An Important Lesson From Hermann Hesse’s “Der Steppenwolf”
To be brutally honest, in the beginning, I hated the book.
I thought it was boring and didn’t see why I should read it. But we had to, so I kept on going… in the end, I was glad I did.
On the back of the book, there is one single quote by Frédéric Beigbeder that only turns out to be true after reading the very last page.
There are few books that transform us, that give us the courage to change our lives. “Der Steppenwolf” is such a book.
The protagonist, Harry Haller, is an Author, Poet, Musician and much more. His personality is plagued by an inner wolf figure which he partly blames for what his life has become. You see, his life turned into quite a depressing one. To the point where he hated every day and even wanted to take his own life.
One night, while sitting in a restaurant alone he meets Hermine and from then on his life changes forever. He learns to live and love again and at the end, he enters a magical theatre. There, for example, he relives his entire romantic life starting by asking out the girl he never dared to talk to in real life. A lot more happens, but I don’t want to spoiler you too much…
Now, this probably sounds a bit confusing to you and I totally recommend you read the book to understand everything a lot better. The point of this article is to teach a lesson and not to write a summary. So here comes the lesson:
It’s trying to teach you to only take seriously the most important things in life. You should be able to laugh about all the other fluff around it.
This, however, begs the age-old question of what is important and what isn’t. In my opinion, this is different for every individual. Everyone must identify a few key things that are most important to them and then learn to laugh about all the little things that are quite insignificant in the long run. All the little things that bother us. A good example is worrying about the possibly embarrassing text you just sent to your crush, or your editing software crashing yet again, or your battery running out. Most of these things are fixable and extremely irrelevant if you think about them in the context of the next couple of years. Just learning to laugh about such minor inconveniences could make this world a much happier place.
