He waited for an answer, which did not come; so he shrugged and repeated: “We’re looking for a reason that would justify what you did. We have established that respectable people are only too happy to involve themselves in crime, of course only in their imagination. We might add that criminals, to judge by what they themselves say, would all like to be regarded as respectable people. So a definition virtually proffers itself: Crimes are the coming together, in the bodies and minds of sinners, of what other people discharge in small irregularities. Which is to say, in fantasies and in thousands of everyday acts and attitudes of nastiness and spite. One could also say: Crimes are in the air and are merely seeking the path of least resistance that leads them to certain people. One could even say that, while they are the acts of individuals who are incapable of any morality, in the main they are the concentrated expression of some universally human misconduct in the distinction between good and evil. That is what filled us from our early youth with the critical spirit our contemporaries have never got beyond!”

“But what are good and evil, exactly?” Agathe tossed out the question without Ulrich’s noticing how he was tormenting her with his impartiality.

“How would I know?” he answered with a laugh. “I’m noticing only now for the first time that I loathe evil. I really didn’t know how much until today. Oh, Agathe, you have no idea what it’s like,” he lamented pensively; “Science, for example! For a mathematician, to put it very simply, minus five is no worse than plus five. A research scientist mustn’t loathe anything and will under certain circumstances feel more pleasurable excitement over a beautiful cancer than a beautiful woman. A man of knowledge knows that nothing is true and that the whole truth will not be revealed until the end of days. Science is amoral. This whole glorious business of penetrating into the unknown has weaned us off the habit of being personally concerned with our conscience. In fact, it doesn’t even give us the satisfaction of taking such concern entirely seriously. And art? Doesn’t it amount to a continual creation of images that don’t correspond to the image of life itself? I’m not talking about bogus idealism or the painting of voluptuous nudes at a time when everyone goes around covered all the way up to their nose,” he said, joking again. “But think of a real work of art: Have you never had the feeling that something about it reminds you of the scorched smell that rises from a knife you’re whetting on a grindstone—a cosmic, meteoric, lightning-storm smell, divinely uncanny!?”

This was the only point at which Agathe interrupted him of her own volition. “Didn’t you use to write poems yourself?” she asked him.

“You still remember that? When did I confess that to you?” Ulrich asked. “Yes; well, we all write poems at some stage. I was still doing it even when I was a mathematician,” he admitted. “But the older I got, the worse they became; and I don’t believe it was due to lack of talent so much as a growing distaste for the disorder and roving romanticism of this emotional digression—”