by Robert Musil
All the same, the conclusion of this matter, if it was to be legally unimpeachable, could only be that Ulrich now, and without delay, make up for what he had neglected. He ought to have sent his sister an immediate special delivery letter or telegram, and he realized it should have said something like, “I refuse to have anything to do with you unless. . . !” But he was not at all minded to write anything of the kind; it was simply impossible for him to do so at the moment.
Moreover, that fateful performance had been preceded by a decision to live together or at least share his house in the coming weeks, and the short time that was left before Ulrich’s departure had constrained them to talk primarily about that. They had agreed provisionally on “however long it will take to work out the divorce,” so that Agathe would have counsel and protection. But now, as Ulrich recalled that conversation, he also remembered an earlier remark his sister had made, that she wanted “to kill Hagauer,” and evidently this “plan” had been working in her and taken on a new form. She had vigorously insisted on selling the family property quickly, which might very well have had the purpose of causing the estate to dissolve, though the sale might have seemed advisable for other reasons as well; in any case, the siblings had hired a broker and set their terms. And so Ulrich now had to consider as well the question of what would happen to his sister after he had returned to his carelessly provisional life, which he himself could not approve of. The situation she was in could not possibly continue. Surprisingly close though they had grown in the brief time they had been together—a fated crossing of their paths it seemed, though no doubt the result of all sorts of unrelated details; while Agathe perhaps had a more far-fetched view of it—they knew so little of each other in the many and various superficial respects on which a shared life depends. Indeed, when he thought of his sister impartially, Ulrich found many unresolved questions, and he could not even form a clear conception of her past; the most revealing light seemed to be shed by the conjecture that she had a very lax way of treating everything that happened through her or to her and that she lived very precariously and perhaps fantastically in expectations that ran alongside her actual life, for this at least could plausibly explain her having lived with Hagauer for so long and then broken with him so suddenly. It would also explain the indifference with which she treated the future: she had left home, that seemed to satisfy her for the time being, and as for the question of the next step, she simply avoided it. And Ulrich himself was unable either to picture her now living without a husband and waiting indefinitely like a young girl, or to imagine the man for whom his sister would be the right woman; and this he had also said to her shortly before he left.
But she had looked into his face with alarm—though probably she was clowning a bit, pretending to be alarmed—and then calmly answered with a question: “Can’t I just stay with you for the time being, without our having to decide everything?”
It was in this vague way, without any more definite notion, that the idea of living together was confirmed. Ulrich realized that this experiment would put an end to his experiment of a “life on vacation.” He did not want to think of the possible consequences, but the fact that his life would from now on be subject to certain restrictions was not unwelcome, and for the first time he thought again of the circle of people, and especially the women, involved in the Parallel Campaign. The prospect, entailed in this change, of cutting himself off from everything was wonderfully appealing. Just as it often takes only a small alteration in a room to turn its dull reverberations into glorious resonance, so now in his imagination his little house was transformed into a shell in which one could hear a muted echo of the city’s noise, like the murmur of a distant river.
And then, toward the end of that conversation, there had been one other special little conversation:
“We will live like hermits,” Agathe said with a happy smile, “but in matters of love we’re both free, of course. For you at least nothing stands in the way!” she assured him.
“Do you realize,” Ulrich said in reply, “that we will be moving into the Millennium?”
“What’s that?”
“We’ve talked so much about a love that’s not like a stream flowing toward a destination but is a state of being like the ocean. Now let’s be honest: When you were told in school that the angels in Paradise do nothing but praise the Lord and glory in His presence, were you able to imagine this blissful state of doing nothing and thinking nothing?”
“I always imagined it must be a little boring, which is surely due to my imperfection,” was Agathe’s answer.
“But after everything we’ve agreed on,” Ulrich explained, “you now have to imagine this ocean as a state of motionlessness and seclusion that is filled with everlasting crystal-clear events. In ancient times people tried to imagine such a life here on earth: that is the Millennium, the Kingdom of a Thousand Years, formed in our own image and yet not among any of the kingdoms that we know! And that is how we will live! We will cast off all self-interest, we will treasure neither goods nor knowledge, nor lovers, nor friends, nor principles, nor even ourselves. Accordingly, our spirit will open, dissolve its separation from man and beast, and thus disclose itself in such a manner that we can no longer continue as ‘we’ and will only maintain ourselves by being interwoven with all that is!”
This little interlude had been a joke. He had been sitting with paper and pencil, making notes and sporadically talking with his sister about what she could expect from the sale of the house and furniture. He was also still angry, and he himself didn’t know whether he was blaspheming or fantasizing. And due to all this they had not got around to grappling with the matter of the will in a responsible way.
It was probably due to this confluence of multiple currents that Ulrich, still on this day, had by no means arrived at active contrition. There was much about his sister’s coup de main that appealed to him, even though he himself was defeated by it. He had to admit to himself that the man living at ease “by the rule of free spirits,” to whom he had granted all too much comfort within himself, had thereby with a single blow been brought into dangerous conflict with the profoundly undefined person from whom real seriousness emanates. Nor did he want to dodge the consequences of such an act by redressing it quickly and in an ordinary way: But then there was no rule, and events had to be allowed to unfold as they would.
13
DIFFICULTIES OF A MORALIST IN WRITING A LETTER
Two days later, toward evening, Ulrich sat down at his desk and began writing a letter to Agathe.
It was clear to him—as light and clear as a windless day can sometimes be—that her ill-considered venture was extremely dangerous; what had happened so far could still be regarded as a risky bit of foolishness that concerned only the two of them, but this depended completely on its being undone before it gained relationships with reality, and the danger was growing with each passing day. Ulrich had written thus far when he stopped, feeling uneasy at the thought of entrusting to the mail a letter that discussed this in undisguised terms. He told himself that it would be more suitable in every way if he himself went with the next train instead of the letter; but of course that also made little sense, since he had let days go by without doing anything about the matter, and then he knew he would not go.
He noticed there was something beneath these vacillations that was almost as firm as a resolution: he felt like simply letting things take their course and waiting to see what would come of the incident. So the problem he was faced with was merely that of determining to what extent and how consciously he could really want this, and now all sorts of far-ranging thoughts went through his head.
Right at the start he made the observation that until now, whenever he conducted himself “morally,” he always found himself in a less resourceful state than when he was doing or thinking something one would usually call “immoral.” This is a universal phenomenon: for when people are brought into conflict with their surroundings, they deploy all their fac
ulties, while in situations where they are merely doing their duty they understandably behave no differently than while paying their taxes; from which we may conclude that everything bad is carried out with some degree of imagination and passion, whereas the good is distinguished by an unmistakably joyless and affectless demeanor. Ulrich remembered that his sister had expressed this moral predicament very ingenuously by asking whether being good was no longer good. It ought to be difficult and breathtaking, she had claimed, and wondered at the fact that moral people nevertheless were almost always boring.
He smiled contentedly and carried that thought forward with the observation that Agathe and he both stood in a special kind of contrast to Hagauer that could be roughly described as that of people who are bad in a good way to a man who is good in a bad way. If one leaves out of account the great middle range of life, which is, reasonably enough, occupied by people in whose thinking the general terms “good” and “evil” have simply ceased to occur ever since they let go of their mothers’ apron strings, then the marginal strata, where deliberate moral efforts still exist, are indeed left to such bad-good and good-bad people, of which the former have never seen the good fly or heard it sing and therefore call on all their fellow men to share their enthusiasm for a moral landscape where stuffed birds perch on lifeless trees; whereupon the latter, the good-bad mortals, vexed by their rivals, assiduously cultivate at least in their thoughts a penchant for evil, as though they were convinced that only in bad deeds, which are not quite as shopworn as the good ones, some tremulous remnant of moral vitality still survives. And so—of course without Ulrich’s being quite conscious of this foreknowledge—the world at that time had the choice between being ruined either by its lame morality or by its nimble immoralists, and probably still does not know which of the two it finally decided on with overwhelming success; unless, perhaps, the teeming many, who never have time to concern themselves with morality in general, did concern themselves with it in one particular instance, because they had lost confidence in the state of the world they lived in and of course subsequently lost a number of other things as well. For bad-bad people, whom one can so easily blame for everything, were as rare then as they are now, and the good-good represented an ideal as remote as a distant nebula. But it was precisely of them that Ulrich was thinking, while everything else he appeared to be thinking about was a matter of complete indifference to him.
And he gave his thoughts an even more general and impersonal form by putting the relationship that exists between the injunctions “Do!” and “Do not!” in the place of good and evil. For as long as a morality is in the ascendancy—and this is as true of the spirit of neighborly love as it is of the spirit of a horde of vandals—“Do not!” is merely the reverse and a natural corollary of “Do!”: the doing and the not-doing are a burning passion, and whatever faults they entail hardly matter, because these are the faults of heroes and martyrs. In this condition good and evil are identical with the happiness and unhappiness of the whole person. But as soon as the contested ethos has come to power and has spread, and there are no particular obstacles to its fulfillment, the relationship between commandment and prohibition necessarily passes through a decisive stage where duty is no longer born anew and alive each day but needs to be kept at hand, leached of its substance and dissected into ifs and buts, for every kind of use and application; and thus begins a process in the course of which virtue and vice, due to their provenance in the same rules, laws, exceptions, and restrictions, come to look more and more like each other, until in the end that strange but basically unbearable self-contradiction comes about that was Ulrich’s point of departure: that the distinction between good and evil loses all meaning when compared with the delight of a pure, deep, spontaneous mode of action—a thrill that can leap like a spark from sanctioned as well as from forbidden activities. Indeed, anyone inquiring into this without prejudice will probably recognize that the proscriptive part of morality is more highly charged with this tension than the prescriptive one: While it seems relatively natural that certain actions that are thought of as “bad” must not be performed, or, if one performs them nonetheless, at least should not have been performed, such as appropriating other people’s property or unrestrained sensual indulgence, the corresponding affirmative moral conventions—in this case, unlimited devotion to giving or the mortification of fleshly desire—have almost been lost, and where they are still practiced, they are the business of fools and crackpots or bloodless prigs. And in such a condition, where virtue is decrepit and moral behavior consists mainly in avoiding what is immoral, it can easily happen that the latter appears to be not only more spontaneous and vigorous than the former, but actually more moral, if one may use that term not in the sense of law and justice but as a gauge of whatever passion can still be aroused by matters of conscience. But could anything be more contradictory than cultivating an inward predilection for evil because, with whatever remnants of a soul one still possesses, one is seeking the good?!
Ulrich had never experienced this contradiction more strongly than he did at the moment when the rising arc his reflections had traversed led him back to Agathe. Her innate readiness to resort to (and here again he used that cursory term) a good-bad form of expression, which had manifested itself so momentously in her tampering with their father’s will, offended the same readiness in his own nature, which had taken the merely speculative form of, one might say, a pastor’s admiration for the devil, while in his personal life he was not only capable of living fairly and squarely in accord with the times but, as he could see, did not wish to be disturbed in doing so. With equal degrees of melancholy satisfaction and ironic lucidity he noted that his entire theoretical preoccupation with evil amounted to wishing that he could protect evil incidents from the evil people who are itching to exploit them, and he suddenly felt a longing for goodness, as a man who has uselessly roamed about in foreign parts might imagine coming home someday and going straight to the village well to drink its water. But if this simile had not occurred to him first, he might have noticed that his entire effort to form an idea of Agathe as a morally hybrid person such as the present age produces in large numbers was only a pretext serving to shield him from a prospect that frightened him far more. For oddly enough, his sister’s behavior, which could not be condoned if one examined it consciously, exerted a beguiling allure as soon as one joined her in her dream; because then all discord and division vanished, and in their stead arose an impression of a passionate, affirmative, eagerly resolute goodness that, in comparison with its enfeebled everyday forms, could very easily be mistaken for an ancient vice.
Ulrich did not easily permit himself such an exaltation of his feelings, least of all when faced with the task of writing this letter, so he now directed his thoughts back out into generalities. These reflections would have been incomplete had he not remembered how easily and how often, in the times he had lived through, the longing for a duty drawn from the fullness of life had led to now one, now another virtue being selected from the available supply and made the focus of noisy veneration. National, Christian, humanistic virtues had all taken their turn; at one point it was steely strength, then it was kindness, individuality came next, soon thereafter community, one day it was the ethos of the split second, while the day before it was historical serenity: the shifting moods of public life basically derive from the exchange of such guiding ideals; but this had always left Ulrich indifferent and only made him feel that he was standing on the sidelines. Even now, all it meant to him was a complement to the general picture, for it is only a partial understanding that can lead one to believe it possible to tackle the moral uninterpretability of life, which sets in at a level of complexity that has become too great, with interpretations that are already part of the problem. Such attempts merely resemble the movements of a sick man restlessly changing his position while the paralysis that ties him to his bed advances inexorably. Ulrich was convinced that the condition that gave rise to these efforts was inevitable
and that it defined the stage at which every civilization had begun to decline, because none so far had been able to generate a new inner excitement in place of the one it had lost. He was also convinced that what had happened to every moral system in the past lay in store for every future one. For the slackening of moral intensity has nothing to do with the domain of commandments and the following of them, it is independent of their distinctions, it is not amenable to external rigor, it is an entirely inner process, marked by a lessening of the meaning of all actions and of faith in the unity of responsibility for them.
And so, without his having previously intended it, Ulrich’s thoughts returned to the idea he had once jokingly characterized, in a remark to Count Leinsdorf, as the “general secretariat for precision and soul”; and even though on other occasions he had only brought it up playfully and in jest, he now realized that all his adult life he had consistently behaved as if such a “general secretariat” lay within the realm of possibility. Perhaps—he could tell himself this by way of excuse—every thinking person carries such an idea of order within himself, just as grown men still wear beneath their clothes the pictures of saints which their mothers hung around their necks when they were children, and this icon of order which no one dares to either take seriously or discard must look more or less like this: on one side it vaguely symbolizes the longing for a law of right living, an iron and natural law that allows no exception and is proof to every objection, that is as freeing as a rapture and as sober as the truth; the other side, however, represents the conviction that one’s own eyes will never behold such a law, that one’s own thoughts will never conceive it, that no single man’s gospel and authority but only an exertion by all will bring it about, if it is not altogether a chimera. For a moment Ulrich hesitated. Undoubtedly he was a believer who just didn’t believe anything: his greatest dedication to science had never succeeded in making him forget that the beauty and goodness of people comes from what they believe and not from what they know. But faith had always been bound up with knowledge, even if only an imagined knowledge, ever since the primordial days of its magical origin. And this ancient component of knowledge has long since rotted and has pulled faith down with it into the same decay: the task now, therefore, is to establish that connection anew. And, of course, not simply in a manner that raises faith “to the level of knowledge”; but rather in such a way that it takes wing from that height. The art of rising above knowledge must be practiced again. And since this cannot be done by any one person, all human beings would have to turn their minds to it, whatever else their minds might be occupied with; and when Ulrich at this moment thought of a ten-year, a hundred-year, or a thousand-year plan humanity would have to adopt in order to direct its efforts toward that goal, he did not have to inquire very far to realize that this was what he had long imagined, under all sorts of names, as the truly experimental life. For what he meant by the word “faith” was not that stunted wanting-to-know, that credulous ignorance that generally goes by the name of faith, but rather an intuitive knowing that is neither knowledge, nor imagination, nor belief either, but precisely that “other” quality that eludes all these terms.