The pleasant tranquillity of those weeks and months of the Beatrice period was long since gone. I thought at that time I had reached a haven and had found peace. But it was ever so--scarcely did I begin to adapt myself to circumstances, scarcely had a dream done me good, when it faded again. In vain to complain! I now lived in a fire of unstilled desires, of tense expectation, which often rendered me completely wild and mad. I frequently saw before me the picture of my dream-mistress with extraordinary clearness, much more clearly than I saw my own hand. I spoke to it, wept over it, cursed it. I called it mother and knelt before it in tears. I called it my beloved and felt its ripe kiss of fulfilled desire. I called it devil and whore, vampire and murderer. It invited me to the tenderest dreams of love and to the most horrible abominations--nothing was too good and precious for it, nothing too bad and vile. I passed the whole of that winter in a state of inward tumult difficult to describe. I had long been accustomed to loneliness--that did not depress me. I lived with Demian, with the hawk, with my picture of the big dream-figure, which was my fate and my mistress. It sufficed to live in close communion with those things, since they opened up a large and broad perspective, leading to Abraxas. But I was not able to summon up these dreams, these thoughts, at will. I could not invest them in colors, as I pleased. They came of themselves, taking possession of me, governing me and shaping my life. I was secure in so far as the outside world was concerned. I was afraid of no one. My schoolfellows had learned to recognize that, and observed a secret respect towards me, which often caused me to smile. When I wished, I could penetrate most of them with a look, thereby surprising them occasionally. Only, I seldom or never wanted to do this. It was my own self which occupied my attention, always myself. And yet I longed ardently to live a bit of real life, to give something of myself to the world, to enter into contact and battle with it. Sometimes as I wandered through the streets in the evening and could not, through restlessness, return home before midnight, I thought to myself: Now I cannot fail to meet my beloved, I shall overtake her at the next corner, she will call to me from the next window. Sometimes all this seemed to torture me unbearably, and I was quite prepared to take my own life some day. At that time I found a peculiar refuge--by “chance,” as one says. But really such happenings cannot be attributed to chance. When a person is in need of something, and the necessary happens, this is not due to chance but to himself; his own desire leads him compellingly to the object of which he stands in need.