Singapore Dream and Other Adventures

by Hermann Hesse

  Here, there, and everywhere were priests, temple servants, and their minions in great number. Hands were stretched out to me, and ceremonial-looking brass and silver bowls were held out to me on every side. In brief, I ended up passing out more than fifty tips. But I did all of this, including my questioning of the priests, in a semicompetent dream state, a kind of half consciousness. I had no respect for the miserable priests; I felt scorn for the images and shrines, the ludicrous gold and ivory, the sandalwood and silver. But I felt a deep sense of empathy and compassion for the kindly, gentle Indian folk, who over centuries had turned a magnificent pure teaching into an utter caricature and built this immense edifice of naive gullibility, foolishly sincere prayers and offerings, and movingly misguided all-too-human ignorance and childishness. The feeble, blind vestige of the Buddha’s teaching that in their simplemindedness they were capable of understanding, they honored, cared for, hallowed and ornamented, made offerings to costly images—what are we to do, we smart and spiritual people from the West, who are much closer to the source of Buddha’s teaching and to all knowledge?

  I was dragged past more altars and pillars. Here and there was the glitter of gold and rubies, dull old silver in quantity, and with all the fantastic richness of the temple treasures, the shabbiness of the temple servants and the priests, the poorness of the wooden partitions and glass cases, the beggarly dearth of lighting were amazing to see. Priests displayed the ancient holy books of the temple, richly bound in silver, whose sacred texts in Sanskrit and Pali they themselves probably could no longer read. And what they noted down on a palm leaf in exchange for a tip was no beautiful saying or name, but just the date and the name of the place—a tacky, matter-of-fact receipt.

  Finally I was shown the shrine and the receptacle in which the holy tooth of the Buddha was kept. We have all that in Europe too. I gave my donation and moved on. The Buddhism of Ceylon is beautiful to photograph and to write literary descriptions of. Beyond that, it is nothing but another of the many moving, painfully grotesque forms in which helpless human suffering expresses its need and its lack of spirit and strength.

  And then they pulled me unexpectedly back out into the night. In the woolly darkness, the rain still poured down heavily, beneath me the candles of the youths reflected in the holy turtle pond. Oh, there’s no lack of holiness and holy things here, but for that Buddha who was not made out of stone or crystal or alabaster—for him everything was holy, everything was God!

  I was again pulled and shoved, and groping in the dark, I helplessly went along. I was hurried outside down a few steps and over some wet grass, where suddenly, as a red rectangle in the night, the lit-up doorway of a second, smaller temple stood before us. I went in, offered flowers, was pushed toward an inner door, and suddenly I saw before me, frighteningly near, a large recumbent Buddha in the wall, eighteen feet long, made of granite and luridly painted in red and yellow. It is amazing how from the slick vacancy of all these figures, the magnificent essential Idea of them shines forth—the wrinkleless serene smoothness of the countenance of the Perfect One.

  Now we were finished. I was again standing outside in the rain, and I still had to pay the guide, the candle bearers, and the priest of the smaller temple. But I had given away all my money, and looking at my watch, I now saw with a shock that the whole nocturnal temple journey had taken only twenty minutes. I ran quickly back to the hotel in the rain, with my small host of faithful from the temple at my heels. I got money from the hotel cashier and shared it out. The priest, the guide, and the first and second candle bearers bowed down before its power, and shivering, I climbed up the many steps to my room.

  PIDURUTALAGALA

  In order to take leave of India in a quiet and worthy fashion, on one of the last days before my departure, alone in the freshness of a rainy morning, I climbed the highest peak in Ceylon, that of Pidurutalagala. When expressed in English feet, the height of its summit sounds quite impressive, but in reality it is just a little over two thousand meters high and climbing it is just a stroll.

  The cool green mountain valley of Nuwara Eliya lay silvery in the light morning rain. It was typical English-Indian with its corrugated sheet metal roofs and its wastefully large tennis courts and golf courses. The Singhalese loused each other in front of their huts or sat shivering, wrapped in wool head scarfs. The landscape, which resembles that of the Black Forest, lay lifeless and veiled. Aside from a few birds, for a long time I had seen no living thing, until in a garden hedge I saw a fat, poisonous green chameleon, whose sinister movements I watched for a long time to the accompaniment of the song of the insects.

  The path began its climb from a small ravine, the few roofs disappeared, a rapid brook rushed by me on its way down. The way was narrow and steep and for a good hour I climbed steadily upward through tough, thick bush and annoying swarms of gnats. Only rarely did a bend in the path provide the chance for a view, and when it did, you saw always the same pretty, somewhat boring valley with its lake and hotel roofs. The rain gradually halted, the cool wind went to sleep, and the sun came out again for a few minutes.

  I had climbed the initial slopes, and the path now led over more level, springy bog and past several beautiful mountain brooks. Here the alpine roses grow more opulently than at home, on sturdy trees three times the height of a man, and a furry, white-flowering weed here reminded me very much of edelweiss. I found many of the wildflowers we know from home, but all strangely enlarged and more developed, and all of them with an alpine character. The trees here have no tree line to worry about and grow vigorously and rich with foliage all the way to the uppermost heights.

  I now came to the last stage of the ascent. The path abruptly began to climb steeply and soon I was surrounded by forest; a weird, dead, enchanted forest, where trunks and branches, winding snake-like, stared at me with their long, thick, white beards of moss. A wet, bitter odor of leaves and mist hung in the air.

  It was all quite beautiful, but it was not really what I had pictured to myself, and I was already beginning to fear that today yet another was to be added to the many disappointments of my Asian journey. As I was thinking this, the forest came to an end. I came out, warm and rather breathless, onto a gray Ossianic heath and saw the bare summit with its small stone pyramid quite near in front of me. A hard, cold wind drove into me, and I pulled my coat round myself and slowly continued climbing the last hundred paces.

  What I saw up there was perhaps not typically Indian, but it was the greatest and purest impression that I received of all of Ceylon. The wind had just swept the whole breadth of the Nuwara Eliya valley clear of clouds. I saw, deep blue and immense, the high mountains of Ceylon swelling in mighty ramparts. In the midst of them stood the beautiful pyramid of primordially sacred Adam’s Peak. Beyond it in a boundless distance and depth lay the sea, blue and smooth, and in between were a thousand mountains, broad valleys, narrow gorges, streams, and waterfalls—with its countless folds, here was the whole mountainous island in which the ancient tales saw paradise. Far below me, mighty ranges of clouds cruised and thundered over isolated valleys; behind me churning mist rose smoke-like out of dark-blue depths; and across all of it blew the cold sibilant mountain wind. Both the foreground and the distance stood out clearly in the humid air, deeply saturated in a windblown fusion of colors, as though this country truly were paradise, and as though just now at this very moment the first humans were descending into the valleys for the first time from its blue cloud-wreathed mountains.

  This great primeval landscape spoke more potently to me than anything else I had seen in India. The palm trees and the birds of paradise, the rice paddies and the temples in the rich coastal cities, the valleys of the tropical lowlands steaming with fertile growth—all that, and even the primeval forest, beautiful and enchanting as it was, remained always alien for me, as something just there for the onlooker—it never became intimately and fully part of me. For the first time, here in the cold air, amid the se
ething clouds of the raw heights, it became completely clear to me to what extent our being and our northern culture are rooted here in these more primitive and poorer lands. We come to the South and the East full of longing, drawn by an intimation of a darker and more fulfilling home; and we find paradise here, the fullness and lush abundance of an all-natural bounty; we find the plain, simple, childlike people of paradise. But we ourselves are other; we are strangers here and without birthright; we have long since lost paradise, and the new paradise that we have and seek to build is not to be found on the equator and in the warm seas of the East; rather it lies within us and in our own northern future.

  RETURN JOURNEY

  Again I have been traveling day and night, day after day for weeks, over the blue-black sea, living in a tiny hole of a cabin. I stand for hours in the evening leaning on the railing. I see the bare black surface grow bright in the evening light. I see the strangely displaced constellations flaming against the green late-night heavens, and I see the gleaming white moon sitting straight up like a boat floating in the blackness. The English people lie in their deck chairs and read out-of-date English magazines and reviews, and the Germans throw dice in the smoking room using leather cups. I often join them, and from time to time silence and suspense occur on deck when the marvelously built, brown-black, tiger-like woman from Honolulu passes by, with a spring in every step, rocking back and forth with vital force and animal confidence. No one is in love with her, no one feels up to her level. We look at her like a beautiful but overwhelming act of nature, a storm or an earthquake. But many of us are in love with the gentle, overly slender, two-meter-tall young lady from England, who has the face of a boy and can laugh like an angel. She was in China visiting relatives. She traveled there via Vladivostok and is now traveling back via Suez. During the day she wears discreet, practical traveling clothes and in the evening gets quite dressed up, and she is clearly passing her entire smiling youth doing nothing besides parading her own charm and loveliness across all the seas and lands of the earth.

  My desires and thoughts are all already in my homeland, which nevertheless, being infinitely far away, remains half unreal; whereas my many impressions of the last few months are with me in a newer, more sensually vivid way. When I think them over, what comes out is that only a very few of them are really “exotic.” Most of them are purely human in nature and are not significant and important to me because of their foreign costume but because of their relationship to my own and everyone else’s human nature.

  As for the still completely fresh exotic images that constantly throng my mind, they include the palmy beach of Penang with its stretches of white sand and yellow fishermen’s huts, the luminous blue Chinese streets in the cities of the Straits and the Malay States, the hilly swarm of islands of the Archipelago near Riouw, the monkey tribes in the jungles, and the crocodile rivers of Sumatra. The latest of those impressions came from up in Nuwara Eliya. There everything was more or less home-like and simple, raw, and plain; no temples, no palm trees. But on my first outing there, suddenly a beautiful white flower spoke to me. It reached out and touched me in the inmost treasure chamber of my earliest and strongest impressions, impressions of the type we take in as children and which later no sea or mountain in the world can equal. After weeks of living in new, strange, superficial impressions, I felt touched in my inmost depths by this flower, which reminded me of something. As I tried to trace what it was, I soon realized that this was the same white, large-cupped calla lily that when I was a little boy had blossomed in my mother’s room. And as I walked farther, I found this same large white flower, which had been cultivated in my parent’s house in the Black Forest as a cherished favorite and a prideworthy rarity, growing in its hundreds and thousands, blooming as buttercups do in April at home. It was a luxuriant and beautiful sight, but it only half pleased and thrilled me to see what had once been my mother’s pride and joy growing here in Ceylon as an uncared-for weed.

  From the long journey at sea, perhaps the most beautiful and most penetrating impression was that of the island of Socotra seen from the north, with its pale, dead sand hills and the wild, raw, and rugged chalk cliffs staring back at one. Then there was the southern end of Calabria with its lonely millennia-old stone cities in the raw rock cliffs. Not to be forgotten are the mountains of Sinai, with their noble outlines, standing crystalline in soft rosy light, and the Suez Canal, which on the return journey I saw in its full colors in the bright Egyptian air.

  But much stronger for me in my memory than these beautiful images were the many small human things I saw. The lean, silent Chinese servant, sleeping on a thin bast mat on the floor in front of his master’s door. His master roared at him in the middle of the night to fetch some trifle. Tired, he turned his head, his lids fluttered for a moment, then he looked up with his clever, patient, brown eyes and got to his feet, awake and resigned, with the submissive soft call: “Tuan!”

  Or the Malay foreman of the forest workers of Batang Hari, a relative of the former raja, a man from a noble family, haggard, with a beautiful sad face. I saw him one evening noiselessly appear on our veranda, blow out his lantern, and make his presence known to the landlord with a dignity and refinement of gesture that we rarely see in our fine noble officers at home.

  Then the swarthy hordes of children in the jungle villages, who watched our boat arrive, staring with curiosity, full of suspense, and with our first step onto the land, fled in terror but without a sound and disappeared like little animals into the bush.

  And how lovely it was in the evening in the Chinese part of town to see a young pair of friends going for a walk. Fine, slim youths with beautiful brown eyes and light, bright, spiritual faces, clothed either entirely in white or entirely in black, with infinitely noble, slender, intelligent hands. Tenderly and cheerfully they walked together, with the left hand of one loosely resting in the right hand of his friend or with an arm on his friend’s shoulder.

  And throughout the Archipelago, the kindhearted, handsome Malays, kept in strict submission by the Dutch, polite and pliable; and on Ceylon the soft, gentle Singhalese. You scold them and they make a face like a troubled child; you give them an order and they begin working with fake, overdone zeal; you tell them a joke and their laughter spreads broadly and blissfully over their whole face. They all have the same beautiful beseeching eyes, and they all retain a vestige of primitive innocence and unaccountability in their light, flighty state of mind. They forget important things in the course of a meal, and they lose themselves in games so totally that they sometimes get very serious about them and kill each other; which is why in really serious matters, matters of real importance, they are much too cowardly. In Nuwara Eliya I saw a laborer who was chased from the work site and pursued by the overseer, who kept beating him. He had committed some kind of minor treachery, and he was completely willing to be punished, but under no circumstances did he want to leave. He wanted to stay there, just to stay there, stay by his work, stay by his bread, stay by his honor, stay by his communality with the others. The strong young man unresistingly let himself be struck and whipped with the end of a rope. He slowly yielded to the violence, howling loud and without restraint like a wounded animal, and great tears ran down his dark face.

  It was also beautiful and thought-provoking to see all these people at their religious practices—Hindu, Mohammedan, and Buddhist. All of them, from the rich urban householder down to the least coolie or outcast, have religion. Their religion might be inferior, spoiled, externalized, or denatured, but it is mighty and omnipresent like the sun and the air. It is a life force and a magical atmosphere, and it is the only thing that we can seriously envy these poor, subjugated peoples. That which we northern Europeans, in our intellectualistic and individualistic cultures feel only rarely—perhaps while listening to the music of Bach—the self-oblivious feeling of belonging to an intangibly pervasive community and the ability to draw force from an unconquerable magical source—this is s
omething that the Mohammedan has every evening in the most remote corner of the world as he performs his prostrations and says his prayers; and the Buddhist has every day in the cool vestibule of his temple. And if we are unable to achieve this once more in a higher form, then we Europeans will no longer have any right to superiority over the East. The English, who in their sense of nationalism and in their exclusive cultivation of their own race, possess a kind of ersatz religion, are thus the only Westerners who have achieved real power and real cultural significance out here.

  My ship sails on and on. The day before yesterday, the untamable sun of Asia still burned down on the deck. We sat there blithely in our thin white clothes and drank ice-cold drinks. Now we are already closer to the European winter, which will soon greet us with cold and rain showers in Port Said. Then the hot coasts of the Eastern isles and the blistering Singapore noon will regain their glamor in our memory. But none of that will ever be as dear and valuable to me as the potent sense of unity and close relatedness of all human beings that I found among the Indians, Malays, Chinese, and Japanese.

  ASIAN TRAVELERS

  One thing continued to strike me daily more and more strongly from the moment I laid eyes on my first Asian port and as long as I continued to travel in the East—how much the Asians travel! In the West, in Europe and America, traveling and “modern transport” are considered to be our Western specialties. So for example, the average citizen anywhere in Europe sees a train trip of more than six or eight hours as a noteworthy journey. A shop assistant or a porter who has perhaps been to Paris, to Geneva, to Nice, or even to Naples, has the reputation of a worldly man, someone who has gotten around in the world. In Asia, it is otherwise. In India, Indochina, the Archipelago, and in much of China, the people travel infinitely more than we do. For simple people of the lower classes to travel two, three, six, or ten days is considered nothing special. If one of us travels from Colombo to Batavia he thinks of himself as an enterprising chap, and he is astounded to learn that a sea voyage of three weeks, a train trip of many days, means nothing to an Asian.