In this mood Ulrich spread out his work, which he had interrupted weeks and months ago, and his gaze immediately settled on the equations of hydrodynamics where he had gotten bogged down. He darkly remembered having thought of Clarisse when he had used the three basic states of water as an example to show a new mathematical possibility; and Clarisse had then diverted him from it.^* But there is a kind of remembering that recalls not so much the word as the atmosphere in which it was spoken, and so Ulrich suddenly thought: “Carbon...” and then had the impression, as if out of nowhere, that it would help him if he could just instantaneously know in how many states carbon occurred; but he couldn’t remember, and instead he thought: “Man occurs in two states, male and female.” He dwelled on this thought for quite a while, seemingly stunned with amazement, as if it were God knows how great a discovery that man lives in two different permanent states. But concealed beneath this momentary stopping of his mind, something different was taking place. For one can be hard, selfish, driven, pushed outward in bas-relief, as it were, and suddenly feel oneself to be not only the same Ulrich So-and-so but also the opposite, recessed and inverted, a selflessly happy creature in an ineffably tender and somehow also selfless state of all surrounding things. And he asked himself: “How long has it been since I last felt this?” To his surprise, it was little more than twenty-four hours. The silence that surrounded him was refreshing, and the state he was reminded of did not seem as uncommon as it usually did. “After all, we’re organisms,” he thought, reassured, “who have to prevail against one another in an unfriendly world with all the vigor and desire we have at our disposal. But each of us, together with all his enemies and victims, is also a particle and child of this world, and perhaps not as separate from the rest or as independent as he imagines.” Given that premise, it seemed to him not at all incomprehensible that from time to time an intimation of unity and love arises from the world, almost a certainty that the palpable urgencies of life under ordinary circumstances keep us from seeing more than half of the pattern in which all beings are interwoven. There was nothing in this that had to be offensive to a person whose feelings were imbued with the precision of a mathematical-scientific worldview: Ulrich was even reminded of the work of a psychologist with whom he was personally acquainted that dealt with two large opposing groups of concepts, one based on the sense of being encompassed by the contents of experience, the other on the encompassing of these contents by the subject. It proposed that such a state of “being within something” and “looking at something from outside,” a “concave” and a “convex” way of feeling, a “spatial” and a “figural” awareness, an “insight” orientation and an “outlook” orientation, occurred in so many other opposite pairs of experience and their corresponding linguistic tropes that it was justifiable to assume a primeval doubleness of human consciousness behind it. It was not the kind of study that is rigorously based on factual research, but was of the imaginative kind that roams slightly in advance of established knowledge and that originates in an impetus that lies outside the scope of everyday scientific activity; but it was built on solid foundations and its deductions were persuasive, edging towards a unity of feeling that was hidden behind primordial mists, and whose myriad scattered fragments, Ulrich now assumed, had produced the present-day mentality that is vaguely organized around contrasting male and female modes of experience and is mysteriously shadowed by ancient dreams.