by Robert Musil
“It isn’t for us to have and to hold,” he lectured her. “We are nomads who must keep moving onward, step after step.” And when he noticed that Gerda’s whole body was quivering with frustrated desire, he made no bones about calling it a weakness, if not actually a residue of her non-Germanic genes, and felt like Adam walking with his God, his manly heart having once more resisted his erstwhile rib’s tempting of his faith. At such moments Gerda despised him. Which was probably why she had told Ulrich so much about it, at least in the beginning. She suspected that a full-grown man would do both more and less than Hans, who would bury his tear-stained face in her lap like a child after he had insulted her. Since she was just as proud of her experiences as she was bored with them, she let Ulrich in on all this in the anxious hope that he would find something to say that would put an end to the agonizing beauty of it.
Ulrich, however, seldom spoke to her as she wished he might; instead, he cooled her off with his sardonic tone, because even though it made Gerda more reserved, he knew too well that she longed to submit to him, and that neither Hans nor anyone else had the power over her mind he could have if he chose. He justified himself with the thought that any other real man in his place would have the same effect on Gerda, that of a blessed relief after that woolly-minded dirty little tease Hans. But even as he was thinking it over, suddenly seeing it all in perspective, Hans had collected himself and started a fresh attack.
“All in all,” he said, “you’ve made the biggest possible mistake by trying to express as a concept something that occasionally elevates an idea somewhat above the level of the merely conceptual. But I suppose that’s what makes the difference between one of you intellectual people and the likes of us. First,” he added proudly, “one must learn to live it before one can, perhaps, learn to think it.” When Ulrich smiled at this, he flashed out like a bolt of lightning: “Jesus was a seer at the age of twelve, without first getting his doctorate.”
This provoked Ulrich into breaking the silence he owed to Gerda by giving Hans a piece of advice that betrayed his knowledge of facts he could have learned only from her. “I don’t know why,” he said, “if you want to live it, you don’t go all the way. I would take Gerda in my arms, forget all the qualms of my rational mind, and keep her locked in my arms until our bodies either crumbled to ashes or became transformed into the fullness of their own being in a way that is beyond our power of comprehension!”
Hans, feeling a stab of jealousy, looked not at him but at Gerda, who turned pale with embarrassment. Ulrich’s words about locking her in his arms had touched her like a secret promise. At the moment she didn’t care at all how “the other life” was to be imagined, and she felt sure that Ulrich would do everything just as it should be done, if he really wanted to. Hans, incensed at Gerda’s betrayal, argued against Ulrich’s proposal, which could not be carried out successfully, he said, because the time was not ripe. The first souls to take flight would have to take off from a mountain, just like the first airplanes, and not from the lowlands of a period like the present. Perhaps there must first come a man who would release mankind from its bondage before it could achieve the heights. It was not unthinkable that he might be the man himself, but that was his own affair, and apart from this, the present low level of spiritual development was incapable of producing such a man.
Now Ulrich remarked on the proliferation of redeemers these days—indeed, every self-respecting chairman of a social club seemed to be eligible. If Christ were to come again tomorrow, he would certainly fare worse than the first time. The better newspapers and book clubs would find him vulgar, and the great international press would hardly be likely to welcome him to its columns.
With this they were back where they had started, the discussion had come full circle, and Gerda sank back into herself.
Yet something had changed; without giving any outward sign of it, Ulrich had tripped himself up a little. His thoughts had parted company with his words. He looked at Gerda. Her body was angular, her skin looked dull and tired. That faint breath of old-maidishness that hung over her had suddenly become apparent to him, although it had probably always been the major factor holding him back from ever coming to the point with this girl who was in love with him. Of course, Hans also had something to do with it, what with the semi-physical nature of his communal utopia, which had an old-maidish quality of its own. Ulrich did not feel attracted to Gerda, but even so he was inclined to continue his dialogue with her. This reminded him that he had invited her to come to see him. She gave no sign of either remembering this invitation or of having forgotten it, and he got no opportunity to ask her about it privately. It left him with an uneasy sense of regret as well as of relief, such as one feels when one skirts a danger recognized too late.
114
THINGS ARE COMING TO A BOIL. ARNHEIM IS GRACIOUS TO GENERAL STUMM. DIOTIMA PREPARES TO MOVE OFF INTO INFINITY. ULRICH DAYDREAMS ABOUT LIVING ONE’S LIFE AS ONE READS A BOOK
His Grace had urged Diotima to find out about the famous Makart pageant, which had brought all Austria together in the 1870s in a burst of national fervor; he still had vivid memories of the richly draped carriages, the heavily caparisoned horses, the trumpeters, and the pride people took in their medieval costumes, which lifted them out of their humdrum daily lives. It was this that had brought Diotima, Arnheim, and Ulrich to go through the materials on the period at the Imperial Library, from which they were now emerging together. As Diotima, her lip curling with disdain, had predicted to His Grace, what they had come up with was quite impossible; such frippery could no longer make people forget the monotony of their existence. They were still on the library stairs when the beauty informed her companions that she felt like making the most of the sunny day and the year 1914—which in the few weeks of its existence had already left the moldering past so far behind—by walking home. But they had no sooner stepped out into the light of day when they bumped into the General, on his way in. Proud to be discovered on such a mission of high learning, he instantly offered to turn back and enlarge Diotima’s entourage by joining it. This made Diotima realize after only a few steps that she was tired and wanted a cab. With no such vehicle in sight, they all stopped in front of the library, which faced a trough-shaped rectangular square, three sides of which were formed by splendid ancient façades, while on the fourth the asphalt street in front of a long, low palace shimmered like an ice rink, with cars and carriages rushing past, none of which responded to the four people waving and signaling to them like survivors of a shipwreck, until they tired of it and forgot about giving anything but the occasional halfhearted signal in the direction of the traffic.
Arnheim had a big book under his arm. He was pleased with this gesture, both condescending and respectful toward the life of the mind. He greeted the General eagerly: “How nice to see you coming to the library too; men of position nowadays so seldom seek out the life of the mind in its own house.”
General Stumm replied that he was quite at home in this library.
Arnheim was impressed. “Almost all we have nowadays is writers, and hardly anyone who reads books anymore,” he went on. “Do you realize, General, how many books are printed annually? I think it’s over a hundred books a day published in Germany alone. Over a thousand periodicals are founded every year. The whole world is writing! Everyone helps himself to ideas as though they were his own, all the time. Nobody feels any responsibility toward the situation as a whole. Ever since the Church lost its influence, there is no central authority to stem our general chaos. There is no educational model, no educational principle. In these circumstances it is only natural that feeling and morality should drift without an anchor, and the most stable person begins to waver.”
The General felt his mouth turning dry. It wasn’t as though Dr. Arnheim was actually addressing him in person; he was a man standing in the square and thinking out loud. The General thought of how many people talk to themselves in the street, on their way to somewhere; civilians, of course, bec
ause a soldier who did such a thing would be locked up, and an officer would be sent to the psychiatric clinic. Stumm felt embarrassed at the thought of standing there philosophizing in public, as it were, smack-dab in the middle of the Imperial Residential capital. Apart from the two men, there seemed to be only one other, a mute figure of bronze standing on a stone pedestal in the sunny square. The General had only just noticed this monument and did not remember whom it represented, so that he had to apologize for his ignorance when Arnheim asked him.
“And to think that he was put here to be venerated,” the great man remarked. “But that’s how it is. Every moment of our lives we move among institutions, problems, and challenges of which we have barely caught the tail end, so that the present is constantly reaching into the past. We keep crashing through the floor, if I may put it so, into the cellars of time, even while we imagine ourselves to be occupying the top floor of the present.”
Arnheim smiled. He was making conversation. His moving lips flickered in the sunshine, and the lights in his eyes kept changing like those on a signaling steamer. Stumm was growing uneasy; he found it hard to keep acknowledging so many and such unusual turns in the conversation while being served up to the world, in full uniform, on this platter of a square. Grass was growing in the cracks between the cobblestones; it was last year’s grass but looked implausibly fresh, like a corpse left lying in the snow; it was, in fact, most peculiar and disturbing that grass should be growing here between the stones, when only a few steps farther on the asphalt was being polished, in keeping with the times, by the passing cars. The General began to be troubled by a nervous fear that if he had to go on listening much longer he might suddenly go down on his knees and eat grass in front of the whole world, without knowing why. He looked around for Ulrich and Diotima for protection.
These two had taken shelter where a thin veil of shade had spun itself around the corner of the wall, and seemed to be involved in an argument, though their voices were too low to be understood.
“You make it sound hopeless,” Diotima was saying.
“What do you mean?” Ulrich asked, without real interest.
“There is still such a thing as individuality.”
Ulrich tried to catch her eye sideways. “Good heavens, we’ve been all over this already.”
“You have no heart, or you wouldn’t always talk like this,” she said softly. The sun-heated air was rising from the stone pavement up between her legs, which were encased in long skirts like those of a robed statue, inaccessible and to all intents nonexistent. She showed no awareness of it. It was a caress that had nothing to do with anyone, any man. Her eyes turned pale, but that might have been merely the effect of her reserve in a situation where she was exposed to the glances of the passersby. Turning to Ulrich, she said with an effort:
“When a woman has to choose between duty and passion, what can she rely on if not her character?”
“You don’t have to choose,” Ulrich replied.
“You go too far; I wasn’t speaking of myself,” his cousin whispered.
As he did not reply, they both stared across the square for a while in a hostile silence. Then Diotima asked: “Do you think that what we call our soul might emerge from the shadows where it usually keeps itself?”
Ulrich gave her a puzzled look.
“In the case of unusual, specially gifted persons,” she added.
“Am I to understand that you’re interested in establishing a rapport with the Beyond?” Ulrich asked incredulously. “Has Arnheim introduced you to a medium?”
Diotima was disappointed in him. “I would never have thought you capable of such a misunderstanding,” she said reproachfully. “When I speak of emerging from the shadows, I mean from the unreality, from that flickering concealment in which we sometimes sense the presence of the unusual. It is spread out like a net that torments us because it will neither hold us nor let us go. Don’t you think that there have been times when it was otherwise? When the inner life was a stronger presence, when there were individuals who walked in the light or, as people used to say, walked in holiness, and miracles could happen in reality because they are an ever-present form of another reality, and nothing else!”
Diotima surprised herself by the firmness with which it seemed possible to say this sort of thing, without any special elation, as though she were walking on solid ground. Ulrich felt secretly infuriated, but actually he was deeply shocked. Has it come to this, he thought, that this giant hen can talk the way I do? Again he saw Diotima’s soul in the shape of a colossal chicken pecking at his own soul, in the shape of a little worm. He was seized by the primal childhood terror of the giantess, mixed with another strange sensation; there was a certain gratification in being spiritually consumed, as it were, in mindless accord with a kinswoman. Their unanimity was a silly coincidence, of course; he did not believe that there was any magic in being related by blood, nor could he possibly have taken his cousin seriously even if he were dead drunk. But he had been changing lately, mellowing perhaps; his characteristic inner readiness to move to the attack was giving way to a need for tenderness, dreams, kinship, whatever, which also manifested itself in sudden outbreaks of the ill will that was its opposite.
Which prompted him to make fun of his cousin now: “If that’s how you feel,” he said, “then you ought to go all the way and become Arnheim’s lover, openly or in secret, as soon as possible.”
“You shouldn’t say such things; I’ve given you no right!” Diotima rebuked him.
“But I must speak of it. Until now I wasn’t sure what was going on between you and Arnheim. But now I understand, and you look to me like a person who is seriously thinking of flying to the moon. I would never have thought you capable of such madness.”
“I’ve told you that I’m capable of going to extremes.” Her upward gaze was meant to be audacious, but the sun made her screw up her eyes, so that she seemed to be twinkling at him.
“These are the ravings of starved love,” Ulrich said, “which pass off when hunger is appeased.” He wondered what Arnheim’s plans might be with regard to her. Did he regret his proposal, and was he covering his retreat by putting on some sort of act? But then he could simply leave and not come back; a man who had been in business all his life would surely have the necessary callousness for that? He remembered noticing certain signs in Arnheim that indicated passion in an older man; his face was sometimes a grayish yellow, slack and tired, like a room with the bed still unmade at noon. The most likely explanation was the havoc caused by two almost equally strong passions fighting each other to a standstill. But since he was incapable of imagining the passion for power in the degree to which it ruled Arnheim, he could not conceive of the measures love had to take in order to fight it.
“You’re an odd sort of man,” Diotima said. “Always different from what one would expect. Wasn’t it you who spoke to me of seraphic love?”
“You regard that as a possibility?” Ulrich asked absentmindedly.
“Not as you described it, of course.”
“So Arnheim loves you seraphically?” Ulrich began to laugh softly.
“I wish you wouldn’t laugh.” Diotima almost hissed at him.
“You don’t understand,” he apologized. “It’s only the excitement. You and Arnheim are sensitive people. You love poetry. I’m sure that you are sometimes touched by a breath . . . a breath of something: the question is just what that is. And now you want to get to the bottom of it, with all the thoroughness of your idealism.”
“Aren’t you always saying that one must be precise and thorough?” Diotima countered.
It was too much. “You’re mad!” he said. “Forgive my saying so, but you are mad. And you of all people mustn’t be.”
Meanwhile Arnheim had been telling the General that for the last two generations the world had been undergoing the most profound revolution of all: the end of the soul was in sight.
It gave the General a stab. What the devil, here was yet ano
ther problem to think about. To be honest, he had thought until this moment, despite Diotima, that there was no such thing as the soul. At military school and in the regiment, nobody gave a hang about this kind of preacher’s talk. But here was this manufacturer of guns and tanks, talking about the soul as though he could see it standing there. The General’s eyes began to itch and to roll around gloomily, goggling at the translucent air around them.
But Arnheim was not waiting to be asked for particulars; words flowed from his lips, from that pale pink slit between his clipped mustache and his little pointed beard. As he phrased it, the soul had started to shrivel and age ever since the Church began to crumble, around the beginning of the bourgeois era. Since then it had lost God and all solid values and ideals until the present, when men had actually reached the point of living without morals, without principles, without real experiences, in fact.