“It’s when you learn to get the mastery over yourself. You can be immortal, and have magical powers as well. Have you never practised such experiments?”
On my evincing curiosity with regard to those practices, he was mysteriously silent, but when I turned to go he burst out in explanation.
“For example, when I go to sleep or when I wish to concentrate my thoughts I do such exercises. I think of something or other, a word for instance, or a name, or a geometrical figure. Then I think it into myself, as strongly as I can. I try to get it into my head, until I feel it is there. Then I think it in my neck, and so on, until I am quite full of it. Then my thoughts are concentrated and nothing more can disturb my repose.”
I understood to a certain degree what he meant. Yet I felt he had something else in his mind, he was oddly excited and hasty. I tried to make the questions easy for him, and he soon gave me an indication of what immediately concerned him.
“You are also continent?” he asked me anxiously.
“What do you mean by that? Do you mean it from the sex point of view?”
“Yes, yes. I have been continent for two years, since I knew of what I have told you. Before that I practised a vice, you know what. You have never been with a woman, then?”
“No,” I said. “I haven’t found the right one.”
“But if you should find her, the one you consider the right one, then would you sleep with her?”
“Yes, naturally. If she had nothing against it,” I said with some scorn.
“Oh, then you are on a false track! One can only perfect one’s inner forces if one remains entirely continent. I have done it, for two whole years. Two years and a little more than a month! It’s so hard. Often I can scarcely hold out any longer.”
“Listen, Knauer, I don’t believe that continency is so terribly important.”
“I know,” he parried, “they all say that. But I did not expect to hear it from you. Whoever will go the higher spiritual way must remain pure, unconditionally!”
“Well, then, do so! But I don’t understand why one man should be purer than another, because he represses his sex instincts. Or can you switch off all sexual matters from your thoughts and dreams?”
He looked despairingly at me.
“No, that’s just it. God! and yet it must be. At night I have dreams which I couldn’t relate even to myself. Terrible dreams, terrible!”
I recollected what Pistorius had said to me. But however much I felt his words to be right I could not pass them on. I could not give advice which did not result from my own experience, advice the observance of which I did not yet feel myself equal to. I was silent and felt humiliated that someone should come to me for counsel when I had none to give.
“I have tried everything!” wailed Knauer beside me. “I have done all that a man can do, with cold water, with snow, with gymnastic exercises and running, but all that doesn’t help a bit. Each night I wake up out of dreams on which I dare not think. And most dreadful of all, I am by degrees losing everything that I had gained spiritually. It is almost impossible for me any longer to concentrate my thoughts or to lull myself to sleep. Often I lie awake the whole night through. I shall not be able to bear that much longer. Finally, when I can carry on the struggle no further, when I give in and make myself impure again, then I shall be worse than all the others who have never struggled against it. You understand that, don’t you?”
I nodded, but could say nothing to the point. He began to bore me, and I was horrified at myself, because his obvious need and despair made no deep impression on me. My only sentiment was: I can’t help you.
“Then you know nothing that would help me?” he asked at last, exhausted and sad. “Nothing at all? There must be some way! How do you manage?”
“I cannot tell you anything, Knauer. People can’t help one another in this case. No one has helped me, either. You must think of something yourself, and you must obey the prompting which really comes from your own nature. There is nothing else. If you cannot find yourself, you won’t find any spirits, either.”
Disappointed, and suddenly become dumb, the little fellow looked at me. Then his look suddenly glowed with hate, he made a grimace at me and cried with rage: “Ah, you’re a nice sort of saint! You have your vice as well, I know! You pretend to wisdom, and secretly you stick in the same filth as I and all of us! You’re swine, swine, like myself. We are all swine!”
I went away and left him standing there. He made two, three steps in my direction, then he stopped, turned round and ran away. I felt sick from a feeling of pity and horror. I could not get rid of the feeling until I got home to my little room, and placing my few pictures before me, I surrendered myself up with passionate fervor to my dreams. My dreams came back at once, the dream of front door and crest, of mother and the strange woman, and I saw the features of the woman so very clearly that I began to draw her picture the same evening.
In a few days this drawing was finished, painted in as if unconsciously in dreamy quarter-of-an-hour periods. In the evening I hung it on the wall, put the reading lamp in front of it, and stood before it as before a spirit with whom I had to fight until victory should be decided one way or the other. It was a face similar to the former, resembling my friend Demian, in certain traits even resembling
