The Journey to the East by Hermann Hesse
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"Poet of the Interior Journey"

There was a time in my 20’s when I was obsessed with Hermann Hesse. I was a Hesse Obsessor. After all, he was regarded highly enough as an author to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1946.

Something now lures me back to the novels I read then, "Siddhartha" and "Steppenwolf". However, I thought I would try this one as a "wedgie" or stopgap between more ambitious projects.

In truth, this is more a novella than a novel.

Even burdened by a 30 page introduction by Dr Timothy Leary (he coined the term "Poet of the Interior Journey" for Hesse), it’s less than 110 pages long.

So, is it any good? Yes, well, it's OK.

The Home of Light

There is a suggestion in the title of the novel that, in order to gain spiritual awareness, you must head towards the East.

However, this is not a purely geographical concept. For the West, it doesn’t necessarily mean Asia. It is a metaphor:

"We not only wandered through Space, but also through Time. We moved towards the East, but we also travelled into the Middle Ages and the Golden Age."

The East is where the Sun rises. The East is the Home of Light, the Home of Enlightenment. Even more simply, it is Home:

"Throughout the centuries it had been on the way, towards light and wonder, and each member, each group, indeed our whole host and its great pilgrimage, was only a wave in the eternal stream of human beings, of the eternal strivings of the human spirit towards the East, towards Home."

Wisdom and spirituality are not just found in the East, they are found at Home.

Lost Pilgrims

One other thing is implied: we can embark on our spiritual journey individually or we can travel as a collective.

Whichever way we choose, each of us can stray and end up a lost pilgrim.

The collective pilgrimage of Hesse's characters appears to fail and they feel disillusioned, worthless and spiritless:

"There was nothing else left for me to do but to satisfy my last desire: to let myself fall from the edge of the world into the void – to death."

For them, the confrontation with the void ushers in a suicidal impulse.

The Inevitability of Despair

All along, there is but one enemy, Despair.

The protagonist HH’s ambition to write a book about his adventures is based on his desire to escape from Despair:

"It was the only means of saving me from nothingness, chaos and suicide."

Despair is not just the experience of Depression for an Individual. It is not just something that the mentally imbalanced suffer from.

All of us have to confront Despair every step of our spiritual journey. In Hesse's eyes, it's a necessary part of the journey:

"Despair is the result of each earnest attempt to go through life with virtue, justice and understanding and to fulfill their requirements. Children live on one side of despair, the awakened on the other side."

The Freedom to be Happy

Along HH’s path, he imagines the source of his temporal Happiness:

"My happiness arose from the freedom to experience everything imaginable simultaneously to exchange outward and inward easily, to move Time and Space about like scenes in a theatre."

Note the fluidity, not just of Space, but of Time, hence the earlier allusion to the Middle Ages and the Golden Age.

You can see the appeal to Timothy Leary, who speculated [inaccurately in my opinion] that Hesse wrote the novella while on drugs.

Home is Where the Soul Is

Once again, Hesse's spiritual journey transcends geography:

"Our goal was not only the East, or rather the East was not only a country and something geographical, but it was the home and youth of the soul, it was everywhere and nowhere, it was the union of all times."

The Journey to the East is not just a journey to Asia, but an Interior Journey, a Journey that begins and ends at Home and with the Self.

This is where we will find true Happiness.

The Disappearing Self

In any spiritual journey, as with any other, we have to be cautious of spoilers.

However, within the theistic framework of the novel, each individual member of the group must merge with the God figure:

"He must grow, I must disappear."

The enemy of Spirituality is the persistence of the Self or Selfishness.

Ultimately, it seems that Hesse’s message is that we must transcend the Self, embrace a Universal Love and become one with that Love, if you like, a God.

We don't need to go elsewhere to achieve this.

The best place to seek the Self and Universal Love is at Home, the Home of the Soul.


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