by Robert Musil
Ulrich laughed, and got something warm to drink. —Looked at more closely, it’s a stupid frivolity—he said—but let’s not talk about me. Tell me what’s been happening to you. Diotima could not utter a word; this had never happened to her before; she sat in her uniform and felt illuminated by the many lights that Ulrich had turned on. It confused her.
—So Arnheim has acted badly? Ulrich tried to help.
Diotima nodded. Then she began. Arnheim was free to do as he pleased. Nothing had ever happened between her and him that would, in the ordinary sense, have imposed any obligations on him or given him any privileges.
—But if I’ve observed rightly, the situation between you had already gone so far that you were to get a divorce and marry him? Ulrich interjected.
—Oh, marry? the Colonel said. —We might perhaps have got married, if he had behaved himself better; that can come like a ring that one finally slips on loosely, but it ought not to be a band that binds!
—But what did Arnheim do? Do you mean his escapade with Leona?
—Do you know this person?
—Barely.
—Is she beautiful?
—One might call her that.
—Does she have charm? Intelligence? What sort of intelligence does she have?
—But, my dear cousin, she has no intelligence of any land whatsoever!
Diotima crossed one leg over the other and allowed herself to be handed a cigarette; she had gathered a little courage. —Was it out of protest that you appeared at the party in this outfit? Ulrich asked. —Am I right? Nothing else would have moved you to do such a thing. A kind of Overman in you enticed you, after men failed you: I can’t find the right words.
—But, my dear friend, Diotima began, and suddenly behind the smoke of the cigarette tears were again running down her face. —I was the oldest of three daughters. All my youth I had to play the mother; we had no mother; I always had to answer all the questions, know everything, watch over everything. I married Section Chief Tuzzi because he was a good deal older than I and already beginning to lose his hair. I wanted a person I could finally subject myself to, from whose hand my brow would receive grace or displeasure. I am not unfeminine. I am not so proud as you know me. I confess to you that during the early years I felt bliss in Tuzzi’s arms, like a little girl that death abducts to God the father. But for…years I’ve had to despise him. He’s a vulgar utilitarian. He doesn’t see or understand anything about anything else. Do you know what that means!
Diotima had jumped up; her coat remained lying in the chair; her hair hung over her cheeks like a schoolgirl’s; her left hand rested now in manly fashion on the pommel of her saber, now in womanly fashion went through her hair; her right arm made large oratorical flourishes; she advanced one leg or closed her legs tightly together, and the round belly in the white riding breeches had—and this lent a remarkably comic effect—not the slightest irregularity such as a man betrays. Ulrich now first noticed that Diotima was slightly drunk. In her doleful mood she had, at the party, tossed off several glasses of hard spirits one after another, and now, after Ulrich, too, had offered her alcohol, the tipsiness had been freshly touched up. But her intoxication was only great enough to erase the inhibitions and fantasies of which she normally consisted, and really only exposed something like her natural nature: not all of it, to be sure, for as soon as Diotima came to speak of Arnheim, she began to talk about her soul.
She had given her entire soul to this man. Did Ulrich believe that in such questions an Austrian has a finer sensibility, more culture? —No.
—But perhaps he does!—Arnheim was certainly an important person. But he had failed ignominiously. Ignominiously!—I gave him everything, he exploited me, and now I’m miserable!
It was clear that the suprahuman and suggestive love play with Arnheim, rising physically to no more than a kiss but mentally to a boundless, floating duet of souls (a love play that had lasted many weeks, during which Diotimas quarrel with her husband had kept it pure), had so stirred up Diotimas natural fire that, to put it crudely, someone ought to be kicking it out from under the kettle to prevent some kind of accident of exploding nerves. This was what Diotima, consciously or not, wanted from Ulrich. She had sat down on a sofa; her sword lay across her knees, the sulfurous mist of gentle rapture over her eyes, as she said: —Listen, Ulrich: you’re the only person before whom I’m not ashamed. Because you’re so bad. Because you’re so much worse than I am.
Ulrich was in despair. The circumstances reminded him of the scene with Gerda that had taken place here weeks ago, like this one the result of a preceding overstimulation. But Diotima was no girl overstimulated by forbidden embraces. Her lips were large and open, her body damp and breathing like turned-up garden soil, and under the veil of desire her eyes were like two gates that opened into a dark corridor. But Ulrich was not thinking of Gerda at all; he saw Agathe before him, and wanted to scream with jealousy at the sight of this feminine inability to resist any longer, although he felt his own resistance fading from second to second. His expectation was already a mirror in which he saw the breaking of these eyes, their growing dull, as only death and love can achieve, the parting in a faint of lips between which the last breath steals away, and he could hardly still expect to feel this person sitting there before him collapsing completely and looking at him as he turned away in decay, like a Capuchin monk descending into the catacombs. Apparently his thoughts were already heading in a direction in which he hoped to find salvation, for with all his strength he was fighting his own collapse. He had clenched his fists and was drilling his eyes, from Diotima’s viewpoint, into her face in a horrible way. At this moment she felt nothing but fear and approval of him. Then a distorted thought occurred to Ulrich, or he read it from the distortion of the face into which he was looking. Softly and emphatically he replied: —You have no idea how bad I am. I can’t love you; I’d have to be able to beat you to love you!
Diotima gazed stupidly into his eyes. Ulrich hoped to wound her pride, her vanity, her reason; but perhaps it was only his natural feelings of animosity against her that had mounted up in him and to which he was giving expression. He went on: —For months I haven’t been able to think of anything but beating you until you howl like a little child! And he suddenly seized her by the shoulders, near the neck. The imbecility of sacrifice in her face grew. Beginnings of wanting to say something still twitched in this face, to save the situation through some kind of detached comment. Beginnings of standing up twitched in her thighs, but reversed themselves before reaching their goal. Ulrich had seized her saber and half drawn it from its scabbard. —For God’s sake! he felt. —If nothing intervenes I’ll hit her over the head with it until she gives no more signs of her damned life! He did not notice that in the meantime a decisive change had been taking place in the Napoleonic colonel. Diotima sighed heavily as if the entire woman that she had been since her twelfth year was escaping from her bosom, and then she leaned over to the side so as to let Ulrich’s desire pour itself over her in whatever way he liked.
If her face had not been there, Ulrich would at this moment have laughed out loud. But this face was indescribable the way insanity is, and just as infectious. He threw away the saber and gave her, twice, a rough smack. Diotima had expected it to be different, but the physical concussion nevertheless had its effect. Something started going the way clocks sometimes start when they are roughly treated, and in the ordinary course that events took from that point on something unusual was also mingled, a scream and rattle of the emotions.
Childish words and gestures from long ago mingled with it, and the few hours until morning were filled with a kind of dark, childish, and blissful dream state that freed Diotima from her character and brought her back to the time when one does not yet think about anything and everything is good. When day shone through the panes she was lying on her knees, her uniform was scattered over the floor, her hair had fallen over her face, and her cheeks were full of saliva. She could not reca
ll how she had come to be in this position, and her awakening reason was horrified at her fading ecstasy. There was no sign of Ulrich.
***
[Valerie]
A young person tells himself: I’m in love. For the first time. He tells himself, he doesn’t just do it; for there is in him still a little of the childish pride of wanting to possess the world of grownups, the whole world.
He might have previously desired and possessed beautiful women. He might also have been in love before; in various ways: impatiently, boldly, cynically, passionately; and yet the moment may still come when he tells himself for the first time: I’m in love. Ulrich had at the time immediately loosened the bonds that tied him to the woman with whom this happened, so that it was almost like a breaking up. He left from one day to the next; said, We wont write much. Then wrote letters that were like the revelation of a religion, but hesitated to mail them. The more powerfully the new experience grew in him, the less he let any of it show.
He suddenly began to recall this vividly. At that time he had been quite young, an army officer, on leave in the countryside. Perhaps that was what had brought about his shift in mood. He was spiritedly courting a woman, older than he, the wife of a cavalry captain, his superior; she had for a long time been favorably inclined toward him, but seemed to be avoiding an adventure with this beardless little man who confused her with his unusual philosophical and passionate speeches, which came from beyond her circle. On a stroll, he suddenly seized her hand; fate had it that the woman left her hand for a moment in his as if powerless, and the next instant a fire blazed from arms to knees and the lightning bolt of love felled both of them, so that they almost fell by the side of the path, to sit on its moss and passionately embrace.
The night that followed was sleepless. Ulrich had said goodbye in the evening and said: tomorrow we run away. Desire aroused and not yet satisfied threw the woman back and forth in her bed, dry as thirst, but at the same time she feared the stream that was to moisten her lips in the morning, because of its overflowing suddenness. The entire night she reproached herself because of the others youth, and also on account of her husband, for she was a good wife, and in the morning wept tears of relief when she had handed to her Ulrich’s letter, in which he took such an abrupt departure amid piled-up protestations.
Valerie had been the name of this good-natured woman, Ulrich remembered, and at that time, in spite of his inexperience, he must have already been clearly aware that she was only the impetus, but not the content, of his sudden experience. For during that sleepless night, shot through with passionate ideas, he had been borne farther and farther away from her, and before morning came, without his rightly knowing why, his resolve was fixed to do something the like of which he had never done before. He took nothing but a rucksack along, traveled a quite short stretch on the train, and then wandered, his first step already in unknown territory, through a completely isolated valley to a tiny shrine hidden high in the mountains, which at this season no one visited and where hardly anyone lived.
What he did there was, if one were to make a story of it to someone, absolutely nothing. It was fall, and in the mountains the early-autumn sun has a power of its own; mornings it lifted him up and bore him to some tree high up on the slopes, from beneath which one looked into the far distance, for in spite of his heavy hiking boots he was really not conscious of walking. In the same self-forgetful way he changed his location several times during the day and read a little in a few books he had with him. Nor was he really thinking, although he felt his mind more deeply agitated than usual, for his thoughts did not shake themselves up as they usually do, so that a new idea is always landing on top of the pyramid of the earlier ones while the ones at the bottom are becoming more and more compacted until finally they fuse with flesh, blood, skull case, and the tendons supporting the muscles, but his insights came like a jet into a full vessel, in endless overflowing and renewal, or they passed in an everlasting progression like clouds through the sky in which nothing changes, not the blue depths and not the soundless swimming of those mother-of-pearl fish. It could happen that an animal came out of the woods, observed Ulrich, and slowly bounded away without anything changing; that a cow grazed nearby, or a person went past, without any more happening than a beat of the pulse, twin to all the others of the stream of life that softly pounds without end against the walls of the understanding.
Ulrich had stumbled into the heart of the world. From there it was as far to his beloved as to the blade of grass beside his feet or to the distant tree on the sky-bare heights across the valley. Strange thought: space, the nibbling in little bites, distance disstanced, replaces the warm husk and leaves behind a cadaver; but here in the heart they were no longer themselves, everything was connected with him the way the foot is no farther from the heart than the breast is. Ulrich also no longer felt that the landscape in which he was lying was outside him; nor was it within; that had dissolved or permeated everything. The sudden idea that something might happen to him while he was lying there—a wild animal, a robber, some brute—was almost impossible of accomplishment, as far away as being frightened by one’s own thoughts. Later: Nature itself is hostile. The observer need only go into the water. And the beloved, the person for whose sake he was experiencing all this, was no closer than some unknown traveler would have been. Sometimes his thoughts strained like eyes to imagine what they might do now, but then he gave it up again, for when he tried to approach her this way it was as if through alien territory that he imagined her in her surroundings, while he was linked to her in subterranean fashion in a quite different way.
***
“You’re working…?” She did not conceal her disappointment, for with remarkable certainty she felt it as disloyalty whenever Ulrich leafed through books in his hand and his forehead became stiff as bone.
“I have to. I can’t bear the uncertainty of what we’re going through. And we’re not the first people it’s happening to either.”
“Twin siblings?”
“That’s perhaps something especially elect. But I don’t believe in such mysteries as being chosen—” He quickly corrected himself. “Hundreds of people have had the experience of believing that they were seeing another world open up before them. Just as we do.”
“And what came of it?”
“Books.”
“But it can’t have been just books?”
“Madness. Superstition. Essays. Morality. And religion. The five things.”
“You’re in a bad mood.”
“I could read to you or talk with you for hours about things from these books. What I began yesterday was an attempt to do that. You can go back as far as you like from this moment in which we’re now talking, millennia or as far as human memory can reach, and you will always find described the existence of another world that at times rises up like a deep sea floor when the restless floods of our ordinary life have receded from it.
“Since we’ve been together I’ve been comparing as much of this as I could get hold of. All the descriptions state, in odd agreement, that in that condition there is in the world neither measure nor precision, which have made our world of the intellect great, neither purpose nor cause, neither good nor bad, no hmit, no greed, and no desire to kill, but only an incomparable excitement and an altered thinking and willing. For as objects and our emotions lose all the limitations that we otherwise impose on them, they flow together in a mysterious swelling and ebbing, a happiness that fills everything, an agitation that is in the true sense boundless, one and multiple in shape as in a dream. One might perhaps add that the ordinary world, with its apparently so real people and things that lord it over everything like fortresses on cliffs, if one looks back at it, together with all its evil and impoverished relationships, appears only as the consequence of a moral error from which we have already withdrawn our organs of sense.
“That describes exactly as much as we ourselves experienced when we looked into each other’s eyes for the first time.<
br />
“The condition in which one perceives this has been given many names: the condition of love, goodness, turning away from the world, contemplation, seeing, moving away, returning home, willlessness, intuition, union with God, all names that express a vague harmony and characterize an experience that has been described with as much passion as vagueness. Insane peasant women have come to know it, and dogmatic professors of theology; Catholics, Jews, and atheists, people of our time and people of tens of thousands of years ago; and as amazingly similar as the ways are in which they have described it, these descriptions have remained remarkably undeveloped; the greatest intellect has not told us any more about it than the smallest, and it appears that you and I will not learn any more from the experience of millennia than we know by ourselves.
“What does this mean?”
Agathe looked at him questioningly. “Lindner,” she said, “when I once asked him about the significance of such experiences—and by the way, he dismisses them—maintains that they go back to the difference between faith and knowledge, and that for the rest, they’re neurotic exaggerations—”
“Very good,” Ulrich interrupted her. “If you had reminded me of that yesterday, it might perhaps have spared my despair at my lack of results. But we’ll come back to Lindner later! Of course that’s fibbing; if I believe something, I at least want to have the hope that under favorable circumstances I could also experience it, but not keep stopping after the same first steps all the time.
“No, Agathe, it means something quite different. What would you say if I maintain that it signifies nothing other than the lost paradise. It is a message. A message in a bottle that has been drifting for thousands of years. Paradise is perhaps no fairy tale; it really exists.”
