by Robert Musil
So there was truly no need for a personality with such a broad base and such a clarified summit to allow itself to be intimidated by the saucy criticism of a young woman, and on returning to the present, Lindner drew out his watch and confirmed that Agathe had still not come, although it was almost time when Peter could return home. Nevertheless, he opened the piano again and, if he did not expose himself to the unfathomableness of the song, he did let his eyes roam again over its words, accompanying them with a soft whisper. In doing this he became aware for the first time that he was giving them a false emphasis that was far too emotional and not at all in accord with the music, which for all its charm was rather austere. He saw before him a Jesus child that was “somehow by Murillo, which is to say that in some quite vague way, besides the black cherry eyes of that master’s older beggar boys, it had their picturesque beggar’s rags, so that all this child had in common with the Son of God and the Savior was the touchingly humanized quality, but in a quite obviously overdone and really tasteless way. This made an unpleasant impression on him and again wove Agathe into his thoughts, for he recalled that she had once exclaimed that there was really nothing so peculiar as that the taste which had produced Gothic cathedrals and passionate devotion should have been succeeded by a taste that found pleasure in paper flowers, beading, little serrated covers, and simpering language, so that faith had become tasteless, and the faculty for giving a taste and smell to the ineffable was kept alive almost solely by nonbelievers or dubious people! Lindner told himself that Agathe was “an aesthetic nature,” meaning something that could not attain the seriousness of economics or morality but in certain cases could be quite stimulating, and this was one of them. Up to now Lindner had found the invention of paper flowers beautiful and sensible, but he suddenly decided to remove a bouquet of them that was standing on the table, hiding it for the time being behind his back.
This happened almost spontaneously, and he was slightly dismayed by this action, but was under the impression that he probably knew how to provide an explanation for the “peculiarity” remarked on by Agathe, which she had let take its course, an explanation she would not have expected of him. A saying of the Apostles occurred to him: “Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal!” And glancing at the floor with puckered forehead, he considered that for many years everything he had done stood in relationship to eternal love. He belonged to a wondrous community of love—and it was this that distinguished him from the ordinary intellectual—in which nothing happened for which an allegorical connection to the Eternal could not have been given, no matter how contingent and yoked to things earthly: indeed, nothing in which this connection would not have taken root as its inmost meaning, even if this did not always result in one’s consciousness always being polished to a shine. But there is a powerful difference between the love one possesses as conviction and the love that possesses one: a distinction in freshness, he might say, even if, of course, the difference between purified knowledge and muddy turbulence was certainly just as justified. Lindner did not doubt that purified conviction deserved to be placed higher; but the older it is, the more it purifies itself, which is to say that it frees itself from the irregularities of the emotions that produced it; and gradually there remains not even the conviction of these passions but only the readiness to remember and be able to use them whenever they might be needed. This might explain why the works of the emotions wither away unless they are freshened once again by the immediate experience of love.
Lindner was preoccupied with such almost heretical considerations when suddenly the bell shrilled.
He shrugged his shoulders, closed the piano again, and excused himself to himself with the words: “life needs not only worshipers but workers!”
57
TRUTH AND ECSTASY
Agathe had not finished reading the entries in her brothers diaries when for the second time she heard his steps on the gravel-strewn path beneath the windows, this time with unmistakable clarity. She made up her mind to penetrate his lair again, without his knowledge, at the first opportunity that presented itself. For however alien this way of viewing things was to her nature, she did want to get to know and understand it. Mixed in with this, too, was a little revenge, and she wanted to pay back secret with secret, and so did not want to be surprised. She hastily put the papers in order, replaced them, and erased every trace that might have betrayed her new knowledge. Moreover, a glance at the time told her that she really ought to have left the house long since and was no doubt being awaited with some irritation elsewhere, something Ulrich might not know about. The double standard she was applying suddenly made her smile. She knew that her own lack of candor was not really prejudicial to loyalty, and that this lack was, moreover, much worse than Ulrich’s. This was a spontaneous satisfaction that enabled her to part from her discovery notably reconciled.
When her brother entered his study again he no longer found her there, but this did not surprise him. He had finally wandered back in, the people and circumstances he had been discussing with Stumm having so filled his mind that after the General left he had strolled about in the garden for some time. After long abstinence, a hastily drunk glass of wine can bring about a similar, merely alcoholic vivacity, behind whose colorful scene changes one remains gloomy and untouched; and so it had not even crossed his mind that the people in whose destinies he was again apparently so interested lived no great distance from him and could easily have been contacted. The actual connection with them had remained as paralyzed as a cut muscle.
Still, several memories formed an exception to this and had aroused thoughts to which there were even now bridges of feeling, although only quite fragmentary ones. For instance, what he had characterized as “the return of Section Chief Tuzzi from the inwardness of emotion to its external manipulation” gave him the deeper pleasure of reminding himself that his diaries aimed at a distinction between these two aspects of emotion. But he also saw before him Diotima in her beauty, which was different from Agathe’s; and it flattered him that Diotima was still thinking of him, although with all his heart he did not begrudge her her chastisement at the hands of her husband in those moments when this heart again, so to speak, transformed itself into flesh. Of all the conversations he had had with her, he remembered the one in which she had postulated the possibility of occult powers arising in love; this insight had been vouchsafed her by her love for the rich man who also wanted to have Soul, and this now led him to think of Arnheim as well. Ulrich still owed him an answer to the emotional offer that was to have brought him influence on the world of action, and this led him to wonder what could have become of the equally magniloquent and no less vague offer of marriage that had once enraptured Diotima. Presumably the same thing: Arnheim would keep his word if you reminded him of it, but would have no objection if you forgot. The scornful tension that had emerged on his face at the memory of Diotima’s moment of glory relaxed again. It really would be quite decent of her not to keep a hold on Arnheim, he thought. A voice speaking reasonably in her overpopulated mind. At times, she had fits of sobriety and felt herself abandoned by the higher things, and then she would be quite nice. Ulrich had always harbored some small inclination for her in the midst of all his disinclination, and did not want to exclude the possibility that she herself might finally have realized what a ridiculous pair she and Arnheim made: she prepared to commit the sacrifice of adultery, Arnheim the sacrifice of marriage, so that again they would not come together, finally convincing themselves of something heavenly and unattainable in order to elevate themselves above the attainable. But when Bonadea’s story about Diotima’s school of love occurred to him, he finally said to himself that there was still something unpleasant about her, and there was nothing to exclude her throwing her entire energy of love at him at some point.
This was, more or less, how Ulrich let his thoughts run on after his conversation with Stumm, and it had seemed
to him that this was how upstanding people had to think whenever they concerned themselves with one another in the traditional way; but he himself had got quite out of the habit.
And when he entered the house all this had disappeared into nothingness. He hesitated a moment, again standing in front of his desk, took his diaries in his hands, and put them down again. He ruminated. In his papers a few observations about ecstatic conditions followed immediately after the exposition of the concept of the emotions, and he found this passage correct. An attitude entirely under the domination of a single emotion was indeed, as he had occasionally mentioned, already an ecstatic attitude. To fall under the sway of anger or fear is an ecstasy. The world as it looks to the eyes of a person who sees only red or only menace does not indeed last long, and that is why one does not speak of a world but speaks only of suggestions and illusions; but when masses succumb to this ecstasy, hallucinations of terrifying power and extent arise.
A different kind of ecstasy, which he had also pointed out previously, was the ecstasy of the uttermost degree of feeling. When this is attained, action is no longer purposeful but on the contrary becomes uncertain, indeed often absurd: the world loses its colors in a kind of cold incandescence, and the self disappears except for its empty shell. This vanishing of hearing and seeing is doubtless, too, an impoverishing ecstasy—and incidentally, all enraptured states of soul are poorer in diversity than the everyday one—and becomes significant only through its link with orgiastic ecstasy or the transports of madness, with the state of unbearable physical exertions, dogged expressions of will, or intense suffering, for all of which it can become the final component. For the sake of brevity, Ulrich had, in these examples, telescoped the overflowing and desiccating forms of losing oneself, and not unjustly so, for if from another point of view the distinction is indeed a quite significant one, yet in consideration of the ultimate manifestations, the two forms come close to merging. The orgiastically enraptured person leaps to his ruin as into a light, and tearing or being torn to pieces are for him blazing acts of love and deeds of freedom in the same way that, for all the differences, the person who is deeply exhausted and embittered allows himself to fall to his catastrophe, receiving salvation in this final act; in other words, he too receives something that is sweetened by freedom and love. Thus action and suffering blend on the highest plane on which they can still be experienced.
But this ecstasy of undivided sovereignty and of the crisis of an emotion are, of course, to a greater or lesser degree merely mental constructs, and true ecstasies—whether mystical, martial, or those of love groups or other transported communities—always presuppose a cluster of interrelated emotions and arise from a circle of ideas that reflects them. In less consolidated form, occasionally rigidifying and occasionally loosening up again, such unreal images of the world, formed in the sense of being particular groupings of ideas and feelings (as Weltanschauung, as personal tic), are so frequent in everyday life that most of them are not even regarded as ecstasies, although they are the preliminary stage of ecstasies in about the same way that a safety match in its box signifies the preliminary stage of a burning match. In his last entry, Ulrich had noted that a picture of the world whose nature is ecstatic also arises whenever the emotions and their subservient ideas are simply given priority over sobriety and reflection: it is the rapturous, emotional picture of the world, ecstatic life, that is periodically encountered in literature and to some extent also in reality, in larger or smaller social communes; but what was missing in this enumeration was precisely what for Ulrich was most important, the adducing of the one and only condition of soul and world which he considered an ecstasy that would be a worthy coequal of reality. But his thoughts now digressed from the subject, for if he wanted to make up his mind about evaluating this most seductive of exceptions, it was absolutely necessary—and this was also brought home to him in that he had hesitatingly alternated between an ecstatic world and a mere picture of an ecstatic world—to first become acquainted with the link that exists between our emotions and what is real: that is to say, the world to which we, as opposed to the illusions of ecstasy, impart this value.
But the standards by which we measure this world are those of the understanding, and the conditions under which this happens are likewise those of the understanding. But understanding—even if increasingly greater discrimination of its limits and rights places great obstacles in the path of the intellect—possesses a peculiarity in specific relation to the emotions that is easily perceived and characterized: in order to understand, we must put aside our emotions to the greatest extent possible. We block them out in order to be “objective,” or we place ourselves in a state in which the abiding emotions neutralize each other, or we abandon ourselves to a group of cool feelings that, handled carefully, are themselves conducive to understanding. We draw upon what we apprehend in this clearheaded condition for comparison when in other cases we speak of “delusions” through the emotions; and then we have a zero condition, a neutralized state: in short, a specific situation of the emotions, the silent presupposition of experience and thought processes with whose aid we consider merely as subjective whatever other emotional states used to delude us. A millennium’s experience has confirmed that we are most qualified to consistently satisfy reality if we place ourselves in this condition again and again, and that whoever wants not merely to understand but also to act also has need of this condition. Not even a boxer can do without objectivity, which in his case means “staying cool,” and inside the ropes he can as little afford to be angry as he can to lose his courage if he does not want to come out the loser. So our emotional attitude too, if it is to be adapted to reality, does not depend solely on the emotions governing us at the moment or on their submerged instinctual levels, but depends simultaneously on the enduring and recurrent emotional state that guarantees an understanding of reality and is usually as little visible as the air within which we breathe.
This personal discovery of a connection that is usually not often taken into account had enticed Ulrich to thinking further about the relation of the emotions to reality. Here a distinction must be made between the sense perceptions and the emotions. The former also “deceive,” and clearly neither the sensuous image of the world that sense perceptions represent to us is the reality itself, nor is the mental image we infer from it independent of the human way of thinking, though it is independent of the subjective way of thinking. But although there is no tangible similarity between reality and even the most exact representation of it that we have—indeed, there is, rather, an unbridgeable abyss of dissimilarity—and though we never get to see the original, yet we are able in some complex way to decide whether and under what conditions this image is correct. It is different with the emotions: for these present even the image falsely, to maintain the metaphor, and yet in so doing fulfill just as adequately the task of keeping us in harmony with reality, except that they do it in a different way. Perhaps this challenge of remaining in harmony with reality had a particular attraction for Ulrich, but aside from that, it is also the characteristic sign of everything that asserts itself in life; and there can thus be derived from it an excellent shorthand formula and demonstration of whether the image that perception and reason give us of something is correct and true, even though this formula is not all-inclusive. We require that the consequences of the mental picture of reality we have constructed agree with the ideational image of the consequences that actually ensue in reality, and only then do we consider the understanding’s image to be correct. In contrast to this, it can be said of the emotions that they have taken over the task of keeping us constantly in errors that constantly cancel one another out.
And yet this is only the consequence of a division of labor in which the emotion that is served by the tools of the senses, and the thought processes that are heavily influenced by this emotion, develop and, briefly stated, have developed into sources of understanding, while the realm of the emotions themselves has been relegated
to the role of more or less blind instigator; for in primeval times, our emotions as well as our sense sensations sprang from the same root, an attitude that involved the entire creature when it came into contact with a stimulus. The division of labor that arose later can even now be expressed by the statement that the emotions do without understanding what we would do with understanding if we were ever to do anything without some instigation other than understanding! If one could only project an image of this feeling attitude, it would have to be this: we assume about the emotions that they color the correct picture of the world and distort and falsely represent it. Science as well as everyday attitudes number the emotions among the “subjectivities”; they assume that these attitudes merely alter “the world we see,” for they presume that an emotion dissipates after a short time and that the changes it has caused in a perception of the world will disappear, so that “reality” will, over a shorter or longer time, “reassert” itself.