orders, I was sent to Entlebuch for a cure, in the hope that my fitful appetite and my then unstable health would be improved. For the first time I was alone among adult strangers. I was quartered in the Catholic priest’s house. For me this was an eerie and at the same time fascinating adventure. I seldom got a glimpse of the priest himself, and his housekeeper was scarcely an alarming person, though liable to be curt. Nothing in the least menacing happened to me. I was under the supervision of an old country doctor who ran a kind of hotel-sanatorium for convalescents of all types. It was a very mixed group: farm people, minor officials, merchants, and a few cultivated people from Basel, among them a chemist who had attained that pinnacle of glory, the doctorate. My father, too, was a Ph.D., but he was merely a philologist and linguist. This chemist was a fascinating novelty to me: here was a scientist, perhaps one of those who understood the secrets of stones. He was still a young man and taught me to play croquet, but he imparted to me none of his presumably vast learning. And I was too shy, too awkward, and far too ignorant to ask him. I revered him as the first person I had ever met in the flesh who was initiated into the secrets of nature, or some of them, at least. He sat at the same table with me, ate the same food as I did, and occasionally even exchanged a few words with me. I felt transported into the sublimer sphere of adulthood. This elevation in my status was confirmed when I was permitted to go on the outings arranged for the boarders. On one of these occasions we visited a distillery, and were invited to sample their wares. In literal fulfilment of the verse:
But now there comes a kicker,
This stuff, you see, is liquor6
I found the various little glasses so inspiring that I was wafted into an entirely new and unexpected state of consciousness. There was no longer any inside or outside, no longer an “I” and the “others,” No. 1 and No. 2 were no more; caution and timidity were gone, and the earth and sky, the universe and everything in it that creeps and flies, revolves, rises, or falls, had all become one. I was shamefully, gloriously, triumphantly drunk. It was as if I were drowned in a sea of blissful musings, but, because of the violent heaving of the waves, had to cling with eyes, hands, and feet to all solid objects in order to keep my balance on the swaying streets and between the rocking houses and trees. “Marvellous,” I thought, “only unfortunately just a little too much.” The experience came to a rather woeful end, but it nevertheless remained a discovery, a premonition of beauty and meaning which I had spoiled only by my stupidity.
At the end of my stay my father came to fetch me, and we travelled together to Lucerne, where — what happiness! — we went aboard a steamship. I had never seen anything like it. I could not see enough of the action of the steam engine, and suddenly I was told we had arrived in Vitznau. Above the village towered a high mountain, and my father now explained to me that this was the Rigi, and that a cog-wheel railway ran up it. We went to a small station building, and there stood the strangest locomotive in the world, with the boiler upright but tilted at a queer angle. Even the seats in the carriage were tilted. My father pressed a ticket into my hand and said, “You can ride up to the peak alone. I’ll stay here, it’s too expensive for the two of us. Be careful not to fall down anywhere.”
I was speechless with joy. Here I was at the foot of this mighty mountain, higher than any I had ever seen, and quite close to the fiery peaks of my faraway childhood. I was, indeed, almost a man by now. For this trip I had bought myself a bamboo cane and an English jockey cap — the proper articles of dress for a world traveller. And now I was to ascend this enormous mountain! I no longer knew which was bigger, I or the mountain. With a tremendous puffing, the wonderful locomotive shook and rattled me up to the dizzy heights where ever-new abysses and panoramas opened out before my gaze, until at last I stood on the peak in the strange thin air, looking into unimaginable distances. “Yes,” I thought, “this is it, my world, the real world, the secret, where there are no teachers, no schools, no unanswerable questions, where one can be without having to ask anything.” I kept carefully to the paths, for there were tremendous precipices all around. It was all very solemn, and I felt one had to be polite and silent up here, for one was in God’s world. Here it was physically present. This was the best and most precious gift my father had ever given me.
So profound was the impression this made upon me that my memories of everything that happened afterwards in “God’s world” were completely blotted out. But No. 1 also came into his own on this trip, and his impressions remained with me for the rest of my life. I still see myself, grown up and independent, wearing a stiff black hat and with an expensive cane, sitting on the terrace of one of the overwhelmingly elegant palatial hotels beside Lake Lucerne, or in the beautiful gardens of Vitznau, having my morning coffee at a small, white-covered table under a striped awning spangled with sunlight, eating croissants with golden butter and various kinds of jam, and considering plans for outings that would fill the whole long summer day. After the coffee I would stroll calmly, without excitement and at a deliberate pace, to a steamship, which would carry me towards the Gotthard and the foot of those giant mountains whose tops were covered with gleaming glaciers.
For many decades this image rose up whenever I was wearied from overwork and sought a point of rest. In real life I have promised myself this splendour again and again, but I have never kept my promise.
This, my first conscious journey, was followed by a second a year or two later. I had been allowed to visit my father, who was on holiday in Sachseln. From him I learned the impressive news that he had become friendly with the Catholic priest there. This seemed to me an act of extraordinary boldness, and secretly I admired my father’s courage. While there, I paid a visit to the hermitage of Flüeli and the relics of Brother Klaus, who by then had been beatified. I wondered how the Catholics knew that he was in a beatific state. Perhaps he was still wandering about and had told people so? I was powerfully impressed by the genius loci, and was able not only to imagine the possibility of a life so entirely dedicated to God but even to understand it. But I did so with an inward shudder and a question to which I knew no answer: How could his wife and children have borne having a saint for a husband and father, when it was precisely my father’s faults and inadequacies that made him particularly lovable to me? “Yes,” I thought, “how could anyone live with a saint?” Obviously he saw that it was impossible, and therefore he had to become a hermit. Still, it was not so very far from his cell to his house. This wasn’t a bad idea, I thought, to have the family in one house, while I would live some distance away, in a hut with a pile of books and a writing table, and an open fire where I would roast chestnuts and cook my soup on a tripod. As a holy hermit I wouldn’t have to go to church any more, but would have my own private chapel instead.
From the hermitage I strolled on up the hill, lost in my thoughts, and was just turning to descend when from the left the slender figure of a young girl appeared. She wore the local costume, had a pretty face, and greeted me with friendly blue eyes. As though it were the most natural thing in the world we descended into the valley together. She was about my own age. Since I knew no other girls except my cousins, I felt rather embarrassed and did not know how to talk to her. So I began hesitantly explaining that I was here for a couple of days on holiday, that I was at the Gymnasium in Basel and later wanted to study at the university. While I was talking, a strange feeling of fatefulness crept over me. “She has appeared just at this moment,” I thought to myself, “and she walks along with me as naturally as if we belonged together.” I glanced sideways at her and saw an expression of mingled shyness and admiration in her face, which embarrassed me and somehow pierced me. Can it be possible, I wondered, that this is fate? Is my meeting her mere chance? A peasant girl — could it possibly be? She is a Catholic, but perhaps her priest is the very one with whom my father has made friends? She has no idea who I am. I certainly couldn’t talk to her about Schopenhauer and the negation of the Will, could I? Yet she doesn’t seem in any way sinister. Perhaps her priest is not one of those Jesuits skulking about in black robes. But I cannot tell her, either, that my father is a Protestant clergyman. That might frighten or offend her. And to talk about philosophy, or about the devil, who is more important than Faust even though Goethe made such a simpleton of him — that is quite out of the question. She still dwells in the distant land of innocence, but I have plunged into reality, into the splendour and cruelty of creation. How can she endure to hear about that? An impenetrable wall stands between us. There is not and cannot be any relationship.
Sad