Stories of Five Decades

Introduction

IN 1921 Hermann Hesse’s publisher urged him to prepare a selected edition of his works. But as Hesse read through the products of his past twenty-two years of literary activity, he came to the sobering conclusion that there was nothing there to select. A realistic appraisal of his own abilities prevented him from invoking, even for purposes of comparison, the works of the grand masters of narrative: Cervantes, Dostoevsky, Balzac. Yet even when he considered such models as Turgenev or the nineteenth-century Swiss writer Gottfried Keller, Hesse realized that he was by no stretch of the imagination a storyteller. For all his works, he belatedly saw, dealt not with the world but only with his own secret dreams and wishes, his own bitter anguish. There was no doubt in my mind that, of all my stories, not a single one was good enough as a work of art to be worth mentioning.

Hesse’s gloomy reassessment of 1921 anticipates his reflections on the questionable art of storytelling in the introduction to his late tale The Interrupted Class. True storytelling, he argues, is possible only in societies in which the narrator can take for granted a common basis of language, values, and understanding between himself and his readers. But the fragmentation produced by the proliferation of beliefs and ideologies in the twentieth century has destroyed that common ground, isolating the author as merely one among countless alienated individuals in a pluralistic world. In his own efforts to use revered models of the past in order to come to grips with his essentially modern experience, Hesse had been, as he put it, a deceiver deceived. As a result, he made up his mind henceforth to eschew the good old tradition of storytelling and to seek new modes of expression that, though less perfect and less beautiful, would provide a more honest reflection of the consciousness that he sought to render. These attempts, which produced his major novels beginning with Demian (1919), are the works with which most readers now identify Hesse.

Hesse’s disenchantment with his early works and his determination to create a new style resulted directly from his experience with psychoanalysis in the years 1916 and 1917, during which he underwent some seventy sessions with Josef B. Lang, a disciple of Jung. The reevaluation of all his beliefs, sparked notably by the writings of Jung and Nietzsche, prompted him to turn frankly inward to the problems of his own consciousness. As a result, narratives that can be called stories in any conventional sense virtually disappear from his work. Instead, Hesse increasingly favored literary forms that enabled him to examine his own past and present, singling out for particular scrutiny those moments at which individual experience achieves the level of universal validity. Fiction begins to give way to essays that move from the private to the public, from the real to the symbolic, and to autobiographical reflections that turn out to be less an account of his life than an attempt to comprehend its meaning. And in his fiction, from Demian to The Glass Bead Game (1943), storytelling in the traditional sense recedes in order to allow large mythic patterns to emerge. The forms that Hesse favored in the second half of his life—essay, autobiography, and mythic-symbolic narrative—constitute three different modes of access to the single problem that obsessed him: his own consciousness and its place in a timeless reality that transcends immediate temporal concerns.

Yet this seemingly abrupt change of direction nel mezzo del cammin, to cite one of Hesse’s favorite poets, is no reason for us to reject the earlier works, as Hesse himself felt inclined to do in that moment of disillusionment in 1921. As we look back at them—with the benefit of hindsight, to be sure—we can see foreshadowed there not only the themes of alienation and introspection but even the style of mythic generalization that has attracted a new generation of readers to Hesse in the second half of the twentieth century. And in the 1941 introduction to a new edition of his first prose a somewhat mellower Hesse conceded that even such juvenalia as An Hour beyond Midnight (1899) and The Posthumous Writings and Poems of Hermann Lauscher (1901) are crucial documents for the history of his development.

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Hesse’s first published prose piece opens when a shipwrecked dreamer lays down his oars to greet the isle of his dreams. But his eye is suddenly caught by his reflection in the dark-green waters of the bay, and for two paragraphs, until he finally turns his attention back to the shore, he loses himself in the contemplation of his own image. The Narcissus pose was quite fashionable at the turn of the century, and it is hardly surprising to find the twenty-two-year-old Hesse adopting it in the prose sketches he published under the rather recherché title An Hour beyond Midnight. The dated tone of these misty lines and their conventional image seem quite remote from the style of Hesse’s mature works. Yet, as we trace the development of Hesse’s fiction, we shall be sent back repeatedly to that passage in which the young writer presented himself to the world, for it anticipates several characteristics of his subsequent oeuvre.

The style of Hesse’s prose changes quite noticeably in the course of the fifty years from the early poèmes en prose to such late narratives as The Interrupted Class (1948). In the first decade of the century Hesse experimented with a variety of styles before he found the voice that is familiar to the readers of his major novels. The nine pieces of An Hour beyond Midnight, for instance, constitute a textbook case of fin de siècle aestheticism. In explicit imitation of Maeterlinck, Hesse created there a precious language of elegant archaisms and sonorous alliterations in order to do justice to what he called (in the 1941 introduction) the dreamland of my poetic hours and days, which lay mysteriously somewhere between time and space. But within two years Hesse turned sharply away from the cult of l’art pour l’art and the otherworldly spirituality of his chief model, the Romantic poet Novalis. In The Posthumous Writings and Poems of Hermann Lauscher he exploited the ironic techniques of E. T. A. Hoffmann in order to distance himself from his own immediate past and what he had come to regard as its romantic excesses. In the person of Lauscher, as he noted in an expanded edition of 1907, Hesse wanted to bury my own dreams. Using a fictional device that anticipates the framework of Steppenwolf (1927), Hesse introduces himself here in the guise of an editor who is publishing the works of his friend Lauscher as documents of the curious soul of a modern aesthete and eccentric. Although Lauscher’s poetic works, we are told, display the carefully polished, precious form that characterized Hesse’s own first prose and poetry, the five pieces—ranging from Lauscher’s recollections of his childhood to his Diary, 1900—are marked for the most part by a stridently contemporary style, evident in the student slang, the vulgarisms, and the strained imagery of November Night.

After the success of his novel Peter Camenzind (1904), however, Hesse’s style underwent yet another transformation as he moved away from the preciosity of his first prose vignettes and the radically anti-bourgeois shock tactics of Hermann Lauscher and settled upon the mellow tones of melancholy realism that dominated his works for the next decade. In a series of stories typified by The Marble Works, The Latin Scholar, and The Cyclone, he depicted the life of shopkeepers, servant girls, and artisans in small-town Germany, explicitly modeling his narrative style on the stories of Gottfried Keller. Here Hesse seemed to be celebrating the very gutbürgerlich culture of the Wilhelmine era that he had previously so indignantly rejected. Appropriately enough, these tales, collected in volumes with such down-to-earth titles as In This World (1907), Neighbors (1908), and Byways (1912), assured his popularity with an audience content with the status quo and blithely closing its eyes to all the portents of the social revolution that was soon to erupt into World War I.

During these same years Hesse was also writing fiction of a strikingly different sort—stories that appeared in various newspapers and journals but were not collected until much later, when Hesse published them in such volumes as Story Book (1935) and Dream Journeys (1945). In The City (1910) Hesse sketches a pessimistic parable on the rise and fall of culture, which anticipates by almost ten years both Spengler and Hesse’s own postwar cultural criticism. In his lyrical account of The Wolf (1907), an animal that is hounded to death by an insensitive mob of peasants, we encounter for the first time in Hesse’s works the wolf motif that became increasingly obsessive until it generated the novel Steppenwolf. And nothing could be further from narrative realism than the fantasy about A Man by the Name of Ziegler (1908), who is driven mad when he comes to understand the language of animals. In such works as these we have a foretaste of the magically surreal style that characterizes the major novels of the twenties and thirties, as well as such later stories as Inside and Outside, An Evening with Dr. Faust, and Edmund.

Yet in all these tales—from the perfumed aestheticism of the earliest prose poems through the realism and surrealism of the following decades down to the rarefied classicism of the stories collected in the volume Late Prose (1951)—we detect beneath the kaleidoscope of styles a consistent theme that is announced in the opening lines of The Island Dream. For the image of narcissism betrays an introspective consciousness that has rejected the world outside for the sake of its own inner reality. The isle of beauty in that first volume, to which the young writer retreated from his humdrum existence as a book dealer in Tübingen, is nothing but a symbol for the realm of the imagination, where lovely ladies wander through fragrant groves or play Chopin in incense-laden, candle-lit chambers. Indeed, many of the early pieces are little more than aesthetic sublimations of those adolescent sex dreams in which a timid boy sees himself surrounded by choirs of adulating girls who cling to his every banal utterance with devoted attentiveness and who are perceptive enough to recognize genius in the proud youth scorned by the real world. But if we look behind the conventional pose and the dated exterior, we see in these vignettes the underlying theme of the alienated individual who rejects external reality for an inner realm of timelessness created by his own imagination. This is precisely the attitude that we encounter twenty-eight years later in the author of Dream Journeys (1927), who emphatically prefers the visions of his own fantasy to anything that mere reality has to offer. In a more radical form, the student Edmund (in the story of that title) does not flee from reality; instead, he forces the external world to conform to the reality of his vision when he strangles his skeptical teacher in accordance with the dictates of an Indic tantra.

But it is not only in the early escapist pieces and the late surreal stories that we find Hesse’s characteristic tendency toward subordination of external reality to inner vision. It is also evident in many of the prewar stories, despite their ostensible realism after the fashion of Gottfried Keller. For all these schoolboys, students, missionaries, and apprentices turn out to be outsiders just as much as the magnificent wolf that, in the story of 1907, is struck down by the peasants. The action in these stories is never narrated for its own sake, as Hesse realized in 1921. Everything happens for the benefit of the hero, who is shocked out of childhood innocence into the consciousness of maturity by the events that he witnesses. The phenomenon of The Cyclone, for all the beauty of the nature description, is important only to the extent that it reflects the violent sexuality to which the adolescent is exposed for the first time. By the same token, the characters of these stories seem to act or to be acted upon—e.g., the injury of Tina’s fiancé in The Latin Scholar and Helene Lampart’s death in The Marble Works—mainly so that the hero or narrator can gain insight into human nature and, ultimately, into his own consciousness. Storytelling for its own sake recedes, in other words, as external action is reduced to little more than material for the meditations of the hero on his road to self-awareness. Characteristically, in most of these stories the hero is not so much a participant in the action as, rather, a witness of it; and he often turns out to be a first-person narrator like the shipwrecked dreamer of the first prose piece—a Narcissus obsessed with the image of his own consciousness.

The tendency toward introspection is paralleled from first to last by a criticism of the world from which the author-hero is fleeing. In Hermann Lauscher this critique amounts to little more than the student’s attempt to épater le bourgeois. In the parable in which society ladies flock to admire Harry, the Steppenwolf (1928), Hesse is lampooning an attitude that we recognize today as radical chic. But even during the decade preceding World War I, Hesse’s wolf frequently bit the hand that fed it—or, at least, bought its books. Robert Aghion (1913) can be read as a bitter attack on the arrogant colonializing mentality of Western man and the haughty complacency of Christianity. And The Homecoming (1909) belongs to that substantial genre of literature in which a man returning home after years abroad suddenly sees unmasked all the malice and pettiness of his own society. In many of these stories, by the way, Hesse portrays with considerable precision his own home town in southern Germany, Calw, which in its fictional form is called Gerbersau. In 1949 all of Hesse’s early tales about provincial southern Germany were published in a two-volume edition entitled simply Gerbersau. It is probably safe to say that the German public, in a mood of intense self-scrutiny after two world wars, was able to perceive in those early stories much of the social criticism that was not obvious to their first readers.

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If we now return to Hesse’s first prose piece, The Island Dream, we note another characteristic that is anticipated there. After the narrator has beached his boat on the sand and wandered for a time, he lies down to rest in the shade of a cypress grove. Presently he is awakened from his slumbers by the cheerful cries of some young women who are tossing a golden ball in a nearby clearing. When the ball happens to land near him, he picks it up and reveals himself to the women, who, after recovering from their fright, greet the young wanderer and invite him to join them. By this point most readers will have realized that Hesse is alluding here to the story of Odysseus and Nausicaä, who meet in precisely the same way; and the remainder of Hesse’s tale closely parallels Homer’s account of Odysseus’ sojourn among the Phaeacians. Now if we look at Hesse’s other stories, we find that many of them are similarly catalyzed by a literary source. A second episode from An Hour beyond Midnight, Incipit vita nova, is sparked by Dante’s work of that title. (A similar use of Dante’s Vita Nuova occurs some twenty years later in the chapter of Demian entitled Beatrice.) The episode November Night in Hermann Lauscher is prefigured by the scene in Auerbach’s Cellar from Goethe’s Faust. The Marble Works is in part an updated version of Gottfried Keller’s well-known story concerning A Rustic Romeo and Juliet. The legend of The Field Devil is based on the medieval Saints’ Lives, while another story relates an episode From the Childhood of Saint Francis of Assisi. In fact, almost every tale subsequently incorporated into the volume Story Book retells a legend or an episode from history. Thus, Chagrin d’Amour uses a fictional background borrowed from Wolfram von Eschenbach’s epic Parzival as the setting for a plot suggested by a French folk song (recently revived by Joan Baez). Similarly, the inscription that precipitates the magic in the story Inside and Outside is taken from a poem by Goethe (Epirrhema). The action of Edmund is inspired by an Indic tantra. And the parable of Harry, the Steppenwolf amounts to a playful extension of Kafka—whose works Hesse was one of the first to admire—since the Steppenwolf occupies a menagerie cage recently vacated by a panther resembling the one that replaced Kafka’s Hunger Artist.

To point out these sources is in no way to belittle Hesse’s achievement. In the first place, he demonstrated his powers of creative imagination by inventing actions to accommodate the allusion (e.g., the tantra, or the French folk song, or the quotation from Goethe) that inspired the story. That is, his stories amount to more than the retelling of familiar tales in new words. (As an editor and anthologist, by the way, Hesse compiled a number of volumes during these years, ranging from his own translations of medieval and Renaissance tales to volumes of Romantic poetry and modern fiction.) In the second place, and more importantly: twentieth-century literature—from Joyce’s Ulysses and Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus to Eliot’s The Waste Land and Brecht’s St. Joan of the Stockyards—has made us increasingly conscious of the basic literariness of literature, which has come to be considered not so much an imitation of life in the Aristotelian sense as a playful manipulation of elements that already exist in an autonomous world of art. Precisely this kind of manipulation of existing forms occurs in Hesse’s major novels. Demian is indebted, as many of the chapter headings and quotations suggest, to episodes in the Bible, from Genesis to Revelation. And Siddhartha (1922) gets its title as well as its basic outline from legends surrounding the life of Buddha. So the allusion, in The Island Dream, to Odysseus among the Phaeacians anticipates the prefigurational techniques that Hesse, along with many of the other major writers of the century, was to develop with considerable sophistication.

The use of literary sources is related, moreover, to the tendency toward introspection. For the realm that Hesse opposes to everyday reality—in An Hour beyond Midnight as well as such later stories as Dream Journeys—is explicitly a realm of art. It became increasingly clear to Hesse, in the course of his life, that eternity is a frame of mind: the ability to perceive what Harry Haller, in Steppenwolf, calls the golden trace that gives life its meaning. Hesse was much more at home in that timeless spiritual realm than in the real world. He consistently resisted attempts to make of him a public figure, preferring to spend his days and hours in the relative isolation of a farmhouse on the shores of Lake Constance (1904–12), a villa in the suburbs of Bern (1912–19), and two different dwellings in the Swiss Alps above Lugano (1919–62). In his later years, behind a sign requesting No Visitors Please, he devoted himself to his writing, to his painting, and to his books—notably, to the German literature of the period 1750 to 1850, in which he always claimed to feel spiritually most at home, and later to the world of Oriental culture that increasingly claimed his interest. From a writer of this sort, who by choice has shut himself off from the contemporary world, we would not reasonably expect a fertile invention of exciting fictional narratives set in the everyday reality of modern European society. But we would legitimately expect to encounter evidences of that cultural realm in which he preferred to spend his time—hence Saint Francis, Faust, the wisdom of India, and the many other references of that order. The Glass Bead Game, in the novel of that title, is Hesse’s most brilliant image for the timeless realm of culture: for that institution has the sole function of enabling the men of Castalia to play with the cultural values of the past and present just as easily as one plays upon the various consoles of an organ. In those early stories, with their literary allusions and their rich associations of quotation and form, we sense the inchoate outlines of that cultural realm to which Hesse’s introspective tendency ultimately led him.

Apart from literature and culture, the second principal source of Hesse’s fiction is his own life. We have already noted that increasingly during the twenties Hesse turned to pure autobiography in the attempt to come to grips with his past. Up to that point, however, his stories represent the best reservoir of biographical information. The Latin Scholar describes the year when Hesse, before dropping out of school for good, was attending a gymnasium in a town near Calw. The Cyclone depicts the period when the youth was back in Calw, working as an apprentice in the local tower-clock workshop. The episodes of Hermann Lauscher provide a lightly fictionalized account of Hesse’s life in Tübingen, where he worked as a bookseller by day while, at night, he sought refuge in an aesthetic realm an hour beyond midnight. Robert Aghion combines Hesse’s own firsthand observations during his voyage to Indonesia in 1911 with stories from the history of his family, several of whom had spent years as missionaries in India during the nineteenth century. But in all these stories, as well as the novels from these early years, biographical experience serves not as a starting point for the exploration of reality and other people; rather, it leads him inevitably back into his own consciousness for the encounter with himself. It was this realization, in 1921, that caused Hesse to reject these early works as failures, at least from the standpoint of traditional storytelling, and to say that they represented nothing more than his secret dreams, his own bitter anguish.

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If we return for a final time to Hesse’s earliest story, we can see a clear indication of the difference between his juvenalia and the works of his maturity. There, as the shipwrecked dreamer approaches the island of his dreams, his attention is distracted by his reflection in the waters of the bay. Almost fifty years later, a similar situation recurs in Hesse’s recollection of The Interrupted Class. Sent on an errand by his teacher, the twelve-year-old pauses on a bridge to watch the fish in the river below; but as he looks into the water he falls into a state of rapt contemplation in which he forgets all temporality until he is startled by the chiming of the church clock, which summons him back to reality. This parallel exemplifies the fact that to an astonishing degree Hesse’s works consist of varying configurations of the same limited group of images—in this case, an epiphany produced by gazing into a body of water. But the image first occurs in a fictional setting that represents an escapist flight from reality. The shipwrecked dreamer, after all, has left the world behind for an aesthetic realm where nothing interferes with his rapturous contemplation of his own reflection. The late variation of the image has an entirely different context: for the autobiographical reminiscence forces Hesse to come to grips with an episode from his childhood that he had successfully repressed for many years. The first image stands under the sign of Narcissus, who is lost in worshipful contemplation of himself; the second leads the author into a consideration of the individual’s ethical responsibilities in the world into which he has been thrust and with which he must somehow cope. The first image represents the young Hesse, still trying to express himself by means of literary forms appropriated reverently from respected masters; the second reveals the old Hesse, who has reverted frankly to autobiographical reminiscence in an effort to understand his own consciousness, since the questionable art of storytelling has unmasked itself as inadequate.

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From all that has been said, it should be evident that more than mere caprice dictated the choice of stories in this volume. The contents pages reflect the fact that most of Hesse’s stories were written before World War I; those that appeared thereafter moved ever closer to autobiography, to the essay, and to the parable, tendencies that are apparent in such late narratives as The Interrupted Class, Dream Journeys, and Harry, the Steppenwolf. Stories of Five Decades (none except Inside and Outside, Tragic, and Dream Journeys has ever before been available in English) provides a representative selection that displays the full range of Hesse’s storytelling and the course of its development. It includes pieces from every major period and every important collection. And if some of his stories have been omitted for reasons of space, no aspect of his work is neglected. (Most of the omitted stories fall into one of two categories: realistic tales from the Gerbersau period, and the retelling of medieval and Renaissance stories and legends.) Since the boundary line between fiction on the one hand and pure autobiography or essay on the other becomes increasingly tenuous in Hesse’s work, only one narrative from the last years is included here. Others may be found in Hesse’s My Belief: Essays on Life and Art, to be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the spring of 1973, and in the English-language edition of his Autobiographical Writings.

Hesse published most of his stories several times, first in various newspapers and magazines and subsequently in collections of his own works. Frequently the titles were altered, and sometimes the text itself was modified. The final titles are used in this edition and the translations follow the final revision, but the stories are arranged chronologically in the order in which they were first written. The selection thus offers a spectrum of Hesse’s writing from 1899 to 1948 that can be duplicated only by an edition of his poetry, since in no other literary form—novel, essay, autobiographical reflection—did he span so many years. Here, within the covers of a single volume, one can follow Hesse’s development from the aestheticism of his neoromantic youth to the classicism of his old age. And the reader who knows Hesse mainly through his major novels of the twenties and thirties will be surprised to encounter him here in a variety of earlier incarnations. Yet the greatest surprise of all, surely, is to see how faithful Hesse remained to himself from start to finish and with what unremitting honesty he tested and discarded literary forms until he found the mode that was adequate for the expression of his own consciousness. Hesse’s gloomy rejection of his early work in 1921 did not mark a radical break with his past but rather a turning point. Far from toning down the secret dreams that he detected in his prewar stories, Hesse transposed them from minor into major, proclaiming the realm of his imagination as his characteristic and principal theme.

THEODORE ZIOLKOWSKI

The Island Dream

1899

A LONG-ARCHING WAVE lifted the rounded bow of my skiff and set it down on the shingle. Leaving the thwart, a shipwrecked dreamer held out his arms to the silent land. My frayed purple cloak fell in soft, humble folds from my hips down. My arms and neck were thin from rowing and fasting, my hair had grown long and was curling at the back of my neck. My reflection lay before me in the dark-green, still water of the bay, and I saw that in the course of my long journey everything about me had changed; I was browner, leaner, and more supple. Cruel hours had etched their dangers, defeats, and struggles into my cheeks. The sunless mornings when I had clung to my boat with my bruised limbs, the storms that had shown me the abysses of the sea had marked my cheeks and neck with their angular, furrowed script.

But my eyes shone clear, alert, and childlike in their wide hollows. Many nights they had watched, searching for the eternal stars and peering through the opalescent ocean darkness on the lookout for rising sails or land. For many days they had seen no dust, and only seldom, with smiling nostalgia, glimpsed the green of passing forests and the smoke of distant hidden cities. And now, large and radiant, they were smiling at me out of the smooth mirror.

They drank in the sight, of which they had so long been deprived, of the white stones, the brown earth, the grass, and the clumps of bushes. The air surrounding the bushes looked to me like a fine, whitish edge, for I had long lost the habit of the air that lies over the green earth. With diffident joy I breathed in the delicate full fragrance of the meadow and of the bare ground and, at once firmly and forbearingly, I set foot on the treasured realm of terra firma.

A gentle land breeze brought me a smell of forest plants and the faint perfume of distant gardens. In my joy I stretched out both arms to it and with delight felt its soft breath creeping over my hands and fingers and grazing my temples that were accustomed to the biting sea wind.

I pulled my gray boat up on the sand and passed my right hand over the hard vault of the gunwale, which had been worn smooth by my clutching hands. Then I made my way inland till I came to a dense thicket which stood before me like a circular wall and extended farther than I could see. I skirted the green hedge, delighting in its bluish shadow traversed by golden-green lights. I crossed a meadow of soft grass which gradually grew taller and grazed my knees with silken blossoms. The meadow lay in the full sunlight, but on the edge, where I was walking, the high bushes cast an even band of shade.

A gentle weariness crept into my legs. When I had gone some distance, I detected, on my left, a narrow opening, a kind of gateway in the thicket. In the green darkness I saw a path of seashells, and in the background towering treetops. But the passage was barred by a plaited garland. I stood there for a time, my eyes bathing in the gentle twilight and delighting in the soft, graduated color. From the bright green hedge to the half-visible secrets of the innermost grove, the green dispersed into a thousand shadows; eagerly my eyes followed the deepening darkness to the brown forest hues in the distance and returned with renewed pleasure to the yellowish light of the sun-drenched meadow.

With joyful exuberance I removed the garland from the rounded posts, so that the entrance lay open. I twined the red and white garland round my neck and waist, as though decking myself out for a summer festival. Then with cautious step I proceeded into the half-darkness. I came to a circular clearing, surrounded by a wall of saplings and bushes; both the clearing and the narrow path had been cut out of the forest by design. A brown and green light filtered through the overhanging treetops. In the circular clearing the ground had been strewn with white sand, and two narrow semicircular marble benches stood facing each other. I turned and followed the path leading into the grove. My head was heavy with the unaccustomed scent, and I heard the ringing of my quick-flowing blood.

After I had walked for some time, the heaviness in my legs increased and I longed for a place to rest. But then after a bend the path grew broader, and the forest walls on both sides receded, opening up a view of a large open space that appeared to be a garden. Any number of paths, wide and narrow, often bordered by bushes, twined round grass plots and flowerbeds, in which there were roses and other magnificent flowers of many colors, well tended and free of dead leaves. In the middle of the garden I saw groups of venerable trees, and behind them in the fading whiteness a marble building, a palace or temple.

I was drawn to a low bench shaded by cypresses. I sat down in the soft grass, crossed my hands behind my head, and leaned against the stone bench as I had often leaned against the thwart of my boat on quiet nights. High above me I saw the wide, marvelously blue sky and a few little fluffy, motionless clouds; then I shut my eyes and delighted in the red glow that shone through my lids. Then the god of sleep bent over me and unbound my weary limbs.

My soul spread its wings in a dream: images of yesterday and the day before filled me with new horror and grief. The sea lashed my boat with its waves and the angry sky sent storms. And the solitude for which I had so long yearned weighed upon me more heavily than the sky. And behind it the land with its noisy cities, from which I had torn myself away. A weary echo, a half-forgotten scent, a dimly remembered song of childhood—a shimmer of beauty and art cast in dirt and noise. Once again, as many times before, I saw anguished reflections of beauty’s timid light, and trembled with her and suffered with her. Still further away, under bright, old-fashioned skies, lay the springtimes of my childhood, touching my heart with tender fragrance.

On unhurried wings my dream flew back over the tangled pathways of my life, back to the first sunrises, and hovered sadly over the first mountains I had climbed and over my father’s