Butterflies: Reflections, Tales, and Verse

This elegant collection of writings on butterflies and nature reveals Hermann Hesse’s inspired thoughts on change and its effects on our sense of beauty, soul, and wonderment.

Joined with the artistry of Jakob Hübner, whose precise and beautiful engraved copper chalcography technique was among Mr. Hesse’s favorites, Butterflies: Reflections, Tales, and Verse inspires a window through which to see a butterfly’s cycle of life as also being a representation of our own transitions.

"I have always had a connection with butterflies and other fleeting and ephemeral beauties, while I have never succeeded in maintaining permanent, committed and so-called solid relationships," writes Hermann Hesse in a letter from 1926. This preference, occasionally resembling an elective affinity, for "flowers and butterflies, that are of everlasting things, a fleeting allegory" - as he says in one of his poems, has left its mark on Hesse's entire oeuvre.