Hesse

"a man whose progressive isolation and emotional decay I was witnessing with my own eyes. During that period I became increasingly aware that the illness he was suffering from didn't stem from any deficiencies in his nature. On the contrary, he had strengths and talents in abundance, but had never managed to combine them harmoniously, and that was his only problem. I came to realize that Haller had a peculiar genius for suffering, that he had, in the sense that Nietzsche intends in many of his aphorisms, trained himself to the point where his capacity for suffering was masterly, limitless, awesome." Hesse, Steppenwolf " When he heard that I never drink wine, his face again assumed a vacant expression and he said: 'I suppose you are right not to. For years I too lived abstemiously, even fasting for long periods, but at the moment I'm again under the sign of Aquarius, a dark and damp sign of the zodiac." Hesse, Steppenwolf Every age, every culture, every ethos and tradition has a style of its own, has the varieties of gentleness and harshness, of beauty and cruelty that are appropriate to it. Each age will take certain kinds of suffering for granted, will patiently accept certain wrongs. Human life becomes a real hell of suffering only when two ages, two cultures and religions overlap. Required to live in the Middle Ages, someone from the Graeco-Roman period would have died a wretched death by suffocation, just as a savage inevitably would in the midst our civilization. Now, there are times when a whole generation gets caught to such an extent between two eras, two styles of life, that nothing comes naturally to it since it has lost all sense of morality, security and innocence." Hesse, Steppenwolf