by Robert Musil
A short line leads from this poetic puerility to the frissons of the séance and necromantic ritual; a second one leads to the abominations of actual necrophilia; perhaps a third to the pathological opposites of exhibitionism and violent coercion.
These comparisons may be disconcerting, and in part quite unappetizing. But if one does not allow oneself to be deterred and considers them from a medical-physiological point of view, so to speak, one finds that they all have one thing in common: an impossibility, an impotence, a lack of natural courage or of the courage for a natural life.
And if in this endeavor one does not fear risky comparisons, one learns something in addition: that silence, unconsciousness, and all manner of incomprehension in the partner are associated with the effect of driving the mind to eccentric extremes.
What is repeated in this way, above all, is the previously mentioned fact that an incompatible partner skews the balance of love; all that needs to be added is that not infrequently it is an already skewed emotional disposition that prompts such a choice in the first place. And inversely, it would be the responsive, living, acting partner who determines the emotions and keeps them in order, and without whom they devolve into mystification.
But what about the still life—isn’t its strange charm also a mystification? In fact, almost an ethereal necrophilia?
And yet, a similar mystification takes place in the gaze of happy lovers as an expression of their highest feelings. They look into each other’s eyes, cannot tear themselves loose, and languish in an infinite emotion that expands like rubber!
That was more or less how the exchange had begun, but here its thread got caught, as it were, and remained that way for quite a while before they were able to continue. They had looked at each other, and that had caused them to lapse into silence.
But if an observation is called for that explains this and even justifies such conversations at all and expresses their import: perhaps one could say what Ulrich at that moment understandably left unspoken: that it is by no means as simple to love as nature would have us believe when she entrusts every bungler among her creatures with the necessary tools.
36
BREATHS OF A SUMMER DAY
The sun, meanwhile, had risen higher; they had left the chairs like stranded boats in the shallow shade near the house and were lying on a lawn in the garden beneath the full depth of the summer day. They had been doing this for quite a while, and though their circumstances had shifted, they had almost no consciousness of any change. Not even the pause in their conversation brought this about; their speech had been suspended without any sense of a rupture.
A soundless stream of lusterless blossoms, coming from a group of trees that were past their flower, was drifting like snow through the sunshine; and the breath that bore it was so gentle that not a leaf stirred. It cast no shadow on the green of the lawn, but the green seemed to darken from within like an eye. The trees and bushes that stood on the sides or formed a backdrop, tenderly and lavishly decked out in their own green by the young summer, gave the impression of awed spectators who, startled and spellbound in their gay attire, were participating in this funeral procession and celebration of nature. Spring and fall, the speech and silence of nature, and the twin enchantments of life and death were commingled in this picture; hearts seemed to stop, removed from their breasts to join the silent procession through the air. “Then my heart was taken out of my breast,” a mystic had said: Agathe remembered it.
She knew, too, that she herself had read this saying to Ulrich from one of his books. Here in the garden, not far from the place where they were now, was where it had happened. More details emerged. Other sayings that she had recalled to his memory occurred to her: “Is it you, or is it not you? I know not where I am; nor do I wish to know!” “I have risen above all my faculties up to the dark power! I am in love, and know not with whom! My heart is full of love and at the same time empty of love!” Thus, once again, there echoed within her the lament of the mystics in whose heart God has penetrated as deeply as a thorn that no fingertips can grasp. She had read many such blissful laments to Ulrich at the time. Perhaps her rendering now was not exact: memory deals rather imperiously with what it wants to hear; but she understood what was meant, and formed a resolve. As at this moment of flowery procession, the garden had once before looked mysteriously abandoned and animated; and that had been at the very hour after the mystical confessions Ulrich kept in his library had fallen into her hands. Time stood still, a thousand years weighed as lightly as the opening and closing of an eye; she had arrived at the Millennium; perhaps God was even making himself felt. And while she was feeling these things one after the other, even though time was supposed to no longer exist; and while her brother, so that she would not suffer anxiety in this dream, was next to her, even though space seemed no longer to exist either: the world, notwithstanding these contradictions, seemed in all its parts pervaded by transfiguration.
What she had experienced since then could not but appear to her as talkatively tempered compared to what had come before; and yet, what an expansion and affirmation that first revelation had bestowed on her subsequent days, even if the all but corporeal warmth of its immediacy had been lost! Under these circumstances, Agathe resolved this time to approach with deliberation the rapture that had previously befallen her in this garden in an almost dreamlike way. She did not know why she associated it with the name of the Millennium. It was a word bright with feeling and almost palpable, like a thing, yet it remained opaque to the understanding. That was why she could imagine that the Thousand-Year Kingdom could begin at any moment. It is also called the Kingdom of Love: this Agathe knew also; but only now did it occur to her that both these names have been handed down since biblical times and signify the kingdom of God on earth, whose imminent arrival is meant in a completely real sense.
Ulrich, moreover, occasionally used these words as ingenuously as his sister, without on that account believing in Scripture; and so it was not at all surprising to her that she seemed to know automatically how one should behave in the Millennium. “You must keep perfectly still,” an inspiration told her. “You must leave no room for any kind of desire, not even the desire to ask. Divest yourself of your cleverness in handling your affairs. Deprive the mind of all tools, and prevent it from being used as a tool; both knowledge and will must be discarded; renounce reality and the desire to turn toward it. Contain yourself until head, heart, and limbs are nothing but silence. But if in this way you arrive at the highest selflessness, then at last outside and inside will touch, as if a wedge that had split the world in two had sprung out. . . !”
This may not have been exactly a sober plan of action. But it seemed to her that, with a firm intention, it must be attainable; and she pulled herself together as if she were trying to feign death. But it soon proved as impossible to completely silence all thoughts and all reports from the senses and the will as it had been in childhood not to commit any sins between confession and communion; and after some effort she completely gave up the attempt. In the process, she discovered that she was only superficially adhering to her purpose, and that her attention had long since slipped away. At the moment, it was occupied with a quite far-flung question, a little monster of dereliction: she was asking herself in the most foolish way, and was very intent on the foolishness of it: “Have I really ever been violent, mean, hateful, and unhappy?” A man without a name came to mind; who lacked a name because she bore it and had carried it away with her. When she thought of him, her name felt like a scar; but she no longer felt hatred for Hagauer, and now she repeated her question with the slightly melancholy stubbornness with which one gazes after a wave that has flowed on. What had happened to the desire to do him almost mortal harm? She had nearly lost it in her distraction and appeared to believe it must be possible to find it somewhere nearby. Moreover, Lindner might well be a stand-in for this desire for hostility; she asked herself this too and thought of him fleetingly. Perhaps now it seemed aston
ishing to her how much had already happened to her, young people being as a rule more prone to be surprised at how much they have already had to feel than older people, who have become as used to the inconstancy of passions and circumstances as they are to changes in the weather. But nothing could have meant more to Agathe than this: At that very moment, mysteriously detached from the great reversal in her life, from the flight of its passions and conditions, from the wondrous stream of emotion (in which youth ordinarily believes itself returned to the glory of primordial nature), there stood out again the stone-clear sky of motionless reverie from which she had just awakened.
So her thoughts, while still under the spell of the festive procession of flowers and of death, were no longer moving with it in its mute, solemn way; rather, Agathe was “thinking to and fro,” as one could describe it in contrast to the state of mind in which life lasts “a thousand years” without a wingbeat. This difference between two states of mind was very clear; and she recognized with some amazement how often just this difference, or something closely related to it, had already been touched on in her conversations with Ulrich. Involuntarily she turned to her brother, and without losing sight of the spectacle surrounding them she took a deep breath and asked: “Doesn’t it seem to you too that at a moment like this, and in comparison with it, everything else seems irrelevant?”
These few words dispersed the cloudy weight of silence and memory. For Ulrich as well had been watching the foamlike drift of blossoms floating past on their aimless journey; and because his thoughts and memories were tuned to the same note as those of his sister, no further introduction was needed to enable him to answer her unspoken thoughts. He slowly stretched his limbs and replied: “I’ve been wanting to tell you something for a long time—already in the state in which we were talking about the meaning of still lifes, and through all these days really—even if it doesn’t perfectly hit the mark: There are, to set out the contrast sharply, two possible ways of living passionately, and two kinds of passionate people. One way is to start howling with rage or misery or enthusiasm at each provocation like a child, getting rid of one’s feeling in a single brief, trivial whirl of intensity. In this case, and it’s the usual one, emotion ends up being the everyday negotiator of everyday life; and the more violent it is and the more easily excited, the more it resembles the restlessness in a tiger’s cage at feeding time, when the meat is carried past the bars, and the satiated fatigue soon afterward. Isn’t that how it is? The other way of living passionately is to restrain oneself and not accede even in the slightest degree to the action toward which every emotion tends and is driven. And in this case life becomes a rather uncanny dream in which feeling rises to the tops of the trees, to the tallest spires, to the zenith of the sky! It’s more than likely that this is what we were thinking of when we were pretending to talk about paintings and nothing but paintings.”
Agathe propped herself up, curious. “Didn’t you once say,” she asked, “that there are two fundamentally different possibilities of living, and that they’re almost like two different musical keys or tonalities of feeling? One of them was supposed to be the key of ‘worldly’ emotion, which never comes to rest or fulfillment; the other, I don’t know if you gave it a name, but it must have been a ‘mystical’ feeling that resonates constantly but never arrives at ‘complete reality’?” Although she spoke hesitantly, she had been overhasty and finished with some embarrassment.
Ulrich nevertheless recognized quite well what he seemed to have said; and he visibly found it difficult to swallow, as though he had something too hot in his mouth, and tried to smile. He said: “If that is what I meant, I’ll have to express myself all the more modestly now! I’ll just follow a well-known example and call the two kinds of passionate existence the appetitive and then, for its opposite, the nonappetitive, however unattractive that may or may not sound. Because in every human being there is a hunger, and it behaves like a ravenous beast; and there is no hunger but something that ripens tenderly, free of greed and satiety, like a grape in the autumn sun. In fact, in every feeling there is the one as well as the other.”
“In other words a vegetal, perhaps even vegetarian, disposition, beside the animal one?” There was a hint of amusement and teasing in Agathe’s question.
“Almost!” Ulrich replied. “Maybe the animalistic and the vegetative, understood as basic opposites in the sphere of desires, would be a trove for a philosopher! But would that make me want to be one? All I’m presuming to claim is what I’ve said, and particularly what I said last, that the two kinds of passionate existence have a model, perhaps even their origin, in every emotion, because every emotion contains those two aspects distinctly,” he continued. But curiously, he went on to speak only about what he called the appetitive aspect. Its drive is toward action, toward movement, toward enjoyment; by its operation, emotion transforms itself into a work, or into an idea or conviction, or into a disappointment. Those are all different ways in which emotion discharges its tension, but they can also be means for it to recharge and gain strength. For emotion changes in being expended; it wears down, disperses, and ultimately expires even as it succeeds; or it encapsulates itself in its product, transforming its vital energy into stored energy, which later yields a return of vital energy, occasionally with compound interest. “And doesn’t that explain one thing, namely that the robust activity of our worldly emotion, with its irrelevance, which you were so pleasantly sighing about, doesn’t make a great difference to us, even if it is a profound difference?”
“You may be only too right!” Agathe agreed. “My God, this entire work of the emotions, its worldly wealth, the wanting, the rejoicing, the to-do, the infidelity, all for no reason other than that emotion drives us to it! Including everything one experiences and forgets: It’s certainly beautiful like a tree full of apples of every color, but it’s also meaningless and monotonous, like everything that grows to the same plump roundness each year and then falls off the branch!”
Ulrich nodded at his sister’s answer with its breath of impetuousness and renunciation. “The world owes all its works of beauty, all progress, but also all unrest, and ultimately its meaningless cycling, to the appetitive side of the emotions!” he confirmed. “Do you know, by the way, that this term, ‘appetitive,’ is commonly used to refer to the share that our innate drives have in every emotion? Therefore,” he added, “what we have said is that it’s the drives to which the world owes its beauty and progress.”
“Its crazed agitation too,” Agathe added.
“Usually that is exactly what one says; so it seems useful to me not to disregard the other side! Because it’s at the very least unexpected that man should owe precisely his progress to something that actually belongs to the animal stage!”—He smiled as he said this. He too had now propped himself up on his elbow and turned completely toward his sister, as if he wanted to elucidate something for her: but he went on hesitantly like one who wants first to be instructed himself by the words he is searching for. “Without question,” he said, “the actively prehensile feelings of man—and you were right to speak of an animal disposition—have at their core the same few instincts the animal already has. This is quite clear in the major emotions: in hunger, anger, joy, self-will, and love, the soul’s veil barely covers the most naked wanting—!”
It appeared that he intended to continue in the same vein; but though the conversation—which had arisen from a dream of nature, the peculiarly uneventful procession of blossoms still drifting through the space of awareness—did not for a moment leave any doubt as to the siblings’ crucial question, but rather, from the first to the last word, stood under the influence of that emblem, was dominated by the enigmatic conception of “a happening without anything happening,” and was taking place in a mood of gentle affliction: even though this was how it was, in the end the conversation had led to the opposite of such an ideal and its emotional tenor when Ulrich found himself constrained to emphasize the constructive activity of strong dri
ves along with the disruption they caused. Such a clear vindication of the drives, and implicitly of the instinctual nature of man, and of active humanity altogether—for that too was implied—might of course have been part of a “Western, Occidental, Faustian sense of life,” as it is called in the language of books in contrast to any sensibility that, according to the same self-fertilizing language, is supposed to be “Oriental” or “Asian.” He remembered these pretentious vogue words. But it was not his or his sister’s intention, nor would it have been consistent with their habits, to give a specious meaning to an experience that moved them deeply by employing such fly-by-night, poorly rooted notions; rather, everything they talked about was meant as true and real, though its source might be as remote and improbable as a walk in the clouds. That was why Ulrich had taken pleasure in subtending the fine haze of feeling with an explanation on the model of the natural sciences—even if that did seem to abet the “Faustian” idea—simply because the spirit of fidelity to nature promised to exclude everything that is excessively fanciful. At least he had sketched out an approach to such an explanation. It was of course all the stranger that he had done so only for what he called the appetitive aspect of emotion, while completely ignoring the question of how he might apply an analogous idea to the nonappetitive aspect, even though originally he had certainly not given it any less importance. It was not without reason that it happened this way. Whether the psychological and biological dissection of this aspect of feeling seemed more difficult to him, or whether he merely considered such analysis a cumbersome instrument altogether—both might have been the case—what influenced him primarily was something else, of which he had already given several indications since the moment when Agathe’s deep sigh had betrayed the painful and elating contrast between the past, restless passions of life and the seemingly undying passion that was at home in the timeless stillness beneath the stream of blossoms. For—to repeat what he had already repeated in various ways—not only are two dispositions discernible in every individual emotion, through which, and in accord with their nature, that emotion can be developed to the point of passion; but there are also two kinds of people, or in every person periods of his or her destiny, that differ in that one or the other disposition predominates.