Ulrich now replied with another paraphrase. “All still lifes really paint the world of the sixth day of creation, when God and the world were alone together, without man!” And in answer to a questioning smile from his sister he said: “So what they arouse in the way of human emotion would probably be jealousy, a mysterious curiosity, and sorrow!”

That was almost an “aperçu,” and not even the worst of its kind: he noted it with displeasure, for he was not fond of these insights turned to precision as if on a lathe and hastily gilded. But neither did he do anything to improve what he had said, nor did his sister ask him to do so. For the obstacle that kept them both from adequately expressing themselves about the uncanny art of the still life, or nature morte, was its mysterious resemblance to their own life.

This resemblance had always played a great role for both of them. Without there being any need to recount in detail something that reached back to their shared childhood memories and that had reawakened at their reunion and ever since imbued all their experiences and most of their conversation with an indefinable strangeness, it cannot be left unmentioned that the narcotic breath of the still life was always to be felt in it. Spontaneously, therefore, and without adopting anything specific that might have guided them, they turned their curiosity toward everything that might be related to the nature of the still life; and the result was something more or less like the following exchange of words, which tautened and mobilized their conversation once again like a vortex:

Having to beg for something before an imperturbable countenance that grants no response drives a person into a frenzy of despair, attack, or humiliation. It is just as harrowing, but unspeakably beautiful, to kneel before an unmoving countenance in which life was extinguished a few hours ago, leaving behind a glow like a sunset.

This second example is even an emotional commonplace, if ever anything could be labeled as such! The world speaks of the benediction and dignity of death; the poetic motif of the beloved on his bier has existed for hundreds if not thousands of years; there is a whole genre of related, especially lyric, death poems. There is probably something adolescent about this. Who imagines that death bestows upon him the noblest of beloveds to keep as his own? He who lacks the courage or the possibility of having a living one!

A short line leads from this poetic puerility to the frissons of the séance and necromantic ritual; a second one leads to the abominations of actual necrophilia; perhaps a third to the pathological opposites of exhibitionism and violent coercion.

These comparisons may be disconcerting, and in part quite unappetizing. But if one does not allow oneself to be deterred and considers them from a medical-physiological point of view, so to speak, one finds that they all have one thing in common: an impossibility, an impotence, a lack of natural courage or of the courage for a natural life.