Free Klingsor's Last Summer by Hermann Hesse

punishments upon his head. Yet he himself had later, without thinking of Wagner, had the same thought and had several times seen himself in a kind of vision killing his wife and his children.
    And was that not perfectly understandable after all? Was it not right? Was it so very difficult to see that the responsibility for the existence of children could become intolerable to a man, as intolerable as his own nature and own being, which he regarded as sheer error, as nothing but torture and guilt?
    With a sigh, he thought this thought through to the end. It now appeared quite certain that even then, when he first heard about it, he had understood Wagner’s killings in his heart and had approved of them, approved of them only as a possibility, of course. Even then, when he did not yet feel unhappy and regard his life as a mess, even then, years ago, when he still thought he loved his wife and believed in her love for him, even then his inner nature had understood the schoolteacher Wagner and had secretly concurred with his horrible act of butchery. What he said at the time had expressed only the opinion of his intellect, not that of his heart. His heart, that innermost root from which his destiny sprang, had forever and ever held a different opinion. It had understood and approved crimes. There had always been two Friedrich Kleins, one visible and one secret, a civil servant and a criminal, a paterfamilias and a murderer.
    But in those days he had always been on the side of his “better” self, the civil servant and decent person, the husband and upright citizen. He had never condoned the secret intentions of his heart, had never even recognized them. And yet that inner voice had been secretly guiding him and finally made of him a fugitive and outcast.
    Gratefully, he clung to this thought. It was at least an element of consistency, something approaching rationality. It was not yet enough; everything important still remained obscure; but he had achieved a certain amount of light, a modicum of truth. And truth was what mattered. If only he did not again lose the end of the thread.
    Between waking and sleep, feverish with exhaustion, poised on the brink between thought and dream, he lost the thread again a hundred times, found it anew a hundred times. Until day broke and the noise of the streets sounded in through his window.

2
    I N THE COURSE OF THE MORNING Klein tramped through the city. He came to a hotel whose garden he liked, went in, looked at rooms, and took one. Only as he was departing did he note the name of the hotel. He read: Hotel Continental. Wasn’t this name familiar to him? Had it not been prophesied? Just like the Hotel Milano? But he soon gave up searching his memory and was content with the atmosphere of foreignness, playfulness, and peculiar portentousness into which he seemed to have stumbled.
    The magic of the day before gradually returned. It was very good that he was in the south, he thought gratefully. He had been guided well. Were it not for this charming enchantment all around him, which promoted this calm sauntering and self-forgetfulness, he would have been entirely at the mercy of his compulsive thoughts with all the suffering they entailed. But as it was, he succeeded in vegetating in pleasant fatigue for hours at a time, without compulsions, without anxiety, without thoughts. That did him good. It was fortunate that this southland existed, and that he had prescribed it for himself. The south made life easier. It comforted. It anaesthetized.
    Even now, in broad daylight, the landscape looked fantastic and improbable. The mountains were all too close, too steep, too high, as if envisioned by some eccentric painter. But everything near and small was lovely: a tree, a patch of lake shore, a house painted in gay colors, a garden wall, a narrow strip of wheat among the grapes, small and tended as a kitchen garden. All this was charming and amiable, gay and sociable; it breathed haleness