Hesse reflects on happiness as a moment outside time, free from hope and fear. In The Poet, a young man leaves his promised life to study with the Master of the Perfect Word, discovering both the beauty and the cost of artistic devotion. The poems turn to the seasons, solitude, memory and death, closing with Stufen and its call to leave familiar forms of life behind and begin again.
Hermann Hesse — 1 recording in the archive.
Related reading: The Seasons of the Soul by Hermann Hesse.
Dear listeners, let me say a few words about happiness and what that word means to me. By happiness I mean something entirely objective: sharing in timeless being, in the eternal music of the world, in what others have called the harmony of the spheres, or the smile of God. The world's countenance shines and laughs eternally, while human beings, generations, peoples and empires rise, flourish and sink back into shadow and nothingness. Life makes music eternally; eternally it dances its round. And whatever joy, consolation and laughter is allotted to us, transient, endangered and frail as we are, is radiance from that source: an eye full of light, an ear full of music, breathing the perfect present, singing in the chorus of the spheres, dancing in the world's round, joining in God's eternal laughter. That is our share in happiness. Many have experienced it only once, many only a few times. Yet whoever has experienced it was not happy merely for a moment. They also brought something back: something of its radiance and sound, something of the light of timeless joy. And everything that lovers have brought into our world in the way of love, and artists in the way of consolation and serenity, which often shines as brightly after centuries as on its first day, comes from there. When people grown old try to remember when, how often and how intensely they felt happiness, they look above all to their childhood, and rightly so. For experiencing happiness requires, above all, independence from time, and thus from fear as well as hope. Most people lose this capacity with the years. Happiness had been experienced only in childhood, in hours or moments that were very difficult to recover. For even there, even in the realm of childhood, closer examination did not always find the radiance genuine, or the gold entirely pure. When such a memory appeared, it first seemed to concern weeks or days, or at least a whole day: a Christmas, perhaps, a birthday or the first day of the holidays. But to reconstruct a childhood day in memory would require thousands of images, and memory could not gather enough for a single day, not even half a day. Yet whether these were experiences of days, of hours or merely of minutes, I have experienced happiness a number of times, and even late in life, in old age, I…