Quotes from The Confusions of Young Törless

“The feeling of not being understood and of not understanding the world is no mere accompaniment of first passion, but its sole non-accidental cause. And the passion itself is a panic-stricken flight in which being together with the other means only a doubled solitude.”
― Robert Musil, quote from The Confusions of Young Törless

“Es gibt immer einen Punkt dabei, wo man nicht mehr weiß, ob man lügt oder ob das, was man erfunden hat, wahrer ist als man selber.”
― Robert Musil, quote from The Confusions of Young Törless

“We sometimes have a flash of understanding that amounts to the insight of genius, and yet it slowly withers, even in our hands - like a flower. The form remains, but the colours and the fragrance are gone.”
― Robert Musil, quote from The Confusions of Young Törless

“She liked to convey that she was well acquainted with the smartness and the manners of the stylish world, but that she had got beyond all that sort of thing. She was fond of declaring that she did not care a snap of the fingers for that, or for herself, or indeed for anything whatsoever. On this account, and in spite of her blowsiness, she enjoyed a certain degree of respect among the peasant lads of the neighbourhood. True, they spat when they spoke of her, and felt obliged to treat her with even more coarseness than other girls, but at bottom they were really mightily proud of this ‘damned slut’ who had issued from their own midst and who had so thoroughly seen through the veneer of the world.”
― Robert Musil, quote from The Confusions of Young Törless

“There were moments when life at school became a matter of utter indifference to him. Then the putty of his everyday concerns dropped out and, with nothing more to bind them together, the hours of his life fell apart.”
― Robert Musil, quote from The Confusions of Young Törless

“Ich weiß jetzt nichts von Rätseln. Alles geschieht: Das ist die ganze Weisheit.”
― Robert Musil, quote from The Confusions of Young Törless

“Perhaps I don't know enough yet to find the right words for it, but I think I can describe it. It happened again just a moment ago. I don't know how to put it except by saying that I see things in two different ways-everything, ideas included. If I make an effort to find any difference in them, each of them is the same today as it was yesterday, but as soon as I shut my eyes they're suddenly transformed, in a different light. Perhaps I went wrong about the imaginary numbers. If I get to them by going straight along inside mathematics, so to speak, they seem quite natural. It's only if I look at them directly, in all their strangeness, that they seem impossible. But of course I may be all wrong about this, I know too little about it. But I wasn't wrong about Basini. I wasn't wrong when I couldn't turn my ear away from the faint trickling sound in the high wall or my eye from the silent, swirling dust going up in the beam of light from a lamp. No, I wasn't wrong when I talked about things having a second, secret life that nobody takes any notice of! I-I don't mean it literally-it's not that things are alive, it's not that Basini seemed to have two faces-it was more as if I had a sort of second sight and saw all this not with the eyes of reason. Just as I can feel an idea coming to life in my mind, in the same way I feel something alive in me when I look at things and stop thinking. There's something dark in me, deep under all my thoughts, something I can't measure out with thoughts, a sort of life that can't be expressed in words and which is my life, all the same.

“That silent life oppressed me, harassed me. Something kept on making me stare at it. I was tormented by the fear that our whole life might be like that and that I was only finding it out here and there, in bits and pieces. . . . Oh, I was dreadfully afraid! I was out of my mind.. .”

These words and these figures of speech, which were far beyond what was appropriate to Törless's age, flowed easily and naturally from his lips in this state of vast excitement he was in, in this moment of almost poetic inspiration. Then he lowered his voice and, as though moved by his own suffering, he added:

“Now it's all over. I know now I was wrong after all. I'm not afraid of anything any more. I know that things are just things and will probably always be so. And I shall probably go on for ever seeing them sometimes this way and sometimes that, sometimes with the eyes of reason, and sometimes with those other eyes. . . . And I shan't ever try again to compare one with the other. .”
― Robert Musil, quote from The Confusions of Young Törless

“Eine große Erkenntnis vollzieht sich nur zur Hälfte im Lichtkreise des Gehirns, zur anderen Hälfte in dem dunklen Boden des Innersten, und sie ist vor allem ein Seelenzustand, auf dessen äußerster Spitze der Gedanke nur wie eine Blüte sitzt.”
― Robert Musil, quote from The Confusions of Young Törless

“Der Himmel schwieg. Und Törless fühlte, dass er unter diesem unbewegten, stummen Gewölbe ganz allein sei, er fühlte sich wie ein kleines lebendes Pünktchen under dieser riesigen, durchsichtigen Leiche.
Aber es schreckte ihn kaum mehr. Wie ein alter, längst vertrauter Schmerz hatte es nun auch das letzte Glied ergriffen.”
― Robert Musil, quote from The Confusions of Young Törless

“At that moment he didn’t like mankind, the grown-ups, the adults. He never liked them when it was dark. At such times it was his habit to think mankind away. Then the world would seem like a dark, empty house, and he felt a shudder inside himself, as if now he had to search through room after room—dark rooms where you didn’t know what was hidden in the corners—feeling his way across the thresholds where no foot would tread any more apart from his, until in one room the doors in front of and behind him would suddenly close and he would be facing the mistress of the black hordes herself. And at that moment all the locks of all the other doors he had come through would shut, and far beyond the walls the shadows of the darkness would stand watch, like black eunuchs, keeping out all human contact.”
― Robert Musil, quote from The Confusions of Young Törless

“What's the bee in your bonnet? Seems to be some kind of idealism.”
― Robert Musil, quote from The Confusions of Young Törless

“L'excitation que lui donnaient les peines d'amour de ses héros accélérait son pouls, faisait rougir ses joues et briller ses yeux.”
― Robert Musil, quote from The Confusions of Young Törless

“Een huivering liep als op dunne spinnenpoten heen en weer over zijn rug, zette zich vast tussen zijn schouderbladen en trok met fijne klauwtjes zijn hoofdhuid strak naar achteren.”
― Robert Musil, quote from The Confusions of Young Törless

“Und es gibt auch Dinge, wo zwischen Erleben und Erfassen diese Unvergleichkeit herrscht. Immer aber ist es so, dass das, was wir in einem Augenblick ungeteilt und ohne Fragen erleben, unverständlich und verwirrt wird, wenn wir es mit den Ketten der Gedanken zu unserem bleibenden Besitze fesseln wollen. Und was groß und menscenfremd aussieht, solange unsere Worte von ferne danach langen, wird einfach und verliert das Beunruhigende, sobald es in den Tatkreis unseres Lebens eintritt.”
― Robert Musil, quote from The Confusions of Young Törless

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“I saw thee once - only once - years ago:
I must not say how many - but not many.
It was a July midnight; and from out
A full-orbed moon, that, like thine own soul, soaring,
Sought a precipitate pathway up through heaven,
There fell a silvery-silken veil of light,
With quietude, and sultriness, and slumber,
Upon the upturn'd faces of a thousand
Roses that grew in an enchanted garden,
Where no wind dared stir, unless on tiptoe -
Fell on the upturn'd faces of these roses
That gave out, in return for the love-light,
Their odorous souls in an ecstatic death -
Fell on the upturn'd faces of these roses
That smiled and died in the parterre, enchanted
By thee, and by the poetry of thy presence.

Clad all in white, upon a violet bank
I saw thee half reclining; while the moon
Fell upon the upturn'd faces of the roses,
And on thine own, upturn'd - alas, in sorrow!

Was it not Fate, that, on this July midnight -
Was it not Fate, (whose name is also Sorrow,)
That bade me pause before that garden-gate,
To breathe the incense of those slumbering roses?
No footsteps stirred: the hated world all slept,
Save only thee and me. (Oh, Heaven! - oh, G**!
How my heart beats in coupling those two words!)
Save only thee and me. I paused - I looked -
And in an instant all things disappeared.
(Ah, bear in mind the garden was enchanted!)
The pearly lustre of the moon went out:
The mossy banks and the meandering paths,
The happy flowers and the repining trees,
Were seen no more: the very roses' odors
Died in the arms of the adoring airs.
All - all expired save thee - save less than thou:
Save only divine light in thine eyes -
Save but the soul in thine uplifted eyes.
I saw but them - they were the world to me.
I saw but them - saw only them for hours -
Saw only them until the moon went down.
What wild heart-histories seemed to lie enwritten
Upon those crystalline, celestial spheres!
How dark a wo! yet how sublime a hope!
How silently serene a sea of pride!
How daring an ambition! yet how deep -
How fathomless a capacity for love!
But now, at length, dear Dian sank from sight,
Into a western couch of thunder-cloud;
And thou, a ghost, amid the entombing trees
Didst glide away. Only thine eyes remained.
They would not go - they never yet have gone.
Lighting my lonely pathway home that night,
They have not left me (as my hopes have) since.
They follow me - they lead me through the years.
They are my ministers - yet I their slave.
Their office is to illumine and enkindle -
My duty, to be saved by their bright fire,
And purified in their electric fire,
And sanctified in their elysian fire.
They fill my soul with Beauty (which is Hope,)
And are far up in Heaven - the stars I kneel to
In the sad, silent watches of my night;
While even in the meridian glare of day
I see them still - two sweetly scintillant
Venuses, unextinguished by the sun!”
― Edgar Allan Poe, quote from The Raven and Other Poems

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