BOOK ... Hermann Hesse on Little Joys, Breaking the Trance
of Busyness, and the Most Important Habit for Living with Presence
“Of all ridiculous things the most
ridiculous seems to me, to be busy — to be a man who is brisk about his food
and his work,” Kierkegaard admonished in 1843 as he
contemplated our
greatest source of unhappiness.
It’s a sobering sentiment against the backdrop of modern life, where the cult
of busyness and productivity plays out as the chief drama of our existence —
a drama we persistently lament as singular to our time. We reflexively blame
on the Internet our corrosive compulsion for doing at the cost of being,
forgetting that every technology is a symptom and not, or at least not at
first, a cause of our desires and pathologies. Our intentions are the basic
infrastructure of our lives, out of which all of our inventions and actions
arise. Any real relief from our self-inflicted maladies, therefore, must come
not from combatting the symptoms but from inquiring into and rewiring the
causes that have tilted the human spirit toward those pathologies — causes as
evident to Kierkegaard long ago as to any contemporary person who crumbles
into bed at night having completed the day’s lengthy to-do list yet feeling
like a thoroughly incomplete human being.
How to heal that aching spirit is
what Hermann Hesse (July 2, 1877–August 9, 1962) addresses
in a spectacular 1905 essay titled “On Little Joys,” found in My
Belief: Essays on Life and Art — the out-of-print treasure that gave us
the beloved writer and Nobel laureate on the
three types of readers and why
the book will never lose its magic.
More than a century before our present
whirlpool of streaming urgencies, Hesse writes:
Great masses of
people these days live out their lives in a dull and loveless stupor.
Sensitive persons find our inartistic manner of existence oppressive and
painful, and they withdraw from sight… I believe what we lack is joy. The
ardor that a heightened awareness imparts to life, the conception of life as
a happy thing, as a festival… But the high value put upon every minute of
time, the idea of hurry-hurry as the most important objective of living, is
unquestionably the most dangerous enemy of joy.
Decades before the German philosopher Josef
Pieper made his prescient case for liberating
leisure and human dignity from the clutch of workaholism, Hesse laments how modern life’s “aggressive haste” —
and what a perfect phrase that is — has “done away with what meager leisure
we had.” He writes:
Our ways of
enjoying ourselves are hardly less irritating and nerve-racking than the
pressure of our work. “As much as possible, as fast as possible” is the
motto. And so there is more and more entertainment and less and less joy…
This morbid pursuit of enjoyment [is] spurred on by constant dissatisfaction
and yet perpetually satiated.
Noting that he doesn’t have a silver bullet
for the problem, Hesse offers:
I would simply
like to reclaim an old and, alas, quite unfashionable private formula:
Moderate enjoyment is double enjoyment. And: Do not overlook the little joys!
A century before psychoanalyst Adam
Phillips made his compelling case for the
art of missing out and the paradoxical value of our unlived lives, Hesse considers what moderation looks like in the
face of seemingly unlimited possibilities for what to do with one’s time, and
although the options available have changed in the hundred-some years since,
the principle still holds with a firm grip:
In certain
circles [moderation] requires courage to miss a première. In wider circles it
takes courage not to have read a new publication several weeks after its
appearance. In the widest circles of all, one is an object of ridicule if one
has not read the daily paper. But I know people who feel no regret at
exercising this courage.
Let not the man* who
subscribes to a weekly theater series feel that he is losing something if he
makes use of it only every other week. I guarantee: he will gain.
Let anyone who is accustomed to looking at
a great many pictures in an exhibition try just once, if he is still capable
of it, spending an hour or more in front of a single masterpiece and content
himself with that for the day. He will be the gainer by it.
Let the
omnivorous reader try the same sort of thing. Sometimes he will be annoyed at
not being able to join in conversation about some publication; occasionally
he will cause smiles. But soon he will know better and do the smiling
himself. And let any man who cannot bring himself to use any other kind of
restraint try to make a habit of going to bed at ten o’clock at least once a
week. He will be amazed at how richly this small sacrifice of time and
pleasure will be rewarded.
Learning this difference between binging on
stimulation and savoring enjoyment in small doses, Hesse argues, is what sets
part those who live with a sense of fulfillment from those who romp through
life perpetually dissatisfied. He writes:
The ability to
cherish the “little joy” is intimately connected with the habit of
moderation. For this ability, originally natural to every man, presupposes
certain things which in modern daily life have largely become obscured or
lost, mainly a measure of cheerfulness, of love, and of poesy. These little
joys … are so inconspicuous and scattered so liberally throughout our daily
lives that the dull minds of countless workers hardly notice them. They are
not outstanding, they are not advertised, they cost no money!
He points to the most readily available,
most habitually overlooked of those joys — our everyday contact with nature.
A century before throngs of screen zombies began swarming the sidewalks of
modern cities, Hesse writes:
Our eyes, above
all those misused, overstrained eyes of modern man, can be, if only we are
willing, an inexhaustible source of pleasure. When I walk to work in the
morning I see many workers who have just crawled sleepily out of bed,
hurrying in both directions, shivering along the streets. Most of them walk
fast and keep their eyes on the pavement, or at most on the clothes and faces
of the passers-by. Heads up, dear friends!
Hesse offers his prescription for breaking
this trance of busyness and inattention:
Just try it once
— a tree, or at least a considerable section of sky, is to be seen anywhere.
It does not even have to be blue sky; in some way or another the light of the
sun always makes itself felt. Accustom yourself every morning to look for a
moment at the sky and suddenly you will be aware of the air around you, the
scent of morning freshness that is bestowed on you between sleep and labor.
You will find every day that the gable of every house has its own particular
look, its own special lighting. Pay it some heed if you will have for the
rest of the day a remnant of satisfaction and a touch of coexistence with
nature. Gradually and without effort the eye trains itself to transmit many small
delights, to contemplate nature and the city streets, to appreciate the
inexhaustible fun of daily life. From there on to the fully trained artistic
eye is the smaller half of the journey; the principal thing is the beginning,
the opening of the eyes.
In a sentiment which Annie Dillard would
come to echo many decades later in her beautiful meditation on reclaiming
our capacity for joy and wonder,
Hesse adds:
A stretch of
sky, a garden wall overhung by green branches, a strong horse, a handsome
dog, a group of children, a beautiful face — why should we be willing to be
robbed of all this? Whoever has acquired the knack can in the space of a
block see precious things without losing a minute’s time… All things have
their vivid aspects, even the uninteresting or ugly; one must only want to
see.
And with seeing
come cheerfulness and love and poesy. The man who for the first time picks a
small flower so that he can have it near him while he works has taken a step
toward joy in life.
Noting that these small joys take the form
of different things for each of us, Hesse adds:
[There are] many
other small joys, perhaps the especially delightful one of smelling a flower
or a piece of fruit, of listening to one’s own or others’ voices, of
hearkening to the prattle of children. And a tune being hummed or whistled in
the distance, and a thousand other tiny things from which one can weave a
bright necklace of little pleasures for one’s life.
He ends with an offering of counsel as
valid and vitalizing today as it was a century ago, perhaps even more:
My advice to the
person suffering from lack of time and from apathy is this: Seek out each day
as many as possible of the small joys, and thriftily save up the larger, more
demanding pleasures for holidays and appropriate hours. It is the small joys
first of all that are granted us for recreation, for daily relief and
disburdenment, not the great ones.
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Thursday, March 23, 2017
BOOK SPECIAL..... Hermann Hesse on Little Joys,
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