There had always been something that his thoughts could not deal with. Something that seemed so simple and so strange. He had seen images that were not images. Outside those hovels, even when he was sitting with Beineberg in the cake shop.

There were similarities and unbridgeable dissimilarities. And he had been excited by this game, this secret, very personal perspective.

And now one human being was monopolizing it all. Everything had now become real, embodied in a single human being. And so all the strangeness was transferred to that one human being. In the process it sprang out of the imagination and into life, and grew threatening ...

All the excitement had exhausted Törless, his thoughts were only loosely linked together.

All that remained with him was the memory that he could not let Basini go, that Basini was destined to play an important role for him too, and one which he had as yet only vaguely discerned.

In the meantime he shook his head in amazement as he thought of Beineberg’s words. Was he, too ... ?

He can’t be searching for the same thing as me, and yet he was the one who found the right term for it ...

Törless was dreaming rather than thinking. He was no longer capable of distinguishing his own psychological problem from Beineberg’s fantasies. In the end he had only a single feeling, that the giant noose was contracting ever tighter around everything.

The conversation went no further. They put out the light and crept carefully back into their dormitory.

 

The next few days brought no decision. There was a lot of school work to be done, Reiting carefully avoided being on his own, and Beineberg too was cautious not to return to their discussion.

Thus it came about that during these days, like a stream driven underground, what had happened buried its way deeper into Torless and gave his thoughts an irrevocable direction.

There was no longer any question of having Basini expelled. Now, for the first time, Törless felt wholly concentrated upon himself, and was unable to think of anything else. He even felt indifferent about Božena; what he had felt for her was becoming a fantastic memory, which had now made way for something serious.

Admittedly that serious thing seemed to be no less fantastic.

 

Preoccupied with his thoughts, Törless had gone for a walk alone in the school grounds. It was about midday, and the late autumn sun cast pale memories over meadows and paths. Since Törless, unsettled as he was, did not feel like walking any further, he merely strolled around the building and threw himself down in the pale, rustling grass at the foot of the almost windowless side wall. The sky spread out above him, in that pale, ailing blue so typical of autumn, and little white round clouds scudded across it.

Törless lay stretched out on his back and, dreaming vaguely, squinted between two treetops in front of him that were shedding their leaves.

He thought of Beineberg; what a strange character he was! His words would have been at home in a crumbling Indian temple, among weird idols and serpents lurking in deep crannies, initiated into the secrets of magic; but what place did they have in the daylight, in the institute, in modern Europe? And yet those words, having snaked their way endlessly in a thousand twists and turns, like a path without end or view, seemed suddenly to have reached a tangible goal ...

And suddenly he noticed - and he felt as though this was happening for the first time - how high the sky really was.

It came to him like a shock. Right above him there gleamed a little blue, unimaginably deep hole between the clouds.

It seemed to him that if one had a long, long ladder, one should be able to climb into that hole. But the further he pushed his way in, lifting himself up with his gaze, the further away the blue, glowing background retreated. And yet he felt as though it should be possible to reach it and hold it, merely with one’s gaze. The desire became painfully intense.

It was as though the power of vision, strained to its limit, was Hinging glances like arrows between the clouds, and as though, aim as far as they might, they always fell short.

Törless thought about this now; he tried to remain as calm and sensible as he possibly could. ‘Of course there is no end,’ he said to himself, ‘it goes on and on, ever onward, into infinity.’ He kept his eyes fixed on the sky and said this out loud, as though to test the power of a magic spell. But without success; the words said nothing, or rather they said something quite different, as though they were referring to the same object, but to another strange, indifferent side of it.

‘Infinity!’ Törless knew the word from maths class. He had never imagined anything particular by it. It was forever returning; someone must have invented it once, and since then it had become possible to calculate with it as surely as one did with anything solid. It was whatever its value happened to be in the calculation; Törless had never ventured further than that.

And now, all of a sudden, the idea flashed through him that there was something terribly unsettling about the word. It struck him as a concept that had formerly been tamed, one with which he had performed his daily little tricks, and which had now been suddenly unleashed. Something beyond understanding, something wild and destructive seemed to have been put to sleep by the work of some clever inventor, and had now suddenly been woken to life, and grown terrible before him.