Without qualities

The title of Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities puzzled me when I first saw it. I don’t pretend to have a full sense of what Musil means to be without qualities but in Chapter 34 Ulrich experiences a moment of self-consciousness. “At this moment he wished he were a man without qualities.” Elucidation of this idea comes in the following sentences. “Few people in mid-life really know how they got to be what they are, how they came by their pastimes, their outlook, their wife, their character, profession, and successes, but they have the feeling that from this point on nothing much can change.”

The cliché of the mid-life crisis might be a subject for joking, but still it is during this stage of life that a man faces his greatest challenge, to survive the weight of being small.

Twenty years ago when I was still in graduate school, I bought a copy of the diary of C.S. Lewis chronicling the years 1922 to 1927. The title given to the diary was “All my road before me”, and even at that time in my life I was aware of my own road and had a real sense that of how I’d only just begun a journey that would take me into uncharted territory. Now it seems that the present volume of my own diary would have to carry the title “Half my road behind me.” I commiserate with Ulrich’s desire to return to that youthful state where he was less defined by his own history and could still shape himself. When we are young, we are without qualities, or those qualities are just forming, taking shape, and giving structure to the person we will become in mid-life.