Passion and
willpower
can do nothing about it.
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" Agathe interrupted.
"If I were a man, I wouldn't have any qualms about trifling with women in the most irresponsible way.
And I'd desire them only out of absentmind- edness and wonder.
"
"Oh? Would you really? How nice ofyou! "
"They're such absurd parasites. Women share a man's life on the same level as his dog! " There was no hint of moral indignation in Agathe's statement. She was pleasantly tired and kept her eyes closed, for she had gone to bed early and Ulrich, who had come to say good night, saw her lying in his place in his bed. But it was also the bed in which Bonadea had lain thirty-six hours earlier, which was probably why Ulrich reverted to the subject of his mistresses.
"All I was trying to describe was my own incapacity for a reason- ably forgiving relationship to myself," he repeated, smiling. "For me to take a real interest in something it must be part of some context, it must be controlled by an idea. The experience itself I'd really prefer to have behind me, as a memory; the emotional effort it exacts strikes me as unpleasant and absurdly beside the point. That's how it is with me, to describe myself to you bluntly. Now, the simplest, most in- stinctive idea one can have, at least when one is young, is that one's a hell of a fellow, the new man the world's been waiting for. But that
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doesn't last beyond thirty! " He reflected for a moment and then said: "That's not it. It's so hard to talk about oneself. What I would have to say is that I have never subjected myself to an idea with staying power. One never turned up. One should love an idea like a woman; be oveijoyed to get back to it. And one always has it inside oneself! And always looks for it in everything outside! I never formed such ideas. My relationship to the so-called great ideas, and perhaps even to those that really are great, has always been man-to-man: I never felt I was born to submit to them; they always provoked me to over- throw them and put others in their place. Perhaps it was precisely this jealousy that drove me to science, whose laws are established by teamwork and never regarded as immutable! " Again he paused and laughed, at either himself or his argument. "But however that may be," he went on seriously, "by connecting no idea or every idea with myself, I got out ofthe habit oftaking life seriously. I get much more out of it when I read about it in a novel, where it's wrapped up in some point of view, but when I'm supposed to experience it in all its fullness it always seems already obsolete, overdone in an old-fash- ioned way, and intellectually outdated. And I don't think that's pecu- liar to me. Most people today feel much the same. Lots of people feign an urgent love of life, the way schoolchildren are taught to hop about merrily among the daisies, but there's always a certain pre- meditation about it, and they feel it. Actually, they're as capable of killing each other in cold blood as they are of being the best of friends. Our time certainly does not take all the adventures and go- ings-on it's full of at all seriously. When they happen, there's a fuss. They immediately set off more happenings, a kind of vendetta of happenings, a whole compulsive alphabet of sequels, from B to Z, and all because someone said A. But these happenings in our lives have less life than a book, because they have no coherent meaning. "
So Ulrich talked, loosely, his moods changing. Agathe offered no response; she still had her eyes closed but was smiling.
Ulrich said: "Now I've forgotten what I'm telling you. I don't think I know my way back to the beginning. "
They were silent for a while. He was able to scrutinize his sister's face at leisure, since it was not defended by the gaze of her eyes. It lay there, a piece of naked body, the way women are when they're together in a women's public bath. The feminine, unguarded, natural
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cynicism of this sight, not intended for men's eyes, still had an unusual effect on Ulrich, though no longer quite as powerful as in their first days together, when Agathe had from the start claimed her right as a sister to talk to him without any mental beating around the bush, since for her he was not a man like others. He remembered the mixture of surprise and horror he had experienced as a boy when he saw a pregnant woman on the street, or a woman nursing her child; secrets from which the boy had been carefully shielded suddenly bulged out full-blown and unembarrassed in the light of day. Per- haps he had long been carrying vestiges of such reactions about with him, for all at once he seemed to feel entirely free of them. That Agathe was a woman with many experiences behind her was a pleas- ant and comfortable thought; there was no need to be on his guard in talking with her, as he would be with a young girl; indeed, it was touchingly natural that everything was morally relaxed with a mature woman. It also made him feel protective toward her, to make up to her for something by being good to her in some way. He decided to do all he could for her. He even decided to look for another husband for her. This need to be kind restored to him, although he barely noticed, the lost thread of his discourse.
"Our self-love probably undergoes a change during adolescence," he said without transition. "That's when a whole meadow of tender- ness in which one had been playing gets mowed down to provide the fodder for one particular instinct. "
"So that the cow can give milk! " Agathe added, after the slightest pause, pertly and with dignity but without opening her eyes.
"Yes, it's all connected, I suppose," Ulrich agreed, and went on: "So there's a moment when the tenderness goes out of our lives and concentrates on that one particular operation, which then remains overcharged with it. It's as though there were a terrible drought ev- erywhere on earth except for one place where it never stops raining, don't you think? "
Agathe said: "I think that as a child I loved my dolls more fiercely than I have ever loved a man. After you'd gone I found a whole trunkful of my old dolls in the attic. "
"What did you do with them? " Ulrich asked. "Did you give them away? "
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"Who was there to give them to? I gave them a funeral in the kitchen stove," she said.
Ulrich responded with animation: "When I remember as far back as I can, I'd say that there was hardly any separation between inside and outside. When I crawled toward something, it came on wings to meet me; when something important happened, the excitement was not just in us, but the things themselves came to a boil. I won't claim that we were happier then than we were later on. After all, we hadn't yet taken charge of ourselves. In fact, we didn't really yet exist; our personal condition was not yet separated from the world's. It sounds strange, but it's true: our feelings, our desires, our very selves, were not yet quite inside ourselves. What's even stranger is that I might as easily say: they were not yet quite taken away from us. I f you should sometime happen to ask yourself today, when you think you're en- tirely in possession of yourself, who you really are, you will discover that you always see yourself from the outside, as an object. You'll no- tice that one time you get angry, another time you get sad, just as your coat will sometimes be wet and sometimes too warm. No matter how intensely you try to look at yourself, you may at most find out something about the outside, but you'll never get inside yourself. Whatever you do, you remain outside yourself, with the possible ex- ception of those rare moments when a friend might say that you're beside yourself. It's true that as adults we've made up for this by being able to think at any time that 'I am'-if you think that's fun. You see a car, and somehow in a shadowy way you also see: 'I am seeing a car. ' You're in love, or sad, and see that it's you. But neither the car, nor your sadness, nor your love, nor even yourself, is quite fully there. Nothing is as completely there as it once was in child- hood; everything you touch, including your inmost self, is more or less congealed from the moment you have achieved your 'personal- ity,' and what's left is a ghostly hanging thread of self-awareness and murky self-regard, wrapped up in a wholly external existence. What's gone wrong? There's a feeling that something might still be salvaged. Surely you can't claim that a child's experience is all that different from a man's? I don't know any real answer, even if there may be this or that idea about it. But for a long time I've responded by having lost my love for this kind of 'being myself' and for this kind of world. "
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Ulrich was glad that Agathe listened to him without interrupting, for he was not expecting an answer from her any more than he was from himself, and was convinced that for the present, nobody could give him the kind of answer he had in mind. Yet he did not fear for an instant that anything he was talking about might be above her head. He did not see it as philosophizing, nor even as an unusual subject for a conversation, any more than a young man-and he was behav- ing like one, in this situation-will let the difficulty of groping for the right words keep him from finding everything simple when he is ex- changing views on the eternal problems of "Who are you? This is who I am" with someone else. He derived the assurance that his sis- ter was able to follow him word for word not from having reflected on it but from her inner being. His eyes rested on her face, and there was something in it that made him happy. This face, its eyes closed, did not thrust back at him. The attraction it held for him was bottom- less, even in the sense that it seemed to draw him into never-ending depths. Submerging himself in contemplation of this face, he no- where found that muddy bottom of dissolved resistances from which the diver into love kicks off, to rebound to the surface and reach dry ground again. But since he was accustomed to experience every incli- nation toward a woman as a forcibly reversed disinclination against human beings, which-even though he found it regrettable-did offer some guarantee against losing himself in her, the pure inclina- tion as he bent even deeper toward her in curiosity alarmed him al- most as ifhe were losing his balance, so that he soon drew back from this state, and from pure happiness took refuge in a boy's trick for recalling Agathe to everyday reality: with the most delicate touch he could manage, he tried to open her eyes. Agathe opened them wide with a laugh and cried: "Isn't this pretty rough treatment for some- one who's supposed to be your self-love? "
This response was as boyish as his attack, and their looks collided hard, like two little boys who want to tussle but are laughing too much to begin. Suddenly Agathe dropped this and asked seriously: "You know that myth Plato tells, following some ancient source, that the gods divided the original human being into two halves, male and female? " She had propped herself up on one elbow and unexpect- edly blushed, feeling awkward at having asked Ulrich if he knew so familiar a story; then she resolutely charged ahead: "Now those two
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pathetic halves do all kinds of silly things to come together again. It's in all the schoolbooks for older children; unfortunately, they never tell you why it doesn't work! "
"I can tell you that," Ulrich broke in, glad to see how well she had understood him. "Nobody knows which of so many halves running around in the world is his missing half. He grabs one that seems to be his, vainly trying to become one with her, until the futility of it be- comes hopelessly clear. If a child results, both halves believe for a few youthful years that they've at least become one in the child. But the child is merely a third half, which soon shows signs of trying to get as far away from the other two as it possibly can and look for a fourth half. In this way human beings keep 'halving' themselves physiologically, while the ideal ofoneness remains as far away as the moon outside the bedroom window. "
"You'd think that siblings might have succeeded halfway already! " Agathe interjected in a voice that had become husky.
"Twins, possibly. "
"Aren't we twins? "
"Certainly! " Ulrich suddenly became evasive. "Twins are rare;
twins of different gender especially so. But when, into the bargain, they differ in age and have hardly known each other for the longest time, it's quite a phenomenon-one really worthy of us! " he de- clared, struggling to get back into a shallower cheeriness.
"But we met as twins! " Agathe challenged him, ignoring his tone. "Because we unwittingly dressed alike? "
"Maybe. And in all sorts of ways! You may say it was chance; but
what is chance? I think it's fate or destiny or providence, or whatever you want to call it. Haven't you ever thought it was by chance that you were hom as yourself? Our being brother and sister doubles that chance! " That was how Agathe put it, and Ulrich submitted to this wisdom.
"So we declare ourselves to be twins," he agreed. "Symmetrical creatures of a whim of nature, henceforth we shall be the same age, the same height, with the same hair, walking the highways and by- ways of the world in identical striped clothes with the same bow tied under our chins. But I warn you that people will tum around and look after us, half touched and half scornful, as always happens when something reminds them of the mysteries of their own beginnings. "
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"Why can't we dress for contrast? " Agathe said lightly. "One in yellow when the other is in blue, or red alongside green, and we can dye our hair violet or purple, and I can affect a hump and you a paunch: yet we'd still be twins! "
But the joke had gone stale, the pretext worn out, and they fell silent for a while.
"Do you realize," Ulrich then said suddenly, "that this is some- thing very serious we're talking about? ''
No sooner had he said this than his sister again dropped the fan of her lashes over her eyes and, veiling her consent, let him talk alone. Or perhaps it only looked as if she had shut her eyes. The room was dark; what light there was did not so much clarify out- lines as pour over them in bright patches. Ulrich had said: "It's not only the myth of the human being divided in two; we could also mention Pygmalion, the Hermaphrodite, or Isis and Osiris-all dif- ferent forms of the same theme. It's the ancient longing for a dop- pelganger of the opposite sex, for a lover who will be the same as yourself and yet someone else, a magical figure that is oneself and yet remains magical, with the advantage over something we merely imagine of having the breath of autonomy and independence. This dream of a quintessential love, unhampered by the body's limita- tions, coming face-to-face in two identical yet different forms, has been concocted countless times in solitary alchemy in the alembic ofthe human skull. . . . "
Here he broke off; evidently something disturbing had occurred to him, and he ended with the almost unfriendly words: "There are traces of this in even the most commonplace situations of love: the charm of every change of clothing, every disguise, the meaning two people find in what they have in common, the way they see them- selves repeated in the other. This little magic is always the same, whether one's seeing an elegant lady naked for the first time or a naked girl formally dressed for the first time in a dress buttoned up to the neck, and great reckless passions all have something to do with the fact that everyone thinks it's his own secret self peering out at him from behind the curtains of a stranger's eyes. ··
It sounded as though he were asking her not to attach too much importance to what they were saying. But Agathe was again thinking
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of the lightning flash of surprise she had felt when they first met, disguised, as it were, in their lounging suits. And she answered:
"So this has been going on for thousands ofyears. Is it any easier to understand as a case of shared self-delusion? "
Ulrich was silent.
And after a while, Agathe said delightedly: "But it does happen in one's sleep! There you do sometimes see yourself transformed into something else. Or meet yourself as a man. And then you're much kinder to him than you are to yourself. You'll probably say that these are sexual dreams, but I think they are much older. "
"Do you often have that sort of dream? " Ulrich asked. "Sometimes. Not often. "
"I almost never do," he confessed. "It must be ages since I had
such a dream. "
"And yet you once explained to me," Agathe now said, " - i t must
have been at the very beginning, back in our old house-that people really did experience life differently thousands of years ago. "
"Oh, you mean the 'giving' and the 'receiving' vision? " Ulrich re- plied, smiling at her although she could not see him. "The 'embrac- ing' and 'being embraced' of the spirit? Yes, of course I should have talked about this mysterious dual sexuality of the soul too. And how much else besides! There's a hint of it wherever you look. Every anal- ogy contains a remnant of that magic of being identical and not iden- tical. But haven't you noticed? In all these cases we've been talking about, in dream, in myth, poem, childhood, even in love, feeling more comes at the cost of understanding less, and that means: through a loss of reality. "
"Then you don't really believe in it? " Agathe asked.
Ulrich did not answer. But after a while he said: "Translated into the ghastlyjargon ofour times, we could call this faculty we all lack to such a frightening degree nowadays 'the percentual share' of an indi- vidual's experiences and actions. In dreams it's apparently a hundred percent, in our waking life not even half as much. You noticed it today at once in my house; but it's exactly the same with my relations to the people you'll meet. I also once called it-if I'm not mistaken, in conversation with a woman where it was truly relevant, I must admit-the acoustics of the void. If a pin drops in an empty room,
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the sound it makes is somehow disproportionate, even incommen- surable; but it's the same when there's a void between people. There's no way to tell: is one screaming, or is there a deathly silence? For everything out of place and askew acquires the magnetic attrac- tion of a tremendous temptation when there's nothing with which to counteract it. Don't you agree? . . . But I'm sorry," he interrupted himself, "you must be tired, and I'm not letting you have your rest. It seems there are many things in my surroundings and my social life that won't be much to your liking, I'm afraid. "
Agathe had opened her eyes. After coming out of hiding at last, her glance contained something uncommonly hard to define, which Ulrich felt coursing sympathetically through his whole body. He sud- denly started to talk again: "When I was younger I tried to see just that as a source of strength. And if one doesn't have anything to pit against life? Fine, then life flees from man into his works! That's more or less what I thought. And I suppose there's something daunt- ing about the lovelessness and irresponsibility of today's world. At the very least there's something in it of adolescence, which centuries can go through as well as teenagers, years of rapid, uneven growth. And like every young man I began by plunging into work, adven- tures, amusements; what difference did it make what one did, as long as one did it wholeheartedly? Do you remember that we once spoke of 'the morality of achievement'? We're born with that image, and orient ourselves by it. But the older one gets, the more clearly one finds out that this apparent exuberance, this independence and mo- bility in everything, this sovereignty of the driving parts and the par- tial drives-both your own against yourself and yours against the world-in short, everything that we 'people of the present' have regarded as a strength and a special distinction of our species, is basically nothing but a weakness of the whole as against its parts.
Passion and willpower can do nothing about it. The moment you're ready to go all out into the middle of something, you find your- self washed back to the periphery. Today this is the experience in all experiences! "
Agathe, with her eyes now open, was waiting for something to hap- pen in his voice; when nothing changed and her brother's words sim- ply came to an end like a path turning off a road into a dead end, she said: "So your experience tells you that one can never really act with
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conviction and will never be able to. By conviction," she explained, "I don't mean whatever knowledge or moral training have been drilled into us, but simply feeling entirely at home with oneself and with everything, feeling replete now where there's emptiness, something one starts out from and returns to-" She broke off. "Oh, I don't really know what I mean! I was hoping you'd explain it to me. "
"You mean just what we were talking about," Ulrich answered gently. "And you're also the only person I can talk to about these things. But there'd be no point in starting over just to add a few more seductive words. I'd have to say, rather, that being 'at the inner core' ofthings, in a state ofunmarred 'inwardness'-using the word not in any sentimental sense but with the meaning we just gave it-is ap- parently not a demand that can be satisfied by rational thinking. " He had leaned forward and was touching her arm and gazing steadily into her eyes. "Human nature is probably averse to it," he said in a low voice. "All we really know is that we feel a painful need for it! Perhaps it's connected with the need for sibling love, an addition to ordinary love, moving in an imaginary direction toward a love un- mixed with otherness and not-loving. " And after a pause he added: "You know how popular those babes-in-the-wood games are in bed: people who could murder their real siblings fool around as brother- and-sister babies under the same blanket. "
In the dim light his face twitched in self-mockery. But Agathe put her trust in his face and not in his confused words. She had seen faces quivering like this a moment before they plunged; this one did not come nearer; it seemed to be moving at infinitely great speed over an immense distance. Tersely she answered: "Being brother and sister isn't really enough, that's all. "
'Well, we've already spoken of being twins," Ulrich responded, getting noiselessly to his feet, because he thought that she was finally being overwhelmed by fatigue.
'We'd have to be Siamese twins," Agathe managed to say.
"Right, Siamese twins! " her brother echoed, gently disengaging her hand from his and carefully placing it on the coverlet. His words had a weightless sound, light and volatile, expanding in widening cir- cles even after he had left the room.
Agathe smiled and gradually sank into a lonely sadness, whose darkness imperceptibly turned into that of sleep. Ulrich meanwhile
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tiptoed into his study and stayed there, unable to work, for another two hours, until he, too, grew tired, learning for the first time what it was like to be cramped out of considerateness. He was amazed at how much he would have wanted to do during this time that would involve making noise and so had to be suppressed. This was new for him. And it almost irritated him a little, although he did his best to imagine sympathetically what it would be like to be really physically attached to another person. He knew hardly anything about how such nervous systems worked in tandem, like two leaves on a single stalk, united not only through a single bloodstream but still more by the effect oftheir total interdependence. He assumed that every agi- tation in one soul would also be felt by the other, even though what- ever evoked it was going on in a body that was not, in the main, one's own. "An embrace, for instance-you are embraced by way of the other body," he thought. "You may not even want it, but your other self floods you with an ovezwhelming wave of acceptance! What do you care who's kissing your sister? But her excitement is something you must love jointly. Or suppose it's you who are making love, and you have to flnd a way to 'ensure' her participation; you can't just let her be flooded with senseless physiological processes . . . ! " Ulrich felt a strong arousal and a great uneasiness at this idea; it was hard for him to draw the line between a new way oflooking at something and a distortion of the ordinary way.
SPRING IN THE VEGETABLE GARDEN
The praise Meingast bestowed on her and the new ideas she was get- ting from him had deeply impressed Clarisse.
Her mental unrest and excitability, which sometimes worried even her, had eased, but they did not give way this time, as they so often did, to dejection, frustration, and hopelessness; they were succeeded
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instead by an extraordinary taut lucidity and a transparent inner at- mosphere. Once again she took stock of herself and arrived at a criti- cal estimate. Without questioning it, and even with a certain satisfaction, she noted that she was not overly bright; she had not been educated enough. Ulrich, on the other hand, whenever she thought of him by comparison, was like a skater gliding to and fro at will on a surface of intellectual ice. There was no telling where it came from when he said something, or when he laughed, when he was irritable, when his eyes flashed, when he was there and with his broad shoulders preempting Walter's space in the room. Even when he merely turned his head in curiosity, the sinews of his neck taut- ened like the rigging of a sailboat taking off with the wind into the blue. There was always more to him than she could grasp, which acted as a spur to her desire to fling herself on him bodily to catch hold ofit. But the tumult in which this sometimes happened, so that once nothing in the world had mattered except that she wanted to bear Ulrich's child, had now receded far into the distance, leaving behind not even that flotsam and jetsam that incomprehensibly keeps bobbing up in the memory after the tide of passion has ebbed. When she thought ofher failure at Ulrich's house, insofar as she ever still did, Clarisse felt cross, at most, but her self-confidence was hale and hearty thanks to the new ideas supplied by her philosophic guest, not to mention the sheer excitement of again seeing this old friend who had been transported into the sublime. Thus many days passed in all kinds of suspense while everyone in the little house, now bathed in spring sunshine, waited to see whether Ulrich would or would not bring the permit to visit Moosbrugger in his eerie domicile.
There was one idea in particular that seemed important to Clarisse in this connection: The Master had called the world "so thoroughly stripped of illusions" that people could no longer say about anything whether they ought to love it or hate it. Since then Clarisse felt that one was obliged to surrender oneselfto an illusion ifone received the grace of having one. For an illusion is a mercy. How was anyone at that time to know whether to tum right or left on leaving the house, unless he had a job, like Walter, which then cramped him, or, like herself, had a visit to pay to her parents or brothers and sisters, who bored her! It's different in an illusion! There life is arranged as effi-
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ciently as a modem kitchen: you sit in the middle and hardly need stir to set all the gadgets going. That had always been Clarisse's sort of thing. Besides, she understood "illusion" to mean nothing other than what was called "the will," only with added intensity. Up to now Clarisse had felt intimidated by being able to understand so little of what was going on in the world. But since Meingast's return she saw this as a veritable advantage that freed her to love, hate, and act as she pleased. For according to the Master's word mankind needed nothing so much as willpower, and when it came to wanting some- thing with a will, Clarisse had always had that inner power! When Clarisse thought about it she was chilled with joy and hot with re- sponsibility. Of course, what was meant by will here was not the grim effort it took to learn a piano piece or win an argument; it meant being powerfully steered by life itself, being deeply moved within oneself, being swept away with happiness!
Eventually she could not help telling Walter something about it. She informed him that her conscience was growing stronger day by day. But despite his admiration for Meingast, the suspected instiga- tor of this deed, Walter answered angrily: "It's probably lucky for us that Ulrich doesn't seem able to get the permit! "
Clarisse's lips merely quivered slightly, betraying sympathy for his ignorance and stubbornness.
"What is it you want from this criminal, anyway, who has nothing whatever to do with any of us? " Walter demanded manfully.
"It'll come to me when I get there! " she said.
"I should think you ought to know it already," Walter asserted. His little wife smiled the way she always did when she was about to
hurt him to the quick. But then she merely said: ''I'm going to do something. "
"Clarisse! " Walter remonstrated firmly. "You may not do anything without my permission. I am your lawful husband and guardian. "
This tone was new to her. She turned away and took a few steps in confusion.
"Clarisse! " Walter called after her, getting up to follow her. "I in- tend to take steps to deal with the insanity that's going around in this house! "
Now she realized that the healing power ofher resolve was already
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manifesting itself, even in the strengthening of Walter's character. She turned on her heel: "What steps? " she asked, and a flash oflight- ning from her narrowed eyes struck into the moist, wide-open brown ofhis.
"Now look," he said to mollify her, backing away a little, in sur- prise at her demanding such a concrete response. 'We've all got this in our system, this intellectual taste for the unhealthy, the prob- lematic, for making our flesh creep; every thinking person has it; but-"
"But we let the philistines have their way! " Clarisse interrupted triumphantly. Now she advanced on him without taking her eyes off him; felt how a sense ofher own healing power held him in its strong embrace and overpowered him. Her heart was filled with an odd and inexpressible joy.
"But we won't make such a to-do over it," Walter muttered sulkily, finishing his sentence. Behind him, at the hem of his jacket, he felt an obstacle; reaching backward, he identified it as the edge of one of those light, thin-legged little tables they had, which suddenly seemed spooky to him; he realized that if he kept backing away he would make it slide backward, which would be ludicrous. So he resisted the sudden desire to get far away from this struggle, to some dark-green meadow under blossoming fruit trees, among people whose healthy cheerfulness would wash his wounds clean. It was a quiet, stout wish, graced with women hanging on his words and paying their toll of grateful admiration. At the moment Clarisse came up close he actu- ally felt rudely molested, in a nightmarish way. But to his surprise Clarisse did not say: ''You're a coward! " Instead, she said: 'Walter? Why are we unhappy? "
At the sound ofher appealing, clairvoyant voice he felt that happi- ness with any other woman could never take the place of his unhap- piness with Clarisse. 'W e have to be! " he answered with an equally noble upsurge.
"No, we shouldn't have to be," she said obligingly. She let her head droop to one side, trying to find a way to convince him. It didn't matter what it was: They stood there facing each other like a day without an evening, pouring out its fire hour after hour without lessening.
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"You'll have to admit," she said finally, at once shyly and stub- bornly, "that really great crimes come about not because somebody commits them but because we let them happen. "
Now Walter knew, ofcourse, what was coming, and felt a shock of disappointment.
"Oh God! " he cried out impatiently. "I know as well as you do that far more people's lives are ruined by indifference and by the ease with which most of us today can square our conscience than by the evil intentions of isolated individuals. And of course it's admirable that you're now going to say that this is why we must all quicken our conscience and carefully weigh in advance every step we take. "
Clarisse interrupted him by opening her mouth, but thought bet- ter of it and did not respond.
"Of course I think about poverty too, and hunger, and all the cor- ruption that's allowed to go on in this world, or mines caving in be- cause the management economized on safety measures," Walter went on in a deflated tone, "and I've agreed with you about it al- ready. "
"But in that case two lovers mustn't love each other either, as long as they're not in a state of 'pure happiness,' " Clarisse said. "And the world will never improve until there are such lovers! "
Walter struck his hands together. "Don't you understand how un- fair to life such great, dazzling, uncompromising demands are? " he exclaimed. "And it's the same with this Moosbrugger, who keeps popping into your head like something on a turntable. Of course you're right to claim that no stone should be left untumed as long as such miserable human creatures are simply killed off because society doesn't know what to do with them. But of course it's even more right that the healthy, normal conscience is justified in simply refus- ing to bother with such overrefined scruples. A healthy way of think- ing is recognizable, in fact, by certain signs; one can't prove it but has to have it in one's blood. "
"In your blood," Clarisse replied," 'of course' always means 'of course not. ' "
Nettled, Walter shook his head to show that he would not answer this. He was fed up with always being the one to warn that a diet of one-sided ideas was unhealthy; in the long run, it was probably also making him unsure of himself.
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But Clarisse read his thoughts with that nervous sensitivity that never failed to amaze him. With her head high, she jumped over all the intermediate stages and landed on his main point with the sub- dued but intense question: "Can you imagine Jesus as boss of a coal mine? '' He could see in her face that by "Jesus" she really meant him, through one of those exaggerations in which love is indistin- guishable from madness. He waved this off with a gesture at once indignant and discouraged. "Not so direct, Clarisse! " he pleaded. "Such things mustn't be said so directly! "
"Yes, they must," she answered. "It's the only way! If we don't have the strength to save him, we will never have the strength to save ourselves! "
"And what difference will it make if they do string him up? " Wal- ter burst out. The brutality of it made him believe he felt the liberat- ing taste of life itself on his tongue, gloriously blended with the taste of death and the doom of their entanglement with it that Clarisse was conjuring up with her hints.
Clarisse looked at him expectantly. But Walter said nothing more, either from relief after his outburst or from indecision. And like someone forced to play an unbeatable final trump card, she said: ''I've had a sign! "
"But that's just one ofyour fantasies! " Walter shouted at the ceil- ing, which represented heaven. But with those last airy words Cla- risse had ended their tete-a-tete, giving him no chance to say anything more.
Yet he saw her only a short while later talking eagerly with Mein- gast, who was rightly troubled by a feeling that they were being watched but was too nearsighted to be sure of it. Walter was not re- ally participating in the gardening being done so zestfully by his visit- ing brother-in-law, Siegmund, who with rolled-up shirtsleeves was kneeling in a furrow doing something or other that Walter had in- sisted must be done in the spring if one wanted to be a human being and not a bookmark in the pages of a gardening book. Instead of gar- dening, Walter was sneaking glances at the pair talking in the far cor- ner of the open kitchen garden.
Not that he suspected anything untoward in the corner he was ob- serving. Still, his hands felt unnaturally cold in the spring air; his legs were cold too, what with the wet places on his trousers from occa-
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sionally kneeling to give Siegmund instructions. He took a high tone with his brother-in-law, the way weak, downtrodden people will whenever they get a chance to work off their frustrations on some- one. He knew that Siegmund, who had taken it into his head to re- vere Walter, would not be easily shaken in his loyalty. But this did not prevent him from feeling a veritable after-sunset loneliness, a graveyard chill, as he watched Clarisse; she never cast a glance in his direction but was all eyes for Meingast, hanging on the Master's words. Moreover, Walter actually took a certain pride in this. Ever since Meingast had come to stay in his house, he was just as proud of the chasms that suddenly opened up in it as he was anxious to cover them up again. From his standing height he had dispatched to the kneeling Siegmund the words: "Ofcourse we all feel and are familiar with a certain hankering for the morbid and problematic! " He was no sneaking coward. In the short time since Clarisse had called him a philistine for saying the same thing to her, he had formulated a new phrase: "life's petty dishonesty. "
"A little dishonesty is good, like sweet or sour," he now instructed his brother-in-law, "but we are obligated to refine it in ourselves to the point where it would do credit to a healthy life! What I mean by a little dishonesty," he went on, "is as much the nostalgic flirting with death that seizes us when we listen to Tristan as the secret fascina- tion that's in most sex crimes, even though we don't succumb to it. For there's something dishonest and antihuman, you see, both in ele- mental life when it overpowers us with want and disease, and in exag- gerated scruples of mind and conscience trying to do violence to life. Everything that tries to overstep the limits set for us is dishonest! Mysticism is just as dishonest as the conceit that nature can be re- duced to a mathematical formula! And the plan to visit Moosbrugger is just as dishonest as"-here Walter paused for a moment-"as if you were to invoke God at a patient's bedside! "
There was certainly something in what he had said, and he had even managed to take Siegmund by surprise with his appeal to the physician's professional and spontaneous humanitarianism, to make him see Clarisse's scheme and her overwrought motivation as an im- permissible overstepping of bounds. However, Walter was a genius compared with Siegmund, as may be seen in Walter's healthy out- look having led him to confess such ideas as these, while his brother-
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in-law's even healthier outlook manifested itself in his dogged si- lence in the face of such dubious subject matter. Siegmund patted the soil with his fingers while tilting his head now to one side, now to the other, without opening his lips, as ifhe were trying to pour some- thing out of a test tube, or then again, as if he had just heard enough with that ear. And when Walter had finished there was a fearfully profound silence, in which Walter now heard a statement that Cla- risse must have called out to him once, for without being as vivid as a hallucination, it was as if the hollow space were punctuated by these words: "Nietzsche and Christ both perished of their incomplete- ness! " Somehow, in some uncanny fashion reminiscent of the "coal mine boss," he felt flattered. It was a strange position that he, health personified, should be standing here in the cool garden between a man he regarded condescendingly and two unnaturally overheated people just out of earshot, whose mute gesticulations he watched with a superior air and yet with longing. For Clarisse was the slightly dishonest element his own health needed to keep from flagging, and a secret voice told him that Meingast was at this very moment en- gaged in immeasurably increasing the permissible limits of this dis- honesty. He admired Meingast as an obscure relation admires a famous one, and seeing Clarisse whispering conspiratorially with him aroused his envy more than his jealousy-a feeling, that is, that ate into him even more deeply than jealousy would have, and yet it was also somehow uplifting; the consciousness of his own dignity forbade him to get angry or to go over there and disturb them; in view oftheir agitation he felt himself superior, and from all this arose, he did not know how, some vague, mongrel notion, spawned outside all logic, that the two of them over there were in some reckless and reprehen- sible fashion invoking God.
If such a curiously mixed state of mind must be called thinking, it was of a kind that cannot possibly be put into words, because the chemistry of its darkness is instantly ruined by the luminous influ- ence of language. Besides, as his remark to Siegmund had shown, Walter did not associate belief of any sort with the word "God," and when the word occurred to him it generated an abashed void around itself. And so it happened that the first thing Walter said to his brother-in-law, after a long silence, had nothing to do with this. ''You're an idiot to think you have no right to talk her out of this visit
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in the strongest possible terms," he said bitterly. "What are you a doctor for? "
Siegmund wasn't in the least offended. "You're the one who will have to have it out with her," he replied, glancing up calmly before turning back to what he was doing.
Walter sighed, then started over again. "Clarisse is an extraordi- nary person, of course. I can understand her very well. I'll even admit that she's not all wrong to be as austere in her views as she is. Just thinking ofthe poverty, hunger, misery ofevery kind the world is so full of, the disasters in coal mines, for instance, because the man- agement wouldn't spend enough on timbering . . . "
Siegmund gave no sign that he was giving it any thought.
'Well, she does! " Walter continued sternly. "And I think it's won- derful of her. The rest of us get ourselves a good conscience much too easily. And she's better than we are for insisting that we all ought to change and have a more active conscience, the kind with no limit to it, ever. But what I'm asking you is whether this isn't bound to lead to a pathological state of moral scrupulousness, if it isn't something like that already. You must have an opinion! "
Siegmund responded to this pressing challenge by propping him- self up on one knee and giving his brother-in-law a searching look. "Crazy! " he said. "But not, strictly speaking, in a medical sense. "
"And what do you say," Walter continued, forgetting his superior stance, "to her claim that she's being sent signs? "
"She says she's being sent signs?
"Oh? Would you really? How nice ofyou! "
"They're such absurd parasites. Women share a man's life on the same level as his dog! " There was no hint of moral indignation in Agathe's statement. She was pleasantly tired and kept her eyes closed, for she had gone to bed early and Ulrich, who had come to say good night, saw her lying in his place in his bed. But it was also the bed in which Bonadea had lain thirty-six hours earlier, which was probably why Ulrich reverted to the subject of his mistresses.
"All I was trying to describe was my own incapacity for a reason- ably forgiving relationship to myself," he repeated, smiling. "For me to take a real interest in something it must be part of some context, it must be controlled by an idea. The experience itself I'd really prefer to have behind me, as a memory; the emotional effort it exacts strikes me as unpleasant and absurdly beside the point. That's how it is with me, to describe myself to you bluntly. Now, the simplest, most in- stinctive idea one can have, at least when one is young, is that one's a hell of a fellow, the new man the world's been waiting for. But that
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doesn't last beyond thirty! " He reflected for a moment and then said: "That's not it. It's so hard to talk about oneself. What I would have to say is that I have never subjected myself to an idea with staying power. One never turned up. One should love an idea like a woman; be oveijoyed to get back to it. And one always has it inside oneself! And always looks for it in everything outside! I never formed such ideas. My relationship to the so-called great ideas, and perhaps even to those that really are great, has always been man-to-man: I never felt I was born to submit to them; they always provoked me to over- throw them and put others in their place. Perhaps it was precisely this jealousy that drove me to science, whose laws are established by teamwork and never regarded as immutable! " Again he paused and laughed, at either himself or his argument. "But however that may be," he went on seriously, "by connecting no idea or every idea with myself, I got out ofthe habit oftaking life seriously. I get much more out of it when I read about it in a novel, where it's wrapped up in some point of view, but when I'm supposed to experience it in all its fullness it always seems already obsolete, overdone in an old-fash- ioned way, and intellectually outdated. And I don't think that's pecu- liar to me. Most people today feel much the same. Lots of people feign an urgent love of life, the way schoolchildren are taught to hop about merrily among the daisies, but there's always a certain pre- meditation about it, and they feel it. Actually, they're as capable of killing each other in cold blood as they are of being the best of friends. Our time certainly does not take all the adventures and go- ings-on it's full of at all seriously. When they happen, there's a fuss. They immediately set off more happenings, a kind of vendetta of happenings, a whole compulsive alphabet of sequels, from B to Z, and all because someone said A. But these happenings in our lives have less life than a book, because they have no coherent meaning. "
So Ulrich talked, loosely, his moods changing. Agathe offered no response; she still had her eyes closed but was smiling.
Ulrich said: "Now I've forgotten what I'm telling you. I don't think I know my way back to the beginning. "
They were silent for a while. He was able to scrutinize his sister's face at leisure, since it was not defended by the gaze of her eyes. It lay there, a piece of naked body, the way women are when they're together in a women's public bath. The feminine, unguarded, natural
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cynicism of this sight, not intended for men's eyes, still had an unusual effect on Ulrich, though no longer quite as powerful as in their first days together, when Agathe had from the start claimed her right as a sister to talk to him without any mental beating around the bush, since for her he was not a man like others. He remembered the mixture of surprise and horror he had experienced as a boy when he saw a pregnant woman on the street, or a woman nursing her child; secrets from which the boy had been carefully shielded suddenly bulged out full-blown and unembarrassed in the light of day. Per- haps he had long been carrying vestiges of such reactions about with him, for all at once he seemed to feel entirely free of them. That Agathe was a woman with many experiences behind her was a pleas- ant and comfortable thought; there was no need to be on his guard in talking with her, as he would be with a young girl; indeed, it was touchingly natural that everything was morally relaxed with a mature woman. It also made him feel protective toward her, to make up to her for something by being good to her in some way. He decided to do all he could for her. He even decided to look for another husband for her. This need to be kind restored to him, although he barely noticed, the lost thread of his discourse.
"Our self-love probably undergoes a change during adolescence," he said without transition. "That's when a whole meadow of tender- ness in which one had been playing gets mowed down to provide the fodder for one particular instinct. "
"So that the cow can give milk! " Agathe added, after the slightest pause, pertly and with dignity but without opening her eyes.
"Yes, it's all connected, I suppose," Ulrich agreed, and went on: "So there's a moment when the tenderness goes out of our lives and concentrates on that one particular operation, which then remains overcharged with it. It's as though there were a terrible drought ev- erywhere on earth except for one place where it never stops raining, don't you think? "
Agathe said: "I think that as a child I loved my dolls more fiercely than I have ever loved a man. After you'd gone I found a whole trunkful of my old dolls in the attic. "
"What did you do with them? " Ulrich asked. "Did you give them away? "
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"Who was there to give them to? I gave them a funeral in the kitchen stove," she said.
Ulrich responded with animation: "When I remember as far back as I can, I'd say that there was hardly any separation between inside and outside. When I crawled toward something, it came on wings to meet me; when something important happened, the excitement was not just in us, but the things themselves came to a boil. I won't claim that we were happier then than we were later on. After all, we hadn't yet taken charge of ourselves. In fact, we didn't really yet exist; our personal condition was not yet separated from the world's. It sounds strange, but it's true: our feelings, our desires, our very selves, were not yet quite inside ourselves. What's even stranger is that I might as easily say: they were not yet quite taken away from us. I f you should sometime happen to ask yourself today, when you think you're en- tirely in possession of yourself, who you really are, you will discover that you always see yourself from the outside, as an object. You'll no- tice that one time you get angry, another time you get sad, just as your coat will sometimes be wet and sometimes too warm. No matter how intensely you try to look at yourself, you may at most find out something about the outside, but you'll never get inside yourself. Whatever you do, you remain outside yourself, with the possible ex- ception of those rare moments when a friend might say that you're beside yourself. It's true that as adults we've made up for this by being able to think at any time that 'I am'-if you think that's fun. You see a car, and somehow in a shadowy way you also see: 'I am seeing a car. ' You're in love, or sad, and see that it's you. But neither the car, nor your sadness, nor your love, nor even yourself, is quite fully there. Nothing is as completely there as it once was in child- hood; everything you touch, including your inmost self, is more or less congealed from the moment you have achieved your 'personal- ity,' and what's left is a ghostly hanging thread of self-awareness and murky self-regard, wrapped up in a wholly external existence. What's gone wrong? There's a feeling that something might still be salvaged. Surely you can't claim that a child's experience is all that different from a man's? I don't know any real answer, even if there may be this or that idea about it. But for a long time I've responded by having lost my love for this kind of 'being myself' and for this kind of world. "
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Ulrich was glad that Agathe listened to him without interrupting, for he was not expecting an answer from her any more than he was from himself, and was convinced that for the present, nobody could give him the kind of answer he had in mind. Yet he did not fear for an instant that anything he was talking about might be above her head. He did not see it as philosophizing, nor even as an unusual subject for a conversation, any more than a young man-and he was behav- ing like one, in this situation-will let the difficulty of groping for the right words keep him from finding everything simple when he is ex- changing views on the eternal problems of "Who are you? This is who I am" with someone else. He derived the assurance that his sis- ter was able to follow him word for word not from having reflected on it but from her inner being. His eyes rested on her face, and there was something in it that made him happy. This face, its eyes closed, did not thrust back at him. The attraction it held for him was bottom- less, even in the sense that it seemed to draw him into never-ending depths. Submerging himself in contemplation of this face, he no- where found that muddy bottom of dissolved resistances from which the diver into love kicks off, to rebound to the surface and reach dry ground again. But since he was accustomed to experience every incli- nation toward a woman as a forcibly reversed disinclination against human beings, which-even though he found it regrettable-did offer some guarantee against losing himself in her, the pure inclina- tion as he bent even deeper toward her in curiosity alarmed him al- most as ifhe were losing his balance, so that he soon drew back from this state, and from pure happiness took refuge in a boy's trick for recalling Agathe to everyday reality: with the most delicate touch he could manage, he tried to open her eyes. Agathe opened them wide with a laugh and cried: "Isn't this pretty rough treatment for some- one who's supposed to be your self-love? "
This response was as boyish as his attack, and their looks collided hard, like two little boys who want to tussle but are laughing too much to begin. Suddenly Agathe dropped this and asked seriously: "You know that myth Plato tells, following some ancient source, that the gods divided the original human being into two halves, male and female? " She had propped herself up on one elbow and unexpect- edly blushed, feeling awkward at having asked Ulrich if he knew so familiar a story; then she resolutely charged ahead: "Now those two
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pathetic halves do all kinds of silly things to come together again. It's in all the schoolbooks for older children; unfortunately, they never tell you why it doesn't work! "
"I can tell you that," Ulrich broke in, glad to see how well she had understood him. "Nobody knows which of so many halves running around in the world is his missing half. He grabs one that seems to be his, vainly trying to become one with her, until the futility of it be- comes hopelessly clear. If a child results, both halves believe for a few youthful years that they've at least become one in the child. But the child is merely a third half, which soon shows signs of trying to get as far away from the other two as it possibly can and look for a fourth half. In this way human beings keep 'halving' themselves physiologically, while the ideal ofoneness remains as far away as the moon outside the bedroom window. "
"You'd think that siblings might have succeeded halfway already! " Agathe interjected in a voice that had become husky.
"Twins, possibly. "
"Aren't we twins? "
"Certainly! " Ulrich suddenly became evasive. "Twins are rare;
twins of different gender especially so. But when, into the bargain, they differ in age and have hardly known each other for the longest time, it's quite a phenomenon-one really worthy of us! " he de- clared, struggling to get back into a shallower cheeriness.
"But we met as twins! " Agathe challenged him, ignoring his tone. "Because we unwittingly dressed alike? "
"Maybe. And in all sorts of ways! You may say it was chance; but
what is chance? I think it's fate or destiny or providence, or whatever you want to call it. Haven't you ever thought it was by chance that you were hom as yourself? Our being brother and sister doubles that chance! " That was how Agathe put it, and Ulrich submitted to this wisdom.
"So we declare ourselves to be twins," he agreed. "Symmetrical creatures of a whim of nature, henceforth we shall be the same age, the same height, with the same hair, walking the highways and by- ways of the world in identical striped clothes with the same bow tied under our chins. But I warn you that people will tum around and look after us, half touched and half scornful, as always happens when something reminds them of the mysteries of their own beginnings. "
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"Why can't we dress for contrast? " Agathe said lightly. "One in yellow when the other is in blue, or red alongside green, and we can dye our hair violet or purple, and I can affect a hump and you a paunch: yet we'd still be twins! "
But the joke had gone stale, the pretext worn out, and they fell silent for a while.
"Do you realize," Ulrich then said suddenly, "that this is some- thing very serious we're talking about? ''
No sooner had he said this than his sister again dropped the fan of her lashes over her eyes and, veiling her consent, let him talk alone. Or perhaps it only looked as if she had shut her eyes. The room was dark; what light there was did not so much clarify out- lines as pour over them in bright patches. Ulrich had said: "It's not only the myth of the human being divided in two; we could also mention Pygmalion, the Hermaphrodite, or Isis and Osiris-all dif- ferent forms of the same theme. It's the ancient longing for a dop- pelganger of the opposite sex, for a lover who will be the same as yourself and yet someone else, a magical figure that is oneself and yet remains magical, with the advantage over something we merely imagine of having the breath of autonomy and independence. This dream of a quintessential love, unhampered by the body's limita- tions, coming face-to-face in two identical yet different forms, has been concocted countless times in solitary alchemy in the alembic ofthe human skull. . . . "
Here he broke off; evidently something disturbing had occurred to him, and he ended with the almost unfriendly words: "There are traces of this in even the most commonplace situations of love: the charm of every change of clothing, every disguise, the meaning two people find in what they have in common, the way they see them- selves repeated in the other. This little magic is always the same, whether one's seeing an elegant lady naked for the first time or a naked girl formally dressed for the first time in a dress buttoned up to the neck, and great reckless passions all have something to do with the fact that everyone thinks it's his own secret self peering out at him from behind the curtains of a stranger's eyes. ··
It sounded as though he were asking her not to attach too much importance to what they were saying. But Agathe was again thinking
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of the lightning flash of surprise she had felt when they first met, disguised, as it were, in their lounging suits. And she answered:
"So this has been going on for thousands ofyears. Is it any easier to understand as a case of shared self-delusion? "
Ulrich was silent.
And after a while, Agathe said delightedly: "But it does happen in one's sleep! There you do sometimes see yourself transformed into something else. Or meet yourself as a man. And then you're much kinder to him than you are to yourself. You'll probably say that these are sexual dreams, but I think they are much older. "
"Do you often have that sort of dream? " Ulrich asked. "Sometimes. Not often. "
"I almost never do," he confessed. "It must be ages since I had
such a dream. "
"And yet you once explained to me," Agathe now said, " - i t must
have been at the very beginning, back in our old house-that people really did experience life differently thousands of years ago. "
"Oh, you mean the 'giving' and the 'receiving' vision? " Ulrich re- plied, smiling at her although she could not see him. "The 'embrac- ing' and 'being embraced' of the spirit? Yes, of course I should have talked about this mysterious dual sexuality of the soul too. And how much else besides! There's a hint of it wherever you look. Every anal- ogy contains a remnant of that magic of being identical and not iden- tical. But haven't you noticed? In all these cases we've been talking about, in dream, in myth, poem, childhood, even in love, feeling more comes at the cost of understanding less, and that means: through a loss of reality. "
"Then you don't really believe in it? " Agathe asked.
Ulrich did not answer. But after a while he said: "Translated into the ghastlyjargon ofour times, we could call this faculty we all lack to such a frightening degree nowadays 'the percentual share' of an indi- vidual's experiences and actions. In dreams it's apparently a hundred percent, in our waking life not even half as much. You noticed it today at once in my house; but it's exactly the same with my relations to the people you'll meet. I also once called it-if I'm not mistaken, in conversation with a woman where it was truly relevant, I must admit-the acoustics of the void. If a pin drops in an empty room,
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the sound it makes is somehow disproportionate, even incommen- surable; but it's the same when there's a void between people. There's no way to tell: is one screaming, or is there a deathly silence? For everything out of place and askew acquires the magnetic attrac- tion of a tremendous temptation when there's nothing with which to counteract it. Don't you agree? . . . But I'm sorry," he interrupted himself, "you must be tired, and I'm not letting you have your rest. It seems there are many things in my surroundings and my social life that won't be much to your liking, I'm afraid. "
Agathe had opened her eyes. After coming out of hiding at last, her glance contained something uncommonly hard to define, which Ulrich felt coursing sympathetically through his whole body. He sud- denly started to talk again: "When I was younger I tried to see just that as a source of strength. And if one doesn't have anything to pit against life? Fine, then life flees from man into his works! That's more or less what I thought. And I suppose there's something daunt- ing about the lovelessness and irresponsibility of today's world. At the very least there's something in it of adolescence, which centuries can go through as well as teenagers, years of rapid, uneven growth. And like every young man I began by plunging into work, adven- tures, amusements; what difference did it make what one did, as long as one did it wholeheartedly? Do you remember that we once spoke of 'the morality of achievement'? We're born with that image, and orient ourselves by it. But the older one gets, the more clearly one finds out that this apparent exuberance, this independence and mo- bility in everything, this sovereignty of the driving parts and the par- tial drives-both your own against yourself and yours against the world-in short, everything that we 'people of the present' have regarded as a strength and a special distinction of our species, is basically nothing but a weakness of the whole as against its parts.
Passion and willpower can do nothing about it. The moment you're ready to go all out into the middle of something, you find your- self washed back to the periphery. Today this is the experience in all experiences! "
Agathe, with her eyes now open, was waiting for something to hap- pen in his voice; when nothing changed and her brother's words sim- ply came to an end like a path turning off a road into a dead end, she said: "So your experience tells you that one can never really act with
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conviction and will never be able to. By conviction," she explained, "I don't mean whatever knowledge or moral training have been drilled into us, but simply feeling entirely at home with oneself and with everything, feeling replete now where there's emptiness, something one starts out from and returns to-" She broke off. "Oh, I don't really know what I mean! I was hoping you'd explain it to me. "
"You mean just what we were talking about," Ulrich answered gently. "And you're also the only person I can talk to about these things. But there'd be no point in starting over just to add a few more seductive words. I'd have to say, rather, that being 'at the inner core' ofthings, in a state ofunmarred 'inwardness'-using the word not in any sentimental sense but with the meaning we just gave it-is ap- parently not a demand that can be satisfied by rational thinking. " He had leaned forward and was touching her arm and gazing steadily into her eyes. "Human nature is probably averse to it," he said in a low voice. "All we really know is that we feel a painful need for it! Perhaps it's connected with the need for sibling love, an addition to ordinary love, moving in an imaginary direction toward a love un- mixed with otherness and not-loving. " And after a pause he added: "You know how popular those babes-in-the-wood games are in bed: people who could murder their real siblings fool around as brother- and-sister babies under the same blanket. "
In the dim light his face twitched in self-mockery. But Agathe put her trust in his face and not in his confused words. She had seen faces quivering like this a moment before they plunged; this one did not come nearer; it seemed to be moving at infinitely great speed over an immense distance. Tersely she answered: "Being brother and sister isn't really enough, that's all. "
'Well, we've already spoken of being twins," Ulrich responded, getting noiselessly to his feet, because he thought that she was finally being overwhelmed by fatigue.
'We'd have to be Siamese twins," Agathe managed to say.
"Right, Siamese twins! " her brother echoed, gently disengaging her hand from his and carefully placing it on the coverlet. His words had a weightless sound, light and volatile, expanding in widening cir- cles even after he had left the room.
Agathe smiled and gradually sank into a lonely sadness, whose darkness imperceptibly turned into that of sleep. Ulrich meanwhile
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tiptoed into his study and stayed there, unable to work, for another two hours, until he, too, grew tired, learning for the first time what it was like to be cramped out of considerateness. He was amazed at how much he would have wanted to do during this time that would involve making noise and so had to be suppressed. This was new for him. And it almost irritated him a little, although he did his best to imagine sympathetically what it would be like to be really physically attached to another person. He knew hardly anything about how such nervous systems worked in tandem, like two leaves on a single stalk, united not only through a single bloodstream but still more by the effect oftheir total interdependence. He assumed that every agi- tation in one soul would also be felt by the other, even though what- ever evoked it was going on in a body that was not, in the main, one's own. "An embrace, for instance-you are embraced by way of the other body," he thought. "You may not even want it, but your other self floods you with an ovezwhelming wave of acceptance! What do you care who's kissing your sister? But her excitement is something you must love jointly. Or suppose it's you who are making love, and you have to flnd a way to 'ensure' her participation; you can't just let her be flooded with senseless physiological processes . . . ! " Ulrich felt a strong arousal and a great uneasiness at this idea; it was hard for him to draw the line between a new way oflooking at something and a distortion of the ordinary way.
SPRING IN THE VEGETABLE GARDEN
The praise Meingast bestowed on her and the new ideas she was get- ting from him had deeply impressed Clarisse.
Her mental unrest and excitability, which sometimes worried even her, had eased, but they did not give way this time, as they so often did, to dejection, frustration, and hopelessness; they were succeeded
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instead by an extraordinary taut lucidity and a transparent inner at- mosphere. Once again she took stock of herself and arrived at a criti- cal estimate. Without questioning it, and even with a certain satisfaction, she noted that she was not overly bright; she had not been educated enough. Ulrich, on the other hand, whenever she thought of him by comparison, was like a skater gliding to and fro at will on a surface of intellectual ice. There was no telling where it came from when he said something, or when he laughed, when he was irritable, when his eyes flashed, when he was there and with his broad shoulders preempting Walter's space in the room. Even when he merely turned his head in curiosity, the sinews of his neck taut- ened like the rigging of a sailboat taking off with the wind into the blue. There was always more to him than she could grasp, which acted as a spur to her desire to fling herself on him bodily to catch hold ofit. But the tumult in which this sometimes happened, so that once nothing in the world had mattered except that she wanted to bear Ulrich's child, had now receded far into the distance, leaving behind not even that flotsam and jetsam that incomprehensibly keeps bobbing up in the memory after the tide of passion has ebbed. When she thought ofher failure at Ulrich's house, insofar as she ever still did, Clarisse felt cross, at most, but her self-confidence was hale and hearty thanks to the new ideas supplied by her philosophic guest, not to mention the sheer excitement of again seeing this old friend who had been transported into the sublime. Thus many days passed in all kinds of suspense while everyone in the little house, now bathed in spring sunshine, waited to see whether Ulrich would or would not bring the permit to visit Moosbrugger in his eerie domicile.
There was one idea in particular that seemed important to Clarisse in this connection: The Master had called the world "so thoroughly stripped of illusions" that people could no longer say about anything whether they ought to love it or hate it. Since then Clarisse felt that one was obliged to surrender oneselfto an illusion ifone received the grace of having one. For an illusion is a mercy. How was anyone at that time to know whether to tum right or left on leaving the house, unless he had a job, like Walter, which then cramped him, or, like herself, had a visit to pay to her parents or brothers and sisters, who bored her! It's different in an illusion! There life is arranged as effi-
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ciently as a modem kitchen: you sit in the middle and hardly need stir to set all the gadgets going. That had always been Clarisse's sort of thing. Besides, she understood "illusion" to mean nothing other than what was called "the will," only with added intensity. Up to now Clarisse had felt intimidated by being able to understand so little of what was going on in the world. But since Meingast's return she saw this as a veritable advantage that freed her to love, hate, and act as she pleased. For according to the Master's word mankind needed nothing so much as willpower, and when it came to wanting some- thing with a will, Clarisse had always had that inner power! When Clarisse thought about it she was chilled with joy and hot with re- sponsibility. Of course, what was meant by will here was not the grim effort it took to learn a piano piece or win an argument; it meant being powerfully steered by life itself, being deeply moved within oneself, being swept away with happiness!
Eventually she could not help telling Walter something about it. She informed him that her conscience was growing stronger day by day. But despite his admiration for Meingast, the suspected instiga- tor of this deed, Walter answered angrily: "It's probably lucky for us that Ulrich doesn't seem able to get the permit! "
Clarisse's lips merely quivered slightly, betraying sympathy for his ignorance and stubbornness.
"What is it you want from this criminal, anyway, who has nothing whatever to do with any of us? " Walter demanded manfully.
"It'll come to me when I get there! " she said.
"I should think you ought to know it already," Walter asserted. His little wife smiled the way she always did when she was about to
hurt him to the quick. But then she merely said: ''I'm going to do something. "
"Clarisse! " Walter remonstrated firmly. "You may not do anything without my permission. I am your lawful husband and guardian. "
This tone was new to her. She turned away and took a few steps in confusion.
"Clarisse! " Walter called after her, getting up to follow her. "I in- tend to take steps to deal with the insanity that's going around in this house! "
Now she realized that the healing power ofher resolve was already
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manifesting itself, even in the strengthening of Walter's character. She turned on her heel: "What steps? " she asked, and a flash oflight- ning from her narrowed eyes struck into the moist, wide-open brown ofhis.
"Now look," he said to mollify her, backing away a little, in sur- prise at her demanding such a concrete response. 'We've all got this in our system, this intellectual taste for the unhealthy, the prob- lematic, for making our flesh creep; every thinking person has it; but-"
"But we let the philistines have their way! " Clarisse interrupted triumphantly. Now she advanced on him without taking her eyes off him; felt how a sense ofher own healing power held him in its strong embrace and overpowered him. Her heart was filled with an odd and inexpressible joy.
"But we won't make such a to-do over it," Walter muttered sulkily, finishing his sentence. Behind him, at the hem of his jacket, he felt an obstacle; reaching backward, he identified it as the edge of one of those light, thin-legged little tables they had, which suddenly seemed spooky to him; he realized that if he kept backing away he would make it slide backward, which would be ludicrous. So he resisted the sudden desire to get far away from this struggle, to some dark-green meadow under blossoming fruit trees, among people whose healthy cheerfulness would wash his wounds clean. It was a quiet, stout wish, graced with women hanging on his words and paying their toll of grateful admiration. At the moment Clarisse came up close he actu- ally felt rudely molested, in a nightmarish way. But to his surprise Clarisse did not say: ''You're a coward! " Instead, she said: 'Walter? Why are we unhappy? "
At the sound ofher appealing, clairvoyant voice he felt that happi- ness with any other woman could never take the place of his unhap- piness with Clarisse. 'W e have to be! " he answered with an equally noble upsurge.
"No, we shouldn't have to be," she said obligingly. She let her head droop to one side, trying to find a way to convince him. It didn't matter what it was: They stood there facing each other like a day without an evening, pouring out its fire hour after hour without lessening.
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"You'll have to admit," she said finally, at once shyly and stub- bornly, "that really great crimes come about not because somebody commits them but because we let them happen. "
Now Walter knew, ofcourse, what was coming, and felt a shock of disappointment.
"Oh God! " he cried out impatiently. "I know as well as you do that far more people's lives are ruined by indifference and by the ease with which most of us today can square our conscience than by the evil intentions of isolated individuals. And of course it's admirable that you're now going to say that this is why we must all quicken our conscience and carefully weigh in advance every step we take. "
Clarisse interrupted him by opening her mouth, but thought bet- ter of it and did not respond.
"Of course I think about poverty too, and hunger, and all the cor- ruption that's allowed to go on in this world, or mines caving in be- cause the management economized on safety measures," Walter went on in a deflated tone, "and I've agreed with you about it al- ready. "
"But in that case two lovers mustn't love each other either, as long as they're not in a state of 'pure happiness,' " Clarisse said. "And the world will never improve until there are such lovers! "
Walter struck his hands together. "Don't you understand how un- fair to life such great, dazzling, uncompromising demands are? " he exclaimed. "And it's the same with this Moosbrugger, who keeps popping into your head like something on a turntable. Of course you're right to claim that no stone should be left untumed as long as such miserable human creatures are simply killed off because society doesn't know what to do with them. But of course it's even more right that the healthy, normal conscience is justified in simply refus- ing to bother with such overrefined scruples. A healthy way of think- ing is recognizable, in fact, by certain signs; one can't prove it but has to have it in one's blood. "
"In your blood," Clarisse replied," 'of course' always means 'of course not. ' "
Nettled, Walter shook his head to show that he would not answer this. He was fed up with always being the one to warn that a diet of one-sided ideas was unhealthy; in the long run, it was probably also making him unsure of himself.
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But Clarisse read his thoughts with that nervous sensitivity that never failed to amaze him. With her head high, she jumped over all the intermediate stages and landed on his main point with the sub- dued but intense question: "Can you imagine Jesus as boss of a coal mine? '' He could see in her face that by "Jesus" she really meant him, through one of those exaggerations in which love is indistin- guishable from madness. He waved this off with a gesture at once indignant and discouraged. "Not so direct, Clarisse! " he pleaded. "Such things mustn't be said so directly! "
"Yes, they must," she answered. "It's the only way! If we don't have the strength to save him, we will never have the strength to save ourselves! "
"And what difference will it make if they do string him up? " Wal- ter burst out. The brutality of it made him believe he felt the liberat- ing taste of life itself on his tongue, gloriously blended with the taste of death and the doom of their entanglement with it that Clarisse was conjuring up with her hints.
Clarisse looked at him expectantly. But Walter said nothing more, either from relief after his outburst or from indecision. And like someone forced to play an unbeatable final trump card, she said: ''I've had a sign! "
"But that's just one ofyour fantasies! " Walter shouted at the ceil- ing, which represented heaven. But with those last airy words Cla- risse had ended their tete-a-tete, giving him no chance to say anything more.
Yet he saw her only a short while later talking eagerly with Mein- gast, who was rightly troubled by a feeling that they were being watched but was too nearsighted to be sure of it. Walter was not re- ally participating in the gardening being done so zestfully by his visit- ing brother-in-law, Siegmund, who with rolled-up shirtsleeves was kneeling in a furrow doing something or other that Walter had in- sisted must be done in the spring if one wanted to be a human being and not a bookmark in the pages of a gardening book. Instead of gar- dening, Walter was sneaking glances at the pair talking in the far cor- ner of the open kitchen garden.
Not that he suspected anything untoward in the corner he was ob- serving. Still, his hands felt unnaturally cold in the spring air; his legs were cold too, what with the wet places on his trousers from occa-
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sionally kneeling to give Siegmund instructions. He took a high tone with his brother-in-law, the way weak, downtrodden people will whenever they get a chance to work off their frustrations on some- one. He knew that Siegmund, who had taken it into his head to re- vere Walter, would not be easily shaken in his loyalty. But this did not prevent him from feeling a veritable after-sunset loneliness, a graveyard chill, as he watched Clarisse; she never cast a glance in his direction but was all eyes for Meingast, hanging on the Master's words. Moreover, Walter actually took a certain pride in this. Ever since Meingast had come to stay in his house, he was just as proud of the chasms that suddenly opened up in it as he was anxious to cover them up again. From his standing height he had dispatched to the kneeling Siegmund the words: "Ofcourse we all feel and are familiar with a certain hankering for the morbid and problematic! " He was no sneaking coward. In the short time since Clarisse had called him a philistine for saying the same thing to her, he had formulated a new phrase: "life's petty dishonesty. "
"A little dishonesty is good, like sweet or sour," he now instructed his brother-in-law, "but we are obligated to refine it in ourselves to the point where it would do credit to a healthy life! What I mean by a little dishonesty," he went on, "is as much the nostalgic flirting with death that seizes us when we listen to Tristan as the secret fascina- tion that's in most sex crimes, even though we don't succumb to it. For there's something dishonest and antihuman, you see, both in ele- mental life when it overpowers us with want and disease, and in exag- gerated scruples of mind and conscience trying to do violence to life. Everything that tries to overstep the limits set for us is dishonest! Mysticism is just as dishonest as the conceit that nature can be re- duced to a mathematical formula! And the plan to visit Moosbrugger is just as dishonest as"-here Walter paused for a moment-"as if you were to invoke God at a patient's bedside! "
There was certainly something in what he had said, and he had even managed to take Siegmund by surprise with his appeal to the physician's professional and spontaneous humanitarianism, to make him see Clarisse's scheme and her overwrought motivation as an im- permissible overstepping of bounds. However, Walter was a genius compared with Siegmund, as may be seen in Walter's healthy out- look having led him to confess such ideas as these, while his brother-
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in-law's even healthier outlook manifested itself in his dogged si- lence in the face of such dubious subject matter. Siegmund patted the soil with his fingers while tilting his head now to one side, now to the other, without opening his lips, as ifhe were trying to pour some- thing out of a test tube, or then again, as if he had just heard enough with that ear. And when Walter had finished there was a fearfully profound silence, in which Walter now heard a statement that Cla- risse must have called out to him once, for without being as vivid as a hallucination, it was as if the hollow space were punctuated by these words: "Nietzsche and Christ both perished of their incomplete- ness! " Somehow, in some uncanny fashion reminiscent of the "coal mine boss," he felt flattered. It was a strange position that he, health personified, should be standing here in the cool garden between a man he regarded condescendingly and two unnaturally overheated people just out of earshot, whose mute gesticulations he watched with a superior air and yet with longing. For Clarisse was the slightly dishonest element his own health needed to keep from flagging, and a secret voice told him that Meingast was at this very moment en- gaged in immeasurably increasing the permissible limits of this dis- honesty. He admired Meingast as an obscure relation admires a famous one, and seeing Clarisse whispering conspiratorially with him aroused his envy more than his jealousy-a feeling, that is, that ate into him even more deeply than jealousy would have, and yet it was also somehow uplifting; the consciousness of his own dignity forbade him to get angry or to go over there and disturb them; in view oftheir agitation he felt himself superior, and from all this arose, he did not know how, some vague, mongrel notion, spawned outside all logic, that the two of them over there were in some reckless and reprehen- sible fashion invoking God.
If such a curiously mixed state of mind must be called thinking, it was of a kind that cannot possibly be put into words, because the chemistry of its darkness is instantly ruined by the luminous influ- ence of language. Besides, as his remark to Siegmund had shown, Walter did not associate belief of any sort with the word "God," and when the word occurred to him it generated an abashed void around itself. And so it happened that the first thing Walter said to his brother-in-law, after a long silence, had nothing to do with this. ''You're an idiot to think you have no right to talk her out of this visit
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in the strongest possible terms," he said bitterly. "What are you a doctor for? "
Siegmund wasn't in the least offended. "You're the one who will have to have it out with her," he replied, glancing up calmly before turning back to what he was doing.
Walter sighed, then started over again. "Clarisse is an extraordi- nary person, of course. I can understand her very well. I'll even admit that she's not all wrong to be as austere in her views as she is. Just thinking ofthe poverty, hunger, misery ofevery kind the world is so full of, the disasters in coal mines, for instance, because the man- agement wouldn't spend enough on timbering . . . "
Siegmund gave no sign that he was giving it any thought.
'Well, she does! " Walter continued sternly. "And I think it's won- derful of her. The rest of us get ourselves a good conscience much too easily. And she's better than we are for insisting that we all ought to change and have a more active conscience, the kind with no limit to it, ever. But what I'm asking you is whether this isn't bound to lead to a pathological state of moral scrupulousness, if it isn't something like that already. You must have an opinion! "
Siegmund responded to this pressing challenge by propping him- self up on one knee and giving his brother-in-law a searching look. "Crazy! " he said. "But not, strictly speaking, in a medical sense. "
"And what do you say," Walter continued, forgetting his superior stance, "to her claim that she's being sent signs? "
"She says she's being sent signs?
