On Reading Books
Hermann Hesse
1920

WE HAVE AN INBORN TENDENCY to establish types in our minds and to divide mankind according to them. From the “characters” of Theophrastus and the four temperaments our grandfathers talked about, to the most modern psychology, this need for type arrangement can be traced. Also everyone sorts the people around him into types according to their resemblance to characters that were important to him in his childhood. Now 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. 
	If I set forth the following three types, or better, three stages, of book readers, I do not therefore mean that the world of readers is comprised of only these three groups, or that one reader belongs to this and another to that group. Rather, each of us belongs at times to one group and at times to another. 
	First of all, there is the naive reader. Everyone reads naively at times. This reader consumes a book as one consumes food, he eats and drinks to satiety, he is simply a taker, be he a boy with a book about Indians, a servant girl with a novel about countesses, or a student with Schopenhauer. This kind of reader is not related to a book as one person is to another but rather as a horse to his manger or perhaps as a horse to his driver: the book leads, the reader follows. The substance is taken objectively, accepted as reality. But the substance is only one consideration! There are also highly educated, very refined readers, especially of belles lettres, who belong entirely to the class of the naive. These, to be sure, do not concentrate upon the material content; they do not evaluate a novel, for example, by the number of murders or marriages in the story, but they take the writer himself and the aesthetics of the book wholly objectively, they enjoy the writer's exaltations, they feel their way accurately into his attitudes toward the world, and they accept without reservation the writer's interpretations of his creations. What the material, setting, and action are to simple souls, the art, language, education, and intellectuality of the writer are to these cultivated readers. They take them objectively, as the final and highest value of a composition, just as the reader of Karl May accepted the exploits of old Shatterhands as true acts, as reality itself. 
	This naive reader in his relationship to reading is not really a person at all, is not himself. He evaluates the events in a novel according to their suspense, their danger, their erotic content, their splendor or misery; or he may evaluate the writer instead by measuring him against aesthetic standards, which in the final analysis always remain arbitrary. This kind of reader assumes in an uncomplicated way that a book is there simply and solely to be read faithfully and attentively and to be judged according to its content or its form. Just as a loaf of bread is there to be eaten and a bed to be slept in. 
	However, since you may take a completely different attitude toward anything in the world, so you may toward the book. If one follows one’s nature and not one’s education one becomes a child again and begins to play with things; the bread becomes a mountain to bore tunnels into, and the bed a cave, a garden, a snow field. Something of this childlikeness, this genius for play, is exhibited by the second type of reader. This reader treasures neither the substance nor the form of a book as its single most important value. He knows, in the way children know, that every object can have ten or a hundred meanings for the mind. He can, for example, watch a poet or philosopher struggling to persuade himself and his reader of his interpretation and evaluation of things, and he can smile because he sees in the apparent choice and freedom of the poet simply compulsion and passivity. This reader is already so far advanced that he knows what professors of literature and literary critics are mostly completely ignorant of: that there is no such thing as a free choice of material and form. When the literary historian says: In such and such a year Schiller selected this subject and decided to treat it in iambic pentameters—then this reader knows that it was not open to the poet to choose either subject or iambics, and his enjoyment consists in seeing not the material in the hands of his poet but the poet in the grip of his material. From this point of view the so-called aesthetic values almost disappear, and it can be precisely the writer's mishaps and uncertainties that furnish much the greatest charm and value. For this reader follows the poet not the way a horse obeys his driver but the way a hunter follows his prey, and a glimpse suddenly gained into what lies beyond the apparent freedom of the poet, into the poet’s compulsion and passivity, can enchant him more than all the elegance of good technique and cultivated style. 
	One stage further along we find the third and last type of reader. Once more it must be emphasized that no one of us need belong permanently to any one of these types, that each of us may belong today to the second, tomorrow to the third, the day after once more to the first stage. And so now to the third and last kind of reader. He is apparently the exact reverse of what is generally called a “good” reader. He is so completely an individual, so very much himself, that he confronts his reading matter with complete freedom. He wishes neither to educate nor to entertain himself, he uses a book exactly like any other object in the world, for him it is simply a point of departure and a stimulus. Essentially it makes no difference to him what he reads. He does not read a philosopher in order to learn from him, to adopt his teaching, or to attack or criticize him. He does not read a poet to accept his interpretation of the world; he interprets it for himself. He is, if you like, completely a child. He plays with everything—and from one point of view there is nothing more fruitful and rewarding than to play with everything. If this reader finds a beautiful sentence in a book, a truth, a word of wisdom, he begins by experimentally turning it upside down. He has known for a long time that for each truth the opposite also is true. He has known for a long time that every intellectual point of view is a pole to which an equally valid antipole exists. He is a child insofar as he puts a high value on associative thinking, but he knows the other sort as well. And so this reader is able, or rather each one of us is able, at the hour in which he is at this stage, to read whatever he likes, a novel or grammar, a railroad timetable, a galley proof from the printer. At the hour when our imagination and our ability to associate are at their height, we really no longer read what is printed on the paper but swim in a stream of impulses and inspirations that reach us from what we are reading. They may come out of the text, they may simply emerge from the type face. An advertisement in a newspaper can become a revelation; the most exhilarating, the most affirmative thoughts can spring from a completely irrelevant word if one turns it about, playing with its letters as with a jigsaw puzzle. In this stage one can read the story of Little Red Ridinghood as a cosmogony or philosophy, or as a flowery erotic poem. Or one can read the label “Colorado maduro” on a box of cigars, play with the words, letters, and sounds, and thereby take a tour through the hundred kingdoms of knowledge, memory, and thought. 
	But, it will be objected, can that be called reading? Is the person who reads a page of Goethe unconcerned about Goethe’s intentions and meanings? If he reads it like an advertisement or like an accidental hodgepodge of letters, is he still a reader at all? Isn’t the stage of reading that you call the third and last really the lowest, most childish and barbaric? For such a reader what becomes of the music of Holderlin, the passion of Lenau, the will of Stendhal, the scope of Shakespeare? The objection is valid. The reader at the third stage is no longer a reader. The person who remained there permanently would soon not read at all, for the design in a rug or the arrangement of the stones in a wall would be of exactly as great a value to him as the most beautiful page full of the best-arranged letters. The one book for him would be a page with the letters of the alphabet. 
	So be it: the reader at the last stage is really no longer a reader at all, he doesn’t give a hoot about Goethe, he doesn’t read Shakespeare. The reader in the last stage simply doesn’t read any more. Why books? Has he not the entire world within himself? 
	Whoever remained permanently at this stage would not read any more, but no one does remain permanently at this stage. But whoever is not acquainted with 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. For just once in your life remain for an hour, a day at the third stage, the stage of not-reading-any-more. You will thereafter (it’s so easy to slip back) be that much better a reader, that much better a listener and interpreter of everything written. Stand just once at the stage where the stone by the road means as much to you as Goethe and Tolstoy, you will thereafter gain from Goethe, Tolstoy, and all poets infinitely more value, more sap and honey, more affirmation of life and of yourself than ever before. For the works of Goethe are not Goethe, and the volumes-of Dostoevsky are not Dostoevsky, they are only an attempt, a dubious and never successful attempt, to conjure up the many-voiced multitudinous world of which he was the central point. 
	Try just once to write down one of those little sequences of ideas that drift through your mind in the course of a walk. Or, apparently easier, a simple dream that you had during the night! You dreamed about a man who at first was threatening you with a cane but then bestowed a medal on you. But who was the man? You reflect, you find certain features of your friend in him, of your father, but there is also something different about him, something feminine; without your being able to say how, something about him that reminds you of a sister, of a beloved. And the cane with which he threatened you had a handle that reminds you of a walking stick you had when you went on your first hikes as a schoolboy, and then a hundred thousand memories burst in, and if you want to keep track of the content of this simple dream, even though only by shorthand and in key phrases, you can before you get it in order fill up a book, or two or ten books. For a dream is the opening through which you see into the content of your soul, and this content is the world, no more and no less than the world, the whole world from your birth up to today, from Homer to Heinrich Mann, from Japan to Gibraltar, from Sirius to the Earth, from Red Ridinghood to Bergson. —And to the extent that your attempt to write down your dream is related to the world that embraces that dream, so the work of an author is related to what he tried to say. 
	For almost a hundred years now scholars and amateurs have tried their hands at interpreting the second part of Goethe’s Faust and have found the most beautiful and the most stupid, the profoundest and the most banal interpretations for it. But in every work of poetry, though perhaps hidden, there lurks under the surface that nameless ambiguity, that “overdetermination of symbols,” as the newer psychology has it. Without having recognized this, be it only a single time, in all its infinite fullness and inexhaustible significance, you stand handicapped before every poet and thinker, you take for the whole what is a small part, you believe in interpretations that barely touch the surface. 
	The shiftings of the reader among the three stages are, as can be easily understood, possible for everyone in every field. You can occupy the same three stages with a thousand intermediate stages in respect to architecture, painting, zoology, history. In every case the third stage at which you are most yourself will put an end to your reading, will dissolve poetry, will dissolve art, will dissolve world history. And yet unless you intuitively know this stage, you will never read any book, any science or art except as a schoolboy reads his grammar.