The Man Without Qualities, Volume 2

by Robert Musil

  Called as a witness, Agathe found it quite understandable that one could not understand anything, and responded: “I suggest you try looking at a mirror in the night: it’s dark, it’s black, you see almost nothing at all; and yet this nothing is something quite distinctly different from the nothing of the rest of the darkness. You sense the glass, the doubling of depth, some kind of remnant of the ability to shimmer—and yet you perceive nothing at all!”

  Ulrich laughed at his sister’s immediate readiness to cut knowledge’s reputation down to size; he was far from thinking that concepts have no value, and knew quite well what they accomplish, even if he did not act accordingly. What he wanted to bring out was the inability to get hold of individual experiences, those experiences that for obvious reasons one has to go through alone and lonely, even when one is with another person. He repeated: “The self never grasps its impressions and utterances singly, but always in context, in real or imagined, similar or dissimilar, harmony with something else; and so everything that has a name leans on everything else in regular rows, as a link in large and incalculable unities, one relying on another and all penetrated by a common tension. But for that reason,” he suddenly went on, differently, “if for some reason these associations fail and none of them addresses the internal series of orders, one is immediately left again to face an indescribable and inhuman creation, indeed a disavowed and formless one.” With this they were back at their point of departure; but Agathe felt the dark creation above it, the abyss that was the “universe,” the God who was to help her!

  Her brother said: “Understanding gives way to irrepressible astonishment, and the smallest experience—of this tiny blade of grass, or the gentle sounds when your lips over there utter a word—becomes something incomparable, lonely as the world, possessed of an unfathomable selfishness and radiating a profound narcosis…!”

  He fell silent, irresolutely twisting a blade of grass in his hand, and at first listened with pleasure as Agathe, apparently as unplagued by introspection as she was by an intellectual education, restored some concreteness to the conversation. For she now responded: “If it weren’t so damp, I’d love to lie on the grass! Let’s go away! It would be so nice to lie on a meadow and get back to nature as simply as a discarded shoe!”

  “But all that means is being released from all feelings,” Ulrich objected. “And God alone knows what would become of us if feelings did not appear in swarms, these loves and hates and sufferings and goodnesses that give the illusion of being unique to every individual. We would be bereft of all capacity to think and act, because our soul was created for whatever repeats itself over and over, and not for

  what lies outside the order of things “ He was oppressed, thought

  he had stumbled into emptiness, and with an uneasy frown looked questioningly at his sister’s face.

  But Agathe’s face was even clearer than the air that enveloped it and played with her hair, as she gave a response from memory. “ 1 know not where I am, nor do I seek myself, nor do I want to know of it, nor will I have tidings. I am as immersed in the flowing spring of His love as if I were under the surface of the sea and could not feel or see from any side any thing except water.’ “

  “Where’s that from?” Ulrich asked curiously, and only then discovered that she was holding in her hands a book she had taken from his own library.

  Agathe opened it for him and read aloud, without answering: “ 1 have transcended all my faculties up to the dark power. There I heard without sound, saw without light. Then my heart became bottomless, my soul loveless, my mind formless, and my nature without being.’”

  Ulrich now recognized the volume and smiled, and only then did

  Agathe say: “It’s one of your books.” Then, closing the book, she concluded from memory: “ ‘Are you yourself, or are you not? I know nothing of this, I am unaware of it, and I am unaware of myself. I am in love, but I know not with whom; I am neither faithful nor unfaithful. Therefore what am I? I am even unaware of my love; my heart is at the same time full of love and empty of love!’ “

  Even in ordinary circumstances her excellent memory did not easily rework its recollections into ideas but preserved them in sensory isolation, the way one memorizes poems; for which reason there was always in her words an indescribable blending of body and soul, no matter how unobtrusively she uttered them. Ulrich called to mind the scene before his father’s funeral, when she had spoken the incredibly beautiful lines of Shakespeare to him. “How wild her nature is compared to mine!” he thought. “I haven’t let myself say much today.” He thought over the explanation of “day-bright mysticism” he had given her: All things considered, it was nothing more than his having conceded the possibility of transitory deviations from the accustomed and verified order of experience; and looked at this way, her experiences were merely following a basic principle somewhat richer in feelings than that of ordinary experience and resembled small middle-class children who have stumbled into a troupe of actors. So he had not dared say any more, although for days every bit of space between himself and his sister had been filled with uncompleted happenings! And he slowly began to concern himself with the problem of whether there might not be more things that could be believed than he had admitted to himself.

  After the lively climax of their dialogue he and Agathe had let themselves fall back into their chairs, and the stillness of the garden closed over their fading words. Insofar as it has been said that Ulrich had begun to be preoccupied by a question, the correction must be made that many answers precede their questions, the way a person hastening along precedes his open, fluttering coat. What preoccupied Ulrich was a surprising notion, one that did not require belief but whose very appearance created astonishment and the impression that such an inspiration must never be allowed to be forgotten, which, considering the claims it asserted, was rather disquieting. Ulrich was accustomed to thinking not so much godlessly as God-free, which in the manner of science means to leave every possible turning to God to the emotions, because such a turning is not capable of furthering knowledge but can only seduce it into the impracticable. And even at this moment he did not in the least doubt that the way of science was the only correct way, since the most palpable successes of the human spirit had managed to come into being only since this spirit had got out of God’s way. But the notion that had come upon him said: “What if this selfsame ungodliness turned out to be nothing but the contemporary path to God? Every age has had its own pathway of thought to Him, corresponding to the energies of its most powerful minds; would it not also be our destiny, the fate of an age of clever and entrepreneurial experience, to deny all dreams, legends, and ingeniously reasoned notions only because we, at the pinnacle of exploring and discovering the world, again turn to Him and will begin to derive a relationship to Him from a kind of experience that is just beginning?”

  This conclusion was quite undemonstrable, Ulrich knew that; indeed, to most people it would appear as perverse, but that did not bother him. He himself really ought not to have thought it either: the scientific procedure—which he had just finished explaining as legitimate—consists, aside from logic, in immersing the concepts it has gained from the surface, from “experience,” into the depths of phenomena and explaining the phenomena by the concepts, the depths by the surface; everything on earth is laid waste and leveled in order to gain mastery over it, and the objection came to mind that one ought not extend this to the metaphysical. But Ulrich now contested this objection: the desert is not an objection, it has always been the birthplace of heavenly visions; and besides, prospects that have not yet been attained cannot be predicted either! But it escaped him that he perhaps found himself in a second kind of opposition to himself, or had stumbled on a direction leading away from his own: Paul calls faith the expectation of things hoped for and belief in things not seen, a statement thought out to the point of radiant clarity; and Ulrich’s opposition to the Pauline statement, which is one of the basic tenets of the educated person,
was among the strongest he bore in his heart. Faith as a diminished form of knowing was abhorrent to his being, it is always “against one’s better knowledge”; on the other hand, it had been given to him to recognize in the “intimation ‘to the best of one’s knowledge” a special condition and an area in which exploring minds could roam. That his opposition had now weakened was later to cost him much effort, but for the moment he did not even notice it, for he was preoccupied and charmed by a swarm of incidental considerations.

  He singled out examples. life was becoming more and more homogeneous and impersonal. Something mechanical, stereotypical, statistical, and serial was insinuating itself into every entertainment, excitement, recreation, even into the passions. The life will was spreading out and becoming shallow, like a river hesitating before its delta. The will to art had already become more or less suspicious, even to itself. It seemed as though the age was beginning to devalue individual life without being able to make up the loss through new collective achievements. This was the face it wore. And this face, which was so hard to understand; which he had once loved and had attempted to remold in the muddy crater of a deeply rumbling volcano, because he felt himself young, like a thousand others; and from which he had turned away like these thousands because he could not gain control over this horribly contorted sight—this face was transfigured, becoming peaceful, deceptively beautiful, and radiant, by a single thought! For what if it were God Himself who was devaluing the world? Would it not then again suddenly acquire meaning and desire? And would He not be forced to devalue it, if He were to come closer to it by the tiniest step? And would not perceiving even the anticipatory shadow of this already be the one real adventure? These considerations had the unreasonable consistency of a series of adventures and were so exotic in Ulrich’s head that he thought he was dreaming. Now and then he cast a cautiously reconnoitering glance at his sister, as if apprehensive that she would perceive what he was up to, and several times he caught sight of her blond head like light on light against the sky, and saw the air that was toying with her hair also playing with the clouds.

  When that happened, she too, raising herself up slightly, looked around in astonishment. She tried to imagine how it would be to be set free from all life’s emotions. Even space, she thought, this always uniform, empty cube, now seemed changed. If she kept her eyes closed for a while and then opened them again, so that the garden met her glance untouched, as if it had just that moment been created, she noticed as clearly and disembodiedly as in a vision that the course that bound her to her brother was marked out among all the others: the garden “stood” around this line, and without anything having changed about the trees, walks, and other elements of the actual environment—about this she could easily reassure herself—everything had been related to this connection to make an axis and was thereby invisibly changed in a visible way. It may sound paradoxical; but she could just as well have said that the world was sweeter here; perhaps, too, more sorrowful: what was remarkable was that one thought one was seeing it with one’s eyes. There was, moreover, something striking in the way all the surrounding shapes stood there eerily abandoned but also, in an eerily ravishing way, full of life, so that they were like a gentle death, or a passionate swoon, as if something unnameable had just left them, and this lent them a distinctly human sensuality and openness. And as with this impression of space, something similar had happened with the feelings of time: that flowing ribbon, the rolling staircase with its uncanny incidental association with death, seemed at many moments to stand still and at many others to flow on without any associations at all. In the space of one single outward instant it might have disappeared into itself, without a trace of whether it had stopped for an hour or a minute.

  Once, Ulrich surprised his sister during these experiments, and probably had an inking of them, for he said softly, smiling: “There is a prophecy that a millennium is to the gods no longer than a blink of the eye!” Then they both leaned back and continued listening to the dream discourse of the silence.

  Agathe was thinking: “Having brought all this about is all his doing; and yet he doubts every time he smiles!” But the sun was falling in a constant stream of warmth as tenderly as a sleeping potion on his parted lips. Agathe felt it falling on her own, and knew herself at one with him. She tried to put herself in his place and guess his thoughts, which they had really decided they would not do because it was something that came from outside and not from their own creative participation; but as a deviation it was that much more secret. “He doesn’t want this to become just another love story,” she thought, and added: “That’s not my inclination either.” And immediately thereafter she thought: “He will love no other woman after me, for this is no longer a love story; it is the very last love story there can be!” And she added: “We will be something like the Last Mohicans of love!” At the moment she was also capable of this tone toward herself, for if she summed things up quite honestly, this enchanted garden in which she found herself together with Ulrich was also, of course, more desire than reality. She did not really believe that the Millennium could have begun, in spite of this name Ulrich had once bestowed on it, which had the sound of standing on solid ground. She even felt quite deserted by her powers of desire, and, wherever her dreams might have sprung from, she didn’t know where it was, bitterly sobered. She remembered that before Ulrich, she really had more easily been able to imagine a waking sleep, like the one in which her soul was now rocking, which was able to conduct her behind life, into a wakefulness after death, into the nearness of God, to powers that came to fetch her, or merely alongside life to a cessation of ideas and a transition into forests and meadows of imaginings: it had never become clear what that was! So now she made an effort to call up these old representations. But all she could remember was a hammock, stretched between two enormous fingers and rocked with an infinite patience; then a calm feeling of being towered over, as if by high trees, between which she felt raised up and removed from sight; and finally a nothingness, which in some incomprehensible way had a tangible content: All these were probably transitory images of suggestion and imagination in which her longing had found solace. But had they really been only passing and half formed? To her astonishment, something quite remarkable slowly began to occur to Agathe. “Truly,” she thought, “it’s as one says: a light dawns! And it spreads the longer it lasts!” For what she had once imagined seemed to be in almost everything that was now standing around her, calm and enduring, as often as she dispatched her glance to look! What she had imagined had soundlessly entered the world. God, to be sure—differently from the way a literally credulous person might have experienced it—stayed away from her adventure, but to make up for this she was, in this adventure, no longer alone: these were the only two changes that distinguished the fulfillment from the presentiment, and they were changes in favor of earthly naturalness.

  47

  WANDERINGS AMONG PEOPLE

  In the time that followed they withdrew from their circle of acquaintances, astonishing them by turning down every invitation and not allowing themselves to be contacted in any way. They stayed at home a great deal, and when they went out they avoided places in which they might meet people of their social set, visiting places of entertainment and small theaters where they felt secure from such encounters; and whenever they left the house they generally simply followed the currents of the metropolis, which are an image of people’s needs and, with the precision of tide tables, pile them up in specific places or suck them away, depending on the hour. It amused them to participate in a style of living that differed from their own and relieved them for a time of responsibility for their usual way of life. Never had the city in which they lived seemed to them at once so lovely and so strange. In their totality the houses presented a grand picture, even if singly or in particular they were not handsome at all; diluted by the heat, noise streamed through the air like a river reaching to the rooftops; in the strong light, attenuated by the depths of the streets,
people looked more passionate and mysterious than they presumably deserved. Everything sounded, looked, and smelled irreplaceable and unforgettable, as if it were signaling how it appeared to itself in all its momentariness; and brother and sister not unwillingly accepted this invitation to turn toward the world.

  In doing so, they came upon an extraordinary discord. The experiences that they had not shared openly with each other separated them from other people; but the same problematic passion, which they continued to feel undiminished and which had come to grief not because of a taboo but because of some higher promise, had also transported them to a state that shared a similarity with the sultry intermissions of a physical union. The desire that could not find expression had again sunk back within the body, filling it with a tenderness as indefinable as one of the last days of autumn or first days of spring. It was, nonetheless, not at all as if they loved every person they saw, or everything that was going on: they merely felt the lovely shadow of “how it would be” falling on their hearts, and their hearts could neither fully believe in the mild delusion nor quite escape its pull. It seemed that through their conversations and their continence, through their expectation and its provisional limits, they had become sensitive to the barriers reality places before the emotions, and now perceived together the peculiarly double-sided nature of life, which dampens every higher aspiration with a lower one. This two-sided nature combines a retreat with every advance, a weakness with every strength, and gives no one a right that it does not take away from others, straightens out no tangle without creating new disorder, and even appears to evoke the sublime only in order to mistake it, an hour later, for the stale and trite. An absolutely indissoluble and profoundly necessary connection apparently combines all happy and cheerful human endeavors with the materialization of their opposites and makes life for intellectual people, beyond all dissension, hard to bear.