Young Torless by Robert Musil Read Free Book Online

sense of wonder. The fact was that later he was to have-and indeed to be dominated by-a peculiar ability: he could not help frequently experiencing events, people, things, and even himself, in such a way as to feel that in it all there was at once some insoluble enigma and some inexplicable kinship for which he could never quite produce any evidence. Then these things would seem tangibly comprehensible, and yet he could never entirely resolve them into words and ideas. Between events and himself, indeed between his own feelings and some inmost self that craved understanding of them, there always remained a dividing-line, which receded before his desire, like a horizon, the closer he tried to come to it. Indeed, the more accurately he circumscribed his feelings with thoughts, and the more familiar they became to him, the stranger and more incomprehensible did they seem to become, in equal measure; so that it no longer even seemed as though they were retreating before him, but as though he himself were withdrawing from them, and yet without being able to shake off the illusion of coming closer to them.
    This queer antithesis, which was so difficult for him to grasp, later occupied an important phase of his spiritual development; it was something that tore at his soul, as though to rend it apart, and for a long time it was his soul's chief problem and the chief threat to it.
    For the present, however, the severity of these struggles was indicated only by a frequent sudden lassitude, alarming him, as it were, from a long way off, when ever some ambiguous, odd mood such as this just now-brought him a foreboding of it. Then he would seem to himself as powerless as a captive, as one who had been abandoned and shut away as much from himself as from others. At such times he could have screamed with desperation and the horror of emptiness; but instead of doing anything of the kind he would avert himself from this solemn and expectant, tormented, wearied being within himself and-still aghast at his abrupt renunciation-would begin to listen, more and more enchanted by their warm, sinful breath, to the whispering voices of his solitude.
    behind it. Then the darkness seemed to shrink and withdraw, only in the next instant to advance again and stand motionless as a wall outside the window. This darkness was a world apart. It had descended upon the earth like a horde of black enemies, slaughtering or banishing human beings, or, whatever it did, blotting out all trace of them.
    And it seemed to Törless that he was glad of this. At this moment he had no liking for human beings-for all who were adults. He never liked them when it was dark. He was in the habit then of cancelling them out of his thoughts. After that the world seemed to him like a sombre, empty house, and in his breast there was a sense of awe and horror, as though he must now search room after room-dark rooms where he did not know what the corners might conceal-groping his way across thresholds that no human foot would ever step on again, until-until in one room the doors would suddenly slam behind him and before him and he would stand confronting the mistress of the black hordes herself. And at the same instant the locks would snap shut in all the doors through which he had come; and only far beyond, outside the walls, would the shades of darkness stand on guard like black eunuchs, warding off any human approach.
    This was his kind of loneliness since he had been left in the lurch that time-in the woods, where he had wept so bitterly. It held for him the lure of woman and of something monstrous. He felt it as a woman, but its breath was only a gasping in his chest, its face a whirling forgetfulness of all human faces, and the movements of its hands a shuddering all through his body....
    He feared this fantasy, for he was aware of the perverted lust in the secrecy of it, and he was disturbed by the thought that such imaginings might gain more and more power over him. But they