I don’t usually quote at such length, but I’ve been returning to the following passage again and again since first reading it several days ago now.

It’s from a short story—that’s more of a fable—by the German master Shaman-Type Hermann Hesse. The fable’s title is The Poet and it is contained in a collection with the title Strange News from Another Star.

On the back cover we learn:

“The new note so clear in Demian [1919] was first sounded, Hesse believed, in some of these tales written during the years 1913 to 1918, the period that brought him into conflict with supporters of the war, with his country and its government, with conventional intellectual life, with every form of orthodoxy both in the world and in himself.”

How’s that for an illustration of a Shaman-Type’s stance in the conforming conventionality of the modern world?!

But here’s the quote, like music from the flute of one of our genuine Western Shaman-Types:

“Then one evening when a lantern festival was being celebrated on the river, it happened that Han Fook was wandering alone on the opposite bank. He leaned against the trunk of a tree that hung out over the water, and mirrored in the river he saw a thousand lights floating and trembling, he saw men and women and young girls on the boats and barges, greeting each other and glowing like beautiful flowers in their festive robes, he heard the girl singers, the hum of the zither and the sweet tones of the flute players, and over all this he saw the bluish night arched like the dome of a temple. The youth’s heart beat high as he took in all this beauty, a lonely observer in pursuit of his whim. But much as he longed to go across the river and take part in the feast and be in the company of his bride-to-be and his friends, much deeper was his longing to absorb it all as a perceptive observer and to reproduce it in a wholly perfect poem: the blue of the night and the play of light on the water and the joy of the guests and the yearning of the silent onlooker leaning against the tree trunk on the bank. He realized that at all festivals and with all joys of this earth he would never feel wholly comfortable and serene at heart; even in the midst of life he would remain solitary and be, to a certain extent, a watcher, an alien, and he felt that his soul, unlike most others, was so formed that he must be alone to experience both the beauty of the earth and the secret longings of a stranger. Thereupon he grew sad, and pondered this matter, and the conclusion of his thoughts was this, that true happiness and deep satisfaction could only be his if on occasion he succeeded in mirroring the world so perfectly in his poems that in these mirror images he would possess the essence of the world, purified and made eternal.”

How inexpressibly beautiful, and simple!

But I would add one note here.

Han Fook, just as Hermann Hesse was, is alone because the world he lives in has lost its way and will not or cannot see and experience Life the way he is striving towards.

He seeks to plumb the depths and heights of Life and share his Truths with the people through the medium of his poetry like scattering seeds of tomorrow on a fallow but fertile land…

Have faith Han and Hermann, I’d say, one day the world is destined to awaken to the fact…

That Life is ALL there is…!