Steppenwolf

Hermann Hesse

One day I would be a better hand at the game. One day I would learn how to laugh. Pablo was waiting for me, and Mozart too.

He was, in spite of all, a real Christian and a real martyr. 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.

Obeying is like eating and drinking. There's nothing like it if you've been without it too long.

You have a picture of life within you, a faith, a challenge, and you were ready for deeds and sufferings and sacrifices, and then you became aware by degrees that the world asked no deeds and no sacrifices of you whatever, and that life is no poem of heroism with heroic parts to play and so on, but a comfortable room where people are quite content with eating and drinking, coffee and knitting, cards and wireless. And whoever wants more and has got it in him--the heroic and the beautiful, and the reverence for the great poets or for the saints--is a fool and a Don Quixote.

For half an hour I've known that you're called Harry. I know it because I asked you. But you don't care to know my name.

I had played Don Quixote often enough in my difficult, crazed life, had put honor before comfort, and heroism before reason. There was an end of it!

In reality, however, every ego, so far form being a unity is in the highest degree a manifold world, a constellated heaven, a chaos of forms, of states and stages, of inheritances and potentialities.

All interpretation, all psychology, all attempts to make to make things comprehensible, require the medium of theories, mythologies and lies; and a self-respecting author should not omit, at the close of an exposition, to dissipate these lies so far as may be in his power.

Ah, Harry, we have to stumble through so much dirt and humbug before we reach home. And we have no one to guide us. Our only guide is our homesickness.

O restless spirits! We search and struggle and strive only to come to a place that lets us know we should have valued more the place of our starting, our home. The boy in the Alchemist has to wander all over the desert and to the farthest reaches of the earth, even to the pyramids to realize that his dream is at home. Myths are about the hero who leaves the home in order to return and be more fully at home. Why must this be? Why can't the genius burrow like a worm into his own soil? Why must he always be the sustenance of birds before he can know his knowledge?
Is it the pearl again? Are these the echoes of that milky smooth sphere?
And why must the pursuit of the deepest and most meaningful make the trivial but most necessary seem so foolish? Does the sage have to wander lost and lonely his whole life to finally realize: "But, then, I rather fancy it has more to do with this skill of bantering"? To know how to flirt, to banter, to joke and be easy, to know how to interact as a person of chemistry and sparkle is directly opposed to the pursuit of genius and art.

So it's necessary to be dead, Steppenwolf?

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

James Joyce

You are an artist, are you not, Mr Dedalus? said the dean, glancing up and blinking his pale eyes. The object of the artist is the creation of the beautiful. What the beautiful is is another question.

White roses and red roses: those were beautiful colours to think of. And the cards for first place and second place and third place were beautiful colours too: pink and cream and lavender. Lavender and cream and pink roses were beautiful to think of. Perhaps a wild rose might be like those colours and he remembered the song about the wild rose blossoms on the little green place. But you could not have a green rose. But perhaps somewhere in the world you could.

You made me confess the fears that I have. But I will tell you also what I do not fear. I do not fear to be alone or to be spurned for another or to leave whatever I have to leave. And I am not afraid to make a mistake, even a great mistake, a lifelong mistake and perhaps as long as eternity too.

The pen is a necessarily isolating tool. And as much as art unites and brings together, the artist is a bastion of loneliness. I wonder, too, if the artist must not have some disdain for those around him, hatred for life. The path from Henderson to Portrait to Steppenwolf is a path of hermits and voices crying out in the desert. Perhaps true artists are prophets and their artwork their prophecy. I have yet to hear of a prophet who wasn't a piece to a different puzzle.
The stories of our hearing are the stories of the life we all are not living yet are feeling. Just as there are really no two things that are the same (to be the same is to be one) and just as all things other are more truly the same (to be is to be like) so it is we love to hear stories about outcasts and aliens. But the only good outcast is the one who is trying to break in. What is the story of the outcast who has happily said goodbye and never looked back? All the same we are keepers deep down of our own secret alienation for this is what keeps us distinct and let's us live. Our unique nature is our shield. That we are not completely others (what others are) lets us go on with the next day; that we are not completely others (separate from) let's us live this day. We have to know that we are not alone to breathe, but we have to know that we are all alone in order to dream. And our lives are strange, strange mixtures of breath and dream.
Perhaps Joyce should have entitled his novel Searching for the Green Rose.

Henderson the Rain King

Saul Bellow

The lion is all the baggage that I have, I said. But that's all right. I'm country bred. I'm rugged.

America is so big, and everybody is working, making, digging, bulldozing, trucking, loading, and so on, and I guess the sufferers suffer at the same rate. Everybody wanting to pull together. I tried every cure you can think of. Of course, in an age of madness, to expect to be untouched by madness is a form of madness. But the pursuit of sanity can be a form of madness, too.

That's how it is, you bump into people casually by a tropical lake with crocodiles as part of a film-making expedition and you discover the good in them to be almost unlimited.

Curiously, I saw that he agreed with me. he was glad I had said this. Every brave man will think so, he told me. He will not want to live by passing on the wrath. A hit B? B hit C?--we have not enough alphabet to cover the condition. A brave man will try to make the evil stop with him. He shall keep the blow. No man shall get it from him, and that is a sublime ambition. So, a fellow throws himself in the sea of blows saying he does not believe it is infinite. In this way many courageous people have died. But an even larger number who had more of impatience than bravery. Who have said, 'Enough of the burden of wrath. I cannot bear my neck should be unfree. I cannot eat more of this mess of fear-pottage.

Sungo, he said, listen painstakingly, and I will tell you what I have a strong conviction about. I did as he said, for I thought he might tell me something hopeful about myself. The career of our specie, he said, is evidence that one imagination after another grows literal. Not dreams. Not mere dreams. I say not mere dreams because they have a way of growing actual. At school in Malindi I read all of Bulfinch. And I say not mere dream. No. Birds flew, harpies flew, Daedalus and son flew. And see here, it is no longer dreaming and story, for literally there is flying. You flew here, into Africa. All human accomplishment has this same origin, identically. Imagination is a force of nature. Is this not enough to make a person full of ecstasy? Imagination, imagination, imagination! It converts to actual. It sustains, it alters, it redeems! You see, he said, I sit here in Africa and devote myself to this in personal fashion, to my best ability, I am convinced. What Homo Sapiens imagines, he may slowly convert himself to. Oh, Henderson, how glad I am that you are here! I have longed for somebody to discuss with. A companion mind. You are a godsend to me.

If only we didn't have hearts we wouldn't know how sad it was. but we carry around these hearts, these potty damn mangoes in our breasts, which give us away.

Oh, you can't get away from rhythm, Romilayu, I recall saying many times to him. You just can't get away from it. The left hand shakes with the right hand, the inhale follows the exhale, the systole talks back to the diastole, the hands play patty-cake, and the feet dance with each other. And the seasons. And the stars, and all of that. And the tides, and all that junk. You've got to live at peace with it, because if it's going to worry you, you'll lose. You can't win against it. It keeps on and on and on. Hell, we'll never get away from rhythm, Romilayu. I wish my dead days would quit bothering me and leave me alone. The bad stuff keeps coming back, and it's the worst rhythm there is. The repetitions of a man's bad self, that's the worst suffering that's ever been known. But you can't get away from regularity. But the kind said I should change. I shouldn't be an agony type. Or a Lazarus type. The grass should be my cousins. Hey, Romilayu, not even Death knows how many dead there are. He could never run a census. But these dead should go. They make us think of them. That is their immortality. In us. But my back is breaking. I'm loaded down. It isn't fair--what about the grun-tu-molani?

You want to do me a favor, Your Highness, a big favor? The biggest favor possible?
Assuredly. Why certainly.
All right, then, this is it: will you expect the truth from me? That's my only hope. Without it everything else might as well go bust.

What would a book be like that was about a man who was not an alien? It seems that every story, every book (and my current adventure through A Hero With a Thousand Faces supports this) is about a person who does not fit in, about strangers and foreigners in their own lands, banished within. Is there a story about life within, not life without? Or is it some mode of storytelling that requires the teller to be outside, set off from the rest of the world?
Henderson in Henderson is about as far from being at home as you can be: he is not even at home with the part of him that is looking for a home. Few books have a read with a hero so strangely, and perhaps obliviously set apart from the rest of the world. There are many points in Henderson where you will wonder just how blind Henderson the narrator can be. Don't be quite so sure he doesn't know how blind you are. Any hero who spends as much time clad only in whitey-tighties and a helmet has to have some very formidable insight into how the world works.
It just occurred to me that I am a horrible hedger. I think I try to pass for intelligence a continual and arch-eyebrowed doubt. If a book seems to be about a pompous, belligerent old fool, I say don't be so sure you aren't the belligerent old fool and hope you don't notice that actually I am the belligerent old fool. Unfortunate, but useful. I have a feeling I have duped a few people this way. As long as you keep up the facade and never give too clear an opinion, but always give clear doubts, you should be able to maintain a high level of seeming intelligence.

Poorhouse Fair

John Updike

Living here, where there is no cause to be jealous--for don't you believe jealousy is the one real sin?--I've learned how sweet a human presence is, how timid, and safe. Yet when I could see, as a girl, I hated people--hated them terribly. They could run without tripping, and eat their food without spilling--my own eating was so unpleasant, I imagined, for others to watch. My sister would read to me; I hated her. I believed my parents loved her and only pitied me. There were so many jokes I couldn't understand. I must have set my ears against them. I know I indulged my disability in order to hurt my parents. Yet when my sight fell away finally, all those busy angry patches I couldn't quite make sense of, everything changed. A voice wasn't a twisted face but something musical. I could sit in a room with my parents and feel their emotions washing my sides, and hear a thousand details in their speech they were ignorant of, and feel my being in the room turn them toward gaiety and reverence. For when I was a young girl in my teens my presence did that.

Thus pronouncing Hook had a very clear inner apprehension of what virtue was: An austerity of the hunt, a manliness from which comes all life, so that it can be written that the woman takes her life from the man. As the Indian once served the elusive deer he hunted, men once served invisible goals, and grew hard in such service and pursuit, and lent their society an indispensable shadow. Impotent to provide this tempering salt, men would sink lower than women, as indeed they had. Women are the heroes of dead lands.

Life as a tragedy of misunderstandings. Updike works a story of people who consistently and misunderstand each other in small ways and it reminds me of life and startles me because somehow everything still works and goes on and we haven't all lost our heads and started hitting each other with rocks. But there is skill in the way Updike tells the story from everyone's perspective and it is a good feeling when you slowly start to realize that the problems of the story, of the characters' lives wouldn't be as bad or even wouldn't exist if they weren't assuming so much about each other and life.
We ain't never going to stop assuming, that should be a given of life, but perhaps we can work to change the atoms from which we operate and that might create in us a new, better way of living together. The question of every grievance that life (read: other people) have visited on us becomes perhaps a question of the rough nature of life itself. In most cases, the pain we feel is only the fault of living and life, though it be shared to us by other people. For whatever reason, living is pain and living with other people is hurting them. Since we know this, the love we share for each other can be that much greater. Maybe.
Poorhouse Fair will confuse you with its perspectives. Enjoy the confusion because it might help you to recognize the state of your own life.

The Fall

Albert Camus
Tr. Justin O'Brien

To achieve notoriety it is enough, after all, to kill one's concierge.

I sometimes think of what future historians will say of us. A single sentence will suffice for modern man: he fornicated and read the papers. After that vigorous definition, the subject will be, if I may say so, exhausted.

If pimps and thieves were invariably sentenced, all decent people would get to thinking they themselves were constantly innocent, cher monsieur. And in my opinion--all right, all right, I'm coming!--that's what must be avoided above all. Otherwise, everything would be a joke.

Yes, hell must be like that: streets filled with shop signs and no way of explaining one-self. One is classified once and for all.

An odd epoch, indeed! It's not at all surprising that minds are confused and that one of my friends, an atheist when he was a model husband, got converted when he became an adulterer!

I think perhaps this last quote has my faith wrapped up (entirely?) in it. Righteousness, not being ours, is not the reason we believe. We believe because at some point we are all adulterers; we believe because we are all found guilty before the courts; we believe that no matter how we act, there is something more going on.
Camus purpose in The Fall is to lay out the general guilt of our species. I don't know that it is from a particularly Christian stand point or a even from a religious stand point, but he surely does give you the eerie feeling of tingling hairs on the back of your neck: haven't we all heard a splash in the water and known of the evil and hoped that it wouldn't confront us so we could look elsewhere? Why else would we have such fervor in our prosecution of "criminals" who have not actually harmed us at all? We say that our sense of justice is outraged or that we are angered by the dreadfulness or evil of the act, but I have a feeling we like to pick out the clear cases of evil for ourselves and pin them down and label them and say Ha! Look! We've got it figured out! Here is what evil is! Here is what is wrong with the world! And we are not that.
But we are.
Our righteous anger, the volume of our voices, the stretching of screaming vocal chords all point an incriminating finger into our own lives. We're looking to the newspapers so we don't have to hear that splash echoing in the back of our minds. That splash kills us.

Log from the Sea of Cortez

John Steinbeck

Perhaps the most overrated virtue in our list of shoddy virtues is that of giving. Giving builds up the ego of the giver, makes him superior and higher and larger than the receiver. Nearly always, giving is a selfish pleasure, and in many cases it is a downright destructive and evil thing. One has only to remember some of our wolfish financiers who spend two-thirds of their lives clawing fortunes out of the guts of society and the latter third pushing it back. It is not enough to suppose that their philanthropy is a kind of frightened restitution, or that their natures change when they have enough. Such a nature never has enough and natures do not change that readily. I think that the impulse is the same in both cases. For giving can bring the same sense of superiority as getting does, and philanthropy may be another kind of spiritual avarice.
It is so easy to give, so exquisitely rewarding. Receiving, on the other hand, if it be well done, requires a fine balance of self-knowledge and kindness. It requires humility and tact and great understanding of relationships. In receiving you cannot appear, even to yourself, better or stronger or wiser than the giver, although you must be wiser to do it well.
It requires a self-esteem to receive--not self-love but just a pleasant acquaintance and liking for oneself.
Once Ed said to me, "For a very long time I didn't like myself." It was not said in self-pity but simply as an unfortunate fact. "It was a very difficult time," he said, "and very painful. I did not like myself for a number of reasons, some of them valid and some of them pure fancy. I would hate to have to go back to that. Then gradually," he said, "I discovered with surprise and pleasure that a number of people liked me. And I thought, if they can like me, why cannot I like myself? Just thinking it did not do it, but slowly I learned to like myself and then it was all right."
This was not said in self-love in its bad connotation but in self-knowledge. He meant literally that he had learned to accept and like the person "Ed" as he liked other people. It gave him a great advantage. Most people do not like themselves at all. They distrust themselves, put on masks and pomposities. They quarrel and boast and pretend and are jealous because they do not like themselves. But mostly they do not even know themselves well enough to form a true liking, and since we automatically fear and dislike strangers, we fear and dislike our stranger-selves.
Once Ed was able to like himself he was released from the secret prison of self-contempt. Then he did not have to prove superiority any more by any of the ordinary methods, including giving. He could receive and understand and be truly glad, not competitively glad.
Ed's gift for receiving made him a great teacher. Children brought shells to him and gave him information about the shells. And they had to learn before they could tell him.
In conversation you found yourself telling him things--thoughts, conjectures, hypotheses--and you found a pleased surprise at yourself for having arrived at something you were not aware that you could think or know. It gave you such a good sense of participation with him that you could present him with this wonder.
Then Ed would say, "Yes, that's so. That's the way it might be and besides--" and he would illuminate it but not so that he took it away from you. He simply accepted it.
Although h is creativeness lay in receiving that does not mean that he kept things as property. When you had something from him it was not something that was his that he tore away from himself. When you had a thought from him or a piece of music or twenty dollars or a steak dinner, it was not his--it was yours already, and his was only the head and hand that steadied it in position toward you. For this reason no one was ever cut off from him. Association with him was deep participation with him, never competition.
I wish we could all be so. If we could learn even a little to like ourselves, maybe our cruelties and angers might melt away. Maybe we would not have to hurt one another just to keep our ego-chins above water.

We have thought in this connection that the speed and tempo and tone of modern writing might be built on the nervous clacking of a typewriter; that the brittle jerky thinking of the present might rest on the brittle jerky curricula of our schools with their urge to "turn them out." To turn them out. They use the phrase in speeches; turn them out to what? And the young biologists tearing off pieces of their subject, tatters of the life forms, like sharks tearing out hunks of a dead horse, looking at them, tossing them away. This is neither a good nor a bad method; it is simply the one of our time. We can look with longing back to Charles Darwin, staring into the water over the side of the sailing ship, but for us to attempt to imitate that procedure would be romantic and silly. To take a sailing boat, to fight tide and wind, to move four hundred miles on a horse when we could take a plane, would be not only ridiculous but ineffective. For we first, before our work, are products of our time. We might produce a philosophical costume piece, but it would be completely artificial. However, we can and do look on the measured, slow-paced accumulation of sight and thought and of the Darwins with a nostalgic longing.

And then we thought of what they are, and we are--products of disease and sorrow and hunger and alcoholism. And suppose some all-powerful mind and will should cure our species so that for a number of generations we would be healthy and happy? We are the products of our disease and suffering. These are factors as powerful as other genetic factors. To cure and feed would be to change the species, and the result would be another animal entirely. We wonder if we would be able to tolerate our own species without a history of syphilis and tuberculosis. We don't know.

An Indian had paid three pesos for the harpoon several years ago. Obviously, since that had been paid, that was the price. But he had not yet learned to give time a money value. If he had to go three days in a canoe to get another harpoon, he could not add his time to the price, because he had never thought of time as a medium of exchange. At first we tried to explain the feeling we all had that time is a salable article, but we had to give it up. Time, these Indians said, went on. If one could stop time, or take it away, or hoard it, then one might sell it. One might as well sell air or heart or cold or health or beauty. And we thought of the great businesses in our country--the sale of clean air, of heat and cold, the scrabbling bargains in health offered over the radio, the boxed and bottled beauty, all for a price. This was not bad or good, it was only different. Time and beauty, they thought, could not be captured and sold, and we knew they not only could be, but that time could be warped and beauty made ugly. And again it was not good or bad. Our people would pay more for pills in a yellow box than in a white box--even the refraction of light had its price. They would buy books because they should rather than because they wanted to. They bought immunity from fear in salves to go under their arms. They bought romantic adventure in bars of tomato-colored soaps. They bought education by the foot and hefted volumes to see that they were not short-weighted. They purchased pain, and then analgesics to put down the pain. They bought courage and rest and had neither. And they are vastly amused at the Indian who, with his silver, bought Heaven and ransomed his father from Hell. These Indians were far too ignorant to understand the absurdities merchandising can really achieve when it has an enlightened people to work on.

Well, if you waded through the massive amounts of text above, you are now a better person, or at the least a person inspired to try and be better, to try and be more like--this is where you expect me to say, more like Ed, but that's not the point--to try and be more like yourself. You've heard the phrase, Ask and you shall receive? It is true, but in ways you'd never imagine. This world is the biggest book and it's waiting to be read. It's a book that teaches you it's language as you read it--truly a wonderful thing. And this book, like any good book, points every word and sentence at every other word and sentence, so that you can learn about the petty nature of dissatisfied people from the wigglings of a tube worm. If while you are walking (reading) you see what may be a strange colored leaf or a rusted bolt from a car or a rolling soda lid or a flying piece of paper, maybe it is worth your while to stop and read that sentence a little more carefully. In good writing, even the phrases about tiny things are filled with the weighty meaning of the whole book. This world is written by an excellent author.