And suddenly her [Diotima's] chaste mind was troubled by a bizarre notion: her empty apartment, in the absence of even her husband, seemed like a pair of trousers Arnheim had just slipped into. There are such moments, when chastity itself may be visited by such abortive flashes from the pit of darkness, and so the wonderful dream of love in which body and soul are entirely one bloomed in Diotima.Arnheim, for some reason, "stare[ed] entranced at Diotima." In search of an explanation, our ever-willing narrator begins an essay on the nature of the human soul:
. . . if, in the toils of passion, we do something incomprehensible, that too is, in its own way, understandable. Yet however understandable and self-contained everything seems, this is accompanied by an obscure feeling that it is only half the story. . . . And this horrible feeling of a blind, cutoff space behind the fullness of everything, this half that is always missing even when everything is whole, this is what eventually makes one perceive what one calls the soul."Only love," the narrator declares, "has a special position in relation to this condition:
. . . in this exceptional case the missing half grows back: the beloved seems to stand where ordinarily something was always missing. The souls unite "dos-a-dos," as it were, making themselves superfluous in the process. This is why most people, after the one great love in their youth is over, no longer feel the absence of the soul, so that this so-called foolishness fulfills a useful social function.Note that the narrator says the absence is still there --- we just don't feel it.
The narrator then flatly declares that "Neither Diotima nor Arnheim had ever loved." They are both caught up in a dangerous moment. Arnheim is the first to "shake off the spell':
To linger in such a state was, to his way of thinking, impossible, without either sinking into a dull, vacuous, lethargic brooding or else foisting on one's devotion a solid framework of ideas and convictions that could not be distort its nature.Then the narrator gives full vent to Musil's painfully humorous skepticism:
This method, which admittedly kills the soul but then, so to speak, preserves it for general consumption by canning it in small quantities, has always been its bridge to rational thought, convictions, and practical action . . . God knows, as we have already said, what a soul is anyway. There can be no doubt whatsoever that the burning desire to obey only the call of one's soul leaves infinite scope for action, a true state of anarchy, and there are cases of chemically pure souls actually committing crimes. But the minute a soul has morals, religion, philosophy, a well-grounded middle-class education, ideals in the spheres of duty and beauty, it has been equipped with a system of rules, conditions, and directives that it must obey before it can think of being a respectable soul.And the summation of all this?
For only fools, fanatics, and mental cases can stand living at the highest pitch of soul; a sane person must be content with declaring that life would not be worth living without a spark of that mysterious fire.
* * *
Chapter 46 ends with a story about one of Arnheim's servants stealing one of his sculptures. Arnheim had considered the man to have been in "a pristine state of the soul," but nevertheless has the police take him away. Yet, Arnheim "envied this man for reasons he could not explain to himself."The beginning of an explanation might lie in the uneasiness of the relationship between a human being's ideas and the mysterious fire of his or her soul.
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