The more I realized how lonely and different I would always be in my new circle too, the harder it became for me to break free of it. I don't know anymore if all that drinking and showing off ever brought me any real pleasure; I also never learned to hold my liquor well enough to avoid suffering painful consequences the next day. It was all like some kind of compulsion. I did what I had to do because I had no idea what else I could try. I was afraid of spending so much time alone, and anxiously ashamed of the warm, shy moods I so often felt, the tender thoughts of love that so often came over me.
What I missed most was a friend. There were two or three schoolmates I enjoyed seeing, but they were good, well-behaved students, and my vices were long since common knowledge. So they avoided me. Everyone saw me as a reckless daredevil, on thin ice. My habits were no secret to the teachers either, and I was often seriously punished; it was generally expected that I would be kicked out of school before long. I knew it myself--I had stopped being a good student a long time ago--but I laboriously scraped by and conned my way through, with a feeling that it could not go on like this much longer.
*
There are many ways in which the god can make us lonely and lead us to ourselves. This was the path he took with me. It was like a bad dream. I see myself under the spell of some kind of dream, crawling restless and tormented through the dirt and sticky muck, through broken beer glasses and nights spent cynically chattering away--an ugly and unclean path. There are dreams like that, where on the way to a princess you stay stuck in a pool of shit, or a stinking back street full of filth. That's how it was with me. It was given to me to grow lonely in this undignified way, and to place between myself and my childhood the gates of Eden, closed forever and watched over by implacable, radiant guards. It was a new beginning, and the awakening of a hopeless longing for my former self.
Still I was startled and I shook with fear the first time my father turned up unexpectedly in St.--, alarmed by my host's letters from the boarding house. When he visited again, around the end of that winter, I was already hard and indifferent, and I let him scold me, plead with me, appeal to my memories of Mother as much as he wanted. By the end he was utterly enraged and said that if I didn't change he would let me be kicked out of school in disgrace and send me to reform school. Well, let him! When that second visit ended and he left, I felt bad for him, but he had accomplished nothing--he could no longer find a way to reach me, and sometimes I felt that it served him right.
As for what would become of me, I couldn't care less. In my odd and unpleasant way, sitting in bars and acting full of myself, I was fighting against the world--it was my form of protest. In the process I only wore myself out, but I sometimes saw it like this: If the world has no use for people like me, if it can find no better place or higher task for them, then so much for us. But it would be the world's loss.
Christmas vacation that year was anything but happy. My mother was horrified when she saw me again--I had grown even taller, and my scrawny face looked gray and wasted, with slack features and inflamed rings around my eyes. The first hints of a moustache, and the glasses I had recently started to wear, made me look even less like the boy she knew. My sisters kept their distance, giggling. It was painful. The conversation with Father in his study was painful, and bitter; the greetings of a few relatives, painful; Christmas Eve, especially painful. For as long as I could remember, that had been the great day in our house--the night of festivity and love, of gratitude, of renewing the bonds between myself and my parents. This time it was all depressing, even embarrassing. As usual my father read the Gospel passage about the shepherds "keeping watch over their flock by night"; as usual my sisters stood beaming with delight next to the table with their presents on it; but my father's voice sounded unhappy, and his face looked old and pinched, and my mother was sad, and to me the whole thing seemed embarrassing and unnecessary: the presents and the Christmas wishes, the Gospel and the tree. The gingerbread smelled delicious and gave off thick clouds of even more delicious memories. The tree smelled and told of things that no longer existed. I longed for the evening, and the holiday, to come to an end.
It went on like that all winter. I had recently been given a severe warning by the teachers' council and threatened with expulsion. It would not be long now. Well, fair enough.
I especially resented Max Demian. I had not seen him again during this whole period; I had written to him twice, when I had started school at St.--, but not received an answer. That was why I did not go to see him during vacation.
*
At the start of spring, when the thorny hedges were just starting to turn green, I happened to notice a girl in the park where I had run into Alfons Beck the previous fall. I was taking a walk by myself, full of unsavory thoughts, and worried: my health had taken a turn for the worse, and aside from that I was constantly short of money, owed my classmates money, and had let my tabs in various stores, for cigars and such things, get quite large. I had to invent unavoidable expenses to get my parents to send me more from home. Not that I felt any of these worries very deeply--if my time here was about to come to an end, and I was about to either drown myself or get sent to reform school, these trivial details would never matter. Still, I was constantly living face to face with unpleasant things, and I suffered from it.
That spring day in the park, I saw a young lady I found very attractive. She was tall and thin, elegantly dressed, and with an intelligent boy's face. I liked her right away--she was the type I loved, and she soon began to fill my imagination. She was probably not that much older than me but was much more polished, elegant, and clearly defined, almost a lady already, but with a hint of exuberance and boyishness in her face that I liked enormously.
I had never yet managed to approach a girl I had fallen for, and I failed with this one too. But she made a deeper impression on me than any other girl ever had, and the effect this infatuation had on my life was powerful.
Suddenly I had an image before me again--a high and noble image I respected, and oh, how I wanted to worship and adore! There was nothing I thirsted for more deeply and strongly. I named her Beatrice, because without having read Dante I already knew about Beatrice from an English painting I had a reproduction of. It showed an English Pre-Raphaelite female figure, long-limbed and slender, with a long, thin face and spiritual hands and features. My beautiful girl from the park didn't look exactly like her, but she too had the same slender boyishness of form that I liked, as well as some of the same refined or soulful quality in her face.
I never said a single word to Beatrice. And yet, she had the deepest possible influence on me at that time. She held up an image before my eyes, showed me something sacred, turned me into a worshipper in a temple. Overnight I was finished with drinking and staying out late. I was able to spend time alone again; again I could enjoy reading and going for walks.
This sudden conversion earned me more than my fair share of mockery, needless to say. But I didn't care: I had something to love and adore--I had an ideal, and life was again full of promise and mysterious colors in the twilight. I felt comfortable with myself, although only as a slave beholden to an honored image.
I cannot think back to that time without feeling moved. What I was trying to do, as sincerely and fervently as I knew how, was rebuild another "world of light" from the rubble of a shattered period of my life; my whole life was centered around the desire to throw off everything dark and evil in myself, to dwell completely in the light, on my knees before the gods. At least this time the "world of light" was my own creation, to some extent. I was no longer running away, back to Mother and a sense of security without any responsibility; now I was serving something new, invented and summoned forth from myself, and demanding a certain responsibility and self-discipline. The sexuality I suffered from and was constantly fleeing could now be transformed into spirit and reverence in this holy fire. I was free of everything dark and ugly--no more nighttime groans, no more looking at obscene pictures with my heart poun
ding, no more listening in at forbidden doors, nothing dirty at all. Instead I built myself an altar, to the image of Beatrice, and by dedicating myself to her I was consecrating myself to the spirit and the gods. I took back a portion of life from the dark powers and offered it up to the powers of light. My goal was not pleasure but purity; not happiness but beauty and spirit.
This cult of Beatrice completely changed my life. From one day to the next, the premature cynic had become an acolyte with only one goal: to become a saint. I not only threw off the wicked life I had grown accustomed to, I tried to change everything--I wanted to bring purity, nobility, and dignity into everything I did, whether eating or drinking, my words or my clothes. I started every morning with cold ablutions; at first I had to force myself, but then they came naturally. I behaved seriously and with dignity, stood up straight, walked slower and with more dignity. It may have looked from the outside like ridiculous affectation, but to me it felt like nothing less than the service of God.
Of all the practices I embarked on to express my new way of thinking, one became especially important for me. I started to paint. At first, it was because the English picture of Beatrice I had did not resemble my Beatrice closely enough--I wanted to try to paint her for myself. With an entirely new feeling of joy and hope, I brought beautiful paper, paints, and brushes into my room (I had a room of my own by that point) and prepared a palette, a glass, porcelain bowls, and pencils. The fine tempera paints in little tubes that I had bought delighted me. They included a fiery chromium oxide green, and I can still see it lighting up my little white bowl for the first time.
I was cautious at first. It is hard to paint a face, and I wanted to start by trying other things. I painted ornaments, flowers, and little imaginary landscapes--a tree by a church, a Roman bridge with cypresses. Sometimes I lost myself entirely in this playful activity, as happy as a child with his paint box. Finally, though, I started to paint Beatrice.
Several efforts were total failures and I threw them away. The more I tried to capture the face of the girl I still saw on the street every now and then, the worse it went. Finally I gave up and started to simply paint a face from my imagination, following wherever the paint and brush led me. What emerged was a dream-face, and I was not unsatisfied with it. But I immediately tried again, and each new picture spoke to me more clearly and came closer to the type, if in no way closer to reality.
I got more and more comfortable drawing lines and filling surfaces with a dreaming brush, playfully feeling my way forward, the pictures not following any model but arising from the unconscious. At last, one day, almost without any conscious effort, I finished a face that spoke to me more powerfully than any of the others had. It was not the face of the girl from the park--but I had long since stopped trying to make it be. It was something else, something unreal but no less valuable for that. It looked more like a boy's face than a girl's; the hair was not light blond, like my pretty girl's, but reddish brown, and the chin was firm and strong, though the mouth glowed a vivid red; the whole face was somewhat stiff and mask-like, but impressive and full of inner life.
As I sat before the finished picture, it made a strange impression on me. It struck me as a kind of idol or icon or sacred mask--half masculine, half feminine; ageless; strong-willed and dreamy at once; rigid and at the same time secretly vital and alive. This face had something to tell me--it belonged to me--it demanded something of me. And it bore a certain similarity to someone, though I didn't know who.
This portrait accompanied all my thoughts for some time; it shared my life. I kept it hidden away in a drawer so that no one would find it and make fun of me, but as soon as I was alone in my room I took it out so it could keep me company. At night I pinned it up to the wallpaper across from me, over my bed, so that I would see it as I fell asleep and first thing when I woke up the next morning too.
It was just then that I started to dream a lot again, the way I always had as a child. I felt like I hadn't had any dreams for years. Now they were back, with dream-images of an entirely new kind, and the portrait I had painted showed up in these dreams over and over again: living and talking, my friend or my enemy, sometimes grimacing grotesquely and sometimes infinitely noble, harmonious, and beautiful.
One morning when I woke up from one of these dreams, I suddenly recognized the face. It looked at me with such marvelous familiarity and intimacy, as though it were calling my name. It seemed to know me like a mother, seemed to have been turned toward my face since the dawn of time. I stared at the sheet with my heart pounding--at the thick brown hair, the half-feminine mouth, the strong and oddly bright brow (it had dried like that on its own)--and I felt recognition, rediscovery, and knowledge coming closer and closer to me.
I leaped out of bed, stood before the face, and looked at it up close--stared right into the wide-open, greenish, fixed eyes, the right one slightly higher than the left. And suddenly that right eye twitched, lightly and delicately but clear as day, and with that flutter I recognized the image. . . .
How could it have taken me so long! It was Demian's face.
Later I compared the page many times with Demian's actual features as I remembered them. They were not the same, although they were similar. But still, it was Demian.
One time, on an early summer evening, the red sunlight was slanting through my west-facing window. A dim twilight entered the room. I had the idea of pinning the portrait of Beatrice, or Demian, to the wooden cross between the panes of the window and seeing how it looked with the evening sun shining through it. The face became blurred, losing all its outlines, but the red around the eyes, the bright forehead, and the intensely red mouth glowed deep and savage from the paper's surface. I sat across from it for a long time, even after the light was gone. The feeling gradually came over me that this was not Beatrice, and not Demian, but rather--myself. The picture didn't look like me--and it wasn't supposed to, I felt--but it was my life, it was my soul, my destiny, my daemon. That was how my friend would look, if I ever found another friend; that was how my lover would look, if I ever found her. That was how my life would be, and my death--it was the sound and the rhythm of my destiny.
I had recently started reading a book that made a deeper impression on me than anything I had ever read. I would rarely encounter another book in that way ever again, either, maybe none but Nietzsche's. It was a book by Novalis, with letters and aphorisms, many of which I did not understand, but they all attracted me and drew me in anyway. One of the maxims came back to my mind, and I wrote it under the portrait with a quill: "Fate and character are different names for the same idea." Now I understood what it meant.
I saw the girl I called Beatrice many more times. I no longer felt nervous excitement when this happened, only a gentle harmony, a presentiment rich in emotion: you are joined to me, but not you, only your image; you are a part of my destiny.
*
I started to feel a great longing for Max Demian again. I had not heard anything about him for years and had seen him only once on my vacations. Thinking back, I see I have omitted this short meeting in my account here, out of what I now see was shame and vanity. I have to make up for that omission.
So, on one vacation from school during my bar-hopping phase, when I was wandering around my hometown with the same blase and half-asleep face I always had then, swinging my walking stick and seeing philistines in all the old unchanged faces of the fellow townspeople I despised, my former friend came up to me. I flinched almost as soon as I saw him. Lightning-fast, the memory of Franz Kromer came to me. How I hoped that Demian had forgotten that whole story! It was so unpleasant to have this debt to him--really it was just stupid childhood nonsense, but still, it was something I owed him. . . .
He seemed to wait and see if I wanted to say hello to him, and when I did, as casually as I could, he held out his hand to me. There it was again, his handshake! So firm, so warm and yet cool, and so manly!
He peered into my face and said, "You've grown up, Sinclair." He him
self seemed completely unchanged to me: still as old, still as young, as ever.
He joined me, and we walked together talking about nothing but trivial matters--nothing about the past. I remembered I had written to him several times without receiving an answer. Oh, let him have forgotten that too, those stupid, idiotic letters! He said nothing about them.
There was no Beatrice yet, and no portrait; I was still in the midst of my dissolute time. Before we got back to the city, I invited him to a pub. He agreed. Showing off, I ordered a bottle of wine, poured him a glass, toasted with him, and showed him how well acquainted I was with student drinking customs. I emptied the first glass in a single gulp.
"You go to bars a lot?" he asked me.
"Oh, yes," I said lazily. "What else is there? In the end it's still the most fun thing to do."
"You think so? It may be. Some parts of it are great--the euphoria, the Bacchanalian side. But it seems to me that most people who spend a lot of time in bars have lost all that. Running round to bars all the time is what's truly philistine. Now staying up all night once, with torches lit, in real drunkenness and frenzy, that's one thing. But again and again, one glass after another, that's not the real thing, is it? Can you imagine Faust as a regular in some bar night after night?"
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