67-69 A Senseless Craving for Unreality

These three chapters -- the middle chapter an acknowledged "digression" on the question "Must people be in accord with their bodies? -- focus on Diotima's ongoing efforts to understand Ulrich.

As the narrator says, they "had got into the habit of exchanging ideas by speaking about Arnheim."  And even though Diotima is in love with Arnheim (in a strictly undeclared and unrecognized way, of course), she "sometimes preferred Ulrich's company to Arnheim's." The narrator explains it this way:

Her need to feel superior was more gratified by him [Ulrich], she felt more sure of herself, and to regard him as frivolous, eccentric, or immature gave her a certain satisfaction that balanced the idealism, becoming increasingly dangerous from day to day, that she saw taking on incalculable dimensions in her feelings for Arnheim. Soul is a terribly grave affair, and materialism by contrast is lighthearted. 

Ulrich has needs to, and they are often "displayed in his delight in shocking Diotima." But when she asks him "Why does Arnheim call you an activist?" and says "you maintained that nobody, if he had the necessary power, would do what he wants to do. Now I would like to know what you meant by that," Ulrich tries to answer as seriously as he can.

"I'm very much afraid that the only reason Arnheim, as you say, calls me an activist is that he over-estimates my influence with the Tuzzi family," he answered. "You know how little attention you pay to what I say."  

His answer to her second question is more complicated.

" . . . nobody would turn his dreams into realities even if he could . . . Is there anyone who would not be embarrassed if something he had passionately demanded all his life were suddenly to come true? . . . Please don't think . . . that all I mean by this is that everyone wants what is hard to get, and despises the attainable. What I mean is this: Within reality there is a senseless craving for unreality." 

When she challenges him -- "And what would you do . . . if you could rule the world for a day?" -- he says, "I suppose I would have no choice but to abolish reality." Admitting that he wouldn't know how to go about doing that, he tries to explain further:

"We wildly overestimate the present, the sense of the present, the here and now. . . But what really moves us --- me anyway --- is always . . . opposed in a sense to this way of experience things. It is displaced by so much here and now, so much Present. . . . Some thousand of years ago this was a glacier. . . . Even the earth is not altogether what it's pretending to be for the moment. . . . We can't say that it [the earth] has evolved toward perfection, nor what is true condition is. And the same goes for its daughter, mankind. Imagine the clothes in which people have stood her through the ages, right where we are standing now. Expressed in terms of the madhouse, it suggests long-standing obsessions with suddenly erupting manic ideas; after these have run their course, a new concept of life is there. So you see, reality does away with itself!"

Diotima, of course, has "no way of understanding what Ulrich was talking about." But that doesn't matter, because she has other preoccupations:

For the first time, perhaps, she had a hard, clear glimpse of the fact that her relations with Arnheim would force her, sooner or later, to make a choice that could change her life.