A pity that my invitation to the summit was lost in the post. I had planned to read into the record this passage from Robert Musil’s novel The Man without Qualities. The Austro-Hungarian Empire wishes to celebrate its glories, and owing to the principle of insufficient cause our hero Ulrich finds himself secretariat to something called the Collateral Campaign. The Campaign is not quite sure what it is, or what to do, so it decides to collect ideas from the People.
Ulrich pays a call on his cousin, Diotima, to discuss the results.
“O mighty cousin,” he reported, a thick file in his hand . . . “The whole world seems to be expecting us to undertake reforms, and one half begins with the words ‘Free from______’ and the other half with ‘Onward to_____’
And the narrator summarises:
. . . The one group put the blame for the troubles of the age on one particular thing and demanded its abolition; such particular things, for example, as the Jews, the Roman Catholic Church, socialism or capitalism, the mechanistic system of thought or the neglect of technical developments . . . large-scale land-owning or big cities, intellectualisation or the inadequacy of general education. The second group . . pointed to goals lying somewhere ahead . . . and these highly desirable goals recommended by the second group usually differed from the particular things that the first group wanted to destroy in nothing more than their emotional key. In this dual manner, demands were made both for a slowing up of the tempo of the times and for a competition for the best feuilleton on the grounds either that life is unendurably or that it is exquisitely short.
The Man with Qualities, London, 1961, vol I 322-23.