And the emptiness
supported
them.
Musil - Man Without Qualities - v2
First, that paradise has been placed where it is unattaina- ble.
Even in the first legendary beginnings of the human race it is sup- posed to have been lost, and what people claim to have experienced of it later is described as ecstasy, trance, madness: in short, as pathological delirium; but it is quite striking that something is simultaneously being denied as illness and considered a paradise: this leads me to suppose that it must also be attainable for healthy and rational people, but on a path that is presumed to be forbidden and dangerous.
"But that then leads me to understand the second point, that this con- dition of paradise in life, which is supposed to be taboo as a whole, breaks into pieces and is inextricably mingled in with common life, that is, what people consider the highest values.
"In other words: the ideals of humanity. Think about it: they are all unattainable. But not only, as people pretend, because of human frailty but because, were one to fulfill them absolutely, they would become ab- surd. They are, therefore, the remains of a condition which as a whole is not capable of life, of which our life is not capable.
"One might be tempted to see in this shadowy doppelganger of an- other world only a daydream, had it not left behind its still warm traces in countless details of our lives. Religion, art, love, morality . . . these are attempts to follow this other spirit, they project into our lives with enor- mous power, but they have lost their origin and meaning, and this has made them totally confused and corrupt. "
They are bays but not the ocean.
From the Posthurrwus Papers · 1447
"And that brings us to Lindner.
"He would go mad if he were to follow the emotions that he has de- clared to be the decisive ones in his life. That's why he rations them and dilutes them with convictions.
"You want to be good-like a lake without a shore-and its individual drops, which he carefully stores up in himself, are what draw you to him. "You therefore only have some inkling, and he is convinced (believes) that you feel something is good, feel it like the smell of a field; while he makes a firm distinction between good and evil, but by separating them
he mixes them together hopelessly.
"That makes you feel abandoned, even by yourself, because you have
an intimation of a togetherness as never before. Your experience is hard to communicate, private, almost unsocial. He ties his soul to experiences that can be repeated and understood, for the unequivocal is repeatable and therefore comprehensible, but the mutuality of the ideals he dis- seminates is like the shadowy realm that is neither life nor death. He knows the virtue oflimitation, you the sin oflimitation. You are deprived of power, he is active. His God is nothing but an initial association or the like.
"In a word: You would like to live in God, even if only as His worst creature, while he livesfor Him. But in doing so he is following the same tried-and-true course as everyone else. "
Agathe had found a hairpin. In the period following Bonadea's visit, which Ulrich had not told her about. She was sitting on the sofa and talking with her brother, her hands, full ofidle security, supported in the pillows on both sides, when she suddenly felt the small steel object be- tween her fingers. It quite confused her hands before she drew it out. She looked at the pin, which was that of a strange woman, and the blood rose to her cheeks.
It might have been a small occasion for laughter that Agathe, like any jealous woman, hit upon the truth with such uncanny accuracy. But al- though it would have been easy to explain the discovery in some other fashion, Ulrich made no attempt to do so. Blood had risen to his cheeks too.
Finally, Agathe regained her composure, but her smile was discon- certed.
1448 · THE MAN WITH0 UT QUALITIES
Ulrich mumbled a confession about Bonadea's assault.
She listened to him restlessly. - I ' m not jealous, she said. - 1 have no right to be. B u t -
She sought to find this "but"; the demonstration was meant to cover the wildness that rose up in her against another woman taking Ulrich away from her.
Women are peculiarly nai've when they talk about a man's "needs. " They have let themselves be persuaded that these needs are inexorable violent forces, a kind of sullied but still grandiose suffering on the part of men, and they seem to know neither that they themselves become just as crazy through long abstinence, nor that after a period of transition it is not much more difficult for men to accustom themselves to it than it is for them; the distinction is, in truth, more a moral than a physiological one, a distinction of the habit of granting or denying oneself one's desires. But for many women, who believe they have grounds for not letting their desires gain control over them, this idea, that the man is not allowed to control himself without doing harm to himself, serves as a welcome opportunity to enclose the suffering man-child in their arms, and Agathe too-put in the role of a rather frigid woman through the taboo against otherwise following toward her brother the unambiguous voice of her heart-unconsciously applied this stratagem in her mind.
-1 believe I do understand you-she said-but-but you have hurt me.
When Ulrich tried to ask her pardon and attempted to stroke her hair or her shoulders, she said: -I'm stupid-trembled a little, and moved away.
- I f you were reading a poem aloud to me-she tried to explain-and I wasn't able to keep from looking at the latest newspaper the while, you would be disappointed too. That's just the way it hurt. On your account.
Ulrich was silent. The vexation of again experiencing through explana- tions what had happened sealed his lips.
- O f course I have no right to set rules for you, Agathe repeated. - W h a t is it then that I do give you! But why are you throwing yourself away on such a person! I could imagine your loving a woman I admire. I don't know how to express it, but isn't every caress a person gives some- one somehow taken away from everyone else?
She felt that she would want it that way if she were to abandon this dream and have a husband again.
-Inwardly, more than two people can embrace, and everything ex- ternal is only- She stopped short, but suddenly the comparison oc- curred to her: - 1 could imagine that the person who embraces the body is only the butterfly uniting two flowers-
From the Posthumous Papers · 1449
The comparison seemed to her somewhat too poetic. While she voiced it, she felt vividly the warm and ordinary feeling women have: I must give him something and compensate him.
Ulrich shook his head. "I have," he said seriously, "committed a grave error. But it was not the way you think. What you say is beautiful. This bliss that arises from the skin through mechanical stimulation, this sud- den being seized and changed by God: to ascribe this to a person who is just the instrument, to give him a privileged place through adoration or hate, is basically as primitive as being angry at the bullet that hits you. But I have too little faith to imagine that one could find such people. " Holds her hand-it is a mood borne far away.
When his hand sought pardon on her, Agathe enclosed her brother in her arms and kissed him. And involuntarily, shaken, in a sisterly-com- forting way and then no longer able to control it, she opened her lips for the first time on his with that complete, undiminished womanliness that opens up the ripe fruit oflove to its core.
In the Parallel Campaign everyone declared themselves for Amheim. Clarisse preferred Meingast.
Ulrich came home embittered. Faced with that powerlessness that cannot find a single point from which to express its opposition to the perfecting of an inadequate world.
He felt: They're doing everything I want, it's just that they're doing it badly.
They don't even understand me enough to contradict me; they be- lieve that I'm saying what they're saying, only worse.
Whenever you talk with them you start vomiting from nervousness.
They have goodness, love, soul; chopped into little pieces and mixed in with large chunks of the opposite; this keeps them healthy and makes them idealists, while I end up on the margin of the absurd and the criminal.
Oh, how unbearable they are, these chatterers at Diotima's! But it would be just as nonsensical not to confess that there are many people who feel it as much as I do and who accomplish better things: Why do I
feel so excluded?
He went through Agathe's room and straight to his study. His face mirrored the strain and silence of a hard struggle.
Believers squabble with God when they get to feel isolated among their fellowmen; that's when unbelievers get to know Him for the first
1450 · THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
time. If it were possible to ron out into the empty, chilly universe, that would have been the right expression for Ulrich's despair, anger, and unquiet temperament. His flames had inverted themselves and were burning inwardly. It nearly made him suffocate.
Suddenly he stopped. He took paper and pencil, which were lying under the heap of scribbled papers on his desk, and wrote down an idea. Read it through, walked up and down, read it once more, and added something to it.
There is no necessity behind it! This was the first idea, which, still obscure, contained everything. This world is only one ofcountless possi- ble experiments?
Then: In mathematics there are problems that admit of no general solutions but only case-by-case ones. But under certain given conditions these partial solutions are summarized to give relative total solutions. Thus God gives partial solutions; these are the creative people; they con- tradict one another; we are condemned again and again to derive from this relative total solutions that don't correspond to anything!
Finally: Like molten ore I am poured into the mold that the world has shaped during my lifetime. For that reason I am never entirely what I think and do. For that reason this self always remains strange to me. One attemptedform in an attemptedform ofthe totality.
Acting without reflecting: for a man never gets further than when he doesn't know where he's going.
When he read over this last idea, he tore up the piece of paper and went in to Agathe; for then there is only one thing: not to listen to the bad masters, who have erected one of His possible lives as if for eter- nity, according to God's plan, but to confide oneself to Him humbly and defiantly.
ULRICH-AGA THE JOURNEY
1.
Below lay a narrow stretch of coast with some sand. Boats drawn up on it, seen from above, like blue and green spots of sealing wax. If one looked more closely, oil jugs, nets, men with vertically-striped pants and
From the Posthumous Papers · 1451
brown legs; the smell of fish and garlic; patched-up, shaky little houses. The activity on the warm sand was as small and far away as the bustling of beetles. It was framed on both sides by boulders as by stone pegs on which the bay hung, and farther along, as far as the eye could see, the steep coast with its crinkled details simply plunged into the southern sea. If one cautiously clambered down, one could, over the ruins of fallen rocks, venture out a little into the ocean, which filled tubs and troughs among the stones with a warm bath and strange animal com- rades.
Ulrich and Agathe felt as if a tremendous din had been raised from them and had flown off. They stood out there in the ocean, swaying white flames, almost sucked up and extinguished by the hot air. It was somewhere in ! stria, or the eastern edge of Italy, or on the Tyrrhenian Sea. They hardly knew themselves. They had got on the train and trav- eled; it seemed to them as if they had been crisscrossing at random I in a way . . . that would prevent them from ever finding their way back.
2.
On their mad journey, Ancona was firmly fixed in their memory. They had arrived dead tired and in need of sleep. They got in early in the forenoon and asked for a room. Ate zabaglione in bed and drank strong coffee, whose heaviness was as if lifted to the skies by the foam of whipped cream. Rested, dreamed. When they had gone to sleep it seemed to them that the white curtains in front of the windows were constantly lifting and sinking in an enchanting current of refreshing air; it was their breathing. When they awoke, they saw through the opening slats ore-blue sea, and the red and yellow sails of the barks entering and leaving the harbor were as shrill as floating whistles.
They understood nothing in this new world; it was all like the words of a poem.
They had left without passports and had a mild fear of some sort of discovery and punishment. When they registered at the hotel they had been taken for a young married couple and offered this lovely room with a wide bed meant for two, a letto matri11Wniale, which in Germany has fallen into disuse. They had not dared reject it. After the sufferings of the body, the longing for primitive happiness.
Lying in this bed, they noticed an oval window the size of a cabin port- hole, high up to the right of the door and near a comer of the room, in a
1452 · THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
totally incomprehensible place; it had opaque-colored glass, disquiet- ingly like a secret observation post, but surrounded by a casual wreath of painted roses.
In comparison with the enormous tension that had gone before, it was nothing. And afteJWard there was a conspiratorial happiness in every de- tail, and at the moment when their resistance wavered and melted Ul- rich said: It also makes most sense not to resist; we have to get this behind us so that this tension doesn't debase what we have before us.
And they traveled.
They had stayed three days.
It has to be this way too: charmed by each other again and again. Tra-
versing the scale of the sexual with variations.
For three days they never talked about soul. Only then did they bring it up again.
3·
When they went out on the street for the first time: buzzing ofpeople. Like a flock of sparrows happily dusting themselves in the sand. Curious glances without timidity, which felt themselves at home. At the backs of the brother and sister as they cautiously glided through this crowd lay the room, lay the wakefulness drifting deep over sleep like a eat's paw over water, the blissful exhaustion in which one can ward off nothing, and also not oneself, but hears the world as a pale noise outside the infi- nitely deep corridors of the ear.
The exhaustion of excessive enjoyment in the body, the consumed mar- row. It is shaming and joyful.
4·
They went on. Apparently suitcase nomads. In truth driven by the restlessness of finding a place worth living and dying in.
Much was beautiful and held them enticingly fast. But nowhere did the inner voice say: this is the place.
From the Posthumous Papers · 1453
Finally here. Actually some insignificant chance had brought them here, and they did not notice anything special. Then this voice made itself heard, softly but distinctly.
Perhaps, without knowing it, they had become tired of their random traveling.
5·
Here, where they stayed, a piece of gardenlike nature rose up to the small white hotel, empty at this season, which was concealed on the slope; rose from the narrow beach between the rocky arms of the coast, like a posy of flowers and shrubs pressed against the breast, with narrow paths winding around it in a very gentle, slow climb up to the hotel. A little higher there was nothing but dazzling stone glittering in the sun, between one's feet yellow broom and red thistles that ran from the feet toward the sky, the enormous hard straightness of the plateau's edge, and, if one had climbed up with eyes closed and now opened them: sud- denly, like a thunderously opened fan, the motionless sea.
It is probably the size of the arc in the line of the contour, this far- reaching security enclosed by an arm, a security that is more than human? Or only the enormous desert of the dark-blue color, hostile to life? Or that the bowl ofthe sky never lies so directly over life? Or air and water, of which one never thinks? Otherwise colorless, good-natured messengers, but here where they were at home suddenly rearing up unapproachably like a pair of royal parents.
The legends of almost all peoples report that mankind came from the water and that the soul is a breath of air. Strange: science has deter- mined that the human body consists almost entirely of water. One be- comes small. When they got off the train in which they had crisscrossed the dense network of European energies and, still trembling from the motion, had hastened up here, brother and sister stood before the calm of the sea and the sky no differently than they would have stood a hun- dred thousand years ago. Tears came to Agathe's eyes, and Ulrich low- ered his head.
What is this whole exposition for? Can it be retracted? Something's not right here.
1454 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
Arm on ann, their hands intertwined, they climbed down again in the blue of evening to their new home. In the small dining room the white- ness of the tablecloths sparkled and the glasses stood as soft splendor. Ulrich ordered fish, wine, and fruit, speaking at length and in detail about it with the ma! tre d'hOtel; it did not interfere. The black figures glided around them or stood against the walls. SilveiWare and teeth functioned. The pair even carried on a conversation so as not to attract notice. Ulrich almost came to speak of the impression they had had up above. As if the people of a hundred thousand years ago had really had a direct revelation: it was like that; if one considers how tremendous the experience of these first myths is, and how little since . . . ; it did not interfere; everything that happened was embedded as in the murmuring ofa fountain.
Ulrich looked at his sister for a long time; she was now not even beau- tiful; there was not that either. On an island they had not seen in the daylight a chain of houses shone: that was lovely but far away; the eyes looked at it only fleetingly and then directly in front of themselves again.
They asked for two rooms.
6.
The sea in summer and the high mountains in autumn are the two real tests of the soul. In their silence lies a music greater than anything else on earth; there is a blissful torture in the inability to follow their rhythms, to make the rhythm ofword and gesture so broad that it would join with theirs; mankind cannot keep in step with the breath of the gods.
The next morning, Ulrich and Agathe found a tiny pocket of sand up among the rocks beneath the edge of the plateau; when they stumbled onto it they had the feeling as if a creature that lived there had expected them and was looking at them: here no one knows anything about us anymore. They had been following a small, natural path; the coast curved away, they actually convinced themselves that the shining white hotel had disappeared. It was a long, narrow sunlit step of rock, with sand and bits and pieces of stone. They undressed. They felt the need to bend their knees and stretch their anns, naked, unprotected, small as children before the greatness of the sea and the solitude. They did not say this to each other, and were ashamed before each other, but hidden
From the Posthumous Papers · 1455 behind the motions of their clothing and of searching for a place to lie
down, each tried it for himself.
They were both ashamed because it is so nudist-camp natural and health-conscious, but expected it necessarily had to lead to something else . . .
The silence nailed them to the cross.
They felt that soon they would not be able to stand it anymore, would have to shout, insane as birds.
This was why they were suddenly standing beside each other, with their arms around each other. Skin stuck to skin; timidly this small feel- ing penetrated the great desert like a tiny succulent flower growing all alone among the stones, and calmed them. They wove the circle of the horizon like a wreath around their hips, and looked at the sky. Stood as on a high balcony, inteiWoven with each other and with the unutterable like two lovers who, the next instant, will plunge into the emptiness. Plunged.
And the emptiness supported them. The instant lasted; did not sink and did not rise. Agathe and Ulrich felt a happiness about which they did not know if it might be grief, and only the conviction inspiring them, that they had been chosen to experience the extraordinary, kept them from weeping.
7·
But they soon discovered . . . ifthey did not want to, they did not have to leave the hotel at all. A wide glass door led from their room to a small balcony overlooking the sea. Unobserved, they could stand in the door- way, their eyes directed at this never-answering expanse, their arms flung protectively around each other. Blue coolness, on which the living warmth of the day lay like fine gold dust even after midnight, penetrated from the ocean. While their souls were standing erect within them, their bodies found each other like animals seeking warmth. And then the mir- acle happened to these bodies. Ulrich was suddenly part of Agathe, or she of him.
Agathe looked up, frightened. She looked for Ulrich out there, but found him in the center of her heart. She did see his form leaning out in the night, wrapped in starlight, but it was not his form, only its shining,
1456 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
ephemeral husk; and she saw the stars and the shadows without under- standing that they were far away. Her body was light and fleet, it seemed to her that she was floating in the air. A great, miraculous impetus had seized her heart, with such rapidity that she almost thought she felt the gentle jolt. At this moment brother and sister looked at each other con- founded.
However much they had been preparing themselves for this every day for weeks, they feared that in this second they had lost their reason. But everything in them was clear. Not a vision. Rather an excessive clarity. And yet they still seemed to have lost and put aside not only their reason but all their capacities; no thoughts stirred in them, they could form no purpose, all words had receded far away, the will lifeless; everything that stirs in the individual was rolled up inertly, like leaves in a burning calm. But this deathlike impotence did not weigh them down; it was as if the lid ofa sarcophagus had been rolled offthem. Whatever was to be heard during the night sobbed without sound or measure, whatever they looked at was without form or mood and yet contained within itself the joyous delight of all forms and moods. It was really strangely simple: as their powers became circumscribed all boundaries had disappeared, and since they no longer felt any kind of distinctions, neither in themselves nor about objects, they had become one.
They gazed around cautiously. It was almost painful. They were quite confused, far away from themselves, set down in a distance in which they lost themselves. They saw without light and heard without sound. Their soul was as excessively stretched as a hand that loses all its power, their tongue was as if cut off. But this pain was as sweet as a strange, living clarity.
? It was like a pain grating on their sensibilities, and yet could be called more a sweetness than a pain, for there was no vexation in it but a pecu- liar, quite supranatural comfort.
And they further perceived that the circumscribing powers in them were not lost at all, but in reality inverted, and with them all boundaries had been inverted. They noticed that they had not become mute at all but were speaking, but they were not choosing words but were being chosen by words; no thought stirred in them, but the whole world was full of marvelous thoughts; they thought that they, and things as well, were no longer mutually displacing and repelling hermetic bodies, but opened and allied forms. Their glances, which in their whole lives had
From the Posthu11U)Us Papers · 1457
followed only the small patterns that objects and people form against the enormous background, had suddenly reversed, and the enormous back- ground played with the patterns of life like an ocean with tiny matches.
Agathe lay half fainting against Ulrich's chest. She felt at this moment embraced by her brother in such a distant, silent, and pure fashion that there was nothing at all like it. Their bodies did not move and were not altered, and yet a sensual happiness flowed through them, the like of which they had never experienced. It was not an idea and not imagined! Wherever they touched each other, whether on their hips, their hands, or a strand of hair, they interpenetrated one another.
They were both convinced at this moment that they were no longer subject to the distinctions of humankind. They had overcome the stage of desire, which expends its energy on an action and a brief intensifica- tion, and their fulfillment impinged on them not only in specific places but in all the places of their bodies, as fire does not become less when other fires kindle from it. They were submerged in this fire that fills up everything; swimming in it as in a sea of desire, and flying in it as in a heaven of rapture.
Agathe wept with happiness. Whenever they moved, the recollection that they were still two dropped like a grain of incense into the sweet fire of life and dissolved in it; these were perhaps the happiest moments, where they were not entirely one.
Originally also supposed to come here: . . . I'm in love and don't know with whom . . . I'm neither faithful, nor unfaithful, what am I then.
For they felt, hovering more strongly over this hour than over others a breath of grief and transitoriness, something shadowy and unreal, a- being robbed, a cruelty, a fearful tension of uncertain forces against the fear of being transformed once more. Finally, when they felt the condi- tion fade, they separated wordlessly and in utter exhaustion.
The next morning, Ulrich and Agathe had separated without having made plans, and did not see each other the entire day; they could not do otherwise; the emotions of the night were still ebbing away and taking them with them; both felt the need to come to terms with themselves alone, without noticing that this entailed a contradiction of the experi- ence that had overpowered them. Involuntarily they went off far across the countryside in opposite directions, stopped in places at different
1458 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
times, sought a resting place in view of the sea, and thought of each other.
It may be called strange that their love immediately involved the need for separation, but this love was so great that they mistrusted it and de- sired this test.
Can they still separate? How can it be done?
Now one can dream. Lie under a bush and the bees buzz; or stare into the weaving heat, the thin air. The senses doze off, and in the body memories shine forth again like the stars after sunset. The body is again touched and kissed, and the magic line of demarcation that otherwise still distinguishes the strongest memories from reality is transcended by these soft I dreaming memories. They push time and space aside like a curtain and unite the lovers not only in thought but physically, not with their heavy bodies but with inwardly altered ones consisting entirely of tender mobility. But only when one thinks that during this union, which is more perfect and blissful than bodily union, one has no idea what the other person has just been doing, or what he will be doing the next mo- ment, does the mystery attain its greatest depth. Ulrich assumed that Agathe had remained behind in the hotel. He saw her standing on the white square in front of the white building, speaking with the manager. It was false. Or perhaps she was standing with the young German pro- fessor who had arrived and introduced himself, or was talking with Luisina, the chambermaid with the lovely eyes, and laughing at her pert, funny answers. That Agathe was now able to laugh! It destroyed the Condition; a smile was just heavy enough to be home by it . . . ! I When Ulrich turned around, Agathe was suddenly really standing there. Re- ally? She had come across the stones in a great arc; her dress was flutter- ing in the wind, she cast a dark shadow on the hot ground and was laughing at Ulrich. Blissfully real reality; it hurt as much as when eyes that have been staring into the distance must quickly adapt to nearness.
Agathe sat down beside him. A lizard sat nearby; it silently darted out its tongue, a small, scurrying flame of life, beside their conversation. Ul- rich had noticed it some time before. Agathe hadn't. But when Agathe, who was afraid of small animals, caught sight of it, she was frightened and, laughing in embarrassment, scared the little creature away with a stone. And to gather courage she ran after it, clapping her hands and chasing the little beast.
Ulrich, who had been staring at the small creature as at a flickering
From the Posthurrwus Papers · 1459
magic mirror, said to himself: That we were now so different is as sad as that we were born at the same time but will die at different times. With his eyes and ears he followed this strange body, Agathe. But then he suddenly fell deeply once again into and was at the bottom of the experi- ence out of which Agathe had startled him.
He was not able to pin it down clearly, but in this flickering brightness above the stones in which everything was transformed, happiness into grief, and also griefinto happiness, the painful moment abruptly took on the secret lust of the hermaphrodite who, separated into two indepen- dent beings, finds itself again, whose secret no one who touches it sus- pects. Yet how glorious it is-Agathe's brother thought-that she is different from me, that she can do things I can't even guess at, which yet also belong to me through our secret empathy. Dreams occurred to him, which he otherwise never recalled but which must have often preoc- cupied him. Sometimes in a dream he had met the sister of a beloved, although she did not have a sister, and this strange familiar person ra- diated all the happiness ofpossession and all the happiness ofdesire. Or he heard a soft voice speaking. Or saw only the fluttering of a skirt, which most definitely belonged to a stranger, but this stranger was most definitely his beloved. As i f a disembodied, completely free attachment was only playing with these people. All at once Ulrich was startled, and thought he saw in the great brightness that the secret of love was pre- cisely this, that lovers are not one.
That belongs to the principles of profane love! Thus really already a game against itself.
"How wonderful it is, Agathe," Ulrich said, "that you can do things I can't guess at. "
"Yes," she answered, "the whole world is full of such things. As I was walking across this plateau I felt that I could now walk in every direc- tion. "
"But why did you come to me? "
Agathe was silent.
"It is so beautiful to be different from the way one was born," Ulrich
continued. "But I was afraid ofjust that. " He told her the dreams that he had remembered, and she knew them too.
"But why are you afraid? " Agathe asked.
"Because it occurred to me that ifit is the sense ofthese dreams-and it might well be that they signify the final memory ofit-that our desires
1460 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
aim not at making one person out of two but, on the contrary, at escap- ing from our prison, our oneness, to become two in a union, but prefera- bly twelve, a thousand, incredibly many, rather, to slip out of ourselves as in a dream, to drink life brewed to the boiling point, to be carried out of ourselves or whatever, for I can't express it vety well; then the world contains as much lust as strangeness, as much tenderness as activity, and is not an opium haze but rather an intoxication of the blood, an orgasm of battle, and the only mistake we could make would be to forget the (lustful contact of) lust of strangeness and imagine doing all sorts of things by dividing up the hurricane of love into scanty creeks flowing back and forth between two people-"
He had jumped up.
"But how would one have to be? " Agathe asked pensively and simply. It pained him that she could immediately appropriate his half-loved and half-cursed idea. "One would have to be able to give," she went on, "without taking away. To be such that love does not become less when it's divided. Then that would be possible too.
Not to treat love as a treasure"-she laughed-"the way it's already laid down in language! "
Ulrich was picking up head-sized stones and flinging them from the cliff into the sea, which squirted up a tiny spray; he had not exercised his muscles for a long time.
"But . . . ? " Agathe said. "Isn't what you're saying simply what one reads fairly often, drinking the world in great drafts of desire? To want to be a thousandfold, because once isn't enough? " She was parodying it a little because she suddenly realized that she did not like it.
"No! " Ulrich shouted back. "It's never what others say! " He flung the large stone he was holding in his hand so angrily to the ground that the loose limestone exploded. "We forgot ourselves," he said gently, grasp- ing Agathe under the arm and pulling her away. "It would still have to be a sister and a brother, even if they're divided into a thousand pieces. -Anyway, it's just an idea. "
Meanwhile days came when only the surface stirred. On the sparkling damp stones in the sea. A silent being: a fish, flowerlike in the water. Agathe romped after it from stone to stone until it dived under, darting into the darkness like an arrow, and disappeared. Well? Ulrich thought. Agathe was standing out on the rocks, he on the shore; a melody of eventfulness broke off, and a new one must carty on: How will she turn around, how smile back to the shore? Beautifully. Like all perfection. With total charm in her motion is how Agathe did it; the insights of the
From the Posthumous Papers · 1461
orchestra of her beauty, though it seemed to be making music without a conductor, were always delightful.
And yet all perfected beauty-an animal, a painting, a woman-is nothing more than the final piece in a circle; an arc is completed, one sees it but would like to know the circle. If it is one of life's familiar circles, for instance that of a great man, then a noble horse or a beauti- ful woman is like the clasp in a belt, which closes it and for a moment seems to contain the entire phenomenon; in the same way one can be smitten with a lovely farm horse, because in him as in a focusing mir- ror the entire heavy-footed beauty of the field and its people is re- peated. But if there is nothing behind it? Nothing more than is behind the rays of the sun dancing on the stones? If this infinitude of water and sky is pitilessly open? Then one might almost believe that beauty is something that secretly negates, something incomplete and incom- pletable, a happiness without purpose, without sense. But what if it lacks everything? Then beauty is a torture, something to laugh and cry over, a tickling to make one roll around in the sand, with Apollo's arrow in one's side.
Hatred of beauty. Sense of urgent sexual desire: to destroy beauty.
The brightness of such days was like smoke, which the clarity of the nights wiped away.
Agathe had somewhat less imagination than Ulrich. Because she had not thought as much as he had her emotions were not as volatile as his, but burned like a flame rising straight out of the particular ground on which she happened to be standing. The daring nature of their flight, the conscience made somewhat anxious by the fear of discovery, and finally this hiding place in a flower basket between the porous limestone wall, sea, and sky, at times gave her a high-spirited and childlike cheerfulness. She then treated even their strange experience as an adventure: a for- bidden space within herself over whose enclosure one spies, or into which one forces one's way, with beating heart, burning neck, and heavy soles weighed down with clods of damp earth from the path one has hurriedly followed in secret.
In this way very indirect suggestion of repeated coitus.
1462 ·THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
She sometimes had a playful way of allowing herself to be touched, with opened-even-when-closed eyes; of reappearing; a tenderness that was not to be stilled. He secretly obseJVed her, saw this play of love with the body, which has the captivation of a smile and the oppressive quality of a force of nature, for the first time, or was moved by it for the first time. Or there were hours when she did not look at him, was cold, al- most angry with him; because she was too agitated; like someone in a boat not daring to move, so it was in her body-afterward, every time. Because the connection does not function. Or afterreactions; at first a blocking and then, for no apparent reason, an afterflood. It was thrilling and charming to let oneself be cradled by these inspirations; they short- ened the hours but they forced an optic of nearness and minute obseJVa- tion. Ulrich resisted this. It was a leftover piece of earth drifting in the liquid fire and clouding it; a temptation to explanations such as that Agathe had never learned the proper connection between love and sex. As with most people, the entire power of the sexual had first come to- gether with a spark of inclination at the time she had married Hagauer, who was not yet abhorrent to her. Instead of stumbling into a storm with someone I almost only in the company of I accompanied by someone almost as impersonal as the elements, and only then noticing as a still nameless surprise that this person's legs are not clothed like one's own and that one's soul is beckoning one to change one's hiding place . . .
But such thoughts, too, were like singing in a false key. Ulrich did not allow himself this kind of understanding. Understanding a person one loves cannot involve spying on that person but must come pouring from an overflow of auspicious inspirations. One may only recognize those things that enrich. One makes a gift of qualities in the unshakable secu- rity of a predetermined harmony, a separation that has never b e e n -
Especially when ethical magnanimity is stimulated by it. Not the see- ing or not seeing of weaknesses, but the large motion in which they float without significance.
An ancient column-thrown down at the time of Venice, Greece, or Rome-lay among the stones and the broom; every groove of its shaft and capital deepened by the ray-sharp graving tool of the midday shad- ows. Lying next to it belonged to the great hours of love.
Four eyes watching. Nothing but noon, column, four eyes. If the glance of two eyes sees one picture, one world: why not the glance of four?
From the Posthumous Papers · 1463
When two pairs of eyes look long into each other, one person crosses over to the other on the bridge of glances, and all that remains is a feel- ing that no longer has a body.
When in a secret hour two pairs of eyes look at an object and come together in it-every object hovering deep down in a feeling, and ob- jects standing only as firmly as they do if this deep ground is hard-then the rigid world begins to move, softly and incessantly. It rises and falls restlessly with the blood. The fraternal twins looked at each other. In the bright light it could not be made out whether they were still breathing or had been lying there for a thousand years like the stones. Whether the stone column was lying there or had risen up in the light without a sound and was floating.
There is a significant difference in the way one looks at people and the way one looks at things. Every time after this when they looked at some- one in the hotel: the play of facial expressions of someone with whom one is talking becomes unspeakably alienating if one observes it as an objective process, and not as an ongoing exchange of signals between two souls; we are accustomed to see things lying mutely where they are, and we consider it a disturbing hallucination if they take on a more dy- namic relation to us. But it is only we ourselves who are looking at them in such a way that the small changes in their physiognomies are not an- swered by any alterations in our emotions, and to change this nothing more is needed, basically, than that we not look at the world intellectu- ally but that objects arouse in us our moral emotions instead of our sense-based surveying equipment. At such moments the excitement in which a glimpse brings us something and enriches us becomes so strong that nothing appears real except for a hovering condition, which, beyond the eyes, condenses into objects, and on this side of the eyes condenses into ideas and feelings, without these two sides being separable from each other. Whatever the soul bestows comes forward; whatever loses this power dissipates before one's eyes.
In this flickering silence among the stones there was a panic horror. The world seemed to be only the outer aspect of a speciflc inner atti- tude, and interchangeable with it. But world and self were not solid; a scaffolding sunk into soft depths; mutually helping each other out of a formlessness. Agathe said softly to Ulrich: "Are you yourself or are you not? I know nothing of it. I am incognizant of it and I am incognizant of myself. "
It was the terror: The world depended on her, and she did not know who she was.
"But that then leads me to understand the second point, that this con- dition of paradise in life, which is supposed to be taboo as a whole, breaks into pieces and is inextricably mingled in with common life, that is, what people consider the highest values.
"In other words: the ideals of humanity. Think about it: they are all unattainable. But not only, as people pretend, because of human frailty but because, were one to fulfill them absolutely, they would become ab- surd. They are, therefore, the remains of a condition which as a whole is not capable of life, of which our life is not capable.
"One might be tempted to see in this shadowy doppelganger of an- other world only a daydream, had it not left behind its still warm traces in countless details of our lives. Religion, art, love, morality . . . these are attempts to follow this other spirit, they project into our lives with enor- mous power, but they have lost their origin and meaning, and this has made them totally confused and corrupt. "
They are bays but not the ocean.
From the Posthurrwus Papers · 1447
"And that brings us to Lindner.
"He would go mad if he were to follow the emotions that he has de- clared to be the decisive ones in his life. That's why he rations them and dilutes them with convictions.
"You want to be good-like a lake without a shore-and its individual drops, which he carefully stores up in himself, are what draw you to him. "You therefore only have some inkling, and he is convinced (believes) that you feel something is good, feel it like the smell of a field; while he makes a firm distinction between good and evil, but by separating them
he mixes them together hopelessly.
"That makes you feel abandoned, even by yourself, because you have
an intimation of a togetherness as never before. Your experience is hard to communicate, private, almost unsocial. He ties his soul to experiences that can be repeated and understood, for the unequivocal is repeatable and therefore comprehensible, but the mutuality of the ideals he dis- seminates is like the shadowy realm that is neither life nor death. He knows the virtue oflimitation, you the sin oflimitation. You are deprived of power, he is active. His God is nothing but an initial association or the like.
"In a word: You would like to live in God, even if only as His worst creature, while he livesfor Him. But in doing so he is following the same tried-and-true course as everyone else. "
Agathe had found a hairpin. In the period following Bonadea's visit, which Ulrich had not told her about. She was sitting on the sofa and talking with her brother, her hands, full ofidle security, supported in the pillows on both sides, when she suddenly felt the small steel object be- tween her fingers. It quite confused her hands before she drew it out. She looked at the pin, which was that of a strange woman, and the blood rose to her cheeks.
It might have been a small occasion for laughter that Agathe, like any jealous woman, hit upon the truth with such uncanny accuracy. But al- though it would have been easy to explain the discovery in some other fashion, Ulrich made no attempt to do so. Blood had risen to his cheeks too.
Finally, Agathe regained her composure, but her smile was discon- certed.
1448 · THE MAN WITH0 UT QUALITIES
Ulrich mumbled a confession about Bonadea's assault.
She listened to him restlessly. - I ' m not jealous, she said. - 1 have no right to be. B u t -
She sought to find this "but"; the demonstration was meant to cover the wildness that rose up in her against another woman taking Ulrich away from her.
Women are peculiarly nai've when they talk about a man's "needs. " They have let themselves be persuaded that these needs are inexorable violent forces, a kind of sullied but still grandiose suffering on the part of men, and they seem to know neither that they themselves become just as crazy through long abstinence, nor that after a period of transition it is not much more difficult for men to accustom themselves to it than it is for them; the distinction is, in truth, more a moral than a physiological one, a distinction of the habit of granting or denying oneself one's desires. But for many women, who believe they have grounds for not letting their desires gain control over them, this idea, that the man is not allowed to control himself without doing harm to himself, serves as a welcome opportunity to enclose the suffering man-child in their arms, and Agathe too-put in the role of a rather frigid woman through the taboo against otherwise following toward her brother the unambiguous voice of her heart-unconsciously applied this stratagem in her mind.
-1 believe I do understand you-she said-but-but you have hurt me.
When Ulrich tried to ask her pardon and attempted to stroke her hair or her shoulders, she said: -I'm stupid-trembled a little, and moved away.
- I f you were reading a poem aloud to me-she tried to explain-and I wasn't able to keep from looking at the latest newspaper the while, you would be disappointed too. That's just the way it hurt. On your account.
Ulrich was silent. The vexation of again experiencing through explana- tions what had happened sealed his lips.
- O f course I have no right to set rules for you, Agathe repeated. - W h a t is it then that I do give you! But why are you throwing yourself away on such a person! I could imagine your loving a woman I admire. I don't know how to express it, but isn't every caress a person gives some- one somehow taken away from everyone else?
She felt that she would want it that way if she were to abandon this dream and have a husband again.
-Inwardly, more than two people can embrace, and everything ex- ternal is only- She stopped short, but suddenly the comparison oc- curred to her: - 1 could imagine that the person who embraces the body is only the butterfly uniting two flowers-
From the Posthumous Papers · 1449
The comparison seemed to her somewhat too poetic. While she voiced it, she felt vividly the warm and ordinary feeling women have: I must give him something and compensate him.
Ulrich shook his head. "I have," he said seriously, "committed a grave error. But it was not the way you think. What you say is beautiful. This bliss that arises from the skin through mechanical stimulation, this sud- den being seized and changed by God: to ascribe this to a person who is just the instrument, to give him a privileged place through adoration or hate, is basically as primitive as being angry at the bullet that hits you. But I have too little faith to imagine that one could find such people. " Holds her hand-it is a mood borne far away.
When his hand sought pardon on her, Agathe enclosed her brother in her arms and kissed him. And involuntarily, shaken, in a sisterly-com- forting way and then no longer able to control it, she opened her lips for the first time on his with that complete, undiminished womanliness that opens up the ripe fruit oflove to its core.
In the Parallel Campaign everyone declared themselves for Amheim. Clarisse preferred Meingast.
Ulrich came home embittered. Faced with that powerlessness that cannot find a single point from which to express its opposition to the perfecting of an inadequate world.
He felt: They're doing everything I want, it's just that they're doing it badly.
They don't even understand me enough to contradict me; they be- lieve that I'm saying what they're saying, only worse.
Whenever you talk with them you start vomiting from nervousness.
They have goodness, love, soul; chopped into little pieces and mixed in with large chunks of the opposite; this keeps them healthy and makes them idealists, while I end up on the margin of the absurd and the criminal.
Oh, how unbearable they are, these chatterers at Diotima's! But it would be just as nonsensical not to confess that there are many people who feel it as much as I do and who accomplish better things: Why do I
feel so excluded?
He went through Agathe's room and straight to his study. His face mirrored the strain and silence of a hard struggle.
Believers squabble with God when they get to feel isolated among their fellowmen; that's when unbelievers get to know Him for the first
1450 · THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
time. If it were possible to ron out into the empty, chilly universe, that would have been the right expression for Ulrich's despair, anger, and unquiet temperament. His flames had inverted themselves and were burning inwardly. It nearly made him suffocate.
Suddenly he stopped. He took paper and pencil, which were lying under the heap of scribbled papers on his desk, and wrote down an idea. Read it through, walked up and down, read it once more, and added something to it.
There is no necessity behind it! This was the first idea, which, still obscure, contained everything. This world is only one ofcountless possi- ble experiments?
Then: In mathematics there are problems that admit of no general solutions but only case-by-case ones. But under certain given conditions these partial solutions are summarized to give relative total solutions. Thus God gives partial solutions; these are the creative people; they con- tradict one another; we are condemned again and again to derive from this relative total solutions that don't correspond to anything!
Finally: Like molten ore I am poured into the mold that the world has shaped during my lifetime. For that reason I am never entirely what I think and do. For that reason this self always remains strange to me. One attemptedform in an attemptedform ofthe totality.
Acting without reflecting: for a man never gets further than when he doesn't know where he's going.
When he read over this last idea, he tore up the piece of paper and went in to Agathe; for then there is only one thing: not to listen to the bad masters, who have erected one of His possible lives as if for eter- nity, according to God's plan, but to confide oneself to Him humbly and defiantly.
ULRICH-AGA THE JOURNEY
1.
Below lay a narrow stretch of coast with some sand. Boats drawn up on it, seen from above, like blue and green spots of sealing wax. If one looked more closely, oil jugs, nets, men with vertically-striped pants and
From the Posthumous Papers · 1451
brown legs; the smell of fish and garlic; patched-up, shaky little houses. The activity on the warm sand was as small and far away as the bustling of beetles. It was framed on both sides by boulders as by stone pegs on which the bay hung, and farther along, as far as the eye could see, the steep coast with its crinkled details simply plunged into the southern sea. If one cautiously clambered down, one could, over the ruins of fallen rocks, venture out a little into the ocean, which filled tubs and troughs among the stones with a warm bath and strange animal com- rades.
Ulrich and Agathe felt as if a tremendous din had been raised from them and had flown off. They stood out there in the ocean, swaying white flames, almost sucked up and extinguished by the hot air. It was somewhere in ! stria, or the eastern edge of Italy, or on the Tyrrhenian Sea. They hardly knew themselves. They had got on the train and trav- eled; it seemed to them as if they had been crisscrossing at random I in a way . . . that would prevent them from ever finding their way back.
2.
On their mad journey, Ancona was firmly fixed in their memory. They had arrived dead tired and in need of sleep. They got in early in the forenoon and asked for a room. Ate zabaglione in bed and drank strong coffee, whose heaviness was as if lifted to the skies by the foam of whipped cream. Rested, dreamed. When they had gone to sleep it seemed to them that the white curtains in front of the windows were constantly lifting and sinking in an enchanting current of refreshing air; it was their breathing. When they awoke, they saw through the opening slats ore-blue sea, and the red and yellow sails of the barks entering and leaving the harbor were as shrill as floating whistles.
They understood nothing in this new world; it was all like the words of a poem.
They had left without passports and had a mild fear of some sort of discovery and punishment. When they registered at the hotel they had been taken for a young married couple and offered this lovely room with a wide bed meant for two, a letto matri11Wniale, which in Germany has fallen into disuse. They had not dared reject it. After the sufferings of the body, the longing for primitive happiness.
Lying in this bed, they noticed an oval window the size of a cabin port- hole, high up to the right of the door and near a comer of the room, in a
1452 · THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
totally incomprehensible place; it had opaque-colored glass, disquiet- ingly like a secret observation post, but surrounded by a casual wreath of painted roses.
In comparison with the enormous tension that had gone before, it was nothing. And afteJWard there was a conspiratorial happiness in every de- tail, and at the moment when their resistance wavered and melted Ul- rich said: It also makes most sense not to resist; we have to get this behind us so that this tension doesn't debase what we have before us.
And they traveled.
They had stayed three days.
It has to be this way too: charmed by each other again and again. Tra-
versing the scale of the sexual with variations.
For three days they never talked about soul. Only then did they bring it up again.
3·
When they went out on the street for the first time: buzzing ofpeople. Like a flock of sparrows happily dusting themselves in the sand. Curious glances without timidity, which felt themselves at home. At the backs of the brother and sister as they cautiously glided through this crowd lay the room, lay the wakefulness drifting deep over sleep like a eat's paw over water, the blissful exhaustion in which one can ward off nothing, and also not oneself, but hears the world as a pale noise outside the infi- nitely deep corridors of the ear.
The exhaustion of excessive enjoyment in the body, the consumed mar- row. It is shaming and joyful.
4·
They went on. Apparently suitcase nomads. In truth driven by the restlessness of finding a place worth living and dying in.
Much was beautiful and held them enticingly fast. But nowhere did the inner voice say: this is the place.
From the Posthumous Papers · 1453
Finally here. Actually some insignificant chance had brought them here, and they did not notice anything special. Then this voice made itself heard, softly but distinctly.
Perhaps, without knowing it, they had become tired of their random traveling.
5·
Here, where they stayed, a piece of gardenlike nature rose up to the small white hotel, empty at this season, which was concealed on the slope; rose from the narrow beach between the rocky arms of the coast, like a posy of flowers and shrubs pressed against the breast, with narrow paths winding around it in a very gentle, slow climb up to the hotel. A little higher there was nothing but dazzling stone glittering in the sun, between one's feet yellow broom and red thistles that ran from the feet toward the sky, the enormous hard straightness of the plateau's edge, and, if one had climbed up with eyes closed and now opened them: sud- denly, like a thunderously opened fan, the motionless sea.
It is probably the size of the arc in the line of the contour, this far- reaching security enclosed by an arm, a security that is more than human? Or only the enormous desert of the dark-blue color, hostile to life? Or that the bowl ofthe sky never lies so directly over life? Or air and water, of which one never thinks? Otherwise colorless, good-natured messengers, but here where they were at home suddenly rearing up unapproachably like a pair of royal parents.
The legends of almost all peoples report that mankind came from the water and that the soul is a breath of air. Strange: science has deter- mined that the human body consists almost entirely of water. One be- comes small. When they got off the train in which they had crisscrossed the dense network of European energies and, still trembling from the motion, had hastened up here, brother and sister stood before the calm of the sea and the sky no differently than they would have stood a hun- dred thousand years ago. Tears came to Agathe's eyes, and Ulrich low- ered his head.
What is this whole exposition for? Can it be retracted? Something's not right here.
1454 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
Arm on ann, their hands intertwined, they climbed down again in the blue of evening to their new home. In the small dining room the white- ness of the tablecloths sparkled and the glasses stood as soft splendor. Ulrich ordered fish, wine, and fruit, speaking at length and in detail about it with the ma! tre d'hOtel; it did not interfere. The black figures glided around them or stood against the walls. SilveiWare and teeth functioned. The pair even carried on a conversation so as not to attract notice. Ulrich almost came to speak of the impression they had had up above. As if the people of a hundred thousand years ago had really had a direct revelation: it was like that; if one considers how tremendous the experience of these first myths is, and how little since . . . ; it did not interfere; everything that happened was embedded as in the murmuring ofa fountain.
Ulrich looked at his sister for a long time; she was now not even beau- tiful; there was not that either. On an island they had not seen in the daylight a chain of houses shone: that was lovely but far away; the eyes looked at it only fleetingly and then directly in front of themselves again.
They asked for two rooms.
6.
The sea in summer and the high mountains in autumn are the two real tests of the soul. In their silence lies a music greater than anything else on earth; there is a blissful torture in the inability to follow their rhythms, to make the rhythm ofword and gesture so broad that it would join with theirs; mankind cannot keep in step with the breath of the gods.
The next morning, Ulrich and Agathe found a tiny pocket of sand up among the rocks beneath the edge of the plateau; when they stumbled onto it they had the feeling as if a creature that lived there had expected them and was looking at them: here no one knows anything about us anymore. They had been following a small, natural path; the coast curved away, they actually convinced themselves that the shining white hotel had disappeared. It was a long, narrow sunlit step of rock, with sand and bits and pieces of stone. They undressed. They felt the need to bend their knees and stretch their anns, naked, unprotected, small as children before the greatness of the sea and the solitude. They did not say this to each other, and were ashamed before each other, but hidden
From the Posthumous Papers · 1455 behind the motions of their clothing and of searching for a place to lie
down, each tried it for himself.
They were both ashamed because it is so nudist-camp natural and health-conscious, but expected it necessarily had to lead to something else . . .
The silence nailed them to the cross.
They felt that soon they would not be able to stand it anymore, would have to shout, insane as birds.
This was why they were suddenly standing beside each other, with their arms around each other. Skin stuck to skin; timidly this small feel- ing penetrated the great desert like a tiny succulent flower growing all alone among the stones, and calmed them. They wove the circle of the horizon like a wreath around their hips, and looked at the sky. Stood as on a high balcony, inteiWoven with each other and with the unutterable like two lovers who, the next instant, will plunge into the emptiness. Plunged.
And the emptiness supported them. The instant lasted; did not sink and did not rise. Agathe and Ulrich felt a happiness about which they did not know if it might be grief, and only the conviction inspiring them, that they had been chosen to experience the extraordinary, kept them from weeping.
7·
But they soon discovered . . . ifthey did not want to, they did not have to leave the hotel at all. A wide glass door led from their room to a small balcony overlooking the sea. Unobserved, they could stand in the door- way, their eyes directed at this never-answering expanse, their arms flung protectively around each other. Blue coolness, on which the living warmth of the day lay like fine gold dust even after midnight, penetrated from the ocean. While their souls were standing erect within them, their bodies found each other like animals seeking warmth. And then the mir- acle happened to these bodies. Ulrich was suddenly part of Agathe, or she of him.
Agathe looked up, frightened. She looked for Ulrich out there, but found him in the center of her heart. She did see his form leaning out in the night, wrapped in starlight, but it was not his form, only its shining,
1456 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
ephemeral husk; and she saw the stars and the shadows without under- standing that they were far away. Her body was light and fleet, it seemed to her that she was floating in the air. A great, miraculous impetus had seized her heart, with such rapidity that she almost thought she felt the gentle jolt. At this moment brother and sister looked at each other con- founded.
However much they had been preparing themselves for this every day for weeks, they feared that in this second they had lost their reason. But everything in them was clear. Not a vision. Rather an excessive clarity. And yet they still seemed to have lost and put aside not only their reason but all their capacities; no thoughts stirred in them, they could form no purpose, all words had receded far away, the will lifeless; everything that stirs in the individual was rolled up inertly, like leaves in a burning calm. But this deathlike impotence did not weigh them down; it was as if the lid ofa sarcophagus had been rolled offthem. Whatever was to be heard during the night sobbed without sound or measure, whatever they looked at was without form or mood and yet contained within itself the joyous delight of all forms and moods. It was really strangely simple: as their powers became circumscribed all boundaries had disappeared, and since they no longer felt any kind of distinctions, neither in themselves nor about objects, they had become one.
They gazed around cautiously. It was almost painful. They were quite confused, far away from themselves, set down in a distance in which they lost themselves. They saw without light and heard without sound. Their soul was as excessively stretched as a hand that loses all its power, their tongue was as if cut off. But this pain was as sweet as a strange, living clarity.
? It was like a pain grating on their sensibilities, and yet could be called more a sweetness than a pain, for there was no vexation in it but a pecu- liar, quite supranatural comfort.
And they further perceived that the circumscribing powers in them were not lost at all, but in reality inverted, and with them all boundaries had been inverted. They noticed that they had not become mute at all but were speaking, but they were not choosing words but were being chosen by words; no thought stirred in them, but the whole world was full of marvelous thoughts; they thought that they, and things as well, were no longer mutually displacing and repelling hermetic bodies, but opened and allied forms. Their glances, which in their whole lives had
From the Posthu11U)Us Papers · 1457
followed only the small patterns that objects and people form against the enormous background, had suddenly reversed, and the enormous back- ground played with the patterns of life like an ocean with tiny matches.
Agathe lay half fainting against Ulrich's chest. She felt at this moment embraced by her brother in such a distant, silent, and pure fashion that there was nothing at all like it. Their bodies did not move and were not altered, and yet a sensual happiness flowed through them, the like of which they had never experienced. It was not an idea and not imagined! Wherever they touched each other, whether on their hips, their hands, or a strand of hair, they interpenetrated one another.
They were both convinced at this moment that they were no longer subject to the distinctions of humankind. They had overcome the stage of desire, which expends its energy on an action and a brief intensifica- tion, and their fulfillment impinged on them not only in specific places but in all the places of their bodies, as fire does not become less when other fires kindle from it. They were submerged in this fire that fills up everything; swimming in it as in a sea of desire, and flying in it as in a heaven of rapture.
Agathe wept with happiness. Whenever they moved, the recollection that they were still two dropped like a grain of incense into the sweet fire of life and dissolved in it; these were perhaps the happiest moments, where they were not entirely one.
Originally also supposed to come here: . . . I'm in love and don't know with whom . . . I'm neither faithful, nor unfaithful, what am I then.
For they felt, hovering more strongly over this hour than over others a breath of grief and transitoriness, something shadowy and unreal, a- being robbed, a cruelty, a fearful tension of uncertain forces against the fear of being transformed once more. Finally, when they felt the condi- tion fade, they separated wordlessly and in utter exhaustion.
The next morning, Ulrich and Agathe had separated without having made plans, and did not see each other the entire day; they could not do otherwise; the emotions of the night were still ebbing away and taking them with them; both felt the need to come to terms with themselves alone, without noticing that this entailed a contradiction of the experi- ence that had overpowered them. Involuntarily they went off far across the countryside in opposite directions, stopped in places at different
1458 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
times, sought a resting place in view of the sea, and thought of each other.
It may be called strange that their love immediately involved the need for separation, but this love was so great that they mistrusted it and de- sired this test.
Can they still separate? How can it be done?
Now one can dream. Lie under a bush and the bees buzz; or stare into the weaving heat, the thin air. The senses doze off, and in the body memories shine forth again like the stars after sunset. The body is again touched and kissed, and the magic line of demarcation that otherwise still distinguishes the strongest memories from reality is transcended by these soft I dreaming memories. They push time and space aside like a curtain and unite the lovers not only in thought but physically, not with their heavy bodies but with inwardly altered ones consisting entirely of tender mobility. But only when one thinks that during this union, which is more perfect and blissful than bodily union, one has no idea what the other person has just been doing, or what he will be doing the next mo- ment, does the mystery attain its greatest depth. Ulrich assumed that Agathe had remained behind in the hotel. He saw her standing on the white square in front of the white building, speaking with the manager. It was false. Or perhaps she was standing with the young German pro- fessor who had arrived and introduced himself, or was talking with Luisina, the chambermaid with the lovely eyes, and laughing at her pert, funny answers. That Agathe was now able to laugh! It destroyed the Condition; a smile was just heavy enough to be home by it . . . ! I When Ulrich turned around, Agathe was suddenly really standing there. Re- ally? She had come across the stones in a great arc; her dress was flutter- ing in the wind, she cast a dark shadow on the hot ground and was laughing at Ulrich. Blissfully real reality; it hurt as much as when eyes that have been staring into the distance must quickly adapt to nearness.
Agathe sat down beside him. A lizard sat nearby; it silently darted out its tongue, a small, scurrying flame of life, beside their conversation. Ul- rich had noticed it some time before. Agathe hadn't. But when Agathe, who was afraid of small animals, caught sight of it, she was frightened and, laughing in embarrassment, scared the little creature away with a stone. And to gather courage she ran after it, clapping her hands and chasing the little beast.
Ulrich, who had been staring at the small creature as at a flickering
From the Posthurrwus Papers · 1459
magic mirror, said to himself: That we were now so different is as sad as that we were born at the same time but will die at different times. With his eyes and ears he followed this strange body, Agathe. But then he suddenly fell deeply once again into and was at the bottom of the experi- ence out of which Agathe had startled him.
He was not able to pin it down clearly, but in this flickering brightness above the stones in which everything was transformed, happiness into grief, and also griefinto happiness, the painful moment abruptly took on the secret lust of the hermaphrodite who, separated into two indepen- dent beings, finds itself again, whose secret no one who touches it sus- pects. Yet how glorious it is-Agathe's brother thought-that she is different from me, that she can do things I can't even guess at, which yet also belong to me through our secret empathy. Dreams occurred to him, which he otherwise never recalled but which must have often preoc- cupied him. Sometimes in a dream he had met the sister of a beloved, although she did not have a sister, and this strange familiar person ra- diated all the happiness ofpossession and all the happiness ofdesire. Or he heard a soft voice speaking. Or saw only the fluttering of a skirt, which most definitely belonged to a stranger, but this stranger was most definitely his beloved. As i f a disembodied, completely free attachment was only playing with these people. All at once Ulrich was startled, and thought he saw in the great brightness that the secret of love was pre- cisely this, that lovers are not one.
That belongs to the principles of profane love! Thus really already a game against itself.
"How wonderful it is, Agathe," Ulrich said, "that you can do things I can't guess at. "
"Yes," she answered, "the whole world is full of such things. As I was walking across this plateau I felt that I could now walk in every direc- tion. "
"But why did you come to me? "
Agathe was silent.
"It is so beautiful to be different from the way one was born," Ulrich
continued. "But I was afraid ofjust that. " He told her the dreams that he had remembered, and she knew them too.
"But why are you afraid? " Agathe asked.
"Because it occurred to me that ifit is the sense ofthese dreams-and it might well be that they signify the final memory ofit-that our desires
1460 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
aim not at making one person out of two but, on the contrary, at escap- ing from our prison, our oneness, to become two in a union, but prefera- bly twelve, a thousand, incredibly many, rather, to slip out of ourselves as in a dream, to drink life brewed to the boiling point, to be carried out of ourselves or whatever, for I can't express it vety well; then the world contains as much lust as strangeness, as much tenderness as activity, and is not an opium haze but rather an intoxication of the blood, an orgasm of battle, and the only mistake we could make would be to forget the (lustful contact of) lust of strangeness and imagine doing all sorts of things by dividing up the hurricane of love into scanty creeks flowing back and forth between two people-"
He had jumped up.
"But how would one have to be? " Agathe asked pensively and simply. It pained him that she could immediately appropriate his half-loved and half-cursed idea. "One would have to be able to give," she went on, "without taking away. To be such that love does not become less when it's divided. Then that would be possible too.
Not to treat love as a treasure"-she laughed-"the way it's already laid down in language! "
Ulrich was picking up head-sized stones and flinging them from the cliff into the sea, which squirted up a tiny spray; he had not exercised his muscles for a long time.
"But . . . ? " Agathe said. "Isn't what you're saying simply what one reads fairly often, drinking the world in great drafts of desire? To want to be a thousandfold, because once isn't enough? " She was parodying it a little because she suddenly realized that she did not like it.
"No! " Ulrich shouted back. "It's never what others say! " He flung the large stone he was holding in his hand so angrily to the ground that the loose limestone exploded. "We forgot ourselves," he said gently, grasp- ing Agathe under the arm and pulling her away. "It would still have to be a sister and a brother, even if they're divided into a thousand pieces. -Anyway, it's just an idea. "
Meanwhile days came when only the surface stirred. On the sparkling damp stones in the sea. A silent being: a fish, flowerlike in the water. Agathe romped after it from stone to stone until it dived under, darting into the darkness like an arrow, and disappeared. Well? Ulrich thought. Agathe was standing out on the rocks, he on the shore; a melody of eventfulness broke off, and a new one must carty on: How will she turn around, how smile back to the shore? Beautifully. Like all perfection. With total charm in her motion is how Agathe did it; the insights of the
From the Posthumous Papers · 1461
orchestra of her beauty, though it seemed to be making music without a conductor, were always delightful.
And yet all perfected beauty-an animal, a painting, a woman-is nothing more than the final piece in a circle; an arc is completed, one sees it but would like to know the circle. If it is one of life's familiar circles, for instance that of a great man, then a noble horse or a beauti- ful woman is like the clasp in a belt, which closes it and for a moment seems to contain the entire phenomenon; in the same way one can be smitten with a lovely farm horse, because in him as in a focusing mir- ror the entire heavy-footed beauty of the field and its people is re- peated. But if there is nothing behind it? Nothing more than is behind the rays of the sun dancing on the stones? If this infinitude of water and sky is pitilessly open? Then one might almost believe that beauty is something that secretly negates, something incomplete and incom- pletable, a happiness without purpose, without sense. But what if it lacks everything? Then beauty is a torture, something to laugh and cry over, a tickling to make one roll around in the sand, with Apollo's arrow in one's side.
Hatred of beauty. Sense of urgent sexual desire: to destroy beauty.
The brightness of such days was like smoke, which the clarity of the nights wiped away.
Agathe had somewhat less imagination than Ulrich. Because she had not thought as much as he had her emotions were not as volatile as his, but burned like a flame rising straight out of the particular ground on which she happened to be standing. The daring nature of their flight, the conscience made somewhat anxious by the fear of discovery, and finally this hiding place in a flower basket between the porous limestone wall, sea, and sky, at times gave her a high-spirited and childlike cheerfulness. She then treated even their strange experience as an adventure: a for- bidden space within herself over whose enclosure one spies, or into which one forces one's way, with beating heart, burning neck, and heavy soles weighed down with clods of damp earth from the path one has hurriedly followed in secret.
In this way very indirect suggestion of repeated coitus.
1462 ·THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
She sometimes had a playful way of allowing herself to be touched, with opened-even-when-closed eyes; of reappearing; a tenderness that was not to be stilled. He secretly obseJVed her, saw this play of love with the body, which has the captivation of a smile and the oppressive quality of a force of nature, for the first time, or was moved by it for the first time. Or there were hours when she did not look at him, was cold, al- most angry with him; because she was too agitated; like someone in a boat not daring to move, so it was in her body-afterward, every time. Because the connection does not function. Or afterreactions; at first a blocking and then, for no apparent reason, an afterflood. It was thrilling and charming to let oneself be cradled by these inspirations; they short- ened the hours but they forced an optic of nearness and minute obseJVa- tion. Ulrich resisted this. It was a leftover piece of earth drifting in the liquid fire and clouding it; a temptation to explanations such as that Agathe had never learned the proper connection between love and sex. As with most people, the entire power of the sexual had first come to- gether with a spark of inclination at the time she had married Hagauer, who was not yet abhorrent to her. Instead of stumbling into a storm with someone I almost only in the company of I accompanied by someone almost as impersonal as the elements, and only then noticing as a still nameless surprise that this person's legs are not clothed like one's own and that one's soul is beckoning one to change one's hiding place . . .
But such thoughts, too, were like singing in a false key. Ulrich did not allow himself this kind of understanding. Understanding a person one loves cannot involve spying on that person but must come pouring from an overflow of auspicious inspirations. One may only recognize those things that enrich. One makes a gift of qualities in the unshakable secu- rity of a predetermined harmony, a separation that has never b e e n -
Especially when ethical magnanimity is stimulated by it. Not the see- ing or not seeing of weaknesses, but the large motion in which they float without significance.
An ancient column-thrown down at the time of Venice, Greece, or Rome-lay among the stones and the broom; every groove of its shaft and capital deepened by the ray-sharp graving tool of the midday shad- ows. Lying next to it belonged to the great hours of love.
Four eyes watching. Nothing but noon, column, four eyes. If the glance of two eyes sees one picture, one world: why not the glance of four?
From the Posthumous Papers · 1463
When two pairs of eyes look long into each other, one person crosses over to the other on the bridge of glances, and all that remains is a feel- ing that no longer has a body.
When in a secret hour two pairs of eyes look at an object and come together in it-every object hovering deep down in a feeling, and ob- jects standing only as firmly as they do if this deep ground is hard-then the rigid world begins to move, softly and incessantly. It rises and falls restlessly with the blood. The fraternal twins looked at each other. In the bright light it could not be made out whether they were still breathing or had been lying there for a thousand years like the stones. Whether the stone column was lying there or had risen up in the light without a sound and was floating.
There is a significant difference in the way one looks at people and the way one looks at things. Every time after this when they looked at some- one in the hotel: the play of facial expressions of someone with whom one is talking becomes unspeakably alienating if one observes it as an objective process, and not as an ongoing exchange of signals between two souls; we are accustomed to see things lying mutely where they are, and we consider it a disturbing hallucination if they take on a more dy- namic relation to us. But it is only we ourselves who are looking at them in such a way that the small changes in their physiognomies are not an- swered by any alterations in our emotions, and to change this nothing more is needed, basically, than that we not look at the world intellectu- ally but that objects arouse in us our moral emotions instead of our sense-based surveying equipment. At such moments the excitement in which a glimpse brings us something and enriches us becomes so strong that nothing appears real except for a hovering condition, which, beyond the eyes, condenses into objects, and on this side of the eyes condenses into ideas and feelings, without these two sides being separable from each other. Whatever the soul bestows comes forward; whatever loses this power dissipates before one's eyes.
In this flickering silence among the stones there was a panic horror. The world seemed to be only the outer aspect of a speciflc inner atti- tude, and interchangeable with it. But world and self were not solid; a scaffolding sunk into soft depths; mutually helping each other out of a formlessness. Agathe said softly to Ulrich: "Are you yourself or are you not? I know nothing of it. I am incognizant of it and I am incognizant of myself. "
It was the terror: The world depended on her, and she did not know who she was.
