She knew, too, that she herself had read this saying to Ulrich from one of his books. Here in the garden, not far from the place where they were now, was where it had happened. More details emerged. Other sayings that she had recalled to his memory occurred to her: “Is it you, or is it not you? I know not where I am; nor do I wish to know!” “I have risen above all my faculties up to the dark power! I am in love, and know not with whom! My heart is full of love and at the same time empty of love!” Thus, once again, there echoed within her the lament of the mystics in whose heart God has penetrated as deeply as a thorn that no fingertips can grasp. She had read many such blissful laments to Ulrich at the time. Perhaps her rendering now was not exact: memory deals rather imperiously with what it wants to hear; but she understood what was meant, and formed a resolve. As at this moment of flowery procession, the garden had once before looked mysteriously abandoned and animated; and that had been at the very hour after the mystical confessions Ulrich kept in his library had fallen into her hands. Time stood still, a thousand years weighed as lightly as the opening and closing of an eye; she had arrived at the Millennium; perhaps God was even making himself felt. And while she was feeling these things one after the other, even though time was supposed to no longer exist; and while her brother, so that she would not suffer anxiety in this dream, was next to her, even though space seemed no longer to exist either: the world, notwithstanding these contradictions, seemed in all its parts pervaded by transfiguration.

What she had experienced since then could not but appear to her as talkatively tempered compared to what had come before; and yet, what an expansion and affirmation that first revelation had bestowed on her subsequent days, even if the all but corporeal warmth of its immediacy had been lost! Under these circumstances, Agathe resolved this time to approach with deliberation the rapture that had previously befallen her in this garden in an almost dreamlike way. She did not know why she associated it with the name of the Millennium. It was a word bright with feeling and almost palpable, like a thing, yet it remained opaque to the understanding. That was why she could imagine that the Thousand-Year Kingdom could begin at any moment. It is also called the Kingdom of Love: this Agathe knew also; but only now did it occur to her that both these names have been handed down since biblical times and signify the kingdom of God on earth, whose imminent arrival is meant in a completely real sense.

Ulrich, moreover, occasionally used these words as ingenuously as his sister, without on that account believing in Scripture; and so it was not at all surprising to her that she seemed to know automatically how one should behave in the Millennium. “You must keep perfectly still,” an inspiration told her. “You must leave no room for any kind of desire, not even the desire to ask. Divest yourself of your cleverness in handling your affairs. Deprive the mind of all tools, and prevent it from being used as a tool; both knowledge and will must be discarded; renounce reality and the desire to turn toward it. Contain yourself until head, heart, and limbs are nothing but silence. But if in this way you arrive at the highest selflessness, then at last outside and inside will touch, as if a wedge that had split the world in two had sprung out. . . !”