by Robert Musil
Ulrich must have looked involuntarily at his childhood friend in inquiry, for Walter instantaneously added a defense. —That only sounds unsettling, he asserted, but it hasn’t by any means gone too far. Everyone rises by taking on other people’s mistakes and improving them in himself. It was only that Clarisse had an unusually vehement intensity when such problems suddenly got hold of her, and a way of expressing them without making any concessions. —But if you knew her as well as I do, you would find that behind everything that seems strange in her there is an incomparable feeling for the deepest questions of life! Love made him blind, while it made Clarisse transparent for him, all the way to the bottom, where one’s thoughts lie, while all distinctions between bright and stupid, healthy and sick minds take place in the shallower layers of what one says and does.
***
After the scene with her husband, Clarisse had washed her whole body and run out of the house. The blue line of the edge of the woods attracted her; she wanted to crawl in. And while she was running, the sparkling, shining, drop-spraying of the white water was around her, like a hedgehog with outward-pointing needles. She was pursued by an obsessively irritating need for cleanliness. But when she had reached the woods, she plopped down between the first tree trunks behind the bushes at the edge. From there she looked straight into the small, dark, nostril-like open windows of her house, and this already made her feel much better. The smell of herbs burned in the morning sun; growths tickled her; she was comforted by nature’s sticking, hard, hot inconsiderateness. She felt removed from the restrictiveness of her personal bonds. She could think. It had become obvious that Walter was being destroyed by the attraction she radiated; he hardly needed to sink much further than he had today. So it was up to her to make the sacrifice! (Clarisse got up and walked deeper into the woods.) What was it, this sacrifice? Such words pop up like a poem (but she wished to conceal herself with this word, in order to get behind it). The word “sacrifice” followed (first) the same way it followed that she bore within herself the soul of a murderer, and, especially after the scene with her husband, she had to assume that she also concealed in herself the soul of a satyr, a he-goat. Like is, after all, only attracted by like. But whoever sees must sacrifice himself: that is the merciless law by which greatness lives. Clarisse began to understand; but at the same time that she realized that she bore within herself the soul of a he-goat, the fright that had rolled into her like a block of ice began to melt, and the excitement caused by the body and inhibited by the soul thawed out in her limbs. It was a marvelous condition. The contact with the bushes pressed deep into her nerves through her skin; the swelling of the moss under her soles, the twittering of the birds, became sensual and covered the interior of the world with something like the flesh of a fruit. —You will all deny me when you recognize me! Clarisse thought. As soon as that was thought, it also came to her that Walter would really have to learn to deny her, for that was the only way he could be freed from her. At this thought she was overcome by an immense sadness. —Everyone will deny me, she said once again. —And only when you have all denied me will you be grown up. Only when you have all grown up will I return to you! she added. That was like the beginnings of splendid poems, whose second lines were already lost in an excess of excitement and beauty. Golgotha Song, she called it. A tension as if she would have to break out in a stream of tears at any moment accompanied this incredible achievement. What she admired most deeply was the incredible compulsion in this storm of freedom. —If I were only a little superstitious and not so hardy— she thought—I would really have to be afraid of myself! Her thoughts went now one way—as if she were only an instrument on which a strange and higher being were playing, her beautiful idol that gave her answers before she had managed to ask the questions, and built up ideas that came to her like the outlines of whole cities, so that she stopped in astonishment—and now another way, so that Clarisse herself seemed quite empty, a feathery light something that had to restrain its steps with effort, for everything upon which her eye fell, or every recollection the ray of memory illuminated, led her hurriedly forward and handed her on to the next thing and the next idea, so that Clarisse’s thoughts seemed at times to be running alongside her, and a wild race with her body began, until the young woman in her mental alienation was forced to stop and, exhausted, throw herself into some berry bushes.
She had found a clearing into which the sun shone, and while she felt the warm earth on which she lay, she stretched herself out as if on a cross, and the nails of the sun’s rays penetrated her upward-turned hands.
She had left a note for Ulrich in the house, which said nothing but that she was waiting for him in the woods.
After the conversation with Walter, Ulrich had set out and had indeed found the note. He automatically assumed that Clarisse was hiding somewhere and would make her presence known when he entered the woods. Oppressed by the hot morning, he set out (listlessly) on the path that they were accustomed to taking when they went to the woods, and when he did not find Clarisse, he pushed on at random farther into the forest. From everything Walter had said, what most stuck in his mind was the news that Clarisse was preoccupied with Moosbrugger. As far as he was concerned, Moosbrugger could have been long dead and hanged, for he had not thought about him for weeks, which was quite remarkable when he thought that not all that long ago the image of this crude figure of fantasy had been one of the focal points in his life. —One truly feels, as a so-called normal person—he told himself—just as incoherent as someone who is insane. The heat relaxed his collar and the pores of his face, and slowly entered and emerged from his softened skin. Meeting Clarisse aroused no particularly pleasant expectations. What could he say to her? She had always been what one calls crazy without meaning it seriously; if she were now really to become so, she might perhaps be ugly and repellent, that would be simplest; but what if she was not repellent to him? No; Ulrich assumed that she would have to be. The deranged mind is ugly. In this way he suddenly almost tripped over her, for they both had spontaneously followed the direction of a broad path that was the continuation of the one that had led them to the woods. Clarisse, a patch of color among the colorful weeds and concealed from his glance, had seen him coming. She had quickly crawled out into his path and lay there. The many unconscious, manly, and resolute shifts in his face, which believed itself unobserved and was living in no more than vegetative rapport with the obstacles through which it was coming toward her, gave her a marvelous sensation. Ulrich only stopped, surprised, when he discovered her lying almost directly beneath him, her smiling glance lifted up to him. She was not in the least ugly.
—We have to free Moosbrugger, Clarisse declared, after Ulrich had asked her to explain the sudden inspirations he had heard about. —If there’s no other way, we have to help him escape! Of course I know you’ll help me!
Ulrich shook his head.
—Then come! Clarisse said. —Let’s go deeper into the woods, where we’ll be alone. She had jumped up. The senselessly raging will that emanated from this small being was like clouds of unfamiliar insects buzzing and swarming among blackberry shoots exhaling their odors in the sun, inhuman but pleasant. —-But you’re all hot! Clarisse exclaimed. —You’ll catch cold among the trees! She took a kerchief from her warm body and swiftly threw it over his head; then she climbed up him, disappearing likewise under the kerchief, and, before he could throw her off, kissed him like a high-spirited little girl. Clarisse stumbled, and fell to a sitting position. —I haven’t forgiven you—Ulrich threatened grumblingly— that during the time you were in love with this muddlehead Meingast I simply didn’t exist for you! —Oh? Clarisse answered. —You don’t understand. Meingast is homosexual. So you didn’t understand me at all!
—But what’s this chatter about redeeming all about? Ulrich asked severely. —That only blossomed because of him, didn’t it?
—Oh, I’ll explain that to you. Come! Clarisse assured him.
Ulrich started with what Walter
had already told him.
—All right. But that’s not the main point. The main point is the bear.
—The bear?
—Yes; the pointed muzzle with the teeth that tear everything to pieces. I arouse the bear in all of you! Clarisse showed with a gesture what she meant, and smiled innocently. —But, Clarisse! —Of course! Clarisse said. —You deny me when I’m being honest! But even Walter believes that every person has an animal in him whom he resembles. From which he has to be redeemed. Nietzsche had his eagle, Walter and Moosbrugger have the bear.
—And I? Ulrich asked, curious.
—I don’t know yet.
—And you?
—I’m a he-goat with eagle’s wings.
So they wandered through the woods, eating berries now and then, heat and hunger making them as dry as violin wood. Sometimes Clarisse broke off a small dry twig and handed it to Ulrich; he didn’t know whether to throw it away or keep it in his hand; as with children, when they do such things, there was something else behind it, for which there was no articulated notion. Now Clarisse stopped in the wilderness, and the light in her eyes shone. She declared: —Moosbrugger has committed a sexual murder, hasn’t he? What’s that? Desire separated in him from what’s human! But isn’t that the same in Walter too? And in you?
Moosbrugger has had to pay for it. Isn’t one obliged to help him? What do you say to that? From the foot of the trees came the smell of darkness, mushrooms, and decay, from above of sunlit fir twigs.
—Will you do that for me? Clarisse asked.
Ulrich again said no, and asked Clarisse to come back to the house.
She meandered along beside him and let her head droop. They had gone quite far from the path. —We’re hungry, Clarisse said, and pulled out a piece of old bread she was carrying in her pocket. She gave Ulrich some of it too. It produced a remarkably pleasant-unpleasant feeling, which quieted hunger and tortured thirst. —The mills of time grind dryly—Clarisse poetized—you feel grain after grain falling.
And it occurred to Ulrich without thinking about it much that among these totally meaningless annoyances he felt better than he had in a long time.
Clarisse set about once more to win him over. She would do it herself. She had a plan. She only needed a little money. And he would have to speak to Moosbrugger in her stead, because she wasn’t allowed in the clinic anymore.
Ulrich promised. This derring-do fantasy filled up the time. He guarded himself against all consequences. Clarisse laughed.
As they were on the way home, chance had it that they caught up with a man leading a tame bear. Ulrich joked about it, but Clarisse grew serious and seemed to seek protection in the closeness of his body, and her face became deeply absorbed. As they passed the man and the bear, she suddenly called out: —I’ll tame every bear! It sounded like an awkward joke. But she suddenly reached for the bear’s muzzle, and Ulrich had difficulty pulling her back quickly enough from the startled, growling beast.
***
The next time, Ulrich met Clarisse at the painter’s studio of friends of hers, where a circle of people had gathered and was making music. Clarisse did not stand out in these surroundings; the role of odd man out fell to Ulrich instead. He had come reluctantly and felt repugnance among these people, who, contorted, were listening ecstatically. The transitions from charming, gentle, and soft to gloomy, heroic, and tumultuous, which the music went through several times within the space of a quarter hour, musicians don’t notice, because for them this progression is synonymous with music and therefore with something of the highest distinction!—but to Ulrich, who at the moment was not at all under the sway of the prejudice that music was something that had to be, this music seemed as badly motivated and unmediated in its progression as the carryings-on of a company of drunks that alternates periodically between sentimentality and fistfights. He had no intention of imagining what the soul of a great musician might be like and passing judgment on it, but what was usually considered great music seemed to him much like a chest with a beautifully carved exterior and full of the contents of the soul, from which one has pulled out all the drawers, so that the contents he all jumbled together inside. He usually could not understand music as an amalgam of soul and form, because he saw too clearly that the soul of music, aside from rarely encountered pure music, is nothing but the conventional soul of Jack and Jill whipped to a frenzy.
He was, notwithstanding, supporting his head in both hands like the others; he just did not know whether it was because he was thinking of Walter or closing his ears a little. In truth, he was neither keeping his ears entirely closed nor thinking of Walter. He merely wanted to be alone. He did not often reflect about other people; apparently because he also rarely thought about himself as “a person.” He usually acted on the opinion that what one thinks, feels, wants, imagines, and creates could, in certain circumstances, signify an enrichment of life; but what one is signifies under no circumstances more than a by-product of the process of this production. Musical people, on the other hand, are quite often of the opposite opinion. They do produce something, to which they apply the impersonal name of music, but what they produce consists for the most part, or at least for the part that is most important to them, of themselves, their sensations, emotions, and their shared experience. There is more momentary being and less lasting duration in their music, which among all intellectual activities is closest to that of the actor. This intensification, which he was being forced to witness, aroused Ulrich’s antipathy; he sat among these people like an owl among songbirds.
And of course Walter was his exact opposite. Walter thought passionately and a great deal about himself. He took everything he encountered seriously. Because he encountered it; as if that were a merit that can make one thing into another. He was at every moment a complete individual and a complete human being, and because he was, he became nothing. Everybody had found him captivating, brought him happiness, and invited him to remain with them, with the end result that he had become an archivist or curator, had run aground, no longer has the strength to change, curses everyone, is contentedly unhappy, and goes off punctually to his office. And while he is in his office something will perhaps happen between Clarisse and Ulrich that could arouse in the person he is, if he should find out about it, an agitation as if the entire ocean of world history were pouring into it; while Ulrich, on the other hand, was far less agitated. But Clarisse, immediately after she had come in—Walter was not there—had sat down beside Ulrich; with her back bent forward, her knees drawn up, in the darkness, for the lights had not yet been turned on, right after the first beats they heard she had spread her hand over his, as if they belonged together in the most intimate fashion. Ulrich had cautiously freed himself, and that was also a reason for supporting his head with both hands; but Clarisse, when she saw what he was up to, and saw him from the side sitting there just as moved as everyone else, had gently leaned against him, and she had been sitting that way for half an hour now. He was not happy either.
He knew that what he committed over and over was nothing but the opposite error from Walters. This error gave rise to a dissolution without a center; the person was subsumed in an aura; he ceased to be a thing, with all its limitations, as precious as they were accidental; at the highest degree of intensification he became so indifferent toward himself that the human, as opposed to the suprahuman, had no more significance than the little piece of cork to which is attached a magnet that draws it back and forth through a network of forces. At the last it had been like that for him with Agathe. And now—no, it was a calumny to put these things next to each other—but even between himself and Clarisse something was now “going on,” was under way, he had blundered into a realm of effects in which he and Clarisse were being moved toward each other by forces, forces that showed no consideration for whether, on the whole, they felt an inclination for each other or not.
And while Clarisse was leaning on him, Ulrich was thinking about Walter. He saw him before him in a partic
ular way, as he often secretly saw him. Walter was lying at the edge of some woods, wearing short pants and unbecoming black socks, and in these socks had neither the muscular nor the skinny legs of a man, but those of a girl, of a not very pretty girl, with smooth, unlovely legs. His hands crossed behind his head, he was looking at the landscape over which, one day, his immortal works would roll, and he radiated the feeling that talking to him would be an interruption. Ulrich really loved this image. In his youth, Walter had actually looked that way. And Ulrich thought: What has separated us is not the music—for he could quite well imagine a music rising as impersonally and beyond things and each-time-once-only as a trail of smoke that loses itself in the sky—but the difference in the attitude of the individual to music; it is this image that I love because it is left over, a remainder, while he surely loves it for the opposite reason, because it swallows up within itself everything that he might have become, until finally it became precisely Walter. —And really—he thought—all that is nothing but a sign of the times. Today socialism is trying to declare the beloved private self to be a worthless illusion, which should be replaced by social causes and duties. But in this it had long since been preceded by the natural sciences, which dissolved precious private things into nothing but impersonal processes such as warmth, light, weight, and so forth. The object as a matter of importance to private individuals, as a stone that falls on their head or one they can buy in a gold setting, or a flower they smell, does not interest up-to-date people in the least; they treat it as a contingency or even as a “thing in itself,” that is, as something that is not there and yet is there, a quite foolish and ghostly personality of a thing. One might well predict that this will change, the way a man who deals daily with millions happens to take with great astonishment a single banknote in his hand; but then object and personality will have become something different. But meanwhile there exists a quite comical juxtaposition. Morally, for instance, one still looks at oneself somewhat as physics looked at bodies three hundred years ago; they “fall” because they have the “quality” of avoiding heights, or they become warm because they contain a fluid: moralists are still attributing such good or bad qualities and fluids to people. Psychologically, on the other hand, one has already gone so far as to dissolve the person into typical bundles of typical averages of behavior. Sociologically, he is treated no differently. But musically, he is again made whole.