by Robert Musil
The conversation in which this remark was made took place in the room that served as a library and a study, and while Ulrich sat over several books he had brought along on his trip, his sister was rummaging through her father’s collection of legal and philosophical books, a bequest of which she was now a co-inheritor, and from which she drew inspiration for some of her questions. Since their outing the siblings had rarely left the house. This was how they spent their time. Occasionally they would stroll in the garden, where winter had peeled the leaves from the naked shrubs, exposing the swollen, rain-soaked earth beneath. This sight was painful. The air was pallid, like something that has long lain in water. The garden was not large. The paths soon turned back upon themselves, and as the siblings followed them, they found themselves in a state of mind that drifted in circular eddies like those of a current rising behind a dam. When they returned to the house, the rooms were dark and sheltered, and the windows were like deep shafts through which daylight entered with the delicacy and brittleness of thin ivory. Agathe had now, after Ulrich’s last, spirited words, stepped down from the library ladder on which she had been sitting and laid an arm around his shoulder, without answering. That was an unaccustomed show of tenderness, for apart from the two kisses—the one on the evening of their first encounter and the one a few days ago on leaving the shepherds’ hut—the modest reserve that naturally obtains between brother and sister had not yet relaxed into more than words and small friendly gestures, and even those two moments of intimate contact had been covered over by the unexpectedness of the first occasion and by the exuberant mischief that prompted the second. But this time Ulrich immediately thought of the garter his sister had warmly bestowed on the deceased in place of a quantity of words. And another thought shot through his head: “There is no question that she has a lover; but she doesn’t seem to care about him very much, otherwise she would not be so content to stay here.” She was evidently a woman, and had led a woman’s life quite independently of him and would continue to do so. His shoulder felt the beauty of the arm that was resting upon it by the distribution of its weight alone, and from the side that was turned toward his sister he had a shadowy sense of the nearness of her blond armpit and the outline of her breast. But in order not to just sit there in passive surrender to this quiet embrace, he took hold of the fingers of the hand resting near his neck, thus muffling the intimacy of her touch with his. “You know, it’s a little childish, the way we’re talking,” he said, not without annoyance. “The world is full of resolution and action, and we’re sitting here talking in lazy luxuriance about the sweetness of ‘being good’ and the theoretical pots we could fill with it!”
Agathe freed her fingers but let her hand return to its place. “What’s this book you’ve been reading all these days?” she asked.
“You know what it is,” he replied. “You’ve peeked into it over my shoulder often enough.”
“But I can’t make heads or tails of it.”
He could not decide whether he should talk about it. Agathe, who had now pulled up a chair, was crouching behind him and was simply and peacefully resting her face in his hair, as if sleeping in it. Ulrich was strangely reminded of the moment when his enemy Arnheim had wrapped an arm around him and the unregulated current of physical contact with another being had poured into him as if through a breach. But this time his own nature did not rise to repel the intruder; instead something was flowing toward it that had been buried beneath the rubble of mistrust and resentment that fills the heart of any man who has lived a fairly long time. Agathe’s relationship to him, hovering between sister and woman, stranger and friend, yet not identifiable as any of them, also did not—as he had already quite often concluded—reside in a particularly far-reaching agreement of thought and feeling; and yet, as he noticed at this moment almost with amazement, this highly ambiguous relationship had become indistinguishable from the fact that in the course of relatively few days, in consequence of myriad impressions impossible to review in a moment, Agathe’s mouth now rested on his hair without further claim, and that the hair had become warm and moist from her breath. This was something as spiritual as it was physical. For when Agathe repeated her question, Ulrich was overcome by a seriousness such as he had not felt since the days when he was still young and a believer; and by the time this cloud of weightless gravity had vanished—a field extending from the space behind his back through his whole body to the book on which his thoughts were resting—he had given an answer that surprised him more by the complete absence of irony in its tone than by its content. He said: “I’m instructing myself about the ways of the holy life.”
He had stood up and walked a few steps, not to move away from his sister but in order to see her from there. “You needn’t laugh,” he said. “I’m not religious; I’m looking at the road to holiness and wondering if it’s possible to drive a car on it!”
“I only laughed,” Agathe replied, “because I’m so curious to hear what you’re going to say. The books you brought along are new to me, but I have a feeling they’re not completely beyond my understanding.”
“Does this sound familiar?” her brother asked, already convinced that she would not find it strange: “You can be caught up in the most vehement emotion but suddenly your glance falls on the play of some random thing abandoned by God and the world and you can’t tear yourself away from it?! Suddenly you feel yourself wafted aloft by its tiny existence like a feather sailing in the wind, relieved of all weight and all power?!”
“Except for the vehement emotion you make such a point of, I think I know what you mean,” Agathe said, and now had to smile again at the fierce embarrassment that showed in her brother’s face, not at all in keeping with the delicacy of his words. “Sometimes one forgets seeing and hearing,” she said, “and loses the power of speech altogether. And yet it’s precisely then that you feel you’ve come to yourself for a moment.”
“I would say,” Ulrich went on excitedly, “it’s similar to looking across a wide sparkling body of water: everything is so bright it seems like darkness to the eye, and on the opposite shore things don’t seem to be resting on the earth but rather hovering in the air with an extreme and delicate distinctness that is bewildering and almost hurts. There’s a feeling of intensification and of loss in this, both. You’re connected with everything and can’t quite make contact with anything. You’re standing here and the world is over there, hypersubjective and hyperconcrete, but both sides almost painfully distinct, and what separates and connects these usually mingled elements is a dark flashing pulse, a brimming over and an extinction, a swinging out and in. You are floating like the fish in the water and the bird in the air, but there is no bank and no branch and only this floating!” It was doubtless a kind of poetry he was speaking, but the ardor and firmness of his language stood out in metallic relief against its subtle, hovering content. He seemed to have cast off a caution that usually restrained him, and Agathe looked at him in astonishment, but also with uneasy joy.
“And you think there’s something behind it?” she asked. “More than a ‘humor,’ or whatever vile reassuring term would be applied?”
“I certainly do!” He sat down again in his previous place and leafed about among the books that lay there, while Agathe stood up to make room for him. Then he laid one of them open, saying, “This is how the saints describe it,” and read aloud: “During these days I was exceedingly restless. Now I sat a while, now I wandered back and forth through the house. It was like an anguish and yet more to be called a sweetness than an anguish, for there was no vexation in it, but rather a strange, quite supernatural pleasantness. I had risen above all my faculties up to the dark power. There I heard without sound, there I saw without light. There my heart became bottomless, my spirit formless, and my nature insubstantial.” It seemed to them both that these words resembled the restlessness by which they themselves were driven through house and garden, and Agathe especially was surprised that saints, too, call their heart bottomless
and their spirit formless; but Ulrich soon appeared to be wrapped in his irony again.
He explained: “The saints say: Once I was shut inside, then I was drawn out of myself and immersed in God without understanding. The emperors out hunting, about whom we read in our storybooks, describe it differently: they say a stag appeared to them with a cross between his antlers, causing the murderous spear to drop from their hands; and then they raised a chapel on that spot so they could go on hunting. And the rich, clever ladies with whom I associate will answer you immediately, if you ask them about it, that the last one who painted such experiences was Van Gogh. Maybe instead of a painter they will talk about Rilke’s poetry; but generally they prefer Van Gogh, who represents an excellent capital investment and cut off his ears because his painting didn’t do enough for him compared to the rapture of things. The majority of our people, on the other hand, will say that cutting off ears is not a German way of expressing one’s feelings. The lofty German way is found in the unmistakable void one experiences in mountain panoramas. For them solitude, little flowers, and babbling brooks are the epitome of human exaltation: but even in that bovine enjoyment of uncooked nature at her wholesome best there lies concealed the misunderstood final residue of a mysterious second life, and all in all something like it must exist or have existed at some time!”
“Then you really shouldn’t make fun of it,” Agathe objected, grim with the thirst for knowledge and shining with impatience.
“I only make fun of it because I love it,” Ulrich curtly retorted.
11
HOLY CONVERSATIONS. CHANGEFUL DEVELOPMENTS
In the days that followed, there were always numerous books on the table, some of which he had brought with him and others he had bought since. He would either speak extemporaneously or else quote from one of many passages he had marked with slips of paper, either to prove a point or because he wanted an exact citation. The books before him were mostly biographies of mystics or scholarly works about them, or collections of their personal utterances, and usually he would deflect the conversation from these texts with the words, “Now let’s look at what is going on here as soberly as possible.” This was a cautious stance that he was not prepared to give up voluntarily, and so once he said to Agathe: “If you could read straight through all these descriptions that men and women of past centuries have left about their state of divine rapture, you would find truth and reality between all these letters, and yet your will to be of the present would be loath to accept the assertions that were formed with these letters.” And he went on: “They speak of an overflowing radiance. Of an infinite expanse, an infinite abundance of light. Of an ethereal ‘oneness’ of all things and all the soul’s capacities. Of a marvelous and indescribable exaltation of the heart. Of insights that come so swiftly that everything is simultaneous and that are like drops of fire falling into the world. And on the other hand they speak of a forgetting and no longer understanding, and even of a perishing of things. They speak of an immense peace that is far removed from the passions. Of a muteness that befalls them. A vanishing of thoughts and intentions, a blindness in which they see clearly, a clarity in which they are both dead and supernaturally alive. They call it an ‘annihilation,’ yet claim to be living more fully than ever: Are these not the same feelings, shimmering through the veils woven in the attempt to express them, that one still has in our time when the heart—‘ravenous and sated,’ as they say!—finds itself suddenly in those utopian regions that lie somewhere and nowhere between an infinite tenderness and an infinite solitude?!”
As Ulrich briefly paused to think, Agathe’s voice joined in: “This is what you once called two layers that are inside us, one on top of the other.”
“I did—when?”
“You’d gone into town without any goal or purpose, and you felt as if you were dissolving into it, but at the same time you didn’t like the town; and I told you that this happens to me often.”
“Oh yes! You even went on to say ‘Hagauer!’” Ulrich exclaimed. “And we laughed: I remember it now. But we didn’t really mean it. I’ve told you on other occasions about the giving and the taking kinds of seeing, about the male and the female principle, about the hermaphroditism of the primal imagination, and the like: I can go on and on about these things! As though my mouth were as far from me as the moon, which is also always available for a confidential nighttime chat if one needs it. But what these pious people have to tell about their soul’s adventure,” he continued, and as he spoke, a tone of objectivity and also of admiration mingled with the bitterness of his words, “is written in a way that is at times comparable with the ruthless rigor and conviction of a Stendhalian analysis. However,” he now injected a qualification, “this is only the case as long as they stick to the phenomena and leave their judgment out of it, because their judgment is warped by the flattering conviction that they are singled out by God to have direct experience of Him. And, of course, as soon as that happens, they stop telling us about their perceptions, which have no nouns or verbs and are therefore very hard to describe, and speak instead in sentences with subject and object, because they believe in their soul and in God as if these were two doorposts between which the miraculous will open. And so they arrive at these statements about the soul being drawn from the body and immersed in the Lord, or that the Lord penetrates them like a lover; they are captured, devoured, dazzled, plundered, ravaged by the Lord, or their soul expands to meet Him, enters into Him, tastes Him, embraces Him with love and hears Him speak. The earthly model for this is unmistakable; and these descriptions now no longer resemble tremendous discoveries, but merely the rather monotonous imagery with which an erotic poet embellishes his subject, about which only one opinion is permissible. For someone like me, at least, who was brought up to maintain reserve, the effect is one of being stretched on a rack, because the elect, at the moment when they assure me that God spoke to them or that they understood the speech of the trees and the beasts, neglect to tell me what was imparted to them; and if they ever do, all that comes out is personal business or church news. It is an everlasting pity that there are no trained scientists who have visions!” he concluded his long reply.
“Do you think they could?” Agathe tempted him. Ulrich hesitated for a moment. His answer came out like a confession.
“I don’t know. Maybe it could happen to me!” When he heard his words, he smiled in order to limit their meaning.
Agathe also smiled; she now seemed to have the answer she had been craving, and her face reflected the little moment of baffled disappointment that follows the sudden cessation of a state of suspense. And perhaps she now raised an objection only to spur her brother on. “You know,” she declared, “I was educated in a very pious school. Because of that, as soon as someone starts talking about religious ideals, I feel a simply scandalous urge to lampoon these things. Our teachers wore a habit whose two colors formed a cross, and to be sure, that was a reminder of one of the most sublime ideas, which we were supposed to be mindful of all day long; but we didn’t give that a moment’s thought and only called our Sisters the cross-spiders, because of the way they looked and because of their silky smooth way of talking. That’s why, while you were reading aloud, I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.”
“Do you know what that proves?” Ulrich exclaimed. “Nothing more or less than this: That the power for good, which really does seem to exist within us, immediately eats its way through the walls if it gets shut up into a solid form and escapes straightaway through the hole into its opposite! It reminds me of the time when I was in the army, upholding throne and altar together with my fellow officers: at no other time in all my life have I heard people speak so loosely about those two as we did in our circle! Feelings don’t like being put on a leash, but some feelings in particular can’t put up with it at all. I’m sure your worthy Sisters believed what they were preaching: but faith must never be more than an hour old! That’s it!”
Even though Ulrich had expressed hims
elf too hurriedly for his own satisfaction, it was clear to Agathe that the faith of those nuns who had robbed her of the joy of believing was a “canned” faith, preserved in its own juices, so to speak, not lacking any of the qualities of faith but no longer fresh; indeed, in some indeterminable way it had entered a condition that was different from what it had been at its source. And perhaps, at this moment, the nature of that original faith was dawning on the truant and rebellious pupil of holiness.
This, among all the other things they had already said about morality, was one of the poignant doubts her brother had implanted in her mind, and it played a part in an inner reawakening she had been feeling since, without having a clear idea of what it was. For the state of indifference she pointedly displayed and encouraged within herself had not always ruled her life. Something had happened once that caused this need for self-punishment to emerge directly from a deep despondency that had made her regard herself as a worthless person because she believed she had not been granted the capacity to keep faith with lofty emotions, and since then she had despised herself for the apathy of her heart. This episode lay between her life as a girl in her father’s house and her incomprehensible marriage to Hagauer and occupied such a narrow span of her life that even Ulrich, for all his sympathy, had not thought of asking her about it. What happened does not take long to tell: At the age of eighteen Agathe had married a man who was only slightly older than herself, and on a trip that began with their wedding and ended with his death, he was torn away from her within a few weeks by a sickness he contracted while traveling before they had even decided upon their future home. The doctors called it typhus, and Agathe repeated the word after them and found a semblance of order in it, for this was the side of the event that was polished smooth for the use of the world; but on the unpolished side it was different: until then Agathe had lived with her father, who was universally respected, so that she came to doubt herself and, worse, presume herself unjust in not loving him, and the long, uncertain waiting for herself at school, with its attendant self-mistrust, had not stabilized her relationship to the world either; later, on the other hand, when her spirits were suddenly stirred into life, and in a joint effort with the companion of her youth she managed in a few months to surmount all obstacles to a marriage arising from their age, even though the lovers’ families had no objection to each other, she had all at once ceased to be lonely and just for that reason become herself. This, then, could well be called love; but there are lovers who gaze into love as into the sun and are merely blinded, and there are lovers who behold life with amazement for the first time when it is illuminated by love. It was to the second kind that Agathe belonged, and before she even knew whether she loved her companion or something else, there came already what the language of the unilluminated world called an infectious disease. It was a storm of horror that burst in upon them with elemental suddenness from the alien regions of life, a flaring up of desperate refusal, a guttering descent, a snuffing out, a ghastly visitation upon two human beings clinging to each other and the drowning of an innocent world in vomit, excrement, and fear.