Plinio's Wish

"I wished for nothing better than to be as one of them and to have no other life than theirs--that passionate, childish, gruesome, uncontrolled life that vacillates between happiness and fear." -- Plinio Designori
From The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse


"And I, for my part, would always stand outside, alone and uncertain, full of intimations but without certainty."

"Distant as my childhood is, and incomprehensible and fabulous though it seems to me on the whole, I still sharply remember all the suffering and doubts I felt at the time, in the midst of happiness. All those feelings existed in the child's heart, where they have been ever since: doubt of my own worth, vacillation between self-esteem and discouragement, between idealistic contempt for the world and ordinary sensuality. And just as I did then, I later continued to regard these aspects of my nature sometimes as a miserable morbidity, sometimes as a distinction. At times I believed that God wished to lead me on this painful path to a special isolation and deepening of my nature, at other times I took it all as nothing but the signs of shabby weakness of character, of a neurosis such as thousands of people bear wearisomely through their lives."

From A Child's Heart