When had he really experienced joy? … He had tasted it in the days of his boyhood, when … he far outstripped… — Hermann Hesse
When had he really experienced joy? … He had tasted it in the days of his boyhood, when … he far outstripped his contemporaries, when he excelled himself … in argument with the learned men. … And again as a youth when his continually soaring goal had propelled him in and out of the crowd of similar seekers, … when every freshly acquired knowledge only engendered a new thirst. Onwards, onwards, this is your path. He had heard this voice when he had left his home and chosen the life of the Samanas. … … How long was it now since he had heard this voice, since he had soared to any new heights? How flat and desolate his path had been! How many long years he had spent without any lofty goal, without any thirst, without any exaltation, content with small pleasures and yet never really satisfied! Without knowing it, he had endeavored and longed all these years to be like all the other people, like these children, and yet his life had been must more wretched and poorer than theirs, for their aims were not his, nor their sorrows his.
p. 83Source: Wikiquote · CC BY-SA 4.0
More from this book
Siddhartha had begun to feel the seeds of discontent within him. … He had begun to suspect that his worthy father and his other teachers, the wise Brahmins, had already passed on to him the bulk and best of their wisdom, that they had already poured the sum total of their knowledge into his waiting vessel; and the vessel was not full, his intellect was not satisfied.
p. 5
No, this tremendous amount of knowledge, collected and preserved by successive generations of wise Brahmins, could not be easily overlooked. But where were the Brahmins, the wise men, the priests who were successful in not only having this most profound knowledge, but in living it?
p. 7
They were all constantly covered by something thin, without individuality of its own, but yet existing, like a thin glass or ice, like a transparent skin, a shell or mold or mask of water, and this mask was smiling, and this mask was Siddhartha’s smiling face, which he, Govinda, in this very same moment touched with his lips. And, Govinda saw it like this, this smile of the mask, this smile of oneness above the flowing forms, this smile of simultaneousness above the thousand births and deaths
