Hermann Hesse - Hymn to Old Age

1. The titles in square brackets denote passages taken from longer texts.

I T WAS A FINE and shining summer here in the southern Alps, and for two weeks I had been feeling a secret fear that it would enda fear that I know to be the additional and most secret ingredient of all things beautiful. Especially I feared even the faintest sign of a thunderstorm, because from mid-August onwards, any thunderstorm can easily get out of control, can last for days, and that means the end of summer, even if the weather manages to recover. Particularly here in the south its almost the rule that summers neck is broken by such a storm and that, blazing and quaking, it must fade and die. Then, when the day-long, violent shudders of this storm in the sky have ended, when the thousand flashes and the endless concerts of thunder and the raging torrents of lukewarm rain have passed away, one morning or afternoon there will emerge from the seething mass of clouds a cool calm sky, of serene colour, filled with autumn, and the shadows in the landscape will become a little sharper and blacker, having lost their colours but gained in form, like a fifty-year-old man who yesterday looked fit and fresh, but suddenly after an illness, a grief, a disappointment, has a face full of little lines, and in all the wrinkles lie the tiny signs of weathering. Such a final summer storm is terrible, and the death throes of summer are horrific, with its violent struggle against the compulsion to die, its crazed and agonised rage, its threshing and heaving, all of which is in vain and after a few more convulsions must end helplessly in extinction.

This year, it seems that summer is not undergoing such a wild, dramatic end (though its still possible). This time it appears to be seeking a slow and gentle death by old age. There is nothing so characteristic of these days, and by no other signs do I sense so inwardly this special, infinitely beautiful kind of summers end, as when coming home from a late-evening walk or from a country supperbread, cheese and wine in a shaded inn somewhere in the forest. What is unique about such evenings is the dilation of warmth, the slow and imperceptible increase of coolness, the nocturnal dew and the silent, infinitely pliant retreat of summer even in its dying moments of resistance. When you walk for two or three hours after sunset, you can sense the struggle in a thousand fine waves. Then, in every dense thicket, every bush, every narrow pathway, the warmth of day has gathered itself and hidden away, holding on grimly for dear life throughout the night, clinging to any refuge, any shelter from the wind. At this hour, on the western side of the hills, the forests are great storage heaters, gnawed at from all sides by the cool night air, and not only every dip, every stream, but every woodland form, every thinness and thickness tells the wanderer with utmost clarity the changing degrees of heat. Just as a skier crossing a mountain landscape can sense each rise and fall, each lengthways and sideways ridge, simply through the bending of his knees, so that with a little practice his knees will give him a complete image of the mountain slope as he descends, I can read the image of the landscape in the darkness of a moonless night simply from the delicate waves of warmth. I enter a forest, and after just three steps I am enveloped in a rapidly increasing flow of heat, as if from a glowing stove, and I find that this heat expands and contracts according to the thickness of the vegetation; every dried-up stream, which has long since lost its water but still keeps a residue of damp in the earth, announces its presence by radiating its coolness. In every season the temperatures at different points of a landscape will vary, but only at this time when late summer turns into early autumn can one feel it so clearly and so strongly. As in winter the rose-red of the bare mountains, as in spring the teeming moistness of air and growing plants, as at the start of summer the nocturnal swarms of fireflies, so too at the end of summer this wonderful night-time walk through the changing waves of warmth is one of those sensual experiences that penetrate most deeply into ones mood and ones sense of being alive.