Narcissus and Goldmund 精彩片段：
17
During the first days Goldmund lived in the cloister, in one of the guest cells. Then, at his own request, he was given a room across the forge, in one of the administrative buildings that surrounded the main yard like a marketplace.
His homecoming put him under a spell, so violent that he himself was astonished by it. Outside the Abbot no one knew him here, no one knew who he was. The people, monks as well as lay brothers, lived a well-ordered life and had their own special occupations, and left him in peace. But the trees of the courtyard knew him, the portals and windows knew him, the mill and the water wheel, the flagstones of the corridors, the wilted rosebushes in the arcade, the storks nests on the refectory and granary roofs. From every corner of his past, the scent of his early adolescence came toward him, sweetly and movingly. Love drove him to see everything again, to hear all the sounds again, the bells for evening prayer and Sunday mass, the gushing of the dark millstream between its narrow, mossy banks, the slapping of sandals on the stone floors, the twilight jangle of the key ring as the brother porter went to lock up. Beside the stone gutters, into which the rainwater fell from the roof of the lay refectory, the same herbs were still sprouting, cranes-bill and plantain, and the old apple tree in the forge garden was still holding its far-reaching branches in the same way. But more than anything else the tinkling of the little school bell moved him. It was the moment when, at the beginning of recess, all the cloister students came tumbling down the stairs into the courtyard. How young and dumb and pretty the boys faces were—had he, too, once really been so young, so clumsy, so pretty and childish?
Beside this familiar cloister he had also found one that was unknown, one which even during the first days struck his attention and became more and more important to him until it slowly linked itself to the more familiar one. Because, if nothing new had been added, if everything was as it had been during his student days, and a hundred or more years before that, he was no longer seeing it with the eyes of a student. He saw and felt the dimension of these edifices, of the vaults of the church, the power of old paintings, of the stone and wood figures on the altars, in the portals, and although he saw nothing that had not been there before, he only now perceived the beauty of these things and of the mind that had created them. He saw the old stone Mother of God in the upper chapel. Even as a boy he had been fond of it, and had copied it, but only now did he see it with open eyes, and realize how miraculously beautiful it was, that his best and most successful work could never surpass it. There were many such wonderful things, and each was not placed there by chance but was born of the same mind and stood between the old columns and arches as though in its natural home. All that had been built, chiseled, painted, lived, thought and taught here in the course of hundreds of years had grown from the same roots, from the same spirit, and everything was held together and unified like the branches of a tree.
Goldmund felt very small in this world, in this quiet mighty unity, and never did he feel smaller than when he saw Abbot John, his friend Narcissus, rule over and govern this powerful yet quietly friendly order. There might be tremendous differences of character between the learned, thin-lipped Abbot John and the kindly simple Abbot Daniel, but each of them served the same unity, the same thought, the same order of existence, received his dignity from it, sacrificed his person to it. That made them as similar to one another as their priestly robes.
In the center of his cloister, Narcissus grew eerily tall in Goldmunds eyes, although he was never anything but a cordial friend and host. Soon Goldmund hardly dared call him Narcissus any more.
"Listen, Abbot John," he once said to him, "Ill have to get used to your new name eventually. I must tell you that I like it very much in your house. I almost feel like making a general confession to you and, after penance and absolution, asking to be received as a lay brother. But you see, then our friendship would be over; youd be the Abbot and I a lay brother. But I can no longer bear to live next to you like this and see your work and not be or do anything myself. I too would like to work and show you who I am and what I can do, so that you can see if it was worth snatching me from the gallows."
"Im glad to hear it," said Narcissus, pronouncing his words even more clearly and precisely than usual. "You may set up your workshop any time you wish. Ill put the blacksmith and the carpenter at your disposal immediately. Please use any material you find here and make a list of all the things you want brought in from the outside. And now hear what I think about you and your intentions! You must give me a little time to express myself: I am a scholar and would like to try to illustrate the matter to you from my own world of thought; I have no other language. So follow me once more, as you so often did so patiently in earlier years."
"Ill try to follow you. Go ahead and speak."
"Recall how, even in our student days, I sometimes told you that I thought you were an artist. In those days I thought you might become a poet; in your reading and writing you had a certain dislike for the intangible and the abstract, and a special love for words and sounds that had sensuous poetic qualities, words that appealed to the imagination."
Goldmund interrupted. "Forgive me, but arent the concepts and abstractions which you prefer to use really images too? Or do you really prefer to think in words with which one cannot imagine anything? But can one think without imagining anything?"
"Im glad you ask! Yes, certainly one can think without imagining anything! Thinking and imagining have nothing whatsoever in common. Thinking is done not in images but with concepts and formulae. At the exact point where images stop, philosophy begins. That was precisely the subject of our frequent quarrels as young men; for you, the world was made of images, for me of ideas. I always told you that you were not made to be a thinker, and I also told you that this was no lack since, in exchange, you were a master in the realm of images. Pay attention and Ill explain it to you. If, instead of immersing yourself in the world, you had become a thinker, you might have created evil. Because you would have become a mystic. Mystics are, to express it briefly and somewhat crudely, thinkers who cannot detach themselves from images, therefore not thinkers at all. They are secret artists: poets without verse, painters without brushes, musicians without sound. There are highly gifted, noble minds among them, but they are all without exception unhappy men. You, too, might have become such a man. Instead of which you have, thank God, become an artist and have taken possession of the image world in which you can be a creator and a master, instead of being stranded in discontentment as a thinker."
"Im afraid," said Goldmund, "Ill never succeed in grasping the idea of your thought world, in which one thinks without images."
"Oh yes, you will, and right now. Listen: the thinker tries to determine and to represent the nature of the world through logic. He knows that reason and its tool, logic, are incomplete—the way an intelligent artist knows full well that his brushes or chisels will never be able to express perfectly the radiant nature of an angel or a saint. Still they both try, the thinker as well as the artist, each in his way. They cannot and may not do otherwise. Because when a man tries to realize himself through the gifts with which nature has endowed him, he does the best and only meaningful thing he can do. Thats why, in former days, I often said to you: dont try to imitate the thinker or the ascetic man, but be yourself, try to realize yourself."
"I understand something of what you say, but what does it mean to realize oneself?"