When I learned about Abraxas from the strange musician Pistorius, I can’t recount it again in a short time. But the most important thing that I learned from him was a further step on the way to myself. At that time, at about eighteen years old, I was an unusual young person, precocious in a hundred things, very backward and helpless in a hundred other things. When I ever compared myself to others, I was often proud and conceited, but just as often I was depressed and humiliated. I had often considered myself a genius, often half-crazy. I was unable to share in the joys and lives of my peers, and I was often consumed by accusations and worries, as if I were hopelessly separated from them, as if life was closed to me.
Pistorius, who was a full-blown nerd himself, taught me to have courage and respect for myself. By always finding valuable things in my words, in my dreams, in my fantasies and thoughts, always taking them seriously and discussing them seriously, he set the example for me.
“You told me,” he said, “that you love music because it is not moral. Because of me. But you don’t have to be a moralist yourself! You must not compare yourself with others, and if nature created you to be a bat, you must not try to turn yourself into an ostrich. You sometimes think you are strange, you accuse yourself of taking a different path than most people. You have to unlearn that. Look into the fire, look into the clouds, and as soon as the premonitions come and the voices in your soul begin to speak, then give yourself over to them and don’t even ask if it’s the teacher or the dad or be suitable or dear to some good God! This is how you spoil yourself. This puts you on the sidewalk and becomes a fossil. Dear Sinclair, Our God is called Abraxas, and he is God and is Satan, he has the light and the dark world within him. Abraxas has no objection to any of your thoughts, any of your dreams. Never forget that. But he leaves you once you become blameless and normal. Then he leaves you and looks for a new pot to boil his thoughts in.”
Of all my dreams, that dark love dream was the most faithful. Often, often, I dreamed of him, stepping away from under the heraldic bird into our old house, wanting to pull my mother to me, and instead of her I held the large, half-male, half-maternal woman in my arms, of whom I was afraid and yet to whom I had the most fervent affection Desire pulled. And I could never tell my friend this dream. I kept it back when I had discovered everything else. He was my corner, my secret, my refuge.
When I was depressed, I asked Pistorius to play old Buxtehude’s Passacaglia for me. In the dark church in the evening I sat lost in this strange, intimate, self-absorbed, self-listening music, which always did me good and made me more willing to agree with the voices of the soul.
Sometimes we would sit in the church for a while after the organ had already died away and watch the faint light shine through the high, pointed-arched windows and disappear.
“It sounds strange,” said Pistorius, “that I was once a theologian and almost became a priest. But it was just a formal error that I made. Being a priest is my profession and my goal. But I was satisfied too soon and made myself available to Jehovah before I even knew Abraxas. Oh, every religion is beautiful. Religion is soul, regardless of whether one takes a Christian communion or whether one goes on a pilgrimage to Mecca.”
“Then,” I said, “you could actually have become a priest.”
“No, Sinclair, no. I would have had to lie. Our religion is practiced as if it were not one. She acts as if she were a work of the mind. I could be a Catholic if necessary, but a Protestant priest – no! The few really believers – I know those – like to stick to the literal, I couldn’t tell them that for me Christ is not a person, but a hero, a myth, a tremendous shadow image in which humanity thinks of itself Wall of eternity painted. And the others who come to church to hear a wise word, to fulfill a duty, not to miss anything and so on, what should I have said to them? Convert them, you mean? But I don’t want that at all. The priest doesn’t want to convert, he just wants to live among believers, among his own kind, be for the feeling from which we make our gods.”
He interrupted himself. Then he continued: “Our new faith, for which we now choose the name of Abraxas, is beautiful, dear friend. He’s the best we have. But he is still an infant! His wings haven’t grown yet. Oh, a lonely religion, that’s not the truth. It must become common, it must have cult and intoxication, festivals and mysteries. . .”
He thought and sank into himself.
“Can’t one also commit mysteries alone, or in a small circle?” I asked hesitantly.
“You can,” he nodded. “I’ve been doing it for a long time. I have committed cults for which I would have to serve years in prison if anyone knew about them. But I know it’s not the right thing yet.”
Suddenly he hit me on the shoulder, making me jump. “Boy,” he said urgently, “you too have mysteries. I know you must have dreams that you don’t tell me. I don’t want to know them. But I tell you: Live them, these dreams, play them, build them altars! It is not yet the perfect, but it is a way. Whether we, you and me and a few others, will renew the world remains to be seen. But inside of us we have to renew it every day, otherwise there will be nothing with us. Remember! You are eighteen years old, Sinclair, you don’t run to the street prostitutes, you must have love dreams, love desires. Maybe they are such that you are afraid of them. Don’t be afraid! You are the best you have! You can believe me. I have lost a lot by violating my dreams of love during your years. You don’t have to do that. If you know about Abraxas, you can’t do it anymore. One must fear nothing and consider nothing forbidden, which is what the soul within us desires.”
Frightened, I objected: “But you can’t do everything you think of! You can’t kill a person because you hate them.”
He moved closer to me.
“Under certain circumstances you can do that too. It’s just usually a mistake. I don’t mean that you should just do whatever comes to mind. No, but you should have these ideas, that have a good meaning, do not make them harmful by driving them away and moralizing about them. Instead of crucifying oneself or another, one can drink wine from a cup with solemn thoughts, contemplating the mystery of the sacrifice. Even without such actions, you can treat your urges and so-called temptations with respect and love. Then they show their meaning, and they all have meaning. — If you ever think of something really crazy or sinful, Sinclair, if you want to kill someone or commit some gigantic act of filth, then just remember for a moment that it is Abraxas who fantasizes like that in you! The person you want to kill is never Mr. So-and-so, he is certainly just a disguise. If we hate a person, so in his image we hate something that sits within ourselves. What is not within ourselves does not upset us.”
Pistorius had never said anything to me that had affected me so deeply. I could not answer. But what touched me most strongly and strangely was the harmony of this encouragement with Demian’s words, which I had carried with me for years and years. She knew nothing about each other and both told me the same thing.
“The things we see,” Pistorius said quietly, “are the same things that are within us. There is no reality other than what we have within us. That’s why most people live in such an unreal way, because they take the images outside for the real and don’t allow their own world within them to express themselves. You can be happy there. But once you know otherwise, you no longer have the choice to follow the path of most people. Sinclair, most people’s path is easy, ours is difficult. – We want to go.”
A few days later, after I had waited for him twice in vain, I found him late in the evening on the street, drifting around a corner in the cold night wind, stumbling and completely drunk. I didn’t want to call him. He passed me without seeing me, staring ahead with glowing and lonely eyes, as if he were answering a dark call from the unknown. I followed him down a street; he drifted along as if pulled by an invisible wire, with a fanatical yet distraught gait, like a ghost. Sad I went back home to my unredeemed dreams.
“So he is now renewing the world within himself!” I thought, and at the same moment I felt that this was mean and moral. What did I know about his dreams? Perhaps in his intoxication he took the safer route than I did in my fear.
IDuring the breaks between school lessons, I sometimes noticed that a classmate was trying to get close to me and I had never noticed him. He was a small, weak-looking, slender youth with reddish-blond, thin hair, who had something of his own in his look and manner. One evening when I came home, he was lying in wait for me in the alley, let me pass him, then ran after me again and stopped in front of our front door.
“Do you want something from me?” I asked.
“I just want to talk to you,” he said shyly. “Be so kind and come a few steps with me.”
I followed him and sensed that he was deeply excited and full of anticipation. His hands were shaking.
“Are you a spiritualist?” he asked all of a sudden.
“No, Knauer,” I said, laughing. “No trace of it. How do you come up with something like that?”
“But are you a Theosophist?”
“Neither.”
“Oh, don’t be so secretive! I sense very well that there is something special about you. You have it in your eyes. I certainly believe you have association with spirits. — I’m not asking out of curiosity, Sinclair, no! I’m a seeker myself, you know, and I’m so alone.”
“Just tell me!” I encouraged him. “I don’t know anything about ghosts, I live in my dreams and you felt that. The other people live in dreams too, but not in their own dreams, that’s the difference.”
“Yes, perhaps it is,” he whispered. “It just depends on what kind of dreams you live in. — Have you heard of white magic?”
I had to say no.
“That’s when you learn to control yourself. You can become immortal and also do magic. Have you never done such exercises?”
When I asked curiously about these exercises, he first acted mysteriously until I turned to leave, then he dug out.
“For example, if I want to fall asleep or concentrate, then I do an exercise like this. I think of something, for example a word or a name, or a geometric figure. I then think it into myself as hard as I can, I try to imagine it inside my head until I feel that it is there. Then I think it down my throat, and so on, until I’m completely filled with it. Then I am completely firm and nothing can disturb me anymore.”
I understood somewhat what he meant. But I certainly felt that he had something else on his mind; he was strangely excited and hasty. I tried to make it easy for him to ask questions, and he soon came up with his actual request.
“You are celibate too?” he asked me anxiously.
“What do you mean? Do you mean sexual?”
“Yes / Yes. I have been celibate for two years now, since I learned about the teaching. Before, I drove a truck, you know. “So you’ve never been with a woman?”
“No,” I said. “I didn’t find the right person.”
“But if you found the one you thought was the one, would you sleep with her?”
“Yes, of course. “If she doesn’t mind,” I said with some mockery.
“Oh, you’re on the wrong path! You can only develop your inner powers if you remain completely abstinent. I did it for two years. Two years and just over a month! It is so hard! Sometimes I can hardly take it anymore.”
“Listen, Knauer, I don’t think abstinence is that terribly important.”
“I know,” he said defensively, “that’s what everyone says. But I didn’t expect it from you. Anyone who wants to take the higher spiritual path must remain pure, absolutely!”
“Yes, then do it! But I don’t understand why someone who suppresses their gender should be ‘purer’ than anyone else. Or can you also eliminate gender from all thoughts and dreams?”
He looked at me desperately.
“No, not at all! Lord God, and yet it has to be. I have dreams at night that I couldn’t even tell myself! Terrible dreams, you!”
I remembered what Pistorius had told me. But as much as I felt his words were right, I couldn’t pass them on, I couldn’t give advice that didn’t come from my own experience and that I didn’t yet feel capable of following. I became silent and felt humiliated that someone was seeking advice from me to whom I had none to give.
“I’ve tried everything!” Knauer complained next to me. “I’ve done what you can do, with cold water, with snow, with gymnastics and running, but it doesn’t help. Every night I wake up from dreams that I’m not even allowed to think about. And the terrible thing is: I’m gradually losing everything I had learned spiritually. I almost never manage to concentrate or put myself to sleep anymore; I often lie awake all night. I can’t stand this for long. If in the end I cannot carry out the fight, if I give in and become unclean again, then I am worse than everyone else who has never fought at all. You understand that, don’t you?”
I nodded, but couldn’t say anything. He began to bore me and I was frightened myself that his obvious distress and desperation did not make a deep impression on me. I just felt: I can’t help you.
“So you don’t know anything about me?” he finally said, exhausted and sad. “Nothing at all? There has to be a way! How do you do it?”
“I can’t tell you anything, Knauer. You can’t help each other. Nobody helped me either. You have to reflect on yourself and then you have to do what really comes from your being. There is nothing else. If you can’t find yourself, I don’t think you’ll find ghosts.”
Disappointed and suddenly silent, the little guy looked at me. Then his eyes flashed with sudden spite, he made a face at me and shouted angrily: “Ah, you are a beautiful saint to me! You have your vice too, I know it! You act like a wise man and secretly you are attached to the same dirt as me and everyone! You are a pig, a pig like myself. We’re all pigs!”
I walked away and left him there. He followed me two or three steps, then he stayed back, turned around and ran away. I felt sick from a feeling of pity and disgust, and I couldn’t get rid of the feeling until I put my few pictures around me in my little room at home and gave myself up to my own dreams with the most fervent fervor. Then my dream came back immediately, of the house gate and the coat of arms, of the mother and the strange woman, and I saw the woman’s features so clearly that I began to draw her picture that same evening.
When this drawing was finished after a few days, painted as if unconsciously in dreamlike fifteen minutes, I hungI opened it on my wall in the evening, moved the study lamp in front of it and stood in front of ither as if in front of a spirit with which I had to fight until the decision was made. It was a face similar to the one before, similar to my friend Demian, and in some features also similar to myself. One eye stood noticeably higher than the other, the gaze went over me in a sunken rigidity, full of fate.
I stood in front of it and felt cold to the chest from the inner exertion. I asked the image, I accused it, I caressed it, I prayed to it; I called it mother, I called it lover, I called it whore and prostitute, I called it Abraxas. In between there were words from Pistorius – or from Demian? — me one; I couldn’t remember when they were spoken, but I thought I heard them again. There were words about Jacob’s fight with the angel of God, and the “I will not leave you, unless you bless me.”
The painted face in the lamplight changed with each invocation. It became bright and shining, became black and dark, closed pale lids over dead eyes, opened them again and flashed glowing glances, it was a woman, was a man, was a girl, was a small child, an animal, blurred into a blur, became again big and clear. In the end, following a strong inner call, I closed my eyes and now saw the image within me, stronger and more powerful. I wanted to kneel before it, but it was so inside me that I could no longer separate it from myself, as if it had become too much me.
Then I heard a dark, heavy roar like a spring storm and trembled with an indescribably new feeling of fear and experience. Stars flashed in front of me and went out, memories all the way back to my first, most forgotten childhood, even to pre-existences and early stages of becoming, streamed past me over. But the memories that seemed to repeat my entire life down to the most secret level did not stop with yesterday and today, they continued, reflected the future, dragged me away from today and into new forms of life whose images were incredibly bright and dazzling None of which I could remember correctly later.
In the night I woke up from a deep sleep, I was in my clothes and lying across the bed. I lit a light, felt that I had to think about something important, and didn’t remember anything about the hours before. I turned on the light, the memory came gradually. I looked for the picture; it was no longer hanging on the wall, nor was it on the table. Then I thought to myself that I had burned it. Or had it been a dream that I had burned it in my hands and eaten the ashes?
A great, twitching restlessness drove me. I put on my hat, walked through the house and alley as if under compulsion, ran and ran through streets and across squares as if blown by a storm, listened outside my friend’s dark church, searched and searched in dark urges, without knowing What. I came through a suburb, Where prostitutes’ houses stood, there was still light here and there. Further out there were new buildings and piles of bricks, some covered in gray snow. As I drifted through this desert like a dream walker under foreign pressure, I remembered the new building in my hometown, to which my tormentor Kromer had once drawn me for our first reckoning. A similar building lay before me in the gray night, yawning at me with a black door hole. I was drawn in, I tried to get out of the way and stumbled over the sand and rubble; the urge was stronger, I had to go in.
I staggered over boards and broken bricks into the desolate room; it smelled dimly of damp cold and stones. There was a pile of sand there, a light gray patch, otherwise everything was dark.
Then a horrified voice called out to me: “For God’s sake, Sinclair, where are you from?”
And next to me a person stood up out of the darkness, a small, thin boy, like a ghost, and while my hair was still standing on end I recognized my schoolmate Knauer.
“How did you get here?” he asked, mad with excitement. “How did you find me?”
“I wasn’t looking for you,” I said, dazed; Every word was difficult for me and came with difficulty from dead, heavy, frozen lips.
He stared at me.
“Not wanted?”
“No. It drew me here. Did you call me? You must have called me. What are you doing here? It’s night after all.”
He wrapped his thin arms around me convulsively.
“Yes, night. It must be morning soon. Oh Sinclair, that you have not forgotten me! Can you forgive me then?”
“What?”
“Oh, I was so ugly!”
Only now did I remember our conversation. Was that four or five days ago? It seemed to me that a life had passed since then. But now I suddenly knew everything. Not just what had happened between us, but also why I had come here and what Knauer had wanted to do out here.
“So you wanted to take your own life, Knauer?”
He shivered from cold and fear.
“Yes I wanted. I don’t know if I could have done it. I wanted to wait until morning.”
I pulled him outside. The first horizontal stripes of light of the day glowed unspeakably cold and listless in the gray air.
I led the boy by the arm for some distance. It spoke out of me: “Now you go home and don’t say anything to anyone! You went the wrong way, the wrong way! We’re not pigs like you think. We are human beings. We make gods and fight with them, and they bless us.”
We moved on and apart in silence. When I got home it was daylight.
DThe best thing that came to me during that time in St. were hours with Pistorius at the organ or in front of the fire. We read a Greek text about Abraxas together, he read me parts of a translation from the Vedas and taught me to say the sacred “Om”. However, it was not these learnings that nurtured me internally, but rather the opposite. What was beneficial to me was finding my way forward within myself, increasing trust in my own Dreams, thoughts and hunches, and the increasing knowledge of the power I carried within me.
I got along with Pistorius in every way. I only had to think hard about him and I was sure that he or a greeting from him would come to me. Like Demian, I could ask him anything without him being there: I just had to imagine him firmly and direct my questions to him as intense thoughts. Then all the soul power given to the question returned to me as an answer. Only it wasn’t the person of Pistorius that I imagined, nor that of Max Demian, but rather the image I had dreamed and painted, the male-female dream image of my demon, which I had to call upon. It no longer lived just in my dreams, and no longer painted on paper, but within me, as a wishful image and an enhancement of myself.
The relationship that the failed suicide Knauer had with me was peculiar and sometimes comical. Since the night I was sent to him, he clung to me like a loyal servant or dog, tried to tie his life to mine and followed me blindly. He came to me with the strangest questions and wishes, wanted to see spirits, wanted to learn the Kabbalah, and didn’t believe me when I assured him that I didn’t understand any of these things. He gave me every power. But what was strange was that he often came to me with his strange and stupid questions just when some knot in my mind needed to be untied, and that his whimsical ideas and concerns often gave me the cue and the impetus to solve it. He was often a nuisance to me and was sent away imperiously, but I felt that he too had been sent to me, that what I gave him came back to me doubled, that he too was a guide for me, or at least a way. The great books and writings that he passed on to me and in which he sought salvation taught me more than I could understand at the moment.
This knauer later disappeared from my path without being noticed. There was no need to argue with him. But probably with Pistorius. Towards the end of my school days in St. I experienced something strange with this friend.
Even harmless people can hardly escape conflict once or several times in their lives to come to terms with the beautiful virtues of piety and gratitude. Everyone has to take the step that separates them from their father and their teachers; everyone has to feel something of the harshness of loneliness, even though most people can’t bear much of it and soon crawl back into hiding. — I was not divorced from my parents and their world, the “bright” world of my beautiful childhood, in a violent struggle, but rather slowly and almost imperceptibly I grew further away from them and became stranger. I was sorry, it often gave me bitter hours when I visited home; but it didn’t go straight to the heart, it was bearable.
But where we have offered love and reverence not out of habit but out of our own initiative, where we have been disciples and friends with our own hearts – there it is a bitter and terrible moment when we suddenly think we realize that leading current in us wants to lead away from the beloved. Every thought that rejects the friend and teacher is directed at our own heart with a poisonous sting, every blow of defense hits our own face. This is what appears to those who thought they had valid morals within themselves When the names “faithlessness” and “ungratefulness” appear like shameful shouts and branding, the frightened heart flees in fear into the dear valleys of childhood virtues and cannot believe that this breach has also been made, that this bond must also be cut.
Over time, a feeling within me had slowly turned against recognizing my friend Pistorius as a leader so unconditionally. What I had experienced in the most important months of my youth was my friendship with him, his advice, his comfort, his closeness. God spoke to me through him. From his mouth my dreams were returned to me, clarified and interpreted. He gave me the courage to be myself. — Oh, and now I slowly felt resistance to him increasing. I heard too much instruction in his words; I felt that he only fully understood part of me.
There was no argument, no scene between us, no rupture and not even a reckoning. I only said a single, actually harmless word to him – but it was just the moment in which an illusion between us shattered into colorful shards.
The premonition had already weighed on me for a while, it became a clear feeling one Sunday in his old scholar’s room. We lay on the floor in front of the fire and he spoke of mysteries and forms of religion that he was studying, that he was thinking about, and whose possible futures concerned him. But to me this all seemed more strange and interesting than vital; it sounded like erudition to me, it sounded like weary searching among the rubble of former worlds. And all of a sudden I felt a repugnance against this whole kind of thing, against this cult of mythologies, against this mosaic game with traditional forms of belief.
“Pistorius,” I said suddenly, with a malice that surprised and frightened me, “you should tell me again a dream, a real dream, that you had that night. What you’re talking about is so—so damned antiquarian!”
He had never heard me speak like that, and at the same moment I felt a flash of shame and horror that the arrow that I shot at him and that hit him in the heart had been taken from his own armory – that I was reproaching myself him in ironic Ton had occasionally heard it expressed, now maliciously directed at him in a pointed form.
He felt it immediately, and he immediately became quiet. I looked at him with fear in my heart and saw him turn terribly pale.
After a long, difficult pause he put more wood on the fire and said quietly: “You are quite right, Sinclair. You’re a smart guy. I’ll spare you the antiquarian stuff.”
He spoke very calmly, but I could clearly hear the pain of the wound. What had I done!
I was close to tears; I wanted to turn to him warmly, to ask him for forgiveness, to assure him of my love and my tender gratitude. Touching words came to my mind – but I couldn’t say them. I lay there, looked into the fire and said nothing. And he was silent too, and so we lay, and the fire burned down and sank, and with each fading flame I felt something beautiful and intimate burn up and evaporate, which could not come back.
“I’m afraid you’re misunderstanding me,” I finally said, very strained and in a dry, hoarse voice Agree. The stupid, senseless words came out of my mouth mechanically, as if I were reading from a newspaper novel.
“I understand you correctly,” Pistorius said quietly. “You’re right.” He waited. Then he continued slowly: “As far as one person can be right against another.”
No, no, I shouted, I’m wrong! – but I couldn’t say anything. I knew that with my single little word I had pointed out to him an essential weakness, his need and his wound. I had touched the point where he had to mistrust himself. His ideal was “antiquarian”, he was a seeker backwards, he was a romantic. And suddenly I felt deeply: exactly what Pistorius had been and given to me, he could not be and give to himself. He had led me along a path that also had to cross and leave him, the guide.
God knows how such a word comes into being! I didn’t mean anything bad, I had no idea of a catastrophe. I had said something that I didn’t know at all at the moment of saying it; I had said something small, somewhat funny, somewhat mischievous The idea gave in and it became fate. I had committed a little careless act of cruelty, and for him it had become a judgment.
Oh, how much I wished back then that he would have become angry, that he would have defended himself, that he would have shouted at me! He didn’t do any of that, I had to do everything inside myself. He would have smiled if he could. The fact that he couldn’t do it was the best way to see how badly I had hurt him.
And by so silently accepting the blow from me, from his cheeky and ungrateful student, by remaining silent and allowing me to be right, by recognizing my word as fate, Pistorius made me hateful to myself, he made my rashness a thousand times greater. When I struck, I had meant to hit someone strong and defensive – now it was a quiet, patient person, a defenseless person who surrendered in silence.
For a long time we lay in front of the dying fire, in which every glowing figure, every twisting ash stick reminded me of happy, beautiful, rich hours and the guilt of my commitment to Pistorius piled up bigger and bigger. Finally I couldn’t take it anymore. I got up and left. I stood in front of his door for a long time, on the dark stairs for a long time, outside the house for a long time, waiting to see if he might come and follow me. Then I went on and walked for hours and hours through the city and suburbs, parks and forests, until evening. And it was then that I first felt the mark of Cain on my forehead.
Only gradually did I start to think. My thoughts were all about accusing me and defending Pistorius. And they all ended with the opposite. A thousand times I was ready to regret and take back my quick word – but it was true after all. Only now did I manage to understand Pistorius, to build his entire dream before me. This dream had been to be a priest, to proclaim the new religion, to give new forms of exaltation, love and worship, to erect new symbols. But this was not his power, not his office. He dwelled too warmly on what had been, he knew all too well what was before, he knew too much about Egypt, about India, about Mithras, about Abraxas. His love was tied to images that the earth had already seen, and deep down he knew that New things had to be new and different, that they had to spring from fresh soil and not be drawn from collections and libraries. Perhaps his job was to help people find themselves, as he had done with me. Giving them the unheard of, the new gods, was not his job.
And here suddenly the realization burned me like a sharp flame: — There was an “office” for everyone, but for no one, one that they could choose for themselves, define and administer as they wished. It was wrong to want new gods, it was completely wrong to want to give anything to the world! There was no, no, no duty for awakened people other than one thing: to search for oneself, to become solid within oneself, to feel one’s own path forward, no matter where it led. — That shocked me deeply, and that was the fruit of this experience for me. I had often played with images of the future, I had dreamed of roles that could be intended for me, as a poet perhaps, or as a prophet, or as a painter, or somehow. All of that was nothing. I wasn’t there to write poetry, to preach, to paint, neither I nor anyone else was there for that. All of this just happened along the way. True career for everyone was just that one: to come to yourself. He might end up as a poet or as a madman, as a prophet or as a criminal—that was not his business, indeed that was ultimately irrelevant. His job was to find his own destiny, not just any destiny, and to live it out within himself, completely and unbroken. Everything else was half, was an attempt to escape, was a retreat into the ideals of the masses, was conformity and fear of one’s own inner being. The new image rose before me, terrible and holy, suspected a hundred times, perhaps already spoken many times, and yet only now experienced. I was a throw of nature, a throw into the unknown, perhaps to something new, perhaps to nothing, and to let this throw from the primal depths have its effect, to feel its will within me and to make it entirely mine, that was my job alone. That alone!
I had already tasted a lot of loneliness. Now I suspected that there was something deeper and that it was inescapable.
I made no attempt to reconcile Pistorius. We remained friends, but the relationship had changed. We only talked about it once, or actually it was just him who did it. He said: “I have a desire to become a priest will, you know that. I wanted to become the priest of the new religion that we have so many inklings about. I will never be able to be that – I know it and have known it for a long time without fully admitting it to myself. I’ll just do other priestly work, maybe on the organ, maybe something else. But I always have to be surrounded by something that I find beautiful and holy, organ music and mystery, symbol and myth, I need that and don’t want to let go of it. — This is my weakness. For I know sometimes, Sinclair, I know at times, that I shouldn’t have such desires, that they are luxuries and weaknesses. It would be greater, it would be more right, if I were simply at the disposal of fate, without any demands. But I can not do it; It’s the only thing I can’t do. Maybe you can one day. It’s hard, it’s the only really hard thing there is, my boy. I have often dreamed of it, but I can’t, it makes me shudder: I can’t stand completely naked and lonely, I too am a poor, weak dog who needs some warmth and food and occasionally wants to feel the closeness of his own kind. Who really wants nothing but to be Fate, he no longer has anyone like him, he stands all alone and has only the cold cosmic space around him. You know, that’s Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane. There were martyrs who were happy to be crucified, but they too were not heroes, were not liberated, they also wanted something that was dear to them and close to home, they had role models, they had ideals. Anyone who only wants fate no longer has any role models or ideals, he has nothing dear, nothing comforting! And you actually have to go this route. People like me and you are quite lonely, but we still have each other, we have the secret satisfaction of being different, of rebelling, of wanting the unusual. This too has to be eliminated if someone wants to follow this path completely. He must also not be a revolutionary, not an example, don’t want to be martyrs. It’s unimaginable—”
No, it was unthinkable. But it was to be dreamed, it was to be felt, it was to be suspected. Sometimes I felt something of this when I found a completely quiet hour. Then I looked into myself and looked into the open, staring eyes of my destiny. They could be full of wisdom, they could be full of madness, they could be full of love radiance or deep malice, it didn’t matter. You weren’t allowed to choose any of it, you weren’t allowed to want any of it. You were only allowed to want yourself , only your fate. Pistorius served as my guide for a while.
In those days I ran around as if blind, storms roaring inside me, every step was dangerous. I saw nothing before me but the abysmal darkness into which all previous paths ran and sank. And within me I saw the image of the leader who resembled Demian and in whose eyes my fate stood.
I wrote on a paper: “A leader has left me. I’m completely in the dark. I can’t take a step alone. Help me!”
I wanted to send this to Demian. But I refrained from doing so; it looked silly and pointless every time I tried to do it. But I knew the little prayer by heart and often said it to myself. It accompanied me every hour. I began to understand what prayer was.
Ma school term was over. I should go on a vacation, my Father came up with it, and then I was supposed to go to university. I didn’t know which faculty. I was granted one semester of philosophy. I would have been just as happy with anything else.