“See Hagauer,” Agathe added.

“There is a paradoxical absurdity in these good people,” Ulrich said. “They turn a state into a demand, a grace into a norm, a way of being into a goal! This family of the good spends a lifetime eating leftovers. Meanwhile a rumor circulates that there was once a great feast of which these are the scraps! To be sure, from time to time a few virtues come back into fashion, but as soon as that has happened, they lose their freshness again.”

“Didn’t you once say that the same act can be good or bad, depending on circumstances?” Agathe now asked.

Ulrich agreed. That was his theory, that moral values are not absolutes but functional concepts. But when we moralize and generalize, we detach them from their natural context: “And that,” he said, “is probably already the point where something is amiss on the path to virtue.”

“How else could moral people manage to be so dreary,” Agathe added, “when their intention to be good ought to be the most delightful, the most challenging, and the most engaging thing one could possibly imagine!”

Her brother hesitated; but suddenly he let slip a statement that led their relationship into unusual terrain. “Our morality,” he declared, “is the crystallization of an inner movement that is completely different from it! None of what we say adds up! Take any phrase—here’s one I just thought of: ‘Prison is a place for repentance!’ Anyone can say this with a good conscience, but no one takes it literally, because it would amount to hellfire for prisoners! So how is one to take it? I’m sure few people know what repentance is, but everyone can tell you the place where repentance should properly reign. Or just think of something ‘uplifting’: how did that notion find its way into moral discourse, and where did it come from? When were we ever so prostrate, with our faces in the dust, that it was a blessing to be uplifted? Or imagine being literally in the grip of an idea: the moment you experienced that as a palpable reality, you would already be deep in the realm of lunacy! And so every word needs to be taken literally, otherwise it decays into a lie, but no word should be taken literally, otherwise the world will turn into a madhouse! Some great rapture rises out of this as an obscure memory, and it can be tempting to imagine that our experience consists entirely of fragments torn from an ancient wholeness that was destroyed a long time ago and was then put together again in a way that was all wrong.”