Narcissus and Goldmund (32 page)

“Narcissus,” he warned, “I'm afraid you don't know whom you're bringing into your cloister. I'm no monk, nor do I wish to become one. I know the three main vows. I gladly accept poverty, but I love neither chastity nor obedience; these virtues don't seem very manly to me. And I have nothing at all left of piety. I haven't confessed or prayed or taken communion in years.”

Narcissus remained calm. “You seem to have become a pagan. But we are not afraid of that. 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. Surely you'd make a very bad monk. But I'm not inviting you to enter the order; I'm merely inviting you to be our guest and to set up a workshop for yourself in our cloister. And one thing more: don't forget that, during your adolescent years, it was I who awakened you and let you go into the worldly life. Whatever has become of you, good or bad, is my responsibility as well as yours. I want to see what has become of you; you will show me, in words, in life, in your works. After you have shown me, if I find that our house is no place for you, I shall be the first to ask you to leave again.”

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. This man Narcissus was no longer the adolescent of old times, no longer the gentle, devoted St. John; he wanted to carve this new Narcissus, the manly, knightly Narcissus. Many statues awaited him: Narcissus, Abbot Daniel, Father Anselm, Master Niklaus, beautiful Rebekka, beautiful Agnes, and still others, friends and enemies, alive and dead. No, he did not want to become a brother of the order, or a pious or learned man; he wanted to make statues, and the thought that his youthful home was to be the home of these works made him happy.

They rode through the chill of late autumn, and one day, on a morning when the bare trees hung thick with frost, they rode across a wide rolling land of deserted reddish moors, and the long chains of hills looked strangely familiar, and then came a high elm wood and a little stream and an old barn at the sight of which Goldmund's heart began to ache in happy anguish. He recognized the hills across which he had once ridden with the knight's daughter Lydia, and the heath across which he had walked that day of thinly falling snow, banished and deeply sad. The elm clumps emerged, and the mill, and the castle. With particular pain he recognized the window of the writing room in which he had then, during his legendary youth, corrected the knight's Latin and heard him tell of his pilgrimage. They rode into the courtyard; it was one of the regular stopping places of the journey. Goldmund asked the Abbot not to tell anyone there his name and to let him eat with the servants, as the groom did. That's how it was arranged. The old knight was no longer there and neither was Lydia, but a few of the old hunters and servants were still part of the household, and in the castle a very beautiful, proud, and domineering noblewoman, Julie, lived and reigned at her husband's side. She still looked wonderfully beautiful, and a little evil. Neither she nor the servants recognized Goldmund. After the meal, in the fading light of evening he crept into the garden, looked over the fence at the already wintery flower beds, crept to the stable door and looked in on the horses. He slept on the straw with the groom, and memories weighed heavily on his chest; he awakened many times. 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! In the morning, as they rode away, he looked anxiously up to the windows. Perhaps he could catch another glimpse of Julie. A few days ago he had looked just as anxiously up to the windows of the bishop's palace to see if Agnes might not appear. She had not shown herself, and neither did Julie. His whole life had been like that, it seemed to him. Saying farewell, escaping, being forgotten; finding himself alone again, with empty hands and a frozen heart. He felt like that throughout the day, sitting gloomily in the saddle, not speaking at all. Narcissus let him be.

But now they were approaching their goal, and after a few days they had reached it. Shortly before tower and roofs of the cloister became visible, they rode across the fallow stony fields in which he had, oh so long ago, gathered John's-wort for Father Anselm, where the gypsy Lise had made a man of him. 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.

18

D
URING
the first days Goldmund lived in the cloister, in one of the guest cells. Then, at his own request, he was given a room across the forge, in one of the administrative buildings that surrounded the main yard like a marketplace.

His homecoming put him under a spell, so violent that he himself was astonished by it. Outside the Abbot no one knew him here, no one knew who he was. The people, monks as well as lay brothers, lived a well-ordered life and had their own special occupations, and left him in peace. But the trees of the courtyard knew him, the portals and windows knew him, the mill and the water wheel, the flagstones of the corridors, the wilted rosebushes in the arcade, the storks' nests on the refectory and granary roofs. From every corner of his past, the scent of his early adolescence came toward him, sweetly and movingly. Love drove him to see everything again, to hear all the sounds again, the bells for evening prayer and Sunday mass, the gushing of the dark millstream between its narrow, mossy banks, the slapping of sandals on the stone floors, the twilight jangle of the key ring as the brother porter went to lock up. Beside the stone gutters, into which the rainwater fell from the roof of the lay refectory, the same herbs were still sprouting, crane's-bill and plantain, and the old apple tree in the forge garden was still holding its far-reaching branches in the same way. But more than anything else the tinkling of the little school bell moved him. It was the moment when, at the beginning of recess, all the cloister students came tumbling down the stairs into the courtyard. How young and dumb and pretty the boys' faces were—had he, too, once really been so young, so clumsy, so pretty and childish?

Beside this familiar cloister he had also found one that was unknown, one which even during the first days struck his attention and became more and more important to him until it slowly linked itself to the more familiar one. Because, if nothing new had been added, if everything was as it had been during his student days, and a hundred or more years before that, he was no longer seeing it with the eyes of a student. He saw and felt the dimension of these edifices, of the vaults of the church, the power of old paintings, of the stone and wood figures on the altars, in the portals, and although he saw nothing that had not been there before, he only now perceived the beauty of these things and of the mind that had created them. He saw the old stone Mother of God in the upper chapel. Even as a boy he had been fond of it, and had copied it, but only now did he see it with open eyes, and realize how miraculously beautiful it was, that his best and most successful work could never surpass it. There were many such wonderful things, and each was not placed there by chance but was born of the same mind and stood between the old columns and arches as though in its natural home. All that had been built, chiseled, painted, lived, thought and taught here in the course of hundreds of years had grown from the same roots, from the same spirit, and everything was held together and unified like the branches of a tree.

Goldmund felt very small in this world, in this quiet mighty unity, and never did he feel smaller than when he saw Abbot John, his friend Narcissus, rule over and govern this powerful yet quietly friendly order. There might be tremendous differences of character between the learned, thin-lipped Abbot John and the kindly simple Abbot Daniel, but each of them served the same unity, the same thought, the same order of existence, received his dignity from it, sacrificed his person to it. That made them as similar to one another as their priestly robes.

In the center of his cloister, Narcissus grew eerily tall in Goldmund's eyes, although he was never anything but a cordial friend and host. Soon Goldmund hardly dared call him Narcissus any more.

“Listen, Abbot John,” he once said to him, “I'll have to get used to your new name eventually. I must tell you that I like it very much in your house. I almost feel like making a general confession to you and, after penance and absolution, asking to be received as a lay brother. But you see, then our friendship would be over; you'd be the Abbot and I a lay brother. But I can no longer bear to live next to you like this and see your work and not be or do anything myself. I too would like to work and show you who I am and what I can do, so that you can see if it was worth snatching me from the gallows.”

“I'm glad to hear it,” said Narcissus, pronouncing his words even more clearly and precisely than usual. “You may set up your workshop any time you wish. I'll put the blacksmith and the carpenter at your disposal immediately. Please use any material you find here and make a list of all the things you want brought in from the outside. And now hear what I think about you and your intentions! You must give me a little time to express myself: I am a scholar and would like to try to illustrate the matter to you from my own world of thought; I have no other language. So follow me once more, as you so often did so patiently in earlier years.”

“I'll try to follow you. Go ahead and speak.”

“Recall how, even in our student days, I sometimes told you that I thought you were an artist. In those days I thought you might become a poet; in your reading and writing you had a certain dislike for the intangible and the abstract, and a special love for words and sounds that had sensuous poetic qualities, words that appealed to the imagination.”

Goldmund interrupted. “Forgive me, but aren't the concepts and abstractions which you prefer to use really images too? Or do you really prefer to think in words with which one cannot imagine anything? But can one think without imagining anything?”

“I'm glad you ask! Yes, certainly one can think without imagining anything! 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. Pay attention and I'll explain it to you. If, instead of immersing yourself in the world, you had become a thinker, you might have created evil. Because you would have become a mystic. Mystics are, to express it briefly and somewhat crudely, thinkers who cannot detach themselves from images, therefore not thinkers at all. They are secret artists: poets without verse, painters without brushes, musicians without sound. There are highly gifted, noble minds among them, but they are all without exception unhappy men. You, too, might have become such a man. Instead of which you have, thank God, become an artist and have taken possession of the image world in which you can be a creator and a master, instead of being stranded in discontentment as a thinker.”

“I'm afraid,” said Goldmund, “I'll never succeed in grasping the idea of your thought world, in which one thinks without images.”

“Oh yes, you will, and right now. 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.”

“I understand something of what you say, but what does it mean to realize oneself?”

“It is a philosophical concept, I can't express it in any other way. For us disciples of Aristotle and St. Thomas, it is the highest of all concepts: perfect being. 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 must know this from your own experience, since you're an artist and have made many statues. If such a figure is really good, if you have released a man's image from the changeable and brought it to pure form—then you have, as an artist, realized this human image.”

“I understand.”

“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. A cloister is no heaven. It is filled with imperfections. Still, a decently run cloister life is infinitely more helpful to men of my nature than the worldly life. I don't wish to speak morally, but from a merely practical point of view, pure thinking, the practice and teaching of which is my task, offers a certain protection from the world. It was much easier for me to realize myself here in our house than it would have been for you. But, 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.”