Steppenwolf

This will be a long post. Below are sections of a book i'm reading and I love these parts.

'My regret for the present day for all the countless hours and days that I lost in mere passivity and that brought me nothing, not even the shocks of awakening. But, thank God, there were exceptions. There were now and then, though rarely, the hours that brought the welcome shock, pulled down the walls and brought me back again from my wanderings to the living heart of the world. Sadly and yet deeply moved, I set myself to recall the last of these experiences. It was at a concert of lovely old music. After two or three notes of the piano the door was opened all of a sudden to the other world. I sped through heaven and saw God at work. I suffered holy pains. I dropped all my defences and was afraid of nothing in the world. I accepted all things and to all things I gave up my heart. It did not last very long, a quarter of an hour perhaps; but it returned to me in a dream at night, and since, through all the barren days, I caught a glimpse of it now and then. Sometimes for a minute or two I saw it clearly, threading my life like a divine and golden track. But nearly always it was blurred in dirt and dust. Then again it gleamed out in golden sparks as though never to be lost again and yet was soon quite lost once more...

How can I fail to be a lone wolf, and an uncouth hermit, as I did not share one of its aims nor understand one of its pleasures? I cannot remain for long in either theatre or movie. I can scarcely read a paper, seldom a modern book. I cannot understand what pleasure and joys they are that drive people to the overcrowded railways and hotels, into the packed cafes with the suffocating and obtrusive music, to the bars and variety entertainments, to world exhibitions, to the Corsos. I cannot understand nor share these joys, though they are within my reach, for which thousands of others strive. On the other hand, what happens to me in my rare hours of joy, what for me is bliss and life and ecstasy and exaltation, the world in general seeks at most in works of fiction; in life it finds it absurd. And in fact, if the world is right, if this music of the cafes, these mass-enjoyments and these Americanised men who are pleased with so little are right, then I am wrong, I am crazy. I am truth the Steppenwolf that I often call myself; that beast astray who finds neither home nor joy nor nourishment in a world that is strange and incomprehensible to him...

In this connexion one thing more must be said. There are a good many people of the same kind as Harry. Particularly many artists are of his kind. These persons all have two souls, two beings within them. There is God and the devil in them; the mother's blood and the father's; the capacity for happiness and the capacity for suffering; and in just such state of enmity and entanglement were the wolf and man in Harry. And these men, for whom life has no repose, live at times in their rare moments of happiness with such strength and indescribable beauty, the spray of there moment's happiness is flung so high and dazzlingly over the wide sea of suffering, that the light of it, spreading its radiance, touches others too with its enchantment. Thus, like a precious, fleeting foam over the sea of suffering arise all those works of art, in which a single individual lifts himself for an hour so high above his personal destiny that his happiness shines like a star and appears to all who see it as something eternal and as their own dream of happiness. All these men, whatever their deeds and work may be, have really no life; that is to say, their lives are non-existent and have no form. They are no heroes, artists or thinkers in the same way that other men are judges, doctors, shoemakers, or schoolmasters. Their life consists of a perpetual tide, unhappy and torn with pain, terrible and meaningless, unless one is ready to see its meaning in just those rare experiences, acts, thoughts and works that shine out above the chaos of such a life...

Men if every kind have their characteristics, their aspects, their virtues and vices and their deadly sins. It was part of the Steppenwolf's aspects that he was a night prowler. The morning was a bad time of the day for him. He feared it and it never brought him and good. On no morning of his life has he ever been in good spirits nor done any good before midday, nor ever had others. By degrees during the afternoon he warmed and became alive, and only towards evening, on his good days, was he productive, active and sometimes, aglow with joy. With this was bound up his need for loneliness and independence. There was never a man with a deeper and more passionate craving for independence than he... 

Only through his virtue, he was bound the closer to his destiny of suffering. It happened to him as it does to all; what he strove for with the deepest and stubbornest instinct of his being fell to his lot, but more than is good for men. In the beginning his dream and his happiness, in the end it was his bitter fate. The man of power is ruined by power, the man of money by money, the submissive man by subservience, the pleasure seeker by pleasure. He achieved his aim. He was ever independant. He took orders from no man and ordered his ways to suit no man. Independently and alone, he decided what to do and leave undone. For every strong man attains to that which a genuine impulse bids him seek. But in the midst of the freedom was a death that he stood alone. The world in an uncanny fashion left him in peace. Other men concerned him no longer. He was not ever concerned about himself. He began to suffocate slowly in the more and more rarefied atmosphere of remoteness and solitude. For not it was his wish no longer, nor his aim, to be alone and independent, but rather his lot and his sentence. The magic was had been fulfilled and could not be cancelled and it was no good now to open his arms with longing and goodwill to welcome the bounds of society. People left him alone now. It was not, however, that he was an object of hatred and repugnance. On the contrary, he had many friends. A great many people liked him. But it was no more than sympathy and friendliness. He received invitations, presents , pleasant letters; but no more. No one came near to him. There was no link left, and no one could have had any part in his life even had any one wished it. For the air of lonely men surrounded him now, a still atmosphere in which the world around him slipped away, leaving him incapable of relationship, an atmosphere against which neither will nor longing availed. This was one of the significant earmarks of his life...

Finally at the age of forty seven of thereabouts, a happy, but not harmless, idea came to him from which he often derived some amusement. He appointed his fiftieth birthday as the day on which he might allow himself to take his own life....

To make all of this come true, or perhaps to be able at last to dare the leap into the unknown, a Steppenwolf must once have a good look at himself. He must look deeply into the chaos of his own soul and plumb its depths. The riddle of his existence would then be revealed to him at once in all its changelessness and it would be impossible for him ever after to escape first from hell of the flesh to the comforts of a sentimental philosophy and then back to the blind orgy of his wolfishness. Man and wold would be compelled to recognise one another without the masks of false feeling and to look one another straight in the eye. Then they would either explode and separate forever and there would be no more Steppenwolf, or else they would come to terms in the dawning light of humour.