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- Herausgeber: Pushkin Press Classics
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
< A classic meditation on artistic creation and the quest for spiritual transcendence from the Nobel Prize-winning author of Siddhartha __________ 'A great writer... complex, subtle, allusive.' The New York Times 'The classic literal-metaphorical journey.' The Guardian '[Hesse's] simplicity belies galaxies of knowledge in motion--history, theology, psychology, philosophy. Rilke, T. S. Eliot, Gide, Thomas Mann rightly called Hesse a master.' Life __________ In the aftermath of the Great War, a League of seekers sets off on a journey to the East. This merry band of artists, poets, musicians and storytellers travel across landscapes and millennia, every member in pursuit of a different goal. Yet all are united in their purpose - and in their vow to keep the League's essential mystery a secret. Initially a devoted follower of the League, the writer H.H. finds himself riven with doubt years later, when he comes to narrate their doings. As he tries to describe their journey without betraying his vow, words, memories, and his very sense of self all seem to slip from his grasp. A kaleidoscopic narrative which reels between despair and elation, Hesse's work was a major inspiration for travellers on the hippie trail of the 1960s and '70s. It remains a profound meditation on spiritual seeking and the act of creation, from one of the twentieth century's great mystics.
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3
THE JOURNEY TO THE EAST
HERMANN HESSE
TRANSLATED FROM THE GERMAN BY HILDA ROSNER
WITH A FOREWORD BY TONY WHEELER
PUSHK IN PRESS CLASSICS
‘Hesse’s simplicity belies galaxies of knowledge in motion – history, theology, psychology, philosophy. Rilke, T. S. Eliot, Gide, Thomas Mann rightly called him a master’
LIFE
Contents
THE JOURNEY TO THE EAST
Foreword
In 1972 I set out on a journey to the East. To me it was the ‘Asia overland trip’; later it would become better known as ‘the hippy trail’, and some of our fellow travellers would describe it as ‘the pot trail’ or simply as an endless succession of acid trips, good and bad. To others it was a religious search, a hunt for Eastern meaning, often led by the spiritual guides whom Indians would soon label as ‘export gurus’. The Beatles’ Maharishi Mahesh Yogi was a fine example.
My backpack wasn’t weighed down with guidebooks, for the simple reason that there weren’t many. I hadn’t yet written the first Lonely Planet guidebook, and it would be a few more years before the first Rough Guide joined my books on the shelves. Hermann Hesse and The Journey to the East did, however, find its place in my pack, and it is interesting to look back, nearly forty years later, and ponder the role it played. 8It certainly wasn’t a guidebook. Hesse’s own visit to India, twenty years before the publication of The Journey to the East, may have been an inspiration for the book, but the ‘East’ of the real world is barely brushed against. If a reader traces the book’s account of eastward travel then H.H., the musical narrator, hardly strays beyond Switzerland and Italy. As Timothy Leary would emphasise with delight in The Politics of Ecstasy, his own sacred text for the 1960s, The Journey to the East was as much a journey of the head as of the feet. As Hesse relates, ‘We not only wandered through Space, but also through Time.’ His roaming not only took him back through history but back into memory (where he ‘caroused with friends of my youth’) and into fiction as well as fact (Sancho Panza rode by his side).
Hesse’s ‘East’ was not just a magical mystery tour to a physical place but a dream-like quest for a cerebral place, a place which was ‘the home and youth of the soul’ or ‘everywhere and nowhere’ or ‘the union of all times’. It was a journey which not only ‘boldly crossed half Europe’ but also ‘a portion of the Middle Ages’.
Even the quest, that search for a place beyond space and time, a journey into the ‘heroic and magical’ or towards ‘light and wonder’, was only part of the journey’s charm, because H.H. was also a member of the 9League, a strange and remote association whose purposes and aims could never be revealed. Conveniently, if any member did decide to spill the beans he would find it impossible, because his intention to divulge the League’s mysteries meant he no longer understood it, and if you do not know the secret how can you reveal it?
It was a view perfectly in step with the 1960s, a time when change seemed imminent and inevitable and we were insiders, members of that league who knew, Saint Dylan reminded us, that ‘something was happening’. And it was clear that those outside our league didn’t know what it was, did they, Mr Jones?
When they did deign to travel in our dimension H.H.’s League members were as hardy as we were in the hippy-trail era and as penny-pinching as modern backpackers. His fellow League members resolutely renounced modern conveniences such as ‘railways, steamers, telegraphs, automobiles, airplanes’. Our trail to the East was similarly purist. We tried to stick to ground level; boarding a plane was admitting failure.
Today, all those years past my own journey to the East, it is sad to contemplate that Hesse not only enticed us to follow the path towards the ‘Home of Light’ but foresaw that we wouldn’t get there. The book’s opening presentiment that the League and its goals have faded 10and finally disappeared turns out to be a false one. It was H.H. himself who failed, who left the League and forgot its great purpose. The Journey to the East ends not with some triumphant arrival at the gates of a new world but with a sad fade into exhaustion. Did we do the same? Did the peace and love of the 1960s also fade? Did the bright vision of the flower-power era turn brittle and crumble? Or did we simply grow older and more cynical, just like every previous generation?
I loved my journey to the East. It opened doors and opened my eyes, and, like many of my fellow travellers, I have tried not to close them again. In recent years I’ve been delighted to see the growth of the gap-year phenomenon. Sure, many of those young travellers are going to do little more than follow a well-beaten track and learn some hard lessons about their capacity for alcohol. Yet even the most superficial gap-year voyagers will probably learn more about life and how to live it in one year on the road than they did in their last half-dozen years of schooling. Travel is always an education, and sometimes the lessons it teaches are painful ones. They are often as much about ourselves as anything else, and that was certainly the case for H.H. His journey to the East became an insight into his own failings, his own lack of faith and his own inability to 11see beneath the surface, to distinguish the servant from the leader.
It is to be hoped that our own journeys will make us better people, with a wider appreciation of our world and its wonders, better able to understand other points of view, more determined to help others less fortunate than ourselves. I hope my life will continue to be a journey to the East.
tony wheelerpublisher lonely planet guides
1
As it has been my destiny to take part in a great experience, and having had the good fortune to belong to the League and allowed to share in that unique journey, the wonder of which blazed like a meteor and afterwards sank into oblivion – even falling into disrepute – I have now decided to attempt a short description of this incredible journey. No man since the days of Hugo and mad Roland has ventured upon such a journey, until our own remarkable times; the troubled, confused, yet so fruitful period following the Great War.
I have allowed myself no illusions as to the difficulties involved in such an attempt. They are very great, and are not only subjective, although these in themselves would be considerable enough. For not only do I no longer possess the tokens, mementos, documents and diaries relating to the journey, but in the difficult 14years of misfortune, sickness and deep affliction which have elapsed since then, many of my recollections have also vanished. As a result of the blows of Fate and continual discouragement, my memory as well as my confidence in these earlier vivid recollections have become impaired. But apart from these purely personal notes, I am handicapped because of my former vow to the League; for although this vow permits unrestricted communication of my personal experiences, it forbids any disclosures about the League itself. And even though the League seems to have had no visible existence for a long time and I have not seen any of its members again, no allurement or threat in the world would induce me to break my vow. On the contrary, if today or tomorrow I had to appear before a courtmartial and was given the option of dying or divulging the secret of the League, I would joyously seal my vow to the League with death.
It can be noted here that since the travel diary of Count Keyserling, several books have appeared in which the authors, partly unconsciously, but also partly deliberately, have given the impression that they are brothers of the League and had taken part in the Journey to the East. Incidentally, even the adventurous travel accounts of Ossendowski come under this justifiable suspicion. But 15they have nothing to do with the League and our Journey to the East any more than ministers of a small sanctimonious sect have to do with the Saviour, the Apostles and the Holy Ghost to whom they refer for special favour and membership. Even if Count Keyserling really sailed round the world with ease, and if Ossendowski actually traversed the countries he described, yet their journeys were not remarkable and they discovered no new territory, whereas at certain stages of our Journey to the East, although the commonplace aids of modern travel such as railways, steamers, telegraph, automobiles, aeroplanes, etc., were renounced, we penetrated into the heroic and magical.
It was shortly after the Great War, and the beliefs of the conquered nations were in an extraordinary state of unreality. There was a readiness to believe in things beyond reality even though only a few barriers were actually overcome and few advances made into the realm of a future psychiatry. Our journey at that time across the Moon Ocean to Famagusta under the leadership of Albert the Great, or say, the discovery of the Butterfly Island, twelve leagues beyond Zipangu, or the inspiring league ceremony at Rudiger’s grave – those were deeds and experiences which were allotted once only to people of our time and zone. 16
I see that I am already coming up against one of the greatest obstacles in my account. The heights to which our deeds rose, the spiritual plane of experience to which they belong might be made proportionately more comprehensible to the reader if it were permitted to disclose to him the essence of the League’s secret. But a great deal, perhaps everything, will remain incredible and incomprehensible to him. The paradox alone must always be accepted that the seemingly impossible must continually be attempted. I agree with Siddhartha, our wise friend from the East, who once said: ‘Words do not express thoughts very well; everything immediately becomes a little different, a little distorted, a little foolish. And yet it also pleases me and seems right that what is of value and wisdom to one man seems nonsense to another.’ Even centuries ago the members and historians of our League recognised and courageously faced up to this difficulty. One of the greatest of them gave expression to it in an immortal verse:
‘He who travels far will often see things
Far removed from what he believed was Truth.
When he talks about it in the fields at home,
He is often accused of lying,
For the obdurate people will not believe 17
What they do not see and distinctly feel.
Inexperience, I believe,
Will give little credence to my song.’
This ‘inexperience’ has given rise to the position where our journey, which once raised thousands to a state of ecstasy, has not only been forgotten by the public, but a real taboo has been placed upon its memory. History is rich in examples of a similar kind. The whole of world history often seems to me nothing more than a picture-book which portrays humanity’s most powerful and senseless desire – the desire to forget. Does not each generation, by means of suppression, concealment and ridicule, efface what the previous generation considered most important? Have we not just had the experience that a long, horrible, monstrous war has been forgotten, distorted and dismissed by every nation? And now that they have had a short respite, are not the same nations trying to recall by means of exciting war novels what they themselves caused and endured a few years ago? In the same way, the day of rediscovery will come for the deeds and sorrows of our League, which are now either forgotten or are a laughing-stock in the world, and my notes should make a small contribution towards it. 18
One of the characteristics of the Journey to the East was that although the League aspired to quite definite, very lofty aims during this journey (they belong to the secret category and therefore cannot be revealed), nevertheless each member could have his own private aims and indeed without them he would not have been included in the party. Each of us, although he appeared to share common ideals and aims, was borne up and comforted by his own fond childhood dream deep within his heart as a source of inner strength and comfort. My own goal for the journey, about which the President questioned me before my acceptance into the League, was a simple one, but many members of the League had set themselves goals which, although I respected, I could not fully understand. For example, one of them was a treasure-seeker and he thought of nothing else but of winning a great treasure which he called ‘Tao’. Still another had conceived the idea of capturing a certain snake to which he attributed magical powers and which he called Kundalini. My own journey and life-goal, which had coloured my dreams since my late boyhood, was to see the beautiful Princess Fatima and, if possible, to win her love.
