Every phenomenon on earth is symbolic, and each symbol is an open gate through which the soul, if it is ready, can enter into the inner part of the world, where you and I and day and night are all one. Every person encounters the open door here and there in the course of life, and it occurs to everyone at one time or another that everything visible is symbolic and that spirit and eternal life are living behind the symbol. Of course, very few people go through the gate and abandon the beautiful phenomenon of the outside world for the interior reality that they intuit.
It thus appeared to the young boy Anselm that the chalice of his flower was the open, silent question toward which his soul was moving in growing anticipation of a blessed answer. Then the lovely multitude of things drew him away again, in conversations and games with grass and stones, roots, bushes, animals, and all the friendly aspects of the world. He often drifted off and sank into deep contemplation of himself. He would abandon himself to the marvelous features of his body, feel his swallowing with closed eyes, his singing, the strange sensations as he breathed, the feelings and imaginings in his mouth and throat. He also groped there for the path and the gate through which one soul can go to another. With amazement he observed the meaningful and colorful figures that often appeared to him out of the purple darkness when he closed his eyes, with spots and half circles of blue and deep red and bright glassy lines in between. Sometimes Anselm experienced a glad and shocking jolt as he felt the hundreds of intricate connections between eye and ear, smell and taste, felt for beautiful fleeting moments sounds, tones, letters of the alphabet that were related and similar to red and blue, to hard and soft, or he was amazed upon smelling a plant or peeled-off green bark at how strangely close smell and taste were and how often they fused and became one.
All children feel this way, although they do not feel it with the same intensity and sensitivity. And with many of them all of this is already gone, as if it had never existed, even before they begin to learn how to read the alphabet. For others, the mystery of childhood remains close to them for a long time, and they take a remnant and echo of it with them into the days of their white hair and weariness. All children, as long as they still live in the mystery, are continuously occupied in their souls with the only thing that is important, which is themselves and their enigmatic relationship to the world around them. Seekers and wise people return to these preoccupations as they mature. Most people, however, forget and leave forever this inner world of the truly significant very early in their lives. Like lost souls they wander about for their entire lives in the multicolored maze of worries, wishes, and goals, none of which dwells in their innermost being and none of which leads them to their innermost core and home.
The summers and autumns of Anselm’s childhood came softly and went without making a sound. Time and again the snowdrops, violets, lilies, periwinkles, and roses bloomed and withered, beautiful and sumptuous as ever. He experienced it all with them. Flowers and birds spoke to him. Trees and springs listened to him, and he took his first written letters and his first problems with friends in his customary old way to the garden, to his mother, to the bright multicolored stones alongside the flower beds.
But one time a spring arrived that did not sound or smell like all the earlier ones. The blackbird sang, and it was not the old song. The blue iris blossomed, but there were no dreams and no fairy-tale figures wandered in and out along the golden-fenced path of its chalice. The hidden strawberries laughed from their green shadows, and the butterflies glittered and tumbled over the high lilies, but nothing was as it used to be. The boy was concerned with other things, and he had many quarrels with his mother. He himself did not know what the matter was or why it continued to disturb him. He only saw that the world had changed and that the friendships of earlier times had dissolved and left him alone.
A year went by like this, and then another, and Anselm was no longer a child. The brightly colored stones around the flower beds bored him. The flowers were mute, and he stuck the beetles on pins in a box. His soul had taken the long hard detour, and the old joys were vanquished and withered.
The young man rushed impetuously into life, which now seemed to him to have really begun. The world of symbols was blown away and forgotten. New wishes and paths enticed him. An aura of childhood could still be seen in his blue eyes and soft hair. However, he did not appreciate being reminded of it, and he cut his hair short and assumed as bold and worldly a posture as he could. His moods kept changing as he stormed through the scary pubescent years, at times a good student and friend, at other times lonely and shy. During his first youthful drinking bouts, he tended to be wild and boisterous. He had been compelled to leave home and saw it only when he returned on short visits to his mother. He was changed, grown, well dressed. He brought friends with him, brought books with him, always something else, and when he walked through the old garden, it appeared to him to be small and silent as he glanced about distractedly. He no longer read stories in the colorful veins of the stones and leaves. He no longer saw God and eternity dwelling in the mysterious blossoms of the blue iris.
Anselm went away to high school and then college. He returned to his home city with a red cap and then with a yellow one, with fuzz on his upper lip and then with a young beard. He brought books in foreign languages with him, and one time a dog. Soon he carried secret poems in a leather case in his breast pocket, then copies of ancient proverbs, and finally pictures of pretty girls and their letters. He came back from trips to foreign countries and took voyages on large ships across the sea. He returned and was a young teacher, wearing a black hat and dark gloves, and the old neighbors tipped their hats to him as he passed and called him professor, even though he had not yet become one. Once again he returned wearing black clothes, slim and somber, and walked behind the slow hearse upon which his old mother lay in the coffin adorned with flowers. And then he rarely returned.
Now Anselm lived in a big city, where he taught students at the university and was regarded as a famous scholar. He went about, took walks, sat and stood exactly like other people of the world. He wore a fine hat and coat, was serious or friendly, with lively and sometimes tired eyes. He was a gentleman and a scholar, just as he had wanted to become. But now he felt the exact same way that he had felt when his childhood came to an end. All of a sudden he felt the impact of many years sliding by that left him standing strangely alone and discontent in the middle of the world that he had always strived to attain. He was not genuinely happy as a professor. He was not deeply gratified to be greeted by the people of the city and the students who showed him great respect. Everything seemed dull and lifeless. Happiness lay once again far away in the future, and the way toward it seemed hot and dusty and ordinary.
It was during this time that Anselm made frequent visits to the house of a friend whose sister attracted him. He no longer felt at ease running after pretty faces. Here, too, he had changed, and he felt that happiness had to come for him in some special way and did not lie waiting for him behind each and every window. He liked the sister of his friend very much, and he often suspected that he was truly in love with her. But she was an unusual girl. Every one of her moves and words was unique and marked in a certain way, so that it was not always easy to keep pace with her and find the same rhythm. Sometimes in the evening, when Anselm walked back and forth in his lonely apartment and listened attentively to his own footsteps echoing through the empty rooms, he would argue with himself about this woman. She was older than the wife he had desired. She was very peculiar, and it would be difficult to live with her and to pursue his scholarly goals, for she did not like to hear anything about academics. Also, she was not strong and healthy and could not put up with parties and company very well. She preferred most of all to live with flowers and music and to have a book, in quiet solitude. She waited for someone to come to her, and she let the world take its course. Sometimes she was so fragile and sensitive that when anything strange happened to her, she easily burst into tears. Then there were
times when she would glow quietly and softly in happy solitude, and anyone who saw this felt how difficult it would be to give something to this strange beautiful woman and to mean something to her. Sometimes Anselm believed that she loved him, and at other times it seemed to him that she did not love anyone. It appeared that she was just tender and friendly with everyone and wanted nothing from the world but to be left in peace. However, he wanted something more from life, and if he were to marry, then there had to be life and excitement and hospitality in his home.
“Iris,” he said to her, “dear Iris, if only the world had been differently arranged! If there were nothing at all but a beautiful, gentle world with flowers, thoughts, and music, then I would wish for nothing but to be with you my entire life, to listen to your stories, and to share in your thoughts. Just your name makes me feel good. Iris is a wonderful name. But I have no idea what it reminds me of.”
“You certainly know,” she responded, “that the blue flag flower is called iris.”
“Yes,” he responded with a feeling of discomfort. “Of course, I know it, and just that in itself is very beautiful. But whenever I say your name, it seems to remind me of something else. I don’t know what it is, but it’s as if it were connected to some very deep, distant, and important memories, and yet I don’t know what they could be and haven’t found the slightest clue.”
Iris smiled at him as he stood there helplessly, rubbing his forehead with his hand.
“That’s how I feel,” she said to Anselm in her voice that was as light as a bird, “whenever I smell a flower. Then my heart tells me each time that a memory of something extremely beautiful and precious is connected to the fragrance, something that had been mine long ago and became lost. It’s also the same with music, and sometimes with poems—all of a sudden something flashes, just for a moment, as if all at once I saw my lost home below in a valley, and then it immediately disappears and is forgotten. Dear Anselm, I believe that we are on earth for this purpose, for contemplating and searching and listening for lost remote sounds, and our true home lies behind them.”
“How beautifully you put all this!” Anselm complimented her, and he felt something stir in his own breast almost painfully, as if a hidden compass there were pointing persistently to its distant goal.
But that goal was completely different from the goal he sought, and this hurt. Was it worthy of him to gamble away his life in dreams by chasing after pretty fairy tales?
One day after Anselm had returned from a lonely journey, he found the stuffy atmosphere in his barren study to be so cold and oppressive that he rushed over to his friend’s house and asked the beautiful Iris for her hand.
“Iris,” he said to her, “I don’t want to continue living like this. You’ve always been my good friend. I must tell you everything. I must have a wife, otherwise I feel my life will be empty and without meaning. And whom else should I wish for my wife but you, my dear flower? Will you accept, Iris? You’ll have flowers, as many as I can find. You’ll have the most beautiful garden. Will you come and live with me?”
Iris looked at him for a long time, calmly and straight into his eyes. She did not smile or blush as she answered him with a firm voice.
“Anselm, I’m not astonished by your proposal. I love you, although I had never thought of becoming your wife. But look, my friend, I’d make great demands on the man I marry. I’d make greater demands than most women make. You’ve offered me flowers, and you mean well. But I can live without flowers and also without music. I could do without all of this and much more if I had to. However, there’s one thing I can’t and won’t do without: I can never live, not even just for a day, if the music in my heart is not at the core of everything I do. If I am to live with a man, then it must be one whose inner music harmonizes perfectly in a delicate balance with mine, and his desire must be to make his own music pure so that it will blend nicely with mine. Can you do that, my friend? If you do, you’ll probably not achieve fame and reap any more honors. Your house will be quiet, and the wrinkles that I’ve seen on your forehead for many years will have to be erased. Oh, Anselm, it won’t work. Look, you’re one of those who must study so that more and more wrinkles appear on your forehead, and you must constantly create more and new worries for yourself. And whatever I may mean and am, well, you may certainly love and find it pretty, but it is merely a pretty toy for you, as it is for most people. Oh, listen to me carefully: Everything that you now consider a toy is for me life itself and would have to be the same for you, and everything about which you worry and for which you strive, I consider a toy and not worth living for. I’m not going to change, Anselm, for I live according to a law that is inside me. Will you be able to change? And you would have to become completely different, if I were to become your wife.”
Anselm stood and could not utter a word, for he was startled by her willpower, which he had thought was weak and whimsical. He was silent, and without realizing it, he crushed a flower he had picked up from the table with his shaking hand.
When Iris gently took the flower out of his hand, it felt in his heart like a severe reproach, but then she suddenly smiled brightly and lovingly as though she had unexpectedly found a way out of the darkness.
“I have an idea,” she said softly, and blushed as she spoke. “You’ll find it strange. It will seem like a whim to you. But it’s not a whim. Do you want to hear it? And will you agree to follow it and allow it to decide everything between you and me?”
Without understanding her, Anselm glanced at Iris with a worried look in his pale features. Her smile compelled him to trust her, and he said yes.
“I’d like to set a task for you,” Iris said, and she became serious again very quickly.
“Very well, do it. It’s your right,” her friend conceded.
“I’m serious about this,” she said. “And it is my final word. Will you accept it as it comes straight from my heart and not haggle and bargain about it, even if you don’t understand it right away?”
Anselm promised. Then she stood up and offered him her hand as she said, “You’ve said to me many times that whenever you speak my name, it reminds you of something that you’ve forgotten, something that was once very important and holy to you. That’s a sign, Anselm, and that’s what has drawn you to me all these years. I also believe that you’ve lost and forgotten something important and holy in your soul that must be wakened again before you can find your happiness and attain your destiny. Farewell, Anselm! I’m giving you my hand and asking you to go and find whatever it is in your memory that is linked to my name. On the day that you rediscover it, I’ll become your wife and go with you wherever you want, and your desires will be my very own.”
Anselm was dismayed and confused and wanted to interrupt her and reproach her for making such a whimsical demand. But with one clear look, she admonished him and reminded him of his promise, and he kept quiet. He took her hand with lowered eyes, pressed it to his lips, and departed.
Anselm had undertaken and completed many tasks in his life, but none had been as strange and important and thus as discouraging as this one. Day after day he ran around and thought about it until he became tired, and time and again he would arrive at a point when he cursed the entire quest and angrily and desperately tried to dismiss it from his mind as the whim of a female. But then something deep within him would oppose this, a very slight mysterious pain, a very soft, barely audible warning. This faint voice in his own heart conceded that Iris was right, and it made the same demand that she did.
But this task was much too difficult for the learned man. He was supposed to remember something that he had long since forgotten. He was supposed to rediscover a single golden thread from the cobweb of buried years. He was supposed to grasp something with his hands and bring it to his beloved, something that was nothing but a drifting bird call, something like a pleasant or sad feeling that one has while listening to music, something thinner, more fleeting and more ethereal than an idea, something more transitory than
a nocturnal dream, more shapeless than a morning mist.
Sometimes when he despairingly tossed his search to the winds and gave up in a terrible mood, he would unexpectedly be stirred by something like a breath of air from distant gardens. He would whisper the name Iris to himself, ten times and more, softly and playfully, like one testing a note on a taut string. “Iris,” he whispered, “Iris,” and he felt something move within him with a slight pain, as in an old abandoned house when a door opens and a shutter slams without cause. He examined memories that he thought he had ordered neatly within himself, and he made strange and disturbing discoveries in the process. His treasure of memories was infinitely smaller than he had imagined. Entire years were missing and stood empty, and when he tried to recall them, they were like blank pages. He found that he had great difficulty conceiving a clear picture of his mother once again. He had completely forgotten the name of a girl whom he had ardently pursued for one year during his youth. He recalled a dog that he had once bought on an impulse during his student years and that he had kept for some time. It took him some days before he could remember the name of the dog.
With growing sorrow and fear, the poor man painfully saw how wasted and empty the life that lay behind him had become. It no longer belonged to him but was strange and disconnected, like something once memorized that could be recalled only with difficulty in the form of barren fragments. He began to write. He wanted to write down, year by year, his most important experiences in order to get a firm hold on them again. But what were his most important experiences? Becoming a professor? Receiving his doctorate? His high school or university days? Forming short attachments and liking different girls in forgotten times? Terrified, he looked up. Was that life? Was that all? He slapped his forehead and could not stop himself from laughing compulsively.
The Fairy Tales of Hermann Hesse Page 23
