y'all can't all be wrong: My Seven Month Steppenwolf Hunt Has Ended

I finally plunged the final knife into Hesse's Wolf last night. I could say I completed it, but with all of its strange recursions and subtle, yet exigent philosophy, it's hardly a book that can be finished on its first read. One certainty: all of my subsequent encounters with looking glasses will incite a double take to ensure the reflection didn't have fur and fangs. I'm no wolf, but hyper-empathy has me barking, howling for the moon's pallor, daydreaming fire hydrant fantasies.

Harry Haller -- Hermann Hesse -- Hermine the lover -- Herman, his "boyhood friend, the enthusiast, the poet, who had shared with ardor all (his) intellectual pursuits and extravagances." My ass and left foot too (with a smile). The autobiographical presumptions that can be drawn are too slapped-face obvious -- too big a dose of spoon-fed Hesse deliberation. Hesse complained of misinterpretation, but it almost seems the desire of the novel. But maybe you read your literature wearing a blue collar riding a pro bono publico bus, or maybe you read your literature sitting at an oak table of some Columbia library (or was it Cornell?)? Isn't every interpretation a little misguided?

I play a game of describe-a-novel-in-one-word-or-phrase. The word or phrase must appear in the novel. For Demian, the word is intimate(verb sense). For Steppenwolf, it's problem of existence. I'll rest on my simple sugar one word summaries and leave the correct interpretations to intellectuals as they strive to join the immortals, in or outside the magic theater.

Side note 1: intellectuals do not have sex. There's a lot of horror in the latter half of the novel when the middle-aged, intellectual Haller, err Hesse, err half-man-half-malamute-thingy goes through and describes his sexual awakening,

who on an autumn evening beneath a swaying elm gave me her brown breasts to kiss and the cup of passion to drink.

Yuck (unless a naked-Bill-Gates-cross-naked-Connie-Chung thing does it for you).

Side note 2: America has never made a mistake. I'm sure I'm in the minority, but doesn't self-examination and behavior towards others (read: foreign policy) define your acceptance and sociability?

Now and again I have expressed the opinion that every nation, and even every person, would do better, instead of rocking himself to sleep with political catchwords about war guilt, to ask himself how far his own faults and negligences and evil tendencies are guilty of the war and all the other wrongs of the world, and that therein lies the only possible means of avoiding the next war.

Of course, I've found that when you beat the living shit out of children, they generally submit and do what's asked of them -- maybe ass kicking is the only answer, err, (final?) solution.