Explicitly discusses a lot of ideas that are fundamental to how I conceive of thought, desire, and their relation to the world. I think this book would've been more impactful for me if I had read it while those ideas were less formed in my own head (although I might overestimate the extent to which I've actually confronted or surmounted these ideas; a point of this book, however, may be that we never truly do, or do only in fleeting moments) but I still appreciated Musil's unabashed commitment to rendering the mental processes that accompany these thoughts with metaphor and imagery. I'll admit that while I found some of these descriptions and lengthy procedures tedious, Musil's virtuosity still can be caught in them, even if not at as consistent a level as in The Man Without Qualities. Musil's background is interesting to me, because of how it is, at least to me, so obviously felt within the foundations of his work, and also because I feel like something of a kindered spirit: our (presumptuous, and near-sacrilegious use of the persona plural) experience of understanding was as deeply affected by mathematics (or rather an aestethically scientific rational thought) as much as literature. Like this line, maybe it stood out because of its simplicity among some of his other metaphors: "It was the secret, undirected, melancholy sensuality of the heart, not fixed on any person, that is like the moist, black, burgeoning earth of spring and like dark underground streams, that only need some chance event to send them bursting through their walls." Separately, I should put a little more effort into these little post-completion scribbles (I have to leave the library though so this one will have to remain like this); it's worth doing these books a little more justice. Especially my prose here is ridiculously perfunctory and lazy--if not the thoughts as well!