After she had thought about it enough to regain her boldness, she discovered that the meaning of what she had experienced did not lie in that “solar eclipse” of her physical sensations; rather, its meaning was mainly a moral one. A sudden transformation of her innermost condition and consequently of all her relations with the world had for a moment lent her that “unity of the conscience with the senses” that she had previously only known through intimations so faint that its evidence in her ordinary life amounted to little more than a tinge of something desolate and dolefully passionate, no matter if Agathe tried to act in a good way or a bad way. It seemed to her that this transformation had been an incomparable surging flow that emanated both from her surroundings toward her and from herself toward them, a oneness of the most exalted meaning with the slightest movements of the mind, which were scarcely distinguishable from the things around her. Things had become pervaded by feelings and feelings by things in such a convincing manner that Agathe felt she had never been so much as touched by anything to which previously she would have applied the word “conviction.” And this had happened in circumstances that by ordinary standards ruled out the possibility of being convinced.

So the meaning of what she experienced in her solitude did not lie in the psychological role it might have played as a sign of a high-strung or fragile personality, for it did not lie in the personal sphere at all, but in something universal, or in the nexus between the personal and the universal, which Agathe not unjustly regarded as a moral one, in the sense that it seemed to this young woman who was so deeply disappointed in herself that if she were granted the ability to always live as she did in those minutes of exception, and if she were not too weak to persist in that state, she would be able to love the world and comply with its ways in good grace; and that otherwise she would not be able to do so! Now she was filled with a passionate longing to return there, but such moments of supreme intensity cannot be recovered by force; and it was only when her tempestuous efforts proved futile that she realized, with the clarity a pale day assumes after the sun has gone down, that the only thing she could hope for, and was in fact waiting for with an impatience that had merely concealed itself beneath her solitude, was that strange prospect her brother had once half-jokingly proclaimed as the Thousand-Year Kingdom, or the Millennium. He could just as well have chosen a different word for it, for what it meant to Agathe was only the convincing and confident ring of something that is on its way. She would not have said this out loud. After all, even now she was not sure yet if it was truly possible. She did not even know what it was. At this moment she had forgotten all the words her brother had used to prove that beyond what was imbuing her spirit with mere shining nebulae, the realm of possibility extended beyond measure. But for as long as she had been with him she had always had the feeling that a country was taking shape from his words, and that this land was not forming in her head, but truly beneath her feet. The very fact that he often only talked about it ironically, and in general his alternations between coolness and emotion, which had often confused her in the past, now gladdened Agathe in her solitude as a warrant that he meant it in earnest, which is an advantage all unfriendly states of mind have over moods of rapture. “I was probably only thinking of death because I’m afraid he doesn’t mean it seriously enough,” she admitted to herself.