“The mind cannot live in nature, only against nature”

Narcissus’s statement that the mind cannot live in nature but only against it defines a central tension in his conversation with Goldmund: the mind seeks stable distinctions, while living nature and Goldmund’s imagination transform one form into another. The line is not a simple dismissal of imagination. Narcissus calls Goldmund’s changing letters magical, but argues that the same openness that makes them alive makes them unsuitable for scientific inquiry.

The Exchange About Letters and Nature

Goldmund explains that a flower petal or a tiny worm on a path can contain more than a library’s books. Words, he suggests, cannot say very much; a Greek letter tilted slightly by his pen may cease to be a fixed character and become a fish, opening onto streams, rivers, Homer’s sea, and the waters where Saint Peter walked. It may instead become a bird, shake its feathers, and fly away. For Goldmund, the written sign is not merely a stable vehicle for a meaning: it can release a chain of images and associations. He concludes that God wrote the world with such letters.

Narcissus replies that he appreciates these magic letters, which can even exorcise demons, but separates their imaginative or spiritual force from the demands of science. Scientific thought, as he describes it, favors the definite and solid; it needs reliable symbols and attends to what is rather than what may become. It cannot allow an omega to turn into a serpent or a bird. His image of the mind living only against nature, as its counterpart, expresses the cost of this discipline: to know by classification is to hold apart what Goldmund experiences as capable of metamorphosis.

Intellectual Difference and Personal Consequence

The sentence belongs to an exchange about whether Goldmund can become a scholar. Goldmund has already begun to accept that he cannot develop a mind like Narcissus’s. His response makes that difference more than a disagreement about methods. He compares his earlier wish to resemble his father with his changed understanding of love after his mother reappeared: beside her, his father’s image seemed diminished and joyless. Goldmund consequently begins to regard intellectual life as fatherly, unmotherly, and hostile to the mother, and admits to feeling some contempt for it.

That comparison reveals the emotional structure beneath Goldmund’s intellectual refusal. The mind’s opposition to nature is linked, in his account, to a paternal order from which he feels increasingly estranged; the maternal image, by contrast, restores the meaning of love and draws him toward embodied, changeable life. The line thus articulates Narcissus’s account of how reason works while also exposing why Goldmund experiences that mode of thought as alien to his own nature.

Significance

The exchange preserves a distinction without making either speaker’s position entirely empty. Narcissus does not deny the force of Goldmund’s images: he recognizes their magic, while insisting that they cannot serve the mind’s scientific purpose. Goldmund, in turn, does not claim to be a scholar or continue striving to become one; he accepts the divergence and recasts it through his contrasting memories of father and mother. The statement’s lasting significance lies in this double function: it describes the mind’s separation from nature and marks the personal separation between Narcissus’s disciplined intellectual vocation and Goldmund’s imaginative, maternal orientation.