“These two contradictions are always present within it; they form a four-horse team,” he said. “One loves a person because one knows him; and because one doesn’t know him. And one knows him because one loves him; and knows not him, because one loves him. And sometimes this reaches such a pitch that it all suddenly becomes very obvious. Those are the notorious moments when Venus sees through Apollo and Apollo sees through Venus, and both behold a lifeless mannequin and are highly surprised that previously they had seen something else in its place. If love is stronger than astonishment at that moment, a struggle arises between them, and sometimes love—albeit exhausted, despairing, and irremediably wounded—emerges victorious. But if love is not as strong, it becomes a struggle between people who feel they have been deceived; it comes to insults, coarse intrusions of reality, endless degradation, all to make up for having been the trusting fool—.” He had experienced these hailstorms of love often enough to be able to describe them quite comfortably.

But now Agathe put an end to this. “If you don’t mind, I would like to point out that these marital and extramarital affairs of honor are for the most part highly overrated!” she objected, and looked around again for a more comfortable position.

“Love is overrated altogether!” Ulrich declared, laughing. “The madman who in his derangement draws a knife and stabs an innocent person who happens to be standing in the place of his hallucination—: in love, he’s normal!”

35

LOVING IS NOT SIMPLE

A comfortable position and leisurely sunshine that caresses without being intrusive facilitated these conversations. They usually took place between two deck chairs that were not so much moved into the protection and shade of the house as into the shaded light that came from the garden and found its freedom tempered by walls that still glowed in the colors of morning. One should of course not assume that the chairs stood there because the siblings—stimulated by their relationship’s sterility, which was, in the ordinary sense, already established and in a higher sense perhaps still impending—might have had the intention of exchanging opinions concerning the deceptive nature of love in Hindu-Schopenhauerian fashion, and to fend off with the tools of dissection the seductive delirium love proffers in order to perpetuate life; rather, the choice of this half-shadowed, indulgent, reclusively inquiring mode had a simpler explanation. The subject under discussion was so constituted that in the infinite experience by which the idea of love becomes clear and distinct, the most various associative pathways presented themselves, leading from one question to the next. Thus the two questions of how one loves the neighbor whom one does not know, and how one loves oneself, whom one knows even less, led their curiosity to the question, encompassing both, of how one loves at all; or, put differently, what love “actually” is. At first glance this may seem a bit too knowing and also all too sensible a question for a couple in love. But it gains in mental confusion as soon as one extends it to millions of lovers and their variety.