The Man Without Qualities, Volume 2

by Robert Musil

  In such back-and-forth fashion they came to reproach the millions of loving couples who in their serious desire for certainty ask themselves a hundred times a day whether they really and truly love each other, and how long it can last: who, however, don’t have to fear conjuring up similar oddities.

  48

  LOVE BLINDS. OR DIFFICULTIES WHERE

  THEY ARE NOT LOOKED FOR

  Another of these world-oriented discussions went like this: “Then how would things stand when a love occurs between two so-called persons of different gentler, which is as famous as it is gladly experienced?” Ulrich objected. “You probably are really partly in love with the person you think you’re loving.”

  “But what you’re mostly doing is simply making a puppet of him!” Agathe interjected resentfully.

  “In any event, what he says and thinks in the process also has its charm!”

  “As long as you love him! Because you love him! But not the other way round! If you’ve once understood how the other person means it, it’s not only anger that’s disarmed, as one always says, but for the most part love as well!”

  Again it was Agathe who gave this passionate answer. Ulrich smiled. She must have banged her head pretty hard against this wall more than once.

  “But at first you can like the other person’s opinions, that’s often involved in the beginning: the well-known marvelous ‘agreeing about everything’; later, of course, you no longer understand it at all,” he said placatingly, and asked: “But deeds? Does love depend on deeds?”

  “Only insofar as they embody a person’s sentiments. Or turn the imagination into a sort of monument!”

  “But didn’t we just decide it wasn’t so much a matter of sentiments?” Ulrich recalled teasingly.

  “It doesn’t depend on anything at all!” Agathe cried. “Not on what the other person is, not on what he thinks, not on what he wants, and not on what he does! There are times when you despise a person but love him all the same. And there are times when you love a personand have the secret feeling that this person with the beard (or breasts), whom you think you’ve known for a long time and…treasure, and who talks about himself incessantly, is really only visiting love. You could leave aside his sentiments and merits, you could change his destiny, you could give him a new beard or different legs—you could leave aside almost the whole person, and still love him! As far as you happen to love him at all,” she added, mitigating her statement.

  Her voice had a deep ring, with a restless glitter buried in its depths like a flame. She sat down guiltily, having involuntarily jumped up from her chair in her zeal.

  Ulrich summed up the result in balanced fashion: “Both contradictions are always present and form a team of four horses: you love a person because you know him and because you don’t know him; and you know him because you love him and don’t know him because you love him. And sometimes that grows strong enough to become quite palpable. Those are the well-known moments when Venus gazes through Apollo and Apollo through Venus at an empty scarecrow, and each is mightily surprised at having seen something there before. If, furthermore, love is stronger than astonishment, it comes to a struggle between them, and sometimes out of this struggle love emerges—even if it is despairing, exhausted, and mortally wounded—as the victor. But if love is not that strong, it leads to a battle between the people involved, to insults intended to make up for having been played for a simpleton…to terrible incursions of reality…to utter degradation….” He had participated in this stormy weather of love often enough to be at ease describing it.

  Agathe interrupted him. “But I find that these marital and extramarital affairs of honor are usually greatly overrated!” she objected.

  “Love as a whole is overrated! The maniac who in his delusion pulls a knife and stabs some innocent person who just happens to be standing in for his hallucination—in love he’s the normal one!” Ulrich said, and laughed.

  Agathe, too, smiled as she looked at him.

  Ulrich became serious. “It’s odd enough to have to think that there really are no two people who can agree spontaneously, without their opinions and convictions being more or less powerfully influenced,” he noted thoughtfully, and for a while this gave the conversation a somewhat different turn.

  Brother and sister were sitting in Ulrich’s room, on either side of the long, darkly shining desk of heavy wood, whose center was now empty because apparently Ulrich was not working on anything. Each of them had lazily posed an arm on the desk and was looking at a small papier-mâché horse standing in the vacant middle ground between them.

  “Even in rational thinking, where everything has logical and objective connections,” Ulrich went on, “it’s usually the case that you unreservedly recognize the superior conviction of someone else only if you have submitted to him in some way, whether as a model and guide, or as a friend or teacher. But without such a feeling, which has nothing to do with the case, every time you make someone else’s opinion your own, it will only be with the silent reservation that you can do more with it than its originator; if indeed you weren’t already out to show this fellow what unsuspected importance his idea really contained! Especially in art, most of us certainly know it would be impossible for us to do ourselves what we read, see, and hear; but we still have the patronizing awareness that if we were able to do any of these things, we could of course do them better! And perhaps it has to be that way, and lies in the active nature of the mind, which doesn’t allow itself be filled up like an empty pot,” Ulrich concluded, “but actively appropriates everything, and literally has to make it part of itself.”

  He would gladly have added something more that occurred to him, and it would not let him rest, so he was already giving vent to his scruple before Agathe had any chance to respond. “But we should also ask ourselves,” he suggested, “what sort of life would arise if all this were not so unfavorable. Our feelings ultimately want to be handled quite roughly, it appears, but in the other borderline case— when we assimilate someone else’s sentiments without resistance, when we submit completely to someone else’s feelings, indeed, when we reach a pure agreement with a second understanding—is there not a happiness that is pathologically tender, in fact almost anti-intellectual? And how could this light be produced without the shadow?” This thought made him want to linger over the conversation; but although the idea was not entirely alien to Agathe either, she was occupied at the moment with smaller concerns. She looked at her brother for a while without speaking, struggling against what was coming over her, but then made up her mind to ask the offensive question, as casually as possible, whether that meant he had arrived at the considered conviction that “even only two people” could never be of one mind, and lovers under no circumstances whatever?

  Ulrich was almost at the point of expressing through a gesture that this was neither to be taken as real nor worth talking about, when he was struck by his sisters misplaced warmth; he had to suppress a smile at this suspicious inquisitiveness, but in doing so lost his own more serious inquisitiveness and fell back again into the interrupted merry flow of his initial joking way of talking. “You yourself began by belittling love!” he replied.

  “Let’s leave it at that!” Agathe decreed magnanimously. “Let’s leave it at people not agreeing, when they’re in love. But in ordinary life, which is certainly nothing less than loving, you must admit that all lands of people have similar convictions and that that plays an enormous role!”

  “They only think they have them!” Ulrich broke in.

  “They agree with each other!”

  “The agreement is imposed on them! People are like a fire that immediately shoots out in all directions unless there’s a stone on top!”

  “But aren’t there, for instance, generally prevailing opinions?” Agathe asked, intending to keep up with her brother.

  “Now you’re saying it yourself!” he countered. “ ‘Prevailing!’ Since it’s necessary that we agree, innumerable arrangements o
f course exist to take care of the externals and delude us inwardly into thinking it so. In making us people of one mind, these arrangements aren’t exactly subtle. Hypnotic suggestion, violence, intimidation, thoughtlessness, cowardice, and such things play a not inconsiderable role. The exercise of these arrangements is mostly alloyed with something base and corrupting. But if their influence stops for just a single moment, allowing reason to take over their affairs, you will very shortly see mankind start gabbling and fall to quarreling, the way the insane start running around when their warders aren’t looking!”

  Agathe recalled the walks in lovely weather where everything had been in unqualified harmony with everything else, and the people, even if they were apparently mistaken in believing that they loved each other, were at least very attentive to one another and filled with an almost solemn amiability and curiosity. It seemed appropriate to mention that love was, after all, the only tiling in the world that made people of one mind, and that in every one of its varieties it did so from both sides voluntarily.

  “But love is precisely one of the agreement machines. It has the lucky effect of making people blind!” Ulrich objected. “Love blinds: half the riddles about loving one’s neighbor we’ve been trying to solve are already contained in this proposition!”

  “The most one might add is that love also enables one to see what isn’t there,” Agathe maintained, concluding reflectively: “So really these two propositions contain everything you need in the world, in order to be happy despite it!”

  In direct connection with this point, however, it was the tiny papier-mâché horse, standing between them all alone in the middle of the desk, that bore the sole responsibility for their conversation. It was hardly a hand’s breadth high; its neck was daintily curved; the brown of its coat was as tender and full as the stomach of a fifteen-year-old girl who has almost, but not yet quite, eaten too much cake, and its mane and tail, its hooves and reins, were of one single, deepest black. It was a horse belonging to a court carriage, but as in legend two gods often grow into one, it was also a candy box in the form of a horse. Ulrich had discovered this little horse in a suburban confectioner’s window and had immediately acquired it, for he knew it from his childhood and had loved it so intensely back then that he could hardly recall whether he had ever owned it. Fortunately, such mercantile poems are sometimes preserved over several generations and merely wander with time from the centers of commerce to display windows in more modest parts of the city. So Ulrich had reverently installed this find on his desk, having already explained the significance of the species to his sister. The candy horse was a close relative of those circus animals—lions, tigers, horses, and dogs—that had lived at the same time, the time of Ulrich’s childhood, on the posters of traveling circuses, and could no more be summoned from the raging expressions of their palpable but one-dimensional existence into fully developed life than this little horse could jump through the glass pane of the shop window. Agathe had quickly understood this, for the confectioner’s horse constituted part of the large family of children’s fancies which are always chasing their desires with the zigzag flight of a butterfly, until at last they reach their goal only to find a lifeless object. And wandering back along childhood’s paths of love, brother and sister had even opened the horse and, with the mixed feelings attending the unsealing of a crypt, found inside a variety of round, flat little tents strewn with grains of sugar, which they thought they had not seen for decades, and which they enjoyed with the cautious courage of explorers.

  In a distracted and pensive way, during the pause that had followed the last exchange with Ulrich, Agathe had been observing this small object with the magnetic soul that stood before them. In the far distances of this daydreaming, perhaps there also emerged from the river of words about similarities and differences in thinking, that idea of the unseparated but not united, and now this joined in a peculiar way with their companionship as children. Agathe finally landed on time’s other shore of silence without knowing how long the interruption had lasted, and she picked up the conversation where it had left off by asking with direct vehemence, as if something had been forgotten: “But not every love has to blind!”

  Ulrich, too, was immediately ready to be pressed into service again in pursuit of the exchange of words that had rushed away, as if he were not sure how long he had been standing there distracted. “Let’s go on!” he suggested, and led with a random example: “Maternal love!”

  “Doting, it’s called,” Agathe replied.

  “In any case, it loves blindly, loves in advance. Won’t let anything distract it,” Ulrich stated, immediately continuing: “And its opposite, a child’s love?”

  “Is that love at all?” Agathe asked.

  “There’s a lot of selfishness and instinctive need for protection and such things in it,” Ulrich ventured, but added that it could also be, at least at certain stages, a real passion. Next, he asked about the love of friends.

  They were again agreed: youth was the only time for passionate friendships.

  “Love of honor?” Ulrich asked.

  Agathe shrugged her shoulders.

  “Love of virtue?”

  She repeated the gesture, then thought it over and said: “Saints or martyrs might call it love.”

  “But then it’s obviously a passion for overcoming the world, or something like that, as well,” Ulrich interjected. “An oppositional passion, but in any case something containing a lot of complications.”

  “But there can also be a lot of complications in love of honor,” Agathe added.

  “Love of power?” Ulrich went on, assenting to her objection with only a nod of his head.

  “That’s probably a contradiction in terms.”

  “Perhaps,” Ulrich agreed. “You might think that force and love are mutually exclusive.”

  “But they aren’t!” Agathe exclaimed, having changed her mind in the meantime. “Look: to be compelled! For women especially, being loved and being compelled is no contradiction at all!”

  Ulrich responded in contradictory ways to this reminder of the possibility of such experiences in his sister’s past; on the one hand he desired an informed explanation; on the other, the primordial ignorance of the gods. Frowning, he thought over what his response should be, and finally said, clearly but hesitating involuntarily: “In that case the association of the words is indeed ambivalent. All power is laid low before love, and if it humiliates love, then—”

  “Let’s not dwell on it,” Agathe interrupted, and offered a new question: “Love of truth?”

  Since he hesitated, “You should know all about that!” she added in jesting reproach; his long-drawn-out efforts to be accurate sometimes made her impatient.

  But the conversation was already inhibited, and slowly it became diffuse. “There, too, it’s not easy to separate out the right concepts,” Ulrich decided. “You can love truth in many different ways: as honor, as power, as virtue, or also like pure spring water and the air you breathe, or like—”

  “Is that love?” Agathe interrupted him again. “That way you could love spinach too!”

  “And why not? Even being partial to something is a form of love.

  There are many transitions,” Ulrich countered. “And love of truth’ especially is one of the most contradictory terms: If the concept of truth is stronger, love is correspondingly less, and in the last analysis you can hardly call the honorable or even the utilitarian need for truth love’; but if the concept of love is strong, what you might call the purest, highest love, then truth ceases to exist.”

  “Truth, unfortunately, arises in cold blood,” Agathe remarked pointedly.

  “To demand truth from love is just as mistaken as demanding justice from anger,” Ulrich agreed. “Emotion is injurious there.”

  “Oh perhaps that’s only men’s talk!” Agathe protested.

  “That’s the way it is: Love tolerates truth, but truth does not tolerate love,” Ulrich confirmed. “Love dissolves
truth.”

  “But if it dissolves the truth, then it has no truth?” Agathe asked this with the seriousness of the ignorant child who knows by heart the story it wants to hear repeated for the twentieth time.

  “A new truth begins,” Ulrich said. “As soon as a person encounters love not as some kind of experience but as life itself, or at least as a land of life, he knows a swarm of truths. Whoever judges without love calls this opinions, personal views, subjectivity, whim; and for him that’s all it is. But the one who loves knows about himself that he is not insensitive to truth, but oversensitive. He finds himself in a kind of ecstasy of thinking, where the words open up to their very centers. He understands in everyway more than is necessary. He can hardly save himself from an inexhaustible flood. And he feels that every rational desire to understand can only banish it. I don’t want to claim that this really is a different truth—for there is only one and the same truth—but it is a hundred possibilities that are more important than truth; it is, to say it more clearly, something by means of which all truth loses the importance attributed to it. Perhaps one might say: truth is the unequivocal result of an attitude to life which we by no means feel unequivocally to be the true attitude!” Ulrich, happy because he had finally achieved a more exact description, drew the conclusion: “So apparently to be surrounded by a swarm of truths means nothing other than that the lover is open to everything that has been loved, and also willed, thought, and put down in words; open to all contradictions, which are after all those of sentient beings; open even to every shared experience, if a word exists that can lift it tenderly to the point of articulation. The distinctive signs of truth and morality have been suppressed for him by the gentle power of life stirring all around him; they remain present, but fruitfulness and fullness have out-and overgrown them. For the lover, truth and deception are equally trivial, and yet this does not strike him as caprice: Now, this is probably no more than a changed personal attitude, but I would say that it still finally depends on countless possibilities underlying whatever reality has conquered them, possibilities that could also have become realities. The lover awakens them. Everything suddenly appears different to him from what you think. Instead of a citizen of this world, he becomes a creature of countless worlds—”