On the Edge

by Markus Werner

  “Mr. Loos,” I said, “it was a perfectly normal hangover that put me out of commission, and you do it all too much honour to interpret it as an expression of civil disobedience and make it a pretext for an excursus on animals and public health.” Loos ordered a glass of white wine, saying nothing until it arrived at the table. He was aware of his propensity to excursus, he said; his wife had often alluded to it. He also dimly remembered having already spoken about overburdenment yesterday. So he was repeating himself. Excursus and repetitions were an imposition on any interlocutor, and since he couldn’t promise to refrain from either, politeness behooved him to retire now.

  Loos was serious. He stood up and gave me his hand. I kept hold of it, disconcerted, and finally told him I had been very much looking forward to my evening with him. “Really?” he asked. “Really,” I said, and lied a bit when I added, “What you feel as an imposition doesn’t disturb me in the least.” Loos sat down and emptied his glass. He took up the thread again calmly, as if nothing had happened. He hardly knew anyone who was not marked by fear of failure. Almost all of us, to use a crude image, had a load in our pants, and just as real incontinence falls prey to shame and silence, so our anxieties about failing remained well cloaked. Whatever context we moved in, we were dealing with nothing but poor souls in secret who required most of their energy to keep their stigma veiled. There was little prospect of a mass coming-out; nor, consequently, of a revolution of the overburdened. What was in prospect, by contrast,—was indeed already a fact—was a proliferation of psychological malaise of unprecedented epidemic proportions. And despite the massive use of chemical aids and the colourful palette of other cures and promises of cures, the root of the problem remained untreated, the wretchedness raged on.

  “Do you tolerate objections?” I asked Loos. “I may be a know-it-all,” he answered, “but I do crave dissent.” “Good,” I said. “I told you that my plan was to devote myself to my divorce-law project today, but that then, instead of getting up early, I stayed in bed, and in the early afternoon, wreck that I was, I couldn’t get anything else going. This lack of drive—or, more accurately, weakness of will—filled me with discontent, even with self-contempt. So, this was the pretext for your disquisition, the gnat you turned into an elephant. Your overburdened-society thesis may well be correct, and is hardly brand new, but it has nothing to do with my case. That’s one thing, and as to the thesis itself: yesterday you stated that you were not a historical pessimist. In fact, so you said, the sum of evils remains approximately constant, since every old one is replaced by one of a different kind. I agree with that, and I also concede that feeling overburdened can be a source of unhappiness, but it’s in no way a new source. There have always been overburdened people—each age produces its own poor souls, and every society its own brand of psychological misery …” “And because that has always been so,” Loos interrupted, “a person should keep his trap shut, especially if he can’t contribute anything ‘brand new’ to the solution of the problem.” “Absolutely not,” I said. “May I finish?” “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’d like to remind you of a time,” I continued, “that I, unlike you, know only from hearsay—I mean the evidently stuffy period of the 50s and early 60s. How tight-meshed the net of morality was then, how rigid the system of values, how reproachful the eye of God! Social control and repression on all sides, and an educational system that would slap your face to prove it only wanted the best, namely the expulsion of all feeling of self-worth, which was perceived as barefaced impertinence, and the training of people to become not exactly failures—they don’t achieve anything anyway—but rather creatures who fear failure and so do everything demanded of them. I ask you as a witness of that time: Is my appraisal correct?” “It could have come from me,” Loos answered. “It was the pure overburdenment society,” I said. “Then came the fresh wind. The apron strings were cut: hair grew longer, skirts got shorter, and breath, walk, and speech became freer. The relativising of morals unburdened the individual, looser and broader ideas of value made new lifestyles possible—in short, the deregulation process in the worldview department has given us room for free play that is unprecedented in history. And yet it’s your view that today’s humanity is more overburdened and psychologically oppressed than ever, simply because the tempo of change is more than we can manage.”

  “I could now say,” Loos ventured after a long pause, during which he ground his teeth, “that it’s the privilege of advancing years to see the new age with its new evils as far more misguided than the old. I could further say that it’s up to each individual to evaluate evils as he chooses, since their magnitude can’t be measured with a yardstick. But I won’t say either, though it would show us in agreement. We are one only in our judgment of a musty period whose demise we welcome. But you are much more sanguine than I am about what followed. You don’t inquire into the costs. You say nothing about the difficult situation of people who are freed from the leash and then, after a few leaps in the air, fall to brooding on where they should turn now in a landscape that is broad and colourful but without signs to mark the way. Put yourself in the place of a woman standing in front of her wardrobe in the year 1950. Two or three things hang there for weekdays, as well as a Sunday dress. She hardly hesitates, her reach is sure. The woman of today stands for a half-hour in front of an overfull wardrobe, a light vertigo takes hold of her, everything she reaches for seems wrong, and she usually concludes she has nothing to wear. Good! We can smile at distress of this kind. But now, does the woman have children to educate? According to what standards? By what methods? With what objectives? The range of offerings is broad and contradictory, and of limited significance. Do you know any parents who are not deeply insecure? Do you know any mother who does not feel she is doing almost everything wrong or, in retrospect, has done everything wrong. If we are cynical, we can say: these mothers, these parents, are right to feel they are failures, for look at their offspring—all with behavioural disorders, all unstable, capricious, disoriented zappers and surfers of their own lives. But as I said, that would be cynical, almost as if we were to blame the captain of a ship that had lost its navigation system through an act of God for not bringing his passengers back to dry land. In short, in the previous epoch we were moulded by a mandatory system of canonical values and a strict, narrow-minded morality; we were often contorted by it, and always overburdened. In our present day, the hierarchy of values has been suspended—they have been privatised to the point that it is open to each individual to choose which ones to follow. But perplexity grows as a result: there is nothing harder and more overburdening than to have to seek and choose without guidance. I won’t go into further detail regarding the old and new modes of overburdening. I will only say, so that you don’t place me in the wrong corner, that I think there is nothing sadder and more dangerous than the clamouring of emancipated slaves for orientation and a foothold—and possibly for the whip.”

  Drops of rain were falling, but Loos seemed not to notice. He did pause, but I saw that he still had more to say. “Well,” I said. “Well,” he said, “if we now add to the new form of overburdening that we’ve already mentioned the even newer form, which consists first in our vain and panting efforts to slow the stormy tempo of development in science and technology and second in our ashen-faced realisation that all the knowledge and understanding we have acquired today will be yesterday’s snow tomorrow—then, I think, my claim of a psychological malaise of unprecedented proportions is not too outlandish. How will it proceed? Dare we hope for a revolution of the snails? What do you think?” “I think it’s raining,” I said, “and that we should move.” “It is indeed raining,” he said.

  After we had taken our seats at the reserved table in the glassed-in annex and received the half white we had ordered, we toasted. “To the revolution of the snails!” I said. “To the early cracking of the rafters!” he said, gracing me with his ever so rare half-mischievous, half-melancholy smile. Since he craved dissent, I then said, I wan
ted to confront him with two empirical findings that must cast doubt on his diagnosis. The one was statistically substantiated, the other the fruit of my own observation. So then: a new representative survey—focused on the psychological, physical, and material condition of the older generation—showed that this group, according to its own estimate, felt significantly better off than the same age group surveyed ten and twenty years previously. And on the other hand, the young, from approximately ages fifteen to thirty, exhibited a cheerful, pleasure-loving, fun- and satisfaction-oriented behaviour—nothing like the depressed, morose behaviour we would expect if his description of the situation were accurate. You only had to be present sometime at a street parade to see how keyed-up and high-spirited so many young people are. And with regard to my own case, as a man in his middle thirties, I was equally unable to help him with any malaise. I took life easy, and its shortness was a call for me not to despise its deliciousness.

  Especially delicious, said Loos, pointing at the menu, was the filet of rabbit—he recommended it highly. “Is that a displacement maneuver or do you not take me seriously?” I asked. “I did tell you I was in a playful mood,” he responded, “and besides, I think we should order before I wind up for the counterpunch.” “I’m familiar with it,” I said. “With what?” he asked. “The filet of rabbit. It was our parting meal out on the terrace.” “I don’t completely understand you,” Loos said. “You probably didn’t hear me when I told you that I was once here with a girlfriend who was a guest in the sanatorium across the way. I wanted to use it as a pleasant setting for suggesting to her that we break up. We both had a filetto di coniglio then.” “Excellent,” said Loos, “and why was she there?” “Problems with her nerves, autonomic instability,” I said. Loos was quiet for a while. “That brings us back to our theme,” he then said. “The malaise has many faces, and a malfunctioning nervous system is one of them, a quiet and sympathetic one, though hard to bear for the one afflicted. More widespread, however, is another, which is really a mask, a form of expression that makes the suffering unrecognisable, namely, hectic cheerfulness. Your cheery youth, Mr. Clarin, know instinctively what reflection and quiet would mean: a plunge into the maw of reality. Believe it or not, I was once on the sidelines watching a street parade, and what I saw was a funeral procession—true, a clangorous one.” “So lust for life is a symptom of grief,” I said. “Are you in your right mind?” “In my right mind I am not, but that’s no evidence for the nonsense of my interpretation. Even if I were a fool, you’d still have to grant me a sympathetic sense for what’s foolish, for masquerades and disguises of every kind, for the mummery of the grieving psyche. It seems to me that your empirical eye doesn’t distinguish between costume and disguise—hence your vehement protest. I’d like, in a fatherly sort of way, to give you a proverb that I picked up somewhere, to take with you on your path through life. I can quote its gist: ‘When you see a giant, ask yourself first if it’s not the shadow of a dwarf.’ ” “Very nice,” I said, “I’ll take it to heart. But you should hold to it and not draw the false conclusion that every reality is mere illusion—in this case that all lust for life is disguised mourning. The existence of actual giants doesn’t invalidate the proverb you quote.” “Agreed,” said Loos. “Let’s go ahead and order now, that is, we can still quickly dispense with the happy seniors—I had almost forgotten about them. Which age group did the statistical findings describe?” “Retirees of both sexes.” “All right, so, retirees—granted, that’s a sizable group. I’m delighted that they feel better off than in earlier times, but it doesn’t surprise me. They have the roughest time behind them, they’re free from many constraints and better cushioned than before. Of the dumbing down of considerable numbers of the aged I say nothing, though it likewise contributes to their sense of wellbeing. However that may be, the results of the survey confirm my diagnosis, I mean because the degree of their wellbeing has to be measured against the dissatisfaction that preceded it. If retirees feel much better off than ever before, then the situation they have escaped must have been an unprecedented torment, no? And now we can give our order—I’ll have the filet of rabbit.”

  I followed suit. And because it seemed senseless to me to make another suggestion on that subject, the conversation faltered. He channels all streams to his mill, I thought, and collects evidence for the misery of the world with the obsession of any collector. “It might seem,” he said now, “that I’m bent on the shabby satisfaction of proving myself right, but it has to do with the fact that no one hears my second, beseeching voice, when I speak. And what it says, after each of my statements, is: ‘Dear world, please give me the lie.’ ” “And?” I asked. “Does she give you an answer now and then?” “Yes, but an evasive one that rather contributes to our sense of impotence. ‘You dear statements all,’ she says, ‘you cannot grasp me. It’s been quite a while,’ she says, ‘since I’ve allowed myself to be comprehended or portrayed. Sorry.’ ” “She could be right,” I said, “and if she is, we’ll just have to stop talking about her.” “Just not so blusteringly, just not so meekly,” Loos responded. “But we still have other possibilities, namely at least two: We can scold her and we can describe the impotence her heedlessly complex character makes us feel. And third, it just occurred to me, there are statements that do not have the ambition of fathoming the world’s constitution. Fortunately we can also talk about football, about dogs and causes of death, we can tell stories about what we’ve experienced, or heard, or invented. In short, we are, figuratively expressed, not dependent for a subject of conversation on the woman who has given us the cold shoulder. We have sufficient other material.”

  Once the food was brought out, Loos closed his eyes for a moment, as he had done the previous evening, and only then picked up his knife and fork. After a few bites he paused and said that he was often sorry, when he had had a delicious meat dish, that his wife could never enjoy it with him, since she had given up eating the meat of warm-blooded animals. At the beginning, when they had gotten to know each other, shortly after her conversion to vegetarianism, she was overzealous like all converts and had even said, to his consternation, that she would not on principle kiss men who were meat-eaters. Thank God that love had subsequently proved stronger than her ascetical resolution, so much stronger that she, his wife, though she stayed with her vegetarian diet, occasionally prepared him chicken, lamb, a cutlet, etc., though always with the affecting anxiety that what she had cooked hadn’t come out right. Of course that was never the case, just the opposite. Sometimes now, when he was about to eat, he saw her blue-green eyes fixed on him, filled with an anxious expectation. It was always her eyes that he saw first whenever he brought her to mind.

  Luckily, I said, his wife had at least not given up drinking wine, and so could enjoy with him, for instance, the merlot bianco we were drinking. Loos stopped chewing, stared at me, swallowed, and asked how I knew that. Because yesterday, I said, when I had asked him whether he could recommend the wine he was drinking, he had given me the remarkable answer: “We always found it congenial.” A person doesn’t forget an answer like that, and so I had now simply concluded that his we meant himself and his wife. That was indeed true, said Loos. He had occasionally drunk a glass of wine with his wife here a year ago. I asked whether I could also conclude that he had accompanied his wife on her convalescent vacation. This was also a valid conclusion, he said, but he would be glad not to have to talk about it for the time being. How had my day been? “I can only repeat,” I said, “that my day was short and barren, I lacked oomph and a clear head, my work lay hardly touched, and my idleness spoiled my mood. My day was an un-day. And yours?”