“the picture book inside him”

“the picture book inside him” is Goldmund’s inward world of remembered people and places, made up of love, grief, travel, and experience. It is both a source of artistic material and a fragile storehouse threatened by death: drawing lets him give its images visible form, while his later reflections sharpen the question of whether he can preserve them without sacrificing the life that made them.

Images Made Visible

After returning from his wanderings, Goldmund draws for days with pen and paper Marie has found for him. The sheets fill with both hurried sketches and carefully rendered figures, as the inward picture book flows onto the page. He returns repeatedly to Lene, drawing her at different moments, including the final night of her life; he also draws the peasant boy he saw dead at his parents’ threshold and a cart of corpses accompanied by figures in plague hoods. These are not detached subjects: the pictures turn experiences of love, death, and epidemic suffering into images he can work upon.

His drawings also gather people from different parts of his life. Rebekka appears as a grieving and indignant young woman; Goldmund depicts himself as wanderer, lover, and fugitive from death. He sketches Mistress Lisbeth, Margrit, and Master Niklaus, as well as a large earth-mother figure with a faint smile and melancholy eyes. Filling the available sheets gives shape to the many faces held in memory. On the last sheet, he draws Marie’s face with a few spare strokes and gives the portrait to her.

Memory Against Erasure

The picture book is more than a collection of portraits. Looking across the valley, Goldmund recalls the distant places he has traversed and the people whose lives remain scattered across them: Lene’s remains, Viktor’s death, the possibility that Robert is still wandering, and Rebekka’s uncertain fate. The cloister of his youth and the knight’s castle also belong to this inner geography. Its contents persist through memory, love, repentance, and longing, even as the people and places themselves are distant or lost.

That persistence is precarious. Goldmund imagines that if he dies, the whole inner world—the women and love, summer mornings and winter nights—will disappear with him. He contrasts the few surviving sculptures from his workshop, especially his Saint John, with the much larger but immaterial picture book in his mind. The problem facing him is whether he can save fragments of that inward world and make them visible to others, rather than continuing to accumulate new experiences that leave him with only an overflowing heart.

Art, Life, and the Cloister

Goldmund’s reflection on the picture book develops into a conflict between living experience and artistic permanence. To follow the senses is to draw deeply on life, but it cannot shield him from death; to defend against transience by devoting himself to work risks turning the artist into a tool and draining away freedom and appetite for life. He sees Master Niklaus as an example of the cost of this division. The artistic challenge, as Goldmund understands it, is to create without renouncing the senses, and to live without abandoning the dignity of creation.

The picture book also acquires greater order through Goldmund’s return to the cloister. After weeks of meditation, relinquishing the immediate pull of homecoming and youthful memories, and telling his stories to Erich, he feels able to see his life with greater clarity. He then asks Narcissus to hear his confession and explains that he now has work and no longer feels like a nobody. The narrative links this new order to the possibility of looking back over experience, but the picture book remains an inward world whose preservation in art is a question, not a completed achievement.