The “incorrigible tendency to compromise”

This morning I read more in Colin Wilson’s The Outsider. It is a wonderful book that a friend gave me 20 years ago. It was out of print, but she managed to get a copy, after I complained to her that I hadn’t been able to get it.

I’d like to share a few quotes from him and by him from the book:

From Hesse’s Steppenwolf:
“Were he already among the immortals – were he already there at the goal to which the difficult path seems to be taking him – with what amazement he would look back over all this coming and going, all the indecision and wild zigzagging of his tracks. With what a mixture of encouragement and blame, pity and joy, he would smile at this Steppenwolf.

…My life had become weariness. It had wandered in a maze of unhappiness that led to renunciation and nothingness; it was bitter with the salt of all human things; yet it had laid up riches, riches to be proud of. It had been, for all its wretchedness, a princely life. Let the little way to death be as it might – the kernel of this life of mine was noble. It came of high descent, and turned, not on trifles, but on the stars…”

Wilson says: “The path that leads from the Outsider’s miseries to this still-centre is a path of discipline, asceticism and complete detachment.”

“In Steppenwolf, Hesse solves the Outsider’s problem to this extent: his wretchedness is the result of his incorrigible tendency to compromise, to prefer temperate, civilized, bourgeois regions. His salvation lies in extremes – of heat or cold, spirit or nature.
…Being a romantic, Hesse refuses to accept any such half-measure; he has a deep sense of the injustice of human beings having to live on such a lukewarm level of everyday triviality; he feels that there should be a way of living with the intensity of the artist’s creative ecstasy all the time. We may dismiss this as romantic wishful-thinking, but it deserves note as being one of the consistent ideals of the Outsider.”

And he offers a quote from Novalis: “When we dream that we dream, we are beginning to wake up.”
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I’m letting go of great expectations this morning. I don’t need them, as I know destiny takes me where I’m meant to go. That helps take the pressure off.

Yes, it’s those nasty old expectations that have been creeping up again. They become so huge that I feel nearly paralyzed and tend to waste more time than usual, to procrastinate more fervently, or to just move slower than I deem to be necessary.

Yesterday a friend reminded me: “It doesn’t matter what you do, just do it with full awareness.” That was her response to my complaint that on days off it takes me a while to get into gear. I’d like to be the dynamo that always blasts full speed ahead, and tend to expect that of myself, but I’m not.

I accept that sometimes I need more time to do things, to let things settle, to simply be. That ever-present internalized critic who judges everything I do (and don’t do!) drives me nuts at times.

The concept of being “in the process” is a great benefit already culled from the training program I enrolled in last February. Although I’ve come a long way from the black-or-white, either-or, extreme perspective and introduced moderation into my life — and never tire of extolling the virtues of moderation, I am still a person of extremes.

But being “in the process” helps me cope better with that in-between space, which creates an inner tension that is sometimes unbearable. That tension is alleviated through the physically experienced insight that I’m where I’m at and it’s good the way it is. Yoga helps, too!

Since I do believe in destiny, why do I get so pushy at times or feel such an urgency to hurry things up? The process is the process and it takes what it takes. I’ll get there eventually.

“My soul that had fallen asleep in the cold…”

Yesterday I had a date to meet a friend at 2 pm. I brought Steppenwolf with me to read in case she got there late. An hour later, she still wasn’t there, so I tried calling. No answer. I read for another 2 hours, hoping she hadn’t had an accident. I figured I am on vacation, so why not stay at the café and read for a while?

After 3 hours she called. She had actually had an accident — and needed an ambulance (not for herself) and had to go to the police station to file an accident report, so it all took a while. Of course, she had forgotten her cell phone in the excitement.

Well, I’d had a hard time really getting into the book, but those three hours helped. And there are a couple more passages that struck me…

Harry meets a woman at a bar/dance hall. He doesn’t want to go home because he’s planning to kill himself. He is grateful to talk with her, then she asks him to dance with her. He explains that he can’t dance. His parents let him learn Latin and Greek, but they didn’t let him learn to dance. (Harry is 48 years old.)

“She looked at me quite coldly, with real contempt, and again something in her face reminded me of my youth.

‘So your parents must take the blame then. Did you ask them whether you might spend the evening at the Black Eagle? Did you? They’re dead a long while ago, you say? So much for that. And now supposing you were too obedient to learn to dance when you were young (though I don’t believe you were such a model child), what have you been doing with yourself all these years?’

‘Well,’ I confessed, ‘I scarcely know myself — studied, played music, read books, written books, traveled–’

‘Fine views of life, you have. You have always done the difficult and complicated things and the simple ones you haven’t even learned. No time, of course. More amusing things to do. Well, thank God, I’m not your mother. But to do as you do and then say you’ve tested life to the bottom and found nothing in it is going a bit too far.’ “

Harry went home and was no longer determined to kill himself. Far from it. He said: “All of a sudden there was a human being, a living human being, to shatter the death that had come down over me like a glass case, and to put out a hand to me, a good and beautiful and warm hand. All of a sudden there were things that concerned me again, which I could think of with joy and eagerness. All of a sudden a door was thrown open through which life came in. Perhaps I could live once more and once more be a human being. My soul that had fallen asleep in the cold and nearly frozen breathed once more, and sleepily spread its weak and tiny wings. Goethe had been with me. A girl had bidden me eat and drink and sleep, and had shown me friendship and had laughed at me and had called me a silly little boy. And this wonderful friend had talked to me of the saints and shown me that even when I had outdone myself in absurdity I was not alone. I was not an incomprehensible and ailing exception. There were people akin to me. I was understood.”

This book was first published in 1929. In closing, more food for thought:

“And all this, I said, just as today was the case with the beginnings of wireless [he meant the radio], would be of no more service to man than as an escape from himself and his true aims, and a means of surrounding himself with an ever closer mesh of distractions and useless activities.”

My friend eventually showed up and we talked for a couple of hours. She was glad to get her mind off the accident and to settle down a bit. It was an interesting afternoon.

For madmen only: entrance not for everyone

It’s a rainy Sunday afternoon and I’m curled up on the couch reading. I came across this passage, and feel the need to share it.

“It might, for example, be possible that in his childhood he was a little wild and disobedient and disorderly, 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. On this point one could speak at length and entertainingly, and indeed write a book about it. The Steppenwolf, however, would be none the better for it, since for him it was all one whether the wolf had been bewitched or beaten into him, or whether it was merely an idea of his own. What others chose to think about it or what he chose to think himself was no good to him at all. It left the wolf inside him just the same.” From Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse.

It often happens in conversations that I hear someone say it all goes back to their childhood. In fact, for a while, I used to think that myself about various difficulties and problems. But then it occurred to me that it didn’t really matter.

To know why I am the way I am is not as helpful as I once thought it could be. No, what I need is to accept that I am the way I am. A little strange, not quite like the others, can fit in and socialize but if I get too close to the civilized it is inevitable that I discover that I don’t think as they do. I have my own reality and perception. Although I try to make sense of that world out there, it eludes me.

Someone I know quite well spends a lot of time trying to figure things out. I wish so much for her that she could learn to use that energy to live, to celebrate her life and her unique self, and make the most of it. (No, I am not talking about myself.)

Today is Sunday, a good day to pray. So I pray especially for this person, but I include everyone else. I pray that she learn to let go of the questions and simply accept herself as she is. I pray that she finds relief from the need to explain things as a way to justify her existence. There is no need to justify. The fact that she was born is enough.