The Man Without Qualities, Volume 2

by Robert Musil

  “Actually, yes,” Ulrich conceded. And without agreeing with her incidental arguments against selfless goodness, which in male human form were courting her soul, he added: “That’s even quite important. For the people who talk of selfless goodness are teaching something that’s better than selfishness and less than goodness.”

  And Agathe asked: “But when you fall in love the usual way, doesn’t that inevitably involve desire and selflessness?”

  “Yes.”

  “And it really can’t be said of self-love either that one desires oneself, or that one loves oneself selflessly?”

  “No,” Ulrich said.

  “Then what’s called self-love may not be any kind of love at all?” Agathe hazarded.

  “That’s as you take it,” her brother replied. “It’s more a confiding in oneself, an instinctive caring for oneself—”

  “Self-toleration!” Agathe said, quite deliberately making a dissatisfied and slightly disgusted face, although she did not exactly know why.

  “Why are we talking about it at all?” Ulrich interjected.

  “But we’re talking about others!” Agathe answered, and laughter at her brother and herself lit up her face. She had again directed her glance at the fence, drawing her brother’s after her; and because their eyes were not focused on a specific distance, the host of vehicles and pedestrians swam past it. “Where shall we begin?” she asked, as if the rest were understood as a matter of course.

  “You can’t just do it on command!” Ulrich objected.

  “No. But we can try to just feel everything in some such way; and we can entrust ourselves to it more and more!”

  “That has to happen of itself.”

  “Let’s help it along!” Agathe proposed. “For instance, let’s stop talking and do nothing but look at them!”

  “That’s all right with me,” Ulrich agreed.

  For a short time they were silent; then something else occurred to Agathe: “To love something in the ordinary sense means to prefer it to something else: so we must try to love one person and at the same time prevent ourselves from preferring him to others,” she whispered.

  “Keep quiet! You have to be quiet!” Ulrich fended her off.

  Now they gazed out for a while again. But soon Agathe propped herself up on her elbow and looked despairingly at her brother. “It’s not working! As soon as I tried it, the people outside became like a river full of pale fish. We’re dreadful idlers!” she complained.

  Ulrich turned toward her, laughing. “You’re forgetting that striving for bliss isn’t work!”

  “I’ve never done anything in my whole life; now I’d like something to happen! Let’s do something good to someone!” Agathe pleaded.

  “Even doing good is a notion that doesn’t occur at all in real goodness. It’s only when the waves break that the ocean disintegrates into droplets!” Ulrich countered. “And what would it mean anyway to do something good in a situation in which you can’t do anything but good?” The anticipation, the headiness of a feeling of victory, the confidence of powers that were for the moment at rest, allowed him to be playful with his seriousness.

  “So you don’t want to do anything?” Agathe asked coolly.

  “Of course I do! But the kingdom of love is in every respect the great anti-reality. That’s why the first thing you have to do is cut the arms and legs off your emotions; and then we’ll see what can happen in spite of that!”

  “You make it sound like a machine/’ Agathe chided.

  “You have to undertake it as a good experimenter,” Ulrich contradicted her, unmoved. “You have to try to circumscribe the decisive part.”

  Agathe now offered serious resistance. “We’re not concluding some scientific investigation but, if you’ll permit the expression, opening our hearts,” she said with somewhat sarcastic sharpness. “And also the point we’d have to start from has not been exactly new for some time, since the Gospels! Exclude hatred, resistance, strife from yourself; just don’t believe that they exist! Don’t blame, don’t get angry, don’t hold people responsible, don’t defend yourself against anything! Don’t struggle anymore; don’t think or bargain; forget and unlearn denial! In this way fill every crack, every fissure, between you and them; love, fear, beg, and walk with them; and take everything that happens in time and space, whatever comes and goes, whatever is beautiful or disturbing, not as reality but as a word and metaphor of the Lord. That’s how we should go to meet them!”

  As usually happened, during this long and passionate and unusually resolute speech her face had taken on a deeper hue. “Splendid! Every word a letter in a great scripture!” Ulrich exclaimed appreciatively. “And we, too, will have to gain courage. But such courage? Is that what you really want?”

  Agathe subdued her zeal and denied it mutely and honestly. “Not entirely!” she added by way of explanation, so as not to deny it too much.

  “It is the teaching of Him who advised us to offer our left cheek if we have been struck on the right one. And that’s probably the mildest transgression that ever was,” Ulrich went on reflectively. “But don’t misunderstand one thing, that this message too, if carried out, is a psychological exercise! A particular behavior and a particular group of ideas and emotions are bound up in it together and mutually support each other. I mean everything in us that is suffering, enduring, tender, susceptible, protective, and yielding: in short, love. And it’s so far from that to everything else, especially to whatever is hard, aggressive, and actively life-shaping, that these other emotions and ideas and the bitter necessities disappear from view entirely. That doesn’t mean that they fade from reality; merely that you don’t get angry at them, don’t deny them, and that you forget knowing about them; so it’s like a roof that the wind can get under and that can never stand for long—”

  “But one has faith in goodness! It’s faith! You’re forgetting that!” Agathe interrupted.

  “No, I’m not forgetting that, but that came along only later, through Paul. I made a note of his explanation. It runs: Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.’ And that’s a gross, I’d almost say covetous, misunderstanding. The tenet of the kingdom that will come at the end of days would like to have something it can get hold of in place of the bliss that the Son of Man has already experienced on earth.”

  “It has been promised. Why are you running it down? Is it then worth nothing to be able to believe not merely with all one’s soul but utterly, with parasol and clothes?”

  “But the breath of the annunciation was not promise and faith but intimation! A condition in which one loves metaphors! A bolder condition than faith! And I’m not the first to notice this. The only thing that’s been regarded as truly real for the bringer of salvation has been the experiencing of these foreshadowing metaphors of happy unresistingness and love; the miserable rest, which we call reality, natural, sturdy, dangerous life, has simply mirrored itself in his soul in a completely dematerialized way, like a picture puzzle. And—by Jehovah and Jupiter!—that assumes, first of all, civilization, because no one is so poor that robbers can’t be found to murder him; and it assumes a desert in which there are indeed evil spirits, but no lions. Secondly, these high and happy tidings appear to have originated pretty much in ignorance of all contemporary civilizations. It is remote from the multiplicities of culture and the spirit, remote from doubts, but also from choice, remote from sickness but also from almost all discoveries that fight it: in short, it is remote from all the weaknesses, but also from all the advantages of human knowledge and capability, which even in its own time were by no means meager. And incidentally, that’s why it also has rather simple notions of good and evil, beautiful and ugly. Now, the moment you make room for such objections and conditions, you’ll also have to content yourself with my less simple procedure!”

  Agathe argued against it anyway. “You’re forgetting one thing,” she repeated, “that this teaching claims to come from God; and in that case every
thing more complex that deviates from it is simply false or indifferent!”

  “Quiet!” Ulrich said, placing a finger on his mouth. “You can’t talk about God in such a stubbornly physical way, as if He were sitting behind that bush over there the way He did in the year 100!”

  “All right, I can’t,” Agathe conceded. “But let me tell you something, too! You yourself, when you’re devising bliss on earth, are prepared to renounce science, tendencies in art, luxury, and everything people rush around for every day. Then why do you begrudge it so much to others?”

  “You’re certainly right,” Ulrich conceded. A dry twig had found its way into his hand, and he pensively poked the ground with it. They had slid down a little, so that once again only their heads peeked over the top of the rise, and that only when they lifted them. They lay beside each other on their stomachs like two marksmen who have forgotten what they were lying in wait for; and Agathe, touched by her brother’s yielding, threw her arm around his neck and made a concession of her own. “Look, what is it doing?” she exclaimed, pointing with a finger to an ant beside his twig, which had attacked another ant.

  “It’s murdering, Ulrich ascertained coldly.

  “Don’t let it!” Agathe pleaded, and in her excitement raised a leg to the sky so that it rose upside down over her knee.

  Ulrich proposed: “Try to take it metaphorically. You don’t even have to rush to give it a particular significance: just take its own! Then it becomes like a dry breath of air, or the sulfurous smell of decaying foliage in autumn: some kind of volatizing drops of melancholy that make the soul’s readiness for dissolution tremble. I can imagine that one could even get over one’s own death amicably, but only because one dies just once and therefore regards it as especially important; because the understanding of saints and heroes is pretty lacking in glory in the face of nature’s constant small confusions and their dissonances!”

  Possibly: Ulrich: Through faith!

  Agathe: Intimation and metaphor won’t do it either.

  Ulrich: Exactly!

  While he was speaking, Agathe had taken the twig from his fingers and attempted to rescue the ant that had been attacked, with the result that she nearly crushed both, but finally she succeeded in separating them. With diminished vitality, the ants crept toward new adventures.

  “Did that make any sense?” Ulrich asked.

  “I understand you to mean by that that what we were trying to do by the fence is against nature and reason,” Agathe answered.

  “Why shouldn’t I say it?” Ulrich said. “Anyway, I wanted to say to surprise you: the glory of God does not twitch an eyelid when calamity strikes. Perhaps too: life swallows corpses and filth without a shadow on its smile. And surely this: man is charming as long as no moral demands are made on him.” Ulrich stretched out irresponsibly in the sun. For they merely needed to change position slightly, they did not even have to stand up, in order for the world on which they had been eavesdropping to disappear and be replaced by a large lawn, bordered by rustling bushes, that stretched in a gentle incline down to their lovely old house and lay there in the full light of summer. They had given up the ants and offered themselves to the points of the sun’s rays, half unawares; from time to time a cool breeze poured over them. “The sun shines on the just and the unjust!” Ulrich offered as benediction, in peaceable mockery.

  “ ‘Love your enemies, for He maketh the sun to rise on the evil and on the good’ is the way it goes.” Agathe contradicted him as softly as if she were merely confiding it to the air.

  “Really? The way I say it, it would be wonderfully natural!”

  “But you’ve got it wrong.”

  “Are you sure? Where is it from anyway?”

  “The Bible, of course. I’ll look it up in the house. I want to show you for once that I can be right too!”

  He wanted to hold her back, but she was already on her feet beside him and hastened away. Ulrich closed his eyes. Then he opened and closed them again. Without Agathe, the solitude was bereft of everything; as if he were not in it himself. Then the steps returned. Great resounding footsteps in the silence, as in soft snow. Then the indescribable sense of nearness set in, and finally the nearness filled with a cheery laugh, prefacing the words: “It goes: ‘Love your enemies,…for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust’!”

  “And where’s it from?”

  “Nowhere else but the Sermon on the Mount that you seem to know so well, my friend.”

  “I feel I’ve been exposed as a bad theologian,” Ulrich conceded with a smile, and asked: “Read it aloud!”

  Agathe had a heavy Bible in her hands, not an especially old or precious thing, but in any case not a recent edition, and read:

  “ ‘Ye have heard that it hath been said, thou shalt love thy neighbor, and hate thine enemy. But I say unto you, love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you; that ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh the sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.’ “

  “Do you know anything else?” Ulrich asked, eager to know.

  “Yes,” Agathe went on. “It is written: To have heard that it was said by them of old time, Thou shalt not kill; and whosoever shall kill shall be in danger of the judgment: But I say unto you, that whosoever is angry with his brother without a cause shall be in danger of the judgment:…but whosoever shall say, Thou fool, shall be in danger of hell fire.’ And then this too, which you know so well: ‘But I say unto you, that ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if any man will sue thee at the law and take away thy coat, let him have thy cloak also. And whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile, go with him twain/ “

  ‘Well, I don’t like that!” Ulrich said.

  Agathe thumbed through the pages. “Maybe you’ll like this: ‘And if thy right hand offend thee, cut it off, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell.’ “

  Ulrich took the book from her and leafed through it himself. “There are even several variations,” he exclaimed. Then he laid the book in the grass, pulled her beside him, and for some time said nothing. At last he replied: “Speaking seriously, I’m like Everyman, or at least like that man; it’s natural for me to apply this saying in reverse. If his hand offend thee, cut it off, and if you smite someone on the cheek, give him a hook to the heart too, just to make sure.”

  62

  THE CONSTELLATION OF BROTHER AND SISTER;

  OR, THE UNSEPARATED AND NOT UNITED

  Even in those years when Ulrich had sought his path in life alone and not without bravado, the word “sister” had often been for him heavy with an undefined longing, although at that time he almost never thought that he possessed a real living sister. In this there was a contradiction pointing to disparate origins, which were indicated in many ways that brother and sister ordinarily discounted. Not that they necessarily saw it as false, but it counted as little in relationship to the truth they knew they were approaching as an intruding corner signifies in the sweep of a grandly curving wall.

  Without question, such things happen often. In many lives the unreal, invented sister is nothing other than the soaring youthful form of a need for love that later, in the condition of chillier dreams, contents itself with a bird or another animal, or turns toward humanity or one’s neighbor. In the life of many others, this sister is adolescent timidity and loneliness, an invented doppelganger full of shadowboxing charm, which softens the anxieties of loneliness in the tenderness of a lonely togetherness. And of many natures it need merely be said that this image that they cherish so ecstatically is nothing but the crassest egotism and selfishness: an excessive liking to be loved that has entered into a jerry-built agreement with swee
t selflessness. But that many men and women bear the image of such a counterpart in their hearts there can be no doubt. It simply represents love and is always the sign of an unsatisfying and tense relation to the world. And it is not only those who are deficient or who are by nature without harmony who have such desires; balanced people have them too.

  And so Ulrich began to speak to his sister about an experience he had related to her once already, and repeated the story of the most unforgettable woman who, with the exception of Agathe herself, had ever crossed his path. She was a child-woman, a girl of about twelve, remarkably mature in her behavior, who had ridden in the same trolley car for a short distance with him and a companion, and had charmed him like a mysteriously bygone love poem whose traces are full of never-experienced bliss. Later, the flaming up of his infatuation had sometimes aroused doubts in him, for it was peculiar and admitted dubious inferences about himself. For that reason he did not relate the incident with feeling but spoke of the doubts, even though it was not without feeling that he generalized them. “At that age, a girl quite often has more beautiful legs than she does later,” he said. “Their later sturdiness apparently comes from what they need to carry directly above them; in adolescence these legs are long and free and can run, and if their skirts expose the thigh in some activity, the curve already has something gently increasing—oh, the crescent moon occurs to me, toward the end of its tender first virginal moon phase—that’s how glorious they look! Later I sometimes investigated the reasons quite seriously. At that age hair has the softest sheen. The face shows its lovely naturalness. The eyes are like some smooth, never-crumpled silk. The mind, destined in future to become petty and covetous, is still a pure flame without much brightness among obscure desires. And what at this age is certainly not yet beautiful—for instance, the childish tummy or the blind expression of the breast—acquires through the clothing, to the extent that it cleverly simulates adulthood, and through the dreamy imprecision of love, everything that a charming stage mask can achieve. So it’s quite in order to admire such a creature, and how else should one do so than through a slight attack of love!”