01.10.09
The Hesse I Love
“With a delicious shudder, I felt streaming toward me from these books the cool but pungent fragrance of a life not of this world yet real nonetheless, a life whose waves now pounded where it sought to realize its fate – in my ecstatic heart. In my reading nook in the attic… there the characters of Shakespeare’s and Goethe’s worlds walked in and out. The sublime and the laughable aspects of everything human were revealed to me: I realized the enigma of the sundered unruly heart… the mighty miracle of the spirit that transfigures our brief stay and through the power of reason raises our petty lives into the realm of fate and eternity,” thus spake Hermann Hesse through Peter Camenzind the moment he discovered literature. Ah! Yes, any bookworm/polybibliogamist can identify with kindred feelings, but Hesse states it oh so beautifully! Beauty: such is the texture of this book.
The nature-loving Hesse of this first opus presented himself differently from the Hesse I experienced in Demian. Like Demian, a bildungsroman, the book sums up Peter Camenzind’s journey through the joys and sorrows of earthly and spiritual life, but absent were Demian’s dark chthonic nature and rigorous themes, and in their stead, a light, idyllic, extremely poetic, and un-disturbing though bittersweet temperament. The novel’s purpose is revealed near the end but I would not even dream of relaying it better in my own words and would rather share these priceless mnemonic paragraphs from the poet Camenzind/Hesse himself.
“As you know, it had been my hope to write a work of some length in which I intended to bring closer to people the grandiose and mute life of nature, that they might love it. I wanted to teach people to listen to the pulse of nature, to partake the wholeness of life and not forget, under the pressure of their petty destinies, that we are not gods and have not created ourselves but are children of the earth, part of the cosmos. I wanted to remind them that night, rivers, oceans, drifting clouds, storms, like creatures of the poet’s imagination and of our dreams, are symbols and bearers of our yearning that spread their wings between heaven and earth, their objectives being the indubitable right to life and the immortality of all living things. Each being’s innermost core is certain of these rights as a child of God, and reposes without fear in the lap of eternity… I also wanted to teach men to find the sources of joy and life in the love of nature. I wanted to preach the pleasures of looking at nature, of wandering in it, and of taking delight in the present.
I wanted to let mountains, oceans, and green islands speak to you convincingly with their enticing tongues, and wanted to compel you to see the immeasurably varied and exuberant life blossoming and overflowing outside your houses and cities each day. I wanted you to feel ashamed of knowing more about foreign wars, fashions, gossip, literature, and art than the springs bursting forth outside your towns, than of the rivers flowing under your bridges, than of the forests and marvelous meadows through which your railroads speed. I wanted to let you know what a golden chain of unforgettable pleasures I, a melancholy recluse, had found in this world and I desired that you, who are perhaps happier and more cheerful than I, should discover even greater joy in it.
Above all, I wanted to implant the secret of love in your hearts. I hoped to teach you to be brothers to all living things, and become so full of love that you will not fear even sorrow and death and receive them like brothers and sisters when they come to you.”
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