A 300 page book I read in two days. Interesting story with great self descriptions of a man torn away from society into himself and his two personas, Harry Haller and the Steppenwolf. Harry Haller is the bourgeois self, who is an intellectual, thinker and socially "normal" man and Steppenwolf is the rebel self who rebels from mediocre bourgeois living and is an angry skeptic. He then meets others, including intimacy with women, who also came to the same conclusions of life's emptiness through their personas, although they come from the superficial world of desires and pleasures, which is the majority of society.
The book continues through the struggles of Harry's troubled self personas and encounters he occurs. Ultimately, it is the recognition of the self, the persona(s) that are not anymore as serious and rather humorous. This is because the acknowledgment comes from a new awareness that the self is a construction of many different personas which are all part of a game, and the idea of a game suggests the illusion we carry in the seriousness of the role we play, the persona we emulate. It's an amazing self insight that allows him to perceive his life apart from his self-made, man-made personas that are only creations of the self and societal structures, cultural conditioning and linguistic formations. This of course, includes all philosophies, all political and religious ideologies and recognizes their transient nature adapting to the current societal structure of the time. It is a revelation from the self, an escape from the ego, a release from the illusionary selves that the majority of the world are unaware and who take their personas as "real" and fail to see the multiplicity of the self and that our personas are in reality illusions we create. And this is all realized under the Magic Theater - Entrance Not For Everybody - For Madmen Only! - The Cost, Your Mind. The entry and experience into this theater happens at the end of the novel by drinking a potion and smoking some secret herb rolled up in yellow rolling paper, which can no doubt be psychedelic drugs or similar drugs that enabled Harry to obtain the ability to let go of his illusionary self and open the doors of perception to see the multiplicities of reality and their relative positions.
This insight is also that of the 1960's Harvard University professor, guru, psychologist and author, Timothy Leary, who found the use of LSD and psychedelics enabled him and many others, including intellectuals, professors, theologians, divinity students, historians and eventually much of the public, to also enter higher portions of reality, recognizing their limited egos, beyond their illusionary personas to perceive that the Magic Theater is the theater that reveals the many games we and our society play, the many chess pieces we both consciously and unconsciously create in the chessboards of life and that the majority, the power and control people, reject this adamantly, entirely living for the seriousness of their illusionary personas in rationalism and language as the only true reality, resulting in the dominating others, including that of the governments who start bloody wars and pass laws that curb and even destroy creativity.
Harry Haller - Steppenwolf - experienced a new found wisdom, pages 129 and 131: "I lived through much in Pablo's little (Magic) theater and not a thousandth part can be told in words. . . When I rose once more to the surface of the unending stream of allurement and vice and entanglement, I was calm and silent, I was equipped, far gone in knowledge, wide, expert - ripe for Hermaine (his last love) . . I belong to her not just as this one piece in my game of chess - I belonged to her wholly. I would now lay out the pieces in my game that all was centered in here and led to fulfillment."
What must be recognized is that while life takes on personas and still, unmoving snapshots of reality and interprets them as absolutes, it still can not hide what is behind such still frames of perception; the moving flow of multifaceted reality, the relative nature of perception. But this can only be so if people stop becoming so serious in their chess games, cease being critics, experts and trash their beliefs in absolutes - "Better learn to listen first! Learn what is to be taken seriously and laugh at the rest." p. 143 The music we hear may be distorted and may not conform to our perceptions, but it can never hide the eternal music of life that exists within it. While many of us have the courage to die for our errors and crimes, we don't have the courage to fully live, anotherwards, we don't know how to to laugh and apprehend the humor of life, to see the relative nature and meanings of the distorted music, and recognize that all of life's perceptions have serious limitations and must not be taken as absolute truths.
Oh, and one more thought. A thought that keeps haunting me is the laughing Haller envisions Mozart as doing, a mad, insane laughter and I sense inside this myself. Life, while beautiful, is truly a painful tragedy, a fightening, suffering existence that deteroriates into death. Without having absolutes to lean on, the human's ability of humor and comedy counter act and balance the psyche. That's the insane, mad, overwhelming laughter. That's the antedote of our awareness to the transient nature of all our relative truths. We see the contradictions, lighten up and laugh, although this laugh comes from the depths of our soul.
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Good read
Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse, was an interesting read in terms of how we view life as individuals. Harry Haller views life as unforgiving and finds no happiness which makes him feel loneliness. He meets a girl named Hermine, someone that reminds him of a childhood friend. She basically teaches him how to live life, and he meets others people such as Maria and Pablo. I thought the book overall was great and made you think how to live life, and do good things in the little time that we have on earth. But there were a few issues I had while reading this book.1. The format seemed strange to me. The book didn’t have chapter sections like most books do. It felt like I had to keep reading or I would lose my place.2. It took me 2 weeks to finish. I’m usually a fast reader but some of the reading was dense for me, and at times I would be confused on what was going on.3. The book at times felt like it was dragging on even though the book is only 218 pages.Overall, the book was great! I also enjoy some of the quotes I read within the book. My favorite quote is towards the end, “Life is always frightful. We cannot help it and we are responsible all the same. One is born and at once one’s guilty.”
Top reviews from other countries
- RYAN FIENNESReviewed in the United Kingdom on April 7, 2021
Picador Modern Classic edition
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