At first Agathe gave no answer.

Ulrich asked: “And what would happen if we were to stop someone here and say to him: ‘Stay with us, brother!’ or: ‘Halt your steps, oh hastening soul! We want to love you as ourselves!’?”

“He would look at us flabbergasted,” Agathe replied. “And then move on twice as fast.”

“Or get mad and call for a policeman,” Ulrich added. “Because he would think he was either dealing with good-natured lunatics, or with people who were pulling his leg.”

“But if we went up to him straightaway yelling, ‘You criminal, worthless scum’?” Agathe suggested tentatively.

“It could be that in that case he would not consider us crazy, and not think we were joking either, but take us for people with dissenting views, as they are called; apostles of some political faction who have a mistaken idea about him. Because obviously the societies for the blind who hate their neighbors don’t have many fewer members than the one that espouses neighborly love.”

Agathe nodded in agreement; then she shook her head and gazed into the air. The air was still the same as before. She looked down, and some humble detail, a basement window, a stray leaf of cabbage, seemed to be gently aflame, as if ignited by the light in the sky. Finally, she looked around for something that would appeal to her of its own accord, a face or an object in a shopwindow, and found it. And yet this real pleasure was a blind spot in the radiance of the day; Ulrich had already commented on this, but now she was even more aware of the contrast. It interfered in the general love of humanity and the world, instead of increasing it with its small contribution. And so Agathe replied: “It’s all very unreal! Today I don’t know whether I love real people and real things, or whether I really love anything!”

“Is that supposed to be the answer to my question,” Ulrich asked, changing the question slightly as he restated it, “whether any love, even a great love, can be anything more than the shadow of a love if there is no sensual fulfillment? A desire that doesn’t give the senses something to do already harbors a mute sadness!”

“I am full of love and empty of love, and both of these together,” Agathe lamented, smiling and pointing to everything and everyone with a small, despondent gesture. —It was the lament of the heart into which God has penetrated as deeply as a thorn that no fingertips can grasp. In the confessions of the mystics, who yearn for Him with all their human soul and corporality, this strange despair again and again disrupts the moments of the most imminent transfiguration, and the siblings now remembered together the hour in the garden when Agathe had read such examples to her brother from a book. Then Ulrich said: “There is something of this mysticism in neighborly love; everyone feels and obeys it without understanding it. And perhaps every great love contains something mystical, maybe even every great passion. Maybe in all those moments that have a deeply opening effect on us, even in a temperate life, our participation in people and things is of a mystical kind, and different from real participation!”