The Man Without Qualities, Volume 2

by Robert Musil

  He was now impatient to write, feeling confident that these ideas had to be subjected to a more intense scrutiny. Once in his study, he turned on the light, as the walls already lay in shadow. Nothing was to be heard of Agathe. He hesitated an instant before beginning.

  He was inhibited when he recollected that in his impatience to take shortcuts in laying out and sketching his idea he had used the concepts “inner” and “outer,” as well as “individual” and “world,” as if the distinction between both agencies of the emotions coincided with these representations. This was of course not so. The peculiar distinction Ulrich had made between the disposition for and the possibility of elaboration into specific and nonspecific emotions, if allowed to prevail, cuts across the other distinctions. The emotions develop in one and the other fashion just as much outwardly and in the world as they do inwardly and in the individual. He pondered over a proper word for this, for he didn’t much like the terms “specific” and “nonspecific,” although they were indicative. “The original difference in experience is most exposed and yet most expressive in that there is an externalizing of emotions as well as an inwardness both internal and external,” he reflected, and was content for a moment, until he found these words, too, as unsatisfactory as all the others, when he went on to try out a dozen. But this did not change his conviction; it only looked to him like a complication in the discussion he was embarking on, the result of language not having been created for this aspect of existence. “If I go over everything once more and find it correct, it won’t matter to me if all I end up talking about is our ordinary emotions and our ‘other ones,” he concluded.

  Smiling, he took down from a shelf a book that had a bookmark in it and wrote at the head of his own words these words of another: “Even if Heaven, like the world, is subjected to a series of changing events, still the Angels have neither concept nor conception of space and time. Although for them, too, everything that happens happens sequentially, in complete harmony with the world, they do not know what time means, because what prevails in Heaven are neither years nor days, but changing states. Where there are years and days, seasons prevail, where there are changes of state, conditions. Since the Angels have no conception of time the way people do, they have no way of specifying time; they do not even know of its division into years, months, weeks, hours, into tomorrow, yesterday, and today. If they should hear a person speak of these things—and God has always linked Angels with people—what they understand by them is states and the determination of states. Man’s thinking begins with time, the Angels’ with a state; so what for human beings is a natural idea is for the Angels a spiritual one. All movement in the spiritual world is brought about through inner changes in state. When this troubled me, I was raised into the sphere of Heaven to the consciousness of Angels, and led by God through the realms of the firmament and conducted to the constellations of the universe, and all this in my mind, while my body remained in the same place. This is how all the Angels moved from place to place: that is why there are for them no intervals, and consequently no distances either, but only states and changes in state. Every approach is a similarity of inner states, every distancing a dissimilarity; spaces in Heaven are nothing but external states, which correspond to the internal ones. In the spiritual world, everyone will appear visible to the other as soon as he has a yearning desire for the other’s presence, for then he is placing himself in the other’s state; conversely, in the presence of disinclination he will distance himself from him. In the same way, someone who changes his abode in halls or gardens gets where he is going more quickly if he longs for the place, and more slowly if his longing is less; with astonishment I saw this happen often. And since the Angels are not able to conceive of time, they also have a different idea of eternity than earthly people do; they understand by it an infinite state, not an infinite time.”

  A few days earlier, Ulrich had accidentally come across this in a selection of the writings of Swedenborg he owned but had never really read; and he had condensed it a little and copied down so much of it because he found it very pleasant to hear this old metaphysician and learned engineer—who made no small impression on Goethe, and even on Kant—talking as confidently about heaven and the angels as if it were Stockholm and its inhabitants. It fit in so well with his own endeavor that the remaining differences, which were by no means insignificant, were brought into relief with uncanny clarity. It gave him great pleasure to seize on these differences and conjure forth in a new fashion from the more cautiously posited concepts of a later century the assertions—dryly unhallucinatory in their premature self-certainty, but with a whimsical effect nevertheless— of a seer.

  And so he wrote down what he had thought.

  Alternate Draft Versions

  1940 - 1942

  The following four chapters, in corrected fair copy, are alternate versions of the preceding “galley” chapters. (Alternates 47 and 48 have been omitted because the first differs in only minor details from galley chapter 57, and the second closely parallels galley chapter 48.) Musil was working on these during the last two years of his life, up to his sudden death on April 15,1942.

  49

  CONVERSATIONS ON LOVE

  Man, the speaking animal, is the only one that requires conversation even for his reproduction. And not only because he is always talking does he speak while that is going on too, but apparently his bliss in love is bound root and branch to his loquacity, and in so profoundly mysterious a fashion that it almost calls to mind those ancients according to whose philosophy god, man, and things arose from the “logos,” by which they variously understood the Holy Ghost, reason, and speaking. Now not even psychoanalysis and sociology have had anything of consequence to say about this, although both these modern sciences might well compete with Catholicism in intervening in everything human. So one must construct one’s own explanation, that in love, conversations play an almost greater role than anything else. Love is the most garrulous of all emotions, and it consists largely of loquaciousness. If the person is young, these conversations that encompass everything are part of the phenomenon of growing up; if he is mature, they form his peacock’s fan, which, even though it consists only of quills, unfolds the more vibrantly the later it happens. The reason might lie in the awakening of contemplative thinking through the emotions of love, and in its enduring connection with them; but this would only be putting off the problem for the moment, for even if the word “contemplation” is used almost as often as the word “love,” it is not any clearer.

  Whether, moreover, what bound Agathe and Ulrich together can be accused of being love or not is not to be decided on these grounds, although they spoke with each other insatiably. What they spoke about, too, turned around love, always and somehow; that is true. But what is true of every emotion is true of love, that its ardor expands more strongly in words the farther off action is; and what persuaded brother and sister, after the initial violent and obscure emotional experiences that had gone before, to give themselves over to conversations, and what seemed to them at times like a magic spell, was above all not knowing how they could act. But the timidity before their own emotions that was involved in this, and their curious penetration inward to this emotion from its periphery, sometimes caused these conversations to come out sounding more superficial than the depth that underlay them.

  50

  DIFFICULTIES WHERE THEY ARE NOT LOOKED FOR

  How do things stand with the example, as celebrated as it is happily experienced, of love between two so-called people of different sexes? It is a special case of the commandment to love thy neighbor without knowing what land of person he is; and a test of the relationship that exists between love and reality.

  People make of each other the dolls with which they have already played in dreaming of love.

  And what the other thinks and really is has no influence on this at all?

  As long as one loves the other, and because one loves the other, everything is enchanting; but t
his is not true the other way around. Never has a woman loved a man because of his thoughts or opinions, or a man a woman on account of hers. These play only an important secondary role. Moreover, the same is true of thoughts as of anger: if one understands impartially what the other means, not only is anger disarmed, but most of the time, against its expectation, love as well.

  But, especially at the beginning, isn’t what plays the major role being charmed by the concord of opinions?

  When the man hears the woman’s voice, he hears himself being repeated by a marvelous submerged orchestra, and women are the most unconscious of ventriloquists; without its coming from their mouths, they hear themselves giving the cleverest answers. Each time it is like a small annunciation: a person emerges from the clouds at the side of another, and everything the one utters seems to the other a heavenly crown, custom fitted to his head! Later, of course, you feel like a drunk who has slept off his stupor.

  And then the deeds! Are not the deeds of love—its loyalty, its sacrifices and attentions—its most beautiful demonstration? But deeds, like all mute things, are ambiguous. If one thinks back on one’s hfe as a dynamic chain of actions and events, it amounts to a play in which one has not noticed a single word of the dialogue and whose scenes have the same monotonous climaxes!

  So one does not love according to merit and reward, and in anti-phony with the immortal spirits mortally in love?

  That one is not loved as one deserves is the sorrow of all old maids of both sexes!

  It was Agathe who gave this response. The uncannily beautiful where-does-it-come-from of love rose up from past loves in conjunction with the mild frenzy of injustice and even reconciled her to the lack of dignity and seriousness of which she sometimes complained because of her game with Professor Lindner, and which she was always ashamed of whenever she again found herself in Ulrich’s vicinity. But Ulrich had begun the conversation, and in the course of it had become interested in pumping her for her memories; for her way of judging these delights was similar to his.

  She looked at him and laughed. “Haven’t you ever loved a person above everything, and despised yourself for it?”

  “I could say no; but I wont indignantly reject it out of hand,” Ulrich said. “It could have happened.”

  “Have you never loved a person,” Agathe went on excitedly, “despite the strangest conviction that this person, whether he has a beard or breasts, about whom you thought you knew everything and whom you esteem, and who talks incessantly about you and himself, is really only visiting love? You could leave out his thinking and his merits, give him a different destiny, furnish him with a different beard and different legs: you could almost leave him out, and you would still love him!…That is, insofar as you love him at all!” she added to soften it.

  Her voice had a deep resonance, with a restless glitter in its depths, as from a fire. She sat down guiltily, because in her unintentional eagerness she had sprung up from her chair.

  Ulrich, too, felt somewhat guilty on account of this conversation, and smiled. He had not in the least intended to speak of love as one of those contemporary bifurcated emotions that the latest trend calls “ambivalent,” which amounts to saying that the soul, as is the case with swindlers, always winks with its left eye while pledging an oath with its right hand. He had only found it amusing that love, to arise and endure, does not depend on anything significant. That is, you love someone in spite of everything, and equally well on account of nothing; and that means either that the whole business is a fantasy or that this fantasy is the whole business, as the world is a whole in which no sparrow falls without the All-Feeling One being aware of it.

  “So it doesn’t depend on anything at all!” Agathe exclaimed byway of conclusion. “Not on what a person is, not on what he thinks, not on what he wants, and not on what he does.”

  It was clear to them that they were speaking of the security of the soul, or, since it might be well to avoid such a grand word, of the insecurity, which they—using the term now with modest imprecision and in an overall sense—felt in their souls. And that they were talking of love, in the course of which they reminded each other of its changeability and its art of metamorphosis, happened only because it is one of the most violent and distinctive emotions, and yet it is such a suspicious emotion before the stern throne of sovereign understanding that it causes even this understanding to waver. But here they had already found a beginning when they had scarcely begun strolling in the sunshine of loving one’s neighbor; and mindful of the assertion that even in this gracious stupefaction you had no idea whether you really loved people, and whether you were loving real people, or whether, and by means of what qualities, you were being duped by a fantasy and a transformation, Ulrich showed himself assiduous in finding a verbal knot that would give him a handhold on the questionable relationship that exists between emotion and understanding, at least at the present moment and in the spirit of the idle conversation that had just died away.

  “This always contains both contradictions; they form a four-horse team,” he said. “You love a person because you know him; and because you don’t know him. And you understand him because you love him; and don’t know him because you love him. And sometimes this reaches such a pitch that it suddenly becomes quite palpable. These are the notorious moments when Venus through Apollo, and Apollo through Venus, gaze at a hollow scarecrow and are mightily amazed that previously they had seen something else there. If love is stronger than this astonishment, a struggle arises between them, and sometimes love—albeit exhausted, despairing, and mortally wounded—emerges the victor. But if love is not so strong, it becomes a struggle between people who think themselves deceived; it comes to insults, crude intrusions of reality, incredible humiliations intended to make up for your having been the simpleton….” He had experienced this stormy weather of love often enough to be able to describe it now quite comfortably.

  But Agathe put an end to this. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to point out that these marital and extramarital affairs of honor are for the most part much overrated!” she objected, and again tried to find a comfortable position.

  “All love is overrated! The madman who in his derangement stabs with a knife and runs it through an innocent person who just happens to be standing where his hallucination is—in love he’s normal!” Ulrich declared, and laughed.

  51

  LOVING IS NOT SIMPLE

  A comfortable position and lackadaisical sunshine, which caresses without being importunate, facilitated these conversations. They were mostly conducted between two deck chairs that had been not so much moved into the protection and shade of the house as into the shaded light coming from the garden, its freedom modulated by the morning walls. One should not, of course, assume that the chairs were standing there because brother and sister—stimulated by the sterility of their relationship, which in the ordinary sense was simply present but in a higher sense was perhaps threatening—might have had the intention of exchanging their opinions concerning the deceptive nature of love in Schopenhauerian-Hindu fashion, and of defending themselves against the insane seductive workings of its drive to procreation by intellectually dismembering them; what dictated the choice of the half-shadowed, the protective, and the curiously withdrawn had a simpler explanation. The subject matter of the conversation was itself so constituted that in the infinite experience through which the notion of love first emerges distinctly, the most various associative pathways came to light, leading from one question to the next. Thus the two questions of how one loves the neighbor one does not know, and how one loves oneself, whom one knows even less, directed their curiosity to the question encompassing both: namely, how one loves at all; or, put differently, what love “really” is. At first glance this might seem rather precocious, and also an all-too-judicious question for a couple in love; but it gains in mental confusion as soon as one extends it to include millions of loving couples and their variety.

  These millions differ not only individu
ally (which is their pride) but also according to their ways of acting, their object, and their relationship. There are times when one cannot speak of loving couples at all but can still speak of love, and other times, when one can talk of loving couples but not of love, in which case things proceed in rather more ordinary fashion. All in all, the word embraces as many contradictions as Sunday in a small country town, where the farm boys go to mass at ten in the morning, visit the brothel in a side street at eleven, and enter the tavern on the main square at noon to eat and drink. Is there any sense in trying to investigate such a word all the way around? But in using it one is acting unconsciously, as if despite all the differences there were some inherent common quality! Whether you love a walking stick or honor is six of one and half a dozen of the other, and it would not occur to anybody to name these things in the same breath if one weren’t accustomed to so doing every day. Other kinds of games about things that are different and yet one and the same can be addressed with: loving the bottle, loving tobacco, and loving even worse poisons. Spinach and outdoor exercise. Sports or the mind. Truth. Wife, child, dog. Those only added to the list who spoke about: God. Beauty, Fatherland, and money. Nature, friend, profession, and life. Freedom. Success, power, justice, or simply virtue. One loves all these things; in short, there are almost as many things associated with love as there are ways of striving and speaking. But what are the distinctions, and what do these loves have in common?

  It might be useful to think of the word “fork.” There are eating forks, manure forks, tree-branch forks, gun forks, road forks, and other forks, and what they all have in common is the shaping characteristic of “forkness.” This is the decisive experience, what is forked, the gestalt of the fork, in the most disparate things that are called by that name. If you proceed from these things, it turns out that they all belong to the same category; if you proceed from the initial impression of forkness, it turns out that it is filled out and complemented by the impressions of the various specific forks. The common element is therefore a form or gestalt, and the differentiation lies first in the variety of forms it can assume, but then also in the objects having such a form, their purpose, and such things. But while every fork can be directly compared with every other, and is present to the senses, even if only in the form of a chalk line, or mentally, this is not the case with the various shapes of love; and the entire usefulness of the example is limited to the question of whether here, too, corresponding to the forkness of forks, there is in all cases a decisive experience, a loveness, a lovebeing, and a lovekind. But love is not an object of sensory understanding that is to be grasped with a glance, or even with an emotion, but a moral event, in the way that premeditated murder, justice, or scorn is; and this means among other things that a multiply branching and variously supported chain of comparisons is possible among various examples of it, the more distant of which can be quite dissimilar to each other, indeed distinct from each other to the point of being opposite, and yet be connected through an association that echoes from one link to the next. Acting from love can thus go as far as hate; and yet the cause is not the much-invoked “ambivalence,” the dichotomy of emotions, but precisely the full totality of life.