All I really wanted was to try and live the life that was spontaneously welling up within me. Why was that so very difficult?

      To tell my story I have to start far in the past. If I could, I’d have to go back much farther yet, to the very earliest years of my childhood and even beyond them to my distant origins.

      When authors write novels, they usually act as if they were God and could completely survey and comprehend some person’s history and present it as if God were telling it to Himself, totally unveiled, in its essence at all points. I can’t, any more than those authors can. But my story is more important to me than any author’s is to him, because it’s my own; it’s the story of a human being—not an invented, potential, ideal, or otherwise nonexistent person, but a real, unique, living one. To be sure, people today have less of an idea than ever before what a really living person is; in fact, human beings, each one of whom is a priceless, unique experiment of nature, are being shot to death in carloads.¹ If we weren’t something more than unique individuals, if we could really be totally dispatched from the world by a bullet, it would no longer make sense to tell stories. But each person is not only himself, he is also the unique, very special point, important and noteworthy in every instance, where the phenomena of the world meet, once only and never again in the same way. And so every person’s story is important, eternal, divine; and so every person, to the extent that he lives and fulfills nature’s will, is wondrous and deserving of full attention. In each of us spirit has become form, in each of us the created being suffers, in each of us a redeemer is crucified.

      Not many people nowadays know what man is. Many feel it and therefore die more easily, just as I shall die more easily when I have finished writing this story.

      I have no right to call myself one who knows. I was one who seeks, and I still am, but I no longer seek in the stars or in books; I’m beginning to hear the teachings of my blood pulsing within me. My story isn’t pleasant, it’s not sweet and harmonious like the invented stories; it tastes of folly and bewilderment, of madness and dream, like the life of all people who no longer want to lie to themselves.

      Every person’s life is a journey toward himself, the attempt at a journey, the intimation of a path. No person has ever been completely himself, but each one strives to become so, some gropingly, others more lucidly, according to his abilities. Each one carries with him to the end traces of his birth, the slime and eggshells of a primordial world. Many a one never becomes a human being, but remains a frog, lizard, or ant. Many a one is a human being above and a fish below. But each one is a gamble of Nature, a hopeful attempt at forming a human being. We all have a common origin, the Mothers,² we all come out of the same abyss; but each of us, a trial throw of the dice from the depths, strives toward his own goal. We can understand one another, but each of us can only interpret himself.

      [1. The First World War was still raging at the time of writing.]

      [2. Perhaps merely “our mothers,” but in view of the mythological nature of this novel, almost surely a reference to the “Mothers,” primordial earth goddesses, in Acts One and Two of the Second Part of Goethe’s Faust.]

      CHAPTER ONE

       Two Worlds

      I begin my story with an experience from the time I was ten years old and attending the grammar school³ in our small town.

      Many memories are wafted to me, touching me inwardly with melancholy and with pleasurable thrills: narrow, dark streets and bright houses and steeples, the chiming of clocks and people’s faces, rooms filled with hominess and warm comfort, rooms filled with mystery and profound fear of ghosts. There is a smell of cozy confinement, of rabbits and servant girls, of home remedies and dried fruit. Two worlds coincided there, day and night issued from two poles.

      One world was my father’s house, but it was even more restricted than that: it actually comprised only my parents. For the most part, this world was very familiar to me; it meant mother and father, love and severity, exemplary manners and school. This was the world of a warm glow, clarity, and cleanliness; gentle, friendly speech, washed hands, clean clothes, and proper behavior were at home here. Here the morning chorale was sung, here Christmas was celebrated. In this world there were straight lines and paths leading to the future, there were duty and guilt, a troubled conscience and confession, forgiveness and good resolutions, love and respect, Bible sayings and wisdom. This was the world to adhere to if one’s life was to be bright and pure, lovely and well-ordered.

      On the other hand, the other world began right in our own house; it was altogether different, smelled different, spoke differently, made different promises and demands. In this second world there were maids and journeymen, ghost stories and scandalous rumors; there was a motley flow of uncanny, tempting, frightening, puzzling things, things like slaughterhouse and jail, drunks and bickering women, cows giving birth, horses collapsing, stories of burglaries, killings, suicides. All these beautiful and scary, wild and cruel things existed all around, in the next street, in the next house; policemen and vagrants ran around, drunks beat their wives, clusters of young girls poured out of the factories in the evening, old women could cast a spell on you and make you sick, bandits lived in the woods, arsonists were caught by the constabulary—this second, violent world gushed out fragrantly everywhere, except in our rooms, where Mother and Father were. And that was very good. It was wonderful that here among us there was peace, order, and repose, duty and a clear conscience, forgiveness and love—and wonderful that all the rest existed, all those noisy, glaring, somber, and violent things, which nevertheless could be escaped with a single bound toward one’s mother.

      And the strangest thing of all was how the two worlds bordered each other, how close together they were! For example, when our maid Lina sat by the parlor door at our evening prayers and joined in the hymn with her bright voice, her scrubbed hands flat on her smoothed-down apron, she belonged totally with Father and Mother, with us, with brightness and correctness. Immediately afterward, in the kitchen or woodshed, when she told me the story of the headless gnome or wrangled with female neighbors in the little butcher shop, she was someone else, she belonged to the other world, she was enveloped in mystery. And so it was with everything, especially with myself. Naturally I belonged to the bright and correct world, I was my parents’ child; but wherever I turned my eyes and ears, the other world was there and I lived in it, too, even though it was often unfamiliar and uncanny to me, even though I regularly got pangs of conscience and anxiety from it. In fact, at times I preferred to live in the forbidden world, and frequently my return home