Now this longtime war appears to be close to the end for our time is a time of universal conformity – so many modern people seem to be afraid to have any individuality. I once said to you that the more truth we discover, the less of the personal is left in the world, because of the longtime war against individuality that individuality is losing. The personal quality of any given creature is precisely that which doesn’t coincide with anything else. The absence of qualities allows the main hero to stay outside the world, nations, state, society, unions, individuality and even his inner self and to contemplate and analyze all and sundry.įor if stupidity, seen from within, did not so much resemble talent as possess the ability to be mistaken for it, and if it did not outwardly resemble progress, genius, hope, and improvement, the chances are that no one would want to be stupid, and so there would be no stupidity.Īnd this way of living makes of him a connoisseur of all sorts of stupidity in this world… Yes, The Man Without Qualities is a novel of ideas – it is so thick with ideas that it is hard to choose among possible quotes.Īnd since the possession of qualities assumes a certain pleasure in their reality, we can see how a man who cannot summon up a sense of reality even in relation to himself may suddenly, one day, come to see himself as a man without qualities. I've never felt so filthy helpless! When you spend a lot of time with ideas you end up itching all over, and you can scratch till you bleed, without getting any relief.
And together these particolored tiles constitute a variegated mosaic of a brilliant farce which shows a wholeness of a complete book.īut do you know what it's like? It's like traveling second class in Galicia and picking up crab lice. And every chapter reads as a vivid fable or an acrid anecdote. The first volume of The Man Without Qualities comprises two parts: A Sort of Introduction and Pseudoreality Prevails and those consist of one hundred and twenty three short chapters.
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