Agathe

by Robert Musil

  For as long as he had served his old master, this word had not once been uttered in his presence; if the need had ever arisen, “undressed” might have been the word. But young people were different nowadays, and most likely he would no longer be able to serve to their satisfaction. With the serenity of the hour when the day’s work is done, he felt that his career was at an end. But Agathe’s last thought before leaving was: “Would Ulrich really throw everything into the fire?”

  15

  FROM KONIATOWSKI’S CRITIQUE OF DANIELLI’S THEOREM TO THE FALL OF MAN. FROM THE FALL OF MAN TO THE EMOTIONAL RIDDLE OF THE SISTER

  The state in which Ulrich stepped into the street when he left Count Leinsdorf’s palace resembled the matter-of-fact feeling of hunger; he halted in front of a billboard and sated his hunger for bourgeois normality by sampling the various announcements and advertisements. The board was several meters wide and covered with words. “Actually,” it occurred to him, “it’s not unreasonable to suppose that these words, which are repeated at every corner of the city, could be enlightening.” They seemed akin to the stock phrases uttered by the characters of popular novels at significant junctures of their lives. He read: “Have you ever worn anything as pleasant and practical as the Tropinam silk stocking?” “His Excellence enjoying himself.” “Saint Bartholomew’s Night, revised.” “Convivial Cheer at the Black Knight.” “Erotic Panache and Dancing at the Red Knight.” Next to that notice was a political attack on “nefarious machinations”: it didn’t refer to the Parallel Campaign, though, but to the price of bread. He walked on and looked into a bookstore window. THE GREAT ­AUTHOR’S LATEST WORK, it said on a cardboard sign next to a row of fifteen copies of the same book. In the opposite corner of the display window, another sign drew attention to a second work: ­LADIES AND GENTLEMEN ALIKE ARE ENTHRALLED BY ‘LOVE’S TOWER OF BABEL’ BY . . .

  “Great author?” Ulrich thought. He remembered reading one of his books and concluding that he did not need to read a second one: the man had become famous since. And in view of this showcase of the German mind and spirit, Ulrich remembered an old joke from his army days: “Mortadella.” That had been the nickname of an unpopular general, after the popular Italian cold cut, and if someone asked for the solution to the riddle, the answer was: “Half pig, half donkey.” Ulrich was inclined to spin variations from this intriguing analogy, but was prevented from doing so by a woman who addressed him with the words: “Are you waiting for the streetcar too?” at which point he realized that he was no longer standing in front of the bookshop, and that moreover he had walked on and now stood motionless by a streetcar stop.

  The lady who brought this to his attention was wearing a knapsack and spectacles; she was an acquaintance of his, a member of the Astronomical Institute and one of the few women who make important contributions to this masculine discipline. His gaze settled on her nose and the bags beneath her eyes, which had come to resemble gutta-percha sweat shields from the habitual strain of intellectual labor; then he noticed beneath these foci her short loden skirt, and above them a grouse feather on a green hat that hovered above her learned features, and he smiled. “Off to the mountains?” he asked.

  Dr. Strastil was indeed going to the mountains for three days of “recreation.” “What do you think of Koniatowski’s paper?” she asked Ulrich. Ulrich said nothing. “It will infuriate Kneppler,” she said. “But Koniatowski’s critique of Kneppler’s deduction from Danielli’s Theorem is interesting, don’t you agree? Do you think this deduction is tenable?”

  Ulrich shrugged. He was one of those mathematicians, called logicians, for whom nothing was ever correct and who were building a new fundamental theory. But he considered the logicians’ logic to be not quite right either. Had he continued his work, he would have fallen back on Aristotle; he had his own views about that.

  “Even so, I don’t think Kneppler’s deduction is off the mark, it’s just wrong,” Dr. Strastil confessed. She could just as well have emphasized that she considered the deduction to be off the mark but nevertheless, in its basic tenets, not wrong; she knew what she meant, but in ordinary language, where words are not defined, no one can express himself unequivocally: as she made use of this vacation language, something beneath her sightseer’s hat stirred with the kind of nervous hauteur that might be aroused in a cloistered monk when he carelessly comes into contact with the sensual world of the laity.

  Ulrich got into the streetcar with Fräulein Strastil: he didn’t know why. Maybe because Koniatowski’s critique of Kneppler seemed so important to her. Maybe he wanted to talk with her about literature, which she knew nothing about. “What will you do in the mountains?” he asked.

  She wanted to climb the Hochschwab.

  “There’ll still be too much snow there,” he said, for he knew the mountains. “It’s too late to get up there on skis, and too early to go up without them.”

  “Then I’ll stay at the bottom,” Fräulein Strastil declared. “I once spent three days in one of the huts at the foot of the Färsenalm. All I want is a bit of nature!”

  The face this worthy astronomer made while pronouncing the word “nature” provoked Ulrich to ask what it was that nature had to offer her.

  Dr. Strastil was sincerely indignant. She could lie on that pasture for three days straight without moving: “Like a boulder!” she proclaimed.

  “That’s only because you’re a scientist!” Ulrich interjected. “A peasant would be bored!”

  Dr. Strastil did not agree. She spoke of the thousands who sought nature every holiday on foot, on wheels, or by boat.

  Ulrich spoke of rural migration, the peasants’ attraction to city life.

  Fräulein Strastil doubted that he was feeling at a sufficiently elemental level.

  Ulrich asserted that the only elemental requirement, next to food and love, was comfort, not a trek to an Alpine meadow. The supposedly natural feeling that drove people to do such things, he said, was a modern Rousseauism, a complicated and sentimental attitude. He did not feel that he was expressing himself well at all, he did not care what he was saying, he only went on speaking because it was still not whatever it was he wanted to bring out from within himself. Fräulein Strastil cast a mistrustful glance at him. She could not make him out; her great experience with abstract concepts was not of the slightest use to her, she could neither distinguish nor fit together the notions he seemed to be merely tossing around with a certain alacrity; she assumed he was talking without thinking. That she was listening to such words with a grouse feather in her hat was her only satisfaction and increased the pleasure with which she looked forward to her solitary retreat.

  At that moment Ulrich’s glance fell on his neighbor’s newspaper, and he read the bold headline of an advertisement: “Our Time Provokes Questions—And Answers Them”: it could have been a recommendation of a new arch support or a lecture, there’s really no way of telling these days, but his thoughts suddenly jumped into the track he needed. His companion made an effort to be objective: “Unfortunately,” she confessed hesitantly, “I don’t know much about literature, our like never has enough time. And maybe I haven’t even read the right things. But X, for instance”—she mentioned a popular name—“X is unbelievably rich for me. I find that when a writer can make us feel things so intensely, this is greatness!” However, since Ulrich felt he had already received enough benefit from Dr. Strastil’s combination of extraordinarily developed capacity for abstract thought with noticeably stunted emotional intelligence, he stood up cheerfully, gave his colleague an extravagant compliment, and hastily got off under the pretext of having already gone two stops too far. Standing on the street, he raised his hat to her once more, and Fräulein Strastil, remembering that she had recently heard disparaging remarks about his contributions, felt humanly moved by a wave of blood that had been aroused by his gracious parting words, an effect that to her way of thinking did not exactly speak for him; he, however, now knew, without yet quite knowing completely, why his though
ts were revolving around the subject of literature and what they were after, from the interrupted Mortadella comparison to the way he had unconsciously led good Dr. Strastil to make those confessions. After all, literature had ceased to be of any concern to him since he had written his last poem, at the age of twenty; even so, there had been a period before that when writing in secret had been a fairly regular habit, and he had given it up not because he had grown older or because he had realized he lacked sufficient talent, but for reasons that now, given his current impressions, he would most likely have characterized with a word that expresses a great deal of effort flowing into the void.

  For Ulrich was one of those book lovers who do not like reading anymore because they feel that the whole business of writing and reading is a plague. “If the rational Strastil wants to be ‘made to feel,’” he thought (“And she’s right about that! If I had contradicted her, she would have invoked music as her crown witness!”), and, as often happens, his thinking partly took place in words and partly impinged on the mind as a wordless objection: so if the sensible Dr. Strastil wanted to be made to feel, what it amounted to was what everyone wants from art, which is to be moved, overwhelmed, entertained, surprised, to be granted a whiff of noble ideas, in short to be given a “vital experience” by a work that itself brings something “to life.” Not that Ulrich was at all opposed to that. In a subsidiary train of thought that ended as a mixture of faint sentimentality and reluctant irony, he reflected: “Feeling is rare enough. Protecting a certain temperature of feeling from cooling down probably helps to maintain the brooding conditions for every kind of cognitive development. And when a person is lifted out of the hodgepodge of intelligent intentions that enmesh him with innumerable foreign objects, and finds himself for a few moments in a condition that is wholly without purpose—for example, while listening to music—he is almost in the state of being of a flower on which rain and sunshine fall.” He was ready to admit that there is a more eternal eternity in the human mind’s pauses and quiescence than in its activity; but now he noticed that his thoughts had moved from “feeling” to “experiencing,” and this entailed a contradiction. For there were, after all, experiences of the will! There were experiences of climactic action! True, one could probably assume that when every one of these experiences reaches its highest point of radiant bitterness, it is nothing but feeling; but that would bring up another contradiction, namely that feeling, in a state of perfect purity, would be a quiescence, a dying away of all action! Or was it not a contradiction after all? Was there some strange coherency in which the highest activity was motionless at the core? But here it became apparent that this sequence of reflections was not so much a side thought as an unwanted one, for with a sudden stirring of resistance against the emotive turn it had taken, Ulrich repudiated the entire view he had stumbled into. He was not disposed to meditate on certain states of mind and, when he thought about feelings, fall prey to emotion himself.

  In a flash it occurred to him that what he was getting at could be described, without further ado, as the futile actuality or eternal momentariness of literature. Does it result in anything? Either it is an enormous detour from experience to experience, leading back to itself, or it is an epitome of stimulus and response, without any particular outcome whatsoever. “A puddle,” he thought, “has given everyone the impression of depth more often and more strongly than the ocean, for the simple reason that there are many more opportunities to experience puddles than oceans.” It seemed to him that it was the same with feelings, and that trivial feelings were thought to be deep for no other reason than this. For the habit of favoring the activity of feeling over feeling itself, which is the hallmark of all emotional people, as well as the wish to make others feel and to be made to feel that is common to all institutions serving the emotional life, amounts to a degradation of the rank and nature of feelings in favor of their fleeting moment as a personal state, and leads to that shallowness, stunted development, and utter irrelevance for which there is no dearth of examples. “Of course such a view can only be repugnant,” Ulrich continued, “to all those people who wear their feelings as a cock wears his feathers and even preen themselves on the idea that eternity begins anew with every ‘unique individual!’” He had a clear mental image of an enormous perversity of nearly humanity-wide proportions but was unable to express it in a way that would have satisfied him, probably because the ramifications were too complex.

  While he was occupied with these thoughts, he watched the streetcars going past, waiting for one that would take him back as close as possible to the center of town. He saw the people climbing in and out, and his technically trained eye absently considered the interplay between welding and casting, rolling and bolting, engineering and hand finishing, historical development and current state of the art, of which the invention of these rolling barracks consisted. “In the end a committee from the department of streetcars comes to the factory and decides on the veneer, the coating, the upholstery, the mounting of armrests and hand supports, the placement of ashtrays and the like,” he thought idly, “and it’s precisely these minuscule details, and the red or green color of the box, and the buoyancy with which one can climb in, using the running board, that for tens of thousands of people make up what they remember and what remains, in their experience, of all that genius. This is what shapes their character, endows it with swiftness or comfort, makes them perceive red cars as home and blue ones as foreign, and is the source of that unmistakable odor of small facts that the centuries wear on their clothes.” So there was no denying—and this unexpectedly fell in line with Ulrich’s principal train of thought—that to a large extent life itself peters out into trivial actuality, or, to put it technically, that in life’s balance of energy, the effective coefficient of spirit is very small.

  And suddenly, as he felt himself swinging onto the streetcar, he said to himself: “I must impress this on Agathe: Morality is the subordination of every momentary state in our life to a single steady state!” This sentence had suddenly occurred to him in the form of a definition. But the overly polished and honed formulation had been preceded and followed by intuitions that, though less fully developed and articulated, enlarged his understanding. A rigorous conception and discipline for the harmless activity of feeling, an austere hierarchy of values, now appeared, vaguely foreshortened, in the prospective future: Feelings must either serve or belong to a state that extends to the ultimate and is as vast as the coastless sea, and that has not been described yet at all. Should that be called an idea, should it be called a longing? Ulrich had to let the matter rest, for at the moment when his sister’s name occurred to him, her shadow had darkened his thoughts. As always when he thought of her, he felt that in her company he had shown himself in a different frame of mind than usual. He also knew that he wanted passionately to return to that condition. But the same memory covered him with shame at having behaved in a presumptuous, ridiculous, intoxicated manner, no better than a drunk who throws himself to his knees in front of spectators whom he won’t be able to look in the face the next day. Given the temperate restraint that governed the siblings’ relationship, that was a grotesque overstatement, and if it was not completely unfounded, it was probably no more than a reaction to feelings that were as yet unformed. He knew that Agathe would be arriving in a few days, and he was putting no obstacles in her way. Had she actually done anything wrong? Conceivably she had gone back on it all when her mood cooled off. But a very vivid premonition assured him that Agathe had not abandoned her intention. He could have tried to find out from her. Once again he felt it was his duty to warn her in a letter. But instead of taking that impulse seriously for even a moment, he imagined what might have impelled Agathe to behave in such an unusual way: he saw it as an unbelievably vehement gesture meant to show her trust in him and to put herself in his hands. “She has very little sense of reality,” he thought, “but a wonderful way of doing what she wants. Rash, one could say; but just for that reason, not tepid! Wh
en she’s angry, she sees the world ruby red!” He smiled amicably and looked around at the people traveling with him. Every one of them had wicked thoughts, this could be taken for granted, and everyone suppressed them, and no one reproached himself unduly for having them: but no one had these thoughts outside himself, in a person who gives them the enchanting inaccessibility of a dreamed experience.

  For the first time since he had left his letter unfinished, Ulrich realized that he no longer had to choose, and that he was already in the state he was still hesitant to enter. According to his laws—he allowed himself the arrogant ambiguity of calling them sacred—­Agathe’s error could not be repented but only be made good by succeeding developments—which, incidentally, corresponded to the original meaning of repentance, which is, after all, a purifying fire and not a state of corruption. To re-compense or in-demnify Agathe’s inconvenient husband would have meant nothing but a taking-back of damage done; in short, merely that double and paralyzing negation of which ordinary good behavior consists, which inwardly cancels itself out to zero. But to reduce to nothing what was going to happen to Hagauer, lift it from him, as it were, like a hovering load, would involve summoning up a great surge of feeling toward him, and that could not be contemplated without trepidation. Thus, according to the logic that Ulrich was seeking to embrace, all that could ever be made good was something other than the damage done, and he had not a moment’s doubt that this other was to be his and his sister’s whole life. “Putting it presumptuously,” he thought: “Saul did not make good each single consequence of his previous sins; he became Paul!” To this peculiar logic, however, feeling and conviction raised the habitual objection that it would be more decent, and in any case no deterrent to later exaltations, to straighten out accounts with one’s brother-in-law first and only then turn one’s sights on the new life. After all, the kind of morality that appealed to him so strongly was completely inadequate for the settling of financial affairs and the conflicts they give rise to. Unsolvable and contradictory problems were bound to turn up on the borderline between that other life and ordinary existence, so it was probably best not to let these develop into borderline cases but instead clear them away sooner rather than later in the normal, passionless way of ordinary decency. But here Ulrich felt again that one could not take one’s bearings from the normal requirements of goodness if one wanted to venture into the realm of unconditional goodness. The task imposed on him, to step into the unknown, seemed to brook no subtraction.