Part of the deep spirituality experienced by Hesse lay in his love of nature, and an early piece of his writing was on the life of St Francis who listened to nature, and found God immanent in actual things – both in their growth and in their decay. For Hesse, the mystic is also a pantheist – God does not reside in Churches or dogmas – instead is immanent in every living thing. God is the power of transformation. Hesse wrote that even individual letters of the alphabet come alive when the words that they compose take on a reality of their own, as in poetry. So it is with rocks, the sun, the rain, and all plants, and animals – they are all inhabited by something divine, the spark that gives them meaning and lends them a voice. And the new wisdom of each generation is at the same time ancient wisdom:
‘Our actual relationship to nature, even where we only still consider it as an object of exploitation, is precisely that of a child to its mother. Furthermore, no new routes have ever been added to the few ancient paths that are able to lead a person to bliss or wisdom.’
Hesse’s discovery in a journey to Southeast Asia was of the wonder of butterflies – where the reality outstripped any flight of the imagination. Butterflies overcame the chasm between nature and art: ‘heraldic beasts of the soul.’ He found that their beauty was both living and a symbol of transience. Butterflies carried within them both the principle of the moment as well as that of eternity. Hesse described them as: ‘the festive, bridal, at one and the same time fertile and ephemeral form of that creature which was previously a sleeping pupa and before the pupa stage a voracious caterpillar.’
Trees, he felt, carried also a wonderful spirituality:
‘Trees have always been the most powerful evangelists. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And I revere them even more when they stand alone. They are like solitary people. Not like hermits who have absented themselves out of some form of weakness, but like great solitary men like Beethoven and Nietzsche. In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they strive with all their life-force for one thing only: to fulfil themselves according to their own laws, to develop their own form, to represent themselves. Nothing is more sacred, nothing more exemplary than a fine, strong tree.’
As a result, Hesse maintains, it wounds the very soul when a tree is felled. The godlessness of a person is shown in his willingness to cut down a tree without feeling any great sorrow in having done so. When a tree has been felled, in the open wound of its severed trunk the growth rings tell of its ongoing struggle over many years with the cold, the wind, the sun, and the rain. They provide evidence that the tree, growing ever upward, attempted to form a link between the earth and the heavens. This was why Hesse called trees “saints”.
“Anyone who knows how to speak to them, anyone who knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts; unconcerned by particulars, they proclaim the ancient law of life.”
And the ancient law of life as spoken by the tree: ‘My task is to shape and reveal the Eternal in my smallest individual detail.” Trees are beautiful and their beauty is not just ephemeral – although what remains precious to us forever is the brief moment in which we realize how magical their presence is:
“They would still be beautiful tomorrow too, but right now they had that magical, ever-to-be-repeated beauty that comes from our own soul and that according to the Greeks, can shine in us only when Eros has cast his gaze upon us.”