No More Learning

Agathe was not inclined to stop. "You don't even know for sure whether it's your duty," she went on. "You do it because that's how you are and because you enjoy it. And that's all I did! "
Suddenly she lost her self-control. Something was terribly sad.
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 1039
Tears sprang to her eyes, and a violent sob rose in her throat. To hide it from her brother's eyes, she threw her arms around his neck and hid her face against his shoulder. Ulrich felt her crying and the trem- bling of her back. A burdensome embarrassment came over him: he was aware of turning cold. At this moment, when he should have been sympathetic, all the tender and happy feelings he thought he had for his sister deserted him; his sensibility was disturbed and wouldn't function. He stroked Agathe's back and whispered some comforting words, but it went against his grain. Since he did not share her agitation, the contact of their two bodies seemed to him like that of two wisps of straw. He put an end to it by leading Agathe to a chair and himself sitting down in another, some distance away. Then he gave her his answer: "You're not enjoying this business with the will at all. And you never shall, because it's all been a disorderly mess! "
"Order? " Agathe exclaimed through her tears. "Duty? ''
She was really quite beside herself because Ulrich had behaved so coldly. But she was already smiling again. She realized that she would have to work things out for herself. She felt that the smile she had forced seemed to be hovering somewhere out there, far from her icy lips. Ulrich meanwhile had shaken off his embarrassment; he was even pleased not to have felt the usual physical stirring; he realized that this, too, would have to be different between them. But he did not have time to think about that now, because he could see that Agathe was deeply troubled, and so he began to talk.
"Don't be upset by the words I used," he pleaded, "and don't hold them against me. I suppose I'm wrong to use words such as 'order' and 'duty'-they sound too much like preaching. But why"-he now went off at a tangent-"why the devil is preaching contemptible? It really ought to be our greatest joy! "
Agathe had no desire to answer this.
Ulrich let it drop.
"Please don't think I'm trying to set myself up as morally supe-
rior! " he begged. "I didn't mean to say that I never do anything bad. What I don't like is having to do it in secret. I like the good highway robbers of morality, not the sneak thieves. I'd like to make a moral robber out of you," he joked, "and not let you err out of weakness. "
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"It's not a point of honor with me," his sister said from behind her distantly hovering smile.
"It's really extremely funny that there are times like ours, when all young people are infatuated with whatever's bad," he said with a laugh, to distance the conversation from the personal level. "This current preference for the morally gruesome is a weakness, of course. Probably middle-class gorging on goodness; being all sucked dry. I myself originally thought one had to say no to everything; ev- eryone thinks so who is between twenty-five and forty-five today; but of course it was only a kind of fashion. I can imagine a reaction set- ting in soon, and with it a new generation that will again stick moral- ity instead of immorality in its buttonhole. The oldest donkeys, who never in their lives felt any moral fervor, who merely uttered moral platitudes when the occasion called for them, will then suddenly be hailed as precursors and pioneers of a new character! "
Ulrich had risen to his feet and was restlessly pacing the room.
'We might put it this way," he suggested. "Good has become a cliche almost by its very nature, while evil remains criticism. The im- moral achieves its divine right by being a drastic critique of the moral! It shows us that life has other possibilities. It shows us up for liars. For this we show our gratitude by a certain forbearance. That there are truly delightful people who forge wills should prove that there is something amiss with the sanctity of private property. Even ifthis doesn't need proving, it is where our task begins: for every kind of crime, we must be able to conceive of criminals who can be ex- cused, even including infanticide or whatever other horrors there maybe. . . . "
He had been trying in vain to catch his sister's eye, even though he was teasing her by bringing up the will. Now she made an involuntary gesture of protest. She was no theoretician; the only crime she re- garded as excusable was her own, and she was insulted all over again by his comparison.
Ulrich laughed. "It looks like an intellectual game, but this kind of juggling does mean something," he assured her. "It goes to show that there's something amiss in the way we judge our conduct. And there really is, you know. In a company ofwill-forgers you would certainly stand up for the inviolability of the legal regulations; it's only in the company of the righteous that it all gets blurred and perverted. If
IntotheMillennium(TheCriminals) · 1 0 4 1
only Hagauer were a rogue, you would be flamingly just; it's too bad he's such a decent fellow! That's the seesaw we're on. "
He waited for a response but none came, so he shrugged his shoul- ders and came back to the point:
"We're looking to justify what you did. We have established that respectable people are deeply attracted to crime, though of course only in their imagination. We might add that criminals, to hear them talk, would almost without exception like to be regarded as respect- able people. So we might arrive at a definition: Crimes are the con- centrated form, within sinners, ofeverything other people work offin little irregularities, in their imagination and in innumerable petty ev- eryday acts and attitudes of spite and viciousness. W e could also say: Crimes are in the air and simply seek the path of least resistance, which leads them to certain individuals. We could even say that while they are the acts ofindividuals who are incapable ofbehaving morally, in the main they're the condensed expression of some kind of general human maladjustment where the distinction between good and evil is concerned. This is what has imbued us from our youth with the criti- cal spirit our contemporaries have never been able to get beyond! "
"But what is good and evil? " Agathe tossed off the question, while Ulrich remained oblivious to the pain his banter was causing her.
"Well, how would I know? " he answered with a laugh. "''ve only just noticed for the first time that I loathe evil. Until today I really didn't know how much. My dear Agathe, you have no idea what it's like," he complained moodily. "Take science, for instance! For a mathematician, to put it very simply, minus five is no worse than plus five. A scientist researching a problem mustn't recoil in horror from anything, and under certain conditions he might get more excited by a lovely cancer than a lovely woman. A man ofknowledge knows that nothing is true and that the whole truth will be revealed only at the end of time. Science is amoral. All our glorious thrusting of ourselves into the Unknown gets us out of the habit of being personally con- cerned with our conscience; in fact, it doesn't even give us the satis- faction of taking our conscience entirely seriously. And art? Doesn't it amount to a creation ofimages that don't correspond to the reali- ties of life? I'm not talking about bogus idealism, or the paintings of voluptuous nudes in a period when everyone goes around covered up to the eyeballs," he joked again. "But think of a real work of art: have
1042 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
you never had the feeling that something about it is reminiscent of the smell of burning metal you get from a knife you're whetting on a grindstone? It's a cosmic, meteoric, lightning-and-thunder smell, something divinely uncanny! "
This was the only point at which Agathe interrupted him with real interest: "Didn't you once write poetry yourself? '' she asked him.
"You still remember that? When did I let you in on it? '' Ulrich asked. "Yes; we all write verses at one time or another. I even went on doing it when I was a mathematician," he admitted. "But the older I got, the worse they became; not so much because of lack of talent, I think, as from a growing aversion to the disorderly and bohe- mian romanticism ofthat sort ofemotional excess. . . . "
His sister shook her head almost imperceptibly, but Ulrich noticed it. "Yes," he insisted, "a poem should be no more of an exceptional phenomenon than an act of goodness! But what, if I may ask, be- comes of the moment of inspiration the moment after? You love po- etry, I know; but what I'm saying is that it isn't enough to breathe out one great puff of fire and let it fade away. This kind of sporadic per- formance is the counterpart of the kind of morality that exhausts it- self in half-baked criticism. " And abruptly returning to his main subject, he said to his sister: "If I were to behave in this Hagauer matter the way you're expecting me to today, I would have to be skeptical, casual, and ironic. The exemplary children you or I might yet have would then be able to say truthfully of us that we belonged to a very secure period of middle-class values that was never plagued by doubts, or plagued at most by superficial doubts. But in fact you and I have already gone to such trouble over our philosophy . . . ! "
Ulrich probably wanted to say a great deal more; he was actually only leading up to some way of coming down on his sister's side, which he had already worked out, and it would have been good ifhe had revealed it to her. For she suddenly stood up and on some vague pretext got her outdoor things.
"So we're leaving it that I'm morally retarded? '' she asked with a forced attempt at humor. "I can't keep up with all you've been saying to the contrary! "
"We're both morally retarded! " Ulrich gallantly assured her. "Both of us! " And he was rather proud of the haste with which his sister left him without saying when she would return.
31
AGA THE W ANTS TO COMMIT SUICIDE AND MAKES A GENTLEMAN'S ACQUAINTANCE
In truth she had rusheq offto spare her brother the sight ofthe tears she could barely hold back. She was as sad as a person who has lost everything. She did not know why. It had come over her while Ulrich was talking. Why? She didn't know that either. He should have done something other than talk. What? She didn't know. He was right, of course, not to take seriously the "stupid coincidence" of her being upset and the arrival of that letter, and to go on talking as he always did. But Agathe had to get away.
At first she felt only the need to walk. She rushed headlong from their house. Where the layout ofthe streets forced her to detour, she always kept to the same general direction. She fled, in the way peo- ple and animals flee from a catastrophe. Why, she did not ask herself. It was only when she grew tired that she realized what she intended to do: never go back!
She would keep walking until dusk. Farther from home with every step. She assumed that by the time she came up against the barricade of evening her decision would be made. The decision was to kill her- self. It was not an actual decision to kill herself, but the expectation that by evening it would be. Behind this expectation was a desperate seething and whirling inside her head. She did not even have any- thing with her to kill herselfwith. Her little poison capsule lay some- where in a drawer or in a suitcase. The only clear thing about her death was the longing never to have to go back again. She wanted to walk out of life. That was where the walking came from. It was as if every step she took was already a step out of life.
As she tired she began to long for green fields and woods, for walk- ing in silence and the open air. She could not get there on foot. She took a streetcar. She had been brought up to control herself in pub- lic. So her voice betrayed no emotion when she bought her ticket and asked for directions. She sat straight-backed and impassive, with not
1043
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a finger twitching. And as she sat there the thoughts started coming. She would of course have felt better had she been able to let herself go; with her limbs fettered as they were, these thoughts came in large bundles that she vainly tried to force through an opening. She bore Ulrich a grudge for what he had said. She didn't want to hold it against him. She gave up her right to. What had she done for him? She was only taking up his time, and doing nothing for him in return; she was in the way of his work and his habits. When she thought of his habits she felt a pang. It seemed that no woman had entered his house in all the time she'd been there. Agathe was convinced that her brother always had to have a woman in his life. So he was depriving himself for her sake. At this moment she would have liked to turn back and tenderly beg his forgiveness. As there was no way she could make it up to him, she was being selfish and bad. But then she re- membered again how cold he had been. He was obviously sorry he had taken her in. To think of all he had planned and said before he got tired of her! Now he no longer mentioned any of it. Agathe's heart was again tormented with the great disillusionment her hus- band's letter had brought her. She was jealous. Senselessly and com- monly jealous. She would have liked to force herself on her brother; she felt the passionate and helpless friendship ofthe person throwing himself against his own rejection. "I could steal or walk the streets for him! " she thought, knowing this was ridiculous but not able to help it. Ulrich's conversations, with their humor and sovereign air of being above the battle, made a mockery ofthis idea. She admired his superiority and all his intellectual needs, which surpassed her own. But she didn't see why every idea always had to be equally true for everyone! In her humbled state she needed some personal comfort- ing, not edifying sermons! She did not want to be brave! And after a while, she reproached herself for being the way she was, and en- larged her pain by imagining that she deserved nothing better than Ulrich's indifference.
This self-denigration, for which neither Ulrich's conduct nor even Hagauer's upsetting letter was sufficient cause, was a temperamental outburst. Ever since Agathe had outgrown her childhood, not so very long ago, everything she regarded as her failure in the face of soci- ety's demands had had to do with her sense of not living in accord with her own deepest inclinations, or even in opposition to them. She
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 1045
inclined to devotion and trustfulness, for she had never become so much at home in solitude as her brother; and if she had found it im- possible to yield herself heart and soul to a person or a cause, it was because she had the capacity for some greater devotion, whether it reached out to the whole world or to God. There is the well-known path of devotion to all mankind that begins with an inability to get along with one's neighbor, and just so may a deep latent yearning for God arise in an antisocial character equipped with a great capacity for love; in that sense, the religious criminal is no greater paradox than the religious old woman who never found a husband. Agathe's behavior toward Hagauer, which had the absurd appearance of a selfish action, was as much the outburst of an impatient will as was the intensity with which she accused herself of losing life by her own weakness just when she had been awakened to it by her brother.
She soon lost patience with the slow, rumbling streetcar. When the buildings along the way grew lower and more rural, she got off and continued the rest of the way on foot. The courtyards were open; through archways and over low fences came glimpses of handymen at their chores, animals, children at play. The air was filled with a peace in whose distances voices sounded and tools banged; sounds moved in the bright air with the irregular, gentle motions of a butter- fly, while Agathe felt herself gliding like a shadow past them toward the rising ground of vineyards and woodland. Just once she paused, in front of a yard where coopers were at work and there was the good noise of mallets hammering on barrel staves. She had always liked watching such honest work and taken pleasure in the modest, sensi- ble, well-considered labor of the workmen. This time, too, she could not get enough of the rhythm of the mallets and the men's moving round and round the barrel. For a few moments it made her forget her misexy and plunged her into a pleasant, unthinking oneness with the world. She always admired people who could do this kind of task, with skills developed so variously and naturally out of a generally ac- knowledged need.
But there was nothing she wanted to do herself, although she had all kinds of mental and practical aptitudes. Life was complete without her. And suddenly, before she saw the connection, she heard church bells ringing, and could barely restrain herself from bursting into tears again. Both bells of the little local church had probably been chiming the whole time, but Agathe just now noticed
I046 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
it and was instantly overcome by how these useless chimes, excluded from the good, lavish earth and flying passionately through the air, were related to her own existence.
She hastily resumed walking, and accompanied by the chimes, which now would not leave her ears, she passed swiftly between the last of the houses and emerged where the road climbed the hillside with its vineyards and scattered bushes lining the paths below, while above, the bright green of the woods beckoned. Now she knew where she was going, and it was a beautiful feeling, as though with every step she were sinking more deeply into nature. Her heart pounded with joy and effort when she sometimes stopped and found the bells still accompanying her, though now hidden high in the air and scarcely audible. It seemed to her she had never heard bells chiming like this in the midst of an ordinary day, for no apparent festive reason, mingling democratically with the natural and self-suf- ficient affairs of men. But of all the tongues of this thousand-voiced city, this was the last to speak to her, and something in it seized hold of her as if to lift her high and swing her up the hill, only to drop her again as it faded into a slight metallic sound no better than all the chirping, rumbling, and rustling sounds of the countryside. So Agathe climbed and walked upward for perhaps another hour, until she suddenly found herself facing the little shrubby wilderness she had carried in her memory. It enclosed a neglected grave at the edge of the woods, where nearly a hundred years before a poet had killed himself and where, in accordance with his last wish, he had also been laid to rest. Ulrich had said that he was not a good poet, even if he was famous. Ulrich was sharply critical of the rather shortsighted po- etics that expressed a longing to be buried high up with a view. But Agathe had loved the inscription on the big stone slab since the day they had come this way and together deciphered the beautiful, rain- worn Biedermeier lettering, and she leaned over the black chain fence with its great angular links, which marked off the rectangle of death from life.
"I meant nothing to all of you" were the words the disgruntled poet had had inscribed on his gravestone, and Agathe thought that this could equally well be said of herself. This thought, here on the edge of the wooded pulpit above the greening vineyards and the alien, immeasurable city that was slowly waving its trails of smoke in
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 1047
the morning sun, moved her afresh. Impulsively she knelt down to press her forehead against one ofthe stone posts that held the chains; the unaccustomed position and the cool touch of the stone feigned the rather stiffand passive tranquillity of the death that was awaiting her. She tried to pull herself together, but was not immediately suc- cessful; bird calls intruded on her ear, so many and such various bird calls that it surprised her; branches stirred, and since she did not feel the wind she had the impression that the trees were waving their branches of their own accord. In a sudden hush, a faint pattering could be heard; the stone she was resting against, touching, was so smooth that she felt that a piece of ice between it and her forehead was keeping her from quite touching it. Only after a while did she realize that what distracted her was precisely what she was trying to hold on to, that fundamental sense of being superfluous which, re- duced to its simplest terms, could be expressed only in the words that life was so complete without her that she had no business being in it. This cruel feeling contained, at bottom, neither despair nor offense, but was rather a listening and looking on that Agathe had always known; it was just that she had no impulse, indeed no possibility, of taking a hand in her own fate. This state of exclusion was almost a shelter, just as there is a kind of astonishment that forgets to ask questions. She could just as well go away. Where to? There really must be a Somewhere. Agathe was not one of those people who can find satisfaction in their conviction of the emptiness of all illusions, which, as a way of accepting a disappointing fate, is equivalent to a militant and spiteful asceticism. She was generous and uncritical in such matters, unlike Ulrich, who subjected all his feelings to the most relentless scrutiny in order to outlaw any that did not pass the test. She was simply stupid! That's what she told herself. She didn't want to think things over! Defiantly she pressed her forehead against the iron chains, which gave a little and then stiffened in resistance. During these last weeks she had somehow begun to believe in God again, but without thinking of Him. Certain states of mind, in which she perceived the world differently from what it appeared to be, in such a way that even she lived no longer shut out but completely enveloped in a radiant certainty, had been brought, under Ulrich's influence, to something akin to an inward metamorphosis, a total transformation.
1048 • THE MAN WITH0 UT QUALITIES
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 be- tween 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 em- barrassed, 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 sever- ity 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 ef- feminate face showed hard, almost ascetic details, clearly the work of a relentlessly active will upon the soft basic material.
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 1049
Agathe did not know what to make of this face, which left her sus- pended 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 sur- prise. He had obviously been watching her for quite some time, be- cause 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 con- cerning 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 ofthe 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. Fi- nally, he said: "One can probably only help someone who is suffering from something one has experienced oneself. "
1050 • THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
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 rude- ness 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 suc- cessful 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 ofhigh society to hide her curiosity. "Still, you must have formed some notion of the kind of catastrophe I'm in- volved 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 gratitud~ that welled up in her. The stranger looked at her in astonishment/ then collected himself and said almost in rebuke: "You are probaMy still too young to know how simple life is. I t only becomes hopelessly con- fused when one is thinking of oneself; but as soon as one stops think- ing 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 modem 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 v e r b i a g e o n l y b e t r a y s t h e u s e r ' s n e e d t o b e f o g t h e r e a l m e a n i n g o f 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 ofour nature without stunting another. Then what's to be lived to the full? The
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mind or the instincts? Every passing whim or one's character? Self- ishness 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 nonegotisti- cal characters who may always be thinking about themselves, but not for their own benefit, which differs far more from the usual selfish- ness, which is always on the lookout for its own advantage, than does the complacent unselfishness ofthose 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 pic- ture of me," she said. "I can see it shining through your words, and it isn't flattering. "
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 with- out a special effort ofwill no one can achieve the integrity and stabil- ity 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
1052 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
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 al- ways 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 sug- gested 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 exagger- ation 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.
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 1053
''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 ifhe were thinking of thus saluting her again, but then something in him stiff- ened, 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 Gymna- sium," 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 lec- ture," 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 "Fraulein," 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 progres- sive 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 re- flected 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
1054 ·THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
might put an immediate end to everything between herself and this new friend, that much was clear. And she would have been sony; 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, Undner said with an offended smile: "I thought it must be something like that when I first caught sight ofyou! "
"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 inca- pable ofliving and acting from any wider perspective. Our esteemed poets," he added jealously, with an attempt at humor about Agathe's perfeiVid pilgrimage to the poet's grave, an attempt that only turned sour on his lips, "who play up to the sentiments ofyoung 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! "
"That sounds like a military code for archangels," Agathe said,
Into the Millennium (The Criminals) · 1055
"but I'm not inclined to agree with you. Let me walk with you part- way. You must explain how it is possible to think as you do. Which way are you going now?