Steppenwolf
Thomas Wayne presents a contemporary take on Hesse's classic story, so apt today, of the lone individual lost in the ironic good fortune and security of bourgeois banality and cultural conformity. Harry Haller has all the insight, all the leisure, all the material goods he needs, yet he is not at peace with his life. A potent combination of Eastern and Western insights into the human search for meaning is given new life in a fresh translation.
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69% recommend31% neutral
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What Hacker News says
- Thanks for an elaborate answer!
Being both a technician and a musician, I couldn't agree more.
The technician in me strives to have as flat, transparent and precise audio reproduction system as possible, with the single purpose: to make what the musician in me does translatable to every other audio system out there, which may very well be quite imperfect, but still intimately known and adapted to by its listener - and thus reproduce my music without surprising the listener in a bad way.
(Funny enough, after many years of chasing that ideal, I'm much closer to it with balanced armature IEMs than with a pair of professional studio monitors at 100x the price!)
An analogy in graphics would be a display with neutral color reproduction that has as perfect black as possible and white as bright as it's sane to have.
It's a never ending quest of course, and it's the creator's one, not spectator's. Which is basically "give me pure silence and transparency so that I know precisely how much sound and color to add". How much is added is a dogma for one and total freedom for another, and that's a completely different story.
From a spectator's point of view, everything becomes much more subjective and roots more in psychology than anything else.
I always remember that interview of a vinyl mastering engineer for the Kompakt label, who said that the art of an audioengineer is that of persuasion. "This sounds awesome, trust me :)
And then, the reconstructive abilities of one's perception also mean a lot.
There's a wonderful passage from the Hesse's Steppenwolf, where the protagonist listens to a gramophone record, noisy and bandlimited, of an orchestra playing a piece, deeper and deeper until he manages to hear the original sound and intent of it through the veil of the record's imperfections.
- Hesse’s books are phenomenal. Besides Siddartha, highly recommend reading A Glass Bead Game and also Steppenwolf.
- True. It's bad that these books are usually read by only young people. I remember reading Steppenwolf for the first time since teens and only then I realized how funny it was all around. Dostoevsky's The Devils is hilarious too, being very dark at the same time.
The same goes for basically all higher culture. Popular culture is usually unfunny because humor is considered a commercial risk.
- Steppenwolf By Herman Hesse. It's remarkable how a fictional character written by someone a century ago can resonate so deeply with a modern person. But then again, that's a common thread amongst great literature. I recommend this book to anyone struggling with loneliness or feeling like they haven't found their footing in this world.
“Learn what is to be taken seriously and laugh at everything else.”
- I like Hesse and I like Steppenwolf even though neither is my favorite -- but there is a fragment in Steppenwolf that I will never forget, that I have used often, and that anchors the love side of my love-hate relationship with the German language:
"...um im Gasthaus [...] das zu trinken, was trinkende Männer nach einer alten Konvention »ein Gläschen Wein« nennen."
English: in order to drink in the pub that which drinking men, according to an old convention, call "a little glass of wine."
But trust me, it really works in German.
- The Glass Bead Game by Herman Hesse. I enjoyed reading both Steppenwolf and Narcissus and Goldmund for the second time.
