And if in this endeavor one does not fear risky comparisons, one learns something in addition: that silence, unconsciousness, and all manner of incomprehension in the partner are associated with the effect of driving the mind to eccentric extremes.

What is repeated in this way, above all, is the previously mentioned fact that an incompatible partner skews the balance of love; all that needs to be added is that not infrequently it is an already skewed emotional disposition that prompts such a choice in the first place. And inversely, it would be the responsive, living, acting partner who determines the emotions and keeps them in order, and without whom they devolve into mystification.

But what about the still life—isn’t its strange charm also a mystification? In fact, almost an ethereal necrophilia?

And yet, a similar mystification takes place in the gaze of happy lovers as an expression of their highest feelings. They look into each other’s eyes, cannot tear themselves loose, and languish in an infinite emotion that expands like rubber!

That was more or less how the exchange had begun, but here its thread got caught, as it were, and remained that way for quite a while before they were able to continue. They had looked at each other, and that had caused them to lapse into silence.

But if an observation is called for that explains this and even justifies such conversations at all and expresses their import: perhaps one could say what Ulrich at that moment understandably left unspoken: that it is by no means as simple to love as nature would have us believe when she entrusts every bungler among her creatures with the necessary tools.

36

BREATHS OF A SUMMER DAY

The sun, meanwhile, had risen higher; they had left the chairs like stranded boats in the shallow shade near the house and were lying on a lawn in the garden beneath the full depth of the summer day. They had been doing this for quite a while, and though their circumstances had shifted, they had almost no consciousness of any change. Not even the pause in their conversation brought this about; their speech had been suspended without any sense of a rupture.

A soundless stream of lusterless blossoms, coming from a group of trees that were past their flower, was drifting like snow through the sunshine; and the breath that bore it was so gentle that not a leaf stirred. It cast no shadow on the green of the lawn, but the green seemed to darken from within like an eye. The trees and bushes that stood on the sides or formed a backdrop, tenderly and lavishly decked out in their own green by the young summer, gave the impression of awed spectators who, startled and spellbound in their gay attire, were participating in this funeral procession and celebration of nature. Spring and fall, the speech and silence of nature, and the twin enchantments of life and death were commingled in this picture; hearts seemed to stop, removed from their breasts to join the silent procession through the air. “Then my heart was taken out of my breast,” a mystic had said: Agathe remembered it.