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.
Interpretation
The quote reflects on how life is often seen through the lens of inherited perceptions and molds.
Robert Musil's quote delves into the concept of how individuals perceive and experience life, emphasizing the influence of societal norms and historical legacies that dictate our understanding and expression of existence. It critiques the repetitive nature of life shaped by pre-conceived frameworks and warns against the limitations these ready-made forms impose on personal experiences and feelings.
In practice
During a speech about societal expectations, I might quote Musil to illustrate how norms shape our life experiences.
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.
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.
This is a country that was founded on racism. It was built on racism. It still continues to thrive through wealth disparity, and housing disparity is all built on the backs of racism.
I find this in all these places I've been travelling - from India to China, to Japan and Europe and to Brazil - there is a frustration with the terms of public discourse, with a kind of absence of discussion of questions of justice and ethics and of values.
All great religions, in order to escape absurdity, have to admit a dilution of agnosticism. It is only the savage, whether of the African bush or the American gospel tent, who pretends to know the will and intent of God exactly and completely.
People will never set their faces decidedly towards heaven, and live like pilgrims, until they really feel that they are in danger of hell.
Men cannot be made good by the state, but they can easily be made bad. Morality depends on liberty.
At some point along the way, I stopped being a writer, and I became a black writer. I never used to be a black writer. I used to write 'Spider-Man,' 'Green Lantern,' whatever was lying around. 'Thor,' 'Hulk,' whatever. Now, if the phone rings or when the phone rings, it's almost exclusively some project that has something to do with my ethnicity.
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