Steppenwolf

Our late midlife lonewolf, Harry Haller, is getting ready to go to dinner at a professor’s house, and he reflects on bourgeois life, in which people perform their daily occupations and pay their regular social calls, and he sees this bourgeois society as effectively being a machine with people playing their never-ceasing mechanized parts. Having placed himself as an outsider, Haller sees through it and understands that it is shallow and stupid. Yet, he sadly appreciates the necessity and power of this machine.

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And they are right, right a thousand times to live as they do, playing their games and pursuing their business, instead of resisting the dreary machine and staring into the void as I do, who has left the track. Let no one think that I blame other men, though now and then in these pages I scorn and even deride them, or that I accuse them of the responsibility of my personal misery. But now that I have come so far, and standing as I do on the extreme verge of life where the ground falls away before me into bottomless darkness, I should do wrong and I should lie if I pretended to myself or to others that the machine still revolved for me and that I was still obedient to the eternal child’s play of that charming world.

-- “Steppenwolf” by Hermann Hesse

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Three Journal

Today became congested, frustrating, and very depressing early on. I’m still doing the 90s for the Three Journal, and in lining up where I am with respect to my run up to Mother’s suicide, I realized that I got jumbled up on my Old Journal entries, and it gave me a headache as I struggled for a good hour to regain my footing.

Moreover, the material itself is very depressing. Indeed, I decided that I don’t feel up to covering her suicide yet. To make life easier, after this round, I think I will simplify my work and stop dividing the material from the 90s. I will just work straight from the beginning. What does it really matter. It was all just one long, overdrawn disappointment - and without the Internet to spice it up a little.