Spiritual Hesse

I learned as much about Hermann Hesse’s life as I know about American literature. Possibly, we can talk about Hemingway, William James, and very few others. But when I read Sidartha, I encountered a good point in making spiritual European literature valid. Hesse’s vision of spiritual life and encountering himself in solitude and driving happiness out of loneliness and into spiritual life seems to me a valid point to support the idea that writers usually can be divided into those who live a lonely life and those who approach life with a bohemian passion. Sidartha is a pray for spirituality where Gautama (Budha) shows his spiritual strength and maintains a strong character against all temptation including the woman of the street. In Steppenwolf, Hesse exposes many of his personal life experiences, and presents a significant amount of his inner perception about philosophical existential objectives far different from those characteristic of our Western hemisphere, namely, power and pleasure. The writings of Demian and Beneath the Wheel support the idea that success does not derive directly from the will to power that he has learned from Nietzsche and others, so failure in life can occur regardless how good someone might be, pretend to be, or think to be. In The Glass Bead Game, he presents his views of religious life beyond spirituality, making Latin a second language of interaction beyond his German’s writings. In this novel, the Magister Ludi possesses a strong religious character filled with esoteric thoughts. The Nobel Prize winner has essentially influenced the German, Anglo-Saxon, and some other European literatures in one particular direction where Western literatures are not particularly focused. It is obvious that Hesse’s literature is particularly is unique in nature and content, and analysis of form would exceptionally discriminate many individual aspect not found in any other European writer.