“the seesaw between lust and despair”

“the seesaw between lust and despair” is Narcissus’s name for Goldmund’s repeated movement between the pleasures of desire and the sadness provoked by death. The expression makes this alternation a central pattern in Goldmund’s life, while Narcissus’s response points toward art as a different path through it.

The Feeling Behind the Phrase

Goldmund describes a world marked by the Great Death, mass burials, burned Jews, abandoned children, and other consequences of catastrophe. Faced with these images, he feels that life is cruel and hopeless. Narcissus distinguishes this response from abstract thought: he calls it feeling, and insists that Goldmund’s despair exists alongside contrary experiences of happiness and desire.

Narcissus recalls Goldmund’s pleasure in riding through a beautiful landscape and in pursuing a count’s mistress. Those moments can make the world appear different, but they do not undo the suffering Goldmund has witnessed. Goldmund agrees that he seeks consolation and fleeting happiness amid horror, without believing that this makes the horror unreal.

A Recurring, Temporary Escape

Narcissus describes desire as an escape from the world’s death and horror, but one that cannot last. Lust fades, leaving Goldmund in what Narcissus calls a desert; Goldmund acknowledges the pattern. The companion expression “the seesaw between lust for life and sadness of death” emphasizes the opposed forces as recurring movements rather than a conflict resolved once and for all.

The image of a seesaw also captures the limits of consolation. Pleasure may briefly lift Goldmund away from despair, yet it does not provide a durable answer to the suffering that prompts his search for relief. Narcissus asks whether Goldmund has tried another road, opening the discussion beyond this repeated alternation.

Art as Another Road

Goldmund says that he has tried art. His account begins with seeing a wooden Madonna in a cloister church after years of wandering: its beauty moves him to seek out its sculptor, and he becomes the master’s apprentice. The work’s effect on him introduces art as an experience distinct from the temporary consolation of desire.

Narcissus connects artistic making with basic images that exist in the creative mind before they take visible form in matter. He argues that Goldmund’s artistic mind may show him a way beyond the confused world of the senses and the recurring swing between lust and despair. The phrase therefore belongs to a conversation in which Goldmund’s remembered experience of suffering and pleasure is set against the possibility of creation—not as proof that horror disappears, but as a different relation to it.