by Robert Musil
This keeping the world in order was perhaps his truest and fiercest passion, a craving for power far surpassing everything even a man in his position could afford, which drove this man who was so powerful in the real world to withdraw at least once a year to his castle in East Prussia, where he dictated a whole book to his secretary. The strange sense of mission that had surfaced first and most vividly in his early days of youthful enthusiasm and still afflicted him from time to time, though with lessened intensity, had found this outlet for itself. In the thick of his global undertakings it came over him like a sweet trance, a longing for the cloister, murmuring to him that all the contradictions, all the great ideas, all worldly experience and effort, were a unity, not only as vaguely understood by what we call culture and humanity but also in a wildly literal and shimmeringly passive sense, as when on a morbidly lovely day one might gaze out over river and meadows, hands crossed in one’s lap, unwilling to tear oneself away, evermore. In this sense, his writing was a compromise. And because there is only one soul, not within reach but in exile, from which it has only one way to make itself known to us in all its hazy ambiguity, while there are such countless, endless problems in the world to which its royal message can be applied, so, as the years went by, he found himself in that grave embarrassment suffered by all legitimists and prophets when it is all taking too long to happen. Arnheim had only to sit down alone to write for his pen to start leading him, with a truly uncanny flow of words, from the soul to the problems of the mind, the moral life, economics, and politics, all brilliantly lighted from some invisible source and appearing in a clear and magically unifying illumination. There was something intoxicating in this expansiveness, but it depended on that split consciousness which alone makes creative composition possible for so many writers, in that the mind shuts out and forgets whatever does not happen to fit into its scheme. Speaking to another person, whose presence was a link to the rest of the world, Arnheim would never have let himself go so recklessly; but bent over a sheet of paper that was ready to reflect his views, he joyfully abandoned himself to a metaphoric expression of his convictions, only a small portion of which had any basis in fact, while the greater part was a billowing cloud of words whose sole—and incidentally not inconsiderable—claim to reality was that it always arose spontaneously in the same places.
Anyone inclined to find fault should remember that having a split personality has long since ceased to be a trick reserved for lunatics; at the present-day tempo, our capacity for political insight, for writing a piece for the newspapers, for faith in the new movements in art and literature, and for countless other things, depends wholly on a knack for being, at times, convinced against our own convictions, splitting off a part of our mind and stretching it to form a brand-new wholehearted conviction. So it was another point in Arnheim’s favor that he never quite honestly believed what he was saying. As a man in his prime he had already had his say on anything and everything; he had his convictions, which covered much ground, and saw no barriers to going on spinning new convictions smoothly out of the old ones, indefinitely. A man whose mind worked to such good effect and who could switch it in other states of consciousness to checking balance sheets and estimating profits to be made on his deals could not fail to notice that there was no shape or set course to his activity, though it continued to expand almost inexhaustibly in every direction; it was bounded only by the unity of his person, and although Arnheim could hold a large amount of self-esteem, this was not for him an intellectually satisfactory state of affairs. He tried blaming it on the residual element of irrationality that the informed observer can detect everywhere in life; he tried to shrug it off on the grounds that in our time everything tends to overflow its borders, and since no man can quite transcend the weaknesses of his century, he saw in this a welcome chance to practice that modesty typical of all great men by setting up above himself, quite unenviously, such figures as Homer and Buddha, because they had lived in more favorable eras. But as time went on and his literary success peaked without making any real difference to his crown-princely state, that element of irrationality, the absence of tangible results, and his troubling sense of having missed his target and lost his original resolve became more oppressive. He surveyed his work, and even though he saw that it was good, he felt as though all these ideas were setting up a barrier between some haunting primal home and himself, like a wall of diamonds growing daily more encrusted.
Something unpleasant of this sort had happened and left its mark on him just recently. He had made use of the leisure he currently indulged himself in more frequently than was his habit, to dictate to his secretary an essay on the essential accord between government architecture and the concept of the state, and he had broken off a sentence intended to run “Contemplating this edifice, we see the silence of the walls” after the word “silence,” in order to linger for a moment over the image of the Cancelleria in Rome, which had just risen up unbidden before his inner eye. But as he looked at the typescript over his secretary’s shoulder he noticed that, anticipating him as usual, the secretary had already written: “. . . we see the silence of the soul.” That day Arnheim dictated no more, and on the following day he had the sentence deleted.
Compared with experiences that reached so far and so deep, what price the ordinary physical love for a woman? Sadly, Arnheim had to admit to himself that it mattered just as much as the realization, summing up his life, that all roads to the mind start in the soul, but none lead back there again. There were of course many women who had enjoyed close relations with him, but other than the parasitic species they tended to be professionally engaged, educated women or artists, for with these two kinds, the kept women and the self-sustaining types, it was possible to have a clear-cut understanding. His moral nature had always guided him into relationships where instinct and the consequent inevitable arrangements with women could somehow be dealt with rationally. But Diotima was the first woman to penetrate into his pre-moral, secret inner life, and this almost made him look at her askance. She was only the wife of a government official, after all, socially most presentable, of course, but without that supreme degree of cultivation that comes only with power, while Arnheim could marry a daughter of American high finance or of an English duke. He had moments of recoiling with a primitive nursery antagonism, the naïvely cruel arrogance and dismay of the well-bred child taken for the first time to a city school, so that his growing infatuation seemed to threaten him with disgrace. When at such moments he resumed his business activities with the icy superiority of a spirit that had died to the world and been reborn to it, then the cool rationality of money, immune to contamination, seemed an extraordinarily clean force compared with love.
But this only meant that for him the time had come when the prisoner wonders how he could have let himself be robbed of his freedom without putting up a life-and-death struggle. For when Diotima said: “What do the affairs of the world amount to? Un peu de bruit autour de notre âme. . .” he felt a tremor go through the edifice of his life.
87
MOOSBRUGGER DANCES
Meanwhile Moosbrugger was still sitting in a detention cell at the district courthouse while his case was under study. His counsel had got fresh wind in his sails and was using delaying tactics with the authorities to keep the case from coming to a final conclusion.
Moosbrugger smiled at all this. He smiled from boredom.
Boredom rocked his mind like a cradle. Ordinarily boredom blots out the mind, but his was rocked by it, this time anyway. He felt like an actor in his dressing room, waiting for his cue.
If Moosbrugger had had a big sword, he’d have drawn it and chopped the head off his chair. He would have chopped the head off the table and the window, the slop bucket, the door. Then he would have set his own head on everything, because in this cell there was only one head, his own, and that was as it should be. He could imagine his head sitting on top of things, with its broad skull, its hair like a fur cap pulled down over his forehead
; he liked that.
If only the room were bigger and the food better!
He was quite glad not to see people. People were hard to take. They often had a way of spitting, or of hunching up a shoulder, that made a man feel down in the mouth and ready to drive a fist through their back, like punching a hole in the wall. Moosbrugger did not believe in God, only in what he could figure out for himself. His contemptuous terms for the eternal truths were: the cop, the bench, the preacher. He knew he could count on no one but himself to take care of things, and such a man sometimes feels that others are there only to get in his way. He saw what he had seen so often: the inkstands, the green baize, the pencils, the Emperor’s portrait on the wall, the way they all sat there around him: a booby trap camouflaged, not with grass and green leaves, just with the feeling: That’s how it is. Then remembered things would pop into his head—the way a bush stood at the river bend, the creak of a pump handle, bits of different landscapes all jumbled up, an endless stock of memories of things he hadn’t realized he’d noticed at the time. “I bet I could tell them a thing or two,” he thought. He was daydreaming like a youngster: a man they had locked up so often he never grew older. “Next time I’ll have to take a closer look at it,” Moosbrugger thought, “otherwise they’ll never understand.” Then he smiled sternly and spoke to the judges about himself, like a father saying about his son: “Just you lock him up, that good-for-nothing, he needs to be taught a lesson.”
Sometimes he felt annoyed, of course, with the prison regulations. Or he was hurting somewhere. But then he could ask to see the prison doctor or the warden, and things fell into place again, like water closing over a dead rat that had fallen in. Not that he thought of it quite in these terms, but he kept having the sense almost constantly these days, even if he did not have the words for it, that he was like a great shining sheet of water, not to be disturbed by anything.
The words he did have were: hm-hm, uh-uh.
The table was Moosbrugger.
The chair was Moosbrugger.
The barred window and the bolted door were himself.
There was nothing at all crazy or out of the ordinary in what he meant. It was just that the rubber bands were gone. Behind every thing or creature, when it tries to get really close to another, is a rubber band, pulling. Otherwise, things might finally go right through one another. Every movement is reined in by a rubber band that won’t let a person do quite what he wants. Now, suddenly, all those rubber bands were gone. Or was it just the feeling of being held in check, as if by rubber bands?
Maybe one just can’t cut it so fine? “For instance, women keep their stockings up with elastic. There it is!” Moosbrugger thought. “They wear garters on their legs like amulets. Under their skirts. Just like the rings they paint around fruit trees to stop the worms from crawling up.”
But we mention this only in passing. Lest anyone suppose that Moosbrugger felt he had to stay on good terms with everything. It wasn’t really like that. It was only that he was both inside and outside.
He was the boss now, and he acted bossy. He was putting things in order before they killed him off. The moment he thought of anything, anything he pleased, it obeyed him like a well-trained dog to whom you say: “Down, boy!” Locked up though he was, he had a tremendous sense of power.
On the dot, his soup was brought. On the dot, he was awakened and taken out for his walk. Everything in his cell was on the mark, strict and immovable. This sometimes seemed incredible to him. He had the strangely topsy-turvy impression that all this order emanated from him, even though he knew that it was being imposed on him.
Other people have this sort of experience when they are stretched out in the summery shade of a hedge, the bees are buzzing, and the sun rides small and hard in the milky sky: the world revolves around them like a mechanical toy. Moosbrugger felt it when he merely looked at the geometric scene presented by his cell.
At such times he noticed that he had a mad craving for good food; he dreamed of it, and by day the outlines of a good plate of roast pork kept rising up before his eyes with an uncanny persistence the moment his mind turned back from other preoccupations. “Two portions!” Moosbrugger then ordered. “No, make it three!” He thought this so hard, and heaped up his imaginary plate so greedily, that he instantly felt full to bursting, to the point of nausea; he gorged himself in his imagination. “Why,” he wondered, wagging his head, “why do I feel so stuffed, so soon after wanting to eat? Between eating and bursting lie all the pleasures of this world! Hell, what a world! There are hundreds of examples to prove how little space it gives you. To take just one, for instance: a woman you don’t have is like the moon at night climbing higher and higher, sucking and sucking at your heart; but once you’ve had her, you feel like trampling on her face with your boots. Why is it like that?” He remembered being asked about it lots of times. One could answer: Women are women and men too, because men chase after them. But it was only one more thing that the people who asked all the questions wouldn’t really understand. So they asked him why he thought that people were in cahoots against him. As if even his own body wasn’t in cahoots with them! This was quite obvious where women were concerned, of course, but even with men his body understood things better than he did himself. One word leads to another, you know what’s what, you’re in each other’s pocket all day long, and then, in a flash, you’ve somehow crossed that narrow borderline where you get along with them without any trouble. But if his body had got him into this, it had better get him out of it again! All Moosbrugger could remember was that he’d been vexed or frightened, and his chest with its arms flailing had rushed at them like a big dog on command. That was all Moosbrugger could understand anyway; between getting along and being fed up there’s only a thin line, that’s all, and once something gets started it soon gets scary and tight.
Those people who were always using those foreign words and were always sitting in judgment on him would keep throwing this up to him: “But you don’t go and kill a man just for that, surely!” Moosbrugger only shrugged. People have been done in for a few pennies, or for nothing at all, when someone happened to feel like it. But he had more self-respect than that, he wasn’t one of that kind. In time the rebuke registered with him; he found himself wondering why he felt the world closing in on him, or whatever you might call it, time and again, so that he had to clear a space for himself by force, in order that the blood could drain out of his head again. He thought it over. But wasn’t it just the same with thinking too? Whenever he felt in the right mood for doing some thinking, the pleasure of it made him want to smile. Then his thoughts stopped itching under the skull, and suddenly there was just one idea there. It was like the difference between an infant’s toddling along and a fine figure of a woman dancing. It was like being under a spell. There’s the sound of an accordion being played, a lamp stands on the table, butterflies come inside, out of the summer night—that was how his thoughts came fluttering into the light of the one idea, or else Moosbrugger grabbed them with his big fingers as they came and crushed them, looking for one breathtaking moment like little dragons caught there. A drop of Moosbrugger’s blood had fallen into the world. You couldn’t see it because it was dark, but he could feel what was going on out there. The tangled mess smoothed itself out. A soundless dance replaced the intolerable buzzing with which the world so often tormented him. Everything that happened was lovely now, just as a homely girl can be lovely when she no longer stands alone but is taken by the hand and whirled around in a dance, her face turned upward to a staircase from which others are looking down at her. It was a strange business. When Moosbrugger opened his eyes and looked at the people who happened to be nearby at such a moment, when everything was dancing to his tune, as it were, they, too, seemed lovely to him. They were no longer in league against him, they did not form a wall against him, and he realized that it was only the strain of getting the better of him that twisted the look of people and things like some crushing weight. At such times M
oosbrugger danced for them. He danced with dignity and invisibly, he who never danced with anyone in real life, moved by a music that increasingly turned into self-communion and sleep, the womb of the Mother of God, and finally the peace of God himself, a wondrously incredible state of deathlike release; he danced for days, unseen by anyone, until it was all outside, all out of him, clinging to things around him like a cobweb stiffened and made useless by the frost.
How could anyone who had never been through all this judge the rest? After those days and weeks when Moosbrugger felt so light he could almost slip out of his skin, there always came those long stretches of imprisonment. The public prisons were nothing by comparison. Then when he tried to think, everything inside him shriveled up, bitter and empty. He hated the workingmen’s study centers and the night schools where they tried to tell him how to think—after all, he knew the heady feeling of his thoughts taking off with long strides, as if on stilts! They made him feel as if he had to drag himself through the world on leaden feet, hoping to find some place where things might be different again.