Here Ulrich sought to secure his footing—literally the way one uses ropes and crampons for a descent down a dangerous rock face—and began a further deliberation.

“The most ancient philosophies, which are almost incomprehensibly obscure to us, often speak of a feminine and a masculine ‘principle,’” he thought.

“The goddesses that existed side by side with the gods in primeval religions are in truth no longer accessible to our sensibility. For us a relationship with these superhumanly powerful women would be masochistic!

“But nature,” he thought, “gives men nipples and women a male sex organ, which does not necessarily mean that our forebears were hermaphrodites. Nor, then, are they likely to have been psychically androgynous. In which case the double possibility of a giving and a taking vision must once have been received from without, as a two-faced aspect of nature, and somehow all that is much older than the difference between the sexes, who later adapted these modes to complement their psychological wardrobe.”

Such was the direction his thoughts took, but subsequently it happened that he remembered a detail from his childhood, and he was distracted by it, because—and this had not happened for a long time—he was finding pleasure in remembering. It must be said in advance that his father had in earlier days been a horseman and had also owned riding horses, to which the empty stable by the garden wall that Ulrich had seen on his arrival still bore witness. Probably that was the only aristocratic fancy his father had arrogated to himself out of admiration for his feudal friends’ way of life, but Ulrich had been a little boy at the time, and the infinity, or at any rate the vastness, that a horse’s tall, muscular body possessed for an admiring child reestablished itself to his senses as an eerie fairytale landscape, a mountain covered with fields of hair through which the ripples of the skin ran like waves of wind. It was, he realized, one of those memories whose splendor comes from the child’s powerlessness to fulfill his wishes; but these words are not adequate to the magnitude of that splendor, which was virtually supernatural, or to the no less miraculous splendor that little Ulrich touched shortly afterward with his fingertips in a quest for the earlier one. For at that time posters announcing a circus had been put up in the town, showing not only horses but also lions and tigers, as well as magnificent large dogs that lived in friendship with the wild beasts, and he had spent a long time staring at these posters before he finally succeeded in getting hold of one of those brightly colored sheets and cutting out the animals, which he now stiffened with little wooden supports so they could stand up. But what happened then can only be compared to drinking that never quenches one’s thirst, no matter how long one goes on drinking; for it knew no bounds, nor, as it went on for weeks, did it yield any progress, and was a constant pull drawing him out of himself and into those adored creatures, which now, with the unutterable happiness of a lonely child, he believed he possessed whenever he looked at them, while just as strongly he felt that some ultimate thing was missing, a lack that nothing could fill, which was precisely what gave his longing the immense radiance that suffused his whole body. But then, along with this peculiarly boundless memory, another, slightly later experience emerged from the oblivion of those young days and despite its childishness took possession of the big adult body that was sitting there, dreaming with open eyes. It was the memory of a little girl who had only two qualities: that she had to belong to him and that as a result he got into fights with other boys. And of these two, only the fights were real, for the little girl did not exist. What a strange time that was, setting out like a knight-errant in search of some unknown boy, preferably bigger than himself, preferably on a lonely road that was capable of harboring a mystery, there to leap at the throat of his surprised enemy and, with some luck, wrestle him to the ground.