THE MAGIC THEATER
ENTRANCE NOT FOR EVERYBODY
FOR MADMEN ONLY!
"How could I fail to be a lone wolf, and an uncouth hermit, as I did not share one of its aims nor understood one of its pleasures? I cannot remain long in either theater or picture-house. I can scarcely read a paper, seldom a modern book. I cannot understand what pleasures and joys they are that drive people to the overcrowded railways and hotels, into the packed cafes with the suffocating and oppressive music, to the Bars and variety entertainments, to World Exhibitions, to the Corsos. I cannot understand nor share these joys, though they are within my reach, for which thousands of others strive. On the other hand, what happens to me in my rare hours of joy, what for me is bliss and life and ecstasy and exaltation, the world in general seeks at most in imagination; in life it finds it absurd. And in fact, if the world is right, if this music of the cafes, these mass enjoyments and these Americanized men who are pleased with so little are right, than I am wrong, I am crazy. I am in truth the Steppenwolf that I often call myself; that beast astray who finds neither home nor joy nor nourishment in a world that is strange and incomprehensible to him."
.......
"I went along the wet street through one of the quietest and oldest quarters of the town. On the opposite side there stood in the darkness an an old stone wall which I always noticed with pleasure. This time, too, the wall was peaceful and serene and yet something was altered in it."
"I strained my eyes and at last, in spite of the mud and puddles, went across, and there over the door I saw a stain showing up faintly on the grey-green of the wall. Why (are the) letters playing on this old wall in the darkest alley of the Old Town on a wet night with not a soul passing by, and why were they so fleeting, so fitful and illegible? But wait, at last I suceeded in catching several words on end. They were:
MAGIC THEATER
ENTRANCE NOT FOR EVERYBODY
I tried to open the door. The display too was over. For a long time I stood waiting in the mud, but in vain. Then, when I had given up and gone back to the alley, a few colored letters were dropped here and there, reflected on the asphalt in front of me. I read:
FOR MADMEN ONLY!"
.......
And now that we have come to these records, these partly diseased, partly beautiful, and thoughtful fantasies, I must confess that if they had fallen into my hands by chance and if I had known their author, I should most certainly have thrown them away in disgust. I should hesitate to share them with others if I saw in them nothing more but the pathological fantasies of a single and isolated case of a diseased temperament. But I see in them a document of the times, not the eccentricity of a single individual, but the sickness of the times themselves.
Human life is reduced to real suffering, to hell, only when two ages, two cultures and religions overlap. A nature such as Nietzche's had to suffer our present ills more than a generation in advance.
(The Steppenwolf) belongs to those whose fate it is to live the whole riddle of human destiny heightened to the pitch of a personal torture, a personal hell.
Let every person do as his conscience bids.
Hermann Hesse, "Steppenwolf," Copyright 1927
