He saw many, many faces behind the Klingsor face in
the big mirror, between those silly twining roses, and he painted many faces
into his picture: sweet and wondering children's faces, young manhood's brow
and temples, full of dreams and ardor, scoffing drinker's eyes, lips of a
thirsting, persecuted, suffering, seeking libertine, of an _enfant perdu.__ But
he built up the head majestically and brutally, made it into a jungle idol, a
jealous, self-infatuated Jehovah, a totem to whom firstborn babes and virgins
might be sacrificed. Those were a few of his faces. Another was the face of the
doomed and decaying man who accepted his fate: moss grew on his skull, the old
teeth stood askew, cracks ran through the white skin, and scales and mold grew
in the cracks. These are the features that some friends particularly love the
painting for. They say: this is man, ecce homo, here is the weary, greedy,
wild, childlike, and sophisticated man of our late age, dying European man who
wants to die, overstrung by every longing, sick from every vice, enraptured by
knowledge of his doom, ready for any kind of progress, ripe for any kind of
retrogression, submitting to fate and pain like the drug addict to his poison,
lonely, hollowed-out, age-old, at once Faust and Karamazov, beast and sage,
wholly exposed, wholly without ambition, wholly naked, filled with childish
dread of death and filled with weary readiness to die.
And
still more remotely, still deeper behind all these faces, slept remoter,
deeper, older faces, prehuman, animal, vegetable, stony, as if the last man on
earth in the moment before death were recalling once again with the speed of
dream all the forms of past ages when the universe was young.
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