In this blog post, I will examine loneliness, the pain of youth, and the reflection that transforms that pain into a part of life, focusing on Hermann Hesse’s ‘Gertrud’.
Loneliness and Pain: The Central Themes of ‘Gertrud’
A book titled ‘Pain Is Youth’ once captured the hearts of young Koreans. Since I am no longer young, I haven’t read it, but I can’t help but think, “Is youth the only thing that hurts? Isn’t life itself painful?” Moreover, the title evokes the image of someone who has endured and overcome the pains of youth and is now observing that pain from a distance. However, even I, in the twilight of my life, am far from being able to observe the pain of young people—let alone soothe my own. Confucius said he reached the stage of “hearing with understanding” (耳順) at the age of 60, but since I am not Confucius, I still find myself easily swayed by this and that. It seems I have not even reached the stage of “being free from confusion” (不惑) that Confucius spoke of. So I wish I could quietly observe that pain from the outside and smile gently, saying, “It’s only natural to suffer when you’re young.”
Had I read Hermann Hesse’s ‘Gertrud’ from such a state of mind, I might have simply been overcome with a wistful sense of nostalgia upon seeing the novel’s narrator, Kun, and the protagonists, Mout and Gertrud. Yet, as I reread this work, my heart raced and I fell into deep thought. Why is that? Is it because I haven’t yet matured mentally? It must be because I, too, suffer from the same illness as the protagonists of this book, and I haven’t yet found the answers they seek. But to put it bluntly, few people ever fully escape that illness and find the answers. Such people would be exceptional beings, like superhumans or saints. Ordinary people suffer from that illness until the day they die. Of course, this illness is not a physical one, but a mental one.
There are countless mental illnesses that people can suffer from: anxiety, anger, pain, desire, and so on. Some even regard the very cycle of life—birth, aging, sickness, and death—as an illness that humans cannot help but endure. However, if I were to name one representative illness that dominates ‘Gertrud’, it would be loneliness. In a way, I might be somewhat free from that illness. After all, I rarely feel the bone-deep loneliness that the protagonists of this novel experience. But it is too early to feel relieved. Loneliness is an illness, yet it also serves the role of enabling deep reflection on all the anguish that humans inevitably suffer. The fact that I no longer feel loneliness as I once did might actually mean that I have given up on deep reflection on life. If that is the case, the title “Youth Is Pain” could be a meaningful one. If the essence of youth lies in fundamental questions about the meaning of life—and if that implies that youth is bound to be painful—then it is not a bad thing to quietly remind young people that they have both the duty and the right to feel that pain.
Modern people often say they feel lonely. It is a loneliness in the crowd, a loneliness of anonymity. This loneliness is not the kind that comes from immersing oneself in solitude, but rather the loneliness felt while mingling with others. It is the loneliness of feeling alone even while surrounded by people. It is the loneliness of feeling isolated and alone, as if one is not deeply connected to anyone. It is the loneliness that stems from the realization that one exists as just another meaningless individual among countless others. This loneliness stems from the loss of one’s identity and the loss of life’s meaning.
By nature, humans are beings who reach out to others with their hands and hearts, and everyone seeks meaning in their lives. That is why we seek to mingle with others again and get swept up in the crowd. We imitate others and try to become like them. Paradoxically, because we are lonely, we cannot bear to be alone. Thus, time for reflection vanishes. Without time to contemplate what it means to live, the meaning of one’s life, true love, trust between people, a just society, or what is right and wrong, one is simply swept along by the world. And in the midst of being swept along, one fulfills and expels one’s desires like an animal. In doing so, one lives without ever posing the questions that can never disappear as long as humanity exists. To put it more grandly, we end up living lives devoid of “human values.” Confucius called such people “small-minded people,” and many have called them “philistines.” These small-minded people and philistines fear loneliness, so they mingle with others and imitate them. And the more they do so, the lonelier they become. Yet, paradoxically, such a lonely life lacks the introspection that comes with true solitude.
Loneliness in a crowd is the loneliness of losing oneself while being swept along by others. Yet there is a different kind of loneliness. It is the loneliness of immersing oneself in one’s own thoughts and discovering that one is different from others. The loneliness the narrator of this novel has felt since childhood is precisely that kind of loneliness.
The narrator says, “I was a different person from him. I, too, lived in solitude like that and was someone who was not properly understood by others. Like him, I was a stranger to others—both by fate and because of my talents. But I did not want to escape that life. I simply wanted to quietly carry out the work I intended to do.”
That solitude is akin to severing ties with others from the start and becoming trapped within one’s own shell. Mr. Roe, a theosophist, says to the narrator: “You’ve caught a contagious disease. It’s a disease rampant among intellectuals. It’s seeped into you too. You must be thinking things like, ‘I’m isolated,’ ‘No one cares about me,’ ‘No one understands me.’ Isn’t that right?”
But his solitude does not keep him in that state. In his solitude, he embraces his own pain. One evening, after playing a new piece and feeling a surge of new strength, he returns home only to sense that the desperate, hollow gaze of the past is still staring at him. In that moment, his heart fills with desire and begins to beat more strongly. He could not understand why he had tried so hard to escape that pain. The image of Gertrude shone through the hazy dust, revealing itself clearly, and he gazed anew into her clear eyes without fear, opening his heart wide to all suffering. From that moment on, he realized that accepting suffering—or rather, the suffering brought by true life—was far better than wandering a dark path, tormented by ghosts.
He gazes at the deep blue sky spread out above the massive beech tree and the countless stars dotting it. Whether bringing joy or sorrow, everything surrenders itself to the vast current of life. The mayfly plunges toward death as if intoxicated. Yet all life sparkles beautifully. Fixing his gaze on the mayfly, he comes to understand and accept his own life and suffering.
What does it mean to understand one’s own life and suffering, which are like that of a mayfly? Does it mean that I have come to love my own life, trapped within its shell? No. It means that I have come to understand all life itself and reach out to embrace it.
Thus, the novel offers the following reflection: Fate is unkind, life is capricious and ruthless, and neither kindness nor reason exists in nature. But for humans, who are in the grip of fate, goodness and will exist, and even if only for a moment, we can become stronger than nature or fate. We can draw close to one another when necessary, loving, understanding, and comforting each other.
And when the forces of darkness have weakened, we can do even more. We can become divine beings for a moment and, through our will, create something that did not exist before. Once created, it can continue to live on its own, even without us. With sounds, words, or other things, we can create games and compose melodies and songs filled with meaning, comfort, and goodwill. We can harbor a god within our hearts, and when filled with passion, we can open that god’s mouth. The god we harbor speaks through our eyes and mouths to those who do not know God or who do not wish to know Him. Though our hearts cannot escape life, we can teach our hearts that they are stronger than chance, and that we can gaze upon suffering without succumbing to despair.
The final conclusion is this: Mout was right. As people age, they become more laid-back than they were in their youth. However, I do not wish to disparage my youth. This is because the beautiful melody of youth echoes like an echo in all my dreams. That melody in my dreams is far sweeter, clearer, and purer than actual youth.
It is true that youth is painful. But there is no meaning in simply enduring pain as pain. Only by embracing that pain and cherishing it in my dreams does it become my own. And only by making that pain my own does my life become truly mine. Human beings are inevitably lonely and prone to pain; they are, in essence, tragic. We are beings swept away by the tides of fate, independent of our will, and we are beings who can never fully realize what we ultimately seek. If one agonizes over the very fate of humanity—that we are destined to die—one will inevitably remain in pain and tragedy forever. Yet, despite this, humans must embrace that tragedy and pain and forge their own lives. We must live meaningful lives.
So, how can we embrace that pain and keep it safe within our dreams? There is no single correct answer. Each of us must find it alone. A helping hand is extended only when we ask such unanswerable questions in solitude; it is not offered when we gather with others merely to seek the right answer. Moving forward, beginning with ‘Gertrud’, we will read various works by Hesse, immersing ourselves in the world of Bildungsromane in this sense, and breathe alongside protagonists who are alone in their search for the meaning of existence.
The Meaning of the Bildungsroman and Hesse’s Literary World
The term “Bildung” in “Bildungsroman” means “to create an image.” The Bildungsroman does not merely depict the process of a child growing up, acquiring culture, and becoming an adult. Growth in the Bildungsroman means constructing one’s own image. The image-building referred to here does not mean cultivating one’s outward appearance. It means forming a distinct personality as a being with its own unique meaning—that is the true essence of image-building. Only by forming such a unique image can one live harmoniously with others in this world as a meaningful being.
There is an interesting example. In French, “solitude” is “solitude,” and the adjective for “lonely” is “solitaire.” However, the word for “solidarity” is solidarité, and the adjective is solidaire. The only difference between the adjectives for “solitude” and “solidarity” is the letters “t” and “d.” These two words seem to show that true solidarity does not arise when we get swept up in the crowd, but rather when we immerse ourselves in solitude. Solitude does not distance me from others; rather, it teaches me that I can form a sense of solidarity with others even within solitude. So, rather than fleeing outward in fear of solitude only to taste an even more desperate loneliness, wouldn’t it be more productive to embrace the pain of solitude and make it my own? For those willing to take that path, immersing oneself in the works of Hermann Hesse would be a good way to begin.
Hermann Hesse (1877–1962) was one of the authors most beloved by my peers during my youth. In particular, ‘Demian’ was a work that young people, whether interested in literature or not, enjoyed reading as a sort of rite of passage. I do not wish to attribute the popularity of his works to the specific circumstances of that era. This is because I believe the questions his works pose and the emotions they evoke are timeless and always relevant.
Hesse was born in 1877 in the small town of Calw in southern Germany. Although his hometown, which he loved throughout his life, was a small town, Hesse lived in a wider world. His father, Johannes Hesse, was a North German-Russian missionary who worked in India, and his mother, Marie, was the daughter of a missionary family born in India. Hesse was also greatly influenced by his maternal grandfather, who worked in the publishing of Protestant literature in Kalf.
At the age of thirteen, Hesse attended a Latin school in Göppingen, entered a theological seminary at fourteen, and worked as an apprentice at a bookstore in the university town of Tübingen when he was eighteen. Fascinated by Goethe and immersed in poetry, he self-published his first collection of poems in 1899 and followed it with a second, though the response was lukewarm.
He then shifted his focus to fiction, publishing ‘Beneath the Wheel’ in 1906 and ‘Gertrud’ in 1910, thereby establishing his reputation as a novelist. He continued to publish poetry and novels until the outbreak of World War I, and in 1919, he released the timeless masterpiece ‘Demian’. Before World War II, he published significant works such as ‘Siddhartha’, ‘Steppenwolf’, and ‘Narcissus and Goldmund’, and began writing ‘The Glass Bead Game’, a utopian tale that seemed to stand in opposition to Nazism. This work was completed with the publication of the second volume ten years after the prologue was released in 1934, when he was 57, and Hesse won the first Nobel Prize in Literature awarded after World War II for this work.
Afterward, he withdrew from public life to live a quiet and fulfilling life, passing away in 1962 at the age of 85. As he described his works as “not novels, but biographies of the soul,” he left behind works that serve as guides for the lost and wandering souls of modern people. The fact that his works are still loved around the world is both evidence that modern people are lost and wandering, and evidence that humans will forever feel a thirst for the soul.
