by Robert Musil
If they tested it soberly (and surreptitiously they both did), it signified hardly more than a bewitching accident and ought to have dissolved the next moment, or at least with the return of activity, into nothingness; and yet this did not happen. On the contrary, they left the window, turned on the lights, and resumed their preparations, only soon to relinquish them again, and without their having to say anything to each other, Ulrich went to the telephone and informed the house where they were expected that they were not coming. He was already dressed for the evening, but Agathe’s gown was still hanging unfastened around her shoulders and she was just striving to impart some well-bred order to her hair. The technical resonance of his voice in the instrument and the connection to the world that had been established had not sobered Ulrich in the slightest: he sat down opposite his sister, who paused in what she was doing, and when their glances met, nothing was so certain as that the decision had been made and all prohibitions were now a matter of indifference to them. Their understanding announced itself to them with every breath; it was a defiantly endured agreement to finally redeem themselves from the ill humor of longing, and it was an agreement so sweetly suffered that the notions of making it a reality nearly tore themselves loose from them and united them already in imagination, as a storm whips a veil of foam on ahead of the waves: but a still greater desire bade them be calm, and they were incapable of touching each other again. They wanted to begin, but the gestures of the flesh had become impossible for them, and they felt an ineffable warning that had nothing to do with the commandments of morality. It seemed that from a more perfect, if still shadowy, union, of which they had already had a foretaste as in an ecstatic metaphor, a higher commandment had marked them out, a higher intimation, curiosity, or expectation had breathed upon them.
Brother and sister now remained perplexed and thoughtful, and after they had calmed their feelings they hesitantly began to speak.
Ulrich said, without thinking, the way one talks into thin air: “You are the moon—”
Agathe understood.
Ulrich said: “You have flown to the moon and it has given you back to me again—”
Agathe said nothing: moon conversations so consume one’s whole heart.
Ulrich said: “It’s a figure of speech. We were ‘beside ourselves.’ ‘We exchanged bodies without even touching each other’ are metaphors too! But what does a metaphor signify? A little something true with a good deal of exaggeration. And yet I was about to swear, impossible as it may be, that the exaggeration was quite small and the reality was becoming quite large!”
He said no more. He was thinking: ‘What reality am I talking about? Is there a second one?”
If one here leaves the conversation between brother and sister in order to follow the possibilities of a comparison that had at least some part in determining their talk, it might well be said that this reality was truly most closely related to the quixotically altered reality of moonlit nights. But if one does not comprehend this reality either, if one sees in it merely an opportunity for some ecstatic foolishness that by day were better suppressed, then if one wanted to picture accurately what was actually happening one would have to summon up the totally incredible idea that there’s a piece of earth where all feelings really do change like magic as soon as the empty busyness of day plunges into the all-experiencing corporeality of night! Not only do external relationships melt away and re-form in the whispering enclosures of light and shadow, but the inner relationships, too, move closer together in a new way: the spoken word loses its self-will and acquires fraternal will. All affirmations express only a single surging experience. The night embraces all contradictions in its shimmering maternal arms, and in its bosom no word is false and no word true, but each is that incomparable birth of the spirit out of darkness that a person experiences in a new thought. In this way, every process on moonlit nights partakes of the nature of the unrepeatable. Of the nature of the intensified. Of the nature of selfless generosity and a stripping away of the self. Every imparting is a parting without envy. Every giving a receiving. Every conception multifariously interwoven in the excitement of the night. To be this way is the only access to the knowledge of what is unfolding. For in these nights the self holds nothing back; there is no condensation of possession on the self’s surface, hardly a memory; the intensified self radiates into an unbounded selflessness. And these nights are filled with the insane feeling that something is about to happen that has never happened before, indeed that the impoverished reason of day cannot even conceive of. And it is not the mouth that pours out its adoration but the body, which, from head to foot, is stretched taut in exaltation above the darkness of the earth and beneath the light of the heavens, oscillating between two stars. And the whispering with one’s companion is full of a quite unknown sensuality, which is not the sensuality of an individual human being but of all that is earthly, of all that penetrates perception and sensation, the suddenly revealed tenderness of the world that incessantly touches all our senses and is touched by them.
Ulrich had indeed never been aware in himself of a particular preference for mouthing adorations in the moonlight; but as one ordinarily gulps life down without feeling, one sometimes has, much later, its ghostly taste on one’s tongue: and in this way he suddenly felt everything he had missed in that effusiveness, all those nights he had spent heedless and lonely before he had known his sister, as silver poured over an endless thicket, as moon flecks in the grass, as laden apple trees, singing frost, and gilded black waters. These were only details, which did not coalesce and had never found an association, but which now arose like the commingled fragrance of many herbs from an intoxicating potion. And when he said this to Agathe she felt it too.
Ulrich finally summed up everything he had said with the assertion: “What made us turn to each other from the very beginning can really be called a life of moonlit nights!” And Agathe breathed a deep sigh of relief. It did not matter what it meant; evidently it meant: and why don’t you know a magic charm against its separating us at the last moment? She sighed so naturally and confidingly that she was not even aware of it herself.
And this again led to a movement that inclined them toward each other and kept them apart. Every strong excitement that two people have shared to the end leaves behind in them the naked intimacy of exhaustion; if even arguing does this, then it is infinitely more true of tender feelings that ream out the very marrow to form a flute! So Ulrich, touched, would have almost embraced Agathe when he heard her wordless complaint, as enchanted as a lover on the morning after the first tempests. His hand was already touching her shoulder, which was still bare, and at this touch she started, smiling; but in her eyes there reappeared immediately the unwished-for dissuasion. Strange images now arose in his mind: Agathe behind bars. Or fearfully motioning to him from a growing distance, torn from him by the sundering power of alien fists. Then again he was not only the one who was powerless and dismissed, but also the one who did this….Perhaps these were the eternal images of the doubts of love, merely consumed in the average life; then again, perhaps not. He would have liked to speak to her about this, but Agathe now looked away from him and toward the open window, and hesitantly stood up. The fever of love was in their bodies, but their bodies dared no repetition, and what was beyond the window, whose drapes stood almost open, had stolen away their imagination, without which the flesh is only brutal or despondent. When Agathe took the first steps in this direction, Ulrich, guessing her assent, turned out the light in order to free their gaze into the night. The moon had come up behind the tops of the spruce trees, whose greenly glimmering black stood out phlegmatically against the blue-gold heights and the palely twinkling distance. Agathe resentfully inspected this meaningful sliver of the world.
“So nothing more than moonshine?” she asked.
Ulrich looked at her without answering. Her blond hair flamed in the semidarkness against the whitish night, her lips were parted by shadows, her beauty was painful and irr
esistible.
But evidently he was standing there in similar fashion before her gaze, with blue eye sockets in his white face, for she went on: “Do you know what you look like now? Like Tierrot Lunairel, it calls for prudence!” She wanted to wrong him a little in her excitement, which almost made her weep. Ages ago, all useless young people had appeared to each other, painfully and peevishly, in the pale mask of the lunarly lonely Pierrot, powdered chalk-white except for the drop-of-blood-red lips and abandoned by a Columbine they had never possessed; this trivialized rather considerably the love for moonlit nights. But to his sisters initially growing grief, Ulrich willingly joined in. “Even ‘Laugh, clown, laugh’ has already sent a chill of total recognition down the spines of thousands of philistines when they hear it sung,” he affirmed bitterly. But then he added softly, whispering: “This whole area of feeling really is highly questionable! And yet I would give all the memories of my life for the way you look right now.” Agathe’s hand had found Ulrich’s. Ulrich continued softly and passionately: “To our time, the bliss of feeling means only the gluttony of feelings and has profaned being swept away by the moon into a sentimental debauch. It does not even begin to understand that this bliss must be either an incomprehensible mental disturbance or the fragment of another life!”
These words—precisely because they were perhaps an exaggeration—had the faith, and with it the wings, of adventure. “Good night!” Agathe said unexpectedly, and took them with her. She had released herself and closed the drapes so hastily that the picture of the two of them standing in the moonlight disappeared as if at one blow; and before Ulrich could turn on the light she succeeded in finding her way out of the room.
And Ulrich gave her yet more time. “Tonight you’ll sleep as impatiently as before the start of a great outing!” he called after her.
“I hope so too!” was what resounded by way of an answer in the closing of the door.
46
MOONBEAMS BY SUNLIGHT
When they saw each other again the next morning it was, from a distance, the way one stumbles on an out-of-the-ordinary picture in an ordinary house, or even the way one catches sight of an important outdoor sculpture in the full haphazardness of nature: an island of meaning unexpectedly materializes in the senses, an elevation and condensing of the spirit from the watery fens of existence! But when they came up to each other they were embarrassed, and all that was to be felt in their glances, shading them with tender warmth, was the exhaustion of the previous night.
Who knows, besides, whether love would be so admired if it did not cause fatigue! When they became aware of the unpleasant aftereffects of the previous day s excitement it made them happy again, as lovers are proud of having almost died from desire. Still, the joy they found in each other was not only such a feeling but also an arousal of the eye. Colors and shapes presented themselves as dissolved and unfathomable, and yet were sharply displayed, like a bouquet of flowers drifting on dark water: their boundaries were more emphatically marked than usual, but in a way that made it impossible to say whether this lay in the clarity of their appearance or in the underlying agitation. The impression was as much part of the concise sphere of perception and attention as it was of the imprecise sphere of emotion; and this is just what caused this impression to hover between the internal and the external, the way a held breath hovers between inhalation and exhalation, and made it hard to discern, in peculiar opposition to its strength, whether it was part of the physical world or merely owed its origin to the heightening of inner empathy. Nor did either of them wish to make this distinction, for a kind of shame of reason held them back; and through the longish period that followed it also still forced them to keep their distance from each other, although their sensitivity was lasting and might well give rise to the belief that suddenly the course of the boundaries between them, as well as those between them and the world, had changed slightly.
The weather had turned summery again, and they spent a lot of time outdoors: flowers and shrubs were blooming in the garden. When Ulrich looked at a blossom—which was not exactly an ingrained habit of this once-impatient man—he now sometimes found no end to contemplation and, to say it all, no beginning either. If by chance he could name it, it was a redemption from the sea of infinity. Then the little golden stars on a bare cane signified “forsythia,” and those early leaves and umbels “lilacs.” But if he did not know the name he would call the gardener over, for then this old man would name an unknown name and everything was all right again, and the primordial magic by which possession of the correct name bestows protection from the untamed wildness of things demonstrated its calming power as it had ten thousand years ago. Still, it could happen differently: Ulrich could find himself abandoned and without a helper as he confronted such a little twig or flower, without even Agathe around to share his ignorance: then it suddenly seemed to him quite impossible to understand the bright green of a young leaf, and the mysteriously outlined fullness of the form of a tiny flower cup became a circle of infinite diversion that nothing could interrupt. In addition, it was hardly possible for a man like him, unless he were lying to himself, which on Agathe’s account could not be allowed to happen, to believe in an abashed rendezvous with nature, whose whisperings and upward glances, piety and mute music making, are more the privilege of a special simplicity which imagines that hardly has it laid its head in the grass than God is already tickling its neck, although it has nothing against nature being bought and sold on the fruit exchange on weekdays. Ulrich despised this cut-rate mysticism of the cheapest price and praise, whose constant preoccupation with God is at bottom exceedingly immoral; he preferred instead to continue abandoning himself to the dizziness of finding the words to characterize a color distinct enough to reach out and take hold of, or to describe one of the shapes that had taken to speaking for themselves with such mindless compellingness. For in such a condition the word does not cut and the fruit remains on the branch, although one thinks it already in one’s mouth: that is probably the first mystery of day-bright mysticism. And Ulrich tried to explain this to his sister, even if his ulterior motive was that it should not, someday, disappear like a delusion.
But as he did so, the passionate condition was succeeded by another-—of a calmer, indeed sometimes almost absentminded conversation—which came to permeate their exchange and served each of them as a screen from the other, although they both saw through it completely. They usually lay in the garden on two large deck chairs, which they were constantly dragging around to follow the sun; this early-summer sun was shining for the millionth time on the magic it works every year; and Ulrich said many things that just happened to pass through his mind and rounded themselves off cautiously like the moon, which was now quite pale and a little dirty, or like a soap bubble: and so it happened, and quite soon, that he came round to speaking of the confounded and frequently cursed absurdity that all understanding presupposes a kind of superficiality, a penchant for the surface, which is, moreover, expressed in the root of the word “comprehend” to lay hold of, and has to do with primordial experiences having been understood not singly but one by the next and thereby unavoidably connected with one another more on the surface than in depth. He then continued: “So if I maintain that this grass in front of us is green, it sounds quite definite, but I haven’t actually said much. In truth no more than if I’d told you that some man passing by was a member of the Green family. And for heaven’s sake, there’s no end of greens! It would be a lot better if I contented myself with recognizing that this grass is grass-green, or even green like a lawn on which it has just rained a little….” He squinted languidly across the fresh plot of grass illuminated by the sun and thought: “At least this is how you would probably describe it, since you’re good at making visual distinctions from judging dress materials. But I, on the other hand, could perhaps measure the color as well: I might guess it had a wavelength of five hundred forty millionths of a millimeter; and then this green would apparently be captured and na
iled to a specific point! But then it gets away from me again, because this ground color also has something material about it that can’t be expressed in words of color at all, since it’s different from the same green in silk or wool. And now we’re back at the profound discovery that green grass is just grass green!”