And what happened was that the precocious boy experienced an unreal second childhood during this period of illness. His sensibility, robbed of its real childhood, now fled with sudden yearning back to those already dimming years and wandered spellbound through a forest of memories whose vividness was perhaps of an almost pathological nature. He relived these memories with no less intensity and passion than he had experienced them in reality before. His betrayed and violated childhood erupted like a long pent-up spring.
When a tree is polled, it will sprout new shoots nearer its roots. A soul that is ruined in the bud will frequently return to the springtime of its beginnings and its promise-filled childhood, as though it could discover new hopes there and retie the broken threads of life. The shoots grow rapidly and eagerly, but it is only a sham life that will never be a genuine tree.
-- Hermann Hesse, Beneath the Wheel (1906)
Aw. This is a sad one!
ReplyDeleteReally enjoying the Hesse passages.
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