Intimate Ties by Robert Musil

Author:Robert Musil [Musil, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Steerforth Press
Published: 2019-05-28T00:00:00+00:00

The Temptation of Silent Veronica

TWO VOICES EMANATING from somewhere sound in your ears. Maybe they’re just lying there silently, side by side, entwined in one another on the pages of a diary, the dark, deep voice of the woman lifting itself with a sudden start, as situated on the page, encircled by the soft, broad, drawling voice of the man, the latter knotted with the former, her as yet unfinished voice left lying there, and in between, that which they did not have time to hide peering forth. Or maybe it isn’t so. But maybe somewhere in the world there is a point at which these two voices, hardly otherwise distinguishable from the lackluster muddle of mundane sounds, shoot out and then merge like two beams intertwined, somewhere, and who knows, maybe we might want to search for such a point, the proximity of which we can only sense here by a certain unrest, like a movement of music not yet heard, yet already formulated in the heavy, woolly folds of the a distant curtain still intact. Maybe these fragments of sound will then collide and burst out of the shell of their sickness and weakness into clear, steadfast, upright declarations.

“Muddled!” In retrospect, in those days when a terrible decision had to be made, to opt either with an indiscernable decisiveness, like a thin thread stretched taut, for the imagination, or for the run of the mill reality, in those days of a desperate last ditch effort to stretch the limits of the unfathomable into this reality – and then to let go and fling yourself into the simply lived as if into a tousled heap of warm feathers, he addressed his dilemma as one might a person. In those days he spoke hourly to himself and raised his voice, because he was afraid. Something had sunk in and settled in him with that incomprehensible, unstoppable imminence with which somewhere in the body a pain suddenly wells up, billows into swollen tissue, and keeps becoming more and more real, evolving into an illness that slowly takes hold of the body with the mild ambiguous smile of a torturer.

“Oh you miserable muddle of emotions,” Johannes begged, “if only you were outside of me!” And: “If only you were a skirt, and I could grab you by the pleats. Talk to you. Then I could say, You are God, and hold a pebble under my tongue when talking of you, to tap a higher truth! After which I could say, I put myself at your mercy, bid you to help me, to watch over me, whatever I do; there is something dead center and motionless inside me, and it’s you.”

But he just lay there with his mouth in the dust and his heart trying to catch up like a child. All he knew was that he needed its dumb thump, because he was a coward, that’s all he knew. But it happened all the same, as if deriving strength from his weakness,

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