But it was also the bed in which Bonadea had lain only thirty-six hours earlier. That was probably why Ulrich returned to the subject of his mistresses. “All I was trying to describe,” he repeated, smiling, “was my own inability to arrive at a mildly reasonable relationship with myself. In order for me to experience anything with real interest, it has to be part of some context, it has to be controlled by an idea. The experience itself I’d really prefer to have behind me, as a memory; the emotional effort it calls for strikes me as unpleasant and absurdly misplaced. That’s how it is when I describe myself ruthlessly to you. And the simplest, most primal idea, at least in one’s younger years, is that you’re a hell of a guy, completely without precedent, and the world has been waiting for you. But once you’ve turned thirty, this is no longer sustainable!” He reflected a moment and then said: “No! It’s so hard to talk about oneself: What I really ought to say is that I’ve never been ruled by a lasting idea. There was nothing like that to be found. One should love an idea like a woman. It should be sheer joy to return to it. And one always has it inside oneself! And looks for it in everything outside oneself! I never found any ideas like that. I’ve always had a man-to-man relationship to the so-called great ideas, maybe even to the ones that are rightly so-called. I think I was not born to subordinate myself: ideas provoked me to overthrow them and put others in their place. Perhaps it was precisely this jealousy that drove me to science, whose laws are sought through collaboration and are not regarded as immutable either!” Again he paused and laughed, either at himself or at his self-portrayal. “But at any rate,” he continued earnestly, “because of this way I have of associating no idea or every idea with myself, I lost the ability to take life seriously. I find life much more exciting when I read about it in a novel, where it’s wrapped up in some conception; but when I’m expected to live it in all its particulars, I always find it outdated, crammed with detail in an old-fashioned way, and intellectually passé. I don’t think it’s just me, either. Most people are like this nowadays, even though many put on a charade of intense joie de vivre, rather like schoolchildren who are taught to skip merrily through the daisies. There’s always something deliberate about it, and they feel that. Actually they’re as capable of murdering each other in cold blood as they are of cheerfully getting along. Our time really doesn’t seem to take seriously the events and adventures it’s filled with. When they happen, there’s a stir. Before you know it, that sets off new happenings, one after the other, like a vendetta, a compulsive recital of the alphabet from B to Z because one has said A. But these events in our life have less life than a book, because they don’t have a coherent meaning.”