As Ulrich briefly paused to think, Agathe’s voice joined in: “This is what you once called two layers that are inside us, one on top of the other.”

“I did—when?”

“You’d gone into town without any goal or purpose, and you felt as if you were dissolving into it, but at the same time you didn’t like the town; and I told you that this happens to me often.”

“Oh yes! You even went on to say ‘Hagauer!’” Ulrich exclaimed. “And we laughed: I remember it now. But we didn’t really mean it. I’ve told you on other occasions about the giving and the taking kinds of seeing, about the male and the female principle, about the hermaphroditism of the primal imagination, and the like: I can go on and on about these things! As though my mouth were as far from me as the moon, which is also always available for a confidential nighttime chat if one needs it. But what these pious people have to tell about their soul’s adventure,” he continued, and as he spoke, a tone of objectivity and also of admiration mingled with the bitterness of his words, “is written in a way that is at times comparable with the ruthless rigor and conviction of a Stendhalian analysis. However,” he now injected a qualification, “this is only the case as long as they stick to the phenomena and leave their judgment out of it, because their judgment is warped by the flattering conviction that they are singled out by God to have direct experience of Him. And, of course, as soon as that happens, they stop telling us about their perceptions, which have no nouns or verbs and are therefore very hard to describe, and speak instead in sentences with subject and object, because they believe in their soul and in God as if these were two doorposts between which the miraculous will open. And so they arrive at these statements about the soul being drawn from the body and immersed in the Lord, or that the Lord penetrates them like a lover; they are captured, devoured, dazzled, plundered, ravaged by the Lord, or their soul expands to meet Him, enters into Him, tastes Him, embraces Him with love and hears Him speak. The earthly model for this is unmistakable; and these descriptions now no longer resemble tremendous discoveries, but merely the rather monotonous imagery with which an erotic poet embellishes his subject, about which only one opinion is permissible. For someone like me, at least, who was brought up to maintain reserve, the effect is one of being stretched on a rack, because the elect, at the moment when they assure me that God spoke to them or that they understood the speech of the trees and the beasts, neglect to tell me what was imparted to them; and if they ever do, all that comes out is personal business or church news. It is an everlasting pity that there are no trained scientists who have visions!” he concluded his long reply.