It's Sunday night, chilly as hell but the atmosphere at Kerttuli is all right, as usual. Except for that drunken poet who asks indecent questions & obviously has no sense of what he should do & what he shouldn't. I imagine him sitting at home, red wine, dim lights, a poem with lots of Greek goddesses & whores & some communist history, too. The Twin Peaks factor heightens as he, out of the blue, encourages us to look into the defeat of the Spanish armada by Elizabeth 1. The barman pours him yet another drink while trying to talk him into going straight home afterwards. "Don't spill that drink, you hear! I just fixed that floor, for fuck's sake, I did!"
Chpt. 22. Ulrich was supposed to call on count Leinsdorf to make himself available for the parallel campaign think-tank. He didn't. Instead, he visists a person whom people have told him to meet but of whom he has previously had many prejudiced conceptions. People have talked about this woman's "ineffable spiritual grace", and the prospect of meeting yet another "high-minded beauty" finally set him in motion. Mrs Tuzzi is married to an official at the ministry of foreign affairs; one of the few commoners to work there, a man whose sense of propriety has made him an important man in European politics. Mr Tuzzi - "a leather steamer trunk with two dark eyes." Decency & propriety is also what occupies Ulrich as he meets Diotima, who does not at all embody his idea of a no longer young bourgoisie hag. In other words, he is attracted to this woman even though her elevation of the parallel campaign as "the greatest and the most important thing in the world" and the privilege of "calling on a whole nation" bemuses him. He finds Diotima's "spirituality" charming, but apparently her ex cathedra statements about the soulless age etc, etc. frightens him, too. Diotima, on her part, saw in Ulrich a man too entangled in intellectual exhibitionism, but a handsome man nonetheless. - Reading this chapter, I wonder about the "spirituality" of women, a concept loaded with contempt as well as reverance. There are few descriptions in old novels of spiritual men. Descriptions of a "spiritual woman's intellect" are kneaded in dirt.
Chpt. 23-4. Earlier that same day, Diotima was even more impressed by another visitor, the "immensly rich" Dr. Arnheim, whose father is a mogul in "Iron Germany". Mr Tuzzi advises his wife to treat her guest with due respect; you never know who will be the next Reichsminister. Arnheim stirs up contradictory feeling; Diotima wants to distance herself from everything, including "men in trade" that may be considered middle-class but on the other hand the image of "the brimming profusion of freely piled-up mountain of money" evokes something she cannot resist. The fact that Arnheim was accompanied by a little black slave did not lessen Diotima's admiration. Her own background is modest; raised by a secondary school teacher, the marriage to Tuzzi caused her predilection for ambition and dreaming to bloom. As her husband built a career for himself, Diotima was admired for her "intelligence" in her newly erected salon, which gradually had become something of a social institution - "a church", swarming with high-ranking officials as well as artists and, above all, scientists. Women, yes, they too were welcome, but Diotima like her girls "unfragmented", not too intelligent. These unfragmented women bolster the Intelligence of Great men - and this made her salon popular among the nobility.
Leinsdorf is Diotima's friend, too, which helps boost the salon. Leinsdorf, as we know, is a man of principles who has only a dim conception about his own ideals. He is religious, but religion cannot, he thinks, be applied to business. Leinsdorf's "professional conscience" still allows him to drive his interests without losing a solid conviction that his every action thrives towards the Good. "He realized the prime importance of establishing a connection between the eternal verities and the world of business, which is so much more complicated than the lovely simplicity of tradition, and he also recognized that such a connection could not be found anywhere but in the profoundities of middle-class culture." The only thing important to him is patriotism (he won't even court Diotima!) and according to his views, every citizen serves society (THE CROWN) in everything she does. We are all civil servants (Count Stallburg subscribes to this view, too, and as for Leinsburg, this is something of a power technique: to say "we are all equal, we are all servants" to wipe out inequalities and unfairness.). Even though Leinsdorf holds the view that Diotima expresses herself far too freely, he does not develop a salon of his own because that would easily "get out of hand". As R aptly remarked: Leinsdorf is lazy.
Beneath the surface of spirituality, Diotima is getting cynical. She no longer flows on the stream of imagination and her distinguished guests had come to appear monotonous. To marvel at human inventiveness in general becomes, in time, a tiresome affair. Civilization, not culture, was the problem. "Civilization, then, meant everything that her mind could not control."
No comments:
Post a Comment