But eventually, as he journeys into and through the experiences that befall him, he does. So intense are Goldmund’s responses, that at first he cannot find meaning.

His reality is akin to Arjuna in the battlefield, as written in the Bhagavad Gita a journey through the realm of extreme emotions, with desire and lust on the one hand, and death in all its forms on the other. Not the ordinary world of duty and work and family and community.

Memory of part of his childhood is denied him and when he awakens to it, he begins a journey of self discovery that takes him away from the cloister and out into the world. His pupil, Goldmund, is at odds with himself. He is a philosopher, a thinker, living close to God in the realm of the abstract mind. Narziss is destined to be the Abbott of a cloister. In Narziss and Goldmun d, Hesse presents the reader with two sorts of spirituality and the two paths that unfold from each. But decades have passed and now I do, and it is with fresh eyes that I can perhaps see what Hesse might have been trying to achieve. Back then I had not a clue about the spiritual path or western esotericism. I first came across his work in my twenties and devoured Steppenwolf and The Glass Bead Game among others. I will admit I am not a scholar of literature or history, nor have I read any biography of Hesse. I’ve only read the first few, and I’m left wondering what I can add that would contribute to the collective understanding of this work.

I visited Goodreads and was not surprised to find well over a thousand reviews. First published in 1930, Narziss and Goldmund forms part of a profoundly insightful body of work by Hermann Hesse.

Hermann hesse narziss ve goldmund