For when that happened, she too was raising herself up slightly and looking around with wonder. She was trying to imagine what it would be like to be released from all of life’s emotions. Even space, this always self-similar, contentless cube, was now different, she thought. If she kept her eyes closed for a while and then opened them again, so that the garden entered her view untouched, as if it had just been created, she perceived, with the disembodied clarity of a vision, that the line that connected her to her brother was distinguished among all others: The garden “stood” around this line, and without anything having changed in the trees, paths, and other parts of the real environment, of which she could easily assure herself, everything was oriented toward this connection as an axis and was thereby invisibly changed in a visible way. It might sound paradoxical, but she could just as well have said that the world was sweeter there, perhaps more sorrowful too: strangely, one seemed to be able to see this with one’s eyes. And there was another conspicuous feature: All the surrounding shapes stood there eerily abandoned, but also ravishingly, and just as eerily, enlivened, in the semblance of a gentle death or a passionate swoon, as though they had just been bereft of something unnamable, which lent them an almost human sensuality and vulnerability. And as with the impression of space, something had happened to the sense of time; this flowing conveyor belt, this rolling staircase with its uncanny association with death, seemed at some moments to stand still and at others to be flowing along by itself, unrelated to anything else. In a single instant of external duration, time could disappear inside, without a trace of whether it had stopped for an hour or a minute.

Once, Ulrich surprised his sister during these experiments and probably had an inkling of them, for he said to her softly, smiling: “There is a prophecy that to the gods a millennium is no more than the blink of an eye.” Then they both leaned back again and continued listening to the dream discourse of silence.