A Meaningful Passage
For Someday-Parsing
(My sloppy attempt at translation! And embedding fonts!)
Kamaswami told him about his business, he showed him wares and warehouses, showed him accounts. Siddhartha learned. He heard much and said little. He treated it all as a game, whose rules he strove to learn precisely, but whose content did not touch his heart.
In matters of love he was childish. He tended to pursue blindly, endlessly, insatiably. She taught him to balance taking with giving, and that every gesture, every caress, every touch, every glance, every aspect of a connection has its secret to patiently unlock. She taught him that in each celebration of love the lovers should admire each other, without being conquered or having conquered, so that neither is glutted, neither has the feeling of having misused or having been misused. He spent wonderful hours with the clever and beautiful artist, became her pupil, her lover, her friend. Here, with Kamala, lay the value and purpose of his current life, and not with Kamaswami’s business.
[Update, May 16, 2024] From a few pages later… for further translation practice/someday-parsing:
That evening she clenched him with painful urgency, tearing and scratching, as if trying to squeeze the last remaining drops of sweetness from this ephemeral, exhausted pleasure. Never had it been so unsettlingly clear to Siddhartha how closely lust is related to death.
Fatigue was written on Kamala’s face, the fatigue of fighting a long, losing battle. He parted from her, disgust congealing in the pit of his stomach like tepid, spoiled wine. He could no longer bear the evening atmosphere: the too-sweet, bleak music, the too-soft smiles, the sickly-sweet scents. But above all, he was disgusted at himself. He had, it seemed to him, been leading a worthless life. Worthless and senseless. Laying down beneath a mango tree, he felt death in his heart and horror in his breast. He sat and sensed his existence withering inside him, unraveling inside him, coming to an end. Siddhartha knew that the game was done, that he could play it no longer. A shudder ran through his body; inside him, he knew, something had died.