MY BELIEF: Essays on Life and Art

by Hermann Hesse ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 22, 1973

Hermann Hesse who lamented the decline of the West and celebrated the journey to the East, whose double-souled heroes are both continually suffering and affirming life, whose novels personify the drama of dualism, the projection of ""the ideal into reality,"" was himself enthralled by two opposing cultural tendencies, the transcendental longings of German Romanticism, in the literary period between 1750 and 1850, and the chaos and plight of the modern world. In these collected essays on life and art, extending from 1904 to 1961, all of Hesse's abundant meditative energy, his proliferation of poles and counterpoles and syntheses, his masterly studies of Dostoevsky and Jean-Paul and Holderlin, his frank and penetrating discussion of moral and political and cultural issues, show him profoundly struggling to overcome the dichotomies of past and present, science and poetry, engendering a unity of belief ""that there are not various peoples and minds but only One Humanity, only One Spirit."" At times both the predicament and the resolve are stated quite baldly: ""The way leads from innocence into guilt, out of guilt into despair, out of despair either to failure or to deliverance: that is, not back again behind morality and culture into a child's paradise but over and beyond these into the ability to live by the strength of one's faith."" But more representative of Hesse's style are those qualities of modesty, delicacy, and tact, the aura of what he calls ""magical thinking,"" which illuminates even the most casual excursion and disarms us by the earnestness and purity of his voice.

Pub Date: Feb. 22, 1973

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Farrar, Straus & Giroux

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1973

Categories: NONFICTION