Steppenwolf

by Hermann Hesse

As for others and the world around him he never ceased in his heroic and earnest endeavor to love them, to be just to them, to do them no harm, for the love of his neighbor was as deeply in him as the hatred of himself, and so his whole life was an example that love of one’s neighbor is not possible without love of oneself, and that self-hate is really the same thing as sheer egoism, and in the long run breeds the same cruel isolation and despair.

A man of the Middle Ages would detest the whole mode of our present-day life as something far more than horrible, far more than barbarous.

there are times when a whole generation is caught in this way between two ages, two modes of life, with the consequence that it loses all power to understand itself

He belongs to those whose fate it is to live the whole riddle of human destiny heightened to the pitch of a personal torture, a personal hell.

A wild longing for strong emotions and sensations seethes in me, a rage against this toneless, flat, normal and sterile life.

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.

it is hard to find this track of the divine in the midst of this life we lead, in this besotted humdrum age of spiritual blindness, with its architecture, its business, its politics, its men!

I cannot remain for long in either theater or picture-house. I can scarcely read a paper, seldom a modern book. I cannot understand what pleasures and joys they are that drive people to the overcrowded railways and hotels, into the packed cafés with the suffocating and oppressive 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.

I needed no more wine. The golden trail was blazed and I was reminded of the eternal, and of Mozart, and the stars. For an hour I could breathe once more and live and face existence, without the need to suffer torment, fear, or shame.

daily use and the accepted and common knowledge seemed sometimes to have no other aim than to be arrested now and again for an instant, and broken through, in order to yield the place of honor to the exceptional and miraculous.

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.

it is nobler and finer to be conquered by life than to fall by one’s own hand.

Our whole civilization was a cemetery where Jesus Christ and Socrates, Mozart and Haydn, Dante and Goethe were but the indecipherable names on moldering stones; and the mourners who stood round affecting a pretence of sorrow would give much to believe in these inscriptions which once were holy, or at least to utter one heart-felt word of grief and despair about this world that is no more.

our feelings, transient, as they are, as something eternal and divine.

She had to touch my deadened heart with her firm and pretty hand, and at the touch of life it would either leap again to flame or subside in ashes.

Are ideals attainable? 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.

For moments together my heart stood still between delight and sorrow to find how rich was the gallery of my life,

That night, however, for the first time since my downfall gave me back the unrelenting radiance of my own life and made me recognize chance as destiny once more and see the ruins of my being as fragments of the divine.

I long for the sufferings that make me ready and willing to die.”

In the mood between joy and fear that fate and parting imposed on me just now, all the stations and shrines of meditation in my life’s pilgrimage caught once more that gleam of pain and beauty that comes from things past;

She left me—left me indeed. Yes, it was autumn, it was fate, that had given the summer rose so full and ripe a scent.