But now, his liberated eyes stayed on this side, he saw and became aware of the visible, sought to be at home in this world, did not search for the true essence, did not aim at a world beyond. Beautiful was this world, looking at it thus, without searching, thus simply, thus childlike.
After leaving the ascetic life, the young Siddhartha, while looking for a new kind of experience, gets to cross a river with the help of a ferryman. Unable to pay him, this old man predicts Siddhartha will return to the river to compensate him in some way. I’ve always thought this river symbolized the threshold between the two worlds (the spiritual life and earthly life). Now Siddhartha finds himself at the other side of the coin where he will meet all the passions and vicious any human has face and soon he will meet his as well. This way, Siddhartha arrives finally to the city.
Obviously, Hesse was going to start the new life of Siddhartha with, in my opinion, the ultimate human experience: love. Till this moment, he had never experienced feel love or being love by someone else. But here I’m talking about the joy, the passion, the lust, the pain and suffering love brings into the game. Siddhartha gets to know Kamala, the most beautiful woman he has ever seen and falls in love with her. She takes him as a courtesan. Siddhartha finds himself in this new position where he’s experiencing this human feeling: this willingness of giving all yourself for the other. But with love comes some tests, because love is not something you’ll give so easily and to anyone.
And if it doesn’t displease you, Kamala, I would like to ask you to be my friend and teacher, for I know nothing yet of that art which you have mastered in the highest degree.
Continue on about the earthly life, Kamala tells him that if he wants to win her affection, he needs to become rich. So this way, she will teach him some of the wonders and mysteries of love. After that, he starts to work with some local businessman. Slowly but very effectively, Siddhartha succeeds in his job, and turns out that he is very good at it. Eventually, he becomes a rich man and thus Kamala’s lover. Here, he learns about how to spend his money, how to enjoy all the pleasures that money can give him and how to live at the expense of an ostentatious life. And so forth we find Siddhartha in the other extreme of the spectrum as to how he started: is now everything he swore he was going to give up. He embraces now the earthly life. With all its joy, love (with Kamala) and ecstasy of the material life, we can say that Siddhartha is living like many of us. We all need to work, we all need the money to survive in this world and we all like to feel the pleasure of a good meal, to have a cozy house, you know, the ordinary things that are now the new ordinary to Siddhartha.
However, after 20 years more or less, Siddhartha starts to feel a kind of emptiness, a kind of disgusting towards his life. He feel the tiredness of living a materialistic life. That leads him to understand that living only this kind of life is not the answer to understand his own life. He was still a samana inside of him, he couldn’t ignore that aspect of his life. Siddhartha felt how was his soul: numb and neglected. In a radical decision, he chooses to leave everything behind: his money, his luxury things and, more important, Kamala, without knowing that she was pregnant of his son.
Hence, we finish this chapter in the life of Siddhartha. A chapter that talks about our common life, honestly. We live, usually, as how Siddhartha lived his life when he met for the first time the modern society of his time: he had to work, tried to live in the best economic conditions, fell in love, and so on. And, as Siddhartha, we can get burned out vey easily with our lives, because there is a wear that our psyche feel. I truly think that many of the modern mental problems have a root with this situation. A person can’t handle for so long to live under the circumstances of just living to get things and to satisfy personal pleasures. So, many of us end up like Siddhartha: giving up everything and start to look for something else, in the best case scenario.
