Every day there comes a moment when a person lays his hands in his lap and all his busyness collapses like ashes. The work accomplished is, from the soul's point of view, entirely imaginary.
Interpretation
This quote reflects on the transient nature of human effort and the often illusory feeling of accomplishment.
Robert Musil's quote emphasizes the inevitability of moments of stillness in our busy lives, where we confront the emptiness of our accomplishments. It suggests that, at some point, we may realize that our relentless striving and productivity are ultimately insignificant from a deeper, soulful perspective, revealing a contrast between external busyness and internal fulfillment.
In practice
In a seminar about work-life balance, this quote could be used to illustrate the importance of finding stillness.
What is perceptible to one’s mistrust is the cut-and-dried way that life is divided up and the ready-made form it assumes, the ever-recurring sameness of it, the pre-formations passed down by generation after generation, the ready-made language not only of the tongue but also of the sensations and the feelings.
It will always be the same possibilities, in sum or on the average, that go on repeating themselves until a man comes along who does not value the actuality above idea. It is he who first gives the new possibilities their meaning, their direction, and he awakens them.
Stupidity is active in every direction, and can dress up in all the clothes of truth. Truth, on the other hand, has for every occasion only one dress and one path, and is always at a disadvantage.
On this thin, scarcely real and yet so perceptible sensation the whole world hung as on a faintly trembling axis, and this in turn rested on the two people in the room.
The truth is not a crystal that can be slipped into one's pocket, but an endless current into which one falls headlong.
Time, which runs through the world like an endless tinsel thread, seemed to pass through the centre of this room and through the centre of these people and suddenly to pause and petrify, stiff, still and glittering... and the objects in the room drew a little closer together.
He never believed in fate or providence, or the future being made by someone in the sky. Instead, at every instant, a trillion trillion possible futures; the pickiness of pure chance and physical laws seemed like freedom from the scheming of a gloomy god.
I believe in the sun. In the tangle of human failures of fear, greed and forgetfulness, the sun gives me clarity.
The ideally non-violent state will be an ordered anarchy.
And perhaps beyond those shrouded swells another man did walk with another child on the dead gray sands. Slept but a sea apart on another beach among the bitter ashes of the world or stood in their rags lost to the same indifferent sun.
To him, who still would gaze upon the glory of the summer sun, there comes, when that sun will from him part, a sullen hopelessness of heart.
all I wanted to do was sneak out into the night and disappear somewhere, and go and find out what everybody was doing all over the country.
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