The Magic of the Book: Hermann Hesse on Why We Read and
Always Will
“If anyone wants to try to enclose in a small
space, in a single house or a single room, the history of the human spirit and
to make it his own, he can only do this in the form of a collection of books.”
I
recently decided to teach myself to write with my left hand. This unorthodox
pastime was sparked in part by rereading the vintage treasure Essays for the
Left Handby the pioneering Harvard psychologist Jerome
Bruner, one of the loveliest and most underappreciated books written in the
twentieth century. Since it was National Poetry Month, every day for the month
of April I wrote out a poem a day with my left hand.
Beyond the tangible satisfaction of mastery
painstakingly acquired, the endeavor had one unexpected and rather magical
effect — it opened some strange and wonderful conduit through space and time,
connecting me to the version of myself who was first learning to read and write
as a child in Bulgaria. Generally lacking early childhood memories, I was
suddenly electrified by a vividness of being, a vibrantly alive memory of the
child’s pride and joy felt in those formative feats of the written word, of
wresting boundless universes of meaning from pages filled with lines of
squiggly characters.
Somehow, as we grow up and learn to read, the
thrill of mastery hardens into habit and we let the magical slip into the
mundane. We come to take this wondrous ability for granted.
No one
has restored the transcendence of the written word more beautifully than
Nobel-winning German-born Swiss writer and painter Hermann Hesse (July
2, 1877–August 9, 1962) in a sublime 1930 essay titled “The Magic of
the Book,” found in his posthumously published treasure trove My
Belief: Essays on Life and Art .
Hesse writes:
Among the many worlds that man did not
receive as a gift from nature but created out of his own mind, the world of
books is the greatest… Without the word, without the writing of books, there is
no history, there is no concept of humanity. And if anyone wants to try to
enclose in a small space, in a single house or a single room, the history of
the human spirit and to make it his own, he can only do this in the form of a
collection of books.
The
question of what books do and what they are for is, of course, and abiding one.
For Kafka, books were “the axe for the
frozen sea within us”; for Carl Sagan, “proof that
humans are capable of working magic”; for
James Baldwin, a way to change
our destiny; for Neil Gaiman, the vehicle for
the deepest human truths; for Polish Nobel laureate
Wislawa Szymborska, our ultimate frontier
of freedom. Falling closest to Galileo, who saw reading
as a way of having
superhuman powers, Hesse considers the historical role of the
written word:
With all peoples the word and writing are
holy and magical; naming and writing were originally magical operations,
magical conquests of nature through the spirit, and everywhere the gift of
writing was thought to be of divine origin. With most peoples, writing and
reading were secret and holy arts reserved for the priesthood alone.
[…]
Today all this is apparently completely
changed. Today, so it seems, the world of writing and of the intellect is open
to everyone… Today, so it seems, being able to read and write is little more
than being able to breathe… Writing and the book have apparently been divested
of every special dignity, every enchantment, every magic… From a liberal,
democratic point of view, this is progress and is accepted as a matter of
course; from other points of view, however, it is a devaluation and
vulgarization of the spirit.
And
yet Hesse offers an optimistic counterpoint to the techno-dystopian narratives
that have continued to spell out the death of the book in the almost-century
since his essay. Writing just a few years after Virginia Woolf’s spirited
admonition against the evils of cinema,
Hesse argues that new media forms — radio and film then, the internet now —
pose no threat to the book, for the book is singular in its spiritual value to
human life:
We need not fear a future elimination of the
book. On the contrary, the more that certain needs for entertainment and
education are satisfied through other inventions, the more the book will win
back in dignity and authority. For even the most childish intoxication with
progress will soon be forced to recognize that writing and books have a
function that is eternal. It will become evident that formulation in words and
the handing on of these formulations through writing are not only important
aids but actually the only means by which humanity can have a history and a
continuing consciousness of itself.
In a remarkably prescient passage, he adds:
We have not quite reached the point where
younger rivals like radio, film, and so forth have taken everything away from
the printed book, but only that part of its function which is dispensable.
[…]
What the crowd does not yet suspect and will
perhaps not discover for a long time has already begun to be decided among
creators themselves: the fundamental distinction between the media through
which an artistic goal is attempted. When this divorce is final, to be sure,
there will still be sloppy novels and trashy films, whose creators are unstable
talents, freebooters in areas in which they lack competence. But to the clarification
of concepts and the relief of literature and her present rivals this separation
will contribute much. Then the cinema will be no more able to damage literature
than, for example, photography has hurt painting.
What lends the book this unshakable
stability, Hesse argues, is precisely its magical character — a character
immutable and irreplaceable however much our media might change. He writes:
The laws of the spirit change just as little
as those of nature and it is equally impossible to “discard” them. Priesthoods
and astrologers’ guilds can be dissolved or deprived of their privileges.
Discoveries or poetic inventions that formerly were secret possessions of the
few can be made accessible to the many, who can even be forced to learn about
these treasures. But all this goes on at the most superficial level and in
reality nothing in the world of the spirit has changed since Luther translated
the Bible and Gutenberg invented the printing press. The whole magic is still
there, and the spirit is still the secret of a small hierarchically organized
band of privileged persons, only now the band has become anonymous.
Hesse adds:
Leadership has slipped out from the hands of
priests and scholars to some place where it can no longer be called to account
and made responsible, where, however, it can no longer legitimatize itself or
appeal to any authority. For that stratum of writers and intellectuals which
seems from time to time to lead because it shapes public opinion or at least
supplies the slogans of the day — that stratum is not identical with the
creative stratum.
That
creative stratum, he argues, consists of timeless works that continue to
enchant the public imagination decades or centuries or millennia after their
creation, be they the ancient Eastern philosophies newly embraced by the West
or the works of Nietzsche, “unanimously rejected by his people, after
fulfilling his mission for a few dozen minds, became several decades too late a
favorite author whose books could not be printed fast enough.” Hesse uses the
word “poet” in that largest James Baldwian
sense and in the very act of reaching us from
beyond the finitude of his own lifetime, he stands as a testament to his own
point:
We can observe every day how completely
marvelous and like fairy tales are the histories of books, how at one moment
they have the greatest enchantment and then again the gift of becoming
invisible. Poets live and die, known by few or none, and we see their work
after their death, often decades after their death, suddenly rise resplendent
from the grave as though time did not exist.
And what they give us upon rising is
precisely that magic of the book, so perennial and inextinguishable, yet so
easily forgotten and taken for granted:
If today the ability to read is everyone’s
portion, still only a few notice what a powerful talisman has thus been put
into their hands. The child proud of his youthful knowledge of the alphabet first
achieves for himself the reading of a verse or a saying, then the reading of a
first little story, a fairy tale, and while those who have not been called seem
to apply their reading ability to news reports or to the business sections of
their newspapers, there are a few who remain constantly bewitched by the
strange miracle of letters and words (which once, to be sure, were an
enchantment and magic formula to everyone). From these few come the readers.
They discover as children the few poems and stories … and instead of turning
their backs on these things after acquiring the ability to read they press
forward into the realm of books and discover step by step how vast, how various
and blessed this world is! At first they took this world for a little child’s
pretty garden with a tulip bed and a little fish pond; now the garden becomes a
park, it becomes a landscape, a section of the earth, the world, it becomes
Paradise and the Ivory Coast, it entices with constantly new enchantments,
blooms in ever-new colors. And what yesterday appeared to be a garden or a park
or a jungle, today or tomorrow is recognized as a temple, a temple with a
thousand halls and courtyards in which the spirit of all nations and times is
present, constantly waiting for reawakening, ever ready to recognize the
many-voiced multiplicity of its phenomena as a unity. And for every true reader
this endless world of books looks different, everyone seeks and recognizes
himself in it… A thousand ways lead through the jungle to a thousand goals, and
no goal is the final one; with each step new expanses open.
Half a
century before Bob Dylan asserted that “the world don’t
need any more songs [because] there’s enough songs for people to listen to, if
they want to listen to songs,”Hesse
makes the same point — a point with which, as any regular reader would know, I
very much agree — about books:
Every true reader could, even if not one new
book were published, spend decades and centuries studying on, fighting on,
continuing to rejoice in the treasure of those already at hand.
What lends reading its ultimate magic, Hesse
asserts, is that this vast body of the written word is at once immensely varied
and reducible to the simplest, most universal human truths:
The great and mysterious thing about this
reading experience is this: the more discriminatingly, the more sensitively,
and the more associatively we learn to read, the more clearly we see every thought
and every poem in its uniqueness, its individuality, in its precise limitations
and see that all beauty, all charm depend on this individuality and uniqueness
— at the same time we come to realize ever more clearly how all these hundred
thousand voices of nations strive toward the same goals, call upon the same
gods by different names, dream the same wishes, suffer the same sorrows. Out of
the thousandfold fabric of countless languages and books of several thousand
years, in ecstatic instants there stares at the reader a marvelously noble and
transcendent chimera: the countenance of humanity, charmed into unity from a
thousand contradictory features.
BY MARIA POPOVA
BRAIN PICKINGS
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