Nevertheless, such a word could also have preceded the segue that was beginning to develop. For forks and other such innocent aids aside, sophisticated conversation nowadays knows how to treat of the essence and nature of love without faltering and nevertheless express itself as grippingly as if this core inhered in all the appearances of love as forkness does in the pitchfork or salad fork. One tends to say then—and the habit of common usage might have tempted Ulrich and Agathe to do so as well—that the main thing in all matters of love is libido, or else eros. These two words do not have the same history, nevertheless, and especially in view of our time, their histories can be compared. For when psychoanalysis (because an age that refuses to have any truck with intellectual depth is intrigued to learn that it has a depth psychology) began to become the philosophy of the day and disturbed the adventureless life of the bourgeoisie, everything and everyone was declared to be the libido, so that in the end it is as impossible to say what this key and skeleton key to the psyche is not as it is to say what it is. And precisely the same is true of eros; except that those who with the greatest conviction reduce all physical and emotional bonds to eros, have experienced their eros in this way from the beginning. It would be futile to translate “libido” as “drive” or “desire,” specifically sexual or presexual desire, and “eros,” conversely, as spiritual or even suprasensory “tenderness”; one would then have to add a special historical treatment on the subject, a prospect so tedious it makes ignorance a pleasure. But this is what determined in advance that the conversation conducted between two deck chairs did not take the direction indicated but instead found appeal and refreshment in the primitive and insufficient process of simply registering as many examples as possible of what is called love in order to sort them in rows as if in a game, and indeed to allow themselves the utmost naivete and not to dismiss even the silliest examples.

And so, comfortably chatting, they classified the examples that occurred to them, and the way in which they occurred, according to the feeling, its object, and the action through which it expressed itself. But there was also an advantage in first taking stock of the behavior, and in considering whether it merited the name of love in a real or a metaphorical sense, and to what extent. In this way many kinds of material were brought together from various directions.

But spontaneously, the first thing they talked about was feeling; for apparently the whole nature of love is to feel. All the more surprising is the answer that feeling is the least part of love: to pure inexperience, it would be like sugar and toothache; not quite as sweet and not quite as painful, and as restless as cattle plagued by horseflies. This comparison may not seem a masterpiece to someone who is himself plagued by love; and yet the usual description is not much different: a sweet torment of joy and anxiety, pain and longing, an intangible ache of desire. It seems that since time immemorial nothing more precise could be said of this condition. But lack of emotional distinctness is not characteristic of love alone. Being happy or sad is also not something one experiences as irrevocably and straightforwardly as one distinguishes smooth from rough, nor can other feelings be recognized purely by feeling, let alone by touch. This turn in their investigation prompted a remark, which they might have elaborated with suitable examples, regarding the unequal disposition and formation of feelings. That was the term Ulrich gave it in advance; and he could just as well have said “disposition,” “elaboration,” and “crystallization.”