"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 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.
This praise made Goldmund blush with embarrassment, and also with pleasure. In order to change the subject, he interrupted his friend: "Ive been able to understand most of what you wanted to tell me. But there is one thing I still cant get through my head: the thing you call pure thinking. I mean your so-called thinking without images, and the use of words with which one cannot imagine anything."
In the center of his cloister, Narcissus grew eerily tall in Goldmunds eyes, although he was never anything but a cordial friend and host. Soon Goldmund hardly dared call him Narcissus any more.
"Ill try to follow you. Go ahead and speak."
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, cranes-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?
"Im afraid," said Goldmund, "Ill never succeed in grasping the idea of your thought world, in which one thinks without images."
"Goldmund," Narcissus said very softly, weighing his words even now, "you dont expect me to become an art expert all of a sudden. You know Im 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. As blessed Father Daniel stood before our youthful veneration, he stands here before me now and with him everything that was sacred to us then and that makes those years unforgettable to us. You have given me a generous gift, my friend, and not only have you given our Abbot Daniel back to me; you have opened yourself completely, to me for the first time. Now I know who you are. Let us speak about it no longer; I cannot. Oh Goldmund, that this hour has been given us!"
And once more it worked. Again his taut, avid ego extinguished itself in wide-vaulted order; again the venerable words floated above him like stars.
Goldmund wished nothing better.
Beside the courtyard gate he found a shed that was both empty and suitable for a workshop. He ordered a drawing board and other tools from the carpenter, all to be made after precise plans he drew himself. He made a list of the materials which the cloister carters were to bring him from nearby cities, a long list. He inspected all the felled timber at the carpenters and in the forest, chose many pieces and had them carried to the grassy lot behind his workshop, where he piled them up to dry under a roof he built with his own hands. He also had much work to do with the blacksmith, whose son, a dreamy young man, was completely charmed and won over by him. Together they stood half the day at the forge, over the anvil, by the cooling trough or the whetstone, making all the bent or straight cutting knives, the chisels, drills, and planes he needed for his work. The smiths son, Erich, an adolescent of almost twenty, became Goldmunds friend. He helped him with everything and was full of glowing interest and curiosity. Goldmund promised to teach him to play the lute, which he fervently desired, and he also allowed him to try his hand at carving. If at times Goldmund felt rather useless and depressed in the cloister and in Narcissuss presence, he was able to recover in the presence of Erich, who loved him timidly and admired him immensely. He often asked him to tell him about Master Niklaus and the bishops city. Sometimes Goldmund was glad to tell stories. Then he would be suddenly astonished to find himself sitting like an old man, talking about the travels and adventures of the past, when his true life was only now about to begin.
Now he felt equal to the task and did not want to wait a moment longer. Those first meditative weeks at the cloister, the abandonment of all the homecoming, all the memories of youth, as well as the stories Erich asked him for, had allowed him to see his life with a certain order and clarity.
"It is a philosophical concept, I cant 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 youre an artist and have made many statues. If such a figure is really good, if you have released a mans image from the changeable and brought it to pure form—then you have, as an artist, realized this human image."
Narcissus stood and looked. He stood there, taking his time, examining the work with the attention and care of the scholar. Goldmund stood behind him, in silence, trying to dominate the tempest in his heart. "Oh," he thought, "if one of us does not pass this test, it will be bad. If my work is not good enough, or if he cannot understand it, all my working here will have lost its value. I should have waited longer."
"Yes," he said curtly, "I am happy. But now its time to go and eat."
"Im 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 Ill 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."
Whether it was a beautiful coincidence, or whether the Abbots 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 Gods world. Although the battles of his work had to be overcome in solitude, and he had to give it all the passions of his senses, these hours of meditation let him return to innocence again and again. Still hot with the rage and impatience of his work, or moved to ecstasy, he would plunge into the pious exercises as though into deep, cool water that washed him clean of the arrogance of enthusiasm as well as the arrogance of despair.
He met with great obstacles, greater than he had anticipated. And these obstacles gave him many worries, but they were sweet worries. 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, and each resistance taught him and made him more sensitive. He forgot everything else. He forgot the cloister; he almost forgot Narcissus. Narcissus came a number of times, but was only shown drawings.
Goldmund interrupted. "Forgive me, but arent 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?"
Minutes felt like hours to him, and he thought of the time when Master Niklaus had held his first drawing in his hands. He pressed his hot humid palms together in the effort of waiting.
"Thats right, Narcissus. If you give me a row of figures and symbols, I can work through them without using my imagination, I can let myself be guided by plus and minus, square roots, and so on, and can solve the problem. That is—I once could, today I could no longer do it. But I cant imagine that solving such a formal problem can have any other value than exercising a students brain. Its all right to learn how to count. But Id find it meaningless and childish if a man spent his whole life counting and covering paper with rows of figures."
It was quiet in the large room. His friend the Abbot was moved to the depth of his heart. Goldmund saw this and embarrassment choked his breathing.
"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 dont 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."
To Goldmunds surprise, to his disappointment even, the father confessor did not take his actual sins too seriously, but reprimanded and punished him unsparingly because of his neglect in praying, confession, and communion. He imposed the following penance upon him: to live moderately and chastely for a month before receiving communion, to hear early mass every morning, and to say three Our Fathers and one Hail Mary every evening.
"I understand something of what you say, but what does it mean to realize oneself?"
Afterwards he said to him: "I exhort you, I beg you not to take this penance lightly. I dont know if you can still remember the exact text of the mass. You are to follow it word by word and give yourself up to its meaning. I will myself say the Our Father and a few canticles with you today, and give you instructions as to the words and meanings to which you are to direct your particular attention. You are to speak and hear the sacred words not the way one speaks and hears human words. Every time you catch yourself just reeling off the words, and this will happen more often than you expect, you are to remember this hour and my exhortation, and you are to begin all over again and speak the words in such a way as to let them enter your heart, as I am about to show you."
He worked at the statues of the evangelists on his best days, when everything was harmonious and no doubts cast their shadows over him. It seemed to him that he was most successful with the figure that bore the traits of Abbot Daniel. He loved it very much; the face radiated kindness and purity. He was less satisfied with the statue of Master Niklaus, even though Erich admired it most of all. This figure revealed discord and sadness. It seemed to be brimming over with lofty plans for creation and yet there was also a desperate awareness of the futility of creating, and mourning for a lost unity and innocence.
With great satisfaction, the Abbot saw Goldmund continue his daily exercises for weeks and months after his period of penance was over and after he had received the holy sacraments.
When Abbot Daniel was finished, he had Erich clean up the workshop. He hid the remaining statues under a cloth and placed only that one figure in the light. Then he went to Narcissus, and when he found that he was busy, he waited patiently until the next day. At the noon hour he took his friend to see the statue.
Recently he had changed greatly and aged far beyond his years, but this was visible to no one, since only one man here had known him before. The hardships of his wandering and unsettled life may already have undermined his strength, but the plague and its many horrors, and finally his captivity at the counts residence and that gruesome night in the castle cellar had shaken him to his roots, and several signs of these experiences stayed with him: gray hair in his blond beard, wrinkles on his face, periods of insomnia, and occasionally a certain fatigue inside the heart, a slackening of desire and curiosity, a gray shallow feeling of having had enough, of being fed up. During preparations for his work, during his conversations with Erich or his pursuits at the blacksmiths and at the carpenters, he grew vivacious and young and all admired him and were fond of him; but at other times hed sit for hours, exhausted, smiling and dreaming, given over to apathy and indifference.
"I could not bring myself to confess before," he admitted. "I felt too small, and I already felt small enough in front of you. Now I feel bigger, now I have my work and am no longer a nobody. And since I am living in a cloister, Id like to submit myself to the rules."
It did not always succeed. Sometimes he did not become calm and relaxed in the evening, after burning hours of work. A few times he forgot the exercises, and several times, as he tried to immerse himself in them, he was tortured by the thought that saying prayers was, after all, perhaps only childish striving for a God who did not exist or could not help. He compained about it to his friend.
Smilingly, Narcissus interrupted: "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. But how would he be able to apply something if he had not learned and practiced it before? And the artist also constantly exercises his eye and imagination, and we recognize this training, even if it finds realization only in a few good works. You cannot dismiss thinking as such and sanction only its application! The contradiction is obvious. So let me go on thinking and judge my thoughts by their results, as I shall judge your art by your works. You are restless now and irritable because there are still obstacles between you and your works. Clear them out of the way. Find or build a workshop for yourself and get to work! Many problems will be solved automatically that way."
"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."
"I understand."
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.
"Im 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. Ill 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."
Narcissus turned to him, and immediately he felt relieved. In his friends narrow face he saw flower something that had not flowered there since his boyhood years: a smile, an almost timid smile on that face of mind and will, a smile of love and surrender, a shimmer, as though all its loneliness and pride had been pierced for a second and nothing shone from it but a heart full of joy.
"Listen, Abbot John," he once said to him, "Ill 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; youd 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."
"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. Thats why, in former days, I often said to you: dont try to imitate the thinker or the ascetic man, but be yourself, try to realize yourself."
During 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.
For this first work he had long since thought out the following design: it was to be in two parts, one representing the world, the other the word of God. The lower part, the stairs, growing out of a sturdy oak trunk and winding around it, was to represent creation, images of nature and of the simple life of the patriarchs and the prophets. The upper part, the parapet, would bear the pictures of the four apostles. One of the evangelists was to have the traits of blessed Abbot Daniel; another those of blessed Father Martin, his successor; and the statue of Luke was to eternalize Master Niklaus.
When finally he could begin—snow had fallen, Christmas was already over—Goldmunds life took on another form. He seemed to have disappeared from the cloister; nobody saw him any more. He no longer waited for the students at the end of classes, no longer drifted through the woods, no longer strolled under the arcades. He took his meals in the mill—it wasnt the same miller now whom he had often visited as a student. And he allowed no one but his assistant Erich to enter his workshop; and on certain days Erich did not hear a word out of him.
The question of where to begin was very important to him. The first work he wanted to make here, and with which he wanted to pay for the cloisters hospitality, was not to be an arbitrary piece that one placed just anywhere for the sake of curiosity, no, it had to blend with the old works of the house and with the architecture and life of the cloister and become part of the whole. He would have especially liked to make an altar or perhaps a pulpit, but there was no need or room for either. He found another place instead. There was a raised niche in the refectory, from which a young brother read passages from the lives of the saints during meals. This niche had no ornament. Goldmund decided to carve for the steps to the lectern and for the lectern itself a set of wooden panels like those around a pulpit, with many figures in half-relief and others almost free-standing. He explained his plan to the Abbot, who praised and accepted it.
Without solemnity Narcissus received his confession. It lasted about two hours. With immobile face the Abbot listened to the adventures, sufferings, and sins of his friend, posed many questions, never interrupted, and listened passively also to the part of the confession in which Goldmund admitted that his faith in Gods justice and goodness had disappeared. He was struck by many of the admissions of the confessing man. He could see how much he had been shaken and terrified, how close he had sometimes come to perishing. Then again he was moved to smile, touched when he found that his friends nature had remained so innocent, when he found him worried and repentant because of impious thoughts which were harmless enough compared to his own dark abysses of doubt.
In the meantime Goldmunds work advanced. A small surging world grew from the thick spiral of the stairs: creatures, plants, animals, and people. In their midst stood Noah between grape leaves and grapes. The work was a picture book of praise for the creation of the world and its beauty, free in expression but directed by an inner order and discipline. During all these months no one but Erich saw the work; he was allowed to execute small tasks and thought of nothing but becoming an artist himself. But on certain days not even he was allowed to enter the workshop. On other days Goldmund took his time with him, showed him a few things and let him try, happy to have a believer and a disciple. If the work turned out successfully, he might ask Erichs father to release the boy and let him be trained as his permanent assistant.
"Well, youll be able to understand it with an example. Think of mathematics. What kind of images do figures contain? Or the plus and minus signs? What kind of images does an equation contain? None. When you solve a problem in arithmetic or algebra, no image will help you solve it, you execute a formal task within the codes of thought that you have learned."
"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 childs 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 dont 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 dont wonder whether or not singing is useful; you sing. Thats how you are to pray."
"Well, yes. But attacking the problem of space with pure thought does not strike me as an occupation on which a man should waste his work and his years. The word space means nothing to me and is not worth thinking about unless I can imagine real space, say the space between stars; now, studying and measuring star space does not seem an unworthy task to me."
Then one day Goldmund surprised him with the request that he hear his confession.
