Steppenwolf (Excerpts)

I've just finished reading the first book of those given to me by the kindly stranger in the coffee shop a month ago. It took me a bit longer than I'd have liked, because I became quite busy in the meantime. I chose to read first the one book that my coffee-drinking, Vonnegut-appreciating friend recommended most highly: Steppenwolf. He urged me to read the author's preface (added in a 1960 reprinting) and cautioned me thoroughly against romanticizing the Steppenwolf's persona or lifestyle. I'm preparing in my mind a letter to write in response to him in which I set out to make the point that it's perhaps admissible to sympathize with the character, for all his similarity.

At any rate, as I've taken to doing with all books I read starting in January of this year, I kept a collection of favorite excerpts as I came across them. I began to worry by the third, fourth, or fifth excerpt if I might be better off just writing the entire story down and calling that my excerpt. Every turn of the page found another bit of exquisitely written narrative that left me no choice but to read it multiple times until I'd had my fill of it. There is no unifying element among the excerpts; some are profound, while others simple yet wonderfully written. If you have hopes of someday reading the book and are weary of my unintentionally revealing to you crucial plot points, then be assured that these excerpts do not explicitly reference the plot, although if you are clever enough you could perhaps deduce one thing or another.

A word of praise should also be said for the translator, Basil Creighton. I suppose that a portion of my enjoyment of the story's tone and style could be attributed to his pen, but on the whole I have to admit that at many times I forgot entirely that I was reading a story originally written in German.

(34) And this too was odd: that somewhere in a green valley vines were tended by good, strong fellows and the wine pressed so that here and there in the world, far away, a few disappointed, quietly drinking townsfolk and dispirited Steppenwolves could sip a little heart and courage from their glasses.

(35) Could I be altogether lost when that heavenly little melody had been secretly rooted within me and now put forth its lovely bloom with all its tender hues?

(36) Oh, if I had had a friend at this moment, a friend in an attic room, dreaming by candlelight and with a violin lying ready at his hand! How I should have slipped up to him in his quiet hour, noiselessly climbing the winding stair to take him by surprise, and then with talk and music we should have held heavenly festival through the night!

(58-59) Man is not capable of thought in any high degree, and even the most spiritual and highly cultivated of men habitually sees the world and himself through the lenses of delusive formulas and artless simplifications—and most of all himself. 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 suspicion 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. Why then waste words, why utter a thing that every thinking man accepts as self-evident, when the mere utterance of it is a breach of taste? A man, therefore, who gets so far as making the supposed unity of the self two-fold is already almost a genius, in any case a most exceptional and interesting person. In reality, however, every ego, so far from being a unity is in in the highest degree a manifold world, a constellated heaven, a chaos of forms, of states and stages, of inheritances and potentialities. It appears to be a necessity as imperative as eating and breathing for everyone to be forced to regard this chaos as a unity and to speak of his ego as though it were a one-fold and clearly detached and fixed phenomenon. Even the best of us shares the delusion.

(65) Man designs for himself a garden with a hundred kinds of trees, a thousands kinds of flowers, a hundred kinds of fruit and vegetables. Suppose, then, that the gardener of this garden knew no other distinction than between edible and inedible, nine-tenths of this garden would be useless to him. He would pull up the most enchanting flowers and hew down the noblest trees and even regard them with a loathing and envious eye. This is what the Steppenwolf does with the thousand flowers of his soul.

(97) Eternity is a mere moment, just long enough for a joke.

(111-112) But it's a poor fellow who can't take his pleasure without asking other people's permission.

(128) Every day new souls kept springing up beside the host of old ones, making clamorous demands and creating confusion; and now I saw as clearly as in a picture what an illusion my former personality had been.

(143-144) Before all else I learned that these playthings were not mere idle trifles invented by manufacturers and dealers for the purposes of gain. They were, on the contrary, a little or, rather, a big world, authoritative and beautiful, many sided, containing a multiplicity of things all of which had the one and only aim of serving love, refining the senses, giving life to the dead world around us, endowing it in a magical way with new instruments of love, from powder and scent to the dancing show, from ring to cigarette case, from waist-buckle to handbag. This bag was no bag, this purse no purse, flowers no flowers, the fan no fan. All were the plastic material of love, of magic and delight. Each was a messenger, a smuggler, a weapon, a battle cry.

(164-165) 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.