Notes From the Legal Pad #4

Steppenwolf and human nature

While I was listening to 100 audiobooks in a month, I took notes on a yellow legal pad. Here, I share some of those notes and expand on them.

These were written while listening to Steppenwolf, by Hermann Hesse:

Struggle against death & war is quixotic. DO IT ANYWAY!

Dancing is a shortcut to happiness.

There’s always a risk of being laughed at when talking to a girl. So take the risk & let yourself be laughed at!

We each all contain a thousand souls.

Things are only serious if they are time-aware. i.e. if time is an important ingredient, then it cannot be frivolous and breezy or silly. Playfulness Demands Timelessness!!!

“I am a musician, not a professor.” Don’t talk about music, play music!

Extract as much joy from your senses as you can!

Gifts are the weapons in the warfare of love.

I think that any one of these highlights could be examined in part and expounded, but I like the portrait they create as a whole.

Reading these notes, you can get a sense for Hesse’s attitudes toward life, even without listening to Steppenwolf itself.

The main character in Steppenwolf is in crisis. He feels that he has a warring nature within his personality — one part tame and civil, the other part wild and solitary — and he has trouble controlling his temperament.

His transformation begins when he meets a woman who dominates his will and convinces him to dance with her. Over the next few weeks, he becomes absorbed in a new community of hedonists, and he loses himself in the raptures of dancing, music, and sex. The story culminates in a phantasmagorical masquerade, and I won’t spoil the ending, since Steppenwolf is absolutely a must-read.

There is no central message in Steppenwolf, nor in any of Hesse’s writing, since he leaps from one topic to the next as if he were a professor of them all. In my estimation, his brilliance lies in his ability to explore the depth of human interaction and the seemingly infinite complexities that arise when people’s minds intersect.

In children’s books, we learn the basics of human interaction by reading things like “John gives an apple to Joan. How do you think Joan feels?” In books like Hesse’s, we learn advanced human behavior and the intricacies of emotion by reading things like “John is sleeping with Joan, but Joan has been cheating on John with Jane, meanwhile John and Jane are secretly hooking up with each other, and Jane’s brother Jack is in love with John. How do you think Joan feels upon learning that Jack is her long-lost father?”

The human brain is capable of so many feelings, and Hesse is able to pick up on the most minute details of social graces, gut reactions, intellectual arguments, and internal struggles; the magic happens when he weaves them all together and creates characters that are as complex and vastly interesting as we are.

Steppenwolf exemplifies this complexity, and I think that some of the notes I highlighted above give a good sense of some of the core themes. Messages like “Dancing is a shortcut to happiness” and “Don’t talk about music: play music” are good pieces of life advice. I can attest as someone who only started dancing a year ago that it is definitely the quickest way to feel joyous.

Other sentiments, like “Gifts are the weapons in the warfare of love” and “Talking to girls is a risk worth taking” point to Hesse’s acute awareness that flirting and seduction are difficult games to play. He writes about how men can feel absolutely demolished when they’re rejected by women, and his advice to not feel despondent and always put yourself out there despite the rejection is necessary wisdom for a lot of men to hear.

Finally, I loved Hesse’s advice to “Extract as much joy from your senses as you can.” His point about time-awareness is crucial for this, and he was a strong believer in the importance of play. I particularly resonated with his assertion that “Playfulness demands timelessness,” since whenever I set a timer at the piano, I’m invariably less creative than when I have no time limits. If I know I’ll only be able to play for 20 minutes, the boundary interferes with the joy. Music, dancing, sex: all of these should be practiced without regard to the clock.

Hesse was a prolific author, and every book I’ve read of his so far has been profoundly insightful and valuable to me. He places his characters in such complex situations, and we can examine how they react in order to analyze the more nuanced dimensions of our own behavior. If we ever find ourselves in situations akin to those Hesse has laid out for us, we can use his writing to help us navigate the unfamiliar and ever-changing landscapes of human nature — in each other and, more importantly, in ourselves.