The Man Without Qualities

by Robert Musil

  “Isn’t it good to be good?” she asked her brother, with a gleam in her eye like the one she’d had when she was fiddling with her father’s medals, which presumably not everybody would have considered good.

  “You’re right,” he replied eagerly. “One really has to formulate some such proposition if one wants to feel the original meaning again! But children still like being ‘good’ as if it were some tidbit. . . .”

  “And being ‘bad’ as well,” Agathe added.

  “But does being good have any part in the passions of adults?” Ulrich asked. “It certainly is part of their principles. Not that they are good—they would regard that as childish—but that their behavior is good. A good person is one who has good principles and who does good things: it’s an open secret that he can be quite disgusting as well.”

  “See Hagauer,” Agathe volunteered.

  “There’s an absurd paradox inherent in those good people,” Ulrich said. “They turn a condition into an imperative, a state of grace into a norm, a state of being into a purpose! In a whole lifetime this household of good people never serves up anything but leftovers, while keeping up a rumor that these are the scraps from a great feast day that was celebrated once. It’s true that from time to time a few virtues come back into fashion, but as soon as that happens they lose their freshness again.”

  “Didn’t you once say that the same act may be either good or bad, depending on circumstances?” Agathe asked.

  Ulrich agreed. That was his theory, that moral values were not absolutes but functional concepts. But when we moralize or generalize we separate them out from their natural context: “And that is presumably the point where something goes wrong on the path to virtue.”

  “Otherwise, how could virtuous people be so dreary,” Agathe added, “when their intention to be good ought to be the most delightful, challenging, and enjoyable thing anyone could imagine!”

  Her brother hesitated, but suddenly he let slip a remark that was soon to bring them into a most unusual relationship.

  “Our morality,” he declared, “is the crystallization of an inner movement that is completely different from it. Not one thing we say is right! Take any statement, like the one that just occurred to me: ‘Prison is a place for repentance.’ It’s something we can say with the best conscience in the world, but no one takes it literally, because it would mean hellfire for the prisoners! So how is one to take it? Surely few people know what repentance is, but everybody can tell you where it should reign. Or imagine that something is uplifting—how did that ever get to be part of our morals? When did we ever lie with our faces in the dust, so that it was bliss to be uplifted? Or try to imagine literally being seized by an idea—the moment you were to feel such a thing physically you’d have crossed the border into insanity! Every word demands to be taken literally, otherwise it decays into a lie; but one can’t take words literally, or the world would turn into a madhouse! Some kind of grand intoxication rises out of this as a dim memory, and one sometimes wonders whether everything we experience may not be fragmented pieces torn from some ancient entity that was once put together wrong.”

  The conversation in which this remark occurred took place in the library-study, and while Ulrich sat over several books he had taken along on his trip, his sister was rummaging through the legal and philosophical books, a bequest of which she was the co-inheritor and out of which she picked the notions that led to her questions. Since their outing the pair had rarely left the house. This was how they spent most of their time. Sometimes they strolled in the garden, where winter had peeled the leaves from the bare shrubbery, exposing the earth beneath, swollen with rain. The sight was agonizing. The air was pallid, like something left too long under water. The garden was not large. The paths soon turned back upon themselves. The state of mind induced in both of them by walking on these paths eddied in circles, as a rising current does behind a dam. When they returned to the house the rooms were dark and sheltered, and the windows resembled deep lighting shafts through which the day arrived with all the brittle delicacy of thinnest ivory.

  Now, after Ulrich’s last, vehement words, Agathe descended from the library ladder on which she had been sitting and put her arms around his shoulders without a word. It was an unaccustomed show of tenderness, for apart from the two kisses, the first on the evening of their first encounter and the other a few days ago when they had set out on their way home from the shepherd’s hut, the siblings’ natural reserve had released itself in nothing more than words or little acts of attentiveness, and on both those occasions, too, the effect of the intimate contact had been concealed by its unexpectedness and exuberance. But this time Ulrich was instantly reminded of the still-warm garter that his sister had given the deceased as a parting gift instead of a flood of words. The thought shot through his head: “She certainly must have a lover; but she doesn’t seem too attached to him, otherwise she wouldn’t be staying on here so calmly.” Clearly, she was a woman, who had led her life as a woman independently of him and would go on doing so. His shoulder felt the beauty of her arm from the distribution of its resting weight, and on the side turned toward his sister he had a shadowy sense of the nearness of her blond armpit and the outline of her breast. So as not to go on sitting there in mute surrender to that quiet embrace, he placed his hand over her fingers close to his neck, with this contact drowning out the other.

  “You know, it’s rather childish, talking the way we do,” he said, not without some ill humor. “The world is full of energetic resolution, and here we sit in luxuriant idleness, talking about the sweetness of being good and the theoretical pots we could fill with it.”

  Agathe freed her fingers but let her hand go back to its place. “What’s that you’ve been reading all this time?” she asked.

  “You know what it is,” he said. “You’ve been looking at the book behind my back often enough!”

  “But I don’t know what to make of it.”

  He could not bring himself to talk about it. Agathe, who had drawn up a chair, was crouching behind him and had simply nestled her face peacefully in his hair as though she were napping. Ulrich was strangely reminded of the moment when his enemy Arnheim had thrown an arm around him and the unregulated current of physical contact with another being had invaded him as through a breach. But this time his own nature did not repel the alien one; on the contrary, something in him advanced toward her, something that had been buried under the rubble of mistrust and resentment that fills the heart of a man who has lived a fairly long time. Agathe’s relationship to him, which hovered between sister and wife, stranger and friend, without being equatable to any one of them, was not even based on a far-reaching accord between their thoughts or feelings, as he had often told himself, yet it was in complete accord—as he was now almost astonished to note—with the fact, which had crystallized after relatively few days full of countless impressions not easy to review in a moment, that Agathe’s mouth was bedded on his hair with no further claim, and that his hair was becoming warm and moist from her breath. This was as spiritual as it was physical, for when Agathe repeated her question Ulrich was overcome with a seriousness such as he had not felt since the credulous days of his youth; and before this cloud of imponderable seriousness fled again, a cloud that extended from the space behind his back to the book before him, on which his thoughts were resting, he had given an answer that astonished him more for the total absence of irony in its tone than for its meaning:

  “I’m instructing myself about the ways of the holy life.”

  He stood up; not to move away from his sister but in order to be able to see her better from a few steps away.

  “You needn’t laugh,” he said. “I’m not religious; I’m studying the road to holiness to see if it might also be possible to drive a car on it!”

  “I only laughed,” she replied, “because I’m so curious to hear what you’re going to say. The books you brought along are new to me, but I have a feeling that I would find them not
entirely incomprehensible.”

  “You understand that?” her brother asked, already convinced that she did understand. “One may be caught up in the most intense feeling, when suddenly one’s eye is seized by the play of some godforsaken, man-forsaken thing and one simply can’t tear oneself away. Suddenly one feels borne up by its puny existence like a feather floating weightlessly and powerlessly on the wind.”

  “Except for the intense feeling you make such a point of, I think I know what you mean,” Agathe said, and could not help smiling at the almost ferocious glare of embarrassment on her brother’s face, not at all in keeping with the tenderness of his words. “One sometimes forgets to see and to hear, and is struck completely dumb. And yet it’s precisely in minutes like these that one feels one has come to oneself for a moment.”

  “I would say,” Ulrich went on eagerly, “that it’s like looking out over a wide shimmering sheet of water—so bright it seems like darkness to the eye, and on the far bank things don’t seem to be standing on solid ground but float in the air with a delicately exaggerated distinctness that’s almost painful and hallucinatory. The impression one gets is as much of intensification as of loss. One feels linked with everything but can’t get close to anything. You stand here, and the world stands there, overly subjective and overly objective, but both almost painfully clear, and what separates and unites these normally fused elements is a blazing darkness, an overflowing and extinction, a swinging in and out. You swim like a fish in water or a bird in air, but there’s no riverbank and no branch, only this floating!” Ulrich had slipped into poetry, but the fire and firmness of his language stood out in relief against its tender and airy meaning like metal. He seemed to have cast off the caution that usually controlled him, and Agathe looked at him astonished, but also with an uneasy gladness.

  “So you think,” she asked, “that there’s something behind it? More than a ‘fit,’ or whatever hateful, placating words are used?”

  “I should say I do!” He sat down again at his earlier place and leafed through the books that lay there, while Agathe got up to make room for him. Then he opened one of them, with the words: “This is how the saints describe it,” and read aloud:

  “‘During those days I was exceeding restless. Now I sat awhile, now I wandered back and forth through the house. It was like a torment, and yet it can be called more a sweetness than a torment, for there was no vexation in it, only a strange, quite supernatural contentment. I had transcended all my faculties and reached the obscure power. There I heard without sound, there I saw without light. And my heart became bottomless, my spirit formless, and my nature immaterial.’”

  It seemed to them both that this description resembled the restlessness with which they themselves had been driven through house and garden, and Agathe in particular was surprised that the saints also called their hearts bottomless and their spirits formless. But Ulrich seemed to be caught up again in his irony.

  He explained: “The saints say: Once I was imprisoned, then I was drawn out of myself and immersed in God without knowledge. The emperors out hunting, as we read about them in our storybooks, describe it differently: They tell how a stag appeared to them with a cross between its antlers, causing the murderous spear to drop from their hands; and then they built a chapel on the spot so they could get on with their hunting. The rich, clever ladies in whose circles I move will answer immediately, if you should ask them about it, that the last artist who painted such experiences was van Gogh. Or perhaps instead of a painter they might mention Rilke’s poetry, but in general they prefer van Gogh, who is a superb investment and who cut his ear off because his painting didn’t do enough when measured against the rapture of things. But the great majority of our people will say, on the contrary, that cutting your ear off is not a German way of expressing deep feelings; a German way is that unmistakable vacuousness of the elevated gaze one experiences on a mountaintop. For them the essence of human sublimity lies in solitude, pretty little flowers, and murmuring little brooks; and yet even in that bovine exaltation, with its undigested delight in nature, there lurks the misunderstood last echo of a mysterious other life. So when all is said and done, there must be something of the sort, or it must have existed at some time!”

  “Then you shouldn’t make fun of it,” Agathe objected, grim with curiosity and radiant with impatience.

  “I only make fun of it because I love it,” Ulrich said curtly.

  135

  HOLY DISCOURSE: ERRATIC PROGRESS

  In the following days there were always many books on the table, some of which he had brought from home, others that he had bought since, and he would either talk extemporaneously or cite a passage, one of many he had marked with little slips of paper, to prove a point or quote the exact wording. The books before him were mostly lives of the mystics, their writings, or scholarly works about them, and he usually deflected the conversation from them by saying: “Now let’s take a good hard look and see what’s really going on here.” This was a cautious attitude he was not prepared to give up easily, and so he said to her once:

  “If you could read right through all these accounts that men and women of past centuries have left us, describing their state of divine rapture, you would find much truth and reality in among the printed words, and yet the statements made of these words would go wholly against the grain of your present-day mind.” And he went on: “They speak of an overflowing radiance. Of an infinite expanse, a boundless opulence of light. Of an overarching oneness of all things and all the soul’s energies. Of an awesome and indescribable uplifting of the heart. Of insights coming so swiftly that it’s all simultaneous and like drops of fire falling into the world. And then again they speak of a forgetting and no longer understanding, even of everything falling utterly away. They speak of an immense serenity far removed from all passion. Of growing mute. A vanishing of thoughts and intentions. A blindness in which they see clearly, a clarity in which they are dead and supernaturally alive. They call it a shedding of their being, and yet they claim to be more fully alive than ever. Aren’t these the same sensations, however veiled by the difficulty of expressing them, still experienced today when the heart—‘greedy and gorged,’ as they say!—stumbles by chance into those utopian regions situated somewhere and nowhere between infinite tenderness and infinite loneliness?”

  As he paused briefly to think, Agathe’s voice joined in: “It’s what you once called two layers that overlie each other within us.”

  “I did? When?”

  “When you walked aimlessly into town and felt as though you were dissolving into it, although at the same time you didn’t like the place. I told you that this happens to me often.”

  “Oh yes! You even said ‘Hagauer!’” Ulrich exclaimed. “And we laughed—now I remember. But we didn’t really mean it. Anyway, it’s not the only time I talked to you about the kind of vision that gives and the kind that receives, about the male and female principles, the hermaphroditism of the primal imagination and so on—I can say a lot about these things. As if my mouth were as far away from me as the moon, which is also always on hand for confidential chats in the night! But what these believers have to say about their souls’ adventures,” he went on, mingling the bitterness of his words with objectivity and even admiration, “is sometimes written with the force and the ruthless analytic conviction of a Stendhal. But only”—he limited this—“as long as they stick to the phenomena and their judgment doesn’t enter in, which is corrupted by their flattering conviction that they’ve been singled out by God to have direct experience of Him. For from that moment on, of course, they no longer speak of their perceptions, which are so hard to describe and have no nouns or verbs, but begin to speak in sentences with subject and object, because they believe in their soul and in God as in the two doorposts between which the miraculous will blossom. And so they arrive at these statements about the soul being drawn out of the body and absorbed into the Lord, or say that the Lord penetrates them like a lover. Th
ey are caught, engulfed, dazzled, swept away, raped by God, or else their soul opens to Him, enters into Him, tastes of Him, embraces Him with love and hears Him speak. The earthly model for this is unmistakable, and these descriptions no longer resemble tremendous discoveries but rather a series of fairly predictable images with which an erotic poet decks out his subject, about which only one opinion is permissible. For a person like me, anyway, brought up to maintain reserve, these accounts stretch me on the rack, for the elect, even as they assure me that God has spoken to them, or that they have understood the speech of trees and animals, neglect to tell me what it was that was imparted to them; or if they do, it comes out as purely personal details, or a rehash of the Clerical News. It’s an everlasting pity that no trained scientists have visions!” he ended his lengthy reply.

  “Do you think they could?” Agathe was testing him.

  Ulrich hesitated for an instant. Then he answered like a believer: “I don’t know; maybe it could happen to me!” When he heard himself saying these words he smiled, as if to mitigate them.

  Agathe smiled too; she now seemed to have the answer she had been hankering after, and her face reflected the small moment of letdown that follows the sudden cessation of a tension. Perhaps she now raised an objection only because she wanted to spur her brother on.

  “You know,” she said, “that I was raised in a very strict convent school. So I have the most scandalous urge to caricature anyone I hear talking about pious ideals. Our teachers wore a habit whose two colors formed a cross, as a sort of enforced reminder of one of the sublimest thoughts we were supposed to have before us all day long; but we never once thought it; we just called the good sisters the cross-spiders, because of the way they looked and their silky way of talking. That’s why, while you were reading aloud, I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.”