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Authors: Gustav Meyrink
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they sometimes discussed my education; in brief, they spoke of things which were of little concern to me.
The Baron refused to let me go to school. He used to say, “Our teachers are like sorcerer’s apprentices, who spend all their time deforming the mind, until the heart dies of thirst. When they have accomplished that, they declare their students ready to go out into the world.”
For that reason he would only give me books to read that he had carefully selected from his own library after he had questioned me in order to ascertain the state of my thirst for knowledge. But he never tested me to see if I had actually read them.
“You will note the things your spirit wants your memory to retain, because it will also make you enjoy them”, was a favourite saying of his. “Schoolmasters, however, are like animal tamers; the latter think it is important for lions to jump through hoops, the former spend all their time getting children to remember that the late lamented Hannibal lost his left eye in the Pontine swamps; the one turns the king of the desert into a circus clown, the other a divine flower into a bunch of parsley.”
The two of them must have been holding a similar conversation, for I heard the Chaplain say, “I would be afraid to let a child drift along like a ship without a rudder. I think it would be certain to run aground.”
“As if most people don’t run aground!” exclaimed the Baron heatedly. “Has someone not run aground, looked at from the higher standpoint of life itself, who, after a youth spent pining behind school windows, becomes, let’s say, a lawyer, marries in order to bequeath his bitter lot to his children, then becomes sick and dies? Do you believe it was for that that his soul created the complicated mechanism we call the human body?”
“Where would we end up if everyone thought as you do?” objected the Chaplain.
“In the most blessed, the most beautiful state the human race can attain! Each one of us would grow in a different way, no one would be like anyone else, everyone would be a crystal, would think and feel in different colours and images, would love and hate differently, as the spirit within wants us to. It must have been Satan himself, the enemy of all colourful diversity, who thought up the slogan that all men are equal.”
“So you do believe in the Devil, Baron? You usually deny it.”
“I believe in the Devil in the same way as I believe in the deadly power of the north wind. But who can point to the place in the universe where cold originates? That is where the Devil must have his throne. Cold spends all its time pursuing warmth, for it wants to become warm itself. The Devil must come to God, icy death to the fire of life; that is the origin of all journeying. They say there is an absolute zero temperature? No one has ever found it yet, and no one ever will, no more than they can ever find absolute magnetic north. Even if you lengthen a bar magnet, or break it in two, the north pole will always be opposite the south pole, in the one case the portion separating the point where the two appear will be longer, in the other shorter, but the two poles will never meet, for that would mean the bar would be a ring and the magnet would no longer be a bar magnet. You may seek the source of either pole in the finite world, but you will always end up on a journey into infinity. Look at the picture on the wall, Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper. There you can see what I was saying about magnets, as well as about education through the soul, transferred to human beings. The mission of the soul of each of the disciples is indicated symbolically by the position of his hands and fingers. In each one of them the right hand is active, whether it is leaning on the table, the edge of which is divided into sixteen parts, which could indicate the sixteen letters of the ancient Roman alphabet, or joined with the left hand. It is Judas Iscariot alone whose left hand is active, his
The Baron refused to let me go to school. He used to say, “Our teachers are like sorcerer’s apprentices, who spend all their time deforming the mind, until the heart dies of thirst. When they have accomplished that, they declare their students ready to go out into the world.”
For that reason he would only give me books to read that he had carefully selected from his own library after he had questioned me in order to ascertain the state of my thirst for knowledge. But he never tested me to see if I had actually read them.
“You will note the things your spirit wants your memory to retain, because it will also make you enjoy them”, was a favourite saying of his. “Schoolmasters, however, are like animal tamers; the latter think it is important for lions to jump through hoops, the former spend all their time getting children to remember that the late lamented Hannibal lost his left eye in the Pontine swamps; the one turns the king of the desert into a circus clown, the other a divine flower into a bunch of parsley.”
The two of them must have been holding a similar conversation, for I heard the Chaplain say, “I would be afraid to let a child drift along like a ship without a rudder. I think it would be certain to run aground.”
“As if most people don’t run aground!” exclaimed the Baron heatedly. “Has someone not run aground, looked at from the higher standpoint of life itself, who, after a youth spent pining behind school windows, becomes, let’s say, a lawyer, marries in order to bequeath his bitter lot to his children, then becomes sick and dies? Do you believe it was for that that his soul created the complicated mechanism we call the human body?”
“Where would we end up if everyone thought as you do?” objected the Chaplain.
“In the most blessed, the most beautiful state the human race can attain! Each one of us would grow in a different way, no one would be like anyone else, everyone would be a crystal, would think and feel in different colours and images, would love and hate differently, as the spirit within wants us to. It must have been Satan himself, the enemy of all colourful diversity, who thought up the slogan that all men are equal.”
“So you do believe in the Devil, Baron? You usually deny it.”
“I believe in the Devil in the same way as I believe in the deadly power of the north wind. But who can point to the place in the universe where cold originates? That is where the Devil must have his throne. Cold spends all its time pursuing warmth, for it wants to become warm itself. The Devil must come to God, icy death to the fire of life; that is the origin of all journeying. They say there is an absolute zero temperature? No one has ever found it yet, and no one ever will, no more than they can ever find absolute magnetic north. Even if you lengthen a bar magnet, or break it in two, the north pole will always be opposite the south pole, in the one case the portion separating the point where the two appear will be longer, in the other shorter, but the two poles will never meet, for that would mean the bar would be a ring and the magnet would no longer be a bar magnet. You may seek the source of either pole in the finite world, but you will always end up on a journey into infinity. Look at the picture on the wall, Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper. There you can see what I was saying about magnets, as well as about education through the soul, transferred to human beings. The mission of the soul of each of the disciples is indicated symbolically by the position of his hands and fingers. In each one of them the right hand is active, whether it is leaning on the table, the edge of which is divided into sixteen parts, which could indicate the sixteen letters of the ancient Roman alphabet, or joined with the left hand. It is Judas Iscariot alone whose left hand is active, his
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