Devils
The devil has spit in the soup. Nothing comes out even. Nothing sounds right. Nothing rejoices and warms. Everything is desolate, sad, foul. All strings out of tune. All colors faded.
I know why this is so. It is not the wine I drank yesterday, and it is not the bad bed I slept in, and it is not even the rainy weather. Devils have been here and shrilly untuned me, string me by string. The anxiety was there again, anxiety from childhood dreams, from fairy tales, from the things as schoolboy had to go through. The anxiety, the being trapped by the unalterable, the melancholy, the aversion. How insipid the world tastes! How dreadful that one has to rise again tomorrow, to eat again, to live again! Then why does one go on living? Why are we so idiotically good-natured? Why didn't we jump in the lake a long time ago?
There is no escape. You can't be a vagabond and an artist and still be a solid citizen, a wholesome, upstanding man. You want to get drunk, so you have to accept the hangover. You say yes to the sunlight and your pure fantasies, so you say yes to the filth and the nausea. Everything is within you, gold and mud, happiness and pain, the laughter of childhood and the apprehension of death. Say yes to everything, shirk nothing, don't try to lie to yourself. You are not a solid citizen, you are not a Greek, you are not harmonious, or the master of you! How much you have lied! A thousand times, even in your poems and books, you have played the harmonious man, the wise man, the happy, the enlightened man. In the same way, men attacking in war have played heroes, while their bowels twitched. My God, what a poor ape, what a fencer in the mirror, man is - particularly the artist - particularly the poet - particularly myself!
Hermann Hesse - The Wanderer
I know why this is so. It is not the wine I drank yesterday, and it is not the bad bed I slept in, and it is not even the rainy weather. Devils have been here and shrilly untuned me, string me by string. The anxiety was there again, anxiety from childhood dreams, from fairy tales, from the things as schoolboy had to go through. The anxiety, the being trapped by the unalterable, the melancholy, the aversion. How insipid the world tastes! How dreadful that one has to rise again tomorrow, to eat again, to live again! Then why does one go on living? Why are we so idiotically good-natured? Why didn't we jump in the lake a long time ago?
There is no escape. You can't be a vagabond and an artist and still be a solid citizen, a wholesome, upstanding man. You want to get drunk, so you have to accept the hangover. You say yes to the sunlight and your pure fantasies, so you say yes to the filth and the nausea. Everything is within you, gold and mud, happiness and pain, the laughter of childhood and the apprehension of death. Say yes to everything, shirk nothing, don't try to lie to yourself. You are not a solid citizen, you are not a Greek, you are not harmonious, or the master of you! How much you have lied! A thousand times, even in your poems and books, you have played the harmonious man, the wise man, the happy, the enlightened man. In the same way, men attacking in war have played heroes, while their bowels twitched. My God, what a poor ape, what a fencer in the mirror, man is - particularly the artist - particularly the poet - particularly myself!
Hermann Hesse - The Wanderer
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