Romanticism with the mind of a young man

Song Baoying/Cartography

Hermann Hesse begins his Book of Peter Carmensyn:

"At that time, I didn't know what the mountains, lakes, and streams in my hometown were called. But I saw the mirror of the lake under the red sun, the turquoise surface of the lake intertwined with silver light, the lofty mountains surrounding the lake cascading on top of each other, the snow-capped notches and small waterfalls between the high crevices of the mountains, and the sloped, sparse meadows at the foot of the mountains, dotted with fruit trees, huts and gray-and-white Alpine cows. My poor, little heart was so empty, so calm, and so expectant, that the spirits of the lakes and mountains wrote their brave and magnificent deeds on my soul. The tough cliffs and steep slopes had a stubborn look, and with a sense of awe, talked about time. ”

Hesse used a Romantic approach to writing.

From this paragraph, some of the characteristics of Romanticism are the author's spiritual and creative descriptions, direct, thorough, with a strong imagination, language does not converge, sentences like extravagance, and the writing sometimes has an unstoppable momentum.

Some say that Hesse was the last knight of the German Romantics. After many years of watching, after Hesse's "Peter Carmenzyn", not only in Germany, but in the world, there was no romantic work in its peak state. This is not to say that Romanticism is not good and is bound to die, but its spiritual pursuit has become the starting point of many modern writers, and its artistic techniques have dissolved in many modern genres.

Continuing with the previous sentence "Talking about time," Hesse continues:

"They are the sons of time, and they have left the scars of time on their bodies. They spoke of what had happened: the earth cracked, bent, and in the groans of pain as it formed, rock peaks and ridges protruded from its tortured body. The rocky mountain roared and roared out, and the mountain towered, rising higher and higher aimlessly until it broke; the Twin Peaks Mountain fought desperately for space, and finally, one won, stood suddenly, and threw its brother aside, falling to pieces. Since that time, broken peaks, squeezed out and broken rocks, have remained in the silt of the mountain and can be seen everywhere. ...... They, these rocky mountains, are just that. It's not difficult to understand what they mean, just look at the steep mountain walls. They are broken, bent and cracked one by one, and each side is covered with cracked scars. We've had terrible encounters, they say, and we're still suffering. But when they say this, they are proud, serious and tenacious, like old warriors who have been tested in the battlefield for a long time. ...... They stood firmly, their faces gloomy; they held their breath, they persevered, their heads held high, and they faced the storm with the cliffs and peaks of the cracks in the road, concentrating their full strength and stubbornly resisting. Every time a wound was cracked, they let out a grunting roar of rage and horror; for every landslide in the distance, they responded with a terrifying groan, intermittent, and furious. ”

I've read this passage countless times. At that time, I knew from the geology books that the mountains in my hometown were the first mountains in the world to rise, and I wanted to write an essay, so I read this passage of Hesse repeatedly and felt the first orogenic movement of the earth.

If the reader is close to the age of the author when reading a book, it is easy to enter the author's feelings. The book was written by Hesse when he was 27 years old, and I read it when I was 28, when I read almost all of Hesse's romance, arrogance, nobility, idealism, and chivalry. Now it is a kind of luck to think of it, across the distant time and space, across different cultures, to feel the Nobel Laureate Hesse of the 1940s at such a close distance.

In the introduction you can see, Peter Carmenqing is a novel, or a prose novel. However, the book uses very few novel plots, a young man who grew up in the mountains, went to the metropolis, experienced art, love, friendship, and returned to the mountains. Among them, large paragraphs of text, describing the interaction between man and heaven and earth, are refreshing prose, silent contemplation, and rhapsody of nature. I had a new idea, if I called this book a novel essay, there was nothing wrong with it, and it might be better.

At that time, Hesse was young, there was no constraint in writing, and only romanticism could express his mind.

Many of the literary youths around me, young and old, are quite realistic and need to make up for the lesson of romanticism.

Even if it's just to accomplish a small goal, make your words beautiful and radiant.

Now there is a question, when the writer is no longer young, is romanticism still needed? I also had a hard time answering, so I went to read the Hesse essay after Peter Carmenqing.

"A wet wind blew toward me from the mountain, and the blue aerial islands over there looked down on some other land below. Under those skies, I will always feel happy, and I will always feel nostalgic. Hesse wrote in The Farmhouse, "The wind I greeted as I went up high, emitting the fragrance of the other and the far, the dividing line and the linguistic boundary, the mountains and the south." The wind is full of promises. Goodbye, small farmhouse, hometown fields! I bid you farewell to your mother like a teenager. ”

Here, the elements of reality increase, and romanticism changes from a method of expression to a feeling.

In What the Poet Sees at Dusk, Hesse writes of a couple sitting on a low wall outside the village enjoying romance when a little girl emerges from the farmhouse.

She changed her pace and walked to the couple as if playing a game. The little girl came to them slowly, as if she had come to them on purpose... The little girl reluctantly walked slowly past them. She hesitated, and after about fifty steps, she stopped and turned back, hesitantly stomped back to her lovers, looked at them and smiled awkwardly, and then walked away again and disappeared into the garden of the farmhouse. ”

The little girl became the protagonist of the work and snatched the couple's play. After a while, the little girl walked out the door again.

"She ran barefoot on the road, ran past the couple and folded back, until she stopped at the garden gate, and after a minute, she ran back and forth two or three times, running back and forth in solitude and silence." Hesse wrote, "The little girl's little run turned into a dance; she floated closer, staggering and changing her steps. In the night, her small figure danced alone on the white path. Her dance is a dance of reverence, a childish dance of praise and prayer for the future, of love. She finished the sacrifice dance with serious concentration, floated back and forth, and finally disappeared into the dark garden. ”

Here, Hesse's description of the little girl has a romance in reality and a reality in romance.

In The Mountain Pass, the place where Hesse writes is the geographical dividing line.

"When I reached the heights of the mountain pass, I stood still. The way down leads to both sides, and the water flows to both sides, and at a high place, everything next to each other, hand in hand, has found its own way to the two worlds. ”

Next, Hesse easily conjures up his association: "The small pool of water that my shoe gently touches pours out to the north, and its water flows into the distant cold sea." Next to the small pool of snow, a drop of snow falls south, flowing to the Ligurian and Adriatic coasts into the sea, the edge of which is Africa. But all the waters of the world will reunite, and the sea of ice and the Nile merge into damp clouds. This ancient, beautiful metaphor makes me feel the sacredness of this moment. Every path leads us wanderers home. ”

Ageing, Hesse was more delicate, more calm, more acute, more sophisticated than before, and more linguistically speaking with nature, but his mind was still young and did not reject romance.

"My drunken nostalgia no longer depicts the multicolored dreams of imagining hazy distances, and my eyes are content to see what is real, because it has learned to see. The world has become more beautiful since then. The world has become more beautiful. I am alone and not agonized by being alone. I have no other wishes. I'm ready to let the sun cook me. I crave maturity. I am ready to die, ready to regenerate. The world has become more beautiful. He wrote at the end of "Yamaguchi".

Because of Romanticism, Hesse always belonged to young readers.

When recommending his works, some publishing houses said that it was a great loss for young people not to be able to read Hesse in their youth. This is a bit of an exaggeration, but it is also close to the truth. By the 1960s, the time of Hesse's death, there was a wave of re-reading of Hesse in the world, and more young people benefited greatly from him taking the lesson of romanticism.

As you read Hesse, the cool breeze of the fragrance of life in the books strikes upon you, a life that has never been seen before in the world, but is real, elevating your small existence to the realm of necessity and eternity. You read the scriptures and feel that you may also be a prophet, and your world is waiting for you to discover some of its treasures.

This excavation is to write it out.

You have to write it out to be the real excavation.

Guest Editor: Dong Xueren

Source: China Youth Daily client