Robert Musil

Something about Nietzsche.
They call him unphilosophical. His works read like spiritual plays. To me he seems to be someone who opened hundreds of new possible ways and has realized none. That is the reason why people to whom new ways are a necessity love him, and those that cannot do without mathematically calculated results call him unphilosophical. Nietzsche himself is of not too great an importance. But Nietzsche and ten sturdy intellectual labourers that do what he has merely pointed out would bring our culture ahead with a step of thousand years. –
Nietzsche is like a park, open to the public – but nobody enters!
From: Cahier 3 (1899 – 1905/06)

November 1913.
Waiting: I overlook my work. It is motionless; like stone. Not meaningless, but the sentences do not move at all. I have two hours before I can leave – if all is well. Every fifth minute I look at the clock, everytime it is less, not as I had estimated but as I – as if for a miracle – had hoped. I see for the first time the furniture stand still in my room. In the same way it looks different like when one sees five buttons of a dice as eyes. The tabele, the two chairs, the sofa, the closet. This is how people without ideas must be like when their working day is done. A somewhat overjoyous expectation is alive in me. As overjoyed as at the end of december 24th just before the party begins.

Somebody on the street whistles, somebody talks passes. A lot of sounds at the same time; somebody talks, on the upperfloor somebody plays the piano, the phone rings. (While I write this down time flies.)
From: Cahier 7 (1913 – 1914)

The matter of verism.
Literary art begins only there, where it moves away from naturalism, they say. Alright. But to adequately put a problem into words, nothing real-important must be overlooked. Else it will be a wrong formulation of a matter.
Here one must adhere to nature, keep exactly to experience, for this resembles scientific thinking. On whatever is left, they may be right. To deviate from nature should not be a poetic license ( like the à part playing in drama) but must come from the original antithesis that seperates art from life.
From: Cahier 5 (1910 – 1911)

I am not even sure whether my good or evil spirit speaks thus to me. But it must be said once.

Since I have awakened to life, I think differently on it. That is: on certain places clear critique, on other places well thought over proposals. Some of it I have written down and published. Much more has remained an unarticulated opposal. Uplifted and brought down again. Far-reaching, assumption based relations, that were not followed by the mind.
The mind, that has received scientific training, will not follow if it has not build itself any bridges of which the carrying-capacity has not exactly been determined. Here and there I calculated only the seperate components of such a bridge; left the job, convinced that it could not be finished anyway. I could sit down and gather material, like there have been great and industrious efforts – …
But what remains of that? If the breath with which has been tried to bring life to the mountain has blown away, an unorganic heap of dead material.
The five year slavery from the war has in the meantime taken the best part of my life; the preamble has become too long, the opportunity to use all force too short. Decline or jump, whatever may come of it, is the only choice left.
I renounce a systematic and exact proove. I merely want to say what I think and make clear why I think this. I comfort myself with the thought that even the most important scientific works have been born out of a need like this, that even Locke’s … are actually travel-letters.
From: Cahier 19 ( 1919 – 1921)

April 4, Thursday … I have 700 pages in Berlin. Today I started the following.
Without suffering sleeplessness I sleep very little lately en feel all but well.
One may not have time to think of God (have no spare thoughts), only then one lives most pleasing to him!?
From science I gained the habbit of working regularly, from literature that of waiting for the being-flooded; that is on of the causes of my problems. Nowadays I find that one must ban the thought of inspiration entirely from the mind, since thinking of it is only a means to trouble it; but what do those extraordinarily happy moments mean nevertheless?

From: Cahier 30 (ca. 1929 – 1941)