Immortality
…[to] recognize chance as destiny once more
and see the ruins of my being
as fragments of the divine.
My soul breathed once more.
My eyes were opened.
There were moments when I felt with a glow
that I had only to snatch up my scattered images
and raise my life as Harry Haller and
as the Steppenwolf to the unity of one picture,
in order to enter myself into the world of imagination
and be immortal.
Was not this, then, the goal set
for the progress of every human life?—excerpt Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse p. 142
Is not immortality a kind of seeing, the ability to see at all?
These remarkable lines express the despair, the loneliness, the bewilderment that one’s life, after all, amounts to very little—that comes when the bloom of youth has dissipated. One is faced with a day by day reminder that there is a limit to the serial renewal of the body, the eternal recurrence of one’s spring time. Winter is coming. You look around and see ruin ahead.
Then one begins to take stock, attempting to survey the journey that one has taken. There is wonderment that you made a certain choice rather than another. By and by one is tempted to give up asking “why” when the universe provides no answer. One thing has led to another, an unbroken chain of cause and effect, and here you are. Were those choices at all? Realistically could I have done other than what I did?
Recall the nursery rhyme, one of the first that we learned as children: Ring Around the Rosie. “Ashes to ashes we all fall down,” goes the line. That is exactly how it sometimes feels if I allow myself to think about it.
A counter suggestion to the malaise of life, the lines which come after the character in Hesse’s story, Harry Haller, has experienced the unconditional love/respect of another human being. The other human being is Maria, a female. Is it significant that she is female?. Perhaps it doesn’t matter. In any case Harry is “burned out” after years of living a life according to the dictates of destiny, the trajectory inscribed by his upbringing, by his past. Now, by virtue of affection, the authentic acceptance by another–Harry’s eyes are opened, and he is enabled to see the meaning of the arc of his life. He is elevated above despair, beyond consideration of the possibility of suicide as a “reasonable” departure from this world. Nothing has changed, except Harry’s ability to see.
I find myself asking, “Is this not enough?” Would it not be enough to see that the life that one has lived, has in truth, been a fulfillment of one’s destiny? One has taken the path determined by all that has been antecedent, one’s ancestral heritage, the time and place wherein one has lived, and the relationships that were initiated, matured, and receded long the journey.
To see that chance and destiny are one…….
I think that would be enough.