revisiting Hermann Hesse

Like many (male) students of my day, I was into Hermann Hesse, and his novels have been gathering dust on my shelves ever since, as I got on with life. A curious librivox recording of Siddartha brought me back to him – it seemed to have been translated and read by a group of people whose first language definitely wasn’t English – and I started to realise that there was a connection between then and now. As a student I’d been thinking about what was the meaning and purpose of life, which many of Hesse’s fictions explore, and now that I’m retired and have time on my hands, I find myself contemplating the same questions, though from a different perspective.

Siddartha seems to be exploring contentment and satisfaction with life; it’s necessary to spend time striving and seeking a purpose, but ultimately we need to find an acceptance of who we are/ have been as we realise that it all comes to an end somehow.

My favourite years ago was always Narziss and Goldmund, and I came back to it after thirty years. It was still painful – in the emotional sense – to read of the friendship against the background of time and eternity, and the quest for meaning to life: how does a person leave even a trace of themselves behind, and why does this matter so much to us? Is it better to risk all in that quest, or settle for a fixed life of calm and contemplation? I thought about that in terms of my own life, and a relatively safe choice of being a teacher for nearly thirty years: there was always a job, a salary and the prospect of a pension.

In the broader picture, I realised that Narziss and Goldmund is one of those novels that fall into the category of bildungsroman. And immediately I recalled another from my student days – Somerset Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge.  So that’s somewhere on the list, now.