The White Dominican by Gustav Meyrink Read Free Book Online

the valley?”
    “Yes. Of course …”
    He ignored my surprise.
    “Anyone who sees the sun”, he continued, “seeks eternity alone. He is lost for the road. They are the saints of the church. When a saint crosses over, he is lost to this world, and to the next one too. But what is worse, the world has lost him; it is orphaned! You know what it means to be a foundling; do not consign others to the fate of having neither father nor mother. Walk the road. Light the lamps until the sun comes of its own accord.”
    “Yes”, I stuttered, thinking with horror of the terrible white road.
    “Do you know what it means that you got back into your coffin?”
    “No, father.”
    “It means that for yet a little while you will share the fate of those who are buried alive.”
    “Do you mean Mutschelknaus, the carpenter?” I asked in my childish way.
    “I know no carpenter of that name; he has not yet become visible.”
    “Nor his wife and … and Ophelia?” I asked, feeling myself blush.
    “No; nor Ophelia either.”
    ‘Strange’, I thought. ‘they live just across the road, and he must see them every day.’
    For a while we were both silent, and then I suddenly burst out sobbing, “But that is horrible! To be buried alive!”
    “Nothing is horrible, my child, that you do for the sake of your soul. I, too, have been buried alive at times. On earth I have often met people who are wretched and in great need and who rail bitterly at the injustice of fate. Many of them sought comfort in the doctrine that came to us from Asia, the doctrine of the Karma which maintains that no being suffers unless it has sown the seed within itself in a former existence. Others seek comfort in the dogma of the unfathomable nature of God’s designs. They all seek comfort, but none have found it.
    I have lit a lamp for such people by inserting a thought” – his smile as he said that was almost grim, and yet at the same time as friendly as ever – “in their minds, but so delicately that they believe it came of its own accord. I ask them this question: ‘Would you accept the agony of dreaming tonight, as clearly as if it were reality, that you lived through a thousand years of unimaginable poverty, if I assured you now that as a reward you would find a sack of gold outside your door when you woke in the morning.?’
    ‘Yes! Of course!’ is the answer every time.
    ‘Then do not bemoan your fate. Are you sure that you did not choose this tormenting dream called life on earth which, at the worst, lasts seventy years, of your own free will, in the hope of finding something much more glorious than a miserable bag of money when you woke? Of course, if you sow a ‘God with unfathomable designs’ you will one day reap him as a malevolent devil.
    Take life less seriously and dreams more so, then things will improve, then the dream can become your leader instead of, as now, going round as a garish clown in the motley shreds of our daytime memories.’
    Listen, my child. There is no such thing as a vacuum. That sentence conceals the secret that everyone must unveil who wants to be transformed from a perishable animal to an immortal consciousness. Only you must not apply the words merely to external nature; you must use them like a key to open up the spiritual realm; you must transform their meaning. Look at it like this: someone wants to walk, but his feet are held fast in the earth; what will happen if his will to walk does not weaken? His creative spirit, the primal force that was breathed into him at the beginning, will find other paths for him to tread, and that force within him that can walk without feet, will walk in spite of the earth, in spite of the obstacle.
    The creative will, man’s divine inheritance, is a force of suction; this suction – you must understand it in a metaphorical sense! – would of necessity create a vacuum in the realm of first causes, if the expression of the will were not eventually followed by its fulfilment.