Narcissus and Goldmund

by Hermann Hesse

A man’s wishes may not always determine his destiny, his mission; perhaps there are other, predetermining, factors.”

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.

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.”

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.

Ah, how much worry there was everywhere, how insufficient all our striving!

My goal is this: always to put myself in the place in which I am best able to serve, wherever my gifts and qualities find the best soil, the widest field of action. There is no other goal.”

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.

“Do not think that I’m completely blind and naïve. No. I’m happy to go, because I feel that it has to be, and because something so marvelous happened to me today. But I’m not imagining that I’ll meet with nothing but joy and mirth. I think the road will be hard. But it will also be beautiful, I hope.

Could one not become as they, could one learn nothing from them?

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. When artists create pictures and thinkers search for laws and formulate thoughts, it is in order to salvage something from the great dance of death, to make something that lasts longer than we do.

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.

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

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.

Thus it happened to everyone and everything: a brief flowering that soon wilted and was soon covered by snow.

All true mysteries, it seemed to him, were just like this mysterious water; all true images of the soul were like this: they had no precise contour or shape: they only could be guessed at, a beautiful distant possibility that was veiled in many meanings.

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.

where did it lead? It led to fame and reputation, to money and a settled life, and to a drying up and dwarfing of one’s inner senses, to which alone the mystery was accessible.

The world seemed destroyed and poisoned; there seemed to be no more joy, no more innocence, no more love on earth. Often he fled the overly violent feasts of the desperate dancers. Everywhere he heard the fiddle of death; he soon learned to recognize its sound. Often he participated in mad orgies, played the lute or danced through feverish nights in the glow of peat torches.

“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?”

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. Would today’s pain also wilt one day and be meaningless, his deep despair at his master’s death, at his dying in anger against him, his hurt that no workshop was open in which he could taste the joy of creating and roll the weight of images from his soul?

It too would be forgotten. Nothing had permanence, and he regretted that, too.

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 show himself to this woman and to offer her combat. It was beautiful to lose his freedom to this beauty; beautiful and deeply exciting to gamble his existence on a single throw.

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?

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.

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. Is that not so?”

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.

In you, this mind is not that of a thinker but that of an artist. But it is mind, and 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.

Listen: the thinker tries to determine and to represent the nature of the world through logic. He knows that reason and its tool, logic, are incomplete—the way an intelligent artist knows full well that his brushes or chisels will never be able to express perfectly the radiant nature of an angel or a saint. Still they both try, the thinker as well as the artist, each in his way. They cannot and may not do otherwise. Because 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. That’s why, in former days, I often said to you: don’t try to imitate the thinker or the ascetic man, but be yourself, try to realize yourself.”

God is perfect being. Everything else that exists is only half, only a part, is becoming, is mixed, is made up of potentialities. But 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 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. You are to speak the Our Father and the canticles, and give yourself up to the words and fill yourself with them just the way you play the lute or sing. You don’t pursue clever thoughts and speculations then, do you? No, you execute one finger position after another as purely and perfectly as possible. While you sing, you don’t wonder whether or not singing is useful; you sing. That’s how you are to pray.”

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.”

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.”

“Neither of us can ever understand the other completely in such things. But there is one realization all men of good will share: 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.”

When he roamed about now, he was looking for the perfume of the past, for memories of his former adventures rather than for new freedom.

Yes, and was it not perhaps more childlike and human to lead a Goldmund-life, more courageous, more noble perhaps in the end to abandon oneself to the cruel stream of reality, to chaos, to commit sins and accept their bitter consequences rather than live a clean life with washed hands outside the world, laying out a lonely harmonious thought-garden, strolling sinlessly among one’s sheltered flower beds.

At any rate, 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.

“Pain? Yes, I have had pains enough. But you see, pains are not so bad; they’ve brought me to reason.

“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.”