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."