Hermann Hesse, I’m Alone, and Completely at Ease: when you walk the road back to yourself, the world opens up—wider, gentler, freer…

I’m Alone, and Completely at Ease is a collection of Hesse’s poems, sketches, and nature pieces—a kind of quiet, self-healing journal in book form.

The title itself comes from his semi-autobiographical novella Klingsor’s Last Summer:

“The world was growing more and more beautiful. I was alone, and felt utterly at ease. I wanted nothing, except to be drenched in sunlight.”

When I first read Klingsor’s Last Summer, that line lodged in my mind and never really left. I couldn’t have explained why I liked it so much at the time, but every now and then it would resurface on its own. Often that’s how it works: you’re drawn to something for no obvious reason, and then one random day, you finally understand why.

Where I live, early autumn—September into October—is mostly rain. Then, suddenly, there’ll be one crystal-clear day. On those days I feel as if nature has handed me a private gift. I can’t resist going out into the sun; if I don’t, I’ll regret it the next morning.

One noon like that, with the light pouring down, I took a walk in a nearby park. After days of rain, the air was washed clean; it smelled of leaves and wet earth, with not a hint of dust. The world looked scrubbed and reset. The sunlight made every color sharper and more vivid. Drops of water on the grass glinted like tiny mirrors. People and cats wandered along the same path, unbothered by one another.

Sunlight is democratic: it either doesn’t show up at all, or it shines on everything. It spills over the tops of tall trees and into the low, tangled shrubs. I felt ridiculously happy; lunch suddenly seemed much less important. And right then, the line from Hesse flashed through my mind again:

“The world was growing more and more beautiful. I was alone, and felt utterly at ease. I wanted nothing, except to be drenched in sunlight.”

I don’t think this feeling is rare. Maybe you have a song you love, but you never remember its title—only one line of the lyrics that you find yourself humming under your breath from time to time.

What you remember isn’t just a sentence. It’s the atmosphere behind it—the mood, the scene, the emotion that once cut straight through to you and quietly stayed.

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01

For Hesse, essays and poems were more than literary work; they were a way to stay alive. In his solitude he watched the world; in his stillness he could hear his own voice.

Just one person, one cat, one hoe. A straw hat. A basket on his back.

He turned to working the soil as a way to steady his inner darkness—sitting quietly in the countryside, planting a slower, unhurried version of himself, rebuilding the order of his own heart.

He wrote and wrote, capturing the moments that moved him: dawns and dusks, trees and lakes, and all the people who long for a bit of peace inside.

Through Hesse we see that even on your own, you can become a universe unto yourself—living richly, freely, on your own terms.

The publisher’s blurb for this book puts it nicely:

“Solitude is not a punishment. The less you want to be disturbed, the more you can understand Hesse.”

Unlike the headlong pace of reading a novel, essays and poems ask you to slow down. They’re best read alone, quietly, with no rush.

If we read too fast, we slip past what matters most—without even noticing what we’ve lost.

02

I’m especially taken with the chapter called “The Iris.”

For Anselm, the iris isn’t just a flower; it’s an image that runs like a thread through his life, from childhood all the way into middle age.

As a boy, one spring, he walked through a lush, green garden. Among all the flowers his mother had planted, there was a single iris — the one he loved most.

A child’s world is beautifully simple: when you like something, you pour all your attention into it.

He would press his face against the flower’s pale green leaves, carefully pinch the tip of a leaf between his fingers, lean in to breathe in its scent, and gaze quietly into the heart of the blossom.

We were all like Anselm once, full of curiosity about whatever was right in front of us — the kind of kids who could crouch in the grass watching ants carry crumbs for an entire afternoon.

Every morning when Anselm woke up and “came back” from strange dreams, the fresh, bright garden was there, waiting for him with open arms.

Back then, the world of dreams was unfamiliar; the garden of real life was what felt like home. Much later, that balance would flip.

Anselm could notice the tiniest changes in the flowers — the bright veins on the petals, the way a bud swelled or a color deepened overnight.

As the seasons turned, the garden looked different every day: sometimes the lawn was scattered with bluebells, sometimes a new fragrance drifted through the air, sometimes the first rose opened in the sun. On other days, every iris in the garden was gone, all withered away. But there was always something new taking their place — red berries ripening in the bushes, butterflies dancing freely in the light.

He saw, heard, smelled, and felt it all.

He talked to butterflies and pebbles, made friends with beetles and lizards, listened to the birds’ stories, studied the unfurling of fern fronds. The lilies faded, the nasturtiums opened, the roses dropped their petals, the berries grew sweet.

“Everything was changing, each thing giving way to another; what vanished now would return again, when its time came.”

Anselm was friends with everything in the garden, and in that gentle world, friendship and trust never seemed to disappear.

He didn’t know that all these things he found so endlessly fascinating would gradually lose their shine as he grew older.

Of all the lovely things around him, the young Anselm loved the blue irises most. In a way, it’s almost dangerous to meet such a breathtaking flower too early in life.

Maybe it was that first glance when he walked past the flowerbed. Maybe it was all the times he stood there studying it carefully. The garden was full of flowers, and yet the iris alone took on a special meaning for him — it became a symbol, a metaphor for everything mysterious and worth thinking about.

When the Little Prince leaves his tiny asteroid B-612 and comes to Earth, he sees many roses that look exactly like the one he left behind. But the rose on his own planet is still the only one that truly matters.

“It’s the time you’ve wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important.”

In the same way, the iris accompanies Anselm through the innocence of childhood, returning every summer in a new guise — more enigmatic, more moving than before.

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03

But as the years pass, everything changes. Even Anselm himself can’t quite explain why.

He finds himself arguing with his mother more often. He feels sad for no clear reason, vaguely irritated, as if something is always slightly wrong. His friendships become unstable — close one moment, distant the next.

He gets his first real taste of loneliness.

Year after year, Anselm grows up. He’s no longer a child. All the things that once filled his days with excitement and surprise slowly start to feel dull. His inner life sets out on a long, difficult journey.

Out in the wider world, he swings between shyness and recklessness. Away from home, his steps grow hurried; when he does go back to visit his mother, it’s just a quick stop, a fleeting glance at the place he came from.

The garden that once felt like an entire universe now seems much too small, no longer able to contain him. The world is wide, and endless new things clamor for his attention.

As adults, we do much the same: we keep setting out on new journeys and leave our hometowns behind. Like Anselm, we go back now and then, but only for a short while, before heading off again to chase some new sense of meaning.

Carrying his childhood wonder and curiosity with him, Anselm moves on — first to high school, then university, then overseas for graduate studies. Eventually he returns, takes a position at a university in a big city, and becomes a gentleman and a scholar.

He has, in a sense, entered the world he once dreamed of. Yet there, in the very life he used to long for, he feels profoundly lonely and disappointed. Time keeps moving. He remains alone.

He is successful, admired, respected. But there is no family left for him in this world.

Home has become a distant dream, sealed away somewhere in his memory.

That same confusion he felt at the end of childhood comes back. He realizes that being a professor does not equal happiness, and the bows and greetings from townspeople and students do not add up to real joy.

The things he once chased with all his heart — now that he finally has them — feel strangely empty.

Deep down, he has a nagging sense that happiness is still far ahead of him, somewhere out in a future he hasn’t yet reached.

04

Anselm often went over to a friend’s place, and over time he found himself drawn to the friend’s younger sister, Alice.

Like anyone searching for happiness, he assumed his own happiness would be special, somehow set apart from everyone else’s.

He was convinced that his happiness would arrive in some unique way — not just be waiting for him behind any old window, like something you could stumble on by accident.

Alice was naturally quiet, gentle, and kind. She liked her world to be filled with flowers, ideas, and music.

Anselm wanted something different from life. If he were to marry, the house had to be full of life and noise, with friends constantly coming and going and the rooms buzzing with conversation.

In Greek mythology, the iris takes its name from Iris, the goddess of the rainbow, the messenger between gods and human beings. In Anselm’s mind, Alice’s name brushed up against that story of the iris and the rainbow goddess.

Her name stirred something in him — a sense of something important and sacred he had once carried in his heart and then somehow lost and forgotten. It felt like the memory of a dream, or a fragment from a beautiful fairy tale.

One day, returning from a solo trip, Anselm couldn’t stand the flat, cold, suffocating quiet of his apartment any longer. He went straight to his friend’s house, determined to ask Alice to marry him.

He felt he simply couldn’t go on like this. He had to have a wife; without that, his life seemed empty and meaningless.

He told Alice that if she married him, she would have flowers — plenty of them — and the most beautiful garden.

Alice didn’t say yes right away. She told him she could live perfectly well without flowers, but there was one thing she could never give up and never compromise on:

“If I’m going to share my life with a man, then the music inside him has to be in perfect harmony with the music inside me.”

The way I read it, she’s talking about two people needing to be on the same wavelength — at least in what they’re reaching for deep down.

Alice then gives Anselm a task: he has to go and look for whatever it is his memory has wrapped around her name, whatever dream or vision her name once awakened in him. When he truly finds it, she says, she will be willing to spend her life with him.

All his life, Anselm has taken on and solved countless tasks. None of them has ever felt as strange, as important, or as discouraging as this one.

He can’t make any sense of it. Annoyed, he tells himself it’s nothing more than Alice’s whimsical nonsense. Part of him wants to push the task away entirely. And yet, at the same time, he feels a kind of protest, a dull ache inside. On some half-buried level, he suspects that Alice is right.

When he finally sits down and really tries to recall the things he has long since forgotten, he discovers that his memories have blurred. He has to strain to bring back even the outline of his mother’s face. He can’t remember the name of the girl he once pursued so passionately in his youth. He dimly remembers having a dog in college, and it takes him several days to remember what the dog was called.

The more he tries to remember, the more his heart fills with fear and sadness. Everything from the past seems to dissolve, as if it no longer belongs to him at all. It all feels strangely foreign.

He wants to write down every significant experience he’s ever had, so that in the future he can hold on to them tightly. But he no longer knows how to tell what really mattered.

“Was it becoming a professor? Earning a doctorate? Going to university at all? Or was it one of those girls I once loved for a time and have now completely forgotten?”

For the first time in his life, he feels how fast and how mercilessly time is slipping away.

05

Another year slips by. Anselm is older now—and somehow younger too.
It sounds like a contradiction, but it’s that odd mix you sometimes see in certain people: they understand how harsh the world can be, yet something in them has become even more childlike and pure.

Those who used to know him well now feel strangely distant from him. They say he seems absent-minded, moody, unpredictable, a little odd. Most of them shrug and put it down to the fact that he’s been single for far too long.

He often neglects his work, lost in his own thoughts. When he lectures, his mind keeps drifting away, but the students are oddly moved by the innocent smile that returns to his face when he snaps back to the present.

He himself doesn’t realize that during this long search, he has already stumbled onto a new kind of meaning.

He starts to notice that behind the memories he takes for granted, there are older ones, hidden away—ancient, mysterious.

Every now and then a feeling will wash over him out of nowhere, like a mild breeze on an April morning or the thin fog of a September dawn: a breath of impressions from somewhere far back in time.

“He caught a whiff of some forgotten fragrance, a trace of some familiar taste; he felt, somewhere on his skin, in his eyes, in his heart, a strange and tender stirring.”

A life is made up of countless tiny moments. Many of the loveliest ones we think we’ve forgotten, assume have disappeared—but they really did happen. We truly lived them, felt them. Those one-of-a-kind experiences may be echoed later, but they can never be repeated in exactly the same way.

The moments of a life can’t be copied and pasted.

As Anselm moves through the deep valley of his memories, searching, he makes all sorts of new discoveries. Only one thing continues to elude him: what, exactly, Alice’s name really means to him, and what it points to inside him.

He goes back to the garden of his childhood and is overwhelmed by a bottomless sadness. When he returns, he shuts himself away and stops seeing people—until a friend comes and more or less drags him out to see Alice again.

She is ill now, frail and weightless, almost like a child.

Over the past year, Anselm has kept his promise, honestly and stubbornly, and Alice has seen all of it.

She tells him:

“Keep going. Stay on this path and walk it through, all the way to where it leads. You think you’re doing this for me, but really, you’re walking this road for yourself.”

Anselm understands what she means, and standing there in front of the person he is about to lose, grief catches him unprepared.

Alice says to him:

“All your life you’ve been searching. You’ve searched for honor, for happiness, for knowledge, and you’ve searched for me. But all of that is just a collection of pretty images. They all leave you in the end—just as I now have to leave you too.”

Anselm begs her to leave him something to remember her by.
What Alice gives him is a single, freshly opened blue iris.

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06

After Alice’s death, Anselm falls apart completely. He walks away from everything—his city, his position, his former life—as if he were vanishing from the world.

People catch sight of him here and there: in some small town, or once, briefly, back near his old home. But he keeps his distance and shrinks from any show of concern that feels too warm, too insistent.

The things he loved, he still loves. Irises, for instance. Wherever he happens to be, if he sees one, he bends down to study it closely, quietly, as if greeting an old friend.

In his dreams, he can clearly see his mother’s face again. In his dreams, Alice still speaks to him.

He spends his days in reflection. He no longer has a settled home. He wanders the countryside, sleeps in the woods. When he’s hungry, he eats bread and wild berries; when he’s thirsty, he drinks the rain and dew caught on leaves.

Some people think he’s an idiot. Others call him a madman. Some are afraid of him, some laugh at him—and some, unexpectedly, are fond of him.

He learns to do things he never used to do—or perhaps things he only did as a small child: he joins in children’s strange games, talks to a broken branch or a small stone as if they could answer.

Seasons come and go. He stares for long stretches at flowers, streams, and lakes, and murmurs to himself:

“Pictures. It’s all just pictures.”

Only one thing in his life does not reduce itself to a picture, and that is what he follows, faithfully. It is the sound of Alice’s voice, and his mother’s—the one solid thing that still gives him comfort and hope.

At the very end of the story, a dream from his early childhood returns. In the dream, he walks into the calyx of an iris, and the entire world of images trails after him, sinking with him into whatever lies beyond all images.

He hums a soft song under his breath. And the narrow path he’s on gently leads him back—back home.

07

After finishing “The Iris,” I found myself stuck on one question:

What would Anselm’s life have looked like if he had never met Alice?

If he’d simply followed the usual script—good career, respectable position, a “normal” life in the eyes of society—that wouldn’t necessarily be wrong. Everyone has their own way of living. As long as he liked his life, he would have every right to drift along a bit, even live a little vaguely and unquestioningly.

But the author doesn’t leave him there. He’s pushed back into solitude.

It reminds me of something Schopenhauer is often summarized as saying: you can choose between being ordinary… or being lonely.

Whichever kind of life you pick—married or single, “successful” or not—there will always be moments of regret, pockets of emptiness. Loneliness is less an exception and more the baseline condition of being human.

If someone is deeply unhappy, even depressed, and keeps reaching outward for rescue, what they finally grab may still feel hollow. It’s only by turning inward, again and again, that you begin to wake up for real.

Hesse writes in Demian that every person’s life is ultimately a journey toward themselves—a tentative attempt at one particular path, a quiet call from some hidden trail that’s theirs alone.

A person who has truly begun to awaken, he suggests, really only has one duty: to find their own self, to stay true to it, and to keep walking their own road—wherever it leads.

In “The Iris,” that’s exactly the road Anselm steps onto: a long, winding trek back to himself.

The path back to one’s own core is, by nature, a lonely one. And along the way, the more he looks outward for answers—for love, for status, for validation—the more lost, isolated, and helpless he feels. He keeps imagining happiness as something far ahead of him, out on the horizon: hazy, untouchable, impossible to hold. Only when he glances back does he begin to realize that happiness was there, quietly present, in all those small, ordinary moments he once rushed past.

Only the fleeting moments are completely real.

We tend to feel most “happy” when happiness seems almost within reach, when we’re still moving toward it. Once we actually have what we thought we wanted, we start worrying about losing it.

So what is happiness, really? There isn’t a single neat definition that fits everyone.

But maybe this comes close: when your inner world is quiet enough, when you’re no longer frantically grabbing at the next thing—that’s probably as close to happiness as most of us ever get.