“Still, I have the feeling that nothing base ever crosses the path of a ‘high-hearted’ person—that word just came to me! It may sound like nonsense, but it’s an experience.”

“It may be an experience,” Ulrich retorted, “but there is also the opposite experience! Or do you think the soldiers who crucified Jesus did not have base emotions? And yet they were instruments of God! Besides, according to the testimony of the ecstatics themselves, there are bad feelings: they lament that they fall from the state of grace and feel unspeakable distress, they’re well acquainted with fear, anguish, shame, maybe even hatred. It’s only when the quiet burning starts again that remorse, wrath, fear, and anguish turn into bliss. It’s all so hard to make sense of!”

“When were you that much in love?” Agathe asked abruptly.

“Me? Oh! I already told you about it. I fled a thousand miles from the woman I loved, and once I felt safe from any possibility of her actual embrace, I wailed for her like a dog howling at the moon!”

Now Agathe confided to him the story of her love. She was excited. Her last question had already sped off as if plucked on an overly taut string, and the rest now followed in the same fashion. She trembled inwardly as she revealed what had been kept secret for years.

But her brother was not notably shocked by her account. “Usually memories age along with people,” he expounded, “and the most passionate experiences become comical in the perspective of time, as if one were seeing them at the end of ninety-nine successively opened doors. But sometimes there are memories that don’t age because they are associated with very strong emotions and hold entire strata of the self in bondage, as it were. That was the case with you. There are such points in almost everyone that slightly distort one’s psychic equilibrium; one’s behavior flows over their invisible presence the way a river flows over a boulder; and with you this just happened to be very strong, so it almost resembled a standstill. But in the end you freed yourself and you’re in motion again!”