Strange News from Another Star by Herman Hesse

  Herman Hesse was one of my first entry points into philosophical literature and I have fond memories of Steppenwolf, The Glass Bead Game, and Demian among others. That said, it has been years—decades, even—since I’ve last picked up one of his books. After my lengthy hiatus, I’ve picked up Strange News from Another Star, a collection of short stories that was fine, but not as affecting as his more substantial works.      

        The collection revolves around a few key themes, including outlandish wishes, mystical journeys into the beyond, and the hidden significance of seemingly everyday phenomena. The tone reads very much like a book of fairytales where an objective and factual tone recounts details that are unrealistic. There are some stories that are more introspective in nature and narrated in first person. Whether inward- or outward-focused, the book reaches for the allegorical, the eternal, and the strange.

Two of the stories that were most engaging to me were “Augustus” and “Faldum”, both of which revolve around odd wishes. In the case of “Augustus,” a mother is granted the ability to make a wish for her son (the actual mechanics are thankfully never explained). In a panic, she makes the wish that everyone will love him. Augustus then follows a hedonistic and philandering path similar to that of Dorian Gray. He’s given the opportunity to make a wish of his own and starts to turn his path around. The premise works, even if it’s essentially just a “monkey’s paw” premise. “Faldum,” by contrast, involves wishes fulfilled. Everyone in this strange village is able to make a wish from a wandering merchant—and their wishes are instantly granted. It’s a little mysterious that they don’t all wish for something more ambitious. Most just ask for a modest sum of money and then go about their way. The wishes that matter are for those of two hermits. One wants nothing more than to talk to nobody and play his violin, so he ascends into the sky and is never seen again. The other hermit wishes to become a mountain—and does, literally. He’s a mountain for ages until many generations of people die and he erodes and then is given the chance to reunite with the music, essentially become music, alongside the violinist. It’s a strange, if engaging, concept.

“Faldum” also stands out in the collection due to the richness of its imagery. The whole opening sequence offers a frame narrative replete with description of the main character’s journey to Faldum. Several other stories have lush passages, including “A Dream Sequence” and “Iris.” I was surprised by how focused Hesse was on the details; I typically think of his writing as more broad strokes with more emphasis on philosophical exposition.

“A Dream Sequence” and “Flute Dream” were stories of less impact on me. They’re imagistic, symbolic, and mystical in nature, offering suggestions of deeper meaning. The challenge with stories like this (and dream sequences in general) is that their internal coherence is often lacking. We have to accept that the symbols have significance despite not having the same access to the writer’s inner states.

“Strange News from Another Star” and “Iris” are somewhat more memorable since they have a more clear focus. While maintaining some aspects of the dreamy free association of Hesse’s more esoteric works, there’s a little more narrative development. In “Strange News from Another Star,” the character goes in search of flowers in far and distant lands because nothing is worse than not adorning their dead with flowers—meanwhile, he arrives in lands full of war and death. “Iris,” meanwhile, follows a man who is drawn into the iris flower and falls in love with a woman named Iris, who refuses to marry him because he can’t commit to her spontaneous inclinations, favouring instead a life of the mind.

Hesse’s novels often revolve around duality. To my recollection, Narcissus and Goldmund, Demian, Steppenwolf, and The Glass Bead Game all revolve around the idea that the mind and the body exist in a challenging duality. There’s the implication that intellect and hedonism exist at opposite ends of a spectrum that struggle against one another within people. The same exploration happens in stories like “Iris” but the story isn’t quite as developed.

A few of the stories address the great beyond; there’s a common motif of crossing a threshold into the unknown and the conflation of death and open gates to the great beyond pop up as mutual metaphors. 

Overall, it was nice to revisit Hesse’s writing. The short stories are a quick entry point into some of the major themes in Hesse’s oeuvre. The lush descriptions are a delight, and I did find myself thinking as I read, particularly around which wishes I would make, given the opportunity, that would not end in disaster.

If you’re looking for an early entry point to Hesse, or if you’re a completionist of his oeuvre, Strange News from Another Star may be worth your while—but in my humble opinion, it would be better to read at least a few of his novels first.

Happy reading!

In Praise of Shadows by Jun'ichirō Tanizaki

        I am sometimes blessed with the rare pleasure of seeing a book I hadn’t previously heard of suddenly mentioned in wildly different contexts. It feels like encouragement from the fates to pick it up, a kind of organic process of magical discovery that even the best algorithms can’t replicate. This time, the universe led me to In Praise of Shadows by Jun’ichirō Tanizaki. I think my initial exposure to it was in Teju Cole’s Known and Strange Things, but there have been at least two or three other references or contexts (another book? the writing on an art gallery wall?) to Tanizaki’s philosophy on shadows.

Tanizaki is a true aesthete. He offers such lush, poetic descriptions of shadows but also how they manifest across different facets of Japanese culture. I myself am drawn to the alluring ambiguity of shadows, though Tanizaki also makes it a matter of national character which leads to some ideas that feel a little spurious.

I’ll start with some of the more engaging parts. Tanizaki reads almost like Walter Benjamin or Roland Barthes in that he provides focused commentary on oft-overlooked elements of our culture. For instance, in an early chapter we see Tanizaki discussing the elegance of Japanese toilets. He discusses their placement in fragrant groves, where people on the toilet get lost in meditation outdoors. Elegance, he says, is frigid. He sees toilets as a most aesthetic object, where that which is unsanitary becomes elegance and an opportunity to reflect on the beauties of nature, suggesting a connection between toilets and the haiku as a poetic form. 

There’s another chapter in which he discusses the difference between lacquered dishware and porcelain. In addition to the disdain he feels towards the clinking and scraping of porcelain utensils, he also talks about the infinite depths of a lacquered bowl. He talks about Japanese soup in such bowls that appear to reflect infinite depths. When you lift the bowl to your face, you look into the cloudy darkness of the soup and it stretches on forever against the lacquered finish. Passages like that reflect also the depths of Tanizaki’s sensuality and read as a poetic philosophy.

In another area, Tanizaki describes the brightness of paper and the darkness of ink and how the technology of writing developed around flecked and tinted paper vs. bright white. He describes how the way pens developed was rooted in the relationship between light and shadow and how those pens changed the way we communicate—how the characters of different languages are shaped, ultimately, by the darkness of ink and the tools to disperse it.

I also loved the way he philosophized about polishing silver. Essentially, Tanizaki feels distaste for the shine, preferring cloudiness and jade’s shadowy surface. He elevates the idea of grime. The oils on peoples’ hands, for example, give statues polish. Grime makes things glow. It’s a reversal of how we often think about polish. 

As a broader aesthetics, Tanizaki points to the necessity of darkness to illuminate that which it enshrouds. I think there’s a lot of merit to that idea and when I consider the role of darkness in some of my favourite artworks, there is something about shining shadows.

Where Tanizaki’s philosophy loses me a little bit is when he ties things back to national character or racial traits. There are a number of unsupported generalities about Western and Japanese character. Some of the claims are interesting points of contrast. For instance, he talks about the dense gardens in Japan relative to the plain manicured lawns of the West. He talks about how in Western culture ghosts are transparent while in Japan they are footless and dark. There are a number of more spurious claims, however. For instance, he suggests that the “yellow” faces (his word) and black hair of the Japanese led to changes in the development of their culture. He also argues that “Orientals” (again, his word) are content to find pleasure in how things are, while Westerners find pleasure in what things can be—hence why the West is so replete with artificial light. He talks about the way bright lights produce heat—and don’t even get him started on the air conditioned nightmare that has taken over that renders all heating artificial.

There’s a lot to like about this sensual aesthetic philosophy. The series of short chapters and vignettes offers focused insight into different aspects of culture, and I really liked that level of phenomenological exploration. I read it with a grain of salt; I’m not sure how I would have received the book when it was originally published in 1933, but in 2026 a lot of the racial and cultural generalizations feel either dated or incomplete. I imagine, too, that with cultural influences being more widely available globally, some of the distinctions that might have previously existed are no longer as pronounced as they might have been.

If you’re also a fan of The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard, this book captures that same deep consideration of phenomena and bridges the worlds poetics and philosophy. It’s worth the hour or two it will take to read—despite all the shadows, it may prove illuminating.

Happy reading!

Cultish by Amanda Montell

  If there’s someone that can make linguistics cool and fun, it’s Amanda Montell. I previously read her book Wordslut, which was a fun breakdown of ‘profane’ language. Cultish retains a similar accessibility and lets Montell’s lively voice shine. It is a contemporary examination of the language games cult leaders play in order to manipulate their audience.

Montell begins the reflection essentially with what we think of as “actual” cult leaders. She gives an account of Jim Jones and the Jamestown massacre, for example. She draws on personal accounts, archival recordings, and other scholarship to explain how Jones was able to maintain such control over his adherents despite the obvious lies and contradictions. Montell describes how language operates to prevent deep consideration of ideas. For Jonestown in particular, I appreciated how Montell drew on the work of Sikivu Hutchinson to explore the narrative of how Jim Jones drew on progressive ideology to manipulate people and ultimately deploy racist stereotypes to his advantage.

There are a few elements that re-emerge across different contexts. In addition to dehumanizing ‘out groups’, Montell identifies the “us vs. them” structures that give cult adherents a sense of belonging they might not otherwise be experiencing. The us/them and in/out group mentality at the core of cults serves to elevate some at the expense of others. This also leads to ‘purity tests’ that give validity to the cult followers’ experience. At the same time, cults operate on the principle that there is always another layer of purity that adherents can never achieve.

The most memorable case study for this is scientology. For instance, in scientology (and other cult-like settings), words are given new meanings that become a kind of code to those “in the know.” Again, that is able to contribute to an in-group and an out-group. We see this in all kinds of places; different communities have their own lexicon. What is different about scientology is that if a member is found to have used a word incorrectly, they are subjected to rigorous “testing” (re-programming) until they demonstrate that they now have the accepted understanding of the word. I found that section pretty compelling because it seemed the most codified and controlled use of language of the different groups in question. 

Despite other cult-like settings not being as interventionist, necessarily, in their adherents’ use of language, there are certain patterns that emerge. One chapter of the text is focused on Multi-level Marketing schemes and another focuses on fitness crazes, like spin and Bikram yoga, and Montell highlights how formulaic their messaging can be. Montell is pretty funny in creating fake outreach messages of a woman trying to recruit for her MLM. As entertaining (and informative) as it is to explain the patterns in the #girlboss dialect, Montell is also pretty sympathetic to those folks that get duped. She highlights the research that shows how cult adherents are not necessarily ignorant but that they hold a more optimistic disposition.

One of the most useful elements of Montell’s analysis of language is her commentary on “thought-terminating clichés.” Those are all those phrases that are designed to make people stop reflecting. Statements like “it is what it is” stand out as an example that encourages people to just stop thinking. Montell touches on the Trump cult briefly, but I can’t help but think of “thought-terminating clichés” like Make America Great Again as a response to any challenge to critical thinking.

Amanda Montell is a special voice in contemporary discourse. I think she’s such an accessible writer that writes in a fun and engaging voice about contemporary issues. The topics she’s addressing are deep and academic, but are delivered with such clarity that readers are made to feel welcome within the complexity of the discourse. I think I liked Wordslut a bit better, but Cultish is more broadly applicable across contexts.

Happy reading!