(Over 60 diverse thinkers on how to get more from books)
Hesse was a German Nobel laureate who wrote poems, novels, and criticism.
“Among the many worlds which man did not receive as a gift of nature, but which he created with his own spirit, the world of books is the greatest”, he proclaimed (Hesse 1978, 153):
Without words, without writing, and without books there would be no history, there could be no concept of humanity
The endless world of books is so “great and mysterious” because as we endlessly go on with our reading, “making finer distinctions, heightening, strengthening”, the clearer our sight becomes, and the further we see (p. 161). The true reader both seeks and recognises themselves in what they read: “each verse of each poet will show a new and different face to the reader every few years, will awaken a different resonance in him” (pp. 159, 161). By learning to read more discriminatively, sensitively, and associatively, we come to see the uniqueness of each work, on which its beauty depends. World literature allows us to see even further because it charms into unity “the countenance of humanity” (p. 162). The “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” (pp. 161–2). Perhaps this explains Hesse’s approach to literature selection (p. 217):
I am opposed in principle to excluding from the circle of my sympathy or at any rate of my interest any literature, school, or author
Hesse describes three stages of readers—each of us belonging to different groups at different times (p. 101). First is the naïve reader who “consumes a book as one consumes food”, reading until satiety (ibid.). The “book leads, the reader follows” (pp. 101–102). They may evaluate the novel’s events “according to their suspense, their danger, their erotic content, their splendor or misery”, or measure the writer “against aesthetic standards, which in the final analysis always remain arbitrary” (p. 102). The book of the naïve reader “is there simply and solely to be read faithfully and attentively and to be judged according to its content or its form” (ibid.).
The second type of reader has a “genius for play” and discounts the importance of the book’s substance or form (ibid.). Like children, they know that every object can have a multiplicity of meanings (pp. 102–3). Whereas the naïve reader follows the writer (“poet”) as “a horse obeys his driver”, this reader is a hunter pursuing prey: “a glimpse suddenly gained into what lies beyond the apparent freedom of the poet, into the poet’s compulsion and passivity, can enchant [the reader] more than all the elegance of good technique and cultivated style” (p. 103). In rejecting the notion that the poet has “free choice of material and form”, their “enjoyment consists in seeing not the material in the hands of his poet but the poet in the grip of his material” (ibid.).
The third type is the opposite of the “good” reader” (ibid.): so much an individual that they approach their books with perfect freedom (ibid.). Reading for neither education nor entertainment, they use a “book exactly like any other object in the world”: a stimulus (ibid.). Essentially it makes no difference to such a reader what they read (ibid.). Like a child they find enjoyment and profit in playing with everything (p. 104). Finding something beautiful—a sentence, a truth, some wisdom—they experiment by turning it upside down. They know that every intellectual position has an equally valid opposite (ibid.) They highly value associative thinking, but don’t restrict themselves to this mode (ibid.).
When we read in this way we can read whatever we like because, our imaginative and associative abilities being at their pinnacle, “we really no longer read what is printed on the paper but swim in a stream of impulses and inspirations that reach us from what we are reading” (ibid.). But at this stage the reader “is no longer a reader”. Remaining at this stage requires only one book: “a page with the letters of the alphabet” (p. 105). We can’t permanently occupy this stage, but to be unacquainted with it is to be “an immature reader” (ibid.). Hesse recommends: (ibid.)
For just once in your life remain for an hour, a day at the third stage, the stage of not-reading-any-more. You will thereafter (it’s so easy to slip back) be that much better a reader, that much better a listener and interpreter of everything written.
Until you recognise this, “you stand handicapped before every poet and thinker”: you conflate a small part with the whole and your interpretations are superficial (p. 106). This stage, “at which you are most yourself”, “will put an end to your reading”, yet until you know it intuitively, “you will never read any book…except as a schoolboy reads his grammar” (p. 107).