Hermann Hesse

PeterCamenzindAs for love, I must confess to having retained a youthful attitude to it all my life. For me, the love of women has been a purifying act of adoration, a flame shooting straight up from my melancholy, my hands stretched in prayer toward the blue heavens. Owing to my mother’s influence and my own indistinct premonitions, I venerated womankind as an alien race, beautiful and enigmatic, superior to men by virtue of inborn beauty and constancy of character, a race which we must hold sacred. For, like stars and blue mountain heights, they are remote from us men and appear to be nearer to God. Since life did not always treat me gently, the love of women has been as bitter for me as it has been sweet. Although I still cherish women, my chosen role of solemn priest has often changed all too quickly into the painfully comic one of fool.

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