Place yourself where you can find fulfillment

My Review of Narziss and Goldmund (Herman Hesse novel)

Warning: Some spoilers are included in this article.

I have read three of Hesse’s works and so far all contain two major characters that learn from each other: Demian and Sinclair, Siddhartha and Govinda, and in this novel, Narcissus and Goldmund.

The novel revolves around two characters, Narziss (or Narcissus) and Goldmund, their relationship, and their individual quests to fulfillment.

Even though the novel is about Narziss and Goldmund, the majority of the story revolves more around Goldmund. He sets out on to the world, an adventure, to find himself and to find fulfillment. He sleeps with married women and kills a man. Yet from all of these he learns something. From killing a man and witnessing a plague, he learns how humans face and experience death. From seeing childbirth, he learns life. From women, he learns their nature, from how they kiss, to how they defend or give themselves. He learns the many ways and arts of love. From his many interactions with them, he learns their figure and their thousand modes and differences. The use of all of these he didn’t know until later in the novel.

The life of Narziss and Goldmund shows there are different paths to fulfillment. And also, those paths might be predetermined to each individual. According to Narziss, Goldmund could not have found fulfillment as a thinker, and Narziss could not with the senses. They both needed to pursue their own paths.

I find this dichotomy akin to Myers-Briggs concept of intuition and sensing. Narziss is an intuitive while Goldmund is a sensor. These represents their preferences in how to process information. Both of these result in different insights and outputs. The intuitive prefers to deal with the abstract, while the sensory prefers to deal with the concrete.

Personally, my path would probably be similar to Narziss’s, the life of thoughts, propositions, and concepts. Thinking, just like craftsmanship, can be practiced and applied to bring results. The work involves clarifying doubts and finding answers. These can be used to help other people.

There are so many lessons I learned from this novel and here are some of them that I’ve gathered:

1. Positive emotions like serenity and satisfaction, as well as negative emotions like sadness and despair, are transitory. This means inner peace is something you strive to gain daily.
2. Beauty can be found in every woman. “Every lack of beauty of youth found its recompense in some special gesture or tone of voice.”
3. Pray just like you sing; without thought as to whether it is worth it or a waste of time.
4. If you have something in your past you don’t remember or are afraid of remembering, then you are not whole. The impact of those events will rise within and posses you. It will always make you suffer until you become conscious of it. Recall your lost memories!
5. Where are you the most fruitful when you apply your disposition, talents, and hard work? At school, at work, or somewhere in the world? Strive to put yourself in that place in order to find fulfillment.
6. When we find fulfillment, we find our share in the true being of God. Man is transitory, and is therefore composed of possibilities. God is whole and complete, and therefore can not have possibilities. When we move from the state of potential to the state of action, we are in turn moving from the state of possibilities into completeness and fulfillment.
7. Both the thoughts and the senses can give their own knowledge of the truth.

My Favorite Quotes

Emotions are temporary

True the look of agony in this face was more strongly marked, and therefore clearer than any of supremest pleasure. But what lay beneath was the same: the almost grinning drawing together of the features, the same flow, the same extinction. He marveled much at his sudden thought: pleasure and pain can be as like as sisters.
p. 126. Tags: [[Pleasure Pain Principle]]

Sadness withers, and even our despair shrivels up. Pain, like our joys, fades out and leaves us, losing all depths and worth, till at last a day comes when we have forgotten what stung our hearts so many years before.
p. 225

There’s nothing to envy, Goldmund. There is no peace in the sense in which you mean it. No doubt there is a peace, but not that peace which abides, and never forsakes us. On earth there is only that peace which we must conquer over and over again, from day to day, in ever fresh assaults and victories. You have never seen me assailed. You know nothing of my doubts at study, my torments in my cell at prayers. It is good that you do not. All you can see is that I am less subject to moods than you, and so you think I must be at peace. But like every true life, it is all battle and sacrifice. Like your life also, o amice.
p. 281. Narziss to Goldmund

Solitude

Again and again, with all the suddenness of a charm, his peace and satisfaction had fallen away. The glib illusions had been defeated, the smooth self-esteem and fatness of soul. Something kept urging him off into solitude, to long meditation and vagrancy, to the sight of grief and pain and death, and the doubtful issue of all men’s striving; something had made him long to stare into the gulf.
p. 172. Tags: [[Solitude]]

Had it all any sense or worth in it? He sank back, and stared up at the pale night-clouds, till he had gazed so long that his thoughts all left him. He could not tell if he watched clouds or looked into the darkness of his own mind.
p. 207. Tags: [[Solitude]]

But he can set himself his own problems, they can grow in his mind to mighty forces.
p. 269

What you really mean is that thought itself seems useless to you, but not the application of thought to the visible and practical world. I can answer you there. We shall never lack chances, nor yet the will, to apply our thinking. This thinker, Narziss, for instance, has used the results of his thought a hundred times over, on behalf of Goldmund, his friend, and on that of each of his monks, and does every hour. But how can a thinker apply anything, unless he has learned it, and practiced it first? Poets and craftsmen continually practice their eyes and fancy, and we praise their skill, even if they only use it to give us bad and unreal images. You cannot reject thought as such, and then only ask for its “practical uses”. The contradiction is clear. So leave me in peace to think my thoughts, and judge me when I show you their results, just as I will judge your craftsmanship by your works.
p. 270

Art and women

When once he had yielded to a woman – though his love might last for days or only hours – she became a beauty in his eyes, and to her he surrendered his whole heart. And soon experience had taught him that every woman is beautiful and worth loving; that those least flaunting, the scorned of men, possess undreamed of ardor and self-forgetfulness, that withered virgins bear within them a tenderness as great as any mother, a sweet, confiding gentleness of their own – so that every woman in the world has her own magic, her own secret, which to read will bring happiness to a man.
In this all women were alike. Every lack of youth or beauty found its recompense in some special gesture or tone of voice.
p. 163

… all these legitimate, true-born works of art, not jugglers’ pieces but true craftsmen’s … presented this same perilous, two-faced smile, this quality both of man and woman, the living together and intermingling of desire and the clearest, passionless intellect.
p. 165

Theological

It may not always be a man’s wishes that determine his destiny and his action. He may be predestined.
p. 8. Narziss to Abbot Daniel.

The love of God is not always one with our love of virtue. Oh, if it were only so easy! We know the good, for it is written. But God is not only in what is written, boy. His commandments are the smallest part of Him. We may keep the commandments to the letter, and yet be very far from God.
p. 33-34. Narziss to Goldmund

Dear God, see what is become of me. I came back to You, an evil, useless man. I have flung away my youth, like a spendthrift, and now very little is left over. I have slain, I have stolen, I have whored. I have idled, and eaten the bread of others. God why did You make us so? And why do You lead us by such ways? Are we not Your children? Did not Your Son go to death for us? Are there not saints and angels to watch over us? Or is it all a bundle of pretty tales, invented to keep the children quiet, at which shavelings laugh among themselves? Your works have confused me, God the Father. You have made the world very ill, and now You rule it very weakly. I have seen streets and houses full of dead men. I have seen the rich lock up their doors and fly, leaving the poor, their brothers, to rot unburied. I have seen how men feared one another, how they struck down Jews like slaughtered cattle. I have seen so many innocent suffer and die, so many evil men wallow in sloth. Have You turned away, and left us utterly? Are Your own creatures of no more worth to You? Do You want men to perish from the world?
p. 219. Tags: [[Why did God permit evil?]], [[The Brothers Karamazov (book)]]

All being, it seemed, was built on opposites, on division. Man or woman, vagabond or citizen, lover or thinker – no breath could be both in and out, none could be man and wife, free and yet orderly, knowing the urge of life and the joy of intellect. Always the one paid for the other, though each was equally precious and essential.

Perhaps it was easier for women. Nature had made them so that, with them, their passion brought its fruit, and so a child was born out of their happiness. Men had no such simple fruitfulness, but instead, an eternal craving, never appeased.

Was the god who fashioned all this malicious and evil – did he laugh at the pain in his own creation? No, it could be no evil god who had made the roes and harts in the forest, fishes and birds, trees and flowers, spring and autumn. And yet this cleft ran through his work, whether it were less perfect than his intention, or he, the god, had a hidden purpose in this lack, this never-satisfied hunger in all his kind. Perhaps it was a seed, sown by the enemy: original sin. But were not all beauty and sanctity born of this same ‘sin’ in human beings, all that man had fashioned with his hands, and then given it back to the god?
p. 238-239. Tags: [[Trade off]], [[Feminine]], [[Masculinity|Masculine]], [[Original sin]], [[Why did God permit evil?]]

It is not for you to think whether God is listening to your prayers, or whether, indeed a God exists at all, as you would imagine Him. Nor have you to fret or puzzle as to whether all this is so much child’s play. In comparison with the God whom we petition all our human strivings are those of children. You must forbid yourself utterly all such silly, childish thoughts during your exercise. Say your Pater Noster, and your canticle, and give yourself up to the words, filling yourself, and letting them penetrate, just as though you were singing or playing a lute. If you sang or played you would not let your mind go hunting after clever thoughts and speculations, but would strive to give out each tone and fingering as clearly and perfectly as you could. When we sing we don’t hinder ourselves with asking if our singing is really a waste of time. We sing, and that is all! That is how you must pray.
p. 276. Narziss to Goldmund.

Fulfilment

Listen, I am only your superior in this: I am awake, whereas you are only half-awake, and at times your whole life is a dream. I call that man awake who, with conscious knowledge and understanding, can perceive the deep, unreasoning powers in his soul, his whole innermost strength, desire, and weakness, and knows how to reckon with himself.
p. 45. Narziss to Goldmund

The task that brings us together, the whole aim and purpose of our friendship, is that you should learn from me how to do it. In you Goldmund, nature and intellect, consciousness and the world of dreams, are set very far from one another. You have forgotten your childhood, which still strives up from the depths of your being, to possess you. It will always make you suffer till you heed it. But enough: awake, as I said, I am your superior. There I am stronger than you, and so I can help you. But in all things else, amice, you are mine, or rather you will be when you know yourself.
p. 45. Narziss to Goldmund

Narziss smiled rather sadly: “What shall I do in the end? Who knows? I may die as head of the school, or as abbot or bishop. That is all one. But my aim is this: always to be where I can serve best, where my disposition, talents, and industry may find their best soil and be most fruitful. That is the only aim in my life.”
p. 65. Narziss to Goldmund

Most certainly we can think without images. Thought and imagery have nothing at all to do with one another. Thinking is not done in pictures, but in concepts, and formulae. There where poetry ends begins philosophy. That was what we quarreled over so often, long ago. For you the world was composed of pictures, for me of concepts. I always said we should never make a scholar of you, and I said, too, that this was not a lack in you, since you were master in the realm of images. Now listen, and I will make it plain to you. If you, instead of escaping into the world, had remained on here as a scholar, the end might have been your own undoing. You would have turned into a mystic. And mystics, to put it plainly and rather bluntly, are those thinkers who cannot free their minds of images, and so not thinkers at all. They are secret poets, poets without verses, painters without a brush, musicians without any notes. There are many good and highly gifted mystics, but almost without exception they are unhappy. You might have been just such a one. But instead, God be praised, you are a craftsman; you have conquered your own world, in which you can be lord and created, instead of having remained an imperfect thinker.
p. 267. Tags: [[How do you contemplate?]]

A thinker strives to find out the essence of the world by means of logic, and so to define it. He knows that our understanding, and logic, its instrument, are imperfect tools with which to work – just as any skilled craftsman knows very well that no brush or chisel ever made, could give the perfect, shining form of a saint or angel. Yet both these – the thinkers and craftsmen – strive to do it, each in his own way. That is all they can do, or dare to do. These are the highest, most significant human activities, since both are striving to fulfill themselves by means of the talents nature gave them.
p. 268

For us, the disciples of Aristotle and St Thomas, the highest of all concepts is perfect being. Perfect being is God. All else that is, is only half. It is imperfect and for ever becoming, is mixed, and composed of possibilities. But God is whole. He is One, has no possibilities, but is all completion and reality. Men are transitory, we become, we are possibilities, and for us there is no perfection, no final being. But in all by which we pass on, from potentiality into action, from possibility to fulfillment, we have our share in this true being of God. That is what I mean when I say, “to fulfill oneself”.
p. 268

I am learning a great deal from you, Goldmund. I begin to see what it is that artists do. Till now it never seemed to me that their art, in comparison with my thought and science, was a thing to be taken very seriously. I would think more or less in this way: Since man, after all, is a dubious alloy of matter and spirit, and since his spirit can bring him to the knowledge of eternity, whereas matter can only draw him down into death, and fetter his soul to all that perishes, he should strive away from the senses, to the spirit, and so exalt his life, and give it meaning. Only now do I begin to perceive how many paths lead us to knowledge, that study is not our only way to it, and perhaps not the best to follow. Certainly it is mine, and I must keep to it. But I see you by the opposite way, the way which leads through the senses, reach as deep a knowledge as any that most thinkers achieve, of the essence and secret of our being, and a far more living mode of setting it forth.
p. 280. Narziss to Goldmund