Toqa Medhat’s Reviews > Steppenwolf > Status Update

In this connection one thing more must be said. There are a good many people of the same kind as Harry. Many artists are of his kind. These persons all have two souls, two beings within them. There is God and the devil in them; the mother's blood and the father's; the capacity for happiness and the capacity for suffering;

... and so it was that the Steppenwolf brought his own dual and divided nature into the destinies of others besides himself whenever he came into contact with them.

There were those, however, who loved precisely the wolf in him, the free, the savage, the untamable, the dangerous and strong, and these found it peculiarly disappointing and deplorable when suddenly the wild and wicked wolf was also a man, and had hankerings after goodness and refinement, and wanted to hear Mozart, to read poetry and to cherish human ideals. Usually these were the most disappointed and angry of all;

For all who got to love him, saw always only the one side in him.
Many loved him as a refined and clever and interesting man, and were horrified and disappointed when they had come upon the wolf in him.
And they had to because Harry wished, as every sentient being does, to be loved as a whole and therefore it was just with those whose love he most valued that he could least of all conceal and belie the wolf.

And even the unhappiest life has its sunny moments and its little flowers of happiness between sand and stone.

How foolish to wear oneself out in vain longing for warmth!
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.

The golden trail was blazed and I was reminded of the eternal, and of Mozart, and the stars.
For an hour I could breathe once more and live and face existence, without the need to suffer torment, fear, or shame.

.. and that those who brought him up had declared a war of extinction against the beast in him; and precisely this had given him the idea and the belief that he was in fact actually a beast with only a thin covering of the human.

How foolish to wear oneself out in vain longing for warmth!

I saw that Haller was a genius of suffering and that in themeaning of many sayings of Nietzsche he had created within himself with positive genius aboundless and frightful capacity for pain.
I saw at the same time that the root of his pessimismwas not world-contempt but self-contempt; for however mercilessly he might annihilate institutions and persons in his talk he never spared himself.