For two years Goldmund worked on this group and from the sed year on he was given Erich as an apprentice. In the balustrade for the staircase he created a small paradise. With ecstasy he carved a graceful wilderness of trees, brush, and herbs, with birds in the branches, and the heads and bodies of animals emerging everywhere. In the midst of this peacefully sprouting primitive garden, he depicted several ses from the life of the patriarchs. This industrious life was rarely interrupted. There was seldom a day now when w was impossible for him, whelessness or boredom made him disgusted with his art. But when he did feel bored or restless hed give his apprentice a chore and walk or ride into the tryside to breathe in the memory-filled perfume of the free and wandering life of the forest, or visit a peasants daughter, or hunt, or lie for hours in the green staring into the vaulted halls of treetops, into the sprouting wilderness of ferns and juniper. He would always return after a day or two. Thetack his work with renewed passion, greedily carve the luxuriant herbs, gently, tenderly coax human heads from the wood, forcefully cut a mouth, an eye, a pleated beard. Beside Erily Narcissus khe statues and he came often to the workshop, which at times was his favorite pla the cloister. He looked on with joy and astonishment. Everything his friend had carried in his restless, stubborn, boyish heart was ing to flower. There it grew and blossomed, a creation, a small surging world: a game perhaps, but certainly no less worthy a game than playing with logic, grammar, and theology.
Pensively he once said: "Im learning a great deal from you, Goldmund. Im beginning to uand what art is. Formerly it seemed to me that, pared to thinking and sce, it could not be taken altogether seriously. I thought something like this: since man is a dubious mixture of mind and matter, sihe mind unlocks reition of the eternal to him, while matter pulls him down and binds him to the transitory, he should strive away from the senses and toward the mind if he wishes to elevate his life and give it meaning. I did pretend, out of habit, to hold art in high esteem, but actually I was arrogant and looked down upon it. Only now do I realize hoaths there are to knowledge and that the path of the mind is not the only one and perhaps not even the best o is my way, of course; and Ill stay on it. But I see that you, on the opposite road, on the road of the senses, have seized the secret of being just as deeply and express it in a much more lively fashion than most thinkers are able to do."
"Now you uand," Goldmund said, "that I t ceive of thoughts without images?"
"I have long sinderstood it. Our thinking is a stant process of verting things to abstras, a looking away from the sensory, an attempt to struct a purely spiritual world. Whereas you take the least stant, the most mortal things to your heart, and in their very mortality show the meaning of the world. You dont look away from the world; you give yourself to it, and by your sacrifice to it raise it to the highest, a parable of eternity. We thiry to e closer to God by pulling the mask of the world away from His face. You e closer to Him by loving His creation and re-creating it. Both are human endeavors, and necessarily imperfect, but art is more i."
"I dont know, Narcissus. But in overing life, iing despair, you thinkers and theologiao succeed better. I have long siopped envying you for your learnin