In her sufferings she read a great deal and discovered that she had lost something, the possession of which she had previously not been much aware of: a soul.
What is that? It is easily defined negatively: it is simply what curls up and hides when there is any mention of algebraic series.
But positively? It appears that this is where it successfully eludes all efforts to grasp it.
It may be that there had once been something fresh and natural in Diotima, an intuitive sensibility, at that time rolled up in the dress of her correctitude, which was threadbare from much brushing, something that she now called ‘soul’ and rediscovered in Maeterlinck’s batikadorned meta physics, in Novalis, but above all in the indescribable wave of skim-romanticism and yearning for God that the machine-age had for a time squirted out as an expression of spiritual and artistic protest against itself. It is also possible that this fresh and natural element in Diotima could be more precisely defined as something made up of stillness, gentleness, devotion and kind ness, which had never got on the right road and, in the oracular casting of the lead that fate performs with us, had happened to set in the comical shape of her idealism. Perhaps it was imagination, or perhaps it was an inexpressible awareness of those instinctive, vegetative workings that go on underground, day after day, inside the husk of the body, that shining envelope which radiates the soulful expression of a beautiful woman gazing out at us. Perhaps it was only at certain indefinable hours that she felt widened and warm in herself, when her sensations seemed more inspired than usual, when volition and ambition fell silent, and she was seized with a hushed rapture at being alive, at the fullness of life; and then her thoughts veered far away from the surface and down into the depths, even if only concerned with the smallest of things, and world events were remote as noise beyond a garden wall. It seemed to Diotima then that she had an immediate vision of truth within herself, quite effortlessly; delicate experiences, as yet without a name, raised their veils; and she felt herself —to quote only some of the many descriptions that she found to hand in literature— harmonious, humane, religious, near to primal depths that sanctify everything rising out of them and make everything that does not have its source in them seem sinful. But even though all this was quite beautiful to think about, such hints and glimpses of a peculiar state were something that not only Diotima never got beyond; neither did the prophetic books that she consulted, which spoke of the same state in the same vague and mysterious language. Diotima was left with no alternative but to lay the blame for this also on an age of civilisation in which—this was the long and the short of it—the portals of the soul had been buried under a landslide.
Robert Musil | The Man Without Qualities
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