were these people in their blind loyalty, their blind strength and tenacity.  They lacked nothing, there was nothing the knowledgeable one, the thinker, had to put him above them except for one little thing, a single, tiny, small thing:  the consciousness, the conscious thought of the oneness of all life.  And Siddhartha even doubted in many an hour, whether this knowledge, this thought was to be valued thus highly, whether it might not also perhaps be a childish idea of the thinking people, of the thinking and childlike people.  In all other respects, the worldly people were of equal rank to the wise men, were often far superior to them, just as animals too can, after all, in some moments, seem to be superior to humans in their tough, unrelenting performance of what is necessary.

Slowly blossomed, slowly ripened in Siddhartha the realisation, the knowledge, what wisdom actually was, what the goal of his long search was.  It was nothing but a readiness of the soul, an ability, a secret art, to think every moment, while living his life, the thought of oneness, to be able to feel and inhale the oneness.  Slowly this blossomed in him, was shining back at him from Vasudeva’s old, childlike face:  harmony, knowledge of the eternal perfection of the world, smiling, oneness.

But the wound still burned, longingly and bitterly Siddhartha thought of his son, nurtured his love and tenderness in his heart, allowed the pain to gnaw at him, committed all foolish acts of love.  Not by itself, this flame would go out.

And one day, when the wound burned violently, Siddhartha ferried across the river, driven by a yearning, got off the boat and was willing to go to the city and to look for his son.  The river flowed softly and quietly, it was the dry season, but its voice sounded strange:  it laughed!  It laughed clearly.  The river laughed, it laughed brightly and clearly at the old ferryman.  Siddhartha stopped, he bent over the water, in order to hear even better, and he saw his face reflected in the quietly moving waters, and in this reflected face there was something, which reminded him, something he had forgotten, and as he thought about it, he found it:  this face resembled another face, which he used to know and love and also fear.  It resembled his father’s face, the Brahman.  And he remembered how he, a long time ago, as a young man, had forced his father to let him go to the penitents, how he had bed his farewell to him, how he had gone and had never come back.  Had his father not also suffered the same pain for him, which he now suffered for his son?  Had his father not long since died, alone, without having seen his son again?  Did he not have to expect the same fate for himself?  Was it not a comedy, a strange and stupid matter, this repetition, this running around in a fateful circle?

The river laughed.  Yes, so it was, everything came back, which had not been suffered and solved up to its end, the same pain was suffered over and over again.  But Siddhartha want back into the boat and ferried back to the hut, thinking of his father, thinking of his son, laughed at by the river, at odds with himself, tending towards despair, and not less tending towards laughing along at {???} himself and the entire world.