“Hesse, the passionate reader who could not live without books, nevertheless harbored just as large a degree of skepticism toward the written word. For everything that was written ran the risk of having no life thereafter, of being nothing but an assemblage of dead letters. It was this Franciscan sympathy for poverty, including poverty of the spirit, that led him to see books differently than the educated bourgeois elite did. Books were alive like trees or clouds in the sky, they were our companions on that journey that ended inevitably in our death. But the key question was, Do we perish in our entirety, or does something of us live on - perhaps in the written word? For Hesse, true education, of which proper reading formed an integral part, must lead to inner growth. But proper reading is the same as proper living: one can only learn this art if one does not imagine one knows what it consists of in advance. One must always be open to new discovery, like a wayfarer who cannot see his goal but instead carries it within himself.”