by Robert Musil
That was why Ulrich had already gotten up before Agathe built her peninsula in the drawing room, and had stolen quietly into the study, where he took up his interrupted mathematical investigation, actually more as a way of passing the time than with an expectation of success. But to his not inconsiderable surprise, in the few hours of a single morning he brought to completion, except for some insignificant details, the work he had left lying untouched for several months. This unexpected solution came about with the help of one of those ideas that lie outside the norm and of which one might say, not that they show up when one no longer expects them but rather that their startling effulgence reminds one of the sudden radiance of the beloved who has been there all along among the other girls before the perplexed suitor ceases to understand how he could have thought any others her equal. Such inspirations involve more than the intellect—there is always some prerequisite of passion at work—and Ulrich felt that at this moment he should be finished and free, and in fact, as no reason or purpose could be found in the thing, he was positively struck by a sense of having finished prematurely; and now the remaining energy drove outward into reverie. He glimpsed a possibility of applying the idea that had solved his problem to far greater questions, playfully dreamed up an outline of such a system, and in these moments of happy relaxation even felt tempted by Professor Schwung’s suggestion that he return to his career and seek the path that leads to success and influence. But when, after a few minutes of intellectual satisfaction, he soberly considered what the consequences would be if he were to yield to his ambition and now, as a laggard, set out on an academic path, it occurred to him for the first time that he was too old for such a venture. Not since his boyhood had he felt this half-impersonal concept of age as something that had inherent substance, nor had he ever known the thought: There is something you can no longer do!
When Ulrich was telling this to his sister afterward, in the late afternoon, he happened to use the word “fate,” and that aroused her interest. She wanted to know what “fate” was.
“Something halfway between ‘my toothache’ and ‘King Lear’s daughters!’” Ulrich replied. “I’m not one of those people who like to bandy this word around.”
“But for young people it’s part of the song of life; they want to have a fate and don’t know what it is.”
“There will come a time when people are better informed, and then the word ‘fate’ will probably have acquired a statistical meaning,” Ulrich responded.
Agathe was twenty-seven, still young enough to have retained some of the hollow forms of feeling that one develops in the beginning of life, and old enough to have intimations of the content reality pours into them later. She replied: “I guess getting old is a fate in itself!” and was very dissatisfied with this answer, which expressed her youthful melancholy in a way that struck her as insipid.
But her brother did not take notice of this and gave an example: “When I became a mathematician,” he said, “I wanted to achieve scientific success and applied all my energy to that end, even though I regarded it only as a preliminary to something else. And even though my first papers were of course imperfect, as beginnings always are, they really did contain ideas that were new at the time and either remained unnoticed or even met with resistance, even though my other work was well received. Now I suppose one could call it ‘fate’ that I lost patience with having to go on driving that wedge with all my strength.”
“Wedge?” Agathe interrupted him, as if the mere sound of this industriously masculine word connoted something that could not fail to be unpleasant. “Why do you call it a wedge?”
“Because that was all I wanted to do in the beginning: I wanted to keep driving the investigation further and deeper like a wedge, and then I simply lost patience. And today, when I finished what may be the last work reaching back to that period, I realized that I probably might have been not entirely unjustified in regarding myself as the leader of a movement, if at the time I had been luckier or shown more persistence.”
“You could still make up for lost time!” Agathe said. “After all, a man isn’t as likely to get too old for something as a woman is.”
“No,” Ulrich replied, “I don’t want to do that. Because it is surprising, but true, that objectively—in the course of things, in the development of mathematical science itself—nothing would have changed. I may have been about ten years ahead of my time, but others, moving more slowly and along different paths, got there without me. The most I could have done was lead them there more quickly; and it’s an open question whether such a change in my life would have quickened my imagination enough to give me a new lead and carry me across the finish line. So there you have a piece of what is called personal fate, but it amounts to something remarkably impersonal.
“Anyway, it happens more and more often the older I get,” he continued, “that something I used to hate subsequently and in a roundabout way takes the same direction as my own path, so that suddenly I can no longer deny its right to exist; or else it will happen that ideas or events that once brought out my greatest enthusiasm turn out to be faulty. So in the long run it seems to make no difference if one gets excited, nor does it matter what meaning one has invested one’s excitement in. It all comes to the same thing in the end. Everything serves a development that is impenetrable and unfailing.”
“This used to be attributed to the unfathomable will of God,” Agathe answered, frowning, in the tone of one speaking from experience, and not in the most respectful way. Ulrich remembered that she had been educated in a convent. He was sitting at the foot of the divan where she lay in her long trousers gathered at the ankles, and the lamp shone on them both, casting a large leaf of light on the floor that had darkened around them. “Nowadays,” he said, “fate gives more the impression of the all-compelling movement of a mass. We are inside it and are rolled along with it, whether we want to or not.” He remembered having been struck once by the thought that in our time every truth comes into the world divided into its half-truths, and that nevertheless in this slippery, capricious way, a much greater overall achievement may result than if everyone earnestly strove to do their whole duty, each man by himself. He had once even made a presentation of this idea, which stuck like a barb in his self-esteem but was nonetheless not without the possibility of greatness, and had added the corollary, which he didn’t mean seriously, that therefore one could do whatever one liked! For nothing could have been further from his mind than this conclusion, and especially now that his fate seemed to have released him from duty, leaving him nothing further to do, at this moment of danger to his ambition, when he had been so oddly driven to finish this last, laggard work still binding him to his earlier days, precisely at this moment of utter personal blankness, what he felt instead of a waning was the new suspense that had developed since he had left home. It had no name; for the moment, one could say that a young person who was akin to him was seeking his advice, or one could say something different: But he saw with astonishing acuity the radiant mat of bright gold against the black-green of the room, and on it the delicate diamond checks of Agathe’s Pierrot costume, and himself, and, framed by an oddly sharp margin, lifted out of the dark, the accident of their being together.
“How did you put that?”
“What we still refer to as a personal fate is being displaced by a collective process that can ultimately be summed up in statistical terms,” Ulrich repeated.
Agathe reflected, and then she had to laugh. “Of course I don’t understand that, but wouldn’t it be wonderful if one could melt in statistics; it’s been ages since love could achieve that!” she said.
And this led Ulrich to suddenly tell his sister what had happened to him when, after finishing his work, he had left the house and walked to the center of the town in order to fill the void left in him by the completion of his paper. He hadn’t wanted to talk about it, because it seemed too personal. For whenever his travels took him to cities with which he had no connection thr
ough business of any kind, he greatly enjoyed the special feeling of solitude it gave him, and seldom had this feeling been as strong as this time. He had seen the colors of the trams, the automobiles, shopwindows, gateways, the shapes of church towers, faces, and facades, and although they all had the usual European resemblance, his gaze skimmed above them like an insect that has flown off course, attracted by the foreign colors of a field where it cannot settle, though it would like to. This walking without aim or purpose in a busily self-preoccupied town, this heightened intensity of experience, which increases as the strangeness of one’s surroundings intensifies and is further heightened by the conviction that it is not oneself that matters but only the aggregate of these faces, only these movements wrenched loose from the body and summed up as armies of arms, legs, or teeth, to whom the future belongs—all this can evoke the feeling that to wander about by oneself as a whole self-contained human being is a positively antisocial and criminal activity; but if one yields to this a little more, there can be a sudden shift to such a delightfully foolish and irresponsible sense of physical well-being, as if the body no longer belonged to a world where the sensual self is enclosed in strands of nerves and blood vessels, but belongs instead to a world flooded with somnolent sweetness. With these words Ulrich described to his sister what might have been the result of a frame of mind without goal or ambition, or of a diminished ability to maintain the illusion of personal selfhood; or perhaps it was nothing other than the “primal myth of the gods,” that “double face of nature,” that “giving” and “taking” way of seeing which he was all but chasing down like a hunter. He now waited curiously to see if Agathe would give a sign of agreement or indicate that she too was familiar with such impressions, and when that did not happen, he explained it again: “It’s like a slight split in one’s consciousness. One feels embraced, encompassed, pierced to the heart by a pleasantly will-less unselfreliance; but on the other hand one is awake, capable of judgment in matters of taste, and even prepared to start a fight with people and things that are full of unventilated pretension. It’s as if there were two relatively autonomous strata of life within us that usually keep each other profoundly in balance. And since we were speaking of fate, it’s also as though we had two fates: one that is active and irrelevant and takes its course, and one that is motionless and important that we never get to know.”
Now Agathe, who had been listening for a long time without stirring, suddenly said: “It’s like kissing Hagauer.”
She had propped herself up on an elbow, laughing, her legs still stretched out on the couch. And she added: “Of course it was never as beautiful as the way you describe it!” And Ulrich laughed too. It was not quite clear why they were laughing. Somehow this laughter had come upon them from the air or from the house or from the traces of awe and unease left behind by the solemnities of the last days, which had touched so uselessly on the Beyond, or from the uncommon pleasure they found in their conversation; for every human custom that is developed and refined to its fullest bears within it the seed of change, and every excitement that goes beyond the ordinary is soon misted over by a breath of sadness, absurdity, and satiation.
And so, by this roundabout route, they arrived at last and as if for recreation at the more innocuous exchange about I and We and family, and at the realization, wavering between banter and wonder, that together they formed a family. And while Ulrich speaks of his desire for community—now once more with the zeal of a man mortifying his own nature, though he does not know whether it is his true or an assumed nature he is tormenting—Agathe listens to the way his words come near to her and withdraw again, and he notices that for a long time—as is, regrettably, his habit—he has been looking for something in her appearance, which is defenselessly exposed to his view by the bright light and her whimsical garment, that would repel him, but has found nothing, and for this he is thankful with a pure and simple affection that he otherwise never feels. And he is very delighted by the conversation. But when it ends, Agathe asks ingenuously: “Now, are you actually for what you call the family, or are you against it?”
Ulrich replies that this doesn’t really matter, because what he has been talking about is a vacillation in the world, not his personal indecision.
Agathe thinks about this.
Finally, she says abruptly: “I don’t know how to judge that. But I do wish I could be completely at one and in accord with myself for once and also . . . : well, somehow live that way! Wouldn’t you like to try it too?”
*Walter is Clarisse’s husband. See footnote in Chapter 3.
8
AGATHE WHEN SHE CANNOT TALK TO ULRICH
AT THE moment when Agathe had boarded the train and begun the unexpected journey to her father, something happened that bore every resemblance to a sudden rupture, and the two fragments into which the moment of departure burst flew as far apart as if they had never belonged together. Her husband had taken her to the station, he had raised his hat and held it, the stiff, round, black, steadily diminishing hat, at a slant before him in the air, as is proper on occasions of leave-taking, while she drove off in her train, and it seemed to Agathe as if the station were rolling backwards as fast as the train was rolling forwards. At this moment, though only an instant earlier she had still believed that she would not stay away longer than circumstances absolutely required, she decided never to return, and she felt herself inwardly agitated like a heart that suddenly realizes it has escaped a danger of which it had not been aware.
When Agathe thought about it later, she was by no means completely satisfied. What she disapproved of in her behavior was that its form reminded her of a strange illness that had befallen her as a child soon after she had started school. For more than a year she had suffered from a not inconsiderable fever that neither rose nor subsided, and had become so frail and emaciated that the doctors were worried, as they could not find a cause. Nor was this illness ever explained later. Now, Agathe had doubtless enjoyed seeing how the great doctors from the university, who looked so dignified and full of wisdom when they first entered her room, lost some of their confidence from week to week; and even though she obediently swallowed every medicine that was prescribed for her and really would have liked to get well, because it was expected of her, she was still pleased that the doctors with all their knowledge could not bring about a cure, and felt herself to be in a supernatural or at least extraordinary state as less and less of her remained. She was proud that the grown-ups had no power over her as long as she was sick, and had no idea how her little body was able to do it. But in the end it recovered of its own accord and in a way that seemed just as remarkable.
Almost all she knew about it today was what the servants had told her later. They claimed that a beggar woman who often came into the house but was once rudely turned away had bewitched her; and Agathe had never found out how much truth there was in this story, for the servants liked to indulge in hints but avoided explanations and appeared to be afraid of violating a strict ban Agathe’s father was said to have imposed. Her own memory had retained only a single, but vivid, image from that time, in which she saw her father striking out in a flaming rage at an untrustworthy-looking woman and slapping her face several times; it was the only time in her life she had seen that small, almost always painfully fair-minded intellectual so utterly changed and beside himself; but as far as she could recall, that had happened not before but during her illness, for she was fairly certain that she was lying in bed at the time, and that this bed, instead of being in her room in the attic, had been on the floor below, “with the grown-ups,” in one of the rooms where the servants should not have allowed the beggar woman to enter, even though she was not a stranger to the kitchen and below stairs. Indeed, it seemed to Agathe that this incident must have occurred toward the end of her illness and that she had suddenly recovered a few days later, roused from her bed by that peculiar impatience with which this illness ended as unexpectedly as it had begun.
Of course she did n
ot know whether these memories stemmed from reality or whether they were fictions produced by the fever. “Probably the only remarkable thing about all of it,” she thought with annoyance, “is that these images were able to survive, halfway between truth and fantasy, without my finding them unusual.” —The jolting of the taxi that was driving them across badly paved streets prevented them from talking. Ulrich had suggested taking advantage of the dry winter weather for an outing, and he also had an idea of where they should go—not a destination in the usual sense, but rather an advance into half-imagined landscapes they had known. And now they were in a cab that was to take them to the outskirts of the town.—“I’m sure that’s the only remarkable thing about it!” Agathe repeated to herself what she had thought a moment ago. That was how she had learned her lessons in school, so that she never knew whether she was stupid or clever, willing or unwilling: the answers expected of her imprinted themselves on her mind with ease, but without her ever discovering the purpose of the questions, against which she felt herself to be protected by a deep-seated indifference. After her illness she had liked going to school as much as she had before, and because one of the doctors had hit on the idea that it might be of benefit if she were removed from her father’s house and brought together with children her own age, she had been placed in a convent school. There, too, she was regarded as a cheerful, docile child, and later she attended a secondary school. Whenever she was told that something was necessary or true, she would take her bearings from that and willingly comply with everything that was demanded of her, because that seemed to require the least effort, and it would have seemed pointless to her to undertake anything against institutional arrangements that had nothing to do with her and were clearly part of a world that had been constructed according to the will of fathers and teachers. Nor did she believe a word of anything she had learned, and because, despite her apparent docility, she was far from being a model student, and because wherever her wishes came into conflict with her convictions she casually did what she wished, she enjoyed the respect of her classmates and even that admiring affection that is earned in school by those who know how to get by without undue exertion. It could even be that she had arranged her strange childhood illness for her own comfort, for with this one exception she had always been healthy and not notably nervous. “In short, a dull and useless character,” she concluded uncertainly. She remembered how much more vigorously than herself her friends had often mutinied against the rigid discipline of the boarding school, and with what maxims of revolt they had equipped their assaults against law and order; yet as far as she had come into a position to observe, it was precisely those who had been most passionate in their rebellion against details who later came to be on the best of terms with the whole of life; those girls had developed into well-married women who brought up their children not very differently from the way they themselves had been reared. And so in spite of her dissatisfaction with herself, she was not convinced that it was better to be an active and good character.