Ulrich has no intention of renouncing science and mathematics. Their austere beauty is the passion of his intellect. But he rejects the rationalist prejudice against mystical experience, which has its own, necessarily poetic and metaphoric language, just as he rejects, with a good deal of revulsion, the sentimental cult of “spiritual” feeling pitted against the hard-won attainments of reason.

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Is Ulrich unhappy or despairing? Not in the usual sense we give to these words. He is extremely lonely but is too tough-minded to indulge in self-pity, and he enjoys human company, though always at an ironic remove. Vaguely, he notices that he does not love himself as he once did, but it is in the nature of such lack that it largely occludes what was lost. It’s probably fairest to say that he has a genius for disillusionment. In any case, by the time he departs for the provincial city of —— to discharge himself of his filial obligations on the occasion of the death of his father, he has shed almost all of his attachments and ambitions and is open to whatever unforeseen possibilities life may have to offer him.

2

Agathe and Ulrich meet under quasi-magical auspices—a ready loophole for skeptical irony. But the magic is compelling. By pure coincidence they are wearing nearly identical Pierrot costumes. Perhaps I should say Pierrot and Columbine. But it is characteristic of such a pairing (Papageno and Papagena are another example) that male and female, even self and other, are subsumed in the charm of an impossible identity. Are they one or two? They are two of a kind.

In commedia dell’arte, these creatures of fantasy are never taken to be real, and yet they are super-real in the claim they make on our longing for such bravery of innocence and love, and maybe our secret belief that such feelings might be possible even for people like ourselves. Why not? Of course there are a million reasons why not. But here, by a trick of chance, a man and a woman of cultured sophistication, siblings separated since childhood, find themselves transformed into a semblance of this moon-enchanted couple.

Naturally, they are charmed, by each other as much as by the amusing coincidence, but they think little of it (although Agathe’s quip—“I didn’t know we were twins”—is prescient). But the reader, meeting them as characters in a book, knows that something out of the ordinary can be expected in the light of such an event. And that light, when we speak of Pierrot, is moonlight.

Skeptical Ulrich as Pierrot in love with the moon seems an unlikely stretch, but late in the story, on a moonlit evening, Ulrich says to Agathe, “You are the moon,” and Agathe understands him. And it is not only Ulrich but Musil himself who gives himself over to “the fantastically altered reality of moonlit nights” and writes transportingly about them, only to have Agathe, three pages on, say to Ulrich, “Do you know what you look like now? ‘Pierrot Lunaire.’ This calls for prudence.”