by Robert Musil
***
Afternoons, in the room, there were fearful moments. Between the extended red-striped awning and the stone railing of the balcony lay a blue, burning band the width of one’s hand. The smooth warmth, the severely attenuated brightness, had dislodged everything from the room that was not fixed. Ulrich and Agathe had not brought along anything to read; that had been their plan; they had left behind ideas, normal circumstances, everything having any connection—no matter how sagacious—with the ordinary human way of living: now their souls lay there like two hard-baked bricks from which every drop of water has escaped. This contemplative natural existence had made them unexpectedly dependent on the most primitive elements.
Finally, a day of rain came. The wind lashed. Time became long in a cool way. They straightened up like plants. They kissed each other. The words they exchanged refreshed them. They were happy again. To always be waiting every moment for the next moment is only a habit; dam it up, and time comes forth like a lake. The hours still flow, but they are broader than they are long. Evening falls, but no time has passed.
But then a second rainy day followed; a third. What had seemed a new intensity glided downward as a conclusion. The smallest help, the belief that this weather was a personal dispensation, an extraordinary fate, and the room is full of the strange light from the water, or hollowed out like a die of dark silver. But if no help comes: what can one talk about? One can still smile at the other from far apart—embrace— weaken the other to the point of that fatigue which resembles death, which separates the exhausted like an endless plain; one can call across: I love you, or: You are beautiful, or: I would rather die with you than live without you, or:
What a miracle that you and I, two such separate beings, have been blown together. And one can weep from nervousness when, quite softly, one begins to fall prey to boredom…
Fearful violence of repetition, fearful godhead! Attraction of emptiness, always sucking in like the funnel of a whirlpool whose walls yield. Kiss me, and I will bite gently and harder and harder and wilder and wilder, ever more drunken, more greedy for blood, listening into your lips for the plea for mercy, climbing down the ravine of pain until at the end we are hanging in the vertical wall and are afraid of ourselves. Then the deep pantings of breath come to our aid, threatening to abandon the body; the gleam in the eye breaks, the glance rolls from side to side, the grimace of dying begins. Astonishment and a thousandfold ecstasy in each other eddy in this rapture. Within a few minutes concentrated flight through bliss and death, ending, renewed, bodies swinging like howling bells. But at the end one knows: it was only a profound Fall into a world in which it drifts downward on a hundred steps of repetition. Agathe moaned: You will leave me! —No! Darling! Conspirator! Ulrich was searching for expressions of enthusiasm, etc. —No—Agathe softly fended him off—I can’t feel anything anymore…! Since it had now been spoken, Ulrich became cold and gave up the effort.
—If we had believed in God—Agathe went on—we would have understood what the mountains and flowers were saying.
—Are you thinking of Lindner? Ulrich probed / What? Lindner… ! Ulrich immediately interjected jealously.
***
It ends in excrement and vomiting like the first time!
—No. I was thinking of the art historian. His thread never breaks. Agathe gave a pained and wan smile. She was lying on the bed; Ulrich had torn open the door to the balcony, the wind flung water in. “What difference does it make,” he said harshly. “Think of whomever you want. We have to look around for a third person. Who’ll observe us, envy us, or reproach us.” He remained standing before her and said slowly: “There is no such thing as love between two people alone!” Agathe propped herself on an elbow and lay there, wide-eyed, as if she were expecting death. —We have yielded to an impulse against order, Ulrich repeated. —A love can grow out of defiance, but it can’t consist of defiance. On the contrary, it can only exist when it is integrated into a society. It’s not the content of life. But a negation of, an exception to, all life’s contents.
But an exception needs whatever it is the exception to. One can’t live from a negation alone. —Close the door, Agathe asked. Then she stood up and arranged her dress. —So shall we leave?
Ulrich shrugged his shoulders. —Well, it’s all over.
—Don’t you remember any more our proviso when we came here?
Ashamed, Ulrich answered: We wanted to find the entrance to paradise!
—And kill ourselves—Agathe said—if we didn’t!
Ulrich looked at her calmly. —Do you want to?
Agathe might perhaps have said yes. She did not know why it seemed more honest to slowly shake her head and say no.
—We’ve lost that resolve too, Ulrich stated.
She stood up in despair. Spoke with her hands on her temples, listening to her own words: I was waiting…I was almost decadent and ridiculous…Because in spite of the life I’ve led I was still waiting. I could not name it or describe it. It was like a melody without notes, a picture with out form. I knew that one day it will come up to me from outside and will be what treats me tenderly and what will hold no harm for me anymore, either in life or in death
Ulrich, who had turned violently toward her, cut in, parodying her with a spitefulness that was a torture to himself: —It’s a longing, something that’s missing: the form is there, only the matter is missing. Then some bank official or professor comes along, and this little beastie slowly fills up the emptiness that was stretched out like an evening sky.
—My love, all movement in life comes from the evil and brutal; goodness dozes off. Is a drop of some fragrance; but every hour is the same hole and yawning child of death, which has to be filled up with heavy ballast. You said before: If we could believe in God!. But a game of patience will do as well, a game of chess, a book. Today man has discovered that he can console himself with these things just as well. It just has to be something where board is joined to board in order to span the empty depths.
—But don’t we love each other any longer, then? Agathe exclaimed.
Now they are again talking as they had earlier. It is very lovely.
—You can’t overlook—Ulrich answered—how much this feeling depends on its surroundings. How it derives its content from imagining a life together, that is, a line between and through other people. From good conscience, because everyone else is so pleased at the way these
two love each other, or from bad conscience as well
—What is it then that we experienced? We mustn’t pretend to something untrue: I wasn’t a fool for wanting to seek paradise. I could determine it the way one can deduce an invisible planet from certain effects. And what happened? It dissolved into a spiritual and optical illusion and into a physiological mechanism that is repeatable. As with all people!
—It’s true, Agathe said. —For the longest time we’ve been living from what you call evil; from restlessness, small distractions, the hunger and satiety of the body.
—And yet—Ulrich answered, as in an extremely painful vision— when it’s forgotten, you’ll be waiting again. Days will come where behind many doors someone will beat on a drum. Muffled and insistently: beat, beat. Days, as if you were waiting in a brothel for the creaking of the stairs; it will be some corporal or bank official. Whom fate has sent you. To keep your life in motion. And yet you remain my sister.
—But what is to become of us? Agathe saw nothing before her.
—You must marry or find a lover—I said that before.
—But are we no longer one person? she asked sadly.
—One person also has both within himself.
—But if I love you? Agathe shouted.
—We must live. Without each other—for each other. Do you want the art historian? Ulrich said this with the coldness of great effort. Agathe dismissed it with a small shrug of her shoulder. —Thank you, Ulrich said. He tried to grasp her slack hand and stroke it. —I’m not so—so firmly convinced either….
***
Once again, almost the great union. But it seems to Agathe that Ulrich does not have sufficient courage.
They were silent for a while. Agathe opened and closed drawers and began to pack. The storm shook at the doors. Then Agathe turned around and asked her brother calmly and in a different voice:
—But can you imagine that tomorrow or the next day we’ll get home and find the rooms the way we left them, and begin to make visits?…
Ulrich did not notice with what enormous resistance Agathe struggled against this idea. He could not imagine all that either. But he felt some new kind of tension, even if it was a melancholy task. At this moment he was not paying enough attention to Agathe.
Continuation: The day after this dismal conversation Clarisse arrived.
Worked-Out Sketches from the 1920s
New Sketches, 1930/31-1933/34
On Kakania
A digression on Kakania. The crucible of the World War is also the birthplace of the poet Feuermaul
It may be assumed that the expression “Crucible of the World War” has, since this object existed, been used often enough, yet always with a certain imprecision as to the question of where it is located. Older people who still have personal memories of those times will probably think of Sarajevo, yet they themselves will feel that this small Bosnian city can only have been the oven vent through which the wind blew in. Educated people will direct their thoughts to political nodal points and world capitals. Those even more highly educated will, moreover, have the names of Essen, Creuzot, Pilsen, and the other centers of the armaments industry confidendy in mind. And the most highly educated will add to these something from the geography of oil, potash, and other raw materials, for that’s the way one often reads about it. But what follows from all this is merely that the crucible of the World War was no ordinary crucible, for it was located in several places simultaneously.
Perhaps one might say to this that the expression is to be understood only metaphorically. But this is to be assented to so completely that it immediately gives rise to even greater difficulties. For, granting that “crucible” is intended to mean metaphorically approximately the same thing that “origin” or “cause” means non-metaphorically, while on the one hand one knows that the origin of all things and events is God, on the other it leaves one empty-handed. For “origins” and “causes” are like a person who goes searching for his parents: in the first instance he has two, that is indisputable; but with grandparents it’s the square of two, with great-grandparents two to the third, and so on in a powerfully unfolding series, which is totally unassailable but which yields the remarkable result that at the beginning of time there must have been an almost infinite number of people whose purpose was merely to produce a single one of today’s individuals. However flattering this may be, and however it may correspond to the significance that the individual feels within himself, today one calculates too precisely for anyone to believe it. Therefore, with heavy heart, one must give up a personal series of ancestors and assume that “starting from someplace” one must have a common descent as a group. And this has a variety of consequences. Such as that people consider themselves in part “brothers,” in part “from alien tribes,” without a person knowing how to determine where the boundary is, for what is called “nation” and “race” is results and not causes. Another consequence, no less influential even if not as obvious, is that Mr. What’s-his-name no longer knows where he has his cause. He consequently feels himself like a snipped thread that the busy needle of life incessantly pulls back and forth because making a button for it was somehow overlooked. A third consequence, just now dawning, is for instance that it has not yet been calculated whether and to what extent there might be two or multiple other Mr. What’s-his-names; in the realm of what is hereditarily possible it is entirely conceivable, only one does not know how great the probability is that it could actually happen with oneself; but a dim oppressiveness of the idea that given man’s nature today this cannot be entirely excluded lies, as it were, in the air.
And surely it would not even be the worst thing. Count Leinsdorf, speaking with Ulrich for a moment, held forth on the aristocratic institution of chamberlains. “A chamberlain needs to have sixteen noble forebears, and people are upset at that being the height of snobbery; but what, I ask you, do people do themselves? Imitate us with their theories of race, that’s what they do,” he explained, “and immediately exaggerate it in a fashion that has nothing at all to do with nobility. As far as I’m concerned we can all be descended from the same Adam, a Leinsdorf would still be a Leinsdorf, for it’s a damn sight more a matter of education and training than a matter of blood!” His Grace was irritated by the intrusion of populist elements into the Parallel Campaign, which for a variety of reasons had to be countenanced up to a certain point. At that time nationalism was nearly ready to put forth its first bloody blossoms, but no one knew it, for despite its imminent fulfillment it did not seem terrible but only seemed ridiculous: its intellectual aspect consisting for the most part of books pasted together with the well-read busyness of a scholar and the total incoherence of untrained thinking by compilers who lived in some rural backwater as elementary-school teachers or petty customs officials.
Preliminary sketch: continuation after first paragraph above Therefore the obvious reservation will probably be put forward that the expression “crucible of the World War” is to be understood merely metaphorically, and this is to be subscribed to so wholeheartedly that it will immediately lead to new difficulties; if on the other hand one maintains that “crucible” signifies the same as causation complex, and such a thing is complicated and extensive in all human endeavors, then it must be contradicted straightaway. For if one pursues causes back in a straight line they lead right back to God as the Prima Causa of everything that happens; this is one of the few problems about which centuries of theology have left no doubt. But on the other hand it’s like a person going from his father to his father’s father, from his father’s father to his father and father’s father of the father’s father, and so on in this series: he will never arrive at a complete notion of his descent. In other words: the causal chain is a warp on a loom; the moment a woof is put in, the causes disappear into a woven texture. In science, research into causes was abandoned long ago, or at least greatly reduced, to be replaced by a functional mode that called for observing relationships. The search for causes belongs to household usage, where the cook’s being in love is the cause of the soup’s being oversalted. Applied to the World War, this search for a cause and a causer has had the extremely positive negative result that the cause was everywhere and in everyone. This demonstrates that one can truly say “crucible” just as well as “cause of” or “guilt for” the war; but then one would have to supplement this entire mode of observation with another. For this purpose, let us proceed experimentally from the problem of why the poet Feuermaul should suddenly pop up in the Parallel Campaign, and even why—leaving behind a decisive but merely trivial contribution to its history—he will immediately and permanently drop out of it again. The answer is that this was apparently necessary, that there was absolutely no way of avoiding it—for everything that happens has, as we know, a sufficient cause—but that the reasons for this necessity are themselves, however, completely meaningless or, more properly, were important only for Feuermaul himself, his girlfriend, Professor Drangsal, and her envier, Diotima, and only for a brief period. It would be sheer extravagance were one to relate this. If Feuermaul had not striven to play a role in the Parallel Campaign, someone else would have done so in his place, or if this other person had not shown up, something else would have; in the interweavings of events there is a narrow insert where this or that influences its success with the differences they make; but in the long run, the things represent each other completely, indeed they somehow also represent the characters, with very few exceptions. Arnheim, too, could have been replaced in the same way; perhaps not for Diotima, but pro
bably as the cause of the changes she underwent and, further, the effects that these led to. This view, which today might almost be called a natural one, seems fatalistic but is so only so long as one accepts it as a destiny. But the laws of nature were also a destiny before they were investigated; after that happened, it was even possible to subordinate them to a technology.
Belongs here: Feuermaul, like all the characters in the story except for Ulrich (and perhaps Leo Fischel), denies the value of technical projects, among others
As long as this has not happened, one can also say that B., the birthplace of the poet Feuermaul, was also the original crucible of the World War. And that is why it is by no means capricious; what it amounts to, really, is that certain phenomena, which were to be found everywhere in the world and belonged to the crucible that, stretching over the entire planet, was everywhere and nowhere, condensed in B. in a fashion that prematurely brought out its meaning. Instead of B. one could say the whole of Kakania, but B. was one of the special points within it. These phenomena were that in B. the people could not stand each other at all, and on the other hand that the poet Feuermaul, born in their midst, chose as the basic principle of his work the assertion that Man Is Good and one need only turn direcdy to the goodness that dwells within him. Both signify the same thing.
***
It would have been a lie had one tried to maintain that even the smallest part of what has been described was present in Feuermaul at the time in any real way, or that it was present at any time in such detail. But life is always more detailed than its results: creating, as it were, a vegetarian diet, mountains of leaves, around a tiny pile of…The results are a few dispositions of individual conduct.
1930-1934
While Agathe and Ulrich were living behind closed crystal panels— by no means abstractly and without looking at the world, but looking at it in an unusual, unambiguous light, this world bathed every morning in the hundredfold light of a new day. Every morning cities and villages awaken, and wherever they do it happens, God knows, in more or less the same way; on the other hand, people are conceived and slain in an instant, and small birds fly from one branch to another with the same right to existence that a giant ocean liner expresses as it swims straight between Europe and America. Somehow everything in the world happens uniformly and with statutory monotony, but varied in countless ways, which, depending on the mood in which one observes them, is as much blissful abundance as ridiculous superfluity. And perhaps even the expression “law of nature”—this exalted regency of mechanical laws, which we worship shivering—is still a much too personal expression; laws have something of the personal relationship an accused has with his judge or a subject with his king; there is in them something of the con-trat social and the beginnings of liberalism too. Nietzsche already noted the more modern view of nature when he wrote: “Nature has a calculable course not because it is ruled by laws but because they are lacking, and every power draws its ultimate consequences at every moment.” That is a statement which fits in with the ideas of contemporary physics but was really coined from biological events, and an intimation of such emotions lies over contemporary life. Once, “You can do what you like” meant following your drives; but one was not supposed to do what one liked, and moral laws conceived in sublimity interfered with it. Today everyone feels in some way that these moral laws are a heap of contradictions, and that to follow them would amount to being able to pander to every one of his drives, and he feels a wild, extraordinary freedom. This freedom permits him a path that only leads forward: that, like the orbits of atoms, this chaos must somehow finally yield a specific value, and that with more precise knowledge of how things cohere one would again be able to give life a meaning.
