Agathe Page 38
Once, Ulrich surprised his sister during these experiments and probably had an inkling of them, for he said to her softly, smiling: “There is a prophecy that to the gods a millennium is no more than the blink of an eye.” Then they both leaned back again and continued listening to the dream discourse of silence.
Agathe thought: “All this was his doing, he alone made it happen; and yet he doubts every time he smiles!” But the sun was steadily pouring its warmth on his parted lips, tenderly, like a sleeping potion; Agathe felt it on her own lips and knew herself to be at one with him. She tried to put herself in his place and guess his thoughts, which was something they had come to regard as impermissible, because it was an intrusion and not the result of creative participation; but as a deviation it was that much more secret. “He doesn’t want this to become just another love story,” she thought; and added: “That suits my taste too.” And then she thought: “He won’t love another woman after me, because this is no longer a love story; it’s in fact the last possible love story!” And she added: “I suppose we’ll be something like the Last Mohicans of love!” At the moment, she was capable of this self-mocking tone, for if she was completely honest, the enchanted garden in which she found herself together with Ulrich was also, of course, more a wish than a reality. She did not really believe that the Thousand-Year Kingdom could have begun, despite the sound of terra firma in the name Ulrich had given it. She even felt quite deserted by her powers of desire, and wherever it was that her dreams came from, bitterly sobered. She remembered times, before she met Ulrich, when she had actually found it easier to imagine that a waking sleep like the one in which her soul was now being gently rocked would be able to escort her behind life to a wakefulness after death, close to God, where powers would come to fetch her, or just take her alongside life to a cessation of ideas and a passage to forests and meadows of imagination: it had never become clear what that was! So now she made an effort to recall those old visions. But all she could remember was a hammock suspended between two enormous fingers and rocked with infinite patience; then a calm state of being overtowered, as if by high trees between which she felt herself lifted up and removed from sight; and finally a Nothing, which in some incomprehensible way had a tangible content: —All these were probably the mixtures of intuition and fantasy in which her longing had found consolation. But was that really all they amounted to, mere hybrids or halves? For to her astonishment, Agathe was gradually beginning to notice something quite remarkable. “Truly,” she thought, “it’s just like the expression: It dawns on you! And the light keeps spreading the longer it lasts!” For what she had once imagined seemed to be present in almost everything that now stood around her in abiding calm, no matter how often she sent out a glance for confirmation. It had entered the world without a sound. To be sure, God—differently from the way a literalist believer might have experienced it—had absented Himself from her adventure, but to make up for that, this adventure was one in which she was no longer alone: those were the only two changes that distinguished the fulfillment from the premonition, and these changes were in favor of earthly naturalness.
*The German phrase zu billigstem Preis und Lob involves an untranslatable pun. Preis and Lob both mean “praise” and are often used as a pair in liturgical language, but Preis also means “price.”
31
STROLLS AMONG THE CROWD
In the time that followed, they withdrew from their acquaintances and astonished them by making a pretext of a journey and not allowing themselves to be reached in any way.
They mostly stayed secretly at home, and when they went out they avoided places where they might meet people of their social set; but they visited places of entertainment and small theaters where they believed themselves to be secure from such encounters; and generally, as soon as they left the house, they simply followed the currents of the metropolis, which are an image of people’s needs and desires and with tide-like precision amass crowds in one place and siphon them away from another, depending on the hour. They abandoned themselves to these movements without any particular purpose. It gave them pleasure to do what many were doing and to participate in a way of life that relieved them for a while of responsibility for their own. And never had the city in which they lived seemed to them at once so lovely and so strange. In their totality, the houses presented a grand picture, even if singly or in particular they were not beautiful at all. Noise streamed through the heat-thinned air like a river reaching up to the rooftops; in the strong light, muted by the depth of the streets, people looked more passionate and more mysterious than they probably deserved. All things sounded, looked, and smelled irreplaceable and unforgettable, as if to proclaim how it felt to be themselves in their instantaneousness; and the siblings gladly accepted this invitation to turn toward the world.
But it was not without reservation that they did so, for they could not help feeling the pervading dichotomy. Everything that was secret and undefined in their relationship, and that bound them together even though they could not speak openly about it, separated them from other people; but the same passion, which they felt constantly, because it had been thwarted less by prohibition than by a sublime promise, had also left them in a state that bore resemblance to the sultry intermittencies of a physical union. Desire, not finding an outlet, sank back into the body and filled it with a tenderness as indefinable as a last day of autumn or a first day of spring. And though they certainly did not feel for every person and for all the world as they did for each other, they still sensed the lovely shadow of “how it would be” falling on their hearts, and the heart could neither fully believe nor entirely escape the gentle illusion, no matter what it encountered.
This created the impression on the siblings, twins by choice, that by their anticipation and asceticism they had become sensitive to all the affections in the world that could not be dreamed to completion, but also to the limits reality and vigilance set to every feeling; and they saw very clearly the peculiarly two-sided nature of life, which dampens every higher aspiration with a lower one. It burdens every advance with a decline and every strength with a weakness; it gives no one a right that it does not take away from another, straightens out no tangle without causing new disorder, and even appears to evoke the sublime only in order to heap the honors it deserves on some trivial thing an hour later. Thus an all but indissoluble and perhaps profoundly necessary relation connects every sublime endeavor to the manifestation of its opposite and makes life for thinking or even just thoughtful people—beyond whatever differences and disagreements may separate them—rather difficult to bear, but it also drives them to seek an explanation for it.
This way in which the honorable side of life and its indignity adhere to each other has been judged in very different ways. Pious misanthropists have seen in it a consequence of earthly frailty; men of brawn, life’s juiciest filet; denizens of the middle range feel as comfortable in this contradiction as they do between their right and left hands; and the circumspect simply say that the world was not created to correspond to human ideas. So it has been regarded as the imperfection of the world or of human expectations, has been accepted with childlike trust on one hand and melancholy resignation or defiant indifference on the other, and all in all, settling this question may be a matter of temperament rather than a soberly honorable task for reason. However, as certainly as the world was not created to correspond to human expectations, it is equally certain that human ideas were created to correspond to the world, for that is their purpose; and why it is precisely in the sphere of the right and the beautiful that this never comes to pass is a strangely open question. The siblings’ aimless walks illustrated this like a picture book and gave rise to conversations that were accompanied by the loosely varying excitement of turning its pages.
None of these conversations treated its subject in a concrete and thoroughgoing way, each of them over their course turned upon the most various related themes; as a result, their overall context became more and
more broad; their structure, determined by a succession of living occasions, broke down again and again, its borders flooded by an influx of new animated observations; and this continued for a long time, sometimes gaining, sometimes losing, before the result was unmistakably evident. The first hypothesis Ulrich adopted—whether by chance or not, with conviction or haphazardly—was that the limit imposed on feeling and also the advances and retreats, or at least the to and fro, of life—its intellectual unreliability, in short—perhaps fulfilled a not unuseful purpose, namely that of producing and sustaining a middling condition of life.
He did not want to demand of the world that it be a pleasure garden for genius. Only at its peaks, if not its excesses, is history the story of genius and its works; in the main it is the story of the average man. He is the material that the world works with and that continually emerges anew from it. Perhaps it was only a moment of fatigue that inspired this thought. Perhaps Ulrich was just building on the notion that it is the middling and average that is sturdiest and offers the best prospects for preserving the species; one had to assume that the first law of life is self-preservation, and that may very well be the case. But undoubtedly, a different outlook was adding its voice to this beginning. We may take it for granted that it is not the average man who creates the great upswings of human history; nonetheless, taking everything into account, genius and stupidity, heroism and indecision, history is precisely a history of millions of impulses and resistances, qualities, decisions, adjustments, passions, insights, and errors, which the average man receives from all sides and distributes in all directions. The same elements are mixed together both in him and in history; and this is the respect in which history is at all events a history of averages or, depending on how you might view it, the average of millions of stories, and if history as a result hovers forever around the undistinguished middle range, what could be more nonsensical than to take umbrage at the mediocrity of an average!
But another thought pushed itself into these deliberations: it was a memory of the calculation of averages as it is understood in probability theory. The rules of probability begin with cold, almost shameless nonchalance in the propensity of events to go one way at one time, a different way at another, or indeed to turn into the opposite of what they are. So one essential aspect in the formation and consolidation of an average is that the higher and special values are far fewer in number than the average ones, that in fact they hardly ever occur, and that this is true also of the disproportionally low ones. Both the high and the low remain, at best and at worst, marginal values, and this is the case not only according to the manual of calculation but also in experience wherever chance-like conditions prevail. This experience may have been obtained from hailstorm insurance and mortality surveys; but there is a clear correspondence between the low probability of marginal values and the fact that in history, too, one-sided arrangements and the unalloyed realization of exorbitant ambitions have rarely lasted. And if that seems but half the story from one point of view, from another we may consider how often, thanks to the same statistical law, the human race has been spared the enterprising mania of genius no less than the ravages of inflamed stupidity incited to action. Without deliberate intention, Ulrich kept on extrapolating from the idea of probability to spiritual and historical events, and from the mechanical concept of the average to mediocrity in the moral sphere; and so he arrived at the two-sidedness of life with which he had begun. For the limits that are set on ideas and emotions, and the changes to which they are subject, their futility, the mysterious and treacherous connection between their meaning and the manifestation of its opposite—all this and the like of it is already given as an inherent consequence of the supposition that one outcome is as likely as another. But this supposition represents the fundamental idea from which probability theory draws its substance, and is that discipline’s definition of chance; that it also characterizes the course of events in the world therefore permits the conclusion that life would not be much different from the way it is if everything were immediately left to chance.
Agathe asked if equating the course of the world with chance wasn’t a capricious way of wrapping the truth in gloom, amounting to romantic pessimism.
“Anything but that!” Ulrich replied. “We began with the futility of all high-hearted expectations and thought there was a treacherous secret behind this. But if we now compare that futility with the rules of probability, we can explain this secret—which we could call, playing mockingly with its famous opposite, the “preestablished disharmony” of creation—very unpretentiously by the fact that nothing happens to contradict it! Evolution is left to itself, not saddled with a spiritual organizing principle; apparently it operates randomly; and while these premises all but exclude the True, they do at least constitute the foundation for the Probable! At the same time, out of this concept of probability, we can explain mediocrity as the statistical average that is the world’s sole stabilizing factor and whose highly undesirable increase is palpable all around us. So there’s nothing Romantic about this, and maybe not even anything gloomy; rather, whether we like it or not, I would say it’s an adventurous possibility!”
Nevertheless, he did not want to say anything more about it, and he let the apparently ingenious venture rest without having got beyond the introduction.—He had the feeling of having touched upon something very large in an awkward and circuitous manner. The large subject was the profoundly ambiguous nature of the world, the fact that it seems to move forwards as well as backwards and is appalling as well as inspiring; and that it cannot affect a cultivated person otherwise, if only because history is precisely not the history of important figures but quite evidently that of the average man, whose confused and equivocal features have imprinted themselves on the world. That conclusion, on the other hand, so swiftly arrived at, had been encumbered with needless complexity in the attempt to give the well-known nature of the average man, by a comparison with the nature of probability, a background whose novelty had not yet been fully explored. But even in this comparison, the basic idea was no doubt seemingly simple. For the average is always also something probable, and the average man is the sediment of all probability. But when Ulrich compared what he had said with what could still be said about it, he almost gave up hope of continuing what he had begun with his juxtaposition of probability and history.
Agathe said with mischievous hesitation: “The concierge dreams of the lottery and hopes she will win! So presuming I had the honor of understanding you, the purpose of history would be to leave behind an ever more undistinguished breed of human being and justify its existence, for which I suppose there is no lack of evidence, or at least no lack of hints that this may be the case; and to accomplish this task, the simplest and soundest thing history could do would be to just leave everything to chance and let the laws of probability determine the distribution and combination of events?” Ulrich nodded. “It’s an if-then. If human history actually had a purpose, and if this were its purpose, then history could not be better than it is, and would in this strange way attain a purpose of not having a purpose!”
Agathe laughed. “And that’s why you’re telling me that the low ceiling under which one lives has a ‘not unuseful’ purpose?”
“A profoundly necessary purpose, the promotion of the average!” Ulrich confirmed. “It is for this purpose that feeling and will are once and for all prevented from growing to the sky.”
“Would that the opposite happened!” Agathe said. “Then my ear wouldn’t be getting sore from paying such close attention before I know everything!”
It seemed to Agathe that a conversation like this about genius, the average man, and probability, which engaged the mind but left the feelings untouched, was a waste of time. Ulrich did not feel quite the same way, even though he was heartily dissatisfied with what he had said. Nothing about it was solid except for the proposition: If something were a game of chance, the result would evince the same distribution of hits and misses as lif
e does. But the fact that the second part of such a conditional proposition is true does not permit the conclusion that the first part is true as well!
In order for the converse of this proposition to be believable, a more rigorous comparison would be needed, namely one that would first make it possible to project notions of probability onto historical and spiritual events and thus compare two such different mental horizons. This was something Ulrich no longer felt like doing; but the more conscious he was of that neglect, the more convinced he became that the problem he had touched upon was an important one. Not only has the growing influence of masses of people with lackadaisical habits of mind—which is leveling humanity more and more toward the midrange—given added significance to any question concerning the structure and development of the human average; but also the basic question of what is the nature of probability seems to tend more and more, for different reasons, including ones that are universal and of intellectual provenance, to assume the place occupied by the question of the nature of truth, even though originally it was merely a practical tool for solving particular problems.