by Robert Musil
Thus Ulrich went on. “I said to Agathe: ‘Apparently beauty is nothing other than having been loved.’ For to love something and beautify it is one and the same. And to propagate its love and make others see its beauty is also one and the same. That’s why everything can appear beautiful, and everything beautiful, ugly; in both cases it will depend on us no less than it compels us from outside, because love has no causality and knows no fixed sequence. I’m not certain how much I’ve said about that, but it also explains this other impression that we have so vividly on our walks: We look at people and want to share in the joy that is in their faces; but these faces also radiate a discomfiture and an almost uncanny repulsion. It emanates, too, from the houses, clothes, and everything that they have created for themselves. When I considered what the explanation for this might be, I was led to a further group of ideas, and through that back to my first notes, which were apparently so fantastic.
“A city such as ours, lovely and old, with its superb architectural stamp, which over the course of ages has arisen from changing taste, is a single great witness to the capacity for loving and the incapacity for loving long. The proud sequence of this city’s structures represents not only a great history but also a constant change in the direction of thought. Looked at in this manner, the city is a mutability that has become a chain of stone and that surveys itself differently every quarter century in order to be right, in the end, for eternal ages. Its mute eloquence is that of dead lips, and the more enchantingly seductive it is, the more violently it must evoke, in its most profound moment of pleasing and of expropriation, blind resistance and horror.”
“It’s ridiculous, but tempting,” Agathe responded to that. “In that case the swallowtail coats of these dawdlers, or the funny caps officers wear on their heads like pots, would have to be beautiful, for they are most decidedly loved by their owners and displayed for love, and enjoy the favor of women!”
“We made a game of it too. In a kind of merry bad temper we enjoyed it to the utmost and for a while asked ourselves at every step, in opposition to life: What, for example, does the red on that dress over there mean by being so red? Or what are these blues and yellows and whites really doing on the collars of those uniforms? And why in God’s name are the ladies’ parasols round and not square? We asked ourselves what the Greek pediment of the Parliament building was after, with its legs astraddle? Either ‘doing a split’ as only a dancer or a pair of compasses can, or disseminating classical beauty? If you put yourself back that way into a preliminary state in which you are not touched by feelings, and where you do not infuse things with the emotions that they complacently expect, you destroy the faith and loyalty of existence. It’s like watching someone eat silently, without sharing his appetite: You suddenly perceive only swallowing movements, which look in no way enviable.
“I call that cutting oneself off from the ‘meaning’ of life. To clarify this, I might begin with how we unquestionably seek the firm and solid in life as urgently as a land animal that has fallen into the water. This makes us overestimate the significance of knowledge, justice, and reason, as well as the necessity of compulsion and violence. Perhaps I shouldn’t say overestimate; but in any case, by far the greatest number of manifestations of our life rest on the mind’s insecurity. Faith, supposition, assumption, intimation, wish, doubt, inclination, demand, prejudice, persuasion, exemplification, personal views, and other conditions of semi-certainty predominate among them. And because meaning, on this scale, lies roughly halfway between reasoning and capriciousness, I am applying its name to the whole. If what we express with words, no matter how magnificent they are, is mostly just a meaning, an opinion, then what we express without words is always one.
“Therefore I say: Our reality, as far as it is dependent on us, is for the most part only an expression of opinion, although we ascribe every imaginable kind of importance to it. We may give our lives a specific manifestation in the stones of buildings: it is always done for the sake of a meaning we impute to it. We may kill or sacrifice ourselves: we are acting only on the basis of a supposition. I might even say that all our passions are mere suppositions; how often we err in them; we can fall into them merely out of a longing for decisiveness! And also, doing something out of ‘free’ will really assumes that it is merely being done at the instigation of an opinion. For some time Agathe and I have been sensitive to a certain hauntedness in the empirical world. Every detail in which our surroundings manifest themselves ‘speaks to us.’ It means something. It shows that it has come into being with a purpose that is by no means fleeting. It is, to be sure, only an opinion, but it appears as a conviction. It is merely a sudden idea, but acts as if it were an unshakable will. Ages and centuries stand upright with legs firmly planted, but behind them a voice whispers: Rubbish! Never has the Hour Struck, never has the Time Come!
“It seems to be willfulness, but it enables me to understand what I see if I note in addition: This opposition between the self-obsession that puffs out the chest of everything we have created in all its splendor, and the secret trait of being given up and abandoned, which likewise begins with the first minute, is wholly and completely in agreement with my calling everything merely an opinion. By this means we recognize that we are in a peculiar situation. For every attribution of meaning shows the same double peculiarity: as long as it is new it makes us impatient with every opposing meaning (when red parasols are having their day, blue ones are ‘impossible’—but something similar is also true of our convictions); yet it is the second peculiarity of every meaning that it is nevertheless given up with time, entirely of its own accord and just as surely, when it is no longer new. I once said that reality does away with itself. It could now be put like this: If man is for the most part only proclaiming meanings, he is never entirely and enduringly proclaiming himself; but even if he can never completely express himself, he will try it in the most various ways, and in doing so acquires a history. So he has a history only out of weakness, it seems to me, although the historians understandably enough consider the ability to make history a particular badge of distinction!”
Here Ulrich seemed to have embarked on a digression, but he continued in this direction: “And this is apparently the reason why I have to take note of this today: History happens, events happen— even art happens—from a lack of happiness. But such a lack does not lie in circumstances—in other words, in their not allowing happiness to reach us—but in our emotions. Our feeling bears the cross of this double aspect: it suffers no other beside itself and itself does not endure. By this means everything connected with it acquires the aspect of being valid for eternity, but we all nonetheless strive to abandon the creations of our feelings and change the meanings that are expressed in them. For a feeling changes in the instant of its existence; it has no duration or identity; it must be consummated anew. Emotions are not only changeable and inconstant—as they are well taken to be—but the instant they weren’t, they would become so. They are not genuine when they last. They must always arise anew if they are to endure, and even in doing this they become different emotions. An anger that lasted five days would no longer be anger but be a mental disorder; it transforms itself into either forgiveness or preparations for revenge, and something similar goes on with all the emotions.
“Our emotions always seek a foothold in what they form and shape, and always find it for a while. But Agathe and I feel an imprisoned ghostliness in our surroundings, the reverse magnetism of two connected poles, the recall in the call, the mobility of supposedly fixed walls; we see and hear it suddenly. To have stumbled Into a time’ seems to us like an adventure, and dubious company. We find ourselves in the enchanted forest. And although we cannot encompass ‘our own’ differently constituted feeling, indeed hardly know what it is, we suffer anxiety about it and would like to hold it fast. But how do you hold a feeling fast? How could one linger at the highest stage of rapture, if indeed there were any way of getting there at all? Basically this is the only question t
hat preoccupies us. We have intimations of an emotion removed from the entropy of the other emotions. It stands like a miraculous, motionless shadow in the flow before us. But would it not have to arrest the world in its course in order to exist? I arrive at the conclusion that it cannot be a feeling in the same sense as the other feelings.”
And suddenly Ulrich concluded: “So I come back to the question: Is love an emotion? I think not. Love is an ecstasy. And God Himself, in order to be able to lastingly love the world and, with the love of God-the-Artist, also embrace what has already happened, must be in a constant state of ecstasy. This is the only form in which he may be imagined—”
Here he had broken off this entry.
51
GREAT CHANGES
Ulrich had personally escorted the General out with the intention of discovering what he might have to say in confidence. As he accompanied him down the stairs, he sought at first to offer a harmless explanation for having distanced himself from Diotima and the others, so that the real reason would remain unstated. But Stumm was not satisfied, and asked: “Were you insulted?”
“Not in the least.”
“Then you had no right to!” Stumm replied firmly.
But the changes in the Parallel Campaign, about which in his withdrawal from the world Ulrich had not had the least inkling, now had an invigorating effect on him, as if a window had suddenly been thrown open in a stuffy hall, and he continued: “I would still like to find out what’s really going on. Since you’ve decided to open my eyes halfway, please finish the job!”
Stumm stopped, supporting his sword on the stone of the step, and raised his glance to his friend’s face; a broad gesture, which lasted the longer in that Ulrich was standing one step higher: “Nothing I’d like better,” he said. “That’s the reason I came.”
Ulrich calmly began to interrogate him. “Who’s working against Leinsdorf ? Tnzzi and Diotima? Or the Ministry of War with you and Arnheim—?”
“My dear friend, you’re stumbling through abysses!” Stumm interrupted him. “And blindly walking past the simple truth, the way all intellectuals seem to do! Above all, I beg you to be convinced that I have passed on Leinsdorf’s wish to have you visit him and Diotima only as the most selfless favor—”
‘Tour officer’s word of honor?”
The General’s mood turned sunny. “If you’re going to remind me of the spartan honor of my profession, you conjure up the danger that I really will start lying to you; for there might be an order from above that would obligate me to do so. So I’d rather give you my private word of honor,” he said with dignity, and continued by way of explanation: “I was even intending to confide to you that recently I have seen myself at times compelled to reflect upon such difficulties; I find myself lying often these days, with the ease of a hog wallowing in garbage.” Suddenly he turned completely toward his more elevated friend and added the question: “How does it happen that lying is so agreeable, assuming you have an excuse? Just speaking the truth seems absolutely unproductive and frivolous by comparison! If you could tell me that, it would be, straight out, one of the reasons I came to hunt you up.”
“Then tell me honestly what’s going on,” Ulrich asked, unyielding.
“In total honesty, and also quite simply: I don’t know!” Stumm protested.
“But you have a mission!” Ulrich probed.
The General answered: “In spite of your truly unfriendly disappearance, I have stepped over the corpse of my self-respect to confide this mission to you. But it is a partial mission. A teeny commission. I am now a little wheel. A tiny thread. A little Cupid who has been left with only a single arrow in his quiver!” Ulrich observed the portly figure with the gold buttons. Stumm had definitely become more self-reliant; he did not wait for Ulrich’s response but set himself in motion toward the door, his sword clanking on every step. And as the entry hall, whose noble furnishings would otherwise have instilled in him a reverence for the master of the house, arched up over the two of them as they came down, he said over his shoulder to this master: “It’s clear you still have not quite grasped that the Parallel Campaign is now no longer a private or family undertaking but a political process of international stature!”
“So now it’s being run by the Foreign Minister?” Ulrich volleyed.
“Apparently.”
“And consequently Tuzzi?”
“Presumably; but I don’t know,” Stumm quickly added. “And of course he acts as if he knows nothing at all! You know what he’s like: these diplomats pretend to be ignorant even when they really are!”
They walked through the front door, and the carriage drove up. Suddenly Stumm turned, confidingly and comically pleading, to Ulrich: “But that’s why you should really start frequenting the house again, so that we have a quasi-confidant there!”
Ulrich smiled at this scheming, and laid his arm around the General’s shoulder; he felt reminded of Diotima. “What is she up to?” he asked. “Does she now recognize the man in Tuzzi?”
“What she’s up to?” the General responded, vexed. “She gives the impression of being irritated.” And he added good-naturedly: “To the discriminating glance, perhaps even a moving impression. The Ministry of Education gives her hardly any other assignments than deciding whether the patriotic association Wiener Schnitzel should be allowed to march in the parade, or a group called Roast Beef with Dumplings as well—”
Ulrich interrupted him suspiciously. “Now you’re talking about the Ministry of Education? Weren’t you just saying that the Foreign Ministry had appropriated the campaign?”
“But look, maybe the Schnitzels are really the affair of the Interior Ministry. Or the Ministry of Trade. Who can predict?” Stumm instructed him. “But in any case, the Congress for World Peace as a whole belongs to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, to the extent that it’s not already owned by the two Ministerial Presidiums.”
Ulrich interrupted him again. “And the War Ministry is nowhere in your thoughts at all?”
“Don’t be so suspicious!” Stumm said calmly. “Of course the War Ministry takes the most active interest in a congress for world peace; I would say no less an interest than police headquarters would take in an international congress of anarchists. But you know what these civilian ministries are like: they won’t grant even a toehold to the likes of us!”
“And—?” Ulrich asked, for Stumm’s innocence still made him suspicious.
“There’s no ‘and’!” Stumm assured him. “You’re rushing things! If a dangerous business involves several ministries, then one of them wants to either shove it off on, or take it away from, one of the others; in both cases the result of these efforts is the creation of an interministerial commission. You only need to remind yourself how many committees and subcommittees the Parallel Campaign had to create at the beginning, when Diotima was still in full command of its energies; and I can assure you that our blessed council was a still life compared with what’s being worked up today!” The carriage was waiting, the coachman sitting bolt upright on his coach box, but Stumm gazed irresolutely through the open vehicle into the bright-green garden that opened beyond. “Perhaps you can give me a little-known word with Inter’ in it?” he asked, and toted up with prompting nods of his head: “Interesting, interministerial, international, intercurrent, intermediate, interpellation, interdicted, internal, and a few more; because now you hear them at the General Staff mess more often than the word ‘sausage.’ But if I were to come up with an entirely new word, I could create a sensation!”
Ulrich steered the General’s thoughts back to Diotima. It made sense to him that the highest mandate came from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, from which it in all probability followed that the reins were in Tuzzi’s hands: but then, how could another ministry offend this powerful man’s wife? At this question Stumm disconsolately shrugged his shoulders. “You still haven’t got it through your head that the Parallel Campaign is an affair of state!” he responded, adding spontaneously: “Tuz
zi is slyer than we thought. He himself would never have been able to ascribe such a thing to it, but interministerial technology has allowed him to hand over his wife to another ministry!”
Ulrich began to laugh softly. From the message clothed in these rather odd words he could vividly imagine both people: magnificent Diotima—the power station, as Agathe called her—and the smaller, spare Section Chief, for whom he had an absolutely inexplicable sympathy, although he knew Tuzzi looked down on him. It was fear of the moon-nights of the soul that drew him to this man’s rational feelings, which were as dryly masculine as an empty cigarette case. And yet, when they had broken over the head of this diplomat, the sufferings of the soul had brought him to the point of seeing in everyone and everything only pacifist intrigues; for pacifism was for Tuzzi the most intelligible representation of soulful tenderness! Ulrich recalled that Tuzzi had finally come to regard Arnheim’s increasingly open efforts concerning the Galician oil fields—indeed, his efforts concerning his own wife—as merely a divertissement whose purpose was to deflect attention from a secret enterprise of a pacifistic nature: so greatly had the events in his house confused Tuzzi! He must have suffered unbearably, and it was understandable: the spiritual passion that he found himself unexpectedly confronting not only offended his concept of honor, just as physical adultery would have done, but struck directly and contemptuously at his very ability to form concepts, which in older men is the true retirement home of manly dignity.