Skip to main content

herman hesse

"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 and 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, 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."

Comments

Which of Hesse's works does this come from? Philosophically and tonally, it sounds like Steppenwolf but I don't recognize it.

thanks,
Don @ Issa's Untidy Hut

Popular posts from this blog

neighborhood nights

I feel like somewhere along my life there was a shift. Suddenly nothing was for fun any more, it was all necessary. Suddenly I'm bothering with what others think, afraid to link any connotations I deem negative to my being. Why do I care what people I've never met, who'll forget they ever saw me, think of me; this obscure stranger in their peripherals. It's a warped sense of mind and place, seeing the space around me in my mind's made up ways. So I stray away from everyone, isolating myself unwittingly, turning them against me. Self fulfilling prophecies, I succeed in creating this reality. I need to break free from my mind's mentalities, with which negativity has propelled me. So I've started a new sport. I call it neighborhood night dancing. Donning headphones and heading out alone to the empty streets as the city sleeps, and moving to the beat. Letting it compel me towards a freedom long gone missing. Letting go is an art. Complete release is a tough ...

Home

I looked back at blog entries, and even though the subject matter was less than pleasant to be reminded of, it was still good, I'm glad I have written reminders so I have points of reference to gauge my growth. And I've come far. I often feel like I've had three stages in my life. The first was with Brent, and though I was a newborn in love's eyes, I soon grew to an extremely old age. My heart was always cracked and my spirit became dulled. I became clogged with darkness, became tired and dragged myself through the days. But I never stopped. I stubbornly sacrificed myself each day for someone whom I thought it was going to help. I was wrong. The first day of my second stage was the day I stopped caring about him and finally focused on myself. I was free, and I was drunk with it. Too drunk. I dove into something that made me happy, too quick. I soon realized there were other ways to get hurt. this stage wasn't that defining, though I began to learn to take things as ...

i dont know where im going with this

no one ever needs anything. they only want. "i need to get atleast 75 on this test" no. you want it. because you want a good mark because you want your mark to go up..ect." you want it because you dont want the alternative. aka failing. you dont need to go to school. you probably should, you probably should want to, but you dont need to. lets get a more exagerated example "you need to take this medicine for your illness or else you'll die." you might think this is a flaw in my theory. but it isnt. you want to take the medicine because you dont want the alternative; death. but you dont need to take it. you never need to do anything.