Agathe had opened her eyes. After being hidden so long, her gaze expressed something extremely hard to define, though sympathy was a part of it, which Ulrich now felt spreading over his whole body. Suddenly he began to talk again: “When I was younger, I tried to regard just that as a sign of strength. So one hasn’t got anything with which to oppose life? Fine, then life will run away from man and into his works! That’s more or less how I thought. And there’s no denying the colossal power that resides in the lovelessness and irresponsibility of today’s world. At the very least there’s a kind of adolescent rowdiness in it. Surely centuries go through growing pains? And like every young man I started by throwing myself into work, adventure, and amusement; it seemed all the same to me what one did, as long as one did it wholeheartedly. Do you remember we once talked about the ‘morality of achievement’? That’s the inborn image in us by which we orient ourselves. But the older one gets, the more clearly one learns that this apparent exorbitance, this independence and mobility in everything, this sovereignty of the driving parts and the partial drives—sovereignty of your own parts and drives against yourself, as well as your own sovereignty against the world—in short, that everything we, as ‘people of today,’ have regarded as a strength and a distinction of our species is basically nothing but a weakness of the whole with respect to its parts. Passion and willpower can do nothing against this. The moment you want to be entirely at the center of anything, you find yourself flushed back to the periphery: that’s the experience in all experiences today!”

Agathe, with her eyes now open, was waiting for something to happen in his voice; when that did not occur and her brother’s talk simply stopped like a path that has branched off from a road and come to a dead end, she said: “So according to your experience one can never really act with conviction, and will never be able to do so. What I mean by conviction,” she corrected herself, “is not some kind of science, or the moral dressage we were put through, but feeling completely present within oneself, and feeling one’s presence in everything else as well; where something that is now empty is fulfilled and complete. I mean something one starts out from and to which one returns. Oh, I myself don’t know what I mean,” she broke off vehemently. “I was hoping that you would explain it to me!”

“You mean exactly what we have been talking about,” Ulrich gently replied. “And you’re the only person with whom I can talk about it like this. But there wouldn’t be any point in my starting over again just in order to add a few enticing words. I should say, rather, that finding oneself in the absolute middle of life, in a state of unimpaired ‘inwardness’—if one doesn’t understand the word in a sentimental sense, but with the meaning we just gave it—is probably not a demand that can be made in a rational state of mind.” He had leaned forward, touched her arm, and looked into her eyes for a long time. “It may be contrary to human nature,” he said softly. “But the reality is that we are painfully in need of it! Because this must be where the desire to be like brothers and sisters comes from, which is a complement to ordinary love, in the imaginary direction of a love without any elements of exclusion and not-love.” And after a while he added: “You know how popular the brother and sister theme is in bed; people who could murder their real siblings put on silly charades of being naughty little brothers and sisters conspiring under a blanket.”