I vs. We
The everlasting dance of oneself in oneness. Further notes from Robert Musil’s ‘Man Without Qualities’
“Few people in midlife really know how they got to be what they are, how they came by their pastimes, outlook, character, profession and successes, but they have the feeling that from this point on nothing much can change”.
So reflects Ulrich, the protagonist of Robert Musil’s novel Man Without Qualities, as he enjoys a long walk on the picturesque streets of Kakania (Vienna), delighting in “flowing like a wave among fellow waves” after a bout of intense working solitude.
He ponders the possibility that events that shape one’s life could have just as well turned out differently. Yet, most of us see our lives as influenced by a deterministic hivemind of collective circumstances, containing “the moods, lives, and deaths of other people much different from us”. We maintain that we are just the sum of larger forces converging in ourselves.
The flow of these events manages to exhaust the limitless possibilities of youth by life’s noontime. We are caught out by the appearance of ourselves in midlife – “as if a person had suddenly materialised with whom one had been corresponding for some twenty years without meeting and whom one had imagined quite differently.”
Ulrich reflects on how his truth-seeking has left him “like a well-trained gymnast’s body that holds the readiness to move and fight,” filling his being with capacities for mental agility that “divides his thoughts into troops exercising each other”. A consequence of such a journey can make oneself appear like “the face of an old clown, full of oft-repeated false passions”, and even sincerity assumes this false clown expression when it becomes a habit.
Ulrich contemplates how the city streets looked different to him as a young man. Everything was “twice as glorious back then, yet there had been an aching sense of being taken captive, an uneasy feeling that ‘Everything I think I am attaining, is attaining me.’”
“I have a gnawing surmise that in this world, untrue, uncaring, and personally indifferent statements will echo more strongly than the most personal and authentic ones. All this beauty is all well and good, but is it mine? Is the truth I am learning MY truth? What further sharpens these suspicions are all those prefabricated compartments and forms of life, semblances of reality, the mould set by earlier generations.”
Most people may find it comforting to enter a ready-made world and simply fill in a few minor personal details here and there amidst a general understanding that what has endured over generations is so stable that only what endures can form the foundation of all future advancements. But just as this fact comforts some, “it casts a shadowy unease on those who live according to their own lights”: that the collective force that builds monuments and allows them to stand could just as easily devour people.
In recollecting his past, Ulrich contemplates a faint memory of an opposing power that once spun restlessly inside him. The earnest instability of youth that so readily mocks its elders, revolts against established thought, and pursues the heroism of martyrdom is nothing more than a struggle to escape this constant spinning of oppositional poles within. The pursuit of newness and desire to translate it into the next vital pose is just playacting. But, like all playacting, it tries to say something.
“What is more joyful than conceiving a new idea, slogan, or concept where one thinks one can recognise oneself? What is more natural than the intense feeling of holding a new form before the common run of people does?”
The desire to birth newness offers a rare opportunity for self-realisation, “a balance of inner and outer, between being crushed and exploding.” Therefore, the craving for revolution is perpetuated by “the discomfort at the intrusion between one’s misty self and the alien and already petrified carapace of the self of one’s predecessors and a loosely fitting group soul.”
Yet very few ideas are truly ‘new’ and are often either old ideas from decades past but “contented and with a little extra fat on their bones” or “they have been shrunken to a reform proposed by some old fool called the Great So-and-so by his fifty admirers.”
Ulrich reflects on the friends of his youth, the rebels who wanted to bring new things and people into this world. Now, those people live in houses “fading in the afternoon light,” like “kindly aunts in outmoded hats, quite proper and irrelevant.”
And yet, “the people who leave these unassuming relics become professors, celebrities, names, and recognised participants in the recognised development of progress. They make it by a more or less direct path from the mist to the pertrifact, and for that reason, history may report of them someday in giving its account of the century: ‘Among those present were…’”
Upon his drawn-out reflections on “the indescribable harmony of the lines and spaces of trees and houses along the street that seem as stiff as folding screens”, Ulrich realises why he feels like just “a small, exhaled breath God has no time for anymore.” It’s at this moment Ulrich, a victim of his own tortuous desire to be seen and unseen, wishes he were a man without qualities.