Just Long Enough For A Joke
More from Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse.
Harry Haller mired in the seeming pointlessness of continuing to live, finds his loneliness relieved by a chance conversation with a female that he has met at the bar, The Black Eagle. She desires to dance but Harry resists, so she bids him take a nap while she dances in an adjoining room. Harry relents and drops off into a deep, much needed sleep in the crowded bar. While dozing in his chair at the table in the public house —Harry dreams that he is granted an audience with Goethe, the revered, dead poet.
These are the lines penned by Hesse:
At that he bent forward
and brought his mouth,
which had now become quite like a child’s,
close to my ear and whispered softly into it:“You take the old Goethe much too seriously, my young friend.
You should not take old people
who are already dead seriously.
It does them injustice.
We immortals do not like things to be taken seriously.
We like joking.
Seriousness, young man,
is an accident of time.
It consists, I don’t mind telling you in confidence,
in putting too high a value on time.
I, too, once put too high a value on time.
For that reason I wished to be a hundred years old.
In eternity, however, there is no time, you see.
Eternity is a mere moment,
just long enough for a joke.”
–excerpt, Steppenwolf
by Hermann Hesse p. 97
