by Robert Musil
She had now half turned away from her brother and was standing motionless, so that he could observe her freely. He knew that experiences of this kind had bound the two of them together for as long as they had known each other. He remembered the morning after his arrival at their father’s house, when he had caught sight of her in woman’s clothes for the first time; it had been at that time, too, that he had had the strange experience of seeing her standing in a grotto of rays of light, and this in addition: that she was a more beautiful repetition and alteration of his self. There were, moreover, many things connected with this that merely had a different external shape. For the painted circus animals that he had loved more ardently than real ones, the sight of his little sister dressed for a ball, her beauty kindling in him the longing to be her, then even the confectioners horse that had lately been the object of a bantering conversation, all arose from the same enchantment; and now, when he again returned to the present, which was by no means droll, the most contradictory scruples about coming too close to one another, the staring at and bending over, the heavy figurative quality of many moments, the gliding into an equivocal we-and-the-world feeling, and many other things, demonstrated to him the same forces and weaknesses. Involuntarily he reflected on these things. Common to all these experiences was that they received an emotion of the greatest force from an impossibility, from a failure and stagnation. That they were missing the bridge of action leading to and from the world; and finally, that they ended on a vanishingly narrow borderline between the greatest happiness and pathological behavior. Looked at in an unholy way, they were all somewhat reminiscent of a porcelain still life, and of a blind window, and of a dead-end street, and of the unending smile of wax dolls under glass and light: things that appear to have got stuck on the road between death and resurrection, unable to take a step either forward or backward. In bringing such examples to mind, Ulrich thought that they were also to be understood without mystery and myth. Such images entice our emotions, which are accustomed to act, and our sympathies, which are usually dispersed over many things, in a direction in which no progress is possible; and this might easily give rise to an experience of dammed-up significance that permits no access of any kind, so that it grows and grows in absolutely unbearable fashion. “Externally, nothing new happens anymore, but the one thing is repeated again and again,” Ulrich thought. “And internally, it’s as if we had henceforth only said, thought, and felt: one thing, one thing, one thing! But it’s not entirely like that either!” he interjected to himself. “It’s rather like a very slow and monotonous rhythm. And something new arises: bliss! A tormenting bliss one would like to give the slip to but can’t! Is it bliss at all?” Ulrich asked himself. “It’s an oppressive increase in the emotion that leaves all qualities behind. I could just as easily call it a congestion!”
Agathe did not seem to notice that she was being observed. “And why does my happiness—for it is happiness—search out just such occasions and hiding places?” Ulrich went on to ask again, with one small change. He could not keep from admitting to himself that separated out from the stream, such an emotion could also wash around the love for a dead person, whose countenance belongs with a more profound defenselessness than any living one to the glances which it cannot drive off. And his happening to think that in literature moody, necrophilic art thoughts were not exactly a rarity did not make it any better, but merely led him to reflect that the charming insanity of relating things, which combines all the soul’s longing into the representation of a beautiful dead woman, has some kind of connection with the malevolent insanity in which a fetish—a hairband, a shoe—draws all the currents of body and soul to itself. And every “fixed idea” too, even one that is only “overpowering” in the ordinary sense, is accompanied by such an intensified usurpation. There was in this a kinship more or less crippled and not entirely pleasant, and Ulrich would not have been a man had not the twisted, slippery, lurking, lost nature of these relationships filled him with suspicion. To be sure, his spirits were lifted by the idea that there was nothing in the world that did not have some black-sheep kin, for the world of health is composed of the same basic elements as the world of disease: it is only the proportions that differ; but when he cautiously directed his glance at Agathe and allowed it to drink from the sight of her, there still dominated in his feelings, in spite of their miserable sublimity, an uncanny absence of will, a marked displacement or being carried away into the vicinity of sleep, of death, of the image, of the immobile, the imprisoned, the powerless. Ideas drained away, every energetic drive dissipated, the unutterable paralyzed every limb, the world slipped away remote and unheeding, and the unstable armistice on the borderline between the enhanced and the diminished was barely to be borne any longer. But precisely with the entrance of this enormous draining away of power something different began, for their bodies seemed to be losing something of their boundaries, of which they no longer had any need. “It’s like the frenzy of the bee swarm that’s trying to surround the queen!” Ulrich thought silently.
And finally the unavoidable discovery dawned on him, although he had so far avoided it, that all these strange, individual temptations of the emotions and emotional experiences, which intermingled and hovered within him like the shadows cast by the foliage of a restless tree when the sun is high, could be encompassed and understood at a single glance if he regarded his love for his sister as their origin. For evidently this emotion and this alone was the hero of his breaking down, of his blocked path, and of all the ambiguous adventures and detours associated with this. Even the psychology of the emotions, which he was pursuing on his own in his diaries, now seemed to him merely an attempt to conceal the love between him and his sister in a quixotic edifice of ideas. Did he, then, desire her? He was really astonished that he was confessing this to himself for the first time, and he now clearly saw the possibilities between which he had to make up his mind. Either he really had to believe that he was making ready for an adventure such as had never existed before, an adventure that he needed only to urge on and set out on with no second thoughts…Or he had to yield to his emotion, even should this feeling be unnatural, in the natural way, or forbid himself to; and was all he was accomplishing through his irresolution to become inventive in subterfuges? When he asked himself this second, rather contemptible question, he did not fail to ask the third it entailed: What was there to prevent him from doing what he wanted? A biological superstition, a moral one? In short, the judgment of others? Thinking of this, Ulrich felt such a violent boiling up of feeling against these others that he was even more surprised, especially as this sudden stab bore no relation to the gentle emotions with which he believed himself filled.
But in reality what came to the fore was only something that had recently receded into the background. For his attachment to Agathe and his detachment from the world were always two sides of one and the same situation and inclination. Even in those years when he had almost never thought that he had a real sister, the concept of “sister” had had a magic effect on him. No doubt this happens often, and it is usually nothing very different from the soaring youthful form of that need for love which in the later condition of submission seeks out a bird, a cat, or a dog, at times too, probably, humanity or one’s neighbor, because between the dust and heat of the struggle to live and life’s games this need cannot truly unfold. Sometimes this need for love is already even in youth full of submission, of timidity toward life, and loneliness, and in that case the misty image of the “sister” takes on the shadowboxing grace of the doppelganger, which transforms the anxiety of being abandoned by the world into the tenderness of lonely togetherness. And sometimes this ecstatic image is nothing but the crassest egotism and selfishness, that is to say an excessive wanting to be loved, which has entered into a jerry-built agreement with sweet selflessness. In all such —and Ulrich thought again of the case in which it transforms itself into a fellow human being and then dispenses with its ambiguity, but also with its beauty!�
�”sister” is a creation originating from the “other” part of emotion, from the uproar of this emotion and the desire to live differently; that’s the way Ulrich would understand it now. But it probably is this only in the weak form of longing. But familiar with longing as he was, his mind was no less acquainted with struggle, and if he correctly understood his past, his precipitate turning toward Agathe had initially been a declaration of war against the world; love is, moreover, always the revolt of a couple from the wisdom of the crowd. It could be said that in his case, the revolt had come first; but it could be said just as well that the core of all his criticism of the world was nothing so much as a knowing about love. “So I am—if a hermaphroditic monasticism is conceivable, why shouldn’t this be!—in the dubious situation of having been, at bottom, a soldier with monastic inclinations, and ultimately a monk with soldierly inclinations who can’t leave off swearing!” he thought cheerfully, but still with astonishment; for he was made aware for perhaps the first time of the profound contradiction between his passion and the entire disposition of his nature. Even as he now looked at Agathe, he thought he perceived his conflict on the sea-bright surface of inwardness spreading out around her, as an evil, metallic reflection. He was so lost in these thoughts that he did not notice that she had for some time been curiously observing his eyes.
Now she stepped up to her brother and mischievously passed her hand downward before his eyes, as if she wished to cut off his peculiar glance. And as if that were not sufficient, she grasped his arm and prepared to pull him up from his chair. Ulrich stood and looked around him the way a person does emerging from sleep. “To think that at this very moment, hundreds of people are fighting for their lives! That ships are sinking, animals are attacking people, thousands of animals are being slaughtered by people!” he said, half like someone looking back with a shudder from a blissful shore, half like a man who is sorry not to be part of it.
“You’re certainly sorry not to be part of it?” Agathe then did indeed ask.
His smile denied it, but his words conceded the point: “It’s pleasant to think about how pleasant it is when I grasp with my whole hand a thing that I’ve merely been stroking for some time with the tip of a finger.”
His sister put her arm through his. “Come, let’s walk around a little!” she proposed. In the hardness of his arm she felt the manly joy at everything savage. She pressed her fingernails against the unyielding muscles, seeking to hurt him. When he complained, she offered the explanation: “In the infinite waters of bliss I’m clutching at the straw of evil! Why should you be the only one?” She repeated her attack. Ulrich placated her with a smile: “What your nails are doing to me is not a straw but a girder!” They were walking meanwhile. Had Agathe demonstrated the ability to guess his thoughts? Were the two of them twin clocks? When emotions are tuned to the same string, is it entirely natural to read emotions from each other’s faces? It is at any rate an impressive game, so long as one does not miss the mark and crash. The loveliest assurance of the miracle’s enduring now lay in their motion, lay in the garden, which seemed to be sleeping in the sunshine, where the gravel crunched, the breeze freshened from time to time, and their bodies were bright and alert. For surmising oneself bound in feeling to everything the eye could see was as easy as the transparent air, and only when they stopped was it afterward as melancholy as a deep breath to take first steps again through this imagistic landscape. The words they exchanged meanwhile really signified nothing, but merely cradled them as they walked, like the childishly amused conversation a fountain has with itself, babbling gossip about eternity.
But without their needing to say anything, they slowly turned into a path that led them near the boundary of their small garden kingdom, and it was evident that this was not happening for the first time. Where they came in sight of the street, rolling animatedly past beyond the high iron fence that was supported by a stone base, they abandoned the path, taking advantage of the cover of trees and bushes, and paused on a small rise, whose dry earth formed the place where several old trees stood. Here the picture of the resting pair was lost in the play of light and shadow, and there was almost no likelihood of their being discovered from the street, although they were so near it that the unsuspecting pedestrians made that exaggerated outward impression which is peculiar to everything one merely observes without in any way participating in it. The faces seemed like things, indeed even poorer than things, like flat disks, and if words were suddenly carried into the garden they had no sense, only an amplified sound such as hollow, decayed rooms have. But the two observers did not have long to wait before one person or another came still closer to their hiding place: whether it was someone stopping and looking in astonishment at all the green suddenly revealed along his course, or whether it was someone moved to stop by the favorable opportunity of resting something in his hand on the stone base of the fence for a moment, or to tie his shoelace on it, or whether in the short shadows of the fence pillars falling on the path it was two people stopped in conversation, with the others streaming past behind them. And the more accidentally this seemed to happen in single cases, the more clearly the invariable, unconscious, enduring effect of the fence detached itself from the variety and contingency of these manifold actions, invading the individual life like a trap.
They both loved this game of cause and effect, which stood in scornful contrast to the game of souls
They had discovered this place on the days when they, too, had strolled through the streets and talked about the difficulties of loving one’s neighbor, and the contradictions of everyone loving everybody; and the fence, which separated them from the world but connected them with it visually, had seemed to them then the manifest image of the human world, not least of themselves: in short, the image of everything which Ulrich had once summarized in the terse expression “the unseparated and not united.” Most of this now seemed quite superfluous and a childish waste of time; as indeed its only mission had been to give them time and to gain from the observing game with the world the conviction that they had something in mind that concerned everyone and did not just spring from a personal need. Now they were much more secure, they knew more about their adventure. All individual questions were froth, beneath which lay the dark mirror of another possible way of life. Their great sympathy with each other and with others, and in general the fulfillment of the promises sunk into the world, promises that constantly emanate the peculiar mirage that life-as-it-is strikes us as fragmented in every way by life-as-it-might-be—this fulfillment was never to be won from details but only from the Totally Different! The fence, however, had still preserved something of its coarse, prompting distinctness, and was at least able to beckon to a leave-taking.
Agathe laid her hand, which had the light, dry warmth of the finest wool, on Ulrich’s head, turned it in the direction of the street, let her hand fall to his shoulder, and tickled her brothers ear with her fingernail and no less with the words: “Now let’s test our love for our neighbors once more, Teacher! How would it be if today we tried to love one of them like ourselves!”
“I don’t love myself!” Ulrich resisted in the same tone. “I even think that all the earlier energy I was so proud of was a running away from myself.”
“So what you’ve sometimes said, that I’m your self-love in the form of a girl, is altogether not terribly flattering.”
“Oh, on the contrary! You’re another self-love, the other!”
“Now, that you’ll have to explain to me!” Agathe commanded without looking up.
“A good person has good defects and a bad one has bad virtues: so the one has a good self-love and the other a bad one!”
“Obscure!”
“But from a famous author from whom Christendom has learned a great deal, but unfortunately just not that.”
“Not much clearer!”
“Half a millennium before Christ, he taught that whoever does not love himself in the right way is not able to love others either. For the rig
ht love for oneself is also being naturally good to others. So self-love is not selfishness but being good.”
“Did he really say that?”
“Oh, I don’t know, perhaps I’m putting the words in his mouth. He also taught that goodwill is not wanting the good but wanting something with goodness. He was a logician and natural philosopher, soldier and mystic, and, significantly, is supposed to have been the greatest teacher, and so it did not even escape him that morality can never be completely detached from mysticism/’
“You’re an insufferable exercise instructor who shows up in the morning; the cock crows, and one’s supposed to hop to it! I’d rather sleep!”
“No, you ought to help me.”
They lay on their stomachs on the ground, next to each other. If they raised their heads, they saw the street; if they didn’t, they saw between pointed young blades of grass the drying fallen leaves from the high tree.
Agathe asked: “So that’s why it’s love your neighbor ‘as yourself’? It could also be the other way around: Love yourself as your neighbor.”
“Yes. And it’s easier to love him not only less than oneself but also more. What’s almost impossible is to love him and yourself in the same way. Compared with that, loving someone so much that you sacrifice yourself for him is positively a relief,” Ulrich replied. For the moment, the conversation had taken on the playful tone that deftly stirred up profound questions, a tone to which they had become accustomed during their walks through the city; but really—and although since then nothing that could be counted as time had passed—they were deliberately imitating themselves, the way one casually immerses oneself again in a game one has outgrown. And Agathe remarked: “So then love your neighbor as yourself also means: don’t love your neighbor selflessly!”