“Good God in heaven,” Ulrich answered, walking on again, “there’s a plus in every minus. Maybe I did say something like that, but there’s no need to take it all that literally.”

“A plus in every minus?”

“Something good in everything bad. Or at least in much of what is bad. Usually in a human minus variant there is an unrecognized plus variant: that’s probably what I wanted to say. And when you regret something, just that may give you the strength to do something better than you could have done otherwise. The crucial thing is never what one does but always what one does afterward.”

“And when you’ve killed someone, what can you do afterward?”

Ulrich shrugged. He felt like answering, just to follow the thought to its logical conclusion: “Conceivably that could enable me to write a poem that gives thousands of people their inner life, or to make a great invention.” But he stopped himself. “That would never happen!” he realized. “Only a lunatic could persuade himself of such a thing. Or an eighteen-year-old aesthete. Such ideas, God knows why, contradict the laws of nature. By the way—” he corrected himself, “it was like that for prehistoric man; he killed because human sacrifice was a great religious poem!”

He did not say any of those thoughts aloud, but Agathe continued: “This may be a silly objection, but the first time I heard you say it doesn’t matter what step one takes, what matters is always the next step, what I imagined was this: If a person could fly inwardly, fly morally, so to speak, always moving at great speed from one improvement to the next, he wouldn’t know any remorse! I envied you tremendously for that!”

“That is absurd,” Ulrich said emphatically. “I said that a misstep doesn’t matter, what matters is the next step. But what is it that matters after the next step? Obviously the step after that. And after the nth step, the nth-plus-one step? Such a person would have to live without an end or a decision, in fact without any reality at all. And yet, what matters is always only the next step. The fact is, we have no method for dealing adequately with this inexorable sequence. Dear Agathe,” he concluded abruptly, “sometimes I regret my whole life!”

“But that’s just what you can’t do!” his sister said.

“Why absolutely not? Why precisely not that?!”

“I,” Agathe replied, “have never done anything and therefore always had time to regret the few things I did undertake. I am convinced you have no experience of this: a state where there’s so little light. The shadows come, and what was has power over me. It’s present in the smallest details, and I can’t forget anything and don’t understand anything. It’s not a pleasant state...”