Reading in this way becomes a contemplative activity—one of inward listening to a resonance that responds to descriptions of subtle and profound, sometimes nearly intangible states of feeling and perception. Ulrich, in an earlier part of the novel, proposed half jokingly to Count Leinsdorf, the leader of the Parallel Campaign, that they institute a “world secretariat for precision and soul.” That is Musil’s motto as a writer as well, and nowhere more than in these late chapters where Agathe joins Ulrich in his investigations. Intellect and feeling, intuition and reason cooperate without abandoning their different criteria for truth in expression. According to Ulrich, this is the sine qua non of authentic ecstatic experience in our time. It is also the alchemy that infuses a sentence by Robert Musil with its characteristic balance of lightness and gravity, sensuousness and rigor, spiritual lucency and intellectual wit.

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Before they met, Agathe was the embodiment of lethargic, compliant indifference. Nothing mattered, because love had died. Virtually from the moment Ulrich arrives, as she talks to him about her husband, her capacity for decisive action is awakened—with a vengeance, one might say. Ulrich in turn begins, almost immediately, to experience the miracle of meeting himself in feminine form. He is entranced by Agathe’s spontaneity, so different from his objective watchfulness and methodical habits of mind. And little by little, without any controlling intent on her part, simply by the convergence of his fascinated passivity and the energy and freedom she exhibits in his presence, he becomes an instrument of her will. At the same time he notices to his astonishment that her impulsive actions, from the charmingly outré to the criminal, are nothing less than enactments of his own ideas, which he has expounded to her in his role of “older brother and somewhat obtuse dispenser of edifying counsel,” and to which she has attended with the eagerness of a disciple. And yet, at one point Agathe realizes that “much of what he said she had already thought: just not with words, for with only herself to rely on, as she had been until now, she would never have made such definite assertions!” Who is the leader, then, in this constellation, and who the follower?

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Gradually it becomes clear to them and to the reader that their relationship is defined by a single astonishing fact: they are indeed related, not only as brother and sister but also in the painful and beautiful way in which the living halves of a severed whole are related and necessary to each other.

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“You are my lost self-love,” Ulrich says to Agathe at one point, and at another: “I would want to be a woman if only—women did not love men.” It seems he can only love himself as a woman. Agathe has no great respect for women, no matter if they consider themselves emancipated or “raise a brood for which a male must supply the nest.” “Ridiculous parasites,” she calls them. “They share a man’s life together with his dog!” Clearly Ulrich and Agathe are renegades, not only to polite society but to their own sex.