LE NZ
39
how in the night his mother had appeared to him: dressed in white,
she had stepped from the dark churchyard wall, a red and a white
rose fastened to her breast; she had sunk down into a corner and
slowly the roses had overgrown her-she must surely be dead; he was
quite untroubled on that account.
In reply Oberlin described to him how he had been alone in a
field at the time of his father's death and had heard a voice, so that
he knew
his
father was dead; and when he went home he found that
it
was so. This led him to speak of other things, he told Lenz of the
people in the mountains, about girls who could feel the presence of
water and metal underground, about men who on many a moun–
taintop had been seized and had wrestled with a spirit; he told him
also how once, by gazing into the deep void of a mountain pool, he
had fallen into a kind of somnambulism. Lenz said that the spirits
of the waters had come upon him, enabling him to feel something of
his true nature. He went on: the simplest and purest individuals
were most closely related to the elements; the more subtle a man's
intellectual life and perceptions, the more blunted this sense of the
elemental became; he did not consider it an exalted state of mind,
because it was not independent enough, but he thought it must give
one a sense of infinite bliss to be thus touched by the individual life
of every form of creation, to have a soul that would communicate
with stones, metals, water and plants, as in a dream to absorb into
oneself every being in nature, as flowers absorb air according to the
waxing and waning of the moon.
He expressed other ideas; how in
all
things there was an inde–
scribable harmony, a tone, a blissfulness which in the higher forms
required a greater number of organs to externalize themselves, to re–
spond, to apprehend, but that consequently these were the more
deeply susceptible; while in the lower forms all was more repressed,
more limited, but consequently contained more repose. He pursued
this further; Oberlin cut him short, it led him too far from his
simple ways. Another time Oberlin showed him some small cakes
of paint and explained to him in what manner each color was re–
lated to human beings; he produced twelve apostles, each represented
by one color. Lenz understood, he spun out the thread even further,
fell into fearful dreams, began, like Stilling,
l
to read the Apocalypse
and studied the Bible assiduously.
1 See
pp.
142-44 for notes.
