"…life is worth little; nature does not coddle and has no need to save…"

Much can be learned from reading the works of Hermann Hesse. And if his ideas cannot be learned it may be possible that they at least be considered. Small efforts toward a departure from the unexamined life.

"…Years ago I had gone into a small Gothic chapel in an Alsatian village, where the weak light, faintly colored, barely penetrated through the painted, dusty windowpanes, and looking up I saw with a great shock of fear a huge carved Christ hanging over me—on the cross, with grim red wounds and a bloody forehead.

We have come a long way, and it is very good that we—a very small fraction of humanity—no longer have utter need of either one of these two, either the bloody Cross or the smoothly smiling Buddha. We must go further in overcoming them and the other gods and learn to do without them. But it would also be very good if one day our children, who have grown up without gods, should again find the courage and the joy and the energy of the soul to erect such clear, huge, unambivalent monuments and symbols of their inner life."

The opening travelogue was beneficial and interesting. The mediocre poetry and short fiction that followed was not. Fortunately Hesse’s memoir was the bulk of the collected text. His short fiction and poetry mercifully was brief.

"…I had looked into the eyes of dying persons and into the calyxes of flowers—not with the desire to explain these things, but only with the need to be there and, yes, not to miss any of these rare moments in which the great voice spoke to me and in which I and my life and sensibilities disappeared and were of no worth, because they became merely a thin, superficial overtone of the deep thunder or the even deeper silence of inconceivable occurrence."