•

Agathe slips in and out of the other condition with ease and without Ulrich’s tutelage. Here she is, for example, in her father’s house after Ulrich has left for Vienna to prepare for her arrival:

During this time and from the moment when she had stayed behind alone, Agathe had been living completely at ease, released from the tension of all relationships, in a serenely melancholy suspension of the will, as if at a great height where there was nothing to be seen but the wide blue sky. . . . Nothing troubled the state she was in, no clinging to the past, no straining for the future; when her gaze fell on any of the objects in her vicinity, it was as if she were coaxing a young lamb to come near; it would either gently approach her, or else simply take no notice of her—but she never took mental possession of it with that motion of inner grasping that imbues every act of cold recognition with something violent and yet futile, for it scares away the happiness that is in things.

Ulrich seems incapable of such humility before the unknowable, though he aspires to it with deep sincerity. In one scene, for example—they are lying in deck chairs on a sunlit lawn—he is talking about the terrifying immensity of pure sense experience unmediated by a conceptual framework. The apparently self-evident fact that grass is green, he laments only half humorously, is actually ungraspable, impossible to capture with words or even to nail down with a scientific measurement.

Agathe . . . found it very understandable that nothing could be understood, and replied: “I suggest you look into a mirror at night sometime: it’s dark, it’s black, you see almost nothing; and yet this nothing is very clearly something other than the nothing of the rest of the darkness. You sense the glass, the doubling of depth, some remnant of the ability to shimmer, and yet you see nothing!”

Ulrich’s response to his sister’s advice is to laugh at her “readiness to strip knowledge of all its honor; he himself was far from thinking that concepts have no value and was well aware of what they accomplish, even if he did not exactly act as if he did.”

We are not told how Agathe felt about the laugh, but one can’t help wondering if Ulrich isn’t being obtuse in his thinking as well as his feeling. Of course concepts have value, and of course they accomplish a great deal, but they cannot open the gates to the liberated state in which self-centered existence comes to an end with the realization of the commandment to love one’s neighbor as oneself. Agathe knows this with an instinctive clarity that tends to elude her theorizing brother, though she does not seem to know that she knows it.

•

Ulrich thinks of himself as “a believer who just didn’t believe anything,” but that is not entirely true. He believes in possibility. He believes, in particular, in the possibility of translating the other condition into a lasting state, not in heaven but in Vienna, or wherever any given man or woman happens to be. That would be the Millennium. It is, ultimately, for all human beings—if not now, then in a future that may never come—that Ulrich aspires to bring heaven down to earth, because the eternal round of seinesgleichen geschieht is not worthy of a species that is capable of such beatitude as he experiences with Agathe in their walks through the city.