While I don't find this a book for the general reader, it is still quite full to the brim with Hesse's signature wisdom, contradiction, and confusion; written at various points in the author's long life, the essays intermingle with one another in intriguing, sometimes bewildering, ways. Here he contradicts what he said in the last essay, there he adds an interesting perspective to his previous injunction or reflection, and there he casts doubt upon his own ability to record himself in any meaningful way whatsoever. But even amidst the tempest in a teapot, we gain great clarity into why Hesse bothered writing at all (for, later in life, he would've rather painted). At the end of "A Guest at the Spa", which is by far the best essay in this collection, he states his purposes explicitly, simply, beautifully:
"If I were a composer, I could without difficulty write a melody for two voices, a melody that would consist of two lines, of two rows of tunes and notes that correspond with one another, complement one another, fight with one another, limit one another, but in any case at every instant, at every point in the sequence, have a most profound interrelationship and reciprocal effect. And anyone who can read music could read off my double melody and always see and hear with every tone its counter-tone, its brother, its enemy, its opposite. Now it is just this, this double voice and constantly advancing antithesis, this double line, that I would like to express in my own medium, in words, and I work myself to the bone trying and do not succeed. I am always attempting it and if anything at all lends tension and weight to my works, it is this intensive concern for something impossible, this wild battling for something unattainable. I would like to find expression for duality, I would like to write chapters and sentences where melody and counter-melody are always simultaneously present, where unity stands beside every multiplicity, seriousness beside every joke. For to me, life consists simply in this, in the fluctuation between two poles, in the hither and thither between the two foundation pillars of the world. I would like always to point with delight at the many-splendored multiplicity of the world, and just as constantly utter a reminder that oneness underlies this multiplicity; I would like always to show that the beautiful and the ugly, the bright and the dark, sin and holiness are always opposites just for the moment, that they constantly merge into each other. For me the highest utterances of mankind are those few sentences in which this duality has been expressed in magic signs, those few mysterious sayings and parables in which the great world antitheses are recognized simultaneously as necessary and as illusion. . . . This is my dilemma and problem. Much can be said about it, but it cannot be solved. To force the two poles of life together, to transcribe the dual voices in life's melody will never be possible for me. And yet I will follow the dark command within me and will be compelled again and again to make the attempt. This is the mainspring that drives my little clock."
In short, the man was trying to wrestle life into the written word: something every author attempts (most unconsciously), and every author fails to achieve. Anyone familiar with writing in any capacity knows that words will always fall short. And yet, what is more human than the endless and continual attempt?
[And I simply have to comment on the marginalia of the book's prior owner; for some reason, they've only ever highlighted passages in which Hesse's wife is mentioned. That, and where females crop up here and there. So, I'm a bit confused; maybe this was a text in a feminist critique course? Who knows.]