El Lobo Estepario - Hermann Hesse

Rating: ★★★★★

30/12/13

Solitude is independence. It had been my wish and with the years I had attained it. It was cold. Oh, cold enough! But it was also still, wonderfully still and vast like the cold stillness of space in which the stars revolve.

I wrote a review a couple of weeks ago and I am still not sure about sharing it. It is too personal. This book is so close to my heart and my first review reflects that; a little too much. I mean, I didn't know what to expect and it blew me away. It is a fascinating work nearly about everything. Everything I care about, everything I dislike, everything I want, everything I love. Even knowing that, clearly, the protagonist doesn't have all the stability of the world, are his statements that implausible?
Nonetheless, it is not all about his pessimist (yet real) points of view on life and society; there is also hope. Just a line, actually, but it is there. More than enough.

So, I am going to leave it at that for now, and share what I think it is a beautifully written and crucial passage.

I could not bear this tame, lying, well-mannered life any longer. And since it appeared that I could not bear my loneliness any longer either, since my own company had become so unspeakably hateful and nauseous, since I struggled for breath in a vacuum and suffocated in hell, what way out was left me? There was none. I thought of my father and mother, of the sacred flame of my youth long extinct, of the thousand joys and labors and aims of my life. Nothing of them all was left me, not even repentance, nothing but agony and nausea. Never had the clinging to mere life seemed so grievous as now.

...More and more plainly, with a wildly beating heart, I felt the dread of all dreads, the fear of death. Yes, I was horribly afraid of death. Although I saw no other way out, although nausea, agony and despair threatened to engulf me; although life had no allurement and nothing to give me either of joy or hope, I shuddered all the same with an unspeakable horror of a gaping wound in a condemned man's flesh.