With showers forecast all week, I'm spending time in my secluded reading room which I've named the "Red House" in memory of Hermann Hesse. The following is an excerpt from one of Hesse's own favourite books, "Wandering - Notes and Sketches", a synthesis of prose, poetry, and watercolour sketches:
"Red House, out of your small garden and vineyard all the southern Alps breathe to me. I have walked past you several times, and even the first time my wanderlust was sharply reminded of its opposite pole; and once again I toy with the old refrain: to have a home, a little house in a green garden, stillness everywhere, a village below me. In a little room facing east my bed would stand, my own bed; in another little room facing south, my table; and there I would hang up the small, ancient Madonna which I bought on an earlier journey, in Brescia.
Like the day between morning and evening, my life falls between my urge to travel and my homesickness. Maybe some day I will have come far enough for travel and distances to become part of my soul, so that I will have their images within me, without having to make them literally real any more. Maybe I will also find that secret home within me where there will be no more flirting with gardens and little red houses. To be at home with myself!
How different life would be! There would be a center, and out of that center all forces would reach.
But there is no center in my life: my life hovers between many poles and counterpoles. A longing for home here, a longing for wandering there. A longing for loneliness and cloister here, and an urge for love and community there. I have collected books and paintings and given them away. I have cultivated voluptuousness and vice, and renounced them for asceticism and penance. I have faithfully revered life as substance, and then realized that I could recognize and love life only as function.
But it is not my concern to change myself. Only a miracle could do that. And whoever seeks a miracle, whoever grasps at it, whoever tries to assist it, sees it fleeing away. My concern is to hover between many extreme opposites and to be ready when a miracle overtakes me. My concern is to be unsatisfied and to endure restlessness.
Red house in the green! I have already lived through you, I can't go on living through you. I have already had a home, I have built a house, measured wall and roof, laid out paths in the garden, and hung my own walls with my own pictures. Every person is driven to do the same - I am happy that I once lived this way. Many of my desires in life have been fulfilled. I wanted to be a poet, and became a poet. I wanted to have a house, and built one. I wanted to have a wife and children, and had them. I wanted to speak to people and impress them, and I did so. And every fulfillment quickly became satiety. But to be satisfied was the very thing I could not bear. Poetry became suspect to me. The house became narrow to me. No goal that I reached was a goal, every path was a detour, every rest gave birth to new longing.
Many detours I will still follow, many fulfillments will still disillusion me. One day, everything will reveal its meaning.
There, where contradictions die, is Nirvana. Within me, they still burn brightly, beloved stars of longing."
The most fundamental delight which literature can offer has something to do with the perception or discovery of truth, not necessarily a profound or complex or earthshaking truth, but a particular truth of some order. This "epiphany" comes at the moment of recognition when the reader's experience is reflected back at him.
This is what happens to me whenever I pick up "Wandering - Notes and Sketches" (German title: "Wanderung - Aufzeichnungen") and suddenly find myself totally absorbed in what the backcover describes as 'a fine antidote to the anxiety-provoking pressures of today'.
And there is so much more in this serene little book. "A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us", wrote Kafka. This book fits this description. And, being a book, no matter how complex or difficult to understand it may seem to be, when you have finished it, you can, if you wish, go back to the beginning, read it again, and thus understand that which is difficult and, with it, understand life that little bit better. Here's to the joy of reading! And to more of Hermann Hesse's writing!
