by Robert Musil
As he turned the pages, Ulrich wondered whether there was some connection between that era, when a photographer could feel like a genius because he drank, wore an open-necked shirt, and, with the aid of the latest techniques, was able to project his sense of his own greatness of spirit onto all those of his contemporaries who posed before his lens, and Ulrich’s own time, when only racehorses were truly felt to have genius because of their all-surpassing ability to stretch their legs and contract them again. The two periods look different. The present looks proudly down upon the past, which, if it had happened to occur later, would have looked proudly down upon the present. Yet it mainly amounted to the same thing, because in both cases the major role is played by muddled thinking and an ignoring of the telling differences. A single aspect of greatness is taken for the whole, a distant analogy for a truth, and the flayed hide of a significant word is stuffed with something modish. It works, though not for long. The talkers in Diotima’s salon were never entirely wrong about anything, for their concepts were as misty as the outlines of bodies in a steambath. “These ideas, on which life hangs as the eagle hangs on his wings,” Ulrich thought, “our countless moral and artistic notions of life, by nature as delicate as mountain ranges of granite blurred by distance.” On such tongues as these the ideas multiplied by being turned over and over; it was impossible to discuss one of them for any length of time without suddenly finding oneself caught up in the next.
These were the kind of people who had throughout history regarded themselves as the New Era, a term like a sack in which to catch all the winds of the compass, always serving as an excuse for not placing things in their own objective order but fitting them into an illusory compound with a chimera. And yet it holds a confession of faith, the oddly living conviction that it is up to them to bring order into the world. If we were to judge what they were trying to do along those lines as halfway intelligent, it might be worth saying that it is precisely the other half, the unnamed or—to come straight out with it—the stupid, never exact or complementary part of that middling intelligence that held an inexhaustible power of self-renewal and fruitfulness. There was life in it, mutability, restlessness, freedom to adopt a fresh perspective. They probably had their own sense of how it was with them. They were shaken up by it, it blew in gusts through their heads, those children of a nerve-racked age, aware that something was wrong, each feeling intelligent enough and yet all of them together feeling somehow barren. If they also happened to have talent—and their intellectual woolliness certainly did not exclude this possibility—then what was going on in their heads was like seeing the weather, the clouds, trains, telegraph wires, trees and animals and the whole moving panorama of our dear world, through a narrow, dirt-encrusted window; and no one was very quick to notice the state of his own window, but everyone noticed it about the window next door.
Ulrich had once asked them, for the fun of it, just what they meant by what they were saying. They gave him jaundiced looks, told him he had a mechanistic view of life and was too skeptical, and stated that the most complicated problems must be made to yield the simplest solutions, so that the New Era—once it had shucked the confusing present—would turn out to be simplicity itself. Compared with Arnheim, Ulrich did not strike them as impressive at all, and Aunt Jane would have patted him on the cheek, saying, “I know just how they feel. You put them off with your seriousness.”
100
GENERAL STUMM INVADES THE STATE LIBRARY AND LEARNS ABOUT THE WORLD OF BOOKS, THE LIBRARIANS GUARDING IT, AND INTELLECTUAL ORDER
General Stumm had noticed the rebuff to his “comrade in arms” and undertook to comfort him. “What a lot of useless palaver,” he said in indignant dismissal of the Council members; then, without any encouragement from Ulrich, he started to talk about himself, with a certain excitement mixed with self-satisfaction:
“You remember, don’t you,” he said, “that I’d made up my mind to find that great redeeming idea Diotima wants and lay it at her feet. It turns out that there are lots of great ideas, but only one of them can be the greatest—that’s only logical, isn’t it?—so it’s a matter of putting them in order. You said yourself that this is a resolve worthy of a Napoleon, right? You even gave me a number of excellent suggestions, as was to be expected of you, but I never got to the point of using them. In short, I have to go about it my own way.”
He took his horn-rimmed glasses out of his pocket and put them on in place of the pince-nez, a sign that he wanted to look closely at someone or something.
“One of the foremost rules for a good general is to find out the enemy’s strength,” he said. “So I asked them to get me a card to our world-famous Imperial Library, and with the help of a librarian who very charmingly put himself at my disposal when I told him who I was, I have now penetrated the enemy’s lines. We marched down the ranks in that colossal storehouse of books, and I don’t mind telling you I was not particularly overwhelmed; those rows of books are no worse than a garrison on parade. Still, after a while I couldn’t help starting to do some figuring in my head, and I got an unexpected answer. You see, I had been thinking that if I read a book a day, it would naturally be exhausting, but I would be bound to get to the end sometime and then, even if I had to skip a few, I could claim a certain position in the world of the intellect. But what d’you suppose that librarian said to me, as we walked on and on, without an end in sight, and I asked him how many books they had in this crazy library? Three and a half million, he tells me. We had just got to the seven hundred thousands or so, but I kept on doing these figures in my head; I’ll spare you the details, but I checked it out later at the office, with pencil and paper: it would take me ten thousand years to carry out my plan.
“I felt nailed to the spot—the whole world seemed to be one enormous practical joke! And I’m telling you, even though I’m feeling a bit calmer about it, there’s something radically wrong somewhere!
“You may say that it isn’t necessary to read every last book. Well, it’s also true that in war you don’t have to kill every last soldier, but we still need every one of them. You may say to me that every book is needed too. But there, you see, you wouldn’t be quite right, because that isn’t so. I asked the librarian.
“It occurred to me, you see, that the fellow lives among those millions of books, he knows each one, he knows where to find them, he ought to be able to help me. Of course I wasn’t going to ask him point-blank: Where do I find the finest idea in the world? That sounds too much like the opening of a fairy tale, even I know that much; besides, I never liked fairy tales, even as a child. But what to do? I had to ask him something of the sort in the end anyway. But I never told him why I wanted to know, not a word about our Campaign and having to find the most inspiring aim for it—discretion, you know; I didn’t feel I was authorized to go that far. So I finally tried a little stratagem. ‘By the way,’ I said casually, ‘how on earth do you go about finding the right book somewhere in this immense collection . . . ?’ I tried to say it as I imagined Diotima might, and I dropped a few pennies’ worth of admiration into my voice, and sure enough, he started to purr and fell all over himself with helpfulness, and what was the Herr General interested in finding out?
“‘Oh, all sorts of things,’ I said, as if he were prying into state secrets; I was playing for time.
“‘I only meant what subject or what author,’ he asked. ‘Is it military history?’
“‘Oh no,’ I said, ‘more on the lines of the history of peace.’
“‘History as such? Or current pacifist literature?’
“No, I said, it wasn’t that simple. ‘Might there be, for instance, something like a compendium of all the great humanitarian ideas or anything like that?’ You remember how much research I’ve already got my people to do on those lines. He didn’t say a word. ‘Or a book on realizing the most important aims of all?’ I say to him.
“‘Something in theological ethics?’ he suggests.
“‘Theological ethics to
o,’ I said, ‘but it would have to include something about our old Austrian culture and a bit about Grillparzer,’ I specified. My eyes must have been blazing with such a thirst for knowledge that the fellow suddenly took fright, as if I was about to suck him dry altogether. I went on a little longer about needing a kind of timetable that would enable me to make connections among all kinds of ideas in every direction—at which point he turns so polite it’s absolutely unholy, and offers to take me into the catalog room and let me do my own searching, even though it’s against the rules, because it’s only for the use of the librarians. So I actually found myself inside the holy of holies. It felt like being inside an enormous brain. Imagine being totally surrounded by those shelves, full of books in their compartments, ladders all over the place, all those book stands and library tables piled high with catalogs and bibliographies, the concentrate of all knowledge, don’t you know, and not one sensible book to read, only books about books. It positively reeked of brain phosphorus, and I felt that I must have really got somewhere. But of course a funny feeling came over me when the man was going to leave me there on my own—I felt both awestruck and uneasy as hell. Up the ladder he scoots, like a monkey, aiming straight at a book from below, fetches it down, and says: ‘Here it is, General, a bibliography of bibliographies for you’—you know about that? In short, the alphabetical list of alphabetical lists of the titles of all the books and papers of the last five years dealing with ethical problems, exclusive of moral theology and literature, or however he put it, and he tries to slip away. I barely had time to grab his lapel and hang on to him.
“‘Just a moment, sir,’ I cried, ‘you can’t leave me here without telling me, your secret, how you manage to . . .’ I’m afraid I let slip the word ‘madhouse,’ because that’s how I suddenly felt about it. ‘How do you find your way in this madhouse of books?’ He must have got the wrong impression—it occurred to me later that crazy people are given to calling others crazy—anyway, he just kept staring at my saber, and I could hardly keep hold of him. And then he gave me a real shock. When I didn’t let go of him he suddenly pulled himself up, rearing up in those wobbly pants of his, and said in a slow, very emphatic way, as though the time had come to give away the ultimate secret: ‘General,’ he said, ‘if you want to know how I know about every book here, I can tell you: Because I never read any of them.’
“It was almost too much, I tell you! But when he saw how stunned I was, he explained himself. The secret of a good librarian is that he never reads anything more of the literature in his charge than the titles and the tables of contents. ‘Anyone who lets himself go and starts reading a book is lost as a librarian,’ he explained. ‘He’s bound to lose perspective.’
“‘So,’ I said, trying to catch my breath, ‘you never read a single book?’
“‘Never. Only the catalogs.’
“‘But aren’t you a Ph.D.?’
“‘Certainly I am. I teach at the university, as a special lecturer in Library Science. Library Science is a special field leading to a degree, you know,’ he explained. ‘How many systems do you suppose there are, General, for the arrangement and preservation of books, cataloging of titles, correcting misprints and misinformation on title pages, and the like?’
“I must admit that when he left me there alone, after that, I felt like doing one of two things: bursting into tears, or lighting a cigarette—neither of which I was allowed to do there. But what do you think happened? As I’m standing there, totally at a loss, an old attendant who must have been watching us all along pads around me respectfully a few times, then he stops, looks me in the face, and starts speaking to me in a voice quite velvety, from either the dust on the books or the foretaste of a tip: ‘Is there anything in particular, sir, you are looking for?’ he asks me. I try to shake my head, but the old fellow goes on: ‘We get lots of gentlemen from the Staff College in here. If you’ll just tell me, sir, what subject you’re interested in at the moment, sir. . . Julius Caesar, Prince Eugene of Savoy, Count Daun? Or is it something contemporary? Military statutes? The budget?’ I swear the man sounded so sensible and knew so much about what was inside those books that I gave him a tip and asked him how he did it. And what do you think? He tells me again that the students at the Staff College come to him when they have a paper to write, ‘And when I bring the books,’ he goes on, ‘they often cuss a bit, and gripe about all the nonsense they have to learn, and that’s how the likes of us pick up all sorts of things. Or else it’s the Deputy who has to draw up the budget for the Department of Education, and he asks me what material was used by the Deputy the year before. Or it might be the Bishop, who’s been writing about certain types of beetles for the last fifteen years, or one of the university professors, who complains that he’s been waiting three weeks to get a certain book, and we have to look for it on all the adjoining shelves, in case it’s been misplaced, and then it turns out he’s had it at home for the last two years. That’s the way it’s been, sir, for nigh on forty years; you develop an instinct for what people want, and what they read for it.’
“‘Well,’ I said, ‘be that as it may, my friend, it still isn’t so simple for me to tell you what I’m looking for.’
“And what do you think he comes back with? He gives me a quiet look, and nods, and says: ‘That happens all the time too, General, if I may say so. There was a lady who came in, not so long ago, who said exactly the same thing to me. Perhaps you know her, sir, she’s the wife of Section Chief Tuzzi, of the Foreign Office?’
“Now, what do you think of that? You could have knocked me over with a feather. And when the old fellow caught on, he just went and fetched all the books Diotima has on reserve there, so now, when I come to the library, it’s practically like a secret mystical marriage; now and then I make a discreet pencil mark in the margin, or I write a word in, and I know she’ll see it the very next day, and she won’t have a clue who it is that’s inside her own head, when she wonders what’s going on.”
The General paused blissfully. But then he pulled himself together, his face took on a look of grim seriousness, and he continued: “Now brace yourself and give me your full attention, because I’m going to ask you something. We’re all convinced—aren’t we?—that we’re living in the best-ordered times the world has ever seen. I know I once said in Diotima’s presence that it’s a prejudice, but it’s a prejudice I naturally share. And now I have to face the fact that the only people with a really reliable intellectual order are the library attendants, and I ask you—no, I don’t ask you; after all, we’ve talked about this before, and naturally I’ve thought it over again in the light of my recent experiences. So let me put it this way: Suppose you’re drinking brandy, right? A good thing to do in some circumstances. But you keep on, and on, and on, drinking brandy—are you with me?—and the first thing is, you get drunk; next, you get the d.t.’s; and finally, you get conducted with military honors to your last resting place, where the chaplain testifies to your unflinching devotion to duty and so on. Do you get the picture? Good, you’ve got it, nothing to it. So now let’s take water. Imagine drinking water until you drown in it. Or imagine going on eating until your intestines are tied into knots. Or you go on taking drugs—quinine, arsenic, opium. What for? you ask. Well, my friend, I’m coming to the most extraordinary proposition: Take order. Or rather, start imagining a great idea, and then mother still greater, and then another even greater than that one, and so on; and in the same style, try 10 increase the concept of order in your head. At first it’s as neat and tidy as an old maid’s room and as clean as a Horse Guards stable. Then it’s as splendid as a brigade in battle formation. Next, it’s crazy, like coming out of the casino late at night and commanding the stars: ‘Universe, ’tenshun, eyes right!’ Or let’s put it this way: At first order is like a new recruit still falling over his own feet, and you straighten him out. Then it’s like dreaming you’ve suddenly been promoted, over everybody’s head, to Minister of War. Next, just imagine a total universal o
rder embracing all mankind—in short, the perfect civilian state of order: that, I say, is death by freezing, it’s rigor mortis, a moonscape, a geometric plague!
“I discussed that with my library attendant. He suggested that I read Kant or somebody, all about the limits of ideas and perceptions. But frankly, I don’t want to go on reading. I have a funny feeling that I now understand why those of us in the army, where we have the highest degree of order, also have to be prepared to lay down our lives at any moment. I can’t exactly explain why. Somehow or other, order, once it reaches a certain stage, calls for bloodshed. And now I am honestly worried that your cousin is carrying all her efforts too far, to the point where she is likely to go and do something that might do her a lot of harm—and I’ll be less able than ever to help her! Do you see what I mean? As for the arts and sciences and all they can offer in terms of great and admirable ideas, of course I have nothing but the greatest respect for all that; I wouldn’t dream of saying anything against it.”