Sergeant Schultz (“I know nothing”) follows from Thomas Mann’s novel ‘Doctor Faustus’

Having spent a year with Adrian in Leipzig, I know how he lived during the other three of his stay there; his manner of life being so regular and conservative that I found it rigid and sometimes even depressing.  Not for nothing, in that first letter, he had expressed his sympathy for Chopin’s lack of adventurous spirit, his ‘not wanting to know.’  He too wanted to experience nothing, see nothing, actually experience nothing, at least not in any obvious sense of the word.  He was not out for change, new sense impressions, distraction, recreation.  As for the last, he liked to make fun of people who were constantly having ‘a little change,’ constantly getting brown and strong – and nobody knew for what.  ‘Relaxation,’ he said, ‘is for those it does no good.’  He was not interested in travel for the sake of sightseeing or ‘culture.’  He scorned the delight of the eye, and sensitive as his hearing was, just so little had he ever felt urged to train his sight in the forms of plastic art.  The distinction between eye-men and ear-men he considered indefeasibly valid and correct and counted himself definitely among the latter.  As for me, I have never thought such distinction could be followed through thick and thin, and in his case I never quite believed in the unwillingness and reluctance of the eye.  To be sure, Goethe says that music is something inborn and native, requiring no great nourishment from outside and no experience drawn from life.  But after all there is the inner vision, the perception, which is something different and comprehends more than mere seeing.  And more than that, it is profoundly contradictory that a man should have, as Leverkühn did, some feeling for the human eye, which after all speaks only to the eye, and yet refuse to perceive the outer world through that organ.  I need only to mention the names of Marie Godeau, Rudi Schwerdtfeger, and Nepomuk Schneidewein to bring home to myself Adrian’s receptivity, yes, weakness for the magic of the eye, the black and blue.  Of course I am quite clear that I am doing wrong to bombard the reader with unfamiliar names when the actual appearance of the owners in these pages is still far off; it is a barefaced blunder which may well make one question the freedom of the will.  What, indeed, is free will?  I am quite aware that I have put down under a compulsion these too empty, too early names.[1]

Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus (1947)

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[1] Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus: The Life of a German Composer Adrian Leverkühn as Told by a Friend, tr. H.T. Lowe-Porter (New York: Knopf/Everyman’s Library, 1992), pp. 179, 180.