Hymn to Old Age

by Hermann Hesse

  Once, a thousand years ago

  There was a home and garden too

  Where birds were buried in the snow

  Out of which the crocus grew.

  I want to break this stifling hold

  And spread my wings to fly away

  Into those distant times whose gold

  Just as brightly shines today.

  Until now I had thought little of death, never feared it, often wished for it with desperate impatience. Only now did I see it in all its reality and greatness, how it stands opposite us as a counter-pole, and waits for us so that a destiny can be completed and a circle closed. Until now my life had been a path at whose beginnings I had spent much time surrounded by love, through my mother and my childhood—a path along which I often sang, often sulked, and which also I often cursed, but at no time did I ever see clearly what the end of this path would be. All the effort, all the power that fed my existence seemed to me to proceed from the dark beginnings, from birth and the womb, and death seemed to me to be just the chance point at which all the power, energy and effort would one day be paralysed and extinguished. Only now did I see the greatness and the necessity that lay in this ‘chance’. I felt my life to be bound and determined at both ends, and saw my path and my task as being to make my way as to a completion, to ripen, and to approach it as the celebration to end all celebrations.

  From Zum Gedächtnis (In

  Memoriam) 1916

  Anyone who has stepped onto the path of maturity can never lose again, but can only win. Until one day the time comes when he too finds the cage door open and with one final beat of the heart escapes from the inadequate.

  From Zum Gedächtnis

  (In Memoriam) 1916

  LITTLE SONG

  Rainbow song in the rain

  The magic of dying light

  Joy like a sweet refrain

  Fading in the night

  The Madonna’s face in pain

  Life’s bitter delight …

  The wind that blasts the bloom

  The wreath laid on the tomb

  Pleasure all too brief.

  Star to darkness hurled:

  Veil of beauty and grief

  Over the depths of the world.

  AFTERWORD

  Hermann Hesse was one of those artists fortunate enough to grow old, and thus be able to experience all phases of life and, in his inimitable fashion, to depict them. He was a man of complex and fragile temperament, who lived a life of intense creativity both as a writer and painter (the twenty volumes of his collected works comprise some 14,000 pages, his correspondence ran to about 35,000 letters, and he painted around 3,000 watercolours), and so the fact that he reached the age of eighty-five was something that could scarcely be taken for granted. Generally such gifts carry their own risks, and such intensity tends to shorten life expectancy. For the most part, those who deviate from the norm and go their own independent way encounter many obstacles and meet with much resistance from their fellow men, as a consequence of which their stay on earth tends to be far shorter than that of people who get along with the world ‘as it is’, and are able to adapt and indeed knuckle under to it. At least twice, when he tried to commit suicide at the age of fourteen and again later at forty-six during the crisis before he wrote Der Steppenwolf, it is far from certain that Hesse would have survived his depressions had it not been for chance and for certain people stepping in at the right moments to look after him.

  The fact that apart from these inner conflicts he also survived external dangers—the historical traumas of the First World War and especially the threat of National Socialism—was due to his political farsightedness, which made him “the first voluntary emigrant” (Joachim Maass) as early as 1912, and from 1924 he was a Swiss citizen. Anyone who has read the diary-like self-revelations of his letters and has thus got to know his bitter opposition to the trends of his time cannot help but be continually astonished at how long he was able to maintain this conflict-laden existence, and also at the lack of bitterness in his works, which focus not on the turmoil of the age but on the often astonishing simplicity of purification and enlightenment.

  Old age and maturity—as we see for ourselves every day—do not necessarily belong together. “People often become old, but rarely mature,” wrote the French author Alphonse Daudet. Very few have the good fortune, despite physical decline, to maintain their inner flexibility and to extract from the restrictions of old age the serenity, tolerance and good-humoured open-mindedness that recapture the charm of youthful spontaneity. This needs a process of consciousness that Heinrich von Kleist described in his famous essay about the puppet theatre:

  We see that in the degree to which … reflection becomes darker and weaker, grace (innocence) emerges ever more radiant and dominant. But just as when two lines intersect, one cuts through the endlessness of the other and suddenly finds itself on the other side, or the image in a concave mirror moves into the endless distance and then suddenly confronts us again, so too when knowledge has as it were passed through endlessness, grace emerges again—so that at the same time it appears at its purest [in someone] who has either no consciousness or endless consciousness.

  The ninety-one-year-old Pablo Picasso expressed the same thought rather more simply, though no less strikingly: “One needs to live long in order to become young.” In the case of Hermann Hesse at any rate, what his first biographer Hugo Ball wrote of him is certainly true: “He felt old in his youth and young in his old age.”

  This volume begins with observations the author made when he was forty-three. These are impressions relating to spring, the rebirth and renewal of nature, depicted by a man at the halfway stage of his life, conscious of the fleeting transience of the world of appearances, into which he knew he was drawn and which he did not resist. The yearly repetition of life’s regeneration does not give him cause to lament the fact that he himself is no longer at that same stage which makes spring so radiant and so full of joy and hope, but it spurs him into thinking about his own process of change and regeneration. He has long been aware of the relativity of youth and age:

  “All gifted, differentiated people are old one minute and young the next, just as they’re happy one minute and sad the next … But people are not always on a level with their own age—inwardly they often rush ahead, and even more frequently they lag behind; then their conscious mind and feeling for life are less mature than their body, they resist its natural manifestations, and demand from themselves something that they cannot achieve.”

  The vain struggle of a consciousness that grows younger from crisis to crisis against the decline of the body was all too familiar to Hermann Hesse. As a ‘Man of Fifty’, on the one hand he is in need of health cures, and on the other he is driven by such a lust for life that he even takes dancing lessons, spends his nights at masked balls, and watches himself with a kind of black humour, having long since seen through the vanity of such escapes. But only when he has lived out this revolt against the gradual fading of the body’s joys and pleasures and has tested them to the full does he succeed in grasping comparable processes in the world around him. When, for example, after a storm the shadows emerge a little more sharply, objects lose their colour but take on a more defined shape, he takes this as an image for the process of ageing. Instead of bemoaning the loss of colour and sensuality, he relishes the gain in form and profile. And from there it is no great step to the realisation that “Age is not worse than youth; Lao Tse is not worse than Buddha. Blue is not worse than red.” Age is only pathetic “when it wants to play at being young”.

  He becomes aware of more and more of the joyful aspects of age once he has given up fighting against it—the increased serenity that makes us less sensitive to blows and pinpricks, the reservoir of experiences, images and memories from the past, which—thanks to the benevolent selectivity of the memory—often seems more beautiful and more worthwhile than the present, the prospect of imminent liberation from the fragility of the body, and
communion with all our friends, with people we love and respect and who have preceded us to death, and finally the fearful yet confident curiosity concerning what awaits us afterwards. As he writes at the end of his famous poem ‘Stages’:

  Perhaps one day even the final knell

  Will have yet more new rooms for us in store

  And life will go on calling evermore …

  And so, my heart, take leave and fare you well!

  Anyone who in addition to these texts from four decades is also able to look into the soul revealed by photos of Hermann Hesse in his old age, the most impressive of which are those taken by his son Martin, will endorse the comment made by his fellow writer Ernst Petzoldt:

  “The goal of all artistic endeavour is none other than to look in old age just as, for example, Hermann Hesse did. Indeed, I would say one doesn’t even need to read him, but simply to look at him in order to be cognisant of his life and work. For his written character is absolutely identical to this ageless countenance, and represents the quintessence, so to speak, of all poems and writings. But we would not really see him without having read him!”

  VOLKER MICHELS 1990

  A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

  Hermann Hesse was born on the second of July 1877 in Calw, Württenberg. His father was a Protestant missionary from Estonia and his mother the daughter of a Württemberg Indologist, and they had first met at a mission in India. His grandfather Hermann Gundert ran a publishing house in Calw, and his large library was at the disposal of the avid young reader. In 1891 Hesse was sent to the Seminary at Maulbronn Abbey, which he mentions in the passage entitled Autumnal Experiences, but he ran away, and after bitter conflicts with his parents he tried to commit suicide in May 1892.

  By working in a bookshop in Tübingen, Hesse became financially independent, and in 1898 he published a small volume of poetry called RomantischeLieder (Romantic Songs), followed in 1899 by a novella called Eine Stunde hinter Mitternacht (One Hour After Midnight). Both works were failures. In 1900, he was rejected for military service because of eye trouble and this, together with various nervous disorders, was to plague him throughout his life. The novel Peter Camenzind, published in 1904 by Samuel Fischer, was a major breakthrough, and from then on he was able to live on his writing.

  In 1904 he married Marie Bernoulli, and they lived in Gaienhofen on Lake Constance, where she bore him three sons. It was here that Hesse renewed his earlier interest in Buddhism and theosophy—an interest which was to lead much later to one of his most famous works, Siddhartha (1922). However, his marriage was soon in difficulties, and a long trip to Sri Lanka and Indonesia, followed by the family’s move to Bern, Switzerland, in 1912 did not help matters. During the First World War, as a staunch pacifist he made many enemies in Germany by publishing an essay attacking nationalism, and his personal crisis deepened when in 1916 his father died, his son Martin became very ill, and his wife’s schizophrenia became a matter of serious concern. His own mental condition deteriorated, and he had to undergo psychiatric treatment.

  By 1919, the marriage had broken down irretrievably, and Hesse moved to Ticino, where he rented rooms in Montagnola. In 1924 he married the singer Ruth Wenger, but this marriage also broke down. By now he was a naturalised Swiss citizen, and shortly after the publication and worldwide success of his novel Steppenwolf, he married Ninon Dolbin, née Ausländer, an art historian. In 1931 he designed the Casa Hesse, near Montagnola, where he was to spend the rest of his life.

  He observed the rise of the Nazis with great concern, and in 1933 helped Bertolt Brecht and Thomas Mann on their journeys into exile. He was bitterly opposed to anti-Semitism (his third wife was Jewish), and eventually his work was banned in Nazi Germany. In 1946 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, and although he continued to write stories, reviews and poems, he devoted much of his remaining time to painting watercolours and attending to a vast correspondence. He died in his sleep of a brain haemorrhage on the ninth of August 1962, and is buried in Montagnola at the San Abbondio cemetery.

  Volker Michels has calculated that Hesse’s literary works comprise some 14,000 pages, while he wrote about 35,000 letters, and painted about 3,000 watercolours. He once talked of his “lifelong failure to acquire a talent for idleness”.

  DHW 2011

  ABOUT THIS EDITION

  This English translation is based on the Insel Taschenbuch 2857, which is an extended and revised version of Insel Taschenbuch 2311—Hermann Hesse, Mit der Reife wird man immer jünger, Betrachtungen und Gedichte über das Alter, edited by Volker Michels (Frankfurt am Main and Leipzig—Insel Verlag, 1990). The poems have been taken from the edition—Hermann Hesse, Die Gedichte (Frankfurt am Main 1977). For extracts from novels and longer passages, the source and date of publication are given at the end of each text. The shorter texts are taken mainly from Hermann Hesse’s letters.

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  Copyright

  English translation © David Henry Wilson 2011

  Original text © Suhrkamp Verlag Frankfurt am Main

  Hymn to Old Age first published in German as Mit der Reife wird man immer jünger in 1990. This translation is of the revised 2002 edition.

  This ebook edition published in 2012 by Pushkin Press, 71-75 Shelton Street, London WC2H 9JQ

  ISBN 978 1 908968 97 5

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  Cover Illustration The Four Ages of Man Valentin de Boulogne © National Gallery London/Bridgeman Art Library

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