A soul of too many dimensions
Hermine ... said:
"I want to tell you something today, something that I have
known for a long while, and you know it too; but perhaps you have never
said it to yourself. I am going to tell you now what it is that I know
about you and me and our fate. You, Harry, have been an artist and a
thinker, a man full of joy and faith, always on the track of what is
great and eternal, never content with the trivial and petty. But the
more life has awakened you and brought you back to yourself, the
greater has your need been and the deeper the sufferings and dread and
despair that have overtaken you, till you were up to your neck in them.
And all that you once knew and loved and revered as beautiful and
sacred, all the belief you once had in mankind and our high destiny,
has been of no avail and has lost its worth and gone to pieces. Your
faith found no more air to breathe. And suffocation is a hard death. Is
that true, Harry? Is that your fate?"
I nodded again and again.
"You have a picture of life within you, a faith, a challenge,
and you were ready for deeds and sufferings and sacrifices, and then
you became aware by degrees that the world asked no deeds and no
sacrifices of you whatever, and that life is no poem of heroism with
heroic parts to play and so on, but a comfortable room where people are
quite content with eating and drinking, coffee and knitting, cards and
wireless. And whoever wants more and has got it in him—the heroic and
the beautiful, and the reverence for the great poets or for the
saints—is a fool and a Don Quixote. Good. And it has been just the same
for me, my friend. I was a gifted girl. I was meant to live up to a
high standard, to expect much of myself and do great things. I could
have played a great part. I could have been the wife of a king, the
beloved of a revolutionary, the sister of a genius, the mother of a
martyr. And life has allowed me just this, to be a courtesan of fairly
good taste, and even that has been hard enough. That is how things have
gone with me. For a while I was inconsolable and for a long time I put
the blame on myself. Life, thought I, must in the end be in the right,
and if life scorned my beautiful dreams, so I argued, it was my dreams
that were stupid and wrong headed. But that did not help me at all. And
as I had good eyes and ears and was a little inquisitive too, I took a
good look at this so-called life and at my neighbors and acquaintances,
fifty or so of them and their destinies, and then I saw you. And I knew
that my dreams had been right a thousand times over, just as yours had
been. It was life and reality that were wrong. It was as little right
that a woman like me should have no other choice than to grow old in
poverty and in a senseless way at a typewriter in the pay of a
money-maker, or to marry such a man for his money's sake, or to become
some kind of drudge, as for a man like you to be forced in his
loneliness and despair to have recourse to a razor. Perhaps the trouble
with me was more material and moral and with you more spiritual—but it
was the same road. Do you think I can't understand your horror of the
fox trot, your dislike of bars and dancing floors, your loathing of
jazz and the rest of it? I understand it only too well, and your
dislike of politics as well, your despondence over the chatter and
irresponsible antics of the parties and the press, your despair over
the war, the one that has been and the one that is to be, over all that
people nowadays think, read and build, over the music they play, the
celebrations they hold, the education they carry on. You are right,
Steppenwolf, right a thousand times over, and yet you must go to the
wall. You are much too exacting and hungry for this simple, easygoing
and easily contented world of today. You have a dimension too many.
Whoever wants to live and enjoy his life today must not be like you and
me. Whoever wants music instead of noise, joy instead of pleasure, soul
instead of gold, creative work instead of business, passion instead of
foolery, finds no home in this trivial world of ours—"
.............................................
"Always as it is today? Always a world only for politicians,
profiteers, waiters and pleasure-seekers, and not a breath of air for
men?"
"Well, I don't know. Nobody knows. Anyway, it is all the same.
But I am thinking now of your favorite of whom you have talked to me
sometimes, and read me, too, some of his letters, of Mozart. How was it
with him in his day? Who controlled things in his times and ruled the
roost and gave the tone and counted for something? Was it Mozart or the
business people, Mozart or the average man? And in what fashion did he
come to die and be buried? And perhaps, I mean, it has always been the
same and always will be, and what is called history at school, and all
we learn by heart there about heroes and geniuses and great deeds and
fine emotions, is all nothing but a swindle invented by the
schoolmasters for educational reasons to keep children occupied for a
given number of years. It has always been so and always will be. Time
and the world, money and power belong to the small people and the
shallow people. To the rest, to the real men belongs nothing. Nothing
but death."
"Nothing else?"
"Yes, eternity."
"You mean a name, and fame with posterity?"
"No, Steppenwolf, not fame. Has that any value? And do you
think that all true and real men have been famous and known to
posterity?"
"No, of course not."
"Then it isn't fame. Fame exists in that sense only for the
schoolmasters. No, it isn't fame. It is what I call eternity. The pious
call it the kingdom of God. I say to myself: all we who ask too much
and have a dimension too many could not contrive to live at all if
there were not another air to breathe outside the air of this world, if
there were not eternity at the back of time; and this is the kingdom of
truth. The music of Mozart belongs there and the poetry of your great
poets. The saints, too, belong there, who have worked wonders and
suffered martyrdom and given a great example to men. But the image of
every true act, the strength of every true feeling, belongs to eternity
just as much, even though no one knows of it or sees it or records it
or hands it down to posterity. In eternity there is no posterity."
"You are right."
"The pious," she went on meditatively, "after all know most
about this. That is why they set up the saints and what they call the
communion of the saints. The saints, these are the true men, the
younger brothers of the Savior. We are with them all our lives long in
every good deed, in every brave thought, in every love. The communion
of the saints, in earlier times it was set by painters in a golden
heaven, shining, beautiful and full of peace, and it is nothing else
but what I meant a moment ago when I called it eternity. It is the
kingdom on the other side of time and appearances. It is there we
belong. There is our home. It is that which our heart strives for. And
for that reason, Steppenwolf, we long for death. There you will find
your Goethe again and Novalis and Mozart, and I my saints, Christopher,
Philip of Neri and all. There are many saints who at first were
sinners. Even sin can be a way to saintliness, sin and vice. You will
laugh at me, but I often think that even my friend Pablo might be a
saint in hiding. Ah, Harry, we have to stumble, through so much dirt
and humbug before we reach home. And we have no one to guide us. Our
only guide is our homesickness."
Steppenwolf -
