“What is that from?” Ulrich asked curiously, and only now discovered that she was holding a book in her hands. Without answering, Agathe opened the book and read aloud: “I rose above all my faculties up to the dark power. There I heard without sound, there I saw without light. Then my heart became bottomless, my soul loveless, my spirit formless, and my nature insubstantial.” Now Ulrich recognized the volume and smiled, and only then did Agathe say: “It’s from your library.” And closing the book, she concluded from memory: “Are you yourself, or are you not? I know nothing of this, I am ignorant of it, and I am ignorant of myself. I am in love, but I know not with whom; I am neither faithful nor unfaithful. What am I, then? I am ignorant even of my love; my heart is full of love and empty of love at the same time!”

Her good memory was not, as a rule, prone to shape its recollections into ideas but preserved them in their sensuous particularity, much the way one memorizes a poem; which is why there was always a participation of body and soul in her words no matter how unobtrusively she spoke. Ulrich recalled her performance before their father’s burial, when she declaimed those wildly beautiful verses by Shakespeare to him. “How wild her nature is compared to mine!” he thought. “I haven’t allowed myself to say much today.” He reconsidered the explanation of “daylight mysticism” he had given her. All in all, it had amounted to no more than his conceding the possibility of transitory deviations from the familiar and established order of experience; and if one thought of it that way, her experiences merely followed a basic principle that was somewhat richer in feeling than that of ordinary experience and resembled little bourgeois children who have landed in a troupe of traveling actors. So he had not dared say any more, even though for days every bit of space between him and his sister had been full of unfinished events! And gradually he began to occupy himself with the question of whether there might not be more things that could be believed than he had admitted to himself.

After the lively culmination of their exchange, Agathe and he had reclined in their chairs, and the stillness of the garden closed over their fading words. Insofar as it has been said that Ulrich had begun to occupy himself with a question, the qualifying observation must now be added that many answers precede their questions as a man in a hurry precedes his open, fluttering coat. What preoccupied Ulrich was a startling idea that did not strictly speaking require belief but by its mere arising provoked astonishment and the impression that such an inspiration must never be allowed to be forgotten, which, considering such claims, was a little uncomfortable. Ulrich was used to thinking in a way that was not godless so much as God-free, which in the ways of science means leaving every possible turning to God to the emotions, because such an orientation is not capable of advancing rational insight but can only lure the mind to venture into the impenetrable. Nor did he doubt even now that this was the only right way, since the most palpable successes of the human spirit had only come about after the spirit decided to steer clear of God. But the idea that had come to beset him said: “What if this ungodliness were nothing other than the contemporary path to God? Every age has had its own pathway to the divine, commensurate with its most potent spiritual capacities; so would it not be our destiny, the destiny of an age of intelligent and enterprising experience, to disavow all dreams, legends, and ingenious conceptions for the sole reason that at the height of our study and exploration of the world we are turning to God again and will gain a relationship with Him through experience at its beginning?!”