The "passion for incredulity" can produce as much self-deception as the uncritical will to believe. - Colin Wilson

In fact, the real problem with the thesis of A Genealogy of Morals is that the noble and the aristocrat are just as likely to be stupid as the plebeian. I had noted in my teens that major writers are usually those who have had to struggle against the odds -- to "pull their cart out of the mud," as I put it -- while writers who have had an easy start in life are usually second rate -- or at least, not quite first-rate. Dickens, Balzac, Dostoevsky, Shaw, H. G. Wells, are examples of the first kind; in the twentieth century, John Galsworthy, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, and Samuel Beckett are examples of the second kind. They are far from being mediocre writers; yet they tend to be tinged with a certain pessimism that arises from never having achieved a certain resistance against problems.

Considered as a whole, Hesse's achievement can hardly be matched in modern literature; it is the continually rising trajectory of an idea, the fundamentally religious idea of how to 'live more abundantly'. Hesse has little imagination in the sense that Shakespeare or Tolstoy can be said to have imagination, but his ideas have a vitality that more than makes up for it. Before all, he is a novelist who used the novel to explore the problem: What should we do with our lives? The man who is interested to know how he should live instead of merely taking life as it comes, is automatically an Outsider.

My theory was that we are all fundamentally 'multiple personalities', beginning with the baby and the child, and slowly developing into more complex selves. If, for some reason, we abruptly cease to develop -- through some trauma that undermines self-confidence -- all those potential personalities are stunted and repressed. And some accident or violent shock may give one of them the opportunity to 'take over'. This suggests, of course, that in some mysterious sense, our 'future' personalities are already there, in embryo, so to speak, and that they also develop as we mature. We move from personality to personality, as we might climb a ladder. The Beethovens and Leonardos got further up the ladder than most of us; yet even they failed to reach the top, as we can see if we study their lives.