Journey to the east - Herman Hesse

Despite it being a whole two decades since I read and forgotten Hesse’s Siddhartha, I reached without hesitation to pick up a book by him in a bookstore perched on the banks of the Ganga. A small book that gave me hope that I would read again with abandon and not with guilt driving my reading.

The story is about a man who connects deeply to a secret, extraordinary, other-worldly yet real sect but loses his way and his faith in it and still wants to write all about this secret sect. Once he writes he realises that he was never equipped to capture its essence. He finds his way back to the people and the sect and disappears to become one with them/it.

Many a time a book finds you, this may sound trite or profound to you, it sometimes sounds that way to me too, but it is real. I have always felt the need to write a book and the last few years the need has surfaced to the top of the conscious mind. But I have been unable to convince myself to write it. The underlying tone of Journey to East is that - should/must you write? The protagonist (he is called H.H) talks about the deep desire to record his experiences with the sect along with the deep uncertainty that he will never be able to capture the realness or the importance of it - as it flits between real and unreal. A dilemma that I struggle with (not the unreal part); will the depth of the story I want to tell ever be possible, will the book ever live up to the experience and if it doesn’t, what is its purpose? And H.H’s friend tells him he felt the same way writing about something as real as WW1. Seriously, can your perception be a book? What makes you think that your experiences of stories that civilisations have been repeating over and over again are worthy?

A few sentences that resonated:

When he describes this sect he says, “We brought the past, future and the fictions into the present moment.” The starkness of his words do not take away from the description of the mind of man/woman - we are in every moment weaving all three dimensions together.

“There are few who are born to be masters; they remain happy and healthy. But all the others who have only become masters through endeavour, end in nothing”. Really made me question the ladder to leadership model that’s still being touted as a singular way of work.

”I imagine every historian is similarly affected when he begins to record the events of some period and wishes to portray them sincerely. For everything becomes questionable as soon as I consider it closely, everything slips away and dissolves”.

an existential crisis to say the least, a book for a minute, park your rationale and relish the parts where the past, present and fiction comes together for a moment and read for your moment of history.