Steppenwolf by David Horrocks Hermann Hesse David Horrocks Hermann Hesse Page B

by a bullet or the blade of a razor. This clarified the situation. To wait until my fiftieth birthday, the solution oddly suggested in the booklet about Steppenwolf, seemed to me far too long. After all, there were still two years to go till that date. Whether it was a matter of a year or a month, whether tomorrow even – the door was now open.
    I cannot say that the ‘decision’ greatly changed my life. It made me a little more indifferent to ailments, a little more careless in my consumption of opium and wine, a little more curious about the limits of what I could bear, but that was all. The other experiences of that evening had stronger after-effects. I read through the Steppenwolf tract once more, now with rapt attention and gratitude as if I knew that some invisible magician was wisely determining my fate, now with scorn and contempt against the tract’s cool objectivity which, so it seemed to me, totally failed to understand the tenor and tension of my life. The points made in it about lone wolves and suicide cases, for all their accuracy and intelligence, were ingenious abstractions, valid only for the general category and type. However, it seemed to me that my person, my real psyche, my own unique, individual destiny could not be caught in so
wide-meshed a net.
    However, what preoccupied me most was that hallucination or vision I had had at the church wall, the dancing illuminated letters with their inviting message that tallied with some of the things intimated in the tract. I had been promised much then, the voices from that strange world had greatly aroused my curiosity, and I often spent hours on end deeply absorbed in contemplation of the matter. In the process, the warnings contained in those inscriptions became more and more clear to me: ‘Not for everybody!’ and ‘For mad people only!’ So I had to be mad and quite remote from ‘everybody’ if those voices were to reach me, those worlds to communicate with me. My God, had I not long since been living at a sufficient remove from everybody, from the lives and minds of normal folk? Had I not been enough of an outsider, mad enough, for years? And yet, deep down inside me, I fully understood this summons,
this invitation to go mad, to jettison all reason, inhibition and bourgeois respectability, and to surrender myself to the fluctuating, anarchic world of the soul, of the imagination.
    One day, after yet again searching the streets and squares in a vain attempt to find the man with the placard on a pole and roaming several times on the lookout past the wall with the invisible portal, I encountered a funeral procession in the suburb of St Martin. Contemplating the faces of the mourners who were trudging along behind the hearse, the thought went through my head: Where is there anyone in this city, in this world, whose death would be a loss to me? And where is there anyone to whom my death might matter? True, there was Erika, the woman I loved. Well yes, but we had been in a very unsteady relationship for ages, rarely seeing one another without falling out, and at that moment I didn’t even know where she was staying. From time to time she would come to me or I would travel to see her and since we are both solitary and difficult people, to some degree like each other in mentality and mental sickness, some sort of
bond continued to exist between us despite everything. But might she not breathe a sigh of relief if she heard of my death? I didn’t know, nor could I guarantee my own feelings with any certainty. To have any knowledge of such matters you have to live a normal, practical life.
    In the meantime I had, on a whim, joined the funeral procession, jogging along behind the mourners as far as the cemetery, an up-to-date concrete affair, complete with crematorium and all mod cons. However, our deceased one was not cremated. Instead, his coffin was unloaded in front of a plain hole in the ground and I watched the clergyman and the remaining vultures,