more Steppenwolf

"one of the significant earmarks of his life...was that he was numbered among the suicides. And here it must be said that to call suicides only those who actually destroy themselves is false. Among these, indeed, there are many who in a sense are suicides only by accident and in whose being suicide has no necessary place. Among the common run of men there are many of little personality and stamped with no deep impress of fate, who find their end in suicide without belonging on that account to the type of the suicide by inclination; while on the other hand, of those who are to be counted as suicides by the very nature of their beings are many, perhaps a majority, who never in fact lay hands on themselves. The "suicide," and Harry was one, need not necessarily live in a peculiarly close relationship to death. One may do this without being a suicide. What is peculiar to the suicide is that his ego, rightly or wrongly, is felt to be an extremely dangerous, dubious, and doomed germ of nature; that he is always in his own eyes exposed to an extraordinary risk, as though he stood with the slightest foothold on the peak of a crag whence a slight push from without or an instant's weakness from within suffices to precipitate him into the void. The line of fate in teh case of these men is marked by the belief they have that suicide is their most probable manner of death. It might be presumed that such temperaments, which usually manifest themselves in early youth and persist through life, show a singular defect of vital force. On the contrary, among the "suicides" are to be found unusually tenacious and eager and also hardy natures. But just as there are those who at the least indisposition develop a fever, so do those whom we call suicides, and who are always very emotional and sensitive, develop at the least shock the notion of suicide. Had we a science with the courage and authority to concern itself with mankind, instead of with the mechanism merely of vital phenomena, had we something of the nature of an anthropology, or a psychology, these matters of fact would be familiar to every one.

What was said above on the subject of suicides touches obviously nothing but the surface. It is psychology, and, therefore, partly physics. Metaphysically considered, the matter has a different and a much clearer aspect. In this aspect suicides present themselves as those who are overtaken by the sense of guilt inherent in individuals, those souls that find the aim of life not in the perfecting and molding of the self, but in liberating themselves by going back to the mother, back to God, back to the all. Many of these natures are wholly incapable of ever having recourse to real suicide, because they have a profound consciousness of the sin of doing so. For us they are suicides nonetheless; for they see death and not life as the releaser. They are ready to cast themselves away in surrender, to be extinguished and go back to the beginning.

As every strength may become a weakness (and under some circumstances must) so, on the contrary, may the typical suicide find a strength and a support in his apparent weakness. Indeed, he does so more often than not. The case of Harry, the Steppenwolf, is one of these. As thousands of his like do, he found consolation and support, and not merely the melancholy play of youthful fancy, in the idea that the way to death was open to him at any moment. It is true that with him, as with all men of his kind, every shock, every pain, every untoward predicament at once called forth the wish to find escape in death. By degrees, however, he fashioned for himself out of this tendency a philosophy that was actually servicable to life. He gained strength through familiarity with the thought that the emergency exit stood always open, and became curious, too, to taste his suffering to the dregs. If it went too badly with him he could feel sometimes with a grim malicious pleasure: 'I am curious to see all the same just how much a man can endure. If the limit of what is bearable is reached, I have only to open the door to escape.' There are a great many suicides to whom this thought imparts an uncommon strength.

On the other hand, all suicides have the responsibility of fighting against the temptation of suicide. Every one of them knows very well in some corner of his soul that suicide, though a way out, is rather a mean and shabby one, and that it is nobler and finer to be conquered by life than to fall by one's own hand. Knowing this, with a morbid conscience whose source is much the same as that of hte militant conscience of so-called self-contented persons, the majority of suicides are left to a protracted struggle against their temptation. They struggle as the kleptomaniac against his own vice. The Steppenwolf was not unfamiliar with this struggle. He had engaged in it with many a change of weapons. Finally, at the age of forty-seven, or thereabouts, a happy and not unhumorous idea came to him from which he often derived some amusement. He appointed his fiftieth birthday as the day on which he might allow himself to take his own life. On this day, according to his mood, so he agreed with himself, it should be open to him to employ the emergency exit or not. Let happen to him what might, illness, poverty, suffering and bitterness, there was a time-limit. It could not extend beyond these few years, months, days whose number daily diminished. And in fact he bore much adversity, which previously would have cost him severer and longer tortures and shaken him perhaps to the roots of his being, very much more easily. When for any reason it went particularly badly with him, when particular pains and penalties were added to the desolateness and loneliness and savagery of his life, he could say to his tormentors: 'Only wait, two years and I am your master.' And with this he cherished the thought of the morning of his fiftieth birthday. Letters of congratulation would arrive, while he, relying on his razor, took leave of all his pains and closed the door behind him. Then gout in the joints, depression of spirits, and all pains of head and body could look for another victim."

Hermann Hesse's Steppenwolf

"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 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. 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. 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."

I'm sorry for ignoring you, blogger. I played at a poker tournament tonight, at work. $10 buy-in, for $1200 worth of chips, points according to when you go out, but money divided amongst the top 4 people (or last 4 people). Anyway, I was the second out [laughs]. I'm not good at poker because 1) my luck is worse than other peoples', 2) I hate folding without seeing the flop, though it gets expensive sometimes, and 3) I hate letting someone buy the pot. So I got taken a couple times because I held on to something that wasn't worth betting on, and I lost on several good hands because someone else had a better one. Then I got to sit there for over an hour watching other people play. I was hoping that a side table would get started, i.e. a free table. No, I was being foolishly hopeful. The side table, when it started, was "buy in what you are willing to pay", chips at at .25, .50, 1.00, and 2.00. That wasn't happening at all. But it was still a fun and entertaining evening. You know, even having eaten and had other drinks, bourbon still gets me tipsy very easily. Literally, I had a plate of chips I stole from the kitchen (since the tournament was at my work), and 2 slices of pizza, and a large pepsi, and I was feeling lightheaded after three sips of bourbon. [laughs] Anyway, I finally decided that it wasn't worth staying anymore, watching the big money sharks eat each other and watching the real money people play penny-ante. I succeeded in meeting new people, but did not really succeed in getting to know my coworkers better. I did, however, (being the anal and organized person I am), print out and take the state laws about gambling. Next I need to look up the Alcohol and Beverage Association's rules about it. Technically, the only thing that is illegal about our tournament is that it's in a public location, though the property is private, and we close and lock the doors before starting, so it's not actually open to the public. (We're also legal because it's equal chances to everyone, no one gets any gain except personal winnings, and the house is making no money from it). Also, though they can require anyone to give testamony about it, if they are charging you with a class C misdemeanor for it, your testimony can't be used against you. So basically, they would have to have the willing testimony of someone making a deal to avoid charges, in order to charge us, and though a class C misdemeanor is technically a fine of no more than $500, I heard that when a pub in the north part of the city was raided, the participants were fined $60 each. But that was also a public place, and the police came in on a called complaint (they keep holding it, though the police have raided it 3 times, apparently). Blah blah blah. Life is getting better, or at least most of us are working past this crappy period of bad luck and hard times that seems to be hitting everyone. Oh, and my brother is gone back up to school for the month, until we officially move him up to Kansas, where he's going to be stationed with the air force. I don't know for what, training or something, gaining experience, whatever. I'm done typing, though I'm still bourbon happy. [laughs]

I died a sudden explosive death today. Freeing myself of my blankets this morning, at my best friend's house where I spent the night, I suddenly lost my body. It just disappeared in a loud bit of light and nothingness. A dark-haired girl was there, waiting for me. I asked if she had time for me to tell her a story, since she is there for everyone everywhere when it is their time to meet her. She smiled and nodded. I told her a wonderful story about a girl with an invisible pet dinosaur, how the dinosaur ended up saving her all the time from nightmares and monsters that no one else believed in, but that one day the dinosaur stopped believing in her and went off on his own. He faced lots of monsters and nightmares and beat them all, but there was something missing in his life. He came to realize that his life only had meaning when he was protecting that girl from her nightmares and monsters, so he tried to go back. But by then, she couldn't see him anymore either. So he turned into a boy and they fell in love, and now he can protect her all the time, even though even she doesn't know it. It was very cute and made her laugh. She leaned over and whispered to me, "You're not dead, you know. You're only dreaming." Then I woke up, and my brother and friend were playing video games. It was a cool dream. It would have been, anyway. It didn't happen. It's just nice to pretend sometimes.