39-40 Meditation on Ulrich and His Arrest

Before describing Ulrich's arrest, the narrator gives us a long meditation on Ulrich's condition as a "man without qualities."  The meditation begins in Chapter 39 by acknowledgingUlrich's lack of true self awareness: "If Ulrich had been asked to say what he was really like he would have been at a loss, for like so many people he had never tested himself other than by a task and his relation to it."

Chapter 39 then expands the mediation to the condition of the whole world.  In today's world, the narrator says, "responsibility's center of gravity is not in people but in circumstances."  He then goes on:

A world of qualities without a man has arisen, of experiences without the person who experiences them, and it almost looks as though ideally private experience is a thing of the past, and that the friendly burden of personal responsibility is to dissolve into a system of formulas of possible meanings. Probably the dissolution of the anthropocentric point of view . . . has finally arrived at the "I" itself, for the belief that the most important thing about experience is the experiencing, or of action the doing, is beginning to strike most people as naive. 

In Chapter 40, the narrator comes down to the question of why Ulrich was living in such a "dim and undecided fashion."  Here is what Ulrich himself thinks about it:

Obviously, he said to himself, what has keeping him spellbound in this aloof and nameless way of life was nothing other than the compulsion to that loosening and binding of the world that is known by a word we do not care to encounter by itself: spirit or mind. Without knowing why, Ulrich suddenly felt sad, and thought: "I simply don't love myself."

Ulrich concludes that "the mind or spirit is the great opportunist, itself impossible to pin down, take hold of, anywhere. . . " He is ready to dislodge himself from his old belief that "the world would be best governed by a senate of the wisest, the most advanced."   Why does he no longer believe this?

[Because] . . . on longer acquaintance with the smokehouse of the mind, in which the world cures the bacon of its daily affairs, one learned to adapt oneself to reality . . . a trained mind would finally end up limiting itself to his specialty and spend the rest of his life convinced that the whole of life should perhaps be different, but there was no point in thinking about it. This is more or less how people who follow intellectual pursuits maintain their equilibrium. Suddenly Ulrich saw the whole thing in the comical light of the question whether, given that there was certainly an abundance of mind around, the only thing wrong was that the mind itself was devoid of mind."

* * *  

And the circumstances of Ulrich's arrest?

In the second half of Chapter 40 we are given an account of Ulrich's arrest as a result of his trying to be reasonable with a police arresting a man for shouting in the street: "he remarked that the man was in no condition to be held responsible for insulting anyone and should be sent home to sleep it off."

Ergo, Ulrich himself is arrested.  This is fortunate (or perhaps unfortunate), however, because it allows one of Count Leinsdorf's friend to finally locate Ulrich at the police station.  Since he is quickly set free, Ulrich "felt obligated to pay his call [to Leinsdorf] . . . and during this visit was immediately appointed Honorary Secretary to the great patriotic campaign. "