•

Despite her natural aptitude for non-conceptual gnosis, Agathe emulates her brother’s gift for clear-eyed rational thought. She depends on Ulrich to point the way to the Millennium, and he does, by engaging with her in loosely discursive philosophical inquiries that range from questions of ethics and the nature of feelings to the baneful role that chance plays in favoring the statistical average over individual genius in determining the fate of humanity. All these themes are contiguous to the other reality, and Agathe burns with impatience for her brother to take a decisive step over that border. (Perhaps she believes that then their union will become indissoluble.) Ulrich, however, moves from one tentative proposition to another, even one that may contradict the first, always stopping short of a definitive conclusion. That is the experimental method he has learned from science and is not willing to forfeit for the facile certainties of dogmatic belief and emotional conviction. But for Agathe, doubt, necessary though it is as a safeguard against illusion, threatens to undermine faith itself. She carries with her a vial of poison with which she will kill herself if hope dies again.

Her instinctive approach to their common quest is diametrically opposite to his. She is ardent. The image of fire in its various manifestations shows up frequently when her inner state and even her appearance is described. As one of the four classic symbolic elements, fire is action itself. It does not hesitate. Its movements are unprepared by any calculus of motive or conscious design. And of course, in its innocent heedlessness, fire can also destroy.

3

Ulrich: “It is an everlasting pity that there are no trained scientists who have visions!”

Agathe, tempting him: “Do you think they could?”

Ulrich: “I don’t know. Maybe it could happen to me!” Then, hearing his words, “he smiled in order to limit their meaning.”

It is hard to escape the impression that Agathe’s and Ulrich’s voices are expressing temptations and anxieties in Musil’s own consciousness, and that by giving birth to Agathe from Ulrich’s hyperintellectual head, Musil introduced a muse who helps not only Ulrich but his author to talk about aspects of mind that are not accessible to ordinary consciousness.

•

Every one of the gnomic sayings cited by Agathe as she peruses Ulrich’s books comes from a single volume, Martin Buber’s Ecstatic Confessions, an anthology of mystical writings from many traditions and historical periods.^§ I don’t believe it is farfetched to regard the tale of Ulrich and Agathe’s voyage to the Millennium as Musil’s ecstatic confession. He could not pour it out in bursts of rhapsodic surrender. It had to be wrested from constraints set by his training in, and fealty to, science and mathematics, and by the no less exacting artistic deliberations that governed the composition of every metaphor and the shape and rhythm of every sentence. The “and” in his watchword, “precision and soul,” is a sign of uncompromising, almost ascetic severity. But if there is any question that Musil belongs in the company of mystical poet-philosophers like Hildegard von Bingen or Meister Eckhart, I propose a reading of the last chapter, “Breaths of a Summer Day,” in the light of such a comparison. Here time, which flowed like a slow-curving stream in earlier chapters, debouches into eternity. With a few concrete particulars—a garden, two deck chairs, sunlight and shade, a man, a woman, and a steady drift of blossoms in the air—an imponderable mystery is invoked. The presence of the miracle is never named, yet it displays itself with stunning simplicity—not as a deciphered riddle but as revelation through words.