My long train journeys gave me ample time and space to read and ponder over Herman Hesse’s Steppenwolf. In the author’s note, Herr Hesse notes that it was written when he was fifty and deals with problems of that age, and he sometimes receives odd reactions when it falls into the hands of very young readers. Now, I am far from fifty - should I be worried that I find the book so captivating and enchanting? And that every so often, I am tempted to say,”Ah, so true!”.

I am only about three quarters into the book, but I want to relish it slowly and ponder on some bits and pieces. The part I loved the most so far is in the “Treatise on Steppenwolf” where there is a discourse on how the notion of an individual is just a delusion. That the supposed unity of the self is just fiction, and that the self is in fact composed of a hundred or a thousand selves. And everyone’s life oscillates between innumerable poles.

We all realise it to some extent in our lives. But often its hard to externalise such random thoughts into tangible words and arguments. Often one dismisses them as the musings of a mind in need of rest. To see them written in such an authoritative manner,in a well-revered time-tested book, is definitely reassuring.

More after I have finished the book. For now, I leave you with some food for thought from the treatise:

And if ever the suspicion of their manifold being dawns upon men of unusual powers and of unusually delicate perceptions, so that, as all genius must, they break through the illusion of the unity of the personality and perceive that the self is made up of a bundle of selves, they have only to say so and at once the majority puts them under lock and key, calls science to aid, establishes schizophrenia and protects humanity from the necessity of hearing the cry of truth from the lips of these unfortunate persons.