Flying beyond the immense crowd of poets of this century (Roberto Minichini together with Hermann Hesse)

I imagine myself carried on a slow drifting cloud beside Hermann Hesse (1877–1962) while the world beneath us expands into an immense terrain made of poets of the twenty first century. They rise like a single living mass, tens of millions of hands lifted upward, a vast collective organism that speaks in short bursts, fragments, impulses. Everything below moves with the rhythm of immediacy. Lines break before they can grow, thoughts appear as flashes without structure, and the age praises this brevity as if depth could fit inside a handful of words. What reaches us is a continuous vibration of tiny statements that cancel one another, a restless surface where nothing has the time to unfold into form. This era confuses speed with insight and mistakes compression for height, convinced that a few sentences can contain what requires long architecture and patient development. High above that tumult another landscape becomes possible. Distance creates the wide internal space where a thought can extend itself without interruption, where a sentence can gather weight, direction, and resonance. Complex prose demands this kind of vastness, a field in which ideas can circle back, expand, connect remote elements, and build the long inner bridges that give writing its authority. I speak to Hesse as if we were continuing one of his interior journeys and I tell him that we must keep rising above this immeasurable multitude if we wish to guard the demanding craft of real prose. Hesse listens with his quiet gravity and replies that true literature survives only when one remains faithful to the slow movement of deep thinking, to the pages that refuse haste, to the long lines that shape meaning through their very extension. Together we glide over the ocean of poets filling our time. We do not despise them, yet we refuse to confuse abundance with greatness. What we seek is another order of magnitude, the kind of height reached only through length, patience, and the layered construction of thought. In this suspended journey we find again the strength of serious prose, a form that needs vastness to exist and loses itself when reduced to the scale of the instant. Here, far above the noise, writing recovers the breadth that allows intelligence to reveal its full dimension.

 

Roberto Minichini, February 2026