by Robert Musil
And truly, that there can be such changes in civilized people, that we actually can produce such effects!—isn’t this the question and the amazement in the bold, glazed eyes of all those who dock at the lonely island of lust, where they are murderer, destiny, and God, and experience the maximum irrationality and adventurousness in the greatest comfort?
The repugnance he came to acquire with time against this kind of love eventually extended to his own body too, which had always encouraged these misbegotten affairs by giving women the illusion of a reliable virility, for which Ulrich was too cerebral and too conflicted. At times he was as downright jealous of his own appearance as if it were a rival using cheap tricks against him—in which a contradiction emerged that is also present in others who are not aware of it. For he was the one who kept his body trim by exercising it, giving it the shape, expression, and readiness for action that influence the mind no less than an ever-smiling or an ever-solemn face can. Oddly enough, the majority of people have either a neglected body, formed and deformed by chance circumstances, which seems to have almost no relation at all to their mind and character, or else a body disguised by the mask of sports, giving it the look of those hours when it is on vacation from itself. Those are the hours when a person spins out the daydream of his appearance, casually picked up from the magazines of the smart, great world. All those bronzed and muscular tennis players, horsemen, and race-car drivers, who look like world-record holders though usually they are merely competent; those ladies all dressed up or all undressed; they are all daydreamers, differing from common daydreamers only in that their dream doesn’t stay in their brain but comes out into the open air as a projection of the mass soul—physically, dramatically, and (as one might say in the idiom of more-than-dubious occult phenomena) ideoplastically. But in common with the usual spinners of fantasies they have a certain shallowness of the dream, both as to its content and its nearness to the waking state. The problem of the integral physiognomy still eludes us, even though we have learned to draw conclusions about man’s nature, sometimes even amazingly correct conclusions, from his handwriting, voice, sleeping position, and God knows what else; yet for the body as a whole we have only the fashionable models on which it forms itself, or at most a kind of nature-cure philosophy.
But is this the body of our mind, our ideas, intimations, plans, or—the pretty ones included—the body of our follies? That Ulrich had loved those follies and still to some extent had them did not prevent him from feeling not at home in the body they had created.
69
DIOTIMA AND ULRICH, CONTINUED
And it was above all Diotima who confirmed in a new way his sense that the surface and depths of his person were not one and the same. This came through clearly for him on these trips with her, which sometimes felt like drives through moonlight, when the young woman’s beauty detached itself from her person altogether and momentarily veiled his eyes like gossamer spun by a dream. He knew, of course, that Diotima compared everything he said with the conventional wisdom on the subject—the higher conventional wisdom, to be sure—and was pleased that she found it “immature,” so that he constantly sat there as if he were before the wrong end of a telescope trained on him. He became smaller and smaller, and believed when he spoke with her (or at least was not far from believing) in his role of devil’s advocate and materialist that he could hear in his own words conversations from his last terms at school, when he and his classmates had idolized all the villains and monsters of world history because the teachers had presented them in tones of idealistic abhorrence. And when Diotima looked at him indignantly he grew smaller still, regressing from the morality of heroism and the drive for expansion to the defiant lies, callousness, and wavering excesses of adolescence—only quite figuratively, of course, as one can detect in a gesture or a word some distant similarity with gestures and words one has long since discarded, or only dreamed, or seen and disliked in others. In any event, this all resonated in his delight in shocking Diotima. The mind of this woman, who would have been so beautiful without her mind, aroused an inhuman feeling in him, perhaps a fear of mind itself, an aversion for all great things, a feeling that was quite faint, hardly detectable—and perhaps feeling was a much too pretentious expression for something that was but a mere breath. But if one magnified it into words, they would have gone something like this: at times he saw not only this woman’s idealism but all the idealism in the world, in all its extent and ramifications, appear bodily in the form of an image hovering just above that Grecian head—it only just missed being the horns of the Devil! Then Ulrich grew even smaller still and—again figuratively speaking—regressed to the first hotly moral state of childhood, in whose eyes temptation and terror lie as in the stare of a gazelle. The tender emotions of that age can in a single moment of yielding cause the whole, still-tiny world to burst into flames, since they have neither an aim nor the ability to make anything happen, but are a completely boundless fire. It was quite unlike him, and yet in Diotima’s company Ulrich ended up longing for these childhood feelings, though he could barely imagine them because they have so little in common with the conditions under which an adult lives.
At one point he very nearly confessed it to her. On one of their trips they had left the car to walk into a small valley that was like a river delta of meadows with steep forested banks and that formed a crooked triangle with a winding brook in its center stilled by a light frost. The slopes had been partly cleared of timber, with a few trees left standing like feather dusters stuck in the bare hillsides and hilltops. This scene had tempted them to take a walk. It was one of those wistful, snowless days that seem in the middle of winter like a faded, no-longer-fashionable summer gown. Diotima abruptly asked her cousin: “Why does Arnheim call you an activist? He says that you’re always full of ideas how to do things differently and better.” She had suddenly remembered that her talk with Arnheim about Ulrich and the General had ended inconclusively.
“I don’t understand,” she went on. “It always seems to me that you hardly ever mean anything seriously. But I must ask you, because we are involved together in such a responsible task. Do you remember our last conversation? There was something you said: you maintained that nobody, if he had the necessary power, would do what he wants to do. Now I would like to know what you meant by that. Wasn’t it a horrible idea?”
Ulrich did not reply at once. And during this silence, after she had spoken as impudently as possible, she realized how much she had been preoccupied with the forbidden question of whether Arnheim and she would do what each of them secretly wanted. She suddenly thought she had given herself away to Ulrich. She blushed, tried to stop herself, blushed even more, and did her best to gaze out over the valley, away from him, with the most unconcerned expression she could muster.
Ulrich had observed the process. “I’m very much afraid that the only reason Arnheim, as you say, calls me an activist is that he overestimates my influence with the Tuzzi family,” he answered. “You know yourself how little attention you pay to what I say. But now that you have asked me, I realize what my influence on you ought to be. May I tell you without your instantly criticizing me again?”
Diotima nodded silently as a sign of assent and tried to pull herself together behind an appearance of absentmindedness.
“So I said,” Ulrich began, “that nobody would turn his dreams into realities even if he could. You remember our file folders full of suggestions? And now I ask you: Is there anyone who would not be embarrassed if something he had passionately demanded all his life were suddenly to come true? If, for instance, the Kingdom of God were suddenly to burst on the Catholics, or the classless society of the future on the socialists? But perhaps this doesn’t prove anything. We get used to demanding things and aren’t quite ready to have our wishes realized; it’s only natural, many people would say. Let me go on: Music must be the most important thing in the world to a musician, and painting to a painter, and probably even the building of cement houses to a
cement specialist. Do you think that this will induce him to imagine God as a specialist in reinforced concrete and that the others will prefer a painted world, or a world blown on the bugle, to the real one? You’ll call it a silly question, but what makes it serious is that we are expected to insist on just this kind of silliness!
“Now please don’t think,” he said, turning to her in all seriousness, “that all I mean by this is that everyone wants what is hard to get, and despises the attainable. What I mean is this: Within reality there is a senseless craving for unreality.”
He had inconsiderately led Diotima a long way into the little valley; the snow trickling down the slopes was perhaps what made the ground wetter the higher they went, and they had to hop from one small clump of grass to the next, which punctuated their talk and forced Ulrich to go on with it by fits and starts. There were, as a result, so many obvious objections to what he was saying that Diotima did not know where to begin. She had got her feet wet and stood still on a grassy mound, led astray and anxious, clutching at her skirts.
Ulrich turned back and laughed. “You’ve started something exceedingly dangerous, great cousin. People are vastly relieved to be left in a position where they can’t put their ideas into practice.”
“And what would you do,” Diotima asked irritably, “if you could rule the world for a day?”
“I suppose I would have no choice but to abolish reality.”
“I’d love to know how you’d go about it.”
“I don’t know either. I hardly know what I mean by it. We wildly overestimate the present, the sense of the present, the here and now; like you and me being here in this valley, as if we’d been put in a basket and the lid of the present had fallen on it. We make too much of it. We’ll remember it. Even a year from now we may be able to describe how we were standing here. But what really moves us—me anyway—is always—putting it cautiously; I don’t want to look for an explanation or a name for it—opposed in a sense to this way of experiencing things. It is displaced by so much here and now, so much Present. So it can’t become the present in its turn.”
In the narrow valley Ulrich’s words sounded loud and confused. Diotima suddenly felt uneasy and moved to get back to the car. But Ulrich made her stay and look at the landscape.
“Some thousands of years ago this was a glacier,” he explained. “Even the earth isn’t altogether what it’s pretending to be for the moment. This well-rounded character is a hysteric. Today it is acting the good middle-class mother feeding her children. Back then the world was frigid and icy, like a spiteful girl. Several thousand years before that it luxuriated in hot fern forests, sultry swamps, and demonic beasts. We can’t say that it has evolved toward perfection, nor what its true condition is. And the same goes for its daughter, mankind. Imagine the clothes in which people have stood here through the ages, right where we are standing now. Expressed in terms of the madhouse, it suggests long-standing obsessions with suddenly erupting manic ideas; after these run their course, a new concept of life is there. So you see, reality does away with itself!
“There’s something else I’d like to tell you”—Ulrich made a fresh start after a while. “That sense of having firm ground underfoot and a firm skin all around, which appears so natural to most people, is not very strongly developed in me. Think back to how you were as a child; all gentle glow. And then a teenager, lips burning with longing. Something in me rebels against the idea that so-called mature adulthood is the peak of such a development. In a sense it is, and in a sense it isn’t. If I were a myrmeleonina, the ant predator that resembles a dragonfly, I’d be horrified to think that the year before I had been the squat gray myrmeleon, the ant lion, running backward and living at the edge of the forest, dug in at the bottom of a funnel-shaped hole in the sand, catching ants by the waist with invisible pincers after first exhausting them by somehow bombarding them with grains of sand. There are times when the thought of my youth horrifies me in quite the same way, even though I may have been a dragonfly then and may be a monster now.”
He did not really know what he was aiming at. With his myrmeleon and myrmeleonina he had only been aping Arnheim’s cultured omniscience a little. But he had it on the tip of his tongue to say: “Please, won’t you make love to me, just to be nice? We are kindred, not wholly separate, certainly not one; in any case, the polar opposite of a dignified and formal relationship.”
But Ulrich was mistaken. Diotima was the kind of person who is satisfied with herself and therefore regards each age she passes through as a step on a stairway leading upward from below. She had no way of understanding what Ulrich was talking about, especially as she did not know what he had left unsaid. But they had meanwhile returned to the car, so she felt serene again, taking in what he was saying as his usual kind of chatter, somewhere between amusing and irritating, commanding no more of her attention than at most the corner of an eye. At this moment he really had no influence whatsoever on her except that of bringing her down to earth. A filmy cloud of shyness, risen from some hidden corner of her heart, had dissipated in a dry void. For the first time, perhaps, she had a hard, clear glimpse of the fact that her relations with Arnheim would force her, sooner or later, to make a choice that could change her whole life. One could not say that she was happy about this just now, but it had the weighty presence of a real mountain range. A weak moment had passed. That “not to do what one wants to do” had had for an instant an absurd glow she no longer understood.
“Arnheim is altogether the opposite of me. He is always overestimating the happiness with which time and space rendezvous with him to form the present moment,” Ulrich sighed with a smile, moved to bring what he had been saying to an orderly conclusion. But he said nothing further about childhood, so it never came to the point where Diotima would have found out that he had a tender side.
70
CLARISSE VISITS ULRICH TO TELL HIM A STORY
Redecorating old castles was the specialty of the well-known painter van Helmond, whose masterpiece was his daughter Clarisse, and one day she unexpectedly walked in on Ulrich.
“Papa sends me,” she informed him, “to find out whether you couldn’t use your splendid aristocratic connections just a little for him too.” She eyed the room with interest, threw herself into one chair and her hat onto another. Then she held out her hand to Ulrich.
“Your Papa overestimates me,” he started to say, but she cut him short.
“Nonsense. You know perfectly well the old man always needs money. Business simply isn’t what it used to be!” She laughed. “Elegant place you’ve got here. Nice!” She scrutinized her surroundings again and then looked at Ulrich. Her whole bearing had something of the endearing shyness of a pet dog whose bad conscience makes its skin twitch.
“Anyway, if you can do it, you will. If not, then you won’t. Of course, I promised him you would. But I came for another reason. His asking me to see you put an idea into my head. It’s about a certain problem in my family. I’d like to hear what you think.” Her mouth and eyes hesitated and flickered for an instant; then she took her leap over the initial hurdle. “Would the term ‘beauty doctor’ suggest anything to you? A painter is a beauty doctor.”
Ulrich understood; he knew her parents’ house.
“Dark, distinguished, splendid, luxurious, upholstered, pennanted, and tasseled,” she went on. “Papa is a painter, a painter is a kind of beauty doctor, and visiting our house has always been regarded as quite the thing socially, like going to the newest spa. You understand what I’m talking about. And one of Papa’s main sources of income has always been decorating palaces and big country houses. Do you know the Pachhofens?”
Ulrich was not acquainted with this patrician family except for a Fräulein Pachhofen he had met once, years ago, in Clarisse’s company.
“She was my friend,” Clarisse said. “She was seventeen, and I was fifteen. Papa was supposed to renovate the castle and do the interiors. The Pachhofen place, of course. We were all invited.
Walter too; it was the first time he came along with us. And Meingast.”
“Meingast?” Ulrich did not know who Meingast was.
“But of course you know him; Meingast, who went to Switzerland later on. He wasn’t yet a philosopher in those days, but a rooster in every family with daughters.”
“I’ve never met him,” Ulrich said. “But now I do know who he is.”
“All right, then.” Clarisse did some strenuous mental arithmetic. “Just a minute! Walter was then twenty-three and Meingast somewhat older. Walter was a great secret admirer of Papa’s, and it was the first time he’d ever been invited to stay at a castle. Papa often had an air of wearing inner royal robes. I think at first Walter was more in love with Papa than with me. And Lucy—”
“Slow down, Clarisse, for heaven’s sake!” Ulrich pleaded. “I seem to have lost the connection.”
“Lucy,” Clarisse said, “is Lucy Pachhofen, of course, the daughter of the Pachhofens with whom we were staying. Now do you understand? All right, then, you understand. Papa wrapped Lucy in velvet or brocade with a long train and posed her on one of her horses; she imagined he must be a Titian or Tintoretto. They were absolutely mad about each other.”
“Papa about Lucy, and Walter about Papa?”
“Give me a chance, will you? At that time, there was Impressionism. Papa was still painting old-fashioned/musical, the way he still does today, brown gravy and peacocks’ tails. But Walter was all for open air, the clean lines of English functionalism, the new and sincere. In his heart, Papa found him as insufferable as a Protestant sermon; he couldn’t stand Meingast either, but he had two daughters to marry off; he had always spent more than he made, so he was long-suffering with the souls of the two young men. Walter, for his part, secretly loved Papa, as I said, but publicly he had to criticize him because of the new art movements, and Lucy never understood anything about art at all, but she was afraid of making a fool of herself in front of Walter, and she was afraid that Walter might turn out to be right, in which case Papa would only be a ridiculous old man. Do you get the picture?”