"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.