1 - Circles

Summary

Nun ist da ein Mittelpunkt, u[nd] rings umher bilden sich auch lauter Mittelpunkte.

[Then there is a center, and all around it other centers come into being.]

— Musil, Nachlass

Die Wege liefen nach kurzem in sich selbst zurück. Der Zustand, in den die beiden auf diesen Weg gerieten, trieb im Kreis, wie es eine Strömung von einer Sperre tut, an der sie hochsteigt.

[The paths soon turned back upon themselves. The state of mind induced in both of them by walking on these paths eddied in circles, as a rising current does behind a dam.]

—Musil, Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften

Sie glichen ja zwei Menschen, die Hand in Hand aus dem Kreis, der sie fest umgeschlossen hat hinausgetreten sind, ohne schon in einem anderen Kreis zu Hause zu sein.

[They were like two people who, hand in hand, have stepped out of the circle that firmly enclosed them, without being at home in another one yet.]

—Musil, Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften

In exile in Switzerland, having returned in the last years of his life to working on sections of the novel he had begun decades before, Musil told an inquiring friend that he was not, it was true, moving forward with his work, but that he was, he hoped, moving deeper. This paradoxical deepening is attained by a circular, doubling-back motion that does not move the reader or writer toward a conclusion but rather calls attention to an experience of presence, an aesthetic resistant to progress.