Steppenwolf

It's late and I should be in bed, dreaming of ice cream or whatever I'll dream of tonight. Instead I'm sitting at my faux-Japanese coffee table listening to tinny mp3's on the laptop and watching my dog snooze a few feet away: his legs akimbo and his one eye peeled slightly, scrutinizing me to see if I'll decide to get him a treat any time soon.

I gave up on Gabriel García Márquez for the time being: he's too tough to enjoy when I'm in the middle of class as I am now. He's more of a summer read, I'd guess. In the meantime I picked up Hermann Hesse's Steppenwolf. I'd attempted Hesse once before, The Siddhartha, and enjoyed the 1/2 I read. Steppenwolf, though a lot more famous, is a pretty 'thick' read. Not that the book is long (only 248 pages) ... but the text is almost syrupy with philosophical meandering.

When I'm reading classical literature I'm more patient than I would be with a modern book: I won't give up on it quite as fast. The whole time I read I think: "There's a reason this is a classic. It's important for me to keep reading." We'll call this the Citizen Kane Syndrome.

Grudgingly I've found a few things I like:

The protagonist is Harry, an asocial intellectual living in post-war Germany. He's unable to fit into society and yet unable to tear away from it. He's bored and hateful of civilization -- seeing mediocrity in those around him -- but is drawn to that very mediocrity.

Here's a passage:

'It is open to a man to give himself up wholly to spiritual views, to seeking after God, to the ideal of saintliness. On the other hand, he can equally give himself up entirely to the life of instinct, to the lusts of the flesh, and so direct all his efforts to the attainment of momentary pleasures. Now it is between the two, in the middle of the road, that the bourgeois seeks to walk. He will never surrender himself either to lust or to asceticism ... In short, his aim is to make a home for himself between two extremes in a temperate zone without violent storms and tempests; and in this he succeeds though it be at the cost of that intensity of life and feeling which an extreme life affords. A man cannot live intensely except at the cost of the self.'

Hesse goes on to say that intellects and artists do not belong to the bourgeois class, but they have to make a decision: do I suffer and fight against society or do I make compromises and dumb down my potential? (Two great books which illustrate this: My Name is Asher Lev and The Fountainhead) He says that the only way the latter can retain their sanity is by escaping into humor .... which, interestingly enough, was a previous discussion topic.

Harry really does come across as an arrogant prig in the book ... and I don't like comparing myself to him. I also don't really throw myself in with either the 'intellects' or the 'artists' these days ... It's just that, if you know my story, you know that I've always felt torn between two poles for most of my life.

I feel torn between theism and atheism, between vice and virtue, between emotion and rationality, between love and being alone. Like Harry, I know that no greatness is ever achieved by existing in the middle: it is only by throwing your lot in with one side or the other that you are ever truly great. And yet, somehow, I always find myself back in the middle.