Peter Camenzind Read Online Free PDF Page A

suspicious to me—when I came upon a few volumes of Gottfried Keller’s works, which I immediately read two or three times in succession. Then suddenly I realized how far removed my stillborn pipe dreams were from real, genuine, austere art. I burned my poems and stories, and with some of the embarrassed feeling that accompanies a hangover, I looked soberly and sadly out at the world.

Chapter Two
    A S FOR LOVE , I must confess to having retained a youthful attitude to it all my life. For me, the love of women has been a purifying act of adoration, a flame shooting straight up from my melancholy, my hands stretched in prayer toward the blue heavens. Owing to my mother’s influence and my own indistinct premonitions, I venerated womankind as an alien race, beautiful and enigmatic, superior to men by virtue of inborn beauty and constancy of character, a race which we must hold sacred. For, like stars and blue mountain heights, they are remote from us men and appear to be nearer to God. Since life did not always treat me gently, the love of women has been as bitter for me as it has been sweet. Although I still cherish women, my chosen role of solemn priest has often changed all too quickly into the painfully comic one of fool.
    Rösi Girtanner and I passed each other almost every day on my way to dinner. She was seventeen, and with her firmly supple body, thin face, and fresh skin, she radiated the same quietly soulful beauty with which all her ancestors were endowed and which her mother possesses to this day. This ancient and blessed family for generations produced a line of women who were quiet and distinguished, with blooming health and flawless beauty. There exists a sixteenth-century portrait by an unknown master of a daughter of the Fugger family, one of the most delicious paintings I know: the Girtanner women all bore some resemblance to her, including Rösi.
    Of course, I was unaware of this likeness at that time. I simply watched her as she walked by in her gay dignity, and I sensed the nobility and simplicity of her character. I would sit pensively in the dusk until I succeeded in conjuring up a clear image of her. Then an uncannily sweet shudder would shake my boyish soul.
    Before long these moments of joy became overcast and cost me bitter pain. I suddenly realized that she was a stranger: she neither knew me nor asked about me. My beautiful vision was in fact a theft; I stole a part of her blessed being. When I felt this with most acute agony, I beheld her presence so distinctly and breathtakingly alive that a warm wave of darkness flooded my heart, making every nerve ache.
    In the daytime this wave would suddenly overwhelm me in the middle of class, or even in the middle of a fight. I would close my eyes, lower my arms, and feel myself slipping into a warm abyss, until the teacher’s voice or a classmate’s fist woke me out of my reverie. I became withdrawn. I would run out into the open and gaze with astonished dreaminess at the world. Now I discovered how beautiful and varicolored everything was, how all things were suffused with light and breath, how clear and green the river was, how red the roofs were, and how blue the mountains. This beauty did not divert my attention; I only savored it quietly and sadly. The more beautiful everything was, the more alien it seemed, as I had no part in it and stood at its edge. In this benumbed state, my thoughts would gradually find their way back to Rösi: if I were to die at this very moment, she would not know, would not ask, or be distressed.
    Yet I felt no wish to be noticed by her. I would gladly have done something unheard of, performed some feat in her behalf, or presented her with a gift without her ever knowing who had given it. In fact, I did do great things in her behalf. During a short vacation I went home and performed any number of feats of prowess every day, all of them, I felt, in Rösi’s honor and glory: I climbed a difficult