by Robert Musil
“No,” Ulrich interjected, “it’s not quite like that; on the contrary, the way you put it is one of the oldest misconceptions! A good person doesn’t make the world good in the least, he doesn’t affect the world at all, he just separates himself from it!”
“But he doesn’t leave the world, does he? He stays right in the midst of it!?”
“He stays in the midst of it, but he feels as if space had been drawn out of things or as if something imaginary were happening: it’s difficult to say!”
“Still, I have the feeling that nothing base ever crosses the path of a ‘high-hearted’ person—that word just came to me! It may sound like nonsense, but it’s an experience.”
“It may be an experience,” Ulrich retorted, “but there is also the opposite experience! Or do you think the soldiers who crucified Jesus did not have base emotions? And yet they were instruments of God! Besides, according to the testimony of the ecstatics themselves, there are bad feelings: they lament that they fall from the state of grace and feel unspeakable distress, they’re well acquainted with fear, anguish, shame, maybe even hatred. It’s only when the quiet burning starts again that remorse, wrath, fear, and anguish turn into bliss. It’s all so hard to make sense of!”
“When were you that much in love?” Agathe asked abruptly.
“Me? Oh! I already told you about it. I fled a thousand miles from the woman I loved, and once I felt safe from any possibility of her actual embrace, I wailed for her like a dog howling at the moon!”
Now Agathe confided to him the story of her love. She was excited. Her last question had already sped off as if plucked on an overly taut string, and the rest now followed in the same fashion. She trembled inwardly as she revealed what had been kept secret for years.
But her brother was not notably shocked by her account. “Usually memories age along with people,” he expounded, “and the most passionate experiences become comical in the perspective of time, as if one were seeing them at the end of ninety-nine successively opened doors. But sometimes there are memories that don’t age because they are associated with very strong emotions and hold entire strata of the self in bondage, as it were. That was the case with you. There are such points in almost everyone that slightly distort one’s psychic equilibrium; one’s behavior flows over their invisible presence the way a river flows over a boulder; and with you this just happened to be very strong, so it almost resembled a standstill. But in the end you freed yourself and you’re in motion again!”
He said this calmly, almost in the manner of a professional evaluation; how easily he was diverted! Agathe was upset. Stubbornly she said: “Of course I’m in motion, but that’s not what I’m talking about! I want to know where I almost arrived at back then!” She was also annoyed, without meaning to be, simply because her excitement had to express itself somehow. Nevertheless, she went on talking in the direction her feelings had originally taken, and she felt quite dizzy between the tenderness of her words and the anger in the background. She spoke about that wondrous state of heightened receptivity and sensitivity that produces a welling up and subsiding of sense impressions, giving rise to a feeling of being in touch with all things, an effortless giving and receiving as if afloat in the soft mirror of a sheet of water; that marvelous sense of outer and inner boundlessness and self-abandonment that love and mysticism have in common! Of course Agathe did not say it in such words, which already entail an explanation, but merely strung passionate fragments of memory into a sequence. But though Ulrich had given much thought to these things, he too was unable to explain such experiences. Above all he did not know whether to attempt an explanation in the terms of the experience itself or by the usual procedures of rational thought. Both were equally natural to him, but not to his sister’s evident passion. What he said in reply, therefore, was merely a mediation, a kind of testing of the possibilities. He pointed out how, in the exalted state they were speaking of, a remarkable affinity exists between thinking and moral feeling, such that every thought is felt as a joy, an event, and a gift and does not wander off into the storage rooms nor attach itself to the sentiments of acquisition and mastery, retention and observation, so that, in the head no less than in the heart, the pleasure of self-possession is replaced by a limitless giving of oneself and intertwining of oneself and others. “Once in your life,” Agathe replied then with rapturous conviction, “everything you do is done for someone else. You see the sun shining for him. He is everywhere, you yourself are nowhere. And yet this is not ‘egotism à deux,’ because the same thing must be happening with the other person. In the end the two hardly exist for each other anymore, and what’s left is a world for people all in twos, which consists of mutual recognition, surrender, friendship, and selflessness!”
In the darkness of the room her cheek glowed with ardor like a rose standing in the shadow. And Ulrich pleaded: “Let us speak more soberly now; there tends to be far too much humbug in these matters!” And that too seemed right to her. Maybe it was due to her anger, which had still not dissipated, that her delight was somewhat dampened by the reality he was invoking; but it was not an unpleasant sensation, this unsteady trembling of the borderline.
Ulrich began to speak of the mischief of interpreting the kind of experiences they were talking about not only as if they involved a peculiar mental shift but as if some superhuman way of thinking were taking the place of the ordinary kind. Whether one called it divine illumination or, in the modern fashion, merely intuition, he considered it the main hindrance to real understanding. In his view nothing could be gained by yielding to fantasies that could not withstand the test of careful investigation. It’s like Icarus, he exclaimed, with his wings of wax that melt in the upper regions; if one wants to fly in reality, not just in dreams, one must learn to do it on metal wings.
And pointing to the books, he continued after a little while: “Those are Christian, Jewish, Indian, and Chinese testimonies, some of them separated by more than a thousand years. And yet in all of them one finds the same pattern of inner movement, diverging from the ordinary but consistent in itself. They differ among each other, almost precisely, only in particulars that stem from their connection with this or that school of theology and cosmic wisdom under whose protective roof they took shelter. Therefore, we may assume the existence of one specific additional, extraordinary condition of great importance, of which man is capable and which has deeper origins than the religions.
“The churches, on the other hand,” he added, “which is to say, the civilized communities of religious people, have always treated this condition with the kind of mistrust a bureaucrat has for the spirit of private enterprise. They have never recognized this rapturous mode of experience without reservation; on the contrary, they have directed great and apparently justified efforts toward replacing it with a regulated and intelligible morality. So the history of this condition resembles a progressive denial and dilution, something like the draining of a swamp.
“And when the spiritual dominion of the Church and its vocabulary became outdated, this condition of ours understandably came to be regarded as a chimera. Why should bourgeois culture have been more religious than the religious culture it replaced?! Under its aegis, the other condition has gone to the dogs, or rather it’s been reduced to the status of a dog that retrieves insights. A lot of people nowadays complain about rationality and want us to believe that in their wisest moments they think by means of a special faculty that is higher than reason. That is the last vestige, itself already a perfectly rationalistic, public thing; what’s left of the drained swamp has turned into hot air! And so, aside from a tolerated existence in poems, the only life granted to the ancient condition is during the first weeks of love among uneducated persons, where it is regarded as a passing confusion. Those are belated green leaves, so to speak, that occasionally sprout from the wood of beds and lecterns: but where it threatens to revert to its original luxuriant growth, it gets dug up and rooted out without mercy!”
Ulr
ich had spoken for about the length of time a surgeon takes to wash his hands and arms to prevent germs from being carried into the operating field; and also with the patience, dedication, and equanimity that contravene the excitement that will come with the work at hand. But after he had thoroughly sterilized himself, he thought almost with longing of a little infection and fever, for he did not love sobriety for its own sake. Agathe was sitting on a ladder that served to reach books on high shelves and gave no sign of participation, even when her brother fell silent; she gazed out into the infinite, sea-like gray of the sky and listened to the silence as much as to the words. So Ulrich went on talking with a touch of defiance that was barely concealed beneath a jocular tone.
“Let’s go back to our bench in the mountains with the herd of cows,” he requested. “Imagine some municipal councilor in brand-new lederhosen sitting there, with the words ‘Grüß Gott’ embroidered on his green suspenders: he represents real life, with its true worth, on vacation. Naturally his consciousness of his own existence is temporarily altered. Looking at the grazing cows, he doesn’t count them, doesn’t classify them, doesn’t estimate their live weight, forgives his enemies, and thinks indulgently of his family. The herd has turned from a practical subject into a quasi-moral one for him. It’s possible, of course, that he’s still estimating and classifying just a bit and doesn’t wholly forgive, but even so these feelings will at least be surrounded by a murmuring forest, a babbling brook, and sunshine. One could sum it up by saying: The usual content of his life now seems ‘far away’ and ‘not really important.’”
“It’s a holiday mood,” Agathe added mechanically.
“Quite right! And if just now his nonholiday life seems ‘not really important,’ it means only: for as long as he’s on vacation. So that is the truth today: Man has two states of existence, of consciousness, and of thought and saves himself from the deadly fright of meeting his own spectral otherness by regarding one condition as a vacation from the other, an interruption, a respite, or something about them that he thinks he knows. Mysticism, on the other hand, would entail the intention of going on a permanent vacation. The municipal councilor is bound to call that dishonorable and instantly feel, as he always does toward the end of his vacation, that real life resides in his orderly office. And do we feel any differently? Whether something needs to be put in order or not will always ultimately determine whether one takes that something completely seriously or not; and here these experiences have not had much luck, because over thousands of years they have not gone beyond their primordial disorder and incompleteness. And this is just the kind of thing for which the term “mania” lies readily at hand—religious mania, erotomania, take your pick. You can be assured: nowadays even the majority of religious people are so infected with the scientific way of thinking that they don’t dare to look at what is burning deep inside their hearts and would always readily speak of this ardor in medical terms as a mania, even if officially they use a different language!”
Agathe looked at her brother, and there was a quality in her eyes like the crackling of fire in the rain. And when he fell silent, she reproached him: “Now you’ve managed to manoeuver us out of it!”
“You are right,” he admitted. “But here is the strange thing: Even though we’ve boarded it all up like an unsafe well, some remnant drop of this uncanny miracle water is still burning a hole into all our ideals. Not one of them is quite right, not one of them makes us happy; they all point to something that is not there; you know what I mean, we’ve talked enough about that today. Our civilization is a temple of what would be called mania if it were unconfined, but at the same time it is the prison of its confinement, and we don’t know if we are suffering from an excess or a deficiency.”
“Maybe you never dared to give yourself over to it all the way,” Agathe said regretfully, and stepped down from her ladder; for they had let themselves be distracted, first by the books and then by their conversation, from their task of sorting their father’s papers, which had become pressing as the days went by. Now they went back to perusing the instructions and notes concerning the distribution of their inheritance, for the day to which Hagauer had been put off was approaching; but before they had seriously begun doing this, Agathe sat up straight and asked him once more: “To what extent do you yourself believe everything you’ve been telling me?”
Ulrich answered without looking up. “Imagine that in that herd, while your heart is turned away from the world, there is a dangerous bull! Try to really believe that the deadly illness you told me about would have taken a different course if your feelings had not weakened for a second!” Then he raised his head and pointed at the papers beneath his hands. “And law, justice, right proportion? Do you think all that is completely superfluous?”
“So to what extent do you believe?” Agathe repeated.
“Yes and no,” Ulrich said.
“That means no,” Agathe concluded.
Here chance intervened in their talk. At the moment when Ulrich, who was neither inclined to resume the discussion nor calm enough to think about practical matters, gathered up the papers that were spread out before him, something fell to the ground. It was a loose packet of all sorts of things that had been inadvertently pulled out, together with the will, from a corner of the desk drawer, where it might have lain for decades without its owner’s knowing. Ulrich looked at it distractedly as he picked it up, and recognized his father’s handwriting on several pages; it was not the script of his old age but that of his prime. Looking more closely, he saw that in addition to handwritten pages, the bundle contained playing cards, photographs, and various knickknacks, and now he quickly realized what he had found. It was the desk’s “poison drawer.” Here were painstakingly recorded jokes, most of them smutty; nude photographs; postcards, to be sent sealed, of plump dairymaids whose panties could be opened at the back; decks of cards that looked quite proper but, when held against the light, showed horrid things; manikins that produced offensive language when their belly was squeezed; and more of that kind. No doubt the old gentleman had forgotten the things lying in that drawer, or else he would have destroyed them in time. They obviously dated from those years in which quite a few aging bachelors and widowers warm themselves with such indecencies, but Ulrich blushed at this exposure of his father’s unprotected fantasies, now severed from the flesh by death. Their relevance to the conversation that had just broken off was immediately clear to him. Nevertheless, his first impulse was to destroy these documents before Agathe had seen them. But Agathe had already noticed that something unusual had come into his hands, so he changed his mind and called her over.
He wanted to wait and hear what she would say. But suddenly he was again acutely aware that she was, after all, a woman who must have had her experiences, a fact of which he had been completely unaware during their more profound conversations. But her face gave no sign of what she was thinking; she looked gravely and calmly at her father’s illicit legacy. From time to time she smiled openly, but without much animation. So Ulrich himself spoke, despite his resolve. “There you have it, the last vestige of mysticism!” he said with angry amusement. “Sharing the same drawer, the testament with its stern moral admonitions and this swill!” He had stood up and was walking back and forth in the room. And no sooner had he begun to talk than his sister’s silence spurred him on to new words.
“You asked me what I believe,” he began. “I believe that all the precepts of our morality are concessions to a society of savages.
“I believe none of them are right.
“There’s another meaning glimmering behind them. A fire that ought to melt them down so they can be recast. I believe that nothing is final.
“I believe there is no equilibrium, but everything wants to rise by the leverage of everything else.
“That’s what I believe: that was born with me or I with it.”
After each sentence he had halted, for he was speaking softly and needed somehow to give emphasis to hi
s confession. His eye was now caught by the classical plaster figures that stood on top of the book shelves; he saw a Minerva, a Socrates; he remembered that Goethe had placed an over-life-size plaster head of Juno in his room. This predilection felt alarmingly remote to him: what had once been a flourishing idea had since withered into a dead classicism. Had become the rearguard righteousness and duty-bound constriction of his father’s contemporaries. Had been in vain.
“The morality that has been handed down to us,” he said, “is like being sent out on a swaying rope that’s slung across an abyss with no other advice than ‘At all times keep a rigid posture.’
“It seems that, without any action on my part, I was born with a different morality.
“You asked me what I believe! I believe I can receive a thousand proofs that something is good and beautiful, it will leave me indifferent, and I will take my bearings solely from one indication: Does this make me rise or sink?
“Does it breathe life into me or not?
“Is it merely my tongue and brain that speak of it or the radiant shudder in my fingertip?
“But I can’t prove anything either.
“And I’m even convinced that a person who gives in to this other morality is lost. He will end up in twilight. In fog and inane nonsense. In spineless ennui.
“If you remove the unequivocal from life, what remains is a carp pond without a pike.
“I believe, then, that our meanest, nastiest trait is the good angel that protects us!
“And so, I don’t believe!