Goethe claimed that there were two ways in which a man might dare to be himself: prayer and song. Wilhelm had always assumed he had the capacity for neither, and that his most intense and important affections would go through life with their eyes turned away. For him, Hans became a third option. But even if their time together seemed a journal of obstructed fortune and unfulfilled wishes, he believed the icy surface of his own priggishness was beginning to darken, crack, and give way to the fluid cold layers beneath.

At that point, as was customary with overheated boys at a certain level of higher learning, Goethe prevailed. The two had spent an entire month trailing Dr. Widmann through the trackless moors of Faust. The poem had seized their imagination to such an extent that they began to term their walks Faust-walks.

The Faust-walks led to new possibilities for the covert discussion of unapproachable subjects. They might remark upon Faust’s life as a story of the protracted and perverse disregard for the obvious, or note that his longing for escape mirrored the wish to break free of the isolation of being himself. This sort of talk so excited them that finally they planned a day-trip to the mountains. The preceding week they saw little of each other, as if husbanding nervous energy. Who knew what could happen on such an outing?

They took the train as far as Zwickau. There, high on the slopes, far from even the hiking-tracks, they surrounded themselves with fire lilies, purple gentians, and alpine columbines. They had vistas at their feet. Their talk was full of sobriety and foolishness. In the original Faust, they agreed, there were two peaks of emotion: his turning from God to the Devil, and his last hours awaiting damnation. Yet Goethe had added a third peak, in the center, with the kiss that sealed Faust’s love for Gretchen—her story integral to the theme of damnation because Faust’s claim of freedom from moral restrictions had the potential for tragic guilt. In support of that interpretation, Hans reminded Wilhelm that Goethe himself had brutally terminated his first affair, with Friederike Brion.

When they unpacked their lunch, Hans’s cucumber sandwich had spoiled. During the intervals of silence, they blushed. The game-playing exacerbated their prickliness and desire. Movement off in the flowers made them jump.

Faust was stubborn, they decided, unwilling to lose any part of himself. He did not know how to renounce. Goethe’s greatest verses concerned the abyss between the desires of which he felt himself composed and the world in which those desires needed to be realized. Lying shoulder to shoulder, breathing in the hot wind sweeping up from the valley, they nearly levitated from tension. A warbler landed nearby and moved forward hop by cautious hop, its sharp round eye holding them in view.