by Robert Musil
“Especially with money!” Arnheim quickly said. “Foolish people imagine it’s a pleasure to have money. It is in fact a terrible responsibility. I won’t speak of the countless lives dependent on me, for whom I represent a sort of fate; let me just mention that my grandfather started by picking up garbage in a middle-sized town in the Rhineland.”
At these words Diotima actually felt a sudden shiver of what she thought was economic imperialism, but this was an error; since she was not quite without the prejudice of her social circle, she associated garbage removal with what was called in her regional dialect the dungman, and so her friend’s courageous confession made her blush.
“With this refining process for waste,” he continued his confession, “my grandfather laid the groundwork for the influence of the Arnheims. But even my father was a self-made man, if you consider that it was he who in forty years expanded the firm into a worldwide concern. Two years at a trade school was all he had, but he can see through the most tangled world affairs at a glance, and knows everything he needs to know before anyone else does. I myself studied economics and every conceivable branch of science, all quite beyond his ken, and no one has any idea how he does it, but he never misses a detail. That is the mystery of a vigorous, simple, great, and healthy life!”
Arnheim’s voice, as he spoke of his father, took on a special, reverential tone, as though its magisterial calm had a small crack somewhere. It struck Diotima all the more because Ulrich had told her that old Arnheim was supposed to be a short, broad-shouldered fellow with a bony face and a button nose, who always wore a gaping swallowtail coat and handled his investments with the dogged circumspection of a chess player moving his pawns. Without waiting for her response, Arnheim continued after a brief pause:
“Once a business has expanded to the degree reached only by the very few I speak of, there is hardly anything in life it is not somehow involved with. It is a little cosmos. You would be amazed if you knew what seemingly quite uncommercial problems—artistic, moral, political—I sometimes have to bring up in conferring with my managing director. But the firm is no longer mushrooming the way it did in its early days, which I’d like to call its heroic days. No matter how prosperous a business firm may be, there is a mysterious limit to its growth, as there is with everything organic. Have you ever asked yourself why no animal in our time grows bigger than an elephant? You’ll find the same mystery in the history of art and in the strange relationships of the life of peoples, cultures, and epochs.”
Diotima was now ashamed of herself for having shrunk from the refining process for waste disposal, and felt confused.
“Life is full of such mysteries. There is something that defies all reason. My father is in league with it. But a man like your cousin,” Arnheim said, “an activist with a head full of ideas how things could be done differently and better, has no feeling for it.”
Diotima responded to this second reference to Ulrich with a smile suggesting that a man like her cousin had no claim to exert any influence on her. Arnheim’s even, somewhat sallow skin, which in his face was as smooth as a pear, had flushed over the cheekbones. He had succumbed to a curious urge Diotima had been arousing in him for some time now to let down his guard and confide in her totally, down to the last hidden detail. Now he locked himself up again, picked up a book from the table, read its title without taking it in, impatiently laid it down again, and said in his usual voice—it moved Diotima as deeply at this moment as the gesture of a man who, in gathering up his clothes, reveals that he has been naked—“I have wandered from the point. What I have to say to you about the General is that you could do nothing better than to realize your plan as quickly as possible and raise the level of our campaign with the help of humanistic ideas and their recognized representatives. But there’s no need to turn the General away on principle. Personally he may be a man of goodwill, and you know my principle of not missing any opportunity to bring the life of the spirit into a sphere of mere power.”
Diotima seized his hand and summed up the conversation in her goodbye: “Thank you for being so frank with me.”
Arnheim irresolutely let that gentle hand rest in his own for a moment, staring down at it thoughtfully as though there were something he had forgotten to say.
66
ALL IS NOT WELL BETWEEN ULRICH AND ARNHEIM
Her cousin often took pleasure, at that time, in reporting to Diotima his experiences as His Grace’s aide-de-camp, and always made a special point of showing her the files with all the proposals that kept pouring into Count Leinsdorf’s office.
“Almighty cousin,” he reported, with a fat folder in his hand, “I can no longer handle this alone. The whole world seems to expect improvements from us. Half of them begin with the words ‘No more of …’ and the other half with ‘Forward to …’ Here is a batch of demands starting with ‘No more Rome!’ and going all the way to ‘Forward to kitchen gardens!’ What would you want to choose?”
It was not easy to sort out all the petitions the world was addressing to Count Leinsdorf, but two kinds surpassed all the rest in volume. One blamed the troubles of the times on one particular detail and demanded its abolition; such details were nothing less than the Jews or the Church of Rome, socialism or capitalism, mechanistic thinking or the neglect of technical possibilities, miscegenation or segregation, big landed estates or big cities, overemphasis on intellect or inadequate popular education. The second group, on the other hand, pointed to a goal just ahead that, when reached, would suffice to take care of everything. These desirable goals of the second persuasion differed from the specific evils denounced by the first mostly by nothing more than the emotional plus or minus signs attached, obviously because the world is made up of both critical and affirming temperaments. So there were letters of the second category that joyfully took the negative line that it was high time to break with the ridiculous cult of the arts, because life was a far greater poet than all the scribblers. These letters demanded courtroom reports and travel books for general use; while letters on the same subject from the first category would be joyfully positive in maintaining that the mountaineer’s ecstasy upon reaching the summit outdid all the sublimities of art, philosophy, and religion, so instead of these one should support mountain-climbing clubs. In this double-jointed fashion the public demanded a slowing down of the tempo of the times just as much as a competition for the best short essay, because life was unbearably/exquisitely short, and there was a desperate need for the liberation of mankind from/by garden apartments, the emancipation of women, dancing, sports, interior decoration, and from any number of other burdens by any number of other panaceas.
Ulrich closed his folder and spoke privately.
“Mighty cousin,” he said, “it is amazing that half of them seek salvation in the future and the other half in the past. I don’t know what we are to make of that. His Grace would say that the present is without salvation.”
“Is His Grace thinking in terms of the Church?” Diotima asked.
“He has only just come up with the discovery that in the history of mankind there is no turning back voluntarily. What makes it difficult is that going forward is not much use either. Permit me to say that we’re in a very peculiar situation, unable to move either forward or backward, while the present moment is felt to be unbearable too.”
When Ulrich talked like this Diotima barricaded herself in her tall body as in a tower marked with three stars in Baedeker.
“Do you believe, dear lady, that anyone fighting for or against a cause today,” Ulrich asked, “who tomorrow by some miracle were to become the all-powerful ruler of the world, would instantly do what he had been clamoring for all his life? I am convinced he would grant himself a few days’ delay.”
Ulrich paused. Diotima suddenly turned to him without responding and asked him sternly:
“Why did you encourage the General about our campaign?”
“What general?”
“General von Stumm!”
> “Do you mean that round little general from the first big meeting? Me? I haven’t even seen him since, let alone encouraged him!”
Ulrich’s astonishment was convincing and called for an explanation on her part. Since it was impossible that a man like Arnheim should be guilty of a falsehood, there had to be a misunderstanding somewhere, and Diotima gave him the reason for her assumption.
“So I am supposed to have spoken with Arnheim about General von Stumm? I never did that either,” Ulrich assured her. “I did talk with Arnheim—just a moment…” He searched his memory, then broke into a laugh. “It would be very flattering if Arnheim attached so much importance to every word I say. We have had several discussions lately—if that’s the word for our differences—and I did once say something about a general, but not any particular one, only incidentally to illustrate a point. I maintained that a general who for strategic reasons sends his battalions to certain doom is a murderer, if you think of them as thousands of mothers’ sons, but that he immediately becomes something else seen from some other perspective, such as, for example, the necessity of sacrifice, or the insignificance of life’s short span. I used a lot of other examples. But here you must allow me to digress. For quite obvious reasons, every generation treats the life into which it is born as firmly established, except for those few things it is interested in changing. This is practical, but it’s wrong. The world can be changed in all directions at any moment, or at least in any direction it chooses; it’s in the world’s nature. Wouldn’t it be more original to try to live, not as a definite person in a definite world where only a few buttons need adjusting—what we call evolution—but rather to behave from the start as someone born to change surrounded by a world created to change, roughly like a drop of water inside a cloud? Are you annoyed with me for being so obscure again?”
“I’m not annoyed with you, but I can’t understand you.” Diotima commanded: “Do tell me the whole conversation!”
“Well, Arnheim started it. He stopped me and formally challenged me to a conversation,” Ulrich began. “‘We businessmen,’ he said to me with a rather puckish smile, quite in contrast to his usual quiet pose, but still very majestic, ‘we businessmen are not as calculating as you might think. Actually, we—I mean the leading men, of course; the small fry may spend all their time calculating—we come to regard our really successful ideas as something that defies all calculation, like the personal success of a politician, and, in the last analysis, like the artist’s too.’ Then he asked me to judge what he was going to say next with the indulgence we grant the irrational: from the first day he saw me, he confided, he’d had certain ideas about me—and it seems, gracious cousin, that you also told him many things about me, which he assured me he had not needed to hear to form his opinion, which was that strangely enough I had made a mistake in choosing a purely abstract, conceptual profession, because no matter how gifted I was in that direction, I was basically a scientist, and no matter how surprised I might be to hear it, my real talent lay in the field of action and personal effectiveness!”
“Oh really?” Diotima said.
“I quite agree with you,” Ulrich hastened to say. “There is nothing I am less fit for than being myself.”
“You are always making fun of things instead of devoting yourself to life,” Diotima said, still annoyed with him over the files.
“Arnheim maintains the opposite. I am under a compulsion to think my way to excessively thorough conclusions about life—he says.”
“You’re always sardonic and negative, always leaping into the impossible and avoiding every real decision,” Diotima maintained.
“It is simply my conviction,” Ulrich replied, “that thinking is a world of its own, and real life is another. The difference between their respective levels of development at the present time is too great. Our brain is some thousands of years old, but if it had worked out only half of everything and forgotten the other half, its true image would be our reality. All one can do is refuse intellectual participation in it.”
“Aren’t you making things much too easy for yourself?” Diotima asked, without any offensive intention, rather like a mountain looking down on a little brook at its foot. “Arnheim enjoys theorizing too, but I think he lets hardly anything pass without examining all its aspects. Don’t you feel that the point of thinking is to be a concentrated capacity for applying—”
“No,” Ulrich said.
“I’d like to hear what answer Arnheim gave you.”
“He told me that the intellect today is the helpless spectator of real developments because it is dodging the great tasks of life. He asked me to look at what subjects the arts treat, at what trivia the churches concern themselves with, at how narrow even the perspective of the scholars is—and I should consider that all the while, the earth is being literally carved up! Then he said that this was precisely what he wanted to talk with me about.”
“And what was your answer?” Diotima asked eagerly, supposing that Arnheim had been trying to appeal to her cousin’s conscience about his indifferent attitude to the problems of the Parallel Campaign.
“I told him that realizing a potential always attracts me less than the unrealized, and I mean not only the future but also the past and missed opportunities. It seems to me our history has been that every time we have fulfilled some small part of an idea, we are so pleased that we leave the much greater remainder unfinished. Magnificent institutions are usually the bungled drafts of their ideas; so, incidentally, are magnificent personalities. That’s what I answered. A difference in the angle of perspective, so to speak.”
“How argumentative of you!” said Diotima, with a sense of injury.
“He retaliated by telling me his impression of me when I resist the active life because of some unfulfilled intellectual element in the general scheme. Would you like to hear it? Like a man who lies down on the ground beside a bed that has been prepared for him. A squandering of energy, something physically immoral, is what he called it, to make sure I didn’t miss the point. He kept at me to make me see that great goals can be reached only by using the existing economic, political, and, not least, intellectual structure of power. For his own part, he considers it more ethical to make use of it than to neglect it. He really hammered away at me. He called me a man of action in a defensive stance, a cramped defensive stance. I think he has some sinister reason for wanting to gain my respect.”
“He wants to be helpful!” Diotima cried out in reproof.
“Oh no,” Ulrich said. “I may be only a little pebble, and he is a splendid, puffed-out glass ball. But I have the impression he’s afraid of me.”
Diotima made no answer. What Ulrich had said might be presumptuous, but it had occurred to her that the conversation he had just recounted was not at all what it should have been according to the impression she had got from Arnheim. It even worried her a bit. Although she thought Arnheim quite incapable of intrigue, Ulrich was gaining her confidence, and so she asked him what she should do about the case of General Stumm.
“Keep him off!” was Ulrich’s answer, and Diotima could not spare herself the reproach that she was well pleased with it.
67
DIOTIMA AND ULRICH
Diotima’s relationship to Ulrich had much improved, now that they had formed the habit of getting together regularly. They often had to drive out together to call on people, and he came to see her several times a week, often unannounced and at unconventional hours. In the circumstances, their being related was convenient for a domestic relaxation of the strict social code. Diotima did not always receive him in the drawing room armored in full panoply from chignon to skirt hem, but sometimes in slight domestic disarray, even if only a very cautious disarray. A kind of fellowship had grown up between them that lay mainly in the form of their association, but forms have their inward effects, and the emotions that create them can also be awakened by them.
Ulrich sometimes felt with great intensity that Diotima was very beauti
ful. On these occasions he saw her as a young, tall, plump heifer of good stock, surefooted and studying with a deep gaze the dry grasses she was feeding on. In other words, even then he did not look on her without the malice and irony that revenged themselves on her spiritual nobility by drawing on images from the animal kingdom and that arose from a deep annoyance less against this foolish paragon than against the school where her performances were a success. “How likable she could be,” he thought, “if she were uneducated and careless and as good-natured as a big warm female body always is when it doesn’t flatter itself that it has any special ideas!” The celebrated wife of the much-whispered-about Section Chief Tuzzi evaporated from her body, leaving it behind like a dream that, together with pillows, bed, and dreamer, turned into a white cloud all alone in the world with its tenderness.
But when Ulrich came back to earth from such a flight of the imagination, what he found before him was an ambitious middle-class mind eager to associate with aristocratic ideas. Physical kinship together with a strong difference in temperament, incidentally, is disturbing; sometimes the mere idea of kinship is enough, the consciousness of self; siblings often cannot bear each other in a way that goes far beyond anything that might be justified; it derives merely from the existence of the one throwing into doubt the existence of the other, from the slightly distorted mirror image they have of each other. Sometimes Diotima’s being about the same height as Ulrich was enough to remind him that they were related and made him feel repugnance for her body. He had transferred to her, with some differences, a function usually reserved for his boyhood friend Walter—that of humbling and irritating his pride, much as seeing ourselves again in certain unpleasant old photographs has the power to humiliate us and at the same time challenge our pride. It followed that even in the mistrust Ulrich felt for Diotima there had to be something of a bond and a drawing together, in short a touch of genuine affection, just as his old warm allegiance with Walter still survived in the form of mistrust. But since he did not like Diotima, this baffled him for a long time without his being able to get to the bottom of it. They sometimes set off on little expeditions together. With Tuzzi’s encouragement they took advantage of the fine weather, despite the unfavorable time of year, to show Arnheim “the lovely sights around Vienna”—Diotima never used any other expression but this cliché—and Ulrich always felt that he was being taken along in the role of an elderly female relation serving as chaperone because Section Chief Tuzzi could not spare the time. Later it happened that Ulrich also drove out alone with Diotima when Arnheim was out of town. For such expeditions, as well as for the immediate purposes of the campaign, Arnheim had made available as many automobiles as might be needed, since His Grace’s carriage, ornate with its coat of arms, was too well known about town and too conspicuous. These cars, incidentally, were not necessarily Arnheim’s own; the rich always can find others who are only too pleased to oblige.