For Ulrich was one of those book lovers who do not like reading anymore because they feel that the whole business of writing and reading is a plague. “If the rational Strastil wants to be ‘made to feel,’” he thought (“And she’s right about that! If I had contradicted her, she would have invoked music as her crown witness!”), and, as often happens, his thinking partly took place in words and partly impinged on the mind as a wordless objection: so if the sensible Dr. Strastil wanted to be made to feel, what it amounted to was what everyone wants from art, which is to be moved, overwhelmed, entertained, surprised, to be granted a whiff of noble ideas, in short to be given a “vital experience” by a work that itself brings something “to life.” Not that Ulrich was at all opposed to that. In a subsidiary train of thought that ended as a mixture of faint sentimentality and reluctant irony, he reflected: “Feeling is rare enough. Protecting a certain temperature of feeling from cooling down probably helps to maintain the brooding conditions for every kind of cognitive development. And when a person is lifted out of the hodgepodge of intelligent intentions that enmesh him with innumerable foreign objects, and finds himself for a few moments in a condition that is wholly without purpose—for example, while listening to music—he is almost in the state of being of a flower on which rain and sunshine fall.” He was ready to admit that there is a more eternal eternity in the human mind’s pauses and quiescence than in its activity; but now he noticed that his thoughts had moved from “feeling” to “experiencing,” and this entailed a contradiction. For there were, after all, experiences of the will! There were experiences of climactic action! True, one could probably assume that when every one of these experiences reaches its highest point of radiant bitterness, it is nothing but feeling; but that would bring up another contradiction, namely that feeling, in a state of perfect purity, would be a quiescence, a dying away of all action! Or was it not a contradiction after all? Was there some strange coherency in which the highest activity was motionless at the core? But here it became apparent that this sequence of reflections was not so much a side thought as an unwanted one, for with a sudden stirring of resistance against the emotive turn it had taken, Ulrich repudiated the entire view he had stumbled into. He was not disposed to meditate on certain states of mind and, when he thought about feelings, fall prey to emotion himself.