drew silence closed like a curtain after it as it died away.