by Robert Musil
“The morality of our time, whatever else may be claimed, is that of achievement. Five more or less fraudulent bankruptcies are acceptable provided the fifth leads to a time of prosperity and patronage. Success can cause everything else to be forgotten. When you reach the point where your money helps win elections and buys paintings, the State is prepared to look the other way too. There are unwritten rules: if you donate to church, charities, and political parties, it needs to be no more than one tenth of the outlay required for someone to demonstrate his goodwill by patronizing the arts. And even success still has its limits; one cannot yet acquire everything in every way; some principles of the Crown, the aristocracy, and society can still to some extent restrain the social climber. On the other hand, the State, for its own suprapersonal person, quite openly countenances the principle that one may rob, steal, and murder if it will provide power, civilization, and glory. Of course, I’m not saying that all this is acknowledged even in theory; on the contrary, the theory of it is quite obscure. I just wanted to sum up the most mundane facts for you. The moral argumentation is just one more means to an end, a weapon used in much the same way as lies. This is the world that men have made, and it would make me want to be a woman—if only women did not love men!
“Nowadays we call good whatever gives us the illusion that it will get us somewhere, but this is precisely what you just called the flying man without remorse, and what I’ve called a problem we have no method for solving. As a scientifically trained person I feel in every situation that my knowledge is incomplete, no more than a pointer, and that perhaps tomorrow I will have new knowledge that will cause me to think differently. On the other hand, even a person wholly governed by his feelings, ‘a person on the way up’ as you have depicted him, will see everything he does as a step upward, from which he is raised to the next step. So there is something in our minds and in our souls, a morality of the next-step’—but is that simply the morality of the five bankruptcies, is the entrepreneurial morality of our time so deeply rooted in our inner life? Or is there only the illusion of a connection? Or is the morality of the careerists a monstrosity prematurely born from deeper currents? At this point I really don’t know the answer!”
Ulrich’s short pause for breath was only rhetorical, for he intended to develop his views further. Agathe, however, who had so far been listening with the curiously passive alertness that was sometimes characteristic of her, switched the conversation onto a totally different track with the simple remark that she wasn’t interested in this answer because all she wanted to know was where Ulrich himself stood; she was not in a position to grasp what everyone might think.
“But if you expect me to accomplish anything in any form whatsoever, I’d rather have no principles at all,” she added.
“Thank God for that!” Ulrich said. “It’s always a pleasure for me, every time I look at your youth, beauty, and strength, to hear from you that you have no energy at all! Our era is dripping with the energy of action. It’s not interested in ideas, only in deeds. This fearful activity stems from the single fact that people have nothing to do. Inwardly, I mean. But even outwardly, in the last analysis, everyone spends his whole life repeating the same thing over and over: he gets into some occupation and then goes on with it. I think this brings us back to the question you raised before, out there in the open air. It’s so simple to have the energy to act, and so hard to make any sense of it! Almost nobody understands that these days. That’s why our men of action look like men bowling; they manage to knock down their nine pins with all the gestures of a Napoleon. It wouldn’t even surprise me to see them ending up by assaulting each other in a frenzy, because of their inability to comprehend why all action is inadequate “ He had spoken energetically at first but lapsed again, first into pensiveness, then into silence for a while. At last he just glanced up with a smile and contented himself with saying: “You say that if I expect any moral effort from you, you are bound to disappoint me. I say that if you expect any moral counsel from me, I am bound to disappoint you. I think that we have nothing definite to demand of one another—all of us, I mean; we really shouldn’t demand action from one another; we should create the conditions that make action possible; that’s how I feel about it.”
“But how is that to be done?” Agathe said. She realized that Ulrich had abandoned the big pronouncements he had begun with and had drifted into something closer to himself, but even this was too general for her taste. She had, as we know, no use for general analysis and regarded every effort that extended beyond her own skin, as it were, as more or less hopeless; she was sure of this for her own part, and believed it was probably true of the general assertions of others too. Still, she understood Ulrich quite well. She noticed that as he sat there with his head down, speaking softly against the energy of action, her brother kept absentmindedly carving notches and lines into the table with his pocketknife, and all the sinews of his hand were tense. The unthinking but almost impassioned motion of his hand, and the frank way he had spoken of Agathe’s youth and beauty, made for an absurd duet above the orchestra of the other words; nor did she try to give it a meaning other than that she was sitting here watching.
“What’s to be done?” Ulrich replied in the same tone as before. “At our cousin’s I once proposed to Count Leinsdorf that he should found a World Secretariat for Precision and Soul, so that even the people who don’t go to church would know what they had to do. Naturally, I only said it in fun, for while we created science a long time ago for truth, asking for something similar to cope with everything else would still appear so foolish today as to be embarrassing. And yet everything the two of us have been talking about so far would logically call for such a secretariat!” He had dropped the speech and leaned back against his bench. “I suppose I’m dissolving into thin air again if I add: But how would that turn out today?”
Since Agathe did not reply, there was a silence. After a while Ulrich said: “Anyway, I sometimes think that I can’t really stand believing that myself! When I saw you before, standing on the rampart,” he added in an undertone, “I suddenly had a wild urge to do something! I don’t know why. I really have done some rash things sometimes. The magic lay in the fact that when it was over, there was something more besides me. Sometimes I’m inclined to think that a person could be happy even as a result of a crime, because it gives him a certain ballast and perhaps keeps him on a steadier course.”
This time, too, his sister did not answer right away. He looked at her quietly, perhaps even expectantly, but without re-experiencing the surge he had just described, indeed without thinking of anything at all. After a little while, she asked him: “Would you be angry with me if I committed a crime?”
“What do you expect me to say to that?” Ulrich said; he had bent over his knife again.
“Is there no answer?”
“No; nowadays there is no real answer.”
At this point Agathe said: “I’d like to kill Hagauer.”
Ulrich forced himself not to look up. The words had entered his ear lightly and softly, but when they had passed they left behind something like broad wheel marks in his mind. He had instantly forgotten her tone; he would have had to see her face to know how to take her words, but he did not want to accord them even that much importance.
“Fine,” he said. “Why shouldn’t you? Is there anyone left today who hasn’t wanted to do something of the land? Do it, if you really can! It’s just as if you had said: 1 would like to love him for his faults!’ “ Now he straightened up again and looked his sister in the face. It was stubborn and surprisingly excited. Keeping his eyes on her, he said slowly:
“There’s something wrong here, you see; on this frontier between what goes on inside us and what goes on outside, some kind of communication is missing these days, and they adapt to each other only with tremendous losses. One might almost say that our evil desires are the dark side of the life we lead in reality, and the life we lead in reality is the dark side of our good d
esires. Imagine if you actually did it: it wouldn’t at all be what you meant, and you’d be horribly disappointed, to say the least….”
“Perhaps I could suddenly be a different person—you admitted that yourself!” Agathe interrupted him.
As Ulrich at this moment looked around, he was reminded that they were not alone; two people were listening to their conversation. The old woman—hardly over forty, perhaps, but her rags and the traces of her humble life made her look older—had sat down sociably near the stove, and sitting beside her was the shepherd, who had come home to his hut during their conversation without their noticing him, absorbed in themselves as they were. The two old people sat with their hands on their knees and listened, or so it appeared, in wonder and with pride to the conversation that filled their hut, greatly pleased even though they did not understand a single word. They saw that the milk went undrunk, the sausage uneaten; it was all a spectacle and, for all anyone knew, an edifying one. They were not even whispering to each other. Ulrich’s glance dipped into their wide-open eyes, and he smiled at them in embarrassment, but of the two only the woman smiled back, while the man maintained his serious, reverential propriety.
“We must eat” Ulrich said to his sister in English. ‘They’re wondering about us.”
She obediently toyed with some bread and meat, and he for his part ate resolutely and even drank a little of the milk. Meanwhile Agathe went on, aloud and unembarrassed: “The idea of actually hurting him is repugnant to me when I come to think of it. So maybe I don’t want to kill him. But I do want to wipe him out! Tear him into little pieces, pound them in a mortar, flush it down the drain; that’s what I’d like to do! Root out everything that’s happened!”
“This is a funny way for us to be talking,” Ulrich remarked.
Agathe was silent for a while. But then she said: “But you promised me the first day you’d stand by me against Hagauer!”
“Of course I will. But not like that.”
Again she was silent. Then she said suddenly: “If you bought or rented a car we could drive to my house by way of Iglau and come back the longer way around, through Tabor, I think. It would never occur to anyone that we’d been there in the night.”
“And the servants? Fortunately, I can’t drive!” Ulrich laughed, but then he shook his head in annoyance. “Such up-to-date ideas!”
“So you say,” Agathe answered. Pensively, she pushed a bit of bacon back and forth on her plate with a fingernail, and it looked as though the fingernail, which had a greasy spot from the bacon, was doing it on its own. “But you’ve also said that the virtues of society are vices to the saint!”
“But I didn’t say that the vices of society are virtues to the saint!” Ulrich pointed out. He laughed, caught hold of Agathe’s hand, and cleaned it with his handkerchief.
“You always take everything back!” Agathe scolded him with a dissatisfied smile, the blood rushing to her face as she tried to free her finger.
The two old people by the stove, still watching exactly as before, now smiled broadly in echo.
“When you talk with me first one way, then another,” Agathe said in a low but impassioned voice, “it’s as if I were seeing myself in a splintered mirror. With you, one never sees oneself from head to toe!”
“No,” Ulrich answered without letting go of her hand. “One never sees oneself as a whole nowadays, and one never moves as a whole— that’s just it!”
Agathe gave in and suddenly stopped withdrawing her hand. “I’m certainly the opposite of holy,” she said softly. “I may have been worse than a kept woman with my indifference. And I’m certainly not spoiling for action, and maybe I’ll never be able to kill anyone. But when you first said that about the saint—and it was quite a while ago—it made me see something ‘as a whole.’ “ She bowed her head, in thought or possibly to hide her face. “I saw a saint—maybe a figure on a fountain. To tell the truth, maybe I didn’t see anything at all, but I felt something that has to be expressed this way. The water flowed, and what the saint did also came flowing over the rim, as if he were a fountain gently brimming over in all directions. That’s how one ought to be, I think; then one would always be doing what was right and yet it wouldn’t matter at all what one did.”
“Agathe sees herself standing in the world overflowing with holiness and trembling for her sins, and sees with incredulity how the snakes and rhinoceroses, mountains and ravines, silent and even smaller than she is, lie down at her feet,” he said, gently teasing her. “But what of Hagauer?”
“That’s just it. He doesn’t fit in. He has to go.”
“Now I have something to tell you,” her brother said. “Every time I’ve had to take part in anything with other people, something of genuine social concern, I’ve been like a man who steps outside the theater before the final act for a breath of fresh air, sees the great dark void with all those stars, and walks away, abandoning hat, coat, and play.”
Agathe gave him a searching look. It was and wasn’t an adequate answer.
Ulrich met her gaze. “You, too, are often plagued by a sense that there’s always a ‘dislike’ before there’s a ‘like,’ “ he said, and thought: “Is she really like me?” Again he thought: “Perhaps the way a pastel resembles a woodcut.” He regarded himself as the more stable. And she was more beautiful than he. Such a pleasing beauty! He shifted his grip from her finger to her whole hand, a warm, long hand full of life, which up to now he had held in his own only long enough for a greeting. His young sister was upset, and while there were no actual tears in her eyes, he saw a moist shimmer there.
“In a few days you’ll be leaving me too,” she said, “and how can I cope with everything then?”
“We can stay together; you can follow me.”
“How do you suppose that would work?” Agathe asked, with the little thoughtful furrow on her forehead.
“I don’t suppose at all; it’s the first I’ve thought of it.”
He stood up and gave the sheepherders some more money, “for the carved-up table.”
Through a haze Agathe saw the country folk grinning, bobbing, and saying something about how glad they were, in short, incomprehensible words. As she went past them, she felt their four hospitable eyes, staring with naked emotion at her face, and realized that she and Ulrich had been taken for lovers who had quarreled and made up.
“They took us for lovers!” she said. Impetuously she slid her arm in his, and a wave of joy welled up in her. “You must give me a kiss!” she demanded, laughing, and pressed her arm in her brothers as they stood on the threshold of the hut and the low door opened into the darkness of evening.
11
HOLY DISCOURSE: BEGINNING
For the rest of Ulrich’s stay little more was said about Hagauer; nor for a long time did they again refer to the idea that they should make their reunion permanent and take up life together. Nevertheless, the fire that had flamed up in Agathe’s unrestrained desire to do away with her husband still smoldered under the ashes. It spread out in conversations that reached no end and yet burst out again; perhaps one should say: Agathe’s feelings were seeking another possibility of burning freely.
She usually began such conversations with a definite, personal question, the inner form of which was: “May I, or may I not…?” The lawlessness of her nature had until now rested on the sad and dispirited principle that “I’m allowed to do anything, but I don’t want to anyway,” and so his young sister’s questions sometimes seemed to Ulrich, not inappropriately, like the questions of a child, which are as warm as the little hands of these helpless beings.
His own answers were different in kind, though no less characteristic: he always enjoyed sharing the yield of his experience and his reflections, and as was his custom expressed himself in a fashion as frank as it was intellectually enterprising. He always arrived quickly at the “moral of the story” his sister was talking about, summed things up in formulas, liked to use himself for illustration, and managed in this
fashion to tell Agathe a great deal about himself, especially about his earlier, more eventful life. Agathe told him nothing about herself, but she admired his ability to speak about his own life like that, and his way of subjecting every point she raised to moral scrutiny suited her very well. For morality is nothing more than an ordering that embraces both the soul and things, so it is not strange that young people, whose zeal for life has not yet been blunted on every side, talk about it a good deal. But with a man of Ulrich’s age and experience some explanation is called for, because men talk of morality only in their working lives, if it happens to be part of their professional jargon; otherwise, the word has been swallowed by the business of living and never manages to regain its freedom. So when Ulrich spoke of morality it was a sign of some profound disorder, which attracted Agathe because it corresponded to something in herself. She was ashamed, now that she heard what complicated preconditions would have to be met, of her naive proclamation that she intended to live “in complete harmony” with herself, and yet she was impatient for her brother to come more quickly to a conclusion; for it often seemed to her that everything he said brought him closer to it, and with greater precision the further he went, but he always stopped at the last step, just at the threshold, where, every time, he gave up the attempt.
The locus of this deflection and of these last steps—and their paralyzing effect did not escape Ulrich—can most generally be indicated by noting that every proposition in European morality leads to such a point, which one cannot get beyond, so that a person taking stock of himself has first the gestures of wading in shallows, as long as he feels firm convictions underfoot, succeeded by the sudden gestures of horribly drowning when he goes a little farther, as though the solid ground of life had abruptly fallen off from the shallows into a completely imponderable abyss. This had a particular way of manifesting itself as well when brother and sister were talking: Ulrich could speak calmly and clearly on any subject he brought up, so long as his reason was involved, and Agathe felt a similar eagerness in listening; but when they stopped and fell silent, a much greater tension came over their faces. And so it happened once that they were carried across the frontier they had hitherto unconsciously respected. Ulrich had maintained that “the only basic characteristic of our morality is that its commandments contradict each other. The most moral of all propositions is: The exception proves the rule!” He had apparently been moved to this assertion only by his distaste for a system that claims to be unyielding, but in practice must yield to every deflection, which makes it the opposite of a precise procedure that first bases itself on experience and then derives the general law from these observations. He was of course aware of the distinction between natural and moral laws, that the first are derived from observing amoral nature, while the second have to be imposed on less stubborn human nature; but being of the opinion that something about this opposition was today no longer accurate, he had been just about to say that the moral system was intellectually a hundred years behind the times, which was why it was so hard to adapt it to changed conditions. But before he could get that far with his explanation Agathe interrupted him with an answer that seemed very simple, but for the moment took him aback.