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The main part of the first volume, after a brief introductory section called, ironically, “A Sort of Beginning,” is titled “Seinesgleichen geschieht”—“The Like of It Happens.” This little gem of compressed bitterness expresses, with epigrammatic precision, a state of affairs in which the same thoughtless habits of speech and emotion, the same petrified rules and dogmas, inadequate moral systems, and ingrained patterns of behavior repeat themselves ad nauseam under the guise of novelty and innovation. If one extends that observation beyond the span of personal existence to history itself and perceives its epochs and eras succeeding each other like the meaningless trends of fashion with little or no advance in moral intelligence, one can begin to appreciate, if not necessarily share, Ulrich’s revolt against the self-­replicating ways of “reality.”

The second volume, where Agathe makes her entrance, bears a starkly contrasting title: “Into the Millennium,” followed by the parenthetical subtitle “(The Criminals).”

The Millennium, in German, is das tausendjährige Reich, a term that, irrespective of Hitler’s use of it as a slogan for his twelve-year reign, carries a good deal more emotional charge and mythic resonance than the Latinate English word, which in our century most of us have come to associate with the turn of a page in the calendar. It is the name for the thousand-year Kingdom of peace prophesied in the Bible and fervently awaited by millenarian sects through the centuries and still today. One does not expect Robert Musil to invoke such a reference without irony. He was as imbued with the ethos of the Enlightenment as any twentieth-century author, a merciless critic of all kinds of mystification, secular as well as religious. Nevertheless, it is the skeptical, scientifically trained Ulrich, in many ways Musil’s alter ego, who declares to his sister, only half jokingly, that together they will embark on a voyage to that fabled, improbable realm.

The source of his faith is not a belief founded in Scripture but a memory referred to by the title of an early chapter as “The long forgotten and supremely important affair with the major’s wife”—an unconsummated romance when he was a twenty-year-old recruit that ended with his fleeing the object of his love and withdrawing to a remote island. There he experienced “the very state described by those believers in God who have entered the state of mystic love, of whom the young cavalry lieutenant at that time knew nothing at all.” This condition is so different from ordinary consciousness that it constitutes a “second reality,” in which “love is not a desire for possession but a gentle self-unveiling of the world for which one would gladly forego possession of the beloved.” Ever since then, at transient moments in the midst of his otherwise worldly and alienated existence, he has felt intimations of that same state of being, which he calls “the other condition.” The descriptions of this state in the writings of the mystics speak to him “in tones of intimate kinship; with a soft, dark inwardness” that is “the opposite of the imperious tone of mathematical and scientific language.”^*