Soul of the Age (23 page)

You're quite right about my smoking. But there too, moderation is not one of my strong points. I did stop smoking four days ago, and intend to keep this up for a few more days, and then I'll start up again, not smoking much at first, but things will soon get out of hand, and I'll have to mount another abstention campaign.

There is little danger of my poisoning myself with toxic substances other than tobacco. Alcohol is a possible exception, but I don't really overindulge in it, and I stick to the very light local wine. I eat quite erratically, but I'm not addicted to anything in particular, and favor mild, light food.

I hope we get to see each other soon, so we can continue this sparring match. But I feel all of this is quite ominous. Decay is setting in, Klingsor's skull is tottering.

Dear Dr. Oppenheim, my thanks for now, in the hope that I shall remain in your good esteem.

TO GEORG REINHART

Montagnola, July 8, 1922

I have been wanting to write to you for a long time, but waited for weeks in the hope of sending you a book with some nice, old stories, which I edited.
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But it still hasn't arrived from the publishers. So, for now, I'm just sending you fond greetings.

I turned forty-five eight days ago. The best thing I can say about the past year is that last May I finally completed my
Siddhartha,
which will be appearing in book form in the winter. I spent two and a half years on it, and even though I'm not altogether satisfied with the book, I feel that I have reformulated for our era a meditative Indian ideal of how to live one's life.

I was saddened, but not at all surprised to hear about the assassination of Rathenau.
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I corresponded a little with him some years ago, when he was beginning to influence public opinion through his writings. I know all too well the mentality, or rather the mindless behavior and boorish pistol waving that led to his murder. It is something I have been trying to combat and bring out into the open for years. The German universities are, unfortunately, one of the main bastions of this nasty and utterly ridiculous anti-intellectualism.

Fond greetings to you and your wife

TO ROMAIN ROLLAND

Montagnola, August 10, 1922

You ask in your kind letter whether I am still “in Lugano.” Well, there isn't an easy answer to that question. All I can say is that I'm still living in Montagnola, but haven't set foot in Lugano for more than a year, even though it would only take me an hour to get there. So you can see the kind of life I'm leading: St. Jerome in his little hut.

Many thanks for the helpful information. If the conference
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is held, I shall try to attend part of it, and would be delighted to get to know your Indian friends.

I have finally finished my
Siddhartha.
It will appear in book form next winter—almost three years after I started work on it—and you shall receive a copy right away. Part One still bears a dedication to you; I have dedicated Part Two to a cousin of mine who has been living in Japan for decades,
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and is steeped in Eastern thought; we are especially close.

I'm delighted to hear that you're in Switzerland again. And I hope we shall get to see each other. A few months ago, I lost a dear friend, the German politician Conrad Haussmann.
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The intellectual climate in Germany smacks of anarchy and religious fanaticism; it's the climate of an apocalypse or imminent thousand-year Reich.

Cordial greetings from an admirer of yours, who wishes you all the best

TO HELENE WELTI

Montagnola, August 29, 1922

Your kind letter arrived yesterday, and there was a package today with all sorts of things. I would like to thank you ever so much for all this kindness, and I look forward to trying out the lotion. I shall have to be careful with most of the foodstuffs, since I seldom partake of such luxuries, and have not eaten any meat or sausage in a long time. Those things won't keep for long in this heat, without a basement, and somebody will have to help me finish off the sausage. I could only eat a little myself. Actually, I would be much better off with apples, if you ever have any from your garden; they're very scarce here. I eat a bit of macaroni or rice once a day, but apart from that I live almost entirely off milk.

I'm glad that you have read
Siddhartha.
While it doesn't amount to much as literature, it represents the sum of my life and the ideas that I have absorbed over the course of twenty years from Indian and Chinese traditions. The ending of
Siddhartha
is almost closer to Taoism than to Indian thought.

I received a rather odd form of vindication over the past few days. There was an international conference in Lugano, and rather than give a talk, I read the ending of
Siddhartha.
Naturally enough, there were only a few who understood it. Among the audience was a Hindu, or rather a Bengali, a professor of Asian history in Calcutta, and afterward he got somebody to translate the whole thing verbatim. He turned up the following day in Montagnola, and said he was astonished and quite moved to find a European who had reached the core of Indian philosophy. He spent many hours with me, and soon we were friends. He told me all sorts of things, sang old Indian songs, some more recent ones, etc., etc.

Romain Rolland is coming today, so he can catch the end of the conference. It's quite awkward for me to have to go to Lugano right now, since I always hate going to the city, and would in any case have to worry about the cost of every single telephone call or stamp, since my pockets are virtually empty at present. But I hope to receive some money in the next few days, and then I can invite my Indian friend for a cup of tea in Lugano.

I believe
Siddhartha
recapitulates for our era something that is truly ancient, and hence its significance for a small group of people. The Indian was extremely excited. He said that, while he realized that we Europeans were aware of Buddhist doctrine and were studying it actively, he was amazed that one of us had got so close to the real, inner, nondogmatic Buddha.

I did a lot of painting over the summer. I showed the sketches to my Hindu friend, and asked him to select one for himself. He chose one with trees and a bridge, and said he had selected that one because he feels I know and love trees and understand the language they speak, as he does himself, and because he interpreted the bridge as a bridge between East and West, which people were discovering anew through our efforts.

I very much hope that
Siddhartha
will eventually appear in English,
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not for the sake of the English themselves but for those Asians and others whom it would vindicate.

There were other nice, interesting people at the conference (the International Women's League for Freedom and Peace; Rolland's sister is one of the leaders), but I only went down twice. Some of them came here to see me—old Frederik van Eeden,
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for instance. You may have read his
Young John.
His background is entirely different from mine. He converted to Catholicism recently, at over sixty, and yet we have become friends; I caught in his voice and eyes a glimpse of a state of mind which is neither Eastern nor Western, a world which exists outside time and space, and yet is more real for all who dwell in it than anything the external world has to offer.

Fortunately, it's still summer, and very hot. I have often thought about the time you were here last year, and would be delighted if we could repeat the experience.

TO BERTHLI KAPPELER

Montagnola, February 5, 1923

There is really nothing left for me to say. You yourself write in your letter that you found
Siddhartha
disturbing, that it turned everything inside you “upside down”—all of which suggests, as you yourself realize, that this book has prodded you to discover new things, challenged your soul. I expect that you too will soon begin to recognize the utter vapidity of your colleagues' questions about the “voguishness” of Indian books and such trifles.

Yet you still felt you needed to raise a question that makes me feel ashamed and also gives me food for thought: Was I serious about
Siddhartha,
do I stand behind it, mean what I say, or was I just having a bit of fun, passing the time, and writing something for its own sake?

I would ask you, before you read any further, whether you have not already answered this question. Your answer was yes. You understood the serious intent of the book and accepted it as a personal challenge. Of course, you have no way of knowing what I put into the book: three years of hard work, many difficult experiences, and ideas drawn from East Asian traditions, which I have been studying intently for the past twenty years. But, actually, you know all of this already, you can sense that I am serious and broach these matters with considerable awe. In any case those kinds of personal considerations and notions about literature seem trivial, since
Siddhartha
raises issues that are truly substantive.

You have also sensed that Siddhartha and I are somehow identical, as is Knulp. Siddhartha is doing the same thing as Knulp (searching for God), but he is much more serious, intense, and, in particular, more conscious about it.

The one thing you find disturbing: why does the backdrop have to be Indian? That is a harder question, but I shall nevertheless try to answer it, since I can feel these questions mean a lot to you.

What follows is a brief credo (intended as a response to your intimate question, not as material for your colleagues' funny parlor games). There is, of course, only one God, one truth, but each people, each age, and each individual perceive it differently, and there are new forms evolving constantly to express that truth. One of the most beautiful and purest such forms is undoubtedly the New Testament—i.e., the Gospels and, to a lesser extent, the Pauline Epistles. There are some proverbs in the New Testament and also in Lao-tse, Buddha, and the Upanishads which rank among the truest, most concise and lively insights that man has ever recognized and articulated. But I could not follow the Christian path to God because of the rigid piety of my upbringing, these ridiculous squabbles in theology, the emptiness and excruciating boredom of the church, etc. So I looked around for other paths to God, and soon discovered the Indian way, which was natural enough in my family, since my grandfather, father, and mother had intimate connections with India, spoke Indian languages, etc. But the most liberating experience of all for me was when I discovered the Chinese way in Lao-tse. Of course, I was also reading Nietzsche, Tolstoy, and Dostoyevsky, who exposed me to modern experiments and problems, but I found the deepest wisdom in the Upanishads, Buddha, Confucius, and Lao-tse, and eventually in the New Testament, once I had overcome my aversion to the specifically Christian form of truth. Yet I remained faithful to the Indian way, even though I do not consider it superior to Christianity: I was simply disgusted by Christianity's attempt to monopolize God and the truth, beginning with Paul and running right through Christian theology, and felt that the Indian methods of finding truth through yoga, etc., are far more practical, astute, and profound.

That is my answer to your question. While I don't feel that Indian wisdom is superior to what Christianity has to offer, I find it somewhat more spiritual, less intolerant, broader, and freer. The Christian truth was forced upon me in my youth in an inadequate form. The Indian Sundar Singh
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had quite the opposite experience: having been force-fed with Indian doctrines, he came to believe that the splendid old Indian religion had been corrupted, just as I had felt about Christianity. And so he chose Christianity, or rather didn't choose it but simply became as convinced, captivated, and overwhelmed by Jesus' message of love as I was by the Indian idea of Unity. Other people will find other paths leading to God and the center of the world.

But the experience itself is always the same. People who suspect the truth (and, like you, initially feel “completely confused”) have a sense of what is important in life and strive after it, inevitably experience—whether in the form of Christianity or otherwise—that God or, if you wish, life is very real. All of us participate in that life; we can resist it or serve it, but nobody who is truly awake could ever live without it.

In the case of those who are deeply intellectual, these experiences may consist partly of thoughts and insights, but they can also take other forms: Thought and awareness are not necessary, life itself can mold us in such a way that we strive increasingly after perfection, value things that are sacred and eternal, and become more and more indifferent to the reality of the other, so-called everyday world.

You know enough now; everything else can be found in
Siddhartha
itself. Please keep these words to yourself. They are intended just for you, but you may share them with one or two others if you feel certain that their interest in the matter goes beyond idle curiosity.

TO ROMAIN ROLLAND

Montagnola, April 6, 1923

My dear friend Rolland,

My friends have never left me as much in the lurch as they have in the case of
Siddhartha,
hardly a single person bothered to drop me a line saying they received the book. Hence the pleasure I derived this morning from reading your kind, wonderful letter.

You're right: I have extremely few colleagues who can appreciate and understand
Siddhartha.
The reviews I have seen convey only a sense of respectful embarrassment.

On the other hand, there are a few people who are completely receptive to
Siddhartha
—to its Indian and human elements as well as to my utterly private mythology—and who breathe it in like air from the homeland. One of the best is the person who shares the dedication of the book with you, my cousin in Japan. He has picked up all sorts of things from his fifteen years living in East Asia and through his long, intimate relationships with Japanese eminences.