Ulrich asked: “What does the commandment: ‘Love thy neighbor as thyself!’ actually mean?”

Agathe gave him a sidelong look.

“Apparently,” Ulrich continued, “it means: Love even the person farthest away, the furthest from being your neighbor! But what does ‘as thyself’ mean? How does one love oneself? In my own case the answer would be: Not at all! In most other cases: More than anything! Blindly! Without question and without restraint!”

“You’re too belligerent; a person who attacks himself will do the same to others!” Agathe replied, shaking her head. “And if you’re not good enough for yourself, how could I be good enough for you?” She said this in a tone that lay between that of cheerfully borne pain and a polite turn in the conversation. But Ulrich failed to hear it and continued in a generalizing vein, gazing rigidly into the distance: “Maybe I should say instead: Usually everyone loves himself best and knows himself least! Love thy neighbor as thyself would then mean: Love him without knowing him and under all circumstances. And strangely enough, in loving one’s neighbor, if such a joke is permitted, there would also be found, as there would be in every other love, the hereditary curse of eating from the tree of knowledge!”

Agathe looked up slowly. “I liked it when you once said about me that I was your self-love, which you had lost and found again. But now you are saying that you don’t love yourself, and, by force of logic and example, that you love me only because you don’t know me! Isn’t it actually an insult that I’m your self-love?” The pain in her voice had now fully given way to amusement.

Her question provoked a counterquestion: Would it have been better if he loved her even though he knew her? Because that, too, is part of the commandment to love one’s neighbor. This causes embarrassment for most people. They love one another without liking each other. “They find each other somehow unappealing or know that they will eventually, and then counteract that much too ener­getically!”

The cheerfulness of this exchange was contrived. Nevertheless it also served to scout out the boundaries of an idea, and of a feeling, whose pronouncement—irrespective of what had or had not transpired since then—had begun on that evening when Agathe, exhausted from her trip and arrival, retired to her new room and Ulrich, standing at her bedside, used the words “you are my lost self-love” during a conversation in which he confessed that he had lost both his love of self and his love of the world, and which had ended with their declaring themselves to be “Siamese twins.” Since then, all their observations of ordinary and average life had served this purpose of exploration, even the banter they had just engaged in, though it had hurt them by its superficiality.

Abruptly, Ulrich’s tone became morose: “We should have simply said that ‘Love thy neighbor as thyself’ is nothing other than the useful admonition: Don’t do to others what you don’t want them to do to you.”