A few notes from Burton Pike's Musil Notes

Hans Tiezte and Erica Tiezte-Conrat, by Oskar Kokoschka, 1908, described by the artist, as the painting's description in the MOMA catalogue reads,  as "closed personalities so full of tension"

Apropos the discussion below about the significance (or lack) of the social world of Kakania, of the parlour game,  I just discovered a few beautiful and relevant passages from Burton Pike's unpublished notes on Musil:

"What M. is always about, why he haunts: looking for a place the individual can fit in in a deadened, shallow world.  This is more important than his ideas, which are (in the essays) hortatory and not new, or indeed constructive, but hortatory to change; cf. Rilke, the goal of art is to produce in reader a moral imperative to change his life."

" The MoE is a book about withdrawal from the world. there are few others like it, which begin at a specific point and spread out without practical hope of reconciliation: Die Wahlverwandschaften; Heinrich von Ofterdingen perhaps."