by Robert Musil
But Clarisse meant nothing of the sort. “People have an obligation to get beyond mere hints!” she asserted.
“Quite remarkable!” Stumm exclaimed, honestly moved. “Old Count Leinsdorf says the same thing you do! Just recently I had a most profound discussion with that distinguished gentleman about metaphors and symbols, and in connection with the patriotic campaign he expressed precisely the opinion you did: that all of us have the obligation to reach out beyond the condition of metaphor to reality!”
“I once wrote him a letter in which I asked him to do something about freeing Moosbrugger,” Clarisse said.
You see, even then we already had two acquaintances in common without knowing it!
“And what was his response? For of course he couldn’t do it. I mean, even if he could, he couldn’t, because he’s much too conservative and legalistic a gentleman.”
“But you could?” Clarisse asked.
“No; whatever’s in the madhouse can stay there. No matter how ambiguous it is. Caution, you know, is the mother of wisdom.”
“But what’s this?” Clarisse asked, smiling, for she had discovered on the scabbard of the General’s sword the woven double eagle, the emblem of the Imperial and Royal Monarchy. “What’s this double eagle?”
“What do you mean? What should the double eagle be? It’s the double eagle!”
“But what is a double eagle? An eagle with two heads? Only one-headed eagles fly around in the real world! So I’m pointing out to you that you’re carrying on your saber the symbol of a double being! I repeat, General, enchanting things are all based, it would appear, on primitive nonsense!”
General: Pst! I shouldn’t be listening to such things! (smiling)
Walter and Clarisse’s Woodsy Armistice
As they approached her house, she was accompanied by the theatrical illusion of being a person returning from a distant land. She had given up her dance but for some reason or other was humming in her head the melody “There my father Parsifal wore the crown, I his knight, Lohengrin my name.” When she walked through the door and felt the violent transition from the morning, whose brightness had already become hard and warm, into the sleeping twilight of the vestibule, she thought she was caught in a trap. Under her light weight the steps she climbed emitted a barely audible sound; it echoed like the breath of a sigh, but nothing in the entire house responded. Clarisse cautiously turned the doorknob of the bedroom: Walter was still sleeping! She was greeted by light the color of milky coffee penetrating the curtains, and the nursery odor of the ending night. Walters lips were sulky like a boys, and warm; at the same time his face was simple, indeed impoverished. Much less was to be seen in it than was normally one’s impression. Only a lustful need for power, otherwise not evident, was now visible. Standing motionless by his bed, Clarisse looked at her husband; he felt his sleep disturbed by her entrance and rolled over on his other side. She lingeringly enjoyed the superiority of the waking over the sleeping person; she felt the desire to kiss him or stroke him, or indeed to scare him, but could not make up her mind. She also did not want to expose herself to the danger associated with the bedroom, and finding Walter still sleeping had obviously found her unprepared. She tore off a piece from some wrapping paper from a purchase, which had been left lying on the table, and wrote on it in large letters: “I have paid a visit to the sleeper and await him in the woods.”
When Walter awoke shortly afterward and discovered the empty bed next to his, he dully remembered that something had gone on in the room while he was sleeping, looked at the clock, discovered the note, and quickly wiped away the cobwebs of sleep, for he had intended on this particular day to get up especially early and do some work. Since this was now no longer possible, he thought it proper, after thinking it over a bit, to put off the work; and although he saw himself forced to scrape his own breakfast together, he was soon standing in the best of spirits under the rays of the morning sun. He assumed that Clarisse was lurking in a hiding place and would materialize from ambush as soon as he entered the woods. He took the usual route, a wide dirt wheelbarrow path, which took about half an hour. It was a half holiday, which is to say one of those days between holidays that do not officially count as holidays; on which account, remarkably enough, precisely those official agencies and the noble professions connected with them took the whole day off, while less responsible private people and businesses worked half the day. Things like this are said to have been sanctioned by history, and the consequence was that on this day Walter was permitted to walk like a private individual in an almost private nature, in which apart from him only a few unsupervised hens were running around. He stretched to see whether he might discover a bright-colored dress either at the edge of the woods or perhaps even coming toward him, but there was nothing to be seen, and although the walk had been lovely at the start, his pleasure in the exercise sank with the increasing heat. His rapid walking soaked his collar and the pores of his face until that unpleasant feeling of damp warmth set in which degrades the human body to a piece of laundry. Walter resolved to get into better shape for the outdoors again; allowed himself the excuse that perhaps he was merely dressed too warmly; was also doubtless anxious lest he might be coming down with something: and his thoughts, which had initially been quite animated, became in this fashion gradually incoherent and finally flopped, as it were, in time with his steps, while the path seemed never to end.
At some point he thought: “As a so-called normal person, one’s thoughts are truly hardly less incoherent than a madman’s!” And then it occurred to him: “Moreover, one does say that it’s insanely hot!” And he smiled weakly that this turn of phrase was apparently not without foundation, since for example the changes a feverish temperature brings about in one’s head are really somewhere between the symptoms of ordinary heat and those of mental disturbance. And so, without taking it entirely seriously, it might perhaps also be said of Clarisse that she had always been what one calls a crazy person without her having to be a sick one. Walter would very much have liked to know the answer to this question. Her brother and doctor claimed that there was not the slightest danger. But Walter believed he had known for a long time that Clarisse was already on the other side of a certain boundary. He sometimes had the feeling that she was merely still hovering around him as do departed souls, of whom it is said that they cannot immediately separate themselves from what they had loved. This idea was not unsuited to inflating his pride, for there were not many other people who would have been up to such a ghastly yet beautiful—as he now called it—struggle between love and horror. There were, to be sure, times when he felt irresolute. A sudden push or collapse could carry his wife away into the domain of the completely repellent and ugly, and that would still have been the least of it, for what if, in that case, she did not repel him! No, Walter assumed that she would have to repel him, for the debased mind was ugly! And Clarisse would then have to be put in an institution, for which there was not enough money. That was all quite depressing. Still, there had been times, when her soul was already, so to speak, fluttering in front of the windowpanes, when he had felt himself so bold that he had no desire to think whether he should pull her in to him or rush out to her.
Such thoughts made him forget the sunny, strenuous path, but finally also caused him to leave off thinking altogether, so that while he remained in animated motion he really had no content, or was filled with terribly ordinary contents, which he solemnly pondered; he walked along Uke a rhythm without notes, and when he bumped into Clarisse he almost stumbled over her. She, too, had at first followed the broad path, and had found at the edge of the woods a small indentation where the spilled sunlight licked the shadows at every breath of wind, like a goddess licking an animal. Here the ground rose gently, and since she was lying on her back, she saw the world within a strange gimlet. Through some kind of kinship of shapes, the uncanny mood that on this day mixed particularly easily with her cheerfulness had again taken hold of her spirits, and gazing long and s
teadily into the horizontally perverse landscape she began to feel sadness, as if she had to assume the burden of a sorrow or a sin or a destiny. There was an enormous sense of abandonment, of anticipation, and an expectancy of sacrifice abroad in the world, of the land she had found the first time she had gone out, when the day just “reached her ankles.” Her eyes involuntarily sought the place where, behind more distant slopes and not visible to her, the extensive buildings of the asylum for the insane must lie; and when she thought she had located them it calmed her, as it calms the lover to know the direction in which his thoughts can find his beloved. Her thoughts “flew,” but not in that direction. “They’re now crouching, having fallen quite silent, Uke huge black birds beside me in the sun,” she thought, and the splendid yet melancholy feeling associated with this lasted until Clarisse caught sight of Walter in the distance. Then she had suddenly had enough of her sorrow, hid behind the trees, held her hand in front of her mouth like a funnel, and shouted, as loudly as she could: “Cuckoo!” She then straightened up and ran deeper into the woods, but immediately changed her mind again and threw herself down in the warm forest weeds beside the path Walter would have to use. His countenance then did come along, thinking itself unobserved, expressing nothing but an unconscious, gently animated attentiveness to the obstacles on the path, and this made his face very strange, indeed quite resolutely masculine, to look at. When he was unsuspectingly close, Clarisse stretched out her arm and reached for his foot, and tins was the moment when Walter nearly fell and first caught sight of his wife, lying almost under his eyes and directing her smiling glance up at him. Despite some of his concerns, she did not look in the least ugly.
Clarisse laughed. Walter sat down beside her on a tree stump and dried his neck with his handkerchief. “Clarisse…!” he began, and continued only after a pause: “I really meant to work today….”
“Meant?” Clarisse mocked. But for once it did not sting. The word whizzed from her tongue and mingled with the cheerful whirring of the flies that zoomed past their ears through the sun like small metal arrows. Walter replied: “I’ll admit that lately I haven’t thought working was the right thing to do if you could just as well sniff the new flowers. Work is one-sided; it goes against one’s duty to wholeness!”
Since he paused briefly, Clarisse threw a small pine cone that had come to hand up in the air a few times and caught it again.
“Of course I’m also aware of the objections that could be raised against that,” Walter asserted.
Clarisse let the pine cone fall to the ground and asked animatedly: “So you’re going to begin working again? Today we need an art that has brush strokes and musical intervals this big!” She stretched her arms out three feet.
“I don’t have to begin that way right off,” Walter objected. “Anyway, I still find the whole problematic of the individual artist off-putting. Today we need a problematic of the totality—” But hardly had he uttered the word “problematic” than it seemed to him quite overexcited in the stillness of the woods. He therefore added something new: “But basically it’s in no way a demand inimical to life that a person should paint something he loves; in the case of the landscape painter, nature!”
“But a painter also paints his beloved,” Clarisse threw in. “One part of the painter loves, the other paints!”
Walter saw his beautiful new idea shrivel up. He was not in the mood to breathe new life into it, but he was still convinced that the idea was important and merely needed careful working out. And the singing of finches, the woodpecker’s drumming, the humming of small insects: it didn’t move him to work but rather dragged him down into an infinite abyss of indolence.
“We’re very much alike, you and I,” he said with gratification. “There’s hardly another couple like us! Others paint, make music, or write, and I refuse to: basically that’s as radical as your eagerness!”
Clarisse turned on her side, raised herself on her elbow, and opened her mouth for a furious response. “I’ll set you free yet, all the way!” she said quickly.
Walter looked down at her tenderly. “What do you mean, really, when you say that we have to be saved from our sinful form?” he asked eagerly.
This time Clarisse did not answer. She had the impression that if she were to speak now it would run away too quickly, and although she intended to say something, the woods confused her; for the woods were on her side: that was something that couldn’t be expressed properly, although it was clear to see.
Walter probed in the delicious wound. “Did you really talk about that again with Meingast?” he asked in a way that demanded a response, yet hesitantly, indeed fearful that she might have done so although he had forbidden it.
Clarisse lied, for she shook her head; but at the same time she smiled.
“Can you still remember the time we took Meingast’s ‘sins’ on ourselves?” he pursued further. He took her hand. But Clarisse only let him have a finger. It is a remarkable condition when a man has to remind himself with as much reluctance as willingness that nearly everything his beloved bestows on him has previously belonged to another; it may be the sign of a love that is all too strong, or perhaps the sign of a feeble soul, and sometimes Walter actually sought out this condition. He loved the fifteen-to-sixteen-year-old Clarisse, who had never been taken with him completely and unreservedly; loved her almost more than the present Clarisse, and the memory of her caresses, which were perhaps the reflection of Meingast’s indecency, stirred him in a peculiar way more profoundly than, by comparison, the cool, unhampered quality of marriage. He found it almost agreeable knowing that Clarisse had a favoring side glance to spare for Ulrich and now entirely once again for the magnificently altered Meingast, and the way in which these men had an unfavorable impact on her imagination magnified his longing for his wife the way the shadows of debauchery and desire under an eye make it appear larger. Of course men in whom jealousy will suffer nothing beside themselves, he-men, will not experience this, but his jealousy was full of love, and when that is the case, then the torture is so precise, so distinct, so alive, that it is almost the vicarious experiencing of desire. Whenever Walter imagined his wife in the act of giving herself to another man he felt more strongly than when he held her in his own arms, and, somewhat disconcerted, he thought by way of excuse: “When I’m painting and I need to see the most subtle curvature of the lines of a face, I don’t look at it directly but in a mirror!” It really stung him that he was yielding to such thoughts in the woods, in the healthy world of nature, and the hand that held Clarisse’s finger began to tremble. He had to say something, but it could not be what he was thinking. He joked in a strained way: “So now you want to take my sins upon yourself, but how are you going to do that?” He smiled; but Clarisse noticed a slight trembling spreading over his lips. This did not suit her just now; although it is always a marvelous spur to laughter, this image of the way a man who is dragging a much too large bale of useless thoughts along with him tries to stride through the small door to which he is drawn. She sat completely upright, looked at Walter with a mockingly serious glance, shook her head several times, and began reflectively:
“Don’t you believe that periods of depression alternate with periods of mania in the world? Urgent, disturbed, fruitful periods of upswing that bring in the new, alternating with sinful periods, despondent, depressed, bad centuries or decades?” Periods in which the world approaches its bright ideal shape and periods where it sinks into its sinful form. Walter looked at her with alarm. “That’s how it is; I just can’t tell you which years,” she continued, adding: “The upswing doesn’t have to be beautiful; in fact, it has to shuck off a good deal, which may of course be beautiful. It can look like a disease: I’m convinced that from time to time humanity has to become mentally ill in order to attain the synthesis of a new and higher health!”
Walter refused to understand.
Clarisse talked on: “People who are sensitive, like you and me, feel that! We’re now living in a period
of decline, and that’s why you can’t work either. In addition there are sensual ages, and ages that turn away from sensuality. You must prepare yourself for suffering….”
Remarkably, it moved Walter that Clarisse had said “you and me.” She had not said that for a long time.
“And of course there are periods of transition,” Clarisse went on. “And figures like Saint John, precursors; we may be two precursors.”
Now Walter responded: “But you had your way and went to the insane asylum; now we really ought to be of one mind again!”
“You mean that I ought not to go again?” Clarisse interjected, and smiled.
“Don’t go again!” Walter pleaded. But he did so without conviction: he felt it himself; his plea was merely meant to cover him.
Clarisse replied: “All precursors’ complain about the spirit’s lack of resolution because they don’t yet have complete faith, but no one dares put an end to the irresolution! Even Meingast doesn’t dare,” she added.
Walter asked: “What is it you’d have to dare?”
“You see, a whole people can’t be insane,” Clarisse said in an even softer voice. “There is only individual insanity. When everyone is insane, then they are the healthy ones. Isn’t that right? Therefore a whole people of the insane is the healthiest of people; you just have to treat them as a people, and not as sick people. And I tell you, the mad think more than the healthy do, and they lead a resolute life of a kind we never have the courage for! To be sure, they are forced to live this life in a sinner’s form, or they can’t yet do otherwise!”