As he proceeded down the street and passed people by, Walser looked timidly at each of their faces and thought: is it possible that this man has no desire to be a great man?
And this question seemed very odd to him, and any response to it quite unacceptable — as was the inverse question: is it possible that this man here, who at this moment is crossing paths with me on the street, is it possible that this shapeless face, which I don’t recognize, and which doesn’t show any hint of hiding any special characteristics or exceptional strength, is it possible, all told, that this face, which is basically a repetition of countless other faces, that this endless face, which is grotesquely commonplace, is it possible that behind this face there is a man who desires to be great, and who believes that such a thing might still be possible?
2
Walser then remembered the words of Klober, the man who was sleeping with his wife, and who calmly continued to utter grand phrases in his presence, as if he were constantly on a stage delivering a speech. All the things that Klober had said about the hatred that was the real requisite for greatness and the isolation that such hatred presupposes, all that now seemed untrue to Walser. A Great Man, or at least the ones who are considered to be great men, always wants to be admired; that is to say: he’s not so strong that he doesn’t still desire the attention of others. If he is admired, it’s because he desired it. And Klober wanted to be a Great Man; when he made his impassioned speeches, what he really wanted was to be admired. He spoke of a prideful, self-imposed solitude, but in speaking about these things — by not having restricted himself to merely thinking them, keeping them inside his private, non-exhibitionist circuitry — by speaking about them publicly, he was contradicting himself. The very act of speaking those phrases contradicted the message they conveyed.
But concerning himself, Walser was now intrigued, for the first time, in an objective way, by his indifference to receiving any applause or cheers for his actions. If he were being completely realistic about it, Walser would have had to admit that no action he had initiated throughout his entire existence had yielded the slightest cheer — indeed, neither insult nor applause. Even when he was reprimanded, even when he was humiliated, Walser had never felt any hatred directed specifically at him. No one hated him. And that fact could as easily make him feel ashamed as, on the contrary, give him an elevated sense of security. In certain epochs, like the one in which he was living, it was reassuring to think that no one, in any place, was, at that moment, recalling one’s name or one’s face with hatred. Walser had never committed a single act that even an ingenuous child would call mischief. He just wasn’t fit for doing evil, thought Walser, as if this were a clearly delineated ineptitude, like any other defective mechanism. He wasn’t hated and he felt hatred for no one. When he performed an action he never looked around to see whether this had been admired or not. The effects of his actions weren’t important.
Certainly he thought that the immediate effects of his movements, for instance, were important, for they were parts of his concrete life, to put it one way — or rather, to put it more simply, if he decided to jump off a tall building, he knew, or anyway suspected, that this would result in his death; therefore: he didn’t jump. And it was this type of reasoning that attached itself to his individual actions — merely: what will happen to me, and only me, after I do this? Everything else was meaningless to him: if people admired or rejected a series of his movements, or the sum total of his gestures — his behavior, in other words — it was all the same to him.
For Walser, it had become clear that one’s existence was made up of a succession of behaviors directed at objects and at other men, and that these behaviors, these ways of acting — crude as they might be — were, objectively speaking, nothing more than a series of clearly delineated movements taken by one’s musculature, easily located on an anatomic chart. The biography of a Man was, at root, merely the movements that his muscles had made.
Each individual event could thus be, not reduced, but likened to — the question was one of equivalence, identity, not of reduction or a loss — the sum total of one’s gestures, the way that a machine — as complex as it might be, as marvelous as its actions might be — is nevertheless nothing more than the sum total of its parts, which, under certain circumstances, perform actions. Walser didn’t think it right for Man — purely by virtue of being able to reflect upon the mechanisms of his existence — to pride himself on being so very different from machines. Merely being able to distance oneself from one’s constituent mechanisms doesn’t mean that those mechanisms cease to exist. Thus, a human existence was, for Walser, a simple sum. The mathematical plus sign reigned in all living beings, and death was so dreadfully frightening precisely because it represented an abrupt interruption of the arithmetic that, at some level, everyone was made to think would go on forever. As if each person, at a given moment, conceived of his body in these terms: as an immortal summation of various behaviors. No one in this century, even after so many successive generations had come and gone — even in the middle of a war, when death is more visible than ever — had ever failed to be surprised (Walser was certain of this) by their own death. We’re always surprised! As if we believed we had the right, after so many days of continued existence, to never be interrupted; as if we had the basic right to belong to a completely different species, to a legitimately never-ending species. This is more than just a belief in an individual eternity in the abstract; this is a belief in an eternity with our own name on it, an eternity that attaches itself to our singular existence.
And then Walser couldn’t help but get caught up in a sense of pride: he, yes he, was a Great Man after all, a Man, as Klober contended, who had been able to separate himself from everyone else, a Man who was truly alone and individual. Precisely because his actions didn’t seem to have any connection to other people — as if those other people didn’t exist. They were absolutely separate, he and other people; his actions were independent, autonomous, and that was his greatness. In short, there was, in Walser, at last, a generalized hatred, a hatred that was serene yet universal, a hatred directed at each and every individual that crossed paths with his existence.
And yet, he would never be an emperor; History would never, regarding Walser, tell of the way he had exterminated this or that number of his fellow human beings, because he, Walser, would never get close to anyone. He was not yet the true Man, as Klober had put it, the Man who only ventures near other people in order to kill them; but, nevertheless, there was still something very significant in Walser: his every point of proximity to other existences, even if these weren’t approached with the intention of killing the other person, were, by nature, and had been for some time, taken up with the intention of not loving the other person. I can draw near to anyone with perfect security, thought Walser, remembering the kiss he’d given Clairie, I can draw near to anyone without fear because I know I won’t love them. I am prepared to not love anyone—and this sentence, thought in this way, felt like a powerful weapon — in wartime — a powerful defense against the hostility of the century. Walser didn’t even own a pistol, but he had eliminated the great weakness of existence, he had made the principal fragility of the species disappear: he had no inclination toward love or friendship! And in that moment, while walking down the street, unarmed, looking down at his old, brown shoes, his irresponsible shoes, as Klober used to say mockingly, at that moment Walser felt as safe — and at the same time as threatening to others — as if he were proceeding down the street in a tank.