TRANSCRIPT
When I was younger, back in my 20s, one of my favorite books in the whole wide world was Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse. I have a copy of it right here. I actually found this copy out on the street in New York City while walking a few days ago. Someone left it out and threw it away and put it out in a pile of books, so I picked it up and I thought, you know, maybe I’ll read it again. I haven’t read it in a while. I remember how helpful of a book it was for me when I was young.
It was a story of a young man who broke away from his family of origin and went exploring the world and exploring his inner world. He was trying to find out who he really was, what his purpose was, what his inner journey was really meant to be. He was seeking enlightenment, seeking himself, seeking truth, and I so admired him. I loved Siddhartha and I loved this book, except for one part.
Thinking about it as I was looking at this, I was thinking, you know, I actually would like to read this part right now. So I read it. I read it a couple of nights ago, and spoiler alert, I’m going to talk about what happens in the book. So if you haven’t read it, you might not want to listen to this, or if you are interested in reading it, pause now and read the book first.
But what happens later in the book, when Siddhartha is a middle-aged guy, is he makes a woman pregnant. She’s having an affair for many years with this rich woman, and he becomes kind of a lost person in his middle years. Disillusioned, he becomes a gluttonous eater, and who knows, drinking alcohol and being fancy himself, and loses his inner journey.
Well, he has sex with a woman and without realizing it, because he leaves right after that, he gets her pregnant and he doesn’t know about it. But then he goes out and for like 10 years lives on the edge of a river with a boatman, a ferryman who ferries men, who ferries people across this river. These two men become sort of enlightened old sages. They just sit all day and they listen to the river, and it’s like in some ways the most wonderful time in his life, according to the book. But he doesn’t know that just a few miles away in the town he has a son who he’s not raising.
And what happens is randomly the son shows up at his little hut with his son’s mother, who is dying, and she dies. Siddhartha’s girlfriend, former girlfriend, dies. So he ends up basically adopting his own son and taking him in, and the son doesn’t like him and doesn’t like this boring lifestyle with these two old men who just sit and meditate all the time.
Siddhartha tries to be a nice father and kind and hopes that his son will eventually come to enjoy this very boring lifestyle of sitting around and meditating on the beauty of the river all day long. But the son doesn’t like it, and the son is resentful and angry and frustrated. I think they say he’s about 11 years old, and he hates his father. He hates this other old enlightened ferryman, and he’s rebellious and he breaks things. Finally, he just runs away.
The ferryman says, the other older ferryman says, “Let him go. He needs to go back to the town. That’s where he belongs. Let him go.” But Siddhartha won’t let him go because he’s dedicated and loves his son. So he follows his son a little ways to the edge of the town, and when he reaches the edge of the town, he realizes, you know, my friend the ferryman is right, and my son will be fine. He’ll find his way in the town. He’s old enough, he’s 11 years old, he has some of his mother’s money. He belongs in the town. I don’t belong in the town. That’s a bad place for me. I belong back with the ferryman, and life will take care of my son.
And he goes back and he lives out his days, zening out next to the river, listening to the sound of the oneness of all things, and he abandons his son. And that never sat right with me, not 30 years ago when I first read the book, and not now when I just read it again a few nights ago. I thought, this is ugly. He just abandoned his kid. He abandoned his child who needed him. He wasn’t flexible. He produced this child’s life. He created him through his actions, and then he, well, he abandoned him for his first 10 years. Presumably, Siddhartha was clever enough to know that having sex makes babies, and he might have made a baby. He never checked up to find out if this was true, and then when he finds out that it was true, he did little or nothing to be a father.
Thirty years ago, I loved the book so much that I kind of put away this later part where he was a lousy dad. But 30 years later, I look at it and I think, no, no, no, no, doesn’t cut it. I’m like, who is this Hermann Hesse character? I read a lot of his books back in the day, most of them in fact, but I don’t really know much about him. So I looked him up, and I found an article on the internet. I printed it out, and I printed out one paragraph actually that I’d like to read here. It was interesting. It tells a lot about Hermann Hesse. It’s from The New Yorker, this article, I don’t know, maybe five, six years ago. It said, “Hermann Hesse’s life was an uneasy compromise between his spiritual absolutism, which pushed him in the direction of irascible isolation, and his human needs, which encumbered him with wives, children, and houses that he never quite wanted or accepted. Married three times, he was unhappy as a husband and as a father, and the characters in his books mostly shun those roles.”
Well, I was like, oh, so he had children who he didn’t want or accept? His human needs encumbered him with these things, wives, children, and houses? It’s like, wait a second, his human needs? So he had a human need for sex? Well, I don’t buy this. A lot of this, this is just conventional crap ideas, and I think, but it really does reflect Hermann Hesse, and it reflects what he put in his books. Oh, Siddhartha, oops, he had sex, oops, he made a kid, but oops, he doesn’t really need to follow his obligation to be a father. He doesn’t need to figure out how to really meet the needs of his child.
So, okay, I accept that he broke away from his parents because they weren’t what he wanted, but when he broke away from his son, Siddhartha failed. And I think it really does reflect the failure of Hermann Hesse. Well, I read this a few nights ago also about his children. I think one of his wives ended up dying. I think he was married, what, three times? One, his first wife, I think ended up with schizophrenia before or after he broke up with her, abandoned her, abandoned the kids. I mean, he was a man who didn’t, to my mind, live up to his obligation, not just of being a man, but of being an adult. When you produce children, it changes everything. It revolutionizes one’s obligation in the world.
What I believe, what I hold to be true, is that when a person has children, they have an obligation, no matter what, as their top priority in life, to be the absolute best parent they can be. That becomes the job that they have taken on, and when people don’t do it, they fail at this primary job. And to my mind, they fail at life. And I think that’s why I was always left with a part of me that just felt like Siddhartha, this beloved character of my youth, also failed at life. He created a son who was a neglected, abandoned boy who probably, if the world of the novel had continued, probably didn’t become a very good person, didn’t become a mature person, certainly didn’t grow up without a father’s love or guidance. Instead, had a father who was just dissociated. Okay, they called him enlightened in the book, but I really think he was just split off.
From himself, split off from his history, split off from his traumas, split off from his obligations. And this was a world that the author Hermann Hesse couldn’t explore in his writing because he hadn’t explored it within himself.
I think of Hermann Hesse’s other novels. Ah gosh, I read so many of them: Narcissus and Goldman, and Steppenwolf, and Demian, and Beneath the Wheel. I got bored reading his books after a while because I felt he was in, as Freud called it, one of the only things I liked that Freud said, Hermann Hesse was in a repetition compulsion. He was repeating the same story over and over and over again.
I started feeling like his characters, they were dressed up differently, had different names, lived in different places, but they were all kind of the same character. This very broken, lost, juvenile person who wasn’t solving the root of the problem and was desperately searching. And all of his characters, desperately brilliant and intellectual and insightful in some ways, but in other ways just lost.
And so now, all these years later, I think I’ve put to rest inside of myself what was this fatal flaw in the character of Siddhartha in the book of Siddhartha and in the character of Hermann Hesse.