Steppenwolf

Herman Hesse

Quotations reprinted without permission from the Bantam Edition (translated by Basil Creighton)

...and I confess that I have not by a long way done with him even now. I often dream of him at night, and the mere existance of such a man, much as I got to like him, has had a thoroughly disturbing and disquieting effect on me.
He had thought more than other men, and in matters of the intellect he had that calm objectivity, that certainty of thought and knowledge, such as only really intellectual men have, who have no axe to grind, who never wish to shine, or to talk others down, or to always appear in the right.
In the course of time I was more and more conscious, too, that this affliction was not due to any defects of nature but rather to a profusion of gifts and powers which had not attained to harmony.
I have practiced abstinence myself for years, and had my time of fasting, too, but now I find myself once more beneath the sign of Aquarius, a dark and humid constellation.
There is much to be said for contentment and painlessness, for these bearable and submissive days, on which neither pain nor pleasure is audible, but pass by whispering and on tip-toe. But the worst of it is that it is just this contentment that I cannot endure. After a short time it fills me with irrepressible hatred an nausea. In desperation I have to escape and throw myself on the road to pleasure, or, if that cannot be, on the road to pain. When I have neither pleasure nor pain and have been breathing for a while the lukewarm insipid air of these so-called good and tolerable days, I feel so bad in my childish soul that I smash my moldering lyre of thanksgiving in the face of the slumbering god of contentment and would rather feel the very devil burn in me than this warmth of a well-heated room... For what I always hated and detested and cursed above all things was this contentment, this healthiness and comfort, this carefully preserved optimism of the middle classes, this fat and prosperous brood of mediocrity.
He has a suspicion of his alloted place in the world, a suspicion of the Immortals, a suspicion that he may meet himself face to face; and he is aware of the existence of that mirror in which he has such bitter need to look and from which he shrinks in such deathly fear.
The human merry-go-round sees many changes: the illusion that cost India the efforts of thousands of years to unmask is the same illusion that the West has labored just as hard to maintain and strengthen.
`Man', whatever people think of him, is never anything more than a temporary bourgeois compromise. Convention rejects and bans certain of the more naked instincts, a little consciousness, morality and debestialization is called for, and a modicum of spirit is not only permitted but even though necessary.
I took my problems and my thoughts with me to the company of women, and it would have seemed to me utterly impossible to love a girl for more than an hour who had scarcely read a book, scarcely knew what reading was, and could not have distinguished Tchaikovsky from Beethoven. Maria had no education. She had no need of these circuitous substitutes.
All the girls I had ever loved were mine. each gave me what she alone had to give and to each I gave what she alone knew how to take.
Yet though she played at being a child she had seen through me completely, and though she made me her pupil there and then in the game of living for each fleeting moment, she seemed to know more of life than is known to the wisest of the wise. It mihgt be the highest wisdom or the merest artlessness. It is certain in any case that life is quite disarmed by the gift to live so entirely in the present, to treasure with such eager care every flower by the wayside and the light that plays on every passing moment.
Do we live to abolish death? No -- we live to fear it and then again to love it, and just for death's sake it is that our spark of life glows for an hour now and then so brightly.
There are always a few such people who demand the utmost of life and yet cannot come to terms with its stupidity and crudeness.
The devil is the spirit, and we are his unhappy children.
...we are all dreaming of a speech without words that utters the inexpressible and gives form to the formless.
...women as well as men who lived half for art and half for pleasure... I had a glimpse into this kind of life, remarkable alike for its singular innocence and singular corruption.
Hadn't we all as connoisseurs and critics in our youth been consumed with love for works of art and for artists that today we regarded with doubt and dismay?
The images of many women floated by me with an unearthly fragrance like moist sea flowers on the surface of the water. Women whom I had loved, desired and sung, whose love I had seldom won and seldom striven to win... These pictures -- there were hundreds of them, with names and without -- all came back. They rose fresh and new out of this night of love, and I knew again, what in my wretchedness I had forgoteen, that they were my life's possession and all its worth.
You have no doubt guessed long since that the conquest of time and the escape from reality, or however else it may be that you choose to describe your longing, means simply the wish to be relieved of your so-called personality. That is the prison where you lie.
...curse the whole world one moment and, the next, to be falling all over myself in the eagerness of my response to the first amiable greeting of the first good honest fellow who came my way, to be wallowing like a suckling-pig in the luxury of a little pleasant feeling and friendly esteem.
Mechanically I bent and unbent my stiffened fingers as though to fight the ravages of a secret poison.
Well, get up, so I told myself, lather yourself, scrape your chin till it bleeds, dress and show an amiable disposition towards your fellow-men.
The on again in mortal dread and an intense yearning for life.
I believe that the struggle against death, the undconditional and self-willed determination to live, is the motive power behind the lives and activities of all outstanding men.
Seriousness, young man, is an accident of time. It consists, I don't mind telling you in confidence, in putting too high a value on time ... In eternity, however, there is no time, you see. Eternity is a mere moment, just long enough for a joke.
She was the one window, the one tiny crack of light in my black hole of dread.
I might have made the most intelligent and penetrating remarks about the ramifications and the cuases of my sufferings, my sickness of soul, my general bedevilment of neurosis. The mechanism was transparaent to me. But what I needed was not konwledge and understanding. What I longed for in my despair was life and resolution, action and reaction, impulse and impetus.
But it's a poor fellow who can't take his pleasure without asking other people's permission.
And all this, I said, ... would be of no more service to man than as an escape from himself and his true aims, and a means of surrounding himself with an ever closer mesh of distractions and useless activities.
...given over bit by bit to self-criticism and at every point was found wanting.