These few words dispersed the cloudy weight of silence and memory. For Ulrich as well had been watching the foamlike drift of blossoms floating past on their aimless journey; and because his thoughts and memories were tuned to the same note as those of his sister, no further introduction was needed to enable him to answer her unspoken thoughts. He slowly stretched his limbs and replied: “I’ve been wanting to tell you something for a long time—already in the state in which we were talking about the meaning of still lifes, and through all these days really—even if it doesn’t perfectly hit the mark: There are, to set out the contrast sharply, two possible ways of living passionately, and two kinds of passionate people. One way is to start howling with rage or misery or enthusiasm at each provocation like a child, getting rid of one’s feeling in a single brief, trivial whirl of intensity. In this case, and it’s the usual one, emotion ends up being the everyday negotiator of everyday life; and the more violent it is and the more easily excited, the more it resembles the restlessness in a tiger’s cage at feeding time, when the meat is carried past the bars, and the satiated fatigue soon afterward. Isn’t that how it is? The other way of living passionately is to restrain oneself and not accede even in the slightest degree to the action toward which every emotion tends and is driven. And in this case life becomes a rather uncanny dream in which feeling rises to the tops of the trees, to the tallest spires, to the zenith of the sky! It’s more than likely that this is what we were thinking of when we were pretending to talk about paintings and nothing but paintings.”

Agathe propped herself up, curious. “Didn’t you once say,” she asked, “that there are two fundamentally different possibilities of living, and that they’re almost like two different musical keys or tonalities of feeling? One of them was supposed to be the key of ‘worldly’ emotion, which never comes to rest or fulfillment; the other, I don’t know if you gave it a name, but it must have been a ‘mystical’ feeling that resonates constantly but never arrives at ‘complete reality’?” Although she spoke hesitantly, she had been overhasty and finished with some embarrassment.

Ulrich nevertheless recognized quite well what he seemed to have said; and he visibly found it difficult to swallow, as though he had something too hot in his mouth, and tried to smile. He said: “If that is what I meant, I’ll have to express myself all the more modestly now! I’ll just follow a well-known example and call the two kinds of passionate existence the appetitive and then, for its opposite, the nonappetitive, however unattractive that may or may not sound. Because in every human being there is a hunger, and it behaves like a ravenous beast; and there is no hunger but something that ripens tenderly, free of greed and satiety, like a grape in the autumn sun. In fact, in every feeling there is the one as well as the other.”