The Man Without Qualities, Volume 2

by Robert Musil

  But such thoughts, too, were like singing in a false key. Ulrich did not allow himself this kind of understanding. Understanding a person one loves cannot involve spying on that person but must come pouring from an overflow of auspicious inspirations. One may only recognize those things that enrich. One makes a gift of qualities in the unshakable security of a predetermined harmony, a separation that has never been—

  Especially when ethical magnanimity is stimulated by it. Not the seeing or not seeing of weaknesses, but the large motion in which they float without significance.

  An ancient column—thrown down at the time of Venice, Greece, or Rome—lay among the stones and the broom; every groove of its shaft and capital deepened by the ray-sharp graving tool of the midday shadows. Lying next to it belonged to the great hours of love.

  Four eyes watching. Nothing but noon, column, four eyes. If the glance of two eyes sees one picture, one world: why not the glance of four?

  When two pairs of eyes look long into each other, one person crosses over to the other on the bridge of glances, and all that remains is a feeling that no longer has a body.

  When in a secret hour two pairs of eyes look at an object and come together in it—every object hovering deep down in a feeling, and objects standing only as firmly as they do if this deep ground is hard—then the rigid world begins to move, softly and incessantly. It rises and falls restlessly with the blood. The fraternal twins looked at each other. In the bright light it could not be made out whether they were still breathing or had been lying there for a thousand years like the stones. Whether the stone column was lying there or had risen up in the light without a sound and was floating.

  There is a significant difference in the way one looks at people and the way one looks at things. Every time after this when they looked at someone in the hotel: the play of facial expressions of someone with whom one is talking becomes unspeakably alienating if one observes it as an objective process, and not as an ongoing exchange of signals between two souls; we are accustomed to see things lying mutely where they are, and we consider it a disturbing hallucination if they take on a more dynamic relation to us. But it is only we ourselves who are looking at them in such a way that the small changes in their physiognomies are not answered by any alterations in our emotions, and to change this nothing more is needed, basically, than that we not look at the world intellectually but that objects arouse in us our moral emotions instead of our sense-based surveying equipment. At such moments the excitement in which a glimpse brings us something and enriches us becomes so strong that nothing appears real except for a hovering condition, which, beyond the eyes, condenses into objects, and on this side of the eyes condenses into ideas and feelings, without these two sides being separable from each other. Whatever the soul bestows comes forward; whatever loses this power dissipates before one’s eyes.

  In this flickering silence among the stones there was a panic horror. The world seemed to be only the outer aspect of a specific inner attitude, and interchangeable with it. But world and self were not solid; a scaffolding sunk into soft depths; mutually helping each other out of a formlessness. Agathe said softly to Ulrich: “Are you yourself or are you not? I know nothing of it. I am incognizant of it and I am incognizant of myself/’

  It was the terror: The world depended on her, and she did not know who she was.

  Ulrich was silent.

  Agathe continued: “I am in love, but I do not know with whom. I am neither faithful nor unfaithful. What am I then? My heart is at once full of love and emptied of love…,” she whispered. The horror of a noontime silence seemed to have clutched her heart.

  Over and over the great test was the sea. Time and again, when they had climbed down the narrow slope with its many paths, its quantity of laurel, its broom, its figs, and its many bees, and stepped out onto the powerful surface spread out above the ocean, it was like the first great chord sounding after the tuning up of an orchestra. How would one have to be to endure this constantly? Ulrich proposed that they try setting up a tent here. But he did not mean it seriously; it would have frightened him. There were no longer any opponents around, up here they were alone; the rebuffs one receives as long as one must contradict the demands of others and the habits of one’s own conscience were used up; in this final battle it was a matter of their resolve. The sea was like a merciless beloved and rival; every minute was an annihilating exploration of conscience. They were afraid of collapsing unconscious before this expanse that swallowed up every resistance.

  This monstrously extended sight was not to be borne without its becoming somewhat boring. This being responsible for every slightest motion was—they had to confess—rather empty, if one compared it with the cheerfulness of those hours when they made no such claims on themselves and their bodies played with the soul like a beautiful young animal rolling a ball back and forth.

  One day Ulrich said: It’s broad and pastoral; there’s something of a pastor about it! They laughed. Then they were startled by the scorn that they had inflicted upon themselves.

  The hotel had a little bell tower; in the middle of its roof. Around one o’clock this bell rang for lunch. Since they were still almost the only guests, they did not need to respond right away, but the cook was indicating that he was ready. The bright sounds sliced into the stillness like a sharp knife contacting skin, which had shuddered beforehand but at this moment becomes calm. “How lovely it is, really,” Ulrich said, as they climbed down on one of these days, “to be driven by necessity. The way one drives geese from behind with a stick, or entices hens from in front with feed. And where everything doesn’t happen mysteriously—” The blue-white trembling air really shuddered like goose pimples if one stared into it for a long time. At that time memories were beginning to torture Ulrich vividly; he suddenly saw before him every statue and every architectural detail of one of those cities overloaded with such things that he had visited years ago; Nürnberg was before him, and Amiens, although they had never captivated him; some large red book or other that he must have seen years earlier in an exhibit would not go away from before his eyes; a slender tanned boy, perhaps only the counter his imagination had conjured up to Agathe, but in such a way as if he had once really met him but did not know where, preoccupied his mind; ideas that he had had at some time and long forgotten; soundless, shadowy things, things properly forgotten, eddied up in this south of stillness and seized possession of the desolate expanse.

  The impatience that from the beginning had been mingled with all this beauty began to rage in Ulrich.

  He could be sitting before a stone, lost to the world, sunk in contemplation, and be tortured by this raging impatience. He had come to the end, had assimilated everything into himself and ran the danger of beginning, all alone, to speak aloud in order to recite everything to himself once again. “Yes, you’re sitting here,” his thoughts said, “and you could tell yourself once again what you’re looking at.” The stones are of a quite peculiar stone-green, and their image is mirrored in the water. Quite right. Exactly as one says. And the stones are shaped like boxes.…But it’s all no use, and I’d like to leave. It is so beautiful!

  And he remembered: at home, sometimes only years later, and sometimes purely by accident, if one no longer has any idea how everything was, suddenly a light falls from behind, from such past things, and the heart does everything as if in a dream. He longed for the past.

  “It’s quite simple,” he said to Agathe, “and everyone knows it, we’re the only ones who don’t: the imagination is stimulated only by what one does not yet possess or no longer has; the body wants to have, but the soul does not want to have. Now I understand the tremendous efforts people make to this end. How stupid it is for this ordinary fellow, this art traveler, to compare this flower to a jewel, or that stone over there to a flower: as if the truly intelligent thing to do wouldn’t be to transform them for a brief moment into something else. And how stupid all our ideals would be, since every ideal, if one takes it ser
iously, contradicts some other ideal; thou shalt not kill, therefore perish? Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s goods, so live in poverty? As if their sense did not lie precisely in the impossibility of carrying them out, which ignites the soul! And how good it is for religion that one can neither see nor comprehend God! But which world? A cold, dark strip between the two fires of the Not-yet and the No-longer!”

  “A world to be afraid of oneself in,” Agathe said. “You’re right.” She said this quite seriously, and there was real bitterness in her eyes.

  —And if it is so! Ulrich laughed. —It occurs to me for the first time in my life that we would have to be terribly afraid of being tricked if Heaven were not to dangle before us an end of the world that does not exist. Evidently everything absolute, hundred-percent, true, is completely monstrous.

  Between two people as well; you mean between us?

  I now understand so well what visionaries are: food without salt is unbearable, but salt without food is a poison; visionaries are people who want to live from salt alone. Is that right?

  Agathe shrugged her shoulders.

  — Look at our chambermaid, a cheerful stupid creature smelling of

  cheap soap. A short time ago I was watching her as she made up the

  room; she seemed to me as pretty as a freshly washed sky.

  It comforted Ulrich to confess this, and a small worm of disgust crawled across Agathe’s mouth. Ulrich repeated it; he did not want to drown out this small disharmony with the great peal of the dark bell. “It is a disharmony, isn’t it? And any trick will do for the soul to keep itself fruitful. Sometimes it dies from love several times in succession. But”— and now he said something he believed to be a consolation, indeed a new love—”if everything is so sad and a deception, and one can no longer believe in anything: isn’t that just when we really need one another? The folk song about the little sister”—he smiled—”quiet, pensive music that nothing can drown out; an accompanying music; a love of lovelessness that softly reaches out its hands…?”

  Time is the greatest cynic.

  Here sexuality and camaraderie!

  A cool, quiet, gray aneroticism?

  Agathe was silent. Something had been extinguished. She was inordinately tired. Her heart had suddenly been snatched away from her, and she was tortured by an unbearable fear of a vacuum within, of her unworthiness and her regressive transformation. This is the way ecstatics feel when God withdraws from them and nothing responds any longer to their zealous appeals.

  The art traveler, as they called him, was a professor returning from Italian cities, who had the butterfly-net skin and botanizing drum-beating mind of the aspiring art historian. He had stopped over here for a few days to rest before his return and to order his notes. As they were the only guests, he had already introduced himself to the pair on the first day. They chatted briefly after meals, or when they met in the vicinity of the hotel, and there was no denying that although Ulrich made fun of him, at certain moments this man brought them welcome relaxation.

  He was strongly convinced of his significance as man and scholar, and from their first encounter, after finding that the couple were not on their honeymoon, he had courted Agathe with great determination. He said to her: You resemble the beautiful —— in the painting by —— , and all the women who have this expression, which repeats itself in their hair and in the folds of their gowns, have the quality of ——: As she was telling this to Ulrich Agathe had already forgotten the names, but for a stranger to know what one was was as pleasant as the firm pressure of a masseur, while one knew oneself to be so diffuse that one could barely distinguish oneself from the noontime silence.

  This art traveler said: Women’s function is to make us dream; they are a stratagem of nature for the fertilization of the masculine mind. He gleamed with self-satisfaction at his paradox, which inverted the sense of fertilization. Ulrich replied: But there are still distinctions in kind among these dreams!

  This man asserted that in embracing a “really great female” one must be able to think of Michelangelo’s Creation. “You pull the blanket of the Sistine ceiling over yourself and underneath it you’re naked except for the blue stockings,” Ulrich ridiculed. No. He admits that carrying this out calls for tact, but in principle such people could be “twice as big” as others. “In the last analysis, the goal of all ethical life is to unite our actions with the highest that we bear within us!” It was not so easy to contradict this theoretically, although practically speaking it was ridiculous.

  —I have discovered—the art historian said—that there are, and in the course of history always have been, two sorts of people. I call them the static and the dynamic. Or, if you prefer, the Imperial and the Faustian. People who are static can feel happiness as something present. They are somehow characterized by balance, equilibrium. What they have done and what they will do blends into what they are doing at the moment, is harmonized, and has a shape like a painting or a melody; has, so to speak, a second dimension, shines in every moment as surface. The Pope, for example, or the Dalai Lama; it is simply unimaginable that they would do something that was not stretched on the frame of their significance. On the other hand, the dynamic people: always tearing themselves loose, merely glancing backward and forward, rolling out of themselves, insensitive people with missions, insatiable, pushy, luckless—whom the static ones conquer over and over in order to keep world history going: in a word, he hinted that he was capable of carrying both strains within himself.

  —Tell me—Ulrich asked, as if he were quite serious—are not the dynamic people also those who in love seem not to feel anything because they have either already loved in their imagination or will only love what has slipped away from them again? Couldn’t one say that too?

  —Quite right! the professor said.

  —They are immoral and dreamers, these people, who can never find the right point between future and past—

  It’s enough to make them throw up.

  —Well, I don’t think I’d claim that—

  —Yes, but you do. They would be capable of committing crazy good or bad deeds because the present means nothing to them.

  He really ought to say: they could commit crazy deeds out of impatience.

  The art historian did not quite know how to answer this, and found that Ulrich did not understand him.

  The restlessness grew. The summer heat increased. The sun burned like a fire to the edge of the earth. The elements filled existence completely, so that there was hardly anyplace left for anything human.

  It happened that toward evening, when the burning air already cast light, cooling folds, they went strolling on the steep banks. Yellow bushes of broom sprang up from the embers of the stones and stood there directly before the soul; the mountains gray as donkeys’ backs with the washed-out green that the grass growing on the white limestone cast over them; the laurel’s hot dark green. The parched glance resting on the laurel sank into cooler and cooler depths. Countless bees hummed; it fused into a deep metallic tone that shot off little arrows whenever, in a sudden turn, they flew by one’s ear. Heroic, tremendous, the approaching line of mountains, in three waves one behind the other, smoothly canted, breaking off steeply.

  —Heroic? Ulrich asked. —Or is it only what we have always hated because it was supposed to be heroic? Endlessly portrayed, this painted and engraved, this Greek, this Roman, this Nazarene, classicistic landscape—this virtuous, professorial, idealistic landscape? And ultimately it impresses us only because weve now encountered it in reality? The way one despises an influential man and is nevertheless flattered because one knows him?

  But the few things here to which the space belonged respected each other; they kept their distance from each other and did not saturate nature with impressions, as they do in Germany. No mocking helped; as only high in the mountains, where everything earthly keeps diminishing, this landscape was no longer a place of human habitation but a piece of the sky, to whose folds a few species of in
sects still clung.

  And on the other side (of this humility) lay the sea. The great beloved, adorned with the peacock’s tail. The beloved with the oval mirror. The opened eye of the beloved. The beloved become God. The pitiless challenge. The eyes still hurt and had to look away, pierced by the shattering spears of light speeding back from the sea. But soon the sun will be lower. It will only be a circumscribed sea of liquid silver, with violets floating on it. And then one must look out over the sea! Then one has to look at it. Agathe and Ulrich feared this moment. What can one do to prevail against this monstrous, observing, stimulating, jealous rival? How should they love each other? Sink to their knees? As they had done at first? Spread out their arms? Scream? Can they embrace each other? It is all so ridiculous, as if one were trying to shout angrily at someone while nearby all the bells of a cathedral are pealing! The fearful emptiness again closed in on them from all sides.

  So it ends the way it begins!

  But at such a moment one can shoot the other, or stab him, since his death cry will be muffled.

  Ulrich shook his head. —One must be somewhat limited to find nature beautiful. To be someone like that fellow down there, who would rather talk himself than listen to someone better. One is forcibly reminded by nature of school exercises and bad poems, and one has to be capable of transforming it at the moment of observation into an anointing. Otherwise one collapses. One must always be stupider than nature in order to stand up to it, and must gossip in order not to lose the language.

  Fortunately, their skin could not stand the heat. Sweat broke out. It created a diversion and an excuse; they felt themselves relieved of their mission.

  But as they were walking back Agathe noticed that she was looking forward to the certainty of meeting the traveling stranger down below in front of the hotel. Ulrich was certainly right, but there was a great consolation in the babbling, insistently pushy company of this person.