I read everything by Hesse in college, all in English, most in German. The one exception was his magnum opus, The Glass Bead Game — I just couldn’t get into it in either language. As for many, Siddhartha and Steppenwolf moved me deeply. (I can wait and I still taste the mix of blood and chocolate and see myself in shards of a broken mirror.) One can hardly imagine more different books, except for Hesse’s conflicted outsider fixation.

Everyone should think about how Hesse’s work came to mean so much decades later. We toss a stone in water and never see all the ripples. _mjh

New England Weather by Archibald MacLeish | The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor

Today is the birthday of Hermann Hesse (books by this author), born in Calw, Germany, in 1877. In 1911, he took a trip to India and started studying Eastern religions, and ancient Hindu and Chinese cultures. His travels inspired his novel Siddhartha, about the early life of Gautama Buddha. It became popular among the counterculture movement of the 1960s, more than 40 years after it was published.

He said: "The world is not imperfect or slowly evolving along a path to perfection. No, it is perfect at every moment, every sin already carries grace in it."

New England Weather by Archibald MacLeish | The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor