Steppenwolf Read Online Free Page B

and, without saying goodbye, disappeared without trace. We have never heard a thing of him since, though we still keep a few letters that arrived for him after his departure. He left nothing behind apart from his manuscript, written during his stay here, in which he penned a few lines, dedicating it to me and indicating that I could do with it whatever I liked.
    I had no possible means of checking how far the experiences recounted by Haller in this manuscript corresponded to reality. That they are for the most part imaginative fictions, I don’t doubt, but not in the sense of stories arbitrarily invented. I see them rather as attempts to express deeply felt psychological processes by presenting them in the guise of things actually occurring before our eyes. I suspect that the partly fantastical things that happen in Haller’s writings originate from the last period of his stay here, and I have no doubt that they are based on his experience of some slice of external reality. During that period our lodger’s behaviour and appearance did indeed change. He was away from home a very great deal, sometimes for whole nights, and his books lay untouched. On the few occasions I encountered him at that time, he seemed strikingly vivacious and rejuvenated, sometimes positively cheerful. True, this was immediately followed by a new spell of profound depression when he lay in bed all day without wanting food. And it was also during that time that an extraordinarily violent, indeed brutal row took place between him and his lover, who had reappeared on the scene. All the tenants were up in arms about this, and Haller apologized to my aunt about it the next day.
    No, I am convinced that he didn’t take his own life. He is still alive, somewhere or other still going up and down other people’s stairs on his weary legs, staring somewhere at shiningly polished parquet floors and neatly tended araucaria plants, spending his days sitting in libraries and his nights in pubs. Or he is lying on a rented sofa, listening to all human life going by outside his windows and knowing that he is excluded from it. Yet he won’t kill himself, because some remnant of faith tells him that he has to drink this bitter cup to the last dregs, go on suffering this vile heartache, because this is the affliction he must die of. I often think of him, though he didn’t make my life easier, wasn’t gifted with the power to cheer me up or reinforce what strengths I possess. Quite the opposite, I’m afraid. But I am not Haller, and I don’t lead his kind of life, but my own. It is the insignificant life of a middle-class man, but it is a secure and thoroughly responsible one. As it is, my aunt and I can look back on Haller in a spirit of peace and friendship. She would be better placed to say more about him than me, but what she knows remains hidden within her kind heart.
    Where Haller’s notebooks are concerned, these bizarre, partly pathological, partly beautiful fantasies rich in ideas, I’m bound to say that if they had chanced to come into my possession without my knowing their author, I would certainly have thrown them away in indignation. But my acquaintance with Haller has made it possible for me to understand them in part, indeed to approve of them. If I merely regarded them as the pathological fantasies of some poor, mentally ill individual, I would have reservations about communicating their contents to others. However, I see something more in them. They are a document of our times, for today I can see that Haller’s sickness of mind is no individualeccentricity, but the sickness of our times themselves, the neurosis of that generation to which Haller belongs. Nor does it by any means appear to afflict only those individuals who are weak or inferior, but precisely those who are strong, the most intelligent and most gifted.
    It makes no difference how much or how little they are based on real life, these notebooks are an attempt to overcome the great