I have just finished Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha, in a 2006 edition by Modern Library. The translation in to English is new, by Susan Bernofsky. She and Tom Robbins, who prologues the edition, both, write a few-pages comment on Siddhartha, which leave me in surprise _it seems like they and I have read a different book.
To begin with, I don't understand Bernofsky's reference to the First World War. Hesse might have started writing Siddhartha in 1919, one year after the great conflagration finished, but I don't find any trace or major influence of it in the story. I mean, if someone tells me that Siddhartha was written in 1912, I'd believe it; if in 1929 or in 1946, the year Hesse was awarded the Noble Prize, I'd believe it. If the war had any influence, whatsoever, Siddhartha seems to represent just the opposite: a black-out topic to forget about it.
As for the psychoanalysis, Siddhartha's dream of the dead Kamala's songbird (it is a beautiful part of the story) is a prophetic one, which relates not with the sort of psychoanalysis dreams rooted in the past experiences of individuals.
When Siddhartha was published in 1922, Hermann Hesse had walked a good deal in life. He had already written several books of poems and a few novels; had held several jobs; had divorced his first wife and started a relationship with someone much younger than him; had undertaken the first trip to the East Indies; had suffered a nervous breakdown and undergone psychoanalysis; had done "relief work for German internees and prisoners of war" and lived later in the remote, mountain town of Montagnola, Switzerland; had consumed mescaline. Far, far away remained at that time the memories of his childhood naughtiness, perhaps portrayed in his explorations of young boys turning rebels (Beneath the Wheel, 1906; Demian, 1919).
However, Robbins and Bernofsky, looked mainly at young Siddhartha, as if the story was about that: a young rebel searching and thinking for himself. Robbins is, from my point of view, unfocused and astray in his analysis. For him, Siddhartha's journey "may be plotted indeed as a long succession of jettisoned doctrines and renounced dogmas" and would be erroneous to compare it with that of Larry Darrell in W. S. Maugham's The Razor's Edge just because of the different backgrounds and attitudes of both young boys. Well, I disagree deeply: Siddhartha is much more; Siddhartha is not this at all.
On her side, Bernofsky states: "Siddhartha, then, (...) represented an escape to a world in which a boy could grow up untouched by strife (...)". Untouched by strife! Wow, Siddhartha is all about striving in life. And "Siddhartha is a child of his time, a fin de siecle youth who has put on a loincloth and monk's robe (...)". Well, indeed, I wonder in wonder: how someone who has translated the whole story can make such incomplete and untrue remarks.
The characters in Siddhartha are always searching, always in motion, on a quest. They start when very young, but continue all through their lives and senility. In the last chapter, Govinda and Siddhartha, two old men, chat. Within the last ten pages of the story Govinda says: "Indeed, I am old, but I have not stopped searching. Never will I cease to search; this seems to be my destiny (...)". Siddhartha, of course, participates in this always being seeking, even when his hair has become gray. Everything that happens to him is important, he learns from everything: "A beautiful courtesan was my teacher for a long time, and a wealthy merchant was my teacher; and a few dice players. Once, even an itinerant disciple of the Buddha was my teacher. (...) From him, as well, I learned. (...) Most of all, however, I learned here, from this river, and from my predecessor, the ferryman Vasudeva (...)". From here, thus, I don't think "Siddhartha takes a detour through the pleasure lands of flesh and fermentation before moving on to more refined ground", as Robbins states in his introduction.
Siddhartha is a book for life, a humble recognition of our human nature in the whole, immutable eternity. Human beings go and come, live, love, hate, suffer, desire in an stoppable chain through the ages, a chain immutable and, at the same time, new from generation to generation. It is the continuous flowing of a river, Heraclitus' river, in the Greek, western philosophy. "All become the river, all of them striving as river to reach their goal, longingly, eagerly, suffering, and the river's voice rang out full of longing, full of burning sorrow, full of unquenchable desire". The flowing river is the symbol of the flowing of life, the eternal sounds of life, the eternal Om. This idea, this feeling of being flowing with the current of an eternal river that seems to be changing and the same at each instant, impossible to grasp or comprehend is indeed the meaning of the universal world religio, re-ligare. We come and go, appear and vanish, but life is always flowing, always there. A religion is the tie between our human condition and the eternal immutability-renovation of life.
All religions can be simplified by doctrines, no matter which one, all of them actually are. It occurs any time we cease to listen to the river, to the flow of life, when the om is silenced. And however, it is through listening to the river how Siddhartha saves his life and finds what he is looking for: peace and content and a still smile in his face, an impressive gait... At the end of his time, being old.
The quest expands, then, much farther than during the rebel years of the youth, far, far into the years of life. In addition, the sufferings of Siddhartha are certainly not the sufferings of the young. He is ready to commit suicide after the blooming of his time, after he has become rich, successful, after many years of weariness, once it seems that "there was nothing left in the world that could console him, give him pleasure", after having experienced the turbulence of sex-love of a woman, after all this. Kamala, the once most beautiful woman, with lips like "a fig parted in two", die because of the bite of a snake, in the very same bed where Vasudeva, the ferryman, lost his wife. Siddhartha is left with a spoiled and heartless boy, who runs away from him. The suffering of a father being rejected, despised, hurt and abandoned by his son is a terrible sorrow, not apt for youngsters against the bourgeois society! Siddhartha is a well matured individual, going through the ordeal of life.
Despite the love and appraisal the book has enjoyed from loose generations of young Europeans, incomparable since Goethe's Werther, Siddhartha is not, thus, a book for the young, but for the adult, and the older and beaten you are by the tidal waves of life, the better you will appreciate Hesse's beautiful story and poetic writing, all the emotions and feelings lying within its pages. Perhaps, Siddhartha is a book to read every 5 years.
Unlike knowledge, life is an initiation voyage.
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