The Man Without Qualities, Volume 2

by Robert Musil

  And looking for him, she woke up; but she felt that she wanted to go back once more, for her happiness had attained such an intensification that it went on increasing. She was quite confused as she got out of bed: the beginnings of wakefulness were in her mind, and all the rest of her body held the not-yet-ended dream that apparently wanted to have no end.

  ***

  Since the dream, there had been in Agathe an intention to lead her brother astray on some mad experiment. It was not clear even to herself. Sometimes the air was like a net in which something invisible had got caught. It spread the web apart but was not able to break through it. All impressions had somewhat too great a weight. When they greeted each other in the morning, the first impression was of a quite sharply sensual delimitation. They emerged from the ocean of sleep onto the islands of “you” and “I.” The body’s color and shape drifted like a bouquet of flowers on the depths of space. Their glances, their movements, seemed to reach farther than usual; the inhibition that otherwise catches and stops them in the secret mechanism of the world must have grown weaker. But words were often suppressed by the fear that they would be too weak to utter this.

  In order to understand such a passion, one must remember the habits of consciousness. Not long ago, for example, a woman wearing glasses not only was considered ridiculous, but really looked it; today is a time in which they make her look enterprising and young: those are habitual attitudes of consciousness; they change but are always present in some connection, forming a scaffolding through which perception enters into consciousness. The image is always present before its component parts are, and is what first gives significance to the meaningless daubings of sense impressions. Polonius’s cloud, which appears sometimes as a ship, sometimes as a camel, is not the weakness of a servile courtier but completely characterizes the way God has created us. The play between self and external world is not like the die and the stamping but is reciprocal and capable of extremely fine motions, to the extent that it is freed from the cruder mechanisms of utility. One rarely imagines how far this extends. In truth it reaches from beautiful, ugly, good, and evil, where it still seems natural to everyone that one man’s morning cloud should be another man’s camel, through bitter and sweet, fragrant and stinking, as far as the apparently most precise and least subjective impressions of colors and forms. Herein lies perhaps the deepest sense of the support that one person seeks in another; but Ulrich and Agathe were like two people who, hand in hand, had stepped out of this circle. What they felt for each other was by no means simply to be called love. Something lay in their relationship to each other that could not be included among the ordinary notions of living together; they had undertaken to live like brother and sister, if one takes this expression in the sense not of an official marriage-bureau document but of a poem; they were neither brother and sister nor man and wife, their desires like white mist in which a fire burns. But that sufficed at times to remove their hold on the world from what they were for each other. The result was that what they were became senselessly strong. Such moments contained a tenderness without goals or limits. And also without names or aid. To do something for someone’s sake contains in the doing a thousand connections to the world; to give someone pleasure contains in the giving all considerations that bind us to other people. A passion, on the other hand, is an emotion that, free from all contaminants, can never do enough for itself. It is simultaneously the emotion of a powerlessness in the person and that of a movement proceeding from it, which seizes the entire world.

  And it is not to be denied that in the company of her brother Agathe tasted the bitter sweetness of a passion. Today one often confuses passion and vice. Cigarette smoking, cocaine, and the vigorously esteemed recurrent need for coitus are, God knows, no passions. Agathe knew that; she knew the substitutes for passion, and recognized passion at the first moment in that not only the self burns, but the world as well; it is as if all things were behind the air just above the tip of a flame. She would have liked to thank the Creator on her knees that she was experiencing it again, although it is just as much a feeling of devastation as of happiness. Agathe felt, too, that this life is like a ship gliding along in infinite seclusion. The sounds on the shore become ever weaker, and objects lose their voice: they no longer say, now you should do this or that with me; movement dies away; the nimble words die away. At times in the mornings there already lay, between the house they were living in and the street, a nothingness that neither Ulrich nor Agathe could penetrate; life’s charms lost their power to evoke the ridiculous little decisions that are so vital: putting on a hat, inserting a key, those small touches of the rudder by means of which one moves forward. But the space in the rooms was as if polished, and everything was full of a soft music, which ceased only when one strained to hear it more clearly. And that was why the loving anxiety was there; the silence behind the sound of a word, behind a handshake, a movement, could often suddenly detach itself for a moment from a series of others, divest itself of the chains of temporal and spatial connections and send the sound out onto an infinite deep, above which it rested motionless. life then stood still. The eye, in sweet torment, could not withdraw itself from the image. It sank into existence as into a wall of flowers. It sank ever deeper and ever more slowly. It reached no bottom; it could not turn around! What might the clocks be doing now? Agathe thought; the idiotic little second hand she remembered, with its precise forward movement around its little circle: with what longing for salvation she now thought of it! And should a glance be absorbed in the other, how painful it was to withdraw it; as if their souls had linked together! It was very nearly comical, this silence. A heavy mountain of soulfulness. Ulrich often struggled to find a word, a jest; it would not matter in the least what one talked about, it only needed to be something indifferent and real that is domesticated in life and has a right to a home. That puts souls back into connection with reality. One can just as well start talking about the lawyer as come up with any clever observation. All it had to be was a betrayal of the moment; the word falls into the silence then, and in the next moment other corpses of words gleam around it, risen up in great crowds like dead fish when one throws poison into the water! Agathe hung on Ulrich’s lips while he was searching for such a word, and when his lips could no longer find it and no longer part, she sank back exhausted into the silence that burned her too, like a pallet consisting of nothing but little tips of flame.

  Whenever Ulrich resisted: —But we do have a mission, an activity in the world! Agathe answered: —Not I, and you are certainly only imagining yours. We have some idea of what we have to do: be together! What difference does it make what progress is made in the world? Ulrich disagreed, and attempted to convince her ironically of the impossibility of what it was that kept him bound in chains. —There’s only one explanation for our inactivity that is to some degree satisfactory: to rest in God and be subsumed in God. You can use another word instead of God: the Primal One, Being, the Unconditional… there are a few dozen words, all powerless. They all oppose assurance to the terror at the sweet cessation of being human: you have arrived at the edge of something that is more than being human. Philosophical prejudices then take care of the rest. Agathe replied: —I understand nothing of philosophy. But let’s just stop eating! Let’s see what comes of that?

  Ulrich noticed that in the bright childishness of this proposal there was a fine black line.

  —What would come of that? He answered in detail: —First hunger, then exhaustion, then hunger again, raging fantasies about eating, and finally either eating or dying!

  —You can’t know without having tried it!

  —But, Agathe! It’s been tried and tested a thousand times!

  —By professors! Or by bankrupt speculators. Do you know, dying must be not at all like one says. I nearly died once: it was different.

  Ulrich shrugged his shoulders. He had no idea how close together in Agathe the two feelings were, to impulsively ignore all her lost years or, if that faile
d, to want to stop. She had never, like Ulrich, felt the need of making the world better than it is; she was happy lying around somewhere, while Ulrich was always on the go. This had been a difference between them since childhood, and it remained a difference until death. Ulrich did not so much fear death as regard it as a disgrace that is set as a final price on all striving. Agathe had always been afraid of death when she imagined it, as every young and healthy person does, in the unbearable and incomprehensible form: Now you are, but at some point you will no longer be! But at the same time she had, in her early youth, already become acquainted with the gradual process of separation that is capable of inserting itself into the tiniest span of time, that hurtlingly rapid—in spite of all its slowness—being turned away from life and becoming tired of and indifferent to it, and striving trustingly into the approaching nothingness that sets in when the body is grievously harmed by an illness without the senses being affected. She had confidence in death. Perhaps it’s not so bad, she thought. It’s always, in any case, natural and pleasant to stop, in everything one does. But decay, and the rest of those horrible things: for heaven’s sake, isn’t one used to everything happening to one while one has nothing to do with it? You know, Ulrich—she terminated the conversation—you’re like this: if you’re given leaves and branches, you always sew them together into a tree; but I would like to see what would happen if we would once, for instance, sew the leaves firmly onto ourselves.

  And yet Ulrich, too, felt they had nothing else to do but be together. Whenever Agathe called through the rooms: —Leave the light on!—a quick call, before Ulrich on his way out darkened the room to which Agathe wished to return once more, Ulrich thought: A request, hasty, what more? Oh, what more? No less than Buddha running to catch a tram. An impossible gait! A collapse of absurdity. But still, how lovely Agathe’s voice was! What trust lay in the brief request, what happiness that one person can call out something like that to another without being misunderstood. Of course, such a moment was like a piece of earthly thread running among mysterious flowers, but it was at the same time moving, like a woolen thread that one places around one’s beloved’s neck when one has nothing else to give her. And when they then stepped out into the street and, walking side by side, could not see much of each other but only felt the tender force of unintended contact, they belonged together like an object that stands in an immense space.

  It lies in the nature of such experiences that they urge their own telling. Within the tiniest amount of happening they contain an extreme of inner processes that needs to break a path for itself to the outside. And as in music or a poem, at a sickbed or in a church, the circle of what can be uttered in such circumstances is peculiarly circumscribed. Not, as one might believe, through solemnity or some other subjective mood, but through something that has far more the appearance of an objective thing. This can be compared with the remarkable process through which one assimilates intellectual influences in one’s youth; there, too, one takes in not every truth that comes along but really only a truth that comes to meet it from one’s own mind, a truth that therefore, in a certain sense, has only to be awakened, so that one already knows it in the moment one comes across it. There are at that age the truths that are destined for us and those that aren’t; bits of knowledge are true today and false tomorrow, ideas light up or go out—not because we change our minds but because with our thoughts we are still connected to our life as a whole and, fed by the same invisible springs, rise and sink with them. They are true when we feel ourselves rising at the moment of thinking them, and they are false when we feel ourselves falling. There is something inexpressible in ourselves and the world that is increased or diminished in the process. In later years this changes; the disposition of the emotions becomes less flexible, and the understanding becomes that extraordinarily flexible, firm, doughty tool which we know it to be when we refuse to allow ourselves to be swayed by emotion. At this point the world has already divided itself: on the one side into the world of things and dependable sensations of them, of judgments and, as it can also be put, recognized emotions or will; on the other side into the world of subjectivity, that is of caprice, of faith, taste, intimation, prejudices, and all those uncertainties, taking an attitude in regard to which, whatever it may be, there remains a kind of private right of the individual, without any claims to public status. When that happens, individual industry may sniff out and take in everything or nothing; it rarely happens in the steeled soul that in the fire of the impression the walls, too, stretch and move.

  But does this attitude really permit one to feel as secure in the world as it might lead one to think? Does not the whole solid world, with all our sensations, buildings, landscapes, deeds, drift on countless tiny clouds? Beneath every perception lies music, poem, feeling. But this feeling is tied down, made invariable, excluded, because we want to perceive things truly, that is, without emotion, in order to let them guide us, instead of our guiding them, which, as one knows, amounts to meaning that we finally, quite suddenly, have really learned to fly instead of merely dreaming about flying, as the millennia before us did. To this emotion imprisoned in objects there corresponds, on the individual side, that spirit of objectivity which has pushed all passion back into a condition where it is no longer perceptible, so that in every person there slumbers a sense of his value, his usefulness, and his significance that cannot be touched, a basic feeling of equilibrium between himself and the world. Yet this equilibrium need only be disturbed at any point, and everywhere the imprisoned little clouds escape. A little fatigue, a little poison, a little excess of excitement, and a person sees and hears things he doesn’t want to believe; emotion rises, the world slides out of its middling condition into an abyss or rises up energetically, solitary, like a vision and no longer comprehensible!

  Often everything that he and Agathe undertook, or what they saw and experienced, seemed to Ulrich only a simile. This tree and that smile are reality, because they have the quite specific quality of not merely being illusion; but are there not many realities? Was it not just yesterday that we were wearing wigs with long locks, possessed very imperfect machines, but wrote splendid books? And only the day before yesterday that we carried bows and arrows and put on gold hoods at festivals, over cheeks that were painted with the blue of the night sky, and orange-yellow eye sockets? Some kind of vague sympathy for these things still quivers within us today. So much was like today and so much was different, as if it was trying to be one of many hieroglyphic languages. Does not this mean that one should also not set too much store in present things? What is bad today will perhaps in part be good tomorrow, and the beautiful ugly; disregarded thoughts will have become great ideas, and dignified ideas decay to indifference. Every order is somehow absurd and like a wax figure, if one takes it too seriously; every thing is a frozen individual instance of its possibilities. But those are not doubts, rather a dynamic, elastic, undefined quality that feels itself capable of anything.

  But it is a peculiarity of these experiences that they are almost always experienced only in a state of nonpossession. Thus the world changes when the impassioned person yearns for God, who does not reveal Himself, or the lover for his distant beloved, who has been snatched from him. Agathe as well as Ulrich had known these things, and to experience them reciprocally when they were together sometimes gave them real difficulty. Involuntarily they pushed the present away, by telling each other for the first time the stories of their past in which this had happened. But these stories again reinforced the miraculousness of their coming together, and ended in the half-light, in a hesitant touching of hands, silences, and the trembling of a current that flowed through their arms.

  And sometimes there were violent rebellions.

  Let’s make an assumption—[Ulrich] said to himself, for example, in order to exclude it again later—and let’s suppose that Agathe would feel loathing at the love of men. In that case, in order to please her as a man, I would have to behave like a woman. I would have to be te
nder toward her without desiring her. I would have to be good in the same way to all things in order not to frighten her love. I could not lift a chair unfeelingly, in order to move it to some other place in insentient space; for I may not touch it out of some random idea; whatever I do must be something, and it is involved with this spiritual existence, the way an actor lends his body to an idea. Is that ridiculous? No, it’s nothing other than festive. For that’s the sense of sacred ceremonies, where every gesture has its significance. That is the sense of all things when they emerge again before our eyes for the first time with the morning sun. No, the object is not a means for us. It is a detail, the little nail, a smile, a curly hair of our third sister.[Ulrich elsewhere defines the three sisters as himself, Agathe, and the Other Condition] “I” and “you” are only objects too. But we are objects that are engaged in exchanging signals with each other; that is what gives us the miraculous: something is flowing back and forth between us, I cannot look at your eyes as if at some dead object, we are burning at both ends. But if I want to do something for your sake, the thing is not a dead object either. I love it, that means that something is happening between me and it; I don’t want to exaggerate, I have no intention of maintaining that the object is alive like me (and has feeling and talks with me), but it does live with me, we always stand in some relationship to each other.