Now the more incompatible this partner is, the more skewed, not to say distorted by passion, love itself becomes. “Compare the healthy love of young people for each other,” Ulrich admonished, “with the ridiculously exaggerated love of the lonely person for his dog, cat, or canary. Look at the passion between a man and a woman fading away, or becoming a nuisance like an ignored and importunate beggar, when it is no longer or not fully reciprocated. Don’t forget, either, that in unequal relations like those between parents and children or master and servant, between a man and the object of his ambition or his vice, the balance between love and its reciprocation could not be more precarious and ultimately perishable. Wherever the natural regulating exchange between the state of love and its object is imperfect, love degenerates like unhealthy tissue!”

There was something special about this idea that attracted him. It could be elaborated in several ways and with many examples. While he was still thinking about it, something he had not foreseen but that crossed his intended path like a pleasant fragrance coming from faraway fields inadvertently directed his reflection to what in the art of painting is called still life, or according to an opposite but equally useful approach in another language, nature morte. “In a way it’s ridiculous for a person to prize a well-painted lobster,” Ulrich continued without transition, “grapes that gleam like a polished mirror, a hare hanging by its hind legs, and the inevitable pheasant, because human appetite is ridiculous, and painted appetite even more so.” And they both had the feeling that this association reached back more deeply than was immediately apparent and was part of the continuation of what they had omitted to say about themselves.

For in actual still lifes—objects, animals, plants, landscapes, and human bodies magically cast, as if by a spell, into the circle of art—something other than what is depicted shows itself, namely the mysterious demonic power of painted life. There are famous paintings of this kind, so they both knew what they were talking about; but it is better, Ulrich said, not to speak of particular pictures but of a kind of picture, and one that moreover does not produce followers, but arises without rules at the summons of a creative impulse. Agathe asked by what signs one would recognize such a painting. Ulrich was visibly unwilling to indicate any definitive trait, but then said slowly, smiling, and without hesitation: “The exciting, indefinite, infinite echo!”

And Agathe understood him. Somehow you feel that you’re on the beach. Small insects are humming. The air brings hundreds of meadow scents. Thought and feeling stroll busily side by side. But stretched out before your eyes is the unresponding wasteland of the sea, and what has importance on the shore loses itself in the monotonous motion of the infinite view. She was thinking how all true still lifes can arouse this happy, insatiable sadness. The longer one looks at them, the clearer it becomes that the things depicted in them seem to be standing on the colorful shore of life, their eyes filled with immensity and their tongues paralyzed.