Man Without Qualities

by Robert Musil

Cities can be recognised by their pace just as people can by their walk.

Even a Man Without Qualities has a father with qualities.

So his son was from boyhood well acquainted with the aristocracy’s talent for condescension, which unconsciously yet so accurately weighed and measured out the exact quantity of affability required; and he had always been irritated by this subservience—of one who did, after all, belong to the intellectual elite—towards the possessors of horses, lands and traditions.

It was, however, not calculated servility that made the father insensitive on this score.

If there is such a thing as a sense of reality, there must also be a sense of possibility.

IF one wants to pass through open doors easily, one must bear mind that they have a solid frame: this principle, according to which the old professor had always lived, is simply a requirement of the sense of reality. But if there is such a thing as a sense of reality—and no one will doubt that it has its raison d’être—then there must also be something that one can call a sense of possibility.

When one wants to praise these poor fools, one sometimes calls them idealists.

The possible, however, covers not only the dreams of nervously sensitive persons, but also the not yet manifested intentions of God.

There Ulrich learned to extend his contempt for the ideals of others to international dimensions.

remembered that there is ascribed to a man’s native land the mysterious capacity of making his musings take root and thrive in their proper climate; and he settled down at home with the feelings of a traveller sitting down on a bench for eternity, although he has a premonition that he will get up again almost immediately.

At the tables in the boîte where she worked Leona did her duty; but what she dreamed of was a protector who would liberate her from that obligation, a liaison of the same duration as her contract, per mitting her to sit in a genteel pose before a genteel menu in a genteel restaurant.

Leona despised him a little, although of course she clung to him faithfully; and Ulrich knew that.

Instead he had hesitated for a moment. That was his age, his thirty-two years; by that time both enmity and love are a little slower in getting started.

It is a fundamental characteristic of civilisation that man most profoundly mistrusts those living outside his own milieu,

without the Pope there would have been no Luther, and without the heathens, no Pope, and so it cannot be denied that man’s most deeply felt association with his fellow-men consists in dissociation from them.

Kakania was perhaps a home for genius after all; and that, probably, was the ruin of it.

THIS man who had returned home could not remember any time in his life that had not been animated by his determination to become a man of importance; it was as though Ulrich had been born with this wish. It is true that such an urge may be a sign of vanity and stupidity; it is no less true, however, that it is a very fine and proper desire, without which there would probably not be many men of importance.

The man was not yet born who could have said to his disciples: ‘Rob, murder, fornicate—our teaching is so strong [hat it will transform the cesspool of your sins into clear, sparkling mountain-rills.’

But in science it happens every few years that something that up to then was held to be error suddenly revolutionises all views or that an unobtrusive, despised idea becomes the ruler over a new realm of ideas;

These younger people have always noticed that the moral stupidity of their elders is just as much a lack of any capacity to form new combinations as is ordinary intellectual stupidity, and the morality that they themselves have felt natural has always been one of achievement, heroism and change.

severe tussle went over into forbidden intimacies, and then continued as tn alternation between the pangs of sin and the pangs of remorse.

But Ulrich was only one of heaven alone knows how many cases in her life. Men—as soon as they have grasped the situation—are generally in the habit of treating such nymphomaniac women little better than imbeciles, who can by the most trivial means be tricked into stumbling over the same thing time and time again; for the tender aspects of masculine self-abandonment somewhat resemble the growling of a jaguar over a hunk of neat, and any interruption is taken gravely amiss.

this quiet, majestic woman began to suffer from self-contempt, which was caused by the lies and degradations to which she had exposed herself in order to be held in someone’s arms.

When her sensuality was aroused, she was melancholy and kind; indeed, in her mingling of rapture and tears, of crude naturalness and inevitably approaching remorse, in the way that her mania would bolt in panic before the threatening depression that was already lying in wait for her, she had a heightened charm that was exciting in much the same way as a ceaseless tattoo on a darkly muffled drum.

she was unfaithful to him in order to escape from him, but while being so she talked about him, or the children that she had had by him, and at the most unsuitable moments; she was never capable of becoming completely free of him.

The new spirit of the times had not yet quite found its feet.

He hated people who could not live up to Nietzsche’s words about ‘suffering hunger in the spirit for the sake of the truth’—all those who give up half-way, the Bunt-hearted, the soft, those who comfort their souls with flummery about the soul and who feed it, because the intellect allegedly gives it stones instead of bread, on religious, philosophic and fictitious emotions, which are like buns soaked in milk.

His view was that in this century we and all humanity are on an expedition, that pride requires that all useless questionings should be met with a ‘not yet’, and that life should be conducted on interim principles, though in the consciousness of a destination that will be reached by those who come after us. The truth is that science has developed a conception of hard, sober intellectual strength that makes mankind’s old metaphysical and moral notions simply unendurable, although all it can put in their place is the hope that a day, still distant, will come when a race of intellectual conquerors will descend into the valleys of spiritual fruitfulness.

Clarisse said: “One’s ability to forbid oneself something harmful is the test of one’s vitality. The weary man is tempted by corruption! What do you say to that? Nietzsche declares the moral aspect of his art.”

His path through life was a series of stirring experiences, which gave rise to the heroic struggle of a soul that would have nothing to do with divided loyalties, never suspecting that in this way it was only contributing to its own division against itself.

For while he was suffering and struggling for the sake of morality in his intellectual actions, as befits a genius, and was paying the full price for his talent, which did not quite suffice for greatness, his destiny had quietly led him round in an inner circle back to nothingness.

explain that everything that came later was florid, degenerate, over-sophisticated and on the downward path.

And he became increasingly violent in his assertion that in a time so poisoned at its spiritual roots as the present an artist of real integrity must abstain from creation altogether.

She therefore loathed all sensuality in art from the bottom of her soul and felt herself drawn to everything lean and austere,

But she believed genius to be all a matter of will.

that all the people who take part in destroying the achievements of a previous good period do so with the feeling that they are improving on them; and that the bloodless young people of such a time think exactly as much of their young blood as the new people of all other times do.

Between ourselves: the world went all out for weak men and ignored the strong.

It would happen that

blockheads played a leading role and men of great talent played th...

Persons who had previously not been taken altogether seriously now acquired fame.

Because with him everything turned into ethical emotion, he could speak convincingly of the immorality of ornament, of the hygiene of simple shapes, and of the beery fumes of Wagnerian music, as was in keeping with the new artistic taste; and even his future father-in-law, who had a painter’s brain like an out- spread peacock’s tail, had been intimidated by it. So it was beyond all doubt that Walter could look back on successes.

Walter was easily frightened, and the manifestations that he observed in himself not only hampered him in his work but also caused him very great anxiety, for they were apparently so independent of his will that they often impressed him as being the beginnings of intellectual deterioration.

But cold and hard as she was, and then again so enthusiastic, with her insubstantial,, flaming will, she possessed a mysterious capacity for influencing him, as though shocks came through her from some direction that could not be fitted into the three dimensions of space. It sometimes bordered on the uncanny.

“It must be easy to have heroic feelings,” he went on, “if one is insensitive by nature, and to think in miles if one has no idea of the abundance that may be hidden in every millimetre!”

“The one we had a few days ago. I explained to you what a living creative principle means to a human being. Don’t you remember how I came to the conclusion that in the old days, instead of death and logical mechanisation, it was blood and wisdom that prevailed?” “No.”

With the exception of the Roman Catholic clergy, there is no one these days, absolutely no one, who still looks like what he should look like, for we use our heads even more impersonally than our hands. But mathematics is the peak of it all, it has got to the point of knowing as little about itself as human beings—some day when they are living on energy-pills instead of meat and bread—are likely to know about meadows and little calves and chickens!”

but he was helpless against the man’s awed refusal, and suddenly it conveyed to him the aura of a power that was mightier than he.

“A man never rises so high as when he does not know where he is going.”

So Diotima learned to know love as something violent, spasmodic and abrupt, which was set free by an even stronger force only once in every week.

And since her husband neither noticed this nor would have thought the same way, and once her body in the end and against her own will betrayed her to him every time, she felt herself in thrall to a despotic regime; doubtless it was one that counted as not unvirtuous, but the course of it was exactly as tormenting to her as she imagined the emergence of a tic would be, or the inexorability of a vice.