And once, during the preparation for confirmation, I was terrified by a conception, which, if that were possible, seemed to me even still more daring. The master had been speaking of Golgotha. The Biblical account of the Passion and Death of Christ had, from my earliest years, made a deep impression on me. As a little boy, on such days as Good Friday, after my Father had read out to us the story of the Passion, I had lived in imagination and with much emotion in Gethsemane and on Golgotha, in that world so poignantly beautiful, pale and ghostlike, and yet so terribly alive. And when I listened to the Passion according to

St. Matthew by Bach, I felt the mystical thrills of this dark, powerful, mysterious world of passion and suffering. I find in this music, even today and in the “actus tragicus,” the essence of all poetry and of all artistic expression.

At the conclusion of the lesson Demian said to me contemplatively: