HERMANN HESSE

“How strange this life has been, he thought.  He had wondered along strange paths.  As a boy I was occupied with the gods and sacrifices, as a youth with asceticism, with thinking and meditation.  I was in search of Brahman and revered the eternal in Atman.  As a young man I was attracted to expiation.  I lived in the woods, suffered heat and cold.  I learned to fast, I learned to conquer my body.  I then discovered with wonder and teachings the great Buddha.  I felt knowledge and the unity of the world circulate in me Iike my own blood, but I also felt compelled to leave the Buddha and the great knowledge.  I went and learned the pleasures of love from Kamala and business from Kamaswami.  I hoarded money, I squandered money, I acquired a taste for rich food, I learned to stimulate my senses.  I had to spend many years like that in order to lose my intelligence, to lose the power to think, to forget about the unity of things.  Is it not true, that slowly and through many deviations I changed form a man into a child?  From a thinker into an ordinary person?  And yes this path has been good and the bird in my breast has not died.  But what a path it has been!  I have had to experience so much stupidity, so many vices, so much error, so much nausea, disillusionment and sorrow, just in order to become a child again and begin anew.  But it was right that it should be so; my eyes and heart acclaim it.  I had to experience despair, I had to sink to the greatest mental depths, to thoughts of suicide, in order to experience grace, to hear Om again, to sleep deeply again and to awaken refreshed again.  I had to become a fool again in order to find Atman in myself.  I had to sin in order to live again.  Whither will my path yet lead me?  This path is stupid, it goes in spirals, perhaps in circles, but whichever way it goes, I will follow it.”

—Hermann Hesse