32-34 Lovesickness and the Ready-Made World

In chapter 32, Ulrich's preoccupation with Moosbrugger continues: "For some unknown reason Moosbrugger concerned him more deeply than the life he himself was leading."

As usual, Ulrich's thoughts take him in all sorts of directions -- from Luther ("We never judge an act by that aspect of it which is pleasing or displeasing to God.") and Machiavelli to a quote from Eckhart on Christ ("In Christ too there was an outer and an inner man, and everything he did with regard to outward things he did as the outer man, while his inner man stood by in immovable solitude.") and a sentence from a "parlor philosopher" that Diotima had repeated to him.

But Ulrich's thoughts also bring a memory "of a passion he had felt for a woman considerably older than he." Their mutual love "remained short and unreal throughout its course."  Under the influence of this passion, Ulrich felt he had "penetrated the heart of the world."  The chapter ends with this conclusion:

It was not long before she had turned entirely into that impersonal center of energy, the underground dynamo that kept his lights going, and he wrote a final letter, setting forth that great ideal of living for love actually had nothing to do with physical possession and the wish "Be Mine! that came from the sphere of thrift, appropriation, and gluttony.  This was the only letter he mailed, and approximately the high point of his lovesickness, from which it soon declined and suddenly ended.

* * *

In the next chapter we return to Bonadea, "who could not go on staring continually at the ceiling," and her aggrieved question: "So you are really capable of blaming me for our passion?" Ulrich's response is not directed to her question but related to "what he had been thinking, off and on, all day":

"Every such question has as many answers hanging on it as there are bees in a hive," Ulrich replied, "All human spiritual disorder with its never-resolved problems, hangs on every single one of them in some disgusting way."

Totally misunderstanding Ulrich's train of thought, Bonadea was "humiliated by her helpless and obscene position, half-naked on a sofa, an easy target for insults." Bonadea gets dressed, but "the rustling and switching of the silken chalices into which she was slipping back did not move Ulrich to remorse."

* * *

After Bonadea leaves, Ulrich is also restless and "he went out to the street with the intention of sending a message to Walter and Clarisse that he would come and see them this evening." Being Ulrich, he stops and contemplates his environment.

All these circular lines, intersecting lines, straight lines, curves and wreaths of which a domestic interior is composed and that had piled up around him with neither nature nor inner necessity but bristled, to the last detail with baroque overabundance. . . . "I am only fortuitous," Necessity leered. . . .  a fluid, mysterious equilibrium between feeling and world was upset for the space of a second. Everything we feel and do is somehow oriented "lifeward," and the least deviation away from this direction toward something beyond is difficult or alarming. 

The narrator decclares "It may be a convenience and a comfort for most people to find the world ready-made . . . and there is no disputing that whatever endures is not only conservative but also the foundation of all advances and revolutions."  Yet, "this casts a feeling of deep, shadowy unease on those who live according to their own lights."

Then Ulrich ponders an even more abstract and difficult question:

The goals, the voices, the reality, all this seductiveness that lures and leads us on, that we pursue and plunge into -- is this reality itself or is it no more than a breath of the real, resting intangibly on the surface of the reality the worlds offers us? What sharpens our suspicions are all those prefabricated compartments and forms of life, semblances of reality, the molds set by earlier generations, the ready-made language not only of the tongue but also of sensations and feelings. 

At little later the narrator steps in and speaks:

Imagine, if you will, what it is to have a heavy world weighing on tongue, hands, and eyes, a chilled moon of earth, houses, mores, pictures, and books, and nothing inside but an unstable, shifting mist; what a joy it must be whenever someone brings out a slogan in which one thinks one can recognize oneself. What is more natural than that every person of intense feeling get hold of this new form before the common run of people does? It offers that moment of self-realization, of balance between inner and outer, between being crushed and exploding.

The "craving for the renovation of life," Ulrich decides:

 "is nothing but the discomfort at the intrusion, between one's own misty self and the alien already petrified carapace of the self of one's predecessors, of a pseudoself, a loosely fitting group soul.  As the chapter concludes, Ulrich thinks of "the friends of his youth . . . all the rebels who wanted to bring new things and new people into the world."  They had "become professors, celebrities, names, recognized participants in the recognized development of progress; they had made it by a more or less direct path from the mist to the petrifact, . . ."

So ends chapter 34, "A Hot Flash and Chilled Walls."