Still reading Musil.

Yesterday, I was floored by the aftermath of drunken craze. Today I was exhausted by my own inherent laziness. To wrestle with my inane proclivities, I read a few chapters of Musil. As I strolled to Wanha Mestari, two blocks away, I noticed the snow. A tiny, friendly layer of snow and a chilly gush of wind. The streets were empty. Wanha Mestari is one of those pubs that has undergone a change for the worse. A few years ago, it was a cosy place where people were having quiet discussions and where university people and regular drinkers intermingled without friction. Recent changes have introduced a sense of inconvenience, in the form of loud music (a strange mix of light entertainment music and heavy metal) and the notorious screens streaming football, golf or what not. These screens crop up in all bars and the result is that there is a new level of distraction, noise and unpleasantness. Regarding pubs, I am very conservative. I want pubs to correspond to my picture of the English countryside. Give me a pork pie, now.

The main topic of today's conversation about Musil was the notion of possibility in chapter 4, "If there is a sense of reality, there must also be a sense of possibility". In the previous chapter, Musil gives a characterization of Ulrich's father. Ulrich, of course, is the man without qualities. His father is a lawyer, respected in high society for his trustworthy behaviour. He has settled down in his own role and for that he is respected. Ulrich's father is outraged by Ulrich's purchase of a chateau, a small castle. Domesticity and an ordered life is fine, of course, but to inhabit a place that is a small castle - that affronts his "sense of propriety". Ulrich's father is a man of principles, to whom the acquisition of the castle inevitably seems like a transgression.

A man of possibilities doesn't identify himself with social reality in the same way as Ulrich's father. He is usually perceived as a know-it-all, a weakling, a troublemaker nourished by hazy dreams. But there's also another description, a quite nitzschean depiction, I reckon.

"A possible experience of truth is not the same as an actual experience or truth minus its 'reality value' but has - according to its partisans, at least - something quite divine about it, a fire, a soaring, a readiness to build and a conscious utopianism that does not shrink from reality but sees it as a project, something yet to be invented."

Is Ulrich the kind of man who invents reality and sees it as a project? Well, the purchase of the small castle and the endless possibilities of decoration and design would lead us to think so, and that is what upsets his father. But what happens is that poor Ulrich is so frightened in front of this grand challenge that carpet sellers, interior decorators and furniture dealers are entrusted with this heavy burden. For Musil, even the seemingly mundane activity of house decoration takes on philosophical and socio-political proportions. Ulrich realizes he has to take recourse to traditions and prejudices because it is within these that possibilities are shaped. Reading the very first chapters of The man without qualities gives one a hint that Ulrich's sense of freedom is quite impossible and that it springs from a cultural background from which he tries to alienate himself.

The man without qualites is a person for whom nothing is real; not himself, nor society, nor other people. "As if life suddenly has been given a sleeping pill and was now standing there stiff, full of inner meaning, sharply outlined, and yet, in sum, making absolutely no sense at all."