Deep Life Reflections: Friday Five
Issue 135 - Unbuilt
Perhaps the best place to begin a journey is by losing our way first.
Welcome to Issue 135 of Deep Life Reflections, where each Friday I share reflections on how to live more deeply, inspired by literature, cinema, and life itself.
This week, we explore the wanderings of two very different characters who improbably meet on the same road. Each asks what it means to lose everything, and in doing so, to find peace.
Join me for this week’s Friday Five.
1. What I’m Reading
Siddhartha. By Hermann Hesse.
The search for the self is one of humanity’s oldest stories. From Homer’s Odysseus, sailing home across the known world driven by longing and memory, to Orson Welles’ Charles Foster Kane, building his Xanadu brick by brick to fill the void inside him, both were searching for something they had already lost. In Siddhartha, Nobel Prize-winner Hermann Hesse offers another version of the journey: one that reveals itself not across seas or empires, but within.
Published in 1922, Siddhartha follows a young Brahmin who abandons the comfort of home to seek Ātman—the innermost essence of the self. His journey becomes a lifelong search. Each encounter and experience shapes him. It’s less a story of discovery than a story of continual becoming.
Hesse began writing Siddhartha in the aftermath of the First World War, amid the wreckage of a Europe trying to make sense of itself. The novel was born out of a desire to find the self amongst the social and psychological disintegration of war.
Hesse was undergoing a similar reckoning in his own life. Born in Germany to missionary parents who had spent considerable time in India, he had a troubled youth that included one failed suicide attempt. He later underwent another emotional breakdown and began therapy with Josef B. Lang, a disciple of Carl Jung. During this time, Hesse began a growing involvement with Eastern philosophy, reading many Indian texts translated into German, drawing from works like the Bhagavad Gita. The result was a work that bridged two worlds: Western sensibility and Eastern spirituality. Hesse became a missionary in reverse, physically rooted in Germany but sowing eastern seeds.
Siddhartha follows a classic three-part structure, each marking a passage through the self. In the first, Siddhartha leaves home to live among the Samanas—self-disciplined monks (ascetics) who abstain from all comfort in pursuit of enlightenment. There he meets the historical Buddha, Gautama. Yet even in Buddha’s presence he senses he cannot be taught, and truth cannot be borrowed. In the second, he is drawn to the material world, entering the city and its temptations: love, wealth, desire, possessions, power. He takes them all. Finally, weary and despairing, he retreats to the river and bonds with the ferryman, Vasudeva, whose silence and listening leads to his greatest realisation: acceptance.
That realisation comes from the river itself. It separates the forest and the city, traversing two worlds, physical and spiritual. Siddhartha learns from the river. It flows yet remains. It moves constantly, yet is eternally still. Hesse uses the river as both teacher and metaphor. Siddhartha comes to see everything is connected. That opposites like joy and sorrow, holiness and sin, gain and loss, are not contradictions but complements. They co-exist, each giving the other meaning. His early mistake was seeking to escape life, first through asceticism, then through pleasure. The river shows him that both must be lived. The enlightened person, if such a thing exists, isn’t the one who withdraws from life or numbs themselves with indulgence, but one who allows life, in all its forms, to flow through them without resistance. Like the river.
Siddhartha learns to let the world be as it is, and be glad of it. An acceptance of imperfection and impermanence. Not resignation, but the freedom that comes from no longer demanding that life makes sense or be fair. In the end, he uses that same acceptance when he lets his son go, just as his father once did with him.
Siddhartha was a gift from a friend when I left Dubai to begin a new chapter in Spain. In his inscription, he wrote it was one of his favourite books, one he’s gifted to many others over the years. He believes Siddhartha’s journey is one we each take in our own way. Yet as the book reminds us, no one can hand us wisdom. In Siddhartha’s words:
“Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom. We can find it, we can be carried by it, we can work wonders with it, but we cannot utter it or teach it.”
Perhaps that’s why the book endures a century after its publication: we can live its lessons rather than learn them.
2. What I’m Watching
Paris, Texas (1984). Directed by Wim Wenders.
In Paris, Texas, we embark on another journey, although this one happens in reverse. Travis Henderson wanders out of the Texan desert after four years. He wears a battered suit and baseball cap, that staple of American menswear. He looks like he’s been walking a long time. Sunken eyes, dishevelled, blank. Travis is tired, forlorn, and lost. Swap the river of Siddhartha with the desert in Wenders’ film and you have two vast landscapes that both connect and divide.
Paris, Texas is a beautiful piece of cinema from 1984 about loss and the impossibility of return. Directed by Wim Wenders, part of the German New Wave of cinema from the 1970s, it’s a German and French co-production written by an American, Sam Shepard, where the dialogue is all about hard truths and splintered silences. The film won the coveted Palme d’Or in Cannes.
Wenders has always been fascinated by America. This film can be seen as a view of America by Europeans. This big, strange country where bone-dry deserts co-exist with sprawling cities. Motels, dust-bowl towns, and truck stops. Star Wars duvets and home-movie reels. An America of myth and mirrors. Paris, Texas is a profoundly sad film. Travis, played perfectly by Harry Dean Stanton, is a profoundly sad character. He’s mute for the first half hour of the film. Travis isn’t insane, simply lost to grief. For a past he cannot change, nor at times, remember.
His surprised, compassionate brother, Walt, flies out from Los Angeles to collect him. Travis and Walt share a long road trip back to L.A. We learn Walt and his wife, Anne, have been looking after Travis’ seven-year-old son, Hunter. Travis slowly begins to speak again, and reconnects gently with Hunter. There’s some tender bonding moments, especially when father and son copy each other’s walks on opposite sides of the road outside Hunter’s school, and when Travis shares an old family photo album, pointing out his mother and father, Hunter’s grandparents.
The film is beautifully shot and framed by Robby Muller. The movie is a canvas of American landscapes that could be stills from paintings by Edward Hopper. Deserts, motels, freeways, truck stops, suburbia, scrubland. It’s Americana. The soundtrack by slide guitarist Ry Cooder complements it perfectly. Sparse and lonely.
The Paris, Texas of the title refers to a nondescript backwater town where Travis once bought a plot of land. He carries an old Polaroid of it, just dirt and sky. He can’t remember why he bought it, only that he never built anything on it. It’s still empty and waiting. A promise Travis couldn’t keep, but also a reminder that once there was hope, a possibility.
Travis learns that his wife, Jane, is living in Houston. He takes a willing Hunter and sets out to find her. Played by Nastassja Kinski, Jane now works in a peep-show booth. Their reunion, unknown at first to Jane, takes place across one-way glass and a telephone line. It leads to two scenes of such mesmerising power that time seems to stop. Through Travis’ prepared dialogue, we learn of trauma, distress, jealousy, and rage, but also of a love that never fully died. Travis’ words come slowly and painfully. He starts to tell a story, not even able to look at her.
“I knew these people,” Travis begins, in what Roger Ebert called, “One of the great monologues of movie history.”
“These two people. They were in love with each other. The girl was very young, about 17 or 18, I guess. And the guy was quite a bit older. He was kind of raggedy and wild. And she was very beautiful, you know?”
The story is his confession. And as it slowly dawns on Jane that it’s Travis on the other side of the mirror, it becomes an opportunity for her to unburden herself too. The film ends in a kind of grace. Travis finds his wife and son only to let them go again. But by choice. It’s a sacrifice, his love for them still burning through the pain and wandering. Acceptance.
We think back to that Polaroid of the dusty scrub of unbuilt land in Paris, Texas. A piece of America. Still empty.
Some places, and some people, are meant to remain unbuilt.
3. What I’m Contemplating
Both Travis and Siddhartha seem to suggest that enlightenment and heartbreak might be cut from the same cloth. Despite their vastly different worlds—one a self-aware Brahmin, the other a rather aimless drifter in contemporary America—both endure the same trial: the pain of letting their sons go after finding them.
Thinking about these two works together, the idea of wholeness feels pervasive, especially how it manifests through two of nature’s great symbols, the river and the desert. Each is timeless, still, and whole in its own way. Even the desert, arid and silent, is cleansing. The river and the desert are not just settings but catalysts: they begin, divide, and complete the journey. Both reveal a universal paradox: that to find wholeness, one must first be stripped of everything, including identity.
Perhaps there’s a version of that within each of us. Part of our innermost interior, where through loss, reflection, reconciliation or sacrifice, we come a little closer to peace and acceptance.
4. A Quote to note
“Most people are like a falling leaf, that wafts and drifts through the air, and twists and tumbles to the ground. Others, however, few, are like stars: they have a fixed course, no wind reaches them, they have their law and their course inside them.”
- Siddhartha
5. A Question for you
Do you find a sense of connectedness in the world around you—like the river or the desert—and if so, where, and why?
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