by Robert Musil
Nothing in life is built, however, without the stones having to be broken out from somewhere else. To Diotima’s painful surprise some tiny, dreamy-sweet almond kernel of imagination, once the core of her existence when there was nothing else in it, and which had still been there when she decided to marry Vice-Consul Tuzzi, who looked like a leather steamer trunk with two dark eyes, had vanished in the years of success. She realized that much of what she understood by “our Old Austrian culture,” like Haydn or the Habsburgs, had once been only a boring school lesson, while to be actually living in the midst of it all now seemed enchanting and quite as heroic as the midsummer humming of bees. In time, however, it became not only monotonous but also a strain on her, and even hopeless. Diotima’s experience with her famous guests was no different from that of Count Leinsdorf with his banking connections; however much one might try to get them into accord with one’s soul, it did not succeed. One can talk about cars and X rays, of course, with a certain amount of feeling, but what else can one do about the countless other inventions and discoveries that nowadays every single day brings forth, other than to marvel at human inventiveness in general, which in the long run gets to be too tiresome!
His Grace would drop in occasionally, and spoke with a political figure or had himself introduced to a new guest. It was easy for him to enthuse about the profound reaches of culture, but when you were as closely involved with it as Diotima, the insoluble problem was not its depths but its breadth! Even questions of such immediate concern as the noble simplicity of Greece or the meaning of the Prophets dissolved, in conversation with specialists, into an incalculable multiplicity of doubts and possibilities. Diotima found that even the celebrities always talked in twos, because the time had already come when a person could talk sensibly and to the point with at most one other person—and she herself could not really find anyone at all. At this point Diotima had discovered in herself the well-known suffering caused by that familiar malady of contemporary man known as civilization. It is a frustrating condition, full of soap, radio frequencies, the arrogant sign language of mathematical and chemical formulas, economics, experimental research, and the inability of human beings to live together simply but on a high plane. And even the relationship of her own innate nobility of mind to the social nobility, whom she had to handle with great care and who brought her, with all her successes, many a disappointment, gradually came to seem to her more and more typical of an age not of culture but merely of civilization.
Civilization, then, meant everything that her mind could not control. Including, for a long time now, and first of all, her husband.
25
SUFFERINGS OF A MARRIED SOUL
In her misery she read a great deal, and discovered that she had lost something she had previously not really known she had: a soul.
What’s that? It is easy to define negatively: It is simply that which sneaks off at the mention of algebraic series.
But positively? It seems successfully to elude every effort to pin it down. There may once have been in Diotima something fresh and natural, an intuitive sensibility wrapped in the propriety she wore like a cloak threadbare from too much brushing, something she now called her soul and rediscovered in Maeterlinck’s batik-wrapped metaphysics, or in Novalis, but most of all in the ineffable wave of anemic romanticism and yearning for God that, for a while, the machine age squirted out as an expression of its spiritual and artistic misgivings about itself. It might also be that this original freshness in Diotima could be defined more precisely as a blend of quiet, tenderness, devotion, and kindness that had never found a proper path and in the foundry in which Fate casts our forms had happened to pour itself into the comical mold of her idealism. Perhaps it was imagination; perhaps an intuition of the instinctive vegetative processes at work every day beneath the covering of the body, above which the soulful expression of a beautiful woman gazes at us. Possibly it was only the coming of certain indefinable hours when she felt warm and expansive, when her sensations were keener than usual, when ambition and will were becalmed and she was seized by a hushed rapture and fullness of life while her thoughts, even the slightest ones, turned away from the surface and toward the inward depths, leaving the world’s events far away, like noise beyond a garden wall. At such times Diotima felt as if she had a direct vision of the truth within herself without having to strain for it; tender experiences that as yet bore no name raised their veils, and she felt—to cite only a few of the many descriptions of it she had found in the literature on the subject—harmonious, humane, religious, and close to that primal source that sanctifies everything arising from it and leaves sinful everything that does not. But even though it was all quite lovely to think about, Diotima could never get beyond such hints and intimations of this peculiar condition; nor did the prophetic books she relied on for help, which spoke of the same thing in the same mysterious and imprecise language. Diotima was reduced to blaming this, too, on a period of civilization that had simply filled up with rubble the access to the soul.
What she called “soul” was probably nothing more than a small amount of capital in love she had possessed at the time of her marriage. Section Chief Tuzzi was not the right business opportunity to invest in. His advantage over Diotima, at first and for a long time, was that of the older man; to this was later added the advantage of the successful man in a mysterious position, who gives his wife little insight into himself even as he looks on indulgently at the trivia that keep her busy. And apart from the tendernesses of courtship, Tuzzi had always been a practical man of common sense who never lost his balance. Even so, the well-cut assurance of his actions and his suits, the—one could say—urbanely grave aroma of his body and his beard, the guardedly firm baritone in which he spoke, all gave him an aura that excited the soul of the girl Diotima as the nearness of his master excites the retriever who lays his muzzle on the master’s knees. And just as the dog trots along behind, his feelings safe and fenced in, so Diotima, too, under such serious-minded, matter-of-fact guidance, entered upon the infinite landscape of love.
Here Section Chief Tuzzi preferred the straight paths. His daily habits were those of an ambitious worker. He rose early, either to ride or, preferably, to take an hour’s walk, which not only preserves the body’s elasticity but also represents the kind of pedantic, simple routine that, strictly adhered to, consorts perfectly with an image of responsible achievement. It also goes without saying that on those evenings when they were not invited out and had no guests he immediately withdrew to his study; for he was forced to maintain his great stock of expert information at the high level that constituted his advantage over his aristocratic colleagues and superiors. Such a life sets firm restraints, and ranges love with the other activities. Like all those whose imagination is not consumed by the erotic, Tuzzi in his bachelor days—apart from having to show himself occasionally because of his diplomatic profession in the company of friends taking out little chorus girls—had been a quiet visitor at one brothel or another, and carried the regular rhythm of this habit over into his marriage. Thus Diotima learned to know love as something violent, assaultive, and brusque that was released only once every week by an even greater power. This change in the nature of two people, which always began promptly on time, to be followed, a few minutes later, by a short exchange on those events of the day that had not come up before and then a sound sleep, and which was never mentioned in the times between, except perhaps in hints and allusions—like making a diplomatic joke about the “partie honteuse” of the body—nevertheless had unexpected and paradoxical consequences for her.
On the one hand, it was the cause of that extravagantly swollen ideality—that officious, outwardly-oriented personality—whose power of love, whose spiritual longing, reached out for all things great and noble that turned up in her environment, and that so intensely spread itself and bound itself to these that Diotima evoked the impression, so confusing to males, of a mightily blazing yet Platonic sun of love, the description of which
had made Ulrich curious to meet her. On the other hand, however, this broad rhythm of marital contact had developed, purely physiologically, into a habit that asserted itself quite independently and without connection to the loftier parts of her being, like the hunger of a farmhand whose meals are infrequent but heavy. With time, as tiny hairs began to sprout on Diotima’s upper lip and the masculine independence of the mature female woman mingled with the traits of the girl, she became aware of this split as something horrible. She loved her husband, but this was mingled with a growing revulsion, a dreadful affront to her soul, which could only be compared to what Archimedes, deeply absorbed in his mathematical problems, might have felt if the enemy soldier had not killed him but made sexual demands on him. And since her husband was not aware of this—nor would he have thought about it if he had been—and since her body always ended up betraying her to him against her will, she felt enslaved; it was a slavery that might not be considered unvirtuous but was just as tormenting as she imagined the appearance of a nervous tic or the inescapability of a vice to be. Now, this might perhaps have made Diotima slightly melancholy and even more idealistic, but unfortunately it happened just at the time that her salon began to cause her some spiritual difficulties.
Section Chief Tuzzi encouraged his wife’s intellectual endeavors because he was not slow to see how they might serve to bolster his own position, but he had never taken part in them, and it is safe to say that he did not take them seriously. For the only things this experienced man took seriously were power, duty, high social status, and, at a certain remove, reason. He even warned Diotima repeatedly against being too ambitious in her aesthetic affairs of state, because even if culture is, so to speak, the spice in the food of life, the best people did not go in for an oversalted diet. He said this quite without irony, as it was what he believed, but Diotima felt belittled. She constantly felt that her husband followed her idealistic endeavors with a hovering smile; and whether he was at home or not, and whether this smile—if indeed he did smile; she could never be quite sure—was for her personally or merely part of the facial expression of a man who for professional reasons always had to look superior, as time went on it became increasingly unbearable to her, yet she could not shake off its infamous appearance of being in the right. At times, Diotima would try to blame a materialistic age that had turned the world into an evil, purposeless game in which atheism, socialism, and positivism left no freedom for a person with a rich inner life to rise to true being; but even this was not often of much use.
Such was the situation in the Tuzzi household when the great patriotic campaign quickened the pace of events. Ever since Count Leinsdorf had established his campaign headquarters in Diotima’s house so as not to involve the aristocracy, an unspoken sense of responsibility had reigned there, for Diotima had made up her mind to prove to her husband, now or never, that her salon was no plaything. His Grace had confided in her that the great patriotic campaign needed a crowning idea, and it was her burning ambition to find it. The thought of creating something with the resources of an empire and before the attentive eyes of the world, an embodiment of culture at its greatest or, more modestly circumscribed, perhaps something that would reveal the innermost being of Austrian culture—this thought moved Diotima as if the door to her salon had suddenly sprung open and the boundless ocean were lapping at her threshold like an extension of the floor.
There is no denying that her first reaction to this vision was the sense of the momentary gaping of an illimitable void.
First impressions are so often right! Diotima felt sure that something incomparable was going to happen, and she summoned up her many ideals; she mobilized all the pathos of her schoolgirl history lessons, through which she had learned to think in terms of empires and centuries; she did absolutely everything one has to do in such a situation. But after a few weeks had passed in this fashion, she had to face the fact that no inspiration whatsoever had come her way. What Diotima felt toward her husband at this point would have been hatred, had she been at all capable of hatred—such a base impulse! Instead, she became depressed, and began to feel a “resentment against everything” such as she had never known before.
It was at this point that Dr. Arnheim arrived, accompanied by his little black servant, and shortly thereafter paid his momentous call on Diotima.
26
THE UNION OF SOUL AND ECONOMICS. THE MAN WHO CAN ACCOMPLISH THIS WANTS TO ENJOY THE BAROQUE CHARM OF OLD AUSTRIAN CULTURE. AND SO AN IDEA FOR THE PARALLEL CAMPAIGN IS BORN
Diotima never had an improper thought, but on this day there must have been all sorts of goings-on in her mind as it dwelled on the innocent little black boy, after she had sent “Rachelle” out of the room. She had willingly listened once again to the maid’s story after Ulrich had left the house of his “great cousin,” and the beautiful, ripe woman was feeling young and as if she were playing with a tinkling toy. There had once been a time when the aristocracy had kept black servants—delightful images of sleigh rides with gaily caparisoned horses, plumed lackeys, and frost-powdered trees passed through her mind—but all this picturesque aspect of high life had perished long ago. “The soul has gone out of society these days,” she thought. Something in her heart sided with the dashing outsider who still dared keep a blackamoor, this improperly aristocratic bourgeois, this intruder who put to shame the propertied heirs of tradition, as the learned Greek slave had once shamed his Roman masters. Cramped as her self-confidence was by all sorts of considerations, it took wing and gladly deserted to his colors as a sister spirit, and this feeling, so natural compared with her other feelings, even made her overlook that Dr. Arnheim—the rumors were still contradictory, nothing was yet known for certain—was presumed to be of Jewish descent; at least on his father’s side, it was reported with certainty. His mother had been dead so long that it would take some time for the facts to be established. It might even have been possible that a certain cruel Weltschmerz in Diotima’s heart was not at all interested in a denial.
She had cautiously permitted her thoughts to stray from the blackamoor and approach his master. Dr. Paul Arnheim was not only a rich man but also a man of notable intellect. His fame went beyond the fact that he was heir to world-spanning business interests; the books he had written in his leisure hours were regarded in advanced circles as extraordinary. The people who form such purely intellectual groups are above social and financial considerations, but one must not forget that precisely for that reason they are especially fascinated by a rich man who joins their ranks; furthermore, Arnheim’s pamphlets and books proclaimed nothing less than the merger of soul and economics, or of ideas and power. The sensitive minds of the time, those with the finest antennae for what was in the wind, spread the report that he combined these normally opposite poles in his own person, and they encouraged the rumor that here was a man for the times, who might be called on one day to guide for the better the destinies of the German Reich and perhaps—who could tell?—even the world. For there had long been a widespread feeling that the principles and methods of old-style politics and diplomacy were steering Europe right into the ditch, and besides, the period of turning away from specialists had already begun.
Diotima’s condition, too, could have been expressed as rebellion against the thinking of the older school of diplomacy, which is why she instantly grasped the marvelous similarity between her own position and that of this brilliant outsider. Besides, the famous man had called on her at the first possible moment; her house was the first by far to receive this mark of distinction, and his letter of introduction from a mutual woman friend mentioned the venerable culture of the Habsburg capital and its people, which this hardworking man hoped to enjoy between unavoidable business engagements. Diotima felt singled out like a writer who is being translated into the language of a foreign country for the first time, when she learned from the letter that this renowned foreigner knew the reputation of her intellect. She noted that he did not look in the least Jewish but was a noble-looki
ng, reserved man of the classic-Phoenician type. Arnheim, too, was delighted to find in Diotima not only a woman who had read his books but who, as a classical beauty on the plump side, corresponded to his Hellenic ideal of beauty, with a bit more flesh on her, perhaps, to soften those strict classical lines. It could not long remain concealed from Diotima that the impression she was able to make in a twenty-minute conversation on a man of real worldwide connections was enough to completely dispel all those doubts through which her own husband, caught up as he was in his rather dated diplomatic ways, had insulted her importance.