“the death dance”

“The death dance” is a recurring image for human life exposed to death, but Goldmund does not understand it only as a warning of inevitable loss. The plague brings him face to face with its victims; an encounter with a painted death dance makes him distinguish another artist’s moral lesson from his own experience. For him, death is at once destructive and intimately bound to birth, love, suffering, and the creative images art can preserve beyond a fleeting life.

The Image and Its Meanings

The expression gathers together the passage of human existence toward death and the suffering that accompanies it. In a conversation with Narcissus, Goldmund calls mortal life a “death dance” whose confusion and pain stand against the creative mind. Narcissus takes up the image to argue that artistic creation can offer a way through the repeated movement between sensual desire and despair: Goldmund’s life in the senses is not the whole of him, because the artist’s mind can shape images from experience.

Goldmund’s understanding is not simply that art defeats death. He describes art as the overcoming of the transitory, while acknowledging that artworks too may eventually burn, crumble, or be destroyed. Their significance lies in their ability to outlast many individual lives: in wood, stone, and color, images form a comparatively lasting realm beyond the moment. Art therefore offers a limited preservation, not an escape from mortality.

The Plague and the Painted Dance

During the plague, Goldmund encounters death not as an abstraction but in abandoned homes, among the dying and dead. At a farmhouse he studies the bodies of a family, attending to the distinct posture and expression of each. His response combines compassion with the artist’s concentrated observation. The scene becomes an encounter with death’s workings and with the human forms in which suffering and resistance remain legible.

On his journey toward Master Niklaus’s city, Goldmund sees a recently painted death dance in a cloister. Its skeleton leads people of every rank out of life: king and bishop, abbot and earl, knight, doctor, peasant, and soldier. Goldmund recognizes the painting as a forceful sermon about the equal reach and certainty of death. Yet he feels that its bony, severe image does not express what he has encountered. Its death is an uncompromising end; his own experience gives death a different register, one that is also sweet, seductive, and connected to a longing for home.

Birth, Love, and Mortality

The contrast between the fresco’s stern lesson and Goldmund’s understanding has roots in his experience of embodied life. While present at a peasant woman’s childbirth, he notices that the expressions of great pain and sexual ecstasy can resemble one another. The insight is not an abstract theory but a recognition formed by watching a woman in labor: pain and joy may share a likeness even when one is more violent and disfiguring.

Goldmund’s later reflections extend this kinship to death. He understands death not only as a warrior, judge, or hangman, but also as a mother and a mistress; its approach can make the lamp of life glow more intensely. The association joins mortality to the maternal image that recurs in his artistic imagination. His hoped-for figure of the original mother is meant to express the intimate relation of ecstasy to pain and death, so that the death dance belongs not only to an ending but to the whole cycle of bodily experience.

Art as a Response to Transience

The image of the death dance informs Goldmund’s work without dictating a single subject or form. His carving of Saint John, inspired by Narcissus, becomes a way of giving lasting form to the friend’s inward being; in the process, Goldmund experiences the artist’s hands as serving an image that exceeds the fleeting transitions of life. This work demonstrates how an individual life can be transformed into an artistic presence without being reduced to a literal likeness.

Back at Mariabronn, Goldmund plans a refectory lectern that will belong to the monastery’s architecture and daily life. Its design places images of creation, nature, patriarchs, and prophets in the winding oak-supported stairs, with the four apostles on the upper parapet. The design gives the death dance a counter-image: not a denial of mortality, but an attempt to gather the changing world into an ordered work that can be encountered by others. Across Goldmund’s reflections and carvings, the expression marks the tension between the brevity of human life and the artist’s effort to make its forms endure.