Great Inspirational Books

Love, Reason, and Ruin

Note: This is a pretty long article. If it gets cut off by your email client, simply click on the title of this piece and you will be redirected to the website where you can read the full article. Thanks! 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. Thanks for reading Every Dawn! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. 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. 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: This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.everydawn.com [https://www.everydawn.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

Sculpting the Clouds. The Magical Future of JG Ballard

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. Thanks for reading Every Dawn! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. 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. 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. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.everydawn.com [https://www.everydawn.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

How To Enjoy Poetry... By Not Understanding It

You don't have to understand poetry in order to enjoy it. But today, the skill of reading poetry is getting lost. Speed-reading, AI summaries and bullet-point lists have destroyed our ability to read in silent images, to enjoy the feeling of words, to not always search for their meaning. I am Andy, philosophy lecturer, and I have been reading and loving poetry for almost fifty years. And in this episode, I will show you how you can also open up a whole new world of poems for yourself, to read and enjoy and get happiness and meaning from, in your everyday life. 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. Thanks for reading Every Dawn! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. 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. 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. 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. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.everydawn.com [https://www.everydawn.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

Siddhartha (3) - By the River

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. Thanks for reading Every Dawn! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. 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. 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. Thanks for reading Every Dawn! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. 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! 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 [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 [https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/2499/pg2499.html] See you next week! — Andy This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.everydawn.com [https://www.everydawn.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

Siddhartha (2) - In the World

Last week, we talked about the beginning of Siddhartha’s journey. The young man leaves his village and with it a safe life as a high-caste member of his society, a future priest or scholar. Together with his friend Govinda, he follows a group of begging ascetics into the wilderness, where they stay for three years, learning the arts and skills needed to survive with nothing: fasting, meditating, punishing the body, getting rid of its desires. But at the end of this time, Siddhartha realises that just killing the ego and closing one’s eyes to the world cannot be all that there is to the ultimate wisdom. 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 [http://shirtysleeves.blogspot.com/2007/11/translation-of-die-lehrlinge-zu-sais-by.html], 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 [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 [https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/2499/pg2499.html] See you next week! — Andy This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.everydawn.com [https://www.everydawn.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]