Talking About Hesse: The Soul, the Body, and Their Arrangements

About the Topic

Hermann Hesse died more than sixty years ago.

In recent years, this German-language writer has found renewed readership in China. People facing uncertainty, difficult decisions, or despair turn to his books, sometimes treating him as a guide in the search for self.

Why does a life from more than a century ago speak so strongly to us now?

Perhaps because he wrote candidly about confusion, struggle, estrangement, spiritual difficulty, and self-renewal. Amid a fast, competitive society, we can be carried along by circumstances, feel lonely in a crowd, and question what life means.

Hesse faced a comparable crisis a century ago.

He offered no standard route to happiness or peace. Instead, he suggested turning inward and accepting one’s vulnerability and contradictions.

In this session, I would like to talk about Hesse’s life.

We will trace his path from resistance to rigid schooling, through war, family upheaval, and prolonged depression, to finding quiet in writing, gardening, and painting. We will also consider Jungian psychoanalysis and his enduring interest in Eastern philosophy.

In Siddhartha, Hesse describes yielding to the paths of soul and body, experiencing desire, wealth, vanity, and despair, and learning to stop struggling against the world. Rather than compare it with an imagined perfection, the task becomes accepting, loving, and belonging to it.