CHAPTER SIX

JACOB WRESTLES WITH THE ANGEL

I cannot summarize in brief what I learned about Abraxas from the strange musician, Pistorius. The most important thing I learned from him, though, was another step on the path to myself. I was an unusual young man then, around eighteen years old—precocious in a hundred ways but very far behind and helpless in a hundred other ways. When I compared myself to other people my age, as I would do every now and then, I sometimes felt proud and conceited but just as often demoralized and depressed. There were many times I saw myself as a genius, many times as half insane. I was never able to share and join in the others’ pleasures, and I was eaten up with worries and self-hatred about how hopelessly isolated I was from them, how cut off from life.

Pistorius, an outsider himself, gave me courage and taught me to keep my self-respect. The way he always found something valuable in my words, my dreams, my thoughts and imaginings, always took them seriously and discussed them in earnest, became exemplary for me.

“You’ve told me you like music because it is outside of morality,” he said. “Well and good. But now stop being a moralist yourself! You can’t keep comparing yourself to other people—if nature has made you a bat, you can’t decide you want to be an ostrich. You sometimes feel like you don’t belong, you blame yourself for following a different path than most other people. You have to unlearn that. Stare into the fire, look at the clouds, and when ideas or intuitions come to you and the voices in your soul start to speak, trust them and don’t worry about whether your teacher or your daddy or any other lord above likes what they have to say! That’s what ruins a person. That’s how you end up on the law-abiding sidewalk, just another fossil. My dear Sinclair, our god is called Abraxas, and he is God and Satan both, he contains the world of light and the world of darkness. Abraxas does not reject a single one of your thoughts and dreams. Never forget that. But he will leave you if you ever turn normal and irreproachable. Then he will leave you, and look for another pot to cook up his thoughts in.”

Out of all my dreams, the dark sex dream was the most faithful. I dreamed it many, many times: stepping under the bird on the coat of arms into our old house, trying to take Mother in my arms and instead finding in my arms the large, half-masculine half-maternal woman I was afraid of and at the same time drawn to with the most desperate, burning desire. But I could never tell my friend about this dream. It was something I kept back even after I had revealed everything else to him. It was my private place, my secret, my refuge.

Whenever I felt depressed, I asked Pistorius if he would play me Buxtehude’s passacaglia. I sat in the church in the evening darkness, lost in this strange, interior, self-absorbed music. It seemed to be listening to itself, and every time I heard it it helped me and made me more ready to heed my own inner voices.

Sometimes we stayed for a while, after the last notes of the organ faded away, and watched the weak light shine through the high windows with their pointed arches and disappear into the space of the church.

“It seems strange,” Pistorius said, “that I used to be a divinity student and almost became a pastor. But it was just an error in form. It truly is my calling and my goal to be a priest. But I took the easy path and put myself at Jehovah’s service before I knew Abraxas. Ah, every religion is beautiful. Religion is soul, irrespective of whether you take Christian communion or make the pilgrimage to Mecca.”

“In that case,” I said, “you could have gone ahead and become a pastor after all.”

“No, Sinclair, no. I would have had to lie. Our religion is practiced as though it weren’t a religion at all. It pretends to be a construction of reason. I could probably be Catholic if I had to, but a Protestant minister? No! The few true believers out there—I do know some—like to cling to literal meanings, I couldn’t tell them that Christ for me is not a person but a mythical hero, a prodigious shadow picture in which humanity sees itself silhouetted on the wall of eternity. As for the others, the ones who come to church to hear a clever sermon, to do their duty, not miss anything, and so on—what could I say to them? Convert them, you think? But I don’t want to, not at all! A priest doesn’t want to convert anyone, he wants to live among the faithful, among people like him, and be the bearer and expression of the feeling out of which we make our gods.”

He broke off. Then he continued: “Our new faith, for which we are choosing the name Abraxas, is a beautiful one, my friend. It is the best we have. But it is still in its infancy! It has not yet grown wings. A lonely religion, alas, is not yet the true one. It has to become communal, has to have rites and raptures, holidays and mysteries. . . .”

He sank into his own thoughts.

“Isn’t it possible to celebrate mysteries alone, or in small groups?” I asked hesitantly.

“It’s possible,” he nodded. “I have done it myself, for a long time. I have performed rites that would land me in jail for years, if they knew. But I know that that is not yet the true way.”

Suddenly he startled me by clapping me on the shoulder. “My boy,” he said urgently, “you have mysteries too. I know that you must be having dreams you don’t tell me about. I don’t want to know what they are. But I tell you: Live your dreams! Act them out, build altars to them! It is not ideal, but it is a path. Time will tell whether or not we will renew the world—you and me and a few other people. But we have to renew it within ourselves, every day, otherwise we have nothing. Think about it! You’re eighteen years old, Sinclair, you don’t go with streetwalkers, you must have sex dreams, sexual urges. Maybe you’re someone who’s afraid of them. Don’t be! They are the best things you have! Believe me. I lost a lot by strangling the sexual dreams I had when I was your age. You can’t do that. Once you know about Abraxas, you mustn’t. We cannot fear anything or treat anything our soul desires as forbidden.”

I was shocked, and I objected: “But you can’t just do anything you want! You can’t kill someone just because you don’t like him.”

He moved closer to me.

“In certain circumstances, you can—that too. Only it’s usually a mistake. And I’m not saying you should simply do whatever comes into your head. No, but these ideas have their own good sense, and you shouldn’t make them harmful by repressing them and moralizing about them. Instead of nailing yourself or anyone else to the cross, you can drink wine from a chalice, think ceremonial thoughts, and consider the mystery of sacrifice that way. It is possible to treat your drives and so-called temptations with respect and love, even if you don’t act on them. Then they show you what they mean—and they all do mean something. The next time something truly crazy or sinful occurs to you, Sinclair—when you want to kill someone or commit some other enormous horror—stop for a moment and think that this is Abraxas imagining within you! The person you want to kill isn’t Mr. So-and-so: he is surely just a disguise. When we hate someone, what we hate is something in him, or in our image of him, that is part of ourselves. Nothing that isn’t in us ever bothers us.”

Nothing Pistorius ever said struck me so deeply, penetrating my innermost secrets. I couldn’t respond. What affected me most powerfully and strangely, though, was the resonance between these words of encouragement and Demian’s words I had carried inside me for so many years. They didn’t know a thing about each other, and yet both of them had told me the same thing.

“The things we see,” Pistorius said softly, “are the same things that are in us. There is no reality other than what we have inside us. That is why most people live such unreal lives, because they see external images as reality and never give their own internal world a chance to express itself. You can be happy living like that, but once you know that there is another way, you can no longer choose to follow the path of the many. The path of the many is an easy one, Sinclair. Ours is hard. — We are trying to follow it.”

A few days later, after I had waited for him twice in vain, I saw him on the street late at night. He came around the corner as if blown by the cold night wind, alone, stumbling drunk. I did not want to call his name. He walked past me without seeing me; he was staring straight ahead with burning, lonely eyes, as though he were following a dark summons from the unknown. I followed him down the street; he drifted along as though pulled by an invisible string, with a fanatical and yet exhausted gait, like a ghost. I sadly walked back home to my own unrealized dreams.

“So that’s how he renews the world inside him!” I thought, and at the same moment I felt that this was a low and moralizing thing to think. What did I know of his dreams? Maybe he was on a surer path in his drunkenness than I was in my timidity.

•   •   •

I had started to notice, in the breaks between classes, that a fellow student I had never paid attention to was trying to approach me. He was a short, skinny, weak-looking boy with thin reddish-blond hair and something strange about how he acted and the look in his eye. One evening when I was walking home, he was loitering in the street waiting for me; he let me pass, then ran after me and stopped in front of our front door with me.

“Do you want something?” I asked.

“I just want to talk to you,” he said shyly. “Please be so good as to walk a little ways with me.”

I followed him and could feel that he was deeply excited and full of anticipation. His hands were shaking.

All of a sudden he asked: “Are you a spiritualist?”

“No, Knauer,” I said with a laugh. “Not a bit. What makes you think that?”

“But you’re a theosophist, then?”

“No, not that either.”

“Oh, don’t be so secretive! I can see perfectly well that you’re different somehow. It’s in your eyes. I’m sure you communicate with spirits. . . . I’m not asking out of curiosity, Sinclair, no! I am a seeker too, you know, and I feel so alone.”

“Tell me about it,” I encouraged him. “I don’t know anything about spirits, I just live in my dreams, that’s what you noticed. Other people live in dreams too, but they’re not their own dreams, that’s the difference.”

“Yes, you may be right,” he whispered. “It all depends what kinds of dreams a person lives in. . . . Have you heard of white magic?”

I had to say no.

“That’s where you learn self-mastery. You can become immortal, cast spells too. You’ve never practiced the exercises?”

I asked curious questions about these exercises, which made him cagey until I turned to walk away, then he dredged something up: “For example, when I want to fall asleep, or concentrate on something, I do one of these exercises. I think of something, a word or a name, a geometrical shape. Then I think it into myself as hard as I can. I try to see it inside my head, until I can feel it there, then I think it down into my neck, and so on, until it entirely fills me up. Then I am firmly grounded, and nothing can shake me.”

I had a general sense of what he meant. Still I could tell he had something else on his mind. He was strangely excited and jittery. I tried to put him at ease, and before long he came out with what he actually wanted to say.

“You’re abstinent too, aren’t you? he asked anxiously.

“What do you mean? Sexually?”

“Yes, yes. I’ve been abstinent for two years now, ever since I first heard the teachings. Before then I committed a vice, you know. . . . So you’ve never been with a woman?”

“No,” I said. “I haven’t found the right one.”

“But if you did find one you thought was right, you would sleep with her?”

“Yes, of course! If she didn’t mind . . .” I said, a little mockingly.

“Oh, but that’s a mistake! The only way to train your inner powers is to stay completely abstinent. I’ve stayed that way for two years. Two years and a little more than a month! It’s so hard to do! Sometimes I think I can’t stand it much longer.”

“Listen, Knauer, I don’t think abstinence is so terribly important.”

“I know,” he countered, “everyone says that. But I didn’t expect it from you! Anyone trying to follow the higher spiritual path has to remain pure, absolutely!”

“All right, then do it! But I don’t understand why someone who represses his sexuality is supposed to be ‘purer’ than anyone else. Can you keep sexuality out of all your thoughts and dreams too?”

He looked at me in despair.

“No, that’s just it! Good God, and yet we have to. I have dreams at night that I can’t even tell myself afterwards. Terrible dreams!”

I remembered what Pistorius had told me. But no matter how true I thought his words were, I could not relay them to someone else—I could not give advice that did not come from my own experience, advice that I myself didn’t feel able to follow. I fell silent, humbled that someone was asking me for advice when I didn’t have any to give.

“I’ve tried everything!” Knauer groaned, standing next to me. “I’ve done everything you can do—cold water, snow, exercise, running—but nothing helps. Every night I wake up from dreams that I can’t bear to even think about. And the horrible thing is that I’m losing everything I’ve learned, spiritually. I can almost never do it anymore, concentrate on something or put myself to sleep. Sometimes I lie awake all night long. There’s no way I can live like this for long. But if I finally have to throw in the towel, if I give up and make myself impure again, I’ll be worse than all the others who never even tried. You understand that, don’t you?”

I nodded but had nothing to say. The fact is, he was starting to bore me. Even though I was shocked at myself for not caring more deeply about his obvious pain and despair, all I felt was: I cannot help you.

“So, you have nothing to tell me?” he said at last, exhausted and miserable. “Nothing at all? There must be a way! How do you do it, then?”

“I have nothing to tell you, Knauer. No one can help anyone else. No one helped me either. You have to just reflect on yourself and then do what truly comes from your nature. There’s nothing else. If you can’t find yourself, then you won’t find any spirits either, it seems to me.”

The little fellow looked at me, disappointed and suddenly speechless. Then his eyes burned with sudden hate; he grimaced at me, furious, and screamed: “Oh you’re a nice saint for me! You have your vices too, I know it! You act so wise and you secretly cling to the same filth as me and everyone else! You’re a pig, a pig, like me. We are all pigs!”

I walked away and left him there. He took two or three steps after me, then stopped, turned around, and ran off. I felt queasy with pity and revulsion, and could not break free of the feeling until I got back to my little room, hung my couple pictures on the wall, and abandoned myself with the most fervent intensity to my own dreams. Right away my dream came back—of the door to the house and the coat of arms, my mother and the strange woman—and I saw the woman’s features so clearly that I started to paint her picture that same night.

When, after a few days, the picture was finished—set down on paper almost unconsciously in dreamlike fifteen-minute bursts—I hung it on my wall, pulled the study lamp over to it, and stood before it as though it were a spirit I had to wrestle with until one of us won and the other one lost. It was a face like the earlier face; it was like my friend Demian’s, and in some features like my own face too. One eye was noticeably higher than the other. The picture’s gaze passed over me and was gone, in a glassy stare, full of destiny.

I stood there before it and felt a chill reaching deep into my chest from inner strain. I asked the image questions, I accused it, caressed it, prayed to it; I called it Mother, lover, whore, and slut, called it Abraxas. At some point Pistorius’s words—or were they Demian’s?—came to mind: I could not remember when I had heard them before, but felt that I was not hearing them for the first time. They were about Jacob wrestling with the angel of God, and his “I will not let thee go, except thou bless me.”

The painted face in the lamplight was transformed every time I appealed to it. It was bright and shining, then black and dark; it closed wan lids over eyes that had died away into nothing, then opened them again so that burning looks flashed out. It was woman, man, girl—a young child, an animal, a blurry patch on the wall—and then big and clear again. Finally, obeying a powerful inner command, I closed my eyes and I saw the image within me, stronger and more powerful than ever. I wanted to kneel down before it, but it was so much a part of me that I could no longer distinguish it from myself. It was as though it had become entirely I.

Then I heard a dark, heavy roaring like that of a spring downpour, and I trembled with an indescribable new feeling of fear and experience. I saw stars flash and go out; memories reaching back to my earliest, most forgotten childhood and even farther, back to pre-existence and early stages of becoming, thronged past me, but these memories that seemed to repeat my whole life, down to its most hidden secrets, did not stop with yesterday, or today, they continued on, reflecting the future, tearing me away from the present into new forms of life. The images were immensely bright, almost blinding, but afterward I could not remember a single one, not the way they really were.

That night I woke up out of a very deep sleep, lying diagonally across the bed in my clothes. I turned on the light, felt that I had to remember something crucially important, but could not recall anything from the past few hours. I turned on the light, and gradually it came back to me. Then I looked for the picture, but it was not on the wall anymore—not on the table either. Then I thought I dimly recalled having burned it. Or was it a dream? That I had held it in my hands as it burned, and eaten the ashes?

Great spasms of anxiety drove me from my room. I put on my hat and hurried out of the house, down the street, as though under some kind of compulsion—through the streets, across the squares of the city, as though blown by a storm; I stopped and listened in the darkness in front of my friend’s church; I searched and searched, driven by dark urges, not knowing what I was looking for. I passed through a part of the city where there were brothels, here and there with a light in the window. Farther out were building sites, piles of bricks partly covered with gray snow. As I passed like a sleepwalker roaming through a wasteland, compelled by a pressure from somewhere outside myself, I remembered the construction site at the edge of town where my tormentor, Kromer, had pulled me through the doorway and made me give him his first payment. There was a similar building here before me, the black hole of its door gaping open in the gray night. It drew me inside; I wanted to escape, and I dragged my feet in the sand and stumbled over the rubble, but the pull was too strong for me, I had to go in.

I stumbled over planks and broken bricks into the desolate room; there was a murky smell of stones and damp cold. A pile of sand, a light-gray patch, otherwise all was dark.

Then a horrified voice called out: “For God’s sake, Sinclair, where did you come from?”

Next to me someone stood up out of the darkness: short and scrawny, like a phantom, and as the hairs stood up on the back of my neck I recognized my schoolmate Knauer.

“What made you come here?” he asked, half-insane with emotion. “How did you find me?”

I didn’t understand.

“I wasn’t looking for you,” I said, dazed. It was difficult to talk; every word was an effort, struggling painfully out through my dead, heavy, almost frozen lips.

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 anyway? It’s the middle of the night!”

He frantically threw his thin arms around me.

“Yes, it’s night, it must be almost dawn. Oh, Sinclair, you didn’t forget me! Can you ever forgive me?”

“For what?”

“Oh, I was so beastly!”

Only then did I remember our conversation. It was, what, four or five days before? It seemed like a lifetime had passed since then. Then all at once I understood everything. Not only what had happened between us, but why I had come out here and what Knauer had been planning to do.

“You were going to kill yourself, weren’t you, Knauer?”

He shivered with cold and fear.

“Yes, I wanted to. I don’t know if I would have been able to. I was waiting until the sunrise.”

I pulled him out into the open. The first horizontal rays of daylight, unspeakably cold and listless, gleamed in the gray air.

I led the boy by the arm a short way and heard a voice come out of my mouth: “Now go home and don’t tell anyone about this! You’ve been on the wrong path, the wrong path! And we aren’t pigs, like you said. We are human beings. We make gods and then wrestle with them, and they bless us.”

We walked on and then parted, in silence. When I got home, it was day.

The best thing the rest of my time in St.— still had to offer was the hours I spent with Pistorius, listening to him play the organ or lying in front of his fireplace. We read a Greek text about Abraxas together; he read me passages from a translation of the Vedas and taught me how to utter the sacred “Om.” And yet these scholarly matters weren’t what encouraged my soul—rather the opposite. What did me good was my forging ahead inside myself, the growing trust I had in my own dreams, thoughts, and intuitions, and my increasing knowledge of the power I carried within me.

Pistorius and I understood each other in every way. I had only to think hard about him and I could be sure that he, or a message from him, would come to me from him. I could ask him something even if he wasn’t there—like Demian: I just needed to picture him firmly in my mind and ask him my questions as concentrated thoughts, and all the power of my soul I put into the question came back to me as the answer. Only it wasn’t the person of Pistorius that I imagined, nor that of Max Demian—instead I summoned up the image I had dreamed and painted, the male-female dream-image of my daemon. It was alive now, no longer only in my dreams or painted on paper, but in me, as an ideal, a heightening of my self.

The relationship that developed later between me and Knauer, the would-be suicide, was odd and sometimes even funny. Ever since the night I had been sent to save him, he clung to me like a faithful servant, or a dog, following me blindly and trying to join his life to mine. He came to me with the most bizarre questions and requests; he wanted to see spirits, wanted to study the kabbalah, and didn’t believe me when I assured him I didn’t know a thing about any of that. He thought I had every power imaginable. But the strange thing was, he often came to me with his bizarre and stupid questions just when there was some puzzle or another inside myself that I needed to solve, and his fanciful ideas and concerns often gave me the key push I needed to solve it. He was often a burden on me, and I would send him away in lordly fashion, but I nonetheless felt that he too was sent to me; even with him, what I gave returned to me twice as rich. He too was my guide, or even the path itself. The crazy books and tracts he brought me, in which he sought his salvation, taught me more than I realized at the time.

Later this Knauer fell away from my path, unnoticed. No confrontation with him was necessary. With Pistorius it was. Near the end of my time at school in St.—, I had one more strange experience with this friend.

Even the most harmless people can hardly avoid coming into conflict, once or twice in their lives, with the beautiful virtues of piety and gratitude. At some point we all have to take the step that separates us from our father and our teachers; we all have to feel something of the cruelty of solitude, even if most people cannot endure too much and quickly crawl back to safety.

I had not parted from my parents, from the “world of light” of my wonderful childhood, in a violent struggle—I had slowly, almost imperceptibly, grown distant from it and more and more a stranger to it. I was sorry, I spent many bitter hours during my visits home, but it didn’t touch me to the core, it was bearable.

But wherever we have given our love and respect not out of habit but out of our ownmost impulses—whenever we have been companions and friends with all our heart—it is a bitter and terrible moment when we suddenly recognize that the currents inside us are carrying us away from the one we once loved. When that happens, every thought pointing away from our friend or teacher is aimed like a poison arrow straight at our own heart—every defensive blow strikes us full in our own face. Then anyone who bears the reigning morality inside him feels the labels “betrayal” and “ingratitude” rise up like disgraceful, stigmatizing accusations; the terrified heart flees in fear, back to the lovely valleys of childhood virtues, and cannot bring itself to believe that this break too must be made, this connection too must be cut.

Slowly, over time, I started to feel myself turning against the idea that my friend Pistorius was my guide in all things. My friendship with him, his advice, his consolation, his closeness, had filled the most important months of my youth. God had spoken to me through him. My dreams had come back to me out of his mouth, clarified and interpreted. He had given me faith in myself. And now, alas! I felt my resistance against him slowly increasing. Too much of what he had to say was didactic; I felt that he fully understood only part of me.

There was no argument or scene between us, no break or day of reckoning. There was only one thing I said to him, actually quite harmless—and yet that was the moment when an illusion between us shattered into brightly colored shards.

I had felt the intuition weighing down on me for some time, and it became a clear feeling one Sunday in his old study. We were lying in front of the fire and he was telling me about mysteries and the other religious forms he studied and longed for, whose possibilities for the future he spent his time brooding over. To me, though, it was all curious and interesting rather than vitally important—I could hear a note of mere pedantry in his words, an exhausted rummaging around under the rubble of bygone worlds. And suddenly I felt revulsion against everything about it: this cult of mythologies, this game of making mosaics out of the forms of belief from the past.

“Pistorius,” I said all of a sudden, in a burst of malice that shocked and surprised me myself, “you should tell me one of your dreams again—I mean a real dream, the kind you have at night. What you’re saying now is so—so damned antiquarian!”

He had never heard me talk like that, and I myself felt, at that very moment—in a lightning flash of shame and horror—that the arrow I had just shot, which had struck him right in the heart, had been drawn from his own arsenal. I had taken self-criticisms I had sometimes heard him express ironically, and wickedly shot them back at him, sharper than before.

He felt it at once and immediately fell silent. I looked at him with fear in my heart and saw him turn terribly pale.

After a long, painful pause, he put another log on the fire and said quietly: “You are absolutely right, Sinclair. You’re a smart one. I’ll spare you any more antiquarianism.”

He spoke very calmly, but I could easily hear the wounded pain in what he said. What had I done?

I was almost in tears. I wanted to give him a kind look, ask his forgiveness, swear my love and gratitude. Soothing words came to mind . . . but I couldn’t speak them. I lay there, looked into the fire, and said nothing. He was silent too. So we lay there, and the fire dwindled and died down, and with every fading tongue of flame I felt something sincere and beautiful smolder and vanish, never to return.

“I’m afraid you misunderstood me,” I finally said, under great strain and with a dry, hoarse voice. These stupid, meaningless words came to my lips almost mechanically, as though I were reading them out of a pulp novel.

“I understood you perfectly,” Pistorius said softly. “You are absolutely right.” He waited. Then he slowly went on: “Insofar as anyone can be in the right against someone.”

No, no! I heard the cry inside me, I’m wrong!—but I couldn’t say anything. I knew that my one simple word had found an essential weakness, a wound, a need in him. I had touched the sore spot where he did not trust himself. His ideal was “antiquarian”—he was a seeker in the past, a Romantic. And all at once I felt, deep inside me: what Pistorius had been to me, and given me, was exactly what he could not be and give to himself. He had led me along a path that would run past and leave behind even him, the guide.

God knows where these things we say come from! I wasn’t trying to be nasty, and had no idea of the disaster my comment would cause. I had said something I didn’t understand at all when I said it; I had indulged in the impulse of a moment, a little bit clever and a little bit mean, and it had turned out to be fate. My careless minor act of cruelty was for him a judgment.

Oh, how I wanted him to get angry, defend himself, scream at me! He did none of that, so I had to do it all myself, on the inside. He would have smiled, if he could have. The fact that he couldn’t showed more clearly than anything else how badly I had hurt him.

Pistorius, by so calmly accepting this blow from me, his insolent and ungrateful pupil—by saying nothing, by accepting that I was right, by taking my word as law and fate—made me hate myself, and made my impetuous remark a thousand times worse. When I’d lashed out I thought it was at someone sturdy and strong—and now he had turned into a meek, quiet, suffering little man, defenseless and acquiescing without a word.

We stayed in front of the dying fire a long time. Every glowing shape in it, every crumbling log of ash, reminded me of happy, rich, and beautiful hours and piled up what I owed to Pistorius higher and higher. Eventually I couldn’t take it anymore. I stood up and left. I lingered at his door for a long time, on the dark stairs for a long time, waited outside the house for a long time to see if perhaps he would come and follow me. Then I walked away, wandered through the city and its outskirts, the park and the forest for hours and hours, until night fell. That was when, for the first time, I felt the mark of Cain on my forehead.

Only gradually was I able to think clearly about what had happened. My thoughts were all meant to accuse myself and defend Pistorius, but they all ended up doing precisely the opposite. I was ready to repent and take back my rash words, a thousand times over—and yet the fact was that they were true. Only now did I fully understand Pistorius, only now could I put together the whole structure of his dream. He had wanted to be a priest, proclaim the new religion, institute new forms of exaltation, love, and worship, and create new symbols. But this was not his strength, and not his task. He was only too happy to linger in the past—he knew all too much about what had come before: Egypt, India, Mithras, Abraxas. His love was tied to images the world had already seen, even while he knew deep down that the new would be different and new, that it would spring up from fresh soil and not need to be cobbled together out of libraries and museums. Perhaps his true task was to help lead people to themselves, the way he had me. His task was not, in fact, to give them that tremendous thing, the new gods.

At this point the realization suddenly flared within me like a sharp burst of flame: everyone has his “task,” but it is never a task he can choose for himself, can define and carry out however he wants. It was wrong to want new gods, it was utterly wrong to want to give the world anything! For awakened human beings, there was no obligation—none, none, none at all—except this: to search for yourself, become sure of yourself, feel your way forward along your own path, wherever it led. — This realization upset me deeply, and that was what I gained from the whole experience. I had often toyed with ideas and images of my future, dreaming up roles to play: as a writer, for example, or prophet, or painter, or whatever it was. All that meant nothing. I was not put on earth to write, or preach, or paint—and nor was anyone else. These things were only secondary. Every person’s true calling was only to arrive at himself. He might end up a poet or a madman, a prophet or a criminal—that was no concern of his; in the end it was meaningless. His concern was to find his own fate, not a random one, and to live it out, full and complete. Everything else was a half-measure, escapism, fleeing back into the ideal of the masses—conformity and fear of what was inside yourself. This new picture rose up before my eyes, terrifying and sacred, foreshadowed and suspected a hundred times, maybe even spoken out loud many times, and yet only now truly experienced. I was a roll of Nature’s dice, thrown into the unknown, maybe into a new world, maybe into the void, and my only purpose in life was to let this throw from the primal depths play out, feel its will inside me, and make that will entirely my own. Only that!

I had already tasted great loneliness. Now I began to suspect the existence of even deeper solitudes, and that they were inescapable.

I made no effort to reconcile with Pistorius. We stayed friends, but our relationship had changed. We spoke about it only once, or actually only he did. He said: “I want to become a priest, as you know. I wanted most of all to become a priest of the new religion we have all these intuitions about. But I’ll never be able to—I know that. I’ve known it for a long time, without ever entirely admitting it to myself. There are other priestly duties for me to perform, maybe on the organ, maybe some other way. But I need to feel beautiful and holy things around me, always: music, mystery cults, symbols, myths. I need it, and I refuse to give it up. . . . That’s my fatal flaw. I know it, Sinclair—every now and then I know that I shouldn’t have such desires, they are a luxury, a weakness. It would be better to put myself at the mercy of fate without making any demands. Truer too. But I can’t do it. It’s the one thing I can’t do. Maybe you will be able to do it someday. It’s hard—it’s the only truly difficult thing there is, my boy. I have often dreamed of doing it, but I can’t, I tremble at the thought of it. I cannot stand so utterly naked and alone, I’m like all the rest, a poor weak dog who needs warmth and food, and sometimes needs to feel close to others of his own kind. If you really and truly want nothing except your fate, there no longer is anyone of your own kind, you’re completely alone with only the cold universe around you. That is Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane, you understand. There have been martyrs who were happy to let themselves be nailed to the cross, but they weren’t heroes either, they weren’t free: they too clung to what was familiar and comfortable for them, they followed others’ examples, they had ideals. Anyone who wants nothing but fate has no model, no ideal, nothing he cares about, no consolation left! And that is the path we actually should follow. People like us are very lonely, but at least we have each other, and the secret satisfaction of being different, of rebelling, of wanting something out of the ordinary. That has to fall away too if you want to follow your path to the end. You can’t want to be a revolutionary either, or an example to others, or a martyr. It’s inconceivable. . . .”

Yes, it was inconceivable. But it could be dreamed, approached, intuited. I felt something of it myself a few times, when I found myself in moments of absolute stillness. Then I peered into myself and looked the image of my destiny right in its open, staring eyes. Those eyes might be full of wisdom or full of madness, might shine with love or evil, it was all the same to me. It was impossible to choose, impermissible to want anything about it. You must want only yourself, your own fate. Pistorius had guided me a good way toward it.

I wandered around as if blind in those days, with a storm raging inside me. Every step was dangerous. I saw nothing but a dark abyss before me—every path I had known led into and vanished into its depths. And in my soul I saw the image of my guide, who looked like Demian and whose eyes held my fate.

I wrote on a sheet of paper: “A guide has left me. I am in total darkness. I cannot take a single step alone. Help me!”

I wanted to send it to Demian. And yet I refrained; every time I wanted to do it, it seemed silly and pointless. Still, I knew this little prayer by heart and often said it to myself. It was with me every hour of the day and night. I began to have a sense of what prayer is.

•   •   •

My schooldays were over. I was supposed to take a trip during vacation—my father had planned it—and then enroll in the university. I did not know which field. A semester in the philosophy department was approved, but I would have been just as happy with any other.