My Belief: Essays on Life and Art

Greetings, What a pleasure it has been to look into the eyes of a great writer. His thoughts on change and personal responsibility is mind blowing. I love the way he gives feedback on the life, writings and ideas of other writers from his time. Hesse's humble but yet confident.

Hesse writes as beautifully in his essays as he does in his non-fiction. What piqued my interest in the book was his essay on "Steppenwolf". It disappointed me, because it is barely a page and a half, a unsatisfactory synopsis of his most personal (I believe) book. When Hesse comes to mind I immediately think of "Steppenwolf" before the "Glass Bead Game", "Siddharta", or any of his other masterpieces. Like Hamsun's "Mysteries" or Ingmar Bergman's film "Hour of the Wolf", perhaps it was simply too "personal" for him to go into. The rest of the essays, however, reflect a meditative, open, imaginative mind free of prejudice. I can't recall the exact name of the essay, but it has to do with bad poetry, and Hesse articulates a feeling that other lovers of poetry will immediately understand: that poems traditionally considered 'bad' often reflect our feelings in a less 'rhyme-scheme', formulaic way, and have a sort of tonic effect on the emotions. Hesse was truly a revolutionary.

A collection of some of Hermann Hesse`s best essays and articles. This is the evidence that he was one of the foremost thinkers of the 20th century. Here he directly express some of his opinions on several subjects, ie literature and they all have a touch of his brilliancy of wisdom and narrative skills. A book that still deserves to be read!