“We fear death, we shudder at life's instability, we grieve to see the flowers wilt again and again, and the leaves fall, and in our hearts we know that we, too, are transitory and will soon disappear. When artists create pictures and thinkers search for laws and formulate thoughts, it is in order to salvage something from the great dance of death, to make something last longer than we do.”
[Herman Hesse]
It makes a difference whether we live for our résumé or our eulogy. The truth is we spend our lives exploring that balance between living for ourselves and living for others. But we hardly have conversations about virtues as we go about the pursuit of everyday things.
In The Road to Character, New York Times columnist David Brooks says, “Within each of us are two selves: the self who craves success, who builds a résumé, and the self who seeks connection, community, love — the values that make for a great eulogy.” (Citing The Lonely Man of Faith where Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik called these selves "Adam I" and "Adam II."):
Soloveitchik argued that these two sides of our nature are at war with each other. We live in perpetual self-confrontation between the external success and the internal value. And the tricky thing, I'd say, about these two sides of our nature is they work by different logics.
The external logic is an economic logic: input leads to output, risk leads to reward. The internal side of our nature is a moral logic and often an inverse logic. You have to give to receive. You have to surrender to something outside yourself to gain strength within yourself. You have to conquer the desire to get what you want. In order to fulfill yourself, you have to forget yourself. In order to find yourself, you have to lose yourself.
We happen to live in a society that favors Adam I, and often neglects Adam II. And the problem is, that turns you into a shrewd animal who treats life as a game, and you become a cold, calculating creature who slips into a sort of mediocrity where you realize there's a difference between your desired self and your actual self.
How and when do we go back to our self-fulfilling, Adam II side? By wrestling with our original moment of weakness, the thing that brought us shame, sometimes way in the past. Says Brooks:
Through history, people have gone back into their own pasts, sometimes to a precious time in their life, to their childhood, and often, the mind gravitates in the past to a moment of shame, some sin committed, some act of selfishness, an act of omission, of shallowness, the sin of anger, the sin of self-pity, trying to be a people-pleaser, a lack of courage.
The other side of the coin in learning to appreciate our strengths is making sense of what created our weakness.
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Siddhartha by Herman Hesse is one of the 12 books that changed my life, but it's not the only book by Herman Hesse worth reading. Narcissus and Goldmund is likely less known in North America, but is one of his greatest novels.
It's the story of two young men —one devoted to the hermetic religious life and another more into the decadent artistic life— through adulthood. Renaissance Germany lends the historical background to this journey with amazing scenes of great artistic creation through a plague-ravaged world.
With this book Hesse explores the spiritual cerebral approach to existence with Narcissus, and the more artistic and physical approach to life with Goldmund. He finds them both wanting in isolation —the first life devoid of love by another human being, a human necessity, the second too fickle without development and nurturing of enduring love for people and things.
Duality is a common theme is Hesse's work; here he presents two separate characters:
“All existence seemed to be based on duality, on contrast. Either one was a man or one was a woman, either a wanderer or a sedentary burgher, either a thinking person or a feeling person – no one could breathe in at the same time as he breathed out, be a man as well as a woman, experience freedom as well as order, combine instinct and mind. One always had to pay for the one with the loss of the other, and one thing was always just as important and desirable as the other.”
Understanding the difference between résumé building and eulogy makes a big difference in the choices and decisions we make in life and at work.
The story is not dated in any way, even the historical background is generic enough. Two generations of readers might enjoy discussing the book's theme, including meditating on it ourselves at two different life stages.
All along or at some point, we realize that true wisdom comes from connecting the two aspects of our nature, and balancing them.
“If I know what love is, it is because of you.
It is not our purpose to become each other; it is to recognize each other, to learn to see the other and honor him for what he is: each the other's opposite and complement.
We fear death, we shudder at life's instability, we grieve to see the flowers wilt again and again, and the leaves fall, and in our hearts we know that we, too, are transitory and will soon disappear. When artists create pictures and thinkers search for laws and formulate thoughts, it is in order to salvage something from the great dance of death, to make something that lasts longer than we do.
All existence seemed to be based on duality, on contrast. Either one was a man or one was a woman, either a wanderer or sedentary burgher, either a thinking person or a feeling person-no one could breathe in at the same time as he breathed out, be a man as well as a woman, experience freedom as well as order, combine instinct and mind. One always had to pay for one with the loss of the other, and one thing was always just as important and desirable as the other.
How mysterious this life was, how deep and muddy its waters ran, yet how clear and noble what emerged from them.”
Narcissus and Goldmund both leave behind a legacy in the novel, and in life, when they learn to balance the two aspects of living for oneself and living for others expressed as friendship in the story.