When I was in school everybody was reading (or at least carrying around a copy of) Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha. I didn’t read it (nor did I carry it around to make it look as if I might be). I am not bragging about this; it is one of many wonderful things I missed while getting “my education.”
Recently The Sun magazine ran an excerpt from Siddhartha on its “Dog-eared Page” page. That’s where the editor prints “selections...from works that have deepened and broadened our understanding of the human condition.” It seemed time to read a small portion of something I’d missed, and what I read made me miss it.
Siddhartha says to his friend and fellow truth-seeker Govinda:
“Love, for me, Govinda, is clearly the main thing. Let seeing through the world, explaining it, looking down on it, be the business of great thinkers. The only thing of importance to me is being able to love the world, without looking down on it, without hating it and myself - being able to regard it and myself and all things with love, admiration, and reverence.”
I wonder if my life and outlook and “in-look” would have been different had I read and incorporated those few words forty or fifty years ago. Maybe they would not have struck me then as they strike me now, because idealism was everywhere when I was young. And they are idealistic words, are they not? ...though I wonder what viable alternative there is to them if we expect to live with ourselves and with one another in this world.
I love Hermann Hesse, though I read Siddhartha so long ago. This is a nice reminder. Thanks, Dean.
ReplyDeleteSiddhartha was a text for my high school German class. We read substantial portions of it. In college I read it again in English translation. Interestingly, the kind of love Siddhartha the character speaks of seems to differ from Christian love, and even from Buddhist compassion. Buddhist compassion is pity for those who suffer because of their insatiable craving arising from ignorance. It is condescension. The essence of Christian love, I think, is forgiveness. Forgiveness retains the measures of perfection and goodness that the forgiven failed. Forgiveness is self-sacrificing power that wills to restore the forgiven to original potency with freedom. Siddhartha’s love rather resembles what Nietzsche advocated: acceptance of all becoming as the eternally recurrent being that is beyond good and evil. Religions and philosophies proffer different ideals of humans’ being in the world. A challenging question is what to do with such spiritual options.
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