The Man Without Qualities: Picador Classic

by Robert Musil

  She took quiet satisfaction in repeating that conversation to herself. It had barely begun when Arnheim was already saying that he had come to this ancient city only to recuperate a little, under the baroque spell of the Old Austrian culture, from the calculations, materialism, and bleak rationalism in which a civilized man’s busy working life was spent nowadays.

  There is such a blithe soulfulness in this city, Diotima had answered, as she was pleased to recall.

  “Yes,” he had said, “we no longer have any inner voices. We know too much these days; reason tyrannizes our lives.”

  To which she had replied: “I like the company of women. They don’t know anything and are unfragmented.”

  And Arnheim had said: “Nevertheless, a beautiful woman understands far more than a man, who, for all his logic and psychology, knows nothing at all of life.”

  At which point she had told him that a problem similar to that of freeing the soul from civilization, only on a monumental and national scale, was occupying influential circles here.

  “We must—” she had said, and Arnheim interrupted with “That is quite wonderful!”—“bring new ideas, or rather, if I may be permitted to say so”—here he gave a faint sigh—“bring ideas for the very first time into the domains of power.” And she had gone on: Committees drawn from all sectors of the population were to be set up in order to ascertain what these ideas should be.

  But just at this point Arnheim had said something most important, and in such a tone of warm friendship and respect that the warning left a deep mark on Diotima’s mind.

  It would not be easy, he had explained, to accomplish anything significant in this way. No democracy of committees but only strong individual personalities, with experience in both reality and the realm of ideas, would be able to direct such a campaign!

  Up to this point, Diotima had gone over the conversation in her mind word for word, but here it dissolved into splendor—she could no longer remember what she had answered. A vague, thrilling feeling of joy and expectancy had been lifting her higher and higher all this time; now her mind resembled a small, brightly colored child’s balloon that had broken loose and, shining gloriously, was floating upward toward the sun. And in the next instant it burst.

  Thus was an idea it had lacked hitherto born to the great Parallel Campaign.

  27

  NATURE AND SUBSTANCE OF A GREAT IDEA

  It would be easy to say what this idea consisted of, but no one could possibly describe its significance. For what distinguishes a great, stirring idea from an ordinary one, possibly even from an incredibly ordinary and mistaken one, is that it exists in a kind of molten state through which the self enters an infinite expanse and, inversely, the expanse of the universe enters the self, so that it becomes impossible to differentiate between what belongs to the self and what belongs to the infinite. This is why great, stirring ideas consist of a body, which like the human body is compact yet frail, and of an immortal soul, which constitutes its meaning but is not compact; on the contrary, it dissolves into thin air at every attempt to grab hold of it in cold words.

  After this preamble it must be said that Diotima’s great idea amounted to nothing more than that the Prussian, Arnheim, was the man to assume the spiritual leadership of the great Austrian patriotic endeavor, even though this Parallel Campaign contained a barb of jealousy aimed at Prussia-Germany. But this was only the dead verbal body of the idea, and whoever finds it incomprehensible or absurd is kicking a corpse. As concerns the soul of this idea, it was chaste and proper, and in any case her decision contained, so to speak, a codicil for Ulrich. She did not know that her cousin had also made an impression on her, although on a far deeper level than Arnheim, and overshadowed by the impression Arnheim had made; had she realized this, she would probably have despised herself for it. But she had instinctively guarded herself against such knowledge by declaring before her conscious mind that Ulrich was “immature,” even though he was older than she was. She took the position that she felt sorry for him, which facilitated her conviction that it was a duty to choose Arnheim instead of Ulrich for the responsibilities of leading the campaign. On the other hand, after she had given birth to this resolution, feminine logic dictated that the slighted party now needed and deserved her help. If he felt shortchanged somehow, there was no better way to make up for it than by taking part in the great campaign, where he would have occasion to be much in her and Arnheim’s company. So Diotima decided on that, too, but only as one tucks in a loose end.

  28

  A CHAPTER THAT MAY BE SKIPPED BY ANYONE NOT PARTICULARLY IMPRESSED BY THINKING AS AN OCCUPATION

  Ulrich, meanwhile, was at home, sitting at his desk, working. He had got out the research paper he had interrupted in the middle weeks ago when he had decided to return from abroad; he did not intend to finish it, but it diverted him to see that he could still do that sort of thing. The weather was fine, but in the last few days he had gone out only on brief errands; he had not even set foot in the garden. He had drawn the curtains and was working in the subdued light like an acrobat in a dimly lit circus arena rehearsing dangerous new somersaults for a panel of experts before the public has been let in. The precision, vigor, and sureness of this mode of thinking, which has no equal anywhere in life, filled him with something like melancholy.

  He now pushed back the sheets of paper covered with symbols and formulas, the last thing he had written down being an equation for the state of water as a physical example to illustrate the application of a new mathematical process; but his thoughts must have strayed a while before.

  “Wasn’t I telling Clarisse something about water?” he mused, but could not recall the particulars. But it didn’t really matter, and his thoughts roamed idly.

  Unfortunately, nothing is so hard to achieve as a literary representation of a man thinking. When someone asked a great scientist how he managed to come up with so much that was new, he replied: “Because I never stop thinking about it.” And it is surely safe to say that unexpected insights turn up for no other reason than that they are expected. They are in no small part a success of character, emotional stability, unflagging ambition, and unremitting work. What a bore such constancy must be! Looking at it another way, the solution of an intellectual problem comes about not very differently from a dog with a stick in his mouth trying to get through a narrow door; he will turn his head left and right until the stick slips through. We do much the same thing, but with the difference that we don’t make indiscriminate attempts but already know from experience approximately how it’s done. And if a clever fellow naturally has far more skill and experience with these twistings and turnings than a dim one, the slipping-through takes the clever fellow just as much by surprise; it is suddenly there, and one perceptibly feels slightly disconcerted because one’s ideas seem to have come of their own accord instead of waiting for their creator. This disconcerted feeling is nowadays called intuition by many people who would formerly, believing that it must be regarded as something suprapersonal, have called it inspiration; but it is only something impersonal, namely the affinity and coherence of the things themselves, meeting inside a head.

  The better the head, the less evident its presence in this process. As long as the process of thinking is in motion it is a quite wretched state, as if all the brain’s convolutions were suffering from colic; and when it is finished it no longer has the form of the thinking process as one experiences it but already that of what has been thought, which is regrettably impersonal, for the thought then faces outward and is dressed for communication to the world. When a man is in the process of thinking, there is no way to catch the moment between the personal and the impersonal, and this is manifestly why thinking is such an embarrassment for writers that they gladly avoid it.

  But the man without qualities was now thinking. One may draw the conclusion from this that it was, at least in part, not a personal affair. But then what is it? World in, and world out; aspects of world falling into place i
nside a head. Nothing of any importance had occurred to him; after he had thought about water as an example, nothing had occurred to him except that water is something three times the size of the land, even counting only what everyone recognizes as water: rivers, seas, lakes, springs. It was long thought to be akin to air. The great Newton thought so, and yet most of his other ideas are still as up-to-date as if they had been thought today. The Greeks thought that the world and life had arisen from water. It was a god: Okeanos. Later, water sprites, elves, mermaids, and nymphs were invented. Temples and oracles were built by the water’s edge. The cathedrals of Hildesheim, Paderborn, and Bremen were all built over springs, and behold, are these cathedrals not still standing today? And isn’t water still used for baptism? And aren’t there devotees of water and apostles of natural healing, whose souls are in such oddly sepulchral health? So there was a place in the world like a blurred spot or grass trodden flat. And of course the man without qualities also had modern scientific concepts in his head, whether he happened to be thinking of them or not. According to them water is a colorless liquid, blue only in thick layers, odorless and tasteless, as you recited over and over in school until you can never forget it, although physiologically it also contains bacteria, vegetable matter, air, iron, calcium sulfate, and calcium bicarbonate, and although physically this archetype of liquids is not basically a liquid at all but, depending on circumstances, a solid, a liquid, or a gas. Ultimately it all dissolves into systems of formulas, all somehow interlinked, and there were only a few dozen people in the whole wide world who thought alike about even so simple a thing as water; all the rest talk about it in languages that belong somewhere between today and some thousands of years ago. So one must say that as soon as a man begins to reflect even a little, he falls into disorderly company!

  Now Ulrich remembered that he had, in fact, told all this to Clarisse, who was no better educated than a little animal; but notwithstanding the superstitions she was made of, one had a vague feeling of oneness with her. The thought pricked him like a hot needle.

  He was annoyed with himself.

  The well-known ability of thought as recognized by doctors to dissolve and dispel those deep-raging, morbidly tangled and matted conflicts generated in the dank regions of the self apparently rests on nothing other than its social and worldly nature, which links the individual creature to other people and objects. But unfortunately the healing power of thought seems to be the same faculty that diminishes the personal sense of experience. A casual reference to a hair on a nose weighs more than the most important concept, and acts, feelings, and sensations, when reported in words, can make one feel one has been present at a more or less notable personal event, however ordinary and impersonal the acts, feelings, and sensations may be.

  “It’s idiotic,” Ulrich thought, “but that’s how it is.” It made him think of that dumb but deep, exciting sensation, touching immediately on the self, when one sniffs one’s own skin. He stood up and pulled the curtains back from the window.

  The bark of the trees was still moist from the morning. On the street outside a violet haze of gasoline fumes hovered. The sun shone through it, and people were moving along briskly. It was an asphalt spring, a seasonless spring day in autumn such as only cities can conjure up.

  29

  EXPLANATION AND DISRUPTIONS OF A NORMAL STATE OF AWARENESS

  Ulrich and Bonadea had agreed on a signal to let her know that he was at home alone. He was always alone, but he gave no signal. He must have expected for some time that Bonadea, hatted and veiled, would show up unbidden. For Bonadea was madly jealous. When she came to see a man—even if it was only to tell him how much she despised him—she always arrived full of inner weakness, what with the impressions of the street and the glances of the men she passed on the way still rocking in her like a faint seasickness. But when the man sensed her weakness and made straight for her body, even though he had callously neglected her for so long, she was hurt, picked a quarrel, delayed with reproachful remarks what she herself could hardly bear to wait for any longer, and had the air of a duck shot through the wings that has fallen into the sea of love and is trying to save itself by swimming.

  And all of a sudden she really was sitting here, crying and feeling mistreated.

  At such moments when she was angry at her lover, she passionately begged her husband’s forgiveness for her lapses. In accordance with a good old rule of unfaithful women, which they apply so as not to betray themselves by an untimely slip of the tongue, she had told her husband about the interesting scholar she sometimes ran into on her visits to a woman friend, although she was not inviting him over because he was too spoiled socially to come from his house to hers and she did not find him interesting enough to invite anyway. The half-truth in this story made it an easier lie, and the other half she used as a grievance against her lover.

  How was she supposed to explain to her husband, she asked Ulrich, why she was suddenly visiting her friend less and less? How could she make him understand such fluctuations in her feelings? She cared about the truth because she cared about all ideals, but Ulrich was dishonoring her by forcing her to deviate further from them than was necessary!

  She put on a passionate scene, and when it was over, reproaches, avowals, and kisses flooded the ensuing vacuum. When these, too, were over, nothing had happened; the chitchat gushed back to fill the void, and time blew little bubbles like a glass of stale water.

  “How much more beautiful she is when she goes wild,” Ulrich thought, “but how mechanically it all finished again.” The sight of her had excited him and enticed him to make love to her, but now that it was done he felt again how little it had to do with him personally. Another abundantly clear demonstration of how a healthy man can be turned with incredible speed into a frothing lunatic. But this erotic transformation of the consciousness seemed only a special instance of something much more general: for an evening at the theater, a concert, a church service, all such manifestations of the inner life today are similar, quickly dissolving islands of a second state of consciousness that is sometimes interpolated into the ordinary one.

  “Only a little while ago,” he thought, “I was still working, and before that I was on the street and bought some paper. I said hello to a man I know from the Physics Society, a man with whom I had a serious talk not so long ago. And now, if only Bonadea would hurry up a little, I could look something up in those books I can see from here through the crack in the door. Yet in between we flew through a cloud of insanity, and it is just as uncanny how solid experiences close over this vanishing gap again and assert themselves in all their tenacity.”

  But Bonadea did not hurry up, and Ulrich was forced to think of something else. His boyhood friend Walter, little Clarisse’s husband, who had become so odd, had once said of him: “Ulrich always puts tremendous energy into doing only whatever he considers unnecessary.” He happened to remember it at this moment and thought, “The same thing could be said about all of us nowadays.” He remembered quite well! A wooden balcony ran all around the country house; Ulrich was the guest of Clarisse’s parents; it was a few days before the wedding, and Walter was jealous of him. It was amazing how jealous Walter could be. Ulrich was standing outside in the sunshine when Clarisse and Walter came into the room that lay behind the balcony. He overheard their conversation without trying to keep out of sight. All he remembered of it now was that one sentence. And the scene: the shadowy depths of the room hung like a wrinkled, slightly open pouch on the sunny glare of the outside wall. In the folds of this pouch Walter and Clarisse appeared. Walter’s face was painfully drawn and looked as if it had long yellow teeth. Or one could also say that a pair of long yellow teeth lay in a jeweler’s box lined with black velvet and that these two people stood spookily by. The jealousy was nonsense, of course; Ulrich did not desire his friends’ wives. But Walter had always had a quite special ability to experience intensely. He never got what he was after because he was so swamped by his feelings. He seem
ed to have a built-in, highly melodious amplifier of the minor joys and miseries of life. He was always paying out emotional small change in gold and silver, while Ulrich operated on a larger scale, with, so to speak, intellectual checks made out for vast sums—but it was only paper, after all. When Ulrich visualized Walter at his most characteristic, he saw him reclining at a forest’s edge. He was wearing shorts and, oddly enough, black socks. Walter did not have a man’s legs, neither the strong muscular kind nor the skinny sinewy kind, but the legs of a girl; a not particularly attractive girl with soft, plain legs. With his hands behind his head he gazed at the landscape, and heaven forbid he should be disturbed. Ulrich did not remember actually having seen Walter like this on any specified occasion which stamped itself on his mind; it was more of an image that slowly hardened over a decade and a half, like a great seal. And the memory that Walter had been jealous of him at that time was somehow pleasantly stimulating. It had all happened at that time of life when one still takes delight in oneself. It occurred to Ulrich that he had now been to see them several times, “and Walter hasn’t been to see me once. But what of it? I might just go out there again this evening.”

  He planned, after Bonadea at last finished dressing and left, to send them word of his coming. It was not advisable to do that sort of thing in her presence because of the tedious cross-examination that would inevitably follow.

  And since thoughts come and go quickly and Bonadea was far from finished, he had yet another idea. This time it was a little theory, simple, illuminating, and time-killing. “A young man with an active mind,” Ulrich reflected, probably still thinking of his boyhood friend Walter, “is constantly sending out ideas in every direction. But only those that find a resonance in his environment will be reflected back to him and consolidate, while all the other dispatches are scattered in space and lost!” Ulrich took it as a matter of course that a man who has intellect has all kinds of intellect, so that intellect is more original than qualities. He himself was a man of many contradictions and supposed that all the qualities that have ever manifested themselves in human beings lie close together in every man’s mind, if he has a mind at all. This may not be quite right, but what we know about the origin of good and evil suggests that while everyone has a mind of a certain size, he can still probably wear a great variety of clothing in that size, if fate so determines. And so Ulrich felt that what he had just thought was not entirely without significance. For if, in the course of time, commonplace and impersonal ideas are automatically reinforced while unusual ideas fade away, so that almost everyone, with a mechanical certainty, is bound to become increasingly mediocre, this explains why, despite the thousandfold possibilities available to everyone, the average human being is in fact average. And it also explains why even among those privileged persons who make a place for themselves and achieve recognition there will be found a certain mixture of about 51 percent depth and 49 percent shallowness, which is the most successful of all. Ulrich had perceived this for a long time as so intricately senseless and unbearably sad that he would have gladly gone on thinking about it.