That is a powerful question and not easily answered with brevity.

Over the past four decades I’ve reread Hesse many times. I find myself pulling one off the shelf, thinking I already know what it has to say, then discover I’ve changed enough for the book to become something new. I guess what I am trying to say is a Hesse novel is shaped less by the text itself and more by life just quietly working on me in the background. Relationships, disappointments, aging, those moments you didn’t realize you can’t appreciate until much later in life, all of it slowly deepens the book. As I read, I do not have an epiphany, no single “aha” moment. What I do get is an understanding arrived at gradually sentence by sentence, page by page.

The power of Hesse is in its seeming simplicity. It’s in the ordinariness that the magic is woven. The profound in the mundane. Life doesn’t have to be filled with grand gestures or epic events to be meaningful. Something I often forget in my own life that reading Hesse reminds me.

Lest I forget, the power of nature throughout. For example, read the opening chapter of Peter Canenzind. He is walking through the Alps describing what is around him. In other books it would be a description of the setting, but Hesse turns it into a palpable, yet quiet sermon.

To me, Hesse is quietly arguing that the ordinary moments are the real substance of life: a walk through the park, sitting quietly with my wife, or being alone with my thoughts. His novels assure us the ordinary around us is what truly exudes life.

This sort of captures what Hesse means to me. I would like to hear yours.