Agathe

by Robert Musil

  The last redoubt still holding out in his defense was guarded by a strong aversion to the fact that notions like “self,” “feeling,” “goodness,” “the other goodness,” “evil,” of which he had made a great deal of use, were so personal and at the same time so high-flown and rarified that they really befitted the moral speculations of much younger people. He fared as doubtless many who follow his story will fare: he irritably picked out individual phrases, asking himself such questions as: “ ‘Production and results of feelings’? What a mechanical, rationalistic idea, what ignorance of human nature! ‘Morality as the problem of a permanent state to which all individual states are subordinate,’ and that’s it? How perfectly inhuman!” If one looked at this through the eyes of a reasonable person, it all seemed tremendously perverse. “The very essence of morality has as its foundation that the important feelings always remain the same,” Ulrich thought, “and the only thing required of the individual is that he act in harmony with them!” But just at that moment the lines, drawn with T square and compass, that defined the rolling locality that enclosed him came to a halt at a spot where his eye, peering out from the body of a modern means of transport and still involuntarily participating in its equipment and furnishings, lit on a stone pillar that had been standing at the edge of the street since the baroque period, so that the unconsciously registered technical comfort of a rational creation suddenly stood in contrast to the eruptive passion of that ancient gesture, which suggested something not unlike a petrified stomachache. The effect of this optical collision was an uncommonly intense confirmation of the ideas from which Ulrich had just been trying to escape. Could anything have made the aimlessness of life more obvious than that accidental glance? Without taking sides with either the Now or the Then in matters of taste, as one usually does when such juxtapositions occur, his mind did not hesitate for a moment in feeling left out by both modernity and tradition, and saw only the grand demonstration of a problem that is likely at bottom a moral one. He could not doubt that the transitoriness of what is regarded as style, culture, the will of the times or the spirit of the age, and is admired as such, is a moral defect. For on the vast scale of the ages this means the same as if, on the smaller scale of one’s own life, one were to develop one’s faculties in a completely one-sided way, squandering oneself in excess and dissolution, never attaining a measure of one’s will, never quite forming a full-fledged character, swept along by one haphazard passion after the other. For that reason it seemed to him also that what is called the “changes” or even the “progress” of historical periods is just a term for the fact that none of these experiments ever arrives at a point where all of them would unite on the way to a conviction that would embrace the totality and thereby provide, for the first time, a possible basis for steady development, lasting enjoyment, and that gravity of great beauty of which nowadays scarcely more than a shadow occasionally falls into our life.

  Of course it struck Ulrich as an outrageous presumption to assume that everything had amounted to nothing. And yet it was nothing. As existence, immeasurable; as meaning, a muddle. Measured by its result, at least, it was no more than that from which the soul of the present day had evolved—in other words, little enough. But even as Ulrich thought this, he was abandoning himself to this “little” with relish, as if it were the last meal at the table of life that his intentions permitted him. He had left the streetcar and taken a route that would lead him quickly to the center of town. He felt as if he were emerging from a cellar. The streets shrieked with gaiety, prematurely filled with the warmth of a summer day. The sweet, toxic taste of soliloquy faded from his mouth; everything was frank and outgoing and glad to be in the sun. Ulrich stopped at almost every shopwindow. These little flasks in so many colors, these bottled fragrances and countless variants of the nail scissor: what a sum of genius there was even in a hairdresser’s salon. A glove shop: what connections and inventions are needed before a goatskin is drawn over a lady’s hand and the animal’s hide has become more refined than her own! He marveled at the matter-of-course assemblage of countless accoutrements and dainty belongings that make up the carefree life, as though he were seeing them for the first time. What a delightful word, he felt: be-longing. And what happiness, this tremendous concord of living together! There was nothing here to remind one of the earth crust of life, the unpaved roads of passion, the—he was actually feeling this: uncivilized aspects of the soul! The attention, a bright and narrow thing, glided across a flower garden of fruits, gems, fabrics, shapes, and enticements that opened their gently penetrating eyes in every color. Since at that time whiteness of skin was prized and protected from the sun, a few gaily colored parasols were already floating above the crowd and laying silky shadows on the pale faces of women. Ulrich’s gaze was even enchanted by the matte golden beer he saw in passing through the plate-glass windows of a restaurant, standing on tablecloths that were so white that they formed blue planes at the boundary of shadow and light. Then the archbishop drove past him; a smooth-rolling, heavy barouche, with red and purple in its darkness: it had to be the archbishop’s carriage, for this horse-drawn vehicle Ulrich was following with his eyes looked quite ecclesiastical, and two policemen stood at attention and saluted the follower of Christ without thinking of their predecessors who had run a lance into his predecessor’s side.

  He gave himself over to these impressions, which just a short while ago he had called “the futile actuality of life,” with such eagerness that little by little, as he took his fill of the world, he began to feel sated, until his earlier antagonism returned. Now Ulrich knew exactly where the weakness of his speculations lay. “What would be the point,” he asked himself, “in the face of this self-sufficient glory, of looking for some outcome above, behind, or beneath it all?! What would that be: a philosophy? An all-encompassing conviction, a law? Or God’s finger? Or rather the assumption that morality has until now lacked an ‘inductive ethos,’ that it is much harder to be good than has generally been supposed, and that it will require an endless collaborative effort similar to the kind practiced everywhere in scientific research? I assume there is no morality because it cannot be deduced from anything constant, that there are only rules for the useless maintenance of transient conditions; and I assume there is no deep happiness without a deep morality: but even so it strikes me as a pallid, unnatural state of affairs that I’m pondering over this, and it isn’t at all what I want!” Indeed, he might well have asked himself far more simply: “What have I taken upon myself?” And now he did that. But this question touched his sensibility more than his intellect; indeed it interrupted his thinking, and even before he apprehended it as a question, it had already eroded, bit by bit, Ulrich’s always alert delight in strategic planning. It had begun like a dark tone close to his ear, accompanying him; then the tone was inside himself, just an octave deeper than everything else; and now Ulrich was finally at one with the question and seemed to himself like a strangely deep sound in the bright hard world, surrounded by a wide interval. So what had he actually taken upon himself, what had he promised?

  He thought hard. He knew that though his use of the term “the Millennium” had been for comparison only, it had not been a mere offhand joke. If one took this promise seriously, what it amounted to was the wish to live, by means of mutual love, in a secular condition so exalted that one can only feel and do whatever heightens and preserves this state. That there are intimations of such a disposition in man was something he had felt as a certainty as far back as he could remember. His own first encounter with it had been “the affair with the major’s wife,” and though his subsequent experiences had not been many or great, they had all been the same. If one summed it all up, one would almost have to conclude that Ulrich believed in the “fall of man” and “original sin.” That is, he was strongly inclined to assume that at some time or other there had been a fundamental change in man’s attitude, which would have had to be more or less like falling out of love: the lover, no longer in l
ove, now sees the whole truth, but something greater has been torn to pieces, and truth, wherever he looks, consists of nothing more than fragments that have been left over and patched together again. Maybe it really was the apple of “knowledge” that wrought this change in consciousness and cast the human race out of a primordial state to which it might find its way back only after having grown wise through sin in the aftermath of an infinity of experience. But Ulrich did not believe in such stories in the form in which they are handed down, but only in the form in which he had discovered them: he believed in them like a man accustomed to reckoning with numbers who applies his skills to the system of feelings spread out before him and, finding that not a single one of them is justified, concludes upon the necessity of introducing a fantastical hypothesis whose properties can be intuitively discerned. This was no small matter! He had entertained similar thoughts often enough, but never before had he been in the position of having to decide within a few days whether to take it seriously as a matter of consequence for his life. A faint sweat broke out under his hat and collar, and he was bothered by the proximity of the people jostling past him. What he was thinking of amounted to taking leave of most living relationships; he had no illusions about that. For people live compartmentalized lives today, and it is as parts of ourselves that we find ourselves linked with others; what one dreams has to do with dreaming and with what others are dreaming; what one does coheres in itself, but to a much greater degree it is bound up with what others are doing; and what one is convinced of is bound up with convictions of which only a fraction are one’s own: so it is completely unrealistic to insist upon acting out of the fullness of one’s own reality. And he of all people had all his life been steeped in the idea that one must impart one’s conviction to others, that one must have the courage to live in the midst of moral contradictions, because that was the price of great achievement. Was he at least convinced of what he was thinking about the possibility and significance of another way of living? Not at all! Nevertheless, he could not prevent his feelings from responding as though faced with the unmistakable signs of a fact for which it had been waiting for years.

  Now, of course, he had to ask himself what on earth entitled him to resolve, like one who has fallen in love with himself, never again to do anything that left the soul indifferent. It runs counter to the spirit of the active life, which is second nature to every man of our time; and even though there were God-persuaded times in the past that were able to give rise to such an endeavor, it had faded away like the light of dawn in the growing strength of the sun. Ulrich felt a scent of reclusiveness and sweetness in himself that he was finding more and more distasteful. And so he sought to restrain his extravagant thoughts as fast as possible and admonished himself, though not quite sincerely, that the promise of a Thousand-Year Kingdom he had so oddly held out to his sister was, if one considered it reasonably, nothing more than a kind of charity; for no doubt living with Agathe would require of him a concerted deployment of delicacy and selflessness, qualities that had hitherto been all too lacking in him. He recalled, in the way one recalls an uncommonly transparent cloud sailing across the sky, certain moments of their time together that had already been of that kind. “Maybe the content of the Millennium is nothing but the burgeoning of this power that shows itself first in two people at a time, until eventually it becomes a resounding communion of all?” he wondered, slightly embarrassed. Once again he sought counsel from his own “affair with the major’s wife,” which he now set himself to remembering: Leaving aside the illusions of love, whose immaturity had been the cause of that mistake, he focused all his attention on the tender sensations of goodness and adoration he had been capable of in his solitude at the time, and it seemed to him that to feel utter trust and affection, or to live for another person, must be a happiness that would move one to tears, as beautiful as the luminous sinking of the day into the peace of evening, and, also to the point of tears, somewhat poor in pleasure and mentally uneventful. For at moments his plan was already striking him as comical, rather like an arrangement between two old bachelors to move in together, and such sudden glints of parody gave him a sense of how little the notion of a life of service in brotherly love was likely to bring him fulfillment. With relative dispassion he admitted to himself that from the beginning there had been a large measure of the asocial in the relationship between Agathe and himself. Not only the business with Hagauer and the will, but the whole emotional tone that prevailed between them pointed to something hard, not to say violent, and without a doubt their bond as brother and sister did not entail more love for each other than repulsion of the rest of the world. “No!” Ulrich thought. “Wanting to live for another person is nothing but the bankruptcy of an egotism that opens a new shop next door, with a partner!”

  In point of fact, despite this deftly chiseled remark, his inner exertion had already passed its peak at the moment when he had been tempted to contain in a small earthly lamp the light that had been filling him; and when it turned out now that this had been a mistake, his thought already lacked the will to attempt a decision, and he readily let himself be distracted. Two men had just bumped into each other near him and were shouting unpleasant remarks at each other as if preparing for a fight, a spectacle he followed with refreshed attention, and no sooner had he turned away from it than his glance collided with that of a woman whose gaze met his like a fat flower nodding on its stem. In that pleasant mood that is an equal blend of emotion and extroverted attention, he took note of the fact that, among real people, the ideal obligation to love one’s neighbor is obeyed in two parts, the first consisting in not being able to stand the human race, and the second in compensating for that by engaging in sexual relations with one half of it. Without stopping to reflect, he turned after a few steps to follow the woman; it was still a mechanical consequence of being touched by her glance. He saw her figure beneath the dress like a large white fish near the surface of the water. He felt the masculine wish to harpoon it and see it flap and flail, and there was as much aversion in this as desire. Some barely perceptible signs made him certain this woman knew he was prowling after her and did not object. He tried to determine her place on the social scale and guessed at the upper reaches of the middle class, where it is difficult to define the exact position. “Merchant’s family? Civil servants?” he wondered. But several images arbitrarily obtruded, among them that of a pharmacy: he felt the pungently sweet smell of the husband coming home; the compact atmosphere of the home itself betraying no sign of the quick darting beam of an intruder’s flashlight that had only recently moved through it. The thought was without question repugnant, and yet dishonorably enticing.

  And while Ulrich continued to walk behind the woman, in reality afraid that she might stop in front of a shopwindow and force him to either stumble foolishly past her or start up a conversation, something inside him was still undistracted and wide awake. “I wonder what Agathe actually wants from me?” he asked himself for the first time. He did not know. He assumed it must be similar to what he wanted of her, but his reasons for thinking that were purely emotional. Wasn’t it rather astonishing how quickly and unexpectedly it had all happened? Except for a few childhood memories, he had known nothing about her, and the little he had heard, for instance about her connection with Hagauer over several years, had not disposed him favorably toward her. Now he also remembered the peculiar hesitation, almost reluctance, with which he had approached his father’s house on the day of his arrival. And suddenly the idea embedded itself in his mind: “My feeling for Agathe is nothing but imagination!” In a man who constantly wanted something other than his surroundings, he thought, now in a serious vein again, in such a man, who always only gets to feel dislike and never arrives at liking, the usual “humane” combination of goodwill and lukewarm kindliness must disintegrate into a cold hardness with a mist of impersonal love hovering above it. Seraphic love, he had once called it. Or, he thought, one could also say: love without a partner. Or just as wel
l: love without sex. Nowadays people only loved in sexual terms: those of the same sex couldn’t abide each other, and in the cross-pollination from one sex to another, mutual love went along with a growing revolt against the overestimation of this compulsion. But seraphic love was free of both of these. It was love liberated from the countercurrents of social and sexual aversions. This love, which could be sensed everywhere side by side with the cruelty of contemporary life, could truly be called the sisterly love of an age that has no room for brotherly love, he told himself, wincing in irritation.

  But even though these were his thoughts in the end, alongside them and intermittently he dreamed of a woman who cannot be attained at all. His vision of her was like late autumn days in the mountains, where the air is as if drained of its blood and dying, but the colors burn with the fiercest intensity of passion. He saw the blue vistas extending without end in mysteriously rich gradations. He completely forgot the woman who was walking in front of him, was far from all desire and perhaps near to love.