Hermann Hesse Archives - James E Hartley

The End of Work

I once mentioned to a friend of mine that I was determined to read more Hermann Hesse.

He enthusiastically told me that I simply must read Beneath the Wheel, that it was by far his favorite book by what turns out to be one of his favorite authors.

I had no idea that Hesse was among anyone’s favorite authors, let alone someone I knew, let alone someone I knew who didn’t dress in all black with black earrings and black fingernail polish. (Truth be told, I have no idea why I associated Hesse with that particular type of person. Really no idea at all.)

You don’t have to hunt hard for the thesis of this book.

Nor did it occur to any of them that a fragile creature had been reduced to this state by virtue of school and the barbaric ambition of his father and his grammar-school teacher. Why was he forced to work until late at night during the most sensitive and precarious period of his life? Why purposely alienated from his friends in grammar school? Why deprived of needed rest and forbidden to go fishing? Why instilled with a shabby ambition? What had they not even granted him his well-deserved vacation after the examination?

Now the overworked little horse lay by the wayside, no longer of any use.

Yep, overworking young school children, turning the academic enterprise into drudgery and endless hours will destroy them. By about a third of the way into this book, you know it won’t end well.

My first thought: I wish some of my students would read this book. I have far too few students who know anything at all about the joy of learning. Too many college students treat school work as nothing other than tedious, arduous tasks. Why shouldn’t school be fun?

My second thought: my first thought is wrong. I wish some of my students would not read this book and actually learn that not all of life is having fun, but sometimes you have to, you know, work. Sometimes, you have to spend some long hours (yes, hours, not minutes) studying.

My third thought: one thought does not fit all.

My fourth thought: one thought does not fit any. As I ponder the book, I realize that I have a hard time connecting the details of our protagonist’s life with the modern age.

I have students who are too obsessed with grades, far too obsessed with grades, students who take no joy in school, who in one sense feel just like our protagonist in the way they see school work as something which chains you to a desk to learn ever more, but who seem to miss out on the rest of life because they are so obsessed with learning exactly what needs to be learned for a class and nothing else. But, it is rare that those are also the students who work the hardest in a class. (This may be a product of the place where I work; it may be different at other schools. Indeed, there is reason to think that it may be different elsewhere.)

I have other students who are a bit too obsessed with recreational activities, who take their school work lightly, and who could benefit from, you know, working. But those are rarely the students who are actually most enjoying their leisure; 14 hours of Netflix and social media per day is not as enjoyable as it might sound.

The longer I ponder this, the more I realize: the idea of work is dead in educational institutions. What is the proper end of work? I suspect very few students could offer an answer, even a bad answer, to that question.

And what about those of us who are no longer students? We work to earn a wage. For some of my friends, it is obvious what constitutes the end of their work. For college professors? Ah, therein lies the rub: what is the end to which the work of a college professor should strive?

Steppenwolf and You

Herman Hesse, Steppenwolf

I read this book a quarter of a century ago, soon after I began serious reading. I think I picked it up at the used book store in Davis, CA, but it may have been at a library book sale. The appeal was obvious: Great Book with the same name as a rock band. So, it must be good, right?

I have a vivid memory of being terribly disappointed with the book. There is this guy who is a werewolf, the Steppenwolf, see, and he knows he is a werewolf, and he starts meeting people, and there is this constant threat that the werewolf will take over and do some violence, but then the werewolf guy goes to some bizarre theater thing and some bizarre things happen there and then he talks to a strange guy named Pablo and then Mozart shows up and then the novel ends. What kind of werewolf book is that?

By the way, that plot description above is not actually a plot description of the novel Hesse wrote. It is the description of the novel my mid-20s-self read.

I reread the book. Wow. My mid-20s-self sure didn’t know anything. It isn’t surprising that he read this book so poorly; his education—and let’s be clear, he had a bachelor’s degree by this point—had left him so woefully uneducated that there was no way he was ever going to make sense of Steppenwolf, the novel that Hesse actually wrote. Even a love of the band of the same name left him woefully unprepared to have any hope of understanding anything at all in that novel that Hesse wrote.

(I have often told my bookish students who enjoy a long conversation about books that they would have had utter disdain for me if they had met me when I was in college—I knew nothing compared to what my bookish students know.)

So what about the novel Steppenwolf that Hesse wrote…you know the one that doesn’t have a werewolf or even a hint of a werewolf, the one in which the Magic Theater isn’t really all that strange?

It is actually a good book—maybe even a Great Book. As an exploration of the human psyche, it is quite thought-provoking. The book was littered with passages which made me wonder, “Is that true?” The mind is a strange place, after all. Our hero, Harry Haller, thinks of himself as being of two minds—the coldly rational human self and the wild wolfish self. The human half must keep the wolfish half at bay. So far, so conventional.

Except, Harry is living in a world (early 20^th century) where the norms of Civilization which help keep man civilized, help keep the wolf at bay, are breaking down. How does a man whose life is ordered to keep his beast under control manage in a world in which everything, from the dance halls to the music to the women, are conspiring to release man’s inner beast? At this point, the novel was starting to intrigue me—after all the early 21^st century is even farther down the path of civilizational decline than was the early 20^th century.

Then, a funny thing happen on the way to the novel I was expecting. The book begins a sustained argument that Harry is wrong to think of himself as being divided into two parts. He isn’t two parts at all; his parts are legion. Crafting this multiplicity of parts into a cohesive whole is the fundamental challenge of becoming human. Take all the parts of you that make up who you are and combine them in this way and you are one person, but combine those same parts in a different way and you are someone else entirely.

So, how do you craft a self? Can you craft a self? And even more interestingly, can you craft a self which is different than the one you have already crafted? Is there a way to take all the constituent parts which make up You and shuffle them up and come up with a different person? The book is wildly optimistic on this. I am much more skeptical.

Can I readjust my personality? I don’t see how. And more interestingly, I don’t see why I would want to do so. After all, if I readjusted my personality, am I still me? Is my immortal soul intricately bound up with, say, my Myers-Briggs personality type?

My Daemon Made Me Do It

She Has Funny Cars.

Some books are nearly impossible to review.

I started listening to Jefferson Airplane’s Surrealist Pillow to help me write this review.

That should tell you what is to come.

It should probably also make you stop reading.

Your mind’s guaranteed/ It’s all you’ll ever need/ So what do you want from Me?

Let’s pretend I just said something deep.

If you read a book written by a drug-addled 1960’s wannabe poet (I’m looking at you Jackie Kerouac), you probably shouldn’t complain about what you find.

But, if you read a book written in 1925 by a German guy and you realize that it is like a novel from the fevered brain of a drug addict in the 1960s and if you wanted to read a novel like that you would have picked one to read but you didn’t pick one to read because you picked a 1925 German book, then can you complain?

Don’t You Want Somebody to Love?

I spilled my coffee. That probably isn’t relevant. But maybe it is a Sign. You’ll never know. Because I won’t tell you. Because I don’t know. I had a dream about coffee. It had milk in it and I hated it so I took out the milk and then I liked it. I didn’t really have that dream. I just made up that dream. But, I did really spill my coffee.

The life of a repo man is always intense.

Repo man should drink more coffee.

Oh, the book. When I spilled my coffee, some got on my book. That probably also isn’t relevant. You just never know.

If you met yourself, would your recognize yourself? What if you just met your Real Self? Is your Real Self more or less You than the You that you think is You?

To be any more than all I am would be a lie.

Wait. What?

So, getting back to that Real You. Would you even recognize that Real You?

Let’s call that Real You your Daemon. Then, let’s spell it Demian. Then let’s write a whole book that may or may not be about Demian and Demian’s mother and some bird.

The Bird Fights Its Way Out of the Egg

I dreamed about that bird. Well, no, I didn’t. Somebody else did. Well, no, somebody else didn’t. A character in a book dreamed about that bird. Well, no, a character in the book didn’t. Characters in books can’t dream. They aren’t real. So, nobody dreamed about that bird. But, the bird is real and the egg is real. So let’s all go worship Abraxas.

A transparent dream beneath an occasional sigh

Most of the time I just let it go by. But not this time. This time I…what? Don’t let it go by?

I saw you. If that sounds creepy, it is. Life is like that. I just made that up for fun. I didn’t see you. My daemon saw you.

I once thought I should read a lot of Herman Hesse. I didn’t know what I was doing. I should have stocked up on LSD first. I think Herman Hesse was meant to be read while taking LSD.

I have never had LSD, so I don’t really know if that is True. But, I have read books about people who took LSD. And I have listened to the Beatles. Does that count?

LSD didn’t exist when Herman Hesse wrote Demian. I looked it up. On Wikipedia. So, it must be true. Herman Hesse must have travelled through time to the 1960’s, met Timothy Leary, written Demian, traveled back through time to 1925 and published his book. He must have done that in a dream. Time travel isn’t possible. My future self told my present self that it is not possible to travel through time. In a dream. Because Time Travel isn’t real. But dreams are Real.

Dreams are more real than Reality. So, why do we call it Reality? We need to stop that.

Demian’s mother doesn’t really exist.

D.C.B.A.-25

Is there any point to exploring a Jungian mindscape? If Jung was right, then what is the reason to explore the minds of others? Am I more liberated when I see that Emil Sinclair is insane? Or am I more liberated when I think that Emil Sinclair isn’t insane, when I think he is more sane than the Sane because the insanity is the Reality and the Reality is the insanity?

Am I more knowledgeable when I realize that Demian’s mother is real and that she is Emil’s mother and my mother and your mother and nobody’s mother and the bird and the egg?

Is my life richer and fuller when I stop trying to live my life in these walls which surround me and I run in circles on the lawn screaming “I am running around in circles” with no other intention than to run in circles on the lawn screaming “I am running around in circles” because the lawn is a stage and my life is an act until that moment when I realize that the lawn is the grass and the grass is out of the seed and is reaching to the sky which is filled with invisible birds screeching that they are flying around the lawn in circles and I am merely the egg and My Real Self is the Bird and You and I and Her are One and we are Four? Tell me how do you Feel?

I am running in circles on the lawn. I am dreaming that I am typing in my office.

Some books are nearly impossible to review.

If you enjoyed reading this, then I have a book to recommend to you.