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1774 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1930
Revolutionary views? I’m afraid I must admit that I’m by no means an out-and-out opponent of revolutionary views. Short of an actual revolution, of course.
The hospital aide clothed in lily-white, who, with the help of acids, thins out a patient’s stool in a white china dish in order to obtain a purple smear, rubbing it until the right hue rewards her attention, is already living, whether she knows it or not, in a world more open to change than is the young lady who shudders at the sight of the same stuff in the street.
For the moment one begins to take anything, no matter how foolish or tasteless, seriously and puts oneself on its level, it begins to reveal a rationale of its own, the intoxicating scent of its love for itself, its innate urge to play and to please.
Alles, was Ulrich im Lauf der Zeit Essayismus und Möglichkeitssinn und phantastische, im Gegensatz zur pedantischen Genauigkeit genannt hatte, die Forderungen, daß man Geschichte erfinden müßte, daß man Ideen-, statt Weltgeschichte leben sollte, daß man sich dessen, was sich nie ganz verwirklichen läßt, zu bemächtigen und am Ende vielleicht so zu leben hätte, als wäre man kein Mensch, sondern bloß eine Gestalt in einem Buch, von der alles Unwesentliche fortgelassen ist, damit sich das übrige magisch zusammenschließe, – alle diese, in ihrer ungewöhnlichen Zuspitzung wirklichkeitsfeindlichen Fassungen, die seine Gedanken angenommen hatten, besaßen das Gemeinsame, daß sie auf die Wirklichkeit mit einer unverkennbaren schonungslosen Leidenschaft einwirken wollten.
Everything that Ulrich had called over time essayism and the sense of possibility, as opposed to the pedantic accuracy, the demands that you should have to invent history, that you should live ideas- rather than world-history, that you should seize which can never be quite realized, and perhaps to live at the end not like a human, but merely like a character from a book, omitted from all non-essential to ensure that the rest magically comes together, - all these, in their unusual worsening reality hostile versions that had adopted his thoughts, had this in common, that they wanted to act on reality with an unmistakable relentless passion.Ulrich's settings will change later on, after he's reunited with his long lost sister Agathe.
[translated by me]
»Es gibt keinen anderen lebenden deutschen Schriftsteller, dessen Nachruhm mir so gewiß ist.«
»There is no other living German writer whose posthumous fame is as certain to me.«Unfortunately this prophesy didn't work out for Musil. But it should have.
[translated by me]
“It’s all decadence! A bottomless pit of intelligence!”