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Hesse: The Wanderer and His Shadow

Book by Gunnar Decker · 2 quotes · Beautiful, Discovery, Elite

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Hesse: The Wanderer and His Shadow Quotes

“Hesse, the passionate reader who could not live without books, nevertheless harbored just as large a degree of skepticism toward the written word. For everything that was written ran the risk of having no life thereafter, of being nothing but an assemblage of dead letters. It was this Franciscan sympathy for poverty, including poverty of the spirit, that led him to see books differently than the educated bourgeois elite did. Books were alive like trees or clouds in the sky, they were our companions on that journey that ended inevitably in our death. But the key question was, Do we perish in our entirety, or does something of us live on - perhaps in the written word? For Hesse, true education, of which proper reading formed an integral part, must lead to inner growth. But proper reading is the same as proper living: one can only learn this art if one does not imagine one knows what it consists of in advance. One must always be open to new discovery, like a wayfarer who cannot see his goal but instead carries it within himself.”

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“Does that mean that all one has to do is wait for the right moment? It was not just a question of that, as Hesse explained: the vita active and the vita contemplativa stand in a very sensitive relation to one another, which must constantly be rebalanced. He would come to summarize this in 1956: 'The flaw in our questioning and complaining is presumably this: namely, that we desire to have something given to us from outside that we can only attain within ourselves, through our own dedication. We demand that life must have a meaning - yet it has precisely as much meaning as we are able to impart to it.' This led him on to formulate the idea of a elite, a secret society, the invisible realm of the league of those taking part in The Journey to the East and finally to The Glass Bead Game - the 'monastery for free spirits' that Nietzsche had in mind and that Hesse affirmed and rejected in equal measure: 'In short, wanting to improve humanity is always a hopeless task. That is why I have always built my faith on the individual, for the individual can be educated and is capable of improvement, and according to my faith it has always been and still remains the small elite of well-intentioned, dedicated, and courageous people who are the guardians of all that is good and beautiful in the world.”

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