And this led Ulrich to suddenly tell his sister what had happened to him when, after finishing his work, he had left the house and walked to the center of the town in order to fill the void left in him by the completion of his paper. He hadn’t wanted to talk about it, because it seemed too personal. For whenever his travels took him to cities with which he had no connection through business of any kind, he greatly enjoyed the special feeling of solitude it gave him, and seldom had this feeling been as strong as this time. He had seen the colors of the trams, the automobiles, shopwindows, gateways, the shapes of church towers, faces, and facades, and although they all had the usual European resemblance, his gaze skimmed above them like an insect that has flown off course, attracted by the foreign colors of a field where it cannot settle, though it would like to. This walking without aim or purpose in a busily self-preoccupied town, this heightened intensity of experience, which increases as the strangeness of one’s surroundings intensifies and is further heightened by the conviction that it is not oneself that matters but only the aggregate of these faces, only these movements wrenched loose from the body and summed up as armies of arms, legs, or teeth, to whom the future belongs—all this can evoke the feeling that to wander about by oneself as a whole self-contained human being is a positively antisocial and criminal activity; but if one yields to this a little more, there can be a sudden shift to such a delightfully foolish and irresponsible sense of physical well-being, as if the body no longer belonged to a world where the sensual self is enclosed in strands of nerves and blood vessels, but belongs instead to a world flooded with somnolent sweetness. With these words Ulrich described to his sister what might have been the result of a frame of mind without goal or ambition, or of a diminished ability to maintain the illusion of personal selfhood; or perhaps it was nothing other than the “primal myth of the gods,” that “double face of nature,” that “giving” and “taking” way of seeing which he was all but chasing down like a hunter. He now waited curiously to see if Agathe would give a sign of agreement or indicate that she too was familiar with such impressions, and when that did not happen, he explained it again: “It’s like a slight split in one’s consciousness. One feels embraced, encompassed, pierced to the heart by a pleasantly will-less unselfreliance; but on the other hand one is awake, capable of judgment in matters of taste, and even prepared to start a fight with people and things that are full of unventilated pretension. It’s as if there were two relatively autonomous strata of life within us that usually keep each other profoundly in balance. And since we were speaking of fate, it’s also as though we had two fates: one that is active and irrelevant and takes its course, and one that is motionless and important that we never get to know.”