During the first days Goldmund lived in the cloister, in one of the guest cells. Then, at his own request, he was given a room across the fe, in one of the administrative buildings that surrouhe main yard like a marketplace.
His homeing put him under a spell, so violent that he himself was astonished by it. Outside the Abbot no one knew him here, no one knew who he was. The people, monks as well as lay brothers, lived a well-ordered life and had their own special occupations, a him in peace. But the trees of the courtyard knew him, the portals and windows knew him, the mill and the water wheel, the flagstones of the corridors, the wilted rosebushes in the arcade, the storks s on the refectory and granary roofs. From every er of his past, the st of his early adolesce came toward him, sweetly and movingly. Love drove him to see everything again, to hear all the sounds again, the bells for evening prayer and Sunday mass, the gushing of the dark millstream between its narrow, mossy banks, the slapping of sandals oone floors, the twilight jangle of the key ring as the brother porter went to lock up. Beside the stoters, into which the rainwater fell from the roof of the lay refectory, the same herbs were still sprouting, es-bill and plantain, and the old apple tree in the farden was still holding its far-reag branches in the same way. But more than anything else the tinkling of the little school bell moved him. It was the moment when, at the beginning of recess, all the cloister students came tumbling dowairs into the courtyard. How young and dumb and pretty the boys faces were—had he, too, once really been so young, so clumsy, so pretty and childish?
Beside this familiar cloister he had also found ohat was unknown, one which even during the first days struck his attention and became more and more important to him until it slowly liself to the more familiar one. Because, if nothing new had been added, if everything was as it had been during his student days, and a hundred or more years before that, he was no longer seeing it with the eyes of a student. He saw ahe dimension of these edifices, of the vaults of the church, the power of old paintings, of the stone and wood figures oars, in the portals, and although he saw nothing that had not been there before, he only now perceived the beauty of these things and of the mind that had created them. He saw the old stoher of God in the upper chapel. Even as a boy he had been fond of it, and had copied it, but only now did he see it with open eyes, and realize how miraculously beautiful it was, that his best and most successful work could never surpass it. There were many such wonderful things, and each was not placed there by ce but was born of the same mind and stood between the old ns and arches as though in its natural home. All that had been built, chiseled, painted, lived, thought and taught here in the course of hundreds of years had grown from the same roots, from the same spirit, and everything was held together and unified like the branches of a tree.
Goldmu very small in this world, in this quiet mighty unity, and never did he feel smaller than when he saw Abbot John, his friend Narcissus, rule over and govern this powerful yet quietly friendly order. There might be tremendous differences of character between the learhin-lipped Abbot John and the kindly simple Abbot Daniel, but each of them served the same unity, the same thought, the same order of existence, received