Hermann Hesse on the Three Types of Readers and the Most Transcendent Form of Reading
Metadata
Highlights
-
We have an inborn tendency to establish types in our minds and to divide mankind according to them. [But] however advantageous and revealing such categories may be, no matter whether they spring from purely personal experience or from attempting a scientific establishment of types, at times it is a good and fruitful exercise to take a cross section of experience in another way and discover that each person bears traces of every type within himself and that diverse characters and temperaments can be found as alternating characteristics within a single individual.
- But what grants this reader her or his superiority over the other types is, above all, a trained capacity for associative thinking that turns the reading material into a springboard for indiscriminate curiosity from which to leap far beyond the
- this stage is a poor, an immature reader. He does not know that all the poetry and all the philosophy in the world lie within him too, that the greatest poet drew from no other source than the one each of us has within his own being.