*The German phrase zu billigstem Preis und Lob involves an untranslatable pun. Preis and Lob both mean “praise” and are often used as a pair in liturgical language, but Preis also means “price.”

31

STROLLS AMONG THE CROWD

In the time that followed, they withdrew from their acquaintances and astonished them by making a pretext of a journey and not allowing themselves to be reached in any way.

They mostly stayed secretly at home, and when they went out they avoided places where they might meet people of their social set; but they visited places of entertainment and small theaters where they believed themselves to be secure from such encounters; and generally, as soon as they left the house, they simply followed the currents of the metropolis, which are an image of people’s needs and desires and with tide-like precision amass crowds in one place and siphon them away from another, depending on the hour. They abandoned themselves to these movements without any particular purpose. It gave them pleasure to do what many were doing and to participate in a way of life that relieved them for a while of responsibility for their own. And never had the city in which they lived seemed to them at once so lovely and so strange. In their totality, the houses presented a grand picture, even if singly or in particular they were not beautiful at all. Noise streamed through the heat-thinned air like a river reaching up to the rooftops; in the strong light, muted by the depth of the streets, people looked more passionate and more mysterious than they probably deserved. All things sounded, looked, and smelled irreplaceable and unforgettable, as if to proclaim how it felt to be themselves in their instantaneousness; and the siblings gladly accepted this invitation to turn toward the world.

But it was not without reservation that they did so, for they could not help feeling the pervading dichotomy. Everything that was secret and undefined in their relationship, and that bound them together even though they could not speak openly about it, separated them from other people; but the same passion, which they felt constantly, because it had been thwarted less by prohibition than by a sublime promise, had also left them in a state that bore resemblance to the sultry intermittencies of a physical union. Desire, not finding an outlet, sank back into the body and filled it with a tenderness as indefinable as a last day of autumn or a first day of spring. And though they certainly did not feel for every person and for all the world as they did for each other, they still sensed the lovely shadow of “how it would be” falling on their hearts, and the heart could neither fully believe nor entirely escape the gentle illusion, no matter what it encountered.

This created the impression on the siblings, twins by choice, that by their anticipation and asceticism they had become sensitive to all the affections in the world that could not be dreamed to completion, but also to the limits reality and vigilance set to every feeling; and they saw very clearly the peculiarly two-sided nature of life, which dampens every higher aspiration with a lower one. It burdens every advance with a decline and every strength with a weakness; it gives no one a right that it does not take away from another, straightens out no tangle without causing new disorder, and even appears to evoke the sublime only in order to heap the honors it deserves on some trivial thing an hour later. Thus an all but indissoluble and perhaps profoundly necessary relation connects every sublime endeavor to the manifestation of its opposite and makes life for thinking or even just thoughtful people—beyond whatever differences and disagreements may separate them—rather difficult to bear, but it also drives them to seek an explanation for it.