He thought hard. He knew that though his use of the term “the Millennium” had been for comparison only, it had not been a mere offhand joke. If one took this promise seriously, what it amounted to was the wish to live, by means of mutual love, in a secular condition so exalted that one can only feel and do whatever heightens and preserves this state. That there are intimations of such a disposition in man was something he had felt as a certainty as far back as he could remember. His own first encounter with it had been “the affair with the major’s wife,” and though his subsequent experiences had not been many or great, they had all been the same. If one summed it all up, one would almost have to conclude that Ulrich believed in the “fall of man” and “original sin.” That is, he was strongly inclined to assume that at some time or other there had been a fundamental change in man’s attitude, which would have had to be more or less like falling out of love: the lover, no longer in love, now sees the whole truth, but something greater has been torn to pieces, and truth, wherever he looks, consists of nothing more than fragments that have been left over and patched together again. Maybe it really was the apple of “knowledge” that wrought this change in consciousness and cast the human race out of a primordial state to which it might find its way back only after having grown wise through sin in the aftermath of an infinity of experience. But Ulrich did not believe in such stories in the form in which they are handed down, but only in the form in which he had discovered them: he believed in them like a man accustomed to reckoning with numbers who applies his skills to the system of feelings spread out before him and, finding that not a single one of them is justified, concludes upon the necessity of introducing a fantastical hypothesis whose properties can be intuitively discerned. This was no small matter! He had entertained similar thoughts often enough, but never before had he been in the position of having to decide within a few days whether to take it seriously as a matter of consequence for his life. A faint sweat broke out under his hat and collar, and he was bothered by the proximity of the people jostling past him. What he was thinking of amounted to taking leave of most living relationships; he had no illusions about that. For people live compartmentalized lives today, and it is as parts of ourselves that we find ourselves linked with others; what one dreams has to do with dreaming and with what others are dreaming; what one does coheres in itself, but to a much greater degree it is bound up with what others are doing; and what one is convinced of is bound up with convictions of which only a fraction are one’s own: so it is completely unrealistic to insist upon acting out of the fullness of one’s own reality. And he of all people had all his life been steeped in the idea that one must impart one’s conviction to others, that one must have the courage to live in the midst of moral contradictions, because that was the price of great achievement. Was he at least convinced of what he was thinking about the possibility and significance of another way of living? Not at all! Nevertheless, he could not prevent his feelings from responding as though faced with the unmistakable signs of a fact for which it had been waiting for years.