Peter Camenzind Read Free

landing area, with my father, in shirtsleeves, plying the paint brush, bluish smoke curling from his pipe into the summer air, brilliant sulphur butterflies unsteadily performing their hesitating flights. On those days my father was always in a high good humor: he whistled (which he could do superbly) and he might even give forth with one brief yodel—this, however, mezzo-forte. Then my mother would cook something good for dinner. I now think she did it in the secret hope that Camenzind would not go off to the tavern that evening. But he went all the same.
    I cannot claim that when I was young my parents either noticeably hampered or furthered my mental development. Mother always had her hands full of work, and nothing in the world interested my father less than questions of child-rearing. He had plenty to do tending his few fruit trees, cultivating the little potato patch, and seeing to his crop of hay. But every few weeks, on the way home in the evening, he would take me by the hand and proceed to the hayloft without a word. There a strange rite of chastisement and atonement was enacted: I was given a thrashing, and neither my father nor I ever quite knew why. These were mute sacrifices at the altar of Nemesis, offered up as a guilty tribute to an ineffable power, without scolding on his part or crying on mine. Any mention of “blind fate” later in my life reminded me of these mystic scenes; they seemed to me a graphic representation of this concept. Unknowingly, my father was obeying a simple pedagogic precept that life practices on all of us when it lets lightning strike, leaving us to ponder what misdeeds provoked the powers above. Unfortunately, such reflection rarely if ever occupied me; for the most part I accepted each installment of punishment passively, perhaps even stubbornly, always without the desirable self-examination and always glad, on those evenings, that once again I had done my share, that I had a few weeks’ respite ahead of me. I was far less passive, however, when it came to my father’s efforts to get me to work. Incomprehensible, bountiful nature had combined within me two diametrically opposed talents: unusual physical strength and an equally strong disinclination to work. My father exerted every effort to make a useful son and helper out of me, and I resorted to every possible ruse to evade the tasks imposed; no hero of antiquity, when I attended school, commanded my sympathy more than Hercules, who was compelled to perform those renowned, irksome labors.
    I knew of nothing more wonderful than roaming idly about the mountains and meadows or along the lake. Mountains, lake, storm, and sun were my companions. They told me stories, molded me, and were dearer to me for many years than any person or any person’s fate. But what I loved above all else, even more than the glistening lake, the mournful pines, and the sunny rocks, were the clouds.
    Show me a man anywhere in the whole wide world who knows and loves clouds more than I! Or show me anything more beautiful. They are a plaything and comfort to the eye, a blessing and a gift of God; they also contain wrath and the power of death. They are as delicate, soft, and gentle as the souls of newborn babes, as beautiful, rich, and prodigal as good angels, yet somber, inescapable, and merciless as the emissaries of death. They hover as a silvery film, and sail past smiling and gold-edged; they hang poised, tinged yellow, red, and blue. Darkly, slowly they slink past like murderers, roaring head-over-heels like mad horsemen, drooping sadly and dreamily in the pale heights like melancholy hermits. They assume the shapes of blessed isles and guardian angels, resemble threatening hands, fluttering sails, migrating cranes. They hover between God’s heaven and the poor earth like beautiful likenesses of man’s every yearning and partake of both realms—dreams of the earth in which the sullied soul cleaves to the pure heaven