So strange is the human being that in the midst of my new life and fulfilled wishes, I was sometimes aware of a slight, fleeting, subconscious desire for solitude, for even boring and empty days. It seemed to me that the time I had spent at home and the dreary uneventful life from which I was so glad to escape, was something desirable.
I did not want to be like anyone else. I wanted to remain in my own skin, although it was often so constrictive... I had to find a bridge to reach people, I must learn to live with them without always feeling at a disadvantage.
Although his colleagues teased him that he had become a monk, Hesse felt he had finally succeeded in achieving what he had yearned for years earlier when, at the height of his restlessness as a husband and father, he had proclaimed: “I would give my left hand if I could again be a poor happy bachelor and own nothing but twenty books, a second pair of boots, and a box full of secretly composed poems.
Every day you are apt to see someone whom you thought you knew through and through do something that proves how little you really know people or can be certain about anything.
For him, behind every feeling and thought was the sense of the open door leading into nothingness. To be sure, he suffered from dread of many things, of madness, the police, insomnia, and also dread of death. But everything he dreaded he likewise desired and longed for at the same time. He was full of burning curiosity about suffering, destruction, persecution, madness and death.
Her little treasure of experiences opened up, and it was larger than she herself would have supposed.
Narcissus knew only too well what a charming golden bird had flown to him. This hermit soon sensed a kindred soul in Goldmund, in spite of their apparent contrasts. Narcissus was dark and spare; Goldmund, a radiant youth. Narcissus was analytical, a thinker; Goldmund, a dreamer with the soul of a child. But something they had in common bridged these contrasts: both were refined; both were different from the others because of obvious gifts and signs; both bore the special mark of fate.
This one was so lively and talkative, she paid no attention to him or his shyness, so he withdrew his feelers awkwardly and a little offended crawled back into himself like a snail brushed by a cartwheel.
But stronger than his knowledge was his love for the boy, his devotion, his fear of losing him. Had he ever lost his heart to anybody so completely, so painfully, so hopelessly and yet so happily?
You are not strict with him, you do not punish him, you do not command him – because you know that gentleness is stronger than severity, that water is stronger than rock, that love is stronger than force.
The known world shrinks and vanishes, and the soul hurls itself into the uncharted distances of the unknown where everything is strange and yet familiar, and the language of music, of poets, and of dreams is spoken.
Yes, one must find one’s dream, then the path becomes easy. But no dream lasts forever, each one is replaced by a new one, and you shouldn’t try to hold onto any of them.
I wanted to say a prayer and tried hard to remember one, but all I could think of was silly phrases such as ‘Dear Sir’ and ‘Under the Circumstances’. In my sadness and confusion I mumbled those.
I had often observed the sparkle in the eye of those who told me of it and I had always treated it with a half-superior, half-envious smile.
I meditated upon it and found myself to be a riddle.
And if time is not real, then the gap which seems to be between the world and the eternity, between suffering and blissfulness, between evil and good, is also a deception.” “How.
I saw Demian’s face and remarked that it was not a boy’s face but a man’s and then I saw, or rather became aware, that it was not really the face of a man either; it had something different about it, almost a feminine element. And for the time being his face seemed neither masculine nor childish, neither old nor young but a hundred years old, almost timeless and bearing the mark of other periods of history than our own.
All I wanted was to try and realize whatever was in me. Why was that so difficult?
Even as a child I had had at intervals a fondness for observing strange forms in nature, not so much examining them as surrendering myself to their magic, their oblique message. Long tree-roots, coloured veins in rock, patches of oil floating on water, flaws in glass – all such things had a certain fascination for me, above all, water and fire, smoke, clouds, dust and expecially the swirling specks of colour which swam before my closed eyes.
Possibly the apparent relapse they had suffered was not a fall and a cause for suffering, but a leap forward and a positive act.