The Wandering Man

By: Hermann Hesse

Émile Friant

“A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening. If one listens to them silently for a long time, the longing reveals its kernel, its meaning. It is not so much a matter of escaping from one's suffering, though it may seem to be so. It is a longing for home, for a memory of the mother, for new metaphors for life. It leads home.”

― Hermann Hesse, Wandering

This is the house where I say goodbye. For a long time I won’t see another house like this one. You see, I’m approaching a pass in the Alps, and here the northern, German architecture, and the German countryside, and the German language come to an end. How lovely it is to cross such a boundary.

The wandering man becomes a primitive man in so many ways, in the same way that the nomad is more primitive than the farmer. But the longing to get on the other side of everything already settled, this makes me, and everybody like me, a road sign to the future. If there were many other people who loathed the borders between countries as I do, then there would be no more wars and blockades.

Nothing on earth is more disgusting, more contemptible than borders.