He saw a substantial distinction here. People of one kind, as already mentioned, reach vigorously for everything and take on every challenge; they dash over obstacles like a rushing stream or surge around them into a new course; their passions are strong and changeable, and the result is a strongly segmented career that leaves nothing behind but an echo of its tumultuous passage. This was the sort of person to whom the concept of the appetitive was meant to apply when Ulrich wanted to establish it as one principal notion of the passionate life; for the other kind is in all essential respects the opposite of the first: such people are shy, pensive, vague; slow to decide, full of dreams and longing, and internalized in their passion. At times—in thoughts that were not part of their current conversation—Ulrich also called the second kind of person “contemplative,” a word that is commonly used with a different meaning, and sometimes merely in the lukewarm sense of “reflective,” but that for him had more than this ordinary significance, and indeed was equivalent to the previously mentioned un-Faustian, Oriental way. Maybe a key distinction in life was reflected in this contemplative mode, especially in conjunction with the appetitive as its opposite: That appealed to Ulrich more strongly than an axiom. But that all such highly composite and exacting conceptions of life could be reduced to a twofold layering already present in every emotion—this elementary possibility of explanation held deep satisfaction for him as well.

Of course it was clear to him that the two kinds of human being that were at issue could not signify anything other than a man “without qualities” in contrast to the one with all the qualities a man is capable of showing. The first could also be called a nihilist who dreams of God’s dreams, as distinct from the activist, who, however, in his impatient mode of conduct, is also a kind of God-dreamer and anything but a realist who bestirs himself in the world with worldly clarity. “Why aren’t we realists, then?” Ulrich asked himself. Neither of them was, neither he nor she; their ideas and their actions had long since left no doubt about that; but they were nihilists and activists, and sometimes one, sometimes the other, whichever happened to come up.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I AM EXTREMELY thankful to Nicholas Berwin for conceiving this project and for reading and commenting on the translation at all stages of its development. His acute sensibility for nuances of meaning, both in English and in German, contributed to the refinement of many details.

I also want to express my gratitude to Edwin Frank for telling me about the “very interesting Musil proposal” that had come across his desk at New York Review Books, and asking me if I would like to do the translation, and for his astute and clarifying editorial scrutiny.

I am indebted to Walter Fanta of the Robert Musil Institut at the University of Klagenfurt for lending me the benefit of his scholarly expertise to help resolve several difficult problems of translation.