In Which We Began Reading As Soon As We Could Write

This is the second in a series. You can find the first part here.

Durable Green

The human being as a social animal would like to achieve distinction from the others, and be praised by them. This is the basis for the preference for virtue.

In middle age the Austrian writer Robert Musil did not last long at any one occupation. Even a short stint as a librarian only unnecessarily served, in his mind, to distract from his duties as a working writer. His relationship with his wife Martha sustained him intellectually and emotionally through the ill health of his father. The following excerpts take place during the early part of the twentieth century, and were translated by Philip Payne.

It was about a woman who runs an inn in Carinthia and is well known for her intimate relationship with her mastiff. In the angry arousal of such an animal there is something that may well stimulate a woman. It is also possible that one feels loathing for men and prefers dogs — such a feeling is possible, precisely with women who love their integrity.

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I have just come from Martha's; on the street the air and the light are like those of early spring. I had the idea that all expression depends on the light — I had seen a coalman in profile. The cheeks dissolving, their colors as if ravaged by the light and then abandoned; forehead, bridge of nose, hair lit from the front (but a diffuse light coming only from over the rooftops) —

I can find no word for the expression of this man's face.

I enjoy the work that is going quite easily but sometimes, it seems, too easily; I don't know if it will turn out to be substandard.

I am very irritable, and a single unreflected remark of Martha's can make me unhappy.

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What matters to me is the passionate energy of the idea. In cases where I am not able to work out some special idea, the work immediately begins to bore me; this is true for almost every single paragraph. Now why is it that this thinking, which after all is not aiming at any kind of scientific validity but only a certain individual truth, cannot move at a quicker pace? I found that in the reflective element of art there is a dissipative momentum — here I only have to think of the reflections that I have sometimes written down in parallel with my drafts. The idea immediately moves onward in all directions, the notions go on growing outward on all sides, the result is a disorganized, amorphous complex. In the case of exact thinking, however, the idea is tied up, delineated, articulated, by means of the goal of the work, the way it is limited to what can be proven, the separation into probable and certain, etc., in short, by means of the methodological demands that stem from the object of investigation.

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Yet again this dreadful lack of energy and unwillingness to work. (Yesterday afternoon... Take note: a little too quick. You mount me as if I were an animal, how could you. Outside, a Sunday like those in spring.) I am afraid that I shall not have enough time for a vacation, a yearning for that surge of energy that massages away self-reproach. Unpleasant letter from home;  I'm supposed to be in Vienna in mid-September, "on the way home"; when am I to take that break?

Type: very muscular, athletically trained men who are timid.

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For three days now in a state of deep depression. I am tired, I sometimes feel dizzy. Above all, I've little confidence in the work.

Half-past midnight. Have just come from Martha's. Have discussed the first half of the work with her and now it's all right up to that point. Martha promised to come to me around 11 tomorrow. Cholera in Spandau.

Wrote home explaining my opinion about Vienna, telling them I'm going but that I don't want to go. Emphasized once again that I will not have anything to do with anyone on a social level when I'm there.

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Literary people who speak scornfully of the work of their spirit. Kerr: "Literature takes up only a corner of my life." Set against that: literature is a bold life arranged in a more logical way. It involves the creation or distillation of possibilities. It is fervor that pares a human being down to the very bone for the sake of a goal in which emotion is in an intellectual mode. The rest is propaganda. Or it is a light that originates in a room, a feeling in one's skin when one looks back at experiences that at other times remain muddled and indifferent.

I have to remind myself how I invariably found all existing literature unsatisfactory from an intellectual perspective. But then all the more subtle and more powerful thinking about what is represented in the work must not take place within the work itself but before the work is written.

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Here only the facts are given, the appearance of the street, the station building, the conversation, etc. It is not stated that these things had such and such a mood, but they do have one. The attitude within me was one of soot and strangled sadness, or something of the sort, and then I saw things in that particular way.

The last is a room in an Alpine inn. Whitewashed walls with wretched paintings. Clothes stand, a broad cross with a curving transverse beam, and four hooks beneath. The little bedside cabinet next to the cupboard is in an impossible state of disrepair. Such things invent people. And he becomes sensual; but there is nothing in the whole world with which to satisfy this errant corporeality.

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Wherever possible, one ought to let facts speak rather than feelings. This gives rise to a fine dryness of tone: i.e., things that have claim to objective, not just subjective, validity. Perhaps as a way of regulating this, statements that one can prefix with the pronoun "we."

I was unwell — angina — spent two days in bed and had a temperature for probably a week before that. Perhaps it was precisely this condition that made me more impetuous.

From time to time the little (round) birds let themselves drop down between the branches, and then, behind the glass of the windows and the thin lace curtains, they seem to be made up of cross-stitching. When they sit still one sees, through the small gaps in the curtains, extensive areas of their plumage. One sees their natural colors, bright, quite bright light that sometimes shines on beak or wings, but is somehow subdued, modified in some way for which there is no description.

I don't want here to attempt once more to keep a diary, but simply to record things that I don't want to forget.

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Walk along the Hauptallee. Martha was in a bad frame of mind and reproached me quite unnecessarily, which left me cold. "You will leave me," she said. "Then I'll have no one. I shall kill myself. I shall leave you." In a momentary state of weakness, Martha slipped far beneath herself to the level of a jealous or neglected woman with a fierce temper. In personal terms, of course, this has no significance for our relationship. But I switched off this reservation, so to speak, and gave myself over to the impressions that would arise if this were a time of disappointment.

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Before the storm, the houses are brighter than the sky.

Between the forked legs of the telegraph poles children have set up their swings.

The great plain was overcast with gloomy light.

In the trees, the leaves glitter, or are quite dark. This makes the masses of foliage look rather like a lake when the wind just stirs its surface and tiny waves flash.

The trees are in winter green, a durable green.

1913

In Which The Sensuality Of Robert Musil Reaches A Great Height

This is the first in a series. You can find the second part here.

His Qualities

I consider it more important to write a book than to rule an empire.

After discarding his early career as an engineer, the mercurial Austrian writer Robert Musil turned inwards. He was always a selfish only child, quick to anger. Nothing changed in adulthood. His overlong, overly serious novel The Man Without Qualities can be difficult to read today, and his brilliant diaries come across as frighteningly lacking in self-awareness at times. They offer a tantalizing glimpse of a creature consistently on the verge of himself. The following excerpts take place during the early part of the twentieth century, and were translated by Philip Payne.

A sign of the times. So many diaries are published. It is the most convenient, the least disciplined form.

Good. Perhaps diaries will become the only kind of writing since everything else seems unbearable. By the way, why generalize?

It is pure analysis - no more, no less. It isn't art. It's not intended to be. Why waste many words on it?

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We have now almost completely forgotten something that former novelists were good at: creating tension!

We merely capture our listeners. That is we try to write with wit and to avoid boring passages. Wherever we go, we pull the listener along with us.

Creating tension, on the other hand, means making the listener anticipate what is coming. Making him think along with us, allowing him to go on his own down the way we point out for him. A certain cozy feeling of being there with us. The comic novel lives off this feeling. One points toward a situation that is about to arise and the thought emerges: what will good old X do now then?

This requires a good deal of miniature painting with the various types. But, however antiquated it seems, it is still an instance of artistic effect in contrast to the effects produced by philosophers and essayists.

"What have I done then?" This motif, which would be sentimental if it were not lapidary, is H's motif. H. is quite innocent, i.e., touching and yet often ordinary. Precisely her weaknesses must be emphasized. But wherever she appears a simple melody and a breadth of substance must dominate. Her fateful liaison with R. gives symbolical form to the fact that, from a certain perspective, one cannot place faith in the understanding. This is what relates to the basic idea. At the beginning and end of the story stands death. That also has something lapidary about it and thereby provides a symbolical framework. This is the way to depict death: great when out of reach; within reach, simply banal. And the way in which, at the end, the beginning seems to be repeated provides an opportunity to sum up all the changes that have taken place in the intervening span.

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I have never finished reading Kant but I don't let that keep me awake at night, nor do I feel that I shall die with shame because another man has already grasped the world in its entirety.

Another species is made up of those who loved greatly - Christ, Buddha, Goethe - myself, in those days of autumn when I was in love with Valerie.

These do not seek after any truth, but they feel that something within them is coming together into some kind of whole.

This has something purely human about it - a natural process.

And such people can balance one idea 10 against the other, for that new thing which grows within them has fastidious roots.

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"Art is a form of sickness. Or rather it would be possible to treat art as a kind of sickness" - this was roughly how I put it in my Paraphrases.

And today, one year later, this idea is reborn within me - so I can see that it really did die in me - just like the whole of that beautiful period.

This sensation of dying-- that once led to the abrupt break with Valerie - is evil.

We cannot hold fast to a wonderful insight within us, it withers away, petrifies and then we find that all that is left in our hands is the impoverished logical framework of the idea.

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What impressed me in earlier times about Schiller's moralizing aesthetics was that one sensed it was completely adequate for all one's needs.

And as far as "the sensual" is concerned, the fiasco can barely be concealed. It is associated with a certain barrenness. What was the harvest that this method brought me in a full year? How few of the hours brought fulfillment. And the price paid for all of this was sloppiness of thought!

It is characteristic of this barrenness that the "great work" seemed to me attainable only via all the stimulants that loneliness, suggestion, and positively hallucinogenic isolation could provide.

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Nietzsche says that it might come about that wars are waged for the sake of an insight. He repeats this too often for it to be possible to take him figuratively, to see it as just a mental process.

How we sometimes seem to be moral: Envy, greed, etc., are not bad in themselves, they are not unconditionally bad. But in each case we have to be persuaded by our understanding which reminds us that this holds true.

Nietzsche is like a park given over to public use - but no one goes in!

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At the age of thirty, in terms of high culture, one is a beginner, a child. One has to learn to see, one has to learn to think, one has to learn to speak and to write: the goal of all these is an aristocratic culture. To learn to see - to accustom the eye to be calm, patient, to be practiced in "waiting-for-things-to-approach-one"; to defer judgment, to learn to examine, to comprehend the individual case from all sides. This is the first schooling in spirituality: not to react immediately to a stimulus but to get a hold on those instincts that stall and inhibit. To learn to see, as I understand it, is almost the same as what is called - in non-philosophical terminology -"strength of will." The essential thing here is, precisely, not "wanting," suspending the decision. All lack of spirituality, all baseness, rests on the inability to resist a stimulus: one is compelled to react, one follows each and every impulse. In many cases such a necessity is, in itself, a susceptibility to illness, decline, a symptom of exhaustion. Almost everything that is crudely and unphilosophically branded with the name "vice" is nothing but the physiological inability not to react. One use to which one can put "having learned-to-see": as a learner one becomes slow, suspicious, reluctant in all things. Anything alien or new one first, with hostile composure, allows to approach-one pulls back one's hand from them. Doesn't this image vaguely remind one of the little dog whose hair stands on end and that puffs itself up when it faces a big one?

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A monstrous storm came. For the first time, his sensuality wore the red, gold-embroidered mantle of love. His whole being was changed. A mood of benevolence and generosity swept over him. Far-reaching thoughts, interweaving their way artistically through each other, took clear shape. In a few weeks he acquired a maturity far beyond his years. {His thoughts and feelings set themselves in order; the philosophy of tranquillity and maturity takes shape.} Then came disillusionment. Simple, brief, necessary. They had finished with each other. "It is immoral to stay together for any longer, unless every single hour brings growth to the soul," he said. "Farewell."

He had seen her the day before in a role in which she had seemed tasteless, inauthentic and banal. There were moments when he woke as if from a dream; like a breath of fresh air, like a new unfamiliar vista.

The following night their sensuality reached greater heights than usual.

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While I'm in bed with a cold my inner self is at times frenetically active, at other times it's not active at all. I had dreamt during the night. A kind of Christmas scene with snowflakes and people walking in pairs - the way that midnight masses in winter are represented in the theater, that kind of thing. I was arm-in-arm with H. But details are of almost no consequence. It was simply one of those dreams I dream two or three times a year that, each time, fill me for several days with an intangible, indefinite yearning for love.

With this yearning I woke up.

Before my windows there is an inexpressibly clear winter sky and the windows are like white sails in its bright blue - ? - No. A quite normal waking without any mood. Blunted nerves, everyday feeling of ease. My dream was not intensified - the indefinite, dull yearning remained.

After breakfast I began to reflect - in the way that one might pick up any kind of activity at all.

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It is said that a thing is the sum of its qualities, or some such statement. But there are instances of relationships that contradict this. Perhaps in all things that pertain to sympathy. 

I have had an old armchair for years. I cut a notch into its armrest, or I rip one of its cushions. In other words I take something away from it. And yet it doesn't seem new to me at all; rather it only really becomes that which I feel my old armchair to be, when I take something away from it. 

This often happens with love as well.

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It is said that feelings are the only evident things in us. This is partly right, for feeling is evident. That I "feel" "something" when I'm jealous, for example, is evident, but that I feel "jealousy" is not evident at all. That is based on ideas and accordingly all the uncertainties of ideas attach to it and these can reach as far as dream-idealism. Each feeling points toward a single fixed spot within me (which I can never get any closer to) and shows, moreover, how we hover over space.

It is distressing to reflect that we hurry like little hunted dots along the line that is our life and finally disappear down some unforeseen hole. And that, in front of us and behind, at intervals that nothing can reduce, other similar dots go racing along, which have some kind of temporary link with us, like the next links in the chain of a paternoster lift that goes racing on round. Anniversaries, birthdays, etc., are a cruel refinement. You have now lived a third, a half, two thirds, of your life. Finally chronology as a whole, if one assumes it to be a product of mankind, is something terribly shortsighted.

This is the backdrop of the empty hours.

1899-1905