From The Man Without Qualities:
At the age when one still attaches great importance to every�thing
connected with tailors and barbers and
enjoys looking in the mirror, one often imagines a place where one would
like
to spend one's life, or at least a place where it would be smart to
stay, even
though one may not feel any particular inclination to be there. For some
time
now such a social idee fixe has been a kind of super-American
city where
everyone rushes about, or stands still, with a stop-watch in his hand.
Air and
earth form an ant-hill, veined by channels of traffic, rising storey
upon
storey. Overhead-trains, overground-trains, underground-trains,
pneumatic
express-mails carrying consignments of human beings, chains of
motor-vehicles
all racing along horizontally, express lifts vertically pumping crowds
from one
traffic level to another . . .. At the junctions one leaps from one
means of
transport. To another, is instantly sucked in and snatched away by the
rhythm
of it, which makes a syncope, a pause, a little gap of twenty seconds
between
two roaring outbursts of speed, and in these intervals in the general
rhythm
one hastily exchanges a few words with others. Questions and answers
click into
each other like cogs of a machine. Each person has nothing but quite
definite
tasks. The various professions are concentrated at definite
places. One
eats
while in motion. Amusements are concentrated in other parts of the city.
And
elsewhere again are the towers to which one returns and finds wife,
family,
gramophone, and soul. Tension and relaxation, activity and love are
meticulously kept separate in time and are weighed out according to
formulae
arrived at in extensive laboratory work. If during any of these
activities one
runs up against a difficulty, one simply drops the whole thing; for one
will
find another thing or perhaps, later on, a better way, or someone else
will
find the way that one has missed. It does not matter in the least, but
nothing
wastes so much communal energy as the presumption that one is called
upon not
to let go of a definite personal aim. In a community with energies
constantly
flowing through it, every road leads to a good goal, if one does not
spend too
much time hesitating and thinking it over. The targets are set up at a
short
distance, but life is short too, and in this way one gets a maximum of
achieve�ment
out of it. And man needs no more for his happiness; for what one
achieves is
what moulds the spirit, whereas what one wants, without fulfillment,
only warps
it. So far as happiness is concerned it matters very little what one
wants; the
main thing is that one should get it. Besides, zoology makes it dear
that a sum
of reduced individuals may very well form a totality of genius.
It is by no means certain that things must turn out this
way, but such imaginings are among the travel-fantasies that mirror our
awareness of the unresting motion in which we are borne along. These
fantasies
are superficial, uneasy and short. God only knows how things are really
going
to turn out. One might think that we have the beginning in our hands at
every
instant and therefore ought to be making a plan for us all. If we don't
like
the high-speed thing, all right, then let's have something else!
Something, for
instance, in slow-motion, in a gauzily billowing, sea-sluggishly
mysterious happiness
and with that deep cow-eyed gaze that long ago so enraptured the Greeks.
But
that is far from being the way of it: we are in the hands of the thing.
We
travel in it day and night, and do everything else in it too: shaving,
eating,
making love, reading books, carrying out our professional duties, as
though the
four walls were standing still; and the uncanny thing about k is merely
that
the walls are travelling without our noticing it, throwing their rails
out
ahead like long, gropingly curving antennae, without our knowing where
it is
all going. And for all that, we like if impossible to think of ourselves
as
being part of the forces controlling the train of events. That is a very
vague
role to play, and it sometimes happens, when one looks out of the window
after
a longish interval, that one sees the scene has changed. What is flying
past
flies past because it can't be otherwise but for all our resignation we
become
more and more aware of an unpleasant feeling that we may have overshot
our
destination or have got on to the wrong line. And one day one suddenly
has a
wild craving: Get out! Jump clear! It is a nostalgic yearning to be
brought to
a standstill, to cease evolving, to get stuck, to turn back to a point
that
lies before the wrong fork. And in the good old days when there was
still such
a place as Imperial Austria, one could leave the train of events, get
into an
ordinary train on an ordinary railway-line, and travel back home.
There, in Kakania, that misunderstood State that has since vanished,
which was in so many things a
model, though all unacknowledged, there was speed too, of course; but
not too
much speed. Whenever one thought of that country from some place abroad,
the
memory that hovered before the eyes was of wide, white, prosperous roads
dating
from the age of foot-travellers and mail-coaches, roads leading in all
directions like rivers of established order, streaking the countryside
like of
bright military twin, the paper-white arm of government holding the
provinces
in firm embrace. And what provinces! There were glaciers and the sea,
the Carso
and the cornfields of Bohemia nights by the Adriatic restless with the
chirping
of cicadas, and Slovakian villages where the smoke rose from the
chimneys as
from upturned nostrils, the village curled up between two little hills
as
though the earth had parted its lips to warm its child �between them. Of
course
cars also drove along those roads--� but
not too many cars! The conquest of the air had begun here too; but not
too
intensively. Now and then a ship was sent off to South America or the
Far East;
but not too often. There was no ambition to have world markets and world
power.
Here one was in the centre of Europe, at the focal point of world's old
axes;
the words 'colony' and 'overseas' had the ring of something as yet
utterly
untried and remote. There was some display of luxury; but it was not, of
course, as over-sophisticated as that of the French. One went in for
sport; but
not in madly Anglo-Saxon fashion. One spent tremendous sums the army;
but only
just enough to assure one of remaining the second weakest among the
great
powers. The capital, too, was somewhat smaller than all the rest of the
world's
largest cities, but nevertheless quite considerably larger than a mere
ordinary
large city. And the administration of this country was carried out in an
enlightened, hardly perceptible manner, with a cautious clipping of all
sharp
points, by the best bureaucracy m Europe, which could be accused of only
one
defect: it could not help regarding genius and enterprise of genius in
private
persons, unless privileged by high birth or State appointment, as
ostentation,
indeed presumption. But who would want unqualified I persons putting
their oar
in, anyway? And besides, in Kakania it was only that a genius was always
regarded as a lout, but never, as sometimes happened elsewhere, that a
mere
lout was regarded as a genius.
All in all, how many remarkable things might be said about that
vanished Kakania! For intance, it
was kaiserlich-k�niglich (Imperial-Royal) and it was kaiserlich
und
k�niglich (Imperial and Royal); one of the two abbreviations applied
to
every thing and person, but esoteric lore was nevertheless required in
order to
be sure of distinguishing which institutions and persons were to
be
referred to as k.k. and which as k.& k. On paper it called itself
the
Austro-Hungrian Monarchy; in speaking, however, one referred to it as
Austria,
that is to say, it was known by a name that it had, as a State, solemnly
renounced by oath, while preserving it in all matters of sentiment, as a
sign
that feelings are just as important as constitutional law and that
regulations
are not the really serious thing in life. By its con�stitution it was
liberal,
but its system of government was clerical. The system of government was
clerical, but the general attitude to life was liberal. Before the law
all
citizens were equal, but not everyone, of course, was a citizen. There
was a
parliament, which made such vigorous use of its liberty that it was
usually
kept shut; but there was also an emergency powers act by means of which
it was
possible to manage without Parliament, and every time when everyone was
just
beginning to rejoice in absolutism, the Crown decreed that there must
now again
be a return to parliamentary government. Many such things happened in
this
State, and among them were those national struggles that justifiably
aroused
Europe's curiosity and are today completely misrepresented. They were so
violent that they several times a year caused the machinery of State to
jam and
come to a dead stop. But between whiles, in the breathing-spaces between
government and government, everyone got on excellently with everyone
else and
behaved as though nothing had ever been the matter. Nor had anything
real ever
been the matter. It was nothing more than the fact that every human
being's
dislike of every other human being's attempts to get on- a dislike in
which
today we �are all agreed-in that country crystallised earlier, assuming
the
form of a sublimated ceremonial that might have become of great
importance if
its evolution had not been prematurely cut short by a catastrophe.
For it was not only dislike
of one's fellow-citizens that was intensified into a strong sense of
community;
even mistrust of oneself and of one's own destiny here assumed the
character of
profound self-certainty. In this country one acted-sometimes indeed to
the
extreme limits of passion and its consequences--differently from the way
one
thought, or one thought differently from the way one acted.
Uninformed
observers have mistaken this for charm, or even for a weakness in what
they
thought was the Austrian character. But that was wrong. It is always
wrong to
explain the phenomena of a country simply by the character of its
inhabitants.
For the inhabitant of a country has at least nine characters: a
professional
one, a national one, a civic one, a class one, a geographical one, a sex
one, a
conscious, an uncon�scious and perhaps even too a private one; he
combines them
all in himself; but they dissolve him, and he is really nothing but a
little
channel washed out by all these trickling streams, which flow into it
and drain
out of it again in order to join other little streams filling another
channel
Hence every dweller on earth also has a tenth character, which is
nothing more
or less than the passive illusion of spaces unfilled; it permits a man
everything, with one exception: he may not take seriously what his at
least
nine other characters do and what happens to them, in other words, the
very
thing that ought to be the filling of him. This interior space-which is,
it
must be admitted, difficult to describe-is of a different shade and
shape in
Italy from what it is in England, because everything that stands out in
relief
against it is of a different shade and shape; and yet both here and
there it is
the same, merely an empty, invisible space with reality standing in the
middle
of it like a little toy brick town, abandoned by the imagination.
In so far as this can at all
become apparent to every eye, it had done so in Kakania, and in this
Kakania
was, without the world's knowing it, the most progressive State of all;
it was
the State that was by now only just, as it were, acquiescing in its own
existence. In it one was negatively free, constantly aware of the
inadequate
grounds for one's own existence and lapped by the great fantasy of all
that had
not happened, or at least had not yet irrevocably happened, as by the
foam of
the oceans from which mankind arose.
Es ist passiert, 'it just sort of happened', people said there when
other 'people in other places thought heaven knows what had occurred. It
was a
peculiar phrase, not known in this sense to the Germans and with no
equivalent
in other languages, the very breath of it transforming facts and the
bludgeonings of fate into something light as eiderdown, as thought
itself Yes,
in spite of much that seems to point the other way, Kakania was perhaps a
home
for genius after all; and that, probably, was the ruin of it.
