Know Thyself through LITERATURE:
Steppenwolf, can you sadly relate? Part III:
The finale in the triumvirate following; Know Thyself #133. and Know Thyself #142.
The two previous passages talked about regretting wasting your present and the sweet recollections of those amazing moments in your life, the times when you truly lived. To me the moments that are the whole point of living, the goal of our lives. The previous posts about the passage from Steppenwolf discussed how fleeting and far between these are, and I asked whether YOU related.
Here is the concluding post, #3:
continuing with the theme of ‘moments that will be remembered as those tender pictures in your mind’s eye’:
‘Once it happened, as I lay awake at night, that I suddenly spoke in verses, in verses so beautiful and strange that I did not venture to think of writing them down, and then in the morning they vanished; and yet they lay hidden within me like the hard kernel within an old brittle husk. Once it came to me while reading a poet, while pondering a thought of Descartes, of Pascal; again it shone out and drove its gold track far into the sky while I was in the presence of my beloved. Ah, but it is hard to find this track of the divine in the midst of this life we lead, in the besotted humdrum age of spiritual blindness, with its architecture, its business, its politics, and its men! How could I fail to be a lone wolf, and an uncouth hermit, as I did not share one of its aims nor understand one of its pleasures?’
Ugh. And this is on page 30-something! I have discovered not only that I can sadly relate but also that I need to read Steppenwolf in doses….tis heavy.
Last Updated on 06/15/2026 by Death of Hypatia Inc.
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