Siddhartha short summary
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Hermann Hesse
German writer (1877–1962)
This article is about the German writer. For the Swiss politician and businessman, see Hermann Hess (politician). For the Ghanaian technology entrepreneur, see Herman Chinery-Hesse.
Hermann Karl Hesse (German:[ˈhɛʁmanˈhɛsə]ⓘ; 2 July 1877 – 9 August 1962) was a German-Swiss poet, novelist, and painter. Although Hesse was born in Germany's Black Forest region of Swabia, his father's celebrated heritage as a Baltic German and his grandmother's French-Swiss roots had an intellectual influence on him. He was a precocious, if not difficult child, who shared a passion for poetry and music with his mother, and was especially well-read and cultured, due in part to the influence of his polyglot grandfather.
As a youth he studied briefly at a seminary, struggled with bouts of depression and even once attempted suicide, which temporarily landed him in a sanatorium. Hesse eventually completed Gymnasium and passed his examinations in 1893, when his formal education ended. However, he remained an autodidact and voraciously read theologic
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“It has to be said, there are no points to be won from liking Hesse nowadays.” This rueful assessment of the novelist Hermann Hesse, quoted in the opening pages of Gunnar Decker’s new biography, “Hesse: The Wanderer and His Shadow” (Harvard), appeared in an obituary in 1962; but it could just as well have been pronounced yesterday, or a hundred years ago. Ever since he published his first novel, in 1904, Hesse has been one of those odd writers who manage to be at the same time canonical—in 1946, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature—and almost perpetually unfashionable among critics. The great German modernists who were his contemporaries mostly disdained him: “A little man,” according to the poet Gottfried Benn; “He displays the foibles of a greater writer than he actually is,” the novelist Robert Musil said. In America today, Hesse is usually regarded by highbrows as a writer for adolescents. Liking him is a good sign at age fifteen, a bad one by age twenty.
For many readers, Hesse’s novels are among the first serious fiction they encounter—a literary gateway drug. This was part
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(119 pp., New Directions, 1951 [U.S.])
I found my old copy of Siddhartha on a shelf at home, a New Directions edition dated in my hand April 1964. It was an important text in the wilderness of suburban high school, along with Basho, Tang dynasty poets and the Beat generation. These writers conveyed a sense of what was transcendent right within the ordinary, and this compelling esthetic helped lead me to the Dharma.
I’ve not revisited Hesse’s Siddhartha since then—forty-five years!—and in those years, like most readers of Inquiring Mind, I have come to cultivate the Dharma. In this age of trouble and insecurity, Dharma practice is my rock and compass. Clearly this was true for Hesse, who began writing this novel in 1919 in the nightmarish aftermath of World War I and his wife’s overwhelming schizophrenia. This was Hesse’s effort, like Siddhartha’s, to meet the fear of impermanence and find a true path. Thirty years later, Siddhartha, published in English in 1951, resonated with seekers of the Beat and post-Beat generations, who knew in their bones that the times w