Kindle Notes & Highlights
Pampambio, Kareno and Laguno,
close to real names of places in southern switzerland
Cadmium yellow and red, Veronese green, emerald, cobalt, cobalt-violet, French vermilion and crimson lake.
relationship between feelings + colour
To be sure, many of his later letters were apprehensive and some contained death wishes.
His favorite poet was Li Tai Pe, the chinese composer of the most profound drinking songs. Sometimes when he got tipsy, he would call himself Li Tai Pe and would refer to Hermann, a writer friend of his, as Thu Fu.
Hesse uses his own name in the short story as Klingsor's friend - suggesting his own closeness and similarity to character?
Fast moving life, swift as dreams and crowded with images.
dreams feel like they only take place over 5 minutes but last all night - life feels short but it's the longest thing you ever do
tangle of treetops, palms, cedars, chestnuts, eucalyptus, red beech and judas trees intertwined with wisteria and climbing liana.
listing overwhelms
In a year perhaps, or sooner, these eyes would be blind and the fires in his heart would be extinct.
casual mentioning of potential death - nihilism or acceptance or desire for death?
There was the mountain peak with deep shadows of cliffs. He rendered it so it looked like a crazy masked face.
life as hall of mirrors - seeks likeness in others - whenever he looks outwards he sees himself - individualistic
Why did time exist? Why always this idiotic succession of one thing after another, and not a roaring, overindulging simultaneity? Why was he now lying alone in bed again, like a widower, like an old man? You could enjoy, could create, all through this short life; and yet at best you were always merely singing one song after another. The whole full symphony with all its hundred voices and instruments never sounds all at once.
Klingsor used to make it a matter of pride to win through without losing any of his ten lives and would consider himself disgraced if he came out with nine or with seven.
He always had a few more strings to his bow than others, a few more irons in the fire, a few more coins in his purse, a few more horses on his cart.
How full and vibrant the dark stillness of the garden was, like the breathing of a sleeping woman.
Everywhere, all around, were women and girls, some still children, with long thin legs, some nubile, some mature and with the signs of knowledge and of fatigue in their restive faces, and all loved him and all wanted to be loved by him.
Sensuality isn't worth a hair more than spirituality, and it's the same the other way around. It's all one, everything is equally good. Whether you embrace a woman or make a poem, it's the same. So long as the main thing is there, the love, the burning, the emotion, it doesn't matter whether you are a monk on Mount Athos or a man about town in Paris."
often he lay bound and gagged in the dungeon of darkness.
Bright yellow houses slept alongside the yellow road, bent forward and half dead, stunned by the summer days. White metallic willows hung heavy wings over golden meadows along the dry stream.
She was everything: mother, child, mistress, animal, madonna.
He loved such frescoes, he loved the way these beautiful works returned to dust and the earth.
He called her the Queen of the Mountains; that was the title of a mysterious Oriental story in the books of his boyhood.
He knew at once that he would paint her, not realistically, but the ray within her that struck him, the poem, the lovely teasing tone: Youth, Redness, Blondness, Amazon.
It was always this way. An experience never came alone, its birds always flew ahead.
