Herman Hesse

Hesse was my favorite writer as a teenager, and I find lately, that I've been thinking of his novels again.  Last week it was The Glass Bead Game, which is the narrative of a gifted young man being inducted into a mysterious but prestigious school in which students learn a way of holistic thinking or systems theory that supposedly encompasses all of human thought and practice: science, engineering, philosophy, art and everything else in between. Their training teaches them to solve problems or exercises  holistically by means of  this "glass bead game."  Such a way of drawing connections between the specialized fields of knowledge -the silos - of modern society would be an important tool to find our way out of the mess that we are in.  Hesse lived in most "interesting times," in Germany and Switzerland, through the world wars.  The social pressure to conform to conventions of nationalism must have been intense under the Nazis, even in Switzerland, and Hesse says that he lived through their ascendency by working, for those ten years, on The Glass Bead Game.
But the book of Hesse's that electrified me, that made my hair stand on end, really quite literally, was Steppenwolf.  And the reason it was so important to me at the time was that it described a man, a rather lonely, melancholy man admittedly,  that had the courage to defy conventions of success and live from the soul.  Fiercely. Quietly.  "Like a wolf of the steppes."  And I've come back around to the thought, more and more, that the existence of our souls is the secret in plain sight, ever-present but elusive, the inheritance that we lose over and over again, the compass in our pockets that we have forgotten even exists.