This remarkable memoir recounts the author's spiritual odyssey with a remarkable person, a modern man, a Trappist monk. The story of their enduring friendship is even more amazing because in 1930 Nobel Prize winning author, Hermann Hesse, wrote his famous novel about just such a fascinating friendship between two medieval men-Narcissus and Goldmund. It is a wonderful mystery that Hesse understood the depth and width of Narcissus and Goldmund's friendship half a century before the author of this memoir embarked on the selfsame voyage of friendship and love when, at the age of twenty, he entered a Trappist monastery in California where he met his own Narcissus and discovered an identical passion and understanding created from archetypical forces brought together in one time and place by the unseen, powerful forces of the cosmos.