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In Secret We Thirst

Graceful, spiritual,
with the gentleness of arabesques
our life is similar
to the existence of fairies
that spin in soft cadence
around nothingness
to which we sacrifice
the here and now

Dreams of beauty, youthful joy
like a breath in pure harmony
with the depth of your young surface
where sparkles the longing for the night
for blood and barbarity

In the emptiness, spinning, without aims or needs
dance free our lives
always ready for the game
yet, secretly, we thirst for reality
for the conceiving, for the birth
we are thirst for sorrows and death

Hermann Hesse was born on 2 July 1877 in the town of Calv, Swabia, in a family of Christian missionaries who worked long in India. Since 1873, they have lived in Calv, where they work in a publishing house under the direction of Hermann Gundett, Hermann Hesse's maternal grandfather. In 1881, the family of Hesse moved to Basel, Switzerland, where he spent five years before returning to Calv. After graduating from the Latin School in Göttingen, in 1891 Hesse joined the Evangelical Theological Seminary in Maulbronn. The following year he ran away and was discovered in the field a day later. After attempting suicide in May 1892, Hesse crossed several medical institutions and educational institutions and entered a serious conflict with his parents. In 1893 he was able to pass an examination with which he completed his education. Hesse begins to apprentice in a bookstore in Esslingen, Neckar, but leaves three days later. Then, in the beginning of the summer of 1894, 14 months of apprenticeship began in the Calv watch factory. In October 1895, he moved again and became an apprentice at a bookstore, this time in Tübingen. Being isolated from political conflicts and World War II, Hesse is working on his novel "The Glass Bead Game", which was published in Switzerland in 1943. In 1946 he received the Nobel Prize for Literature. In 1947 he was named an honorary citizen of his native town of Calv and an honorary doctor of the University of Bern. After the war Hesse wrote less, mainly stories and poems. He died on August 9, 1962, in Monsanto, where he spent most of his life.