steppenwolf
title of a novel written by hermann hesse of a lonely intellectual trying to figure out his place in a world consumed in its own meaninglessness and worthlessness.
"Ah, but 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! How could I fail to be a lone wolf, an uncouth hermit, as I did not share one of its aims nor understand one of its pleasures...I cannot understand what pleasures and joys they are that drive people to overcrowded railways and hotels, into the packed cafes with the suffocating and oppressive music...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 imagination; in life it finds absurd. and in fact, if the world is right, if this music of the cafes, these mass enjoyments of these Americanized men who are pleased with so little are right, then I am wrong, I am crazy. I am the Steppenwolf who I often call myself; the beast astray who find neither home nor joy nor nourishment in a world that is strange and incomprehensible to him."
(quote from the novel)
(quote from the novel)
steppenwolf by Rara July 5, 2005
