Hermann Hesse from Trees: An Anthology of Writings and Paintings
The brilliant German-- Swiss poet, novelist and painter Hermann Karl Hesse vowed at an early age to be a poet or nothing at all. Hesse rebelled against formal education, focusing on a rigorous programme of independent study that included literature, philosophy, art, and history.
One result of these efforts was a series of novels that became counterculture bibles that remain widely influential today.His works include Demian, Steppenwolf, Siddhartha, and The Glass Bead Game, which explore an individual's search for authenticity, self-knowledge and spirituality.In 1946, he received the Nobel Prize in Literature.
During the First World War, Hesse had registered himself as a volunteer with the Imperial army, saying that he could not sit inactively by a warm fireplace while other young authors were dying on the front. He had been found unfit for combat duty, due to an eye condition, and was assigned to service involving the care of prisoners of war.Beyond a desire to serve, he was not caught up in the war hysteria.
In 1917 after a long period of literary abstinence. he published a thoughtful collection of poems and travel prose titled, Wandering.The book was translated in 1974 by James Wright. The prose and poems of this volume are counted among the most beautiful works of Hermann Hesse.
His Prose and Poems and watercolours of the time document one of the most important phases of his evolution: distancing himself from the rituals and security of bourgeois life and the passage from active life to the contemplative life.
The following is a translation of a prose poem that appeared in Wandering that later appeared in Trees: An Anthology of Writings and Paintings,:a fine collection of Hermann Hesse’s essays, poems, and passages on the subject of trees and nature, accompanied by thirty-one of his watercolor illustrations.
One does not have to be religious to appreciate Hesse’s love of the natural world and his urge to find oneness. I find it very uplifting and soothing.
While being a precious literary tribute to the magnificence and power of trees, Hesse uses his subject as a vehicle to explore the human condition and to provide wisdom on how to endure hardships and flourish as a human being with purpose.I hope you enjoy as much as I do.
Trees are Sanctuaries - Hermann Hesse
For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I revere them when they stand alone. They are like lonely persons. Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche. In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfill themselves according to their own laws, to build up their own form, to represent themselves. Nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree.
When a tree is cut down and reveals its naked death-wound to the sun, one can read its whole history in the luminous, inscribed disk of its trunk: in the rings of its years, its scars, all the struggle, all the suffering, all the sickness, all the happiness and prosperity stand truly written, the narrow years and the luxurious years, the attacks withstood, the storms endured.
And every young farmboy knows that the hardest and noblest wood has the narrowest rings, that high on the mountains and in continuing danger the most indestructible, the strongest, the ideal trees grow..
Trees are sanctuaries.Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life.
A tree says: A kernel is hidden in me, a spark, a thought, I am life from eternal life. The attempt and the risk that the eternal mother took with me is unique, unique the form and veins of my skin, unique the smallest play of leaves in my branches and the smallest scar on my bark. I was made to form and reveal the eternal in my smallest special detail.
A tree says: My strength is trust. I know nothing about my fathers, I know nothing about the thousand children that every year spring out of me. I live out the secret of my seed to the very end, and I care for nothing else. I trust that God is in me. I trust that my labor is holy. Out of this trust I live.
When we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer, then a tree has something to say to us: Be still! Be still! Look at me! Life is not easy, life is not difficult. Those are childish thoughts. Home is neither here nor there. Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all.
A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening. If one listens to them silently for a long time, this longing reveals its kernel, its meaning. It is not so much a matter of escaping from one’s suffering, though it may seem to be so. It is a longing for home, for a memory of the mother, for new metaphors for life. It leads home. Every path leads homeward, every step is birth, every step is death, every grave is mother.
So the tree rustles in the evening, when we stand uneasy before our own childish thoughts: Trees have long thoughts, long-breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours. They are wiser than we are, as long as we do not listen to them. But when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness.
― Hermann Hesse
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