by Robert Musil
Up till then he had spoken with such rational decisiveness that these words had a quite remarkable sound. If he had said: I’ve done some reconnoitering, come along, we have to go out by the window and then through a dark corridor, and so on, then we’ll get there…it would not have seemed strange to Agathe to set off immediately.
He really ought to explain it twice: once with yearning, then the way one explains it as prelogical, etc.
But Ulrich merely went on reporting the results of his inquiries.
“From what I’ve found,” he said with the same calm as before, “two things emerge. First, that paradise has been placed where it is unattainable. Even in the first legendary beginnings of the human race it is supposed to have been lost, and what people claim to have experienced of it later is described as ecstasy, trance, madness: in short, as pathological delirium; but it is quite striking that something is simultaneously being denied as illness and considered a paradise: this leads me to suppose that it must also be attainable for healthy and rational people, but on a path that is presumed to be forbidden and dangerous.
“But that then leads me to understand the second point, that this condition of paradise in life, which is supposed to be taboo as a whole, breaks into pieces and is inextricably mingled in with common life, that is, what people consider the highest values.
“In other words: the ideals of humanity. Think about it: they are all unattainable. But not only, as people pretend, because of human frailty but because, were one to fulfill them absolutely, they would become absurd. They are, therefore, the remains of a condition which as a whole is not capable of life, of which our life is not capable.
“One might be tempted to see in this shadowy doppelganger of another world only a daydream, had it not left behind its still warm traces in countless details of our lives. Religion, art, love, morality…these are attempts to follow this other spirit, they project into our lives with enormous power, but they have lost their origin and meaning, and this has made them totally confused and corrupt.”
They are bays but not the ocean.
***
“And that brings us to Lindner.
“He would go mad if he were to follow the emotions that he has declared to be the decisive ones in his life. That’s why he rations them and dilutes them with convictions.
“You want to be good—like a lake without a shore—and its individual drops, which he carefully stores up in himself, are what draw you to him.
“You therefore only have some inkling, and he is convinced (believes) that you feel something is good, feel it like the smell of a field; while he makes a firm distinction between good and evil, but by separating them he mixes them together hopelessly.
‘That makes you feel abandoned, even by yourself, because you have an intimation of a togetherness as never before. Your experience is hard to communicate, private, almost unsocial. He ties his soul to experiences that can be repeated and understood, for the unequivocal is repeatable and therefore comprehensible, but the mutuality of the ideals he disseminates is like the shadowy realm that is neither life nor death. He knows the virtue of limitation, you the sin of limitation. You are deprived of power, he is active. His God is nothing but an initial association or the like.
“In a word: You would like to live in God, even if only as His worst creature, while he lives for Him. But in doing so he is following the same tried-and-true course as everyone else.”
***
Agathe had found a hairpin. In the period following Bonadea’s visit, which Ulrich had not told her about. She was sitting on the sofa and talking with her brother, her hands, full of idle security, supported in the pillows on both sides, when she suddenly felt the small steel object between her fingers. It quite confused her hands before she drew it out. She looked at the pin, which was that of a strange woman, and the blood rose to her cheeks.
It might have been a small occasion for laughter that Agathe, like any jealous woman, hit upon the truth with such uncanny accuracy. But although it would have been easy to explain the discovery in some other fashion, Ulrich made no attempt to do so. Blood had risen to his cheeks too.
Finally, Agathe regained her composure, but her smile was disconcerted.
Ulrich mumbled a confession about Bonadea’s assault.
She listened to him restlessly. —I’m not jealous, she said. —I have no right to be. But —
She sought to find this “but”; the demonstration was meant to cover the wildness that rose up in her against another woman taking Ulrich away from her.
Women are peculiarly naive when they talk about a man’s “needs.” They have let themselves be persuaded that these needs are inexorable violent forces, a kind of sullied but still grandiose suffering on the part of men, and they seem to know neither that they themselves become just as crazy through long abstinence, nor that after a period of transition it is not much more difficult for men to accustom themselves to it than it is for them; the distinction is, in truth, more a moral than a physiological one, a distinction of the habit of granting or denying oneself one’s desires. But for many women, who believe they have grounds for not letting their desires gain control over them, this idea, that the man is not allowed to control himself without doing harm to himself, serves as a welcome opportunity to enclose the suffering man-child in their arms, and Agathe too—put in the role of a rather frigid woman through the taboo against otherwise following toward her brother the unambiguous voice of her heart—unconsciously applied this stratagem in her mind.
—I believe I do understand you—she said—but—but you have hurt me.
When Ulrich tried to ask her pardon and attempted to stroke her hair or her shoulders, she said: —I’m stupid—trembled a little, and moved away.
—If you were reading a poem aloud to me—she tried to explain—and I wasn’t able to keep from looking at the latest newspaper the while, you would be disappointed too. That’s just the way it hurt. On your account.
Ulrich was silent. The vexation of again experiencing through explanations what had happened sealed his lips.
—Of course I have no right to set rules for you, Agathe repeated. —What is it then that I do give you! But why are you throwing yourself away on such a person! I could imagine your loving a woman I admire. I don’t know how to express it, but isn’t every caress a person gives someone somehow taken away from everyone else?
She felt that she would want it that way if she were to abandon this dream and have a husband again.
—Inwardly, more than two people can embrace, and everything external is only— She stopped short, but suddenly the comparison occurred to her: —I could imagine that the person who embraces the body is only the butterfly uniting two flowers—
The comparison seemed to her somewhat too poetic. While she voiced it, she felt vividly the warm and ordinary feeling women have: I must give him something and compensate him.
Ulrich shook his head. “I have,” he said seriously, “committed a grave error. But it was not the way you think. What you say is beautiful. This bliss that arises from the skin through mechanical stimulation, this sudden being seized and changed by God: to ascribe this to a person who is just the instrument, to give him a privileged place through adoration or hate, is basically as primitive as being angry at the bullet that hits you. But I have too little faith to imagine that one could find such people.” Holds her hand—it is a mood borne far away.
When his hand sought pardon on her, Agathe enclosed her brother in her arms and kissed him. And involuntarily, shaken, in a sisterly-comforting way and then no longer able to control it, she opened her lips for the first time on his with that complete, undiminished womanliness that opens up the ripe fruit of love to its core.
***
In the Parallel Campaign everyone declared themselves for Arnheim. Clarisse preferred Meingast.
Ulrich came home embittered. Faced with that powerlessness that cannot find a single point from which to express its opposition to the per
fecting of an inadequate world.
He felt: They’re doing everything I want, it’s just that they’re doing it badly.
They don’t even understand me enough to contradict me; they believe that I’m saying what they’re saying, only worse.
Whenever you talk with them you start vomiting from nervousness.
They have goodness, love, soul; chopped into little pieces and mixed in with large chunks of the opposite; this keeps them healthy and makes them idealists, while I end up on the margin of the absurd and the criminal.
Oh, how unbearable they are, these chatterers at Diotima’s! But it would be just as nonsensical not to confess that there are many people who feel it as much as I do and who accomplish better things: Why do I feel so excluded?
He went through Agathe’s room and straight to his study. His face mirrored the strain and silence of a hard struggle.
Believers squabble with God when they get to feel isolated among their fellowmen; that’s when unbelievers get to know Him for the first time. If it were possible to run out into the empty, chilly universe, that would have been the right expression for Ulrich’s despair, anger, and unquiet temperament. His flames had inverted themselves and were burning inwardly. It nearly made him suffocate.
Suddenly he stopped. He took paper and pencil, which were lying under the heap of scribbled papers on his desk, and wrote down an idea. Read it through, walked up and down, read it once more, and added something to it.
There is no necessity behind it! This was the first idea, which, still obscure, contained everything. This world is only one of countless possible experiments?
Then: In mathematics there are problems that admit of no general solutions but only case-by-case ones. But under certain given conditions these partial solutions are summarized to give relative total solutions. Thus God gives partial solutions; these are the creative people; they contradict one another; we are condemned again and again to derive from this relative total solutions that dont correspond to anything!
Finally: Like molten ore I am poured into the mold that the world has shaped during my lifetime. For that reason I am never entirely what I think and do. For that reason this self always remains strange to me. One attempted form in an attempted form of the totality.
Acting without reflecting: for a man never gets further than when he doesn’t know where he’s going.
When he read over this last idea, he tore up the piece of paper and went in to Agathe; for then there is only one thing: not to listen to the bad masters, who have erected one of His possible lives as if for eternity, according to God’s plan, but to confide oneself to Him humbly and defiantly.
Ulrich-Agathe Journey
1.
Below lay a narrow stretch of coast with some sand. Boats drawn up on it, seen from above, like blue and green spots of sealing wax. If one looked more closely, oil jugs, nets, men with vertically-striped pants and brown legs; the smell of fish and garlic; patched-up, shaky little houses. The activity on the warm sand was as small and far away as the bustling of beetles. It was framed on both sides by boulders as by stone pegs on which the bay hung, and farther along, as far as the eye could see, the steep coast with its crinkled details simply plunged into the southern sea. If one cautiously clambered down, one could, over the ruins of fallen rocks, venture out a little into the ocean, which filled tubs and troughs among the stones with a warm bath and strange animal comrades.
Ulrich and Agathe felt as if a tremendous din had been raised from them and had flown off. They stood out there in the ocean, swaying white flames, almost sucked up and extinguished by the hot air. It was somewhere in Istria, or the eastern edge of Italy, or on the Tyrrhenian Sea. They hardly knew themselves. They had got on the train and traveled; it seemed to them as if they had been crisscrossing at random / in a way…that would prevent them from ever finding their way back.
2.
On their mad journey, Ancona was firmly fixed in their memory. They had arrived dead tired and in need of sleep. They got in early in the forenoon and asked for a room. Ate zabaglione in bed and drank strong coffee, whose heaviness was as if lifted to the skies by the foam of whipped cream. Rested, dreamed. When they had gone to sleep it seemed to them that the white curtains in front of the windows were constantly lifting and sinking in an enchanting current of refreshing air; it was their breathing. When they awoke, they saw through the opening slats ore-blue sea, and the red and yellow sails of the barks entering and leaving the harbor were as shrill as floating whistles.
They understood nothing in this new world; it was all like the words of a poem.
They had left without passports and had a mild fear of some sort of discovery and punishment. When they registered at the hotel they had been taken for a young married couple and offered this lovely room with a wide bed meant for two, a letto matrimoniale, which in Germany has fallen into disuse. They had not dared reject it. After the sufferings of the body, the longing for primitive happiness.
Lying in this bed, they noticed an oval window the size of a cabin porthole, high up to the right of the door and near a corner of the room, in a totally incomprehensible place; it had opaque-colored glass, disquietingly like a secret observation post, but surrounded by a casual wreath of painted roses.
In comparison with the enormous tension that had gone before, it was nothing. And afterward there was a conspiratorial happiness in every detail, and at the moment when their resistance wavered and melted Ulrich said: It also makes most sense not to resist; we have to get this behind us so that this tension doesn’t debase what we have before us.
And they traveled.
They had stayed three days.
It has to be this way too: charmed by each other again and again. Traversing the scale of the sexual with variations.
For three days they never talked about soul. Only then did they bring it up again.
3.
When they went out on the street for the first time: buzzing of people. like a flock of sparrows happily dusting themselves in the sand. Curious glances without timidity, which felt themselves at home. At the backs of the brother and sister as they cautiously glided through this crowd lay the room, lay the wakefulness drifting deep over sleep like a cat’s paw over water, the blissful exhaustion in which one can ward off nothing, and also not oneself, but hears the world as a pale noise outside the infinitely deep corridors of the ear.
The exhaustion of excessive enjoyment in the body, the consumed marrow. It is shaming and joyful.
4.
They went on. Apparently suitcase nomads. In truth driven by the restlessness of finding a place worth living and dying in.
Much was beautiful and held them enticingly fast. But nowhere did the inner voice say: this is the place.
Finally here. Actually some insignificant chance had brought them here, and they did not notice anything special. Then this voice made itself heard, softly but distinctly.
Perhaps, without knowing it, they had become tired of their random traveling.
5.
Here, where they stayed, a piece of gardenlike nature rose up to the small white hotel, empty at this season, which was concealed on the slope; rose from the narrow beach between the rocky arms of the coast, like a posy of flowers and shrubs pressed against the breast, with narrow paths winding around it in a very gentle, slow climb up to the hotel. A little higher there was nothing but dazzling stone glittering in the sun, between one’s feet yellow broom and red thistles that ran from the feet toward the sky, the enormous hard straightness of the plateau’s edge, and, if one had climbed up with eyes closed and now opened them: suddenly, like a thunderously opened fan, the motionless sea.
It is probably the size of the arc in the line of the contour, this far-reaching security enclosed by an arm, a security that is more than human? Or only the enormous desert of the dark-blue color, hostile to life? Or that the bowl of the sky never lies so directly over life? Or air and water, of which one never thinks? Otherwise colorless, g
ood-natured messengers, but here where they were at home suddenly rearing up unapproachably like a pair of royal parents.
The legends of almost all peoples report that mankind came from the water and that the soul is a breath of air. Strange: science has determined that the human body consists almost entirely of water. One becomes small. When they got off the train in which they had crisscrossed the dense network of European energies and, still trembling from the motion, had hastened up here, brother and sister stood before the calm of the sea and the sky no differently than they would have stood a hundred thousand years ago. Tears came to Agathe’s eyes, and Ulrich lowered his head.
What is this whole exposition for? Can it be retracted? Something’s not right here.
Arm on arm, their hands intertwined, they climbed down again in the blue of evening to their new home. In the small dining room the whiteness of the tablecloths sparkled and the glasses stood as soft splendor. Ulrich ordered fish, wine, and fruit, speaking at length and in detail about it with the maître d’hôtel; it did not interfere. The black figures glided around them or stood against the walls. Silverware and teeth functioned. The pair even carried on a conversation so as not to attract notice. Ulrich almost came to speak of the impression they had had up above. As if the people of a hundred thousand years ago had really had a direct revelation: it was like that; if one considers how tremendous the experience of these first myths is, and how little since…; it did not interfere; everything that happened was embedded as in the murmuring of a fountain.
Ulrich looked at his sister for a long time; she was now not even beautiful; there was not that either. On an island they had not seen in the daylight a chain of houses shone: that was lovely but far away; the eyes looked at it only fleetingly and then directly in front of themselves again.
They asked for two rooms.
6.
The sea in summer and the high mountains in autumn are the two real tests of the soul. In their silence Ues a music greater than anything else on earth; there is a blissful torture in the inability to follow their rhythms, to make the rhythm of word and gesture so broad that it would join with theirs; mankind cannot keep in step with the breath of the gods.