"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 by string. The anxiety was there again, anxiety from
childhood dreams, from fairy tales, from the things a 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 have to 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 yourself, you are a bird in the storm. Let it storm!
Let it drive 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, από Rainy
Weather
