Two skies
“Scudded,” in two books.
A terrible translation of Musil
“Intimate Ties is one of those regrettable publications that hurts the reputations of everyone connected with it: Musil’s own, the translator’s, and even the luckless publisher, Archipelago..”
“Who takes what anyone says seriously anyway?”
This dark passage is the last excerpt from The Man Without Qualities I’m posting.
“What’s an ethos?”
General Stumm von Bordwehr, still struggling.
Will
General Stumm von Bordwehr, still struggling with great ideas.
“Apparition in Agathe’s head!”
From The Man Without Qualities. The mere ten pages of Proust that Musil professed to have read must have included the madeleine moment of Swann’s Way.
“Quantities of genius”
Retail density in The Man Without Qualities.
“An infinitely interwoven surface”
Not an “orderly sequence of facts” but “an infinitely interwoven surface.”
“A kind of foreshortening”
From Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities.
“A night in October”
A night in October is a blanket is a night in October.
“It was an intelligent country”
From Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities.
“Our civilization”
Entertainment, cars and guns: from Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities.
“Getting real things done”
From Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities.
“Only one head, his own”
From The Man Without Qualities.
Robert Musil in the Times
“No culture can rest on a crooked relationship to truth”: Robert Musil, quoted by Roger Cohen in a New York Times column. But where did Musil say or write those words. I found out.
“Buddha, Gautama”
From Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities.
Walter is a dilettante
From Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities.
Aaugh!
From Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities.
Committee life
From Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities.
“Just around the corner”
From Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities.
“Like a pair of trousers”
From The Man Without Qualities. Musil’s gift for metaphor and simile is unending.
Committees, committees
From The Man Without Qualities.
“Here are horses!”
From The Man Without Qualities.
“Also like a metaphor”
From Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities.
“As if a person had suddenly materialized”
From Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities.
“Constellations, bacteria, Balzac, and Nietzsche”
Ulrich, lovesick lieutenant, explains the world to the major’s wife.
“An asphalt spring”
From The Man Without Qualities.
“Full of soap, radio frequencies”
Hermine Tuzzi, also known as Ermelinda, also known as Diotima, has discovered in herself “the well-known suffering caused by that familiar malady of contemporary man known as civilization.”
“A particular genius”
For passing as a genius.
“Constructed like the early stages of the automobile”
From The Man Without Qualities.