The Man Without Qualities: Picador Classic

by Robert Musil

  Ulrich was not the man to indulge himself lightly in such exaltations of his feelings, least of all with this letter to write, so he redirected his mind into general reflections. These would have been incomplete had he not remembered how easily and often, in the times he had lived through, the longing for some duty rooted in completeness had led to first one virtue, then another, being singled out from among the available supply, to be made the focus of noisy glorification. National, Christian, humanistic virtues had all taken their turn; once, it was the virtue of chromium steel, another time, the virtue of kindness; then it was individuality, and then fellowship; today it is the fraction of a second, and yesterday it was historical equilibrium. The changing moods of public life basically depend on the exchange of one such ideal for another: it had always left Ulrich unmoved, and only made him feel that he was standing on the sidelines. Even now all it meant for him was a filling in of the general picture, for only incomplete insight can lead one to believe that one can get at life’s moral inexplicability, whose complications have become overwhelming, by means of one of the interpretations already embedded within it. Such efforts merely resemble the movements of a sick person restlessly changing his position, while the paralysis that felled him progresses inexorably. Ulrich was convinced that the state of affairs that gave rise to these efforts was inescapable and characterized the level from which every civilization goes into decline, because no civilization has so far been capable of replacing its lost inner elasticity. He was also convinced that the same thing that had happened to every past moral system would happen to every future one. For the slackening of moral energy has nothing to do with the province of the Commandments or the keeping of them: it is independent of their distinctions; it cannot be affected by any outer discipline but is an entirely inner process, synonymous with the weakening of the significance of all actions and of faith in the unity of responsibility for them.

  And so Ulrich’s thoughts, without his having intended it, found their way back to the idea he had ironically characterized to Count Leinsdorf as the “General Secretariat for Precision and Soul,” and although he had never spoken of it other than flippantly and in jest, he now realized that all his adult life he had consistently behaved as though such a General Secretariat lay within the realm of possibility. Perhaps, he could say by way of excuse, every thoughtful person harbors in himself some such idea of order, just as grown men may still wear next to their skin the picture of a saint that their mother hung around their necks when they were small. And this image of order, which no one dares either to take seriously or to put away, must be more or less something like this: On one hand, it vaguely stands for the longing for some law of right living, a natural, iron law that allows no exceptions and excludes no objections: that is, as liberating as intoxication and sober as the truth. On the other hand, however, it evinces the conviction that one will never behold such a law with one’s own eyes, never think it out with one’s own thoughts, that no one person’s mission or power can bring it about but only an effort by everyone—unless it is only a delusion.

  Ulrich hesitated for an instant. He was doubtless a believing person who just didn’t believe in anything. Even in his greatest dedication to science he had never managed to forget that people’s goodness and beauty come from what they believe, not from what they know. But faith had always been bound up with knowledge, even if that knowledge was illusory, ever since those primordial days of its magic beginnings. That ancient knowledge has long since rotted away, dragging belief down with it into the same decay, so that today the connection must be established anew. Not, of course, by raising faith “to the level of knowledge,” but by still in some way making it take flight from that height. The art of transcending knowledge must again be practiced. And since no one man can do this, all men must turn their minds to it, whatever else their minds might be on. When Ulrich at this moment thought about the ten-year plan, or the hundred-or thousand-year plan that mankind would have to devise in order to work toward a goal it can have no way of knowing, he soon realized that this was what he had long imagined, under all sorts of names, as the truly experimental life. For what he meant by the term “faith” was not so much that stunted desire to know, the credulous ignorance that is what most people take it to be, but rather a knowledgeable intuition, something that is neither knowledge nor fantasy, but is not faith either; it is just that “something else” which eludes all these concepts.

  He suddenly pulled the letter toward him, but immediately pushed it away again.

  The stern glow on his face went out, and his dangerous favorite idea struck him as ridiculous. As though with one glance through a suddenly opened window, he felt what was really around him: cannons and business deals. The notion that people who lived in this fashion could ever join in a planned navigation of their spiritual destiny was simply inconceivable, and Ulrich had to admit that historical development had never come about by means of any such coherent combination of ideas as the mind of the individual may just manage in a pinch; the course of history was always wasteful and dissipated, as if it had been flung on the table by the fist of some low-life gambler. He actually felt a little ashamed. Everything he had thought during the last hour was suspiciously reminiscent of a certain “Inquiry for the Drafting of a Guiding Resolution to Ascertain the Desires of the Concerned Sections of the Population”; even the fact that he was moralizing at all, this thinking theoretically that surveyed Nature by candlelight, seemed completely unnatural, while the simple man, accustomed to the clarity of the sun, goes straight for the next item, unbothered by any problem beyond the very definite one of whether he can risk this move and make it work.

  At this point Ulrich’s thoughts flowed back again from these general considerations to himself, and he felt what his sister meant to him. It was to her he had revealed that curious and unlimited, incredible, and unforgettable state of mind in which everything is an affirmation: the condition in which one is incapable of any spiritual movement except a moral one, therefore the only state in which there exists a morality without interruption, even though it may only consist in all actions floating ungrounded within it. And all Agathe had done was to stretch out her hand toward it. She was the person who stretched out her hand and made Ulrich’s reflections give way to the bodies and forms of the real world. All his thoughts now appeared to him a mere delaying and transition. He decided to “take a chance” on what might come of Agathe’s idea, and at this moment he could not care less that the mysterious promise it held out had started with what was commonly viewed as a reprehensible act. One could only wait and see whether the morality of “rising or sinking” would show itself as applicable here as the simple morality of honesty. He remembered his sister’s passionate question as to whether he himself believed what he was saying, but he could affirm this even now as little as he could then. He admitted to himself that he was waiting for Agathe to be able to answer this question.

  The phone rang shrilly, and Walter was suddenly rushing at him with flustered explanations and hasty snatches of words. Ulrich listened indifferently but readily, and when he put down the receiver and straightened up he still felt the ringing of its bell, now finally stopping. Depth and darkness came flooding back into his surroundings to soothe him, though he could not have said whether it happened as sounds or colors; it was a deepening of all his senses. Smiling, he picked up the sheet of paper on which he had begun writing to his sister and, before he left the room, slowly tore it into tiny pieces.

  142

  ONWARD TO MOOSBRUGGER

  Meanwhile Walter, Clarisse, and the prophet Meingast were sitting around a platter loaded with radishes, tangerines, almonds, big Turkish prunes, and cream cheese, consuming this delicious and wholesome supper. The prophet, again wearing only his wool cardigan over his rather bony torso, made a point now and again of praising the natural refreshments offered to him, while Clarisse’s brother, Siegmund, sat apart, with his hat and gloves on, reporting on yet another conversation he
had “cultivated” with Dr. Friedenthal, the assistant medical officer at the psychiatric clinic, to make arrangements for his “completely crazy” sister Clarisse to see Moosbrugger.

  “Friedenthal insists that he can do it only with a permit from the District Court,” he wound up dispassionately, “and the District Court is not satisfied with the application I obtained for all of you from the Final Hour Welfare Society but requires a recommendation from the Embassy, because we lied, unfortunately, about Clarisse’s being a foreigner. So there’s nothing else to be done: Tomorrow Dr. Meingast will have to go to the Swiss Embassy!”

  Siegmund, who was the elder, resembled his sister, except that his face was unexpressive. If one looked at them side by side, the nose, mouth, and eyes in Clarisse’s pallid face suggested cracks in parched soil, while the same features in Siegmund’s face had the soft, slightly blurred contours of rolling grassland, although he was clean-shaven except for a small mustache. He had not shed his middle-class appearance nearly as much as his sister, and it gave him an ingenuous naturalness even at the moment when he was so brazenly disposing of a philosopher’s precious time. No one would have been surprised if thunder and lightning had burst from the plate of radishes at this imposition, but the great man took it amiably—which his admirers regarded as an event that would make a great anecdote—and blinked an assenting eye toward Siegmund like an eagle that tolerates a sparrow on the perch beside him.

  Nonetheless, the sudden and insufficiently discharged tension made it impossible for Walter to contain himself any longer. He pushed back his plate, reddened like a little cloud at sunrise, and stated emphatically that no sane person who was neither a doctor nor an attendant had any business inside an insane asylum. On him, too, the sage bestowed a barely perceptible nod. Siegmund, who in the course of his life had appropriated quite a few opinions, articulated this assent with the hygienic words: “It is, no doubt, a revolting habit of the affluent middle class to see something demonic in mental cases and criminals.”

  “But in that case,” Walter exclaimed, “please tell me why you all want to help Clarisse do something you don’t approve of and that can only make her more nervous than ever?”

  His wife did not dignify this with an answer. She made an unpleasant face, whose expression was so remote from reality as to be frightening; two long, arrogant lines ran down alongside her nose, and her chin came to a hard point. Siegmund did not feel himself obliged or authorized to speak for the others, so Walter’s question was followed by a short silence, until Meingast said quietly and equably: “Clarisse has suffered too strong an impression. It can’t be left at that.”

  “When?” Walter demanded.

  “Just the other day—that evening at the window.”

  Walter turned pale, because he was the only one who had not been told before—Clarisse had evidently told Meingast and even her brother. Isn’t that just like her! he thought.

  And although it was not exactly called for, he suddenly had the feeling, across the plate of produce, that they were all about ten years younger. That was the time when Meingast—still the old, untransformed Meingast—was bowing out and Clarisse had opted for Walter. Later she confessed to him that Meingast had still, even though he had already given her up, sometimes kissed and fondled her. The memory was like the large are of a swing. Walter had been swung higher and higher: he succeeded in everything he did then, even though there were lots of downswings too. Yet even then Clarisse had been unable to speak with Walter when Meingast was present; he had often had to find out from others what she was thinking and doing. With him she froze up. “When you touch me, I freeze up!” she had said to him. “My body goes solemn—that’s quite different from the way it is with Meingast!” And when he kissed her for the first time she said to him: “I promised Mother never to do anything like this.” Later on, though, she admitted to him that in those days Meingast was always secretly playing footsie with her under the dining room table. It was all Walter’s doing! The richness of the inner development he had called forth in her had hindered her freedom of movement, as he explained it to himself.

  Now he thought of the letters he and Clarisse had written to each other in those days; he still believed that if one were to search through all of literature it would be hard to find anything to match them for passion and originality. In those stormy days he would punish Clarisse, when she was keeping company with Meingast, by running off—and then he would write her a letter; and she wrote him letters, swearing that she was faithful, while candidly reporting that Meingast had kissed her once again on her knee, through her stocking. Walter had wanted to publish these letters as a book, and still thought, off and on, that he would do so someday. So far, unfortunately, nothing had come of it except for a fateful misunderstanding with Clarisse’s governess. One day Walter had said to her: “You’ll see, soon I shall make up for everything!” He had only meant it in his sense: namely, how splendidly he would be justified in the family’s eyes once publication of the letters brought him fame and success; for strictly speaking, things between him and Clarisse at that time were not what they should be. Clarisse’s governess—a family heirloom, pensioned off in the honorable guise of serving as an assistant mother, misunderstood him, however, in her sense, and a rumor promptly arose in the family that Walter was about to put himself in a position to ask for Clarisse’s hand in marriage; once the word was out, it led to very particular joys and restraints. “Real life” instantly awakened: Walter’s father announced that he would no longer pay his son’s bills unless Walter began to earn his keep. Walter’s prospective father-in-law invited him to his studio, where he spoke to him of the hardships and disillusionments awaiting the practitioner of pure, disinterested art, whether in the visual arts, music, or literature. And finally both Walter and Clarisse began to itch with the suddenly tangible thought of having their own house, children, openly sharing a bedroom: like a crack in the skin that cannot heal because one unconsciously keeps scratching at it. And so it came to pass that Walter, only a few weeks after his impulsive words, actually became engaged to Clarisse, which made both of them very happy but also very tense, because it was the beginning of that search for an established place in life that burdens life with all the problems of Western civilization, since the position Walter was sporadically seeking had to pass muster not only as to income but as to how it would affect six major aspects of his life: Clarisse, himself, their love life, literature, music, and painting. Actually, they had only recently emerged from the whirlwind of complications unleashed as soon as he let his tongue run off with him in the elderly mademoiselle’s company, when he accepted his present position in the Department of Works and Monuments and moved with Clarisse into this modest little house, where the rest was up to fate.

  In his heart Walter felt it would be quite pleasant if fate were now to call it a day: though the end would not be precisely what the beginning had promised—but then, when apples are ripe they don’t fall up the tree, but to the ground. That was what Walter was thinking, and meanwhile, across the table from him, above the diametrically opposite end of the colorful tray of wholesome vegetarian food, his wife’s small head hovered; Clarisse was trying to supplement Meingast’s explanation with the utmost objectivity, indeed as objectively as Meingast himself: “I must do something to pulverize the shock. The shock was too much for me, Meingast says,” she specified, and added on her own: “It was certainly no coincidence that that man stopped in the bushes right under my window.”

  “Nonsense!” Walter waved this away as a sleeper waves off a fly. “It was just as much my window as yours!”

  “Our window, then,” Clarisse corrected herself, her thin-lipped smile so pointed that one could not decide whether it expressed bitterness or scorn. “We attracted him. But would you like me to tell you what that man was doing? He was stealing sexual pleasure!”

  It made Walter’s head ache, crammed full as it was of the past, and now the present was wedging itself in, leaving no clear di
fference between past and present. There were still bushes with their bright patches of foliage in Walter’s head, with bicycle paths winding among them. Their adventurous long trips and walks could have happened only this morning. Girls’ skirts were swinging again just as they had in those years when ankles had been boldly exposed for the first time and the hems of white petticoats had frothed with the new movements of a sports-loving generation. In those days, Walter thought—to put it mildly—that what was going on between him and Clarisse was not all it should be, because what happened on these bike trips in the spring of the year they became engaged was in fact everything that can happen and leave a girl technically still a virgin. “Almost incredible, for such a nice girl!” Walter thought, reveling in his memories. Clarisse had called it “taking Meingast’s sins upon ourselves”—he had just gone abroad and was not yet known as Meingast. “It would be cowardly not to be sensual because he was!” was the way Clarisse phrased it, adding: “But with you and me I want it to be spiritual!” Walter did at times worry about the fact that these goings-on were too closely connected with the man who had been gone such a little while, but Clarisse replied: “People who aim at greatness, as we do in art, for instance, can’t be bothered with worrying about this and that.” Walter could remember the zeal with which they set about annihilating the past by repeating it in a new spirit, and the relish with which they found out how to excuse illicit physical pleasures by magically attributing to them some transcendent purpose. At that time, Clarisse had been as energetic in her lustfulness as she was later in refusing herself to him, Walter admitted, letting his mind wander for a moment to dwell on the refractory thought that her breasts were still as taut today as they had been then. Everyone could see that, even through her clothes. Meingast happened to be staring at her breasts just then; perhaps he didn’t realize it. “Her breasts are mute!” Walter declaimed inwardly with all the richness of association of a dream or a poem; and in almost the same way, while this was happening, the reality of the present forced itself through the padding of emotions: