Feeling and thinking must go together, Paul van Geest knows

Narziss und Goldmund by Hermann Hesse runs like a thread through Paul van Geest’s life. Almost every summer, the book marks the beginning of his holiday, and he reflects on whether over the past year he has been too occupied with intellectual matters and whether he has missed something.

Theologian Paul van Geest reads an original German copy of Narziss und Goldmund. At secondary school in Delft, a Jesuit school, Frau Wagner, his German teacher, advised him to read Hermann Hesse’s classic. “She had seen through me a little”, says Van Geest. “I wanted to study Theology and I was even considering the priesthood, but priests live celibately and as a schoolboy I was basically always in love.” He calls the book ‘the mirror of my life’.

The book is about a friendship between two opposites. Narziss is the spiritual man who thinks and reflects. He does not feel or experience and devotes his life to the monastery. Goldmund, by contrast, is a sensitive artist. He is restless, leaves the monastery, seduces many women and loses the love of his life to death. “Narziss and Goldmund are two separate characters in the book, but within an individual they cannot do without one another. Feeling and thinking must go together.”

Kissing one side of yourself awake

As a Theology student, Van Geest was a real thinker. He studied at the Gregoriana, a pontifical university in Rome, and lived in an international college. Everything revolved around study. In the morning breakfast was ready in the refectory, in the afternoon students were served a three-course lunch with two glasses of wine, and at the end of the day another meal was provided. “We did pour the coffee ourselves from jugs and put our trays in a trolley afterwards. I had to clean my own room, but apart from that I was only busy studying.” Van Geest remembers it as a happy time, orderly. “That was where the Narziss in me was kissed awake. The order in the world was the order in my head.”

But Van Geest is equally sensitive to the turbulent side of life. When he returned from Rome and went on holiday with friends he knew from when he studied Dutch in Leiden, he understood Goldmund better again. He also recognised much of Goldmund’s instability during the phases in life when he had to make choices. “Do I marry Ingrid? Do I want children? In what kind of world do I bring those children? When I had to make those kinds of decisions I was in my feelings and became restless. Less happy than when I lived in the cathedral in my head”, he says now he has passed sixty. “Thinking and feeling cannot do without one another. Narziss and Goldmund are two sides of the same person.”

Summer begins with reflection

In the third week of July, when the summer holiday begins and work at the university can pause for a while, Van Geest finds it tempting to start a new project, to keep working. But instead, he likes to take up Narziss und Goldmund at that moment. He rereads the book and reflects on the past academic year. He asks himself whether he has missed something. And there were years when he had. “Long ago my wife put a plate of food next to my computer and walked away; and when my eldest daughter asked why I got up so quickly after dinner, then you know you have missed something. I have occasionally focused too much on work, which made me careless with my relationships.”

Van Geest is now 61 years old. He would quite like to stay this age for a while. He can look back and be satisfied. At 23, in Rome, he was asked to become a diplomat for the pope, an honourable and celibate life. “Intuitively I felt that life dictated something else for me. I knew: Paul will not become what has been placed in Paul if he becomes a diplomat”, he says. The professorship combined with family life, and the golden mean between Narziss and Goldmund, is the life that suits him. In the yearbook of the college in Rome, Van Geest wrote a motto from Hermann Hesse: Wohin noch mag mein Weg mich führen? Närrisch ist er, dieser Weg, er geht in Schleifen, er geht vielleicht im Kreise. Mag er gehen, wie er will, ich will ihn gehen. (Where will my path take me? This path is foolish; it twists and turns, perhaps it even goes in circles. Let the path be what it is, I will walk it.)