The Man Without Qualities, Volume 2

by Robert Musil

  He could not know what motivated Agathe to play this game with him, and she herself would not have been able to discuss it with anyone—not even, and especially, Ulrich. She was behaving capriciously; but to the extent that this means with changeable emotions, it was done intentionally and signified a shaking and loosening up of the emotions, the way a person weighed down by a delicious burden stretches his limbs. So the strange attraction that several times had secretly led her to Lindner had contained from the beginning an insubordination against Ulrich, or at least against complete dependence on him; the stranger distracted her thoughts a little and reminded her of the diversity of the world and of men. But this happened only so that she might feel her dependence on her brother that much more warmly, and was, moreover, the same as Ulrich’s secretiveness with his diary, which he kept locked away from her; indeed, it was even the same as his general resolve to let reason stand beside emotion as well as above it, and also to judge. But while this took up his time, her impatience and stored-up tension was seeking an outlet, an adventure, about which it could not yet be said what path it would take; and to the degree that Ulrich inspired or depressed her, Lindner, to whom she felt superior, caused her to be forbearing or high-spirited. She won mastery over herself by misusing the influence she exercised over him, and she needed this.

  But something else was also at work here. For there was between her and Ulrich at this time no talk either of her divorce and Hagauer’s letters or of the rash or actually superstitious altering of the will in a moment of disorientation, an act that demanded restitution, either civic or miraculous. Agathe was sometimes oppressed by what she had done, and she knew, too, that in the disorder one leaves behind in a lower circle of life Ulrich did not see any favorable sign of the order one strives for in a higher sense. He had told her so openly enough, and even if she no longer remembered every detail of the conversation that had followed on the suspicions Hagauer had recently raised against her, she still found herself banished to a position of waiting between good and ill. Something, to be sure, was lifting all her qualities upward to a miraculous vindication, but she could not yet allow herself to believe in this; and so it was her offended, recalcitrant feeling of justice that also found expression in the quarrel with Lindner. She was very grateful to him for seeming to impute to her all the bad qualities that Hagauer, too, had discovered in her and for unintentionally calming her by the very way he looked while doing it.

  Lindner, who thus, in Agathe’s judgment, had never come to terms with himself, had now begun to pace restlessly back and forth in his room, subjecting the visits she was paying him to a severe and detailed examination. She seemed to like being here; she asked about many details of his house and his life, about his educational principles and his books. He was surely not mistaken in assuming that one would express so much interest in someone’s life only if one were drawn to share it; of course, the way she had of expressing herself in the process would just have to be accepted as her idiosyncrasy! In this vein he recalled that she had once told him about a woman— unpardonably a former mistress of her brother s—whose head always became “like a coconut, with the hair inside” when she fell in love with a man; and Agathe had added the observation that that was the way she felt about his house. It was all so much of a piece that it really made one “afraid for oneself!” But the fear seemed to give her pleasure, and Lindner thought he recognized in this paradoxical trait the feminine psyche’s anxious readiness to yield, the more so as she indicated to him that she remembered similar impressions from the beginning of her marriage.

  Now, it is only natural that a man like Lindner would more readily have thoughts of marriage than sinful ones. And so, both during and outside the periods he set aside for the problems of life, he had sometimes secretly allowed the idea to creep in that it would perhaps be good if the child Peter had a mother again; and now it also happened that instead of analyzing Agathe’s behavior further, he stopped at one of its manifestations that secretly appealed to him. For in a profound anticipation of his destiny, Agathe had, from the beginning of their acquaintance, spoken of nothing with more passion than her divorce. There was no way he could sanction this sin, but he could also not prevent its advantages from emerging more clearly with every passing day; and in spite of his customary opinions about the nature of the tragic, he was inclined to find tragic the lot that compelled him to express bitter antipathy toward what he himself almost wished would happen. In addition, it happened that Agathe exploited this resistance mostly in order to indicate in her offensive way that she did not believe the truth of his conviction. He might trot out morality, place the Church in front of it, pronounce all the principles that had been so ready to hand all his life; she smiled when she answered, and this smile reminded him of Frau Lindners smile in the later years of their marriage, with the advantage that Agathe’s possessed the unsettling power of the new and mysterious. “It’s Mona Lisas smile!” Lindner exclaimed to himself. “Mockery in a pious face!” and he was so dismayed and flattered by what he took to be a meaningful discovery that for the moment he was less able than usual to reject the arrogance ordinarily associated with this smile when she interrogated him on his belief in God. This unbeliever had no desire for missionary instruction; she wanted to stick her hand in the bubbling spring; and perhaps this was precisely the task reserved for him; once again to lift the stone covering the spring to permit her a little insight, with no one to protect him if it should turn out otherwise, no matter how unpleasant, even alarming, this idea was to himself! And suddenly Lindner, although he was alone in the room, stamped his foot and said aloud: “Don’t think for a minute that I don’t understand you! And don’t believe that the subjugation you detect in me comes from a creature subjugated from the beginning!”

  As a matter of fact, the story of how Lindner had become what he was was far more commonplace than he thought. It began with the possibility that he, too, might have become a different person; for he still remembered precisely the love he had had as a child for geometry, for the way its beautiful, cleverly worked out proofs finally closed around the truth with a soft snap, delighting him as if he had caught a giant in a mousetrap. There had been no indication that he was particularly religious; even today he was of the opinion that faith had to be “worked for,” and not received as a gift in the cradle. What had made him a shining pupil in religion class was the same joy in knowing and in showing off his knowledge that he demonstrated in his other subjects. His inner being, of course, had already absorbed the ways in which religious tradition expressed itself, to which the only resistance was the civic sense he had developed early. This had once found unexpected expression in the single extraordinary hour his life had ever known. It had happened while he was preparing himself for his final school examinations. For weeks he had been driving himself, sitting evenings in his room studying, when all at once an incomprehensible change came over him. His body seemed to become as light toward the world as delicate paper ash, and he was filled with an unutterable joy, as if in the dark vault of his breast a candle had been lit and was diffusing its gentle glow into all his limbs; and before he could come to terms with such a notion, this light surrounded his head with a condition of radiance. It frightened him a lot; but it was nevertheless true that his head was emitting light. Then a marvelous intellectual clarity overwhelmed all his senses, and in it the world was reflected in broad horizons such as no natural eye could encompass. He glanced up and saw nothing but his half-lit room, so it was not a vision; but the impetus remained, even if it was in contradiction to his surroundings. He comforted himself that he was apparently experiencing this somehow only as a “mental person,” while his “physical person” was sitting somber and distinct on its chair and fully occupying its accustomed space; and so he remained for a while, having already got half accustomed to his dubious state, since one quickly grows used to the extraordinary as long as there is hope that it will be revealed as the product, even if a diabolical product, of order.
But then something new happened, for he suddenly heard a voice, speaking quite clearly but moderately, as if it had already been speaking for some time, saying to him: “Lindner, where are you seeking me? Sis tu tuus et ego ero tuus” which can be roughly translated: Just become Lindner, and I will be with you. But it was not so much the content of this speech that dismayed the ambitious student, for it was possible that he had already heard or read it, or at least some of it, and then forgotten it, but rather its sensuous resonance; for this came so independently and surprisingly from the outside, and was of such an immediately convincing fullness and solidity, and had such a different sound from the dry sound of grim industriousness to which the night was tuned, that every attempt to reduce the phenomenon to inner exhaustion or inner overstimulation was uprooted in advance. That this explanation was so obvious, and yet its path blocked, of course increased his confusion; and when it also happened that with this confusion the condition in Lindner’s head and heart rose ever more gloriously and soon began to flow through his entire body, it got to be too much. He seized his head, shook it between his fists, jumped up from his chair, shouted “No!” three times, and, almost screaming, managed to speak the first prayer he could think of, upon which the spell finally vanished and die future professor, mortally frightened, took refuge in bed.

  Soon afterward he passed his examinations with distinction and enrolled at the university. He did not feel in himself the inner calling to the clerical class—nor, to answer Agathe’s foolish questions, had he felt it at any time in his life—and was at that time not even entirely and unimpeachably a believer, for he, too, was visited by those doubts that any developing intellect cannot escape. But the mortal terror at the religious powers hiding within him did not leave him for the rest of his life. The longer ago it had been, the less, of course, he believed that God had really spoken to him, and he therefore began to fear the imagination as an unbridled power that can easily lead to mental derangement. His pessimism, too, to which man appeared in general as a threatened being, took on depth, and so his decision to become a pedagogue was in part probably the beginning of an as it were posthumous educating of those schoolmates who had tormented him, and in part, too, an educating of that evil spirit or irregular God who might possibly still be lurking in his thoracic cavity. But if it was not clear to him to what degree he was a believer, it quickly became clear that he was an opponent of unbelievers, and he trained himself to think with conviction that he was convinced, and that it was one’s responsibility to be convinced. At the university, it was also easier for him to learn to recognize the weaknesses of a mind that is abandoned to freedom, in that he had only a rudimentary notion of the extent to which the condition of freedom is an innate part of the creative powers.

  It is difficult to summarize in a few words what was most characteristic of these weaknesses. It might be seen, for instance, in the ways that changes in living, but especially the results of thinking and experience itself, undermined those great edifices of thought aimed at a freestanding philosophical explanation of the world, whose last constructions were erected between the middle of the eighteenth and the middle of the nineteenth centuries: without the fullness of new knowledge the sciences brought to light almost every day having led to a new, solid, even if tentative way of thinking, indeed without the will to do so stirring seriously or publicly enough, so that the wealth of knowledge has become almost as oppressive as it is exhilarating. But one can also proceed quite generally from the premise that an extraordinary flourishing of property and culture had risen by insidious degrees to a creeping state of crisis, which, not long after this day—when Lindner, recuperating from the more stressful parts of his personal reminiscences, was thinking about the errors of the world—was to be interrupted by the first devastating blow. For assuming that someone came into the world in 1871, the year Germany was born, he would already have been able to perceive around the age of thirty that during his lifetime the length of railroads in Europe had tripled and in the whole world more than quadrupled; that postal service had tripled in extent and telegraph lines grown sevenfold; and much else had developed in the same way. The degree of efficiency of engines had risen from 50 to 90 percent; the kerosene lamp had been successively replaced by gaslight, gas mantle lamps, and electricity, producing ever newer forms of illumination; the horse team, which had maintained its position for millennia, was replaced by the motorcar; and airplanes not only had appeared on the scene but were already out of their baby shoes. The average length of life, too, had markedly increased, thanks to progress in medicine and hygiene, and relations among peoples had become, since the last warring skirmishes, noticeably more gentle and confiding. The person experiencing all this might well believe that at last the long-awaited progress of mankind had arrived, and who would not like to think that proper for an age in which he himself is alive!

  But it appears that this civic and spiritual prosperity rested on assumptions that were quite specific and by no means everlasting, and today we are told that in those days there had been enormous new areas for farming and other natural riches that had just been appropriated; that there were defenseless colored peoples who had not yet been exploited (the reproach of exploitation was excused by the idea that it was a means of bestowing civilization upon them); and that there were also millions of white people living who, defenseless, were forced to pay the costs of industrial and mercantile progress (but one salved one’s conscience with the firm and not even entirely unjustified faith that the dispossessed would be better off than before their dispossession). At any rate, the cornucopia from which physical and spiritual prosperity poured forth was so large and unbounded that its effects were invisible, and all one could see was the impression of increase with every achievement; and today it is simply impossible to conceive how natural it was at that time to believe in the permanence of this progress and to consider prosperity and intellect something that, like grass, springs up wherever it is not deliberately rooted out.

  Toward this confident bliss, this madness of growth, this fatefully exultant broad-mindedness, the pale, scrawny student Lindner, tormented even physically by his height, had a natural aversion, which expressed itself in an instinctive sensing of any error and an alert receptivity for any sign of life that gave evidence of this aversion. Of course, economics was not his field of specialization, and it was only later that he learned to evaluate these facts properly; but this made him all the more clairvoyant about the other aspect of this development, and the rot going on in a state of mind that initially had placed free trade, in the name of a free spirit, at the summit of human activities and then abandoned the free spirit to the free trade, and Lindner sniffed out the spiritual collapse that then indeed followed. This belief in doom, in the midst of a world comfortably ensconced in its own progress, was the most powerful of all his qualities; but this meant that he might also possibly have become a socialist, or one of those lonely and fatalistic people who meddle in politics with the greatest reluctance, even if they are full of bitterness toward everything, and who assure the propagation of the intellect by keeping to the right path within their own narrow circle and personally do what is meaningful, while leaving the therapeutics of culture to the quacks. So when Lindner now asked himself how he had become the person he was, he could give the comforting answer that it had happened exactly the way one ordinarily enters a profession. Already in his last year at school he had belonged to a group whose agenda had been to criticize coolly and discreetly both the “classical paganism” that was half officially admired in the school and the “modern spirit” that was circulating in the world outside. Subsequently, repelled by the carefree student antics at the university, he had joined a fraternity in whose circles the influences of the political struggle were already beginning to displace the harmless conversations of youth, as a beard displaces a baby face. And when he got to be an upperclassman, the memorable occurrence applicable to every kind of thinking had dictatorially asserted itself: that the best sup
port of faith is lack of faith, since lack of faith, observed and struggled against in others, always gives the believer occasion to feel himself zealous.

  From the hour when Lindner had resolutely told himself that religion, too, was a contrivance, chiefly for people and not for saints, peace had come over him. Between the desires to be a child and a servant of God, his choice had been made. There was, to be sure, in the enormous palace in which he wished to serve, an innermost sanctum where the miracles reposed and were preserved, and everyone thought of them occasionally; but none of His servants tarried long in this sanctum: they all lived just in front of it; indeed, it was anxiously protected from the importunity of the uninitiated, which had involved experiences not of the happiest sort. This exerted a powerful appeal on Lindner. He made a distinction between arrogance and exaltation. The activity in the antechamber, with its dignified forms and myriad degrees of goings-on and subordinates, filled him with admiration and ambition; and the outside work he now undertook himself, the exercise of influence on moral, political, and pedagogic organizations and the imbuing of science with religious principles, contained tasks on which he could spend not one but a thousand lives, but rewarded him with that enduring dynamism harnessed to inner unchangeability which is the happiness of blessed minds: at least that is what he thought in contented hours, but perhaps he was confusing it with the happiness of political minds. And so from then on he joined associations, wrote pamphlets, delivered lectures, visited collections, made connections, and before he had left the university the recruit in the movement of the faithful had become a young man with a prominent place on the officers’ list and influential patrons.