The Man Without Qualities

by Robert Musil

This era worships money, order, knowledge, calculation, measures and weights—the spirit of money and everything related to it, in short—but also deplores all that. Even as it goes on hammering and calculating during working hours, and at all other times carries on like a horde of children driven from one excess to another by the challenge What’s next? with its bitter, sickening aftertaste, it cannot shake off an inward warning to repent. It deals with this conflict by a division of labor, assigning to certain intellectuals, the confessers and confessors of their period, dealers in absolutions and indulgences, literary Savonarolas and evangelists, whose presence is the most reassuring to those not personally in a position to live up to their precepts, the task of recording all such premonitions and inward lamentations. Of course, all the lip service and government funds dropped annually by the State into their bottomless cultural schemes are much the same kind of moral ransom money.