by Robert Musil
“When were you that much in love?” Agathe asked abruptly.
“Me? Oh … I’ve already told you about that: I fled a thousand miles away from the woman I loved, and once I felt safe from any possibility of really embracing her, I howled for her like a dog at the moon!”
Now Agathe confided to him the story of her love. She was excited. Her last question had snapped from her like an overly tightened violin string, and the rest followed in the same vein. She was trembling inwardly as she revealed what had been concealed for many years.
But her brother was not particularly moved. “Memories usually age along with people,” he pointed out, “and with time the most passionate experiences take on a comic perspective, as though one were seeing them at the end of ninety-nine doors opened in succession. Still, sometimes certain memories that were tied to strong emotions don’t age, but keep a tight grip on whole layers of one’s being. That was your case. There are such points in almost everyone, which distort the psychic balance a little. One’s behavior flows over them like a river over an invisible boulder—in your case this was very strong, so that it almost amounted to a dam. But you’ve freed yourself after all; you’re moving again!”
He said this with the calm of an almost professional opinion; how easily he was diverted! Agathe was unhappy. Stubbornly she said: “Of course I’m in motion, but that’s not what I’m talking about! I want to know where I almost got to back then.” She was irritated too, without meaning to be, but simply because her excitement had to express itself somehow. She went on talking, nevertheless, in her original direction and was quite dizzy between the tenderness of her words and the irritation behind them. She was talking about that peculiar condition of heightened receptivity and sensitivity that brings about a rising and falling tide of impressions and creates the feeling of being connected with all things as in the gentle mirror of a sheet of water, giving and receiving without will: that miraculous feeling of the lifting of all bounds, the boundlessness of the outer and inner that love and mysticism have in common. Agathe did not, of course, put it in such terms, which already contain an explanation; she was merely making passionate fragments of her memories into a sequence. But even Ulrich, although he had often thought about it, could not offer any explanation of these experiences; indeed, he did not even know whether he should attempt to deal with such an experience in its own way or according to the usual procedures of rationality; both came naturally to him, but not to the obvious passion of his sister. And so what he said in reply was merely a mediation, a kind of testing of the possibilities. He pointed out how in the exalted state they were speaking of, thought and the moral sense went hand in hand, so that each thought was felt as happiness, event, and gift, and neither lost itself in the storerooms of the brain nor formed attachments to feelings of appropriation and power, of retention and observation; thus in the head no less than in the heart the delight of self-possession is replaced by a boundless self-giving and bonding.
“Once in a lifetime,” Agathe replied with passionate decisiveness, “everything one does is done for someone else. One sees the sun shining for him. He is everywhere, oneself nowhere. But there is no egoism à deux, because the same thing must be happening with the other person. In the end, they hardly exist for each other anymore, and what’s left is a world for nothing but couples, a world consisting of appreciation, devotion, friendship, and selflessness!”
In the darkness of the room her face glowed with eagerness like a rose standing in the shade.
“Let’s be a little more sober again,” Ulrich gently proposed. “There can be too much fakery in these matters.” There was nothing wrong with that either, she thought. Perhaps it was the irritation, still not quite gone, that somewhat dampened her delight over the reality he was invoking. But this vague trembling of the borderline was a not unpleasant feeling.
Ulrich began by speaking of the mischief of interpreting the kind of experiences they were talking about not as if what was going on in them was merely a peculiar change in thinking, but as if superhuman thinking was taking the place of the ordinary kind. Whether one called it divine illumination or, in the modern fashion, merely intuition, he considered it the main hindrance to real understanding. In his opinion, nothing was to be gained by yielding to notions that would not stand up under careful investigation. That would only be like Icarus’s wax wings, which melted with the altitude, he exclaimed. If one wished to fly other than in dreams, one must master it on metal wings.
He paused for a moment, then went on, pointing to his books: “Here you have testimony, Christian, Judaic, Indian, Chinese, some separated by more than a thousand years. Yet one recognizes in all of them the same uniform structure of inner movement, divergent from the ordinary. Almost the only way they differ from each other comes from the various didactic superstructures of theology and cosmic wisdom under whose protective roof they have taken shelter. We therefore may assume the existence of a certain alternative and uncommon condition of great importance, which man is capable of achieving and which has deeper origins than religions.
“On the other hand,” he added, qualifying what he had said, “the churches, that is, civilized communities of religious people, have always treated this condition with the kind of mistrust a bureaucrat feels for the spirit of private enterprise. They’ve never accepted this riotous experience without reservations; on the contrary, they’ve directed great and apparently justified efforts toward replacing it with a properly regulated and intelligible morality. So the history of this alternative condition resembles a progressive denial and dilution, something like the draining of a swamp.
“And when confessional authority over the spirit and its vocabulary became outmoded, our condition understandably came to be regarded as nothing more than a chimera. Why should bourgeois culture, in replacing the old religious culture, be more religious than its predecessor? Bourgeois culture has reduced this other condition to the status of a dog fetching intuitions. There are hordes of people today who find fault with rationality and would like us to believe that in their wisest moments they were doing their thinking with the help of some special, suprarational faculty. That’s the final public vestige of it all, itself totally rationalistic. What’s left of the drained swamp is rubbish! And so, except for its uses in poetry, this old condition is excusable only in uneducated people in the first weeks of a love affair, as a temporary aberration, like green leaves that every so often sprout posthumously from the wood of beds and lecterns; but if it threatens to revert to its original luxuriant growth, it is unmercifully dug up and rooted out!”
Ulrich had been talking for about as long as it takes a surgeon to wash his arms and hands so as not to carry any germs into the field of operation, and also with all the patience, concentration, and evenhandedness it paradoxically takes to cope with the excitement attendant on the task ahead. But after he had completely disinfected himself he almost yearned for a little fever or infection—after all, he did not love sobriety for its own sake. Agathe was sitting on the library ladder, and even when her brother fell silent she gave no sign of participation. She gazed out into the endless oceanic gray of the sky and listened to the silence just as she had been listening to the words. So Ulrich took up the thread again, with a slight obstinacy that he barely managed to mask by his lighthearted tone.
“Let’s get back to our bench on the mountain, with that herd of cows,” he suggested. “Imagine some high bureaucrat sitting there in his brand-new leather shorts with ‘Grüss Gott’ embroidered on his green suspenders. He represents ‘real life’ on vacation. Of course, this temporarily alters his consciousness of his existence. When he looks at the herd of cows he neither counts them, classifies them, nor estimates the weight on the hoof of the animals grazing before him; he forgives his enemies and thinks indulgently of his family. For him the herd has been transformed from a practical object into a moral one, as it were. He may also, of course, be estimating and counting a little and not forgiving a whole lot, but th
en at least it is bathed in woodland murmurs, purling brooks, and sunshine. In a word, what otherwise forms the content of his life seems ‘far away’ and ‘not all that important.’”
“It’s a holiday mood,” Agathe agreed mechanically.
“Exactly! If he regards his nonvacation life as ‘not all that important,’ it means only as long as his vacation lasts. So that is the truth today: a man has two modes of existence, of consciousness, and of thought, and saves himself from being frightened to death by ghosts—which this prospect would of necessity induce—by regarding one condition as a vacation from the other, an interruption, a rest, or anything else he thinks he can recognize. Mysticism, on the other hand, would be connected with the intention of going on vacation permanently. Our high official is bound to regard such an idea as disgraceful and instantly feel—as in fact he always does toward the end of his vacation—that real life lies in his tidy office. And do we feel any differently? Whether something needs to be straightened out or not will always eventually decide whether one takes it completely seriously, and here these experiences have not had much luck, for over thousands of years they have never got beyond their primordial disorder and incompleteness. And for this we have the ready label of Mania—religious mania, erotomania, take your choice. You can be assured that in our day even most religious people are so infected with the scientific way of thinking that they don’t trust themselves to look into what is burning in their inmost hearts but are always ready to speak of this ardor in medical terms as a mania, even though officially they take a different line!”
Agathe gave her brother a look in which something crackled like fire in the rain. “So now you’ve managed to maneuver us out of it!” she accused him, when he didn’t go on.
“You’re right,” he admitted. “But what’s peculiar is that though we’ve covered it all up like a suspect well, some remaining drop of this unholy holy water burns a hole in all our ideals. None of our ideals is quite right, none of them makes us happy: they all point to something that’s not there—we’ve said enough about that today. Our civilization is a temple of what would be called unsecured mania, but it is also its asylum, and we don’t know if we are suffering from an excess or a deficiency.”
“Perhaps you’ve never dared surrender yourself to it all the way,” Agathe said wistfully, and climbed down from her ladder; for they were supposed to be busy sorting their father’s papers and had let themselves be distracted from what had gradually become a pressing task, first by the books and then by their conversation. Now they went back to checking the dispositions and notes referring to the division of their inheritance, for the day of reckoning with Hagauer was imminent. But before they had seriously settled down to this, Agathe straightened up from her papers and asked him once more: “Just how much do you yourself believe everything you’ve been telling me?”
Ulrich answered without looking up. “Suppose that while your heart had turned away from the world, there was a dangerous bull among the herd. Try to believe absolutely that the deadly disease you were telling me about would have taken another course if you had not allowed your feelings to slacken for a single instant.” Then he raised his head and pointed to the papers he had been sorting: “And law, justice, fair play? Do you really think they’re entirely superfluous?”
“So just how much do you believe?” Agathe reiterated.
“Yes and no,” Ulrich said.
“That means no,” Agathe concluded.
Here chance intervened in their talk. As Ulrich, who neither felt inclined to resume the discussion nor was calm enough to get on with the business at hand, rounded up the scattered papers, something fell to the floor. It was a loose bundle of all kinds of things that had inadvertently been pulled out with the will from a corner of the desk drawer where it might have lain for decades without its owner knowing. Ulrich looked at it distractedly as he picked it up and recognized his father’s handwriting on several pages; but it was not the script of his old age but that of his prime. Ulrich took a closer look and saw that in addition to written pages there were playing cards, snapshots, and all sorts of odds and ends, and quickly realized what he had found. It was the desk’s “poison drawer.” Here were painstakingly recorded jokes, mostly dirty; nude photographs; postcards, to be sent sealed, of buxom dairy maids whose panties could be opened behind; packs of cards that looked quite normal but showed some awful things when held up to the light; mannequins that voided all sorts of stuff when pressed on the belly; and more of the same. The old gentleman had undoubtedly long since forgotten the things lying in that drawer, or he would certainly have destroyed them in good time. They obviously dated from those mid-life years when quite a few aging bachelors and widowers warm themselves with such obscenities, but Ulrich blushed at this exposure of his father’s unguarded fantasies, now released from the flesh by death. Their relevance to the discussion just broken off was instantly clear to him. Nevertheless, his first impulse was to destroy this evidence before Agathe could see it. But she had already noticed that something unusual had fallen into his hands, so he changed his mind and asked her to come over.
He was going to wait and hear what she would say. Suddenly the realization possessed him again that she was, after all, a woman who must have had her experiences, a point he had totally lost sight of while they were deep in conversation. But her face gave no sign of what she was thinking; she looked at her father’s illicit relics seriously and calmly, at times smiling openly, though not animatedly. So Ulrich, despite his resolve, began.
“Those are the dregs of mysticism!” he said wryly. “The strict moral admonitions of the will in the same drawer as this swill!”
He had stood up and was pacing back and forth in the room. And once he had begun to talk, his sister’s silence spurred him on.
“You asked me what I believe,” he began. “I believe that all our moral injunctions are concessions to a society of savages.
“I believe none of them are right.
“There’s a different meaning glimmering behind them. An alchemist’s fire.
“I believe that nothing is ever done with.
“I believe that nothing is in balance but that everything is trying to raise itself on the fulcrum of everything else.
“That’s what I believe. It was born with me, or I with it.”
He had stood still after each of these sentences, for he spoke softly and had somehow or other to give emphasis to his credo. Now his eye was caught by the classical busts atop the bookshelves; he saw a plaster Minerva, a Socrates; he remembered that Goethe had kept an over-lifesize plaster head of Juno in his study. This predilection seemed alarmingly distant to him; what had once been an idea in full bloom had since withered into a dead classicism. Turned into the rearguard dogmatism of rights and duties of his father’s contemporaries. All in vain.
“The morality that has been handed down to us,” he said, “is like being sent out on a swaying high wire over an abyss, with no other advice than: ‘Hold yourself as stiff as you can!’
“I seem, without having had a say in the matter, to have been born with another kind of morality.
“You asked me what I believe. I believe there are valid reasons you can use to prove to me a thousand times that something is good or beautiful, and it will leave me indifferent; the only mark I shall go by is whether its presence makes me rise or sink.
“Whether it rouses me to life or not.
“Whether it’s only my tongue and my brain that speak of it, or the radiant shiver in my fingertips.
“But I can’t prove anything, either.
“And I’m even convinced that a person who yields to this is lost. He stumbles into twilight. Into fog and nonsense. Into unarticulated boredom.
“If you take the unequivocal out of our life, what’s left is a sheep-fold without a wolf.
“I believe that bottomless vulgarity can even be the good angel that protects us.
“And so, I don’t believe!
“And ab
ove all, I don’t believe in the domestication of evil by good as the characteristic of our hodgepodge civilization. I find that repugnant.
“So I believe and don’t believe!
“But maybe I believe that the time is coming when people will on the one hand be very intelligent, and on the other hand be mystics. Maybe our morality is already splitting into these two components. I might also say into mathematics and mysticism. Into practical improvements and unknown adventure!”
He had not been so openly excited about anything in years. The “maybe”s in his speech did not trouble him; they seemed only natural.
Agathe had meanwhile knelt down before the stove; she had the bundle of pictures and papers on the floor beside her. She looked at everything once more, piece by piece, before pushing it into the fire. She was not entirely unsusceptible to the vulgar sensuality of the obscenities she was looking at. She felt her body being aroused by them. This seemed to her to have as little to do with her self as the feeling of being on a deserted heath and somewhere a rabbit scutters past. She did not know whether she would be ashamed to tell her brother this, but she was profoundly fatigued and did not want to talk anymore. Nor did she listen to what he was saying; her heart had by now been too shaken by these ups and downs, and could no longer keep up. Others had always known better than she what was right; she thought about this, but she did so, perhaps because she was ashamed, with a secret defiance. To walk a forbidden or secret path: in that she felt superior to Ulrich. She heard him time and again cautiously taking back everything he had let himself be carried away into saying, and his words beat like big drops of joy and sadness against her ear.