Agathe Page 37

  These words—precisely because they were perhaps an exaggeration—had the faith and with it the wings of adventure. “Good night!” Agathe said unexpectedly, and took them with her. She had released herself and pulled the curtains shut so hastily that the picture of the two of them standing in the moonlight vanished as if at one blow; and before Ulrich turned on the light, Agathe succeeded in finding her way out of the room.

  Ulrich gave her more time: “Tonight you will sleep as impatiently as before the start of a great excursion!” he called after her.

  “I do want that!” was what he heard as the door closed.

  30

  MOONBEAMS BY DAYLIGHT

  When they saw each other again in the morning, it was at first from a distance like coming upon an uncommon painting in an ordinary house, or even like sighting a significant sculpture among the haphazard displays of nature: unexpectedly, from the liquid lowlands of existence, an island of meaning, an elevation and condensing of spirit, comes to light in sensuous manifestation. But when they approached each other, they were embarrassed, and all that was to be felt of the previous night in their glances was the tiredness that was now shading them with tender warmth.

  Who knows, by the way, whether love would be so admired if it wasn’t tiring! When they became aware of the aching aftermath of the previous night’s excitement, it made them happy again, the way lovers are proud of having nearly died of pleasure. Still, the joy they found in each other was not only such a feeling but also an arousal of the eye: The colors and shapes that presented themselves were diffuse and bottomless and yet starkly prominent, like a bouquet of flowers drifting on dark water. They were more clearly delineated than usual, but in a way that made it impossible to say whether this was due to the distinctness of the appearance or to its underlying emotion. This impression was as much part of the compact sphere of perception and attention as it belonged to the ambiguous domain of feeling; and that was precisely what caused it to hover between inside and outside, as a held breath hovers between inhalation and exhalation, and made it hard to discern, in peculiar contrast to its intensity, whether it belonged to the physical world or merely owed its existence to the heightening of inner participation. Nor did either of them wish to make this distinction, for a kind of shame of reason held them back; and for a long time afterward it still forced them to keep a distance from each other, even though their sensitivity was lasting and could well give rise to the belief that the course of the boundaries between them, as well as between them and the world, might have suddenly undergone some slight change.

  The weather had turned summery again, and they spent a lot of time outdoors. Flowers and shrubs were blooming in the garden. When Ulrich looked at a flower—which was not exactly an old habit of this once impatient man—he now sometimes found no end to beholding what he saw and, for that matter, no beginning either. If by chance he knew the flower’s name, it was salvation from the sea of infinity. Then the little golden stars on a bare, supple wand signified “forsythia,” and those premature leaves and umbels were “lilacs.” But if he did not know the name, he would call the gardener over, for then this old man would pronounce an unknown name, and everything would be all right again, and the ancient magic by which possession of the right word vouchsafes protection from the untamed wildness of things bestowed its calming power as it had ten thousand years ago. But something else could happen too: Ulrich would find himself deserted and without support facing some little branch or blossom and not even Agathe was nearby, with whom he could have shared his ignorance: then it suddenly seemed to him utterly impossible to understand the bright green of a young leaf, and the mysteriously limited profusion of forms in a little flower cup became an uninterrupted circle of infinite variation. In addition, it was hardly possible for a man like him, if he did not lie to himself, which on Agathe’s account alone could not be allowed to happen, to believe in one of those bashful rendezvous with nature, whose murmurings and upturned eyes, sweet pieties and silent music-making are the prerogative of a special simplicity which imagines that no sooner has it laid its head in the grass, God is already tickling its neck, notwithstanding the fact that on weekdays it has no objection to nature being bought and sold at the fruit exchange. Ulrich despised this cut-rate mysticism at the cheapest price and praise, whose constant talk of being ravished by Grace is at bottom exceedingly lewd;* better to abandon himself to the impotence of trying to find words for an almost palpable color, or of describing one of those shapes that spoke for themselves in such a mindlessly haunting way. For in such a con­dition the word does not cut, and the fruit remains on the branch although one thinks it already in one’s mouth: that is probably the first secret of daylight mysticism. And Ulrich tried to tell his sister about it, albeit with the ulterior motive that it should not, some day, disappear like an illusion.

  But as a result, the passionate condition was supplanted by a very different state of serene, indeed at times almost desultory conversation that served to shield them from each other as if with a screen, even though they saw through it completely. They usually lay on two large deck chairs, which they were constantly dragging in pursuit of the sun; this early summer sun was shining for the millionth time on the magic it works every year; and Ulrich said many things that happened to pass through his mind and carefully rounded themselves, like the moon, which was now quite pale and a little dirty, or perhaps like a soap bubble: and so it happened, and quite soon, that he came to speak of the confounded and frequently cursed absurdity that all understanding presupposes a kind of superficiality, a penchant for the surface, which is moreover expressed by the idea of grasping entailed in the word “comprehend,” and has to do with the fact that the primary experiences are not understood one by one but each in reference to the next and are thereby unavoidably connected more on the surface than in depth. He then continued: “So if I maintain that this grass in front of us is green, it sounds quite definite, but I have not said a great deal. Actually no more than if I told you that a man walking past us was a member of the Green family. And, good heavens, how many greens there are! I might as well content myself with the understanding that this green lawn is grass green, or even that it is green like a lawn on which it rained a little just a short while ago—” He surveyed the plane of young, sunlit grass, blinking lethargically, and said: “I imagine that is how you would probably describe it, since you’re adept at distinguishing dress materials by their color. I, on the other hand, could possibly measure the color as well: I would guess that it has a wavelength of approximately five hundred and forty millionths of a millimeter; and now this green does appear to have been captured and nailed to a specific point! But already it’s slipping away from me, because look: something in this lawn’s color has something material about it, and that can’t be described in terms of color at all, because it’s different from the same green in silk or in wool. And now we’re back to the profound realization that green grass is grass green!”

  Agathe, summoned as a witness, found it very understandable that nothing could be understood, and replied: “I suggest you look into a mirror at night sometime: it’s dark, it’s black, you see almost nothing; and yet this nothing is very clearly something other than the nothing of the rest of the darkness. You sense the glass, the doubling of depth, some remnant of the ability to shimmer, and yet you see nothing!”

  Ulrich laughed at his sister’s readiness to strip knowledge of all its honor; he himself was far from thinking that concepts have no value and was well aware of what they accomplish, even if he did not exactly act as if he did. What he wanted to get at was the ungraspable nature of isolated experiences, those experiences that for obvious reasons one must cope with alone and in solitude, even when in the presence of a companion. He repeated: “The self never apprehends its impressions and productions in isolation, but always in a context—in real or imagined, similar or dissimilar correspondence with other things; and so all named things lean against each other in one or another respect
or regard, in series and alignments, as links in great and not even remotely comprehensible totalities, each supported by the next and pervaded by common tensions. But that is why,” he suddenly continued in a new direction, “if for some reason this system of associations fails and none of the inner categories responds, we are immediately left again to face an indescribable and inhuman, indeed disavowed and formless, creation!” With that they were back at their point of departure; but Agathe felt above it the dark creation, the abyss that was the world, the God who should help her!

  Her brother said: “Understanding gives way to unslakable aston­ishment, and the slightest experience—this little pennant of grass or the gentle sounds when your lips over there pronounce a word—becomes incomparable, immensely solitary, unfathomable in its self-glory, and has a stunning, narcotic effect...”

  He fell silent, irresolutely twirling a blade of grass in his hand, and listened with pleasure as Agathe, apparently as unentangled in thought as she was unconstrained by rigor, proceeded to restore physicality to their exchange. For now she replied: “If it were drier I would want to lie down in the grass! Let’s travel! I would so much like to lie on a meadow, returned to nature as humbly as a discarded shoe!”

  “But that also just means being released from all feelings,” Ulrich objected. “And God alone knows what would become of us if they didn’t show up in swarms, the loves and hates and sufferings and goodnesses that appear to be each person’s exclusive property. We would probably be deprived of all capacity to think and act, because our soul is made for a life that repeats itself, and not for what steps completely outside the order of things...” He was dejected, believed he had ventured into a void, and searchingly looked into his sister’s face with an uneasily furrowed brow.

  But Agathe’s face was even clearer than the air that surrounded it and toyed with her hair as she now responded with something she had memorized: “I know not where I am, nor do I seek myself, nor do I want to know of it, nor will I have tidings. I am as immersed in the wellspring of His love as if I were beneath the surface of the ocean and could not see or feel from any side any thing but water.”

  “What is that from?” Ulrich asked curiously, and only now discovered that she was holding a book in her hands. Without answering, Agathe opened the book and read aloud: “I rose above all my faculties up to the dark power. There I heard without sound, there I saw without light. Then my heart became bottomless, my soul loveless, my spirit formless, and my nature insubstantial.” Now Ulrich recognized the volume and smiled, and only then did Agathe say: “It’s from your library.” And closing the book, she concluded from memory: “Are you yourself, or are you not? I know nothing of this, I am ignorant of it, and I am ignorant of myself. I am in love, but I know not with whom; I am neither faithful nor unfaithful. What am I, then? I am ignorant even of my love; my heart is full of love and empty of love at the same time!”

  Her good memory was not, as a rule, prone to shape its recollections into ideas but preserved them in their sensuous particularity, much the way one memorizes a poem; which is why there was always a participation of body and soul in her words no matter how unobtrusively she spoke. Ulrich recalled her performance before their father’s burial, when she declaimed those wildly beautiful verses by Shakespeare to him. “How wild her nature is compared to mine!” he thought. “I haven’t allowed myself to say much today.” He reconsidered the explanation of “daylight mysticism” he had given her. All in all, it had amounted to no more than his conceding the possibility of transitory deviations from the familiar and established order of experience; and if one thought of it that way, her experiences merely followed a basic principle that was somewhat richer in feeling than that of ordinary experience and resembled little bourgeois children who have landed in a troupe of traveling actors. So he had not dared say any more, even though for days every bit of space between him and his sister had been full of unfinished events! And gradually he began to occupy himself with the question of whether there might not be more things that could be believed than he had admitted to himself.

  After the lively culmination of their exchange, Agathe and he had reclined in their chairs, and the stillness of the garden closed over their fading words. Insofar as it has been said that Ulrich had begun to occupy himself with a question, the qualifying observation must now be added that many answers precede their questions as a man in a hurry precedes his open, fluttering coat. What preoccupied Ulrich was a startling idea that did not strictly speaking require belief but by its mere arising provoked astonishment and the impression that such an inspiration must never be allowed to be forgotten, which, considering such claims, was a little uncomfortable. Ulrich was used to thinking in a way that was not godless so much as God-free, which in the ways of science means leaving every possible turning to God to the emotions, because such an orientation is not capable of advancing rational insight but can only lure the mind to venture into the impenetrable. Nor did he doubt even now that this was the only right way, since the most palpable successes of the human spirit had only come about after the spirit decided to steer clear of God. But the idea that had come to beset him said: “What if this ungodliness were nothing other than the contemporary path to God? Every age has had its own pathway to the divine, commensurate with its most potent spiritual capacities; so would it not be our destiny, the destiny of an age of intelligent and enterprising experience, to disavow all dreams, legends, and ingenious conceptions for the sole reason that at the height of our study and exploration of the world we are turning to God again and will gain a relationship with Him through experience at its beginning?!”

  This conclusion was completely unprovable, Ulrich knew that; indeed, to most people it would probably appear as perverse, and that did not trouble him. He himself really ought not to have thought it either: The scientific procedure—which he had just a short while ago described as legitimate—consists, aside from in logic, in immersing the concepts it has gained from the surface, from “experience,” into the depths of phenomena and explaining the latter by the former; everything on earth is leveled and laid waste in order to gain mastery over it, and it seemed not unreasonable to object that this ought not to be extended to that which is not of this earth. But Ulrich now contested this objection: the desert is not an objection, it has always been a birthplace of celestial visions; and furthermore, prospects that have not yet been attained cannot be foreseen either! But it escaped him that perhaps he was in a second kind of opposition to himself, or had gone in a direction that veered away from his own. Saint Paul calls faith the confident expectation of things hoped for and the conviction of things unseen, a definition that, with its focus on grasping, has become the conviction of educated people, and Ulrich’s opposition to it was among his most strongly held convictions. Faith as a diminutive form of knowledge was repugnant to his nature, it is always “against one’s better knowledge”; conversely, it had been given to him to recognize in the presentiment of what lies beyond “the best of our knowledge” a special condition and a realm for adventurous minds to explore. That his opposition had now weakened would cause him much trouble later on, but for the moment he was not aware of it, as a swarm of ancillary considerations had come to engage and amuse him.

  He singled out examples. Life was becoming increasingly uniform and impersonal. Something stereotypical, mechanical, statistical, and serial was insinuating itself into every entertainment, excitement, recreation, even into the passions. The will to life was becoming broad and shallow, like a river hesitating before it meets the sea. The will to art was already putting itself in doubt. It seemed as though the age was already beginning to devalue the individual person, but without being able to make up the loss through new collective achievements. That was its face. And this face, which was so hard to understand; which he had once loved and had tried to recast as the muddy crater of a deeply rumbling volcano, because he felt young like a thousand others; and from which, like those thousands, he had turned away, becau
se he could not bear seeing it so horribly deformed; this face was becoming transfigured, becoming placid, slyly beautiful, and shining from within, by dint of a single idea! For what if it were God Himself who was devaluing the world? Would the world not thereby suddenly regain meaning and pleasure? And would He not have to be devaluing it if He were coming closer to it by even the smallest step? And would it not already be the one true adventure to sense just the annunciatory shadow of this?! These considerations had the unreasoning consistency of a series of adventures and felt so foreign in Ulrich’s head that he thought he was dreaming. Now and then he cautiously looked over to his sister, as if fearful that she might perceive what he was up to, and several times he caught sight of her blond head like light on light against the sky, and saw the air that was toying with her hair also playing with the clouds.

  For when that happened, she too was raising herself up slightly and looking around with wonder. She was trying to imagine what it would be like to be released from all of life’s emotions. Even space, this always self-similar, contentless cube, was now different, she thought. If she kept her eyes closed for a while and then opened them again, so that the garden entered her view untouched, as if it had just been created, she perceived, with the disembodied clarity of a vision, that the line that connected her to her brother was distinguished among all others: The garden “stood” around this line, and without anything having changed in the trees, paths, and other parts of the real environment, of which she could easily assure herself, everything was oriented toward this connection as an axis and was thereby invisibly changed in a visible way. It might sound paradoxical, but she could just as well have said that the world was sweeter there, perhaps more sorrowful too: strangely, one seemed to be able to see this with one’s eyes. And there was another conspicuous feature: All the surrounding shapes stood there eerily abandoned, but also ravishingly, and just as eerily, enlivened, in the semblance of a gentle death or a passionate swoon, as though they had just been bereft of something unnamable, which lent them an almost human sensuality and vulnerability. And as with the impression of space, something had happened to the sense of time; this flowing conveyor belt, this rolling staircase with its uncanny association with death, seemed at some moments to stand still and at others to be flowing along by itself, unrelated to anything else. In a single instant of external duration, time could disappear inside, without a trace of whether it had stopped for an hour or a minute.