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.
Interpretation
Despair arises from the challenges of living a virtuous life, while a deeper understanding brings awareness beyond despair.
Hermann Hesse's quote reflects on the duality of life experiences, emphasizing that the quest for virtue, justice, and understanding often leads individuals to confront despair. However, it also suggests that those who achieve a higher level of consciousness can transcend despair, marking a distinction between the innocence of children and the enlightenment of awakened individuals who navigate life's complexities with insight.
In practice
In a motivational speech about overcoming life's challenges.
I shall no longer be instructed by the Yoga Veda or the Aharva Veda, or the ascetics, or any other doctrine whatsoever. I shall learn from myself, be a pupil of myself; I shall get to know myself, the mystery of Siddhartha." He looked around as if he were seeing the world for the first time.
That is where my dearest and brightest dreams have ranged — to hear for the duration of a heartbeat the universe and the totality of life in its mysterious, innate harmony.
I, also, would like to look and smile, sit and walk like that, so free, so worthy, so restrained, so candid, so childlike and mysterious. A man only looks and walks like that when he has conquered his Self. I also will conquer my Self.
You're quite right there," he said. "I have practiced abstinence myself for years, and had my time of fasting, too, but now I find myself once more beneath the sign of Aquarius, a dark and humid constellation.
I call that man awake who, with conscious knowledge and understanding, can perceive the deep unreasoning powers in his soul, his whole innermost strength, desire and weakness, and knows how to reckon with himself.
People know, or dimly feel, that if thinking is not kept pure and keen, and if respect for the world of mind is no longer operative, ships and automobiles will soon cease to run right, the engineer's slide rule and the computations of banks and stock exchanges will forfeit validity and authority, and chaos will ensue.
...our eyes locked in one of those looks that sometimes happen between strangers, when both wordlessly agree that reality contains sinkholes whose depths neither can ever hope to fathom.
If the other fellow can't tell you his story, you can never be sure he isn't trying to kill you.
There may be more poetry than justice in poetic justice.
I am an Anglo-Catholic in religion, a classicist in literature and a royalist in politics.
People have been predicting the death of philosophy since the 17th century. When I was a student, people were saying, 'We're in the last days of philosophy.' Then we were told in the '60s it would be replaced by sociology, then by literary criticism.
A faith that cannot survive collision with the truth is not worth many regrets.
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