He had never previously been aware of it, he had happily gone to the institute of his own free will, indeed he had laughed when his mother had been unable to contain her tears at their first farewell, and only after he had been alone for a few days and felt comparatively at ease did it suddenly surface in him with elemental force.

He thought it was homesickness, a longing for his parents. But actually it was something much more vague and complex. Because in fact it no longer contained the ‘object of that longing’, the image of his parents. I mean that three-dimensional memory, not merely mental but physical as well, of a loved one, which addresses all the senses and is stored in all the senses, in such a way that one can do nothing without feeling the other person’s presence, silent and invisible, at one’s side. This memory soon died away like an echo that has gone on reverberating for only a short while. Törless could no longer, for example, call up the image of his ‘dear, dear parents’ - as he usually thought of them - before his mind’s eye. Whenever he tried to do so, a boundless pain welled up within him in its place, torturing him with its yearning and yet holding him under its spell, because its hot flames both pained and delighted him. More and more, the thought of his parents became a mere pretext for generating within himself that egoistic suffering which enfolded him in its voluptuous pride as though he were in a secluded chapel where, surrounded by hundreds of flaming candles and hundreds of eyes of holy images, incense is strewn among the flagellants intent on their self-inflicted torture.

Then, when his ‘homesickness’ became less violent and gradually faded away, this trait of his grew quite apparent. The disappearance of his yearning did not bring with it any long-awaited contentment, but left a void in the soul of young Törless. And in that nothingness, that incompleteness, he recognized that what he had lost was not merely longing but something positive, a spiritual strength, something that had blossomed and faded within him under the cover of pain.

But now it was over, and that source of a first superior bliss had made itself known to him only by running dry.

Now the passionate traces of his awakening soul vanished once more from his letters, to make way for detailed descriptions of life in the institute and the new friends he had made.

He himself felt impoverished and bare, like a tree experiencing its first winter after a fruitless blossoming.

But his parents were contented. They loved him with a strong, unthinking, animal tenderness. Whenever he had holidays from the boarding-school, his mother felt the house was empty and deserted again after he left, and she would walk through the rooms with tears in her eyes for days after those visits, here and there caressing an object on which the boy’s eyes had rested, or which his fingers had held. And both of his parents would each have allowed themselves to be torn to pieces for his sake.

The clumsy emotion and passionate, defiant grief in his first letters painfully preoccupied them and sent them into a state of fraught hypersensitivity; the cheerful, contented thoughtlessness that followed made them happy again as well, and, feeling that a crisis had been averted, they supported him to the best of their abilities.

In neither of these states did they recognize the symptom of a particular spiritual development. Instead they had seen both their son’s pain and its abatement as being more or less a natural consequence of the prevailing conditions in the school. They failed to see that this was their son’s first unsuccessful attempt, thrown upon his own devices, to develop his own inner strength.

 

Törless was very discontented now, and groped around in vain for something he might use as a support.

 

One episode from this time was characteristic of what was being prepared within Törless, to develop further at a later stage.

One day young Prince H., a member of one of the most influential, oldest and most conservative aristocratic families in the Empire, joined the school.

Everyone else found his gentle eyes sentimental and affected; they mocked as effeminate the way he jutted one hip out when he stood, and played slowly with his fingers when he talked. But they particularly derided him for having been brought to the boarding-school not by his parents, but by his former teacher, a doctor of theology and a member of a religious order.

But he had made a very strong impression on Törless from the first. Perhaps the fact that he was a prince and thus presentable at court had something to do with it. At any rate Törless was now meeting a very different kind of person.

The aura of devotional practices and the silence of an old aristocratic castle seemed somehow to linger around the prince. When he walked, it was with soft, lithe movements, with that contraction of the body that goes together with the habit of walking erect through a suite of empty halls, where anyone else would seem to bump into unseen corners in the empty space.

Keeping company with the prince thus became a source of refined psychological pleasure for Törless. Dawning within him was the kind of knowledge of human nature that teaches us to know and appreciate another person by the fall of his voice, the way he picks something up, even the timbre of his silence and the expression of the physical posture with which he occupies a space; in short, by that agile way, barely tangible and yet the only truly complete way, of being something spiritual and human, which is layered around the tangible, effable core as around a bare skeleton, and by means of that appreciation to anticipate his mental personality.

During this brief time Törless lived as though in an idyll. He did not take exception to his new friend’s religious nature, which was actually something quite alien to him, coming as he did from a free-thinking, bourgeois family. Instead he accepted it without further ado, indeed he even considered it a peculiar distinction on the prince’s part, because it intensified that person’s essence, which he felt to be so dissimilar to his own as to be beyond comparison.

In the prince’s company he felt as though he were in a chapel some distance from the beaten track, where the idea that he didn’t really belong there vanished in the face of the pleasure of seeing daylight through stained-glass windows and letting his eye glide over the useless, gilded decoration that had accumulated in the boy’s soul until he had a vague picture of that soul, as though he were drawing with his finger a beautiful arabesque which made no sense to him but which looped according to unknown rules.

Then the two boys suddenly fell out.

It had been a blunder, as Törless would later have to admit.

They had been arguing about religious matters. And that moment had been the end of everything. Because, as though it was quite independent of him, Törless’s intellect had lashed out at the gentle prince. He heaped upon him the ridicule of the rationalist, like a barbarian he smashed the filigree structure in which the boy’s soul was housed, and they parted in anger.

Since that time they had not spoken a word to one another. Törless was dimly aware that he had done something idiotic, and a vague, emotional insight told him that the wooden ruler of rationalism had shattered something fine and delightful at an untimely moment. But that was something entirely outside his power. A kind of longing for the past remained with him, and probably would for ever, but he seemed to have entered a different stream, which was carrying him further and further away from it.

And then, after a while, the prince, who had not been happy there, left the school.

 

Now Törless’s world became very empty and boring. But he had grown older in the meantime, and the first signs of sexual maturity were beginning, slowly and darkly, to well up within him. During this stage of his development he formed some new friendships commensurate with his age, which would later be of very great importance to him.