Another cut bit
On June 8th, Musil recorded that he and Martha had come across a little “fledgling” who had either fallen or been pushed from his nest. As if he saw his own most-feared fate in the bird’s eyes, he wrote that “No one noticed him” and “the look with which he looked at us, was weary indifference, weary fear, mild helplessness.” Although he wanted to save him from the many dogs in the area, there was no branch low enough to reach; the idea that they might take the bird home must have crossed his mind, for he wrote that he had no idea how to raise such an animal, thus he unhappily “left him to his fate.”[i]
[i] T 716
I’m finally reading A Man Without Qualities, thanks to you (thus thank you!) this bird reminds me of a couple of chapters, 18 and 20 (?) where the mistress in encaged (?) and on the second instance the woodworker and killer make an allusion of a dog that would be tempted to
Play with the caged bird.
As an aside, the allusions he creates with this imagery is transfer of blame from the personal to circumstances or the other by the character in play.
This might be irrelevant but fledglings are not supposed to stay in the nest. They fall to the ground somehow and it is just another stage of being a baby bird. The mother goes to the ground to feed them as they move around on the ground albeit being in an extremely vulnerable state of affairs. One need not “rescue” a fledgling by putting it back up in the nest or taking it home and caring for it; it’s supposed to be on the ground now learning how to get around and practicing flying. The mother stays around and keeps an eye on it and continues to feed it.