The Man Without Qualities, Volume 2

by Robert Musil

  Walter swallowed and asked: “But what is this sinner’s form? You talk about it so much, and a lot about transformation too, about taking sins upon oneself, about double beings and so much else, that I half understand and half don’t understand!”

  That goes around in circles

  Of course it goes around in circles

  Clarisse smiled, and it was her embarrassed and rather excited smile. “That can’t be put in a few words,” she replied. “The insane are just double beings.”

  “Well, you said that before. But what does it mean?” Walter probed; he wanted to know how she was feeling, without consideration for her.

  Clarisse reflected. “In many depictions, Apollo is man and woman. On the other hand, the Apollo with the arrow was not the Apollo with the lyre, and the Diana of Ephesus wasn’t the Diana of Athens. The Greek gods were double beings, and we’ve forgotten that, but we’re double beings too.”

  Walter said after a while: “You’re exaggerating. Of course the god is one thing when he’s killing men and another when he’s making music.”

  “That’s not natural at all!” Clarisse countered. “You would be the same! You would only be excited in a different way. You’re a little different here in the woods and there in your room, but you’re not a different person. I could say that you never transform yourself completely into what you do; but I don’t want to say too much. We’ve lost the concepts for these processes. The ancients still had them, the Greeks, the people of Nietzsche!”

  “Yes,” Walter said, “perhaps; perhaps one could be quite different from the way we are.” And then he fell silent. Snapped a twig. They were both now lying on the ground, with their heads turned toward each other. Finally Walter asked:

  “What sort of double being am I?”

  Clarisse laughed.

  He took his twig and tickled her face.

  “You are billy goat and eagle,” she said, and laughed again.

  “I am not a billy goat!” Walter protested sulkily.

  “You’re a billy goat with eagle’s wings!” Clarisse fleshed out her assertion.

  “Did you just invent that?” Walter asked.

  It had come to her on the spur of the moment, but she could add something to it that she had long known: “Every person has an animal in which he can recognize his fate. Nietzsche had the eagle.”

  “Perhaps you mean what’s called a totem. Do you know that for the Greeks specific animals were still associated with the gods: the wolf, the steer, the goose, the swan, the dog…”

  “You see!” Clarisse said. “I didn’t know that at all, but it’s true.” And she suddenly added: “Do you know that sick people do disgusting things? Just like the man under my window that time.” And she related the story of the old man on the ward who had winked at her and then behaved so indecently.

  “A lovely story, that, and moreover in front of the General!” Walter objected heatedly. “You really mustn’t go there again!”

  “Oh, come on, the General is just afraid of me!” Clarisse defended herself.

  “Why should he be afraid?”

  “I don’t know. But you are too, and Father was afraid, and Meingast is afraid of me too,” Clarisse said. “I seem to possess an accursed power, so that men who have something wrong with them are compelled to offer themselves to me. In a word, I tell you, sick people are double beings of god and billy goat!”

  “I’m afraid for you!” Walter whispered more than spoke, softly and tenderly.

  “But the sick ones aren’t only double beings of god and goat, but also of child and man, and sadness and gaiety,” Clarisse went on without paying attention.

  Walter shook his head. “You seem to associate all men with ‘goat’!”

  “My God, that’s true, I do.” Clarisse defended it calmly. “I carry the figure of the goat within myself too!”

  “The figure!” Walter was a little scornful, but involuntarily; for the constant succession of ideas was making him tired.

  “The image, the model, the daimon—call it what you like!”

  Walter needed a rest, he wished to stop for a while, and replied: “I will admit that in many respects people are double beings. Recent psychology—”

  Clarisse interrupted him vehemently. “Not psychology! You all think much too much!”

  “But didn’t you claim that the insane think more than we healthy people do?” Walter asked mechanically.

  “Then I said it wrong. They think differently. More energetically!” she replied, and went on: “It doesn’t make the slightest difference what one thinks; as soon as one acts, what one thought beforehand doesn’t matter anymore. That’s why I find it right not to go on talking but to go to the insane in their house.”

  “Just a minute!” Walter begged. “What is your double being?”

  “I am first of all man and woman.”

  “But you just said goat too.”

  “That too. Too! It’s not the sort of thing you can measure with ruler and compass.”

  “No, that you can’t!” Walter moaned aloud, covering his eyes with his hands and clenching his hands into fists. As he lay there mute in this posture, Clarisse crept up to him, threw her arms around his shoulders, and kissed him from time to time.

  Walter lay motionless.

  Clarisse was whispering and murmuring something into his ear. She was telling him that the man under the window had been sent by the goat, and that the goat signified sensuality, which had everywhere separated itself from the rest of mankind. All people creep to each other in bed every night and leave the world where it is: this lower solution to the great powers of desire in people must finally be stopped, and then the goat would become the god! This was what Walter heard her say. And wasn’t she right? Yet how did it happen that it pleased him? How did it happen that for a long time nothing else had pleased him? Not the paintings that he had earlier admired; not the masters of music whom he had loved; not the great poems, and not the mighty ideas? And that he now found pleasure in listening to Clarisse telling him something that anyone else would say was fantasy? These were the questions that went through Walter’s mind. As long as his life had lain before him, he had felt it to be full of great desire and imagination; since then, Eros had truly separated himself from it. Was there anything he still did body and soul? Was not everything he touched insignificant? Truly, love was gone from his fingertips, the tip of his tongue, his entrails, eyes, and ears, and what remained was merely ashes in the form of life, or, as he now expressed it rather magniloquently, “dung in a polished glass,” the “goat”! And beside him, at his ear, was Clarisse: a little bird that had suddenly begun to prophesy this in the woods! He could not find the suggestive, the commanding tone to point out to her where her ideas went too far and where they did not. She was full of images jumbled together; he, too, had been this full of images once, he persuaded himself. And of these great images, one has no idea which ones can be made into reality and which ones cannot. So every person bears within himself a leading ideal figure, Clarisse was now maintaining, but most people settle for living in the form of sin, and Walter found that it might well be said of him that he bore an ideal figure within himself, although he, perhaps even self-peni-tently, at least voluntarily, lived in ashes. The world also has an ideal figure. He found this image magnificent. Of course it did not explain anything, but what good is explanation? It expressed the will of humanity, striving upward again and again after every defeat. And it suddenly struck Walter that Clarisse had not kissed him voluntarily for at least a year, and that she was now doing it for the first time.

  6…

  BREATHS OF A SUMMER DAY

  On the same morning, Agathe, impelled by moody contradictions left over from the previous night, said to her brother: “And why should it be possible to live a life in love? There are times when you live no less in anger, in hostility, or even in pride or hardness, and they don’t claim to be a second world!”

  “I’d prefer to say that one li
ves for love,” Ulrich replied indolently. “Our other emotions must inspire us to action in order that they last; that’s what anchors them in reality.”

  “But it’s usually that way in love too,” Agathe objected. She felt as if she were swinging on a high branch that was threatening to break off under her any moment. “But then why does every beginner swear to himself that it will last’ forever, even if he’s beginning for the tenth time?” was her next question.

  “Perhaps because it’s so inconstant.”

  “One also swears eternal enmity.”

  “Perhaps because it’s such a violent emotion.”

  “But there are emotions whose nature it is to last longer than others: loyalty, friendship, obedience, for example.”

  “I think because they are the expression of stable, indeed even moral, relationships.”

  “Your answers aren’t very consistent!”

  The interruptions and continuations of the conversation seemed to nestle in the shallow, lazy breaths of the summer day. Brother and sister lay, a little bleary-eyed and overtired, on garden chairs in the sunshine. After a while Agathe began again:

  “Faith in God imposes no action, contains no prescribed relationships to other people, can be totally immoral, and yet it’s a lasting emotion.”

  “Faith and love are related to each other,” Ulrich remarked. “Also, unlike all the other emotions, both have available their own manner of thinking: contemplation. That means a great deal; for it is not love and faith themselves that create the image of their world; contemplation does it for them.”

  “What is contemplation?”

  “I can’t explain it. Or maybe, in a nutshell, a thinking by intimation. Or, in other words: the way we think when we’re happy. The other emotions you named don’t have this resource. You could also call it meditating. If you say that faith and love can ‘move mountains,’ it means that they can entirely take the place of the mind.”

  “So the thought of the believer and the lover is intimation? The real inner manner of their thinking?”

  “Right!” Ulrich confirmed, surprised.

  “No reason to praise me! You said it yourself yesterday!” his sister informed him. “And just so that I’m sure: contemplation, then, is also the thinking that allows itself to be led not by our actual emotions but by our other ones?”

  “If you want to put it that way, yes.”

  “So that’s the way one could think in a world of special people? Yesterday you used the term ‘ecstatic society’ for it. Do you remember?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good!”

  “Why are you laughing now?” Ulrich asked.

  “Because Mephistopheles says: Truth is proclaimed through the mouths of two witnesses!’ So two suffice!”

  “He’s evidently wrong,” Ulrich contradicted calmly. “In his day, délire à deux, the joint insanity of two people, had not yet been recognized.…”

  A noiseless stream of weightless drifting blossoms, emanating from a group of trees whose flowering was done, drifted through the sunshine, and the breath that bore it was so gentle that not a leaf stirred. It cast no shadow on the green of the lawn, but this green seemed to darken from within like an eye. Extravagantly and tenderly leaved by the young summer, the trees and bushes standing in the wings or forming the backdrop gave the impression of being amazed spectators who, surprised and spellbound in their gay attire, were participating in this funeral procession and celebration of nature. Spring and fall, speech and nature’s silence, life and death, mingled in this picture. Hearts seemed to stop, to have been removed from their breasts, in order to join this silent procession through the air. “My heart was taken from out my breast,” a mystic had said. Agathe cautiously abandoned herself to the enthusiasm that once before in this garden had almost led her to believe in the arrival of the Millennium and under the image of which she imagined an ecstatic society. But she did not forget what she had learned since: in this kingdom, you must keep quite still. You cannot leave room for any land of desire: not even the desire to ask questions. You must also shed the understanding with which you ordinarily perform tasks. You must strip the self of all inner tools. It seemed to her that walls and columns retreated to the side within her, and that the world was entering her eyes the way tears do. But she suddenly discovered that she was only superficially holding fast to this condition, and that her thoughts had long since slipped away from it.

  When she encountered them again, her thoughts were considering a quite remote problem, a little monster of disaffection. She was asking herself in the most foolish fashion, and intent on this foolishness: “Was I ever really impetuous and unhappy?” A man without a name came to mind, whose name she bore, indeed had borne away from him, and she repeated her question with the mute, unmoving obstinacy with which one gazes after a wave that has ebbed away. Presumably, young people (whose life span is still short) are more disposed to be amazed at what they have already felt than older people, who have become accustomed to the changeability of life’s passions and circumstances; except that the escape of feeling is also the stream in whose motion the stone heavens of mystic emotion are reflected, and for one of these reasons it was probably a supranaturally magnified astonishment that contained the question of where the hatred and violence she had felt against Hagauer had come from. Where was the desire to hurt him? She was close to thinking she had lost it, like an object that must still be somewhere nearby.

  So Agathe’s thoughts were doubtless still completely under the spell of the procession of flowers and death, but they were not moving with it, and in its mute and solemn way, but making little jumps here and there. It was not “meditating” she was indulging in, but a “thinking,” even if a thinking without rigor, a branching off and inner continuation of what had earlier been left unsaid in the fleeting exchange about the constancy of the emotions; without exactly wanting to be, she was still gripped by it, and she recalled an image that Ulrich had suggested on another occasion, and with greater sympathy, about this constancy and inconstancy of the emotions. She was thinking now that nothing was more remote from her than expressing her emotions in “works,” and apparently she was thinking for a moment of August Lindner and meant “good works,” “works of love,” “signs of love’s practical orientation,” such as he desired of her in vain; but by and large, she meant simply “works” and was thinking of Ulrich, who earlier had always spoken of spiritual work that one had to fashion out of everything, even if it was only a deeper breath. And that one derived a rule or created an idea for everything and felt responsible for the world also remained a matter of indifference to her most profound inclination: her ambition was not tempted to sit in the masters saddle of a hobbyhorse. And finally character was not the refuge of her emotions either, and when she confronted this question she received the answer: “I never used to love what I felt so strongly that I would have wanted to be, so to speak, its cupboard for my entire life!” And it occurred to her that for her emotions, insofar as they had been aroused by men, she had always chosen men whom she did not like with either all her soul or all her body. “How prophetic!” she thought cheerfully. “Even then I weakened the desires, the pull toward reality in my emotions, and kept open the path to the magic kingdom!”

  For wasn’t that now Ulrich’s theory about passion? Either howl like a child with rage and frustration or enthusiasm—and get rid of it! Or abstain entirely from the pull toward the real, the active, and desire of any land that every emotion contains. What lies in between is the real “kingdom of the emotions”—its works and transformations, its being filled up with reality—as lovely as a storeroom full of apples of every hue, and absurdly monotonous too, like everything that fades and falls the same way with every new year! This was what she was thinking, and she tried to find her way back again to the emotion hovering silently through the world of nature. She kept her mind from turning toward anything in a specific way. She strained to shed all knowledge and desire, all utilitarian u
se of head and heart and limbs. “You must be unegotistic in this most extreme sense; you have to strive to gain this mysterious unmediated’ relationship to outer and inner,” she said to herself, and collected herself almost as if she wanted to feign death. But this seemed as impossible a task as it had been in childhood not to commit a sin between confession and communion, and finally she abandoned the effort entirely. “What?” she asked herself sulkily. “Is a world in which one desires nothing perhaps not desirable?” At this moment she was honestly suspicious of the world of ecstasy, and she urgently wanted to present this fundamental question that underlies all ascesis to her brother. He, however, seemed not to want to be disturbed by anything as he lay there enjoying his comfortable position and closed the narrow slit between his eyelids completely every time she looked over at him.

  So she abandoned her deck chair and stood irresolutely for a while, smiling, looking now at Ulrich, now at the garden. She stretched her legs and adjusted her skirt with small blows of her hand. Each one of these actions had a land of rustic beauty, simple, healthy, instinctive; and it was this way either by chance or because her most recent thoughts had led her to be cheerful in a robust way. Her hair fell in a scallop at each side of her face, and the background, formed of trees and bushes that, from where she was standing, opened into depth, was a frame that positioned her image before earth and sky. This view, which Ulrich was enjoying, for he was secretly observing his sister, not only was attractive but soon became so much so that it suffered nothing else beside it that it would not have drawn in. Ulrich thought this time of the expression “enhanced accountability” for this enchanting image that was forming, not for the first time, between brother and sister; he extrapolated the term from a word that ages ago, in another charmed circle, had meant much to him: and truly, as there is a diminished sense of accountability, whose bewitched nature had formerly astounded him, and which is ultimately always stamped with the defect of senselessness, what seemed to be reigning here was an increased and intensified fullness of the senses, a high superabundance, indeed a distress, of such a kind that everything about Agathe and which was taking place cast a reflection on her that could not be grasped by sensory designations, and placed her in an aspect for which not only no word existed but also no expression or outlet of any kind. Every fold of her dress was so laden with powers, indeed it almost might be said with value, that it was impossible to imagine a greater happiness, but also no more uncertain adventure, than cautiously to touch this fold with the tips of one’s fingers!