Without Lifting A Finger

Was lamenting the few texts I have in paper that I still haven't gotten to (largely because I've gone 99% e-read). Dipped into Musil in The German Library last  night and this morning: Three Women . Finished " Grigia" and have started "The Lady from Portugal." * From "Grigia": Since, however, the cow Grigia had a distinct taste for straying valley-wards, the whole of this operation would be repeated with the regularity of pendulum-clockwork that is constantly dropping lower and constantly being wound higher again. Because this was so paradisically senseless, he teased her by calling her Grigia herself. He could not conceal from himself that his heart beat faster when from a distance he caught sight of her sitting there; that is the way the heart beats when one suddenly walks into the smell of pine-needles or into spicy air rising from the floor of woods where a great many mushrooms grow. In this feeling there was always a residual dread of

     This nothingness had a definite, if indefinable, content. For a long time she had been in the habit of repeating to herself, on all sorts of occasions, words of Novalis: "What then can I do for my soul, that lives within me like an unsolved riddle, even while it grants the visible man the utmost license, because there is no way it can control him?"

And finally both Walter and Clarisse began to itch with the suddenly tangible thought of having their own house, children, openly sharing a bedroom: like a crack in the skin that cannot heal because one unconsciously keeps scratching at it.

. . . He sat down again at his earlier place and leafed through the books that lay there, while Agathe got up to make room for him. Then he opened one of them, with the words: "This is how the saints describe it," and read aloud:      " 'During those days I was exceeding restless. Now I sat awhile, now I wandered back and forth through the house. It was like a torment, and yet it can be called more a sweetness than a torment, for there was no vexation in it, only a strange, quite supernatural contentment. I had transcended all my faculties and reached the obscure power. There I heard without sound, there I saw without light. And my heart became bottomless, my spirit formless, and my nature immaterial.' "      It seemed to them both that this description resembled the restlessness with which they themselves had been driven through house and garden, and Agathe in particular was surprised that the saints also called their hearts bottomless and their spiri

          [From http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr61/nvsr61_03.pdf ] 

     "Can you say that again?" Agathe asked.      "What we still refer to as a personal destiny," Ulrich said, "is being displaced by collective processes that can finally be expressed in statistical terms."      Agathe thought this over and had to laugh. "I don't understand it, of course, but wouldn't it be lovely to be dissolved by statistics?" she said. "It's been such a long time since love could do it!"   

Finished Lambert (a relatively quick read) and have decided to continue with Musil's opus. I've  moved on to Volume II, which begins with Part III:   Into the Millennium (The Criminals) and ends with (of course it never ends) From the Posthumous Papers (different from his short story collection with a similar title, these pages are "twenty chapters, continuing the previous volume, that Musil withdrew in galleys in 1938, and related drafts"). Anyway, switching between Musil's thick tome (at home) and Kafka's stories via my Kindle App (away). * An excerpt from The Man Without Qualities : Ulrich says: "When two men or women have to share a room for any length of time when traveling--in a sleeping car or a crowded hotel--they're often apt to strike up an odd sort of friendship. Everyone has his own way of using mouthwash or bending over to take off his shoes or bending his leg when he gets into bed. Clothes and underwear are basically the same

     The Man Without Qualities is a matchless existential encyclopedia about its century; when I feel like rereading this book, I usually open it at random, at any page, without worrying what comes before and what follows; even if there is "story" there, it proceeds slowly, quietly, without seeking to attract attention; each chapter in itself is a surprise, a discovery. The omnipresence of thinking in no way deprives the novel of its nature as a novel; it has enriched its form and immensely broadened the realm of what only the novel can discover and say.

Nearing the end of Volume 1: A Sort of Introduction and Pseudoreality Prevails, I suppose there is a sense of closure: just a little bit. Clarisse attempts to seduce Ulrich: "I want the child from you!" Clarisse said. Ulrich whistled through his teeth in surprise. She smiled like an adolescent who has misbehaved with deliberate provocation.  Ulrich prepares to go to the train station because of his father's death: He remembered saying casually that he would probably have to either write a book or kill himself. But the thought of death, thinking it over at close range, so to speak, did not in the least correspond to his present state of mind either; when he explored it a little and toyed with the notion of killing himself before morning instead of taking the train, it struck him as an improper conjunction at the moment he had received the news of his father's death! *** After I take a little detour, or is it breather (I'm currently reading Joseph Roth&

     And now they had one of their "terrible scenes," of which this marriage had seen so many. They were all on the same pattern. Imagine a theater with the stage blacked out, and the lights going on in two boxes on opposite sides of the proscenium, with Walter in one of them and Clarisse in the other, singled out among all the men and women, and between them the deep black abyss, warm with the bodies of invisible human beings. Now Clarisse opens her lips and speaks, and Walter replies, and the whole audience listens in breathless suspense, for never before has human talent produced such a spectacle of son et lumiere, sturm und drung. . . . Such was the scene, once more, with Walter stretching out his arm, imploring her, and Clarisse, a few steps away from him, with her finger wedged between the pages of her book. Opening it at random, she had hit on that fine passage where the master speaks of the impoverishment that follows the decay of the will and manifests itself in eve

Or a few Musil-bullets: In love as in business, in science as in the long jump, one has to believe before one can win and score, so how can it be otherwise for life as a whole? There are so many inexplicable things in life, but one loses sight of them when singing the national anthem. It is only fair to say that whenever their higher selves relaxed a bit, the Kakanians breathed a sigh of relief and, born consumers of food and drink as they were, looked with amazement upon their role as the tools of history. The truth is not a crystal that can be slipped into one's pocket, but an endless current into which one falls headlong.

There could be no doubt that if God returned this very day to set up the Millennium on earth, not a single practical, experienced man would take any stock in it unless the Last Judgment came fully equipped with a punitive apparatus of prison fortresses, police, armies, sedition laws, government departments, and whatever else was needed in order to rein in the incalculable potential of the human soul by relying on the two basic facts that the future tenant of heaven can be made to do what is needed only by intimidation and tightening the screws or else by bribery--in a word, by "strong measures."      But then Paul Arnheim would step forward and speak to the Lord: "Lord, why bother? Egotism is the most reliable factor in human life. It enables the politician, the soldier, the king, to keep order in the world by cunning and force. Mankind dances to its tune, as You and I must admit. To do away with force is to weaken the world order. Our task is to make man capable of gr

Or a few Musil-bullets: "How things might turn out! That's always the way with you; it would never occur to you to wonder how things should be." It was essentially the same conversation he had had with Diotima, with only superficial differences. Nor did it make much difference which woman happened to be sitting there facing him; a body, introduced into a given magnetic field, invariably sets certain processes in motion. "Why on earth should I feel called upon to write a book?" Ulrich objected. "I was born of my mother, after all, not an inkwell." In this fashion Arnheim spoke with disapproval of desire, even as he felt it struggling like a blinded slave in the cellar. The moment we speak, certain doors begin to close; language works best for what doesn't really matter; we talk in lieu of living. . . ."

     At this point Gerda's resistance tried to break through. "Are you trying to explain progress to me?" she cried out, doing her best to sound sarcastic.      "But of course," Ulrich came back at her, without breaking stride. "It's called the law of large numbers, a bit nebulously. Meaning that one person may commit suicide for this reason and another for that reason, but when a great number is involved, then the accidental and the personal elements cancel each other out, and what's left . . . but that's just it: what is left? I ask you. Because  you see, what's left is what each one of us as laymen calls, simply, the average, which is a "something," but nobody really knows exactly what . Let me add that efforts have been made to find a logical and formal explanation for this law of large numbers, as an accepted fact, as it were. But there are also those who say that such regularity of phenomena which are not casually related

Imperial and Royal The German phrase kaiserlich und königlich ( pronounced [ˈkaɪzɐlɪç ʔʊnt ˈkøːnɪklɪç] , Imperial and Royal ), typically abbreviated as k. u. k. , k. und k. , k. & k. or Hungarian: cs. és k. (in all cases the "und" is always spoken unabbreviated), refers to the Court of the Habsburgs in a broader historical perspective (see below). Some modern authors restrict its use to the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary from 1867 to 1918. During that period, it indicated that the Habsburg monarch reigned simultaneously as the Emperor of Austria and as the King of Hungary , while the two territories were joined in a real union (akin to a two-state federation in this instance). The acts of the common government, which only was responsible for the Imperial & Royal ("I&R") Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the I&R Ministry of War and the I&R Ministry of Finance (financing only the two other ministries), were carried out in the name of "H

From The Man (re the relationship between Walter and Clarisse): Actually, she owed him a lot. It was he who had brought the news that there were modern people who insisted on plain, cool furniture and hung pictures on their walls that showed the truth. He read new things to her, Peter Altenberg, little stories of young girls who rolled their hoops in the love-crazed tulip beds and had eyes that shone with sweet innocence like glazed chestnuts.   *** Peter Altenberg (9 March 1859, Vienna – 8 January 1919, Vienna) was a writer and poet from Vienna , Austria . He was key to the genesis of early modernism in the city. Biography He was born Richard Engländer on 9 March 1859. The nom de plume, "Altenberg", came from a small town on the Danube River . Allegedly, he chose the "Peter" to honor a young girl whom he remembered as an unrequited love (it had been her nickname). Although he grew up in a middle class Jewish family, Altenberg eventually separated h

     Someone pointed out that a man was a mysterious innerspace, who should be helped to find his place in the cosmos by means of the cone, the sphere, the cylinder, and the cube. Whereupon an opposing voice made itself heard, to the effect that the individualistic view of art underlying that statement was on its way out and that a future humanity must be given a new sense of habitation by means of communal housing and settlements. While an individualistic faction and a socialistic one were forming along these lines, a third one began by voicing the opinion that only religious artists were truly social-minded. At this point a group of New Architects was heard from, claiming leadership on the grounds that religion was at the heart of architecture, besides which it promoted love of one's country and stability, attachment to the soil.

Meanwhile Moosbrugger was still sitting in a detention cell at the district courthouse while his case was under study. His counsel had got fresh wind in his sails and was using delaying tactics with the authorities to keep the case from coming to a final conclusion.      Moosbrugger smiled at all this. He smiled from boredom.      Boredom rocked his mind like a cradle. Ordinarily boredom blots out the mind, but his was rocked by it, this time anyway. He felt like an actor in his dressing room, waiting for his cue.

     Digression Three or Answer Number Four: The course of history was therefore not that of a billiard ball--which, once it is hit, takes a definite line--but resembles the movement of clouds, or the path of a man sauntering through the streets, turned aside by a shadow here, a crowd there, an unusual architectural outcrop, until at last he arrives at a place he never knew or meant to go to. Inherent in the course of history is a certain going off course. The present is always like the last house of a town, which somehow no longer counts as a house in town. Each generation wonders "Who am I, and what were my forebears?" It would make more sense to ask "Where am I?" and to assume that one's predecessors were not different in kind but merely in a different place; that would be a move in the right direction, he thought.

A few things I've inked in The Man lately: "Now please don't think," he said, turning to her in all seriousness, "that all I mean by this is that everyone wants what is hard to get, and despises the attainable. What I mean is this: Within reality there is a senseless craving for unreality."   ***       "And what would you do," Diotima asked irritably, "if you could rule the world for a day?"       "I suppose I would have no choice but to abolish reality." ***   If we ask ourselves dispassionately how science has arrived at its present state--an important question in itself, considering how entirely we are in its power and how not even an illiterate is safe from its domination, since he has to learn to live with countless things born of science--we get a different picture. Credible received wisdom indicates that it all began in the sixteenth century, a time of the greatest spiritual turbulence, when people ce