by Robert Musil
But isn’t the strange charm of the still life shadowboxing too? Indeed, almost an ethereal necrophilia?
And yet there is also a similar shadowboxing in the glances of happy lovers as an expression of their highest feelings. They look into each other’s eyes, can’t tear themselves away, and pine in an infinite emotion that stretches like rubber!
This was more or less how the exchange of words had begun, but at this point its thread was pretty much left hanging, and for quite a while before it was picked up again. For they had both really looked at each other, and this had caused them to lapse into silence.
But if an observation is called for to explain this—and if it is necessary to justify such conversations once again and express their sense—perhaps this much could be said, which at this moment Ulrich understandably left as an unspoken idea: that loving was by no means as simple as nature would have us believe by bestowing on every bungler among her creatures the necessary tools.
52
BREATHS OF A SUMMER DAY
The sun, meanwhile, had risen higher; they had abandoned the chairs like stranded boats in the shallow shade near the house and were lying on a lawn in the garden, beneath the full depth of the summer day. They had been like this for quite some time, and although the circumstances had changed, this change hardly entered their consciousness. Not even the cessation of the conversation had accomplished this; it was left hanging, without a trace of a rift.
A noiseless, streaming snowfall of lusterless blossoms, emanating from a group of trees whose flowering was done, hovered through the sunshine, and the breath that bore it was so gentle that not a leaf stirred. It cast no shadow on the green of the lawn, but this green seemed to darken from within like an eye. Extravagantly leaved by the young summer, the tender trees and bushes standing at the sides or forming the backdrop gave the impression of being amazed spectators who, surprised and spellbound in their gay attire, were participating in this funeral procession and celebration of nature. Spring and fall, speech and nature’s silence, and the magic of life and death too, mingled in this picture; hearts seemed to stop, removed from their breasts to join the silent procession through the air. “My heart was taken from out my breast,” a mystic had said: Agathe remembered it.
She knew, too, that she herself had read this saying to Ulrich from one of his books.
That had happened here in the garden, not far from the place where they were now. The recollection took shape. Other maxims too that she had recalled to his mind occurred to her: “Are you it, or are you not it? I know not where I am; nor do I wish to know!” “I have transcended all my abilities but for the dark power! I am in love, and know not in whom! My heart is full of love and empty of love at the same time!” Thus echoed in her again the laments of the mystics, into whose hearts God had penetrated as deeply as a thorn that no fingertips can grasp. She had read many such holy laments aloud to Ulrich at that time. Perhaps their rendering now was not exact: memory behaves rather dictatorially with what it wishes to hear; but she understood what was meant, and made a resolve. As it now appeared at this moment of flowery procession, the garden had also once looked mysteriously abandoned and animated at the very hour when the mystical confessions Ulrich had in his library had fallen into her hands. Time stood still, a thousand years weighed as lightly as the opening and closing of an eye; she had attained the Millennium: perhaps God was even allowing his presence to be felt. And while she felt these things one after the other—although time was not supposed to exist anymore—and while her brother, so that she should not suffer anxiety during this dream, was beside her, although space did not seem to exist any longer either: despite these contradictions, the world seemed filled with transfiguration in all its parts. What she had experienced since could not strike her as other than conversationally temperate by comparison with what had gone before; but what an expansion and reinforcement it gave to these later things as well, although it had lost the near-body-heat warmth of the immediacy of the first inspiration! Under these circumstances Agathe decided to approach with deliberation the delight that had formerly, in an almost dreamlike way, befallen her in this garden. She did not know why she associated it with the name of the Millennium. It was a word bright with feeling and almost as palpable as an object, yet it remained opaque to the understanding. That was why she could regard the idea as if the Millennium could come to pass at any moment. It is also called the Empire of Love: Agathe knew that too; but only then did it occur to her that both names had been handed down since biblical times and signified the kingdom of God on earth, whose imminent arrival they indicated in a completely real sense. Moreover, Ulrich too, without on that account believing in the Scriptures, sometimes employed these words as casually as his sister, and so she was not at all surprised that she seemed to know exactly how one should behave in the Millennium. “You must keep quite still,” her inspiration told her. “You cannot leave room for any land of desire; not even the desire to question. You must also shed the judiciousness with which you perform tasks. You must deprive the mind of all tools and not allow it to be used as a tool. Knowledge is to be discarded by the mind, and willing: you must cast off reality and the longing to turn to it. You must keep to yourself until head, heart, and limbs are nothing but silence. But if, in this way, you attain the highest selflessness, then finally outer and inner will touch each other as if a wedge that had split the world had popped out!”
Perhaps this had not been premeditated in any clear way. But it seemed to her that if firmly willed, it must be attainable; and she pulled herself together as if she were trying to feign death. But it quickly proved as impossible to completely silence the impulses of thought, senses, and will as it had been in childhood not to commit any sins between confession and communion, and after a few efforts she completely abandoned the attempt. In the process, she discovered that she was only superficially holding fast to her purpose, and that her attention had long since slipped away; at the moment, it was occupied with a quite remote problem, a little monster of disaffection. She asked herself in the most foolish way, reveling in the very foolishness of it: “Was I really ever violent, mean, hateful, and unhappy?” A man without a name came to mind, his name missing because she bore it herself and had carried it away with her. Whenever she thought of him, she felt her name like a scar; but she no longer harbored any hatred for Hagauer, and now repeated her question with the somewhat melancholy obstinacy with which one gazes after a wave that has ebbed away. Where had the desire come from to do him mortal harm? She had almost lost it in her distraction, and appeared to think it was still to be found somewhere nearby. Moreover, Lindner might really be seen as a substitution for this desire for hostility; she asked herself this, too, and thought of him fleetingly. Perhaps she found all the things that had happened to her astonishing, young people always being more disposed to be surprised at how much they have already had to feel than older people, who have become accustomed to the changeability of life’s passions and circumstances, like changes in the weather. But what could have so affected Agathe as this: that in the very moment of sudden change in her life, as its passions and conditions took flight, the stone-clear sky reached again into the marvelous river of emotions—in which ignorant youth sees its reflection as both natural and sublime—and lifted from it enigmatically that state out of which she had just awakened.
So her thoughts were still under the spell of the procession of flowers and death; they were, however, no longer moving with it to its rhythms of mute solemnity; Agathe was “thinking flittingly,” as it might be called in contrast to the frame of mind in which life lasts “a thousand years” without a wing beating. This difference between two frames of mind was quite clear to her, and she recognized with some amazement how often just this difference, or something closely related to it, had already been touched on in her conversations with Ulrich. Involuntarily she turned toward him and, without losing sight of the spectacle unfolding around them, took a deep breath and asked: “Doesn’t
it seem to you, too, that in a moment like this, everything else seems feeble by comparison?”
These few words dispersed the cloudy weight of silence and memory. For Ulrich, too, had been looking at the foam of blossoms sweeping by on their aimless journey; and because his thoughts and memories were tuned to the same string as those of his sister, he needed no further introduction to be told what would answer even her unspoken thoughts. He slowly stretched and replied: “I’ve been wanting to tell you something for a long time—even in the state when we were speaking of the meaning of still lifes, and every day, really—even if it doesn’t hit the center of the target: there are, to draw the contrast sharply, two ways of living passionately, and two sorts of passionate people. In one case, you let out a howl of rage or misery or enthusiasm each time like a child, and get rid of your feelings in a trivial swirl of vertigo. In that case, and it is the usual one, emotion is ultimately the everyday intermediary of everyday life; and the more violent and easily aroused it is, the more this kind of life is reminiscent of the restlessness in a cage of wild animals at feeding time, when the meat is carried past the bars, and the satiated fatigue that follows. Don’t you think? The other way of being passionate and acting is this: You hold to yourself and give no impetus whatever to the action toward which every emotion is straining. In this case, life becomes like a somewhat ghostly dream in which the emotions rise to the treetops, to the peaks of towers, to the apex of the sky! It’s more than likely that that’s what we were thinking of when we were pretending to discuss paintings and nothing but paintings.”
Agathe propped herself up, curious. “Didn’t you once say,” she asked, “that there are two fundamentally different possibilities for living and that they resemble different registers of emotion? One would be worldly emotion, which never finds peace or fulfillment; the other…I don’t know whether you gave it a name, but it would probably have to be the emotion of a ‘mystical’ feeling that resonates constantly but never achieves ‘full reality.’” Although she spoke hesitantly, she had raced ahead too quickly, and finished with some embarrassment.
But Ulrich recognized quite well what he seemed to have said; he swallowed as if he had something too hot in his mouth, and attempted a smile. He said: “If that’s what I meant, I’ll have to express myself less pretentiously now! So I’ll simply use a familiar example and call the two lands of passionate existence the appetitive and, as its counterpart, the non-appetitive, even if it sounds awkward. For in every person there is a hunger, and it behaves like a greedy animal; yet it is not a hunger but something ripening sweetly, like grapes in the autumn sun, free from greed and satiety. Indeed, in every one of his emotions, the one is like the other.”
“In other words, a vegetable—perhaps even a vegetarian—disposition alongside the animal one?” There was a trace of amusement and teasing in this question of Agathe’s.
“Almost!” Ulrich replied. “Perhaps the animalistic and the vegetative, understood as the basic opposition of desires, would even strike a philosopher as the most profound discovery! But would that make me want to be one? All I would venture is simply what I have said, and especially what I said last, that both lands of passionate being have a model, perhaps even their origin, in every emotion. These two aspects can be distinguished in every emotion,” he continued. But oddly, he then went on to speak only of what he understood by the appetitive. It urges to action, to motion, to enjoyment; through its effect, emotion is transformed into a work, or into an idea and conviction, or into a disappointment. All these are ways in which it discharges, but they can also be forms of recharging, for in this manner the emotion changes, uses itself up, dissipates in its success and comes to an end; or it encapsulates itself in this success and transforms its vital energy into stored energy that gives up the vital energy later, and occasionally often with multiple interest. “And doesn’t this explain that the energetic activity of our everyday feelings and its feebleness, which you were so pleasantly sighing about, don’t make any great difference to us, even if it is a profound difference?”
“You may be all too right!” Agathe agreed. “My God, this entire work of the emotions, its worldly wealth, this wanting and rejoicing, activity and unfaithfulness, all only because of the existence of this drive! Including everything you experience and forget, think and passionately desire, and yet forget again. It’s as beautiful as a tree full of apples of every color, but it’s also formlessly monotonous, like everything that ripens and falls the same way each year!”
Ulrich nodded at his sisters answer, which exuded a breath of impetuousness and renunciation. “The world has the appetitive part of the emotions to thank for all its works and all beauty and progress, but also all the unrest, and ultimately all its senseless running around!” he corroborated. “Do you know, by the way, that ‘appetitive’ means simply the share that our innate drives have in every emotion? Therefore,” he added, “what we have said is that it is the drives that the world has to thank for beauty and progress.”
“And its chaotic restlessness,” Agathe echoed.
“Usually that’s exactly what one says; so it seems to me useful not to ignore the other! For that man should thank for his progress precisely what really belongs on the level of the animal is, at the very least, unexpected.” He smiled as he said this. He, too, had propped himself up on his elbow, and he turned completely toward his sister, as if he wished to enlighten her, but he went on speaking hesitantly, like a person who first wants to be instructed by the words he is searching for. “You were right to speak of an animalistic disposition,” he said. “Doubtless there are at its core the same few instincts as the animal has. This is quite clear in the major emotions: in hunger, anger, joy, willfulness, or love, the soul’s veil barely covers the most naked desire!”
It seemed that he wanted to continue in the same vein. But although the conversation—which had issued from a dream of nature, the sight of the parade of blossoms that still seemed to be drifting through the middle of their minds with a peculiar uneventfulness— did not permit any misconstruing of the fateful question of the relation of brother and sister to each other, it was rather that from beginning to end the conversation was under the influence of this idea and dominated by the surreptitious notion of a “happening without anything happening,” and took place in a mood of gentle affliction; although this was the way it was, finally the conversation had led to the opposite of such a pervasive idea and its emotional mood: to the point where Ulrich could not avoid emphasizing the constructive activity of strong drives alongside their disturbing activity. Such a clear indication of the drives, including the instinctive, and of the active person in general—for it signified that too—might well be part of an “Occidental, Western, Faustian life feeling,” as it was called in the language of books, in contrast to everything that, according to the same self-fertilizing language, was supposed to be “Oriental” or “Asiatic.” He recalled these patronizing vogue words. But it was not his or his sisters intention, nor would it have been in keeping with their habits, to give a misleading significance to an experience that moved them deeply by employing such adventitious, poorly grounded notions; rather, everything they discussed with each other was meant as true and real, even if it may have arisen from walking on clouds.
That was why Ulrich had found it amusing to substitute an explanation of a scientific kind for the caressing fog of the emotions; and in truth he did so just because—even if it appeared to abet the “Faustian”—the mind faithful to nature promised to exclude everything that was excessively fanciful. At least he had sketched out the basis for such an explanation. It was, of course, rather stranger that he had done so only for what he had labeled the appetitive aspect of emotions, but quite ignored how he could apply an analogous idea to the non-appetitive aspect, although at the beginning he had certainly considered them to be of equal importance. This did not come about without a reason. Whether the psychological and biological analysis of this aspect of emotion seemed harder t
o him, or whether he considered it in toto only a bothersome aid—both might have been the case—what chiefly influenced him was something else, of which he had, moreover, shown a glimpse since the moment when Agathe’s sigh had betrayed the painful yet joyous opposition between the past restless passions of life and the apparently imperishable ones that were at home in the timeless stillness under the stream of blossoms. For—to repeat what he had already repeated in various ways—not only are two dispositions discernible in every single emotion, through which, and in its own fashion, the emotion can be fleshed out to the point of passion, but there are also two sorts of people, or different periods of destiny within each person, which differ in that one or the other disposition predominates.
He saw a great distinction here. People of the one sort, as already mentioned, reach out briskly for everything and set about everything; they rush over obstacles like a torrent, or foam into a new course; their passions are strong and constantly changing, and the result is a strongly segmented career that leaves nothing behind but its own stormy passage. This was the sort of person Ulrich had had in mind with the concept of the appetitive when he had wanted to make it one major notion of the passionate life; for the other sort of person is, in contrast to this, nothing less than the corresponding opposite of the first kind: the second is timid, pensive, vague; has a hard time making up its mind; is full of dreams and longings, and internalized in its passion. Sometimes—in ideas they were not now discussing— Ulrich also called this sort of person “contemplative,” a word that is ordinarily used in another sense and that perhaps has merely the tepid meaning of “thoughtful”; but for him it had more than this ordinary meaning, was indeed equivalent to the previously mentioned Oriental/non-Faustian. Perhaps a major distinction in life was marked in this contemplative aspect, and especially in conjunction with the appetitive as its opposite: this attracted Ulrich more vitally than a didactic rule. But it was also a satisfaction to him, this elementary possibility of explanation, that all such highly composite and demanding notions of life could be reduced to a dual classification found in every emotion.