"I have the feeling that, basically, Hesse is not a warm writer. He keeps himself at a stoical distance from the hot, painful bloodstream of life. He seems to me to be indifferent, even when he writes about love and justice. His last great work, Magister Ludi, or the Glass Bead Game, is, in essence, a work about love, about the search for an ideal community, about self-sacrifice. But I don't feel any warmth in it, although this is possibly a result of Hesse's literary style, which is Gothic and crystal-clear, icily lucid. Style, they say, is the person...It is interesting what Hesse writes about rebellious natures. He, himself, often ran away from school, ran away from home, and at sixteen completely abandoned his formal education. (He was self-taught, first by reading through his grandfather's library, and later he worked in a bookstore.) Progress, he said, is basically made by those who rebel against the accepted order. But the accepted order protects itself against the push for change - and takes revenge on the rebels."