“ But the worst of it is that it is just this contentment that I cannot endure. After a short time it fills me with irrepressible hatred and nausea. In desperation I have to escape and throw myself on the
road to pleasure, or, if that cannot be, on the road to pain. 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.
road to pleasure, or, if that cannot be, on the road to pain. 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.
—
Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf
I’m not a big “public quote post”-er, but this one describes so much that it probably should end up here.
(via smittenbylife)
