Robert Musil. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

I am looking at a photograph of a late-middle-aged man in a gray suit with broad lapels. He is wearing a bow tie. There are dark leaves behind him and the lines of a sunlit house. His right hand dangles across the armrest of a wicker chair in which he is sitting with one leg draped over the other. The left hand, wearing a signet ring, rests on a round table and is loosely holding a cigarette. The face could belong to a European diplomat or businessman of a now extinct type: refined, austere, intellectual. The dark, dense eyebrows add an expression of calm virility. The only incongruous detail is the eyes: they are closed.

One assumes at first that the snapshot was taken at the moment of blinking. But it is difficult to imagine this face with the eyes open, because all its features and in fact the whole gesture of the body, which at first glance appeared so urbanely relaxed in its well-tailored suit, are drained of motility, as if drugged. At any minute, the cigarette may drop from between those slackly curved fingers. Is this a picture of mortal exhaustion or of extremely attenuated contemplation? Probably it is both. The man depicted is Robert Musil, who died at the age of sixty-one, less than two years after this photograph was taken. At Musil’s funeral, which was attended by eight people, the eulogist applied to him a statement Musil had made about Rilke: “He was not a summit of this age—he was one of those elevations upon which the destiny of the human spirit strides across ages.”

Today no one would dream of describing a human being in such grandiose terms—a political program, perhaps, or a space mission, but not a person, and certainly not a writer. It may have something to do with the expectations writers have of themselves, and with a rather diminished sense, generally, of the human spirit having any sort of destiny. Perhaps it’s better that way. A more modest perspective may open up a vision of what is staring us in the face: that unless we supply the essential necessities to the collective body of man, the spirit may have to find another planet for the fulfillment of its destiny. Musil himself was coming to a similar conclusion near the end of his life (chastened, perhaps, by the enormity of World War II and by his own experience of severe poverty): “The most important thing is not to produce spiritual values, but food, clothing, security, order … And it is just as important to produce the principles necessary for the supply of food, clothing, etc. Let us call it—the spirit of privation.” Elsewhere he described himself as “building a house of cards as the earth begins to crack.”

The house of cards was a huge, phenomenally ambitious construction, more than twenty years in the making and never finished, titled The Man without Qualities—a satire on the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a utopian novel about untried possibilities of being, a meditation on the nature of history, a critique of the major ideologies of the twentieth century, an attempt to combine the different exactitudes of reason and mysticism. The book, a critical success after its first volume was published in 1930, was virtually unknown at the time of the author’s death in 1942. Today it is frequently mentioned along with Ulysses and In Search of Lost Time as one of the great modern novels. Read More

© davidevison / Adobe Stock.

The first time I met an aspiring white supremacist was during a class trip to a county career center in southwest Ohio. He was tall and had buzzed hair and told my friend Niquelle and me that he loved the movie American History X. He wanted to be like Edward Norton’s character, he told us, “but before the part where he turned all pussy.” Norton’s character is an American neo-Nazi who is sent to prison—where he undergoes his aforementioned conversion—after forcing a black man to place his mouth around a curb and then executing him by stomping on the back of his skull. I remember looking over at Niquelle, who is black. I remember feeling my breath catch in my chest, upon which my Star of David necklace dangled, outside my shirt.

Growing up in southwest Ohio, I was aware of the way I could become more or less invisible—more or less white—based on whether I tucked in my necklace or wore it out. (A soggy sort of superpower: Jewboy to the rescue?) I often wore it out in new places, perhaps with an edge of defiance, seeking some sort of confrontation. But then when it came, like on that day—

I didn’t say a word.

I asked Niquelle about this incident recently, and she told me she also remembered the day and the guy vividly, but couldn’t recall the context: “Did he just look at us and let out this terrible thought? Did someone say something that made him angry?” We both remembered being whisked away by the teacher or staff person who was leading the tour, and then that was that. Read More