یادداشت

I remember one such remark, which was not even a remark but merely a look, from near the end of his time here. A famous philosopher of history and cultural critic, a man whose name is known throughout Europe, had announced that he would give a lecture in the university auditorium, and I had succeeded in persuading the Steppenwolf, who initially had no desire to attend the lecture, to come along with me. We went together and sat side by side in the lecture hall. When the speaker mounted the rostrum and began his address, some listeners who had imagined him to be a sort of prophet were disappointed by his rather preening and vain demeanor. When he began to speak, starting with a few words of flattery for the audience and thanking them for attending in such great numbers, the Steppenwolf cast a very brief glance in my direction, a glance that was critical of these words and of the speaker’s whole person, oh, an unforgettable and terrible glance, a whole book could be written about its meaning! His glance did not merely criticize the speaker and annihilate that famous man with its compelling, though gentle irony—that was the least of it. His glance was much more sad than ironic, it was even abysmally, hopelessly sad; this glance contained within it a silent despair that had already become certainty, become a habit and a form, so to speak. It not only penetrated the vain speaker with its light, revealing him with despairing clarity, not only ironized and dismissed the situation of that moment, the expectation and the mood of the audience, the somewhat pretentious title of the promised speech—no, the Steppenwolf’s glance pierced through our entire age, all the bustling fuss, all the striving, all the vanity, the whole superficial display of imaginary, shallow intellectualism—ah, and sadly, the glance went even deeper, went much further, than merely to the shortcomings and hopelessness of our time, of our intellectual life, of our culture. It went to the heart of all humanity, it eloquently expressed in a single second all the doubts of a thinker, perhaps a knower, about the dignity, the meaning of human life as such. That glance said, “Look, this is the kind of monkey we are! Look, this is what man is like!” and all fame, all cleverness, all feats of intellect, all human attempts at sublimity, greatness, and perseverance fell flat and were nothing but a monkey’s game!

— Hermann Hesse; Steppenwolf; Kurt Beals (trans.)