But one thing this doctrine, so clean, so venerable, does not contain: it does nto contain the secret of what the Sublime One himself experienced, he… - Hermann Hesse

Many generations of cloister schoolboys had trooped past beneath this stranger tree, laughing, gossiping, playing, squabbling, shod or barefoot, according to the season of the year; each with his writing-tablet; boys with a flower between their lips, boys cracking nuts, boys with snowballs. Always there were new ones; every second year brought its fresh faces, though most - tousled and yellow-haired - were very like the boys that had passed. Some stayed and turned into novices, then monks, and their yellow hair was shorn. Ch. I

I want to tell you something today, something that I have known for a long while, and you know it too; but perhaps you have never said it to yourself. I am going to tell you now what it is that I know about you and me and our fate. You, Harry, have been an artist and a thinker, a man full of joy and faith, always on the track of what is great and eternal, never content with the trivial and petty. But the more life has awakened you and brought you back to yourself, the greater has you need been and the deeper the sufferings and dread and despair that have overtaken you, till you were up to your neck in them. And all that you once knew and loved and revered as beautiful and sacred, all the belief you once had in mankind and our high destiny, has been of no avail and has lost its worth and gone to pieces. Your faith found no more air to breathe. And suffocation is a hard death. Is that true, Harry? Is that your fate?

The sacred sense of beyond, of timelessness, of a world which had an eternal value and the substance of which was divine had been given back to me today by this friend of mine who taught me dancing.