Ironweed
Nauseated.
- Nov 9, 2019
- 320
I'm not even sure I can truly describe the context, but the novel is about a lonely old man who a series of bizarre and transcendent experiences. The book is very odd, and this passage is from The Treatise on the Steppenwolf Which...eh.
This was one of the significant earmarks of his life.
Another was that he was numbered among the suicides. And
here it must be said that to call suicides only those who actually
destroy themselves is false. Among these, indeed, there are many
who in a sense are suicides only by accident and in whose being
suicide has no necessary place. Among the common run of men
there are many of little personality and stamped with no deep
impress of fate, who find their end in suicide without belonging on
that account to the type of the suicide by inclination; while on the
other hand, of those who are to be counted as suicides by the very
nature of their beings are many, perhaps a majority, who never in
fact lay hands on themselves. The "suicide," and Harry was one,
need not necessarily live in a peculiarly close relationship to death.
One may do this without being a suicide. What is peculiar to the
suicide is that his ego, rightly or wrongly, is felt to be an extremely
dangerous, dubious, and doomed germ of nature; that he is always
in his own eyes exposed to an extraordinary risk, as though he stood
with the slightest foothold on the peak of a crag whence a slight push
from without or an instant's weakness from within suffices to
precipitate him into the void. The line of fate in the case of these men
is marked by the belief they have that suicide is their most probable
manner of death. It might be presumed that such temperaments,
which usually manifest themselves in early youth and persist through
life, show a singular defect of vital force. On the contrary, among the
"suicides" are to be found unusually tenacious and eager and also
hardy natures. But just as there are those who at the least
indisposition develop a fever, so do those whom we call suicides,
and who are always very emotional and sensitive, develop at the
least shock the notion of suicide. Had we a science with the courage
and authority to concern itself with mankind, instead of with the
mechanism merely of vital phenomena, had we something of the
nature of an anthropology, or a psychology, these matters of fact
would be familiar to every one.
What was said above on the subject of suicides touches
obviously nothing but the surface. It is psychology, and, therefore,
partly physics. Metaphysically considered, the matter has a different
and a much clearer aspect. In this aspect suicides present
themselves as those who are overtaken by the sense of guilt
inherent in individuals, those souls that find the aim of life not in the
perfecting and molding of the self, but in liberating themselves by
going back to the mother, back to God, back to the all. Many of these
natures are wholly incapable of ever having recourse to real suicide,
because they have a profound consciousness of the sin of doing so.
For us they are suicides nonetheless; for they see death and not life
as the releaser. They are ready to cast themselves away in
surrender, to be extinguished and to go back to the beginning.
As every strength may become a weakness (and under some
circumstances must) so, on the contrary, may the typical suicide find
a strength and a support in his apparent weakness. Indeed, he does
so more often than not. The case of Harry, the Steppenwolf, is one of
these. As thousands of his like do, he found consolation and support,
and not merely the melancholy play of youthful fancy, in the idea that
the way to death was open to him at any moment. It is true that with
him, as with all men of his kind, every shock, every pain, every
untoward predicament at once called forth the wish to find an escape
in death. By degrees, however, he fashioned for himself out of this
tendency a philosophy that was actually serviceable to life. He
gained strength through familiarity with the thought that the
emergency exit stood always open, and became curious, too, to
taste his suffering to the dregs. If it went too badly with him he could
feel sometimes with a grim malicious pleasure: "I am curious to see
all the same just how much a man can endure. If the limit of what is
bearable is reached, I have only to open the door to escape." There
are a great many suicides to whom this thought imparts an
uncommon strength.
On the other hand, all suicides have the responsibility of fighting
against the temptation of suicide. Every one of them knows very well
in some corner of his soul that suicide, though a way out, is rather a
mean and shabby one, and that it is nobler and finer to be
conquered by life than to fall by one's own hand. Knowing this, with a
morbid conscience whose source is much the same as that of the
militant conscience of so-called self-contented persons, the majority
of suicides are left to a protracted struggle against their temptation.
They struggle as the kleptomaniac against his own vice. The
Steppenwolf was not unfamiliar with this struggle. He had engaged
in it with many a change of weapons. Finally, at the age of fortyseven
or thereabouts, a happy and not unhumorous idea came to
him from which he often derived some amusement. He appointed his
fiftieth birthday as the day on which he might allow himself to take
his own life. On this day, according to his mood, so he agreed with
himself, it should be open to him to employ the emergency exit or
not. Let happen to him what might, illness, poverty, suffering and
bitterness, there was a time-limit. It could not extend beyond these
few years, months, days whose number daily diminished. And in fact
he bore much adversity, which previously would have cost him
severer and longer tortures and shaken him perhaps to the roots of
his being, very much more easily. When for any reason it went
particularly badly with him, when peculiar pains and penalties were
added to the desolateness and loneliness and savagery of his life,
he could say to his tormentors: "Only wait, two years and I am your
master." And with this he cherished the thought of the morning of his
fiftieth birthday. Letters of congratulation would arrive, while he,
relying on his razor, took leave of all his pains and closed the door
behind him. Then gout in the joints, depression of spirits, and all
pains of head and body could look for another victim.
