21 Sep 2010, 4:25 pm
AnonymousAnonymous
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23 Sep 2010, 3:43 pm
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24 Sep 2010, 8:10 am
jojobean
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25 Sep 2010, 2:50 am
01 Oct 2010, 11:26 pm
Ambivalence
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02 Oct 2010, 4:18 am
spongy
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02 Oct 2010, 5:29 am
02 Oct 2010, 6:09 am
02 Oct 2010, 11:42 am
02 Oct 2010, 12:01 pm
moog, i have read a lot of Hesse's books (let's see - Demian, Steppenwolf, Narcissus and Goldmund, Gertrude, Siddhartha, and Rosshalde i think). been meaning to read The Glass Bead Game.
one of my favorite quotes ( i think this is from gertrude):
"The artist is not, as ordinary people think, a gay sort of person who flings off works of art here and there out of sheer exhuberance. Unfortunately he is usually a poor soul who is being suffocated with surplus riches and therefore has to give some of them away. It is a fallacy that there are happy artists; that is just philistines' talk. Lighthearted Mozart kept up his spirits with champagne and was constantly short of bread, and why Beethoven did not commit suicide in his youth instead of composing all that wonderful music, no one knows. A real artist has to be unhappy. Whenever he is hungry and opens his bag, there are pearls inside it."
Ah, katzefrau, I am not suprised that you like Hesse.
I've only read Demian and Siddartha so far, both are wonderful books.
Thank you for the quote. I am not sure if it's quite true, but I am not an artist anymore.
I've been making a little index of page numbers where I found something that strikes a chord with me in Steppenwolf.
I just read this; "Eternity is just the redemption of time, it's return to innocence, so to say, and it's transformation back again into space" There was a recent cosmological theory that circulated the internet recently with the premise that the universe may indeed do exactly that. It made me laugh to find it written here in this book.
Right now I'm reading non-fiction, The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins (from where I plan on reading The Greatest Show on Earth. Before this book I read God is not Great by Christopher Hitchens, and after all listed, I will be trying to get a copy of Stephen Hawking's The Grand Design).
But when I was younger, I poured through Hesse and Dostoevsky as a daily ritual. Demian is an AMAZING book that opened my eyes to the concept of Taoism when I was barely ten years old, which is sort of related to what he calls Abraxas--- there should be neither light nor dark, rather a balance of the two coexisting in perfect harmony.
Dostoevsky is by far my favorite author, though. The Brothers Karamazov and Crime and Punishment were exquisite for a plethora of reasons. Any other Dostoevsky fans, or am I nutter?
I too am a huge fan of both Dostoevsky and Hesse. Der Steppenwolf and The Demons (The Possessed) are probably my favourites, although it's a close call.
02 Oct 2010, 12:14 pm
02 Oct 2010, 12:22 pm
02 Oct 2010, 1:24 pm
MONKEY
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05 Oct 2010, 4:59 pm
It's very good so far, only got it today but already almost half way through. It's basically about some alternate world where it's all run by chimps and bonobos and there's this chimp that thinks he's a human. In that world the bonobos are the chimps' equivalent of a black person, so there are references to "bonoboism" and stuff like that.
Also, this book is not for the prudish, seriously some of the stuff on there is just pervy 
05 Oct 2010, 5:09 pm
It's very good so far, only got it today but already almost half way through. It's basically about some alternate world where it's all run by chimps and bonobos and there's this chimp that thinks he's a human. In that world the bonobos are the chimps' equivalent of a black person, so there are references to "bonoboism" and stuff like that.
Also, this book is not for the prudish, seriously some of the stuff on there is just pervy
"Jenny" by Douglas Preston is very good but it will break your heart. It's about a family that raises a chimp to live as a human ( as
much as possible). The story is fictional but he states that all the incidents described in the book are incidents that happened to
one of five different chimps. Did I say that right? Things start going wrong when Jenny reaches sexual maturity. She doesn't
fully belong in either the human or chimp world and the results are tragic. It is well written though.
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