by Robert Musil
Arnheim could also claim that he thought like a socialist, and many rich people do think like socialists. They don’t mind their capital being decreed to them by a natural law of society, and are firmly convinced that it is the man who confers value on property, not vice versa. They can calmly discuss a future when they will no longer be around, which will see the end of property, and are further confirmed in regarding themselves as social-minded by the frequency with which upright socialists prefer to await the inevitable revolution in the company of the rich rather than that of the poor. One could go on like this for a long time, describing all the functions of money Arnheim had mastered. Economic activity cannot really be separated from the other intellectual activities, and it was surely natural for him to give money as well as good advice to his intellectual and artistic friends when their need was urgent, but he did not always give it, and he never gave them much. They assured him that he was the only man in the whole world they could ask for money, because he alone had the necessary intellectual grasp of the matter, and he believed them, because he was convinced that the need for capital permeates all human functions much like the need for air to breathe, but he also met them halfway in their vision of money as a spiritual force by applying it only with the most tactful restraint.
Why is it, anyway, that a man is admired and loved? Isn’t it an almost unfathomable mystery, rounded and fragile as an egg? Is a man more truly loved for his mustache than for his car? Is the love aroused by a sun-bronzed son of the South more personal than that aroused by a son of a leading industrial magnate? In a period when almost all well-dressed men were clean-shaven, Arnheim went on sporting a Vandyke beard and a clipped mustache; this small, extraneous, yet familiar presence on his face reminded him somehow, rather agreeably, whenever he was letting himself go a bit in talking to his always eager listeners, of his money.
93
EVEN THROUGH PHYSICAL CULTURE IT IS HARD TO GET A HOLD ON THE CIVILIAN MIND
For a long time the General had been sitting on one of the chairs that lined the walls around the intellectual arena, his “sponsor,” as he liked to call Ulrich, occupying the next chair but one, while the free chair between them held refreshments in the form of two wineglasses they had carried away from the buffet. The General’s light-blue tunic had been creeping upward, until it now formed furrows over his paunch, like a worried forehead. They were absorbed in listening to a conversation going on just in front of them.
“Beaupré’s game,” somebody was saying, “is positively touched with genius; I watched him here this summer, and the previous winter on the Riviera. Even when he slips up, luck stays on his side and makes up for it. And he slips up fairly often, because the actual structure of his game negates a really sound tennis style—but then, he’s a truly inspired player, which evidently exempts him from the normal laws of tennis.”
“As for me, I prefer scientific tennis to the intuitive kind,” someone objected. “Braddock, for instance. There may be no such thing as perfection, but Braddock comes close.”
The first speaker: “Beaupré’s genius, his dazzling unpredictability, is at its peak at the point where science fails.”
A third voice: “Isn’t calling it genius overdoing it a bit?”
“What would you call it? Genius is what inspires a man to return the ball just right at the most unlikely moment!”
“I’m bound to agree,” the Braddockian said in support, “that a personality must make itself felt whether a man is holding a tennis racket or the fate of a nation in his hand.”
“No, no, ‘genius’ is going too far,” the third man protested.
The fourth man was a musician. He said: “You’re quite wrong. You’re overlooking the physical thinking involved in sport, because you’re evidently still in the habit of overvaluing the logical, systematic kind of thinking. That’s practically as out of date as the prejudice that music enriches the emotional life, and sport is a discipline of the will. But physical movement in itself is so magical that we can’t stand it without some kind of buffer. You can see that in films when there’s no music. Music is inward motion, it supports the kinetic imagination. Once you have grasped the sorcery in music, you can see the genius in sports without a second’s hesitation. It’s only science that’s devoid of genius; it’s mere mental acrobatics.”
“So then I’m right,” Beaupré’s fan said, “when I say that Braddock’s scientific game shows no genius.”
“You’re not taking into account that we would need to start by revitalizing the term ‘science,’” the Braddock fan said defensively.
“Incidentally, which of them outranks the other one?” someone wondered.
No one knew the answer. Each of them had frequently beaten the other, but no one knew the exact figures.
“Let’s ask Arnheim!” someone suggested.
The group dispersed. The silence in the area of the three chairs lingered on. At last General Stumm said pensively: “Well, I was listening to all that the whole time, you know, and it seems to me you could say the same thing about a victorious general, leaving out the music, perhaps. So why do they call it genius when it’s a tennis player and barbarism when it’s a general?”
Ever since his sponsor had suggested that he try getting through to Diotima by advocating physical culture as his particular cause, he had given considerable thought to the question of how he could best use this promising approach to the civilian mind, despite his personal aversion to the actual practice of it; but the difficulties, as he was forced to observe again and again, were inordinately large.
94
DIOTIMA’S NIGHTS
Diotima wondered how Arnheim could stand all these people, visibly enjoying himself, when her own feelings corresponded all too closely to what she had expressed a number of times in saying that the world’s business was no more than un peu de bruit autour de notre âme.
There were times when she looked around and saw her house filled with the cream of society and culture—and felt bewildered. It reduced the story of her life to nothing but that extreme contrast between the depths and the heights, between the young girl’s anxiety inside a tight middle-class world and now this blinding life at the summit. Already poised on a dizzily high narrow ledge, she felt the call to lift up her foot once more, toward an even greater height. The risk was seductive. She wrestled with the resolve to enter into a life where action, mind, soul, and dream are one. Basically she no longer fretted over the failure of a crowning idea for the Parallel Campaign to emerge; nor did her vision of a World Austria still matter quite so much; even her discovery that for every great projection of the human mind there was an equally valid opposite had lost its terrors for her. The really important movements of life have less to do with logic than with lightning and fire, and she had grown used to not trying to make sense of all the greatness by which she felt surrounded. She would gladly have dropped her campaign altogether and married Arnheim, as a little girl solves her problems by forgetting all about them and leaping into her father’s arms. But the incredible ramification of her project had her trapped. She could take no time to think. The outer chain of events and the inward one ran on independently side by side, even as she tried in vain to link them up. Just like her marriage, outwardly appearing happier than ever, when in fact everything was inwardly dissolving.
Had Diotima been able to act in character, she would have spoken frankly with her husband; but there was nothing she could tell him. Was it love she felt for Arnheim? What they were to each other could be given so many names that even this trivial one occasionally surfaced among her thoughts. They had never even kissed, and an utmost intermingling of souls was something Tuzzi would not understand even if such a thing were confessed to him. Diotima herself sometimes wondered at the fact that nothing more reportable was going on between herself and Arnheim. But she had never dropped her good-girl’s tendency to look up, ambitiously, to older men, and she could more easily have imagined something at least describable if not
actually tangible going on between herself and her cousin, who seemed younger than herself and upon whom she looked down just a little, rather than with the man she loved and who seemed so to appreciate her ability to dissipate her feelings into general reflections on the loftiest plane. Diotima knew that one had to let oneself tumble headlong into radical changes in one’s circumstances and wake up amid one’s new four walls without quite knowing how one got there, but she felt exposed to influences that kept her wide awake. She was not entirely free from the distaste the typical Austrian of her period felt toward his German kin. In its classical form, which has become a rarity in our day, this distaste corresponded more or less to an image of the venerated heads of Goethe and Schiller planted guilelessly on bodies that had been fed on sticky puddings and gravies, and shared something of their nonhuman inwardness. And great as Arnheim’s success was in her circle, it did not escape her that after the first surprise certain resistances made themselves felt, never taking on form or coming out into the open, yet by their whispering presence undermining her self-assurance and making her aware of the differences between her own bias and the reservations felt by many persons upon whom she had been accustomed to model her own conduct. Now, ethnic prejudice is usually nothing more than self-hatred, dredged up from the murky depths of one’s own conflicts and projected onto some convenient victim, a traditional practice from time immemorial when the shaman used a stick, said to be the repository of the demon’s power, to draw the sickness out of the afflicted. That her beloved was a Prussian troubled Diotima’s heart with further terrors, of which she could form no clear image, so she was surely not quite unjustified in perceiving her wavering condition, so sharply different from the brute simplicity of her married state, as a passion.
Diotima suffered sleepless nights, during which she was torn between a Prussian industrial autocrat and an Austrian bureaucrat. In the state between trance and dream, Arnheim’s great, luminous life passed in parade before her. She saw herself airborne at this adored man’s side through a heaven of new honors, but it was a heaven of a distasteful Prussian blue. Meantime, in the black Austrian night, the yellow body of Section Chief Tuzzi still lay beside her own. She was only dimly aware of this, as of a black-and-yellow symbol of the old Kakanian culture, though he had little enough of that. It was backed by the Baroque façade of her noble friend Count Leinsdorf’s great town residence, and the shades of Beethoven, Mozart, and Haydn, and of Prince Eugene of Savoy, Austria’s liberator from the Turks, hovered over it, like homesickness anticipating actual exile. Diotima could not make up her mind to take such a step outside her own world, just like that, even though she almost hated her husband for being the obvious obstacle. Inside her beautiful big body, her soul felt helplessly trapped as in a vast landscape in full flower.
“I mustn’t be unfair,” Diotima thought. “The government official, the man given over to his work, may no longer be awake and open and receptive, but in his youth he might have been capable of it.” She remembered certain moments when they were still engaged to be married, though even then Section Chief Tuzzi had been no longer exactly a youth. “He achieved his position and his personality by hard work and devotion to duty,” she thought tolerantly, “and he has no suspicion that it has cost him his own personal life.”
Ever since she had achieved her social triumph she thought more indulgently of her husband, and so she now made him yet another inward concession. “No one is a born rationalist and utilitarian,” she reflected. “We all start out as a living soul. But ordinary, everyday existence silts us up, the usual human passions go through us like a firestorm, and the cold world brings out that coldness in us that freezes the soul.” Perhaps she had been too reticent to force him into facing up to this. How sad it was. It seemed to her that she could never summon up the courage to involve Section Chief Tuzzi in the scandal of a divorce, such a shattering blow to anyone as wrapped up as he was in his public role.
“Even adultery is preferable!” she suddenly told herself.
Adultery was what Diotima had been considering for some time.
To do one’s duty in one’s appointed place is a sterile notion; quantities of energy are poured out to no purpose! The right course is to choose one’s place and shape one’s circumstances deliberately. If she was going to condemn herself to staying with her husband, there still remained a choice between a useless and a fruitful martyrdom, and it was her choice to make. So far Diotima had been hampered by the moral sleaziness and the unattractive air of irresponsibility that were inseparable from all the stories of adultery that had ever come her way. She simply couldn’t imagine herself in such a situation. To touch the doorknob of a certain kind of hotel room seemed tantamount to diving into a cesspool. To slip, with rustling skirts, up some strange staircase—a certain moral complacency of her body resisted the thought. Hasty kisses went against her grain, as did clandestine words of love. Catastrophe was more in her line. Those last walks together, choked goodbyes, torn between a mother’s duty and love, were much more her style. But owing to her husband’s thrifty disposition she had no children, and catastrophe was precisely the thing to be avoided. So she opted, if it should come to that, for a Renaissance model. A love that had to live with a dagger through the heart. While she could form no very clear image of this, there was something decidedly upright about it, with a background of classic ruins under fleeting clouds. Guilt and its transcendence, passion expiated by suffering, trembled in this image and filled Diotima with an unutterable intensity and awe. “Wherever a person finds her highest potential and the richest field for her energies is where she belongs,” she thought, “because it is there that she can do the most to intensify life as a whole!”
She looked at her husband as best she could in the dark. Just as the eye does not register the ultraviolet rays of the spectrum, so this rationalist would never notice certain emotional realities of the inner life!
Section Chief Tuzzi was breathing evenly, suspecting nothing, cradled by the assumption that during his well-earned eight hours of mental absence nothing of importance could be happening in Europe. Such tranquillity did not fail to impress Diotima, and more than once she pondered the idea: Renunciation! goodbye to Arnheim! great, noble words of anguish, heaven-storming resignation, leave-taking on the scale of a Beethoven; the powerful muscle of her heart tensed up under these demands made on it. The future billowed with conversations full of a tremulous, autumnal brilliance, the poignancy of far-off blue mountain ranges. But could renunciation coexist with the double marriage bed? Diotima started up from her pillows, her black hair flying in wild ringlets. Section Chief Tuzzi’s sleep was no longer the sleep of innocence but rather that of a serpent with a rabbit in its belly. She came dangerously close to waking him up and, in view of this new dilemma, shrieking in his face that she must, she must and would, leave him! Such a flight into hysteria in her conflicted situation would certainly have been understandable, but her body was too healthy for that; she felt that it simply did not react with the requisite horror to Tuzzi’s proximity. She faced the absence of this horror with a dry shudder. No tears succeeded in running down her cheeks, but oddly enough it was the thought of Ulrich that gave her a certain comfort in this particular situation. These days she normally never gave him a thought, but his peculiar remarks about wanting to abolish reality, while Arnheim overestimated it, had a mysterious overtone, a hovering note Diotima had ignored at the time, only to have it surface in her mind during these night watches of hers. “All it means is that one shouldn’t worry too much about what is going to happen,” she told herself irritably. “It’s the most commonplace idea in the world!” Yet even as she phrased this thought so badly and simplistically, she realized that it contained something she did not understand, the very thing that acted on her like a sedative, paralyzing her despair along with her consciousness. Time flitted away like a dark shadow line, as she comforted herself that somehow her inability to muster a lasting despair might also redound to her credit; bu
t this consoling thought no longer took hold.
At night thoughts keep flowing through alternately bright and dark patches, like water in high mountains, and when they quietly reappeared after a while Diotima felt as though she had merely dreamed all that earlier frothing. The boiling little stream behind the dark mountain range was not the same as the quiet river she slid into at the end. Anger, loathing, courage, fear, all had drained away, there must be no such feelings, they didn’t exist: In the soul’s struggles with itself there is no one to blame! Ulrich, too, slipped back into oblivion. All that was left now were the ultimate mysteries, the soul’s eternal longings. Their moral worth does not depend on what one does. It does not depend on the movements of consciousness or of passion. Even the passions are only un peu de bruit autour de notre âme. Kingdoms may be won or lost while the soul does not stir, and one can do nothing to attain one’s destiny; in its own time it grows out of the depths of one’s being, serene and everyday, like the music of the spheres. Then Diotima lay awake more than ever, but full of confidence. Such thoughts, with their final period somewhere out of sight, had the beauty of putting her to sleep very quickly, even on the most sleepless nights. Like a velvety vision, she felt her love fusing with the infinite darkness that reaches out beyond the stars, inseparable from herself, inseparable from Paul Arnheim, immune to all schemes and set purposes. She hardly found the time to reach for the tumbler of sweetened water she kept on her little night table for her insomnia but used only at the very last moment of consciousness, because it always slipped her mind when she was agitated. The soft sound of her drinking purled, like lovers’ whisperings behind a wall, beside her husband’s sleep, unheard by him; then Diotima lay back reverently on her pillows and sank into the silence of unconscious being.
95
THE GREAT MAN OF LETTERS: REAR VIEW