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<p>WILKES-BARRE &#8212; What kind of novel would a libertarian existentialist philosophy teacher write?</p><p>If you guessed &#8220;one about Buddhism,&#8221; you wouldn&#8217;t be too far off &#8212; and maybe a bit prescient. If you guessed, &#8220;a sequel to a 96-year-old novel written by a Nobel Laureate,&#8221; you&#8217;d be closer.</p><p class="n_ 3 v2">If you guessed &#8220;how a person learns about his father by letting his son walk his own path,&#8221; you are just about spot on.</p><p class="n_ 3 v2">King&#8217;s College Philosophy Chair William Irwin concedes that&#8217;s a key theme in his novel &#8220;Little Siddhartha: A Sequel,&#8221; a book that speculates on what, exactly, happened to the son of Hermann Hesse&#8217;s eponymous protagonist in his 1922 novel &#8220;Siddhartha.&#8221;</p><p class="n_ 3 v2">In Hesse&#8217;s book, Siddhartha &#8220;leaves home as a young man&#8221; and has a child without being told, Irwin explained. &#8220;He&#8217;s reunited with the child near the end of the story, and for the first time he really knows love in the love of his son.&#8221; While Siddhartha has chosen a spiritual life with &#8220;a very pared down existence, the son is spoiled and doesn&#8217;t want that life, so he runs away and we don&#8217;t know what happened.&#8221;</p><p class="n_ 3 v2">Irwin, 48, has used the original novel in his Eastern philosophy course since coming to King&#8217;s fresh out of grad school in 1996. &#8220;I&#8217;ve always asked students what do you think happens to the son?&#8221; His sequel is his version of the answer.</p><p class="n_ 3 v2">&#8220;Siddhartha wants him to stay, to help keep him from making all those mistakes <em>he</em> made. This is very parental,&#8221; Irwin explained. In the sequel, the son &#8220;makes the same mistakes, but in different ways. That&#8217;s how I imagine it. He goes on to be a wealthy merchant with all his father&#8217;s strengths and weaknesses, he has the discipline and the smarts but has a way of taking things to an extreme.&#8221;</p><p class="n_ 3 v2">&#8220;It&#8217;s a story of love and forgiveness, I think,&#8221; Irwin said. &#8220;One of the poignant things in the original novel is when he finds out he has a son, and comes to love his son, he finally thinks back to how he must have hurt his father when <em>he</em> left. It never dawned on him.&#8221;</p><p class="n_ 3 v2">He sees some small reflection of his own life in that, he added. &#8220;My father was a good father, and it&#8217;s the same here. The father lets his son walk his own path. My father was a businessman and he let me become a philosophy major. It&#8217;s very likely my son will repay me by becoming a businessman,&#8221; Irwin said with a laugh.</p><p class="n_ 3 v2"><strong>&#8216;How to live&#8217;</strong></p><p class="n_ 3 v2">Born in Yonkers, N.Y., and married to a English literature teacher (at King&#8217;s) who specializes in Shakespeare, Irwin bills himself as a libertarian in politics and an existentialist in philosophy &#8212; small surprise, then, that he wrote a nonfiction book titled &#8220;The Free Market Existentialist.&#8221; But how did Hesse&#8217;s Siddhartha get in the mix?</p><p class="n_ 3 v2">&#8220;Even though it&#8217;s not written by an Eastern author, I use it to expose students to sort of a picture of the world,&#8221; he explained. While not an accurate depiction of Buddhism or Hinduism, &#8220;it raises all the right questions, and depicts the culture.&#8221;</p><p class="n_ 3 v2">And no, he&#8217;s not a Buddhist, but finds value in the philosophy. &#8220;I do accept the four noble truths of Buddhism,&#8221; he said, referring to the general notion that all humans have some suffering, and it ends when you are free of desires.</p><p class="n_ 3 v2">&#8220;I think it&#8217;s a practical philosophy of how to live. It diagnosis the human condition of suffering and ways to deal with suffering.&#8221;</p><p class="n_ 3 v2">He won&#8217;t use his novel in class. &#8220;I don&#8217;t feel comfortable teaching something I&#8217;ve written. I don&#8217;t think they&#8217;ll react objectively.&#8221;</p><p class="n_ 3 v2">And writing the sequel to a well-known novel is not making him rich. It was published by a small company in Maine specializing in books on Eastern religion and philosophy. &#8220;I admit my books have not been published well,&#8221; Irwin chuckled. &#8220;You can see them on Amazon, but they will never see the inside of a bookstore unless I carry them in.&#8221;</p><p class="n_ 3 v2">But he is undaunted, and is already working on his next novel. &#8220;It&#8217;s called &#8216;Academic Affairs&#8217;,&#8221; he said. &#8220;It&#8217;s much different. It&#8217;s about misbehavior on a college campus.&#8221;</p><p class="n_ 3 v2">Fiction, he reassures, pure fiction.</p><style>
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<div class="neCaption">Irwin </div></div><div class="metaInfo"><photo0>https://www.timesleader.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/web1_BIllIrwinPortrait2011-5b1-5d-2-1.jpg</photo0><caption0>Irwin </caption0><photoCredit0></photoCredit0></div></div>
<div class="metaInfo"><bylineMeta><p>By Mark Guydish</p><p>mguydish@www.timesleader.com</p></bylineMeta></div><div class="metaInfo"><shirttailMeta><p>Reach Mark Guydish at 570-991-6112 or on Twitter @TLMarkGuydish</p></shirttailMeta></div>

Libertarian existentialist Buddhist? King’s professor writes ‘Siddhartha’ sequel