Stranger on Earth

Dear Herr Hesse, I know you’ve been dead since 1962, a good ten years before I was born, and my writing to you may come across as a mad gesture the likes of which only the overly obsessed are capable of. I can assure you I’m not mad, even though everyone around me is. I’ve just finished reading your 1919 novel Demian , which you wrote when you’re on the brink of madness (Was the war that bad? Why did all those young men have to die?), and which made you what my generation calls an “overnight sensation” among the disillusioned young. Before I started reading the book, I’d wondered why it’d had such an effect on the young men of the 1910s (and also those of the following decades). It’s just a book, I thought. Aren’t we exaggerating? But I should’ve known. Your Siddhartha has after all been my personal guide since I first read it in 2004, so why should this one be made of lesser stuff? The actor/scholar James Franco, a young(ish) man of my generation, wrote a new introduc...

Of all the lessons in life one has to learn, the lesson of self-love may just be the most trying. This is largely due to the distractions around us that make it difficult to focus on our own needs. We hear thousands of critical and demanding voices, see thousands of tempting and deceptive sights, day in, day out. Our lives often do not belong to us; others claim them and tell us how we must and should live. With the passing years we learn cynicism, sarcasm, violence, and hatred - all weaponry with which we protect ourselves against potential enemies. We learn that the world is full of unconscionable souls, twisted crooks, and cold-blooded highwaymen who are only out for one thing - self-preservation. To make sure that they can survive in this mad world they have to resort to mad means. With all this negativity around (thanks to the mass media this has become an undeniable fact of modern life), it is hard to look into yourself and seek out that little child of innocence you o...