Another Day Of Rage
Waking this morning I half listened to a fragment of a business news report. Last night, Sunday, the President unleashed a twitter blast at China voicing his displeasure at the slow pace of trade agreement negotiations. The Dow Jones dropped 500 points. Is there no other way to nudge different points of view toward common ground, except with the lash of threats? The President threatened to more than double the tariff on goods imported from China to twenty five percent. And yes, the American consumer pays the cost of the tariff.
I continue my entré into Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse. Already it is a magnificent work of writing. I’d like to pause to convey some of the brilliance of the language.
A man of the Middle Ages would detest the whole mode of our present-day life as something far more than horrible, far more than barbarous. Every age, every culture, every custom and tradition has its own character, its own weakness and its own strength, its beauties and ugliness;accepts certain sufferings as matters of course, puts up patiently with certain evils. Human life is reduced to real suffering, to hell, only when two ages, two cultures and religions overlap. A man of the Classical Age who had to live in medieval times would suffocate miserably just as a savage does in the midst of our civilization. Now there are times when a whole generation is caught in this way between two ages, two modes of life, with the consequence that it loses all power to understand itself and has no standard, no security, no simple acquiescence. Naturally,every one does not feel this equally strongly. A nature such as Nietzsche’s had to suffer our present ills more than a generation in advance. What he had to go through alone and misunderstood, thousands suffer today.” –p. 22
….When I have neither pleasure nor pain and have been breathing for a while the lukewarm insipid air of these so-called good and tolerable days, I feel so bad in my childish soul that I smash my moldering lyre of thanksgiving in the face of the slumbering god of contentment and would rather feel the very devil burn in me than this warmth of a well-heated room. A wild longing for strong emotions and sensations seethes in me, a rage against this toneless, flat, normal and sterile life. I have a mad impulse to smash something, a warehouse, perhaps, or a cathedral, or myself, to commit outrages, to pull off the wigs of a few revered idols, to provide a few rebellious schoolboys with the longed-for ticket to Hamburg, or to stand one or two representatives of the established order on their heads. For what I always hated and detested and cursed above all things was this contentment, this healthiness and comfort, this carefully preserved optimism of the middle classes, this fat and prosperous brood of mediocrity. — p. 27
The first paragraph is from the last page of the introduction. The second paragraph is from the next section Harry Haller’s Records, the chapter entitled, “For Madmen Only.”
