Passage

from the classic Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse:

The image of his father, his own image, and the image of his son all flowed together; and the image of Govinda, and other images; they all flowed together. All became the river, all of them striving to reach their goal, longingly, eagerly, suffering, and the river’s voice rang out full of longing, full of burning sorrow, full of unquenchable desire. The river strove to its goal; Siddhartha saw it hurrying along, the river that was made of himself and those he loved and all the people he had ever seen; all the waves and waters were hurrying, suffering, toward goals, many goals—the waterfall, the lake, the rapids, the sea—and all these goals were reached, and each of them was followed by a new goal and the water turned to steam and rose into the sky; it became rain and plunged down from the heavens; it became a spring and became a brook, became a river, striving anew, flowing anew. But the longing voice had changed. It still rang out, sorrowfully, searchingly, but other voices now joined it, voices of joy and of sorrow, good and wicked voices, laughing and mourning, a hundred voices, a thousand.

He no longer saw the face of his friend Siddhartha; instead he saw other faces, many of them, a long series, a flowing river of faces, by the hundreds, by the thousands, all of them coming and fading away, and yet all of them appearing to be there at once, all of them constantly changing, being renewed, and all of them at the same time Siddhartha. He saw the face of a fish, a carp, its mouth wrenched open in infinite pain, a dying fish with dying eyes—he saw the face of a newborn child, red and full of wrinkles, all twisted up to cry—he saw the face of a murderer, saw him stick a knife into a person’s body, and saw, at the same instant, this criminal kneeling down in chains and having his head chopped off with one stroke of the sword—he saw the bodies of men and women naked in the positions and struggles of furious love—he saw corpses laid out, still, cold, empty—he saw the heads of animals: wild boars, crocodiles, elephants, bulls, birds—he saw gods, saw Krishna, saw Agni—he saw all of these figures and faces in their thousandfold interrelations, each helping the others, loving them, hating them, destroying them, giving birth to them anew; each one was a wanting-to-die, a passionately painful confession of transitoriness, and yet none of them died; each of them was only transformed, constantly born anew, constantly being given a new face, without time having passed between one face and he next—and all these figures and faces rested, flowed, engendered one another, floated off and streamed into and through one another, and constantly stretched over all of them was something thin…