#herman hesse
“No llegamos siquiera a un primer beso, pero fuimos enormemente felices”— — Hermann Hesse. El lobo estepario.
“ 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 fulfil 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.”
- Hermann Hesse, Bäume. Betrachtungen und Gedichte
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“sana ne söyleyebilirim ki saygıdeğer kişi? aramaktan bulma fırsatını bir türlü yakalayamayacağını mı?”—hermann hesse - siddhartha
“Tous les livres du monde
Ne t'apporteront pas le bonheur,
Mais ils te ramèneront sans tapage
A l'intérieur de ton être.
Là, tu trouveras tout ce dont tu as besoin,
Le soleil, les étoiles, la lune
Car la lumière que tu recherches
Réside en toi.
La sagesse que tu as si longtemps cherchée
Dans les livres
Surgira, resplendissante, de chaque page
Car désormais cette sagesse sera devenue tienne.”
-Hermann Hesse
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These are three photos from my copy of Steppenwolfby Herman Hesse. It’s about a guy called Harry Haller, who, like the guy in Notes From Underground, feels himself violently at odds with a “general society” he’s conjured in his mind, and like Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, incorrectly feels like he has insulated himself from the consequences of his attitude through his intellectual pursuits.
At the end of the book, he manages to free himself from these self-harming opinions through the judicious application of sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll. This book was written in 1927, so rock ‘n’ roll hadn’t been invented yet, but what they had instead of rock ‘n’ roll was jazz, and he gets lots of jazz.
Most of the book is written as lengthy explorations of how disconnected he feels from the mainstream culture (while feeling very bitter about being forced to engage with it in order to survive, as you can tell from the first image) and his own life. There is also a constant thread of implied menace, without ever stating it directly, from the coming Nazi shitstorm.
When he eventually makes it to the “magic theatre” above and pays the price of admittance, it really kicks off into an almost Hunter-Thompson-esque series of frightening visions and nonsensical scenarios involving brutal murders and sexual encounters and so on. I was convinced I had to make a blog post when I came across the words on one of the doors in the magic theatre:
COMPLETE SUBSTITUTE FOR ALL FORMS OF SOCIABILITY
Man, I am totally in. No further information required.
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— Herman Hesse, Siddhartha
Within you there is a stillness and a sanctuary
to which you can retreat at any time
and be yourself.
~ Hermann Hesse
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Moodboard: Art Appreciation - November.
❝I felt and saw the night outside deep within me. Wind and wetness, autumn, bitter smell of foliage, scattered leaves of the elm tree.❞
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“The bird fights its way out of the egg. The egg is the world. Who would be born must first destroy a world…” - Demian, Herman Hesse
find more: linktr.ee/aarensara
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“Without really wanting to at all, [the majority of men] pay calls and carry on conversations, sit out their hours at desks and on office chairs; and it is all compulsory, mechanical… it could all be done or left undone just as well by machines; and indeed it is this never-ceasing machinery that prevents their being… [from] recognizing the stupidity and shallowness, the hopeless tragedy and waste of the lives they lead, and the awful ambiguity grinning over it all…
I lived, however, quite by myself, and was no longer fit for decent society; for in the first place, I was nearly always in a bad temper and afflicted with the gout, and in the second place, usually drunk…
Naturally it was stupid of me to bespatter the drawing-room ornaments of the worthy folk, stupid and ill-mannered, but I could not help it; and even now I could not help it. I could not bear this tame, lying, well-mannered life any longer.
And since it appeared that I could not bear my loneliness any longer either, since my own company had become so unspeakably hateful and nauseous, since I struggled for breath in a vacuum and suffocated in hell, what way out was left me? There was none.
I thought of my father and mother, of the sacred flame of my youth long extinct, of the thousand joys and labors and aims of my life. Nothing of them all was left me, not even repentance, nothing but agony and nausea. Never had the clinging to mere life seemed so grievous as now.”
-Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse, 1927
