Hermann Hesse - Trees: An Anthology of Writings and Paintings

TREES

An Anthology of
Writings and Paintings

by

HERMANN

HESSE

Selected by

Volker Michels

Translated by

Damion Searls

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CONTENTS

Titles followed by an asterisk were supplied by the German editor, Volker Michels, for untitled poems or excerpts from longer works.

PLATE 1

T rees, for me, have always been the most compelling preachers. I worship and adore them when they live in families and tribes, in forests and grovesand even more when they stand alone. They are like solitary people. Not hermits whove stolen away from society out of some weakness, but great, lonely people, like Beethoven or Nietzsche. The world rustles in their uppermost branches, their roots rest in the infinite, but they do not lose themselves in either, they work with all the strength of their lives toward just one thing: fulfilling their own law that lives within them, shaping their own form, becoming their own selves. Nothing is more sacred, nothing more exemplary, than a strong and beautiful tree.

When a tree is cut down and shows its fatal wound naked to the sunlight, we can read its whole history in the bright disk of its trunk and gravestone: in its annual rings and deformities are faithfully recorded all the struggle, all the suffering and illness, all the joy and flourishing, the lean years and rich years, attacks withstood and storms outlasted. And every farm boy knows that the hardest, noblest wood has the narrowest rings, and that the most indestructible, strongest, most exemplary trunks grow high in the mountains, in constant danger.

Trees are holy. If you know how to talk to them, how to listen to them, you will learn the truth. They preach not doctrines and rules: they preach, with no concern for details, the primal law of life.

A tree says: Hidden in me is a seed, a spark, a thought. I am life from eternal Life. The attempt the eternal Mother made with me, the risk She took, is uniquemy shape is unique, the grain of my skin, the tiniest play of leaves on my crown and the tiniest scar on my bark. My task is to give shape to the eternal, and to show that shape in its unique, distinctive particularity.

A tree says: My power is trust. I know nothing about my fathers, I know nothing about the thousand children I produce every year. I live out the mystery of my seed to the very endthat is my only concern. I trust that God is within me. I trust that my task is a holy one. I live from this trust.

When were sad and have difficulty enduring our life any longer, a tree can say to us: Be quiet! Be at peace! Look at me! Life is not easy, nor is it hard. Those are childish thoughts. Let God speak within you while you stay silent. You are scared because your path is leading you away from your mother and your home. But home is not here or there. Home is inside you, or else it is nowhere.

A fierce desire to wander and roam tugs at my heart when I hear the trees rustling in the evening wind. If you listen long and closely, this longing to travel, too, reveals its seed, its meaning. It is not, as it seems, a longing to run away from your sorrows. It is a longing for home, for the memory of your mother, for new images and parables for life. It leads you back home. Every path leads home, every step is a birth, every step is a death, every grave is the mother.

That is how the tree rustles in the evening, when our own childish thoughts are scaring us. Trees have long thoughtsdrawn out, calm, long of breaththe same way they have longer lives than we do. They are wiser than we are, at least than we are when we do not heed them. But once weve learned how to listen to the trees, the brevity and speed and childish haste of our thoughts attain a gladness without equal. Those who have learned to listen to trees no longer want to be a tree. They do not yearn to be anything but what they are. That is home. And that is happiness.

PLATE 2

My heart greets you, oh faithful trees,

Still tall and strong like you were before,

When I concealed my first young dreams

Of love inside your night.

I hear within your leaves the whisper

Of songs I sang when I was young,

Songs that would twin themselves with the moonlight,

Timid and shy in the light of day.

I greet you too, you timid songs,

Reminding me of better times

When delighted by rose and lilac I tied

A first bouquet for my darling.

Your seductive sound so sweet, unique

To you, like the new green of tender spring,

When the first larks full of pleasure fly

Above newly awakened branches.

What I have sung since those bygone times

Was not so sweet, not so unique,

It only echoed, painfully,

The sound and light of my first love.

PLATE 3

An overcast day, still snow in the woods,

The blackbird sings among bare branches:

Brandishing shyly the breath of spring,

Swollen with lust, aggrieved with woe.

Tight-lipped and tiny in the grass

The crocus folk, the violet bed

Smells timidly of it knows not what,

It smells of death and of festival.

The buds on the trees are blind with tears,

The sky hanging low, so close, so anxious,