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."