by Robert Musil
Nevertheless, such a word might also have preceded the developing continuation of the conversation. For forks and other such innocent aids aside, sophisticated conversation knows nowadays how to handle the essence and nature of love without faltering, and yet to express itself as grippingly as if this kernel were concealed in all the various appearances of love the way forkness is contained in the manure fork or the salad fork. This leads one to say—and Ulrich and Agathe, too, could have been seduced into this by the general custom—that the important thing in every land of love is libido, or to say that it is eros. These two words do not have the same history, yet they are comparable, especially in the contemporary view. For when psychoanalysis (because an age that nowhere goes in for intellectual or spiritual depth is riveted to hear that it has a depth psychology) began to become an everyday philosophy and interrupted the middle classes’ lack of adventure, everything in sight was called libido, so that in the end one could as little say what this key and skeleton-key idea was not as what it was. And much the same is true of eros, except that those who, with the greatest conviction, reduce all physical and spiritual worldly bonds to eros have regarded their eros the same way from the very beginning. It would be futile to translate libido as drive or desire, specifically sexual or pre-sexual drive or desire, or to translate eros, on the other hand, as spiritual, indeed suprasensory, tenderness; you would then have to add a specialized historical treatise. One’s boredom with this makes ignorance a pleasure. But this is what determined in advance that the conversation conducted between two deck chairs did not take the direction indicated but found attraction and refreshment instead in the primitive and insufficient process of simply piling up as many examples as possible of what was called love and putting them side by side as in a game: indeed, to behave as ingenuously as possible and not despise even the least judicious examples.
Comfortably chatting, they shared whatever examples occurred to them, and how they occurred to them, whether according to the emotion, according to the object it was directed at, or according to the action in which it expressed itself. But it was also an advantage first to take the procedure in hand and consider whether it merited the name of love in real or metaphorical terms, and to what extent. In this fashion many kinds of material from different areas were brought together.
But spontaneously, the first thing they talked about was emotion; for the entire nature of love appears to be a process of feeling. All the more surprising is the response that emotion is the least part of love. For the completely inexperienced, it would be like sugar and toothache; not quite as sweet, and not quite as painful, and as restless as cattle plagued by horseflies. This comparison might not seem a masterpiece to anyone who is himself tormented by love; and yet the usual description is really not that much different: being torn by doubts and anxieties, pain and longing, and vague desires! Since olden times it seems that this description has not been able to specify the condition any more precisely. But this lack of emotional specificity is not characteristic only of love. Whether one is happy or sad is also not something one experiences as irrevocably and straightforwardly as one distinguishes smooth from rough, nor can other emotions be recognized any better purely by feeling or even touching them. For that reason an observation was appropriate at this point that they might have fleshed out as it deserved, on the unequal disposition and shaping of emotions. This was the term that Ulrich set out as its premise; he might also have said disposition, shaping, and consolidation.
For he introduced it with the natural experience that every emotion involves a convincing certainty of itself that is obviously part of its nucleus; and he added that it must also be assumed, on equally general grounds, that the disparity of emotions began no less with this nucleus. You can hear this in his examples. Love for a friend has a different origin and different traits from love for a girl; love for a completely faded woman different ones from love for a saintly, reserved woman; and emotions such as (to remain with love) love, veneration, prurience, bondage, or the lands of love and the lands of antipathy that diverge even further from one another are already different in their very roots. If one allows both assumptions, then all emotions, from beginning to end, would have to be as solid and transparent as crystals. And yet no emotion is unmistakably what it appears to be, and neither self-observation nor the actions to which it gives rise provide any assurance about it. This distinction between the self-assurance and the uncertainty of emotions is surely not trifling. But if one observes the origin of the emotion in the context of its physiological as well as its social causes, this difference becomes quite natural. These causes awaken in general terms, as one might say, merely the land of emotion, without determining it in detail; for corresponding to every drive and every external situation that sets it in motion is a whole bundle of emotions that might satisfy them. And whatever of this is initially present can be called the nucleus of the emotion that is still between being and nonbeing. If one wanted to describe this nucleus, however it might be constituted, one could not come up with anything more apt than that it is something that in the course of its development, and independently of a great deal that may or may not be relevant, will develop into the emotion it was intended to become. Thus every emotion has, besides its initial disposition, a destiny as well; and therefore, since what it later develops into is highly dependent on accruing conditions, there is no emotion that would unerringly be itself from the very beginning; indeed, there is perhaps not even one that would indisputably and purely be an emotion. Put another way, it follows from this working together of disposition and. shaping that in the field of the emotions what predominates are not their pure occurrence and its unequivocal fulfillment, but their progressive approximation and approximate fulfillment. Something similar is also true of everything that requires emotion in order to be understood.
This was the end of the observation adduced by Ulrich, which contained approximately these explanations in this sequence. Hardly less brief and exaggerated than the assertion that emotion was the smallest part of love, it could also be said that because it was an emotion, it was not to be recognized by emotion. This, moreover, shed some light on the question of why he had called love a moral experience. The three chief terms—disposition, shaping, and consolidation—were, however, the main cruxes connecting the ordered understanding of the phenomenon of emotions: at least according to a particular fundamental view, to which Ulrich not unwillingly turned whenever he had need of such an explanation. But at this stage, because working this out properly had made greater and more profound claims than he was willing to take upon himself, claims that led into the didactic sphere, he broke off what had been begun.
The continuation reached out in two directions. According to the program of the conversation, it ought now to have been the turns of the object and the action of love to be discussed, in order to determine what it was in them that gave rise to their highly dissimilar manifestations and to discover what, ultimately, love “really” is. This was why they had talked about the involvement of actions at the very beginning of the emotion in determining that emotion, which should be all the more repeatable in regard to what happened to it later. But Agathe asked an additional question: it might have been possible— and she had reasons, if not for distrust, at least to be afraid of it—that the explanation her brother had selected was really valid only for a weak emotion, or for an experience that wanted to have nothing to do with strong ones.
Ulrich replied: “Not in the least! It is precisely when it is at its strongest that an emotion is most secure. In the greatest panic, one is paralyzed or screams instead of fleeing or defending oneself. In the greatest happiness there is often a peculiar pain. Great eagerness, too, ‘can only harm’ as one says. And in general it can be maintained that at the highest pitch of feeling the emotions fade and disappear as in a dazzling light. It may be that the entire world of emotions that we know is designed for only a middling kind of life and ceases at the highest stages, just as it does no
t begin at the lowest.” An indirect part of this, too, is what you experience when you observe your feelings, especially when you examine them closely: they become indistinct and are hard to distinguish. But what they lose in clarity of strength they need to gain, at least to some degree, through clarity of attentiveness, and they don’t do even that….This was Ulrich’s reply, and this obliteration of the emotion juxtaposed in self-observation and in its ultimate arousal was not accidental. For in both conditions action is excluded or disturbed; and because the connection between feeling and acting is so close that many consider them a unit, it is not without significance that the two examples are complementary.
But what he avoided saying was precisely what they both knew about it from their own experience, that in actuality a condition of mental effacement and physical helplessness can be combined with the highest stage of the emotion of love. This made him turn the conversation with some violence away from the significance that acting has for feeling, apparently with the intention of again bringing up the division of love according to objects. At first glance, this rather whimsical possibility also seemed better suited to bringing order to ambiguity. For if, to begin with an example, it is blasphemy to label love of God with the same word as love of fishing, this doubtless lies in the differences between the objects this love is aimed at; and the significance of the object can likewise be measured by other examples. What makes the enormous difference in this relationship of loving something is therefore not so much the love as rather the something. Thus there are objects that make love rich and happy; others that make it poor and sickly, as if it were due entirely to them. There are objects that must requite the love if it is to develop all its power and character, and there are others in which any similar demand would be meaningless from the outset. This decisively separates the connection to living beings from the connection to inanimate things; but, even inanimate, the object is the proper adversary of love, and its qualities influence those of love.
The more disproportionate in value this adversary is, the more distorted, not to say passionately twisted, love itself becomes. “Compare,” Ulrich admonished, “the healthy love of young people for each other with the ridiculously exaggerated love of the lonely person for a dog, cat, or dickeybird. Observe the passion between man and wife fade away, or become a nuisance like a rejected beggar, if it is not requited, or not fully requited. Don’t forget, either, that in unequal associations, such as those between parents and children, or masters and servants, between a man and the object of his ambition or his vice, the relationship of requited love is the most uncertain, and without exception the fatal element. Wherever the governing natural exchange between the condition of love and its adversary is imperfect, love degenerates like unhealthy tissue!…This idea seemed to have something special that attracted him. Ulrich would have expounded on it at length and with numerous examples, but while he was still thinking these over, something unanticipated, which quickened his intended line of thought with expectation like a pleasant fragrance coming across fields, appeared to direct his reflections almost inadvertently toward what in painting is called still life or, according to the contrary but just as fitting procedure of a foreign language, nature morte. “It is somehow ridiculous for a person to prize a well-painted lobster,” Ulrich continued without transition, “highly polished grapes, and a hare strung up by the legs, always with a pheasant nearby; for human appetite is ridiculous, and painted appetite is even more ridiculous than natural appetite.” They both had the feeling that this association reached back in more profound ways than were evident, and belonged to the continuation of what they had omitted to say about themselves.
For in real still lifes—objects, animals, plants, landscapes, and human bodies conjured up within the sphere of art—something other than what they depict comes out: namely, the mysterious, demoniacal quality of painted life. There are famous pictures of this kind, so both knew what they were talking about; it would, however, be better to speak not of specific pictures but of a land of picture, which, moreover, does not attract imitators but arises without rules from a flourish of creative activity. Agathe wanted to know how this could be recognized. Ulrich gave a sign refusing to indicate any definitive trait, but said slowly, smiling and without hesitation: “The exciting, vague, infinite echo!”
And Agathe understood him. Somehow one has the feeling of being on a beach. Small insects hum. The air bears a hundred meadow scents. Thoughts and feelings stroll busily hand in hand. But before one’s eyes lies the unanswering desert of the sea, and what is important on the shore loses itself in the monotonous motion of the endless view. She was thinking how all true still lifes can arouse this happy, insatiable sadness. The longer you look at them, the clearer it becomes that the things they depict seem to stand on the colorful shore of life, their eyes filled with monstrous things, their tongues paralyzed.
Ulrich responded with another paraphrase. “All still lifes really paint the world of the sixth day of creation, when God and the world were still by themselves, with no people!” And to his sister’s questioning smile he said: “So what they arouse in people would probably be jealousy, secret inquisitiveness, and grief!”
That was almost an aperçu, and not a bad one; he noted it with displeasure, for he was not fond of these ideas machined like bullets and hastily gilded. But he did nothing to correct it, nor did he ask his sister to do so. For the strange resemblance to their own life was an obstacle that kept both of them from adequately expressing themselves about the uncanny art of the still life or nature morte.
This resemblance played a great role in their lives. Without it being necessary to repeat in detail something reaching back to the shared memories of childhood that had been reawakened at their reunion and since then had given a strange cast to all their experiences and most of their conversations, it cannot be passed over in silence that the anesthetized trace of the still life was always to be felt in it. Spontaneously, therefore, and without accepting anything specific that might have guided them, they were led to turn their curiosity toward everything that might be akin to the nature of the still life; and something like the following exchange of words resulted, charging the conversation once more like a flywheel and giving it new energy:
Having to beg for something before an imperturbable countenance that grants no response drives a person into a frenzy of despair, attack, or worthlessness. On the other hand, it is equally unnerving, but unspeakably beautiful, to kneel before an immovable countenance from which life was extinguished a few hours before, leaving behind an aura like a sunset.
This second example is even a commonplace of the emotions, if ever anything could be said to be! The world speaks of the consecration and dignity of death; the poetic theme of the beloved on his bier has existed for hundreds, if not thousands of years; there is a whole body of related, especially lyric, poetry of death. This obviously has something adolescent about it. Who imagines that death bestows upon him the noblest of beloveds for his very own? The person who lacks the courage or the possibility of having a living one!
A short line leads from this poetic immaturity to the horrors of conjuring up spirits and the dead; a second line leads to the abomination of actual necrophilia; perhaps a third to the pathological opposites of exhibitionism and coercion by violence.
These comparisons may be strange, and in part they are extremely unappetizing. But if one does not allow oneself to be deterred but considers them from, as it were, a medical-psychological viewpoint, there is one element they all have in common: an impossibility, an inability, an absence of natural courage or the courage for a natural life.
They also supply the truth—should one already be embarked on daring comparisons—that silence, fainting, and every kind of incompleteness in the adversary is connected with the effect of mental exhaustion.
What is especially repeated in this way, as was mentioned before, is that an adversary who is not on the same level distorts love; it is only necessary to add that
it is not infrequently a distorted attitude of the emotion that bids it make a choice at all. And inversely, it would be the responding, living, acting partner who determines the emotions and keeps them in order, without which they degenerate into shadowboxing.
