I felt my destiny drawing me on--I felt that fulfillment was near, and I was insanely impatient and frustrated not to be able to bring it about. Once, at a train station in Innsbruck I think it was, I saw a shape through the window of a departing train that reminded me of her, and I was miserable for days. Suddenly the shape appeared to me again at night, in a dream, and I woke up feeling ashamed and empty, convinced of the senselessness of my hunt. I took the next train straight home.
A few weeks later I enrolled at the University of H--. Everything was a disappointment to me. The lectures I heard on the history of philosophy were as trivial and mass-produced as the hustle and bustle of the young students. Everything followed the same cliched pattern, everyone did the same things as everyone else, and the good cheer on the flushed, boyish faces looked so depressingly empty and prefabricated! I was free, though; I had all my time to myself, and I lived in a nice, quiet, run-down place by the city walls with a couple volumes of Nietzsche on my table. I lived with him, felt the loneliness of his soul, trembled at the fate that had inexorably hounded him, suffered with him, and was overjoyed that there had been someone who had followed his path so relentlessly.
Late one night I wandered through the city, in gusts of autumn wind, and heard groups of students singing in the bars. Clouds of tobacco smoke poured out through the open windows, and torrents of song, loud and strictly rhythmical but utterly lifeless, joyless, and mechanical.
I stood on a street corner and listened. Right on schedule, the students' well-rehearsed high spirits echoed out into the night. Everywhere a communal huddling together, young men unburdening themselves of fate, fleeing to the warmth of the herd!
Two men slowly walked by, behind me, and I heard a snatch of their conversation.
"Isn't it exactly like the young men's house in an African village?" one of them said. "Everything is the way it's supposed to be, down to the prescribed tattoos of their dueling scars! Here you have it: the future of Europe."
The voice somehow reminded me of something--I knew that voice. I followed the men down the dark street. One of them was Japanese, a small, elegant man; I could see his yellow face light up in a smile under a streetlamp.
Then the other man spoke again.
"Well I'm sure it's no better with you in Japan. It is always rare to find people who don't follow the herd. Even here there are some."
I felt a stab of joyous shock with every word. I knew the person who was speaking--it was Demian.
I followed him and the Japanese man through the windy night, down dark streets; I listened to their conversation and was happy to hear the sound of Demian's voice. It had the same old tone from before, the same beautiful confidence and serenity, the same power over me. Now everything was going to be all right. I had found him.
At the end of a street on the edge of the city, the Japanese man said goodbye and opened his front door. Demian started to walk back; I had stopped and was waiting for him in the middle of the street. With my heart pounding I saw him walk toward me, standing up straight, a spring in his step, wearing a brown plastic raincoat and with a thin cane hanging on his arm. Without altering his stride he walked right up to me, took off his hat, and revealed the same old bright face with its decisive mouth and strangely bright forehead.
"Demian!" I cried.
He held out his hand to me.
"There you are, Sinclair! I've been expecting you."
"You knew I was here?"
"I wasn't sure, but I was definitely hoping. I hadn't seen you until tonight. You've been following us."
"So you recognized me right away?"
"Of course. It's true, you've changed. But you have the sign."
"The sign? What sign?"
"We used to call it the mark of Cain, if you recall. It is our special sign. You always had it--that's why I wanted to be your friend. But now it's clearer."
"I didn't know. Or, actually, I did. I painted a picture of you once, Demian, and I was amazed to see that it also looked like me. Was that the sign?"
"It was. It's good that you're here! My mother will be glad too."
I was suddenly frightened. "Your mother? Is she here? She doesn't even know me."
"Oh, she knows about you. She will know who you are even if I don't tell her. . . . You haven't been in touch for a long time."
"Oh, I wanted to write to you, so many times, but I couldn't. I've felt for a while that I'd find you soon. I waited for it every day."
He tucked his arm into mine and walked on with me, exuding a calm that entered me too. Soon we were chatting the same way we used to. We recalled our school days, the confirmation class, and the meeting that hadn't gone well during the school break too--the only thing we didn't discuss was the earliest, closest bond between us, the Franz Kromer story.
We unexpectedly found ourselves in the middle of a strange conversation, full of premonitions and forebodings. We had just been discussing student life, along the lines of Demian's conversation with the Japanese man, and had moved on from that to other things that seemed to be totally unrelated, but Demian's words revealed an underlying connection.
He spoke of the spirit of Europe, and the nature of our age. Everywhere, he said, conformity and the herd instinct prevail; nowhere do freedom and love have the upper hand. All this gathering together, from student fraternities and singing clubs to entire nations, is taking place under a kind of compulsion--they are communities of anxiety, fear, and shame, and on the inside they are old and rotten and about to collapse.
"Community is a beautiful thing," Demian said. "But what we see flourishing everywhere around us is no such thing. True community will arise again when actual individuals come to know each other; then will come a time when it reshapes the world. The communities we have now are just herds. People run as fast as they can to each other because they're afraid of each other--the rich come together over here, the workers over there, the educated elites somewhere else! And why are they afraid? Fear always comes from a split in yourself. They are afraid because they have never gotten to know who they really are. A whole society of people afraid of the unknown in their own hearts! They all can feel that the principles they live by are not valid anymore, that they're following the old laws; none of it, neither their religion nor their morality, is right for us today. For a hundred years and more, Europe has done nothing but go to school and build factories! They know exactly how many ounces of powder it takes to kill someone, but don't know how to pray to God. They don't even know how to be happy for an hour at a time. Just look at these student bars! Or anywhere rich people go to amuse themselves! It's hopeless!
"My dear Sinclair, nothing good can come of all this. These people huddling together so timidly are full of fear and full of wickedness; no one trusts the next. They cling to ideals that no longer exist, and throw stones at anyone who is trying to create a new one. I can feel the conflicts. They will come, believe me, and soon! And naturally they won't make the world 'better.' Whether the workers kill their capitalists or Russia and Germany blow each other to bits, the only thing that'll change is who owns whom. But still it won't have been in vain. These conflicts will clarify how worthless the current ideals have become; they will wipe out all our old stone age gods. The world as it is wants to die, it cries out to be destroyed--and it will be."
"And what about us?" I asked.
"Us? Oh, maybe we will be destroyed too. Our kind can be shot and killed too. But they can't get rid of us that easily. The will of the future will collect around whatever remains of us, or whichever ones of us survive. The will of humanity, which our European marketplace of science and technology has strangled for so long, will reveal itself. And then it will be as clear as day that the will of humanity has nothing, nothing to do with the so-called communities we have today--the nations and tribes, the clubs and churches. What Nature wants with us human beings always stands written in individuals: in you and in me. It was there in Jesus, it was there in Nietzsche. Those are the only tendencies
that matter--of course their appearance may change day to day--and there will be room for them once today's collectivities collapse."
It was late when we arrived at a garden by a river, and stopped.
"This is where we live," Demian said. "Come see us soon. We're waiting for you."
I happily walked the long road home. The night had grown cool; here and there a student staggered noisily through the city to wherever he was going. I had often thought how opposed their ridiculous high spirits were to my lonely life--sometimes feeling I was missing out on something, sometimes simply looking down on them. But I had never felt so calm, so filled with secret strength, as I did that night. How little that world had to do with me, how distant and forgotten it was! I remembered civil servants from my hometown: dignified old gentlemen who clung to the memories of their drunken student nights like souvenirs from a blissful paradise, and who worshipped at the altar of the long-vanished "freedom" of their student years the way poets or other Romantics did with childhood. It was the same everywhere! Everywhere they sought "freedom" and "happiness" somewhere behind them, purely out of fear that they might be reminded of their responsibility for their own lives, might be admonished to follow their own path. A few years of boozing and carousing, then they knuckled under and turned into respectable bureaucrats. Yes, it was rotten here, putrid, and these student idiocies were not as bad or as idiotic as a hundred others.
In any case, by the time I got back to my distant apartment and went to bed, all these thoughts had vanished, and my whole soul clung expectantly to the great promise that had been made to me. Whenever I wanted to--tomorrow, even--I would see Demian's mother. Let the students go on their drinking binges and scar one another's faces, let the rotten world await its own destruction--what did I care? The only thing I awaited was the encounter with my destiny in a new form, a new image.
*
I slept deeply until late the next morning. The new day dawned for me as a glorious holiday, of a kind I had not had since the Christmas celebrations of my childhood. I was full of inner restlessness but without a hint of fear. I felt that an important day in my life had arrived; the world around me seemed transformed, solemnly and meaningfully waiting; even the soft, flowing autumn rain was beautiful: silently, ceremoniously full of serious yet joyful music. It was the first time the outside world was in pure harmony with my inner world, and that is a high holiday of the soul--a day that makes it worthwhile to be alive. Not a single building or shop window or face on the street bothered me; everything was as it should be, and yet it did not wear the empty face of the habitual and everyday. Instead nature was waiting, standing worshipfully ready to meet its destiny. That was how I had seen the world as a boy, on the mornings of the important holidays, Christmas and Easter. I hadn't realized this world could still be so beautiful. I had gotten used to my inward-facing life, and had come to terms with the fact that the life out there had lost all meaning for me; I had decided that losing the glittering colors of the world inevitably went along with the loss of childhood, and that to a certain extent you had to pay for the freedom and manhood of the soul by renouncing that beloved shimmer. Now, enchanted, I saw that it had all merely been overshadowed and covered up, and that it was possible, even as a free man who had renounced childhood happiness, to see the world aglow and feel the heartfelt quiver of childlike vision.
The moment came when I found the garden on the edge of town once more, where I had parted from Demian the night before. Hidden behind tall, rain-gray trees was a small house, bright and homey, with large flowering plants behind a big glass pane, and clear, shining windows revealing dark walls with pictures and bookshelves. The front door led straight into a small heated hallway, and a silent old maid, in black with a white apron, showed me in and took my coat.
She left me alone in the hall. I looked around, and right away I was in the middle of my dream. High up on the dark wooden wall, above a door, hung a black frame, and under the glass was a picture I knew well: my bird with the golden yellow sparrow hawk head, vaulting out of the world-egg. I stood there, deeply moved--I had so much joy and sorrow in my heart, as though everything I had ever done and ever felt was coming back to me in that moment, as answer, as fulfillment. I saw image after image streak like lightning across my soul: my father's house back home, with the old stone coat of arms above the arch of the gate; Demian as a young man drawing the coat of arms; myself as a scared boy trapped in the evil clutches of my enemy, Kromer; myself as a teenager, sitting at the quiet table in my little student room and painting the bird of my yearnings, my soul tangled up in the net of its own threads--and everything, everything down to that moment echoed inside me, having been answered at last with affirmation and approval.
With tears in my eyes I stared at my picture and read myself. Then I looked farther down, and there, in the open door, under the picture of the bird, stood a tall woman in a black dress. It was her.
I couldn't speak a word. With a face timeless and ageless and imbued with will, like her son's, the beautiful, sacred woman gave me a friendly smile. Her gaze was fulfillment, her greeting meant I had come home. I silently held out my hand to her, and she took it in both of her firm, warm hands.
"You must be Sinclair. I recognized you right away. Welcome!"
Her voice was deep and warm, and I drank it in like sweet wine. Then I looked up, into her quiet face, into her black, unfathomable eyes, at her lively, ripe mouth, and at her free and imperious brow, which bore the sign.
"How happy I am!" I said to her, and I kissed her hands. "I feel like I have been on a journey my whole life--and now I've come home."
She smiled a maternal smile.
"No one can ever go home," came her friendly reply. "But when friends' paths meet, the whole world can look like home for a time."
Her words expressed what I had been feeling on my way to her. Her voice as well as her words were very like her son's, and yet completely different. Everything was more mature and warmer, more direct. But the same way Max, long ago, had never seemed like a boy, his mother did not come across in the least like the mother of a grown son: her face and hair smelled so young and sweet, her golden skin was so taut and smooth, her mouth so radiant. She stood before me even more regal than she had been in my dream, and to be this close to her was to feel the joy of love. Her gaze was fulfillment.
So this was the new form in which my fate revealed itself to me: no longer stern and isolating but ripe and joyful! I came to no decisions at that moment, I took no vows--I had arrived, at a goal, a high point of the path, from which I could see the way ahead, long and majestic, reaching into promised lands, shaded by treetops of nearby happiness, cooled by nearby gardens of every pleasure. Whatever might happen to me now, I had been blessed with the knowledge that this woman was in the world, and was ecstatic to be able to drink in her voice and breathe in her closeness. Whether she be a mother to me, or a lover, or a goddess--as long as she was there, as long as my path ran next to hers!
She pointed up at my hawk picture.
"You never made our Max happier than with that picture," she said pensively. "And me as well. We were waiting for you, and when the picture came we knew you were on the way to us. When you were a little boy, Sinclair, my son came home from school one day and said: There's a boy there with the mark on his forehead, I have to make him my friend. It was you. You did not have it easy, but we had faith in you. One time, when you were home for the holidays, you met up with Max. You must have been around sixteen years old. Max told me about it. . . ."
I interrupted her. "Oh, he told you? That was the most miserable time of my life!"
"Yes. Max told me that Sinclair has the hardest part ahead of him: he is trying to flee back into a community, he's hanging around bars. But he won't be able to do it. His mark is obscured, but secretly it is burning him. -- Isn't that how it was?"
"Yes, exactly. Then I found Beatrice, and then, at last, another guide came to me. His name was Pistorius. Only then did I realize
why my childhood was so closely tied to Max, why I couldn't get free of him. Dear Lady--dear Mother--back then I often thought I would have to take my own life. Is the path that hard for everyone?"
She ran her hand over my hair, as soft as a gentle breeze.
"It is always hard to be born. You know it--the bird has to struggle to get out of the egg. Think back and ask yourself: Was the path really so hard? Was it only hard? Wasn't it lovely too? Do you wish you had had a prettier, easier way?"
I shook my head.
"It was hard," I said, as though asleep, "it was hard until the dream came."
She nodded and gave me a piercing look.
"Yes, we all have to find our dream, then the path becomes easy. But no dream lasts forever. Every dream is supplanted by a new one, and you can't try to hold tight to any of them."
I was suddenly frightened. Was that a warning? Was it rejection, already? But whatever it was I was ready to let her be my guide and not ask where she was leading me.
"I don't know how long my dream will last," I said. "I hope it's forever. Under the picture of the bird my destiny has welcomed me, like a mother and like a lover. I belong to that destiny and to no one else."
"For as long as that dream is your destiny, you should stay true to it," she affirmed in a serious voice.