by Robert Musil
Agathe had never accepted the event that had annihilated her feelings. Deranged by despair, she had lain on her knees at her dying friend’s bedside and convinced herself that she could conjure up again the strength with which she had overcome her own illness as a child; and when his decline advanced nonetheless and his consciousness was already waning, she had, in the rooms of a foreign hotel, stared into that vacant face, incapable of understanding, holding the dying body in her arms without considering the danger and without considering the reality to which an indignant nurse was attending, and done nothing but murmur into his ear for hours: “You can’t, you can’t, you can’t!” But when it was all over she had stood up in amazement, and without believing or thinking anything in particular, simply out of a solitary nature’s self-will and capacity to dream, from that moment of empty astonishment on she had treated what had happened as if it were not final. One can see the first signs of such a tendency in anyone who refuses to believe disastrous news or paints the irrevocable in soothing colors; but the special quality in Agathe’s behavior was the force and extent of this reaction, evident from the start in the eruptive suddenness of her disdain for the world. Since then, when encountering anything new, her mind was set on receiving it less as something that was presently the case than as something highly uncertain, an attitude that was greatly facilitated by the mistrust with which she had long regarded reality; the past, on the other hand, had become petrified by the blow she had suffered, and was worn away by time much more slowly than usually happens with memories. But this had nothing of the fog of dreams, the one-sidedness and skewed proportions that cry out for a doctor. On the contrary, Agathe went on with her life, outwardly perfectly lucid, unassumingly virtuous, and merely a little bored, in a slightly elevated state of unwillingness to go on living that was now really quite similar to the fever she had suffered with such peculiar willingness as a child. And the fact that in her memory, which never easily dissolved its impressions into generalizations, the horror of the past remained present hour after hour, like a corpse wrapped in a white sheet, made her blissfully happy, despite all the torment of remembering so exactly, for it had the effect of a mysteriously belated hint that all was not yet over, and kept alive, in the derelict state of her inner being, a vague but exalted tension. Of course all this really amounted to was merely that she had lost the meaning of her life and was deliberately putting herself in a condition that did not suit her years; for only old people live by dwelling on the experiences and successes of the past and are no longer affected by the present. But fortunately, at the age Agathe was then, even as one forms resolutions for all eternity, a single year has nearly the weight of half an eternity, and so it was only to be expected that after a while repressed nature and fettered imagination would forcibly reclaim their freedom. The details of how this happened are unimportant; a man whose advances under different circumstances would never have caught her off balance succeeded in becoming her lover, and this attempt at a reenactment ended, after a very short time of fanatical hope, in passionate disenchantment. Agathe now felt herself reviled by both her real life and her unreal life and unworthy of lofty aspirations. She was one of those intense people who are capable of remaining still and watchfully waiting for a long time until at some point they suddenly fall prey to total confusion; and so in her disappointment she soon made another ill-considered decision that consisted, in short, of punishing herself in a manner opposite to the way in which she had sinned, by condemning herself to share her life with a man who instilled in her a slight revulsion. And this man whom she had sought out for her punishment was Hagauer.
“I have to say that was neither fair nor considerate toward him,” Agathe confessed to herself, and it must be admitted that this was the first time she did so, for fairness and consideration are not popular virtues among young people. Still, her self-punishment in this marriage was not inconsiderable either, and Agathe now examined this matter further. She had gone far afield in her ruminations, and Ulrich too was searching for something in his books and had apparently forgotten their conversation. “In earlier centuries,” she thought, “a person who felt as I did would have entered a convent”—and the fact that she had married instead was not without an innocent comedy that had previously escaped her. This comical aspect, however, which had not been apparent to her youthful mind, was none other than that of our present time, which satisfies the need for escape from the world at worst in a tourist inn, but usually in an Alpine hotel, and even aspires to equip its prisons with attractive furniture. This exemplifies the deep European need not to overdo anything. No European scourges himself any longer, or smears himself with ashes, cuts out his tongue, truly abandons himself, or even just withdraws from all human company, pines away with passion, racks or impales, but everyone does feel an occasional urge to do these things, and so it is hard to tell which is more worth avoiding, the wanting or the not doing. Why then should an ascetic, of all people, starve himself? It will only encourage disturbing fantasies. Rational asceticism consists in having an aversion to eating while maintaining a healthy diet. This kind of asceticism holds out a promise of longevity and permits the spirit a freedom it does not have when it is bound to the body in passionate rebellion! Such bitterly amusing observations, adopted from her brother, now had a fortifying effect on Agathe, for they dissected the “tragic,” which she had long believed in with a kind of fixity to which, in her inexperience, she thought herself obliged, into irony and a passion that had neither a name nor a goal and for that reason alone was not aborted by what she had experienced.
In this way, ever since she had been with her brother, she was becoming aware that a quickening current was flowing into the great split she had suffered between irresponsible living and spectral imaginings, a freeing and at the same time a recombining of what had been released. Now, for instance, in the silence, deepened by books and memories, that reigned between her and her brother, she remembered Ulrich’s description of how, leaving the house for an aimless walk, he had entered into the town and the town had entered into him: it reminded her very precisely of the few weeks of her happiness; and it had been right, too, that she laughed, madly and for no reason, when he told her about it, because she realized that there was something of this inversion of the world, this blissful and comical inside-out gesture even in Hagauer’s thick lips when they puckered for a kiss. That thought made her shudder, admittedly; but there is a shudder, she thought, even in the bright light of noon, and somehow that gave her the feeling that all possibilities were not yet exhausted for her. Some Nothing, a vacancy that had always lain between past and present, had recently flown away. She secretly looked around. The room she was in was one of the rooms in which her destiny had taken shape; this occurred to her now for the first time since she had arrived. For it was here that she had met with her childhood playmate when she knew her father was out, and where they made the great decision to love each other; it was here that she had also sometimes received the one she had called “unworthy,” and had stood by the windows with furtive tears of rage or despair, and where finally, under paternal auspices, Hagauer’s courting had taken place. After having so long served merely as the unnoticed backdrop to human activities, the furniture, the walls, the oddly shut-in light now at this moment of recognition became oddly tangible, and the life that had so strangely come and gone in this setting formed as corporeal and unequivocal a past as if it were ash or charcoal. All that was left was the comically shadowlike sense of things over and done with, the peculiar tingle one feels when coming upon old traces of oneself that have turned to dust, a sensation that, at the moment it comes, is impossible either to grasp or dispel; and that sensation became almost unendurably strong.
Agathe made sure that Ulrich was not paying attention, and carefully opened the top of her dress, where she kept next to her skin the locket with the little picture that she had not ceased to wear through the years. She went to the window and pretended to look out. Cautiously, she snappe
d open the sharp edge of the tiny golden scallop and furtively gazed at her dead beloved. He had full lips and soft, thick hair, and the brash look in the eyes of the twenty-year-old sprang from a face that had only half emerged from the eggshell. For a long time she did not know what she was thinking, but suddenly she thought: “My God, a twenty-one-year-old!”
What do such young people talk about to each other? What significance do they give to their concerns? How comically presumptuous they often are! How the vividness of their ideas misleads them as to their soundness! Curiously Agathe unwrapped from the tissue paper of memory some remarks she had preserved there because she had thought them marvelously clever: My God, she thought, that was almost profound; but even that couldn’t really be said with assurance unless one had a picture of the garden where these things were spoken, with the strange flowers whose names they didn’t know, the butterflies that settled on them like tired drunkards, and the light that flowed over their faces as though heaven and earth were melted together in it. If she measured herself against that, she was now an old and experienced woman, even though not many years had passed, and with some confusion she noticed the incongruity in the fact that she, the twenty-seven-year-old, was still in love with the twenty-one-year-old: he had grown much too young for her! She asked herself: “What feelings would I have to have if, at my age, this boyish man were really to be the most important thing in the world to me?” No doubt they would have been rather peculiar feelings, but she could not even form a clear conception of them. In the end it all dissolved into nothing.
Agathe acknowledged with a great, swelling emotion that in the one and only proud passion of her life she had fallen prey to an error, and the core of that error consisted in a fiery mist that could not be touched or grasped, whether by saying that faith must not grow an hour old or by any other set of words; and it was always this that her brother had been talking about since they were together, and always it was she herself of whom he was speaking, even if he took all sorts of detours into abstraction and his caution was frequently much too slow for her impatience. They always came back to the same conversation, and Agathe herself burned with desire that its flame should not diminish.
When she now spoke to Ulrich, he had not even noticed how long the interruption had lasted. But whoever has not already picked up the clues to what was developing between this brother and sister, let him put aside this account, for it describes an adventure he will never be able to approve of: a voyage to the edge of the possible, leading past, and perhaps not always steering clear of, the dangers of the impossible and the unnatural, indeed of the repulsive; a “limit case,” as Ulrich later called it, of restricted and special validity, reminiscent of the freedom with which mathematics occasionally employs the absurd in order to arrive at truth. He and Agathe came upon a path that had much in common with the business of the God-possessed, but they walked it without piety, without believing in God or the soul, or even in a Beyond or a Once Again; they had come upon it as human beings belonging to this world and walked it as such: and just that was the remarkable thing about it. Ulrich, who at the moment when Agathe spoke again was still occupied with his books and the problems they set him, had nevertheless not for a moment forgotten the conversation that had broken off at her resistance to the piety of her teachers and his own demand for “exact visions,” and he replied immediately: “There’s absolutely no need to be a saint in order to experience something of the kind! You can be sitting on a fallen tree or a bench in the mountains watching a herd of grazing cows and already you’re participating in something that seems nothing less than a transport into another life! You lose yourself and suddenly come to yourself: you yourself have talked about this!”
“But what is it that happens there?” Agathe asked.
“First you need to get clear about what the usual is, Sister Human!” Ulrich declared, trying to put a brake on the all too rapid momentum of the thought with a quip. “The usual is that a herd of cattle means nothing to us but grazing beef. Or it’s a picturesque subject with a background. Or we hardly notice it at all. Herds of cattle beside mountain paths are part of what mountain paths are, and what one experiences at the sight of them would be noticed only if an apartment building or a giant electrical clock appeared in their place. Otherwise, one’s thoughts turn to the question of whether to stand up or remain seated; one finds the flies that swarm around the herd annoying; one looks to see if there’s a bull among the cows; one wonders where the path leads: these are countless little intentions, worries, calculations, and perceptions that form the paper, as it were, on which the picture of grazing cows can be seen. One isn’t aware of the paper at all, one is only aware of the cows that are on it.”
“And suddenly the paper tears!” Agathe interjected.
“Yes. That is, some network of habit in us tears. Now there is no longer anything edible grazing; or anything paintable; nothing gets in your way. You can no longer even form the words ‘grazing’ or ‘pasture,’ because that involves a great many purposeful, useful ideas which you’ve suddenly lost. What’s left on the picture plane is almost unnamable; maybe the closest one can get is to call it a surge of sensations that rises, sinks, breathes, or glitters, as if filling your whole field of vision without any contours. Of course innumerable individual perceptions are included in this: colors, horns, movements, smells, and everything that makes up reality; but this is already no longer acknowledged, even if it may still be recognized. I’m tempted to say: The details lose their egotism, by which each one claims our attention for itself, and are instead deeply and fondly attuned to each other, like kindred souls. And of course there is no longer a ‘picture plane.’ Instead everything flows into you, without bounds or limits.”
Again Agathe eagerly took up the description: “Now all you need to say instead of the ‘egotism of the details’ is the ‘egotism of people,’” she exclaimed, “and you’ve got what is so hard to express: ‘Love thy neighbor!’ doesn’t mean love him as you and he are. It refers to a kind of dream state!”
“All moral propositions,” Ulrich confirmed, “refer to a kind of dream state that has already escaped the rules that are supposed to define it!”
“Basically, then, there is no good and evil but only faith—or doubt!” cried Agathe, to whom the self-sustaining original state of faith now seemed so close, as did its disappearance in morality, of which her brother had spoken when he said that faith cannot live longer than an hour.
“Yes, the moment one slips out of the inessential life, everything is in a new relationship to everything else,” Ulrich agreed. “I would almost say, in no relationship at all. Because this kind is completely unknown to us, we have no experience with it, and all other relationships are extinguished; but this one is so obvious, despite its obscurity, that it can’t be denied. It is strong, but it is inconceivably strong. And there’s also this: Usually one looks at something, and that glance or gaze is like a fine rod or a taut thread by which the eye and what is seen mutually support each other, and every moment is supported by some great weaving of that sort; but at this other moment it’s more as though something painfully sweet were drawing our eye-beams apart.”
“One owns nothing in the world, one no longer holds on to anything, one is not held by anything,” Agathe said. “It’s all like a tall tree with no leaf stirring. And one can’t do anything base in this condition.”
“It has been said that nothing can happen in this condition that is not in harmony with it,” Ulrich added. “A desire ‘to be part of it’ is the sole reason, the loving purpose, and the only form, of all doing and thinking that take place within it. It is something infinitely tranquil and encompassing, and everything that happens within it increases its quietly mounting significance. Or else it doesn’t increase it, in which case it’s bad, and yet the bad cannot happen, because at the instant it happens the stillness and clarity are torn and the miraculous condition ceases to be.”
Ulrich gave his sister a searching look w
hich she was not meant to notice; he had a persistent feeling that they ought to stop soon. But Agathe’s face was expressionless; she was thinking of things long past. She answered: “I’m surprised at myself, but there really was a brief period when I knew nothing of envy, malice, vanity, greed, and things like that; it’s hard to believe, but it seems to me that all of a sudden they disappeared not only from my heart but from the world! In that state it’s not just oneself who can’t do anything base, but others can’t either. A good person makes everything that comes in contact with him good, no matter what action others may take against him: the moment that action enters his sphere, it’s already transformed!”