The Man Without Qualities, Volume 2

by Robert Musil

  His sister had listened to him without stirring, without even a muscle in her face twitching. “We can kill each other if it turns into a book,” she said. “But it seems to me we have less reason to than before.”

  Ulrich involuntarily looked her in the eye.

  “Rather more reason for the opposite,” she went on.

  “You can’t yet say that (too),” Ulrich objected calmly.

  Agathe found that the supporting pillow at her side needed rearranging, which turned her face away from him. “Don’t be angiy with me,” she replied from this posture, “but even though I admire what you write, I still don’t quite understand why you write. Indeed, sometimes I’ve found it enormously comical. You carefully dissect according to natural and moral laws the possibility of extending your hand. Why don’t you simply reach out?”

  “It’s ruinous simply to reach out. Did I ever tell you the story of the major’s wife?”

  Agathe nodded mutely.

  “It can’t end the way that did!”

  The small furrow appeared between Agathe’s brows. “The major’s wife was a commonplace person,” she declared coolly.

  “That’s right. But whether one discovers a world or goes on a Don Quixote adventure doesn’t depend, unfortunately, on the worth of the person in whose honor one embarks on the trip.”

  “Who knows!” Agathe replied. A moment later she impatiently abandoned her comfortable position and sat down in the ordinary way right in front of her brother, as if she were going to test something. She looked at him (almost grimly) but said nothing. “Well?” Ulrich asked encouragingly, expecting an attack (that was awaiting him).

  “Doesn’t everything you’ve written down”—she pointed to the table and the papers lying on it—”answer everything we’ve been asking ourselves so often and have been so uncertain about?”

  “I almost think so.”

  “I have the feeling that everything we’ve been discussing back and forth for so long is resolved in these papers. But why didn’t you hit on it sooner? I’m even immodest enough to maintain that you’ve left us both in the dark for quite a while.”

  “We’re still in the dark. You shouldn’t overestimate these ideas. And it’s been hard for me to open up to you. Sometimes in a dream you have delightful thoughts, but if you carry on with them after you wake up, they’re ridiculous.”

  “Really? But if I’ve understood you correctly, you’re certain that for every emotion there are two worlds and that it depends on us which one we wish to live in!”

  “Two images of the world! But only one reality! Within it, of course, you can perhaps live in one way or the other. And that is when you apparently have the one or the other reality before you.”

  “Apparently, but totally? Apparently, and with no gaps? But if everything were living in this other way, wouldn’t that be the Millennium?”

  Ulrich cautiously confirmed the possibility of this conclusion.

  “So the intimation of this other world would also be what brought about belief in a paradise? Don’t laugh at me, but it’s made me conclude that in this way one would of necessity arrive in paradise just by living according to the other part of one’s feelings, as you call it.”

  “Put correctly, paradise would then have to arrive on earth,” Ulrich rectified.

  “I’m not laughing at all. I just have to add: as far as one can!” / Or: mysticism as anomalous psychology of normal life: You believe that mysticism is a secret through which we enter another world; but it is only, or even, the secret of living differently in our world.”

  “Oh? Yes, that’s what you wrote. But didn’t you even much earlier sometimes call it the concave, submerged world?” Agathe ascertained. “You spoke of an encompassing and an encompassed possibility of feeling as if they were old tales. Of gods and goddesses. Of two branches of development in life. Of moon-nights and day. Of two inseparable twins!”

  It is the answer to all our conversations, all our peculiarities.

  Agathe was pressing, but Ulrich yielded of his own accord: “You can add anything you like: everything that has truly moved me has its explanation here. The victories that come from acting in the world, and the emotions that go with them, have always been alien to me, even if at times I felt an obligation to them. An apparently inactive state I called love, without loving a woman, was opposed in me to the processes of knowledge that gave me the passion a rider has for his horse which I called the world of love because I couldn’t love in the everyday world! We always imagined a different life before us.”

  Agathe interrupted him animatedly. But it was hard for her to find the right words. At the beginning, although soon swept away by what she was saying, there was a little awkwardness in her voice, as when a boy tries to speak in a man’s bass voice, or when a girl paints a mustache on her face, as she began: “You know that I’m no shrinking touch-me-not. And I’ve often reproached myself for my so-called passions, which have always left me completely unmoved. I clearly felt that I was being moved by them only because I hadn’t found what could truly move us.” Possibly better this way: When she applied the expression “touch-me-not” to herself. She said Ulrich knew that she wasn’t one and that she attached no importance to it. But also (that is: he knew) that she found her so-called passions most shameful after the fact. “You scrape yourself like a cow against a tree, just as happily, and suddenly stop in the same bewilderment,” she said.

  Ulrich: A person is passionate in two senses. A land of appetitive sense, which reaches out for everything and undertakes everything, and another, which is timid, has a hard time making up its mind to do things, and is full of inexpressible longing. One probably has both within oneself.

  Agathe: The man with qualities and the man without qualities! Marvelous, marvelous. If someone understands you properly he has saved his life! What author wouldn’t be flattered by such praise! Ulrich responded: It’s not immaterial that we are talking about a passionate person in two quite different senses. We’ve become accustomed to applying the term chiefly to people we really ought to call lustful, to gluttons in every kind of passion, while we rather tend to regard people who are profoundly passionate within themselves as weak in affect, people who ascetically serve some sort of nobler passion of life. That leads to stupid mix-ups.

  Agathe: I’m reproached for acting badly—

  Who reproaches you? (a little suspiciously)

  Agathe violently twitched her shoulders. “Professor Hagauer. Think of his letters. Indeed, I’ve often reproached myself for having done what I did with the will—”

  “We’ll make amends for it,” Ulrich intervened.

  “What a situation to be in, feeling that you’re not a good person and yet not wanting it any other way! You yourself once reproached me about this, and I was insulted—”

  Ulrich interrupted her with an apologetic, defensive gesture. Probably (too) from the author, that it’s important that they have now recognized that they’ve got to the center of their difficulties.

  Agathe: “Oh, you’ve often talked about morality. You’ve set before me at least ten different definitions; every time, listening to you was a totally new experience. But now I’m reproached for being immoral, I’m made to believe it myself, but for all that I’m an absolute marvel of morality!”

  Ulrich: And why a marvel?

  Agathe: You showed me the way! The only condition I love and seek needs no morality, it is morality! Every twitch of the little toe that happens in it is moral. Am I right? (laughs)

  Ulrich: Yes, you’re right.

  Agathe: But first I want to ask you something else…Everything we’ve been talking about half-jokingly and half seriously for the last few days: is it all settled?

  Ulrich: Of course.

  Agathe: To love your neighbor as yourself is an ecstatic demand?

  Ulrich: It is the natural morality of mystic ecstasy, which teaches something that never quite fits the ordinary activity of our lives.

  Early-Morni
ng Walk

  Part I

  Around Clarisse’s mouth laughter was struggling with the difficulties facing her; her mouth kept opening and then pressing itself tightly shut. She had got up too early: Walter was still sleeping; she had hastily thrown on a light dress and gone outside. The singing of birds reached her from the woods through the empty morning stillness. The hemisphere of the sky had not yet filled with warmth. Even the light was still shallowly dispersed. “It only reaches my ankles,” Clarisse thought. “The cock of the morning has just been wound up! Everything is before its time!” Clarisse was deeply moved that she was wandering through the world before it was time. It almost made her cry.

  Without saying anything about it to Walter or Ulrich, Clarisse had been to the asylum a second time. Since then she had been especially sensitive. She applied everything she had seen or heard during her two visits to herself. Three events especially preoccupied her. The first was that she had been addressed and greeted as the Emperors son and a man. When this assertion had been repeated, she had quite distinctly felt her resistance to it yield, as if something ordinary that usually stood in the way of this royal quality was vanishing. And she was filled with an inexpressible desire. The second thing that excited her was that Meingast, too, was transforming himself, and was obviously using her and Walter’s proximity in the process. Since she had surprised him in the vegetable garden—it might have been a few weeks ago—and terrified him with her truly prophetic shout that she could transform herself too and also be a man, he had been avoiding her company. Since then she had not seen him often, even at meals; he locked himself in with his work or spent the whole day out of the house, and whenever he was hungry he secretly took something to eat from the pantry (without asking). It had been just a short time ago that she had succeeded in talking to him again alone. She had told him: “Walter has forbidden me to talk about how you’re undergoing a transformation in our house!” and had blinked her eyes. But even here Meingast kept himself concealed and acted surprised, indeed annoyed. He did not want to let her in on the secret he was busily working on. This seemed to be the explanation. But Clarisse had said to him: “Perhaps I’ll steal a march on you!” And she connected that with the first event. There was little reflection in this, and on that account its relation to reality was unclear; but what was clearly palpable was the lustful emergence of a different being from within the foundation of her own.

  Clarisse was now convinced that the insane people had found her out (that she had offered to Meingast that she could also be a man). And since then she had one secret more: when an invitation to repeat the interrupted visit did not arrive, either from the secretly resisting General von Stumm or from Ulrich, she had after long hesitation herself called Dr. Friedenthal and announced that she would visit him at the hospital. And the doctor had promptly found time for Clarisse. When she asked him immediately upon her arrival whether mad people did not know a great deal that healthy people could not even guess at, he smiled and shook his head, but gazed deeply into her eyes and answered in a tone of complacency: “The doctors of the insane know a lot that healthy people don’t even suspect!” And when he had to go on his rounds he had offered to take Clarisse along, and to begin where they had stopped the last time. As if it were already a matter of course, Clarisse again slipped into the white doctors coat that Friedenthal held for her.

  But—and this was the third event that still excited Clarisse after the fact, and even more than the others—she again did not get to see Moosbrugger. For something remarkable happened. They had left the last pavilion and were breathing in the spicy air of the grounds as they walked, during which Friedenthal ventured: “Now it’s time for Moosbrugger!” when again a guard came running up with a message. Friedenthal shrugged his shoulders and said: “Strange! It’s not going to work out this time either! At this moment the Director and a Commission are with Moosbrugger. I can’t take you with me.” And after he had assured her on his own initiative that he would invite her to continue her visit at the first opportunity, he left with rapid strides, while the guard conducted Clarisse back to the street.

  Clarisse found it striking and extraordinary that her visits had twice come to nothing, and suspected that there was something behind it. She had the impression that she was intentionally not being allowed to see Moosbrugger and that a new excuse was being thought up each time, perhaps even with the purpose of making Moosbrugger disappear before she could get through to him.

  But when Clarisse thought this over again, she nearly cried. She had let herself be outsmarted and felt quite ashamed; for she had heard nothing from Friedenthal. But while she was getting so upset, she was also calming down again. A thought occurred to her that often preoccupied her now, that in the course of the history of mankind many great men had been spirited away and tortured by their contemporaries, and that in the madhouse many had even disappeared. “They could neither defend themselves nor explain, because all they felt for their time was scorn!” she thought. And she recalled Nietzsche, whom she idolized, with his great, sad mustache and grown totally mute behind it.

  But this gave her an uncanny feeling. What had just now insulted or provoked her, her defeat at the hands of the cunning doctor, was suddenly revealed to her as a sign that the destiny of such a great man might also have been preordained for her. Her eyes sought the direction in which the asylum lay, and she knew that she always felt this direction as something special, even when she wasn’t thinking of it.

  It was extremely oppressive to feel oneself so at one with madmen, but she told herself that “to put oneself on the level of the uncanny is to decide for genius!”

  Meanwhile the sun had come up, and this made the landscape even emptier; it was green and cool, with bloody wisps; the world was still low, and reached up only to Clarisse’s ankles on the little rise she was standing on. Here and there a bird’s voice shrieked like a lost soul. Her narrow mouth expanded and smiled at the course of the morning. She stood girded round by her smile like the Blessed Virgin on the earth embraced by sin / crescent moon. She mulled over what she should do. She was under the sway of a peculiar mood of sacrifice: far too many things had recently been going through her head. She had repeatedly believed that it was now beginning with her: to do a great deed, something great with all her soul! But she did not know what.

  She only felt that something was imminent. She stood in fear of it, but felt a longing for the fearful. It hovered in the emptiness of the morning like a cross above her shoulders. But really it was more an active hurt. A great deed. A transformation. There was that idea again, so laden with associations! But, as it were, empty, like a rising first ball of light. And yet it was something active and aggressive. What it might be and her attempts to imagine it caromed through her head in all directions. The swallows, too, had meanwhile begun to dart back and forth through the air.

  Suddenly Clarisse became cheerful again, although the uncanniness did not entirely disappear. It occurred to her that she had got quite far away from her house. She turned around, and began to dance on the way. She stretched her arms straight out and lifted her knee. That was how she traversed the entire last part of her route.

  But before she got home, at a bend in the path, she came upon General von Stumm.

  (1) “Good morning, dear lady! How are things?” he called already

  from a distance of fifteen yards.

  “Quite well!” Clarisse replied with a stern face, in a toneless soft voice.

  (2) Stumm was in uniform, and his little round legs were ensconced in boots and dun-colored riding breeches with a general’s red stripes. At the Ministry he militantly pretended that he sometimes went on long rides in the morning before work, but in reality he went strolling with Clarisse over the banks and meadows that surrounded her house. At this hour Walter was still sleeping, or had to busy himself with his clothes and breakfast in joyless haste so he wouldn’t be late to the office; and if Walter peeked out of the window, filled with jealousy he saw the s
un sparkling on the buttons and colors of a uniform, alongside which a red or blue summer dress was usually to be seen billowing in the wind, as happens in old paintings to the garments of angels in the exuberance of their descending.

  (3) “Shall we go to the ski jump?” Stumm asked cheerfully. The “ski jump” was a small quarry in the hills, and had nothing whatever to do with its name. But Stumm found this name, one that Clarisse had chosen, “exquisite and dynamic.” “As if it were winter!” he exclaimed. “It makes me laugh every time. And you would doubtless, my dear lady, call a snowbank a ‘summer hill’?”

  Clarisse liked being called “my dear lady” and immediately agreed to turn around with him, because once she had become accustomed to the general’s company she found it quite agreeable. First, because he was, after all, a general; not “nothing,” like Ulrich and Meingast and Walter. She now loved everything that was important in the world. Then, because it had occurred to her that it was really a quite peculiar circumstance to be always carrying a sword around, an odd relation to the world that corresponded to the great and fearful feelings that at times / often preoccupied her. Further, she esteemed the voluble von Stumm because she unconsciously recognized that he did not, like the others, desire her in a way that, when she was not in the mood herself, demeaned her. “There’s something strangely pure about him!” she had explained to her jealous husband. But as a final reason, she also needed a person with whom she could talk, for she was oppressed by myriad swarms of inner promptings that she had to keep to herself. And when the General was listening to her, she felt that everything she said and did was good. “You have, my dear lady,” the General would often assure her, “something that sets you apart from all women I have had the honor of getting to know. You positively teach me energy, martial courage, and the conquering of Austrian negligence!” He smiled as if it were a joke, but she clearly noticed that he meant some of it seriously.