In a flash it occurred to him that what he was getting at could be described, without further ado, as the futile actuality or eternal momentariness of literature. Does it result in anything? Either it is an enormous detour from experience to experience, leading back to itself, or it is an epitome of stimulus and response, without any particular outcome whatsoever. “A puddle,” he thought, “has given everyone the impression of depth more often and more strongly than the ocean, for the simple reason that there are many more opportunities to experience puddles than oceans.” It seemed to him that it was the same with feelings, and that trivial feelings were thought to be deep for no other reason than this. For the habit of favoring the activity of feeling over feeling itself, which is the hallmark of all emotional people, as well as the wish to make others feel and to be made to feel that is common to all institutions serving the emotional life, amounts to a degradation of the rank and nature of feelings in favor of their fleeting moment as a personal state, and leads to that shallowness, stunted development, and utter irrelevance for which there is no dearth of examples. “Of course such a view can only be repugnant,” Ulrich continued, “to all those people who wear their feelings as a cock wears his feathers and even preen themselves on the idea that eternity begins anew with every ‘unique individual!’” He had a clear mental image of an enormous perversity of nearly humanity-wide proportions but was unable to express it in a way that would have satisfied him, probably because the ramifications were too complex.

While he was occupied with these thoughts, he watched the streetcars going past, waiting for one that would take him back as close as possible to the center of town. He saw the people climbing in and out, and his technically trained eye absently considered the interplay between welding and casting, rolling and bolting, engineering and hand finishing, historical development and current state of the art, of which the invention of these rolling barracks consisted. “In the end a committee from the department of streetcars comes to the factory and decides on the veneer, the coating, the upholstery, the mounting of armrests and hand supports, the placement of ashtrays and the like,” he thought idly, “and it’s precisely these minuscule details, and the red or green color of the box, and the buoyancy with which one can climb in, using the running board, that for tens of thousands of people make up what they remember and what remains, in their experience, of all that genius. This is what shapes their character, endows it with swiftness or comfort, makes them perceive red cars as home and blue ones as foreign, and is the source of that unmistakable odor of small facts that the centuries wear on their clothes.” So there was no denying—and this unexpectedly fell in line with Ulrich’s principal train of thought—that to a large extent life itself peters out into trivial actuality, or, to put it technically, that in life’s balance of energy, the effective coefficient of spirit is very small.