it's like a slight split in one's consciousness. one feels embraced, encompassed, pierced to the heart by a pleasantly will-less unselfreliance; but on the other hand one is awake, capable of judgement in matters of taste, and even prepared to start a fight with people and things that are full of unventilated pretension. it's as if there were two relatively autonomous strata of life within us that usually keep each other profoundly in balance. and since we were speaking of fate, it's as though we had two fates: one that is active and irrelevant and takes its course, and one that is motionless and important that we never get to know.

robert musil
agathe, or the forgotten sister