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JACK'S EUPHORIA///

-Ask

“

From the earliest youth stirrings of self-confidence, which are often so touching, even moving, to look back upon in later years, all sorts of once-cherished notions lingered in his memory even now, among them the expression “living hypothetically.” It still expressed the courage and the inescapable ignorance of life that makes every step an act of daring without experience; it showed the desire for grand connections and the aura of revocability a young man feels as he hesitantly ventures into life. Ulrich felt that none of this really needed to be taken back. A thrilling sense of having been chosen for something is the best and the only certain thing in one whose glance surveys the world for the first time. If he monitors his feelings, he finds nothing he can accept without reservation. He seeks a possible beloved but can’t tell whether it’s the right one; he is capable of killing without being sure that he will have to. The drive of his own nature to keep developing prevents him from believing that anything is final and complete, yet everything he encounters behaves as though it were final and complete. He suspects that the given order of things is not as solid as it pretends to be; no thing, no self, no form, no principle, is safe, everything is undergoing an invisible but ceaseless transformation, the unsettled holds more of the future than the settled, and the present is nothing but a hypothesis that has not yet been surmounted. What better can he do than hold himself apart from the world, in the good sense exemplified by the scientist’s guarded attitude toward facts that might be tempting him to premature conclusions? Hence he hesitates in trying to make something of himself; a character, a profession, a fixed mode of being, are for him concepts that already shadow forth the outlines of the skeleton, which is all that will be left of him in the end. He seeks to understand himself differently, as someone inclined and open to everything that may enrich him inwardly, even if it should be morally or intellectually taboo; he feels like a stride, free to move in any direction, from equilibrium to equilibrium, but always forward. And when he sometimes thinks he has found the right idea, he perceives that a drop of indescribable incandescence has fallen into the world, with a glow that makes the whole earth look different.

Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities Vol. I

5:49 AM on Thursday 9th February 2012 with 5 notes and Comments

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