Putting it another and perhaps better way, the man with an ordinary sense of reality is like a fish that nibbles at the hook but is unaware of the line, while the man with that sense of reality which can also be called a sense of possibility trawls a line through the water and has no idea whether there’s any bait on it. His extraordinary indifference to the life snapping at the bait is matched by the risk he runs of doing utterly eccentric things. An impractical man—which he not only seems to be, but really is—will always be unreliable and unpredictable in his dealings with others. He will engage in actions that mean something else to him than to others, but he is at peace with himself about everything as long as he can make it all come together in a fine idea. Today he is still far from being consistent. He is quite capable of regarding a crime that brings harm to another person merely as a lapse to be blamed not on the criminal but on the society that produced the criminal. But it remains doubtful whether he would accept a slap in the face with the same detachment, or take it impersonally as one takes the bite of a dog. The chances are that he would first hit back and then on reflection decide that he shouldn’t have. Moreover, if someone were to take away his beloved, it is most unlikely that he would today be quite ready to discount the reality of his loss and find compensation in some surprising new reaction. At present this development still has some way to go and affects the individual person as a weakness as much as a strength.

And since the possession of qualities assumes a certain pleasure in their reality, we can see how a man who cannot summon up a sense of reality even in relation to himself may suddenly, one day, come to see himself as a man without qualities. (The Man Without Qualities)

When he learned about his son’s acquisition of the château it struck him as a transgression against limits all the more sacred for not being legally defined, and he rebuked his son even more bitterly than on the many previous occasions he had found it necessary to do so, almost in terms of prophesying a bad end of which this purchase was the beginning. The basic premise of his life was affronted. As with many men who achieve distinction, this feeling was far from self-serving but consisted in a deep love of the general good above personal advantage—in other words, he sincerely venerated the state of affairs that had served him so well, not because it was to his advantage, but because he was in harmony and coexistent with it, and on general principles. This is a point of great importance: even a pedigreed dog searches out his place under the dining table, regardless of kicks, not because of canine abjection but out of loyalty and faith; and even coldly calculating people do not succeed half so well in life as those with properly blended temperaments who are capable of deep feeling for those persons and conditions that happen to serve their own interests. (The Man Without Qualities)

 One of Prince Lobkowitz’s court gardeners began turning what had once been woodland into a landscaped park in the English style, planted rare and native trees, laid out lawns surrounded by bushes and shrubs, avenues, arbored walks, and pavilions from which to admire the view. More and prouder hotels constantly rose from the ground, and so did assembly rooms, baths, reading rooms, a concert hall, and a theater where all manner of eminent artistes were soon appearing. In 1873 the great cast-iron colonnade was built, and by now Marienbad was one of the most fashionable of European resorts. Marie claimed—and here, said Austerlitz, she launched, with her strong sense of the comical, into a positive verbal coloratura of medical and diagnostic terms—Marie claimed that the mineral waters and particularly the so-called Auschowitz Springs had gained a great reputation for curing the obesity then so common among the middle classes, as well as digestive disturbances, sluggishness of the intestinal canal and other stoppages of the lower abdomen, irregular menstruation, cirrhosis of the liver, disorders of bile secretion, gout, hypochondriacal spleen, diseases of the kidneys, the bladder, and the urinary system, glandular swellings and scrofulous deformities, not to mention weakness of the nervous and muscular systems, fatigue, trembling of the limbs, paralysis, mucous and bloody fluxes, unsightly eruptions on the skin, and practically every other medical disorder known to the human race. I can just see them in my mind’s eye, said Marie, a set of very corpulent men disregarding their doctors’ advice and giving themselves up to the pleasures of the table, which even at a spa were lavish at the time, in order to suppress, by dint of their increasing girth, the anxiety for the security of their social position constantly stirring within them, and I see other patients, most of them ladies and rather pale and sallow already, deep in their own thoughts as they walk along the winding paths from one of the little temples which house fountains to the next, or else in elegiac mood, watching the play of the clouds moving over the narrow valley from the viewing points of the Amalienhöhe or Schloss Miramont. The rare sense of happiness that I felt as I listened to my companion talking, said Austerlitz, paradoxically enough gave me the idea that I myself, like the guests staying in Marienbad a hundred years ago, had contracted an insidious illness, and together with that idea came the hope that I was now beginning to be cured. Indeed, I had never in my life passed over the threshold into sleep more securely than on that first night I spent with Marie. I listened to her regular breathing, and saw her beautiful face next to me every so often for a split second in the summer lightning that flashed across the sky. Then the rain fell steadily outside, the white curtains blew into the room, and as my mind became gradually submerged I felt, like a slight easing behind my forehead, the belief rise within me that I had found release at last. But nothing came of it. I woke before dawn with such an abysmal sense of distress that without even being able to look at Marie I sat up and, like a man seasick, had to perch on the edge of the bed. I had dreamed that one of the hotel servants brought us a drink of a virulent green color for breakfast on a tin tray, with a French newspaper bearing an article on the front page which held forth on the necessity of reforming the spas, speaking several times of the sad lot of the hotel employees qui portent, so my dream newspaper put it, said Austerlitz, ces longues blouses grises comme en portent les quincailliers. The rest of the newspaper consisted almost entirely of death announcements the size of postage stamps, in tiny print which I could decipher only with great difficulty. The announcements were not just in French but also in German, Polish, and Dutch. I still remember, said Austerlitz, Frederieke van Wincklmann, whose death notice said that she had kalm en rustig van ons heengegaan, I remember the strange word rouwkamer and the information that De bloemen worden na de crematieplechtigheid neergelegd aan de voet van het Indisch Monument te Den Haag. I had gone over to the window, where I looked down the main street, still wet with rain, and saw the grand hotels ranged in a semicircle rising to the heights, the Pacifik, the Atlantic, the Metropole, the Polonia and Bohemia with their rows of balconies, their corner turrets and roof ridges emerging from the morning mist like oceangoing steamers from a dark sea. At some time in the past, I thought, I must have made a mistake, and now I am living the wrong life. (Austerlitz)