Summertime Blues
SUMMERTIME BLUES
Hesse understood homesickness – not the ordinary homesickness one has when travelling – but the spiritual homesickness that comes to those who are not at home in this world. It begins with a longing for the days of childhood innocence, but then it extends farther back to a time before birth. Novalis called it the dream of the Blue Flower.
The feeling I call nostalgia is nothing less than a desire for the impossible. I read the books of my youth. Revisit places I once lived. Dream of people long dead. And call to mind the fondest episodes of my childhood. But it is all for naught.
“Not a single path leads back
To the garden of our youth.”
– Hermann Hesse
As a devotee of the Blue Flower, I have felt that longing which is both the longing for something not of this world and the longing for my true self.