by Robert Musil
“I don’t know what it is,” he said. “Maybe the reason I don’t understand is that a fellow’s mind gets so complicated nowadays, but even though I admire your cousin myself as if—I must say, as if I had a great lump sticking in my throat—still, it’s a relief to me that she’s in love with Arnheim.”
“What? Are you sure there’s something going on between them?” Ulrich burst out, although it should not really have been any concern of his; Stumm goggled at him mistrustfully with his shortsighted eyes, still misty with emotion, and snapped on his pincenez.
“I never said he’d had her,” was his straight, soldierly retort. He put his pincenez back in his pocket and added in quite unsoldierly fashion: “But I wouldn’t mind if he had either; devil take me, I’ve told you already that a man’s mind gets complicated in that company. I’m certainly no lover boy, but when I imagine the tenderness Diotima could offer this man I feel a tenderness for him myself, and vice versa, as if the kisses he gave her were my own.”
“He gives her kisses?”
“How do I know? I don’t go around spying on them. I only mean, if he did. I don’t really know what I mean. But I did see him once catching her hand, when they thought nobody was looking, and then for a while they were so quiet together, the kind of stillness you get on the command ‘All helmets off, kneel for prayer!’ and then she whispered something, it sounded like an appeal, and he answered something. I remember what they said word for word, because it was so hard to understand; what she said was: ‘If only we could find the right idea to save us,’ and he said: ‘Only a pure, unflawed idea of love can save us.’ He seemed to have taken her words too personally, because she must have meant the saving idea she needs for her great campaign—What are you laughing at? But feel free to laugh; I’ve always had my own funny ways, I guess, and now I’ve made up my mind to help her. There must be something one can do; there are so many ideas floating around, one of them will have to be the saving idea in the end. But I’ll need you to give me a hand!”
“My dear General,” Ulrich said, “I can only tell you again that you take thinking too seriously. But since you care so much, I’ll try to explain as best I can how the civilian mind works.” By now they had lighted their cigars, and he began: “First of all, General, you’re on the wrong track. The civilian world has no more of a monopoly on the spiritual life than the military has on the physical side, as you think. If anything, it’s exactly the other way around. The mind stands for order, and where will you find more order than in the army, where every collar is exactly four centimeters high, the number of buttons on your tunic never varies, and even on nights made for dreams the beds are lined up straight along the wall? The deployment of a squadron in battle formation, the lining up of a regiment, the proper position of bridle and bit—if all these are not significant spiritual achievements, there is no such thing as spiritual achievement!”
“Go teach your grandmother to suck eggs,” the General growled warily, uncertain whether to mistrust his ears or the wine.
“Just a minute,” Ulrich persisted. “Science is possible only where situations repeat themselves, or where you have some control over them, and where do you have more repetition and control than in the army? A cube would not be a cube if it were not just as rectangular at nine o’clock as at seven. The same kind of rules work for keeping the planets in orbit as in ballistics. We’d have no way of understanding or judging anything if things flitted past us only once. Anything that has to be valid and have a name must be repeatable, it must be represented by many specimens, and if you had never seen the moon before, you’d think it was a flashlight. Incidentally, the reason God is such an embarrassment to science is that he was seen only once, at the Creation, before there were any trained observers around.”
But Stumm von Bordwehr, whose entire life had been prescribed for him since his military-school days, from the shape of his cap to permission to marry, was hardly inclined to listen to such doctrines with an open mind.
“My dear fellow,” he said craftily. “Maybe so, but what has that to do with me? Very witty of you to suggest that science was invented by us army men, but I wasn’t speaking of science at all but, as your cousin says, of the soul, and when she speaks of the soul I feel like taking off all my clothes because the uniform clashes so with it!”
“Stumm, old man,” Ulrich went on doggedly, “a great many people accuse science of being soulless and mechanical and of making everything it touches the same. Yet they don’t notice that there’s much more mechanical or predictable regularity in sentimental matters than in intellectual ones. For when is a feeling really natural and simple? When it can be automatically expected to manifest itself in everybody, given the same circumstances. How could we expect people to behave in a virtuous manner if a virtuous act were not repeatable at will? I could give you many more examples, and if you escape from this drab repetitiveness into the darkest recesses of your being, where the uncontrolled impulses live, those sticky animal depths that save us from evaporating under the glare of reason, what do you find? Stimuli and strings of reflexes, entrenched habits and skills, reiteration, fixation, imprints, series, monotony! That’s the same as uniforms, barracks, and regulations, my dear Stumm; and the civilian soul shows an amazing kinship to the military. You might say that it desperately clings to this model, though it can never quite equal it. And where it can’t do that, it feels like a child left entirely on its own. Take a woman’s beauty, for instance: the beauty that takes you by surprise and bowls you over as if you were seeing it for the first time in your life is really something you have known and sought forever, an image your eyes have long since anticipated, which now comes into full daylight, as it were. But when it’s really a case of love at first sight, a kind of beauty you have never perceived before, you simply don’t know what to do about it. Nothing like it has ever come your way, you have no name for it, you are not prepared to respond to it, you’re hopelessly bewildered, dazzled, reduced to a state of blind amazement, a kind of idiocy that seems to have very little to do with happiness… .”
The General could no longer contain his excitement. He had been listening with that expertise one acquired during military exercises when subjected to critical and edifying remarks by superior officers that one must be able to repeat at command but should not really take to heart, or else one might just as well ride home bareback on a porcupine. But now Ulrich had touched him to the quick, and he broke in: “I must say, what you’re describing is amazingly on target! When I lose myself in admiration for your cousin, everything inside me seems just to dissolve! And when I do my utmost to pull myself together and come up with some useful idea, my mind turns into an agonizing blank again—‘idiotic’ may be too strong a word for it, but it’s close enough. And so you’re saying, as I understand it, that we army men do use our heads, that the civilian mind … of course I can’t accept your suggestion that they model their thinking on ours; that’s just one of your jokes… but that we have just as good a mind, well, that’s what I sometimes think too. And everything that goes above and beyond thinking, as you say, all that stuff we soldiers regard as so notably civilian, such as the soul, virtue, deep feeling, sentiment—the kind of thing this fellow Arnheim handles with such flair—anyway, you’re saying that it’s of course part of the human spirit and in fact involves those so-called considerations of a higher sort we’ve been talking about, but you’re also saying that it’s quite stupefying, and I must say I totally agree with you, but when all’s said and done, the civilian intellect is indisputably the superior one, and so I must ask you, how does it all add up?”
“What I said just now was, first of all—you forgot that—first of all, I said, the military life is intellectual by nature, and second, the civilian life is physical by nature… .”
“But that’s nonsense, surely?” Stumm objected mistrustfully. The physical superiority of the military was a dogma, like the conviction that the officer caste stands nearest to the throne, and even thou
gh Stumm had never regarded himself as an athlete, the moment any doubt was cast upon his physical superiority he felt sure that a comparable civilian paunch had to be several degrees flabbier than his own.
“No more and no less nonsense than everything else,” Ulrich defended himself. “But let me finish. About a hundred years ago, you see, the leading brains in German civilian life believed that a man using his head could deduce the world’s laws while sitting at his desk, like so many geometric theorems about triangles. And the typical thinker was a man in homespun who tossed his long hair back from his forehead and hadn’t even heard of the oil lamp, much less of electricity and the phonograph. Such arrogance has been purged out of our system since then; in these last hundred years we’ve become much better acquainted with ourselves and with nature and everything, but as a result, the better we understand things in detail, the less we understand the whole, as it were, so what we get is a great many more systems of order and much less order over all.”
“That fits in with my own findings,” Stumm agreed.
“Only most people aren’t as keen as you are on making sense of it,” Ulrich continued. “After so many struggles, we’re on a downward slide now. Just think what’s happening today: As soon as some leading thinker comes up with an idea it is immediately pulled apart by the sympathies and antipathies generated: first its admirers rip large chunks out of it to suit themselves, wrenching their masters’ minds out of shape the way a fox savages his kill, and then his opponents destroy the weak links so that soon there’s nothing left but a stock of aphorisms from which friend and foe alike help themselves at will. The result is a general ambiguity. There’s no Yes without a No dangling from it. Whatever you do, you can find twenty of the finest ideas in support and another twenty against it. It’s much like love or hatred or hunger, where tastes have to differ so that each can find his own.”
“You’ve said it!” Stumm exclaimed, in wholehearted agreement again. “I myself have already put something like it to Diotima. But don’t you think that all this confusion seems to justify the military position—though I’d be mortified to have to believe it even for a minute!”
“I’d advise you,” Ulrich said, “to tip off Diotima that God, for reasons still unknown to us, seems to be leading us into an era of physical culture, for the only thing that gives ideas some sort of foothold is the body to which they belong—which gives you, as an army officer, something of an advantage.”
The tubby little General winced. “On the plane of physical culture I look about as beautiful as a peeled peach,” he said after a while, with bitter satisfaction. “And I’d better make it clear that I think of Diotima only in an honorable way, and hope to pass muster in her eyes in the same fashion.”
“Too bad,” Ulrich said. “Your aims would be worthy of a Napoleon, but you won’t find this the right century for them.”
The General swallowed this gentle gibe with the dignity of a man conscious of suffering for the lady of his heart, and only said, after a moment’s thought: “Thank you, in any case, for your interesting advice.”
86
THE INDUSTRIAL POTENTATE AND THE MERGER OF SOUL WITH BUSINESS. ALSO, ALL ROADS TO THE MIND START FROM THE SOUL, BUT NONE LEAD BACK AGAIN
At this time, when the General’s love for Diotima took a back seat to his admiration for Diotima and Arnheim as a pair, Arnheim should long since have made up his mind never to come back. Instead, he made arrangements to prolong his stay; he kept his suite at the hotel, and the great mobility of his life seemed to have come to a standstill. It was a time when the world was being shaken up in various ways, and those who kept themselves well informed toward the end of the year 1913 lived on the edge of a seething volcano, although the peaceful processes of production everywhere suggested that it could never really erupt again. The power of this suggestion was not equally strong everywhere. The windows of the handsome old palace on the Ballhausplatz where Section Chief Tuzzi held sway often lit up the bare trees in the gardens across the way until late into the night, giving a thrill of awe to the better class of strollers who might be passing by in the darkness. For just as his sainthood permeates the figure of the humble carpenter Joseph, so the name Ballhausplatz permeated that palace with the aura of being one of a half-dozen mysterious kitchens where, behind drawn curtains, the fate of mankind was being dished up. Dr. Arnheim was quite well informed of what was going on. He received coded telegrams and, from time to time, a visit from one of his managers, bringing confidential information from company headquarters; the windows of his hotel suite, too, were often lit up till all hours, and an imaginative observer might easily have thought that a secondary or counter-government was here in nightly session, a modern, apocryphal battle station of economic diplomacy.
Nor did Arnheim for his part ever neglect to produce such an impression; without the power of suggestion in his appearance, a man is only a sweet watery fruit without a peel. Even at breakfast, which for this reason he never took in private but in the hotel restaurant, open to all, he dictated his orders for the day to his shorthand-scribbling secretary with the authoritative air of the experienced ruler and the courteous poise of a man who knows all eyes are upon him. Arnheim would have found none of the details inspiring in themselves, but since they not only combined to lay claim to his attention but also made room for the charms of breakfast, they produced a heightened sense of things. Human talent, he liked to think, probably needs to be somewhat restricted if it is to unfold to its best potential; the really fertile borderland between reckless freedom of thought and a dispirited blankness of mind is, as everyone who knows life is aware, a very narrow strip of territory. Besides, he never doubted that it made all the difference who had an idea. Everyone knows that new and important ideas seldom arise in only one mind at a time, while, on the other hand, the brain of a man who is accustomed to thinking is constantly breeding thoughts of unequal value, so that the end result, its final effective form, always comes to an idea from the outside, not merely from the thinker’s mind but from the whole concatenation of his circumstances. A question from the secretary, a glance at a nearby table, a greeting from someone entering the room, or some such thing would always remind Arnheim, at just the right moment, that he must keep up an imposing presence, and this perfecting of his appearance carried over to his thinking as well. It all culminated in his conviction, suiting his needs, that the thinking man must always be simultaneously a man of action.
Nevertheless, he attached no great importance to his present occupation; even though it was designed to achieve something that might, under certain circumstances, be remarkably profitable, he still felt that he was overstaying his time here. He repeatedly reminded himself of that cold breath of ancient wisdom, Divide et impera, which applies to every transaction and calls for a certain subordination of each individual instance to the whole, for the secret of the successful approach to any undertaking is the same as that of the man who is loved by many women while himself careful to play no favorites. But it was no use. Fully mindful of the demands the world imposes on a man born to action on a grand scale, and no matter how often he took pains to search his soul, he could not close his eyes to the fact that he was in love. It was an awkward fix, because a heart turned fifty is a tough muscle, not so easily stretched as that of a twenty-year-old in love’s springtime, and it caused him considerable vexation.
It troubled him, to begin with, that his interest in his far-flung international concerns was withering like a flower cut off at the root, while everyday trivia like a sparrow on his windowsill or a waiter’s smile positively blossomed into significance for him. As to his moral concepts, normally a comprehensive system for being always in the right, without any loopholes, he saw them shrinking in scope while taking on a certain physical quality. It could be called devotion, but this again was a word that usually had a much wider and anyway a quite different meaning, for without devotion nothing can be achieved in any sphere: devotion to duty, to a superior or a leader, eve
n devotion to life itself, in all its richness and variety, seen as a manly quality, had always seemed to him to be uprightness itself, which for all its openness had more to do with restraint than with a yielding up of the self. And the same might be said of faithfulness, which, confined to a woman, smacks of limitation, as was true of chivalry and gentleness, unselfishness and delicacy, all of them virtues usually thought of in association with her but losing their richest quality thereby, so that it is hard to say whether a man’s experience of love only flows toward a woman as water tends to collect in the lowest, generally not the most acceptable spot, or whether the love of a woman is the volcanic center whose warmth sustains all life on earth. A supreme degree of male vanity therefore feels more at ease in male rather than female company, and when Arnheim compared the wealth of ideas he had brought to the spheres of power with the state of bliss he owed to Diotima, he could not shake off the sense of having slipped somehow.
At times he longed for embraces and kisses like a boy ready to fling himself passionately at the feet of the coldhearted beloved refusing him, or else he caught himself wanting to burst out sobbing, or hurl a challenge to the world and, finally, carry off the beloved in his arms. Now, we all know that the irresponsible margin of the conscious personality that breeds stories and poems is also the home base of all sorts of childish memories that surface on those rare occasions when the intoxication of fatigue, the release of alcohol, or some other disturbance brings them to light. Arnheim’s bursts of feeling were no more substantial than these phantoms, so that he need not have been upset by them (thereby considerably increasing his original agitation), if these infantile regressions had not forced him to realize that his inner life was swarming with faded moral stereotypes. The stamp of general validity he was always at pains to give to his actions, as a man conscious of living with the eyes of all Europe upon him, suddenly showed itself as having nothing to do with his inner life. This may be quite natural for anything supposed to be valid for everyone, but what troubled him was the implication that if what is generally valid is not the inward truth, then contrariwise the inward man is not generally valid. And so Arnheim now felt haunted at every step not only by the urge to sound some deafening wrong note, or perform some foolishly illegitimate act, but also by the annoying thought that on some irrational level this would be the right thing to do. Ever since he had come to know again the fire that makes the tongue go dry in the mouth, he was overcome with the sense of having lost a path he had always followed, the feeling that the whole ideology of the great man he lived by was only an emergency substitute for something that was missing.