#robert musil

[emozional-mente]

“Aveva un solo difetto, quello di

eccitarsi in modo straordinario.”

Robert Musil

[determinate-negation]

“A left-wing tabloid had slavered its venomous spittle all over the Great Idea, as Count Leinsdorf might have put it, calling it just another sensation for the ruling class in the wake of the latest sex murder, and this caused an honest workingman who had been drinking to lose his temper. He had brushed up against two solid citizens pleased with their day's business who, convinced that a contented frame of mind could express itself anywhere, were rather loudly airing their approval of the great patriotic campaign they had read about in their paper. Words were exchanged, and as the proximity of a policeman encouraged the citizens as much as it provoked their attacker, the scene became increasingly impassioned. The policeman began by watching it over his shoulder, subsequently turning to face it and then coming closer; he attended as an observer, like a protruding offshoot of the iron machinery of the state, which ends in buttons and other metal trim. There is always something ghostly about living constantly in a well-ordered state. You cannot step into the street or drink a glass of water or get on a stretcar without touching the balanced levers of a gigantic apparatus of laws and interrelations, setting them in motion or letting them maintain you in your peaceful existence; one knows hardly any of these levers, which reach deep into the inner workings and, coming out the other side, lose themselves in a network whose structure has never yet been unraveled by anyone.

So one denies their existence, just as the average citizen denies the air, maintaining that it is empty space. But all these things that one denied, these colorless, odorless, tasteless, weightless, and morally indefinable things such as water, air, space, money, and the passing of time, turn out in truth to be the most important things of all, and this gives life a certain spooky quality. Sometimes a man may be seized by panic, helpless as in a dream, thrashing about wildly like an animal that has blundered into the incomprehensible mechanism of a net. Such was the effect of the policeman's buttons on the working-man, and it was at this moment that the arm of the state, feeling that it was not being respected in the proper manner, proceeded to make an arrest.”

The Man Without Qualities, Robert Musil

[azmyomar]

Peace, mercy, and blessings of God be upon you. How are you,? I am truly embarrassed and ashamed to ask you, but I swear to God I need to get medicine for my grandmother's leg, and it costs 600 shekels. I swear to God I don't have that amount. If you could help me, may God reward you.

Donate to Help Azmy Provide for His Family in Gaza, organized by Rylan Nfinitu

Hello all, My name is Rylan Bonnet, and I am from California, USA. I am rais… Rylan Nfinitu needs your support for Help Azmy Provide for

[sivavakkiyar]

The basic premise of his life was affronted. As with many men who achieve distinction, this feeling was far from self-serving but consisted in a deep love of the general good above personal advantage—in other words, he sincerely venerated the state of affairs that had served him so well, not because it was to his advantage, but because he was in harmony and coexistent with it, and on general principles. This is a point of great importance: even a pedigreed dog searches out his place under the dining table, regardless of kicks, not because of canine abjection but out of loyalty and faith; and even coldly calculating people do not succeed half so well in life as those with properly blended temperaments who are capable of deep feeling for those persons and conditions that happen to serve their own interests.

Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities (chapter 3, ‘Even A Man Without Qualities Has A Father With Qualities’)

[provadistampa]

i miei occhi sono sempre sporchi

[theglasschild]

“…. by the time they have reached the middle of their life’s journey, few people remember how they have managed to arrive at themselves, at their amusements, their point of view, their wife, character, occupation and successes, but they cannot help feeling that not much is likely to change anymore. It might even be asserted that they have been cheated, for one can nowhere discover any sufficient reason for everything’s coming about as it has. It might just have well as turned out differently. The events of people’s lives have, after all, only to the last degree originated in them, having generally depended on all sorts of circumstances such as the moods, the life or death of quite different people, and have, as it were, only at the given point of time come hurrying towards them” ― Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities

[illsoda]

"If all those leaps of attention, flexings of eye muscles, fluctuations of the psyche, if all the effort it takes for a man just to hold himself upright within the flow of traffic on a busy street could be measured, he thought - as he toyed with calculating the incalculable - the grand total would surely dwarf the energy needed by Atlas to hold up the world, and one could then estimate the enormous undertaking it is nowadays merely to be a person who does nothing at all."

Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil, Pg. 7 trans. Sophie Wilkins and Burton Pike

[franzkavkas]

A primordial drive to goodness takes shape in Kafka’s story (The Stoker)—no resentment, rather something of the submerged passion of childhood for Goodness; the feeling of an agitated child’s prayer, and something of the fretful eagerness of painstaking schoolwork, and much for which one can conceive of no other expression save moral tenderness. The demands of that which one must do; are here posed with a conscience that is not driven by ethical principles but by a fine, haunting oversensitivity, which incessently uncovers small questions of great significance and which reveals remarkable convolutions in questions that for others are merely smooth uninteresting solids. 

Robert Musil, 1914 review of The Stoker for Die Neue Rundschau