On the Desire to Change Society

“Suddenly, out of the becalmed mentality of the nineteenth century’s last two decades, an invigorating fever rose all over Europe.  No one knew exactly what was in the making: nobody could have said whether it was to be a new art, a new humanity, a new morality, or perhaps a reshuffling of society.  So everyone said what he pleased about it.  But everywhere people were suddenly standing up to rebel against the old order.  Everywhere the right man suddenly appeared in the right place and – this is so important! – enterprising men of action joined force with enterprising men of intellect.  Talents of a kind that had previously been stifled or had never taken part in public life before suddenly came to the fore.  They were as different from each other as could be, and could not have been more contradictory in their aims.  There were those who loved the overman and those who loved the underman; there were health cults and sun cults and the cults of consumptive maidens; there was enthusiasm for hero worshippers and for the believers in the Common Man; people were devout and sceptical, naturalistic and mannered, robust and morbid; they dreamed of old tree-lined avenues in palace parks, autumnal gardens, glassy ponds, gems, hashish, disease and demonism, but also of prairies, immense horizons, forges and rolling mills, naked wrestlers, slave uprisings, early man and the smashing of society.  These were certainly opposing and widely varied battle cries, but uttered in the same breath. [...] If one does not want to, there is no need to make too much of this bygone ‘movement’.  It really affected only that thin, unstable layer of humanity, the intellectuals, who are unanimously despised by all those who rejoice in impregnable views, no matter how divergent from one another (the kind of people who are back in the saddle today, thank God); the general population was not involved.  Still, even though it did not become a historical event, it was an eventlet...” (p. 53-4)

On the Jack-of-All-Trades

“Such older people were accustomed to say that he simply lacked power, but it would have been equally valid to call him a lifelong many-sided dilettante, and it was quite remarkable that there were always authorities in the worlds of music, painting and literature who expressed enthusiastic views about Walter’s future.  In Ulrich’s life, by contrast, even though he had a few undeniably noteworthy achievements to his credit, it had never happened that someone had came up to him and said: ‘You are the man I have always been waiting for, the man my friends have been waiting for.’  In Walter’s life this happened every three months. [...] He had an air about him that seemed to matter much more than any specific achievement.  Perhaps he had a particular genius for passing as a genius.” (pp.48-9)

On Codependency

“She was chained to this man, so favoured by circumstance, by some compulsion she could not fathom; she despised him for her own spinelessness and felt spineless to despise him; she was unfaithful to him as a means of escape but always chose the most awkward moments to speak of him or of their children; and she was never able to let go of him completely.  Like many unhappy wives, she ended up with an attitude – in an otherwise rather unstable personal environment – determined by resentment of her solidly-rooted husband, and she carried her conflict with him into every new experience that was supposed to free her from him.” (p.40)

On Meaninglessness

“She could utter the words ‘truth, goodness and beauty’ as often and as casually as someone else might say ‘Thursday’.” (p. 39)

On Generational Politics

“Now, it is a question whether the world is so topsy-turvy that it always needs turning around.  The world itself has always had a two-fold answer to this question.  From the beginning of the world most people, in their youth, have been in favour of turning the world around.  They have always felt it was ridiculous the way their elders clung to convention and thought with the heart – a lump of flesh – instead of with the brain.  To the young, the moral stupidity of their elders has always looked like the same inability to make new connections that constitutes ordinary stupidity, and their own natural morality has always been one of achievement, heroism and change.  But they have no sooner reached their years of accomplishment than they no longer remember this, and even less do they want to be reminded of it.” (pp. 37-8)

On Science

"If we translate 'scientific outlook' into 'view of life', 'hypothesis' into 'attempt' and 'truth' into 'outcome', then there would be no notable scientist or mathematician whose work, in courage and revolutionary impact, did not far outmatch the greatest deeds in history.  The man has not yet been born who could say to his followers: 'You may steal, kill, fornicate - our teaching is so strong that it will transform the cesspool of your sins into clear, sparkling mountain streams.'  But in science it happens that something till then held to be in error suddenly revolutionizes the field, or that some dim and disdained idea becomes the ruler of a new realm of thought.  Such events are not merely upheavals but lead us upwards like a Jacob's ladder.  The life of science is as strong and glorious and carefree as a fairy tale.  And Ulrich felt: people simply don't realise it, they have no idea how much thinking can be done already; if they could be taught to think a new way, they could change their lives." (p. 37)

On Work

"Baron Munchausen's post horn was more beautiful than our canned music, the Seven-League Boots more beautiful than a car, Oberon's kingdom lovelier than a railway tunnel, the magic root of the mandrake better than a telegraphed image, eating of one's mother's heart and then understanding birds more beautiful than an ethologic study of birds' vocalisations.  We have gained reality and lost dream.  No more lounging under a tree and peering at the sky between one's big and second toes; there's work to be done.  To be efficient, one must be hungry and dreamy but eat steak and keep going.  It is exactly as if the old, inefficient breed of humanity had fallen asleep on an anthill and found, when the new breed awoke, that the ants had crept into its bloodstream, making it move frantically ever since, unable to shake off that antlike feeling of industry." (p. 36)

On Hedonism

"Of course, if the art of trading for money not the entire person, as usual, but only the body must be called prostitution, then Leona occasionally engaged in prostitution.  But if you have lived for nine years, as she had from the age of sixteen, on the miserable pay of the lowest dives, with your head full of the prices of costumes and underwear, the deductions, greediness and caprice of the owners, the commissions on the food and drink of the patrons warming up to their fun, and the price of a room in the nearby hotel, day after day, including the fights and the business calculations, then everything the layman enjoys as a night on the town adds up to a profession full of its own logic, objectivity and class codes.  Prostitution especially is a matter where it makes all the difference whether you see it from above or from below." (p.18)