The Man Without Qualities

by Robert Musil

  She would have been willing to imagine a God who opens up His world like a hiding place. But Ulrich said that this was not necessary, it could only do harm to imagine more than one could experience. And it was for him to decide in these matters. But then, it was also for him to guide her without abandoning her. He was the threshold between two lives, and all her longing for the one and all her flight from the other led first to him. She loved him as shamelessly as one loves life. When she opened her eyes in the morning, he awoke in every limb of her body. He was looking at her even now, from the dark mirror of her anguish: which made Agathe remember that she wanted to kill herself. She had a feeling that it was to spite him that she had run away to God when she had left home to kill herself. But that intention now seemed exhausted, to have sunk back to its source, which was that Ulrich had hurt her feelings. She was angry with him, she still felt that, but the birds were singing, and now she heard them again. She was just as confused as before, but it was now a joyful confusion. She wanted to do something, but it should strike out at Ulrich, not just at herself. The endless stupor in which she had been kneeling gave way to the warmth of the blood streaming back into her limbs as she rose to her feet.

  When she looked up, a man was standing beside her. She was embarrassed, not knowing how long he had been watching her. As her glance, still dark with agitation, met his, she saw that he was looking at her with unconcealed sympathy, manifestly hoping to inspire her with wholehearted confidence. The man was tall and lean and wore dark clothes, and a short blond beard covered his cheeks and chin. Beneath his mustache one could easily make out full, soft lips, which were in remarkably youthful contrast to the many gray hairs already scattered among the blond ones, as if age had forgotten them in the growth of hair. It was altogether not an easy face to read. The first impression led one to think of a secondary-school teacher; the severity in this face was not carved in hardwood but rather resembled something soft that had hardened under petty daily frustrations. But if one started with this softness, on which the manly beard seemed to have been planted in order to adjust it to a system with which the wearer concurred, then one realized that this originally rather effeminate face showed hard, almost ascetic details, clearly the work of a relentlessly active will upon the soft basic material.

  Agathe did not know what to make of this face, which left her suspended between attraction and repulsion; all she understood was that this man wanted to help her.

  “Life offers us just as much opportunity to strengthen the will as to weaken it,” the stranger said, wiping his glasses, which had been misted over, in order to see her better. “One should never run away from problems, but try to master them!” Agathe stared at him in surprise. He had obviously been watching her for quite some time, because his words were emerging from the middle of some interior monologue. Startled by his own voice, he raised his hat, his manners belatedly catching up with this essential gesture of courtesy, then quickly regained his composure and went straight on: “Do forgive my asking whether I may be of some help,” he said. “It seems to me that it is truly easier to speak of one’s pain to a stranger, even concerning a grave shock to the self, such as I believe I am witnessing here?”

  Evidently it was not without effort that the stranger spoke to her; apparently he had felt called upon to do so out of duty, as an act of charity; and now that he found himself walking beside this beautiful woman, he was literally struggling for words. For Agathe had simply stood up and begun slowly to walk with him away from the grave and out from under the trees into the open space at the edge of the hills, neither of them deciding whether they wanted to choose one of the paths leading downward, or which one. Instead, they walked along the hilltop for quite a distance, talking, then turned back, and then turned back to walk in the original direction once more; neither of them knew where the other had meant to go originally, and neither wanted to interfere with the other’s plans.

  “Won’t you tell me why you were crying?” the stranger persisted, in the mild tones of a physician asking where it hurts.

  Agathe shook her head. “It wouldn’t be easy to explain,” she said, and suddenly asked him: “But tell me something else: What makes you so sure you can help me without knowing me? I’d be inclined to think that one can’t help anyone!”

  Her companion did not answer right away. He opened his mouth to speak several times, but seemed to force himself to hold back. Finally, he said: “One can probably only help someone who is suffering from something one has experienced oneself.”

  He fell silent. Agathe laughed at the thought that this man could suppose himself to have been through what she was suffering, which would have been repellent to him had he known what it was. But her companion seemed not to hear this laugh, or to regard it as a rudeness born of nerves. After a pause, he said calmly: “Of course, I don’t mean that anyone has a right to imagine that he can tell anyone else what to do. But you see, fear in a catastrophe is infectious—and successful escape is also infectious! I mean just having escaped as from a fire, when everyone has lost his head and run into the flames: what an immense help when a single person stands outside, waving, does nothing but wave and shout incomprehensibly that there is a way out. . . .”

  Agathe nearly laughed again at the horrible ideas this kindly man harbored; but just because they seemed so out of character, they molded his wax-soft face almost uncannily.

  “You talk like a fireman!” she retorted, deliberately adopting the teasing, frivolous tone of high society to hide her curiosity. “Still, you must have formed some notion of the kind of catastrophe I’m involved in, surely?” Unintentionally, the seriousness of her scorn showed through, for the simple idea that this man presumed to offer her help aroused her indignation by the equally simple gratitude that welled up in her. The stranger looked at her in astonishment, then collected himself and said almost in rebuke: “You are probably still too young to know how simple life is. It only becomes hopelessly confused when one is thinking of oneself; but as soon as one stops thinking of oneself and asks oneself how to help someone else, it’s quite simple!”

  Agathe thought it over in silence. And whether it was her silence or the inviting distance into which his words took wing, the stranger went on, without looking at her:

  “It’s a modern superstition to overestimate the personal. There’s so much talk today about cultivating one’s personality, living one’s life to the full, and affirming life. But all this fuzzy and ambiguous verbiage only betrays the user’s need to befog the real meaning of his protest. What, exactly, is to be affirmed? Anything and everything, higgledy-piggledy? Evolution is always associated with resistance, an American thinker has said. We cannot develop one side of our nature without stunting another. Then what’s to be lived to the full? The mind or the instincts? Every passing whim or one’s character? Selfishness or love? If our higher nature is to fulfill itself, the lower must learn renunciation and obedience!”

  Agathe was considering why it should be simpler to take care of others than of oneself. She was one of those completely nonegotistical characters who may always be thinking about themselves, but not for their own benefit, which differs far more from the usual selfishness, which is always on the lookout for its own advantage, than does the complacent unselfishness of those who are always worrying about their fellow human beings. So what her companion was saying was at bottom foreign to her nature, and yet it somehow moved her, and the words he seized hold of so forcefully sailed alarmingly before her eyes as though their meaning were more to be seen in the air than heard. Also, they happened to be walking along a ridge that gave Agathe a marvelous view of the deep curving valley below, a position that evidently gave her companion the sense of being in a pulpit or on a lecture platform. She stopped and with her hat, which all this time she had been swinging carelessly in her hand, she drew a line through the stranger’s argument: “So you have formed your own picture of me,” she said. “I can see it shining through your words, and it isn’t flatt
ering.”

  The tall gentleman seemed dismayed, for he hadn’t meant to hurt her, and Agathe looked at him with a friendly laugh. “You seem to be confusing me with the cause of the liberated personality, and a rather neurotic and unpleasant personality at that!” she maintained.

  “I was only speaking of the underlying principle of the personal life,” he said apologetically. “I must confess that the situation in which I found you suggested to me that you might want some helpful advice. The underlying principle of life is so widely misunderstood nowadays. Our entire modern neurosis, with all its excesses, arises solely from a flabby inner state in which the will is lacking, for without a special effort of will no one can achieve the integrity and stability that lifts a person above the obscure confusion of the organism!”

  Here again were two words, “integrity” and “stability,” that echoed her old longings and self-accusations. “Do tell me what you mean by that,” she asked him. “Surely there can only really be a will when one has a goal?”

  “What I mean doesn’t matter,” was the answer she received, in a tone both mild and brusque. “Don’t all the great ancient scriptures of mankind tell us with utmost clarity what to do and not to do?”

  Agathe was disconcerted.

  “To set up fundamental ideals of life,” her companion explained, “requires such a penetrating knowledge of life and of people, and such a heroic mastery of the passions and egotism, as has been granted to only very few individuals in the course of thousands of years. And these teachers of mankind have throughout the ages always taught the same truths.”

  Agathe instinctively resisted, as would anyone who considers her young flesh and blood better than the bones of dead sages.

  “But precepts formulated thousands of years ago can’t possibly apply to conditions today!” she cried.

  “Those precepts are not nearly as foreign as is claimed by skeptics, who are out of touch with living experience and self-knowledge,” her chance companion answered, with bitter satisfaction. “Life’s deepest truths are not arrived at in debate, as Plato already said. Man hears them as the living meaning and fulfillment of his self. Believe me, what makes the human being truly free, and what takes away his freedom, what gives him true bliss and what destroys it, isn’t subject to ‘progress’—it is something every genuinely alive person knows perfectly well in his own heart, if he will just listen to it!”

  Agathe liked the expression “living meaning,” but then something suddenly occurred to her: “Are you religious?” she asked him. She looked at her companion with curiosity. He gave no answer.

  “You’re not a priest, by any chance . . . ?” she continued, but was reassured by his beard, for the rest of his appearance suddenly suggested that surprising possibility. It must be said to her credit that she would not have been more astounded had he casually referred to “our sublime ruler, the divine Augustus.” She knew that religion plays a great role in politics, but one is so used to not taking ideas bandied about in public life seriously that to expect the “Christian” parties to be composed of true believers is the same kind of exaggeration as expecting every postal clerk to be a philatelist.

  After a lengthy, somewhat wavering pause, the stranger replied: “I would prefer not to answer your question; you are too remote from all that.”

  But Agathe was seized with a lively curiosity.

  “I’d like to know who you are!” she demanded to be told, and this was, after all, a feminine privilege that was not to be denied. He showed the same, slightly comical hesitation as before, when he had belatedly raised his hat to her. His arm seemed to twitch as if he were thinking of thus saluting her again, but then something in him stiffened, as though one army of thoughts had battled another and won, instead of a trifling gesture being playfully performed.

  “My name is Lindner, and I teach at the Franz Ferdinand Gymnasium,” he said, adding after a moment’s thought: “I also lecture at the University.”

  “Then you might know my brother?” Agathe asked in relief, adding Ulrich’s name. “He read a paper there recently, if I’m not mistaken, at the Pedagogical Society, on Mathematics and the Humanities, or something like that.”

  “Only by name. We’ve never met. Oh yes, I did attend that lecture,” Lindner admitted. He seemed to say it with a certain reserve, but Agathe’s attention was caught by his next question:

  “Your father must have been the distinguished jurist?”

  “Yes. He died recently, and I’m now staying with my brother,” Agathe said freely. “Won’t you come and see us?”

  “I’m afraid I have no time for social calls,” Lindner replied brusquely, his eyes cast down in uncertainty.

  “In that case I hope you won’t have any objections if I come to see you sometime,” Agathe said, paying no attention to his reluctance. “I do need your advice.” And since he had been calling her “Fräulein,” she said: “I’m married; Hagauer is my name.”

  “Then you’re the wife of the noted Professor of Education Hagauer . . . !” Lindner cried. He had begun the sentence on a note of high enthusiasm, but it wavered and became hesitant. For Hagauer was two things: he was in education and he was a progressive in education. Lindner was actually opposed to his ideas, but how bracing it was to recognize, through the uncertain mists of a female psyche, which has just proposed the impossible notion of inviting herself to a man’s house, the familiar form of an enemy; it was the drop from the second to the first of these sentiments that was reflected in his change of tone.

  Agathe had noticed it. She did not know whether to tell Lindner of the situation between her husband and herself. If she told him, it might put an immediate end to everything between herself and this new friend, that much was clear. And she would have been sorry; precisely because there was so much about Lindner that made her laugh at him, he also made her feel that she could trust him. The impression, borne out by his appearance, that this man seemed to want nothing for himself oddly moved her to be forthright with him: he quieted all longing, and that made frankness quite natural.

  “I’m about to get a divorce,” she finally admitted.

  A silence followed. Lindner now had a downcast look. It put Agathe out of all patience with him. Finally, Lindner said with an offended smile: “I thought it must be something like that when I first caught sight of you!”

  “Does that mean you’re opposed to divorce too?” Agathe cried, giving free rein to her irritation with him. “Of course, you’re bound to be against it. But it really does put you rather behind the times!”

  “At least I can’t regard it as matter-of-factly as you do.” Lindner defended himself pensively, took off his glasses, polished them, put them on again, and contemplated Agathe. “It seemed to me you have too little willpower,” he stated.

  “Willpower? My will, for what it’s worth, is to get a divorce!” Agathe cried, knowing it was not a very sensible answer.

  “Please don’t misunderstand me,” Lindner gently corrected her. “I am of course willing to believe that you have good reasons. It’s only that I see things in a different light. The free and easy morals prevailing nowadays amount, in effect, to nothing more than a sign that the individual is chained hand and foot to his own ego and incapable of living and acting from any wider perspective. Our esteemed poets,” he added jealously, with an attempt at humor about Agathe’s perfervid pilgrimage to the poet’s grave, an attempt that only turned sour on his lips, “who play up to the sentiments of young ladies, and are therefore overestimated by them, have a far easier role to play than I, when I tell you that marriage is an institution of responsibility and the mastery of the human being over its passions! Before anyone dissociates himself from the external safeguards that mankind has wisely set up against its own undependability, he should recognize that isolation from and disobedience to the greater whole do far more harm than the physical disappointments we so fear!”