Journey to the East by Herman Hesse

nb: this is mostly about travel and depression, if you’re just here to read about my thoughts on Hesse, skip to where there’s a big bold capitalised bit telling you where that starts.

The terror of return is beginning to grip me.

Two nights sleepless as I travelled on planes overnight then a 13-hour sleep catching up on the missed hours then a normal night’s sleep and then, bang, yesterday night, back to the hellishness of the restlessness of my day to day life. Holidays – as I have learned over and over again – are not a solution for depression. Even a healthy, wholesome holiday like I’m having – I had two beers in Cyprus and one in Varanasi two days ago and though I might try and find a wine bar in Mumbai tomorrow night (yes, on this trip I am also spending 20 hours in Mumbai as well as my six hours in Larnaca, 10 hours in Riyadh, 10 hours in Delhi (of course I left the airport at all of these, I’m boring but I’m not dead yet!) and four nights in Benares), I don’t think I’m going to end up passed out in a pool of other people’s urine (not that I’ve ever done that 😜😜😜 (I haven’t done that recently))-

Even a healthy, wholesome holiday has the soothing and regenerative power of a binge; it is not something from which one builds, it is something on which one leans.

A holiday is a crutch, not a solution (unless it’s medical tourism (e.g. getting a hair transplant), which is different)… Especially if, like me, your life is an unsatisfactory and unsatisfying mess, taking time outside of that – physically or pharmacologically – is obviously deeply, deeply inviting. And for a few days that is lovely.

To move and to progress, to see new things and to read many books and to not have pointless yet stressful emails pinging in your phone on a constant fucking basis… It’s nice. But it’s not a fundamental change, is it? Those pointless yet stressful emails will be back on Monday, that absolute lack of time to read and think and write (I feel today I could maybe have sat down and written something (this doesn’t count), but then I remembered that I had to start the journey back to my current and unsustainable life in London tomorrow and I just fucking folded into bleak fucking horror.

The holiday has been pleasant (aside from the need to source and carry cash all the fucking time in India, which I would have appreciated a warning about – it’s not Germany, which I know loves cash even though I haven’t been there since a schoolchild); I have seen many monkeys, I have watched rituals I do not understand, I have sneered at other white Eurmerican tourists who I deem to be worse tourists than I am, and – as I said – I’ve sat by the Ganges and read and read some very good books.

But part of a sustainable adulthood – I think – is not having dread… Is not dreading a return to the place you are holidaying from. Is not needing, desperately desperately desperately, for change, yet putting it off (or trying to sneak it in around the things that need to be changed, so you end up in classes or doing homework for fucking classes for like 20 hours a week, on top of like 60+ hours a week of work (definitely over 70 if you include the commute, though tbf I do get to read (or do homework) during that time so it is sorta reclaimed) on top of the hour or two I spend on this blog, on top of trying to exercise for 3/4 hours a week minimum (sure, I’ve basically lost the COVID slash antipsychotic weight, but I’m still not thin), on top of trying to make sure I spend at least 30 mins a week playing with sound or a musical instrument because I know that actually gives me pleasure (I’m not saying it gives pleasure to anyone else!), on top of sleeping, on top of chores, laundry, grocery shopping, ironing, and also trying to maintain a positive and supportive relationship, and do at least one act of premeditated socialising, too. It’s so much! I’m so busy. I’m #solondon

Where was I?

Yes, I’m dreading returning to my unsustainable present. Which is a pity, as I’d like to not be distracted from my last few days of holiday reading time.

–///–

COMMENTS ON THE BOOK START HERE

Journey to the East was, along with The Hill of Devi, an early selection for my holiday reading – you can probably guess from the title why.

This, though, is far from a simple picaresque tale of travel adventures or misadventures, and is instead a far more complex – though very brief – text about groups, responsibility, reverence, religion, memory and the self-aggrandising nature of the writer…

A man reflects, decades later, on his time as part of a society that sought to travel to and through an enlightened state – their journey would take them across Europe, Asia, Africa, backwards and forwards in time, with the “East” of their name merely a symbolic and unchanging destination rather than a geographical one (e.g. always pursuing the land from which the sun rises – there is always an East beyond the East (and, weirdly, we often do call that the West, but it is where you reach if you continue east when east)…

At some point, though, the narrator – known as H.H. – loses his favourite compatriot in his subgroup of the society, and eventually loses everyone else while seeking, fruitlessly, to find his lost friend. Much later, he wonders if the society still exists, if anyone remembers it other than him, and maybe he could write its history?

Of course, it turns out the friend was not lost and not a peer or inferior to H.H., but the president of the society, and his abandonment of the group was a test, which they all failed, all of them drifting apart and several of them deciding to write memoirs and histories of the group they had lost.

The novel, then, becomes about ownership of memory and of the past, about institutions and their petty plays for power and needless desires to control… It is about how people should be fucking grateful for the rest of their fucking loves if anyone bigger and better than them ever lets them have a moment of joy… And it’s about how a return to an institution (no matter how cruel?) seems to offer a final peace.

Is it good? Morally, I don’t think so (like institutions are always eventually bad, baybe), but narratively it kept me engaged and confused and I basically read it in one sitting, under the precariously spinning fan of my tiny mouse-filled “hotel” room.

It’s an interesting book, and maybe it bears re-reading or a better understanding of the wider context of Hesse’s oeuvre, but it’s definitely thought provoking, and it’s definitely unlike other things I have recently read.

Dreamlike, twisty, messy, political, strange: it’s the kind of book some people really love.

This edition translated by Hilda Rosner