Robert Musil beside old larches and a moss-covered stone in the mountains

The crystals beneath the moss

Robert Musil (1880–1942) was an Austrian writer. In his novella Grigia, a letter from home reaches a man staying in the mountains. Before he reads it he recognises the handwriting of his sick son. The knowledge that his family can now place him on the map runs through his whole body. A few lines later he stands before a wood where he can imagine crystals living under the moss. The letter and the stones belong to a single moment in which the world becomes tangible to him again.

Colours change places

A fairy-tale forest of old larch trunks, covered in fine green hair, stood on an emerald slope. Beneath the moss violet and white crystals might be alive.

– Robert Musil, Grigia, 1923, p. 16.[1]

White and violet have already appeared in the open meadows alongside green and brown. Now those same colours make their way underground. Nobody has lifted the moss. The word mochten, rendered here as might, lets the eye reach the surface and the imagination carry on beneath it. A gemstone makes the opposite journey by lending its colour to the visible hillside. It is an emerald slope on which the larches stand. Meadow, wood and mineral exchange qualities as the man takes them in.

A moment of wonder

A little earlier he felt that life in the mountains was unfolding like a passionately acted scene. His son’s familiar handwriting briefly gives him a firm sense of where he is. Almost at once the landscape acquires the freedom of a fairy tale. Even the bark on the old trunks appears to be growing fine green hair. To follow the crystals into the sentence is to share his peculiar experience. The same eye that has just recognised a hand with such certainty can bring something to life beneath an opaque layer of moss.