Even the beauty of a woman is undeniably enhanced or diminished by the man who possesses her. It is reality that awakens possibilities, and nothing would be more perverse than to deny it. Even so, it will always be the same possibilities, in sum or on the average, that go on repeating themselves until a man comes along who does not value the actuality above the idea. It is he who first gives the new possibilities their meaning, their direction, and he awakens them.

But such a man is far from being a simple proposition. Since his ideas, to the extent that they are not idle fantasies, are nothing but realities as yet unborn, he, too, naturally has a sense of reality; but it is a sense of possible reality, and arrives at its goal much more slowly than most people’s sense of their real possibilities. He wants the forest, as it were, and the others the trees, and forest is hard to define, while trees represent so many cords of wood of a definable quality. Putting it another and perhaps better way, the man with an ordinary sense of reality is like a fish that nibbles at the hook but is unaware of the line, while the man with that sense of reality which can also be called a sense of possibility trawls a line through the water and has no idea whether there’s any bait on it. His extraordinary indifference to the life snapping at the bait is matched by the risk he runs of doing utterly eccentric things. An impractical man—which he not only seems to be, but really is—will always be unreliable and unpredictable in his dealings with others. He will engage in actions that mean something else to him than to others, but he is at peace with himself about everything as long as he can make it all come together in a fine idea. Today he is still far from being consistent. He is quite capable of regarding a crime that brings harm to another person merely as a lapse to be blamed not on the criminal but on the society that produced the criminal. But it remains doubtful whether he would accept a slap in the face with the same detachment, or take it impersonally as one takes the bite of a dog. The chances are that he would first hit back and then on reflection decide that he shouldn’t have. Moreover, if someone were to take away his beloved, it is most unlikely that he would today be quite ready to discount the reality of his loss and find compensation in some surprising new reaction. At present this development still has some way to go and affects the individual person as a weakness as much as a strength.

And since the possession of qualities assumes a certain pleasure in their reality, we can see how a man who cannot summon up a sense of reality even in relation to himself may suddenly, one day, come to see himself as a man without qualities.

5

ULRICH

The man without qualities whose story is being told here was called Ulrich, and Ulrich—his family name must be suppressed out of consideration for his father—had already given proof of his disposition while still on the borderline between childhood and adolescence, in a class paper on a patriotic theme. Patriotism in Austria was quite a special subject. German children simply learned to despise the wars sacred to Austrian children, and were taught to believe that French children, whose forebears were all decadent lechers, would turn tail by the thousands at the approach of a German soldier with a big beard. Exactly the same ideas, with roles reversed and other desirable adjustments, were taught to French, English, and Russian children, who also had often been on the winning side. Children are, of course, show-offs, love to play cops and robbers, and are naturally inclined to regard the X family on Y Street as the greatest family in the world if it happens to be their own. So patriotism comes easily to children. But in Austria, the situation was slightly more complicated. For although the Austrians had of course also won all the wars in their history, after most of them they had had to give something up.

This was food for thought, and Ulrich wrote in his essay on love of country that anyone who really loved his country must never regard it as the best country in the world. Then, in a flash of inspiration that seemed to him especially fine, although he was more dazzled by its splendor than he was clear about its implications, he added to this dubious statement a second, that God Himself probably preferred to speak of His world in the subjunctive of possibility (hic dixerit quispiam—“here someone might object that . . .”), for God creates the world and thinks while He is at it that it could just as well be done differently. Ulrich gloried in this sentence, but he must not have expressed himself clearly enough, because it caused a great uproar and nearly got him expelled from school, although nothing happened because the authorities could not make up their minds whether to regard his brazen remark as calumny against the Fatherland or as blasphemy against God. At the time, he was attending the Theresianum, that select school for the sons of the aristocracy and gentry that supplied the noblest pillars of the state. His father, furious at the humiliation brought upon him by this unrecognizable chip off the old block, packed him off abroad to a Belgian town nobody had ever heard of, where a small, inexpensive private school run on shrewd and efficient business lines did a roaring trade in black sheep. There Ulrich learned to give his disdain for other people’s ideals international scope.

Since that time sixteen or seventeen years had passed, as the clouds drift across the sky. Ulrich neither regretted them nor was proud of them; he simply looked back at them in his thirty-second year with astonishment. He had meanwhile been here and there, including brief spells at home, and engaged in this or that worthwhile or futile endeavor.