by Robert Musil
The General could not quite see why one could not have experiences if one had no morals. Whereupon Arnheim opened the big volume bound in pigskin that he was holding, revealing an expensive facsimile of a manuscript so valuable that even a mortal of Arnheim’s extraordinary standing could not be permitted to take the original out of the building. The General saw the depiction of an angel with wings spread horizontally across two pages, against a background of dark earth, golden sky, and marvelous colors layered like clouds; he was looking at a reproduction of one of the most moving and splendid of early medieval paintings, but since he did not know this, while he did know all about bird-hunting and depictions of it, he could only conclude that a creature with wings and a long neck that was neither human nor a snipe must be an aberration to which his companion wished to draw his attention.
Arnheim was pointing his finger at it and saying pensively: “Here you see what that great lady who is creating the Austrian Campaign is trying to bring back into the world. . . .”
“I see, I see,” Stumm said, realizing that he had failed to appreciate this thing for what it was and that he had better watch his step.
“The great expressiveness, and with such utter simplicity,” Arnheim went on, “bears witness to what our age has lost forever. What is our science compared with this? Patchwork. Our art? Extremes, without a mediating substance to hold them together. We lack the magic key to unity, and this, you see, is why I am so deeply moved by this Austrian plan to set the world an example of unification, of a shared idea, even though I do not quite believe it can be done. I am a German. Everything in the world today is loud and crude, and Germany is the loudest. In every country the people are straining themselves morning, noon, and night, whether at work or at play, but in Germany they start earlier and stop later than anywhere else. In all the world the spirit of cold calculation and brute force has lost touch with the soul, but we in Germany have the most businessmen and the strongest army in the world.” He looked around the square with delight. “Here in Austria, things have not yet gone so far. The past is still with you, and the people have kept something of their original intuitiveness. If the German spirit can still be saved from rationalism, this is the only place left from which a start can be made. But I am afraid,” he added with a sigh, “we can hardly succeed. A great idea nowadays encounters too much resistance; great ideas just barely help to prevent each other from being misused. We are living in a state of moral truce, as it were, armed to the teeth with ideas.”
He smiled at his own joke. Then something more occurred to him: “You know, the difference between Germany and Austria we have just touched on always reminds me of billiards. Even at billiards everything goes wrong if you try to do it all by calculation instead of with feeling.”
The General had guessed that he was supposed to feel flattered by the reference to a moral armed truce, and he wanted to show that he had been paying attention. He did know something about billiards, so he said, “I play snooker myself, and skittles too, but I never heard that there’s a difference between the Austrian and the German styles of play.”
Arnheim shut his eyes and gave it some thought. “I myself never play billiards,” he said after a moment, “but I know that you can play the ball high or low, from the right or from the left; that you can strike the second ball head-on or merely graze it; that you can hit it hard or lightly, bluff a little—or a lot—and there must be many more such options. Now, if you imagine each of these elements with all their inherent gradations, you have an almost infinite number of possible combinations. To state them theoretically, I should have to take into account, besides the laws of mathematics and statics, the mechanics of solids, plus the laws of elasticity; I would have to know the coefficients of the materials, the influence of the temperature, the most precise means of measuring the coordination and gradation of my motor impulses, of estimating distances exactly, like a nonius, how to combine the various factors with better than the speed and accuracy of a slide rule, to say nothing of allowing for margins of error, fields of dispersal, and the fact that the aim, which is the correct coincidence of the two balls, is in itself not clearly definable but only a collection of barely adequate data round an average value.”
Arnheim spoke slowly, and in a way that compelled attention, as though pouring a liquid drop by drop from a vial to a glass; he did not spare his interlocutor a single detail.
“And so you see,” he continued, “that I should need to have all the qualities, and do all the things, I cannot possibly have and do. You must be enough of a mathematician to see that it would take a lifetime to plan a single carom shot in that fashion; it boggles the mind! And yet I step up to the table with a cigarette between my lips, a tune in my ear, and my hat on, as it were, and hardly bothering to look over the board, I take my cue to the ball and the problem is solved! General, this is the sort of thing that happens all the time in real life. You are not only an Austrian, you are a military man, so you’re bound to understand me: politics, honor, war, art, all the crucial processes of life, take place beyond the scope of the conscious rational mind. Man’s greatness is rooted in the irrational. Even we businessmen don’t really operate by calculation—not the leading men, that is. The little fellows may have to count their pennies; we learn to regard our really successful moves as a mystery that defies analysis. A man who doesn’t care deeply about feeling, morality, religion, music, poetry, form, discipline, chivalry, generosity, candor, tolerance—believe me, such a man will never make a businessman of real stature. This is why I have always admired the military, especially the Austrian military, based as it is on age-old traditions, and I am truly delighted that Frau Tuzzi can count on your support. It is a relief to me to know it. Your influence, with that of our younger friend, is extremely important. All great things rest on the same principles; great obligations are a blessing, General.”
To his own surprise he suddenly found himself spontaneously shaking Stumm’s hand, then he ended by saying: “Hardly anyone realizes that true greatness has no rational basis; I mean to say, everything strong is simple.”
Stumm von Bordwehr held his breath; he was not sure he understood a word of it all, and wished he could rush back into the library and spend hours reading up on all these points that the great man had paid him the compliment of making to him. At last, out of this March gale whirling in his mind, there came a piercing ray of lucidity. What the hell, he thought, this fellow wants something from me! He looked up. Arnheim was still holding the book in both hands but was now turning his attention seriously to hailing a cab. His face was slightly flushed with animation, like that of a man who has just been trading ideas with another. The General was silent, like a man awed by a portentous thought. If Arnheim wanted something from him, then General Stumm was free to want something from Arnheim too, to the advantage of His Majesty’s service. This perception opened such vistas of possibility that Stumm put off thinking about just what it all really meant. But if the angel in the book had suddenly lifted up a wing to give clever General Stumm a glimpse of what was hidden underneath, the General could not have felt more bewildered and overjoyed.
Over in Diotima’s and Ulrich’s corner, the following question had meanwhile been posed: Should a woman in Diotima’s difficult position make a gesture of renunciation, or let herself be swept into adultery, or take a third, mixed course, such as belonging physically to one man and spiritually to another, or perhaps physically to neither? For this third solution there was as yet no libretto, as it were, only some great harmonic chords. Diotima still wanted it understood that she was absolutely not speaking of herself but speaking only of “a woman”—every time Ulrich tried to fuse the two together he got a warning glance from her.
And so he also chose a devious course. “Have you ever seen a dog?” he asked. “You only think you have. What you see is only something you feel more or less justified in regarding as a dog. It isn’t a dog in every respect, and always has some personal quality no other dog has. So
how can we ever hope, in this life, to do ‘the right thing’? All we can do is something that’s never the right thing and is always both more and less than that. Has a tile ever fallen off the roof in precise accord with the law of falling bodies? Never. Even in the lab, things never behave just as they should. They diverge from the ideal course in all possible directions, while we keep up a fiction that this is to be blamed on our faulty execution of the experiment, and that somewhere midway a perfect result is obtainable.
“Or else you find certain stones, and because of the properties they have in common they are all regarded as diamonds. But suppose one of them comes from Africa and another from Asia, one is dug out of the ground by a black man and the other by an Oriental. What if these differences in circumstances were to matter so much that they cancel out what the objects have in common? In the equation ‘diamond plus circumstances is still diamond,’ the use value of the diamond is so great that it makes the value of the circumstances negligible. But it’s possible to imagine spiritual circumstances in which the situation is reversed.
“Everything partakes of the universal and also has something special all its own. Everything is both true to type and refuses to conform to type and is in a category all its own, simultaneously. The personal quality of any given creature is precisely that which doesn’t coincide with anything else. I once said to you that the more truth we discover, the less of the personal is left in the world, because of the longtime war against individuality that individuality is losing. By the time everything has been rationalized, there’s no telling how much of us will be left. Nothing at all, possibly, but then, when the false significance we attach to personality has gone, we may enter upon a new kind of significance as if embarking upon a splendid adventure.
“So how do you decide? Should ‘a woman’ go by the law? Then she may as well go by the laws of society. Conventional morality is a perfectly valid average and collective value, to be literally adhered to, without deviations, wherever it is acknowledged. But no individual case can be decided on moral grounds alone; morality is irrelevant to it in the precise degree that it shares in the inexhaustible nature of the universe.”
“That was quite a speech,” Diotima said. She took a certain satisfaction in the loftiness of discourse being imposed upon her, but intended to gain the upper hand by not talking in equally wild generalities. “But what is a woman to do, given the circumstances, in real life?”
“Let things happen,” Ulrich answered.
“What things?”
“Whatever happens. Her husband, her lover, her renunciation, her mixed feelings.”
“Do you have any idea what you are saying?” Diotima asked, feeling painfully reminded of how her high resolve possibly to give up Arnheim had its wings clipped every night by the mere fact that she slept in Tuzzi’s bed. Ulrich must have sensed some of this, because he asked her bluntly: “Would you try your luck with me?”
“With you?” Diotima drawled, then decided to save face by taking a humorous tack. “If this is an offer, just what is it you have in mind?”
“I’ll tell you,” Ulrich replied seriously. “You read a great deal, don’t you?”
“Of course.”
“What is it you do, then? I’ll tell you: You leave out whatever doesn’t suit you. As the author himself has done before you. Just as you leave things out of your dreams or fantasies. By leaving things out, we bring beauty and excitement into the world. We evidently handle our reality by effecting some sort of compromise with it, an in-between state where the emotions prevent each other from reaching their fullest intensity, graying the colors somewhat. Children who haven’t yet reached that point of control are both happier and un-happier than adults who have. And yes, stupid people also leave things out, which is why ignorance is bliss. So I propose, to begin with, that we try to love each other as if we were characters in a novel who have met in the pages of a book. Let’s in any case leave off all the fatty tissue that plumps up reality.”
Diotima felt called upon to argue the case; she wanted to direct the conversation away from this too-personal vein, and she also wanted to show that she understood something of the problems that had been touched upon.
“All well and good,” she said, “but art is supposed to afford us a vacation from reality, so that we can return to it with our energies restored.”
“And I am opinionated enough to say that there should be no time off,” her cousin retorted. “What sort of a life is it that we have to drill holes in it called holidays; would we punch holes in a painting because it makes too strenuous demands on our sense of beauty? Should we look forward to taking time off from eternal bliss in the next world? Even the thought of time taken off my life by having to sleep sometimes seems unacceptable to me.”
“Ah, there it is.” Diotima seized her opportunity. “You see how unnatural it all is, what you’re saying. What human being doesn’t need to rest and take a break? It’s a perfect illustration of the difference between you and Arnheim. Yours is a mind that will not acknowledge the shadow on things, the dark side, while his has developed out of the fullness of human experience, with sunshine and shadow intermingled.”
“Of course I exaggerate,” Ulrich admitted coolly. “You will see it even more clearly as we go into more detail. Think of the great writers, for instance. We can model our lives on them, but we can’t squeeze life out of them, like wine out of grapes. They have given so solid a form to what once moved them that it confronts us like pressed metal even between the lines. But what have they actually said? Nobody knows. They themselves never knew all of it at a time. They’re like a field over which bees fly back and forth; they themselves are flying back and forth, as it were. Their thoughts and feelings show all the gradations between truth and even error, as can be demonstrated if necessary, and changeable natures that come close to us at will and then elude us when we try to observe them closely.
“There is no detaching an idea in a book from its context on the page. It catches our eye like the face of a person looming up in a crowd as it is being swept past us. I suppose I’m exaggerating a little again, but tell me, what happens in our lives that is any different from this? Leaving the precise, measurable, and definable sensory data out of account, all the other concepts on which we base our lives are no more than congealed metaphors. Take as simple a concept as manliness, and think how it keeps wavering among its many possible variants. It’s like a breath that changes shape at every exhalation, with nothing to hold on to, no firm impression, no logic. So when we simply leave out in art whatever doesn’t suit us and our conceptions, we’re merely going back to the original condition of life itself.”
“My dear friend,” Diotima said, “you don’t seem to be talking about anything in particular.” Ulrich had paused for a moment, and her words fell into that pause.
“Yes, I suppose so. I hope I haven’t been talking too loudly.”
“You’ve been talking fast, in a low voice, and at length,” she said, with a touch of sarcasm. “Without saying a word of what you meant to say. Do you realize what you’ve just explained to me all over again? That reality should be abolished! It’s true that when I heard you make this point the first time, on one of our trips into the country, I think, it made a lasting impression—I don’t know why. But how this is to be done is something you haven’t yet revealed, I’m sorry to say.”
“Clearly, I’d have to go on talking for at least as long again to do so. But do you really expect it to be that simple? If I’m not mistaken, you spoke of wanting to fly away with Arnheim into some kind of transcendent state. Something you regard as another kind of reality. What I have been saying, on the other hand, is that we must try to recover unreality. Reality no longer makes sense.”
“Oh, Arnheim would hardly agree with you there,” Diotima said.
“Of course not. That’s just the difference between him and me. He is trying to make the fact that he eats, sleeps, is the great Arnheim, and doesn’t know whether to mar
ry you or not, mean something, and to this end he has been collecting all the treasures of the mind throughout his life.” Ulrich suddenly paused, and the silence lengthened.
After a while he asked, in a different tone: “Can you explain to me why I should be having this conversation with you, of all people? Suddenly I’m reminded of my childhood. You won’t believe this, but I was a good child, mild as the air on a warm moonlit night. I could fall madly in love with a dog, a pocketknife . . .” But then he left this statement unfinished too.
Diotima looked at him, wondering what he could mean. She again remembered how he had once hotly advocated “precision of feeling,” while just now he was taking the opposite view. He had accused Arnheim of insufficiently clean-cut intentions, while now he favored “letting things happen.” And she was troubled by the fact that Ulrich was advocating an intense emotional life without any “time off,” compared with Arnheim’s ambiguous suggestion never to let oneself in for single-minded hatred or total love! These thoughts left her uneasy.
“Do you really believe that there is such a thing as boundless feeling?” Ulrich asked her.
“Oh yes, there is such a thing as boundless emotion,” Diotima said, the ground firm under her feet again.
“You see, I don’t quite believe that,” Ulrich said absently. “Strange how often we talk about it, but we certainly do our best to avoid it throughout our lives, as if we were afraid of drowning in it.”
He noticed that Diotima was not listening. She was uneasily watching Arnheim, who was looking around for a cab.
“I’m afraid we ought to rescue him from the General,” she said.
“I’ll go and get a cab and take the General off your hands,” Ulrich offered, and at the moment he turned to go, Diotima laid her hand on his arm and said kindly, as if to reward him for his trouble: “Any feeling that isn’t boundless is worthless.”