These removals from the world are physical enactments of Musil's "Other Condition," which arises even amidst everyday life, in the moments of exceptional seeing and experiencing felt by the siblings. Moments when the fragmented character of the world is suddenly resolved into meaning. Moments when one can do no wrong (anything that occurs within the Other Condition, as within love, is beyond good and evil), moments when the usual sense of the arbitrariness of everything is transformed into significance. To set out to lengthen these moments into some form of duration is a dangerous business, bound to disappoint. It is also, in a strange way, the paradox of this unfinished, unfinishable novel, a sort of endless attenuation of the momentary, motivated resistance to habit and quotidian meaninglessness, an attempt to hold the moment (the one thing, remember, that Faust may not request of Mephistopheles without losing the devilish bargain: "Moment, moment, stay a while, you are so beautiful!). To live life like literature; to never do anything that is not motivated by pure will and desire. As Walter Pater so unforgettably writes, "To burn always with this hard gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life". But who can stand it?
The sea is the great test for the siblings who have now become fully lovers, having worn themselves out with happiness and sexual pleasure. We do not know how long it takes for them to begin to go mad, alone on these islands (without books!) staring only into each other's eyes and into the endless sea. But we do know that the idyll does eventually begin to grow tired, so tired that even a banal art historian who stops awhile at one of the hotels provides some welcome distraction for Agathe, which disgusts Ulrich, who, nevertheless admits to finding the chamber maid attractive. As Ulrich notes, love cannot exist between two people alone. One always needs a third: to admire, to envy, to lure away. Or, two lovers who are united against the world also need the world's proximity to experience their separateness. In the beautiful passage titled "The Three Sisters," Ulrich and Agathe talk about the world as if it were the third lover in a menâge à trois with them; a lover neither would be jealous of. But Ulrich also asks Agathe if she could imagine sharing a man with another woman. She says she could imagine it being quite beautiful--but only could not imagine the woman.
But in a note at the end of one passage, Musil writes that Clarisse soon joins the siblings who are floundering in the infinity of their own four eyes, suggesting that, perhaps, he had considered experimenting with a sexual, sensual adventure with these three characters. This scene was either not written or has disappeared. But in some of the most brilliant passages of the book, Ulrich is alone with a now fully-mad Clarisse on the Island of Health.
Here they both lose their connection to normal reality even more than Ulrich and Agathe do, as Ulrich begins to become infected with Clarisse's vision of the world. Yet, this iteration is merely another step in the direction he had been going all along, a matter merely of emphasis. And, as such, is another conscious, even logically-grounded experiment on the nature of what is real; for the whole book has taken on this fundamental question: how do we know what is real, necessary, law, essence, truth and what is merely arbitrary, contingent, custom, habit, prejudice? Musil describes over and over the oscillation between what is (natural law, reality, what must be) and what could be (possibility, new vision, perspectivism, subjectivity), never fully abandoning what is real, but sounding its complex depths. For he was a scientist and a precise explorer amid the vast realms. What he wanted to do was to expand the map of reality, expand our vision of what is real. And the discussions of Clarisse's visions on the Island of Health are a perfect object lesson in this process of new seeing:
"For awhile, Clarisse saw things that one otherwise does not see. Ulrich could explain that splendidly. Perhaps it was insanity. But a forester out walking sees a different world from the one a botanist or a murderer sees. One sees many invisible things. A woman sees the material of a dress, a painter a lake of liquid colors in its stead. I see through the window whether a hat is hard or soft. If I glance into the street I can likewise see whether it is warm or cold outside, whether people are happy, sad, healthy, or ailing; in the same way, the taste of a fruit is sometimes already in the fingertips that touch them. Ulrich remembered: if one looks at something upside down--for instance, behind the lens of a small camera--one notices things one had overlooked. A waving back and forth or shrubs or heads that to the normal eye appear motionless. Or one becomes conscious of a peculiar hopping quality of the way people walk. One is astonished at the persistent restlessness of things. In the same way, there are unperceived double images in the field of vision, for one eye sees something differently from the other; afterimages crystallize from still pictures like the most delicate-colored fogs; the brain suppresses, supplements, forms the supposed reality; the ear does not hear the thousands of sounds of one's own body; skin, joints, muscles, the innermost self, broadcast a contrapuntal composition of innumerable sensations that, mute, blind, and deaf, perform the subterranean dance of the so-called waking state" (1555-1556).
And then, most radically questioning all that is stable and conventional, Ulrich reflects:
"The foundation of human life seemed to him a monstrous fear of some kind, indeed really a fear of the indeterminate. He lay on the white sandy platform of the island between the depths of sea and sky. He lay as in snow. Clarisse was romping an playing like a child behind the thistly dunes. He was not afraid. He saw life from above. The island had flown away with him. He understood his past. Hundreds of human orders have come and gone: from the gods to brooch pins, and from psychology to the record player, every one of them an obscure unit, every one of them mysteriously sinking after a few hundred or a few thousand years and passing into rubble and building site: what else is this but a climbing up out of nothingness, each attempt on a different wall? Like one of those dunes blown by the wind, which for a while forms its own weight and then is blown away again by the wind? What is everything we do other than a nervous fear of being nothing: beginning with our pleasures, which are no pleasures but only a din, a chattering instigated to kill time, because a dark certainty admonishes us that it will in the end annihilate us, all the way to those inventions that outdo each other, the senseless mountains of money that kill the spirit, whether one is suffocated or borne up by them, to the continually changing fashions of the mind, of clothes that change incessantly, to murder, assassination, war, in which a profound mistrust of whatever is stable and created explodes: what is all that but the restlessness of a man shoveling himself down to his knees out of a grave he will never escape, a being that will never entirely climb out of nothingness, who fearfully flings himself into shapes but is, in some secret place that he is hardly aware of himself, vulnerable and nothing?" (1557-58).
This terror in the face of the uncreated and unformed--the world like an infinite ocean, without firm delineations or rules, the modern condition of world, which Nietzsche described as a horizon (the horizon of God, traditional morality) wiped clean by a sponge---that existential terror of openness, which one avoids by flinging oneself into the predetermined forms, constructs, rules--Musil elsewhere describes them as the two dozen cake pans--is only revealed as open to us in special moments. Terrible, sublime, exceptional moments. In such states, the usual fabric of reality is torn; the usual scaffolds are seen to be merely stage props, temporary, ephemeral at best.
The point is not to deny normal reality, but to expand it. What Ulrich elsewhere calls "a tear in the paper" of normal reality, the mind loosened by a change or a vacation-mood, might precipitate the ability to see differently, though one often unfortunately loses the new insights, bit by bit as one reintegrates back into regular, dull life. A crime, too, is a means to such a tear in the paper--be it an artistic crime against formal stylistic rules, a crime against one's contemporary social morals, or a gratuitous act against expectations. A calamity such as the one we are collectively experiencing now can also incite new seeing. One does not wish for disasters, plagues, wars, or personal upheavals like heartbreak or the death of a loved one, but when they come, they do provide powerful opportunities for new seeing and experiencing. New visions that can also lead to new ways of living and being together in the world.
