Musil reading diary chapters 32-33.

The next chapter sort of continues with the theme I brought up in my two last updates: the experience of meaning. We begin with Moosebrugger, however. Ulrich is yet again contemplating his feelings for the Moosebrugger case, which engages him more than the events in his own life. Why? Actually, it's not that clear. There's something of a 'moral' reactions agains victimization. But in what sense is Moosebrugger a victim? A victim of the media attention? The scrutiny of the juridical system? Anyways, as alway, the foreground of Ulrich's attention is Ulrich himself. "Judge the sin and not the sinner". This seems to be the religious idea Ulrich is thinking about next. He muses on the "religious immoralists", according to whom there is always the soul of a man that remains pure irrespective of the deeds a person is responsible for doing. But still, there is something in the idea of the Soul that attracts Ulrich, even though he, a scientist!, in no way would desire to be associated with romantic chatterboxes like Diotima. Moosebrugger, in a way, comes to stand for this fuzzy "spiritual longing" that Ulrich is so obsessed with wiping out. A wrong-headed conception of the inner purity of the sinner evokes "the sickly breath of corruption [...] a room with yellow French paperbacks on the tables and glass-bead curtains instead of doors". We don't want to be one of those people, do we?

Next, Ulrich's attraction to the thinking of religious mystics is spelled out, mostly through his love affair with a major's wife which he pursued as a young man. The colonel's wife is a gorgeous piano player and she is - as is all the women in The Man without Qualities - called a "sensual woman". R asked me what I thought about Musil's own attitudes about gender - so far, I find it hard to tell. He's a good writer, and sometimes assholes are good writers, too, and one cannot always tell the difference based on the text alone.

As the love affair gets deeper, both lovers get scared. Ulrich tells his lover that he has to go on a furlough, the major's wife was relieved. But as Ulrich made himself a temporary home on some island he ended up on, he couldn't stop thinking about her. Or, should we say, he couldn't stop mavelling at the idea of her. As soon as the idea took a more concrete form, it faded. He saw mystic connections, a sense of coherence; nature made sense to him. "When the world surpassed his eyes, its meaning lapped against him within in soundless waves." Musil describes Ulrich's temporary sense of tranquility, unity and serenity, which soon enough "declined and suddenly ended". But this is something he struggles with, it seems: the spectre of "mysticism". We have already seen that Ulrich takes a quite ironic stance towards the pseudo-religious dreaming of the driving spirits behind the parallel campaign.

In the next chapter, we are back with the scene in which Bonadea gets dressed - she has stopped dressing - and in which Ulrich is deeply preoccupied with his own thoughts. This book progresses slowly. Or; progression is the wrong concept here. Ulrich's rude demeanor enrages Bonadea, who finally decides to leave him. She dresses, veil and all, and walks out. She understood that Ulrich had grown tired of here and she wanted to leave with dignity.