Agathe

by Robert Musil

  And the moment she exclaimed those words, they both felt again that they were not subjected to a mere fantasy but to something unknowable and unpredictable. Hovering within the overflowing emotion, there was truth; beneath the semblance, there was reality; peering out from the world were the shadowy outlines of a world being transformed. To be sure, it was a peculiarly coreless, only half-tangible reality they were divining, a half-truth as familiar as it was familiarly uncompletable that was wooing credibility: not a reality for the world’s daily use nor indeed a truth for all the world, just a secret one for lovers. But obviously it was not mere caprice or illusion either; and its most secret insinuation whispered: Surrender yourself to me without reserve, and you will know the whole truth! But there were no clearly spoken words that said this: for the language of love is a cryptic language and in its highest perfection as mute as an embrace.

  Smiling, Agathe knitted her brows and peered into the crowd; Ulrich followed suit, and together they gazed into the stream of people that flowed beside them and streamed toward them. Did they feel the forgetfulness of self and the power, the happiness, the goodness, the deep and high constraint that prevail within a brotherhood of human beings, even if it is only the accidental brotherhood of a busy street, so that one cannot believe there could be anything wrong or divisive in it? Their own existence, sharply bounded and set down heavily into that glory, stood out in wondrous contrast to it, as did the existence of every other person walking darkly through this cloudburst and loosed flood of tenderness whose radiance shone reflected in their eyes. At this moment, when a single vivid impression reprised and completely answered all questions concerning the “kingdom of love” and the meaning of the love of one’s neighbor and the doubts surrounding that notion, Ulrich leaned over to his sister to see her face and asked her: “Do you think you can love someone in more than a vague sort of way when neither moral conviction nor sensual desire is involved?”

  It was the first time since they had started going on these outings that he asked her this question so directly.

  At first Agathe gave no answer.

  Ulrich asked: “And what would happen if we were to stop someone here and say to him: ‘Stay with us, brother!’ or: ‘Halt your steps, oh hastening soul! We want to love you as ourselves!’?”

  “He would look at us flabbergasted,” Agathe replied. “And then move on twice as fast.”

  “Or get mad and call for a policeman,” Ulrich added. “Because he would think he was either dealing with good-natured lunatics, or with people who were pulling his leg.”

  “But if we went up to him straightaway yelling, ‘You criminal, worthless scum’?” Agathe suggested tentatively.

  “It could be that in that case he would not consider us crazy, and not think we were joking either, but take us for people with dissenting views, as they are called; apostles of some political faction who have a mistaken idea about him. Because obviously the societies for the blind who hate their neighbors don’t have many fewer members than the one that espouses neighborly love.”

  Agathe nodded in agreement; then she shook her head and gazed into the air. The air was still the same as before. She looked down, and some humble detail, a basement window, a stray leaf of cabbage, seemed to be gently aflame, as if ignited by the light in the sky. Finally, she looked around for something that would appeal to her of its own accord, a face or an object in a shopwindow, and found it. And yet this real pleasure was a blind spot in the radiance of the day; Ulrich had already commented on this, but now she was even more aware of the contrast. It interfered in the general love of humanity and the world, instead of increasing it with its small contribution. And so Agathe replied: “It’s all very unreal! Today I don’t know whether I love real people and real things, or whether I really love anything!”

  “Is that supposed to be the answer to my question,” Ulrich asked, changing the question slightly as he restated it, “whether any love, even a great love, can be anything more than the shadow of a love if there is no sensual fulfillment? A desire that doesn’t give the senses something to do already harbors a mute sadness!”

  “I am full of love and empty of love, and both of these together,” Agathe lamented, smiling and pointing to everything and everyone with a small, despondent gesture. —It was the lament of the heart into which God has penetrated as deeply as a thorn that no fingertips can grasp. In the confessions of the mystics, who yearn for Him with all their human soul and corporality, this strange despair again and again disrupts the moments of the most imminent transfiguration, and the siblings now remembered together the hour in the garden when Agathe had read such examples to her brother from a book. Then Ulrich said: “There is something of this mysticism in neighborly love; everyone feels and obeys it without understanding it. And perhaps every great love contains something mystical, maybe even every great passion. Maybe in all those moments that have a deeply opening effect on us, even in a temperate life, our participation in people and things is of a mystical kind, and different from real participation!”

  “And what is mystical participation, if not just the opposite of a real one?”

  Ulrich didn’t stop to consider his answer, but he did hesitate. Finally, he said with great resoluteness: “Look, one is at the same time full of love and empty of love. One loves everything and nothing in particular. One is unable to detach oneself from the most trivial little thing, and at the same time the totality has no importance at all. This is a complete contradiction; both can’t be real at the same time. And yet it is real; it would be pointless to deny it! So if I can’t ask you to conceive of mystical participation as some kind of religious sorcery, there remains only the assumption that there are two ways of experiencing reality that more or less force themselves upon us!”

  Sometimes at a propitious moment, and in close association, there arise the answers to such questions that, sporadically and haltingly, have troubled the mind with shifting unrest. Sometimes this abridgement is deceptive; but it is always a preview. One such moment was that of Ulrich’s idea that there are two kinds of reality in the world, or rather that there are two kinds of worldly reality. Once that statement had been made, and before the siblings had persuaded themselves of its plausibility, there was no question in their life that had not been affected by this answer. The many unusual and boundlessly intertwined experiences and conjectures of the recent past, and the premonitory intimations of these at an earlier time, may not have found an explanation, but a refreshed confidence now pervaded them all. Thus a flame contracts darkly and holds its breath before flaring higher.

  33

  CONVERSATIONS ABOUT LOVE

  Man, the speaking animal par excellence, is the only one that requires conversation even for his reproduction. And it is not only because he is talking in any case that he speaks while engaged in that activity, but apparently for him the delights of loving and those of talking are linked; and this in so profoundly mysterious a fashion that it almost calls to mind those ancients according to whose philosophy God, man, and things arose from the “Logos,” by which they variously understood the Holy Spirit, reason, and speech. Well, not even psychoanalysis and sociology have taught us anything substantial about this, even though these two youngest sciences might very well compete with Catholicism in having had something to say about all things human. So one must make one’s own rhyme and reason of the fact that in love, conversations play an almost greater role than anything else. Love is the most talkative of all feelings and consists to a large part entirely of loquacity. If the person is young, these all-encompassing conversations are symptoms of growth; in an adult, they form one’s peacock’s fan, which displays itself all the more vividly the later one starts, even if all it consists of are quills. The reason for this may be that contemplative thought is awakened by the emotions of love and forms lasting ties with them; but of course this would only displace the question, for even though the word “contemplation” is used almost as often as the word “love,” its
meaning is by no means clearer.

  By the way, even though Ulrich and Agatha could not get their fill of talking to one another, we cannot on those grounds accuse the bonds between them of being bonds of love. That the subject of their talk was always and in some manner concerned with love is undeniable. But what is true of all emotions applies to the emotion of love as well: its ardor expands ever more largely in words the further re­moved it still is from action; and what induced the siblings after their initial obscure and intense experiences with each other to abandon themselves to conversations, and what seemed to them at times like an enchantment, was first and foremost their not knowing how they could act. But their consequent fear of their own feelings, and the curiosity with which they explored them, peering into them from their periphery, sometimes caused the conversations to veer into shallow waters that belied the depth from which they issued.

  34

  DIFFICULTIES WHERE THEY ARE NOT LOOKED FOR

  What about the example, as famous as it is gladly lived, of love between the proverbial “two people of the opposite sex”? It is a special case of the commandment: Thou shalt love thy neighbor without knowing what kind of person he is; and a test of the relationship that exists between love and reality.

  People make of each other the dolls with which they have already played in dreams of love.

  And what the other person believes and thinks and actually is plays no part in this?

  As long as one loves him or her, and because of one’s love, everything is enchanting; but this does not work in reverse. Never has a woman loved a man for his opinions and ideas, or a man, a woman for hers. These merely play an important supporting role. Incidentally, love fares much as anger does in this respect: If one understands without prejudice what the other person means, not only is anger disarmed, but usually, quite unexpectedly, love as well.

  But isn’t it true that especially in the beginning, delight in the concordance of one’s opinions plays a major role?

  When the man hears the woman’s voice, he hears himself being repeated by a marvelous sunken orchestra, and women are the most unconscious ventriloquists; they hear themselves giving the cleverest answers without a word passing their own lips. Each time, it is like a small annunciation: one person steps out of the clouds to stand by another’s side, and everything the first utters seems to the second a heavenly crown, custom-fitted to the size of her or his head! Later, of course, one feels like a drunk who has slept off his stupor.

  But what of the works of love? Love’s fidelity, its sacrifices, its attentions, are they not its most beautiful proof? But works, like all mute things, are ambiguous. If one looks back on one’s life as a colorful chain of events and actions, it resembles a play of which one remembers not a single word of dialogue and all of whose scenes rather tediously have the same climaxes!

  So one does not love in accordance with merit and reward, in the alternating chant of immortal spirits mortally in love?

  That one is not loved as one deserves is the sorrow of all old maids of both sexes.

  It was Agathe who gave this response. The eerily beautiful gratuitousness of love and the mild euphoria of injustice rose up from past love affairs and even reconciled her to the lack of dignity and seriousness she sometimes accused herself of on account of her game with Lindner, which she was always ashamed of when she was in Ulrich’s presence. But Ulrich had started the conversation, and in the course of it had become interested in sounding her out about her memories, for her way of viewing these delights was similar to his.

  She looked at him, laughing. “Haven’t you ever adored someone and despised yourself for it?”

  “I can honestly say I have not; but I won’t reject the thought with indignation,” Ulrich said. “It could have happened.”

  “Haven’t you ever loved a person despite being eerily convinced,” Agathe continued excitedly, “that this person, whether he has a beard or breasts, a person you’re sure you know very well, and of whom you think highly, and who talks incessantly about you and himself, is actually just paying love a visit? You could leave out his way of thinking and his merits, you could change his fate, you could even furnish him with a different beard and different legs; you could almost leave him out, and you would still love him!—That is to say, insofar as you love him at all!” she added to temper her intensity.

  Her voice had a deep sound, with an unsteady brightness in its depths, as if from a fire. Now she sat down guiltily, because in her unintentional eagerness she had sprung up from her chair.

  Ulrich, too, felt slightly guilty because of this conversation, and smiled. He had not with any of his words intended to speak of love as one of the fashionably divided feelings that are termed “ambivalent” by the latest trend, which implies, more or less, that the soul, in the manner of tricksters, always winks with its left eye while pledging an oath with its right hand. Rather, he had taken pleasure in the fact that in order for love to arise and endure, no essential prerequisites are needed. That is, one loves someone despite everything, or, one could just as well say, for no reason; and that means either that the entire thing is a figment or else that the figment is itself an entire whole, just as the world is an entirety in which no sparrow falls from the roof without the All-Feeling-One being aware of it.

  “So it doesn’t depend on anything at all!” Agathe exclaimed by way of conclusion. “Not on what a person is, not on what he means, not on what he wants, and not on what he does.”

  It was clear to them that they were speaking of the soul’s certainty, or, as it might be better to avoid such a grand word, the uncertainty which they felt (using the term now with modest imprecision and in the aggregate sense) in their souls. And that they were talking about love, reminding each other of love’s mutability and its shape-shifting arts, happened only because it is one of the most intense and distinctive feelings, and yet such a suspect feeling before the stern bar of evaluative feeling that it causes judgment itself to falter. But of this the siblings had already received an inkling when they had barely begun to stroll in the sunshine of neighborly love; and remembering his assertion that even in this state of dazed beneficence one does not know whether one really loves people, and whether one loves people as they really are, or whether, and by means of what qualities, one is being duped by a fantasy and a mutation, Ulrich showed himself earnestly intent on holding the problematic relationship between feeling and knowing firmly in place with a knot, at least for now and in the spirit of the casual conversation that had just died away.

  “These two contradictions are always present within it; they form a four-horse team,” he said. “One loves a person because one knows him; and because one doesn’t know him. And one knows him because one loves him; and knows not him, because one loves him. And sometimes this reaches such a pitch that it all suddenly becomes very obvious. Those are the notorious moments when Venus sees through Apollo and Apollo sees through Venus, and both behold a lifeless mannequin and are highly surprised that previously they had seen something else in its place. If love is stronger than astonishment at that moment, a struggle arises between them, and sometimes love—albeit exhausted, despairing, and irremediably wounded—emerges victorious. But if love is not as strong, it becomes a struggle between people who feel they have been deceived; it comes to insults, coarse intrusions of reality, endless degradation, all to make up for having been the trusting fool—.” He had experienced these hailstorms of love often enough to be able to describe them quite comfortably.

  But now Agathe put an end to this. “If you don’t mind, I would like to point out that these marital and extramarital affairs of honor are for the most part highly overrated!” she objected, and looked around again for a more comfortable position.

  “Love is overrated altogether!” Ulrich declared, laughing. “The madman who in his derangement draws a knife and stabs an innocent person who happens to be standing in the place of his hallucination—: in love, he’s normal!”

  35


  LOVING IS NOT SIMPLE

  A comfortable position and leisurely sunshine that caresses without being intrusive facilitated these conversations. They usually took place between two deck chairs that were not so much moved into the protection and shade of the house as into the shaded light that came from the garden and found its freedom tempered by walls that still glowed in the colors of morning. One should of course not assume that the chairs stood there because the siblings—stimulated by their relationship’s sterility, which was, in the ordinary sense, already established and in a higher sense perhaps still impending—might have had the intention of exchanging opinions concerning the deceptive nature of love in Hindu-Schopenhauerian fashion, and to fend off with the tools of dissection the seductive delirium love proffers in order to perpetuate life; rather, the choice of this half-shadowed, indulgent, reclusively inquiring mode had a simpler explanation. The subject under discussion was so constituted that in the infinite experience by which the idea of love becomes clear and distinct, the most various associative pathways presented themselves, leading from one question to the next. Thus the two questions of how one loves the neighbor whom one does not know, and how one loves oneself, whom one knows even less, led their curiosity to the question, encompassing both, of how one loves at all; or, put differently, what love “actually” is. At first glance this may seem a bit too knowing and also all too sensible a question for a couple in love. But it gains in mental confusion as soon as one extends it to millions of lovers and their variety.

  These millions differ not only as individuals (which is their pride), but also in their action, object, and relationship. Sometimes one cannot speak of lovers at all, and yet of love; sometimes of lovers but not of love, in which case things proceed in a rather more ordinary way. And the word comprises as many contradictions as Sunday in a small country town where the farm boys go to Mass at ten in the morning, visit the brothel in a side street at eleven, and enter the tavern on the main square at twelve to eat and drink. Does it make sense to explore such a word from all sides? But in using it one acts unconsciously as if underlying all the differences there were one common ground! One can love a walking stick and one can love honor; the difference between the two is as great as that between one and one thousand, and no one would think of naming them in the same breath if one wasn’t accustomed to doing just that every day. One can cite other examples of what is one and one thousand yet one and the same, such as loving the bottle, tobacco, and even worse poisons. Spinach and outdoor activities. Sports or the mind. Truth. One’s wife, one’s child, one’s dog. To this list, the siblings added further examples: God, Beauty, Fatherland, and money. Nature, a friend, one’s profession, and life. Freedom. Success, power, justice, or simply virtue. One loves all of that. In short, there are as many things associated with love as there are endeavors and figures of speech. But what are the differences between all these loves and what do they have in common?