But it is a flat anxiety. Our collective worries are banal. After all, you have to worry about something. But I think Hesse's commentary about our frivolity is exactly right, and I'd be the first one to be rounded up if anybody did anything about it. Everything in the culture is derivative.
High art is usually incomprehensible, because it was intended to be.
Technology is increasing in leaps and bounds, but human wisdom and sensibility seem to be stagnating. But that doesn't mean there aren't hidden burdens that we all bear but can't identify. The Medieval order is as incomprehensible to us as the Feuilletist Age is to the far-off Masters of Herman Hesse's Magic Bead Game. Historians have long marveled at how medieval peasants tended to destroy everything around them. In feudal societies, the connections between Church and State and custom may have been invisible, but that doesn't mean they weren't very real to peasants.