by Robert Musil
“What should be done?” Ulrich replied in the same tone as before. “Once at our cousin’s I suggested to Count Leinsdorf that he should found a world secretariat for precision and soul, so that churchgoers wouldn’t be the only people who know what they are supposed to do. Of course I was only joking. We created science for the sake of truth a long time ago, but the idea that something similar might be needed for what is left over seems so foolish in our time that one would be ashamed to propose it in earnest. And yet everything you and I have been talking about would lead us to this secretariat.” He had abandoned his speech and leaned back against his bench. “I suppose I’m dissolving into thin air again if I add: But how would that turn out today?” Since Agathe did not answer, the room became still. Ulrich said after a while: “By the way, sometimes I myself believe that I cannot stand this conviction! When I saw you earlier,” he continued in a lowered voice, “standing there on the Rampart, I don’t know why, I had a wild urge to suddenly do something. I’ve actually done some really rash things in the past; the magic lay in this: after it had happened, there was, besides me, something more. Sometimes I can even imagine a person becoming happy as a result of committing a crime, because it gives him a certain ballast, and with it, maybe, a steadier course.”
Again his sister did not immediately answer. He observed her calmly, even searchingly, but the experience he was talking about did not return; in fact, he was not thinking anything. After a little while she asked him: “Would you be mad at me if I committed a crime?”
“Now how do you expect me to answer that?” Ulrich asked. He was again bent over his knife.
“Is there no such thing as a decision?”
“No, there are no real decisions in our time.”
After that Agathe said: “I want to kill Hagauer.”
Ulrich forced himself not to look up. The words had entered his ear lightly and softly, but after they had passed, they left an imprint in the memory, like a wide wheel track. He had immediately forgotten the tone of her voice; he would have needed to see her face in order to know how her words were to be understood, but he did not want to accord even that much significance to them. “Fine,” he said, “and why not?! Could there be a person today who hasn’t wanted something like that at some time? Do it, if you really can! It’s the same as if you had said: I want to love him for his faults!” Only now did he straighten up again and look his sister in the face. Her expression was stubborn and surprisingly agitated. Still gazing at her, he slowly declared: “You see, something here doesn’t add up; on this frontier between what goes on inside us and what happens outside, some kind of intermediary link is missing these days, and transmuting them into each other is not possible without tremendous losses; one could almost say that our evil wishes are the shadow side of the life we are actually living, and the life we are actually living is the shadow side of our good wishes. Just imagine you really did that: it wouldn’t be anything like what you thought, and you would at the very least be terribly disappointed...”
“I could suddenly become a completely different person: You admitted that yourself!” Agathe interrupted him.
Glancing aside at this moment, Ulrich was reminded that they were not alone: two people were listening to their conversation. The old woman—she might have been no more than forty but her rags and the traces of her humble life made her look older—had sat down by the stove with a friendly look on her face, and sitting beside her was the shepherd, who had come home unbeknownst to his guests, who were too preoccupied with themselves to have noticed his arrival. The two old people rested their hands on their knees and listened, flattered, it seemed, and astonished by such a conversation, even if they did not understand a single word of it. They saw that the milk had not been drunk and the sausage had not been eaten; it was a spectacle, and who knows, maybe an uplifting one. They did not even whisper with each other. Ulrich’s gaze dove into their opened eyes, and out of embarrassment he gave them a smile, which only the woman reciprocated, while her husband gravely maintained respectful decorum.
“We must eat!” Ulrich said in English to his sister. “They’re wondering about us.”
Obediently she toyed with some bread and meat, while he resolutely ate and even drank of the milk. Agathe meanwhile said, aloud and unembarrassed: “When I really think about it, I find the idea of seriously hurting him unpleasant. So maybe I don’t want to kill him. But I do want to extinguish him! Rip him into little pieces, pulverize them in a mortar, pour the dust into the water: this I would like to do! Completely destroy everything that has happened!”
“You know, it’s a little funny, the way we’re talking,” Ulrich said.
Agathe was silent for a while. But then she said: “Remember, you promised me on the first day that you would support me against Hagauer.”
“Of course I will. But not that way.”
Again Agathe was silent. Then she suddenly said: “If you bought or rented a car, we could drive to my house via Iglau and come back by the longer route, I think via Tabor. It wouldn’t occur to anyone that we were there in the night.”
“And the servants? Fortunately I can’t drive!” Ulrich laughed, but then he shook his head, annoyed: “Some newfangled notions you’ve got!”
“You can say that,” Agathe said. Pensively she pushed a piece of bacon back and forth with her fingernail, and it looked as if the fingernail, which had acquired a greasy sheen from the bacon, were doing it all by itself. “But you also said: The virtues of society are vices for the saint!”
“Except I didn’t say the vices of society are virtues for the saint!” Ulrich corrected her. He laughed, seized Agathe’s hand, and cleaned it with his handkerchief.
“The fact is, you always take everything back!” Agathe scolded, smiling ruefully, while the blood rose to her face as she tried to free her finger.
The faces of the two old people by the stove, who were still watching as before, now lit up with wide, beaming smiles.
“When you talk to me like that, first one way, then the other,” Agathe said forcefully with a low voice, “it’s like seeing myself in the shards of a mirror. With you it’s impossible to see all of oneself in one view!”
“No,” Ulrich replied, still holding on to her hand, “these days no one sees all of himself, nor does anyone move as a unified whole: that is the problem!”
Agathe gave in and suddenly stopped trying to withdraw her arm. “I’m certainly the opposite of holy,” she said softly. “I may have been worse in my indifference than a woman for hire. And I’m certainly not enterprising and probably won’t be able to kill anyone. But when you said what you said about the saint the first time, quite a while ago, there was something I saw as a whole . . . !” She lowered her head to think or to prevent him from seeing her face. “I saw a saint, he may have been standing on a fountain. To tell the truth, I may have seen nothing at all, but I felt something that would have to be described that way. The water was flowing, and what the saint was doing also flowed over the rim, as if he were the bowl of a fountain brimming over on all sides. That, I think, is how one ought to be, then you would always be doing the right thing, and it wouldn’t matter what you did.”
“Agathe sees herself standing in the world as a fount of holy profusion, trembling on account of her sins and much astonished to see snakes and rhinoceroses, mountains and chasms lying at her feet, serene and even smaller than she is. But what about Hagauer?” Ulrich said, gently teasing her.
“That’s just it. He can’t be part of it. He has to go!”
“I’ll tell you a story too,” her brother said. “Every time I’ve had to take part in some common venture, some genuine human occasion, I’ve been like a man who steps out of the theater before the last act for a breath of air, sees the great dark emptiness with the many stars, and leaves hat, coat, and show behind him in order to walk away.”
Agathe gave him a searching look. It was and it wasn’t a fitting answer.
Ulrich met her gaze. �
��You too are often plagued by an aversion for which the corresponding attraction does not yet exist,” he said, and thought: “Is she really like me?” Again it seemed to him: Maybe she is, in the way a pastel resembles a woodcut. He considered himself the more solid of the two. And she was more beautiful. So pleasing in her beauty. He now released her finger to grasp her whole hand; it was a warm, long hand full of life, which up till now he had held only for greeting. His young sister was agitated, and though there were no actual tears in her eyes, there was a shimmer in them. “In a few days you will leave me too,” she said, “and how am I going to cope with everything then?”
“We can stay together, you can join me later on.”
“How do you picture that?” Agathe asked, with that pensive little frown on her forehead.
“I haven’t pictured it yet; I thought of it only just now.” He stood up and gave the sheepherders more money, “for the cuts in the table.” Through a haze Agathe saw the peasants grinning and nodding and heard them affirming some joyful sentiment in short words she could not understand. As she passed them, she felt those four hospitable eyes gazing on her face with naked emotion and realized that she and Ulrich had been taken for lovers who had quarreled and made up. “They thought we were lovers!” she said. Exuberantly she slid her arm into his, and all her joy flared into expression. “You ought to give me a kiss!” she demanded, laughing, and pressed her brother’s arm against her body as they stood on the threshold of the cottage and the low door opened into the darkness of the evening.
*Moosbrugger is a psychopath who is on trial for murdering a prostitute. His story, and Ulrich and Clarisse’s interest in his case, forms one of the major subplots of the novel.
10
HOLY CONVERSATIONS. BEGINNING
During the rest of Ulrich’s stay, little more was said about Hagauer, and a long time passed before the siblings returned to the idea of prolonging their renewed relationship by starting a life together. Nevertheless, the flame that had shot forth with Agathe’s unrestrained desire to eliminate her husband went on smoldering beneath the ashes. It spread out in conversations that reached no conclusion, then leapt up again; perhaps one should say that Agathe’s spirit was seeking another chance to burn freely.
She would usually begin such a conversation with a definite and personal question, the inner form of which was: “Am I allowed or am I not?” The lawlessness of her nature had until then lived by the sad and weary conviction: “I can do whatever I want, I just don’t care to,” and so his younger sister’s questions occasionally, and not without justification, affected Ulrich rather like the questions of a child, which are as warm as the little hands of this helpless being.
His answers were of a different kind, but no less characteristic of him: He was always glad to share with her something of the yield of his life and reflections, and, as was his custom, he expressed himself in a manner as candid as it was intellectually enterprising. He always arrived quickly at “the moral of the story” his sister was talking about, summing it up with a formula, liked to use himself for illustration, and in this way told Agathe a great deal about himself and especially about his earlier, more eventful life. Agathe told him nothing about herself, but she admired his ability to talk about his life like that, and his way of subjecting all her suggestions to moral scrutiny suited her very well. For morality is nothing other than an order of the soul and of things, encompassing both, and so it is not strange that young people whose will to live has not yet been blunted on all sides talk about it a great deal. But with a man of Ulrich’s age and experience some explanation is needed; for men talk about morality only in their working lives, if it is part of their occupational lingo; otherwise the word has been swallowed up by the activities of life and never regains its freedom. So when Ulrich spoke of morality, it signaled a deep disorder, which attracted Agathe because it resonated with something in herself. She was ashamed of her somewhat naive confession that she would like to live “in perfect accord with herself,” now that she was hearing what intricate preconditions would have to be met; yet she wished impatiently that her brother would arrive at a result more quickly, for often she felt that everything he was saying was moving in that direction, was in fact becoming more and more precise as he neared the conclusion, halting only at the last step, just before the threshold, where, each time, he would abandon the project.
The locus of this turnaround and those final steps could be described in the most general terms—and the paralyzing effect of this did not escape Ulrich—as follows: Every proposition in European morality leads to such a point beyond which there is nowhere further to go; so that a person giving account of himself has at first the gestures of a man wading in shallow waters, as long as he feels some firm conviction underfoot, until suddenly, when he goes a little farther, the gestures are those of a fearful drowning, as if the very foundations of life had fallen abruptly from the shallows to a depth that offers no foothold at all. This manifested itself outwardly in the siblings’ conversation as well: Ulrich could talk in a calm and elucidating manner on any subject he started out with so long as his intellect was engaged, and Agathe felt a similar eagerness in listening; but then, when they stopped and were silent, a much more intense alertness came into their faces. And so it happened once that they were led across the boundary at which they had unconsciously halted before then. Ulrich had maintained that “the only distinguishing mark of our morality is that its commandments contradict each other. The most moral of all propositions is this one: The exception proves the rule!” Probably all that provoked him to say this was his aversion to a moral system that pretends to be unbending but in practice has to bend at every turn, which means it is the opposite of an exact procedure that takes account of experience first and obtains the law from those observations. Of course he was aware of the distinction that is made between natural and moral laws, according to which the first are derived from the observation of nature, which knows no morality, while the second must be imposed on the less obstinate nature of man; but in his opinion something about this division was no longer valid, and he had been about to say that moral thought was a hundred years behind the times, and that this was why morals were so difficult to apply to present-day needs. But before he reached that point in his explanation, Agathe interrupted him with an answer that seemed very simple but at that moment took Ulrich by surprise.
“Is being good not good, then?” she asked her brother, and there was something in her eyes that he had seen before, when she was doing something with the medals that would probably not have been good in everyone’s estimation.
“You’re right,” he replied eagerly. “One really does have to start with such a proposition if one wants to feel the original meaning again! But children still love being good the way they love sweets—”
“Being bad too,” Agathe added.
“But is being good one of the passions of adults?” Ulrich asked. “It’s one of their principles! Not that they are good, that would strike them as childish. They do good. A good man is a person with good principles who does good works: it’s an open secret that he may at the same time be thoroughly loathsome!”
“See Hagauer,” Agathe added.
“There is a paradoxical absurdity in these good people,” Ulrich said. “They turn a state into a demand, a grace into a norm, a way of being into a goal! This family of the good spends a lifetime eating leftovers. Meanwhile a rumor circulates that there was once a great feast of which these are the scraps! To be sure, from time to time a few virtues come back into fashion, but as soon as that has happened, they lose their freshness again.”
“Didn’t you once say that the same act can be good or bad, depending on circumstances?” Agathe now asked.
Ulrich agreed. That was his theory, that moral values are not absolutes but functional concepts. But when we moralize and generalize, we detach them from their natural context: “And that,” he said, “is probably already the point where something is amiss
on the path to virtue.”
“How else could moral people manage to be so dreary,” Agathe added, “when their intention to be good ought to be the most delightful, the most challenging, and the most engaging thing one could possibly imagine!”
Her brother hesitated; but suddenly he let slip a statement that led their relationship into unusual terrain. “Our morality,” he declared, “is the crystallization of an inner movement that is completely different from it! None of what we say adds up! Take any phrase—here’s one I just thought of: ‘Prison is a place for repentance!’ Anyone can say this with a good conscience, but no one takes it literally, because it would amount to hellfire for prisoners! So how is one to take it? I’m sure few people know what repentance is, but everyone can tell you the place where repentance should properly reign. Or just think of something ‘uplifting’: how did that notion find its way into moral discourse, and where did it come from? When were we ever so prostrate, with our faces in the dust, that it was a blessing to be uplifted? Or imagine being literally in the grip of an idea: the moment you experienced that as a palpable reality, you would already be deep in the realm of lunacy! And so every word needs to be taken literally, otherwise it decays into a lie, but no word should be taken literally, otherwise the world will turn into a madhouse! Some great rapture rises out of this as an obscure memory, and it can be tempting to imagine that our experience consists entirely of fragments torn from an ancient wholeness that was destroyed a long time ago and was then put together again in a way that was all wrong.”