Narcissus and Goldmund

by Hermann Hesse

We are sun and moon, dear friend; we are sea and land. It is not our purpose to become each other; it is to recognize each other, to learn to see the other and honor him for what he is: each the other’s opposite and complement.”

Oh, how incomprehensible everything was, and actually sad, although it was also beautiful. One knew nothing. One lived and ran about the earth and rode through forests, and certain things looked so challenging and promising and nostalgic: a star in the evening, a blue harebell, a reed-green pond, the eye of a person or of a cow. And sometimes it seemed that something never seen yet long desired was about to happen, that a veil would drop from it all; but then it passed, nothing happened, the riddle remained unsolved, the secret spell unbroken, and in the end one grew old and looked cunning like Father Anselm or wise like Abbot Daniel, and still one knew nothing perhaps, was still waiting and listening.

timidly she brought the small white fruit out of her dress;

You must leave me, sweetheart, and sleep with the gypsies again and the peasant women. Oh, leave, go before they catch you and bind you! We’ll never be happy, never!” Softly he stroked her knee, touched her sex very delicately, and begged: “My little flower, we could be so very happy. Won’t you let me?”

Romantic

How could those fishermen and fishwives, those haggling shoppers not see these mouths, the deathly frightened eyes and wildly flailing tails, the gruesome, useless, desperate battle, this unbearable transformation from mysterious, miraculously beautiful animals—the quiet last shiver that ran across the dying skin before they lay dead and spent—into flattened, miserable slabs of meat for the tables of those jovial paunches? These people saw nothing, knew nothing, and noticed nothing; nothing touched them.

“And afterwards?” Lene asked violently. “Afterwards it is all over? And you go away? What about me?” Goldmund caught her braid and pulled at it softly. “Silly little girl,” he said,

nice dude

Oh, that those lips and breasts should fall prey to the “pigs” and rot in the fields! Was there no power or magic to save such precious flowers?

Now enchanted and now despairing, he wooed his work as though it were a reluctant woman, struggled with it as firmly and gently as a fisherman struggling with a giant pike,