by Robert Musil
This gentle mania, which was nothing but an extremely elevated form of the involvement of two people with each other, also unleashed a deepened sympathy, a sinking into togetherness; the change also became apparent in their relation to the world, but in such a manner that along with the arrogance there began to predominate at times a peculiar immersion in the nature and doings of other people, and in the claim this involved to recognition and love. A temperate explanation, such as that this was merely the expression of an overflowing mood, sometimes amicable, sometimes arrogant, did not suffice. For the happy person is no doubt friendly, and with cheerful complaisance wants to let everyone know it, and Ulrich or Agathe, too, felt lifted up at times by such gaiety, like a person being carried on someone’s shoulders and waving at everyone: yet this actively outward-striving amicability seemed to them harmless beside the kind that overcame them passively and almost hauntingly at the sight of others as soon as they made room to be ready for what they had called “walking two miles with them.” Ulrich might also have wondered that he had often seen himself approaching other people as if they were a generality, with theories and emotions that applied to them all; but now it was happening even in a constrained way on a small individual scale, with that silent insatiability of his which had once made Agathe herself suspect that it was more a longing for empathy on the part of a nature that never involves itself with others than it was the expression of confident benevolence. To be sure, Agathe was now reacting as he did: although she had, for the most part, spent her life without either love or hate, but merely with indifference, she felt the same inclination toward others, quite divorced from any possibility of action, indeed from any idea that might have given comprehensible shape to her almost oppressive empathy.
Ulrich analyzed it: “If you like, you can just as well call it a bifurcated egotism as the start of loving everyone.”
Agathe joked: “As love, it’s still rather timid at the start/’
Ulrich went on: “In truth, it has as little to do with egotism as with its opposite. Those are later concepts, indispensable for decocted souls. In the Eudemian ethics, however, it still runs: Self-love is not selfishness but a higher condition of the self, with the consequence that one loves others, too, in a higher way. Also, more than two thousand years ago the notion was formulated, apparently just for us, and then lost again, a linking of goal and cause into a ‘goal-cause’ that motivates what is loved as it does the lover.’ An unreal idea, and yet as if created in order to distinguish the sympathetic awareness of the emotions from the dead truth of reason!”
He touched her hand with his fingertips. Agathe looked around her shyly; they were in one of the busiest streets; there probably weren’t many other people roaming around whose concerns reached back to the fourth century B.C. “Don’t you think that we’re behaving extremely strangely?” Agathe asked. She saw women in the latest fashions, and officers with red, green, yellow, and blue necks and legs; many necks and legs stopped suddenly behind her and turned to look at her or some other woman, expecting an “advance.” A ray of light from the heavenly vaults of truth had fallen on all this activity, and it looked somewhat precarious.
“I think so,” Ulrich said dryly. “Even if I might have been mistaken.”
For he could no longer recall exactly the passage that had once made an impression on him.
Agathe laughed at him. “You’re always so truth-loving,” she mocked, but secretly she admired him.
But Ulrich knew that what they were commanded to seek had as little to do with truth in the ordinary sense as it did with egotism or altruism, so he replied: “Love of truth is really one of the most contradictory formulations there is. For you can revere truth in God knows how many ways, but the one thing you can’t do is love it. If you do, it begins to waver. Love dissolves truth like wine the pearl.”
“Do pearls really dissolve in wine?” Agathe asked.
“I have no idea,” Ulrich conceded with a sigh. ‘Tin pretty far gone. I’m already using expressions I can’t account for! I meant to say: To the person who loves, truth and deception are equally trivial!”
This observation, that truth is dissolved by love—the opposite of the more fainthearted assertion that love cannot bear the truth!—contains nothing new. The moment a person encounters love not as an experience but as life itself, or at least as a kind of life, he understands that there are several truths about everything. The person who judges without love calls this “opinions” and “subjectivity”; the person who loves denies that with the sage’s saying: “We can’t know the meaning of even the simplest words if we don’t love!” He is not being insensitive to truth, but oversensitive. He finds himself in a kind of enthusiasm of thinking, in which words open up to their very core. The person judging without love calls something an illusion that is merely die consequence of the excited involvement of the emotions. He himself is free of passion, and truth is free of passion; an emotion is injurious to its truth, and to expect to find truth where something is “a matter of the emotions” seems to him just as wrongheaded as demanding justice from wrath. And yet it is precisely the general content of existence and truth that distinguishes love as an experiencing of the world from love as an experience of the individual. In the special world of love, contradictions do not raise each other to nothing and cancel each other out, but raise each other to the heights. They don’t adapt to each other, either, but are in advance a part of a higher unity, which, the moment they come into contact, rises from them as a transparent cloud. Therefore, in love as in life itself, every word is an event and none is a complete notion, and no assertion is needed, nor any mere whim.
It is hard to account for this, because the language of love is a secret language, and in its ultimate perfection as silent as an embrace. Ulrich was capable of walking beside Agathe and seeing the reliable line of her profile in sparkling clarity before the swarm of his thoughts; then he perhaps recalled that in every delimitation there resides a tyrannical happiness. This is apparently the basic happiness of all works of art, of all beauty, of whatever is formed by earth at all. But it is perhaps, too, the basic hostility, the armor between all beings. And Agathe looked away from Ulrich into the stream of people and sought to imagine what cannot be imagined, what happiness it would be to do away with all limits. In thought they contradicted each other, but they would also have been able to change sides, since on earlier occasions they had, at times alone, at times together, experienced one side as well as the other. But they did not speak about this at all. They smiled. That was enough. They each guessed what the other meant. And if they guessed wrongly, it was just as good as if it were right. If, on the contrary, they said something that cohered more firmly, they almost felt it as a disturbance. They had already spoken so much about it. A certain indolence, indeed paralysis, of thought was part of their silent insatiability as they now observed people and sought to enclose them within the magic circle that surrounded themselves, just as fluid and fleeting mobility belonged to this thinking. They were like the two halves of the shell of a mussel opening itself to the sea.
And at times they suddenly laughed at each other.
“It’s not as simple as one would like to think, loving one’s fellow man like oneself!” Ulrich sighed mockingly once again.
Agathe took a deep breath and told him with satisfaction that it was his fault. “You’re the one who’s always destroying it!” she complained.
“They’re the ones! Look at them!” Ulrich countered. “Look how they’re watching us! They’d say Thanks a lot!’ to our love!”
And in truth this made them laugh with a kind of abashed shame, for unfortunately nothing is more amusing than raising one’s eyes when they are still tender with sentiment. So Agathe laughed beforehand. But then she replied: “And yet what we’re looking for can’t be far away. Sometimes one feels one’s own breath against a veil as warm as a pair of strange lips. This seems to me that close too.”
Ulrich added: “And there is
a circumstance that could lead one to believe that we’re not simply chasing chimeras. For even an enemy can be divined only if you’re able to feel what he feels. So there is a love your neighbor’; it even has a postscript: so you get a cleaner shot at him! And quite generally, you never understand people entirely through knowing and observing them; it also calls for understanding of a kind you have with yourself; you must already have that understanding when you approach them.”
“But I usually don’t understand them at all,” Agathe said, surveying the people.
“You believe in them,” Ulrich replied. “At least you want to. You lend’ them credence. That’s what makes them seem worthy of loving.”
“No,” Agathe said. “I don’t believe in them in the least.”
“No,” Ulrich said. “ ‘Belief isn’t an accurate expression for it.”
“But then what should it really be called,” Agathe asked, “when you think you understand people without knowing anything about them, and when you have an irresistible inclination for them, although you can be almost certain that you wouldn’t like to know them?”
“One usually lives in the cautious balance between inclination and aversion one keeps ready for one’s fellowmen,” her brother responded slowly. “If, for whatever reason, the aversion seems to be dormant, then only a desire to yield must remain, a desire that cannot be compared to anything one knows. But it’s no longer an attitude that corresponds to reality.”
“But you’ve said so often that it’s the possibility of another life!” Agathe reproached him.
“An awareness of the world as it could be is what it is,” Ulrich said, “shot through with an awareness of the world as it is!”
“No, that’s too little!” Agathe exclaimed.
“But I can’t say that I really love these people,” Ulrich defended himself. “Or that I love the real people. These people are real when they’re in uniform and civilian clothes; that’s the norm, so it’s our attitude that’s unreal!”
“But among themselves they think of it the same way!” Agathe responded, on the attack. “Because they don’t love each other in a real way, or really don’t love each other, in exactly the same way you’re claiming about our relation to them: their reality consists in part of fantasies, but why should that degrade ours?”
“You’re thinking with such strenuous sharpness today!” Ulrich fended her off, laughing.
“I’m so sad,” Agathe replied. “Everything is so uncertain. It all seems to shrink to nothing and expand again endlessly. It won’t let you do anything, but the inactivity is also unbearable because it really presses in all directions against closed walls.”
And in this or similar fashion the preoccupation of brother and sister with their surroundings always broke off. Their involvement remained unarticulated: there was nowhere an accord in opinion or activity in which it could have expressed itself; the feeling grew all the more, the less it found a way of acting that corresponded to it, and the desire to contradict appeared as well: the sun shone on the just and unjust, but Ulrich found that one might better say, on the unseparated and not united, as the real origin of mankind’s being evil as well as good.
Agathe concurred in this opinion: “I’m always so sad whenever we have to laugh at ourselves,” she asserted, and laughed, because along with everything else an old saying had occurred to her, which sounded quite strange, as idle as it was prophetic. For it proclaimed: “Then the eyes of the soul were opened, and I saw love coming toward me. And I saw the beginning, but its end I did not see, only its progression.”
49
SPECIAL MISSION OF A GARDEN FENCE
Another time Agathe asked: “By what right can you speak so glibly of an Image of the world/ or even of a world’ of love? Of love as ‘life itself? You’re being frivolous!” She felt as if she were swinging back and forth on a high branch that was threatening to break under the exertion at any moment; but she went on to ask: “If one can speak of a cosmic image of love, could one not also finally speak of an image of anger, envy, pride, or hardness?”
“All other emotions last for a shorter period,” Ulrich replied. “None of them even claims to last forever.”
“But don’t you find it somewhat odd of love that it should make that claim?” Agathe asked.
Ulrich countered: “I believe one might well say that it also ought to be possible for other emotions to shape their own images of the world: as it were, one-sided or monochrome ones; but among them love has always enjoyed an obscure advantage and has been accorded a special claim to the power of shaping the world.”
During this exchange they sought out a place in their garden where they could look through the fence at the street, with its rich variety of human content, without exposing themselves, as far as possible, to the glances of strangers. This usually led them to a low, sunny rise whose dry soil gave footing to several larches, and where if they lay down they were camouflaged by the play of light and shadow; in this half hiding place they were on the one hand so near the street that the people passing by gave them the peculiar impression of being alive in that merely animalistic way that attaches to all of us when we believe ourselves unobserved and alone with our demeanor, and on the other hand any eyes that were raised could see brother and sister and draw them into the events that they were observing with interest and a reserve for which the fence, a solid barrier but transparent to the glance, served as a positively ideal image.
“Now let’s try whether we really love them or not,” Agathe proposed, and smiled mockingly or impatiently.
Her brother shrugged his shoulders.
“Stop, O you hastening past, and bestow for a moment your precious soul upon two people who intend to love you!” Ulrich said, pushing it to absurdity.
“You can’t bestow yourself for a moment; you have to do it without end!” Agathe corrected him threateningly.
“A park. A mighty fence. Us behind it,” Ulrich affirmed. “And what might he be thinking when we called him, after he had involuntarily slowed his steps and before he timidly doubles them? That he’s walking by the garden fence of a private madhouse!”
Agathe nodded.
“And we,” Ulrich went on, “wouldn’t even dare! Don’t you absolutely know we won’t do it? Our inmost harmony with the world warns us that we’re not allowed to do such a thing!”
Agathe said: “If we were to address the brother hastening past, instead of as ‘our good friend’ or ‘dear soul,’ as ‘dog’ or ‘criminal,’ he probably wouldn’t consider us mad but would merely take us for people who ‘think differently’ and are mad at him!”
Ulrich laughed and was pleased with his sister. “But you see how it is,” he declared. “General rudeness is unbearable today. But because it is, goodness too must be false! It’s not that rudeness and goodness depend on each other as on a scale, where too much on one side equals too little on the other; they depend on each other like two parts of a body that are healthy and sick together. So nothing is more erroneous,” he went on, “than to imagine, as people generally do, that an excess of bad convictions is to blame for a lack of good ones; on the contrary, evil evidently increases through the growth of a false goodness!”
“We’ve heard that often,” Agathe replied with pleasantly dry irony. “But it’s apparently not simple to be good in the good way!”
“No, loving is not simple!” Ulrich echoed, laughing.
They lay there looking into the blue heights of die sun; then again through the fence at the street, which, to their eyes dazzled by the sunny sky, was spinning in a hazily excited gray. Silence descended. The feelings of self-confidence that the conversation had raised were slowly transformed into an undercutting, indeed an abduction, of the self. Ulrich related softly: “I’ve invented a magnificent sham pair of concepts: ‘egocentric and allocentric.’ The world of love is experienced either egocentrically or allocentrically; but the ordinary world knows only egotism and altruism, a coupled pair that, by comparison, ar
e quarrelsomely rational. Being egocentric means feeling as if one were carrying the center of the world in the center of one’s self. Being allocentric means not having a center at all anymore. Participating totally in the world and not laying anything by for oneself. At its highest stage, simply ceasing to be. I could also say: turning the world inward and the self outward. They are the ecstasies of selfishness and selflessness. And although ecstasy appears to be an outgrowth of healthy life, one can evidently say as well that the moral notions of healthy life are a stunted vestige of what were originally ecstatic ones.”