Hermann Hesse on Solitude, The Price of Difficulty, The Courage to Be Yourself, and How to Find Your Future – The Marginalian

“No one can build a bridge for you to cross the river of life, only you.” the young Nietzsche wrote as he thought about what it takes to find yourself. Somehow, this very controversial man, cycling between mysterious depression and electric burning close to madness, managed to inspire the strong spirits of people – among them, the great German poet, novelist, painter, and Nobel laureate. Hermann Hesse (July 2, 1877–August 9, 1962), who took out of Nietzsche's philosophy the ideas of humanity, and then expanded it with his extreme personality.

Some of Hesse's most courageous ideas about our human responsibility to ourselves and to the world are expressed in his “Letter to a New German,” which he wrote to desperate youth in 1919 and later included in his 1946 anthology. If the War Continues… (public library), published the year he received the Nobel Prize – the same moving piece that gave Hesse hope, the difficult art of taking responsibility, and the wisdom of the inner voice.

Decades before EE Cummings asserted that “to be nobody-but-you – in a world where you're doing your best, day and night, to be everybody – is to fight the hardest battle anyone can fight,” Hesse wrote:

You must stop the habit of being someone else or nothing at all, of imitating the words of others and mistaking the faces of others as your own.

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One thing is given to man who makes him a god, reminds him that he is a god: to know the end.

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When the end comes to a person from outside, it puts him down, like an arrow kills a deer. When destiny comes to a person from within, from his depths, it makes him strong, it makes him a god… A person who has seen his destiny never tries to change it. The attempt to change the future is a childish pursuit that causes people to fight and kill each other… All misery, poison, and death are a rare, fixed creation. But all true action, all that is good and happy and fruitful in the world, is a living end, an end that has become yourself.

Echoing Nietzsche's insistence that a fulfilling life requires embracing rather than running away from hardship, Hesse urges young people to treat their suffering with respect and curiosity, and adds:

Will not your bitter pain be the voice of fate, will not that voice be sweet when you understand it?

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Action and suffering, which together make up our lives, are complete; they are one. A child suffers, gives birth, is weaned; it suffers here and there until it finally dies. But all that is good in man, for which he is praised or loved, is only good suffering, the right kind, the living kind of suffering, the perfect suffering. The ability to suffer well is more than half of life – indeed, all of life. Birth is suffering, growth is suffering, the seed is suffering in the earth, the root is carried by the rain, the shoot is suffering to blossom.

In the same way, my friends, man suffers from fate. The end is earth, rain and growth. Fate is painful.

Long before Simone Weil thought about how to make use of our suffering, Hesse treats suffering as “the creator of fate” and adds:

It is hard to learn to suffer. Women are more successful and more beautiful than men. Learn from them! Learn to listen when the voice of life speaks! Learn to look where the sun of fate plays with your shadows! Learn to respect life! Learn to respect yourself! From suffering comes strength…

Writing fifteen years after he made his best case for breaking the notion of busyness, Hesse returns to the sandbox of self-indulgence – solitude:

Real action, good and glorious action, my friends, does not come from work, from busyness, from striving. It grows in the mountains alone, it grows on the peaks where there is silence and danger. It grows from suffering that you have not yet learned to suffer.

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Loneliness is the path that fate tries to lead a person to. Being alone is the path men are most afraid of. A path full of horrors, where snakes and frogs lie in wait… Without solitude there is no suffering, without solitude there is no bravery. But the solitude I have in mind is not the solitude of the cool poets or of the theater, where the fountain gushes sweetly from the mouth of the hermit's cave.

Learning to be nourished by solitude instead of succumbing to it, Hesse says, is a prerequisite for managing our destiny:

Most men, the herd, have never felt alone. They leave father and mother, but only to crawl to the wife and quietly succumb to new warmth and new bonds. They are never alone, they are never discussed. And when a single man passes their way, they fear him and hate him like a disease; They threw stones at him, but they did not find peace until they were far away from him. The air around him smells of the stars, the cold places of the stars; it does not have the sweet warm smell of home and hatching.

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A man should not care about the possibility of falling, if he wants to taste solitude and face his destiny. It's easy and fun to walk with people, with a crowd – even in distress. It's easier and more comforting to devote yourself to the “tasks” of the day, the collective tasks.

In a sentiment that the poet May Sarton would echo in her dramatic solitude two decades later, Hesse adds:

Solitude is not chosen, as the end can be chosen. Solitude comes to us when we have a magic stone that attracts the future.

Two thousand years after Seneca admonished that “all your sorrows be spent upon you if you have not learned to be sorrowful,” Hesse rejoices:

Blessed is he who has found solitude, not the solitude pictured in paintings or poetry, but his own, unique, predetermined. Blessed is he who knows suffering! Blessed is he who carries the magic stone in his heart. In it comes the end, in it comes the real action.

In line with Seamus Heaney's lyrical insight that “the true and solid way of entering and experiencing consists in being true…

You were created to be yourself. Made to enrich the world with sound, tone, dignity.

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In each of you there is a hidden being, in the deep sleep of childhood. Heal it! In each of you there is a vocation, a will, a natural impulse, an impulse for the future, the new, the higher. Let it grow, grow, grow! Your future is neither this nor that; it's not money or power, it's not wisdom or success in your business – your future, your difficult and dangerous path is this: to mature and find God in you.

A century later, the entire piece remains a fascinating and insightful read, as do all of Hesse's. If the War Continues…. Complete this piece with Ursula K. Le Guin about suffering and the other side of pain, Louise Bourgeois about how solitude enriches creative work and Elizabeth Bishop about why everyone should have one long period of solitude in life, then revisit Hesse about the admonition to enjoy the small joys of life, why books will survive all the technology of the future, what three types of life teach our readers.