Chapter Six: Jacob Wrestling
What I learned about Abraxas from the strange musician Pistorius I cannot retell briefly. But the most important thing I learned from him was a further step on the way to myself. At that time, at about eighteen, I was an unusual young man, precocious in a hundred things and very backward and helpless in a hundred others. When I compared myself with others now and then, I had often been proud and conceited, but just as often downcast and humiliated. Often I had regarded myself as a genius, often as half mad. I did not manage to join in the pleasures and the life of the boys my age, and often I had consumed myself in reproaches and worries, as if I were hopelessly cut off from them, as if life were closed to me.
Pistorius, who was a full-grown eccentric himself, taught me to keep my courage and my respect for myself. By always finding something of value in my words, my dreams, my fantasies and thoughts, by always taking them seriously and discussing them seriously, he set me the example.
“You told me,” he said, “that you love music because it isn’t moral. All right. But then you yourself mustn’t be a moralist either! You mustn’t compare yourself with others, and if nature has made you a bat, you mustn’t try to make yourself an ostrich. You sometimes think yourself strange; you reproach yourself for going other ways than most people. You must unlearn that. Look into the fire, look into the clouds, and as soon as the intuitions come and the voices in your soul begin to speak, give yourself over to them, and whatever you do, don’t ask first whether it suits or pleases Mr. Teacher or Mr. Papa or some dear God or other! That’s how you ruin yourself. That’s how you end up on the sidewalk and become a fossil. My dear Sinclair, our god is called Abraxas, and he is God and he is Satan; he has the bright world and the dark world in him. Abraxas has no objection to any of your thoughts, to any of your dreams. Never forget that. But he leaves you once you have become irreproachable and normal. Then he leaves you and looks for a new pot to cook his thoughts in.”
Of all my dreams that dark dream of love was the most faithful. Often, often I dreamed it: I stepped under the bird of the coat of arms into our old house, wanted to draw my mother to me, and instead of her held in my arms the tall woman, half male, half motherly, of whom I was afraid and to whom the most ardent longing nonetheless drew me. And this dream I could never tell my friend. This one I kept back when I had opened everything else to him. It was my corner, my secret, my refuge.
When I was depressed, I would ask Pistorius to play me old Buxtehude’s passacaglia. In the dark church in the evening I would sit lost in this strange, heartfelt music, sunk in itself, listening to itself, which did me good every time and made me more ready to grant the voices of the soul their due.
Sometimes we stayed sitting in the church for a while after the organ had died away, and watched the faint light shine through the high, pointed windows and fade.
“It sounds funny,” Pistorius said, “that I was once a theologian and almost became a pastor. But it was only a mistake of form I made there. To be a priest is my calling and my goal. Only I was content too soon and put myself at Jehovah’s disposal before I knew Abraxas. Ah, every religion is beautiful. Religion is soul, no matter whether you take a Christian Communion or make a pilgrimage to Mecca.”
“In that case,” I said, “you could really have become a pastor after all.”
“No, Sinclair, no. I’d have had to lie. Our religion is practiced as though it weren’t one. It acts as though it were a work of the intellect. I could be a Catholic, perhaps, if need be, but a Protestant priest—no! The few real believers—I know some—like to hold to the literal; I couldn’t tell them, for instance, that for me Christ isn’t a person but a hero, a myth, a tremendous shadow picture in which mankind sees itself painted on the wall of eternity. And the others, who come to church to hear a clever word, to fulfill a duty, so as not to miss anything and so on, well, what should I have said to them? Convert them, you think? But I don’t want that at all. The priest doesn’t want to convert; he wants only to live among believers, among his own kind, and to be the bearer and expression of the feeling out of which we make our gods.”
He broke off. Then he went on: “Our new faith, for which we now choose the name of Abraxas, is beautiful, my dear friend. It’s the best thing we have. But it’s still an infant! Its wings haven’t grown yet. Ah, a solitary religion, that isn’t the real thing yet. It has to become communal; it must have cult and intoxication, festivals and mysteries…”
He mused and sank into himself.
“Can’t one celebrate mysteries alone too, or in the smallest circle?” I asked hesitantly.
“One can,” he nodded. “I’ve been celebrating them for a long time. I’ve performed rites for which I’d have to serve years in the penitentiary if anyone knew about them. But I know it isn’t the right thing yet.”
Suddenly he slapped me on the shoulder so that I jumped. “My boy,” he said urgently, “you have mysteries too. I know you must have dreams you don’t tell me. I don’t want to know them. But I tell you: live them, these dreams, play them out, build altars to them! It isn’t perfection yet, but it is a way. Whether one day, you and I and a few others, we will renew the world remains to be seen. But inside ourselves we have to renew it every day, or else there’s nothing to us. Think about that! You’re eighteen years old, Sinclair; you don’t run after streetwalkers; you must have dreams of love, wishes of love. Perhaps they’re of such a kind that you’re afraid of them. Don’t be afraid! They’re the best thing you have! You can believe me. I lost a great deal by doing violence to my dreams of love when I was your age. You mustn’t do that. Once you know about Abraxas, you mustn’t do that anymore. You mustn’t fear anything or consider anything forbidden that the soul in us desires.”
Startled, I objected: “But you can’t do everything that comes into your head! You can’t kill a person because you find him repugnant.”
He moved closer to me.
“Under certain circumstances you can do that too. Only it’s usually a mistake. And I don’t mean that you should simply do everything that crosses your mind. No, but you shouldn’t make these ideas, which have their good meaning, harmful by driving them away and moralizing at them. Instead of nailing yourself or someone else to a cross, you can drink wine from a chalice with solemn thoughts and think of the mystery of the sacrifice as you do. Even without such acts, you can treat your urges and so-called temptations with respect and love. Then they show their meaning, and they all have meaning.—The next time something really wild or sinful occurs to you, Sinclair, if you’d like to kill someone or commit some gigantic obscenity, then think for a moment that it’s Abraxas fantasizing in you like that! The person you want to kill is never, after all, Mr. So-and-so; he’s surely only a disguise. When we hate a person, we hate something in his image that sits in ourselves. What isn’t in ourselves doesn’t stir us up.”
Pistorius had never said anything to me that struck me so deeply in my most secret place. I could not answer. But what had touched me most strongly and most strangely was the way this counsel chimed with words of Demian’s that I had carried within me for years and years. They knew nothing of each other, and both told me the same thing.
“The things we see,” Pistorius said softly, “are the same things that are in us. There is no reality except the one we have in us. That’s why most people live so unreally: because they take the pictures outside for the real thing and never let their own world inside them get a word in. You can be happy that way. But once you know the other, you no longer have the choice of going the way most people go. Sinclair, the way of most people is easy; ours is hard.—Let’s go.”
A few days later, after I had waited for him in vain twice, I came upon him late in the evening in the street as he came blowing around a corner, alone in the cold night wind, stumbling and completely drunk. I did not want to call out to him. He went past me without seeing me and stared ahead with glowing and lonely eyes, as if he were following a dark call from the unknown. I followed him the length of a street; he drifted along as if pulled on an invisible wire, with a fanatical and yet dissolved gait, like a ghost. Sadly I went back home, to my unredeemed dreams.
“So that’s how he renews the world in himself!” I thought, and felt in that same moment that this was a low and moralizing thought. What did I know of his dreams? Perhaps in his drunkenness he was going a surer way than I in my anxiety.
During the breaks between lessons I had sometimes noticed that a classmate I had never paid attention to was seeking my company. He was a small, weak-looking, slight youth with thin, reddish-blond hair, who had something of his own in his look and behavior. One evening, when I was coming home, he was lying in wait for me in the lane, let me pass him, then ran after me again and stopped in front of our front door.
“Do you want something from me?” I asked.
“I’d just like to talk to you once,” he said shyly. “Be so kind as to walk a few steps with me.”
I went with him and sensed that he was deeply agitated and full of expectation. His hands were trembling.
“Are you a spiritualist?” he asked quite suddenly.
“No, Knauer,” I said, laughing. “Not in the least. What gives you an idea like that?”
“But you’re a theosophist?”
“Not that either.”
“Oh, don’t be so secretive! I can feel quite well that there’s something special about you. You have it in your eyes. I’m sure you have dealings with spirits.—I’m not asking out of curiosity, Sinclair, no! I’m a seeker myself, you know, and I’m so alone.”
“Go on and tell me!” I encouraged him. “I don’t know anything at all about spirits; I live in my dreams, and you’ve sensed that. Other people live in dreams too, but not in their own; that’s the difference.”
“Yes, perhaps that’s how it is,” he whispered. “It all depends on what kind of dreams they are that you live in.—Have you ever heard of white magic?”
I had to say no.
“That’s when you learn to master yourself. You can become immortal, and work magic too. Have you never done exercises like that?”
When I asked curiously about these exercises, he was mysterious at first, until I turned to go; then he brought it all out.
“For example, when I want to fall asleep or to concentrate, I do one of these exercises. I think of something, for instance a word or a name, or a geometric figure. Then I think it into myself as hard as I can; I try to picture it inside my head until I feel that it’s in there. Then I think it into my throat, and so on, until I’m completely filled with it. Then I’m quite firm, and nothing can upset me anymore.”
I understood more or less what he meant. But I sensed clearly that he had something else on his mind; he was strangely agitated and hurried. I tried to make it easy for him to ask, and soon enough he came out with his real concern.
“You’re abstinent too, aren’t you?” he asked me anxiously.
“What do you mean? Do you mean sex?”
“Yes, yes. I’ve been abstinent for two years now, since I learned about the doctrine. Before that I practiced a vice, you know what I mean.—So you’ve never been with a woman?”
“No,” I said. “I haven’t found the right one.”
“But if you found the one you thought was the right one, then you would sleep with her?”
“Yes, of course.—If she has no objection,” I said with a little mockery.
“Oh, but then you’re on the wrong path! The inner powers can be developed only if you remain completely abstinent. I’ve done it, for two years. Two years and a little more than a month! It’s so hard! Sometimes I can hardly stand it anymore.”
“Listen, Knauer, I don’t think abstinence is so terribly important.”
“I know,” he protested, “everyone says that. But I didn’t expect it from you. Whoever wants to go the higher spiritual way must stay pure, absolutely!”
“Well, then do it! But I don’t understand why someone who suppresses his sex should be ‘purer’ than anyone else. Or can you shut sex out of all your thoughts and dreams too?”
He looked at me in despair.
“No, that’s just it! Lord God, and yet it has to be. At night I have dreams I couldn’t even tell myself! Terrible dreams, I tell you!”
I remembered what Pistorius had said to me. But however much I felt his words to be right, I could not pass them on; I could not give advice that did not come from my own experience and that I did not yet feel equal to following myself. I fell silent and felt humiliated that someone was seeking advice from me when I had none to give.
“I’ve tried everything!” Knauer wailed beside me. “I’ve done whatever can be done, with cold water, with snow, with gymnastics and running, but nothing helps. Every night I wake up from dreams I mustn’t even think about. And the horrible thing is: because of it I’m gradually losing everything I had learned in spiritual things. I almost never manage anymore to concentrate or put myself to sleep; often I lie awake the whole night. I won’t be able to stand it much longer. If in the end I can’t carry the fight through after all, if I give in and make myself unclean again, then I’m worse than all the others who never fought at all. You understand that, don’t you?”
I nodded but could say nothing to it. He was beginning to bore me, and I was frightened at myself that his obvious distress and despair made no deeper impression on me. I felt only: I can’t help you.
“So you have nothing at all for me?” he said at last, exhausted and sad. “Nothing at all? There must be a way! How do you do it, then?”
“I can’t tell you anything, Knauer. People can’t help one another there. No one helped me either. You have to look into yourself, and then you must do what really comes out of your nature. There is nothing else. If you can’t find yourself, then you won’t find any spirits either, I think.”
Disappointed and suddenly gone mute, the little fellow looked at me. Then his look blazed up in sudden spite; he made a face at me and shouted furiously: “Ah, you’re a fine saint! You have your vice too, I know it! You act like a sage, and secretly you’re stuck in the same filth as I am and everyone! You’re a pig, a pig, like me. We’re all pigs!”
I went off and left him standing there. He took two or three steps after me, then fell back, turned around, and ran off. I felt sick from a feeling of pity and disgust, and I could not get free of the feeling until, at home in my little room, I set my few pictures up around me and gave myself over with the most longing intensity to my own dreams. At once my dream came back, of the front door and the coat of arms, of my mother and the strange woman, and I saw the woman’s features so overly distinctly that I began to draw her picture that same evening.
When this drawing was finished after a few days, brushed in, as if unconsciously, in dreamlike quarter hours, I hung it on my wall in the evening, moved my study lamp in front of it, and stood before it as before a spirit with whom I had to wrestle to the end. It was a face like the earlier one, like my friend Demian, in some features like myself as well. One eye stood conspicuously higher than the other; the gaze went out over me in absorbed rigidity, full of fate.
I stood in front of it and grew cold down into my chest from inner strain. I questioned the picture, I accused it, I caressed it, I prayed to it; I called it mother, I called it beloved, called it whore and harlot, called it Abraxas. In between, words of Pistorius’s—or of Demian’s?—came to me; I could not remember when they had been spoken, but I thought I heard them again. They were words about Jacob wrestling with the angel of God, and the “I will not let thee go, except thou bless me.”
The painted face in the lamplight changed with every invocation. It grew bright and shining, grew black and gloomy, closed sallow lids over dead eyes, opened them again and flashed glowing looks; it was woman, was man, was girl, was a little child, an animal, blurred into a smudge, grew large and clear again. At last, following a strong inner call, I closed my eyes and now saw the picture within me, stronger and more powerful. I wanted to kneel down before it, but it was so deep inside me that I could no longer separate it from myself, as if it had become nothing but me.
Then I heard a dark, heavy roaring as of a spring storm and trembled with an indescribably new feeling of fear and experience. Stars flashed up before me and went out; memories back to my first, most forgotten childhood, yes, back into previous existences and early stages of becoming, streamed past me in a throng. But the memories, which seemed to repeat my whole life to me down to its most secret places, did not stop with yesterday and today; they went on, mirrored the future, tore me away from today and into new forms of life whose images were tremendously bright and dazzling, but none of which I could properly remember later.
In the night I woke from deep sleep; I was in my clothes and lying across the bed. I lit a light, felt that I had to remember something important, knew nothing anymore of the hours before. I lit a light; memory came gradually. I looked for the picture; it no longer hung on the wall, nor did it lie on the table. Then I seemed to recall dimly that I had burned it. Or had it been a dream that I had burned it in my hands and eaten the ashes?
A great, twitching restlessness drove me. I put on my hat and went through the house and down the lane as if under compulsion; I ran and ran through streets and across squares as if blown by a storm, listened outside my friend’s dark church, searched and searched in a dark urge without knowing for what. I came through a suburb where there were brothels; here and there a light was still burning. Farther out lay new buildings and heaps of bricks, partly covered with gray snow. As I drifted through this wasteland like a sleepwalker under some alien pressure, I remembered the new building in my hometown into which my tormentor Kromer had once drawn me for our first reckoning. A similar building lay before me here in the gray night, yawning at me with a black doorway. It drew me in; I wanted to avoid it and stumbled over sand and rubble; the urge was stronger; I had to go in.
Over boards and broken bricks I staggered into the desolate space; it smelled dismally of damp cold and stones. A heap of sand lay there, a pale gray patch; otherwise everything was dark.
Then a horrified voice called out to me: “For God’s sake, Sinclair, where did you come from?”
And beside me someone rose up out of the darkness, a small, thin fellow, like a ghost, and while my hair was still standing on end I recognized my schoolmate Knauer.
“How did you get here?” he asked, as if crazed with agitation. “How could you find me?”
I did not understand.
“I wasn’t looking for you,” I said, dazed; every word cost me effort and came laboriously over dead, heavy lips that seemed frozen.
He stared at me.
“Not looking for me?”
“No. Something drew me here. Did you call me? You must have called me. What are you doing here? It’s night.”
He threw his thin arms around me convulsively.
“Yes, night. It must be morning soon. Oh, Sinclair, that you haven’t forgotten me! Can you forgive me?”
“For what?”
“Oh, I was so ugly!”
Only now did I remember our conversation. Had that been four or five days ago? It seemed to me a lifetime had passed since. But now I suddenly knew everything. Not only what had happened between us, but also why I had come here and what Knauer had meant to do out here.
“So you meant to take your life, Knauer?”
He shuddered with cold and with fear.
“Yes, I meant to. I don’t know whether I could have. I wanted to wait until it was morning.”
I drew him out into the open. The first horizontal streaks of daylight glimmered unspeakably cold and cheerless in the gray air.
I led the boy a little way by the arm. Something spoke out of me: “Now you go home and say nothing to anyone! You went the wrong way, the wrong way! And we aren’t pigs, as you think. We are human beings. We make gods and wrestle with them, and they bless us.”
In silence we walked on and parted. When I got home it was day.
The best thing that time in St. still brought me was the hours with Pistorius at the organ or in front of the fire. We read a Greek text about Abraxas together; he read me passages from a translation of the Vedas and taught me to speak the sacred “Om.” Yet it was not this learning that advanced me inwardly, but rather the opposite. What did me good was finding my way forward within myself, the growing trust in my own dreams, thoughts, and intuitions, and the growing knowledge of the power I carried within me.
With Pistorius I was in tune in every way. I needed only to think of him strongly, and I was sure that he or a greeting from him would come to me. I could ask him something, just as with Demian, without his being there himself: I needed only to picture him firmly and direct my questions to him as intense thoughts. Then all the power of soul that had gone into the question returned to me as an answer. Only it was not the person of Pistorius that I pictured, nor that of Max Demian, but it was the image I had dreamed and painted, the man-woman dream image of my daemon, that I had to invoke. It lived now no longer only in my dreams, and no longer painted on paper, but in me, as an image of desire and a heightening of myself.
Peculiar and sometimes comical was the relationship into which the failed suicide Knauer had entered with me. Since the night when I had been sent to him, he clung to me like a faithful servant or a dog, tried to tie his life to mine, and followed me blindly. He came to me with the strangest questions and wishes, wanted to see ghosts, wanted to learn the Kabbalah, and did not believe me when I assured him that I understood nothing of all these things. He credited me with every power. But the strange thing was that he often came to me with his peculiar and stupid questions just when some knot in me needed untying, and that his whimsical notions and requests often gave me the cue and the impulse for the solution. He was often a nuisance to me and was sent away imperiously, but still I felt: he too had been sent to me; from him too what I gave him came back to me doubled; he too was a guide to me, or at least a way. The crazy books and writings he brought me, in which he sought his salvation, taught me more than I could see at the moment.
This Knauer later slipped away from my path without my noticing. With him no reckoning was necessary. But with Pistorius it was. With this friend I went through one more peculiar experience toward the end of my school days in St.
Even harmless people are hardly spared coming into conflict once or several times in their lives with the fine virtues of filial piety and gratitude. Everyone must at some point take the step that separates him from his father, from his teachers; everyone must feel something of the hardness of solitude, even if most people can bear little of it and soon creep back under shelter again.—From my parents and their world, the “bright” world of my beautiful childhood, I had not parted in violent struggle, but had slowly and almost imperceptibly grown more distant from them and become more of a stranger. I was sorry about it; it often gave me bitter hours on my visits home; but it did not go to my heart; it could be borne.
But where we have offered love and reverence not out of habit but out of our very own impulse, where with our very own hearts we have been disciples and friends—there it is a bitter and terrible moment when we suddenly think we recognize that the guiding current in us means to lead us away from the one we love. Then every thought that rejects the friend and teacher turns its poisoned sting against our own heart; then every blow of defense strikes our own face. Then, for one who believed he carried a valid morality within himself, the names “faithlessness” and “ingratitude” rise up like shameful catcalls and brands; then the frightened heart flees anxiously back into the dear valleys of the virtues of childhood and cannot believe that this break too must be made, that this bond too must be cut.
Slowly, over time, a feeling in me had turned against acknowledging my friend Pistorius so unconditionally as my guide. What I had lived through in the most important months of my youth had been my friendship with him, his advice, his comfort, his nearness. Through him God had spoken to me. From his mouth my dreams had come back to me, clarified and interpreted. He had given me the courage to be myself.—Ah, and now I felt resistance to him slowly growing. I heard too much instruction in his words; I felt that he understood only one part of me fully.
There was no quarrel, no scene between us, no break, and not even a reckoning. I said only a single word to him, a harmless one really—but it was all the same the moment in which an illusion between us fell apart into colored shards.
The foreboding had been weighing on me for a while; it became a distinct feeling one Sunday in his old scholar’s room. We were lying on the floor in front of the fire, and he was speaking of mysteries and forms of religion that he studied, that he pondered, and whose possible future occupied him. But to me all this seemed more curious and interesting than vital; what came across to me from it sounded like erudition, like weary searching among the ruins of former worlds. And all at once I felt an aversion to this whole manner, to this cult of mythologies, to this mosaic game with handed-down forms of belief.
“Pistorius,” I said suddenly, with a malice that broke out of me, surprising and frightening even me, “you ought to tell me a dream again sometime, a real dream that you’ve had at night. What you’re talking about there is so—so damned antiquarian!”
He had never heard me talk like that, and in the same moment I myself felt, with a flash of shame and fright, that the arrow I had shot at him, which struck him in the heart, had been taken from his own armory—that I was now maliciously throwing back at him, in pointed form, self-reproaches I had occasionally heard him utter in an ironic tone.
He felt it instantly, and he fell silent at once. I looked at him with fear in my heart, and saw him turn terribly pale.
After a long, heavy pause he put fresh wood on the fire and said quietly: “You’re quite right, Sinclair. You’re a clever fellow. I’ll spare you the antiquarian stuff.”
He spoke very calmly, but I could hear the pain of the wound well enough. What had I done!
Tears were close; I wanted to turn to him warmly, wanted to ask his forgiveness, to assure him of my love, my tender gratitude. Touching words occurred to me—but I could not say them. I stayed lying there, looked into the fire, and said nothing. And he said nothing either, and so we lay there, and the fire burned down and sank together, and with every fading flame I felt something beautiful and intimate glow out and fly away that could not come back.
“I’m afraid you misunderstand me,” I said at last, very strained, in a dry, hoarse voice. The stupid, senseless words passed my lips as if mechanically, as though I were reading aloud from a newspaper serial.
“I understand you quite correctly,” Pistorius said softly. “You’re right, after all.” He waited. Then he went on slowly: “As far as one person can be right against another.”
No, no, something cried in me, I am wrong!—but I could say nothing. I knew that with my one little word I had pointed him to an essential weakness, to his distress and his wound. I had touched the point where he had to mistrust himself. His ideal was “antiquarian”; he was a seeker turned backward; he was a romantic. And suddenly I felt deeply: precisely what Pistorius had been to me and had given me, he could not be and give to himself. He had led me along a path that must go beyond him too, the guide, and leave him behind.
God knows how such a word comes about! I had not meant it badly at all, had had no inkling of a catastrophe. I had said something that at the moment of saying it I myself did not know at all; I had given way to a little, somewhat witty, somewhat malicious notion, and it had turned into fate. I had committed a small, careless rudeness, and for him it had become a judgment.
Oh, how I wished then that he had grown angry, that he had defended himself, that he had shouted at me! He did none of that; all of that I had to do myself, inside me. He would have smiled if he could have. That he could not was what showed me best how hard I had hit him.
And by taking the blow from me, from his forward and ungrateful pupil, so soundlessly, by keeping silent and letting me be right, by acknowledging my word as fate, Pistorius made me hateful to myself and made my rashness a thousand times greater. When I struck, I had thought I was hitting someone strong and able to defend himself—now it was a quiet, patient man, a defenseless man, who surrendered without a word.
For a long time we stayed lying before the dying fire, in which every glowing figure, every curling stick of ash called happy, beautiful, rich hours back to my memory and piled up the debt of my obligation to Pistorius higher and higher. At last I could bear it no longer. I got up and went. For a long time I stood outside his door, for a long time on the dark stairs, for a long time outside the house, waiting to see whether he might come and follow me. Then I went on and walked for hours and hours through town and suburbs, park and forest, until evening. And it was then that I first felt the mark of Cain on my forehead.
Only gradually did I come to reflect. All my thoughts intended to accuse me and defend Pistorius. And all of them ended in the opposite. A thousand times I was ready to regret my hasty word and take it back—but it had been true all the same. Only now did I succeed in understanding Pistorius, in building up his whole dream before me. This dream had been to be a priest, to proclaim the new religion, to give new forms of exaltation, of love and worship, to set up new symbols. But this was not his strength, not his office. He lingered too warmly in what had been; he knew the past too exactly; he knew too much about Egypt, about India, about Mithras, about Abraxas. His love was bound to images the earth had already seen, and yet in his innermost self he no doubt knew that the new had to be new and different, that it had to spring from fresh soil and not be drawn from collections and libraries. His office was perhaps to help lead people to themselves, as he had done with me. To give them the unheard-of, the new gods, was not his office.
And here the insight suddenly burned me like a sharp flame:—there was an “office” for everyone, but for no one an office he could choose, define, and administer as he pleased. It was wrong to want new gods; it was completely wrong to want to give the world anything at all! There was no, no, no duty for awakened people but the one: to seek themselves, to become firm in themselves, to grope their own way forward, no matter where it led.—That shook me deeply, and that was the fruit of this experience for me. I had often played with pictures of the future; I had dreamed of roles that might be meant for me, as a poet perhaps or as a prophet, or as a painter, or something. All that was nothing. I was not here to write poetry, to preach, to paint; neither I nor any other human being was here for that. All that came about only incidentally. The true calling for everyone was only this one thing: to come to himself. He might end up as a poet or as a madman, as a prophet or as a criminal—that was not his business; indeed, in the end it was of no importance. His business was to find his own fate, not just any fate, and to live it out in himself, wholly and unbroken. Everything else was half-measures, was an attempt to escape, was flight back into the ideals of the masses, was conformity and fear of one’s own inner self. Terrible and holy, the new image rose before me, sensed a hundred times, perhaps often spoken already, and yet only now lived. I was a throw of nature, a throw into the uncertain, perhaps toward something new, perhaps toward nothing, and to let this throw from the primal depths take effect, to feel its will in me and make it wholly my own, that alone was my calling. That alone!
I had already tasted much solitude. Now I sensed that there was a deeper kind, and that it was inescapable.
I made no attempt to reconcile with Pistorius. We remained friends, but the relationship had changed. Only a single time did we talk about it, or really it was only he who did. He said: “I have the wish to become a priest, you know that. Most of all I would have liked to become the priest of the new religion of which we have so many intimations. I’ll never be able to be that—I know it, and I’ve known it for a long time without entirely admitting it to myself. I’ll just perform other priestly services, perhaps at the organ, perhaps some other way. But I must always be surrounded by something I feel to be beautiful and holy, organ music and mystery, symbol and myth; I need it and don’t want to give it up.—That is my weakness. For I know sometimes, Sinclair, I know at times, that I shouldn’t have such wishes, that they are luxury and weakness. It would be greater, it would be more right, if I simply stood at the disposal of fate, without any claims. But I can’t do that; it’s the only thing I can’t do. Perhaps you’ll be able to someday. It’s hard; it’s the only really hard thing there is, my boy. I’ve often dreamed of it, but I can’t; it makes me shudder: I can’t stand so completely naked and alone; I too am a poor, weak dog who needs a little warmth and food and would like now and then to feel the nearness of his own kind. Whoever really wants nothing at all but his fate no longer has any others of his kind; he stands quite alone and has only cold space around him. You know, that’s Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane. There have been martyrs who gladly let themselves be nailed to the cross, but they weren’t heroes either, weren’t set free; they too wanted something that had grown dear and homelike to them; they had models, they had ideals. Whoever wants only his fate has neither models nor ideals anymore; he has nothing dear, nothing comforting! And that is the way one really ought to go. People like you and me are lonely enough, but we still have each other; we have the secret satisfaction of being different, of rebelling, of wanting the unusual. That too has to fall away if someone wants to go the whole way. He mustn’t want to be a revolutionary, either, or an example, or a martyr. It’s beyond imagining—”
No, it was beyond imagining. But it could be dreamed, it could be felt in advance, it could be sensed. A few times I felt something of it, when I found a wholly quiet hour. Then I looked into myself and looked into the open, staring eyes of the image of my fate. They could be full of wisdom, they could be full of madness, they could beam love or deep malice; it was all the same. None of it could one choose; none of it could one want. One could want only oneself, only one’s fate. To this point Pistorius had served me for a stretch of the way as a guide.
In those days I ran about as if blind; a storm roared in me; every step was danger. I saw nothing but the abysmal darkness before me, into which all the paths so far ran out and sank down. And within me I saw the image of the guide, who resembled Demian and in whose eyes my fate stood.
I wrote on a piece of paper: “A guide has left me. I am standing in complete darkness. I cannot take a step alone. Help me!”
I meant to send it to Demian. But I left it undone; every time I meant to, it looked silly and senseless. But I knew the little prayer by heart and often said it inwardly. It went with me every hour. I began to sense what prayer is.
My school days were over. I was to take a trip during the vacation; my father had thought this up; and then I was to go to the university. To which faculty I did not know. I had been granted one semester of philosophy. I would have been just as content with anything else.