A Bad Joke, Or..
After the signal to attack is given, one can only wait, wait and observe the course of battle, of this weeks events, of my life, —to see how things will play out. To observe and wait is a rarefied ability, to restrain oneself, to resist temptation to “make something happen,” to prematurely intervene….
I offer a few more lines from Herman Hesse.
There are a good many people of the same kind as Harry.
Many artists are of his kind. These persons all have two souls,
two beings within them. There is God and the devil in them;
the mother’s blood and the father’s;
the capacity for happiness and the capacity for suffering;
and in just such a state of enmity and entanglement
towards and within each other as were the wolf and man in Harry.And these men, for whom life has no repose,
live at times in their rare moments of happiness
with such strength and indescribable beauty,
the spray of their moment’s happiness
is flung so high and dazzlingly over the wide sea of suffering,
that the light of it, spreading its radiance,
touches others too with its enchantment.Thus, like a precious, fleeting foam
over the sea of suffering arise all those works of art,
in which a single individual
lifts himself for an hour so high above his personal destiny
that his happiness shines like a star
and appears to all who see it as something eternal
and as a happiness of their own.All these men, whatever their deeds and works may be,
have really no life;
that is to say,
their lives are not their own and have no form.They are not heroes, artists or thinkers
in the same way
that other men are judges, doctors, shoemakers, or schoolmasters.Their life consists of a perpetual tide, unhappy and torn with pain,
terrible and meaningless,
unless one is ready to see its meaning
in just those rare experiences,
acts, thoughts and works
that shine out above the chaos of such a life.To such men
the desperate and horrible thought has come
that perhaps the whole of human life
is but a bad joke,
a violent and ill-fated abortion of the primal mother,
a savage and dismal catastrophe of nature.To them, too, however, the other thought has come
that man is perhaps not merely a half-rational animal
but a child of the gods and destined to immortality.
–excerpt Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse, from Treatise on The Steppenwolf p, 44
