Klingsors last summer

It is good to experience such a wonderful autumn. If you have some time, I want to invite you on a little adventure.

Take a bottle of wine, put some cigarettes in it and drive out to a quiet place. Find a mountain, a hill or, if that’s not possible, a small patch of earth.

In any case, a place where you can lie in the sun without anyone disturbing you.

Enjoy the warmth, the heat on your skin and the flickering in the air. Hear the buzzing of the flies, the sound of the wind, smell the dust, the dry grass and the hot stones.

And as soon as you feel that you are lost to the world, at least for a moment, take a sip of wine and open the world to Klingsors.

Klingsor!

Klingsor, the sorcerer, Klingsor, the seducer of women, the friend Li Tai Pos, the drunkard, the painter, the poet and the seeker, who lives a life like a paper burning on all sides.

Klingsor, who paints, cries, walks through the world and speaks. Paints, dreams, tears his heart out of his body and laughs while doing so. He loves women, looks at the world, seeks to see everything, in order to capture it on canvas with his last strength.

And it burns.

And it burns.

And it burns.

For one more summer.

Klingsor, the fool in a world that thinks he is reasonable. A world that sets the rules, that laughs at artists, at those who chase a butterfly, a laughing child or just a dream.

Klingsor, the aging painter who wants to taste one more time, one last time, a little sip from the well.

And fails. In the process, he goes under and takes everything with him.

The legend of Klingsor. And his last summer.

But it is not only the story that touches me. It’s not just the beauty of the language and the virtuosity that Hesse possesses here.

It’s the way the book reaches out to me. It’s the mood it conveys and the feelings it arouses in me.

In this book, Hesse has reached his zenith both linguistically and technically. Here, he playfully creates what he wished for as a youth, namely to be “poet or nothing at all”.

I don’t know if you’ve read “Klingsors letzter Sommer” yet.

If not, then you’re lucky!

Take a hot day, hide in a lonely spot and enjoy one of the most wonderful books of his time for an hour or two.