This is the second and last part of a two-part article. Find the first part here!

The Fateful Voyage and a New Encounter

And now Walter Faber leaves the jungle, he goes back home, he lands in New York. He meets his girlfriend, Ivy, and she hopes that he's now back for a while and they can do the usual thing that people do in a couple: they go out together, they eat. But Faber is restless. He does not want this life anymore. He feels that he needs a break, particularly after the discovery of his dead friend. And he decides to leave immediately again. He calls his boss and he says, "I want to leave earlier for the next job. I don't want a rest in New York. I want to leave. I want to go to the next job, which will be in Europe, in France somewhere. And send me immediately." And the boss says, "Yes, okay, but you will be too early. You only have to be there in two weeks. You are not supposed to go now." And Faber says, "Then I will take a ship. I will cross the Atlantic in a ship."

And this is again a particularly wild suggestion by somebody so technologically refined as Walter Faber. Because of course, you would use the most efficient means, you would use an airplane, not a ship. A ship is something, even in the '50s, that you don't use anymore to cross the Atlantic. Although there are ships that have this schedule, it's more something for old people who want to relax and they want to chill on the ship. It's not something for a young, dynamic engineer who is going to a UN project. But Walter Faber says, "I want to do this. I want to go on the ship." So Walter Faber, now already a little shaken in his worldview but unable to admit it, takes the ship and sails to Europe. And we see already – and this is the mastery of Frisch – how slowly this person starts to fall apart in a way that he himself cannot see, but we can see it from the outside.

A Modern Greek Tragedy

And now this whole thing has a very Greek, ancient Greek tragedy ring to it. And for this, it's important to know how Greek tragedies actually worked. Because the whole idea of a tragedy is that you see a person who is a good person but in some way flawed. And then the worst possible thing happens to them, but not because of an accident, not because of a random accident, but because of their life choices. Because it's the consequence, the expected outcome of their life choices. And the more they try to act against fate, the more fate comes after them. And the more what they try to avoid is what actually happens to them. And this is something you see in all these ancient tragedies. They all begin with a setup, with some situation that is there at the beginning, and you know that just consequently following this setup will lead you to the worst possible outcome, will lead you to the tragic outcome.

And this is exactly what happens to Walter in this book. We start with this person who is unable to have feelings, who is unable to be a human being, who sees everything mechanistically, everything as a machine. The whole universe is just a machine. And just following this idea to its end, to its necessary end, destroys the person.

And so now we are already underway. He is on his ship, he is shaken, he cannot admit it. He tries to have a good time, he pretends to himself that he has a good time. And when you read the book, it sounds like a good time, but you know that this person would not have behaved like this if they were indeed okay, which they are not. And so one day, as he is on the deck of the ship looking for some entertainment, for some game to play, for something to do, he meets a young woman, Elisabeth, whom he calls Sabeth. And he just notices her from a distance at the beginning, and he tries to avoid her. He doesn't want another relationship. And this again is Walter Faber trying to avoid something that is scary to him: a human relationship.

But of course, we being outside of this and looking inside like the gods we are reading this novel, we know what is going to happen. He is not able to avoid this because the whole universe of the novel will conspire to bring him into this situation where he will again meet his demons. And so this woman is not going anywhere, and they have to be scheduled together for the same table for lunch and dinner because no other places are free. And although Walter tries to avoid eating at the same table with her, in the end, they are there together. And he happens to play ping pong, and she happens to play ping pong, so they start playing ping pong. She has a boyfriend, but she soon quarrels with her boyfriend. And when they finally arrive in France, Walter Faber and the girl are friends, but nothing else happens. They separate, and they say goodbye, and the girl goes away to Paris.

Now, Walter is much older than the girl; he could be her father. And he knows this. And this is why he also knows that trying to have any kind of relationship is pointless. And so he goes his way in Paris, also away from her. But it is still too early, he still arrived too early, he still has a few days to wait. And so he looks in Paris for things to do. And of course, if you are in Paris, you go to the museum. And so he goes to the museum to see what that is about. And it is not that he's particularly interested in museums; museums are old, they are not technological, there's nothing for him to see there. But something pulls him there, something tells him to go to the museum. And here again, we have his subconscious, perhaps some subconscious wish, some urge to fulfil his destiny.

And of course, in the museum, he meets the girl again. They go have a coffee, they go eat together, and they like each other. And she feels that she can profit from his friendship because he is so much more older than her, so much more experienced. He even has a car, he has a lot of money, she doesn't have any. And so he offers, at a moment of not being himself or not thinking, or of being overwhelmed by this situation, he offers to take her in his car to Italy. And so now these two people that should never have been together are together on a car driving to Italy. And of course, slowly the thing becomes more, and they start being a couple, they start having a relationship that none of the two actually wants to acknowledge because Walter Faber doesn't want it, and the girl is also confused because this man is so much older than her.

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The Inescapable Truth

So now, little by little, Faber pieces together the background of the girl. And it turns out that this girl is the daughter of one of his friends from when he was young. And here we have this echo from the beginning of the book, where he met in the airplane this other person who knew his girlfriend while he was young, while he was a student, and who knew this other guy who killed himself in South America, who was also a friend of his from his study days. And now the girl mentions her mother, and the name of the mother is a name he knows. And he not only knows her mother, but it turns out that – one very crucial moment in the novel, a very big moment in the novel – he realizes that this is his girlfriend from the times of his studies, Hanna.

And now, because this is in the '50s, and if you go back 15, 20 years, you end up in Nazi Germany. And so this is exactly now what happens to him. Twenty years before, when he was a student (now he's a middle-aged man), he was in Nazi Germany, and this woman, this girl then, his girlfriend, was called Hanna, and she was a Jewish woman. And because it was Nazi Germany and she was a Jewish woman and he was not Jewish, he was a non-Jewish German, "Aryan" German as they called them, they are not allowed to have a relationship, they are not allowed to marry. And Hanna doesn't want them to marry because she doesn't want to endanger the career of Walter Faber, who is going to have a career as an engineer. And if he married her, he wouldn't get a job, and he would be considered a friend of Jews, which was the worst thing you could be in Nazi Germany, and it would even perhaps endanger his life. And so they separate. And Hanna gives up Walter for his own benefit. And this again is a moment where Walter behaves horribly to her, like he behaved horribly to the woman in New York, because he accepts her sacrifice. His career is to him more important than the relationship to Hanna. And he's okay with leaving her and her child. And I think he knows that she is going to have a child, but he leaves her anyway. He studies, he has his career, and Hanna is out of his life.

But now he meets this daughter of Hanna. And he starts calculating, and eventually, he works out that she must be his daughter. But he's unable to admit it to himself. And so a large part of this beautiful relationship between the two is travelling through the countryside in Italy on this sports car and being in the sun and having all these touristy experiences. And it's beautiful, and it's a happy time – the '50s in Italy, everything is nice and cheap and sunny and beautiful and carefree. Nobody has anything to do. She's on a trip to eventually visit her mother who lives in Athens; he is just waiting for his job to begin. And so nothing bad is happening externally to them. But internally, of course, this thing destroys him, the thought that this could be his daughter. And he keeps calculating on the back of cigarette packages and on the back of napkins, trying to add up whether this child is the child that he had with Hanna, whether she could be. And he arrives in the end at the conclusion that it's not possible, it just doesn't work out. She must be the child of somebody else. And this is also what her mother told her. Her mother didn't tell her about Walter because she separated from Walter in order to not implicate him in this. She told her that her father was somebody else.

And now they continue in this way, and she tells him about her mother, and he says, "I knew your mother." And they decide to go to Greece to visit the mother who is living in Greece. And of course, the choice of Greece again is a great move by Frisch because he wants to go to this Greek tragedy motive. He wants to show us that this is a Greek tragedy. This person Walter Faber is going to be destroyed in the way of the Greek tragedy.

Catharsis: The Cleansing Power of Tragedy

And the whole point of the Greek tragedy – now perhaps we should mention this – is the catharsis, what Aristotle calls catharsis. Catharsis means cleansing, cleaning, ritual cleaning. And what happens in the tragedy, according to Aristotle, is that we see these people suffer, and through their suffering of the characters in the tragedy, we are cleaned internally from our bad thoughts, from our bad psychological situation. And we emerge renewed and clean and stronger and with more understanding and more compassion for others. So this cleansing is a process of growth. And this growth is crucial for Aristotle and is the whole point of the tragedy. So if you have a tragedy, it's not about seeing people suffer; the point is, through the suffering of the people, you should see the world and yourself in a new light. And this should make you a better person.

And this is the same thing that Frisch wants us to do. He sees that every one of us is to some extent Walter Faber, and we are all guilty of this. And by steering Walter Faber through his life, through his past, towards his final resolution in Greece, towards this catharsis, he makes a statement about all of us. Why are we like this? And why are we all of us so technologically determined? Why are we so mechanical? Why are we neglecting our human qualities in favor of being these automatons, robots that neglect their humanity in order to have a more comfortable life, like Walter Faber does?

And so Walter Faber in the end meets his destiny, and it's not a good one. They go to Athens, and there his daughter, who still doesn't know that she is his daughter (she wants to present him to her mother as her new boyfriend, as her partner), is bitten by a snake. And so now he has to bring her to a hospital. He manages to bring her to a hospital in this Greece of the '50s where, of course, there are no mobile phones, there's no way to call for help on a remote beach. He has to carry her, he has to find a truck to bring her to the hospital. And now you have this situation where the mother arrives at the hospital after she's being informed that her daughter is there, having been bitten by a snake, and her boyfriend is there. And now she meets this boyfriend, and this is her own boyfriend from 20 years prior, Walter Faber. And they now finally all realize what's happening and how impossible the situation is.

I won't spoil the ending for you. Perhaps I have already, because I told you the whole point of the tragedy is to lead to the worst possible outcome for all in order to achieve this catharsis. So go read the book. But in the end, of course, none of this turns out well for Walter Faber. He is unraveling; his life is at a point where it cannot possibly continue.

Why This Book Still Matters

I hope you enjoyed this. This is, I think, a glorious, a wonderful book with a wonderful understanding of human frailty, of human illusions, and also, as I said in the beginning, of the soul of the tech bro, the soul of the geek who thinks that he has the world under control because he has the technology of the world under control. But the world, and fate, and personal fate is not a machine. And so, although we think that we have this world under control, in reality, the world is just waiting to pounce. This is more or less what this book is trying to tell us. And it does. And it destroys Walter, and it destroys his life. But it does so in a way that really achieves this catharsis for us, this cleansing. And so you come out of this book not depressed because of what happens to Walter. You come out of this book with a new appreciation of what it means to be human, of what it means to relate to one's past in a responsible way, to relate to one's mistakes, and to take responsibility for one's life – which is very often something we try to avoid – and to appreciate how great and how wonderful life is if we only open our eyes, look at it, and engage with it.

Thank you for being here, and see you next time for a book you can't miss! — Andy

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Can we escape fate? Are we free to determine our own destiny, our own path through life? Or are we just pawns pushed around by forces we don't understand? Meet Walter Faber, a man who believes in logic, reason, and in engineering his own destiny. Max Frisch's Homo Faber is not just another novel; it's a modern reenactment of ancient tragedy where every rational choice leads to inevitable doom.

Hello, welcome back. My name is Andy, and today we are going to talk about a book that is immensely timely. It is a book that talks about tech growth, about technology, and the effects of technology on human beings, on the soul of human beings. But it does this in 1957, at a time when you would not expect this. So, it's an immensely prophetical book. It is also a book that really captures both the essence of ancient Greek tragedy and the essence of what technology does to us in a modern tale.

The book I'm talking about is Homo Faber – Homo Fay-ber, you would say perhaps in English – by Max Frisch. Max Frisch was a very influential German-language author, Swiss in fact, who mainly wrote in the '50s, '60s, up to the '70s. He was perhaps one of the biggest names of German literature throughout the '60s and is still taught in schools. His books are very important, very influential, very much talked about. And this book is one of his most famous. There was even a movie made from it, an American movie actually, with American actors – an international production, partly German, partly French, I think, partly American. It was released under the title "Voyager" in the US.

What Does "Homo Faber" Mean?

You know "homo" means human – Homo Sapiens, the wise human, which is our biological self-designation as a species. And "faber," the second part, is related to the word "to fabricate," "fabrication." "Fabric" means something that is artificially made. And so the term Homo Faber is sometimes used in anthropology, in history or in sociology, as the concept that human beings can be seen under this perspective of being toolmakers, tool-making animals. Homo Faber – fabricating animals.

Because other animals – this is at least the assumption there when we use the word – any other animals don't do that. It is not entirely true; crows are known to use tools, apes can use sticks to get bananas from the tree, so they are using tools. But undoubtedly, human beings have a much greater capacity at this. We can not only use tools that we find, but we can fabricate tools. We can fabricate very complex tools or tools for multiple steps that we are going to use in a very remote future. We can fabricate tools for other people; we can make factories which then will produce other things. So, we have multiple levels of tool use, and industrial societies are all based on this idea of fabricating things. And in this way, our whole modern world is a world of fabricating things that started, of course, with the Industrial Revolution back in England. We are defined as being Homo Faber, as being tool-making animals. You cannot think of human beings in any other way. Of course, we have many other properties, but if you look around your world, if you just look around your room, it's full of things that we have fabricated. The room itself, the house is fabricated. None of us live in caves that occur naturally. Behind me, I see a shelf of books; in front of me, the light that shines on me; there's a microphone; there's a camera. We are surrounded by our fabrications. We are tool-making animals, we are tool-using animals.

And so Frisch sees the essence of the human being as being Homo Faber. And in this tale – because this is not an anthropological or philosophical book, it's a tale – he begins with a particular person who represents this thing, this Homo Faber. Today, we would say Elon Musk represents the ideal Homo Faber: somebody whose whole life is dedicated to fabricating stuff, artificial stuff that is supposed to make life better or more interesting, or to eradicate disease or to bring us to Mars – all these big promises of industrialization. Zuckerberg from Facebook (Meta) is another Homo Faber. We are surrounded by them; there are many, many like that. Even Bill Gates, you can say, is a Homo Faber. Every industrial person, every software developer defines themselves, defines their life through their work with machines, with artificial things.

But it's important to see that although today we have all these big personalities that represent technology, and even the dangers of technology, in reality, this is a very old thing. Technology always existed. The ancient Greeks had technology: they had writing, they built temples, they had lots of artificial structures, they had weapons, military technology. And particularly, of course, throughout human history, all kinds of technologies for everyday life: we had mills, we had windmills, we have water mills; we have again, technologies for war, we have ships, we have technologies of discovery, we have books, we have libraries. These are all technologies.

And then there was this explosion of technology in the 18th, 19th century, what we call the Industrial Revolution. This was a big boost in technology and in the way we relate to technology. And this took away from us almost entirely our non-technological life that we had before. So after the Industrial Revolution, we are all married with technology, almost necessarily. It's almost inescapable. There are few individuals who try to live without technology; they go on their homestead and live without electricity and without modern conveniences. But these are so prominent because they are so rare that we watch videos about them and about their lives, and they are on YouTube – perversely again, using technology in order to show us how well they live without technology. And everybody else is just totally embedded in this technological world.

The Question Frisch Asks

Now the question is: what does this do to us? And this question Frisch asks in the '50s, the end of the '50s. And you have to see that this is a big time of engineering back then. In the '50s, after the Second World War, was the time when the West, especially Western Europe, was rebuilt. The United States didn't need rebuilding because they had not suffered destruction on their own soil. And they had the wealth that came from being the winners in the war. They had machines, they had all this technology that was developed throughout the war: primarily airplanes, landing strips, tanks, cars, vehicles of all sorts, food technologies. And now they took all these technologies and they applied them to everyday life.

And suddenly there was this sense of a new explosion, a new age of industrial revolution. You can see this in comics, in The Jetsons and other such visions of people living in this jet age. The jet age itself – jet engines are from this time, end of the Second World War. The first jet engines for airplanes, air travel, which made it possible to travel very quickly, much faster than ever before, and the decline of ocean voyages in favor of airplane voyages. And there was this feeling that we are going into a science fiction world. You had all these science fiction exhibitions, and science fiction itself took off in the '50s. And it was the big time of science fiction. If you look at all these writers – Bradbury, Clarke, Asimov – these all flourished throughout the '50s, '60s, which was the time when people were hungry for technology to change their lives for the better, to bring us into some utopian world. You had concepts of space stations back then, flying to Mars, having these big space stations like you see them in 2001: A Space Odyssey, the Kubrick movie.

And then, of course, you had the Apollo program, flying to the moon. And flying to the moon was the big thing. Kennedy at the beginning of the '60s saying that in 10 years we will land on the moon. And I make this promise, I make this plan, I commit us to landing on the moon by the end of the '60s. And they managed. They went to the moon, and they paid a ton of money for it. And they developed all the technologies that were necessary, almost out of nowhere. And within 10 years, a man was standing on the moon. So this is an explosion of technology. This is a belief in technology, the power of technology to make us better. Not only to bring us to the moon in a way like a transportation achievement, but to make our lives better, to make our relationship with the world better.

And this is also expressed then – and now we come back to the book – in terms of development help to other countries, which also started after the Second World War. The idea that rich countries help poorer countries, not by colonizing them, but by providing technical help. So you have UNESCO, you have the UN, and all kinds of UN development programs sending engineers from the West and tools from the West and machines from the West, from the rich countries to the developing countries, where they will be used to improve the lives of the people in these developing countries.

Meet Walter Faber: The Enlightenment Engineer

And this is exactly where we are in the book Homo Faber. We have this person, Walter Faber. That's his name. And he is a German (Swiss?) originally, living in New York now, and he's an engineer for the UN (UNESCO in the novel). He's traveling around, sent by his company who develops machines for the developing world. And he's sent around to various places in the developing world to install and oversee the operations of these machines. And so his job is very much the job of this enlightenment engineer, somebody like an Elon Musk, who is convinced that his work directly contributes to the bettering of humanity, to making the world better, to improving it, to saving lives. And he really believes in it. He has an almost religious belief in technology, in science, and he refuses to engage with anything else.

And now this is important because we come to this point where we realize very soon that Walter is not able any more to engage with human feelings that are outside of the sphere of technology. And again, much like today, we have these tech bros who seem to be stuck in their world of technology, unable to perceive any problems outside of their technology, who believe that everything can be solved through technology. And Walter Faber is like this. He's a person who cannot have a normal human relationship. He has a girlfriend, but he only meets this girlfriend in order to satisfy some social needs. He is not himself attached to this girlfriend, although she is to him. He is never afraid of the dark, for example. He says, "Why should I be afraid of the dark? There is nothing to be afraid of. Dark is just dark." And people who see ghosts in the dark, they have a problem; this is not rational. And when he sees something beautiful, a sunset, he says, "Okay, I know why the sunset is red — it’s because this is the CO2 from the air and the light is refracted and scattered in particular ways that make the sunset red. But there is nothing to it. There is nothing to admire. Why should I admire the CO2 content of the atmosphere and call it a beautiful sunset? What does it even mean, beauty? What is beauty?"

So Walter Faber goes through life in this way of detachment, of scientific detachment, of calculating everything, of knowing how things come about. In a way, he is a superior man in this tech bro way because he is superior to his own feelings. He is not a slave to passions. He is somebody who is cool, detached, superior to the world also, at least he thinks so, because he understands the world in a way others don't. When he's in an airplane — and the story begins in an airplane — and the airplane is shaking, others are perhaps afraid for their lives. He is not, because he knows how much load the airplane wings can take and when the shaking will become too much. And all this is rational thought that keeps him from being afraid.

The Unraveling Begins

And now for the rest of the book – and this is the nice thing about the story, and don't forget we are not talking about a non-fiction book, we are talking about a story, we are talking about a novel, and a very gripping novel, a beautiful novel – the novel begins with this weird man, Walter Faber, who is stuck in this way of seeing the world. And now the rest of the novel, the whole program of this book, is to deconstruct Walter Faber, to show him that the world is not as he thinks it is, to show him that a human being cannot live in this way, that we are not like that.

And Frisch goes on a confrontation course with this character Faber that he invented. He confronts him with all sorts of disasters, step by step, little by little, until the life of Walter Faber unravels and becomes worse and worse and becomes unbearable. And he reaches a point at which his world collapses.

The story begins in an airplane. Walter Faber is flying. And it is the genius of Frisch that, from the beginning, we see immediately how Walter Faber sees the world. He looks out of the window, he sees the moon, he sees the remote hills and mountains along the way out of his airplane window, down there in the hazy purple light of dusk. And instead of seeing all these things, he sees just hills, he sees colors, he sees the scattering, like I said, of the light. And he says, "Why are people so crazy about this? Why do people see things so poetically? You don't have to do this. You can just say, 'These are hills, this is an airplane, I'm looking out of the window.' And that's it."

And beside him sits a man, a Swiss businessman. And the two play chess after a while to pass the time. Remember, this was written in 1957, so probably it is 1955 or something in the story. So this is a time when airplanes could not yet fly non-stop across the continental United States. So they are landing at some point to refuel. And when they land there for refueling, the first unusual thing happens. Suddenly, Walter Faber has the feeling that he does not want to continue. He doesn't feel well. He feels dizzy, he feels sick. He goes in the bathroom, he waits it out, and he misses his plane.

He goes out and somehow he's relieved to have missed the plane. He doesn't understand why. He distrusts his feeling because, as we said, he tries not to have any feelings. So he feels bad about missing his plane, but he knows there's another plane, there's no problem, he will get the next plane. But then he meets a stewardess from his plane who is still looking for him. So he has not actually missed his plane. The stewardess grabs him and pulls him onto the plane, although he feels that he doesn't want to. He feels this resistance.

And what happens next, you can imagine: the plane crashes. And so this premonition was actually the premonition of this thing that was going to happen. And this upsets him because this whole thought is alien to him, because premonitions don't exist. Premonitions are not scientific. He shouldn't have them, and this shouldn't have happened. The whole crash shouldn't have happened, because airplanes are safe. But anyway, it happened. And the crash itself can be explained in mechanistic ways; it can be explained with science. So he's not unduly upset by the crash itself. He takes it cooler than the other people on the plane. Nobody is injured, there are no deaths. The crash is a very soft landing in the desert. So now they're sitting in the desert, everybody is fine. They get out of the airplane, they have drinks, they have food, and they spend a few days waiting to be rescued, while they are relatively comfortable there in the desert.

And this is used again as a way for Frisch to show how Walter Faber sees the world. After a while, they are rescued, they are brought to their destination. But then Walter Faber finds out that the person who was sitting with him in the plane, the Swiss businessman, is somebody who knows people from his past, people Walter Faber studied with in Zürich in Switzerland long ago when he was a student. And so they become friends, and they decide to continue together. And although Faber is always busy denying that this plane crash affects him emotionally, we see that he is shaken. He doesn't want to go home, he does not want to continue his normal life immediately. He does not want to go to his engineering job with the UN where he was originally going to. He needs a break.

And so he goes together with this man who was in the airplane, his seat neighbor. They go together, they rent a jeep, and they go to find the friend of Walter Faber's youth, Joachim, who now is in this Latin American country and has a farm somewhere. And so suddenly they find themselves – although Faber is always so rational and so calculative and so unemotional – suddenly he finds himself in a South American jungle on a jeep together with a person he barely knows, looking for a friend from his past. And this is the beginning of this unraveling. And they go and they find the friend from his past, but unfortunately, this friend has committed suicide on his farm. And this is another blow to Walter Faber. Suddenly it's not only seeing his friend from the past, but it is witnessing the death of his friend from the past and seeing that the world is not as he thought. The world is not this well-ordered thing where everybody goes on their orbits like planets. The world is a place that can be dangerous, that can be unpredictable. It's a place where you can die. And this is the next shock.

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This article is getting too long for an email, so I’ll stop here and we continue next time! If you want to know what happens next without waiting, you can watch the video linked at the top, which tells the whole story! :) — See you next week!

— Andy

Update: The second part of this article is now here:

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Hello, welcome back to our series on books you can't miss. And today, I really want to talk about this one: J.G. Ballard, Vermillion Sands.

This is one of the most remarkable books I've ever read. And I know that I say this about all the books we are discussing, but you know, all these books are remarkable. This is why I am making these posts and videos, right? I wouldn't make them for books that everybody knows or books that are not remarkable. So obviously, all these books are special.

But some books have a magic in them. The language reaches back to some mythical time, when words had this power to enchant people, to enchant the reader. And I feel that Ballard and some other writers can go back to that and give us this language that is more than just the description of plot.

You know, this is the opposite of Dan Brown, for example. Dan Brown — and I love Dan Brown, I’ve read all his novels, and I have read novels of his that kept me up all night because he has this trick of ending the chapters always when you want to know what happens in the next chapter. So I really enjoyed Dan Brown, but his language is there to serve the plot. The words are just there to create an image in your mind that helps you understand what's happening. And the whole interest in the book is in what's happening.

But with some books, like this one, this is not the case. These books are not about what is happening, although magical things happen in these books too. But a big part of the fun of reading these, perhaps the most fun in reading it, is in enjoying the language. And this, I feel, fits well with the previous video, which was about how to read and how to enjoy poetry. And some of you told me in the comments that it resonated with you and that you thought in similar ways about it. And I feel that you will also enjoy this if you were one of those who enjoy poetry because this is poetry. It is poetry. It is magic put in the service of a story.

But the story is itself a story about poetry and magic. It is not a realistic story. None of the things that happen in this book could happen. It is a kind of science fiction. It is a kind of fantasy world that half exists in some imagined future, or that could exist in some imagined future. And nobody knows exactly where it is or what it is exactly about, or when these things happen or how they work, because it is full of magic.

It is perhaps similar to some novels of magical realism, of Salman Rushdie for example, who has similar things happening in his novels. But Ballard is still stranger than Rushdie. And the magical pieces in Rushdie are more there to provide the plot points where the real people go through, while here the whole world, this weird world, is actually the protagonist.

This is a collection of stories, and the only thing that connects these stories is the words. And therefore, it's right that the book is called Vermilion Sands because these vermilion sands are what connects everything in the story. And vermilion, of course, is the shade of red. And so these are red sands. And I always thought of it as describing some future version of Mars, or perhaps some imagined, some magical version of Mars. Perhaps like Bradbury also does it, you know, Ray Bradbury in his Martian stories. He also has a magical version of Mars which contains canals and water and ancient civilizations of Martians who still walk around as shades and have an influence on the landscape and communicate with the astronauts who go there. And it's all steeped in poetical and allegorical motifs.

And something similar is happening here. You have this, as I imagine it, (although he never talks about Mars) Martian background, a world of red sand. But it's a world in which the red sand has become normal. It has become something like a seaside resort place where people go to relax, where people go to have a good time. And it very much resembles what I imagine would be going to the sea in England, where you have things like these little cabins that you can rent, these wooden cabins where you can store your stuff, or perhaps you can, you can put, uh, something in there, some chairs, or you can sit comfortably. It has all these, you know, beach chairs and these things. It has bars on the beach. But the beach borders a sea of sand.

And not only this, but it also has other incredible things. It has scorpions that have diamonds on them, they have precious jewels on them. And this is such a powerful image, these little scorpions with the jewels on them, because it gives you this magical, almost 'yung' you could say, connection between the danger of the scorpion, who is going to bite you if you come too close, and the attraction of the jewel that is incorporated in this scorpion.

Then we have plants that sing. They sing so well that they can sing operas, and they are inspired by other singers. And so a singer can sing, and the plant will sing with them. And there are psychotropic clothes, where the clothes react to the emotions of the wearer. And so you're wearing these clothes, and if your emotions are right, and if the clothes you are wearing feel relaxed and in harmony with the wearer, then they look brilliant and beautiful. But if you have negative thoughts, if you are anxious and you wear the clothes, then they might fall off you, they might look wilted, or they might even strangle you.

And this magical world is so convincing and it is so real. And throughout the book, it undergoes a transformation. This is the whole history of this holiday resort of Vermillion Sands. And it begins at its height, where everybody goes to Vermillion Sands because it's the 'in' thing. It's where you go to have a good time. It's where you go to have holiday. It's full of these bars where the rich people go, but it's still accessible in the beginning. Normal people also go there and try to make money by catering to the rich.

And then it becomes more and more crazy. It becomes more and more exclusive, and it becomes more and more decadent. And over the course of the book, which is all short stories (this, there's no overarching story, and there is no cast of characters that is constant, it's all different stories), but the overarching thing is a development of Vermillion Sands, of this resort. And so over time, it becomes more exclusive, but they're more decadent and more expensive. And then people start leaving, and things are starting to fall apart.

And then towards the end of the book, it gets this air of an abandoned fairground, which is also again a magical environment. Bradbury has also used that in his stories, the idea of this fairground that still contains the ghosts of the people having fun, and somehow their shadows are still there, but in reality, they have departed. And now everything is falling apart, and it's the sadness of the abandoned fairground. And this is what happens to Vermillion Sands too. So everybody goes, everybody leaves, and there is nothing left there anymore. And only a few people are left, only a few people are there, often crazies, loners, people who are left behind when the party has already moved on to some other place. They are left behind in this broken place, and they still create their own stories in this place, which now are stories of abandonment and of decay.

And so this is a beautiful book. It's a beautiful book because it's not only beautiful in its language, it is wonderful in its images, and it is also, in this overarching sense, it is a history of a place that begins as a young and strong and crazy place of fun and ends as a place of sadness, in a kind of walk through the seasons where you start in spring and you go through the summer, and in the end, you have the fall, where the fall, the word 'fall' itself, right, indicates a fall, the falling of leaves, the falling of the season, and the decay that comes with it. And so in the end, you have fall and winter in this book, and Vermillion Sands is abandoned.

But we have its stories in this book. They are here forever, and we can always access them.

And we will start with the first story. I will just read you two pages, the first two pages from the first story. It is not enough to get an idea of what the story is about, and although the story is beautiful, it is wonderful as a story, and the whole book is wonderful as a book, as I said. We will just be able to hear a little bit of this magic of language in this. And I want you to relax and not to think too much about it. Like I said in this poetry video, it's not about really understanding what's happening. It's about closing your eyes and living there, going to Vermillion Sands, being part of it, seeing it in front of your eye. And I will also put up some pictures that I think fit it. So let's enjoy these two pages together. The story is called "The Cloud Sculptors of Coral D".

All summer the cloud sculptors would come from Vermillion Sands and sail their painted gliders above the coral towers that rose like wide pagodas beside the highway to Lagoon West.

The tallest of the towers was Coral D, and here the rising air above the sand reefs was topped by swanlike clumps of fair weather cumulus. Lifted on the shoulders of the air above the crown of Coral D, we would carve seahorses and unicorns, the portraits of presidents and film stars, lizards and exotic birds.

As the crowd watched from their cars, a cool rain would fall onto the dusty roofs, weeping from the sculptured clouds as they sailed across the desert floor towards the sun.

Of all the cloud sculptures we were to carve, the strangest were the portraits of Leonora Chanel. As I look back to that afternoon last summer when she first came in her wide limousine to watch the cloud sculptures of Coral D, I know we barely realized how seriously this beautiful but insane woman regarded the sculptures floating above her in that calm sky. Later her portraits, carved in the whirlwind, were to weep their storm rain upon the corpses of their sculptors.

I had arrived in Vermillion Sands three months earlier. A retired pilot, I was painfully coming to terms with a broken leg and the prospect of never flying again. Driving into the desert one day, I stopped near the coral towers on the highway to Lagoon West. As I gazed at these immense pagodas stranded on the floor of this fossil sea, I heard music coming from a sand reef 200 yards away.

Swinging on my crutches across the sliding sand, I found a shallow basin among the dunes where sonic statues had run to seed beside a ruined studio. The owner had gone, abandoning the hangar-like buildings to the sand-rays and the desert, and on some half-formed impulse I began to drive out each afternoon. From the lathes and joists left behind, I built my first giant kites, and later gliders with cockpits. Tethered by their cables, they would hang above me in the afternoon air like amiable ciphers.

One evening, as I wound the gliders down onto the winch, a sudden gale rose over the crest of Coral D. While I grappled with a whirling handle, trying to anchor my crutches in the sand, two figures approached across the desert floor.

One was a small hunchback with a child's overlit eyes and a deformed jaw twisted like an anchor barb to one side. He scuttled over to the winch and wound the tattered gliders towards the ground, his powerful shoulders pushing me aside. He helped me onto my crutch and peered into the hangar. Here my most ambitious glider to date, no longer a kite but a sail-plane with elevators and control lines, was taking shape on the bench.

He spread a large hand over his chest. "Petit Manuel. Acrobat and weightlifter. Nolan!" he bellowed. "Look at this!"

His companion was squatting by the sonic statues, twisting their helixes so that their voices became more resonant.

"Nolan's an artist," the hunchback confided to me. "He'll build you gliders like condors."

The tall man was wandering among the gliders, touching their wings with his sculptor's hands. His morose eyes were set in a face like a board box's. He glanced at the plaster on my leg and my faded flying jacket, and gestured at the gliders.

"You have given cockpits to them, Major?" The remark contained a complete understanding of my motives. He pointed to the coral towers rising above us into the evening sky. "With silver iodide we could carve the clouds."

The hunchback nodded encouragingly to me, his eyes lit by an astronomy of dreams.

I don't know what you think, but for me, these are two of the most beautiful pages of text, of prose, I've ever read. And it goes on like that. It never lets you down, this book. You read, and every page is a discovery of a new marvel, of a new wondrous world full of magic and full of beauty and full of tragedy also.

It is always the danger that is close to the beauty. Here we have the beautiful clouds and the sculptures made of clouds, but there's also this crazy woman. We know from the beginning that somebody will die, and the clouds will rain upon the corpses of the sculptors. We know that these airplanes are dangerous, they are homemade. We know later that together with the jewels come the scorpions on which the jewels are fastened. There's always this sense of danger being ever-present around the corner while people have fun. There is fun, but there's also this danger.

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The author himself, J.G. Ballard, writes in the beginning, in the preface to the book:

"Vermillion Sands is my guess at what the future will actually be like. It is a curious paradox that almost all science fiction, however far removed in time and space, is really about the present day. Very few attempts have been made to visualize a unique and self-contained future that offers no warnings to us. Perhaps because of this cautionary tone, so many of science fiction's notional futures are zones of unrelieved grimness. Even its heavens are like other people's hells. By contrast, Vermillion Sands is a place where I would be happy to live."

So this is all I have for today. I don't want to talk much more after these beautiful sentences by J.G. Ballard. And I encourage you to get this book, read it. It will change how you think about writing. It will change how you think about books. It will accompany you for years, like it does me. I've carried this book around for three decades now, from Germany to Hong Kong, and I've always had it with me. And I hope that it will also become your friend and companion in a similar way.

Tell me in the comments what you thought about it. I'm curious if it resonates with you in the same way like it does to me, or if it left you indifferent, or if you hated it.

See you next time.

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Look at this one. These are a few lines from a love poem by Pablo Neruda, but don't worry about that. Let's just read it slowly, without trying to understand it. Just listen to the words.

Here I love you.
In the dark pines the wind disentangles itself.
The moon glows like phosphorous on the vagrant waters.
Days, all one kind, go chasing each other.

The snow unfurls in dancing figures.
A silver gull slips down from the west.
Sometimes a sail. High, high stars.
Oh the black cross of a ship.
Alone.

Sometimes I get up early and even my soul is wet.
Far away the sea sounds and resounds.
This is a port.

Let the words echo for a little while more. Keep them in your mind, like the aftertaste of something nice, a sweet, a fruit, or a drink that you like. Perhaps you already found this enjoyable. Or perhaps you are saying, like my daughter would, “I don't understand this.” But have patience for a moment longer.

Rational understanding is not the only way to relate to the world and to receive input from it. The way we live now, with all the media that bombard us with content all day, we are very much trained to immediately look for the message, the “point” that is made, the one bit of information that we need to extract and use.

But for much of human history, this was not the case. Much of what we see and hear today is words — information that is naked, removed from its context, ready to be processed and consumed. But imagine how it was in old times, before most people could read. If you were a farmer, you would go out to your fields in the morning. You would work there in silence, listening to the wind, the birds, the insects. You would see the sky, the trees, the mountains, your crop.

All these things would actually give you information, but of a much different kind: it would be indirect, hidden within the world, in need of being decoded. The wind and the colours on the mountains would tell you how far the season has come. The clouds would tell you of the weather. The insect buzz would give you information on how healthy the environment was, on how well your field is being pollinated. The birds, their cries, the species you can see and hear, their flight patterns in the sky — all these things would tell you more about the world around you, about how the year is going along, about when to expect your harvest and whether it will be a good one or not. You would not have a calendar or a phone app to tell you the time or the season. You would have to understand your place within your world by yourself, by using these cues, by feeling the passage of time, the changing of nature, by reading it off a myriad little observations.

But it wouldn't be “reading,” really. Again, modern language fails us. You don’t “read” the book of nature. You “feel” it. It's not a process of decoding a linear flow of information, like the one you’re listening to now, but of taking in a whole picture at once, the whole state of the world that surrounds you in one particular moment, and letting your senses, your subconscious, your instincts take over and do the understanding. The result of this process will be a feeling, not a piece of hard information. It will be a feeling situated inside a particular context: YOUR feeling, from YOUR field, about YOUR future plans and YOUR concerns, based on YOUR experience and YOUR past. You won't get context-free advice in this way, and you wouldn't want any. You want your understanding of the seasons and the harvest to apply to YOU and YOUR field, YOUR family, YOUR world — you'd have no use for an abstract list, for information that is not tailored to YOU and YOUR life at this exact place and this exact moment in time.

What does all this have to do with poetry?

The same sense of feeling something happening that the farmer has, is exactly what allows us to feel poetry and art. Think of an abstract painting like this here:

You cannot “understand” that logically. And even if you could, if you dissected the way it is painted, the brushes used and so on, you would still miss the point. You are not supposed to analyse it. You must look at it like the farmer looking at the sky — and let it speak to you in its own language, in its own way.

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I think of it as tasting the words of a poem, or the image on a painting. When you experience a bite of food, you can do it in two ways: You can either ask yourself: “How was this made?” and try to analyse the ingredients, guess at the way of preparation and how the cook achieved the particular effects that make this food special. Or you can just close your eyes and enjoy it without asking anything at all. The second way is not worse than the first — arguably, it’s better, bringing about more enjoyment in the moment, not less.

Let's look at another poem. This one is by Paul Celan, who is generally considered “difficult” to understand. He is, but the whole point is not to try and understand him. Instead, try to get into a dreamy state where you listen and see the images pass by your mind, without trying to make rational sense of them. Here we go:

The stone.
The stone in the air, which I followed.
Your eye, as blind as the stone.

We were
hands,
we baled the darkness empty, we found
the word that ascended summer:
flower.

Flower - a blind man's word.
Your eye and mine:
they see
to water.

Growth.
Heart wall upon heart wall
adds petals to it.

One more word like this word, and the hammers
will swing over open ground.

I know that some will say that you do need to understand these poems. They are coded messages about the Holocaust perhaps, or about other events in the poet’s life, and not trying to understand them devalues the poetry. People who say this usually work at literature departments of universities and make a living off explaining poems to others. And I won’t entirely disagree. There may be multiple layers in a poem, some of them purely rooted in the image, some of them in the sound of the words, and some again in their meaning. That’s fine, and if you can get enjoyment or insights from understanding the hidden meaning, then go ahead.

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Here I'm not talking to those who are already experts in reading and understanding poetry. For the person who just encounters a poem like that for the first time, it would be bad advice to try and understand every word and every hidden meaning in it. If the poet wanted us to do this, they would have written the meaning out, rather than those images and words that they used. Some people do that, and what they produce is called an essay or a pamphlet, or an instruction manual. But not a poem. The mystery of the language, the richness of the images, the hidden meanings — these are all necessary parts of poems of this kind, and it would be a waste of the poet's effort to strip his work of them in order to just “understand” them.

Let me show you another one, this one from a Greek poet I love, Yannis Ritsos. As with all these poets, translations often ruin the work, but we cannot do much about that. Not reading Neruda, Celan or Ritsos at all, because they don't write English, would certainly be worse than to read them in translation.

So, here we go:

Forgetfulness

The house with the wooden staircase and the orange trees,
facing the azure, big mountain. The countryside gently
walks around inside the rooms. The two mirrors
reflect the singing of the birds. Only
that in the middle of the bedroom lie abandoned
two fabric slippers for the old. So,
when the night falls, the dead visit the house again
in order to collect something of theirs left behind,
a scarf, a vest, a shirt, two socks
and then, possibly due to short memory or carelessness,
they take along something of ours. Next day,
the postman passes our door without stopping.

Listen to these words, these images, listen to their taste:

“The countryside gently walks around inside the rooms.”
“The two mirrors reflect the singing of birds.”

Why are the dead careless? Why have they left behind a scarf, a vest, a shirt, two socks? Nobody knows. But it doesn't matter. What matters is the sound of the words, the echo of the images in one's mind, the nameless things that one can take away from it all.

Some kinds of poetry speak to us as the sky and the hills spoke to the farmer of old. There is nothing to understand and everything to just stop, and be silent, and listen to.

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Today, we’re coming to the third part of our reading of Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha, the life story of a young Hindu man at the time of the Buddha.

In the beginning of the book, discussed in the first post in this series, young Siddhartha leaves his home village together with his friend Govinda, and they join a group of ascetics who live in the wilderness. They stay with them for three years, but slowly Siddhartha realises that the whole wisdom of life cannot consist in only running away from it and hiding among wild animals. So he and Govinda travel on, following rumours of the appearance of the Buddha, a wise man who has found the secret to end all suffering. They meet the Buddha, and Govinda becomes a Buddhist monk, but Siddhartha has his doubts: of all the monks in the Buddha’s garden, only one seems to him to be truly enlightened: the Buddha himself. And he is also the only one achieved his enlightenment without following the Buddhist teachings. Siddhartha questions whether enlightenment can be taught at all. Perhaps one needs to arrive at it through the process of experiencing life itself. He parts from the Buddha and from Govinda and makes his way towards the next town.

There he meets Kamala, a thoughtful courtesan who likes him and helps him get a job as a merchant’s assistant. In time, Siddhartha’s three special abilities (“I can think. I can wait. I can fast”) prove to be a key for success, not only in the wilderness but also in the world of commerce. Siddhartha makes a fortune without ever really wanting to, and feels increasingly trapped in his life of luxury, while he feels that his dream of the enlightenment keeps receding into the distance. One day, he cannot bear his existence as a man of the world any more. In the night he flees from his life. Without saying farewell, he walks out of his garden, leaving it all behind forever.

In the same hour of the night, Siddhartha left his garden, left the city, and never came back. ...

When she [Kamala] received the first news of Siddhartha’s disappearance, she went to the window, where she held a rare singing bird captive in a golden cage. She opened the door of the cage, took the bird out and let it fly. For a long time, she gazed after it, the flying bird. From this day on, she received no more visitors and kept her house locked. But after some time, she became aware that she was pregnant from the last time she was together with Siddhartha.

By the River

Siddhartha walked through the forest, was already far from the city, and knew nothing but that one thing, that there was no going back for him, that this life, as he had lived it for many years until now, was over and done away with, and that he had tasted all of it, sucked everything out of it until he was disgusted with it. Dead was the singing bird he had dreamt of. Dead was the bird in his heart. Deeply, he had been entangled in Sansara, he had sucked up disgust and death from all sides into his body, like a sponge sucks up water until it is full. And full he was, full of the feeling of been sick of it, full of misery, full of death, there was nothing left in this world which could have attracted him, given him joy, given him comfort.

So Siddhartha stumbles into the forest, not knowing where he’s going or why. He crosses the forest and arrives at a river, and there he suddenly stops. He recognises the river he crossed as a young man, when he first came to this city. Then he knew where he was going — but where is he going now?

... Whatever for should he walk on, wherever to, to which goal? No, there were no more goals, there was nothing left but the deep, painful yearning to shake off this whole desolate dream, to spit out this stale wine, to put an end to this miserable and shameful life.

A hang bent over the bank of the river, a coconut-tree; Siddhartha leaned against its trunk with his shoulder, embraced the trunk with one arm, and looked down into the green water, which ran and ran under him, looked down and found himself to be entirely filled with the wish to let go and to drown in these waters. A frightening emptiness was reflected back at him by the water, answering to the terrible emptiness in his soul. Yes, he had reached the end. There was nothing left for him, except to annihilate himself, except to smash the failure into which he had shaped his life, to throw it away, before the feet of mockingly laughing gods. This was the great vomiting he had longed for: death, the smashing to bits of the form he hated! Let him be food for fishes, this dog Siddhartha, this lunatic, this depraved and rotten body, this weakened and abused soul! Let him be food for fishes and crocodiles, let him be chopped to bits by the daemons!

With a distorted face, he stared into the water, saw the reflection of his face and spit at it. In deep tiredness, he took his arm away from the trunk of the tree and turned a bit, in order to let himself fall straight down, in order to finally drown. With his eyes closed, he slipped towards death.

But at this last moment, the memory of a long-forgotten word comes back to him, a syllable “which is the beginning and the end of all prayers of the Brahmans, the holy ‘Om’...” Siddhartha suddenly realises what he was about to do.

Om! he spoke to himself: Om! and again he knew about Brahman, knew about the indestructibility of life, knew about all that is divine, which he had forgotten.

But this was only a moment, flash. By the foot of the coconut-tree, Siddhartha collapsed, struck down by tiredness, mumbling Om, placed his head on the root of the tree and fell into a deep sleep.

When he awakes, hours later, a Buddhist monk is sitting by his side, guarding his sleep. The monk explains that there are wild animals in this forest, and since he was passing through, he thought it his duty to stop and stay with the sleeping man who a while. The monk does not recognise the man in the rich clothes, but Siddhartha looks into the face of his childhood friend and immediately knows that it was Govinda who, once more, stayed by his side when Siddhartha needed him. Siddhartha tells him who he is.

“And now, Siddhartha, what are you now?”

“I don’t know it, I don’t know it just like you. I’m travelling. I was a rich man and am no rich man any more, and what I’ll be tomorrow, I don’t know.”

“You’ve lost your riches?”

“I’ve lost them or they me. They somehow happened to slip away from me. The wheel of physical manifestations is turning quickly, Govinda. Where is Siddhartha the Brahman? Where is Siddhartha the Samana? Where is Siddhartha the rich man? Non-eternal things change quickly, Govinda, you know it.”

Govinda looked at the friend of his youth for a long time, with doubt in his eyes. After that, he gave him the salutation which one would use on a gentleman and went on his way.

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The Ferryman

Siddhartha is refreshed from his sleep and the meeting with his friend. It seems to him that the river has taken away the old Siddhartha and left him empty again, ready to find a new life. And Siddhartha knows that this life will begin right here:

By this river I want to stay, thought Siddhartha, it is the same which I have crossed a long time ago on my way to the childlike people, a friendly ferryman had guided me then, he is the one I want to go to, starting out from his hut, my path had led me at that time into a new life, which had now grown old and is dead — my present path, my present new life, shall also take its start there!

Siddhartha meets the old ferryman, the same one who had brought him over the river the first time, when Siddhartha had just come from the hermits and the meeting with the Buddha. The ferryman remembers him, and offers Siddhartha a place to stay for a while. Siddhartha learns to work the ferry, he helps the old ferryman, Vasudeva, with his small rice plot, they cook and eat and live together. And one day, they talk about the river.

“Did you,” so [Siddhartha] asked [Vasudeva] at one time, “did you too learn that secret from the river: that there is no time?”

Vasudeva’s face was filled with a bright smile.

“Yes, Siddhartha,” he spoke. “It is this what you mean, isn’t it: that the river is everywhere at once, at the source and at the mouth, at the waterfall, at the ferry, at the rapids, in the sea, in the mountains, everywhere at once, and that there is only the present time for it, not the shadow of the past, not the shadow of the future?”

“This it is,” said Siddhartha. “And when I had learned it, I looked at my life, and it was also a river, and the boy Siddhartha was only separated from the man Siddhartha and from the old man Siddhartha by a shadow, not by something real. Also, Siddhartha’s previous births were no past, and his death and his return to Brahma was no future. Nothing was, nothing will be; everything is, everything has existence and is present.”

Siddhartha spoke with ecstasy; deeply, this enlightenment had delighted him. Oh, was not all suffering time, were not all forms of tormenting oneself and being afraid time, was not everything hard, everything hostile in the world gone and overcome as soon as one had overcome time, as soon as time would have been put out of existence by one’s thoughts? In ecstatic delight, he had spoken, but Vasudeva smiled at him brightly and nodded in confirmation; silently he nodded, brushed his hand over Siddhartha’s shoulder, turned back to his work.

And once again, when the river had just increased its flow in the rainy season and made a powerful noise, then said Siddhartha: “Isn’t it so, oh friend, the river has many voices, very many voices? Hasn’t it the voice of a king, and of a warrior, and of a bull, and of a bird of the night, and of a woman giving birth, and of a sighing man, and a thousand other voices more?”

“So it is,” Vasudeva nodded, “all voices of the creatures are in its voice.”

“And do you know,” Siddhartha continued, “what word it speaks, when you succeed in hearing all of its ten thousand voices at once?”

Happily, Vasudeva’s face was smiling, he bent over to Siddhartha and spoke the holy Om into his ear. And this had been the very thing which Siddhartha had also been hearing.

One day, news from the Buddha’s impending death come to the town and many people, monks as well as laymen, travel to have one last look at the holy man. They all cross the river at the ferry, and it is here that Siddhartha meets Kamala again, who is now travelling with her boy, Siddhartha’s son. But Kamala has been bitten by a snake on the way, and in the night she dies.

Siddhartha now is alone with his son, a new role again, for which he is not prepared. The boy grows up unhappy with the two old men by the river, but Siddhartha does not know what to do about it. He is afraid to bring the boy back to the city, afraid of what might become of him and of the young man among the temptations that he, Siddhartha, had finally managed to escape. But he also recognises that he cannot keep him forever by the ferry.

Their unhappy relationship ends when the boy runs away. Siddhartha tries to follow him for a while, but the boy is far ahead and Siddhartha knows that he won’t be able to find him. He finally gives up the chase, lets the boy go, and returns to the ferryman’s hut, to Vasudeva, and to the river.

A long time later, the two men sit quietly by the river. Vasudeva is old now, he does not row the ferry any more. But they still sit together by the river and listen to it.

They listened. Softly sounded the river, singing in many voices. Siddhartha looked into the water, and images appeared to him in the moving water: his father appeared, lonely, mourning for his son; he himself appeared, lonely, he also being tied with the bondage of yearning to his distant son; his son appeared, lonely as well, the boy, greedily rushing along the burning course of his young wishes, each one heading for his goal, each one obsessed by the goal, each one suffering. The river sang with a voice of suffering, longingly it sang, longingly, it flowed towards its goal, lamentingly its voice sang.

“Do you hear?” Vasudeva’s mute gaze asked. Siddhartha nodded.

“Listen better!” Vasudeva whispered.

Siddhartha made an effort to listen better. The image of his father, his own image, the image of his son merged, Kamala’s image also appeared and was dispersed, and the image of Govinda, and other images, and they merged with each other, turned all into the river, headed all, being the river, for the goal, longing, desiring, suffering, and the river’s voice sounded full of yearning, full of burning woe, full of unsatisfiable desire. For the goal, the river was heading, Siddhartha saw it hurrying, the river, which consisted of him and his loved ones and of all people he had ever seen, all of these waves and waters were hurrying, suffering, towards goals, many goals, the waterfall, the lake, the rapids, the sea, and all goals were reached, and every goal was followed by a new one, and the water turned into vapour and rose to the sky, turned into rain and poured down from the sky, turned into a source, a stream, a river, headed forward once again, flowed on once again. But the longing voice had changed. It still resounded, full of suffering, searching, but other voices joined it, voices of joy and of suffering, good and bad voices, laughing and sad ones, a hundred voices, a thousand voices.

... Already, he could no longer tell the many voices apart, not the happy ones from the weeping ones, not the ones of children from those of men, they all belonged together, the lamentation of yearning and the laughter of the knowledgeable one, the scream of rage and the moaning of the dying ones, everything was one, everything was intertwined and connected, entangled a thousand times. And everything together, all voices, all goals, all yearning, all suffering, all pleasure, all that was good and evil, all of this together was the world. All of it together was the flow of events, was the music of life. And when Siddhartha was listening attentively to this river, this song of a thousand voices, when he neither listened to the suffering nor the laughter, when he did not tie his soul to any particular voice and submerged his self into it, but when he heard them all, perceived the whole, the oneness, then the great song of the thousand voices consisted of a single word, which was Om: the perfection.

Govinda

Vasudeva dies, and Siddhartha is now the ferryman by the river. And one day, monks in yellow robes pass through the forest, and Siddhartha once again recognises his friend Govinda, now also an old man. Govinda stays for the night in the ferryman’s hut, and the two friends talk. Govinda has not found the peace he was looking for, but he can see that Siddhartha has.

“Siddhartha,” he spoke, “we have become old men. It is unlikely for one of us to see the other again in this incarnation. I see, beloved, that you have found peace. I confess that I haven’t found it. Tell me, oh honourable one, one more word, give me something on my way which I can grasp, which I can understand! Give me something to be with me on my path. It is often hard, my path, often dark, Siddhartha.”

Siddhartha said nothing and looked at him with the ever unchanged, quiet smile. Govinda stared at his face, with fear, with yearning, suffering, and the eternal search was visible in his look, eternal not-finding. ...

“Bend down to me!” he whispered quietly in Govinda’s ear. “Bend down to me! Like this, even closer! Very close! Kiss my forehead, Govinda!”

But while Govinda with astonishment, and yet drawn by great love and expectation, obeyed his words, bent down closely to him and touched his forehead with his lips, something miraculous happened to him. ...

He no longer saw the face of his friend Siddhartha, instead he saw other faces, many, a long sequence, a flowing river of faces, of hundreds, of thousands, which all came and disappeared, and yet all seemed to be there simultaneously, which all constantly changed and renewed themselves, and which were still all Siddhartha. He saw the face of a fish, a carp, with an infinitely painfully opened mouth, the face of a dying fish, with fading eyes — he saw the face of a new-born child, red and full of wrinkles, distorted from crying — he saw the face of a murderer, he saw him plunging a knife into the body of another person — he saw, in the same second, this criminal in bondage, kneeling and his head being chopped off by the executioner with one blow of his sword — he saw the bodies of men and women, naked in positions and cramps of frenzied love — he saw corpses stretched out, motionless, cold, void — he saw the heads of animals, of boars, of crocodiles, of elephants, of bulls, of birds — he saw gods, saw Krishna, saw Agni—he saw all of these figures and faces in a thousand relationships with one another, each one helping the other, loving it, hating it, destroying it, giving re-birth to it, each one was a will to die, a passionately painful confession of transitoriness, and yet none of them died, each one only transformed, was always reborn, received evermore a new face, without any time having passed between the one and the other face—and all of these figures and faces rested, flowed, generated themselves, floated along and merged with each other, and they were all constantly covered by something thin, without individuality of its own, but yet existing, like a thin glass or ice, like a transparent skin, a shell or mold or mask of water, and this mask was smiling, and this mask was Siddhartha’s smiling face, which he, Govinda, in this very same moment touched with his lips. And, Govinda saw it like this, this smile of the mask, this smile of oneness above the flowing forms, this smile of simultaneousness above the thousand births and deaths, this smile of Siddhartha was precisely the same, was precisely of the same kind as the quiet, delicate, impenetrable, perhaps benevolent, perhaps mocking, wise, thousand-fold smile of Gotama, the Buddha, as he had seen it himself with great respect a hundred times. Like this, Govinda knew, the perfected ones are smiling.

Not knowing any more whether time existed, whether the vision had lasted a second or a hundred years, not knowing any more whether there existed a Siddhartha, a Gotama, a me and a you, feeling in his innermost self as if he had been wounded by a divine arrow, the injury of which tasted sweet, being enchanted and dissolved in his innermost self, Govinda still stood for a little while bent over Siddhartha’s quiet face, which he had just kissed, which had just been the scene of all manifestations, all transformations, all existence. The face was unchanged, after under its surface the depth of the thousand-foldness had closed up again, he smiled silently, smiled quietly and softly, perhaps very benevolently, perhaps very mockingly, precisely as he used to smile, the exalted one.

Deeply, Govinda bowed; tears he knew nothing of, ran down his old face; like a fire burned the feeling of the most intimate love, the humblest veneration in his heart. Deeply, he bowed, touching the ground, before him who was sitting motionlessly, whose smile reminded him of everything he had ever loved in his life, what had ever been valuable and holy to him in his life.

Thus ends the tale of Siddhartha, the high-caste priest’s son who became a hermit, then a lover, a businessman, a rich man, a sick man, a ferryman, and who finally found his enlightenment in listening to a river. He found it not by following any teachings, and he found it only after he had stopped looking for it.

If you’d like to watch this as a video, here is the YouTube version of this post!

Leave a comment

If you’d like to read Siddhartha yourself, you can find it here in an older English translation (the one quoted in this article):

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2500/2500-h/2500-h.htm

And here in the original German:

https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/2499/pg2499.html

See you next week!

— Andy

At the same time, news of the Buddha reach them. They leave the ascetics to go and find the Buddha and to hear his teaching. When they find the wise man, Govinda, Siddhartha’s friend, decides to stay as a monk in the Buddha’s community. Siddhartha is still not convinced. In a meeting between the young man and the old teacher, Siddhartha makes the point that the Buddha himself clearly did not become enlightened by following Buddhist teachings. His enlightenment came as a consequence of the life he had led, his experiences and his thoughts about the world. It was lived rather than learned wisdom that made the Buddha himself — and this is also the path that Siddhartha wishes to follow. He leaves his friend with the other monks and leaves, now alone, to find his destiny:

Out of this moment, when the world melted away all around him, when he stood alone like a star in the sky, out of this moment of a cold and despair, Siddhartha emerged, more a self than before, more firmly concentrated. He felt: This had been the last tremor of the awakening, the last struggle of this birth. And it was not long until he walked again in long strides, started to proceed swiftly and impatiently, heading no longer for home, no longer to his father, no longer back.

…And here’s the same post as a video with all the images and dozens more! Read on, the story continues below!

Kamala

Siddhartha now wanders alone along the dusty road, without a goal, without knowing where he’s going, except that he won’t return back. Not to his family, not to his friend, not to the teachings of the Buddha. Whatever it is he’s looking for, it will be something new, an experience he has not yet had.

Siddhartha learned something new on every step of his path, for the world was transformed, and his heart was enchanted. He saw the sun rising over the mountains with their forests and setting over the distant beach with its palm-trees. At night, he saw the stars in the sky in their fixed positions and the crescent of the moon floating like a boat in the blue. He saw trees, stars, animals, clouds, rainbows, rocks, herbs, flowers, stream and river, the glistening dew in the bushes in the morning, distant high mountains which were blue and pale, birds sang and bees, wind silverishly blew through the rice-field. All of this, a thousand-fold and colourful, had always been there, always the sun and the moon had shone, always rivers had roared and bees had buzzed, but in former times all of this had been nothing more to Siddhartha than a fleeting, deceptive veil before his eyes, looked upon in distrust, destined to be penetrated and destroyed by thought, since it was not the essential existence, since this essence lay beyond, on the other side of, the visible. But now, his liberated eyes stayed on this side, he saw and became aware of the visible, sought to be at home in this world, did not search for the true essence, did not aim at a world beyond. Beautiful was this world, looking at it thus, without searching, thus simply, thus childlike. Beautiful were the moon and the stars, beautiful was the stream and the banks, the forest and the rocks, the goat and the gold-beetle, the flower and the butterfly. Beautiful and lovely it was, thus to walk through the world, thus childlike, thus awoken, thus open to what is near, thus without distrust.

We see here Siddhartha’s journey taking shape. The first step was leaving his father’s home and the certainties of his pre-planned, safe life. The second step was the freeing of his mind from the body, the ability to control his body and to make it follow his will. And now, in this third stage, he realises that the world out there is not just illusion, not random images that should be transcended, but something that might contain inherent meaning, a message, a secret. And he perceives himself as part of that world that waits to be explored and understood:

All of this had always existed, and he had not seen it; he had not been with it. Now he was with it, he was part of it. Light and shadow ran through his eyes, stars and moon ran through his heart.

This is a quintessentially romantic way of viewing the world: everything that exists is a cipher, a code, a secret pointer to something else, to a realisation that transcends words. The German poet Novalis (1772-1801) gave this sentiment its perhaps clearest expression:

Mankind travels along manifold pathways. He who pursues and compares them will perceive the emergence of certain strange figures; figures that appear to be inscribed in that massive tome composed in cipher that one everywhere and in everything beholds: on wings, eggshells, in clouds, in the snow, in crystalline and stone formations, in freezing waters, on the skins and in the bowels of mountain-ranges, of plants, beasts, people, in the stars of the heavens, in contiguous and expansive panes of pitch and glass, in the clustering of iron filings around the magnet, in the extraordinary ebb and flow of contingency. In these one may glimpse an intimation of the key to this wondrous text, its very grammar-book; and yet the intimation refuses to accommodate itself to fixed forms and appears to begrudge any translation into a higher key... (Novalis, The Novices at Sais, translation by Douglas Robertson, used with permission.)

Hesse was himself a late romantic, just like Novalis. And his Siddhartha is driven by the same hunger for meaning, the same thirst for a life that is more than what it appears to be.

One night, Siddhartha sleeps in the hut of a ferryman by a river. In the morning, the ferryman takes him across.

The ferryman got him across the river on his bamboo-raft, the wide water shimmered reddishly in the light of the morning.

“This is a beautiful river,” he said to his companion.

“Yes,” said the ferryman, “a very beautiful river, I love it more than anything. Often I have listened to it, often I have looked into its eyes, and always I have learned from it. Much can be learned from a river.”

And the ferryman predicts that Siddhartha, who does not have any money and cannot pay for his passage, will one day return to pay him.

“Do you think so?” asked Siddhartha amusedly.

“Surely. This too, I have learned from the river: everything is coming back! You too, Samana, will come back. Now farewell! Let your friendship be my reward. Commemorate me, when you’ll make offerings to the gods.”

Later, Siddhartha reaches the outskirts of a city. There, he sees many people and among them a rich woman in a sedan chair, at the entrance of a beautiful garden:

Siddhartha stopped at the entrance to the pleasure-garden and watched the parade, saw the servants, the maids, the baskets, saw the sedan-chair and saw the lady in it. Under black hair, which made to tower high on her head, he saw a very fair, very delicate, very smart face, a brightly red mouth, like a freshly cracked fig, eyebrows which were well tended and painted in a high arch, smart and watchful dark eyes, a clear, tall neck rising from a green and golden garment, resting fair hands, long and thin, with wide golden bracelets over the wrists.

Siddhartha saw how beautiful she was, and his heart rejoiced. He bowed deeply, when the sedan-chair came closer, and straightening up again, he looked at the fair, charming face, read for a moment in the smart eyes with the high arcs above, breathed in a slight fragrant, he did not know. With a smile, the beautiful woman nodded for a moment and disappeared into the grove, and then the servants as well.

But Siddhartha realises that, as long as he looks like a beggar from the wilderness, he will not be able to make this woman’s acquaintance:

I am still a Samana, he thought, I am still an ascetic and beggar. I must not remain like this, I will not be able to enter the grove like this. And he laughed.

So he goes into the city, befriends a barber, and manages to get a haircut and a shave for free. He washes in the nearby river, and the next day, clean and with his hair oiled, he goes again to meet the woman, the famous courtesan Kamala. This time, Kamala stops and talks to him.

“Never before this has happened to me, my friend, that a Samana from the forest came to me and wanted to learn from me! Never before this has happened to me, that a Samana came to me with long hair and an old, torn loincloth! Many young men come to me, and there are also sons of Brahmans among them, but they come in beautiful clothes, they come in fine shoes, they have perfume in their hair and money in their pouches. This is, oh Samana, how the young men are like who come to me.”

“Already I am starting to learn from you,” said Siddhartha. “Even yesterday, I was already learning. I have already taken off my beard, have combed the hair, have oil in my hair. There is little which is still missing in me, oh excellent one: fine clothes, fine shoes, money in my pouch. You shall know, Siddhartha has set harder goals for himself than such trifles, and he has reached them.”

Still, Siddhartha is new in this city, and he doesn’t know where to go next. So he asks Kamala for advice.

“Dear Kamala, thus advise me where I should go to, that I’ll find these three things most quickly?”

“Friend, many would like to know this. You must do what you’ve learned and ask for money, clothes, and shoes in return. There is no other way for a poor man to obtain money. What might you be able to do?”

“I can think. I can wait. I can fast.”

“Nothing else?”

This list of the three skills of the Samana will come up again later on in the book. It is what he learned in the wilderness: thinking, waiting, fasting. Later, a potential employer, a rich businessman, will ask him what these skills are good for. What benefit could one possibly get from thinking, waiting fasting?

“I can think. I can wait. I can fast.”

“That’s everything?”

“I believe, that’s everything!”

“And what’s the use of that? For example, the fasting — what is it good for?”

“It is very good, sir. When a person has nothing to eat, fasting is the smartest thing he could do. When, for example, Siddhartha hadn’t learned to fast, he would have to accept any kind of service before this day is up, whether it may be with you or wherever, because hunger would force him to do so. But like this, Siddhartha can wait calmly, he knows no impatience, he knows no emergency, for a long time he can allow hunger to besiege him and can laugh about it. This, sir, is what fasting is good for.”

But Siddhartha can also read and write, and these are skills that not everyone has in ancient India. So the rich merchant, a client of Kamala’s, who agreed to give Siddhartha a chance, hires him to help out in his office. And when the day’s work is done, he goes back to Kamala, now in the possession of money, shoes and clothes.

He was not in Kamaswami’s house for long, when he already took part in his landlord’s business. But daily, at the hour appointed by her, he visited beautiful Kamala, wearing pretty clothes, fine shoes, and soon he brought her gifts as well. Much he learned from her red, smart mouth. Much he learned from her tender, supple hand. Him, who was, regarding love, still a boy and had a tendency to plunge blindly and insatiably into lust like into a bottomless pit, him she taught, thoroughly starting with the basics, about that school of thought which teaches that pleasure cannot be taken without giving pleasure, and that every gesture, every caress, every touch, every look, every spot of the body, however small it was, had its secret, which would bring happiness to those who know about it and unleash it.

In the beginning, Siddhartha is still very much the detached ascetic from the forest. He is playing the game of business and money, but his heart is not in it. Kamaswami, his boss, complains to a friend that Siddhartha lacks the proper enthusiasm:

“This Brahman,” he said to a friend, “is no proper merchant and will never be one, there is never any passion in his soul when he conducts our business. But he has that mysterious quality of those people to whom success comes all by itself, whether this may be a good star of his birth, magic, or something he has learned among Samanas. He always seems to be merely playing with our business-affairs, they never fully become a part of him, they never rule over him, he is never afraid of failure, he is never upset by a loss.”

The friend advised the merchant: “Give him from the business he conducts for you a third of the profits, but let him also be liable for the same amount of the losses, when there is a loss. Then, he’ll become more zealous.”

Kamaswami followed the advice. But Siddhartha cared little about this. When he made a profit, he accepted it with equanimity; when he made losses, he laughed and said: “Well, look at this, so this one turned out badly!”

Years pass, in which Siddhartha keeps conducting business, earning money, being successful, and visiting Kamala for lessons in love.

Once, he said to her: “You are like me, you are different from most people. You are Kamala, nothing else, and inside of you, there is a peace and refuge, to which you can go at every hour of the day and be at home at yourself, as I can also do. Few people have this, and yet all could have it.”

“Not all people are smart,” said Kamala.

“No,” said Siddhartha, “that’s not the reason why. Kamaswami is just as smart as I, and still has no refuge in himself. Others have it, who are small children with respect to their mind. Most people, Kamala, are like a falling leaf, which is blown and is turning around through the air, and wavers, and tumbles to the ground. But others, a few, are like stars, they go on a fixed course, no wind reaches them, in themselves they have their law and their course....”

Kamala looked at him with a smile. “Again, you’re talking about him,” she said, “again, you’re having a Samana’s thoughts. ... You are the best lover,” she said thoughtfully, “I ever saw. You’re stronger than others, more supple, more willing. You’ve learned my art well, Siddhartha. At some time, when I’ll be older, I’d want to bear your child. And yet, my dear, you’ve remained a Samana, and yet you do not love me, you love nobody. Isn’t it so?”

“It might very well be so,” Siddhartha said tiredly. “I am like you. You also do not love — how else could you practise love as a craft? Perhaps, people of our kind can’t love. The childlike people can; that’s their secret.”

Sansara

Years pass, and Siddhartha, using his skills of thinking, waiting and fasting makes his way in the world. He has his own house, his own servants, money and power. But he has no friends, except for Kamala.

That high, bright state of being awake, which he had experienced that one time at the height of his youth, in those days after Gotama’s sermon, after the separation from Govinda, that tense expectation, that proud state of standing alone without teachings and without teachers, that supple willingness to listen to the divine voice in his own heart, had slowly become a memory, had been fleeting; distant and quiet, the holy source murmured, which used to be near, which used to murmur within himself. ... Slowly, like humidity entering the dying stem of a tree, filling it slowly and making it rot, the world and sloth had entered Siddhartha’s soul, slowly it filled his soul, made it heavy, made it tired, put it to sleep. On the other hand, his senses had become alive, there was much they had learned, much they had experienced. ...

His face was still smarter and more spiritual than others, but it rarely laughed, and assumed, one after another, those features which are so often found in the faces of rich people, those features of discontent, of sickliness, of ill-humour, of sloth, of a lack of love. Slowly the disease of the soul, which rich people have, grabbed hold of him.

Like a veil, like a thin mist, tiredness came over Siddhartha, slowly, getting a bit denser every day, a bit murkier every month, a bit heavier every year.

Tired of this life, Siddhartha flees into pleasures. One night, he parties until the morning “with dancing girls and wine,” but nothing any more can make him forget what’s wrong with his life. Disgusted with himself, exhausted, he finally falls asleep and has a dream:

Kamala owned a small, rare singing bird in a golden cage. Of this bird, he dreamt. He dreamt: this bird had become mute, who at other times always used to sing in the morning, and since this arose his attention, he stepped in front of the cage and looked inside; there the small bird was dead and lay stiff on the ground. He took it out, weighed it for a moment in his hand, and then threw it away, out in the street, and in the same moment, he felt terribly shocked, and his heart hurt, as if he had thrown away from himself all value and everything good by throwing out this dead bird.

This is a sign to him that this period of his life has also come to an end.

For all of these many years, without knowing it himself, he had tried hard and longed to become a man like those many, like those children, and in all this, his life had been much more miserable and poorer than theirs, and their goals were not his, nor their worries; after all, that entire world of the Kamaswami-people had only been a game to him, a dance he would watch, a comedy. Only Kamala had been dear, had been valuable to him — but was she still thus? Did he still need her, or she him? Did they not play a game without an ending? Was it necessary to live for this? No, it was not necessary! The name of this game was Sansara, a game for children, a game which was perhaps enjoyable to play once, twice, ten times — but for ever and ever over again?

Then, Siddhartha knew that the game was over, that he could not play it any more. Shivers ran over his body, inside of him, so he felt, something had died.

He leaves his house, says farewell to the mango tree he used to sit under, to his pleasure-garden, to his home.

Since he had been without food this day, he felt strong hunger, and thought of his house in the city, of his chamber and bed, of the table with the meals on it. He smiled tiredly, shook himself, and bid his farewell to these things.

In the same hour of the night, Siddhartha left his garden, left the city, and never came back. ...

When she [Kamala] received the first news of Siddhartha’s disappearance, she went to the window, where she held a rare singing bird captive in a golden cage. She opened the door of the cage, took the bird out and let it fly. For a long time, she gazed after it, the flying bird. From this day on, she received no more visitors and kept her house locked. But after some time, she became aware that she was pregnant from the last time she was together with Siddhartha.

And thus ends Siddhartha’s time in the world. It has been said that the structure of the book mirrors the stages of an ideal Hindu man’s life: Student, householder and recluse. I always thought that there is a wisdom in structuring life and its expectations like that, acknowledging the different roles that the passage of time, experience, and the flow and ebb of our bodily abilities bestow upon us; in contrast to the common ideal of eternal youth that the wellness industry is trying to sell modern consumers.

Again, we’re at the length limits for an email, and possibly at the end of your willingness to read a novel on your phone. Let’s stop here and save the last part of Siddhartha’s journey for next week.

If you’d like to read Siddhartha yourself, you can find it here in an older English translation (the one quoted in this article):

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2500/2500-h/2500-h.htm

And here in the original German:

https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/2499/pg2499.html

See you next week!

— Andy

Welcome back to EveryDawn!

We’ve already begun talking about Hesse — in the previous two articles we discussed Romanticism, and how Hermann Hesse was really a late German Romantic.

Today I’d like to tell you Hesse’s book Siddhartha, a book that I’ve read and loved all my life. I discovered it maybe at 15 or 16, on my mother’s bookshelf in a now far-away, two-room flat outside of Athens, Greece. I borrowed it right there and never returned it. It is here with me now, forty years later, and it has been all this time. When I moved to Germany to study, when I moved to Hong Kong to work — this little volume has never been out of my arm’s reach. When I went for a holiday back to Greece this past month, it was the only physical book I had with me in my hand-luggage, as it always is — just in case the power runs out on my reading tablet or I’m stuck on a desert island after a plane crash with nothing else to read. I must have read this book hundreds of times over the years — in full and in excerpts, reading a page or two before sleep, or going through the whole tale once again, from beginning to end, on a conference trip or a holiday. And still, it’s the only book I can imagine reading over and over again. If I was stranded somewhere with only one book, it wouldn’t be the Bible or Plato’s works, it wouldn’t be Neruda’s poems or the Dao, and it wouldn’t even be the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. It would certainly be this one small volume, barely a hundred pages long, but a book that contains the whole world of what it means to be human within it.

Come with me for a short while, and let’s have a look at it together!

The Son of the Brahman

In the shade of the house, in the sunshine of the riverbank near the boats, in the shade of the Sal-wood forest, in the shade of the fig tree is where Siddhartha grew up, the handsome son of the Brahman, the young falcon, together with his friend Govinda, son of a Brahman. The sun tanned his light shoulders by the banks of the river when bathing, performing the sacred ablutions, the sacred offerings. In the mango grove, shade poured into his black eyes, when playing as a boy, when his mother sang, when the sacred offerings were made, when his father, the scholar, taught him, when the wise men talked.

Thus begins one of the most remarkable books of the 20th century. To feel the impact of the language, you have to read it out loud, slowly, like a poem, letting the words flow, letting the repetitions unfold their rhythm, just like rhapsodes would have memorised the ancient epics in exactly the same way, following the same repetitions, the same music of the words. Thankfully, the translation here preserves much of the sound of the German.

Henry Miller, another one of the writers I’d like to talk about in a future post, once said that this book, Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha, was a “more potent medicine than the New Testament.” In the 1960s, after Hesse’s death, some of his works were embraced as inspiration by the US counter-culture movements. Timothy Leary was a fan of Hesse’s work and Kurt Vonnegut thought that this book was Hesse’s “simplest, clearest, most innocent tale of seeking and finding.”

But Henry Miller’s, Robert Pirsig’s and Kerouac’s works, all similarly inspirational, are read today mostly for their historical value, rather than as lived (and living) experiences. Hesse, in contrast, managed to create a work that, by being set in an almost-mythical time and place, transcends fashion and historical contingencies and speaks directly to every reader, no matter whether they live in 1920’s Switzerland, 1960’s San Francisco or 2020’s Shenzhen.

The book tells the story of a young man, Siddhartha, an educated and well-off son of a high-caste priest in a village in India, at the time of the Buddha’s life. It is no accident that Siddhartha shares his name with the Buddha himself: throughout the book he goes on a journey of enlightenment that lets him live many lives. Siddhartha becomes a hermit, a merchant, a lover, a broken man. And it is only at the end of this journey that he finally is able to find what he is looking for.

Beginnings

The story starts in the ancestral village where Siddhartha grows up, a handsome, educated, promising young man:

For a long time, Siddhartha had been partaking in the discussions of the wise men, practising debate with Govinda, practising with Govinda the art of reflection, the service of meditation. He already knew how to speak the Om silently, the word of words, to speak it silently into himself while inhaling, to speak it silently out of himself while exhaling, with all the concentration of his soul, the forehead surrounded by the glow of the clear-thinking spirit. He already knew to feel Atman in the depths of his being, indestructible, one with the universe.

He is not only good at the spiritual teachings — he’s also popular among his family and friends:

Joy leapt in his father’s heart for his son who was quick to learn, thirsty for knowledge; he saw him growing up to become great wise man and priest, a prince among the Brahmans.

Bliss leapt in his mother’s breast when she saw him, when she saw him walking, when she saw him sit down and get up, Siddhartha, strong, handsome, he who was walking on slender legs, greeting her with perfect respect.

Love touched the hearts of the Brahmans’ young daughters when Siddhartha walked through the lanes of the town with the luminous forehead, with the eye of a king, with his slim hips.

But as much as he is loved by everyone, Siddhartha is not at ease with himself.

Siddhartha had started to nurse discontent in himself, he had started to feel that the love of his father and the love of his mother, and also the love of his friend, Govinda, would not bring him joy for ever and ever, would not nurse him, feed him, satisfy him. He had started to suspect that his venerable father and his other teachers, that the wise Brahmans had already revealed to him the most and best of their wisdom, that they had already filled his expecting vessel with their richness, and the vessel was not full, the spirit was not content, the soul was not calm, the heart was not satisfied.

And then, one day, a group of ascetics come through Siddharta’s town:

Three skinny, withered men, neither old nor young, with dusty and bloody shoulders, almost naked, scorched by the sun, surrounded by loneliness, strangers and enemies to the world, strangers and lank jackals in the realm of humans. Behind them blew a hot scent of quiet passion, of destructive service, of merciless self-denial.

And Siddharta knows: If there is a secret that has yet eluded him, if there is wisdom that he does not yet have, these men must be in possession of it.

In the evening, after the hour of contemplation, Siddhartha spoke to Govinda: “Early tomorrow morning, my friend, Siddhartha will go to the Samanas. He will become a Samana.”

His friend is as surprised by this decision as his father is appalled. But in the end, neither his father’s opposition nor his friends attempts to convince him are successful. One early morning, Siddhartha leaves everything behind and walks towards the edge of his village, following the footsteps of the three naked ascetics:

As he slowly left on stiff legs in the first light of day the still quiet town, a shadow rose near the last hut, who had crouched there, and joined the pilgrim — Govinda.

“You have come,” said Siddhartha and smiled.

“I have come,” said Govinda.

Samana life

Siddhartha and Govinda stay with the Samanas for three years and learn to live like them. They learn to fast, to hunger, to kill the desires of their bodies, to become almost pure soul:

Instructed by the oldest of the Samanas, Siddhartha practised self-denial, practised meditation, according to a new Samana rules. A heron flew over the bamboo forest — and Siddhartha accepted the heron into his soul, flew over forest and mountains, was a heron, ate fish, felt the pangs of a heron’s hunger, spoke the heron’s croak, died a heron’s death. A dead jackal was lying on the sandy bank, and Siddhartha’s soul slipped inside the body, was the dead jackal, lay on the banks, got bloated, stank, decayed, was dismembered by hyaenas, was skinned by vultures, turned into a skeleton, turned to dust, was blown across the fields. And Siddhartha’s soul returned, had died, had decayed, was scattered as dust, had tasted the gloomy intoxication of the cycle, awaited in new thirst like a hunter in the gap, where he could escape from the cycle, where the end of the causes, where an eternity without suffering began.

But we see at the end of this passage already the seed of what is to come: although Siddhartha can escape his desires, his upbringing, his knowledge, his social role, he cannot escape the cycles of death and re-incarnation. The eternity without suffering stays eternally out of reach.

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And so, when one day word of a new teaching reaches them, Siddhartha is ready to leave the Samanas and seek enlightenment elsewhere:

A man had appeared, Gotama by name, the exalted one, the Buddha, he had overcome the suffering of the world in himself and had halted the cycle of rebirths. He was said to wander through the land, teaching, surrounded by disciples, without possession, without home, without a wife, in the yellow cloak of an ascetic, but with a cheerful brow, a man of bliss, and Brahmans and princes would bow down before him and would become his students.

So he and Govinda go to find the Buddha. It is not difficult to follow the rumours and the sightings of the holy man and his disciples, and after a while they meet him. In a memorable scene Siddhartha and the Buddha very briefly meet and exchange a few words:

“I wish that you, oh exalted one, would not be angry with me,” said the young man. ... “But let me say this one more thing: I have not doubted in you for a single moment. I have not doubted for a single moment that you are Buddha, that you have reached the goal, the highest goal towards which so many thousands of Brahmans and sons of Brahmans are on their way. You have found salvation from death. It has come to you in the course of your own search, on your own path, through thoughts, through meditation, through realizations, through enlightenment. It has not come to you by means of teachings! And — thus is my thought, oh exalted one, — nobody will obtain salvation by means of teachings! ... This is what I have thought and realized, when I have heard the teachings. This is why I am continuing my travels — not to seek other, better teachings, for I know there are none, but to depart from all teachings and all teachers and to reach my goal by myself or to die. But often, I’ll think of this day, oh exalted one, and of this hour, when my eyes beheld a holy man.”

Govinda will stay with the Buddha, and so, after going through much together, the two friends finally part. Govinda takes the yellow robe of the monk, while Siddhartha goes back onto the dusty country road, to find his own salvation or his own death:

“How deaf and stupid have I been!” he thought, walking swiftly along. “When someone reads a text, wants to discover its meaning, he will not scorn the symbols and letters and call them deceptions, coincidence, and worthless hull, but he will read them, he will study and love them, letter by letter. But I, who wanted to read the book of the world and the book of my own being, I have, for the sake of a meaning I had anticipated before I read, scorned the symbols and letters, I called the visible world a deception, called my eyes and my tongue coincidental and worthless forms without substance. No, this is over, I have awakened, I have indeed awakened and have not been born before this very day.”

In thinking these thoughts, Siddhartha stopped once again, suddenly, as if there was a snake lying in front of him on the path.

Because suddenly, he had also become aware of this: He, who was indeed like someone who had just woken up or like a new-born baby, he had to start his life anew and start again at the very beginning. When he had left in this very morning from the grove Jetavana, the grove of that exalted one, already awakening, already on the path towards himself, he had every intention, regarded as natural and took for granted, that he, after years as an ascetic, would return to his home and his father. But now, only in this moment, when he stopped as if a snake was lying on his path, he also awoke to this realization: “But I am no longer the one I was, I am no ascetic any more, I am not a priest any more, I am no Brahman any more. Whatever should I do at home and at my father’s place? Study? Make offerings? Practise meditation? But all this is over, all of this is no longer alongside my path.”

Motionless, Siddhartha remained standing there, and for the time of one moment and breath, his heart felt cold, he felt a cold in his chest, as a small animal, a bird or a rabbit, would when seeing how alone he was. For many years, he had been without home and had felt nothing. Now, he felt it. Still, even in the deepest meditation, he had been his father’s son, had been a Brahman, of a high caste, a cleric. Now, he was nothing but Siddhartha, the awoken one, nothing else was left. ...

Out of this moment, when the world melted away all around him, when he stood alone like a star in the sky, out of this moment of a cold and despair, Siddhartha emerged, more a self than before, more firmly concentrated. He felt: This had been the last tremor of the awakening, the last struggle of this birth. And it was not long until he walked again in long strides, started to proceed swiftly and impatiently, heading no longer for home, no longer to his father, no longer back.

And here ends the first part of the book. Hesse took a break before continuing with the story. He wrote that he found it difficult to write the second part, because he did not himself have the experiences that he wanted Siddhartha to have. In the end, Siddhartha will achieve the wisdom he is looking for, but not in the way he thought.

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This post is getting too long for an email, so let me stop here for today. Next week, we will see how the tale unfolds further on and we will discuss a few points of note regarding Hesse’s Siddhartha, in my opinion one of the greatest novels ever written.

By the way, if you’d like to read it, you can find it here in an older English translation (the one quoted in this article):

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2500/2500-h/2500-h.htm

And here in the original German:

https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/2499/pg2499.html

Of course, you can also buy it as a book on Amazon or any other bookshop of your choice.

Thanks for being here! The images are generated by Midjourney, and there are many more of them in the video linked at the beginning of this post!

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Our First Book

The problem is that I am not the type who has, you know, a very nicely organized library. I just managed the shelf to make it look reasonably organized for the video. Otherwise, those 4,000 books are just everywhere in my home, and they are not particularly photogenic. So this is why I won't necessarily make a tour of them now, but anyway, the book I would like to begin with is a book that is very dear to me. It is one of the books that has influenced me hugely my whole life. I have spent it in the light of this book because this book has provided a constant illumination to my own life.

It was like a light source, like a lamp that is there on the one hand to guide me through dark periods of my own life when things were difficult. On the other hand, it has also been a light, you know, in the other metaphor that I could use to understand myself better, to see myself in this light, and to understand what I was doing and why I was doing it.

And also a light to illuminate life in general, what the meaning of life is, and what you know the meaning of life can be for me, the meaning of my life. And all this meaning and illumination and clarity that came out of this book has stayed with me from the first time I read it, which was before I was 18. I am still reading it. It's still always close to me when I go on a holiday. It's always in my backpack as a physical book, and I'm always reading it on flights. I'm always reading it on beaches when whenever it's impractical to carry an electronic book around, and you don't want to be limited by the battery of the book, and so on. And so therefore, I always carry a book, and this is most often the book that I will take because it's also a book that I can reread again and again. I can reread it hundreds of times, which I have done, and I can still enjoy every sentence.

Introducing Herman Hesse

Now, this is a German book. It's a book which perhaps you will not know, or perhaps you will—who knows? It's by a German author, Herman Hesse. Herman Hesse got a Nobel Prize of literature in the 50s, but he was an author who was born at the end of the 19th century, just at the beginning of the 20th, and he died in 1962, I think. I will put his dates here. And he wrote his last books around the 1950s in the middle of the 20th century. So he lived through all the wars of the 20th century. He did not have an easy life like most people of this generation who were involved in all these world wars, but he found strength and inspiration to create some of the most inspiring, uplifting books that have been published ever. I would say some of the most spiritual books also. Hesse was very much interested in Indian spirituality. He traveled to India. He was bitterly disappointed by what he found there because India was not what he had hoped. The India he saw, obviously, was the India of Colonial British India, a country that was poor and where this spirituality that he craved was not really there.

Hesse's Romanticism

Hesse was a romantic. He was a person who made up his own world. He created his own world and he lived in that world, and he tried to share his world with us, his readers. But what he saw in India, you know, the poverty, the colonial administration, the suffering, the dirt, the heat—you know, these were all contrary to his own visions of what romantic India, Buddhist India should be—an enlightened place that was perhaps also, you know, as clean and antiseptic as his own Germany or Switzerland where, for him, in his environment, a very clean, organized life. And then suddenly he was thrown into this chaos of mid-20th-century India, and he was shocked. And he did not like it. So he went back to Switzerland and continued to write his stories.

The Core of Romanticism

In Hesse's work, one thing I already mentioned is the romanticism. So he is a romantic. He's a very classic German romantic in the sense that he wants the world to be in a particular way that excites great emotions in us. This is somehow perhaps one can say the core of the romantic sentiment. You want to have great emotions, and you want these great emotions to be somehow realized not only in your mind, but you want them to be triggered by the greatness of the world, by the way the world is, by the way the universe is, by the greatness of the universe, by the beauty of life, by the staggering variety of creation.

And these were sentiments that were already used in German literature and poetry throughout the 18th and 19th centuries when Goethe and Schiller and, you know, philosophers and writers were writing about and Novalis of course, and Kant, and then you had the Romantic Movement also in England with Lord Byron, for example, or Shelley. And you get an idea for this perhaps you have seen those Ivory Merchant movies about British aristocratic young people going to India or being somewhere, you know, in the UK in the early 20th century in, you know, times where they lived in these beautiful houses with white curtains and so on, and had these strong feelings that you associate with these Byronic characters.

Romanticism in Literature and Life

So this is the kind of the romantic sentiment, sense of sensibility right. For example, this love affair, um, in there these various love affairs, not the restrained ones but the, you know, the silly ones, the ones where you're overcome with emotion, and this overcoming of emotion is even stronger than morality.

This is the core of it that you are not restrained by morality, by rules, by society, but your emotion blows up and is such a fundamental force that the whole world has to, you know, follow your emotion, has to yield to it. And you become, in a sense, this superperson, this Übermensch, which later Nietzsche advocated, and Nietzsche is also in this sense a romantic. The feelings that you have become more important than reality, and somewhere on this path, it leads to craziness, of course, right? It leads to a loss of contact with reality, but it is also a sentiment that is very attractive in a way because instead of being like we are today, these little cogs in the big machine of the world, and we feel that, you know, everything is shrinking.

The Constraints of Modern Life

Our flats are shrinking. I'm living here on 700 square feet with four people in Hong Kong. We don't have so much space, but also cities are growing, and individual space is shrinking, and freedoms are shrinking everywhere. Personal expression is being limited more and more from all sides, and people have to be more predictable and more oiled in a way to fit into this machinery that is built around them. And we don't have so much of an opportunity to be ourselves and to discover ourselves.

And of course, capitalism makes things worse because capitalism demands of us to be consumers that have a uniform taste. We need to consume the same things. We cannot just go off and say, "Now I want to, you know, ride a black horse." You will not find a black horse. There are no black horses anymore, right? Perhaps there are one or two somewhere, but then you first have to apply to the local, you know, school riding school, and then you have to find the horse there, and then it's not your horse. It's a shared horse.

The Loss of Varied Experiences

So we just don't have access to these varied experiences anymore. We can travel, of course, right? But even when we travel, often we will travel with a travel group. We will travel with an agency. We will travel to some kind of organized thing or some organized expeditions or a cruise where everything's pre-organized for you, and you have to just take on your role and do whatever is expected of you instead of being able to be a strong, unique individual, right, with your own perception of the world and your own relation to the universe. And this is what romanticism is about.

The Romanticism of Youth

Hesse very much has this, and of course, this is, if you think of a human life, a trait that we most have in our youth, not in childhood because childhood is normally again very restricted by the parents, by school, by laws, by regulations. But the moment you step over this limit of 18 years of age, which is still a magical limit, you step over that, and then suddenly you are in a world that is full of possibility. All the restrictions are gone. You're not a child anymore. You can do things. You can sign contracts. You can buy. You can sell stuff. You can move out of your parents' house. You can find your own home. You can discover your own city. You can discover your own new friends that are in the same situation as you, and then suddenly you have this explosion of freedom as an 18-year-old who perhaps leaves home in order to study in another city. And this has always been this age of going away and discovering yourself. And this is just the romantic sentiment. This is just the moment that the romantics also idolize—the idea that I go out and I am myself.

The Amish and Romantic Freedom

Only for the romantics, this was a lifelong pursuit. To date, something we accept in 18-year-olds and we give them, you know, a few years to discover this. And this, by the way, is something similar to what the Amish have. They have organized this into an even more traditionally ritualized thing where they have this period where you can escape from all these rules that the Amish society has when you are a particular age. You can go and make experiences and see the world, and then you are supposed to return back to the community and follow the strict rules for the rest of your life. So this is still, you know, somehow warped image of this romantic freedom of youth, of teenage years. And so this is what the romantics wanted only, as I said, you know, as a lifelong pursuit.

Romanticism in Movies and Life

And this is still what we seek in movies, right? When we watch movies about young people or movies that are often, you know, um, animation like these Japanese Ghibli Studio movies like, uh, Kiki, you know, the little witch who goes, and she's 13. So she's not yet at this age where this would be the right age for this romantic explosion of self. She's only 13, but in this movie, she is actually older. I mean, she does things that we would not do at 13 but at 16 or 18. She moves out of her house, and she goes and lives alone and rents a place and so on.

And this period of growing up is this magical period. It has this magical air about it, and perhaps all of us remember it fondly from our own lives, the time when we were 18 or 20 or 22. And then slowly this starts to fade, this romantic sentiment, and it goes and becomes the grown-up world in which then we get a job, and we lose contact with our old friends, and our lives become more regulated. And we have to get up in the morning, and then perhaps a decade later, we have our own family and we have children, and we have to bring them to school, and we have to follow again all these rules that we used to follow when we were in school. Only now we follow them because our children are in school, and we have to live this life with them.

The Stages of Life

And then you reach the stage where the children are gone, then perhaps you have some opportunity, but it's not the same anymore, right? You are weighed down by all these things that society has bestowed upon you in a way, you know, a house, a mortgage, cars, family, uh, still I mean other family. You always have relations around you. You have, uh, still a job. Now you are higher in your job. You have more responsibilities, and with some exceptions, you know, for example, us professors, sometimes have an easier life in this period because we are teaching, we're doing research, we're not so much in this everyday grind, and we are in constant contact with young people which gives us a little bit of a, you know, infusion of youthfulness, like teachers also have it, right? Secondary school teachers are often very cool people because they have this permanent contact with youth which makes them be more youthful themselves.

Old Age and Romanticism

And then, of course, comes old age, which in principle has all the necessary ingredients to be exciting and amazing and romantic, except that now we are too old for it because we are often disillusioned. We are often bodily sick, ill in some way. Some things don't work anymore. You know, we cannot go around and travel the world. We cannot climb mountains.

Some can, and they do. There are many older people who are very active still, but there are also many older people who cannot be because their life just does not allow this anymore. Their bodies do not allow this anymore. And so this is why over the course of a life, we lose this opportunity, you know, more and more to be romantic, to be these romantic heroes that realize this romantic potential that they're supposed to have.

Memories of Romanticism

And this is why in the end, in the memory of most of us, the period that we remember that has these markings of the romantic life is our 18 to 22, 25, you know, phase where we can live this. And then it slowly fades away, and so we always keep a fun memory of this. And often the music we listen to later in life is the music we were listening to at this age, and the ideas, the dreams we have later in life are often related to the ideas and dreams we had in this phase.

And so this stays with us as a memory for the rest of our life. But I think what books can do—now to come back to the books of Hesse—what books can do is that they can give us back this thing. We can live through the book many, many lives, and this is something that has been said before many times, of course. It's nothing original, but it is something that is still very true.

The Power of Books

Books allow us to live a life that is rich with other lives where we take these stories, and if we read the book correctly, we are not just reading the plot. We are taking the stories and making them our own, making them be our own lives. And this is something that you know gets lost when we have these short versions of books. You know, there are all these online reading services where you get, uh, some kind of Cliff Notes, you know, of the book. You get some kind of summary, speed reading. All these things are stupid, I believe, because the point is that the point of a book is that you want to live in this book. If this is a good book, of course, if it's a piece of garbage, if it is some kind of, or you know, it's a, it's a non-fiction book where you want to learn something about, let's say, gardening, and you just want this piece of information. You know, how much fertilizer goes into my tomato? Okay, that's that's another thing. But the books that we live in should be books that we can really live in where we can put our life in and um be there in the word of the book and be lost there. And when you come out on the other end, you have lived an additional life. And this is the greatness of books. This is what is wonderful about them. And this is the way I like to read books, and this is why I don't read many of the books that most people read because I'm not interested in some shallow romances. I want to find a book that is a book that I can live with, that I can live in, and that will give me an additional life.

Conclusion

And with this perhaps I should end for today. Surprisingly, I actually intended this to be the first session where I would talk about an actual book from Hesse. But um, I feel that perhaps it was good to have this little bit of introduction to what this romantic approach to life is, which will help us understand Hesse better. And I will talk next time about Hesse's book, which uh is a great book. It's exactly this kind of book that will give you a new life to live, a life that you have never dreamed of living in, and it's, it's the most exciting, is the greatest book. I, you know, one of the greatest books. Let's be careful that I've ever read, and I think you will enjoy it immensely. And so we will meet again next week and talk about that. Thank you for being here, and see you next time!

You saw perhaps that I’m starting a new series of posts, where we will weekly discuss inspirational books that have been hugely important and influential for my own life.

For your convenience, I have separated the book posts from the (shorter) daily inspiration posts, into two different categories. On the Substack page for Every Dawn, you will be able to select which posts you want to see, in case you are only interested in the books or only in the inspiration (although, of course, I think that you will enjoy both!) Also, you can go to Substack, to your own profile page, and unsubscribe there from one of the two sections, if you decide that you don’t want to receive it in your email.

If you don’t do anything, you will from now on receive both the books and the inspiration posts. The books discussions are also available as a podcast now, called the Great Inspirational Books podcast, which you should be able to find in your favourite podcast directory (but it may take a few days for me to appear there — some of these podcast directories are a bit slow to update). The podcast will contain only the books section, not the short inspirational videos, which are too short to do well in podcast form, I’m afraid.

I hope that you’ll enjoy the new content and I’ll see you again soon! If you have any feedback, feel free to leave a comment or to send me an email by replying to any of the emails I send you. I read and reply to every message.

Best wishes,

Andy

Welcome Back to Every Dawn

Hello and welcome back to Every Dawn. I want to start a new series of videos that will be longer than what we had until now. You know, originally I was making these longer, 8 to 10-minute ones, and then I changed them to 3 minutes because YouTube has these three-minute shorts. And so these videos are supposed to be distributed to more viewers, and I thought this would be a good idea to promote our channel by having more people see these videos as shorts. But now I feel that the short videos are perhaps a little too short. I mean, it's good for a daily inspiration, but in the long run, if you want to have some understanding of philosophy, if you want to have some real inspiration that goes beyond the sound bite, then it is better to have a slightly longer form in which to do this.

The Importance of Books in My Life

Another thing is that something I never talk about in these videos is that my life has always been full of books. When I moved to Hong Kong, where I live now, from Germany, I had with me around 3,000 books that I shipped here. And then, of course, I kept buying books, so now I must have around 4,000. You see some of them behind me, but this is already a place that we cleaned up specifically so that I can make these videos because everywhere else there's no space. So what this means is that a big part of my life are books, and I want to talk about books because this is one of my favorite topics. This is what my life is about and has been about for 30 years, 40 years, since I was 16, 20. This is where I started reading books regularly, living with them, and living through them also because I identified with these characters in the novels I read, and I wanted to be like them. And these books had a huge influence on my own life.

Sharing My Love for Books

Now that I'm getting older, I feel that I have all these worlds inside me—all these different books that live in me—and I want to share this. I want to share this with you, but I also want to share this with my children who perhaps will not have the time in our modern world like I had it. You know, when I was young, we didn't have smartphones; I didn't have a TV. I still don't have a TV, but now we have YouTube. So my life was much more quiet then my children's lives are now. I went out to play on the street, football with my cousins perhaps twice or three times a week, and the rest of the time I was in my room having nothing to do. I was reading books and also as a student, you know, when I was studying in the mid-80s, we still did not have mobile phones. If you wanted to talk to your friends, you had to essentially visit them because also nobody as a student had their own phone—you know, landline. So we would just walk around and go visit people and then talk to them. And if the weather was bad or if you didn't want to walk around too much, then you just stayed home and you were alone and you did your thing. And since I didn't have a TV, you know, the thing to do was to read a book. So these books were hugely influential to me.

Books in the Modern World

But I see that for my children, this is not the same because they grow up in a world that has YouTube, and we are even promoting YouTube to them because we think that it is better. You know, if we guide them in the use of media so that they see something valuable on YouTube like a documentary or something they can learn from—all these educational channels about science. So these are the kinds of things we like to show them, and in this way, we hope to steer them a little bit in the direction of having some discerning ability of choosing, you know, good content rather than some stupid gameplay videos. So I mean, it works with varying degrees of success obviously as every parent would know, but this is still the plan.

Introducing Books to My Children and You

And so now I feel that these books that were so important to me, I often don't have an opportunity to give them to my children with the expectation that they will read them because it is just too difficult for a child today. I see they don't have any time. When they come from school, you know, they're almost always at school all day. When they come from school, it's you know, afternoon, it's perhaps 4, 5, 6:00 in the afternoon. Sometimes other activities go until 8 or 9. Then essentially, they can just eat and go to bed again. And even if they finish school early, they still have to do a lot of homework. So there is really not much time to read long books in the way that I used to read them when I was at school or later when I was a student at University.

Sharing Inspirational Books

And so what I want to do with these videos—these longer videos—is also to perhaps give them some ideas for books that are worth reading, that are fun to read, that are educational, that are instructional, that are just, you know, enriching one's life. I don't want to make it educational in the sense of, you know, you suffer through your education—what is often what school is—but I want to show them and I want to share with you books that are really great, that are really fun, that really give you a totally different image of what it means to be a human being, to live a human life, to think the thoughts that humans can have that perhaps some of us have, some of us don't have because we have different lives and experiences.

My Life Through Books

Many of my experiences are experiences that are made through books because my own life has not been adventurous. You know, I'm a philosopher. I went to school, I went to University, I traveled a little bit as a young person around Europe like everybody does, taking a few trains here and there to see different cities. But you know, I never went to India to live in an Indian village. I never went to Africa. I never even visited you know the Americas or the United States. I went twice to Japan as a grownup now, you know, in the past 5 years. So I didn't do anything exotic in my life, and I just studied and then, you know, more or less I became a programmer for many many years, 20 years, and then after that, I became a philosopher. And so now, here I am, being a YouTuber. So there was some excitement in my life of course, but it is not like I lived through, you know, revolutions, catastrophic events, whatever. And I'm happy that I did not because these are not always the most pleasant things to happen to someone.

Introducing Important Books

Back to the books, what I wanted to say is that in this series, I will give you one book every time of the books that were really important to me. So these are books that I think no one should miss reading because these are books that will enhance your life, that will make your life richer and more beautiful and deeper and will give you a much better understanding of what it means to be human. And perhaps you know some of these books, I'm confident that you will not know all of them or you will not even perhaps know many of them because I am originally a German living in Germany. So many of these books are German books. Now here we are in an English language YouTube channel with most viewers being in the UK and in the US, so I guess that perhaps most of you will not know German authors that were very important to me and that I think are really worth reading.

Beyond the Usual Suspects

So we will talk less about the people you have already talked about in your secondary school, let's say in your English studies. You probably had to read, you know, Hemingway and Kerouac and all these people. And although these are also important to me and I do have all their books somewhere here—Fitzgerald of course, I mean these are beautiful books—but often for me, there have been German books that were more important than those English language books. And so yeah, I will present some of these books to you, and I hope that you will find this interesting. I cannot do this every day, of course, so I will still do the short videos every day, and then this kind of thing with books, we will do perhaps once a week. It might also be a little more infrequent if it so happens that, you know, something else is happening in my life, but more or less, you know, weekly I hope that I can manage this.

The Spirit of Every Dawn

And the videos will be in the same spirit like this year, so we are not going to become a book channel. The videos will be in the same spirit of Every Dawn—inspiration, books that are inspirational, that are motivating, uplifting, sometimes tragic but always worth reading. And I hope that you will stick with me and perhaps even you know, share these videos with others and that we will have fun together. So thank you, I will stop here now. I will not immediately put the first book after that because I also don't want these videos to become too long. You should not be sitting here three hours listening to me droning on about a book.

I will give you the next book in the next video, and I hope that you will enjoy it and I hope that you will come back. Thank you, and see you next time.