This week I found myself back in Kyoto. Walking through temples that have been standing for hundreds of years, lasting through wars, plagues and much more, served as a useful reminder that this pandemic too will pass. But seeing so many people flocking to sakura and choosing to ignore a less serene reality made me also think we likely still have some time to go before that passing will happen. While walking, a line from Robert Musil came to mind, where he talked of ‘liberal scraps of an unfounded faith in reason and progress’. From that I returned to the Austrian writer, who I first encountered when a dear friend pushed me to read his work before heading to Vienna.
Musil’s The Man Without Qualities is essentially a book of aphorisms housed within a novel. Witness to, and participant in, the remarkable intellectual burst of energy from Vienna as the Austrian empire expired, his work feels fitting for the current moment. What Musil beautifully captured was the way life is hard to grasp, and how attempts to control the course of events are regularly dashed on the rocks of reality. ‘Nothing in life can be relied on unless it is firmly nailed down’, he observed, and elsewhere, ‘the truth is not a crystal that can be slipped into one’s pocket, but an endless current into which one falls headlong.’ Such thoughts were surely influenced by writing during a period of remarkable change and dislocation, a time when expectation and experience did not line up, thought and life were out of sync. Shortly after the First World War, he noted, ‘we have been many things, but we haven’t changed; we have seen a lot and perceived nothing… all that remains of the experience is an astonished restlessness, as if the neural branches that the experiences were beginning to send out had been lopped off before they matured.’ One must wonder whether we will experience something similar as we emerge from the pandemic. There are certainly indicators we will, currently it feels many people are done with the virus, even if the virus is not done with us. Returning to Musil, he continued, ‘the way the world careened into the War evinced above all a debilitating lack of intellectual and spiritual organization: our unwillingness to take the signs seriously, to recognize the uncontrolled forces and counterforces’. Morbid symptoms keep appearing, but still we dance on. Again, it is hard not to notice the contemporary echoes.
This drift and confusion that Musil identified was not resolved by the Great War, it persisted and was reinforced by the experience. ‘Everything belonging to the realm of the mind finds itself nowadays in profound disorder’, he judged. There is a commonplace assumption that a major crisis should be matched with an equally significant resolution, it is a regular narrative in stories, and can be traced back to the roots of the word ‘crisis’ in classical Greek. A term found in the fields of politics, law and medicine, it connoted a decisive moment when a judgment was reached. More specifically to medicine, it represented a turning point in the progression of a disease or illness, which determined whether the patient would improve or decline. And yet, our experience with crises are often much less satisfying. Instead, turning points fail to turn, and major problems are not met with major solutions. Part of the misapprehension lies surely lies in relying on the same actors and institutions to solve problems they helped cause in the first place. Again, considering the Great War, Musil identified how the experience revealed what was lacking: ‘no values stood firm; accountability was lodged nowhere; life was tossed ecstatically into the flames.’ Burn burn. Yes, very occasionally a phoenix appears after, but most of the time instead one is just left with ashes.
Shifting, failing, incomplete… and yet, we must act, still we must find our way. In The Man Without Qualities, Musil determined that there is ‘only one question worth thinking about, the question of the right way to live’. This becomes all the more pressing and challenging when dealing with a world neither working nor complete, when facing ‘the disintegration of an earlier condition that is supposed to have been more solid’. Lecturing on the topic of stupidity, Musil proposed as a workable principle for how to do things: ‘act as well as you can and as badly as you must, but in doing so remain aware of the margin of error of your actions’. This is a humble and cautious position, recognising that ‘occasionally we are all stupid; occasionally we must also act blindly or half blindly, or else the world would stand still.’ The value of Musil’s perspective is it accepts the need to act, while also being conscious of the difficulty of doing so in a world with incomplete knowledge and limited capacity.
Whether not seeing, not thinking, or not feeling; whether the world appears stable or crumbling, regardless of any of this, still we must find a way to act and to do so ethically. Being and doing are delicate and uncertain propositions, but still one must venture out: ‘something is not quite in balance, and a person presses forward, like a tightrope walker, in order not to sway and fall.’ Foot by foot unevenly, pressing forward, twisting when the wind gets stronger. But continue to move forward, we must. ‘There’s a whole circle of questions here, which has a large circumference and no center, and all these questions are: “How should I live?”’ And so, perhaps the turning point is instead the drawing of the circle. The circle turns and flattens, the ouroboros loops and curls. The question in the air, always demanding an answer.