If one here leaves the conversation between brother and sister in order to follow the possibilities of a comparison that had at least some part in shaping it, it might well be said that this reality was truly most closely related to the fantastically altered reality of moonlit nights. For the moonlit world also cannot be fathomed if one sees in it only an occasion for a bit of romantic reverie that is better suppressed by daylight; but rather, if one wants to observe rightly, one must open oneself to the utterly unbelievable fact that all feelings really do change as if under a charm as soon as the piece of earth one happens to occupy plunges from the empty commotion of the day into the sentient corporeality of night. Not only do external relations melt away and re-form in the whispering nuptials of light and shadow, but inner relations, too, converge in a new way. The spoken word loses its self-will in the listening presence of a neighbor. All affirmations express but a single streaming experience. Night clasps all contradictions in her shimmering maternal arms, and at her breast no word is either false or true, but each is the incomparable birth of spirit out of darkness that man experiences with each new thought. Thus every event on a moonlit night is imbued with the nature of the unrepeatable. It is of the nature of intensification, and is of the nature of selflessness and surrender. Every imparting is a parting without grudge, every giving a receiving, every receiving a conception pregnant with the vibrancy of night. To be like this is the only access to the knowledge of what is occurring. For the self holds nothing back on these nights, no condensed residue of self-possession, scarcely a memory; the intensified self shines out into a boundless selflessness. And these nights are filled with the senseless feeling that something is about to happen such as the world has never seen before, indeed such as the impoverished reason of day cannot even imagine. And it is not the mouth that pours forth rhapsodies, but the body, from the head down to the feet, is stretched taut above the darkness of the earth and beneath the light of heaven in an exultant gladness that vibrates between two stars. And the whispering with one’s companions is full of a nameless sensuality that is not the sensuality of a person but of earthly life itself, of all that penetrates perception and sensation, the suddenly revealed tenderness of the world that ceaselessly touches all our senses and is touched by them.

To be sure, Ulrich had never been aware of harboring a predilection for exulting in moonlight reveries; but as one commonly gulps life down without feeling, sometimes much later one feels a taste of it, now but a ghostly shadow on one’s tongue: and in this way he suddenly felt everything he had missed in the way of such raptures, all the nights he had spent heedless and lonely before he met his sister, as liquid silver poured over endless shrubbery, as flecks of moonlight in the grass, as pendant apple boughs, singing frost, and gilded black waters. Those were all details that did not cohere and that had never been together but that now commingled like the fragrance of a multitude of herbs arising from an intoxicating drink. And when he said this to Agathe, she felt it too.