"Clouded Sky", Hermann Hesse

Hermann Hesse

Wandering : Notes and Sketches

Clouded Sky

Dwarf shrubs blossom between the rocks. I lie and gaze into the evening skv. which for hours has been slowly covering itself with small, silent, tangled clouds. Winds must be blowing up there, though here one can't perceive a trace of them. They weave the cloud threads like yarn.

As the rising of moisture and the raining down of water on the earth follow each other in a certain rhythm, as the seasons, and ebb tide and flood tide, have fixed times and sequences, so everything within us moves according to laws and rhythms. There is one Professor Fliess, who calculated certain numerical progressions in order to indicate the periodic repetition and return of vital occurrences. It sounds like the Cabala, but presumably the Cabala is also knowledge. The very fact that German professors make fun of it speaks well for it.

The dark waves in my life, which I fear, come also with a certain regularity. I don’t know the dates and numbers, I have never kept a continuing diary. I do not and will not know whether the numbers 23 and 27 or any other numbers have anything to do with it. I only know: from time to time thete rises in my soul, without external cause, the dark wave. A shadow runs over the world, like the shadow of a cloud. Joy sounds lalse. and music stale. Depression pervades everything, dying is better than living. Like an attack this melancholy comes from time to time, I don’t know at what intervals, and slowly covers my sky with clouds. It begins with an unrest in the heart, with a premonition of anxiety, probably with my dreams at night. People, houses, colors, sounds that otherwise please me become dubious and seem false. Music gives me a headache. All my mail becomes upsetting and contains hidden arrows.

At such times, having to converse with people is torture, and immediately leads to scenes. Because of times like this, one does not own guns; for the same reason, one misses them. Anger, suffering, and complaints are directed at everything, at people, at animals, at the weather, at God, at the paper in the book one is reading, at the material of the very clothing one has on. But anger, impatience, complaints and hatred have no effect on things, and are deflected from everything, back to myself. I am the one who deserves hatred. I am the one who brings discord and hatred into the world.

I am resting after one such day. I know that for a while now rest is to be expected. I know how beautiful the world is; for the time being, it is more beautiful for me than for any other person; colors fuse more delicately, the air flows more blissfully, the light hovers more tenderly. And I know that I must pay for this with the days when life is unbearable. There are good remedies against depression: song, piety, the drinking of wine, making music, writing poems, wandering. By these remedies I live, as the hermit lives by his prayers. Sometimes it seems to me that the scales have tipped, and that mv good hours are too seldom and too few to make up for the bad ones. Then sometimes I find that, on the contrary, I have made progress, that the good hours have increased and the evil ones decreased. What I never wish, not even in the worst hours, is a middling ground between good and bad, a lukewarm, bearable center. No, rather an exaggeration of the curve — a worse torment and, because of it, the blessed moments even richer in their brilliance.

Despair fades away from me, life is pleasing again, the sky is beautiful again, wandering is meaningful again. On such days of return, I feel something ol the mood of recovery;

weariness without any particular sorrow, resignation without bitterness, gratitude without self-contempt. Slowly the lifeline begins to rise. I hum a line of a song again. I pick a flower

again. I toy with my walking stick again. I have overcome it again. And I will have to overcome it once more, perhaps many times.

It would be wholly impossible for me to say whether this cloudy, silently disturbed, unraveled sky is mirrored in my soul or the reverse, whether or not I read the image of my own inner life in this sky. Sometimes everything is so completely uncertain ! There are days when I am convinced that no man on earth can recognize certain moods of air and cloud, certain tones of color, certain fragrances and movements of moisture as finely, as exactly, and as truly as I can., with my old, nervous senses of poet and wanderer. And then again, as today, it can become doubtful to me whether I have seen, heard, and smelled anything after all, whether everything that I took to be true is not merely an image cast outward, the image of my inner life.

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