by Robert Musil
In spite of her many weaknesses, Clarisse, for whom genius was a matter of the will, belonged neither to the shrilly got-up people nor to the disheartened ones. She wrote down with great energy what she had read, and in doing so had the right feeling of originality in assimilating this material and feeling it mysteriously becoming part of her inmost being, as in the vividly leaping flames of an immolation. “By accident,” she wrote, “while I was already thinking of my departure, memories clashed in my head. That the Sienese (Perugia?) in the year… carried a portrait… into the church, that Dante … names the fountain that is still standing today in the Piazza… And that Dante said about the piety of Francis of Assisi, who was canonized shortly afterward: It rose among us like a shining star.”
Where she no longer remembered the names she put in periods. There was time for that later. But the words “rose like a shining star” she felt in her body. That she—incidentally—had hit upon the article she had read had come about because she longed for better times; not as an escape, but because—as she felt—something active had to happen.
This Francis of Assisi—she wrote—was the son of prosperous Sienese citizens, a draper, and before that a smart young man about town. People of today like Ulrich, who have access to science, are reminded by his later behavior (after his religious awakening) of certain manic states, and it cannot be denied that they are right in doing so. But what in 1913 is mental illness can in 13 … (periodic insanity, hysteria, of course not illnesses with an anatomical course, only those that coexist with health!!) merely have been seen as a one-sided debit of health. The etiology of certain diseases is not only a personal but also a social phenomenon— she underlined this sentence. In parentheses she threw in a few additional words: (Hysteria. Freud. Delirium: its forms are different according to the society. Mass psychology offers images that do not differ greatly from the clinical). Then came a sentence that she also underlined: It is by no means excluded that what today becomes mere inner destruction will one day again have constructive value.
If the healthy person is a social phenomenon, then so is the sick person.
It went through her mind that Dante and Francis of Assisi were actually one and the same person; it was a tremendous discovery. She did not, however, write it down but undertook to look into this problem later, and the next moment her splendor, too, was extinguished. The decisive thing is—she wrote—that at that time a person, whom today we would in good conscience put in a sanatorium, could live, teach, and lead his contemporaries! That the best of his contemporaries saw him as an honor and an illumination! That at that time Siena was a center of culture. But she wrote in the margin: All people are one person? Then she went on more calmly: It fascinates me to imagine how things looked then. That age did not have much intelligence. It did not test things; it believed like a good child, without bothering itself about what was improbable. Religion went along with local patriotism; it was not the individual Sienese who would enter into heaven, but one day the whole city of Siena that would be transplanted there as a unit. For one loved heaven by loving the city. (The cheerfulness, the sense of ornament, the broad vistas of small Italian cities!) Religious eccentrics were few; people were proud of their city; what they shared was a common experience. Heaven belonged to this city, how should it be otherwise? The priests were considered not particularly religious people but merely a kind of official; for in all religions God was always something far away and uncertain, but the faith that the Son of God had come to visit, that one still had the writings of those who had seen Him with their own eyes, imparted an enormous vitality, nearness, and security to the experience, which the priests were there to confirm. The officer corps of God.
If in the midst of this one is brushed by God, as Saint Francis was, it is only a new reassurance, which does not disturb the civic cheerfulness of the experience. Because everyone believed, a few could do so in a particular way, and thus intellectual wealth was added to simple, legitimate security. For in sum more energies flow from opposition than from agreement….
Here deep furrows formed on Clarisse’s forehead. Nietzsche occurred to her, the enemy of religion: here there were still some difficult things for her to reconcile. —I do not presume to know the enormous history of these emotions—she told herself—but one thing is certain: today the religious experience is no longer the action of all, of a community, but only of individuals. And apparently that is why this experience is sick.
Feeling of solitude in the sea of the spirit, which is in motion in all directions.
Note: Mass experience connected with Meingast.
She stopped writing and walked slowly up and down the room, excitedly rubbing her hands against each other or rubbing her forehead with a finger. It was not from despondency that she fled into past and remote times; it was absolutely clear to her that she, striding up and down in this room, was connected with the Siena of the past. Thoughts of recent days were intermingled with this: she was in some fashion or other not only destined but already actually involved in taking over the mission that recurred over the centuries, like God in every new Host. But she was not thinking of God; remarkably enough, this was the only idea she did not think of, as if it had no role in it at all; perhaps it would have disturbed her, for everything else was as vivid as if she had to get on a train tomorrow to travel there. By the windows great masses of green leaves waved in at her; tree balls; they steeped the whole room in a watery green. This color, “with which at that time my soul was filled,” as she said later, played a great role in her as the chief color of these ideas.
This connection to the past, which Ulrich lacks.
Feeling! Pealing of bells. Processions march with banners to the Virgin and gorgeous robes. She was walking in the middle. When they stopped, however, the crowd did not stop. But that was not upsetting.
***
[Clarisse flees to Italy, where she joins Ulrich on the “Island of Health”:]
—In Pompeii—Ulrich said—the cast of a woman has been found sealed in a fraction of a second into the cooling lava like a statue by the gases into which her body dissolved when the terrible stream of fire enveloped her. This nearly naked woman, whose shift had slid up to her back, had been overtaken as she was running and fallen facedown with her arms outstretched, while her small hair-knot, untidily put up, still sat firmly on the back of her head; she was neither ugly nor beautiful, neither voluptuous from living well nor gnawed by poverty, neither twisted by horror nor unwittingly overpowered without fear; but just because of all that, this woman, who many centuries ago jumped out of bed and was thrown on her stomach, has remained as incredibly alive as if at any second she could stand up again and run on. Clarisse understood exactly what he meant. Whenever she scratched her thoughts and emotions in the sand, with some mark or other that was as charged with them as a boat that can hardly stay afloat for the multiplicity of its cargo, and the wind then blew on it for a day, animal tracks ran over it, or rain made pockmarks in it and eroded the sharpness of the outlines the way the cares of life erode a face, but most especially when one had forgotten it completely and only through some chance stumbled on it again and suddenly confronted oneself, confronted an instant compressed and full of emotions and thoughts that had become sunken, faded, small, and barely recognizable, overgrown from left to right but not vanished, with grasses and animals living around it without shyness, when it had become world, earth: then … ? Hard to say what then; the island became populated with many Clarisses; they slept on the sand, flew on the light through the air, called from the throats of birds; it was a lust to touch oneself everywhere, to run into oneself everywhere, an unutterable sensitivity: a giddiness escaped from the eyes of this woman and was able to infect Ulrich, the way one person’s lustful glance can ignite the greatest lust in another. God knows what it is—Ulrich thought—that causes lovers to scratch the mystery of their initials into the bark of trees, so that they grow along with it; that has invented the seal and the coat of arms, the magic
of portraits gazing out of their frames: to end ultimately in the trace of the photographic plate, which has lost all mystery because it is already nearly reality again.
But it was not only that. It was also the multiplicity of meaning. Something was a stone and signified Ulrich; but Clarisse knew that it was more than Ulrich and a stone, that it was everything in Ulrich that was hard as stone and everything heavy that was oppressing her, and all insight into the world that one acquired, once one had understood that the stones were like Ulrich. Exactly as if one says: This is Max, but he is a genius. Or the fork of a branch and a hole in die sand say: this is Clarisse, but at the same time she is a witch and is riding her heart. Many emotions that are otherwise separate crowd around such a sign, one never quite knew which ones, but gradually Ulrich also recognized such an uncertainty in the world in his own feelings. It threw into relief some of Clarisse’s peculiarly invented trains of thought, which he almost learned to understand.
The uncertainty: For a while Clarisse saw things that one otherwise does not see. Ulrich could explain that splendidly. Perhaps it was insanity. But a forester out walking sees a different world from the one a botanist or a murderer sees. One sees many invisible things. A woman sees the material of a dress, a painter a lake of liquid colors in its stead. I see through the window whether a hat is hard or soft. If I glance into the street I can likewise see whether it is warm or cold outside, whether people are happy, sad, healthy, or ailing; in the same way, the taste of a fruit is sometimes already in the fingertips that touch them. Ulrich remembered: if one looks at something upside down—for instance, behind the lens of a small camera—one notices things one had overlooked. A waving back and forth of trees or shrubs or heads that to the normal eye appear motionless. Or one becomes conscious of the peculiar hopping quality of the way people walk. One is astonished at die persistent restlessness of things. In the same way, there are unperceived double images in the field of vision, for one eye sees something differently from the other; afterimages crystallize from still pictures like the most delicate-colored fogs; the brain suppresses, supplements, forms the supposed reality; the ear does not hear the thousand sounds of one’s own body: skin, joints, muscles, the innermost self, broadcast a contrapuntal composition of innumerable sensations that, mute, blind, and deaf, perform the subterranean dance of the so-called waking state. Ulrich remembered how once, not even very high up in the mountains, he had been overtaken by a snowstorm early in the year; he was on his way to meet some friends who were supposed to be coming down a path, and was surprised at not yet having met up with them, when the weather suddenly changed; the clarity darkened, a howling storm came up, and thick clouds of snow flung sharp icy needles at the solitary wanderer, as if for him it were a matter of life and death. Although after a few minutes Ulrich reached the shelter of an abandoned hut, the wind and the torrents of snow had gone right through him, and the icy cold as well as the exertions of his struggle against the storm and the force of the snow had exhausted him within a very brief period. When the storm passed as quickly as it had come, he of course set out on his way again; he was not the sort of person to let himself be intimidated by such an event, at least his conscious self was totally free of excitement and any kind of overestimation of the danger he had come through; indeed, he felt himself in the highest of spirits. But he still must have been shaken, for he suddenly heard his party coming toward him and cheerfully called to them. But no one answered. He again called out loudly—for it is easy to get off the path in the snow and miss each other—and ran, as well as he could, in the direction indicated, for the snow was deep and he had not been prepared for it, having undertaken the climb without either skis or snowshoes. After some twenty-five paces, at every one of which he sank in up to his hips, exhaustion forced him to stop, but just then he again heard voices in animated conversation, and so near that he absolutely should have seen the speakers, whom there was nothing to conceal. And yet no one was there except the soft, bright-gray snow. Ulrich collected his senses, and the conversation became more distinct. I’m hallucinating, he said to himself. Yet he called out again; without success. He began to fear for himself and checked himself in every way he could think of; spoke loudly and coherently, calculated small sums in his mind, and carried out movements of arms and fingers whose execution demanded total control. All these things worked, without the phenomenon vanishing. He heard whole conversations full of surprising import and a harmonious multiplicity of voices. Then he laughed, found the experience interesting, and began to observe it. But that did not make the phenomenon disappear either; it faded only when he turned around and had already climbed down several hundred yards, while his friends had not taken this way back at all and there was no human soul in the vicinity. So unreliable and extensive is the boundary between insanity and health. It really did not surprise him when in the middle of the night
Clarisse, trembling, woke him up and claimed she was hearing a voice. When he asked her, she said it was not a human voice and not an animal voice, but a “voice of something,” and then he, too, suddenly heard a noise that could in no way be ascribed to a material being; and the next instant, while Clarisse was trembling more and more violently and opened her eyes wide like a night bird, something invisible seemed to glide around the room, bumping into the mirror in its glass frame and exerting a disembodied pressure, and in Ulrich, too, fears—not one fear, a bundle of fears, a world of fears—poured out in panic, so that he had to bring all his reason to bear in order to resist and to calm Clarisse down.
Dramatize! Make all this present!
***
But he was reluctant to apply his reason. One could feel strangely happy in this uncertainty that the world assumed in Clarisse’s vicinity. The sketchings in the sand and the models made of stones, feathers, and branches now took on meaning for him too, as if here, on this Island of Health, something was trying to come to fulfillment that his life had already touched on several times. The foundation of human life seemed to him a monstrous fear of some kind, indeed really a fear of the indeterminate. He lay on the white sand between the blue of the air and the blue of the water on the small, hot sandy platform of the island between the cold depths of sea and sky. He lay as in snow. If he were to have been blown away then, this is the way it could have happened. Clarisse was romping and playing like a child behind the thistly dunes. He was not afraid. He saw life from above. This island had flown away with him. He understood his past. Hundreds of human orders have come and gone: from the gods to brooch pins, and from psychology to the record player, every one of them an obscure unit, every one an obscure conviction that it was the ultimate, ascendant one, and every one of them mysteriously sinking after a few hundred or a few thousand years and passing into rubble and building site: what else is this but a climbing up out of nothingness, each attempt on a different wall? like one of those dunes blown by the wind, which for a while forms its own weight and then is blown away again by the wind? What is everything we do other than a nervous fear of being nothing: beginning with our pleasures, which are no pleasures but only a din, a chattering instigated to kill time, because a dark certainty admonishes us that it will in the end annihilate us, all the way to those inventions that outdo each other, the senseless mountains of money that kill the spirit, whether one is suffocated or borne up by them, to the continually changing fashions of the mind, of clothes that change incessantly, to murder, assassination, war, in which a profound mistrust of whatever is stable and created explodes: what is all that but the restlessness of a man shoveling himself down to his knees out of a grave he will never escape, a being that will never entirely climb out of nothingness, who fearfully flings himself into shapes but is, in some secret place that he is hardly aware of himself, vulnerable and nothing?
To here: Role of human experiences that spread not through rational transmission but through contagion. A social (humanity’s) experience in two people.
And no way at all of framing this in cycles!
&nb
sp; Ulrich remembered the man he had observed with Clarisse and Meingast in the green circle of the lantern. Here on the Island of Health even this distorted human creation, this exhibitionist, this despairing creature, this sexual desire stealing forth in a crouch out of the darkness when a woman passed by, was not basically different from other people. What else but a solitary exhibitionism were Walters sentimental music, or Meingast’s political thoughts about the common will of the many? What is even the success of a statesman standing in the midst of human bustle other than an anesthetizing exercise that has the appearance of a gratification? In love, in art, in greed, in politics, in work, and in play, we seek to articulate our painful secret: A person only half belongs to himself, the other half is expression. This quotation from Emerson is I think word for word! In the travail of their souls, all people yearn for expression. The dog sprays a stone with himself and sniffs his excrement: to leave a trace in the world, to erect in the world a monument to oneself, a deed that will still be celebrated after hundreds of years, is the meaning of all heroism. I have done something: that is a trace, a dissimilar but immortal portrait. “I have done something” binds parts of the material world to myself. Even just expressing something already means having one sense more with which to appropriate the world. Even wheedling someone into something the way Walter does has this sense. Ulrich laughed, because it occurred to him that Walter would walk around in despair with the thought: Oh, I could say a thing or two about that…! It is the profound basic feeling of the bourgeois, a feeling that is steadily being silenced and pacified. But on the Island of Health