My generation may have read it the form of slim New Directions paperback with a black-and-white photo of a statue of the Buddha of its cover. "This is the kind of book," begins its back-cover blurb,

—rare in our day and age—which takes root in the heart and grows there for a lifetime. Here the spirituality of the East and the West have met in a novel that enfigures deep human wisdom with a rich and colorful imagination. . . . Written in a prose of almost biblical simplicity and beauty, Siddhartha is becoming a treasured book, as well loved in America as it has been in Europe.

What we did not know when we long ago read Siddhartha, and likely do not generally know today, is that Hermann Hesse was a grown-up brilliant child who had been abused and emotionally tortured by his parents (Alice Miller, The Drama of the Gifted Child). At base, every one of his books is a fantasy about failure of Authority, about survival of injury and abuse at the hands of Authority, about surviving Injuring Authority and somehow finding one's way to finding, even becoming, Beneficient Authority. (Siddhartha takes this latter concept to a convoluted extreme: Its protagonist rejects Authority to seek the self-Authority of wisdom, encounters, nullifies, and rejects higher Authority in the form and person of the Buddha and ultimately in the form of Attachment to the forms, states, and stages of Being Itself, and yet nonetheless goes on to become another's beloved, beneficient higher Authority even as he rejects that role in believing that he has transcended the concept of Authority itself.)

But why resort to fiction? Why not, as Miller teaches, cognize and re-cognize the actuality, the facts, of one's injury by Authority, and deal with it in the only healthful way possible: through fact-based understanding and, ultimately and ongoingly, mourning? Because the first, and ongoing, lesson inculated in vulnerable Injured by ascendant Injurer is that there is, and will be, no real, no real-time, escape from Injury—that the Injured's innate self-preservational fight-or-flight response will not be allowed to healthfully operate. Only strategic displacement of its impulse—through its pseudo-resolution in Fantasy, through injury of Self as proxy for Injurer, or through injury of others as proxy for Injurer¹ or salvation of others as proxy for Injured Self²—can occur. Once the healthiest possible response to Injurer—direct, immediate Action to fight or flee—has been deferred, resolution of Injury through direct Action is impossible. The only healthful response to Remembered Injury possible thenceforth is understanding it and mourning its occurrence, effects, and unresolvability—mourning That Which Should Have Not Occurred But Did Occur And Cannot Be Undone.

So it is that the habit of Fantasy, seemingly the only available option when Injury cannot be directly and healthfully fought or fled, does not magically end as Injured's childhood helplessness before Injuring Authority ends, as Injured matures to adulthood. So it is that every one of Hesse's books is an exercise of dealing with what troubled him most without actually dealing with what troubled him most. They are imaginings of Awakeness, Acceptance, and Acceptedness—of Resolvedness—by a man habituated to repetitively, compulsively escaping the reality of Injury through Fantasy.

But Hesse's books are worse than mere fiction. Crafted to provide their readers no clues to the reasons for their existence, they depend for their success on the exploitation of their readers' ignorance of their own unresolved needs for delivery from Injury by Authority. Hesse's works neither implicitly nor explicitly direct his readers toward healthfully responding to the issues they exercise because their author did not know how to healthily respond to them, substituting for Resolvedness the currying of reader adulation. So it is that at the conclusion of Siddhartha its protagonist can seem to the entralled, adoring Govinda to have transcended all in the bliss of Unity while having failed to understand in the slightest how and why he was originally driven by Authority to seek its repudiation and transcendence. Sleepwalking thus, he becomes for Govinda not an exemplar of Health but the Authority he had so rightfully hated and sought to escape, for in preferring his dream of transcendence to the ongoing work of understanding and mourning Injury in his life—for it is a choice and it is work—he remains incapable of the compassion that would compel him to seek to engender the unenthrallment of Govinda as a necessity of freeing himself. Had Hesse achieved the resolvedness he deserved in youth and continued to seek in adulthood, he would have ceased courting the enthrallment of his readers as the exploitation it is and compassionately sought to engender their unenthrallment as a necessity of freeing himself.

However beautiful the prose and imagery of his books, however poetic their "simplicity," through their creation and promulgation Hesse became for his readers—ongoingly becomes for each new reader—the Injuring Authority he had so rightfully hated. Taught as part of school curricula, his works should be identified, framed, and explicated as such. To do otherwise is to entrain others in the Ignorance Hesse sought to escape, to reinstantiate his habit of sleepwalking, his failure to seek and achieve fact-based understanding of the terrible events of his early life toward their healthful mourning. That he was awarded the Nobel prize for literature merely exemplifies our preference—his preference—for anesthesia over healing.

"Treasured"? "Well loved"? On no basis acceptable to Health. "Deep human wisdom"? No; rather, the exploitation of Audience in its systematic avoidance.

We come to understand this not by equalling or cancelling Authority, but by observing and understanding What Is.