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- Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
tIn An Education in Happiness (Un'educazione alla felicita), Flavia Arzeni discusses that most elusive of mental states, happiness, and how two of the twentieth century's greatest writers and Nobel-Pize winners, Rabindranath Tagore and Hermann Hesse, thought we should seek it. tHappiness is neither a privilege of the few, nor a fleeting state of mind: it is hidden behind a door that every person can open once they have found it, at the end of an arduous journey of self-discovery. Tagore and Hesse are arguably very different: one comes to us from the core of Indian culture, the other from the very heart of Old Europe; the former is an eternal wanderer, the latter a determined armchair traveller. Still, there are extraordinary affinities between their works, and they both understood that the path to happiness is paved with small acts and simple notions.Arzeni offers us an oasis of stability and calm in which we can find the answers to our fundamental concerns about life and happiness. tFlavia Arzeni's An Education in Happiness is translated from the Italian by Howard Curtis published by Pushkin Press. tFlavia Arzeni is Professor of Modern German Literature at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at the University La Sapienza in Rome.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013
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FLAVIA ARZENI
AN EDUCATION IN HAPPINESS
Translated from the Italian by Howard Curtis
Contents
INTRODUCTION
A few years ago, I happened to be in Montagnola, a small village near Lugano in the Swiss canton of Ticino, sitting beside the entrance to the museum next door to the house where Hermann Hesse lived for many years, and watching the visitors as they went in to look at photographs, manuscripts and other mementoes of the writer’s long, troubled life. It was an average day, in an average year, but I was struck by the number of people there and by the looks of expectation on their faces. Many were young, but there was certainly no shortage of older people, including some who were quite elderly, and they seemed to be from every social class—the kind of people you could see any morning buying a paper from a news-stand or waiting at the bus stop.
What I knew about Hermann Hesse at that time was what someone of my age and profession could not help but know.
I had read most of his work, had attended a conference about him some time earlier, and had assigned graduation theses on him to some of my students. But that day, sitting by the entrance to that small museum, I saw with my own eyes, in the uninterrupted flood of visitors drawn there by nothing more than the desire to get closer to the memory of Hesse, the extraordinary fascination this idiosyncratic writer continues to exert—almost fifty years after his death and almost a hundred after writing his most famous novels—on millions of people who read his books, share his ideas, and flock to the village of Montagnola in large numbers to feel close to him.
Hesse was well aware that his fame, as demonstrated by the thousands of letters he received in the last years of his life, derived not only from the undeniable literary quality of his work, but also from the fact that it deals with the great questions of human existence—where are we, where are we going, what can we do to make a little easier the perennial search for a peaceful life and some form of happiness?
Some years later, in a small town in East Bengal, I observed that a similar kind of popular cult exists in India around the figure of the great Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore. The museum dedicated to his memory in Santiniketan, and his various houses there—as well as his family’s home in Calcutta—are also the objects of a constant, silent pilgrimage which reminded me of what I had seen in Montagnola.
Seeing that brought back a memory—of the day I had first set foot in an old house by the sea where I was to live for a considerable length of time. Looking at the spines of the books in the library of the house, I noticed seven or eight volumes of Tagore, elegantly bound, in an Italian edition published around the time of the First World War. I pulled one out at random. It was a collection of poetry, and someone had annotated it in places. Some words, such as ‘joy’, ‘harmony’ and ‘consolation’ had been repeatedly underlined, and I took this as a good omen, as if I were being given clues to the secret of a happy life.
It struck me then that Tagore’s vast literary output, like Hesse’s, may contain some clues as to how to find a more balanced way of facing the storms of life and to approach that rare, fleeting state of mind to which we give the name ‘happiness’.
It was that reflection and that memory that gave me the idea of investigating the lives and works of these two writers, contemporaries of one another, who, starting from quite different places, worked towards the same goal. One moved from West to East, the other from East to West; one led a troubled, contradictory existence, the other was born into a world of comfort and privilege; one was shy and difficult, the other outgoing and eloquent. Yet both had a very similar insight—to attain happiness, one needs only a few things—a close bond with, and acceptance of, nature; a respect for small things and humble tasks; an idea of love that transcends the desire for possession; and finally, an awareness that, to get close to wisdom and truth, it is necessary to go beyond the boundaries of one’s own native culture and religion and draw also on the teachings of other religions and other cultures.
Neither Hesse nor Tagore ever expressed these beliefs in a treatise or breviary on happiness. In addition, Hesse experienced, as did many of those close to him, some of the typical ills of our time—anxiety, a sense of solitude, depression, a death wish. Whatever lessons we may derive from him are contained not only in the many seeds strewn throughout his literary work, but also in the painful elements of his life. Whole generations have looked and continue to look to him, as they have to Tagore, as to a mysterious, sometimes enigmatic master with a simple, reassuring message. It is that message that this investigation aims to bring to light.
I have complemented my research by creating a garden on the border between Tuscany and Umbria inspired by those which Hermann Hesse cultivated during his lifetime and tended so passionately; it serves as a place for reflection on the ideas of happiness propounded by these two authors, as presented in this book.
PILGRIMAGES TO HAPPINESS?
EVERY ONE OF THE MORE than six billion men and women in the world today aspires to be happy. Even a baby, as soon as it comes into the world, before it has either reason or words, desires happiness and, if it can, indicates with a smile when it has achieved it. But if you could ask each of those six billion men and women what happiness is, almost nobody would give you the same answer. In fact, many of them would probably answer that it is impossible to say what happiness is. Does being happy derive from being virtuous, as some ancient Greeks asserted? Or does it lie in a balanced enjoyment of the benefits of the body and the mind, as Aristotle said? Or in detachment from the passions, as it was for the Stoics? Or in being wise? Or in getting closer to God, as any believer—today, as in the past—would tell you? Or in satisfying material needs, as asserted in those doctrines that value the needs of society above those of the individual?
How difficult, if not impossible, it is to find a definition for happiness is demonstrated by the United States Constitution, which includes the pursuit of happiness as one of the inalienable rights of man, but does not define it in concrete terms, leaving this open to interpretation.
As with the idea of beauty, it is easier to speak of the idea of happiness through examples, especially from literature. There are many one could quote, but that would take another book. One of the most beautiful, most famous and most surprising is this passage from a story by Katherine Mansfield: “What can you do if you are thirty and, turning the corner of your own street, you are overcome suddenly by a feeling of bliss—absolute bliss!—as though you’d suddenly swallowed a bright piece of that late afternoon sun and it burned in your bosom, sending out a little shower of sparks into every particle, into every finger and toe? …”1
Hesse, too, in a brief memoir, uses the image of being flooded with a fragment of sun. Having looked for happiness in reading and writing, and having given more pleasure to other people with his work than he had derived from it himself, he had to go back to his years of childhood to find an image of happiness: “One morning I woke up, a lively child of about ten, with a totally strange but delightful feeling of joy and well-being, which like an inner sun went through me with its rays, as if at that moment, in that instant of awakening from a child’s sound sleep, something new and wonderful had happened … I knew nothing of yesterday or tomorrow, but was enveloped and softly lapped by a happy today.”2
Happiness is not a ‘thing’, not an objective fact, but an individual, elusive and almost always temporary state born out of the relationship we have with ‘something’. It does not necessarily find expression in loving, which can in fact be a cause of unhappiness, but in a certain relationship we have with the loved person. It does not come from the body, but from the relationship we have with our bodies. Its character, in other words, is intimately bound up with each person’s subjective nature.
It is hardly surprising, therefore, that with the development of studies on man this theme has gone beyond the confines of philosophy and religion and has increasingly become the subject of scientific research, in fields ranging from psychology to biology, and from sociology to the neurosciences. The shelves of bookshops are full of popular books on happiness and how it can be achieved. Not a day goes by without a conference or festival being held, or a book or film produced, with happiness as its theme. All these are signs of a growing belief that happiness is not due solely to external circumstances, to our genetic makeup, to health or wealth, but is the result of a state of mind; that, to attain it, it is not enough to try to change the things around us—we have to change ourselves. This presupposes, of course, that we have the ability to have an effect on our minds and control our thoughts, and that we are not dealing with actual pathologies, mental disorders or forms of severe depression, to which we can respond only with medicine, drugs, or appropriate forms of psychotherapy. It is a question, first and foremost, of being able to cope with an emotional reality that is common to the vast majority of men and women—the fact that we experience negative feelings and unpleasant events more intensely than positive or pleasant ones. If the media usually present more bad news than good, and give more prominence to acts of violence than acts of kindness, it is not just because people love scandal. It is simply because evil makes a greater impression on our imagination and sensibility than does good.
Even historically, the nature of happiness has been less studied and less commented on than its opposite, the nature of unhappiness and pain, precisely because of an awareness that the negative elements of existence occupy an overriding place in men’s thoughts. In fact, the whole Romantic movement, which has had so much influence on European cultural life over the past two centuries, focused on the darker elements of life and the anxious, troubled aspects of the personality.
It is no coincidence that today we know more about the negative dimension, the dark side of our psyches, than we do about the more positive aspects—depressive states, anxieties, fears and phobias have been studied in much greater depth than the mechanisms that produce conditions of well-being. Nor is it a coincidence that literature more frequently deals with sorrow, anxiety and torment than joy and happiness. Happiness is in fact often perceived as a non-event, something that cannot be described or does not deserve to be described. As Tolstoy puts it so well in the first lines of Anna Karenina: “All happy families resemble one another, every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”3 Or André Gide, when he wonders in The Immoralist: “What would there be in a story of happiness?”
There are, in fact, few modern poets or novelists who are remembered not only for the intrinsic quality of their work, but also for the positive teachings present in it—the conception of life it conveys, the crutches it provides a limping, suffering mankind. One of these few is, of course, Tolstoy who, even though he wrote about tragic events, unhappy lives and wars, did represent, for certain people at one time, a new model of open-mindedness, tolerance, pacifism and desire for simplicity. Something similar may be said of Goethe, who has been considered by many generations as not only the greatest German poet, but also a teacher of the art of living and a symbol of the balance and wisdom we associate with the idea of happiness. These were rare, isolated figures, who enlightened the centuries in which they lived. And yet, even in their cases, their reputations with succeeding generations owe more to their artistic and literary message than whatever message of reassurance and comfort they may have wanted to convey.
This is not the case, however, with our two authors, equally popular, but in very different parts of the world—Hermann Hesse and Rabindranath Tagore.
Both men lived through years of crisis, war, unrest and social upheaval at the end of the nineteenth century and in the first decades of the twentieth century, but belonged to profoundly different cultures—one to the vast culture of Europe, the other to the great civilisation of India. They sought happiness in similar ways—not by dominating nature but by being in tune with it; not by desiring to possess what is large but by growing closer to what is small; not with great feats but with patient practice and constant work; not through the mechanical observance of a religion or a tradition but by trying to find the truth in different cultures. The value of their work does not derive only from its artistic quality, but also from the advice it contains for living more happily, drawing on a cultural and literary heritage that unites West and East, and bringing the conduct of the individual back into harmony with the world that surrounds him. That is why they have found great fame both during their lifetimes and since.
And that is why, every year, thousands of visitors descend on a small museum in the village of Montagnola, in the hills overlooking Lake Lugano, to follow in the footsteps of Hesse. On another lake, Constance, there is an even smaller village, Gaienhofen, where the writer lived for only a few years in the first decade of the twentieth century. Here, too, enthusiasts come to visit his house and tread the paths where he used to walk.
A mirror image of the cult exists in a very different part of the world—north-east India—in the remote village where Rabindranath Tagore founded first an experimental school and then his international university Visva-Bharati, and in Calcutta, where the former Tagore family residence has also become a museum and is the goal of a constant pilgrimage by Indians and non-Indians alike.
These are not just examples of cultural tourism. By visiting Hesse’s and Tagore’s homes and following their daily routines the crowds are searching for their message, their answers to the question: ‘How do we become—and how do we stay—happy?’
The theme of harmony and serenity runs through the fiction, poetry and essays of both men, and even more through their reflections, letters and autobiographical writings. At a distance of almost a century from when they were written, their works are still read all over the world, and are reissued in the form of anthologies or thematic collections, as is done with the thoughts of the great masters. And this is what they were—masters of the rare art of helping others to live, helping the young to overcome the storms of youth and the old to live with the paralysing stillness of old age.
Hesse and Tagore were not consistently famous, and there were times when their reputations suffered a decline. At periods during their lifetimes, and after their deaths, reservations about their work were expressed by academic critics. This is hardly surprising—for the reasons already stated, it is impossible to judge these authors merely in terms of literary quality, separate from the human message that permeates their art.
Hesse found success immediately with his first novel, PeterCamenzind, a success repeated with a strange, cryptic work, Demian, which was particularly appreciated by the young, and then again, ten years later, with a book that has remained consistently popular, Narziss and Goldmund. But his official consecration came in 1946, when he was awarded the Nobel Prize—an award which was not unconnected with Hesse’s dissident stand, first against militarism, then against Nazism. In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, however, there were those who, in a Germany where it seemed impossible to separate literature from politics, distanced themselves from an author they considered an apostle of the inner life and the prophet of an outdated individualism. But his fame grew again to extraordinary heights in the 1960s and 1970s, first in America and then throughout the world, thanks to two books in particular; two books that can still be considered central to his output—Siddhartha and Steppenwolf.
In the course of a generally retiring, inward-looking existence, Hesse was not unaware of the extraordinary stir his books and ideas caused in the outside world. This had nothing to do with vanity or ambition. His success demonstrated to him that his metaphors and teachings had struck a genuine chord and indicated how the seeds he had sown might flower in the future. So many admirers wanted to see him in person, especially in his final years, that, to protect himself, he had to put a sign on the gate of his house telling visitors to “walk by, as if nobody lived here”. But when it came to writing, he was both generous with his time and conscientious—although he obviously could not answer all the tens of thousands of letters he was sent in his life the many letters from him that have survived demonstrate how concerned he was to advise and reassure his correspondents.
Tagore, too, was a cult figure and has remained so in India, whereas in the West the huge popularity he enjoyed in the first decades of the last century faded during the more political period that art went through after the Second World War. Like Hesse, he was a precocious writer, translated into several languages when he was still young, but it was above all his volume of poems called Gitanjali that spread his fame in the West and gained him the enthusiastic admiration of two giants of literature—Ezra Pound and W B Yeats—as demonstrated by Yeats’s beautiful introduction to his first collection translated into English. Nor did he lack for official recognition—from the knighthood conferred on him by the British government to the most sought-after honour of all, the Nobel Prize for Literature, which he was awarded in 1913. However, his relations with the British soon deteriorated. These were the years when the first tears began to appear in the fabric of the vast British Empire and London adopted an intransigent policy towards the movement for Indian independence. In 1919, after the violent repression in the Punjab known as the Amritsar Massacre, an indignant Tagore returned his knighthood. This did nothing to diminish his fame, in fact it may even have increased it, and it grew even further when he began travelling tirelessly. Wherever he went—from France to Sweden; from Argentina to the United States he was greeted as a celebrity. In Germany he found a remarkable mentor in Count Hermann Keyserling, himself a distinguished man of letters with a deep knowledge of India, who went with him from city to city, lecture to lecture, and introduced him to a public that responded with an enthusiasm sometimes verging on hysteria. In the years immediately following the First World War, Germany was going through a dramatic period of crisis and uncertainty. Humiliated by their defeat and the conditions of the peace imposed by the victors, their economy shattered, their currency worthless, surrounded by a hostile Europe, many Germans were attracted to Tagore’s clear, noble, accessible poetic language, and his unusual, austere persona. Among his admirers, he numbered poets and writers such as Rainer Maria Rilke and Stefan Zweig.
Hesse never met Tagore. He knew his work and even wrote reviews of Gitanjali, The Gardener and The Home and the World. When it came to Tagore’s personality, however, and the effect he had on public opinion, Hesse always maintained a certain reserve. Perhaps he was disconcerted by this very ‘European’ Easterner, this poet with such a liking for applause. Or perhaps he sensed in Tagore’s prophetic message a desire to be a guide for posterity that was not dissimilar from his own. They may have respected one another intellectually, but—despite so many affinities—they kept their distance. And yet Hesse and Tagore are in a way complementary. What unites them above all is that for both men, their conception of life and their vision of the world were just as important as their poetic and literary work. While it may have been the latter that brought them into the limelight, it was the former that ensured that their names were surrounded with an aura of myth and legend. Coming from different worlds and different cultural spheres, Hesse and Tagore both moved towards ideals of harmony, happiness and wisdom which went beyond the merely contingent. As writers, both men were consistent and obsessive, tackling the same themes over and over—the primary role of nature in human existence, the importance of work and of love for one’s fellow men, the joy of small everyday things, the essential function of art, and the reconciling of different cultures and religions within a single great unity that transcends space and time.
A DISCIPLINED REBEL
A STRANGE TEACHER
TO JUDGE FROM HIS LIFE, Hesse would seem an unlikely teacher of happiness. He had a disturbed adolescence marked by rebellion against his teachers and parents, and a young manhood full of doubts and anxieties, which resulted in a constant desire for movement, especially on foot. He was a bundle of contradictions, frequently in crisis, torn between asceticism and sensuality, between an aspiration towards peace and quiet and a hunger for knowledge, between a desire for order and a wish to break up the family.
How is it possible, we may wonder, that this man—subject to depressions and to chronic psychosomatic and physical ailments, afflicted by pains in his eyes and joints, tortured by migraine and sleepless nights, and so devoured by anxiety that he several times contemplated suicide—how is it possible that this man managed not only to survive, but to find, at a certain point in his life, a kind of harmony and balance that allowed him to reach his eighty-fifth birthday unscathed? And how is it possible that this bundle of misery has become a cult figure for millions of readers, for many generations, as confused today as they were in the past, who find in his writings answers to the questions that plague their lives?
Calw is a small town in the Black Forest, in the German state of Baden-Württemberg, surrounded by woods and gentle hills. It was here that Hermann Hesse was born in 1877, and here that he spent the first years of his life. In fact, he was to spend almost the whole of his life in remote localities in the southern part of Germany or in Switzerland, with only brief periods in cities such as Basle, Bern or Zurich. The tranquil landscapes of his childhood left such an indelible mark on him and on his work that during his old age he would continue to draw on the same world of images, which was always an anchor and a refuge for him in the storms of life.
At the time Calw was the centre of an active Pietist community. Pietism was a religious movement within German Protestantism which placed the individual’s search for God above the dogmatism of the organised Church, although Hesse’s family also belonged to the latter. Both his father and his maternal grandfather were missionaries, and his mother, a central figure in the writer’s life, made sure that his education was based on unshakable moral principles and a clear distinction between what is lawful and what is forbidden; between what faith teaches us and what leads us to sin. But alongside this strict provincial ethos, there was another aspect to Hesse’s family, no less important for the development of his vision of the world; an aspect that encouraged a more open, tolerant and cosmopolitan outlook. It was his maternal grandfather, Hermann Gundert, who knew various European and oriental languages, had studied Sanskrit and had spent many years in India, who left the deepest mark on his personality. Hesse thus had a cultural background that combined two opposing visions—one dogmatic, the other inquisitive and unorthodox. Over time this contrast came to be not only a source of anxiety to him but also one of intellectual and spiritual richness.
So it was that Hesse became familiar from an early age with two religious strands—Christianity in the form of a strict Pietism and Indian spirituality. The Hesse household, as he himself recalled, was one in which different worlds met—where the Holy Scriptures were read and Eastern philosophy was discussed: “Many worlds came together in that house. We read the Bible and prayed, we studied Indian philosophy and applied it, we played excellent music, we learned about Buddha and Lao-Tzu, and many guests arrived from different countries.”4
