“Except for the vehement emotion you make such a point of, I think I know what you mean,” Agathe said, and now had to smile again at the fierce embarrassment that showed in her brother’s face, not at all in keeping with the delicacy of his words. “Sometimes one forgets seeing and hearing,” she said, “and loses the power of speech altogether. And yet it’s precisely then that you feel you’ve come to yourself for a moment.”

“I would say,” Ulrich went on excitedly, “it’s similar to looking across a wide sparkling body of water: everything is so bright it seems like darkness to the eye, and on the opposite shore things don’t seem to be resting on the earth but rather hovering in the air with an extreme and delicate distinctness that is bewildering and almost hurts. There’s a feeling of intensification and of loss in this, both. You’re connected with everything and can’t quite make contact with anything. You’re standing here and the world is over there, hypersubjective and hyperconcrete, but both sides almost painfully distinct, and what separates and connects these usually mingled elements is a dark flashing pulse, a brimming over and an extinction, a swinging out and in. You are floating like the fish in the water and the bird in the air, but there is no bank and no branch and only this floating!” It was doubtless a kind of poetry he was speaking, but the ardor and firmness of his language stood out in metallic relief against its subtle, hovering content. He seemed to have cast off a caution that usually restrained him, and Agathe looked at him in astonishment, but also with uneasy joy.

“And you think there’s something behind it?” she asked. “More than a ‘humor,’ or whatever vile reassuring term would be applied?”

“I certainly do!” He sat down again in his previous place and leafed about among the books that lay there, while Agathe stood up to make room for him. Then he laid one of them open, saying, “This is how the saints describe it,” and read aloud: “During these days I was exceedingly restless. Now I sat a while, now I wandered back and forth through the house. It was like an anguish and yet more to be called a sweetness than an anguish, for there was no vexation in it, but rather a strange, quite supernatural pleasantness. I had risen above all my faculties up to the dark power. There I heard without sound, there I saw without light. There my heart became bottomless, my spirit formless, and my nature insubstantial.” It seemed to them both that these words resembled the restlessness by which they themselves were driven through house and garden, and Agathe especially was surprised that saints, too, call their heart bottomless and their spirit formless; but Ulrich soon appeared to be wrapped in his irony again.