by Herman Hesse
“All the girls I had ever loved were mine. Each gave me what she alone had to give and to each I gave what she alone knew how to take.”
— Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf
Synopsis
Hesse’s Steppenwolf follows Harry Haller, a man divided between his human and wolfish natures, searching for meaning in a mechanized, alienating world. It is both a portrait of despair and a metaphysical exploration of identity — how many selves live within one, and how reality splinters into infinite variations.
Themes
- Infinite variations of life — the chessboard of being, the idea that “it could just as well be any other way.”
- Love and individuality — “Each gave me what she alone could give me…”
Selected Lines
“It is remarkable, all that men can swallow. For a good ten minutes I read a newspaper. I allowed the spirit of an irresponsible man who chews and munches another’s words in his mouth, and gives them out again undigested, to enter into me through my eyes. I absorbed a whole column of it.”
“What others chose to think about it or what he chose to think himself was no good to him at all. It left the wolf inside him just the same.”
“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.”
“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.”
“It may be presumed that he has never carefully watched a real wolf. Had he done so he would have seen, perhaps, that even animals are not undivided in spirit. The wolf, too, has his abysses. The wolf, too, suffers.”
“He who sentimentally sings of blessed childhood is thinking of the return to nature and innocence and the origin of things, and has quite forgotten that these blessed children are beset with conflict and complexities and capable of all suffering.”
“…so it is with the majority of men day by day and hour by hour in their daily lives and affairs. Without really wanting to at all, they pay calls and carry on conversations, sit out their hours at desks and on office chairs; and it is all compulsory, mechanical and against the grain…”
“Obeying is like eating and drinking. There’s nothing like it if you’ve been without it too long.”
“…it’s a poor fellow who can’t take his pleasure without asking other people’s permission.”
“They’re never in any embarrassment. They always know what to do and how to behave themselves. They don’t flatter and they don’t intrude. They don’t pretend. They are as they are, like stones or flowers or stars in the sky.”—
“What a coward you are! Every one risks being laughed at when he addresses a girl.”
“God is good and has the span of all our days in his hands and that of every waltz and fox trot too. He is sure to do what is right.”
“And now, as I looked back, I saw how deep my love and trust must have been for her betrayal to have inflicted so deep and lifelong a wound.”
“The second game had the affinity with the first, it was the same world built of the same material, but the key was different, the time changed, the motif was differently given out and the situations differently presented.”