“GOLDMUND: Now both flames have died out in me.

I no longer have the animal happiness of ecstasy and I wouldn’t want it now, even if women were still running after me. …and to create works of art is no longer my wish either… I´ve made enough statues…therefore it is time for me to die…and I´m curious about it…really curious. Not of the beyond, Narcissus, I think about that very little..I no longer believe in it. There is no beyond. The dried up tree is dead forever…the frozen bird does not come back to life, nor does a man after he has died…No I´m curious about dying only because it is still my belief that or my dream that I am on the road to my mother..

NARCISSUS: It seems to me you have found peace now..Goldmund.

GOLDMUND:: Do you mean peace with God? No, that peace I have not found. I don´t want any peace with him. He has made the world badly; we don’t need to praise it and he´ll care little whether I praise him or blame him.

But I have made peace with the pain in my chest, yes. In former days, I was not good at bearing pain, and although I sometimes thought that dying would come easily to me, I was wrong. …I was still much too strong and wild to die…

but now it is different…as I rode along , I realized that force and youth and intelligence had already abandoned me…I stumbled  into a gully with my horse and fell into a stream and broke several ribs…and lay there helpless in the water and that´s when I first learned about real pain…As I fell, I felt something break inside my chest and the breaking pleased me, I was glad to hear it. I was content with it. I lay there in the water and knew that I was about to die….but dying no longer seemed terrible to me...I lay there and had burning pains in my chest and I was defending myself against them and screaming when I heard a laughing voice I had not heard since childhood.It was my mother´s voice, a deep womanly voice, full of ecstasy and love. And then I saw it was she, that she was with me, holding me in her lap, and that she had opened my breast and put her fingers between my ribs to pluck out my heart. When I saw that, it no longer hurt. And now when the pains come back, they are not pains, they are not enemies. they are my mother´s fingers taking my heart out. She works hard at it. Sometimes she presses down and moans as though in ecstasy. Sometimes she laughs and hums tender sounds. Sometimes she is not with me but high above in heaven…and I see her face among the clouds as large as a cloud…I had completely forgotten my mother until you conjured her up again..That day too it hurt very much….but even then my mother called me and I had to follow…she is everywhere..

..She was Lise the gypsy, she was Master Niklaus´ beautiful Madonna, she was life, love, ecstasy..she was also fear, hunger, instinct…now she is death; she has her fingers in my chest…I wanted to tell you about my mother and how she keeps her fingers clasped around my heart…my secret dream was to make a statue of the mother…she was to me the most sacred of all the images..only a short while ago it would have been unbearable to me to think that I might die without having  carved her statue…and now see how strangely things have turned out. It is not my hands that shape and form her…..it is her hands that shape and form me. She is closing her fingers around my heart, she is loosening it, she is emptying me; she is seducing me into dying and with me dies my dream, the beautiful statue, the image of the great mother Eve. I can still see it and if I had force in my hands, I could carve it.But she doesn´t want that..she doesnt want me to make her secret visible.She rather wants me to die. I´m glad to die. She is making it easy for me…….

But you , Narcissus, how will you die when your time comes…since you have no mother? Without a mother one cannot love.Without a mother, one cannot die…¨”