He explained: “The saints say: Once I was shut inside, then I was drawn out of myself and immersed in God without understanding. The emperors out hunting, about whom we read in our storybooks, describe it differently: they say a stag appeared to them with a cross between his antlers, causing the murderous spear to drop from their hands; and then they raised a chapel on that spot so they could go on hunting. And the rich, clever ladies with whom I associate will answer you immediately, if you ask them about it, that the last one who painted such experiences was Van Gogh. Maybe instead of a painter they will talk about Rilke’s poetry; but generally they prefer Van Gogh, who represents an excellent capital investment and cut off his ears because his painting didn’t do enough for him compared to the rapture of things. The majority of our people, on the other hand, will say that cutting off ears is not a German way of expressing one’s feelings. The lofty German way is found in the unmistakable void one experiences in mountain panoramas. For them solitude, little flowers, and babbling brooks are the epitome of human exaltation: but even in that bovine enjoyment of uncooked nature at her wholesome best there lies concealed the misunderstood final residue of a mysterious second life, and all in all something like it must exist or have existed at some time!”

“Then you really shouldn’t make fun of it,” Agathe objected, grim with the thirst for knowledge and shining with impatience.

“I only make fun of it because I love it,” Ulrich curtly retorted.

11

HOLY CONVERSATIONS. CHANGEFUL DEVELOPMENTS

In the days that followed, there were always numerous books on the table, some of which he had brought with him and others he had bought since. He would either speak extemporaneously or else quote from one of many passages he had marked with slips of paper, either to prove a point or because he wanted an exact citation. The books before him were mostly biographies of mystics or scholarly works about them, or collections of their personal utterances, and usually he would deflect the conversation from these texts with the words, “Now let’s look at what is going on here as soberly as possible.” This was a cautious stance that he was not prepared to give up voluntarily, and so once he said to Agathe: “If you could read straight through all these descriptions that men and women of past centuries have left about their state of divine rapture, you would find truth and reality between all these letters, and yet your will to be of the present would be loath to accept the assertions that were formed with these letters.” And he went on: “They speak of an overflowing radiance. Of an infinite expanse, an infinite abundance of light. Of an ethereal ‘oneness’ of all things and all the soul’s capacities. Of a marvelous and indescribable exaltation of the heart. Of insights that come so swiftly that everything is simultaneous and that are like drops of fire falling into the world. And on the other hand they speak of a forgetting and no longer understanding, and even of a perishing of things. They speak of an immense peace that is far removed from the passions. Of a muteness that befalls them. A vanishing of thoughts and intentions, a blindness in which they see clearly, a clarity in which they are both dead and supernaturally alive. They call it an ‘annihilation,’ yet claim to be living more fully than ever: Are these not the same feelings, shimmering through the veils woven in the attempt to express them, that one still has in our time when the heart—‘ravenous and sated,’ as they say!—finds itself suddenly in those utopian regions that lie somewhere and nowhere between an infinite tenderness and an infinite solitude?!”