The Book in 3 Sentences

1. Narcissus, a young monk of pure intellect, recognises that his friend Goldmund is not made for the cloister but for the world of the senses, and by waking him to his own nature sets him loose from the monastery into a life of wandering.
2. Goldmund throws himself into experience - lovers, hunger, plague, murder and grief - and through it all learns that everything he has felt can only be redeemed by giving it form, becoming a sculptor and carving his lifetime of faces into wood.
3. Returning to the monastery old and worn out, he dies in Narcissus's care, leaving the thinker with the realisation that a life lived fully through the senses can reach something the mind alone never will.

Overview & Impressions

Narcissus and Goldmund is beautifully written. It is a very raw and unfiltered look at human beings - their motivations, their contradictions and their inner psyche - told through two friends who represent the two sides of human nature: the thinker and the artist, the spirit and the senses. Goldmund’s journey is incredibly engaging and the medieval setting is rendered beautifully. Hesse wonderfully captures love, death, art and experience in a way that feels lived rather than described. It is also a philosophically dense novel, and the idea that stayed with me most is art as a vessel for self-actualisation - a way of transforming the chaos of experience into something lasting and transcendent. Highly recommend.

Top Quotes

Don't you know that a wastrel's life may be one of the shortest roads to sainthood?

You think you're not learned or logical or pious enough for me. On the contrary, you are not enough yourself.

Any life expands and flowers only through division and contradiction. What are reason and sobriety without the knowledge of intoxication? What is sensuality without death standing behind it? What is love without the eternal mortal enmity of the sexes?

To create, without sacrificing one's senses for it. To live, without renouncing the nobility of creating. Was that impossible?

When a man tries to realize himself through the gifts with which nature has endowed him, he does the best and only meaningful thing he can do.

We thinkers try to come closer to God by pulling the mask of the world away from His face. You come closer to Him by loving His creation and re-creating it. Both are human endeavors, and necessarily imperfect, but art is more innocent.

But how will you die when your time comes, Narcissus, since you have no mother? Without a mother, one cannot love. Without a mother, one cannot die.

Summary, Quotes & Notes

I

It was impossible to emulate simultaneously the kindly humble Abbot and the extremely intelligent, learned, brilliant Brother Narcissus. Yet every fiber of his youthful soul strove to attain these two incompatible ideals. It caused him much suffering.

There was cloister honor and student honor, and occasionally one contradicted the other, Goldmund was well aware of that. But, as anywhere else in the world, the unwritten law defeated the written one; he would never try to evade student laws and codes while he was himself a student.

II

At first it was Narcissus, the thinker, who had the harder time of it. All was mind to him, even love; he was unable to give in to an attraction without thinking about it first.

Deep inside himself he felt the life he had dreamed of up to now, all his beliefs, all the things for which he felt himself destined, his entire vocation, threatened at the root by the kiss through the window, by the expression of those dark eyes.

III

Don't you know that a wastrel's life may be one of the shortest roads to sainthood?

"Love of God," he said slowly, searching for words, "is not always the same as love of good, I wish it were that simple. We know what is good, it is written in the Commandments. But God is not contained only in the Commandments, you know; they are only an infinitesimal part of Him. A man may abide by the Commandments and be far from God."

Some day you will think of what I am going to say to you now: our friendship has no other purpose, no other reason, than to show you how utterly unlike me you are.

All that was alive and radiant in this young man spoke only too clearly: he bore all the marks of a strong human being, richly endowed sensually and spiritually, perhaps an artist, but at any rate a person with a great potential for love, whose fulfillment and happiness consisted of being easily inflamed and able to give himself.

Science is, to quote your words, nothing but the 'determination to establish differences.'

Believe me, there isn't an intonation in your voice, not a gesture, not a smile that I don't take seriously. But your thoughts I take less seriously. I take seriously all that I find essential and necessary in you.

You think you're not learned or logical or pious enough for me. On the contrary, you are not enough yourself.

I'm awake, whereas you are only half awake, or completely asleep sometimes. I call a man awake who knows in his conscious reason his innermost unreasonable force, drives, and weaknesses and knows how to deal with them.

Natures of your kind, with strong, delicate senses, the soul-oriented, the dreamers, poets, lovers are almost always superior to us creatures of the mind.

You live fully; you were endowed with the strength of love, the ability to feel. Whereas we creatures of reason, we don't live fully; we live in an arid land, even though we often seem to guide and rule you.

IV

I believe that he suffers because he has forgotten a part of his past.

Goldmund had rediscovered his soul and was ready to follow its call, but he did not know where it would lead him. Narcissus knew this and felt powerless; his favorite's path led to regions in which he himself would never travel.

Although he had no inkling of where his future would lead him, he did feel strongly, often with anguishing clarity, that his destiny was shaping itself, that this respite of innocence and calm was coming to an end, that all within him was taut and ready. These premonitions were often blissful, kept him awake half the night like a sweet infatuation; at other times they were full of darkness and suffocation.

V

Perhaps I did ruin a future monk in you, but in exchange I cleared the path inside you for a destiny that will not be ordinary. Even if you burned down our rather handsome cloister tomorrow, or preached a mad doctrine of error to the world, I would not for an instant regret that I helped you on the road toward it.

Having goals was a privilege he did not share with others,

He was waiting, standing under the cloister roof like a hesitant wanderer caught in the rain who stops under any roof, a tree, just to wait, for fear of the inhospitality of the unknown.

"Has your father come, or a message from him?" "No, nothing. Life itself has come to me. I'm leaving without father, without permission. I'm bringing shame upon you, you know; I'm running away."

At her first kiss I felt something melt inside me that hurt in an exquisite way. All my longings, all my dreams and sweet anguish, all the secrets that slept within me, came awake, everything was transformed and enchanted, everything made sense.

I think the road will be hard. But it will also be beautiful, I hope. It is extremely beautiful to belong to a woman, to give yourself. Don't laugh if I sound foolish. But to love a woman, you see, to abandon yourself to her, to absorb her completely and feel absorbed by her, that is not what you call 'being in love,' which you mock a little. For me it is the road to life, the way toward the meaning of life.

There he had lain, tired unto death, extenuated, with his pale face and bony hands, corpselike, and yet he had listened to his friend, lucid and sympathetic, had lent his ear to this love-drunken man with the smell of a woman still on him, had sacrificed his few moments of rest between penances. It was strange and divinely beautiful that there was also this kind of love, this selfless, completely spiritualized kind. How different it was from today's love in the sunny field, the reckless, intoxicated play of the senses. And yet both were love.

For him there was only giving himself and loving, loving his praying friend in the night-dark church as much as the beautiful warm young woman who was waiting for him.

VI

What long conversations he had had with Narcissus! But now, it seemed, he had entered a wordless world, in which one called to one another like owls, in which words had no meaning. He was ready for it. He had no more need for words today, or for thoughts; only for Lise, only for this wordless, blind, mute groping and searching, this sighing and melting.

To be a bear and love a she-bear would not be bad, would at least be much better than to keep one's reason and language and all that, and vegetate alone, sad and unloved.

VII

This was a sin, adultery. Not so long ago he would have died rather than commit this sin. And now a second woman was waiting to come to him and his conscience was calm and serene; not so calm perhaps, but neither adultery nor lust were troubling and burdening it. Rather a feeling of guilt for some crime one had not committed but had brought along with one into the world. Perhaps this was what theology called original sin? It might well be. Yes, life itself bore something of guilt within it - why else had a man as pure and aware as Narcissus subjected himself to penance like a condemned felon? And why did he, himself, feel this guilt somewhere deep inside him? Was he not a happy, healthy young man, free as a bird in the sky? Was he not loved by women? Was it not beautiful to feel allowed to give the woman the same profound joy she gave him? Then why was he not fully, not completely happy? Why did this strange pain penetrate his young joy, as it penetrated Narcissus's virtue and wisdom, this subtle fear, this grief over the transitory? Why was he made to muse like this, every so often, to think, when he knew he was no thinker? Still, it was beautiful to be alive.

No, it was fortunate that love did not need words; or else it would be full of misunderstanding and foolishness.

And yet, again and again one felt the urge to speak, the urge to think.

Goldmund had long since regretted the words he had said before lifting her off her horse. How stupid of him; words were unnecessary in love; he should have kept silent.

But in spite of all she had said, he still saw love in her eyes, and the pain on her quivering lips was also love. He believed her eyes more than he believed her words.

VIII

Miraculously, without understanding why, he was surprised by the realization that pain and joy could resemble each other so closely.

The women like you and the men think: 'Oh Lord, he's harmless, he wouldn't hurt a fly.' But look here, little brother, a man gets older, the baby face grows a beard and wrinkles, your pants wear out and before you know it you are an ugly, unwelcome guest, and instead of youth and innocence, nothing but hunger is staring out of your eyes. At that point you've got to be hard, you've got to have learned a few things about the world; or else you'll soon find yourself lying on the dung heap and the dogs'll come and pee on you. But I don't think that you'll be running around for too long anyhow, your hands are too delicate and your curls too pretty, you'll crawl back to where life is easier, into a nice warm conjugal bed or a good fat cloister or some beautifully heated writing room. And your clothes are so fine, you could be taken for a squire.

IX

In less than two years he had learned all the joys and sorrows of homeless life: loneliness, freedom, the sounds of forests and beasts, wandering, faithless loving, bitter deathly want.

Fighting death had been the strongest emotion of all, the strangest, knowing how small and miserable and threatened one was, and yet feeling this beautiful, terrifying force, this tenacity of life inside one during the last desperate struggle.

Since that moment in front of the sweet saintly wooden figure, Goldmund possessed something he had not possessed before, something he had so often mocked or envied in others: a goal! He had a goal. Perhaps he would reach it; perhaps his whole, ragged existence would grow meaningful and worthwhile.

X

At least this was what Goldmund read from the master's head: great patience, years of study and thinking, great modesty, and an awareness of the dubious value of all human undertaking, but also faith in his mission.

He thought that he, that all men, trickled away, changing constantly, until they finally dissolved, while their artist-created images remained unchangeably the same. He thought that fear of death was perhaps the root of all art, perhaps also of all things of the mind. We fear death, we shudder at life's instability, we grieve to see the flowers wilt again and again, and the leaves fall, and in our hearts we know that we, too, are transitory and will soon disappear.

Although sorrow and awareness remained essentially untouched in his soul, life, on the surface, played for him in rainbow colors. The gayest and lightest period in Goldmund's life had begun.

Quite a number of people are able to feel the beauty of the world profoundly and vastly, and to carry high, noble images in their souls, but they are unable to exteriorize these images, to create them for the enjoyment of others, to communicate them.

Instead of learning, monkhood, and virtue, powerful drives and instincts had become his masters: sex, women, desire for independence, wandering.

Ah, it was not worth being an artist in order to make little angel figures and similar frivolities, no matter how beautiful.

To him, art and craftsmanship were worthless unless they burned like the sun and had the power of storms.

XI

As soon as he gave himself to a woman - whether it lasted weeks or just hours - she became beautiful to him, and he gave himself completely.

Love and ecstasy were to him the only truly warming things that gave life its value. Ambition was unknown to him; he did not distinguish between bishop and beggar. Acquisition and ownership had no hold over him; he felt contempt for them. Never would he have made the smallest sacrifice for them; he was earning ample money and thought nothing of it. Women, the game of the sexes, came first on his list, and his frequent accesses of melancholy and disgust grew out of the knowledge that desire was a transitory, fleeting experience.

Art was a union of the father and mother worlds, of mind and blood.

Any work of art that was truly sublime, not just a good juggler's trick; that was filled with the eternal secret, like the master's madonna; every obviously genuine work of art had this dangerous, smiling double face, was male-female, a merging of instinct and pure spirituality.

In art, in being an artist, Goldmund saw the possibility of reconciling his deepest contradictions, or at least of expressing newly and magnificently the split in his nature.

In order to be able to create a work like this, one had not only to carry images in one's soul; one also had to have inexpressibly trained, practiced eyes and hands. Perhaps it was after all worthwhile to place one's entire life at the service of art, at the expense of freedom and broad experience, if only in order to be able once to make something this beautiful, something that had not only been experienced and envisioned and received in love, but also executed to the last detail with absolute mastery? It was an important question.

They were deeply disappointing because they aroused the desire for the highest and did not fulfill it. They lacked the most essential thing - mystery. That was what dreams and truly great works of art had in common: mystery. Goldmund continued his thought: It is mystery I love and pursue.

XII

A wayfarer may be delicate or crude, artful or awkward, brave or cowardly - he is always a child at heart, living in the first day of creation, before the beginning of the history of the world, his life always guided by a few simple instincts and needs. He may be intelligent or stupid; he may be deeply aware of the fleeting fragility of all living things, of how pettily and fearfully each living creature carries its bit of warm blood through the glaciers of cosmic space, or he may merely follow the commands of his poor stomach with childlike greed - he is always the opponent, the deadly enemy of the established proprietor, who hates him, despises him, or fears him, because he does not wish to be reminded that all existence is transitory, that life is constantly wilting, that merciless icy death fills the cosmos all around. The childlike life of the wanderer, its mother-origin, its turning away from law and mind, its openness and constant secret intimacy with death had long since deeply impregnated and molded Goldmund's soul.

Any life expands and flowers only through division and contradiction. What are reason and sobriety without the knowledge of intoxication? What is sensuality without death standing behind it? What is love without the eternal mortal enmity of the sexes?

Years passed. Goldmund seemed to have forgotten that there were other things on earth besides hunger and love, and this silent, eerie onrush of the seasons; he seemed completely drowned in the motherly, instinctive basic world. But in his dreams or his thought-filled moments of rest, overlooking a flowering or wilting valley, he was all eyes, an artist. He longed desperately to halt the gracefully drifting nonsense of life with his mind and transform it into sense.

Goldmund pleased him greatly. He wooed his favor with small services, admired his knowledge, his audacity, his mind, and loved his health, strength, and frankness.

XIII

At this moment he thought how petty and cheap a living person could be in his childish fear and curiosity, compared to the nobility of the dead.

Life was beautiful, beautiful and fleeting as happiness. Youth was beautiful and wilted fast.

XIV

He regretted the lost innocence, the lost childlike quality of his soul. Had he gone away from the cloister, left Narcissus, offended Master Niklaus and renounced beautiful Lisbeth merely to camp in the heath, track stray cattle, and kill that poor fellow back there on those stones? Did all this make sense? Was it worth experiencing? His heart grew tight with meaninglessness and self-contempt.

The world seemed destroyed and poisoned; there seemed to be no more joy, no more innocence, no more love on earth.

Often he participated in mad orgies, played the lute or danced through feverish nights in the glow of peat torches.

Oh, how this fullness strained at him, how he longed to come to himself quietly, to let them pour out, to convert them to lasting images!

A feeling of admiration rose with a humble shudder in his unwieldy heart, and of horror at his wasted, burned-up life.

"Dear God, see what has become of me. I have returned from the world. I've become an evil, useless man. I have squandered my youth like a spendthrift and little remains. I have killed, I have stolen, I have whored, I have gone idle and have eaten the bread of others. Dear Lord, why did you create us thus, why do you lead us along such roads? Are we not your children? Did your son not die for us? Are there no saints and angels to guide us? Or are they all pretty, invented stories that we tell to children, at which priests themselves laugh? I have come to doubt you, Lord. You have ill-created the world; you are keeping it in bad order. I have seen houses and streets littered with corpses. I have seen the rich barricade themselves in their houses or flee, and the poor let their brothers lie unburied, each suspicious of the other. They slaughter the Jews like cattle; I have seen many innocent people suffer and die, and many a wicked man swim in prosperity. Have you completely forgotten and abandoned us, are you completely disgusted with your creation, do you want us all to perish?"

These figures that meant love and torture to him today, fear and passion, would stand before later generations, nameless, without history, silent symbols of human life.

He found himself almost envying the solid burghers their pretty, secure houses, their fenced-in lives, the comforting, secure feeling of having a home, of belonging in a room, or in a workshop, among wives and children, servants and neighbors.

XV

It was that way with everything: even sadness passed, even pain and despair, as well as the joys. Everything passed, faded, lost its depth, its value, and finally there came a time when one could no longer remember what had pained one so. Pains, too, wilted and faded.

Drawing had greatly lessened his feeling of heaviness and lightened the bursting fullness in his soul. As long as he was drawing, he did not know where he was. His world consisted of nothing but a table, white paper, and, at night, a candle.

It was beautiful to lose his freedom to this beauty; beautiful and deeply exciting to gamble his existence on a single throw.

XVI

Oh, it was high time that he accomplished something, created something, left something behind that would survive him.

Would things just go on the same way: new towns, new landscapes, new women, new experiences, new images, piled one on the other, experiences from which he gleaned nothing but a restless, torturous as well as beautiful overflowing of the heart? It was shameless how life made fun of one; it was a joke, a cause for weeping! Either one lived and let one's senses play, drank full at the primitive mother's breast - which brought great bliss but was no protection against death; then one lived like a mushroom in the forest, colorful today and rotten tomorrow. Or else one put up a defense, imprisoned oneself for work and tried to build a monument to the fleeting passage of life - then one renounced life, was nothing but a tool; one enlisted in the service of that which endured, but one dried up in the process and lost ones freedom, scope, lust for life.

Ach, life made sense only if one achieved both, only if it was not split by this brittle alternative! To create, without sacrificing one's senses for it. To live, without renouncing the nobility of creating. Was that impossible?

Perhaps there were husbands and heads of families who did not lose their sensuality by being faithful. Perhaps there were people who, though settled, did not have hearts dried up by lack of freedom and lack of risk. Perhaps. He had never met one. All existence seemed to be based on duality, on contrast. Either one was a man or one was a woman, either a wanderer or a sedentary burgher, either a thinking person or a feeling person - no one could breathe in at the same time as he breathed out, be a man as well as a woman, experience freedom as well as order, combine instinct and mind. One always had to pay for the one with the loss of the other, and one thing was always just as important and desirable as the other.

Perhaps it had not turned out right or was incomplete - or did God intend this lack, this longing in human life for a special purpose? Was this perhaps the seed of the enemy, of original sin? But why should this longing and this lack be sinful? Did not all that was beautiful and holy, all that man created and gave back to God as a sacrifice of thanks spring from this very lack, from this longing? His thoughts depressed him.

What would love be without secrecy? What would love be without risk?

For an eternity he sat that way, miserably bent over, trying to accept what had been imposed upon him, to realize it, to breathe it in, and fill himself with it.

In any case Goldmund refused to die; he had vainly tried to accept his fate, and he could not.

XVII

"what is this world in which we are made to live? Is it not hell? Is it not revolting and disgusting?" "Certainly, that's how the world is." "Ah!" Goldmund cried with indignation. "And how often you told me that the world was divine, that it was a great harmony of circles with the Creator enthroned in its midst, that what existed was good, and so forth. You told me Aristotle had said so, or Saint Thomas. I'm eager to hear you explain the contradiction." Narcissus laughed. "Your memory is surprising, and yet it has deceived you slightly. I have always adored our Creator as perfect, but never his creation. I have never denied the evil in the world. No true thinker has ever affirmed that life on earth is harmonious and just, or that man is good, my dear friend. On the contrary. The Holy Bible expressly states that the strivings and doings of man's heart are evil, and every day we see this confirmed anew."

Life in this cloister is just as imperfect and full of sin as it is in the world outside. And yet we constantly set the idea of justice against original sin and try to measure our imperfect lives by it and try to correct evil and put ourselves in everlasting relationship with God.

But in one thing you are quite wrong: you think that the things you have said are thoughts. But actually they are feelings. They are the feelings of a man preoccupied with the horror of life, and you must not forget that these sad, desperate emotions are balanced by completely different ones! When you feel happy on a horse, riding through a pretty landscape, or when you sneak somewhat recklessly into a castle at night to court a count's mistress, then the world looks altogether different to you, and no plague-stricken house or burned Jew can prevent you from fulfilling your desire.

You find yourself surrounded by death and horror in the world, and you escape it into lust. But lust has no duration; it leaves you again in the desert.

Besides this desperate coming and going between lust and horror, besides this seesaw between lust for life and sadness of death - have you tried no other road?" "Oh yes, of course I have. I've tried art.

To work at that seems good and comforting to me, because it almost succeeds in making the transitory eternal.

The basic image of a good work of art is not a real, living figure, although it may inspire it. The basic image is not flesh and blood; it is mind. It is an image that has its home in the artist's soul.

At the center of the confused, painful battlefield of life, at the center of the endless and meaningless death dance of fleshly existence, there exists the creative mind.

It is the mind that will show you the way out of the blurred confusion of the world of the senses, out of the eternal seesaw between lust and despair.

You need not pride yourself any longer on your many sins. You have lived the usual life of the world. You have herded swine like the prodigal son; you no longer know what law and order mean.

Goldmund was full of admiration every time his friend spoke in this manner, when he acted the abbot, with quiet assurance and a hint of mockery of people and life in the world, because then he saw what Narcissus had become: a man. True, a man of the mind and of the church, with delicate hands and a scholar's face, but a man full of assurance and courage, a leader, one who bore responsibility.

Scattered and infertile, the scenes of his life stretched out behind him, rich in magnificent images but broken in so many pieces, so poor in value, so poor in love!

And now they rode through the gates of Mariabronn and dismounted under the Italian chestnut tree. Tenderly Goldmund touched the trunk and stooped to pick up one of the prickly, split husks that lay on the ground, brown and withered.

XVIII

Thinking and imagining have nothing whatsoever in common. Thinking is done not in images but with concepts and formulae. At the exact point where images stop, philosophy begins. That was precisely the subject of our frequent quarrels as young men; for you, the world was made of images, for me of ideas. I always told you that you were not made to be a thinker, and I also told you that this was no lack since, in exchange, you were a master in the realm of images.

Mystics are, to express it briefly and somewhat crudely, thinkers who cannot detach themselves from images, therefore not thinkers at all.

When a man tries to realize himself through the gifts with which nature has endowed him, he does the best and only meaningful thing he can do.

God is not mixed. He is one, he has no potentialities but is the total, the complete reality. Whereas we are transitory, we are becoming, we are potentials; there is no perfection for us, no complete being. But wherever we go, from potential to deed, from possibility to realization, we participate in true being, become by a degree more similar to the perfect and divine. That is what it means to realize oneself.

You see me, friend Goldmund, in a place and function where it is made rather easy for me to realize myself. You see me living in a community and a tradition that corresponds to me and furthers me.

In spite of the difficulty, you found a way to become an artist, and I admire that a great deal. Your life has been much harder than mine.

I'd find it meaningless and childish if a man spent his whole life counting and covering paper with rows of figures." "You are wrong, Goldmund. You assume that this zealous problem-solver continuously solves problems a teacher poses for him. But he can also ask himself questions; they can arise within him as compelling forces. A man must have measured and puzzled over much real and much fictitious space mathematically before be can risk facing the problem of space itself.

You are actually saying that you have a rather low opinion of thinking, but a rather high one of the application of thought to the practical, visible world. I can answer you: we lack no opportunities to apply our thinking, nor are we unwilling to do so. The thinker Narcissus has, for instance, applied the results of his thinking a hundred times to his friend Goldmund, as well as to each of his monks, and does so at every instant.

You are restless now and irritable because there are still obstacles between you and your works. Clear them out of the way.

He met with great obstacles, greater than he had anticipated. And these obstacles gave him many worries, but they were sweet worries.

Whether it was a beautiful coincidence, or whether the Abbot's knowledge of souls was great enough to achieve it, a period of fulfillment and peace came for Goldmund from this confession and penance. It made him profoundly happy. Amid the many tensions, worries, and satisfactions of his work, he found himself morning and evening released by the easy but conscientiously executed spiritual exercises, relaxed after the excitements of the day, his entire being submitted to a higher order that lifted him out of the dangerous isolation of the creator and included him as a child in God's world.

Continue," said Narcissus. "You promised; you must keep your promise. You are not to think about whether God hears your prayers or whether there is a God such as you imagine. Nor are you to wonder whether your exercises are childish. Compared to Him to whom all our prayers are addressed, all our doing is childish. You must forbid yourself these foolish child's thoughts completely during the exercises.

While you sing, you don't wonder whether or not singing is useful; you sing. That's how you are to pray.

His taut, avid ego extinguished itself in wide-vaulted order; again the venerable words floated above him like stars.

XIX

You don't expect me to become an art expert all of a sudden. You know I'm not. I can tell you nothing about your art that you would not find ridiculous. But let me tell you one thing: at first glance I recognized our Abbot Daniel in this evangelist, and not only him, but also all the things he once meant to us: dignity, kindness, simplicity.

Pensively he once said: "I'm learning a great deal from you, Goldmund. I'm beginning to understand what art is. Formerly it seemed to me that, compared to thinking and science, it could not be taken altogether seriously. I thought something like this: since man is a dubious mixture of mind and matter, since the mind unlocks recognition of the eternal to him, while matter pulls him down and binds him to the transitory, he should strive away from the senses and toward the mind if he wishes to elevate his life and give it meaning. I did pretend, out of habit, to hold art in high esteem, but actually I was arrogant and looked down upon it. Only now do I realize how many paths there are to knowledge and that the path of the mind is not the only one and perhaps not even the best one. It is my way, of course; and I'll stay on it. But I see that you, on the opposite road, on the road of the senses, have seized the secret of being just as deeply and can express it in a much more lively fashion than most thinkers are able to do." "Now you understand," Goldmund said, "that I can't conceive of thoughts without images?" "I have long since understood it. Our thinking is a constant process of converting things to abstractions, a looking away from the sensory, an attempt to construct a purely spiritual world. Whereas you take the least constant, the most mortal things to your heart, and in their very mortality show the meaning of the world. You don't look away from the world; you give yourself to it, and by your sacrifice to it raise it to the highest, a parable of eternity. We thinkers try to come closer to God by pulling the mask of the world away from His face. You come closer to Him by loving His creation and re-creating it. Both are human endeavors, and necessarily imperfect, but art is more innocent."

You should not envy me, Goldmund. There is no peace of the sort you imagine. Oh, there is peace of course, but not anything that lives within us constantly and never leaves us. There is only the peace that must be won again and again, each new day of our lives.

You only see that I am less subject to moods than you, and you take that for peace. But my life is struggle; it is struggle and sacrifice like every decent life; like yours, too.

In the end our works make us feel ashamed, we have to start out again, and each time the sacrifice has to be made anew.

An old experience repeated itself: his work became the possession of others, was looked at, judged, praised; and he was lauded, honored, but his heart and his workshop stood empty and he no longer knew whether the work had been worth the sacrifice.

Since the completion of his big work his life had been in disorder. He missed early mass; he was deeply restless and dissatisfied.

The girl listened gladly to his chatting, laughed delighted at his jokes, but she refused his advances, and for the first time he realized that, to a young woman, he seemed an old man.

One could speak intelligently with men, and they understood an artist's work, but all the rest - chatting, tenderness, games, love, pleasure without thought - did not flourish among men, for that one needed women, wandering, freedom, and ever new impressions.

In order to make this a good statue, I needed my entire youth, my wandering, my love affairs, my courtship of many women. That is the source at which I have drunk.

I was looking forward to it; that's quite true. But now that I'm about to ride off, it feels less amusing than one might think. You'll laugh at me, but I don't like going away; and this dependence does not please me.

The world in which he lived and made his home, his world, his cloister life, his priestly office, his scholarly being, his well-constructed thought edifice - all this had often been shaken to its foundations by his friend and was now filled with doubt.

But seen from above, with God's eyes - was this exemplary life of order and discipline, of renunciation of the world and of the joys of the senses, of remoteness from dirt and blood, of withdrawal into philosophy and meditation any better than Goldmund's life? Had man really been created to live a regulated life, with hours and duties indicated by prayer bells?

Perhaps it was harder, braver and nobler to wander through forests and along the highways with torn shoes, to suffer sun and rain, hunger and need, to play with the joys of the senses and pay for them with suffering.

Goldmund had shown him that a man destined for high things can dip into the lowest depths of the bloody, drunken chaos of life, and soil himself with much dust and blood, without becoming small and common, without killing the divine spark within himself, that he can err through the thickest darkness without extinguishing the divine light and the creative force inside the shrine of his soul.

XX

I think about that very little, and if I may say so openly, I no longer believe in it. There is no beyond.

I'm curious about dying only because it is still my belief or my dream that I am on the road toward my mother.

I cannot give up the thought that, instead of death with his scythe, it will be my mother who will come to take me back to her, who will lead me back to nonbeing and innocence.

"I had completely forgotten my mother until you conjured her up again. That day, too, it hurt very much, as though animal jaws were tearing at my intestines. We were still young then, pretty young boys. But even then my mother called me and I had to follow. She is everywhere. She was Lise, the gypsy; she was Master Niklaus's beautiful madonna; she was life, love, ecstasy. She also was fear, hunger, instinct. Now she is death; she has her fingers in my chest."

For many years it has been my most cherished, my secret dream to make a statue of the mother. She was to me the most sacred of all my images; I have carried her always inside me, a figure of love and mystery. Only a short while ago it would have been unbearable to me to think that I might die without having carved her statue; my life would have seemed useless to me. And now see how strangely things have turned out: it is not my hands that shape and form her; it is her hands that shape and form me. She is closing her fingers around my heart, she is loosening it, she is emptying me; she is seducing me into dying and with me dies my dream, the beautiful statue, the image of the great mother-Eve.

He said farewell with his eyes. And with a sudden movement, as though he were trying to shake his head, he whispered: "But how will you die when your time comes, Narcissus, since you have no mother? Without a mother, one cannot love. Without a mother, one cannot die."