Sorry Dawn,
I just started a new job and I've been very busy. Not too busy to read books, fortunately. And I have been reading the forum, just haven't had time or anything important enough to say to draw me from my slumber...
Regardless, I'm back!
Wynter,
Thanks for posting back. I identify with the theme of internal conflicts as well.
It's been a few years since I read Steppenwolf, but I remember it pretty well. To answer your question, however, I'll draw from two of Hesse's novels that are fresher in my mind, Demian and Siddhartha, as well.
Hesse's heroes in these novels are always searching for truth, and when they find a new worldview to their liking, they embrace it as the whole truth and begin to see things through that lens, for lack of a better term. It becomes his central philosophy and all else suddenly appears to have sprung out from that central truth, making him feel wise and superior. Soon, however, he sees the error of his thinking, and he is as a babe in the wood again, and so he goes searching for another philosophy to supplant the previous one, and regain that feeling of mastery.
At the end of all this searching, he realizes that he was gaining wisdom through his searches, but that all of his old ways of thinking all had value, and that the real truth is an amalgam, (or a gestalt to use a term my favorite author, Phil Dick, seemed to adore,and I think its from Jung, whom Hesse seems to be familiar with and so it seems appropriate)
I have the nasty habit of latching on to "secret sciences" like birth order, personality profiles, astrology. I didn't take them so seriously at first, but I gave each of them (and many other kooky philosophies and many more "legitimate" philosophies i.e. Christianity, Evolutionary biology, romanticism......) a fair shake and found some grain of truth in each. Astrology is the least legit feeling of those worldviews, and yet it's so easy to study a little bit and feel that your eyes are being opened to something big and cosmic.
Regardless of the legitimacy of any of these philosophies, (some I now embrace, others I scoff at), the reason I was attracted to them was the fun and excitement of that mystical experience. The feeling that you understand the whole, even if you cannot describe or understand all the parts. That's the feeling I get when I read Hesse, hence my ramble.
Sorry for the length of this post. I hope you have a big monitor or else your eyes are bleeding by now.
It's so hard to talk about this subject, isn't it? It's so esoteric and, dare I say, crackpot, that it eludes lucidity.
There I go again.
ET