Steppenwolf

I am reading Hesse's Steppenwolf and as an opener he said he doesn't particularly like younger people reading his book because they misunderstand what the Steppenwolf really is and what it is really about. He was going through a sort of mid-life crisis as was the person who made the cover of this paper-back book that I got at the used book store in a very gay-friendly neighborhood. The cover looks like a mixture of a Michael Jackson Thriller and a science fiction Anastasia. It is just THAT good. Well Hesse was saying that people in the beginning stages of their lives (which I suppose I am still in ) will not truly be able to understand what the Steppenwolf was, what this wolf of the Steppes was, the half wolf half man that is never fully part of society and wanders around never feeling fully human, never fully wolf. He will always outcast himself out of society on his own accord because he loves his freedom but it is this freedom that leaves him all alone. I am 22 year-old girl, and somehow, I think I am my own Steppenwolf in my own world. Though Hesse would not like this, I do because it makes sense to me, more sense than much of what I write or say about myself. For I think that I am of another time and another place and fell into this place that I must now accustom myself to. I am trying...

"These persons all have two soul, two beings within them. There is God and the Devil in them; the mother's blood and the father's; the capacity for happiness and the capacity for suffering; and in just such a state of enmity and entanglement towards and within each other as were the wolf and the man in Harry.
And these men, for whom life has no repose, live at times in their rare moments of happiness with such strength and indescribable beauty, the spray of their moment's happiness is flung so high and dazzlingly over the wide sea of suffering, that the light of it, spreading its radiance, touches others too with its enchantment. Thus like a precious, fleeting foam over the sea of suffering arise all those works of art, in which a single individual lifts himself for an hour so high above his personal destiny that his happiness shines like a star and appears to all who see it as something eternals and as a happiness of their own."
Hesse