Never has a man had a deeper, more passionate need for independence than he had. In his youth, when he was still poor and struggling to earn his bread, he preferred to starve and go about in ragged clothing, if that meant that he could salvage a bit of independence. He never sold himself for money or for luxury, to women or to the powerful, and a hundred times over he cast aside and rejected those things that clearly promised him advantage and good fortune in the eyes of the world, just in order to retain his freedom. He could imagine nothing more abhorrent and atrocious than the obligation to carry out official duties, adhere to a regular daily and yearly schedule, obey the orders of others. An office, a law chamber, the halls of bureaucracy were as abhorrent to him as death, and the most horrible thing he could experience in a dream was to be imprisoned in an army barracks. He knew how to extricate himself from all of these circumstances, often at great cost to himself. Herein lay his strength and virtue, in this he was unshakable and incorruptible, in this his character was firm and straight. But this virtue, in turn, was very closely tied to his suffering and his fate. He fared as everyone fares: he obtained what he most stubbornly sought and strove for, compelled by his own innermost drives, but he obtained more than is good for any man. At first it was his dream and his delight, but later it became his bitter fate. Men of power are brought low by power, men of money by money, the subservient by serving, the slave to passion by passion. And so it was that the Steppenwolf was brought low by his independence.
\u2014 Steppenwolf; Hermann Hesse; Kurt Beals (trans.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Another was his status as a suicide. It must be said here that it is incorrect to apply the term \u201csuicide\u201d only to those who actually kill themselves. In fact, the latter group includes many people who only become suicides incidentally, so to speak, who are not suicides of necessity, in their very nature. Among those without a personality, without a strong stamp, without a strong fate, among the dime-a-dozen men of the herd, there are many who die by suicide, though they are not suicides through and through, it is not their whole signature and stamp, while on the other hand, among those who are suicides in their very nature, there are very many, perhaps the majority, who never actually lay hands upon themselves. The \u201csuicide\u201d\u2014and Harry was one\u2014does not necessarily need to live in a particularly close relationship to death\u2014and one can also do that without being a suicide. But it is a peculiar trait of the suicide that he, rightly or wrongly, experiences his own self as a particularly dangerous, dubious, and endangered spawn of nature, that he always perceives himself as extraordinarily exposed and imperiled, as if he were standing on the narrowest ledge of a precipice, where a little push from without or the slightest weakness from within would suffice to send him plunging into the abyss. People of this sort are distinguished in their lines of fate by the fact that suicide is the most likely cause of death for them, at least in their own imagination. The precondition of this disposition, which almost always manifests itself by early youth and accompanies these men throughout their lives, is by no means a particular lack of vitality, on the contrary, some extraordinarily tenacious, passionate, and bold constitutions can be found among the \u201csuicides.\u201d But just as there are certain constitutions that tend toward fever at the slightest sign of illness, these constitutions, whom we dub \u201csuicides,\u201d and who are always very delicate and sensitive, begin intensely to dwell upon the prospect of suicide at the slightest shock. If we had a science with the courage to assume the great responsibility of studying human beings as such, rather than only the mechanisms of living organisms\u2014if we had something like an anthropology, a psychology\u2014these facts would be known to everyone.
\u2014 Steppenwolf; Hermann Hesse; Kurt Beals (trans.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Just as every strength can also become a weakness (indeed, under certain circumstances it must become one), so, conversely, the typical suicide can often make of his apparent weakness a form of strength and support, indeed, he does this extraordinarily often. This was likewise the case for Harry, the Steppenwolf. Like thousands of his kind, he did not use the notion that the path to death stood open to him at every moment merely as the basis for a youthful, melancholy play of fantasy; rather, he made of this very thought a source of consolation and support. True, every shock, every pain, every bitter circumstance in life immediately awakened in him the wish to take refuge in death, as is the case for every man of his ilk. But he gradually transformed this inclination into a philosophy that was positively conducive to life. His intimate acquaintance with the thought that that emergency exit perpetually stood open to him gave him strength, made him curious to savor pains and bitter circumstances, and when he was particularly miserable, he could at times feel with a grim joy, with a sort of schadenfreude: \u201cI\u2019m curious to see how much a man can really endure after all! Whenever I reach the limits of what is bearable, I need only open the door, and I can escape.\u201d There are many suicides who derive unusual strength from this thought.
\u2014 Steppenwolf; Hermann Hesse; Kurt Beals (trans.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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