my father loved Tibet. not in the way tourists love it, the prayer flags and altitude photos, but in the quiet, interior way of someone who had found a tradition that made sense of suffering. he read Tibetan Buddhist texts the way other people read the news: daily, seriously, as if the words might rearrange something inside him. growing up, i absorbed this without fully understanding it. Tibet was not a place on a map to me. it was the sound of my father turning pages late at night.
i read Hesse's Siddhartha for the first time as a teenager, and it landed differently than it might have for someone without that backdrop. the story felt familiar. not the plot, but the pull. Siddhartha's restlessness, his refusal to accept someone else's answer to the question of how to live. he walks away from the Brahmins, from the Buddha himself. not out of arrogance, but out of a conviction that truth has to be lived, not received.
on choosing your own path
what struck me most was the book's argument about free will: that it isn't the absence of constraint, but the willingness to make choices whose consequences you cannot see. Siddhartha chooses the merchant life, chooses pleasure, chooses loss. none of these are mistakes. they are the curriculum. Hesse suggests that you cannot skip ahead to wisdom. you have to earn it by living through the parts that don't look like progress.
most people sleepwalk. that's not a judgment. it's an observation Hesse makes gently, through Siddhartha's eyes, as he watches the "child people" go about their lives. they eat, they worry, they love their children. but they don't ask the question. the book doesn't condemn them for it. it simply notes that awareness, real awareness of your surroundings, your choices, the water moving beneath you, is rare. and that rarity is what makes a life feel meaningful or hollow.
nomadland
years later, i watched Chloé Zhao's Nomadland and felt that same recognition. Fern driving her van through the American West isn't running from grief. she's choosing to stay close to it, to let the landscape hold what language can't. Zhao films the way Hesse writes: without sentimentality, with enormous patience for silence. the people Fern meets on the road are Siddhartha's ferrymen. they've found something by giving up the need to arrive.
my father would have understood Fern immediately. the deliberate impermanence. the conviction that home is not a structure but a quality of attention.
the river
at the end of Siddhartha, the river teaches what no teacher could: that everything is happening at once. the water is always arriving and always leaving. enlightenment, in Hesse's telling, is not a destination or a reward. it is the moment you stop asking the river where it's going and simply listen.
i think about this more than i probably should. in a world that optimizes for outcomes, the idea that the point is presence, just presence, feels almost subversive. but it's the truest thing i know. my father knew it. Siddhartha learned it. Fern lives it.
the river doesn't stop.