Hymn to Old Age

by Hermann Hesse

  Afterwards, they sat on a tree trunk on the bank—the sun was beginning to set—and Siddhartha told the ferryman where he came from and about his life, and how today, in his hour of despair, he had seen it all before his eyes. His tale went on deep into the night.

  Vasudeva listened very attentively. He took it all in, origin and childhood, all the learning, all the seeking, all the joy, all the sorrow. This was one of the greatest of the ferryman’s virtues—like few others, he knew how to listen. Without his saying anything at all, the speaker felt how Vasudeva absorbed his words, silently, openly, expectantly, not missing a single one, waiting without impatience, offering neither praise nor blame, but just listening. Siddhartha felt what happiness it was to confide in such a listener, to sink his own life, his own quest, his own suffering into the heart of another.

  But towards the end of Siddhartha’s tale, when he spoke about the tree by the river, and about his deep fall, about the holy Om and about how after his slumber he had felt such love for the river, the ferryman listened with redoubled attentiveness, completely and utterly engaged, his eyes tightly closed.

  When Siddhartha fell silent, however, and there had been a long pause, Vasudeva said: “It is as I thought. The river has spoken to you. It is a friend to you and it also speaks to you. That is good, that is very good. Stay with me, Siddhartha, my friend. Once I had a wife—her bed was next to mine, but she died long ago, and I have lived alone for a long time. Live with me now—there is room and food for both of us.”

  “I thank you,” said Siddhartha, “I thank you and I accept. And I also thank you, Vasudeva, for listening to me so well! Rare are the people who know how to listen, and I have never met anyone who knew it as well as you. In this too I shall learn from you.”

  “You will learn it,” said Vasudeva, “but not from me. The river taught me how to listen, and you too will learn from it. It knows everything, the river, and one can learn everything from it. You see, you have learnt that too from the river—that it is good to strive downwards, to sink, to search for the depths. The rich and noble Siddhartha will become an apprentice oarsman, the learned Brahman Siddhartha will become a ferryman—this too has been told to you by the river. You will also learn the other from it.”

  After a long pause, Siddhartha said: “What other, Vasudeva?”

  Vasudeva stood up. “It is now late,” he said. “Let us go to bed. I can’t tell you about the ‘other’, my friend. You will learn it, and perhaps you already know it. You see, I am not a scholar, I don’t know how to talk, and I don’t know how to think. I only know how to listen and to be pious—otherwise I have learnt nothing. If I could say it and teach it, perhaps I should be a sage, but now I am just a ferryman, and it is my task to row people across this river. Many have crossed it, thousands, and for all of them my river has been nothing but an obstacle on their travels. They travelled for money and on business, and to weddings and on pilgrimages, and the river was in their way, and the ferryman was there to help them overcome the obstacle as swiftly as possible. But some among the thousands, a few, four or five—for them the river ceased to be an obstacle; they heard its voice, they listened to it, and the river became sacred to them, as it is sacred to me. Now let us go and rest, Siddhartha.”

  Siddhartha stayed with the ferryman and learnt how to handle the boat, and when there was nothing to do on the ferry, he worked with Vasudeva in the rice field, collected wood and picked fruit from the pisang trees. He learnt to make an oar, to repair the boat, to weave baskets, and he was happy with everything he learnt, and the days and months raced by. But the river taught him more than Vasudeva could teach him. From the river he never ceased to learn. Above all, he learnt from it how to listen, to hearken with a silent heart, with a waiting, open soul, without passion, without desire, without judgement, without opinion.

  He lived as a friend with Vasudeva, and sometimes they exchanged words—few but long-considered words. Vasudeva was not a friend of words, and Siddhartha seldom succeeded in getting him to speak.

  “Have you,” he once asked him, “have you also learnt this secret from the river—that there is no time?”

  Vasudeva’s face was covered with a bright smile.

  “Yes, Siddhartha,” he said. “Is this what you mean—that the river is everywhere at the same time, at its source and its mouth, at the waterfall, at the ferry, in the rapids, in the sea, in the mountains, everywhere, at the same time, and that for it there is only the present, not the shadow past, nor the shadow future?”

  “That’s it,” said Siddhartha. “And when I had learnt it, I looked at my life and it too was a river, and the boy Siddhartha was separated from the man Siddhartha and from the old man Siddhartha only by shadows and by nothing real. And Siddhartha’s earlier births were no past either, and his death and his return to Brahma will be no future. Nothing was, nothing will be; everything is, everything has being and presence.”

  Siddhartha spoke with delight, because this enlightenment had made him deeply happy. For was not all suffering time, was not all self-torment and self-terror time, were not all difficulties and all hostilities in the world overcome and gone as soon as one could think time away? He had spoken with delight, and Vasudeva smiled at him radiantly, nodded his affirmation, patted Siddhartha’s shoulder with his hand, and returned once more to his work.

  And on another occasion, when the river had swollen in the rainy season and was racing wildly, Siddhartha said: “Is it not true, my friend, that the river has many voices, very many voices? Does it not have the voice of a king and of a warrior and of a bull and of a night bird and of a woman giving birth and of a man sighing and a thousand other voices?”

  “It is so,” nodded Vasudeva, “all the voices of all creatures are in its voice.”

  “And do you know,” continued Siddhartha, “what word it speaks when you succeed in hearing all its ten thousand voices at once?”

  A happy laugh came from Vasudeva’s face, and he leant against Siddhartha and whispered the sacred Om in his ear. And this was exactly what Siddhartha had also heard.

  From time to time his smile was just like that of the ferryman, and was almost as radiant and almost as translucent with joy, similarly glowing from a thousand tiny folds, just as childlike, just as aged. Many travellers, when they saw the two ferrymen, thought they were brothers. In the evenings they often sat together on the tree trunk by the river, said nothing, and both listened to the water, which for them was not water but the voice of life, the voice of what is, of the endlessly becoming. And it sometimes happened that as they both listened to the river, they both thought of the same things, of a conversation two days ago, of one of their travellers whose face and fate concerned them, of death, of their childhood, and sometimes at the very same moment when the river had said something good to them, they would look at each other, both thinking exactly the same, both happy with the same answer to the same question.

  The ferry and the two ferrymen radiated something that many of the travellers could sense. Sometimes it would happen that when a traveller had looked into the face of one of the ferrymen, he would begin to tell his life story, talk of his suffering, confess his sins, ask for comfort and advice. And sometimes it would happen that one would ask permission to spend an evening with them, in order to listen to the river. It also happened that curious people came who had been told that at the ferry lived two wise men, or sorcerers, or saints. The inquisitive ones asked many questions, but they were given no answers, and they found neither sorcerers nor sages, but just two friendly little old men, who seemed to be mute and a little strange and crazy. And the nosy ones laughed, and talked about how stupid and how credulous were the people who spread such rumours.

  Extract from Siddhartha 1922

  For people with temperament, for artists, the decade between forty and fifty is always a critical time of unease and frequent dissatisfaction, in which one often has difficulty with life and with oneself. But then come years of calmness. I’ve not only exp
erienced that within myself but have also observed it in many others. Lovely though youth may be, the time of fighting and ferment, maturing and growing old also has its beauty and its happiness.

  From a letter written in

  December 1955 to his son Bruno

  HOW SWIFTLY THINGS PASS

  I was a child but yesterday

  Smooth of skin and loud with youthful laughter

  And now I am an aged man already

  Doing nothing till the end of day

  With bloodshot eyes dimly gazing after

  With bended back, walking on legs unsteady.

  Oh how swiftly life just fades away.

  Yesterday red, today blockhead

  Tomorrow dead!

  Had I not by my mistress been betrayed

  And had my wife not from me run away

  Then I’d go singing through the streets all day

  And in the night lie snugly in my bed.

  But when the women leave you high and dry

  Give up, my son, because you cannot win.

  Reach for the whisky, bear things with a grin

  For now the time has come to say goodbye.

  In the face of rights accepted by all humans, the older man is in the wrong if he accepts the love of a much younger woman and then lets her down, because the older man should be the wiser and the more circumspect.

  From a letter written c1925

  to his wife Ruth

  At the age of fifty a man gradually casts off certain childish things, the quest for reputation and respectability, and he begins to look back over his own life without passion. He learns to wait, he learns to stay silent, he learns to listen, and if these good gifts must be paid for with some illnesses and weaknesses, he considers that he has made a profit from the transaction.

  Note written on the fiftieth birthday of his wife Ninon 18th September 1945

  THE MAN OF FIFTY

  From the cradle to the bier

  It will take but fifty year

  Then death will claim his share.

  You decline and you deteriorate

  You despair and you disintegrate

  And dammit you even lose your hair.

  Your ancient teeth are moulding

  And against your manly chest

  There is no young lady pressed—

  It’s just a Goethe novel you are holding.

  But one more time ere I depart

  Let me embrace one of those girls

  With sparkling eyes and tumbling curls

  Whom I can hold against my heart

  Kissing her lips, her face, her breast

  And helping her to get undressed.

  After that, in God’s name then

  Death can come for me. Amen.

  One dies so damnably slowly, and piece by piece—every tooth, muscle and bone says its own goodbye, as if one had a special relationship with each of them.

  From an undated letter

  We have to torment ourselves and eat many bitter fruits before we lie still and rot … A rocket has a much better life—it goes whoosh, and is off at the peak of its powers.

  From a letter written on

  25th April 1916 to Ernst Kreidolf

  By youth we are forsaken

  Our health too has declined.

  The foreground now is taken

  By the contemplative mind.

  The older one gets and the less reason one actually has for clinging to life, the more stupidly and fearfully one shrinks away from death. And the more greedily and childishly one falls upon the last crumbs of the meal, the last few pleasures. And one keeps on hoping, and one keeps on finding grounds for hope. Today, as the fifty-year-old’s fatal lust for life keeps me busy, I hope for the time to come, for the stillness and detachment of the age that lies beyond these critical years.

  From März in der Stadt

  (March in the City), 1927

  I long for death, but not for a premature, immature death, and in all my yearning for maturity and wisdom I remain deeply and utterly in love with the sweet and capricious foolishness of life. We want both together, dear friend—lovely wisdom and sweet folly! We want to walk together and stumble together over and over again, for both should be delectable.

  From a letter written on 20th

  January 1917 to Walter Schädelin

  I’m often surprised by the extreme toughness with which our nature clings to life. Compliantly, though by no means willingly, we adjust to circumstances which just two days ago would have seemed to us totally unbearable.

  From a letter written in March

  1956 to Peter Suhrkamp

  Coming to terms with physical pain, when it lasts for some time, is certainly one of the hardest things to do. Those who are heroic by nature resist pain, try to deny it and grit their teeth like Roman Stoics, but admirable though this attitude might be, we still tend to have our doubts about whether pain can be truly conquered. As for me, I’ve always coped best with sharp pain when I have not resisted it, but have given myself over to it as one gives oneself over to inebriation or adventure.

  From a letter written in

  February 1930 to Georg Reinhart

  Between fifty and eighty one can enjoy lots of nice experiences—almost as many as in the earlier decades. I would not recommend going past eighty, though—then it’s not nice any more.

  From a letter written in

  April 1961 to Gunter Böhmer

  ON GROWING OLD

  Growing old is this: things you enjoyed

  Are tiresome, muddy waters cloud the spring,

  Of sharpness even pain is now devoid

  For soon there’ll be an end to everything.

  And what we once regarded with resentment—

  Commitment, duty, binding obligation—

  Is now a source of refuge and contentment:

  One more day’s work would bring us consolation.

  This bourgeois comfort too, though, cannot last—

  The soul now longs to fly without a care.

  It senses death, when time and self have passed

  And deeply breathes it in like sweetest air.

  REUNION WITH NINA

  WHEN, AFTER MONTHS OF absence, I return to my hill in Ticino, I am always surprised and moved by its beauty—then it is not a matter of simply being back home, but first I must transplant myself, sink new roots, rebind old threads, return to old habits, and gradually rediscover feelings of past and home before my southern rural life begins to re-emerge. Not only do the suitcases have to be unpacked, and the country clothes and shoes located again, but I must also find out whether the winter rains have made their mark on the bedroom, whether the neighbours are still alive, and I must enquire what has changed here during my six-month absence, and what advances have been made in the process that is gradually robbing even this beloved place of its long-guarded innocence and is filling it with the blessings of civilisation. Indeed, down in the gorge below another slope has been deforested and a villa is under construction, and on a sharp bend our road has been widened, and an enchanting old garden has been made into an escape route. The last horse-drawn carriages have gone, and have been replaced by cars, but these new automobiles are much too big for our narrow lanes. And so I shall never again see old Piero in his blue postilion’s uniform, with his yellow carriage and two bounding horses, racing down the hill, and I shall never again see him in the Grotto del Pace with his glass of wine, enjoying his little off-duty break. Alas, I shall never again sit at that beautiful forest’s edge above Lugano, my favourite spot for painting—a stranger has bought both forest and field, and fenced it in with wire, and where there were once a few beautiful ash trees, now they’re building a garage.

  On the other hand, the grass below the vines is as green as ever, and from beneath the faded leaves scamper the same old blue-green emerald lizards, and the forest is blue and white with evergreens, anemones and strawberry blossoms, and shining up coolly and softly through this verdant forest is the
lake …

  Anyway, ahead of me lies a whole summer and autumn, and once again I’m hoping for a few good months, enjoying long days out in the open, being free for a while from my gout, playing with my paints, and living a happier, more innocent life than is possible in winter and in the cities. The years pass quickly—the barefooted children I saw going to school in the village when I first moved here are now married, or sitting at typewriters or behind counters in Lugano or Milan, and the elders of the village are dead and buried.

  Now I remember Nina—is she still alive? Dear God, why have I not thought of her before? Nina is my friend, one of the few good friends I have in this region. She is seventy-eight years old, and lives in one of the most remote villages in the area, on which modern times have scarcely laid a finger. The path to her place is steep and difficult—I shall have to go down the hill for a few hundred metres in the baking sun, and then climb up again on the other side. But I set out at once, and first go downhill through the vineyards and forest, then across the narrow green valley, then steeply up the slopes which in summer are covered with cyclamen and in winter with Christmas roses. I ask the first child I meet in the village how old Nina is getting on. Oh, I’m told, she still spends her evenings sitting by the church wall taking snuff. Happily I go on my way—so she’s still alive, I haven’t lost her yet, and she’ll give me a warm welcome, and even if she moans and groans a bit, she’ll once more offer me the perfect model of a lonely old woman, stoically and not without humour enduring her gout and her isolation, standing no nonsense and making no concessions to the world, but spitting serenely in its face, and right to the end not bothering either doctor or priest.