What do such young people talk about to each other? What significance do they give to their concerns? How comically presumptuous they often are! How the vividness of their ideas misleads them as to their soundness! Curiously Agathe unwrapped from the tissue paper of memory some remarks she had preserved there because she had thought them marvelously clever: My God, she thought, that was almost profound; but even that couldn’t really be said with assurance unless one had a picture of the garden where these things were spoken, with the strange flowers whose names they didn’t know, the butterflies that settled on them like tired drunkards, and the light that flowed over their faces as though heaven and earth were melted together in it. If she measured herself against that, she was now an old and experienced woman, even though not many years had passed, and with some confusion she noticed the incongruity in the fact that she, the twenty-seven-year-old, was still in love with the twenty-one-year-old: he had grown much too young for her! She asked herself: “What feelings would I have to have if, at my age, this boyish man were really to be the most important thing in the world to me?” No doubt they would have been rather peculiar feelings, but she could not even form a clear conception of them. In the end it all dissolved into nothing.

Agathe acknowledged with a great, swelling emotion that in the one and only proud passion of her life she had fallen prey to an error, and the core of that error consisted in a fiery mist that could not be touched or grasped, whether by saying that faith must not grow an hour old or by any other set of words; and it was always this that her brother had been talking about since they were together, and always it was she herself of whom he was speaking, even if he took all sorts of detours into abstraction and his caution was frequently much too slow for her impatience. They always came back to the same conversation, and Agathe herself burned with desire that its flame should not diminish.

When she now spoke to Ulrich, he had not even noticed how long the interruption had lasted. But whoever has not already picked up the clues to what was developing between this brother and sister, let him put aside this account, for it describes an adventure he will never be able to approve of: a voyage to the edge of the possible, leading past, and perhaps not always steering clear of, the dangers of the impossible and the unnatural, indeed of the repulsive; a “limit case,” as Ulrich later called it, of restricted and special validity, reminiscent of the freedom with which mathematics occasionally employs the absurd in order to arrive at truth. He and Agathe came upon a path that had much in common with the business of the God-possessed, but they walked it without piety, without believing in God or the soul, or even in a Beyond or a Once Again; they had come upon it as human beings belonging to this world and walked it as such: and just that was the remarkable thing about it. Ulrich, who at the moment when Agathe spoke again was still occupied with his books and the problems they set him, had nevertheless not for a moment forgotten the conversation that had broken off at her resistance to the piety of her teachers and his own demand for “exact visions,” and he replied immediately: “There’s absolutely no need to be a saint in order to experience something of the kind! You can be sitting on a fallen tree or a bench in the mountains watching a herd of grazing cows and already you’re participating in something that seems nothing less than a transport into another life! You lose yourself and suddenly come to yourself: you yourself have talked about this!”