No More Learning

"I think, Gerda, that I'm done with science now. Which means that I am niaking common cause with the younger generation. Is it enough to swear to you that knowledge is akin to greed? That it is a shabby form of thriftiness? A supercilious kind of spiritual capitalism? There is more feeling in me than you think. But I want to spare you the kind of talk that amounts to nothing but words. "
"You must get to know Hans bett~r," Gerda replied weakly, then she erupted again: "Anyway, you'd never understand that it's possi- ble to fuse with others into a community, without any thought of yourself! "
"Does Hans still come so often? " Ulrich asked warily. Gerda shrugged her shoulders.
Her shrewd parents had refrained from forbidding Hans Sepp the house altogether; he was allowed to come a few days every month. In tum Hans Sepp, the student who was nothing and had as yet no pros- pect of becoming something, had to promise not to make Gerda do anythingsheshouldn't,andtosuspendhisprop~gandizingforsome . mystical, Germanic action. In this way they hoped to rob him of the charm of forbidden fruit. And Hans'Sepp in his chastity (only the sensual man wants to possess, but then sensuality is a Jewish-capital- istic trait) had calmly given his word as requested, without, however,· taking it to mean that he would give up his frequent secret comings
and goings, making incendiary speeches, hotly pressing Gerda's hands or even kissing her, all of which still comes naturally to soul- mates. but only that he would refrain from advocating sexual union without benefit of clergy or civic authority, which he had been ad- vocating, but on a purely theoretical plane. He had pledged hi_s word all the more readily as he did not feel that he and Gerda were spiritu- ally mature enough as yet to turn his principles into action; setting up a barrier to the temptations of the baser instincts was quite in line with his way of thinking. .
But the two young people naturally suffered under these restraints imposed on them before they had found their own inner discipline. Gerda especially would not have put up with such interference from her parents, had it not been for her own uncertainties; this made her resentment all the greater. She did not really love her young friend all that much; it was more a matter of translating her opposition to her parents into an attachment to him. Had Gerda been born some years later than she was, her papa would have been one of the richest men in town, even if not too highly regarded as a result, and her mother would have admired him again, before Gerda could have been of an age to experience the bickerings of her progenitors as a conflict within herself. She would then probably have taken pride in being of"racially mixed" parentage; but as things stood, she rebelled against her parents and their problems, did not want to be. genetically tainted by them, and was blond, free, Germanic, and forceful, as if she had. nothing at all to do with them. This solution, as good as it looked, had the disadvantage that she had never got around to bring- ing the worm that was gnawing at her inwardly out into the light of day. In her home, nationalism and racism were treated as nonexis- tent, even though they were convulsing half of Europe with hysteri- cal ideas and everything in ·the Fischel household in particular turned on nothing else. Whatever Gerda knew of it had come to her from the outside, in the dark form of rumors, suggestion, and exag- geration. The paradox of her parents-who normally reacted strongly to anything talked about by many people-making so nota- ble an exception in this case had made a deep impression early in her life, and since she attached no definite, objective meaning to this ghostly presence, she tended to connect with it everything disagree- able and peculiar in her home life, especially during her adolescence.
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One day she met the Christian-Gennanic circle ofyoung people to which Hans Sepp belonged, and suddenly felt she had found her true home. It wou:ld be hard to say what these young people actually believed in; they fonned one of those innumerable undefined "free- spirited" little sects that have infested Gennan youth ever since the breakdown of the humanistic ideal. They were not racial anti-Sem- ites but opponents of "the Jewish mind," by which they meant capi- talism and socialism, science, reason, parental authority and parental arrogance, calculation, psychology, and skepticism. Their basic doc- trinal device was the "symbol"; as far as Ulrich could make out, and he had, after all, some understanding of such things, what they meant by "symbol" was the great images ofgrace, which made every- thing that is confused and dwarfed in life, as Hans Sepp put it, clear and great, images that suppress the noise of the senses and dip the forehead in streams of transcendence. Such symbols were the Isen- heim Altar, the Egyptian pyramids, and Novalis; Beethoven and Ste- fan George were acceptable approximations. But they did not state, in so many words, what a symbol was: first, because a symbol cannot be expressed in so many words; second, because Aryans do not deal in dry fonnulas, which is why they achieved only approximations of symbols during the last century; and third, because some centuries only rarely produce the transcendent moment of grace in the tran- scendent human being.
Gerda, who was no fool, secretly felt not a little distrust toward these overblown sentiments, but she also distrusted her distrust, in which she thought she detected the legacy of her parents' rational- ism. Behind her fa~ade of independence she was anxiously at pains to disobey her parents, in dread that her bloodlines might hinder her from following Hans's ideas. She felt deeply mutinous against the taboos girding the morals of her so-called good family and against the arrogant parental rights of intrusion that threatened to suffocate ~er personality, while Hans, who had "no family at all," as her mother put it, suffered much less than she did; he had emerged from her circle of companions as Gerda's "spiritual guide," passionately ha- rangued the girl, who was as old as he was, trying to transport her, with his tirades accompanied by kisses, into the "region of the Un- conditional," though in practice he was quite adept at coming to tenns with the conditioned state of the Fischel household, as long as
he was permitted to reject it "on principle," which of course always led to rows with Papa Leo.
"My dear Gerda," Ulrich said after a while, "your friends tor- ment you about your father-they really are the worst kind of blackmailers! "
Gerda turned pale, then red. "You are no longer young yourself," she replied. ''You think differently from us. " She lmew that she had stung Ulrich's vanity, and added in a conciliatory tone: "I don't ex- pect much from love anyway. Maybe I am wasting my time with Hans, as you say; maybe I have to resign myself altogether to the idea that I'll never love anyone enough to open every crevice of my soul to him: my thoughts and feelings, work and dreams; I don't even think that would be so very awful. "
"How wise beyond your years you sound, Gerda, when you talk like your friends," Ulrich broke in.
Gerda was annoyed. "When I talk with my friends," she said, "our thoughts flow from one to the other, and we lmow that we live and speak as one with our people-do you have any idea what this means? We stand with countless others ofour own kind, we feel their presence, in a sensory, physical way I'm sure you've never . . . In fact, you can't even imagine such a thing, can you? Your desire has always been for asingle person; you think like a beast ofprey! "
Why a beast of prey? Her words hung in midair, giving her away; she realized their senselessness and felt ashamed of her eyes, wide with fear, which were staring at Ulrich.
"Let's not go into that," Ulrich said gently. "Let me tell you a story instead. Do you know"-he drew her closer with his hand, inside which her wrist disappeared like a child among high crags-"the sensational story of the capture of the moon? You know, of course, that long ago our earth had several moons. And there's a very popular theory that such moons are not what we take them for, cosmic bodies that have cooled like the earth itself, but great globes of ice rushing through space that have come too close to the earth and are held fast by it. Our moon is said to be the last of them. Come and have a look at it! "
Gerda had followed him to the window and looked for the pale moon in the sunny sky.
"Doesn't it look like a disk ofice? " Ulrich asked. "That's no source
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of light. Have you ever wondered why the man in the moon always faces us the sam~. way? Our last moon is no long~rturning on its axis, that's why; it's already fixed in place! You see, once the moon has come into the earth's po-. yer it doesn't merely revolve around the earth but is drawn steadily closer. We don't notice it because it takes thousands of years or even longer for the screw to tighten. But there's no getting away from it, and there must have been thousands of years in the history of the earth during which the previous moons were drawn very close and went on racing in orbit with incredible speed. And just as our present moon pulls a tide from three to six feet high after it, an earlier one would have dragged in its wake whole mountain ranges of water and mud, tumbling all over the globe. We can hardly imagine the terror in which generation after generation must have lived on such a crazy earth for thousands upon thousands of years. "
"But were there . human beings on earth already? " Gerda asked.
"Certainly. In the end, such an ice moon cracks up, comes crash- ing down like giant hailstones, and the mountainous flood it has been dragging along in its orbit collapses and covers the whole globe with one vast tidal wave before it settles down again: That's nqne other than the great biblical Flood, meaning a great universal inundation! How else could all the myths be iu such agreement, if mankind hadn't experienced it all? And since we have one moon left, such ages are bound to come once more. It's a strange thought. . . . "
Gerda gazed breathlessly out c;>f the window and up at the moon; her hand was still resting in his, the moon was a pale, ugly stain on the sky, and it was precisely this unassuming presence that made this fantastic cosmic adventure-of which she somehow saw herself as the victim-look like an ordinary, everyday reality.
"But there's no truth at all to this story," Ulrich said. "The experts call it a crackpot theory, and the moon isn't really coming any closer to the earth; it is, in fact, thirty-two kilometers farther from us than it should be, according to our calculations, if I remember it right. "
"Then why did you tell me this story? " Gerda asked, and tried to extricate her hand from his. But her defiance had quite run out of steam, as it always did when she spoke with this man, who was cer-. tainly not Hans's intellectual inferior and yet managed to keep from going to extremes in his Views, to keep his fingernails clean and his
hair combed. Ulrich noticed the fine black down growing like a con- tradiction on Gerda's fair skin; the tiny hairs sprouting from her body seemed to bespeak the variously composite nature of poor modem mankind.
"I don't really know," he replied. "Shall I come and see you again? "
Gerda took out the excitement of her liberated hand on various small objects, which she pushed this way and that, without saying anything.
"See you soon, then," Ulrich promised, although this had not been his intention before he came.
74
THE FOURTH CENTURY B. C. VERSUS THE YEAR 1797· ULRICH RECEIVES ANOTHER LETTER FROM HIS FATHER
The rumor had quickly spread that the meetings at Diotima's were an extraordinary success. And now Ulrich received an unusually long letter from his father, stuffed with enclosed pamphlets and offprints. The letter read more or less like this:
My dear son:
Your extended silence . . .
However, I have had the pleasure ofhearing from another
source that my efforts on your behalf . . . my kind friend Count Stallburg . . . His Grace Count Leinsdorf . . . our kinswoman the wife of Section ChiefTuzzi . . . And now I must ask you, if you
· will, to use all your influence in your new circle in the following matter:
The world would come apart if everything held to be true were indeed to be accepted as such and every will could have its way
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as long as it seems to itself legitimate. All of us are therefore duty-bound to determine the one truth and the proper aim; then, insofar as we have succeeded in so doing, to take care, with an unflinching sense of our duty, that it is set down in the clear form of scientific thought. You may gather from this what it means when I tell you that in lay circles, but also, sad to say, in scientific circles susceptible to the promptings of a confused age, an extremely dangerous movement has been afoot for a long time to bring about certain presumed reforms and ameliorations in the proposed revision of the penal code. To fill you in, a committee of noted experts has been in existence for a number of years, appointed by the Minister of Justice to draw up such a proposed revision, to which committee I have the honor to belong, as does my university colleague Professor Schwung, whom you inay remember from earlier days before I had seen through him, so thatfor many years he could pass as my best friend. As regards the liberalizations mentioned above, a rumor has reached me-unfortunately only too likely to be true! -that in the approaching jubilee year of our revered and merciful sovereign, exploiting, as it were, all inclinations to magnanimity, special efforts are likely to be made to pave the way for just such a disastrous emasculation of our legal system. It goes without saying that Professor Schwung and I are equally resolved to forestall this.
I realize that you are not versed in legal matters, but the chances are you know that the method of breaching our fortifications most favored by the present tendency to legal obfuscation, which falsely dubs itself humanitarianism, consists in the effort to extend the concept of mental impairment, for which punishment is not in order, in the vague form of diminished responsibility, even to those numerous individuals who are neither insane nor morally normal: that army of inferior persons the morally feebleminded, which sadly enough constitutes one of the ever-growing diseases of our civilization. You will see for yourself that this concept of diminished responsibility-if you
can call it a concept, which I contest-is most intimately connected with the manner in which we interpret the concepts of
full responsibility, or irresponsibility, as the case may be, and this brings me to the point of this letter:
Proceeding from already existing formulations of the law, and in view of the circumstances cited, I have proposed to the previously mentioned planning committee the following version of Paragraph 318 of our future penal code:
"No criminal act has been committed if the perpetrator was in a state of unconsciousness or pathological disturbance of his mind at the time he was engaged in the act under consideration, so that-" and Professor Schwung submitted a proposal beginning with exactly the same words.
But then he continued as follows: "so that he could not exercise his free will," while mine was to read: "so that he did not have the capacity to perceive the wrongfulness of his act. " I must admit that I did not at first realize the malicious intent of this contradiction. My personal view has always been this, that as the intellect and reasoning power develops, the will comes to dominate desires or instincts by way of considered thoughts and the decisions springing from them. Any willed act is accordingly always the result of prior thought and not purely instinctive. Man is free insofar as he has the power of choice in the exercise of his will; when under the influence of human cravings, that is to say, cravings prompted by his sensual nature which interfere with his ability to think clearly, then he is not free. Volition is simply not a matter of chance but an act of self-determination arising necessarily from within the person, and so the will is determined by thought, and when the thought process is disturbed, the will is no longer the will, as the man's action is prompted only by his natural cravings. . I am ofcourse aware that the opposite view is also represented in the literature, i. e. , that thought is regarded as being determined by the will. This is a view, however, that has its adherents among modem jurists only since 1797, while the one I hold has stood up to all attacks since the fourth century B. C. But to show that I was willing to meet my colleague halfway, I put forward a formulation that would join both proposals, as follows:
"No criminal act shall have been committed if the offender was at the time of his act in a state of unconsciousness or a
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morbid disturbance ofhis mental activity, so that he did not have the capacity to perceive the wrongfulness of his act and could not exercise his free will. "
But here Professor Schwung revealed himself in his true colors! Showing no appreciation whatsoever of my willingness to meet him halfway, he arrogantly insisted that the "and" in my statement had to be replaced with an "or. " You see the point? What differentiates the thinker from the layman is precisely this fine distinction of an "or" where the layman simply puts an "and," and Schwung was trying to stigmatize me as a superficial thinker by exposing my readiness to find a compromise, using the "and" to unite both formulations, exposing it to the suspicion that I had failed to grasp the full magnitude ofthe difference to be bridged, with all its implications!
It goes without saying that from that moment on I have rigorously opposed him on every point.
I immediately withdrew my compromise proposal and have had to insist on the acceptance of my first version without any compromise whatsoever; since when, however, Schwung has been making trouble for me with a most perfidious ingenuity. He claims, for instance, that under my proposed version, which is based on the capacity to recognize a wrongful act as such, a person who suffers from special delusions but is otherwise normal, as sometimes happens, could be exonerated on grounds of mental illness only if it could be proved that this person had assumed, because of his delusions, the existence of circumstances under which his act would be justified or not punishable under the law, so that he would have been acting correctly, although within a false concept of reality. This objection has no merit at all, however, for while empirical logic recognizes the existence of persons who are partly insane and partly sane, the logic of the law must never admit such a mixture ofjuridical states; before the law, a person is either respons. ible for his actions or not responsible, and we may assume that even in persons suffering from special kinds of delusions, a general capacity to know right from wrong still ~sts. If this is blurred by delusions in a specific instance, it needs only a special effort of the intelligence to bring
it into harmony with the rest of the personality, and there is no reason to see any special problem in that.
And so I immediately pointed out to Professor Schwung that if the state of being responsible and that of not being responsible for one's actions cannot logically exist simultaneously, these states must be assumed to follow each other in rapid alternation, giving rise to the problem, especially where his theory is concerned, from which ofthese alternating states has the act in question resulted? To determine this, you would have to cite all the influences to which the accused has been subjected since his birth, and everything that may have influenced the actions of all his forebears, from whom his good and bad trafts are inherited.
You will hardly believe this, but Schwung actually had the cheek to retort that this was quite so, as the logic of the law must never admit a mixture of two juridical states with respect to one and the same act, so that it is necessary to decide even with regard to each specific act of volition whether it was possible for the accused, in the light of his psychological history, to control his will or not. He chooses to claim that we are far more clearly aware of our free will than of the fact that everything that happens has a cause, and as long as we are basically free, we are also free with respect to specific causes, so that we must assume that in such a case it only requires a special effort of the will to resist the causally determined criminal impulses.
At this point Ulrich desisted from further exploration of his fa- ther's plans and pensively hefted in his hand the many enclosures cited in the letter's margin. Casting one more hasty glance at the let- ter's conclusion, he learned that his father expected him to use his "objective influence" on Counts Leinsdorf and Stallburg, and strongly advised him to warn the appropriate committees of the Par- allel Campaign in good time of the dangers to the spiritual founda- tion of the entire government should so important a problem be wrongly formulated and resolved in the Year of the Jubilee.
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75
GENERAL STUMM VON BORDWEHR CONSIDERS VISITS TO DIOTIMA AS A DELIGHTFUL CHANGE FROM HIS USUAL RUN OF DUTY
The tubby little General had paid Diotima another visit. Although the soldier has but a modest part to play in the council chamber, he began by saying, he would take it upon himself to predict that the state is the power to hold one's own in the struggle among nations, and that the military strength displayed in peacetime wards off war. But Diotima had instantly pulled him up short.
"General," she said, quivering with indignation, "all of life de- pends upon the forces of peace; even the life of business, rightly re- garded, is a form of poetry. "
The little General stared at her for a moment, dumbfounded, but soon regained his seat in the saddle.
"Your Excellency . . . ,"he hastened to agree. In order to under- stand this form of address, we must remember that Diotima's hus- band was a ministerial section chief, and that in Kakania a section chief held the same rank as divisional commanders, who alone were entitled to be addressed as Excellency and only when on duty, at that; but since the soldier's profession is a knightly one, no soldier could expect to advance his career without so addressing them even when off duty, and in the spirit of chivalrous striving one also ad- dressed their wives as Excellency, without wasting much thought on the question of when they were on duty. Such intricate considera- tions flashed through the little General's mind and enabled him tq reassure Diotima instantly, with his first words, of his unqualified agreement and humble devotion, as he said, "Your Excellency takes the words out of my mouth. It goes without saying that, for political reasons, the W ar Ministry could not have been considered when the committees were set up, but we heard that the great movement is to be pacifist in it~aims-an international·peace campaign, they say, or
perhaps the donation of Austrian murals to the Peace Palace at The Hague-and I can assure Your Excellency of our entire sympathy with such an aim. People generally tend to have certain misconcep- tions about the military; of course I won't deny that a young lieuten- ant is likely to yearn for a war, but all responsible quarters are most deeply convinced that the sphere of force, which we unfortunately do represent, must be linked with the blessings of the human spirit, precisely as Your Excellency has just put it. "
He now dug a little brush out of his trouser pocket and went over his little mustache with it a number oftimes; it was a bad habit dating back to his time as a cadet, a phase during which the mustache still stands for life's impatiently awaited great hope, and he was totally unaware of it. His big brown eyes were Hxed on Diotima's face, try- ing to read the effect of his words: Diotima seemed mollified, though in his presence she never quite was, and deigned to fill him in on what had been going on since the Hrst meeting. The general showed enthusiasm, especially for the Great Council, expressed his admira- tion for Arnheim, and declared his conviction that such a gathering was bound to bear splendid fruit.
"There are so many people, after all, who don't realize how little order there is in the world of the mind," he explained. "I am even convinced, if Your Excellency will permit me to say so, that most people suppose they are seeing some progress in the order of things every day. They see order everywhere: in the factories, the offices, the railway timetables, the schools-here I may also mention proudly our oWn. barracks, which in their modest way positively recall the discipline of a good orchestra-and no matter where you lo. ok, you will see order of some kind, rules and regulations for pedestri- ans, drivers, taxation, churches, business, social protocol, etiquette, morality, and so on. I'm sure that almost everyone considers our era the best-ordered of all time. Don't you have this feeling too, deep down, Your Excellency? I certainly do. If I'm not very careful, I let myself be overcome by the feeling that the modern spirit rests pre- cisely on such a greater order, and that the great empires of Nineveh and Rome fell only because somehow they let things slide. That's
what I think most people feel; they go on the unspoken assumption that the past is dead and gone as a punishment for something that got out of order. But of course that's a delusion that people who know
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their history shouldn't succu~b to. It's why, unfortunateiy, we can't do without power and the soldier's profession. "
It was deeply gratifying to the General to chat like this with this brilliant young woman; what a delightful change from the usual run of his official duties. But Diotima had no idea how to answer him, so she fell back on repeating herself:
'W e really do hope to bring the most distinguished minds to bear on it, though our task even then will be a hard one. You can't imagine what a great variety of suggestions keep pouring in, and we do want to make the best choices. But you were speaking of order, General. We will· never reach our goal through order, by a sober weighing of pros and cons, comparisons and tests. Our solution must come as a flash of lightning, a fire, an intuition, a synthesis! Looking at the his- tory of mankind, we see no logical development; what it does sug- gest, with its sudden flashes of inspiration, the meaning of which emerges only later on, is a great poem! " .
"If I may say so, Your Excellency," the General replied, "a soldier knows very little about poetry; but if anyone can breathe lightning and fire into a movement, it is Your Excellency; that much an old army officer can understand. "
COUNT LEINSDORF HAS HIS DOUBTS
So far the tubby little General had been quite urbane, even though he had come uninvited to see her, and Diotima had confided more to him than she had intended. What made her fear him nonetheless, so that she aftexward regretted again her amiability to him, was not re- ally his doing but, as Diotima told herself, her old friend Count Leinsdorf's. Could His Grace be jealous? And if so, of whom? Al- though he always put in a brief appearance at meetings, Leinsdorf did not seem as favorably inclined to the Council as Diotima had ex-
pected. His Grace was decidedly averse to what he called mere liter- ature. It stood for something he associated with Jews, newspapers, sensation-hungry booksellers, and the liberal, hopelessly garrulous paid hirelings of the bourgeoisie; the expression "mere literature" had positively become his new signature phrase.
Every time Ulrich offered to read him the latest proposals that had come in the mail, including all the suggestions for moving the world forward or back- ward, he would cut him off with the words everyone uses when in addition to his own plans he hears about those everyone else has:
"No, no, I'm busy today, and all that is mere literature anyway. "
What he was thinking of, in contrast to mere literature, was fields, the men who worked them, little country churches, and that great order of things which God had bound as firmly together as the sheaves on a mown field, an order at once comely, sound, and re- warding, even if it did sometimes tolerate distilleries on country es- tates because one had to keep pace with the times. Given this tranquil breadth of outlook, gun clubs and dairy cooperatives, no matter how far from the great centers they were to be found, must appear as part and parcel of that solid order and community; and if they should be moved to make a claim on general philosophical prin- ciples, that claim must enjoy the priority of a duly registered spiritual property, as it were, over any spiritual claims put forward by private individuals. This is why, every time Diotima wanted to speak with him seriously about something she had gleaned from her Great Minds, Count Leinsdorf was usually holding in his hand, or pulling out of his pocket, some petition from a club of five simpletons, saying that this paper weighed more in the world of real problems than the bright ideas of some genius. ·
This attitude resembled the one praised by Section ChiefTuzzi, as embodied in his ministerial archives, which withheld their official recognition of the Council's existence while taking every fleabite from the most insignificant provincial news sheet in deadly earnest; and Diotima, when beset by such problems, had no one she could confide in except Amheim. But Arnheim, of all people, Jook His Grace's part in the matter. It was he who explained to her about that grandseigneur's tranquil breadth of outlook, when she complained to him about Count Leinsdorf's predilection for crack shots and co-op- dairies.
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"His Grace believes that we must take our direction from the land and the times," he explained gravely. "Believe me, it comes naturally of owning land. The soil uncomplicates life, just as. it purifies water. Even I feel its effect every time I stay on my own very modest coun- try estate. Real life makes everything simple. " And after a slight hesi- tation he added: "The grand scale on which His Grace's life takes place also makes him extremely tolerant, not to say recklessly indulgent. . . . "
This side of her noble patron was new to Diotima, so she looked up expectantly.
"I wouldn't wish to state as a certainty," Amheim went on with a vague emphasis, "that Count Leinsdorf is aware how very much your cousin, as his secretary, abuses his confidence-in principle only. I hasten to add-by his skepticism toward lofty schemes, by his sar- casm as a form of sabotage. I would be inclined to fear that his influ- ence on His Grace was not a wholesome one, if this true peer were not so firmly entrenched in the great traditional feelings and ideas that support real life, so that he can probably afford to risk this confidence. "
These were strong words, and Ulrich had deserved them. But Di- otima did not pay as much attention to them as she might have, be- cause she was so impressed with the other aspect of Arnheim's outlook, his owning landed estates not as a landowner but rather as a kind of spiritual massage; she thought it was magnificent, and mused o. n what it might be like to find oneselfthe lady ofsuch a manor.
"I sometimes marvel," she said, "at the generosity with which you yourself judge His Grace. All of that is surely part of a vanishing chapter of history? "
"And so it is," Amheim replied, "but the·simple virtues of courage, chivalry, and self-di~cipline, which his caste developed to such an ex- emplary degree, will always keep their value. In a wbrd, the ideal of the Master! I have learned to value the principle of the Master more and more in my business life as well. "
"Then. the ideal of the Masferwould, in the end, amount to almost the same thing as that of the Poem? " Diotima asked pensively.
"That's a wonderful way of putting it! " her friend agreed. "It's the secret of a vigorous life. Reason alone is not enough for a moral or a political life. Reason has its limits; what really matters always takes
place above and beyond it. Great men have always loved music, po- etry, form, discipline, religion, and chivalry. I would go so far as to say, in fact, that they and only they can succeed! Those are the so- called imponderables that make the master, make the man, and there is something, some obscure residue of this, in what the popu- lace admires in the actor. But to return to your cousin: Of course it isn't simply a matter of turning conservative when we begin to prefer our comforts to sowing wild oats. But even if we were all born as revolutionaries, there comes a day when we notice that a simple, good person, regardless of what we think of his intelligence-a de- pendable, cheerful, brave, loyal human being, in other words-is not only a rare delight but also the true soil from which all life springs. Such wisdom is as old as the hills, but it denotes a change in taste, which iri our youth naturally favors the exotic, to that of the mature man. I admire your cousin in many respects, or if this is saying too much, because there is little he says that is defensible, I could almost say that I love him, for something that is extraordinarily free and in- dependent in his nature, together with much that. is inwardly rigid and eccentric; it is just this mixture of freedom and mental rigidity that may account for his special charm, by the way. But he is a dan- gerous man, with his infantile moral exoticism and his highly devel- oped intelligence that is always on the lookout for some adventure
without knowing what, exactly, is egging him on. "
77
ARNHEIM AS THE DARLING OF THE PRESS
Diotima repeatedly had occasion to contemplate the imponderables of Arnheim's attitude.
It was on his advice, for instance, that the representatives of the leading newspapers were sometimes invited to the sessions of the Council (as Section Chief Tuzzi had somewhat sarcastically: dubbed
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the Committee to Draft a Guiding Resolution with Regard to the Seventieth Jubilee of His Majesty's Reign), and Arnheim, who was only a guest without any official status, enjoyed a degree of attention from them that put all other celebrities in the shade. For some rea- son newspapers are not the laboratories and experimental stations of the mind that they could be, to the public's great benefit, but usually only its warehouses and stock exchanges. If he were alive today, Plato-to take him as an example, because along with a dozen others he is regarded as the greatest thinker who ever lived-would cer- tainly be ecstatic about a news industry capable of creating, exchang- ing, refining a new idea every day; where information keeps pouring in from the ends of the earth with a speediness he never knew in his own lifetime, while a staff of demiurges is on hand to check it all out instantaneously for its content of reason and reality. He would have supposed a newspaper office to be that topos uranios, that heavenly realm of ideas, which he has described so impressively that to this day all the better class of people are still idealists when talking to their children or employees. And ofcourse ifPlato were to walk sud- denly into a news editor's office today and prove himselfto be indeed- that great author who died over two thousand years ago, he would be a tremendous sensation and would instantly be showered with the most lucrative offers. If he were then capable of writing a volume of philosophical travel pieces in three weeks, and a few thousand of his well-known short stories, perhaps even tum one or the other of his older works into a fUm, he could undoubtedly do very well for him- self for a considerable period of time. The moment his return had ceased to be news, however, and Mr. Plato tried to put into practice one of his well-known ideas, which had never quite come into their own, the editor in chief would ask him to submit only a nice little column on the subject now and then for the Life and Leisure section (but in the easiest and most lively style possible, not heavy: remem- ber the readers), and the features editor would add that he was sorry, but he could use such a contribution only once a month or so, be- cause there were so many other good writers to be considered. And both of these gentlemen would end up feeling that they had done quite a lot for a man who might indeed be the Nestor of European ,:mblicists but still was a bit outdated, and certainly not in a class for
current newsworthiness with a man like, for instance, Paul Arnheim.
Amheim himselfwould ofcourse never concur in this, because his reverence for all greatness would be offended by it, yet in many re- spects he was bound to find it understandable. These days, with ev- erything in the world being talked about helter-skelter, when prophets and charlatans rely on the same phrases, except for certain subtle differences no busy man has the time to keep track of1 and editors are constantly pestered with alarms that someone or other may be a genius, it is very hard to recognize the tr. ue value of a man or an idea; all one can do is keep an ear cocked for the moment when all the murmurs and whispers and shufflings at the editor's door grow loud enough to be admitted as the voice of the people. From that moment on, however, genius does enter a new state. It ceases to be a windy business of book or drama reViews, with all their contra- dictions, which the paper's ideal reader will take no more seriously than the babble ofchildren, but has achieved the status of a fact, with all the consequences that entails.
Fools who keep inveighing against such realities overlook the des- perate need for idealism. behind all this. The world of those who write and have to write is chockablock with big terms and concepts that have lost their referent. The attributes of great men and great causes tend to outlive whatever it was that gave rise to them, and so a great many attributes are left over. They had once been coined by a distinguished man for another distinguished man, but these men are long dead, and the surviving concepts must be put to some use. Writ- ers are in consequence always searching for the right man for, the words. Shakespeare's "powerful imagination," Goethe's "universal- ity," Dostoyevsky's "psychological depth," and all the other legacies of a long literary history hang like endless laundry in the heads of writers, and the resulting mental overstock reduces these people to calling every tennis player a profound strategist and every fashiona- ble writer a great man ofletters. Obviously they will always be grate- ful for a chance to use up their surplus without reducing its value. But it must always be applied to a man whosfl distinction is already an established fact, so that everyone understands that the words can be pinned on him, and it hardly matters where. And such a man was
Amheim, because Amheim was Amheim, whose very birth as the heir of his father was already an event, and there could be no doubt about the news value of anything he said. All he had to do was to take
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just enough trouble to say something that, with a little goodwill, could be regarded as significant. Arnheim himself formulated it as a principle: "Much ofa man's real importance," he used to say, "lies in his ability to make himself understood by his contemporaries. "
So now once again he got along beautifully, as always, with the papers, which fastened on him. He could afford to smile at those am- bitious financiers or politicians who stand ready to buy up whole for- ests of newspapers. Such an effort to influence public opinion seemed to him as uncouth and timid as offering to pay for a woman's love when it could be had so much more cheaply just by stimulating her imagination. He had told the reporters who asked him about the Council that the very fact of its convocation proved its profound ne- cessity, because nothirig in world history happened without a rational cause; a sentiment that so fully corresponded to their professional outlook that it was quoted appreciatively in several newspapers. It was in fact, on closer scrutiny, a good statement. For the kind ofpeo- ple who take everything that happens seriously would feel nauseated if they could assume that not every event has a good cause; on the other hand, they would also rather bite their tongues, as we know, than take anything too seriously, even significance itself. The pinch of pessimism in Arnheim's statement greatly contributed to the solid dignity of their professional endeavors, and even the fact that he was a foreigner could be read as a sign that the whole world was concern- ing itself with these enormously interesting movements in Austria.
The other celebrities. in attendance did not have the same instinc- tive flair for pleasing the press, but they noticed its e. ffect; and since celebrities in general know little about each other and in that train to immortality in which they are traveling together usually set eyes on each other only in the dining car, the special public recognition Am- heim enjoyed had its unexamined effect on them too; and even though he continued to stay away from all official committee meet- ings, in the Council itselfhe came quite automatically to play the role of a central figure. The further this meeting of minds progressed, the clearer it became that he was the really sensational element in it, al- though he basically did nothing to create that effect other than, pos- sibly, by expressing in conversation with its famous members his judgment, which could be interpreted as an openhearted pessimism, that the Council could hardly be expected to accomplish much of
anything, but that, on the other hand, so noble a task merited all the trustful devotion one could muster. So subtle a pessimism inspires confidence even in great minds, for the idea that the intellect nowa- days cannot really accomplish much is, for some reason, more conge- nial than the possibility that the intellect of some colleague might succeed in accomplishing something, and Arnheim's reserved judg- ment about the Council could be taken as leaning toward the more acceptable negative chance.
DIOTIMA'S METAMORPHOSES
Diotima's feelings did not develop in quite the same straight ascend- ing line as Arnheim's success.
It sometimes happened, in . the midst of a social gathering in her transformed apartment, with its rooms stripped of their usual fur- nishings, that she felt as though she were awakening in some dream- land. She would be standing there, surrounded by space and people, the light of the chandelier flowing over her hair and on down her shoulders and hips so that she seemed to feel its bright flood, and she was all statue, like some figure on a fountain, at the epicenter of the world, drenched in sublime spiritual grace. She saw it as a once-in-a- lifetime chance to bring about everything that she had always held to be most important and supremely great, and she no longer cared par- ticularly that she had no very clear idea what this might be. The whole apartment, the presence of the people in it, the whole eve- ning, enveloped her like a dress lined in yellow silk; she felt it on her skin, though she did not see it. From time to time she turned her gaze to Amheim, who was usually standing somewhere in a group of men, talking; but then she realized that her gaze had been resting on him all along, and it was only her awakening that now followed her eyes. Even when she was not looking at him, the outermost wingtips
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of her soul, so to speak, always rested on his face and told her what was going on in it.
And as long as we're on the subject of feathers, one might add that there was also something dreamlike in his appearance, something of a businessman with golden angel's wings who had descended into the midst ofthis gathering. The rattle of express and luxury trains, the humming of limousines, the peace of hunting lodges, the flap- ping of sails on a yacht, were all in these invisible, folded plumes that rustled softly whenever he raised his arm in a gesture, in these wings with which her feelings had dressed him. Amheim was often away on his trips, as always, and this gave his presence a permanent air of reaching out beyond the present moment and local events, impor- tant as they were for Diotima. She knew that while he was in town a secret coming and going of telegrams, visitors, and emissaries in charge of his business affairs was constantly afoot. She had gradually formed an idea, perhaps even an exaggerated one, of the importance of a firm with global interests and its involvement in world affairs on the highest level. Arnheim sometimes told breathtaking stories about the ramifications of international finance, overseas trade, and their connection with politics; quite new horizons, indeed first-ever hori- zons, opened up for Diotima; all it took was to hear him once on the subject of Franco-German confrontation, of which Diotima knew not much more than that almost everyone she knew felt slightly anti- German while acknowledging a certain burdensome frateqtal duty. In Amheim's presentation it became a Gallo-Celtic-:-East European-
Transalpine complex interlinked with the problems of the coal mines of Lorraine and the oil fields of Mexico as well as the antagonism between Anglo- and Latin America. Of such ramifications Section Chief Tuzzi had no idea, or showed none. He confined himself to pointing out to Diotima yet again, from time to time, that in his opin- ion Amheim's presence and marked preference for their home was definitely inexplicable without·ulterior motives, but he did not say what these might be, and did not know himself.
And so his wife was deeply impressed with the superiority ofa new breed of men over the methods of an obsolete diplomacy. She had not forgotten the moment ofher decision to make Amheim the head of the Parallel Campaign. It had been the first great idea of her life, accompanied by the most amazing sensations of dreaming and melt-
ing all at once, and as the idea broadened out into marvelous dis- tances, everything that had made up Diotima's life hitherto melted toward it. What little part of this state of mind could be put into words did not amount to much: a glittering, a flickering, a strange emptiness and flight of ideas; nor did she mind admitting-Diotima thought-that its nucleus, the thought of placing Amheim at the head of the unprecedented patriotic campaign, would be impossible. Amheim was a foreigner in Austria, there was no getting around it. To put him in charge from the start, as she had presented it to her husband and Count Leinsdorf, was simply not feasible. Neverthe- less, everything had turned out as, in her spellbound state, she had known it would. For all her other efforts to inject a truly inspiring content into the campaign had remained fruitless so far; the great first session, all the committee work, even this special council, against which Amheim, by some strange irony of fate, had actually warned her himself, had so far led to nothing other than . . . Amheim, whom people were always crowding around, who had to keep talking endlessly, who formed the secret focus of all their hopes. He was the New Man, destined to take over the helm of history from the old powers. She could flatter herself that it was she who had discovered him on sight•. talked with him about the entrance of the New Man into the spheres of power, and helped him against all resistance to follow his path here. Even if Arnheim did have ulterior motives, as Tuzzi suspected, Diotima would in any case have felt almost justified in supporting him all the way; at such a fateful moment one cannot stop to split hairs, and Diotima felt with absolute certainty that her life had reached a pinnacle. .
Apart from the born losers and the lucky devils of this world, one human being is about as badly offas the next, but they lead their lives on different levels. For the man of today, who has on the whole not much perspective on the meaning of his life, the confident sense of his own level is a most desirable second best. In exceptional cases this confidence can rise to an ecstasy ofheight or power, just as there are those who tum giddy when they know themselves to be high up in a building, even though they are standing in the middle of a room with the windows shut. When Diotima reflected that one of the most influential men in Europe was working together with her to. infuse ideas into the strongholds of power, and how destiny itself must have
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brought them together, and what was going on, even if on this partic- ular day nothing special was actually happening on this high floor of a World-Austrian humanitarian. undertaking: when she reflected on it, her tangled ~houghts soon resembled knots that had slackened into loops; they came more easily and were soon racing along, accompanied by. an unusual sense of joy and success, as though streaming toward her and bringing flashes of amazing insights. Her self-confidence rose; successes she would never have dreamed of lay Within reach; she felt more cheerful than was her habit, sometimes even a daring joke would occur to her, and something she had never known in all her lif~. waves of gaiety, even of exuberance, ~oursed through her. She felt as though she were high up in a turret, in a room with many windows. But it was also a queer, scary feeling. She felt plagued by an indefmable, general, indescribable sense of well- being that made her want to do things, do something, anything, though she couldn't imagine what. It was as if she had suddenly become aware of the globe turning under her feet and could not shake this awareness off; or as if all this excitement without tangible cause were as inhibiting as a dog leaping about at one's feet, though how it had got there no one could say. And so Diotima sometimes
worried about the change she had undergone without her own ex- press permission, and her condition, all in all, most resembled that bright, nervous gray, the color of the faiflt, weightless sky at the hour of utter hopelessness, when the heat is at its worst.
At this point Djotima's striving toward the ideal underwent a sig- nificant change. This striving had never been clearly distinguishable from the proper admiration for all greatness; it was a noble idealism, a decorous high-mindedness, a disciplined exaltation, and since, in these more robust times of ours, we hardly recognize any of this any- more, perhaps it should be laid out briefly once more. This idealism had nothing to do with realities, because reality always involves work- ing at something, which means getting your hands dirty. I t was more like the flower paintings done by archduchesses, for whom flowers were the-only seemly choice of life study, and quite typical of this idealism was the term "culture"; it regarded itself as the vessel of culture. But this idealism could also be described as harmonious, be- cause it detested everything unbalanced and saw the bisk of educa- tion as reconciling all the crude antagonisms sadly so prevalent in the
world; in short, it was not perhaps so very different from what we still mean-though of course only wherever the great middle-class tradi. . : tions are still upheld-by a sound and pure idealism, the kind that distinguishes most carefully between conflicts worthy of its concern and those that aren't, and which, ~ecause of its faith in a higher hu- manity, does not share the conviction of the saints (along with doc- tors and engineers) that even moral garbage may contain unused heavenly fuels. Formerly, had Diotima been roused from her sleep and asked what she wanted, she would have said, without having to think, that a living soul's powers of love felt the need to share itself with all the world; but after being awake for a while she would have modified this by noting that in our present world, with its overgrowth of civilization and intellect, it would perhaps be safer to speak more cautiously, even in cases of the highest sensibilities, of a force analo- gous to the power of love. And she would really have meant it. Even today there are still thousands of people who are like atomizers, spraying the power of love around like a perfume.
When Diotima sat down to read her books she brushed her lovely hair back from her forehead, which gave her a logical air, and pro- ceeded to read responsibly, with a view to extracting from what she called culture whatever might help her in the none too easy social situation in which she found herself; and this was ·how she lived, dis- tributing herself in tiny droplets of rarefied love among all the things that deserved it, condensing as a cloudy breath upon them at some distance from herself, so that she was actually left with nothing but the empty bottle ofher body, one of the household effects of Section Chief Tuzzi. Before Amheim appeared on the scene this had finally led to moods of deep depression, when Diotima was still alone be- tween her husband and that most incandescent event ofher life, the Parallel Campaign; since then, however, her energies had quite natu- rally regrouped. The power of love had firmly pulled itself together and had reentered her body, as it were, and the "analogous" force had become something very selfish and unmistakable. The feeling her cousin had been the first to evoke, that she was about to take some kind of action and that something she could not yet bring her- self to imagine was about to happen between herself and Amheim, had now grown so much more intense than anything she had ever known that she felt exactly as if she had passed from dreaming to
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waking. A void, typical of the first stage of that transition, had opened up in Diotima, and she seemed to remember descriptions she had read that suggested it might herald the beginning of a great passion. She thought she could understand in that light much of what Arn- heim had been saying to her recently. Everything he told her about his position, the qualities needed and the duties laid upon him by his life, was in preparation for something inexorable, and Diotima, sur- veying everything that had been her ideal hitherto, felt the pessi- mism that casts its shadow on every act, just as, with one's trunks all packed, one casts a last look around the rooms that have been. home for years and are now seen with the life nearly gone out of them. The unexpected effect wa. S that Diotima's soul, temporarily unsupervised by the higher faculties, behaved like a truant schoolboy boisterously careening around until he is overcome by the sadness ofhis pointless liberty; and owing to this curious situation something briefly entered into her relations with her husband, despite the increasing distance between them, that bore a strange resemblance, if not to. a late springtime of love, then at least to a potpourri of all love's seasons.
The little Section Chief, with his pleasant aroma of tanned dry skin, was baffled by what was happening. He had noticed several times that his wife, when guests were present, seemed strangely. dreamy, withdrawn, remote, and highly nervous, truly nervous and yet far away at the same time; still, when they were alone again and he approached her, somewhat intimidated and disconcerted, to ask her about it, she would suddenly throw her arms around him with inexplicable exuberance, and the pair of lips she pressed on his fore- head were so hot they reminded him of the barber's curling irons on his mustache when they got too close to his skin. Such unscheduled affection was not to his taste, and he stealthily wiped away its traces when Diotima was not looking. But whenever he felt like taking her in his arms, or had actually done so, which made it even worse, she hotly accused him ofnever having loved her, ofonly pouncing on her like an animal. Now, from the days of his youth, a certain degree of touchiness and moodiness had of course formed part of his image of a desirable woman who would complement a man's nature, and the ineffable grace with which Diotima proffered a cup of tea, picked up a new book, or passed judgment on a problem that, in his opinion, she could not possibly understand, had always delighted him with its
formal perfection. It all affected him like perfect background music by which to dine, something he dearly loved; but then, Tuzzi was also sure that the detachment of music from dining (or from church ser- vices) and the endeavor to cultivate it for its own sake was a sign of middle-class presumption, even though he'knew that one should never say so; anyway, it was not the sort of thing he ever seriously concerned himself with. But what was he to do when Diotima hugged him one minute and the next denounced him as a man be- side whom a person with a soul of her own could never be free to fulfill herself? What could a man say in answer to exhortations that he give more thought to the oceanic depths of beauty within, instead of fastening on her body? All of a sudden he was supposed to see the difference between Eros, the free spirit of love unburdened by lust, and mechanical sex. It was all, of course, stuff she had read some- where, and comical at that, but when a woman lectures a man in this fashion as she is undressing in front ofhim! -Tuzzi thought-it be- comes downright insulting. For he could not fail to notice that Di- otima's underwear had evolved in the direction of a certain worldly frivolity. She had always dressed with care and deliberation, since her social position required her to be smart without dressing above her station. But within the gradations from respectable durability to filmy, frilly provocation she was now making concessions to beauty she would once have called unworthy of an intelligent woman. How- ever, when Giovanni (Tuizi's name was really Hans, but he had been stylishly rechristened in keeping with his surname) noticed, she blushed down to her shoulders and brought up Frau von Stein, who had made no concessions even to a Goethe! So now Section Chief Tuzzi was no longer free, when he felt that the time had come, to escape from those weighty concerns of state beyond the private sphere and fmd release in the very lap of his own household; he found himself instead at Diotima's mercy; instead of the former clear line between mental exertion at the office and physical relaxation at home, he was faced with a virtual return to the strenuous and slightly ridiculous union of mind and body appropriate to courtship, to carry-
ing on like a cock pheasant or some lovesick, versifying youth.
It is hardly too much to say that he found this utterly revolting at times, and that because of it his wife's public success at this time caused him physical pain. Diotima had public opinion on her side,
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something Section Chief Tuzzi respected so unconditionally that he shied away from asserting his authority or meeting her incomprehen- sible moods with sarcasm, lest he seem unappreciative. It began to dawn on him that being the husband of a distinguished woman was a painful affliction that had to be carefully hidden from the world, much like an accidental castration. He took great pains to show noth- ing ofwhat he felt, came and went inconspicuously, always in a cloud of amiable official impenetrability, whenever Diotima had visitors or meetings, dropping the occasional politely. helpful suggestion or comforting ironic remark, and seemed to lead his life in a separate but friendly adjoining world, always in accord with Diotima, even en- trusting her with a little mission now and then when they were alone, publicly encouraging Amheim's visits to his home; in whatever spare time he had from the weighty cares of office, he studied Amheim's publications, and hated men who published their writings as the cause of his troubles.
For this was the question to which the main question-why was Arnheim frequenting his house? -sometimes reduced itself: Why did Amheim write? Writing is a particular form of chatter, and Tuzzi couldn't stand men who chatter. They made him want to clench his jaws and spit through his teeth like a sailor. . There were exceptions, of course; that he granted. He knew some high-ranking civil servants who had written their memoirs after they retired, and others who sometimes wrote for the newspapers. As Tuzzi saw it, a civil servant wrote only when he was dissatisfied or when he was a Jew, because Tuzzi held that Jews were ambitious and dissatisfied. Then there were also men of achievement who had written books about their experiences, but only in their old age and in America or, at most, in England. Besides, Tuzzi was of course versed in literature and, like all diplomats, had a preference for memoirs, from which one could pick up witty remarks and insights into the workings of men's minds. Still, that such works were no longer being written must signify something, so perhaps his was an old-fashioned taste, not in keeping with an age of functionalism. Finally, people wrote because it was their profession. Tuzzi could accept this without reservation, so long as it brought in enough money, or fell into the after all recognized category of "poet. " He even felt quite honored to receive the leading men in this profession, in which he had hitherto included those writ-
ers supported by the Foreign Office's Save the Reptile Fund, but without giving it much thought he would also have counted the Iliad and the Sermon on the Mount, both of which he certainly revered, among those achievements we owe to a profession that may either be practiced independently or have to he subsidized. But why a man like Amheim, who had no need whatsoever to write at all, should write so much was a problem behind which Tuzzi, now more than ever, suspected something that persisted in eluding him.
79
SOLIMAN IN LOVE
Soliman, the little black slave or African prince, as the case may be, had meanwhile managed to convince Rachel, Diotima's little maid or, alternatively, confidante, that they would have to keep a sharp eye on what went on in the house, in order to forestall a sinister plan of Arnheim's when the time came. Not that she was entirely convinced, but the two of them kept watch like conspirators, and always eaves- dropped when there were visitors. Soliman talked endlessly about couriers coming and going and mysterious visitors to his master at the hotel, and said he was prepared to give his oath as an African prince that he would get to the bottom of it. The African princely oath entailed Rachel's slipping her hand between the buttons of his jacket and shirt so she could lay it on his bare chest while he recited the vow, and his hand doing the same to her; this Rachel declined. All the same, little Rachel, who dressed and undressed her mistress and took her telephone calls, and through whose hands Diotima's black hair flowed every morning and evening while golden words from her mistress's lips flowed through her ears: this ambitious little creature. who had been living as though posed atop a pillar ever since the Parallel Campaign had started, trembling with adoration that flowed upward from her eyes to the goddess she served day after day,
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had for some time taken pleasure in spying on her, plain and simple. Through open doors from neighboring rooms or the crack of a slowly closing door or simply while lingering over some small task nearby, she tried to overhear everything said by Diotima and Am- heim, Tuzzi and Ulrich, and picked up glances, sighs, hand-kissings, words, laughter, gestures, like scraps of a tom-up document she could not fit together again. But most of all it was the little keyhole that opened up vistas which curiously, somehow, reminded Rachel of the long-forgotten time when she lost her virtue. That tiny open- ing let her gaze slip deep inside the room's interior, where people broken . up into sections flat as cardboard moved about, their voices no longer held within the fine borders of words but proliferating into meaningless sound; the awe, reverence, and admiration that bound Rachel to these people then came wildly undone, dissolving in ex- citement as when a lover suddenly penetrates, with all. his being, so deeply into the beloved that ~verythinggrows dark before her eyes, and behind the drawn curtain of her skin the light flares up.