The Man Without Qualities, Volume 2

by Robert Musil

  There followed in an appendix individual examples that really ought to have been marginal notations but had been suppressed at the places they had been intended for in order not to interrupt the exposition. And so these stragglers that had dropped out of their context no longer belonged to a specific place, although they did belong to the whole and retained ideas that might possibly have some useful application for the whole:

  “In the relation ‘to love something’ what carries such enormous distinctions as that between love of God and loving to go fishing is not the love but the ‘something.’ The emotion itself: the devotion, anxiousness, desire, hurt, gnawing—in other words, loving—does not admit a distinction.”

  “But it is just as certain that loving one’s walking stick or honor is not apples and oranges’ only for the reason that these two things do not resemble each other, but also because the use we make of them, the circumstances in which they assume importance—in short, the entire group of experiences—are different. It is from the non-interchangeability of a group of experiences that we derive the certainty of knowing our emotion. That is why we only truly recognize it after it has had some effect in the world and has been shaped by the world; we do not know what we feel before our action has made that decision.”

  “And where we say that our emotion is divided, we should rather say that it is not yet complete, or that we have not yet settled down.”

  “And where it appears as paradox or paradoxical combination, what we have is often something else. We say that the courageous person ignores pain; but in truth it is the bitter salt of pain that overflows in courageousness. And in the martyr it rises in flames to heaven. In the coward, on the contrary, the pain becomes unbearably concentrated through the anticipatory fear. The example of loathing is even clearer; those feelings inflicted with violence are associated with it, which, if received voluntarily, are the most intense desire.

  “Of course there are differing sources here, and also varying combinations, but what comes into being most particularly are various directions in which the predominant emotion develops.”

  “Because they are constantly fluid, emotions cannot be stopped; nor can they be looked at under the microscope. This means that the more closely we observe them, the less we know what it is we feel. Attention is already a change in the emotion. But if emotions were a ‘mixture’ this should really be most apparent at the moment when it is stopped, even if attention intervenes.”

  “Because the external action has no independent significance for the mind, emotions cannot be distinguished by it alone. Innumerable times we do not know what we feel, although we act vigorously and decisively. The enormous ambiguity of what a person does who is being observed mistrustfully or jealously rests on this lack of clarity.”

  “The emotions lack of clarity does not, however, demonstrate its weakness, for emotions vanish precisely when feeling is at its height. Even at high degrees of intensity, emotions are extremely labile; see for instance the courage of despair or happiness suddenly changing into pain. At this level they also bring about contradictory actions, like paralysis instead of flight, or ‘being suffocated’ by one’s own anger. But in quite violent excitation they lose, so to speak, their color, so that all that remains is a dead sensation of the accompanying physical manifestations, contraction of the skin, surging of the blood, blotting out of the senses. And what appears fully in these most intense stages is an absolute bedazzlement, so that it can be said that the shaping of the emotion, and with it the entire world of our emotions, is valid only in intermediate stages.”

  “In these average stages we of course recognize and name an emotion no differently from the way we do other phenomena that are in flux, to repeat this once again. To determine the distinction between hate and anger is as easy and as difficult as ascertaining the distinction between premeditated and unpremeditated murder, or between a basin and a bowl. Not that what is at work here is capriciousness in naming, but every aspect and deflection can be useful for comparison and concept formation. And so in this way the hundred and one kinds of love about which Agathe and I joked, not entirely without sorrow, are connected. The question of how it happens that such quite different things are characterized by the single word love’ has the same answer as the question of why we unhesitatingly talk of dinner forks, manure forks, tree-branch forks, rifle forks, road forks, and other forks. Underlying all these fork impressions is a common ‘forkness’: it is not in them as a common nucleus, but it might almost be said that it is nothing more than a comparison possible for each of them. For they do not all even need to be similar to one another: it is already sufficient if one leads to another, if you go from one to the next, as long as the neighboring members are similar to one another. The more remote ones are then similar through the mediation of these proximate members. Indeed, even what constitutes the similarity, that which associates the neighboring members, can change in such a chain; and so one travels excitedly from one end of the path to the other, hardly knowing oneself how one has traversed it.”

  “But if we wished to regard, as we are inclined to do, the similarity existing among all kinds of love for its similarity to a kind of ‘ur-love,’ which so to speak would sit as an armless and legless torso in the middle of them all, it would most likely be the same error as believing in an ‘ur-fork.’ And yet we have living witness for there really being such an emotion. It is merely difficult to determine the degree of this ‘really.’ It is different from that of the real world. An emotion that is not an emotion for something; an emotion without desire, without preferment, without movement, without knowledge, without limits; an emotion to which no distinct behavior and action belongs, at least no behavior that is quite real: as truly as this emotion is not served with arms and legs, so truly have we encountered it again and again, and it has seemed to us more alive than life itself! Love is already too particular a name for this, even if it most intimately related to a love for which tenderness or inclination are expressions that are too obvious. It realizes itself in many different ways and in many connections, but it can never let itself be detached from this actualization, which always contaminates it. Thus has it appeared to us and vanished, an intimation that always remained the same. Apparently the dry reflections with which I have filled these pages have little to do with this, and yet I am almost certain that they have brought me to the right path to it!”

  56

  THE DO-GOODER SINGS

  Professor August Lindner sang. He was waiting for Agathe.

  Ah, the boy s eyes seem to me So crystal clear and lovely, And a something shines in them That captivates my heart.

  Ah, those sweet eyes glance at me, Shining into mine! Were he to see his image there He would greet me tenderly.

  And this is why I yield myself To serve his eyes alone, For a something shines in them That captivates my heart.

  It had originally been a Spanish song. There was a small piano in the house, dating from Frau Lindners time; it was occasionally devoted to the mission of rounding out the education and culture of son Peter, which had already led Peter to remove several strings. Lindner himself never used it, except possibly to strike a few solemn chords now and then; and although he had been pacing up and down in front of this sound machine for quite some time, it was only after cautiously making sure that the housekeeper as well as Peter was out of the house that he had let himself be carried away by this unwonted impulse. He was quite pleased with his voice, a high baritone obviously well suited to expressing emotion; and now Lindner had not closed the piano but was standing there thinking, leaning on it with his arm, his weightless leg crossed over his supporting leg. Agathe, who had already visited him several times, was over an hour late. The emptiness of the house, stemming in part from that fact and in part from the arrangements he had made, welled up in his consciousness as a culpable plan.

  He had found a soul of bedazzling richness, which he was making great efforts to save and which evoked the impression of confidin
g itself to his charge; and what man would not be charmed at finding something he had hardly expected to find, a tender female creature he could train according to his principles? But mixed in with this were deep notes of discontent. Lindner considered punctuality an obligation of conscience, placing it no lower than honesty and contractual obligations; people who made no punctual division of their time seemed to him pathologically scatterbrained, forcing their more serious fellow men, moreover, to lose parcels of their time along with them; and so he regarded them as worse than muggers. In such cases he took it as his duty to bring it to the attention of such beings, politely but unrelentingly, that his time did not belong to him but to his activity; and because white lies injure one’s own mind, while people are not all equal, some being influential and some not, he had derived numerous character exercises from this; a host of their most powerful and malleable maxims now came to his mind and interfered with the gentle arousal brought on by the song.

  But no matter: he had not sung any religious songs since his student days, and enjoyed it with a circumspection. ‘What southern naïveté, and what charm,” he thought, “emanate from such worldly lines! How delightfully and tenderly they relate to the boy Jesus!” He tried to imitate the poem’s artlessness in his mind, and arrived at the result: “If I didn’t know better, I’d be capable of believing that I feel a girl’s chaste stirrings for her boy!” So one might well say that a woman able to evoke such homage was reaching all that was noblest in man and must herself be a noble being. But here Lindner smiled with dissatisfaction and decided to close the lid of the piano. Then he did one of his arm exercises that further the harmony of the personality, and stopped again. An unpleasant thought had crossed his mind. “She is unfeeling!” he sighed behind gritted teeth. “She would be laughing!”

  He had in his face at this moment something that would have reminded his dear departed mother of the little boy under whose chin every morning she tied a big lovely bow before sending him off to school; this something might be called the complete absence of roughhewn maleness. On this tall, slack, pipestem-legged apparition, the head sat as if speared on a lance over the roaring arena of his schoolmates, who jeered at the bow tie made by his mother’s hand; and in anxiety dreams Professor Lindner even now sometimes saw himself standing that way and suffering for the good, the true, and the beautiful. But for this very reason he never conceded that roughness is an indispensable male characteristic, like gravel, which has to be mixed into mortar to give it strength; and especially since he had become the man he flattered himself to be, he saw in that early defect merely a confirmation of the fact that he had been born to improve the world, even if in modest measure. Today we are quite accustomed to the explanation that great orators arise from speech defects and heroes from weakness, in other words the explanation that our nature always first digs a ditch if it wants us to erect a mountain above it; and because the half-knowledgeable and half-savage people who chiefly determine the course of life are quick to proclaim nearly every stutterer a Demosthenes, it is that much easier, as a sign of intellectual good taste, to recognize that the only important thing about a Demosthenes was his original stuttering. But we have not yet succeeded in reducing the deeds of Hercules to his having been a sickly child, or the greatest achievements in the sprint and broad jump to flat-footedness, or courage to timidity; and so it must be conceded that there is something more to an exceptional talent than its omission.

  Thus Professor Lindner was by no means restricted to acknowledging that the raillery and blows he had feared as a child could be a cause of his intellectual development. Nevertheless, the current disposition of his principles and emotions did him the service of transforming every such impression that reached him from the bustle of the world into an intellectual triumph; even his habit of weaving martial and sportive expressions into his speech, as well as his tendency to set the stamp of a strict and inflexible will on everything he said and did, had begun to develop to the degree that, as he grew up and lived among more mature companions, he was correspondingly removed from direct physical attacks. At the university, he had even joined one of the fraternities whose members wore their jackets, caps, boots, insignia, and sword just as picturesquely as the rowdies whom they despised, but made only peaceful use of them because their outlook forbade dueling. In this, Lindners pleasure in a bravery for which no blood need be spilled had achieved its definitive form; but at the same time it gave witness that one can combine a noble temperament with the overflowing pulse of life or, of course in other terms, that God enters man more easily when he imitates the devil who was there before him.

  So whenever Lindner reproached his more compact son, Peter, as he was unfortunately often called upon to do, that yielding to the very idea of force made a person effeminate, or that the power of humility and the courage of renunciation are of greater value than physical strength and courage, he was not talking as a layman in questions of courage but enjoying the excitement of a conjurer who has succeeded in yoking demons to the service of the good. For although there was really nothing that could disturb his equilibrium at the height of well-being he had attained, he was marked by a disinclination to jokes and laughter bordering almost on anxiety—as an injury that has healed leaves behind a limp—even when he merely suspected their bare possibility. “The tickling of jokes and humor,” he was accustomed to instruct his son on the subject, “originate in the sated comfort of life, in malice, and in idle fantasies, and they easily induce people to say things their better selves would condemn! On the other hand, the discipline that comes from stifling ‘witty’ ripostes and ideas is an admirable test of strength and an annealing test of will, and the more you use the silence you have struggled to master in order to look into your joke more closely, the better it turns out for the whole man. “We usually see first,” this standing admonition concluded, “how many impulses to elevate oneself and demean others it conceals, how much coquetry and frivolity lie behind most jokes, how much refinement of sympathy they stifle in ourselves and others, indeed how much horrifying coarseness and mockery comes to light in the laughter we try to coax from an audience!”

  As a result, Peter had to hide carefully from his father his youthful inclination to mockery and joking; but he was so inclined, and Professor Lindner often felt the breath of the evil spirit in his surroundings without being able to spot the poisonous phantom. It could go so far that the father would instill fear in the son with a subduing glance, while secretly fearing him himself, and when this happened he was reminded of something ineffable between his wife and himself while his plump spouse was still on earth. Being lord and master in his own house, establishing its atmosphere and knowing that his family surrounded him like a peaceful garden in which he had planted his principles, belonged for Lindner to the indispensable preconditions of happiness. But Frau Lindner, whom he had married shortly after he finished his studies, during which time he had been a lodger at her mothers, had unfortunately soon thereafter ceased to share his principles and put on an air of being reluctant to contradict him that irritated him more than contradiction itself. He could not forget having sometimes caught a glance from the corner of her eye while her mouth was obediently silent, and every time this happened he subsequently found himself in a situation that was not exactly proof against adverse comment: for instance, in a nightshirt that was too short, preaching that her dignity as a woman should preclude her finding any pleasure in the rough, loose young men who with their drunkenness and scrapes still dominated student life at that time and who accordingly were not as undesirable as lodgers as they ought to be.

  Woman’s secret mockery is a chapter in itself, with the most intimate connections to her lack of understanding for those preoccupations of greatest importance to the male; and the moment Lindner remembered this, the mental processes that had until then been churning indistinctly within him uncorked the idea of Agathe. What would she be like to live with intimately? “There is no question of her being what one might comfort
ably call a good person. She doesn’t even try to hide it!” he told himself, and a remark of hers that occurred to him in this connection, her laughing assertion that today the good people were no less responsible for the corruption of life than the bad ones, made his hair stand on end. But on the whole he had already “extracted the abscessed teeth” of these “horrible views,” even if every time they came up they upset him all over again, by once and for all declaring to himself: “She has no conception of reality!” For he thought of Agathe as a noble being, even though she was, for a “daughter of Eve,” full of venomous unrest. The proper attitude, however certain it may be for the believer, seemed to her the most intellectually unascertainable object, the solution of life’s most extreme and difficult task. She seemed to have a dreamily confused idea of what was good and right, an idea inimical to order, with no more coherence than an accidental grouping of poems. “Reality is alien to her!” he repeated. “If, for example, she knows something about love, how can she make such cynical statements about it as that it’s impossible, and the like?” Therefore she must be shown what real love is.

  But here Agathe presented new difficulties. Let him admit it fearlessly and courageously: she was offensive! She all too gladly tore down from its pedestal whatever you cautiously raised up; and if you found fault with her, her criticism knew no bounds and she made it clear that she was out to wound. There are such natures that rage against themselves and strike the hand bringing them succor; but a determined man will never allow his behavior to depend on the behavior of others, and at this moment what Lindner saw was the image of a peaceful man with a long beard, bending over a sick woman anxiously fending him off, and seeing in the depths of her heart a profound wound. The moment was far removed from logic, and so this did not mean that he was this man; but Lindner straightened up— this he actually did—and reached for his beard, which in the meantime had lost a good deal of its fullness, and a nervous blush raced across his face. He had remembered that Agathe had the objectionable habit of instilling in him the belief, more than any other human being ever could have done, that she would like to share his most sublime and most secret feelings; indeed, that in her own constrained situation she was even waiting for a special effort of these feelings in order, once he had exposed the innermost treasures of his mind, to pour scorn on him. She was egging him on! Lindner admitted this to himself and could not have done otherwise, for there was a strange, restless feeling in his breast that one might have hard-heartedly compared, although he was far from thinking this, with hens milling about in a chicken coop. But then she could suddenly laugh in the most mysterious way, or say something profane and hard that cut him to the quick, as if she had been building him up only in order to cut him down! And had she not already done this today too, even before her arrival, Lindner asked himself, bringing him to such a pass with this piano? He looked at it; it stood there beside him like a housemaid with whom the master of the house had transgressed!