“And sometimes it seemed that something never seen yet long desired
was about to happen, that a veil would drop from it all. . . .” (73)
“When artists create pictures and thinkers search for laws
and formulate thoughts, it is in order to salvage something from the great
dance of death, to make something that lasts longer than we do.” (157)
“Any work of art that was truly sublime, not just a good
juggler’s trick; that was filled with the eternal secret, like the master’s
Madonna; every obviously genuine work of art had this dangerous, smiling double
face, was male-female, a merging of instinct and pure spirituality. . . . In
art, in being an artist, Goldmund saw the possibility of reconciling his
deepest contradictions, or at least of expressing newly and magnificently the
split in his nature.” (171)
“One thing, however, did become clear to him—why so many
perfect works of art did not please him at all, why they were almost hateful
and boring to him, in spite of a certain undeniable beauty. Workshops,
churches, and palaces were full of these fatal works of art. . . .They were
deeply disappointing because they aroused the desire for the highest and did
not fulfill it. They lacked the most essential thing—mystery. That was what
dreams and truly great art had in common: mystery.” (184-185)
“All existence seemed to be based on duality, on contrast.
Either one was a man or one was a woman, either a wanderer or a sedentary
burgher, either a thinking person or a feeling person—no one could breathe in
at the same time as he breathed out, be a man as well as a woman, experience
freedom as well as order, combine instinct and mind. One always had to pay for
the one with the loss of the other, and one thing was always just as desirable
as the other.” (249)
“God is perfect being. Everything else that exists is only
half, only a part, is becoming, is mixed. He is one, he has no potentialities
but is the total, the complete reality. Whereas we are transitory, we are
becoming, we are potentials; there is no perfection for us, no complete being.
But wherever we go, from potential to deed, from possibility to realization, we
participate in true being, become by a degree more similar to the perfect and
divine.” (280)
“Goldmund had showed [Narcissus] that a man destined for
high things can dip into the lowest depths of the bloody, drunken chaos of
life, and soil himself with much dust and blood, without becoming small and
common, without killing the divine spark within himself, that he can err
through the thickest darkness without extinguishing the divine light and the
creative force inside the shrine of his soul.” (301)
Hesse,
Herman. Narcissus And Goldmund.
Trans. Ursule Molinaro. New York: Picador, 1968. Print.
