It is Agathe who does that in his stead. Or rather, she does it for him: “Essentially she was making Ulrich the gift of a crime, by placing herself in his hands, fully trusting that he would understand her rashness.” And Ulrich, watching her as she forges her father’s will, “experienced a pleasure he had never known, for there was an enchanting absurdity in succumbing, for once entirely and without caution, to what another being was doing.”

And yet, though her crime—and his by complicity—may well have grave consequences for them both, it is only a foil to a spiritual event that is made visible by the narrator briefly parting the curtains to a view behind the physical action:

An aura of justice with flames instead of logic surrounded her. Goodness, decency, and law-abidance, as she had experienced these virtues in the people she knew, Hagauer in particular,^† had always seemed to her as if a stain had been removed from a dress; but the wrong that hovered around her at this moment was like the drowning of the world in the light of a rising sun. It seemed to her as if right and wrong were no longer general terms and a compromise arranged for millions of people, but the magical encounter of Me and You, the madness of a first creation, not yet comparable with any thing, not measurable by any standard.

There is no hint of irony in this description. It is meant to evoke a dimension of consciousness that knows nothing of the statutes by which the world of seinesgleichen geschieht conducts its business, and that knows instead something of incomparable value, power, beauty, and even utility, if people would only avail themselves of it. That, of course, is not a reasonable proposition. It is the view from within the precincts of the other reality.

•

Strolling together in their dead father’s garden on paths that “turned back upon themselves,” talking about the nature of morality, the siblings find themselves “in a state of mind that drifted in circular eddies like those of a current rising behind a dam.” The entire image—of the current impeded by a barrier and the mental state that drifts in circles that rise as they turn—is a virtual diagram of Ulrich and Agathe’s relationship and of the direction and even the form their conversations will take in the course of the book.

•

A circle that rises as it turns is describing a spiral. That is the peculiar form of the siblings’ quest and of the novel within the novel that, in this edition, bears Agathe’s name as a title. Unlike narratives that progress on the horizontal plane of a timeline, their story proceeds in a slowly cycling ascent to higher and higher stations. This asks of the reader a special kind of attention and imaginative participation. When, for example, the narrator says of Agathe, who is puzzling over the fantastical prospect of the Millennium, that “even now she was not sure yet if it was truly possible. . . . But for as long as she had been with him she had always had the feeling that a country was taking shape from his words, and that this land was not forming in her head, but truly beneath her feet,” the reader is invited, or perhaps I should say more strongly “enjoined,” to imagine—which is to say, attempt to intuit—the other condition as an at least conceivable reality, separate from the socially conditioned world we all inhabit.^‡