I’m in the midst of what has become my yearly sojourn to
Helsinki, although this year the visit is short, as I’m only in the city to
give a talk at a conference. This is the fifth (or sixth?) consecutive summer I’ve
come to Helsinki. In previous summers, I’ve come to collaborate with Heikki
Haario’s group. Those visits were long (2-3 weeks) and the work strenuous, but
what came from them is a small body of research that I’m as proud of as
anything I’ve done. But this visit may be the last one for a while, and though
I’m glad to see things change, I don’t know what the future will bring. My fear
is that I’ll not have any ideas as good as the best ones I’ve pursued in past
summers here in Helsinki.
As with last year, on my way to Finland, I spent a few days
in Beaumont, Texas with my grandmother, Jane. She will be 88 this August and is
bedridden in a nursing home. She still has some of her wits (for example, she
knows who I am), but her body is shot and her mind is slowly slipping. Her
clearest distant memories, at this point, aren’t of her adult life, but rather are
of her childhood in Miles City, Montana. She wants to go back there, to her
childhood home, whose address she still remembers.
Visiting Grandma Jane brings a useful perspective: life is
short and one day we, and all who know us, will be gone. How does the
realization of the transitory nature of life inform the way we live? This
question is one of the central ones in Hermann Hesse’s classic novel, ‘Narcissus
and Goldmund’, which I read on the flights to and from Texas. I bought the book
to give to Alex for graduation, started reading it again, and couldn’t put it
down. It’s an important book for me; the first time I read it was when I was
22, when my father gave it to me, and it had a profound impact on me then. This
reading, my third, it has also opened me up and got me reflecting on my life.
The story is of a great friendship, between Narcissus, a
rigorous intellectual and pious monk, and one of his students Goldmund, who ends
up devoting his life to freedom, the love of women, and art. Early in the book Narcissus is Goldmund’s
teacher in a cloister school and helps him to realize his true self – an artist
and man of the senses – after which Goldmund embarks on the life of a wanderer.
After several years of wandering, deeply moved by a statue of Mary that he sees
in a church, Goldmund finds its maker, becomes his assistant, and devotes
himself to becoming a sculpture artist. After several years, he becomes so accomplished
that his master offers his daughter’s hand and his prosperous studio to him,
but instead Goldmund chooses to return to the freedom of the road. After many
more trials, including wandering through the death and destruction of plague-ravaged
Germany, Goldmund ends up back at the cloister, where Narcissus is now the
Abbot. Their friendship and love for each other rekindles, and in the last
years of his short life, Goldmund makes several great sculptures for the Abbey.
Narcissus and Goldmund is among my very favorite books, and
as with other of Hesse’s work, it’s easy to read, but also deals with deep
philosophical questions about how to live. Narcissus and Goldmund represent two
archetypes of the well-lived life at opposite ends of the spectrum. For me,
they both serve as a mirror, reflecting back my own choices and asking, “Are
you living life as well as you’d like to be?”
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