Affecting high spirits, I trotted along the damp, foggy asphalt of the narrow streets, the lanterns cast their tearful, misty gaze down through the cool, damp gloom, drawing sluggish reflections from the sodden ground. The forgotten years of my youth flooded back to me\u2014how I used to love such dark and gloomy evenings in the late fall and winter, with what eager intoxication I used to soak up the moods of loneliness and melancholy, when I would spend half the night trudging through hostile, leafless nature, through rain and storms, wrapped in my coat, already lonely even then, but filled with a deep satisfaction, and filled with verses that I would later write down by candlelight in my room, perched on the edge of my bed! Now that was all in the past, I had drained that cup and it would not be filled again. Was that a shame? No, it was not a shame. What lay behind was not a shame at all. What was a shame was in the here and now, these countless hours and days that I lost, that I merely suffered through, that brought me neither gifts nor shocks of any kind. But thank God there were also exceptions\u2014sometimes, rarely, there were those other hours, hours that brought shocks, brought gifts, broke down walls and brought me, errant that I am, back again to the living heart of the world. Sad and yet profoundly agitated, I sought to remember my most recent experience of that sort. It had happened at a concert, it was a program of magnificent old music, and just as the woodwinds were playing a quiet passage, suddenly, between two beats, the door to the beyond had swung open to me again, I had flown through the heavens and seen God at work, I had suffered blissful pains and ceased to defend myself against anything in the world, ceased to fear anything in the world, I had affirmed everything, had given my heart to everything. It had not lasted long, perhaps a quarter of an hour, but it returned to me that night in a dream, and since then, throughout all the bleak days, it had secretly shone for me from time to time, sometimes I saw it clearly for minutes on end, leading like a golden, godly path through my life, almost always deeply buried beneath dung and dust, but then shining forth again in golden sparks, seeming as if it could never be lost again, and yet soon it was deeply lost indeed. On one occasion, when I was lying awake at night, I suddenly began reciting verses, verses so beautiful and so bizarre that it never could have occurred to me to write them down, by morning I had forgotten them, and yet they lay concealed within me like a heavy nut in an old and fragile shell. On other occasions it happened when I was reading a poet, when I was reflecting on an idea from Descartes, from Pascal, or again it shone forth and led me onward along the golden path into the heavens when I was with my lover. Oh, it is hard to find that godly path in the midst of this life that we lead, in the midst of such a very contented, very bourgeois, very mindless age, when we are confronted with this architecture, these businesses, these politics, these people! How could I be anything but a Steppenwolf and a surly hermit in the midst of a world full of goals none of which I share, and pleasures none of which I desire! I can\u2019t bear to sit too long in a theater or cinema, I can barely read a newspaper, rarely a modern book, I can\u2019t understand what pleasure and joy it is that people seek in the overfilled trains and hotels, in the overfilled caf\u00e9s with their oppressive, overbearing music, in the bars and cabarets of the elegant cities of luxury, in the world\u2019s fairs, on the promenades, in the lectures for the intellectually curious, at the great athletic fields\u2014I cannot understand all of these joys, I cannot share them, though surely they would be within my reach, while thousands of others must toil and push to attain them. And, on the other hand, those things that bring me my few hours of joy, that bring me bliss, adventure, ecstasy, and exaltation, those are things that the world knows and seeks and loves only in literature, if at all, in life the world considers them insane. And indeed, if the world is right\u2014if all this music in the caf\u00e9s, all these mass entertainments, all these Americanized people who are content with so little, if all of them are right\u2014then I really am the Steppenwolf that I have often called myself, an animal that has strayed into a foreign world it does not understand, where it no longer finds its home, its air, its nourishment.
\u2014 Steppenwolf; Hermann Hesse; kurt Beals (trans.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Affecting high spirits, I trotted along the damp, foggy asphalt of the narrow streets, the lanterns cast their tearful, misty gaze down through the cool, damp gloom, drawing sluggish reflections from the sodden ground. The forgotten years of my youth flooded back to me\u2014how I used to love such dark and gloomy evenings in the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[57,34,56,53],"class_list":["post-226","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-26","tag-steppenwolf","tag-34","tag-56","tag-53"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/parsavarastin.ir\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/226","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/parsavarastin.ir\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/parsavarastin.ir\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parsavarastin.ir\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parsavarastin.ir\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=226"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/parsavarastin.ir\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/226\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":234,"href":"https:\/\/parsavarastin.ir\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/226\/revisions\/234"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/parsavarastin.ir\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=226"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parsavarastin.ir\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=226"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parsavarastin.ir\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=226"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}