More STEPPENWOLF quotes

I finished Steppenwolf Sunday, then started reading Peter Davies' The French Revolution:  A Beginner's Guide for my History Meetup.

Monday I had dinner with Maria and Sergey at Yorkville Crepes.  Then we went to the Yorkville Library for the Short Story Meetup, where we discussed three more Chekhov stories: "In the Ravine" (which made my jaw drop!), "The Bishop" and "The Lady With the Dog." John S. was there and gave me a copy of the Frank Norris novel McTeague, upon which Erich Von Stroheim's silent classic Greed is based!  Another book that I hope to read someday...

Donald came over for his birthday and I bought a cake at Loblaw's.  I grabbed the first vanilla cake I saw, and its expiry date was tomorrow so I got it half-price--I hope that doesn't make me a cheapskate.

Can't resist posting some more Steppenwolf quotes!

"Now and again I have expressed the opinion that every nation, and even every person, would do better, instead of rocking himself to sleep with political catchwords about war guilt, to ask himself how far his own fault and negligences and evil tendencies are guilty of the war and all the other wrongs of the world, and that therein lies the only possible means of avoiding the next war.  They don't forgive me that, for, of course, they are themselves all guiltless, the Kaiser, the generals, the trade magnates, the politicians, the papers.  Not one of them has the least thing to blame himself for.  Not one has any guilt.  One might believe that everything was for the best, even though a few million men lie under the ground. And mind you, Hermine, even though such abusive articles cannot annoy me any longer, they often sadden me all the same.  Two-thirds of my countrymen read this kind of newspaper, read things written in this tone every morning and every night, are every day worked up and admonished and incited, and robbed of their peace of mind and better feelings by them, and the end and aim of it all is to have the war over again, the next war that draws nearer and nearer, and it will be a good deal more horrible than the last.  All that is perfectly clear and simple.  Any one could comprehend it and reach the same conclusion after a moment's reflection.  But nobody wants to.  Nobody wants to avoid the next war, nobody wants to spare himself and his children the next holocaust if this be the cost."

"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.  Good."

"The communion of the saints, in earlier times it was set by painters in a golden heaven, shining, beautiful and full of peace, and it is nothing else but what I meant a moment ago when I called it eternity.  It is there we belong.  There is our home.  It is that which our heart strives for.  And for that reason, Steppenwolf, we long for death....  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."

"For the first time I understood Goethe's laughter, the laughter of the immortals.  It was a laughter without an object.  It was simply light and lucidity.  It was that which is left over when a true man has passed through all the sufferings, vices, mistakes, passions and misunderstandings of men and got through to eternity and the world of space.  And eternity was nothing else than the redemption of time, its return to innocence, so to speak, and its transformation again into space."

"I was bathed in sweet joy like a rippling pool.  And yet that was only the shell.  Within all was significant and tense with fate, and while, love-lost and tender, I was busied with the little sweet appealing things of love and sank apparently without a care in the caress of happiness, I was conscious all the while in my heart how my fate raced on at breakneck speed, racing and chasing like a frightened horse, straight for the precipitous abyss, spurred on by dread and longing to the consummation of death."

"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; and so too had the little tavern, thick with smoke, among whose patrons I had lately been numbered and whose primitive opiate of a bottle of cheap wine had lately heartened me enough to spend one more night in my lonely bed and to endure life for one more day."

At the movies: "I saw the prophet and his awestruck people pass through to the other side, and behind them I saw the war chariots of Pharaoh come into sight and the Egyptians stop and start on the brink of the sea, and then, when they ventured courageously on, I saw the mountainous waters close over the heads of Pharaoh in all the splendour of his gold trappings and over all his chariots and all his men, recalling, as I saw it, Handel's wonderful duet for two basses in which this event is magnificently sung.  I saw Moses, further, climbing Sinai, a gloomy hero in a gloomy wilderness of rocks, and I looked on as Jehovah in the midst of storm and thunder and lightning imparted the Ten Commandments to him, while his worthless people set up the golden calf at the foot of the mountain and gave themselves over to somewhat roisterous celebrations.  I found it so strange and incredible to be looking on at all this, to be seeing the sacred writ, with its heroes and its wonders, the source in our childhood of the first dawning suspicion of another world than this, presented for money before a grateful public that sat quietly eating the provisions brought with it from home.  A nice little picture, indeed, picked up by chance in the huge wholesale clearance of culture in these days!"

"As a marionette whose thread the operator has let go for a moment wakes to new life after a brief paralysis of death and coma and once more plays its lively part, so did I at this jerk of the magic thread throw myself with the elasticity and eagerness of youth into the tumult from which I had just retreated in the listlessness and weariness of elderly years.  Never did sinner show more haste to get to hell."

"There aren't any police and such like any more.  We can choose, Dora.  Either we stay quietly up here and shoot down every car that tries to pass, or else we can take a car and drive off in it and let others shoot at us. It's all the same which side we take.  I'm for staying here."

"When you listen to radio you are a witness of the everlasting war between idea and appearance, between time and eternity, between the human and the divine.  Exactly, my dear sir, as the radio for ten minutes together projects the most lovely music without regard into the most impossible places, into respectable drawing rooms and attics and into the midst of chattering, guzzling, yawning and sleeping listeners, and exactly as it strips this music of its sensuous beauty, spoils and scratches and beslimes it and yet cannot altogether destroy its spirit, just so does life, the so-called reality, deal with the sublime picture-play of the world and make a hurly-burly of it."

THE WAR LORD

"The pious," she went on meditatively, "after all know most about this.  That is why they set up the saints and what they call the communion of the saints.  The saints, these are the true men, the younger brothers of the Saviour.  We are with them all our lives long in every good deed, in every brave thought, in every love.  The communion of the saints, in earlier times it was set by painters in a golden heaven, shining, beautiful and full of peace, and it is nothing else but what I meant a moment ago when I called it eternity.  It is the kingdom on the other side of time and appearances.  It is there we belong.  There is our home.  It is that which our heart strives for.  And for that reason, Steppenwolf, we long for death.  There you will find your Goethe again and Novalis and Mozart, and I my saints, Christopher, Philip of Neri and all.  There are many saints who at first were sinners.  Even sin can be a way to saintliness, sin and vice.  You will laugh at me, but I often think that even my friend Pablo might be a saint in hiding.  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"--Steppenwolf

Yesterday John P. took me on a tour of the Art Gallery of Ontario.  I've been there before, but not with someone who had so much to say about the art there. He has more artistic opinions than I do!  He even treated me to dinner at the AGO restaurant afterward. (I had a cornish hen and churro funnel cake.)

That evening I saw Franklin J. Schaffner's The War Lord (for the second time), screening the video for the History Meetup.  It's one of the more intelligent movies about feudalism, with Charlton Heston well cast as the antihero lead.

Last week at the History Meetup, where we discussed Thailand, Bohdan gave me a fancy coffee-table book about the architectural marvels of the world!

STEPPENWOLF quotes

Steppenwolf is an amazing novel, really original!  Here are some quotes from the  Basil Creighton translation I'm reading:

"When the lecturer ascended the platform and began his address, many of his hearers, who had expected a sort of prophet, were disappointed by his rather dapper appearance and conceited air.  And when he proceeded, by way of thanking them for their attendance in such numbers, the Steppenwolf threw me a quick look, a look which criticized both the words and the speaker of them--an unforgettable and frightful look which spoke volumes!  It was a look that did not simply criticize the lecturer, annihilating the famous man with its delicate but crushing irony.  That was the least of it.  It was more sad than ironical; it was indeed utterly and hopelessly sad; it conveyed a quiet despair, born partly of conviction, partly of a mode of thought which had become habitual with him.  This despair of his not only unmasked the conceited lecturer and dismissed with its irony the matter at hand, the expectant attitude of the public, the somewhat presumptuous title under with the lecture was announced--no, the Steppenwolf's look pierced our whole epoch, its whole overwrought activity, the whole surge and strife, the whole vanity, the whole superficial play of a shallow, opinionated intellectuality.  And alas! the look went still deeper, went far below the faults, defects and hopelessness of our time, our intellect, our culture alone.  It went right to the heart of all humanity, it bespoke eloquently in a single second the whole meaning of man's life.  It said: 'See what monkeys we are!  Look, such is man!' and at once all renown, all intelligence, all the attainments of the spirit, all progress towards the sublime, the great and the enduring in man fell away and became a monkey's trick!'"

"Every age, every culture, every custom and tradition has its own character, its own weakness and its own strength, its beauties and ugliness; accepts certain sufferings as matters of course, puts up patiently with certain evils.  Human life is reduced to real suffering, to hell, only when two ages, two cultures and religions overlap."

"When I have neither pleasure nor pain and have ben 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 my than this warmth of a well-heated room.  A wild longing for strong emotions and sensations seethes in me, a rage against this toneless, flat, normal and sterile life.  I have a mad impulse to smash something, a warehouse, perhaps, or a cathedral, or myself, to commit outrages, to pull off the wigs of a few revered idols, to provide a few rebellious schoolboys with the longed-for ticket to Hamburg, or to stand one or two representatives of the established order on their heads."

On hearing jazz: "I stood for a moment on the scent, smelling this shrill and blood-raw music, sniffing the atmosphere of the hall angrily, and hankering after it a little too.  One half of this music, the melody, was all pomade and sugar and sentimentality.  The other half was savage, temperamental and vigorous.  Yet the two went artlessly well together and made a whole.  It was the music of decline.  There must have been such music in Rome under the later Emperors.  Compared with Bach and Mozart and real music it was, naturally, a miserable affair; but so was all our art, all our thought, all our makeshift culture in comparison with real culture.  The music was at least sincere, unashamedly primitive and childishly happy.  There was something of the Negro in it, and something of the American, who with all his strength seems so boyishly fresh and childlike to us Europeans.  Was Europe to become the same?  Was it on the way already?"

"Now, whoever thinks that he knows the Steppenwolf and that he can imagine to himself his lamentably divided life is nevertheless in error.  He does not know all by a long way.  He does not know that, as there is no rule without an exception and as one sinner may under certain circumstances be dearer to God than ninety and nine righteous persons, with Harry too there were now and then exceptions and strokes of good luck, and that he could breathe and think and feel sometimes as the wolf, sometimes as the man, clearly and without confusion of the two; and even on very rare occasions, they made peace and lived for one another in such fashion that not merely did one keep watch whilst the other slept but each strengthened and confirmed the other."

"For it appears to be an inborn and imperative need of all men to regard the self as a unit.  However often and however grievously this illusion is shattered, it always mends again.  The judge who sits over the murderer and looks into his face, and at one moment recognizes all the emotions and potentialities and possibilities of the murderer in his own soul and hears the murderer's voice as his own, is at the next moment one and indivisible as the judge, and scuttles back into the shell of his cultivated self and does his duty and condemns the murderer to death.  And if ever the suspicions of their manifold being dawns upon men of unusual powers and of unusually delicate perceptions, so that, as all genius must, they break through the illusion of the unity of the personality and perceive that the self is made up of a bundle of selves, they have only to say so and at once the majority puts them under lock and key, calls science to aid, establishes schizomania and protects humanity from the necessity of hearing the cry of truth from the lips of these unfortunate persons."

"His coffin was set down before a simple hole in the ground, and I saw the clergyman and the other vultures and functionaries of a burial establishment going through their performances, to which they endeavoured to give all the appearance of great ceremony and sorrow with such effect that they outdid themselves and from pure acting they got caught in their own lies and ended by being comic....  Nor could anyone be talked into a pious frame of mind; and when the clergyman addressed the company repeatedly as 'dear fellow-Christians,' all the silent faces of these shop people and master bakers and their wives were turned down in embarrassment and expressed nothing but the wish that this uncomfortable function might soon be over."

On a professor: "He believes in the studies whose servant he is; he believes in the value of mere knowledge and its acquisition, because he believes in progress and evolution.  He has not been through the war, nor is he acquainted with the shattering of the foundations of thought by Einstein (that, thinks he, only concerns the mathematicians). He sees nothing of the preparations for the next war that are going on all round him.  He hates Jews and Communists.  He is a good, unthinking, happy child, who takes himself seriously; and, in fact, he is much to be envied."

"He was holding a newspaper to which he subscribed, an organ of the militarist and jingoist party, and after shaking hands he pointed to it and commented on a paragraph about a namesake of mine--a publicist called Haller, a bad fellow and a rotten patriot--who had been making fun of the Kaiser and expressing the view that his own country was no less responsible for the outbreak of the war than the enemy nations.  There was a man for you!  The editor had given him his deserts and put him in the pillory.  However, when the professor saw that I was not interested, we passed to other topics, and the possibility that this horrid fellow might be sitting in front of them did not even remotely occur to either of them.  Yet so it was, I myself was that horrid fellow.  Well, why make a fuss and upset people?  I laughed to myself, but gave up all hope now of a pleasant evening."

On a picture of Goethe: "'Let us hope,' said I, 'that Goethe did not really look like this.  This conceited air of nobility, the great man ogling the distinguished company, and beneath the manly exterior what a world of charming sentimentality!  Certainly, there is much to be said against him.  I have a good deal against his venerable pomposity myself.  But to represent him like this--no, that is going too far.'"

"Before this in any case I didn't see eye to eye with the professor.  Like nearly all professors, he is a great patriot, and during the war did his bit in the way of deceiving the public, with the best intentions, of course.  I, however, am opposed to war.  But that's all one."

STEPPENWOLF

"He who has known the other days, the angry ones of gout attacks, or those with that wicked headache rooted behind the eyeballs that casts a spell on every nerve of eye and ear with a fiendish delight in torture, or soul-destroying, evil days of inward vacancy and despair, when, on this distracted earth, sucked dry by the vampires of finance, the world of men and of so-called culture grins back at us with the lying, vulgar, brazen glamour of a Fair and dogs us with the persistence of an emetic, and when all is concentrated and focused to the last pitch of the intolerable upon your own sick self--he who has known these days of hell may be content indeed with normal half-and-half days like today"--Steppenwolf

My birthday feast was delayed a day because someone was out shopping late, but I didn't mind.

Friday we got a new oven, refrigerator and dishwasher from Costco.  Now I'll be able to bake gingerbread again! We'll also be able to make scalloped potatoes and ham, and chicken curry.

Saturday afternoon I went to the Articled Meetup at the Reference Library.  We were discussing the corona virus, which didn't really interest me but the group looks promising.

At the singing group Sunday, we sang the Broadway show tune "You Gotta Have Heart."

Today I made my bed, only to find out that someone had earlier scattered some odour-eating baking soda on the mattress, so I had to unmake it to remove the stuff! (I should have procrastinated like I usually do...)

Today I finally finished the Thai history book. (In 1978 their top export was tapioca!) So I started reading Hermann Hesse's psychological novel Steppenwolf, translated from German.  I've read thirty-odd pages and it's pretty crazy!

My 58th

Today was my 58th birthday.  Maria had a surprise for me--we got a guided tour of the Royal Canadian Military Institute!  Among other things, we got to see the seat the Red Baron was sitting in when he got shot down.  Sergei, Malcolm, Krystyna and John S. were also there.  Afterward, Debi joined us for lunch at the Midi bistro, where they put a candle on my profiteroles.  Maria gave me an old copy of the collected poems of Lord Tennyson. (I'd been reciting "The Eagle" by heart.) And John S. has given me a gift subscription to the US history magazine American Heritage.

Elizabeth, whom I had lunch with last week, gave me a cute birthday card.  She has nice handwriting (a dying art, of course).

Sunday I went to the singing group's rehearsal, which was going to start over an hour earlier, but when I got there it turned out that it had been cancelled because of the snow! (The email came just after I left, of course.) Oh well, I was glad to get out of the house.

Monday night I went to the Short Story Meetup.  We discussed three more Chekhov stories: "The Student," "Anna on the Neck" and "The House With the Mezzanine."

The Thai history book is getting more interesting!  Chulalungkorn was King around the same time as Meiji's Japan and embarked on a similar program of modernization and developing a nation-state, but while Meiji inherited from the shoguns a bureaucracy that made top-down changes easier, Chulalungkorn (also known by the shorter name Rama V) had to work more gradually and wait for many in the old order to retire or die.  Which makes his achievements all the more impressive!

On Youtube I've been watching "Musical Hell," a channel with reviews of bad musical movies.  I have to admit I have a soft spot for Xanadu, even the silly animated scene!

1917

"When he crossed the river by the ferry boat and afterwards, mounting the hill, looked at his village and towards the west where the cold purple sunset lay a narrow streak of light, he thought that truth and beauty which had guided human life there in the garden and in the yard of the high priest had continued without interruption to this day, and had evidently always been the chief thing in human life and in all earthly life, indeed; and the feeling of youth, health, vigour--he was only twenty-two--and the inexpressible sweet expectation of happiness, of unknown mysterious happiness, took possession of him little by little, and life seemed to him enchanting, marvellous, and full of lofty meaning"--Anton Chekhov, "The Student"

Wednesday I got my health card renewed at the depot in the basement of the Canadian Tire near Rosedale station, with just a week to spare. (I was surprised how quickly it went.) But I was careless and stopped for lunch at Tim Horton's because I wanted to try their strawberry confetti doughnut.  So I was late getting home, which made things inconvenient for Moira because she had somewhere to go and John was late arriving and we can't leave Father alone in the house while he's unwell. Next time I'll be more careful!

Thursday night I saw Sam Mendes' 1917 at the Market Square with the History Meetup. (They've installed posh new seats there.) It was gripping and believable, and the one-shot gimmick didn't distract.  I didn't recognize Colin Firth as the general--he isn't the sort of actor who always plays himself!  Nice photography by Roger Deakins.

Yesterday I had lunch with Elizabeth from my memoir group at Les Moulins Lafayette. (I had a ham and cheese croissant and a briochette with jam.) Elizabeth is very interesting:  she's over 80 and survived the Polish Occupation!  To this day she won't wear black leather coats (part of the SS uniform) and the smell of burnt wood bothers her. Compared to people like her, Canadians like me don't know much about life.

I finished translating that Korean book about the engineer Jang Yongshil.  We have a book of short stories in their original French somewhere around, so maybe I'll try translating them.

Moira just finished reading The Peanuts Papers, a book of essays about the comic strip Peanuts, and now I'm going to look at it.

I hope I'm through the slow part of the Thailand history book.  I'm getting close to the part about King Mongkut, later played by Yul Brynner.