Life & Wisdom Quote by Herman Hesse

The date does the heavy lifting: 1914 lands like a slammed door. Hesse isn’t offering a quaint personal preference shift; he’s marking the moment Europe’s idea of cosmopolitan freedom curdled into catastrophe. “Until 1914 I loved to travel” reads almost innocently, the way a prewar bourgeois intellectual might catalog his pleasures. Then comes the pivot - “Since then” - and the sentence tightens into a renunciation. Travel, once a form of self-cultivation, becomes implicated in a world that has made movement feel morally suspect, logistically perilous, or simply pointless.

The subtext isn’t just fear of borders; it’s disillusionment with the cultural promise behind them. Italy and India aren’t random stamps in a passport. They signal the old European itinerary (Italy as the museum of civilization) and the exoticized elsewhere (India as spiritual counterpoint), both classic Hesse magnets. After the war begins, those external geographies collapse inward: he “almost entirely abandoned travelling,” a phrase that suggests struggle rather than pure choice, as if the desire persists but can’t be justified.

Switzerland matters, too - neutral, mountainous, sealed off by terrain and politics, a physical metaphor for retreat. Hesse’s decade-long enclosure hints at a broader modernist turn: when history becomes too loud, the journey relocates from railways to psyche. The line is spare, even bureaucratic, but that dryness is the point. It performs a kind of emotional austerity, as if only plain facts can survive the era’s wreckage.