Then he had halted in mid-speech; evidently something disturbing had occurred to him, and he had concluded with the almost unfriendly words: “Even under the most ordinary everyday conditions of love, traces of this can be found: in the charm of every change of clothing, every disguise, in the significance of mutual correspondences or repetitions of oneself in another. The little magic is always the same, whether one sees a lady naked for the first time, or a naked girl for the first time in a high-necked dress, and the great, ruthless passions are all due to someone imagining that his most secret self is peering out from behind the curtains of a stranger’s eyes.”

It sounded as though he were asking her not to overestimate what they were saying. But Agathe thought once again of the lightning flash of surprise she had felt when they first met, disguised, as it were, in their lounging suits. And she replied: “So this has been around for thousands of years; does it make it any easier to understand if one explains it as a meeting of two illusions?”

Ulrich was silent.

And after a while Agathe said delightedly: “But it’s like that in sleep! There you see yourself sometimes transformed into something else. Or you meet yourself as a man. And then you’re nicer to him than you ever are to yourself. You’ll probably say those are sexual dreams; but to me it seems they’re much older.”

“Do you often have dreams like that?” Ulrich asked.

“Sometimes; rarely.”

“I almost never do,” he confessed. “It’s ages since I’ve had that kind of dream.”

“And yet you once declared to me,” Agathe now said, “—I think it must have been right at the beginning, still in the old house—that thousands of years ago people really had different kinds of experiences!”

“Oh, you mean the ‘giving’ and the ‘receiving’ kind of seeing?” Ulrich replied and smiled, even though Agathe could not see him. “The spirit’s modes of ‘being embraced’ and ‘embracing’? Yes, of course I must have talked about this mysterious bisexuality of the soul, too. And who knows what else! There are hints of this in everything. Even in every analogy there’s a remnant of the magic of being the same and not the same. But haven’t you noticed: In all the patterns of behavior we’ve mentioned—in dream, myth, poem, childhood, even in love—the increase in feeling is purchased at the expense of understanding, and that means: at the expense of reality.”

“So you don’t really believe in it”? Agathe asked.

To this Ulrich gave no answer. But after a while he said: “Translated into the disastrous idiom of our time, one could call this value, which is in such terrifyingly scarce supply for everyone today, the percentage share of a person in his experiences and actions. In dreams it seems to be a hundred percent, in waking life it doesn’t even amount to half of one percent! This is something you noticed immediately in my home today; but my relationships with the people you will meet are no different. Once—and really, if I’m not mistaken, I ought to add that it happened in conversation with a woman where it was very apropos—I called it the “acoustics of the void.” If a pin drops in an empty room, the resulting noise has something disproportionate, even exorbitant, about it; but it’s the same when there’s emptiness between people. Then one no longer knows: Are we screaming, or is there a deathly silence? Because everything that’s unaligned or off-kilter acquires the magnetic power of an enormous temptation as soon as it turns out that one has nothing to counteract it with. Don’t you agree? But I’m sorry,” he interrupted himself, “you must be tired, and I’m not letting you rest. It seems, I’m afraid, there are some things in my surroundings and in my social life that won’t be to your liking.”