Read Peter Camenzind for Free Online

world. For days I would ponder whether it might not be better to stay home and forget about Latin, burying all my hopes in the depressing regimentation of my miserable life at home. I went about tormented and wretched; I found no solace at the bedside of my sick mother. The picture of that imaginary grove with the busts of Plato and Homer rose up to mock me, and I destroyed it, heaping upon it all the scorn and venom of my tortured being. The weeks became unbearably drawn out, as though I were destined to lose my entire youth to this period of anger and frustration.
    If the rashness and thoroughness with which life destroyed my blissful dreams stunned and outraged me, I was now amazed how suddenly even such agonies as these could be overcome. Life had shown me its gray work-a-day side; it now suddenly opened its infinite depths to my riveted eye and laid the burden of experience with sobering effect upon my young heart.
    While still in bed, early one hot summer morning, I felt thirsty. As I passed through my parents’ bedroom on my way to the kitchen, I heard my mother groaning. I went up to her bed. She neither noticed nor answered me and continued to make the same dry, frightening moans. Her eyelids quivered and her face had a bluish pallor. Though anxious, I was not frightened until I noticed her hands lying on the sheet as motionless as sleeping twins. These hands told me that my mother was dying: they seemed so sapped of all life, so deathly weary as no living persons. I forgot my thirst and, kneeling down beside her, placed one hand on her forehead and tried to catch her eyes. When our gaze met, hers was steadfast and untroubled but nearly extinct. It did not occur to me to wake my father, who lay nearby, breathing heavily. I knelt there for nearly two hours and watched my mother die. Her death took place with calm gravity and with courage, as befitted her kind. She set me a noble example.
    The little room was quiet. Gradually it filled with the light of the new day; house and village lay asleep, and I had ample time to let my thoughts accompany my dying mother’s soul over house and village and lake and snow-capped peaks into the cool freedom of a pure, early-morning sky. I felt little grief, for I was overcome with amazement and awe at being allowed to watch the great riddle solve itself and the circle of life close with a gentle tremor. The uncomplaining courage of the departing spirit was so exalted that some of its simple glory fell upon my soul as well, like a cool clear ray. My father asleep beside her, the absence of a priest, the homing soul not consecrated by either prayer or sacrament—none of this bothered me. I felt only an ominous breath of eternity suffuse the dawn-lit room and mingle with my being.
    At the very last moment—there was no light left in her eyes—I kissed my mother’s wilted cool lips, for the first time in my life. The strange chill of this contact filled me with sudden dread. I sat on the edge of the bed and felt tear after tear glide slowly, hesitantly down my cheeks, chin, and hands.
    Then my father awoke, saw me sitting there and, still half asleep, asked me what was wrong. I wanted to reply but was unable to utter a word. I left him and reached my room in a daze. I dressed slowly and mechanically. Soon my father appeared.
    â€œShe is dead,” he said. “Did you know?”
    I nodded.
    â€œThen why did you let me go on sleeping? And no priest attended her. May you be…” He uttered a grievous curse.
    At that point I felt an indefinable jab of pain in my head, as though a vein had burst. I stepped up to him, firmly grasped both his hands—his strength was a boy’s compared to mine—and stared him in the face. I could not say anything, but he became still and timid. When we both went to attend to my mother, the presence of death took hold of him too and made his face strange and solemn. Then he bent down over the corpse and began