Ulrich had spoken for about the length of time a surgeon takes to wash his hands and arms to prevent germs from being carried into the operating field; and also with the patience, dedication, and equanimity that contravene the excitement that will come with the work at hand. But after he had thoroughly sterilized himself, he thought almost with longing of a little infection and fever, for he did not love sobriety for its own sake. Agathe was sitting on a ladder that served to reach books on high shelves and gave no sign of participation, even when her brother fell silent; she gazed out into the infinite, sea-like gray of the sky and listened to the silence as much as to the words. So Ulrich went on talking with a touch of defiance that was barely concealed beneath a jocular tone.

“Let’s go back to our bench in the mountains with the herd of cows,” he requested. “Imagine some municipal councilor in brand-new lederhosen sitting there, with the words ‘Grüß Gott’ embroidered on his green suspenders: he represents real life, with its true worth, on vacation. Naturally his consciousness of his own existence is temporarily altered. Looking at the grazing cows, he doesn’t count them, doesn’t classify them, doesn’t estimate their live weight, forgives his enemies, and thinks indulgently of his family. The herd has turned from a practical subject into a quasi-moral one for him. It’s possible, of course, that he’s still estimating and classifying just a bit and doesn’t wholly forgive, but even so these feelings will at least be surrounded by a murmuring forest, a babbling brook, and sunshine. One could sum it up by saying: The usual content of his life now seems ‘far away’ and ‘not really important.’”

“It’s a holiday mood,” Agathe added mechanically.

“Quite right! And if just now his nonholiday life seems ‘not really important,’ it means only: for as long as he’s on vacation. So that is the truth today: Man has two states of existence, of consciousness, and of thought and saves himself from the deadly fright of meeting his own spectral otherness by regarding one condition as a vacation from the other, an interruption, a respite, or something about them that he thinks he knows. Mysticism, on the other hand, would entail the intention of going on a permanent vacation. The municipal councilor is bound to call that dishonorable and instantly feel, as he always does toward the end of his vacation, that real life resides in his orderly office. And do we feel any differently? Whether something needs to be put in order or not will always ultimately determine whether one takes that something completely seriously or not; and here these experiences have not had much luck, because over thousands of years they have not gone beyond their primordial disorder and incompleteness. And this is just the kind of thing for which the term “mania” lies readily at hand—religious mania, erotomania, take your pick. You can be assured: nowadays even the majority of religious people are so infected with the scientific way of thinking that they don’t dare to look at what is burning deep inside their hearts and would always readily speak of this ardor in medical terms as a mania, even if officially they use a different language!”