the internet's contents, millions of blogs, words words words infinitely increasing, can not but present an impossible horizon of variety. but, as to depth, a verticality in the great horizontality...
for someone truly in a "Steppenwolfian" state, achievement of level, relation to the world -- and not as some self-romanticization or bravado -- the isolation and aloneliness can only be relieved by what Hesse had Harry Haller describe as the golden thread amidst the mundane and satisfied middling -- by pursuits, studies, observations...that give some insight into the (possibly meaningless) human condition, world and life.
in medias res...the one-volume Frank bio Dostoyevky, readings of the history of "the Sixties", et al, are the kind of unworldly fare that makes it possible to survive in this world. as a "Steppenwolf".
so that philosophy is less a practice of dying, than trying to live in another world while confined embodied to this one. even if the "other world" does not (of a certainty) exist.
50+. "Ach, es ist schwer, diese Gottesspur zu finden inmitten dieses Lebens, das wir fuhren, inmitten dieser so sehr zufriedenen, so sehr bürgerlichen, so sehr geistlosen Zeit, im Anblick dieser Architekturen, dieser Geschäfte, dieser Politik, dieser Menschen. Wie sollte ich nicht ein Steppenwolf und ruppiger Eremit sein inmitten einer Welt, von deren Zielen ich keines teile, von deren Freude keine zu mir spricht?" -- from Hesse's Steppenwolf
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