There were moreover masses of onlookers crowding the sidewalks and filling the windows, and though Ulrich knew it would all be over in an hour, much like a theater performance, he nevertheless experienced the events of this day with a special vividness, and the universal sympathy with his fate lay like a heavily trimmed cloak around his shoulders. For the first time he felt the upright stance of tradition. The wave of emotion running ahead of the procession, the crowd’s chatter quieting, falling silent, and breathing freely again, the ecclesiastical magic, the dull thuds produced by clods of earth dropping on wood, already audible in his anticipation, the pent-up silence of the procession: all this plucked at the vertebrae as if at the strings of a primordial musical instrument, and with astonishment Ulrich felt within himself an indescribable resonance whose vibrations seemed to be raising his body from within, as if the surrounding solemnity were literally bearing him aloft. And as he was closer than usual to others on this day, he went on to imagine how different it might be if at this moment, in accordance with the original meaning of the pomp that was now being enacted as a half-forgotten custom, he were actually striding along as the heir to some great position of power. Sadness vanished at this thought, and death changed from an awful private affair into a transition that was accomplished through a public ceremony; there was no longer the gaping hole, stared at with dread, which every man or woman whose presence one is accustomed to leaves behind after the first days of their disappearance, but already the successor was walking in the place of the deceased, the crowd breathing its fealty to him, the ceremony at once a death rite and a coming of age for the one who would now take up the sword and set forth alone, for the first time without anyone to follow, toward his own end. “I should have closed my father’s eyes!” Ulrich inadvertently thought. “Not for his sake or my own, but—” he didn’t know how to finish the thought; but that he had never liked his father, and that his father had not liked him, seemed a petty overestimation of the importance of persons in the face of this order of things; and indeed, faced with death, any personal thoughts had the stale taste of emptiness, whereas all that was meaningful in the moment seemed to emanate from the giant body of the procession as it slowly advanced through the crowd-lined street, however pervaded by idleness, curiosity, and thoughtless compliance that body might be.