The Man Without Qualities Page 20

  He did not stir, but only gave Clarisse a dumbfounded stare.

  And Clarisse offered no explanations, stood there, and breathed hard.

  She was definitely not at all in love with Ulrich, she assured Walter after he had spoken. If she were in love with him, she would say so at once. But she did feel kindled by him, like a light. She felt she shone more herself, amounted to more, when he was near; Walter on the other hand always wanted only to close the shutters. Besides, her feelings were nobody else’s business, not Ulrich’s and not Walter’s!

  Yet Walter thought that between the fury and indignation that breathed from her words he could scent a narcotic, deadly kernel of something that was not fury.

  Dusk had fallen. The room was black. The piano was black. The silhouettes of two people who loved each other were black. Clarisse’s eyes gleamed in the dark, kindled like a light, and in Walter’s mouth, restless with pain, the enamel on a tooth shone like ivory. Regardless of the greatest affairs of state occurring in the world outside, and despite its vexations, this seemed to be one of those moments for which God had created the earth.

  39

  A MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES CONSISTS OF QUALITIES WITHOUT A MAN

  But Ulrich did not come that evening. After Director Fischel had left him in such haste, he fell to mulling over the question of his youth: why the world so uncannily favored inauthentic and—in a higher sense—untrue statements. “One always gets one step ahead precisely when one lies,” he thought. “That’s another thing I should have told him.”

  Ulrich was a passionate man, but not in the sense of passions as commonly understood. There must indeed have been something that drove him again and again into this state, and it was perhaps passion, but when he was actually excited or behaving in an excited manner, his attitude was both passionate and detached at the same time. He had run the gamut of experience, more or less, and felt that he might still now at any time plunge into something that need not mean anything to him personally so long as it stimulated his urge to action. So without much exaggeration he was able to say of his life that everything in it had fulfilled itself as if it belonged together more than it belonged to him. B had always followed A, whether in battle or in love. Therefore he had to suppose that the personal qualities he had achieved in this way had more to do with one another than with him; that every one of them, in fact, looked at closely, was no more intimately bound up with him than with anyone else who also happened to possess them.

  Nevertheless, one is undoubtedly conditioned by one’s qualities and is made up of them, even if one is not identical with them, and so one can sometimes seem just as much a stranger to oneself at rest as in motion. If Ulrich had been asked to say what he was really like he would have been at a loss, for like so many people he had never tested himself other than by a task and his relation to it. His self-confidence had not been damaged, nor was it coddled and vain; it never needed that overhauling and lubrication that is called probing one’s conscience. Was he a strong person? He didn’t know; on that point he was perhaps fatefully mistaken. But he had surely always been a person with faith in his own strength. Even now he did not doubt that the differences between identifying with one’s own experiences and qualities and distancing oneself from them was only a difference in attitude, in a sense a deliberate decision or a choice of the degree to which one saw one’s life as a general manifestation or an individual one. Put simply, one can take what one does or what happens to one either personally or impersonally. One can feel a blow as an insult as well as a pain, in which case it becomes unbearably intensified; but one can also take it in a sporting sense, as a setback by which one should not let oneself be either intimidated or enraged, and then, often enough, one never even notices it. But in this second case, all that has happened is that the blow has been put in a general context, that of combat, so that it is seen to depend on the purpose it is meant to serve. And it is just this—that an experience derives its meaning, even its content, only from its position in a chain of logically consistent events—which is apparent when a man sees his experience not only as a personal event but as a challenge to his spiritual powers. He will also be less emotionally affected by what he does. But oddly enough, what we consider a sign of superior intelligence in a boxer is judged to be cold and callous in people who can’t box but incline to an intellectual way of life. Whether we apply and demand a general or a personal attitude in a given situation is governed by all sorts of distinctions. A murderer who goes coolly about his business is likely to be judged particularly vicious; a professor who continues to work out a problem in the arms of his wife is seen as a dry-as-dust pedant; a politician who climbs to high office over the bodies of those he has destroyed will be called a monster or a hero, depending on his success; but soldiers, hangmen, or surgeons, on the other hand, are expected to behave with the same impassivity that is condemned in others. Without going further into the morality of these examples, we cannot overlook the uncertainty that leads in every case to a compromise between the objectively and the subjectively proper attitude.

  This uncertainty gave Ulrich’s personal problem a broader context. In earlier times, one had an easier conscience about being a person than one does today. People were like cornstalks in a field, probably more violently tossed back and forth by God, hail, fire, pestilence, and war than they are today, but as a whole, as a city, a region, a field, and as to what personal movement was left to the individual stalk—all this was clearly defined and could be answered for. But today responsibility’s center of gravity is not in people but in circumstances. Have we not noticed that experiences have made themselves independent of people? They have gone on the stage, into books, into the reports of research institutes and explorers, into ideological or religious communities, which foster certain kinds of experience at the expense of others as if they are conducting a kind of social experiment, and insofar as experiences are not actually being developed, they are simply left dangling in the air. Who can say nowadays that his anger is really his own anger when so many people talk about it and claim to know more about it than he does? A world of qualities without a man has arisen, of experiences without the person who experiences them, and it almost looks as though ideally private experience is a thing of the past, and that the friendly burden of personal responsibility is to dissolve into a system of formulas of possible meanings. Probably the dissolution of the anthropocentric point of view, which for such a long time considered man to be at the center of the universe but which has been fading away for centuries, has finally arrived at the “I” itself, for the belief that the most important thing about experience is the experiencing, or of action the doing, is beginning to strike most people as naïve. There are probably people who still lead personal lives, who say “We saw the So-and-sos yesterday” or “We’ll do this or that today” and enjoy it without its needing to have any content or significance. They like everything that comes in contact with their fingers, and are purely private persons insofar as this is at all possible. In contact with such people, the world becomes a private world and shines like a rainbow. They may be very happy, but this kind of people usually seems absurd to the others, although it is still not at all clear why.

  And suddenly, in view of these reflections, Ulrich had to smile and admit to himself that he was, after all, a character, even without having one.

  40

  A MAN WITH ALL THE QUALITIES, BUT HE IS INDIFFERENT TO THEM. A PRINCE OF INTELLECT IS ARRESTED, AND THE PARALLEL CAMPAIGN GETS ITS HONORARY SECRETARY

  It is not difficult to describe the basic traits of this thirty-two-year-old man Ulrich, even though all he knows about himself is that he is as close to as he is far from all qualities, and that they are all, whether or not he has made them his own, in a curious fashion indifferent to him. With a suppleness of mind, owing simply to his being gifted in various directions, he combines a certain aggressiveness. His is a masculine mind. He is not sensitive toward other people and rarely puts himself in their
place, except to get to know them for his own purposes. He is no respecter of rights unless he respects the person whose rights they are, which is not very often. With the passage of time, a certain inclination toward the negative has developed in him, a flexible dialectic of feeling that easily leads him to discover a flaw in something widely approved or, conversely, to defend the forbidden and to refuse responsibilities with a resentment that springs from the desire to create his own responsibilities. Despite this need, however, and apart from certain self-indulgences, he lets himself be guided morally by the chivalrous code that is followed by almost all men as long as they live in secure circumstances in middle-class society, and so, with all the arrogance, ruthlessness, and negligence of a man called to his vocation, he leads the life of another man who has made of his inclinations and abilities more or less ordinary, practical and social use. He was accustomed, instinctively and without vanity, to regard himself as the instrument of a not unimportant purpose, which he intended to discover in good time; even now, early in this year of groping unrest, after he realized how his life had been drifting, the feeling that he was on his way somewhere was soon restored, and he made no special effort with his plans. It is none too easy to recognize in such a temperament the passion that drives it; ambiguously formed by predisposition and circumstances, its fate has not yet been laid bare by any really tough counterpressure. But the main thing is that the missing element needed in order to crystallize a decision is still unknown. Ulrich was a man forced somehow to live against himself, though outwardly he appeared to be indulging his inclinations without constraint.

  Comparing the world to a laboratory had rekindled an old idea in his mind. Formerly he had thought of the kind of life that would appeal to him as a vast experimental station for trying out the best ways of being a man and discovering new ones. That the great existing laboratory was functioning rather haphazardly, lacking visible directors or theoreticians at the top, was another matter. It might even be said that he himself would have wanted to become something like a philosopher king; who wouldn’t? It is so natural to regard the mind as the highest power, the supreme ruler of everything. That is what we are taught. Anybody who can dresses up in intellect, decks himself out in it. Mind and spirit, in combination with a numinous other something, is the most ubiquitous thing there is. The spirit of loyalty, the spirit of love, a masculine mind, a cultivated mind, the greatest living mind, keeping up the spirit of one cause or another, acting in the spirit of this or that movement: how solid and unexceptionable it sounds, right down to its lowest levels. Beside it everything else, be it humdrum crime or the hot pursuit of profits, seems inadmissible, the dirt God removes from His toenails.

  But what of “spirit” standing by itself, a naked noun, bare as a ghost to whom one would like to lend a sheet? One can read the poets, study the philosophers, buy paintings, hold all-night discussions—does all this bestow spirit on us?* If it does, do we then possess it? And even if we should, this spirit is so firmly bound up with the accidental form in which it happens to manifest itself! It passes right through the person who wants to absorb it, leaving only a small tremor behind. What can we do with all this spirit? It is constantly being spewed out in truly astronomical quantities on masses of paper, stone, and canvas, and just as ceaselessly consumed at a tremendous cost in nervous energy. But what becomes of it then? Does it vanish like a mirage? Does it dissolve into particles? Does it evade the earthly law of conservation? The motes of dust that sink and slowly settle down to rest inside us bear no relation to all that expense. Where has it gone, where and what is it? If we knew more about it there might be an awkward silence around this noun, “spirit.”

  Evening had come; buildings as if broken out of pure space, asphalt, steel rails, formed the cooling shell that was the city. The mother shell, full of childlike, joyful, angry human movement. Where every drop begins as a droplet sprayed or squirted; a tiny explosion caught by the walls, cooling, calming, and slowing down, hanging quietly, tenderly, on the slope of the mother shell, hardening at last into a little grain on its wall.

  “Why,” Ulrich thought suddenly, “didn’t I become a pilgrim?” A pure, uncontingent way of life, as piercingly fresh as ozone, presented itself to his senses; whoever cannot say “Yes” to life should at least utter the “No” of the saint. And yet it was simply impossible to consider this seriously. Nor could he see himself becoming an adventurer, though it might feel rather like an everlasting honeymoon, and appealed to his limbs and his temperament. He had not been able to become a poet or one of those disillusioned souls who believe only in money and power, although he had the makings of either. He forgot his age, he imagined he was twenty, but even so, something inside him was just as certain that he could become none of those things; every possibility beckoned him, but something stronger kept him from yielding to the attraction. Why was he living in this dim and undecided fashion? Obviously, he said to himself, what was keeping him spellbound in this aloof and nameless way of life was nothing other than the compulsion to that loosening and binding of the world that is known by a word we do not care to encounter by itself: spirit, or mind. Without knowing why, Ulrich suddenly felt sad, and thought: “I simply don’t love myself.” Within the frozen, petrified body of the city he felt his heart beating in its innermost depths. There was something in him that had never wanted to remain anywhere, had groped its way along the walls of the world, thinking: There are still millions of other walls; it was this slowly cooling, absurd drop “I” that refused to give up its fire, its tiny glowing core.

  The mind has learned that beauty makes things or people good, bad, stupid, or enchanting. It dissects a sheep and a penitent and finds humility and patience in both. It analyzes a substance and notes that it is a poison in large quantities, a stimulant in smaller ones. It knows that the mucous membrane of the lips is related to the mucous membrane of the intestine, but also knows that the humility of those lips is related to the humility of all that is saintly. It jumbles things up, sorts them out, and forms new combinations. To the mind, good and evil, above and below, are not skeptical, relative concepts, but terms of a function, values that depend on the context they find themselves in. The centuries have taught it that vices can turn into virtues and virtues into vices, so the mind concludes that basically only ineptitude prevents the transformation of a criminal into a useful person within the space of a lifetime. It does not accept anything as permissible or impermissible, since everything may have some quality that may someday make it part of a great new context. It secretly detests everything with pretensions to permanence, all the great ideals and laws and their little fossilized imprint, the well-adjusted character. It regards nothing as fixed, no personality, no order of things; because our knowledge may change from day to day, it regards nothing as binding; everything has the value it has only until the next act of creation, as a face changes with the words we are speaking to it.

  And so the mind or spirit is the great opportunist, itself impossible to pin down, take hold of, anywhere; one is tempted to believe that of all its influence nothing is left but decay. Every advance is a gain in particular and a separation in general; it is an increase in power leading only to a progressive increase in impotence, but there is no way to quit. Ulrich thought of that body of facts and discoveries, growing almost by the hour, out of which the mind must peer today if it wishes to scrutinize any given problem closely. This body grows away from its inner life. Countless views, opinions, systems of ideas from every age and latitude, from all sorts of sick and sound, waking and dreaming brains run through it like thousands of small sensitive nerve strands, but the central nodal point tying them all together is missing. Man feels dangerously close to repeating the fate of those gigantic primeval species that perished because of their size; but he cannot stop himself.

  This reminded Ulrich of that rather dubious notion in which he had long believed and even now had not quite uprooted from himself: that the world would be best governed by a senate of the wis
est, the most advanced. It is after all very natural to think that man, who calls in professionally trained doctors rather than shepherds to treat him when sick, has no reason, when well, to let public affairs be conducted by windbags no better qualified than shepherds. This is why the young, who care about the essentials in life, begin by regarding everything in the world that is neither true nor good nor beautiful, such as the Internal Revenue Service or a debate in the legislature, as irrelevant; at least they used to. Nowadays, thanks to their education in politics and economics, they are said to be different. But even at that time, as one got older and on longer acquaintance with the smokehouse of the mind, in which the world cures the bacon of its daily affairs, one learned to adapt oneself to reality, and a person with a trained mind would finally end up limiting himself to his specialty and spend the rest of his life convinced that the whole of life should perhaps be different, but there was no point in thinking about it. This is more or less how people who follow intellectual pursuits maintain their equilibrium. Suddenly Ulrich saw the whole thing in the comical light of the question whether, given that there was certainly an abundance of mind around, the only thing wrong was that mind itself was devoid of mind.

  He felt like laughing. He was himself, after all, one of those specialists who had renounced responsibility for the larger questions. But disappointed, still-burning ambition went through him like a sword. At this moment there were two Ulrichs, walking side by side. One took in the scene with a smile and thought: So this is the stage on which I once hoped to play a part. One day I woke up, no longer snug in mother’s crib, but with the firm conviction that there was something I had to accomplish. They gave me cues, but I felt they had nothing to do with me. Like a kind of feverish stagefright, everything in those days was filled with my own plans and expectations. Meanwhile the stage has continued revolving unobtrusively, I am somewhat farther along on my way, and I may already be standing near the exit. Soon I shall be turned out, and the only lines of my great part that I will have uttered are “The horses are saddled! The devil take all of you!”