Words Worth Quoting: Hermann Hesse

"...and to explain so complex a man as Harry by the artless division into wolf and man is a hopelessly childish attempt. Harry consists of a hundred or a thousand selves, not two. His life oscillates, as everyone's does, not merely between two poles, such as the body and the spirit, the saint and the sinner, but between thousand and thousands."

"Man designs for himself a garden with a hundred kinds of trees, a thousand kinds of flowers, a hundred kinds of fruit and vegetables. Suppose, then, that the gardener of this garden knew no other distinction than between edible and inedible, nine-tenths of this garden would be useless to him. He would pull up the most enchanting flowers and hew down the noblest trees and even regard them with a loathing and envious eye. This is what the Steppenwolf does with the thousand of flowers of his soul. What does not stand classified as either man or wolf he does not see at all. And consider all that he imputes to "man"! All that is cowardly and apish, stupid and mean--while to the wolf, only because he has not succeeded in making himself its master, is set down all that is strong and noble."

- from Steppenwolf, by Hermann Hesse

The Hawkline Monster

I think The Hawkline Monster ties with In Watermelon Sugar for my favorite Brautigan novel so far. Brautigan’s gothic western masterpiece follows the exploits of Greer and Cameron, two Oregon hitmen hired to kill a monster that lives in ice caves beneath a Victorian house in the middle of nowhere. Their employers are the strange Miss Hawklines—twin sisters as eerily hard to pin down as the house itself. The sisters spend their time trying to perfect The Chemicals, their father’s unfinished experiment he was working on when he went missing, which presumably has something to do with the monster beneath the house. If Greer and Cameron can take care of their little problem, they might be able to get along nicely without any more distractions.

Surreal, dark, creative, and wonderfully sinister, The Hawkline Monster makes me want to time travel back to the beginning of the 20^th century, name myself Magic Child, and see the world through eyes acquainted with the strange.

Words Worth Quoting

“Everybody was lying to the FBI and CIA, sir. They were all afraid of punishment for various activities forbidden by our laws. No variation or permutation on their stories will hang together reasonably. Each witness lied about something, and usually about several things. The truth is other than it appeared. In short, the government, being an agency of punishment, acted as a distorting factor from the beginning, and I had to use information-theory equations to determine the degree of distortion present. I would say that what I finally discovered may have universal application: no governing body can ever obtain an accurate account of reality from those over whom it holds power. From the perspective of communication analysis, government is not an instrument of law and order, but of law and disorder.”

- from The Golden Apple, by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson