How deep the loneliness into which his life had drifted on account of his disposition and destiny and how consciously he accepted this loneliness as his destiny, I certainly did not know until I read the records he left behind him. He was, in fact, as he called himself, a real wolf of the Steppes, a strange, wild, shy-very shy-being from another world than mine. Indeed, he was unsociable to a degree I had never before experienced in anybody.
He lived by himself very quietly, and but for the fact that our bedrooms were next door to each other-which occasioned a good many chance encounters on the stairs and in the passage-we should have remained practically unacquainted. He took the attic room on the top floor and the bedroom next it, returned a day or two later with two trunks and a big case of books and stayed nine or ten months with us. Some years ago the Steppenwolf, who was then approaching fifty, called on my aunt to inquire for a furnished room. Yet the impression left by his personality has remained, in spite of all, a deep and sympathetic one. Indeed, of his past life and origins I know nothing at all. I, however, feel the need of adding a few pages to those of the Steppenwolf in which I try to record my recollections of him. Whether this manuscript needs any introductory remarks may be open to question. THIS BOOK CONTAINS THE RECORDS left us by a man whom, according to the expression he often used himself, we called the Steppenwolf. Chalk that down to a one-star due to not-for-me. Well, actually, I found the content kind of boring, too. The prose is just boring, which might be partly the translator's fault (my edition is ancient and does not name the translator). It's a good chunk of I-don't-get-it - I mean, I understand Hermann Hesse's intentions and all that, but maybe he's right that I'm too young for it. And then I got onto my MA and discovered I was wrong, of course, that I could still find any given book stultifyingly boring regardless of any merit I tried to find within its pages.
I have in my hands the key to any text, anywhere, and damn it I will appreciate every text for something about it, whether it be the brilliance of the writing or the social context or just having fun ripping it apart. I don't know if anyone else has this, but when I graduated with my English lit degree I thought, right.
0 kommentar(er)
