by Robert Musil
Agathe thought: “Moonlit night … two miles …” And much else drifted through her mind as well. What Ulrich was telling her was one more version of all that; she did not have the impression that she would be losing anything if she did not pay really close attention, although she listened gladly. Then she thought of Lindners asserting that one had to live for something and could not think of oneself, and she asked herself whether that, too, would be “allocentric.” Losing oneself in a task, as he demanded? She was skeptical. Pious people have enthusiastically pressed their lips to lepers’ sores: a loathsome idea! an “exaggeration that is an affront to life,” as Lindner liked to call it. But what he did consider pleasing to God, erecting a hospital, left her cold. Thus it happened that she now plucked her brother by the sleeve and interrupted him with the words: “Our man has shown up again!” For partly out of fun, partly from habit, they had fastened on a particularly unpleasant man to use for their mental experiment. This was a beggar who conducted his business for a while every day in front of their garden fence. He treated the stone base as a bench that was awaiting him; every day he first spread out beside himself a greasy paper with some leftover food on it, with which he casually regaled himself before putting on his business expression and packing away the rest. He was a stocky man with thick, iron-gray hair, had the pasty, spiteful face of an alcoholic, and had defended his location a number of times with great rudeness when other beggars unsuspectingly came near: Ulrich and Agathe hated this parasite who offended against their property—and further refined what was proper to them, their loneliness—hated him with a primitive instinct of possessiveness that made them laugh, because it seemed to them totally illicit; and for just that reason they used this ugly, spiteful guest for their boldest and most dubious conjurations of loving one’s neighbor.
Hardly had they caught sight of him than Ulrich said, laughing: “I repeat: If you just, as people say, imagine yourself in this situation or feel any kind of vague sense of social responsibility for him—indeed, even if you only see him as a picturesque, tattered painting—there’s already a small percentage of the genuine ‘putting oneself in another’s place.’ Now you have to try it one hundred percent!”
With a smile, Agathe shook her head.
“Imagine you were in accord with this man about everything the way you are with yourself,” Ulrich proposed.
Agathe protested. “I’ve never been in accord with myself!”
“But you will be then,” Ulrich said. He took her hand.
Agathe let it happen and looked at the beggar. She became strangely serious and after a while declared: “He’s stranger to me than death.”
Ulrich enclosed her hand in his more completely and asked again: “Please try!”
After a while Agathe said: “I feel as if I’m hanging on this figure; I myself, and not just my curiosity!” From the tension of concentration, and its focus on a single object, her face had taken on the involuntary expression of a sleepwalker.
Ulrich helped out: “It’s like in a dream? Raw-sweet, alien-self, encountering oneself in the shape of another?”
Agathe dismissed this with a smile. “No, it’s certainly not as enchantingly sensual as it is in such dreams,” she said.
Ulrich’s eyes rested on her face. “Try, as it were, to dream him!” he counseled persuadingly. “Cautious hoarders, in our waking state we consist mostly of giving out and taking back; we participate, and in doing so preserve ourselves. But in dreams we have a trembling intimation of how glorious a world is that consists entirely of prodigality!”
“That may be so,” Agathe answered hesitantly and distractedly. Her eyes remained fixed on the man. “Thank God,” she said slowly after a while, “he’s become an ordinary monster again!” The man had got up, gathered his things together, and left. “He was getting uncomfortable!” Ulrich claimed, laughing. When he fell silent, the constant noise of the street rose and mingled with the sunshine in a peculiar feeling of stillness. After a while Ulrich asked pensively: “Isn’t it strange that almost every single person knows himself least of all and loves himself most? It’s evidently a protective mechanism. And ‘Love thy neighbor as thyself’ means in this fashion too: love him without knowing him, before you know him, although you know him. I can understand one’s taking this merely for an extreme expression, but I doubt that it will satisfy the challenge; for, pursued seriously, it asks: love him without your reason. And so an apparently everyday demand, if taken literally, turns into an ecstatic one!”
Agathe responded: “Truly, the ‘monster was almost beautiful!”
Ulrich said: “I think one not only loves something because it’s beautiful, but it’s also beautiful because one loves it. Beauty is nothing but a way of saying that something has been loved; the beauty of all art and of the world has its origin in the power of making a love comprehensible.”
Agathe thought of the men with whom she had spent her life. The feeling of first being overshadowed by a strange being, and then opening one’s eyes in this shadow, is strange. She pictured it to herself. Was it not alien, almost hostile things that fused together in the kiss of two lives? The bodies remained unitedly separated. Thinking of them, you feel the repulsive and ugly with undiminished force. As horror, even. You are also certain that spiritually you have nothing to do with each other. The disparity and separation of the persons involved is painfully clear. If there had been some illusion of a secret accord, a sameness or likeness, this was the moment it vanished like a mist. No, you weren’t under the least illusion, Agathe thought to herself. And yet the sense of an independent self is partially extinguished, the self is broken; and amid signs signifying an act of violence no less than a sweet sacrifice, it submits to its new state. All of that causes a “skin rash”? Doubtless the other ways of loving are not able to do as much. Perhaps Agathe had so often felt the inclination to love men she didn’t like because this is when this remarkable transformation happens most irrationally. And the remarkable power of attraction that Lindner had lately exercised on her signified nothing else, that she did not doubt. But she hardly knew that this was what she was thinking about; Ulrich, too, had once confessed that he often loved what he didn’t like, and she thought she was thinking of him. She recalled that all her life she had believed only in surroundings that rushed past, with the hopeless hope that they could remain the same; she had never been able to change herself by her own volition, and yet now, as a gift, a hovering borne by the forces of summer had taken the place of vexation and disgust. She said to Ulrich gratefully: “You have made me what I am because you love me!”
Their hands, which had been intertwined, had disengaged themselves and were now just touching with their fingertips; these hands awakened to consciousness again, and Ulrich grasped his sister’s with his own. “You have changed me completely,” he responded. “Perhaps I have had some influence on you, but it was only you who were, so to speak, flowing through me!”
Agathe nestled her hand in the hand that embraced it. “You really don’t know me at all!” she said.
“Knowing people is of no consequence to me,” Ulrich replied. “The only thing one ought to know about a person is whether he makes our thoughts fruitful. There shouldn’t be any other way of knowing people!”
Agathe asked: “But then how am I real?”
“You’re not real at all!” Ulrich said with a laugh. “I see you the way I need you, and you make me see what I need. Who can say so casually where the first and fundamental impulse lies? We are a ribbon floating in the air.”
Agathe laughed, and asked: “So if I disappoint you it will be your fault?”
“No doubt!” Ulrich said. “For there are heights where it makes no sense to discriminate between 1 have been mistaken in you’ and ‘I have been mistaken in myself/ For instance, the heights of faith, of love, of magnanimity. Whoever acts from magnanimity, or, as it can also be called, from greatness, doesn’t ask about illusion, or about certainty either. There are some things he m
ay even not want to know; he dares the leap over falsehood.”
“Couldn’t you also be magnanimous toward Professor Lindner?” Agathe asked rather surprisingly, for ordinarily she never spoke of Lindner unless her brother brought up his name. Ulrich knew that she was holding something back. It was not exactly that she was concealing that she had some sort of relationship with Lindner, but she did not say what it was. He more or less guessed it and, with some displeasure, acquiesced in the necessity of allowing Agathe to go her own way. The instant that, for God knows what reasons, such a question sprang from her lips, Agathe had immediately realized once more how ill the term “Professor Lindner” accorded with the term “magnanimity.” She felt that in some way or other, magnanimity could not be professed, much as she felt that Lindner was good in some unpleasant way. Ulrich was silent. She sought to look into his face, and when he turned it away as far as he could, she plucked his sleeve. She used his sleeve as a bell rope until Ulrich’s laughing countenance again appeared in the doorway of grief and he delivered a small admonishing speech on how the person who in his magnanimity too soon abandons the firm ground of reality can easily become ridiculous. But that not only related to Agathe’s readiness for magnanimity in relation to the dubious Lindner, but also directed a scruple at that true and not-to-be-deceived sensibility in which truth and error signify far less than the enduring emanation of the emotions and their power to seize everything for themselves.
49
MUSINGS
Since that scene, Ulrich thought he was being borne forward; but really all that could be said was that something new and incomprehensible had been added, which he perceived, however, as an increase in reality. He was acting perhaps a little like a person who has seen his opinions in print and is ever after convinced of their incontrovertibility; however he might smile at this, he was incapable of changing it. And just as he had been about to draw his conclusions from the millennial book, or perhaps he merely wanted once more to express his astonishment, Agathe had retaliated and cut off the discussion by exclaiming: “We’ve already spent enough time talking about this!” How Ulrich felt that Agathe was always in the right, even when she wasn’t! For although nothing could be less the case than that there had been enough discussion between them— not to mention anything true or decisive—indeed, precisely such a saving event or magic formula for which one might have initially hoped had not materialized; yet he knew, too, that the problems that had dominated his life for die better part of a year were now bunched together dense and compact around him, and not in a rational but in a dynamic fashion. Just as if there would soon be enough talk about them, even if the answer did not happen to come out in words.
He could not even altogether remember what he had thought and said about these problems over the course of time; indeed, he was far from being able to do so. He had doubtless set out to converse about them with all mankind; but it lay, too, in the nature of the reproach itself that nothing one could say about it was joined in a forward-looking way to anything else but that everything was as widely scattered as it was connected. The same movement of die mind, clearly distinguished from the ordinary, arose again and again, and the treasure of the things it reached out to include grew; but no matter what Ulrich might remind himself of, it was always as far from one inspiration to a second as it would have been to a third, and nowhere did a dominant assertion emerge. In this way he recalled, too, that a similar “equally far,” of the kind that was now almost burdensomely and depressingly affecting his thoughts, had once existed in the most inspiring way between himself and die whole world around him: an apparent or actual suspension of the spirit of separation, indeed almost of the spirit of space. That had been in the very first years of his manhood, on the island where he had taken refuge from the majors wife but with her image in his heart. He had probably described it in almost the same words too. Everything had been changed in an incomprehensibly visual way through a condition of fullness of love, as if all he had known previously had been a condition of impoverishment. Even pain was happiness. His happiness, too, almost pain. Everything was leaning toward him, suspended. It seemed that all things knew about him, and he about them; that all beings knew about each other, and yet that there was no such thing as knowing at all, but that love, with its attributes of swelling fullness and ripening promise, ruled this island as the one and perfect law. He had later used this often enough as a model, with slight changes, and in recent weeks, too, he might have been able to refresh this description to some extent; it was by no means difficult to go on in it, and the more one did so without thinking, the more fruitful it turned out to be. But it was precisely this indefiniteness that now meant the most to him. For if his thoughts were connected in such a way that nothing of substance could be added to them which they would not have absorbed, the way an arriving person disappears into a crowd, still that only proved their similarity to the emotions by which they had been summoned into Ulrich’s life die first time; and this correspondence of an alteration of the sphere of the senses, experienced now a second time through Agathe, which seemed to affect the world with an altered way of thinking—of which it might also be said that it catches the wind in infinite dreams without stirring from the spot and had already exhausted itself once in the process!—this remarkable correspondence, to which Ulrich was only today fully attentive, inspired in him courage and apprehension. He still recalled that on that earlier occasion he had used the expression of having come to the heart of the world. Was there such a thing? Was it really anything more than a circumlocution? Only by excluding his brain was he inclined to mysticism’s claim that one must give up one’s self; but did he not have to admit to himself just for that reason that he did not know much more about this than he had before?
He walked farther along these expanses, which nowhere seemed to offer access to their depths. Another time he had called this “the right life”; probably not long ago, if he was not mistaken; and certainly if he had been asked earlier what he was up to, even when he was busy with his most precise work he would ordinarily not have found any answer except to say that it was a preliminary study for the right life. Not to think about it was simply impossible. Of course one could not say what it should look like—indeed, not even if there was such a thing—and perhaps it was just one of those ideas that are more a badge of truth than a truth; but a life without meaning, a life that obeyed only the so-called necessities, and their contingency disguised as necessity, in other words a life lived eternally moment to moment—and here again an expression occurred to him that he had once made up: the futility of the centuries!—such a life was for him a simply unbearable idea! But no less unbearable than a life “for something,” that sterility of highways shaded by milestones amid unsurveyed expanses. He might call all that a life preceding the discovery of morality. For that, too, was one of his views, that morality is not made by people and does not change with them but is revealed; that it unfolds in seasons and zones and can actually be discovered. This idea, which was as out of fashion as it was current, expressed perhaps nothing but the demand that morality, too, have a morality, or the expectation that it have one hidden away, and that morality was not simply tittle-tattle revolving on itself on a planet circling to the point of implosion. Of course he had never believed that what such a demand contained could be discovered all at once; it merely seemed to him desirable to think of it at times, which is to say at a time that seemed propitious and relatively accommodating, after some thousands of centuries of aimless circling of the question, whether there was not some experience that might be derived from it. But then, what did he really know about it even now? On the whole, nothing more than that this group of problems, too, had in the course of his life been subjected to the same law or fate as the other groups, which closed ranks in all directions without forming a center.
Of course he knew more about it! For instance, that to philosophize as he was doing was considered horribly facile, and at this moment he fervently wished to
be able to refute this error. He knew, too, how one goes about such a thing: he had some acquaintance with the history of thought; he could have found in it similar efforts and how they had been contested, with bitterness or mockingly or calmly; he could have ordered his material, arranged it, he could have secured a firm footing and reached beyond himself. For a while he painfully recalled his earlier industriousness, and especially that frame of mind that came to him so naturally that it had once even earned him the derisive appellation of “activist.” Was he then no longer the person constantly haunted by the idea that one must work toward the “ordering of the whole”? Had he not, with a certain stubbornness, compared the world to a “laboratory,” an “experimental community”; had he never spoken of “mankind’s negligent condition of consciousness,” which needed to be transformed into will; demanded that one had to “make” history; had he not, finally, even if it had been only ironically, actually called for a “General Secretariat of Precision and Soul”? That was not forgotten, for one cannot suddenly change oneself; it was merely suspended for the moment! There was also no mistaking where the reason lay. Ulrich had never kept accounts on his ideas; but even if he had been able to remember them all at the same time, he knew that it would have been impossible for him to simply take them up, compare them, test them for possible explanations, and so, ultimately, bring forth from the vapors the little tissue-thin metal leaf of truth. It was a peculiarity of this way of thinking that it did not contain any progress toward truth; and although Ulrich basically assumed that such progress might sometime, through a slow and infinite process, be brought about in the totality, this did not console him, for he no longer had the patience to let himself be outlived by whatever it was to which he was contributing something, like an ant. For the longest time his ideas had not stood on the best footing with truth, and this now seemed to him again the question most urgently in need of illumination.