by Robert Musil
With a quick movement he pulled the letter toward himself, but immediately pushed it away again.
The austere fervor that had lit up his face just a moment ago was extinguished, and his dangerous pet idea struck him as ridiculous. As though with a glance through a suddenly opened window he sensed what was really around him: the guns, the commerce of Europe. The notion that people who lived in this fashion could ever join together for a deliberate navigation of their spiritual destiny was simply impossible to conceive, and Ulrich had to admit that historical development had also never been the result of any planned association of ideas such as may, in a pinch, be possible in the mind of an individual, but was always prodigal in spirit and hence wasteful in effect, as if scattered onto the table by the fist of an uncouth gambler. He even felt a little ashamed. Everything he had thought in this hour was suspiciously reminiscent of a certain “Survey for the Drafting of a Guiding Resolution and to Ascertain the Wishes of Participant Circles of the Population,”* and the very activity of moralizing, this theoretical way of thinking that observes nature by candlelight, struck him as utterly unnatural, unlike the operations of the simple man, who, accustomed to seeing things in the clear light of day, always reaches only for what is nearest at hand and never troubles himself with any question other than the particular one of whether his grasp will succeed in holding that object securely.
At this moment, Ulrich’s thoughts streamed back from generalities to himself, and he felt the importance of his sister. It was to her that he had shown that strange, unconditional, incredible, and unforgettable state in which everything is a yes. The state in which one is capable of no spiritual movement other than that of morality, and hence also the only condition in which there is a morality without interruption, even if it should only consist in all actions hovering groundlessly within it. And all that Agathe had done was reach out for this possibility. She was the person whose hand reaches out, and into the place of Ulrich’s reflections there now entered the bodies and forms of the real world.
Everything he had been thinking now appeared to him as mere delay and transition. He decided to “chance it” and see what would come of Agathe’s whim, and at this moment it was a matter of complete indifference to him that the mysterious promise it held had begun with what by ordinary standards was a disgraceful act. It remained to be seen whether the morality of “rising and sinking” would turn out to be as applicable to this state of affairs as the simple morality of honesty. And he remembered his sister’s passionate question of whether he himself believed what he was telling her; but even now he was as unable to answer it with a simple “yes” as he had been at the time. He admitted to himself that he was waiting for Agathe in order to answer this question.
The telephone rang shrilly and Walter, at the other end of the line, was suddenly flooding him with rushed explanations and hastily bundled words. Ulrich listened indifferently and obligingly, and when he had put the receiver down and stood up, it was as if the ring tone were still fading in his ear; depth and darkness streamed back into his surroundings. The effect was soothing, but he would not have been able to say if it happened in sounds or in colors. It was like a depth of all the senses. Smiling, he took the sheet of paper on which he had begun writing to his sister and tore it slowly into small pieces before leaving the room.
*This is the title of one of the Parallel Campaign’s eccentric resolutions.
14
THROW EVERYTHING YOU HAVE INTO THE FIRE, INCLUDING YOUR SHOES
During this time and from the moment when she had stayed behind alone, Agathe had been living completely at ease, released from the tension of all relationships, in a serenely melancholy suspension of the will, as if at a great height where there was nothing to be seen but the wide blue sky. Every day she strolled for her pleasure through the town; she read when she was at home; she attended to her affairs: she experienced this mild, aimless activity of living with grateful appreciation. Nothing troubled the state she was in, no clinging to the past, no straining for the future; when her gaze fell on any of the objects in her vicinity, it was as if she were coaxing a young lamb to come near; it would either gently approach her, or else simply take no notice of her—but she never took mental possession of it with that motion of inner grasping that imbues every act of cold recognition with something violent and yet futile, for it scares away the happiness that is in things. And so it seemed to Agathe that everything around her was much more understandable than usual, but it was her conversations with her brother that mainly occupied her mind. In keeping with her unusually exact memory, which did not deform its material with intentions and prejudices, there now rose up around her again the living words, the surprising little inflections of voice and gesture accompanying the talk; but these came out of sequence and rather the way they had been before Agathe had quite understood them and realized what they wanted. Nevertheless, it was all in the highest degree meaningful; her memory, which had so often been haunted by remorse, was now full of quiet affection, and the recent past lay sensuously close to the warmth of the body, instead of losing itself, as it usually did, in the frost and darkness that lie in wait for what has been lived in vain.
And in this way, wrapped in invisible light, Agathe also spoke with the lawyers, notaries, and businessmen her path led her to. Nowhere did she meet with rejection; everyone was happy to oblige the charming young woman, who came recommended by her father’s name, with everything she desired. She conducted herself with an air that combined assurance and absence in equal measure: what she had resolved upon was outside herself, as it were, and the experience she had gained in life—something else that can be distinguished from the essential person—continued working on that resolution like a hired agent who calmly and cleverly exploits opportunities that offer themselves to his task; that she was preparing to commit a fraud—which to a neutral observer would be the most obvious meaning of her actions—did not penetrate to her own perception at the time. The unity of her conscience excluded it. The radiance of her conscience outshone this dark point, which nevertheless, like the core of a flame, formed its center. Agathe herself did not know how to express it: As a result of her intent she found herself in a state that was as far from that ugly intent as the sky is from the earth.
Already in the morning after her brother left, Agathe had observed her appearance very closely: it had begun by accident with her face, when her glance had fallen on it and not come back out of the mirror. She was held fast the way sometimes one may not feel like walking at all, yet walks another hundred steps and then another hundred and a hundred more all the way to some object that comes into view only now, at which point one really decides to turn back, but again does not do so. In this way, without vanity, she was captivated by the landscape of her self that lay before her behind a vaporous film of glass. She moved on to her hair, which was still like light velvet; she opened the collar of her reflection’s dress and slipped the dress off its shoulders; finally, she undressed it completely and examined it down to the rosy nails, where the body ends in hands and feet and scarcely belongs to itself anymore. Everything was still like the sparkling day approaching its zenith: ascendant, pure, exact, and afloat on that slowing arc of becoming that is the time before noon and that manifests itself in a human being or a young animal as it does in a ball that has almost, but not quite, reached its highest point in the air. “Maybe it’s passing through that point at this moment,” Agathe thought. This notion frightened her. But actually it could take a while yet: she was only twenty-seven. Her body, as uninfluenced by athletic coaches and masseurs as it was by childbearing and the tasks of motherhood, had been formed by nothing but its own growth. If it could have been set naked into one of those grand and lonely landscapes that are formed by the sky-facing side of a high mountain range, the vast, infertile, billowing swell of such an elevation would have carried her like a pagan goddess. In nature of this kind, noon does not pour down swaths of light and heat, it merely seems to rise beyond i
ts zenith for a while and imperceptibly shades into the sinking, hovering beauty of the afternoon. From the mirror came the slightly uncanny sense of that imponderable hour.
Just then it occurred to Agathe that Ulrich too was letting his life go by as if it would last forever. “Maybe it’s a mistake that we didn’t meet as old people,” she said to herself, and had a melancholy vision of two banks of fog sinking to the ground in the evening. “They’re not as beautiful as a radiant noon,” she thought, “but what do these two shapeless gray things care how people feel about them! Their hour has come and is as soft as the most glowing noonday hour!” She had nearly turned her back to the mirror, but there was a taste for hyperbole in her mood that suddenly provoked her to turn around again, and now she had to laugh at the memory of a fat couple at a Marienbad spa she had observed years ago, sitting on a green bench and caressing each other with the utmost tenderness and delicacy of feeling. “Their hearts are slim too, beating under all that fat, and because they’re entranced by the inner view, they don’t know how amusing they look from outside,” Agathe told herself in self-reproach and made the face of someone swooning in rapture, trying at the same time to make herself look fat by squeezing her body and squashing it into pudgy folds. When this bout of exuberance had passed, it looked just as though tiny tears of anger had risen to her eyes, and coolly pulling herself together, she returned to a dispassionate, objective scrutiny of her appearance. Although she was considered slender, she detected in her limbs the interesting possibility that they could become heavy. Also her chest was possibly too broad. The very white skin of the face was dimmed by blond hair as though by candles burning in daylight; the nose stood out a little too far, and on one side its almost classical line was dented at the tip. Indeed, it might well be that everywhere in the flame-like basic form a second form was hiding that was broader and more melancholic, like a linden leaf that has fallen among laurel branches. Agathe became curious about herself, as if she were looking at herself for the first time. This could very well be how the men she had become involved with had seen her, and she herself had known nothing about it. There was something unsettling about this feeling. But by some vagary of the imagination, before she could call her memories to account about this, she heard behind everything she had experienced the ardent, long-drawn-out mating cry of the donkey, which had always strangely excited her: it sounds utterly foolish and ugly, but just for that reason there may be no second heroism of love as disconsolately sweet as his. She shrugged her shoulders at the life she had led and turned back to her image with the firm intention of finding a place in it where her appearance was already yielding to age. There were the little areas near the eyes and ears that are the first to develop fine wrinkles that make them look as if something had slept on them, or the round beneath the inner side of the breasts, which so easily loses its definition: it would have given her satisfaction at this moment and a promise of peace to observe a change of this kind, but there was still none to be perceived anywhere, and the beauty of the body floated almost eerily in the depth of the mirror.
At this moment it struck Agathe as really strange that she was Frau Hagauer, and the difference between the densely defined relationship that was constituted thereby and the inward wake of uncertainty that flowed back to her from it was so strong that she herself seemed to be standing there without a body, while the body in the mirror seemed to belong to Frau Hagauer; and it was up to Frau Hagauer to come to terms with that body, since it had pledged itself to circumstances that were beneath its dignity. Even in this there was something of that buoyant delight in being alive that can sometimes resemble fright, and the first thing Agathe decided, after hastily getting dressed, led her into her bedroom to look for a capsule that had to be in her luggage. This small airtight capsule, which had been in her possession for almost as long as she had been married to Hagauer, and from which she never parted, contained a tiny amount of a drab-looking substance she had been promised was a deadly poison. Agathe remembered certain sacrifices she had needed to make in order to acquire this forbidden substance, about which she knew only what she had been told about its effect, along with one of those chemical names that sound like a magic formula which the uninitiated must memorize without understanding it. But apparently all the devices that bring the end a little closer, like the possession of poison or weapons or the pursuit of survivable adventures, belong to the romanticism of joie de vivre; and it may be that the course of most people’s lives is so depressed, so erratic, with so much darkness in the light and altogether so perverse that life’s indwelling joy can only be released by a far-off possibility of putting an end to it. Agathe felt reassured when her eyes lit on the small metal object that appeared to her, in the uncertainty that lay ahead, as a bringer of luck and a talisman.
So this did not at all mean that Agathe at that time already intended to kill herself. On the contrary, she feared death exactly the way every young person does when the thought occurs, for instance before falling asleep after a wholesomely spent day: “It can’t be avoided: there will be a day just as fine as today, and I will be dead.” Nor does it make one feel like dying when one has to watch someone else die, and her father’s demise had tormented her with impressions whose horrors had reemerged ever since she had stayed behind in the house after her brother’s departure. But: “I am a little dead”—this was a feeling Agathe had often. And especially at moments like this, just after she had been conscious of her young body’s shapeliness and health, of this taut beauty that in its mysterious composition is as groundless as the decomposition of the elements at death, she could easily fall from a state of happy security into one of trepidation, awe, and silence such as one feels when stepping out of a room full of lively activity and suddenly finding oneself beneath the glitter of the stars. Despite the resolutions that were stirring inside her, and despite her satisfaction at having rescued herself from a failed life, she now felt at a slight remove from herself, and only tenuously connected to herself. Coolly she thought of death as a condition of being released from all toils and illusions, and pictured it as an intimate, gentle lulling to sleep: one lies in God’s hand, and this hand is like a cradle or a hammock slung between two tall trees and faintly swaying in the wind. She imagined death as a great tranquility and fatigue, free of all wanting, all effort, all attention and thought, rather like the pleasant feebleness one feels in one’s fingers when sleep carefully loosens their hold on some last thing in the world they were still holding on to. Without question this indolent and casual conception of dying was consistent with the needs of a person who is not fond of the exertions of living, and in the end she amused herself with the observation that this reminded her of the divan she had brought into her father’s austere drawing room so that she could lie on it, reading—the only change she had made in the house on her own initiative.
Nevertheless, the thought of giving up life was anything but a game for Agathe. It seemed profoundly believable to her that after so much fruitless agitation a state of blissful repose should follow, which inadvertently assumed a kind of corporeal substance in her imagination. She experienced it this way because she felt no need for the stirring illusion that the world can be improved, and because she was at all times prepared to relinquish her share in the world completely, so long as that could be done in a pleasant fashion; besides, she had already had a special encounter with death in that unusual sickness that had befallen her on the borderline between childhood and girlhood. That was when—in a scarcely perceptible depletion of her strength, which seemed to inject itself into each tiniest span of time even while, as a whole, it advanced with irresistible speed—more and more parts of her body fell away from her and vanished into the void; but in step with this decline and this turning away from life, there had been an unforgettable new striving toward a goal that banished all the agitation and fear that came with her illness, a curiously meaningful state in which she was even able to exert a certain domination over the adults around her, while th
ey became increasingly unsure of themselves. It is not inconceivable that this advantage, which she had come to know under such impressive circumstances, later formed the nucleus of her spiritual readiness to withdraw from life in a similar fashion if, for some reason, the excitements it offered did not correspond to her expectations; but more probably it was the other way around and the illness that enabled her to escape the demands of school and home was the first expression of her transparent relationship to the world, which made her permeable, as it were, to a ray of feeling she could not explain. For Agathe felt herself to be of a spontaneous, simple disposition, warm, lively, even fun-loving and easily satisfied, and indeed she had adapted herself amicably to many very different kinds of situations; nor had she ever experienced that collapse into indifference that befalls women who can no longer bear their disillusionment: but in the midst of the laughter or the tumult of sensual adventuring that still continued, there was a sense of debasement that made every fiber of her body tired and nostalgic for something else, the most nearly accurate name of which would probably have to be Nothing.