Engineers

There are many parallelisms between Gadda's "pasticciaccio" and Musil's "Mensch ohne Eigenschaft". Both are baroque in the language, both don't have an end, both believe that reality is not possible to represent, and both are written by engineers. I think the studies of the authors are determinant for their poetic; engineers study for years the perfect world of mathematical and physical abstraction, and then, when they pass to application, they find that these abstraction don't capture many facets of the real world; they are so convinced that reality is diryt and inconsistent, simply because it don't has the pureness of mathematics. This attitude is very different from that ofthe physicist, that is not confronted with application and usually believes that the world is just a shell of illusion atound a core of perfect logic.