Happiness – by Hermann Hesse Translation from the German by Gerry Busch To me, happiness means something quite specific, namely completeness itself, timeless existence, the eternal music of the world, that which others may have called the harmony of the spheres or the smile of God. This phenomenon, this endless music, this richly resounding, golden, glittering eternity is the pure, absolute present, it knows no time, no history, no before, no after. The face of the world beams and laughs endlessly, while people, generations, races, empires rise up and blossom, only to fall back into the shadows of oblivion once more. Endlessly life plays its music, endlessly it performs its round dance, and anything we mortal, endangered, frail beings derive in the way of joy, solace and laughter is the glow from that, an eye full of light, an ear full of music. Regardless of whether or not the “happy” people in legends ever existed, or whether the great light shone on those children of fortune and chosen people merely during festive occasions, or only for moments at a time, they could not have experienced any other happiness, shared in any other joy but this. Breathing in the absolute present, singing along with the chorus of the spheres, dancing along in the world’s round dance, laughing along with the eternal laughter of God, this is our share of happiness. Many have experienced it only once, many only occasionally. But the people who experienced it were not merely happy for a moment, they also brought along with them some of the glitter and sound, some of the light of timeless joy — the source of everything that shines as brightly centuries later as on the day it was created, such as love brought into the world by lovers, solace and serenity given us by artists. It has taken me a lifetime to arrive at this sweeping, universal, sacred meaning for the word happiness, and perhaps it is necessary to emphasize to the school children among my readers that I am in no way engaging in semantics here; instead, I am describing my own inner development, and am not trying to persuade them to adopt a meaning this strong in their oral or written usage of the word happiness. For me, however, that beloved, glowing little word happiness has become associated with everything I have felt since childhood upon hearing the sound of the word itself. The sensation was certainly more pronounced in childhood, the response of all the senses to the sensual qualities and appeal of the word were louder and more intense, but if the word itself had not been so deep, primal and all-encompassing, my ideas about the eternal present, about the “golden trail” (in Goldmund), and about the laughter of immortals (in Steppenwolf) would not have crystallized around this word. As elderly people try to recall when, how often and how profoundly they have felt happiness, they search primarily in their childhood, and rightly so, because the experience of happiness requires, above all, an independence from time, and from fear and from hope, as well; but most people lose this capacity with age. When trying to remember my share in the glow of the eternal present, in the smile of God, I return to my childhood, too, for that is where the most significant discoveries turn up. Of course, the happy times of youth were more dazzling and variegated, more festively dressed and more colorfully illuminated; the intellect played a bigger role during those times than in childhood. But on closer and closer inspection, they turn out to have been more fun and merriment than true happiness. People were cheerful, witty, clever, and amused one another. I remember one moment among my circle of friends when I was in the full bloom of my youth: During a conversation, someone innocently asked for the definition of Homeric laughter, and I answered him using rhythmical laughter that was an exact imitation of hexameter. This brought hilarity and the clinking of wineglasses — but moments like this did not survive further scrutiny. That was all very nice, it was funny, tasted good, but happiness it was not. Happiness, it seemed, when one pursued this study long enough, happiness had only been experienced in childhood, in hours or moments that were very hard to recapture, for even then, even in the realm of childhood, the glitter did not always turn out to be genuine, the gold was not always pure. If I was painstakingly selective very few experiences remained, and even they were not pictures one could paint or stories one could tell; they adroitly defied description. When such a memory first presented itself, it was a recollection of weeks or days, or at least one day, maybe Christmas, a birthday or the first day of a vacation. But to reproduce just one childhood day in memory would require thousands of images, and one’s memory cannot bring together a sufficient number of pictures for even one single day, let alone half a day. Nevertheless, whether in occurrences lasting days, hours or mere minutes at a time, I have experienced happiness often, and have had brief encounters with it in my later years, even in old age. As often as I have summoned up, queried and tested those early encounters with happiness, however, one in particular has survived. It was when I was a schoolboy, and the actual feeling, that which was genuine, fundamental and magical about it, the condition of inner laughter and being one with the world, absolutely free of time, hope and fear, and living totally in the present, cannot have lasted long, perhaps just minutes. A lively boy of about ten years, I awoke one morning with an unusually sweet and profound feeling of joy and well-being which shone through me like an inner sun. It was as if something new and wonderful had occurred right at this moment of awakening from a good sleep; as if my miniature, boyish universe had entered a new state of being, a new light and climate; as if early this very morning, all of life had finally attained its full value and meaning. I knew nothing of yesterday or of tomorrow, I was immersed in a wondrous today and I gently bathed in it. It felt good and was savored by my mind and my senses without curiosity and without explanation; it permeated me, and tasted magnificent. It was morning; through the high window I saw the pure, bright blue of the sky as it hovered cheerfully over the long roofs of the neighboring houses. It too seemed full of joy, as if it had special plans, and had put on its finest clothes for the occasion. There was nothing more to be seen of the world from my bed, only this beautiful sky and this long strip of roof on the neighbor’s house; but even this roof, this boring and dismal roof made of dark reddish-brown tiles, seemed to be laughing. Over its steep, shadowy, oblique surface ran a gentle play of colors, and the one bluish glass tile between the reddish clay ones seemed alive, and seemed to take a particular pleasure in reflecting a bit of this quiet, steadily shining morning sky. The sky, the somewhat rough edge of the roof, the uniformed army of the brown tiles, and the thin, airy blue of the glass tile seemed in a beautifully pleasant way to be in agreement with one another; they appeared to have no other intention on this special morning but to laugh at one another good-naturedly. The blue of the sky, the brown of the tiles and the blue of the glass had a purpose; they belonged together, they played with one another, they were in good spirits; and it felt good to see them that way, to be a spectator of their games, to feel permeated by the same morning glow and the same sense of well-being that they were enjoying. And so I lay in bed for a delightful eternity, enjoying the onset of morning and the peaceful after-effects of sleep, and if I have savored the identical or similar happiness at other times in my life or not, none of those moments could have been any deeper or more genuine: The world was in order. And whether this happiness lasted a hundred seconds or ten minutes, it was so far removed from time that it resembled every other genuine happiness as completely as one fluttering blue lycaenid butterfly resembles another. It was transitory, it got engulfed by time, but it was profound and ageless enough to draw me back to it today after more than sixty years, so that in spite of my tired eyes and aching fingers, I am compelled to recall it, smile at it, recreate and describe it. This happiness consisted of nothing else but the harmony of the few things around me with my own existence, a feeling of contentment and well-being that needed no changes and no intensification. It was still quiet in the house, and not a sound was heard from outside, either. Were it not for this silence my reverie would probably have been disrupted by reminders of daily duties, of getting up and going to school. But it was obviously neither day nor night. True, the pleasant light and the cheery blueness of the sky were there, but one could hear neither the maidservants’ footsteps on the sandstone tiles of the court, nor a slamming door, nor the boy from the bakery on the steps. This morning interlude was beyond time, it demanded nothing, it hinted at no events to come, it was self-sufficient, and since I was an integral part of it there was no actual day for me either, not one thought about getting up and going to school, about half-completed homework assignments or poorly studied vocabulary, about rushing through breakfast in the freshly aired-out dining room across the way. My happiness met its downfall this time through an intensification of beauty, through an increase and overabundance of joy. As I lay there motionless, letting the bright, peaceful morning world penetrate me and draw me into itself, something unusual in the distance forced its way through the quiet; it was something glittering, overly-brilliant, golden and triumphant, bursting with joy, full of fascinating, stimulating sweetness: the sound of a trumpet. And as I finally woke up completely, sat up in bed and threw the covers back, the sound had already acquired two voices, many voices: It was the town band marching along the streets, making them reverberate with their playing; an extremely rare and exciting occurrence, blaring out with merriment, making my childish heart both laugh and sob at the same time. It was as if all of the happiness, all of the magic of this blissful hour had flowed together into these stirring, bittersweet tones and flowed away, becoming temporal and transitory once more. I was out of my bed in one second, trembling with excitement, and I dashed to the door and into the adjoining room where I could watch the streets below from the windows. Giddy from excitement, curiosity and the desire to participate, I lay down in an open window, listened with pleasure to the swelling, majestic sounds of the approaching band, saw and heard the neighbors’ houses and the streets awaken, come to life, and fill up with faces, figures and voices — and at that very same moment I recalled everything that had been completely forgotten during my euphoria between sleep and daylight. As it turned out, there was no school today — no, it was an official holiday, the King’s birthday, I believe, and so there were parades, banners, music and incredible entertainment in store for us. And with this realization I had returned and was subject once again to the laws which govern everyday life; for even if those metallic sounds had awakened me to a holiday rather than an average day, the special, beautiful and sacred aspects of this morning’s magic had already passed, engulfed by the waves of time, world and routine once more. … Hermann Hesse, 1955