Siddhartha

Everyone has a point of awakening and most usually it that moment of enlightenment is brought on by a movie, picture, music piece, talk with a significant other. My moment of awakening came as as result of reading Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha.

I can't help but say that I can still vividly remember my first reading of that book. I remember where I was, what I felt, what I did immediately after reading that scene where Siddhartha too was having his moment of enlightenment in the water.

The symbolism of water - the giver and taker of life, the one stable entity in a changing world - has deeply inspired me in my poetry and musical compositions. Other Hesse works like Demian, which run along the same theme as Siddhartha, have their moments, but nothing can surpass the moment of teenage wonderment that Siddhartha brought for me.