Eckhardt is on his way to the employment agency. He is thinking about his life, and ends up remembering his wild, erotic relationship with Mariana, which gave him more insight into the interconnectedness of life than his years of academic study of philosophy and literature. This short portrait of the intellectual and emotional life of the young humanities scholar Eckhardt - a man literally incapacitated by his own mind - is illustrative of a young academic elite that is useless to the labour market.