by Robert Musil
Agathe was not supposed to know anything about it.
When he wrote in it, he suffered from the feeling of having committed an act of disloyalty. Or it reinforced and liberated him, for the chilling state of the wrong secretly committed destroyed the intellectual magic spell that was feared as much as it was desired.
That is why in response to Agathe’s question Ulrich smiled but gave no other answer.
But now Agathe had suddenly asked: “Do you have mistresses?” This was the first time that she was again addressing such a question to him. “You should, of course,” she added, “but you told me yourself that you don’t love them!” And then she asked: “Do you have another friend besides me?”
She said this casually, as if she were no longer expecting an answer, but also in an easy and playful way, as if a tiny quantity of a very precious substance were lying in the palm of her hand and she was preoccupied with it.
Late at night Ulrich wrote down in his diary the answer he had given.
50
AN ENTRY
It was only one of life’s small challenges that she asked me this question, and what it means is: But you and I are still living outside of the “condition”! One might just as well exclaim: “Give me some water, please!” or: “Stop! Leave the light burning!” It is the request of a moment, something hasty, unconsidered, and nothing more. I say “nothing more,” but still I know that it’s nothing less than if a goddess were running to catch a bus! A most unmystic gait, an implosion of absurdity! Such small experiences demonstrate how much our Other Condition assumes a single, specific state of mind, and capsizes in an instant if one disturbs its equilibrium.
And yet it is such moments that make one really happy. How beautiful Agathe’s voice is! What trust lies in such a tiny request, popping up in the midst of a high and solemn context! It’s touching, the way a bouquet of expensive flowers snagged with a wool thread off the beloved’s dress is touching, or a protruding piece of wire for which the hands of the bouquet maker were too weak. At such moments one knows exactly that one is overestimating oneself, and yet everything that is more than oneself, all the thoughts of mankind, seem like a spider web; the body is the finger that tears it at every moment and to which a wisp still clings.
I just said: The hands of the bouquet maker and abandoned myself to the seesaw feeling of a simile, as if this woman could never be old and fat. That’s moonshine of the wrong sort! And that’s why I gave Agathe a methodical lecture rather than a direct answer. But I was really only describing the life that hovers before me. I’d like to repeat that and, if I can, improve on it.
In the center stands something I have called motivation. In ordinary life we act not according to motivation but according to necessity, in a concatenation of cause and effect; of course something of ourselves is always involved in this concatenation, which makes us think we are free. This freedom of will is man’s ability to do voluntarily what he wishes involuntarily. But motivation has nothing to do with wishing; it cannot be divided according to the opposition of freedom and compulsion: it is the highest freedom and the most profound compulsion. I chose the word because I couldn’t find a better one; it’s probably related to the painter’s term “motif.” When a landscape painter goes out in the morning with the intention of finding a motif he will usually find it, that is, he will find something that fulfills his intention; yet it would be more accurate to say: something that fits in with his intention—the way a word, unless it happens to be too big, fits in every mouth. For something that fulfills is rare, it overfills immediately, spilling over the intention and seizing hold of the entire person. The painter who originally intended to paint “something,” even though “from his own point of view,” now paints to paint, he paints for the salvation of his soul, and only in such moments does he really have a motif before him; at all other times he merely talks himself into thinking he does. Something has come over him that crushes intention and will. When I say it has nothing at all to do with them, I am of course exaggerating. But one must exaggerate when one is looking at the region that one’s soul calls home. There are surely all sorts of transitions, but they are like those of the spectrum: you go through innumerable gradations from green to red, but when you are there you are all there, and there is no longer the slightest trace of green.
Agathe said the gradation is the same as when one more or less lets things happen, does some things from inclination, and finally when one acts from love.
At any rate, there is something similar in speaking, too. One can clearly make a distinction between a thought that is only thinking and a thought that moves the entire person. In between are all sorts of transitions. I said to Agathe: Let’s only talk about what moves the entire person!
But when I’m alone I think how murky that is. A scientific idea can also move me. But that isn’t the kind of moving that matters. On the other hand, an affect, too, can move me totally, and yet afterward I am merely confounded. The truer something is, the more it is turned away from us in a peculiar way, no matter how much it may concern us. I’ve asked myself about this remarkable connection a thousand times. One might think that the less “objective” something is, the more “subjective,” the more it would have to be turned toward us in the same way, but that is false; subjectivity turns its back on our inner being in just the same way that objectivity does. One is subjective in questions where one thinks one way today and another tomorrow, either because one doesn’t know enough or because the object itself depends on the whim of the emotions: but what Agathe and I would like to say to each other is not the provisional or incidental expression of a conviction that on some better occasion could be raised to the status of truth, but could equally well be recognized as error, and nothing is more alien to our condition than the irresponsibility and sloppiness of such witty brainstorms, for between us everything is governed by a strict law, even if we can’t articulate it. The boundary between subjectivity and objectivity crosses without touching the boundary along which we are moving.
Or should I perhaps rather restrict myself to the uprooted subjectivity of the arguments one carries on as an adolescent with one’s friends? to their mixture of personal sensitivity and impartiality, their conversions and apostasies? These are the preliminary stage of politics and history and of humanitarianism, with their vague wishy-washiness. They move the entire self, they are connected with its passions and seek to lend them the dignity of a spiritual law and the appearance of an infallible system. What they mean to us lies in their indications of how we ought to be. And all right, even when Agathe tells me something, it’s always as if her words go through me and not merely through the sphere of thoughts to which they are addressed. But what happens between us doesn’t appear to have great significance. It is so quiet. It avoids knowledge. “Milky” and “opalizing” are the words that occur to me: what happens between us is like a movement in a shimmering but not very transparent liquid, which is always moved along with it as a whole. What happens is almost entirely a matter of indifference: everything goes through life’s center. Or comes from it to us. Happens with the remarkable feeling that everything we have ever done and could do is also involved. If I try to describe it as concretely as possible, I would have to say: Agathe gives me some answer or other or does something, and right away it takes on for me as much significance as it has for her, indeed apparently the same significance, or one like it. Perhaps in reality I don’t understand her rightly at all, but I complement her in the direction of her inner motion. Because we are in the same state of excitement, we are evidently guessing at what can intensify it and have to follow along unresistingly. When two people find themselves in anger or in love, they intensify each other in similar fashion. But the uniqueness of the excitement, and the significance that everything assumes in this state of excitement, is precisely what is extraordinary.
If I could say that we are accompanied by the feeling of living in harmony with God, it would be simple; but how can one describe without presupposition
s what it is that constantly excites us? “In harmony” is right, but with what cannot be said. We are accompanied by the feeling that we have reached the middle of our being, the secret center, where life’s centrifugal force is preserved, where the incessant twisting of experience ceases, where the conveyor belt of stamping and ejecting that makes the soul resemble a machine stops, where motion is rest; that we have arrived at the axis of the spinning top. These are symbolic expressions, and I absolutely hate these symbols, because they are so ready to hand and spread out endlessly without yielding anything. Let me see if I can attempt it once again, and as rationally as possible: the state of excitement in which we live is that of correctness. This word, which used this way is as unusual as it is sensible, calms me somewhat. The feeling of correctness contains contentment and satiation. Conviction and the bringing of things to the still point are part of it; it is the profound state into which one falls after attaining one’s goal. If I continue to represent it to myself this way and ask myself: what is the goal that is attained? I don’t know. Yet it’s really not quite right, either, to speak of a state of the attained goal; it’s at least just as true that this state is accompanied by an enduring impression of intensification. But it is an intensification without progression. It is also a state of the highest happiness, although it does not lead beyond a weak smile. At every second we feel ourselves swept away, yet externally and internally we hold ourselves rather inert; the motion never ceases, but it oscillates in the smallest space. Also involved is a profound collectedness combined with a broad dispersion and the awareness of animated activity, with a breakthrough by means of a process we do not sufficiently understand. Thus my intention to limit myself to the most neutral description immediately results again in surprising contradictions. But what presents itself so disjointedly to the mind is, as experience, of great simplicity. It is simply there; so to be properly understood it would also have to be simple! [“This dilemma, that the state of highest happiness is a state of inertness and passivity instead of leading to the simplicity of experience (= action), is one that Musil returns to again and again, both philosophically and in terms of how to work it into the fabric of the novel.]
There is also between Agathe and me not the slightest discrepancy in the opinion that the question: “How should I live?,” which we have both taken upon ourselves, is to be answered: This is the way we should live!
And sometimes I think it’s crazy.
51
END OF THE ENTRY
I now see the task more clearly. Something in human life makes happiness short, so much so that happiness and brevity apparently go together like siblings. This makes all the great and happy hours of our existence disjointed—a time that drifts in time in fragments—and gives to all other hours their necessary, emergency coherence. This “something” causes us to lead a life that does not touch us inwardly. It causes us to gobble people as easily as to build cathedrals. It is the reason why all that happens is always only “pseudo-reality,” what is real merely in an external sense. It bears the guilt for our being deceived by all our passions. It evokes the ever-recurring futility of youth and the senseless eternal upheaval of the ages. It explains why activity is merely the result of the instinct for activity rather than a person’s decision, why our actions complete themselves as insistently as if they belonged more to each other than to us, and why our experiences can fly in the air but not in our will. This “something” has the same significance as our not quite knowing what to do with all the spirit we produce; it also causes us to not love ourselves and is the reason we may well find ourselves talented but, all things considered, see no purpose in it.
This “something” is: that over and over again we leave the condition of significance in order to enter the state of what is in and of itself meaningless in order to bring some significance to it. We leave the condition of the meaningful and enter the state of the necessary and makeshift; we leave the condition of life to step into the world of the dead. But now that I have written this down, I notice that what I am saying is a tautology and apparently meaningless. Yet before I wrote, what was in my head was: “Agathe gives me some answer or other, a sign; it makes me happy”; and then the thought: “We do not step out of the world of the intellect in order to put intellect in an unintellectual world.” And it seemed to me that this thought was complete, and that the “stepping out” characterizes exactly what I mean. And I only need to put myself back in that state for it still to seem to me to be so.
I must ask myself how a stranger might understand me. When I say “significance,” he would certainly understand: what is significant. When I say “intellect,” he would first of all understand: stimulation, active thinking, receptivity, and the exercise of will. And it would seem to him a matter of course that one must step out of the world of the intellect and carry its significance into life; indeed, he would consider such a striving for “intellectualization” as the worthiest fulfillment of human tasks. How can I express that “intellectualization” is already original sin, and “not to leave the world of the intellect” a commandment that knows no gradations but is fulfilled either entirely or not at all?
Meanwhile a better explanation has occurred to me. The state of excitement in which we find ourselves, Agathe and I, doesn’t urge us to actions or to truths, which means that it doesn’t break anything off from the edge, but flows back into itself again through that which it evokes.
This is of course only a description of the form of what happens. But when I describe in this way what I experience, I am able to grasp the changed, indeed quite different, role that my conduct, my action, has: What I do is no longer the discharge of my tension in the final form of a state in which I have found myself, but a channel and relay station on the way back to significance!
To be sure, I almost said: “Way back to an intensification of my tension”—but then one of those contradictions occurred to me which our condition exhibits, namely that it demonstrates no progression and therefore can’t very well demonstrate intensification either. Accordingly, I thought I ought to say “way back to myself—how imprecise all this is!—but the condition is not in the least egotistic but full of a love turned toward the world. And so I simply wrote “significance” again, and the word is good and natural in its context, without my having so far succeeded in getting at its content.
But as uncertain as all this is, a life has always hovered before me whose centerpiece this would be. In all the other ways I’ve lived, I always had the obscure feeling of having seen it, forgotten it, and not found it again. It robbed me of satisfaction in everything that was mere calculating and thinking, but it also made me come home after every adventure and from every passion with the stale feeling of having missed the mark, until finally I lost almost all desire to have an effect in the world. That happened because I did not want to let anything compel me to leave the sphere of significance. Now I can also say what “motif” is. Motif is what leads me from significance to significance. Something happens, or something is said, and that increases the meaning of two human lives and unites them through its meaning, and what happens, which physical or legal concept it represents, is quite unimportant, plays absolutely no role in it.
But can I imagine what that means in its fullest extent, can I even imagine what it means in its smallest? I must try. A person does something…no, I can’t duck it: Professor Lindner does something! He arouses Agathe’s inclination. I feel this event, want to spoil it and negate it — and the moment I yield to my dislike, I step out of the sphere of significance. What 7 feel can never become a motif for Agathe. My breast may be full of vexation or anger, my head an arsenal of sharp and ready objections—my heart is empty! My condition is then suddenly negative! My state is no longer positive! There’s another marvelous pair of notions I’ve got hold of! What makes me think of the characterizations “positive” and “negative”? I unexpectedly recall a day when I was also sitting with some paper in front of me and trying to write—at the
time it was to be a letter to Agathe. And gradually it comes to mind: a condition of “do” and a condition of “don’t” as the two component elements of every morality, the “do” prevailing during its rise, the “don’t” during the satiety of its reign—is not this relationship between “challenge” and “prohibition” the same as what I am now calling positive and negative? The connection between Agathe and me characterized by everything being challenge and nothing prohibition? I recall speaking at that time of Agathe’s passionate, affirming goodness, which in an age in which things of that sort are no longer understood looks like a primitive vice. I said: It’s like returning home after the longest time and drinking water from the well of one’s village! And challenge of course does not mean that we demand but means that everything we do demands the utmost from us.
Not leaving the sphere of the significant would therefore be the same as a life in pure positiveness? The thought that it is also the same as “living essentially” alarms me, although it was to be expected. For what else should “essentially” signify? The word probably comes from mysticism or metaphysics, and characterizes the opposition to all earthly happenings that are without peace and full of doubts; but since we have separated ourselves from Heaven, it lives on on earth as the longing to find among thousands of moral convictions the one that gives life a meaning that does not change. Endless conversations between Agathe and me on the subject! Her youthful desire for moral instruction alongside the defiance in which she wanted to kill Hagauer and has at least really injured him in a material way! And the same search for conviction everywhere in the world; the intimation that man can’t live without morality, and the deep disquiet at how his own emotions undermine every one of them! Where is the possibility of a “whole” life, a “complete” conviction, a love that is without any admixture of not-love, without a shred of self-seeking and selfishness? What that means is: only living positively. And it means: not wanting to admit any happening without “significance” whenever I speak of a “never-ending condition,” in contrast to the “eternally futile moment-to-moment quality” of our usual way of acting, or of the alliance of every momentary state with a “lasting state” of the emotions, which restores our “responsibility.” I could go on repeating such expressions for pages, expressions that characterized what we meant from one side or another. We summarized it as “living essentially,” always somewhat embarrassed by the term’s bombastic-transcendental overtones, but we had no other that would have been simpler to use. So it is no small surprise for me to suddenly find almost in my hands what I was seeking in die clouds!