یادداشت

He led me into his room, which smelled strongly of tobacco, pulled a book from a pile, and leafed through it, looking for something—
“That’s good, too, very good,” he said, “just listen to this sentence: ‘One should be proud of pain—all pain is a remembrance of our lofty rank.’ Excellent! Eighty years before Nietzsche! But that’s not the saying I was thinking of—wait—there I have it. So: ‘The majority of people do not want to swim, until they are already able to.’ Isn’t that funny? Of course they don’t want to swim! They were born for the land, not for the water. And of course they don’t want to think; they were made for living, not for thinking! Yes, and whoever thinks, whoever makes thinking his primary aim, can make great progress in it, but he’s just exchanged the land for the water, and one day he will drown.”

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

Something Haller once said gave me the key to understanding this. He said to me, when we had been talking about the so-called barbarities of the Middle Ages: “In reality, these are not barbarities at all. A man of the Middle Ages would find the entire lifestyle of our present day cruel, horrible, and barbaric in a completely different way! Every epoch, every culture, every custom and tradition has its style, has its own characteristic forms of tenderness and cruelty, beauty and barbarity, takes certain forms of suffering for granted, patiently tolerates certain evils. Human life only becomes true suffering, true hell, where two epochs, two cultures and religions overlap. A man of classical antiquity who had to live in the Middle Ages would have been miserably suffocated by it, just as a savage would suffocate in the midst of our civilization. There are times when a whole generation is caught between two epochs, between two lifestyles, in such a way that it loses all of its self-evidence, all of its customs, its sense of security and innocence. Of course, not everyone experiences this equally strongly. Nietzsche’s nature was such that he had to suffer the misery of our day more than a generation ahead of time—and what he had to endure, alone and misunderstood, is suffered today by thousands.”

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