Words from the Steppenwolf:
The
devil is the
spirit, and we are his unhappy children.
...women as well as men who lived half for art and half for pleasure... I had a glimpse into this kind of life, remarkable alike for its singular
innocence and singular
corruption.
I might have made the most intelligent and
penetrating remarks about the ramifications and the cuases of my sufferings, my
sickness of soul, my general
bedevilment of
neurosis. The mechanism was transparaent to me. But what I needed was not knowledge and understanding. What I longed for in my despair was life and
resolution, action and reaction, impulse and
impetus.
There is much to be said for
contentment and painlessness, for these bearable and
submissive days, on which neither pain nor
pleasure is audible, but pass by whispering and on tip-toe. But the worst of it is that it is just this contentment that I cannot endure. After a short time it fills me with
irrepressible hatred and
nausea. In
desperation I have to escape and throw myself on the road to pleasure, or, if that cannot be, on the road to pain. When I have neither pleasure nor pain and have been breathing for a while the lukewarm,
insipid air of these so-called good and tolerable days, I feel so bad in my childish
soul that I smash my moldering
lyre of thanksgiving in the face of the
slumbering god of contentment and would rather feel the very
devil burn in me than this warmth of a well-heated room... 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.
Hermann Hesse