Jean-Christophe, vol 1 | Page 7

them seem by them to be
brought about.
The pendulum of life moves heavily, and in its slow beat the whole
creature seems to be absorbed. The rest is no more than dreams,
snatches of dreams, formless and swarming, and dust of atoms dancing
aimlessly, a dizzy whirl passing, and bringing laughter or horror.
Outcry, moving shadows, grinning shapes, sorrows, terrors, laughter,
dreams, dreams.... All is a dream, both day and night.... And in such
chaos the light of friendly eyes that smile upon him, the flood of joy
that surges through his body from his mother's body, from her breasts
filled with milk--the force that is in him, the immense, unconscious
force gathering in him, the turbulent ocean roaring in the narrow prison
of the child's body. For eyes that could see into it there would be
revealed whole worlds half buried in the darkness, nebulæ taking shape,
a universe in the making. His being is limitless. He is all that there is....
Months pass.... Islands of memory begin to rise above the river of his
life. At first they are little uncharted islands, rocks just peeping above
the surface of the waters. Round about them and behind in the twilight
of the dawn stretches the great untroubled sheet of water; then new
islands, touched to gold by the sun.
So from the abyss of the soul there emerge shapes definite, and scenes
of a strange clarity. In the boundless day which dawns once more, ever
the same, with its great monotonous beat, there begins to show forth the
round of days, hand in hand, and some of their forms are smiling,
others sad. But ever the links of the chain are broken, and memories are

linked together above weeks and months....
The River ... the Bells ... as long as he can remember--far back in the
abysses of time, at every hour of his life--always their voices, familiar
and resonant, have rung out....
Night--half asleep--a pale light made white the window.... The river
murmurs. Through the silence its voice rises omnipotent; it reigns over
all creatures. Sometimes it caresses their sleep, and seems almost itself
to die away in the roaring of its torrent. Sometimes it grows angry, and
howls like a furious beast about to bite. The clamor ceases. Now there
is a murmuring of infinite tenderness, silvery sounds like clear little
bells, like the laughter of children, or soft singing voices, or dancing
music--a great mother voice that never, never goes to sleep! It rocks the
child, as it has rocked through the ages, from birth to death, the
generations that were before him; it fills all his thoughts, and lives in all
his dreams, wraps him round with the cloak of its fluid harmonies,
which still will be about him when he lies in the little cemetery that
sleeps by the water's edge, washed by the Rhine....
The bells.... It is dawn! They answer each other's call, sad, melancholy,
friendly, gentle. At the sound of their slow voices there rise in him
hosts of dreams--dreams of the past, desires, hopes, regrets for
creatures who are gone, unknown to the child, although he had his
being in them, and they live again in him. Ages of memory ring out in
that music. So much mourning, so many festivals! And from the depths
of the room it is as though, when they are heard, there passed lovely
waves of sound through the soft air, free winging birds, and the moist
soughing of the wind. Through the window smiles a patch of blue sky;
a sunbeam slips through the curtains to the bed. The little world known
to the eyes of the child, all that he can see from his bed every morning
as he awakes, all that with so much effort he is beginning to recognize
and classify, so that he may be master of it--his kingdom is lit up. There
is the table where people eat, the cupboard where he hides to play, the
tiled floor along which he crawls, and the wall-paper which in its antic
shapes holds for him so many humorous or terrifying stories, and the
clock which chatters and stammers so many words which he alone can

understand. How many things there are in this room! He does not know
them all. Every day he sets out on a voyage of exploration in this
universe which is his. Everything is his. Nothing is immaterial;
everything has its worth, man or fly, Everything lives--the cat, the fire,
the table, the grains of dust which dance in a sunbeam. The room is a
country, a day is a lifetime. How is a creature to know himself in the
midst of these vast spaces? The world is so large! A creature is lost in it.
And the