My Belief: Essays on Life and Art

There are those writers who spin tales and tell imaginary stories and there are those who document their lives. These essays fall into the latter category within the oeuvre of Hermann Hesse. Each is a delight whether of personal detail, literary criticism, philosophy, or meditation on the meaning of life. Hesse had to write and most often he had to write about himself. There is little that he wrote that is not confessional in aspect and therapeutic in function. These essays provide milestones and assessments of his life and reading. They are a joy to read and consider alongside his fiction and other writings.

Here is an especially moving excerpt from his essay "The Magic of the Book":

For every thinking person each verse of each poet show more will show a new and different face to the reader every few years, will awaken a different resonance in him. When as a youth I read for the first time, only partially understanding it, Goethe's Elective Affinities, that was a completely different book from the Elective Affinities that I have now read perhaps for the fifth time! The great and mysterious thing about this reading experience is this: the more discriminatingly, the more sensitively, and the more associatively we learn to read, the more clearly we see every thought and every poem in its uniqueness, its individuality, in its precise limitations and see that all beauty, all charm depend on this individuality and uniqueness--at the same time we come to realize ever more clearly how all these hundred thousand voices of nations strive toward the same goals, call upon the same gods by different names, dream the same wishes, suffer the same sorrows. Out of the thousandfold fabric of countless languages and books of several thousand years, in ecstatic instants there stares at the reader a marvelously noble and transcendent chimera: the countenance of humanity, charmed into unity from a thousand contradictory features." (pp 161-62) show less

Impure and distorting is the gaze of the will. Only when we desire nothing, only when our seeing becomes pure contemplation, does the soul of things open up. Hesse’s legacy is pietistic Protestantism, his parents were missionaries in India. The mixture of Christianity and Buddhism resounds in Hesse to a new, positively tuned melody that enchants. He developed the legacy of his parents into a mystical Christianity that sought the unity of religions. Only with this book one understands the books of Hesse in its depth.

"I believe that despite the obvious nonsense of life, there is a purpose to life, I resign myself to not being able to grasp that ultimate purpose in my mind, but I am willing to serve it, even if it means sacrificing show more myself."

Deutsch/German
Unrein und verzerrend ist der Blick des Willens. Erst wenn wir nichts begehren, nur wenn unser Sehen zur reinen Betrachtung wird, öffnet sich die Seele der Dinge. Hesses Erbe ist der pietistische Protestantismus, seine Eltern waren Missionare in Indien. Die Mischung aus Christentum und Buddhismus erklingt in Hessen zu einer neuen, positiv gestimmten Melodie, die verzaubert. Er entwickelte das Erbe seiner Eltern zu einem mystischen Christentum, das die Einheit der Religionen anstrebte. Nur mit diesem Buch versteht man die hessischen Bücher in ihrer Tiefe.

"Ich glaube, dass trotz des offensichtlichen Unsinns das Leben doch einen Sinn hat, ich ergehe mich darein, diesen letzten Sinn nicht mit dem Verstand erfassen zu können, bin aber bereit, ihm zu dienen, auch wenn ich mich dabei opfern muss." show less

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