"Still, our Steppenwolf has at least discovered a Faustian duality within himself, has found out that no unified soul inhabits the single entity that is his body and that at best he is just starting out on a long pilgrimage towards such an ideal inner harmony. He would like either to become wholly human by conquering the wolf in himself, or conversely to renounce his human side in order at least to live an integrated, undivided life as a wolf. He has presumably never observed a real wolf closely, otherwise he might have seen that animals too have no such things as unified souls; that the beautiful, taut frames of their bodies house a whole variety of aspirations and states of mind; that wolves suffer too, having dark depths within them. Oh no, human beings are always desperately mistaken and bound to suffer when they try to get 'back to nature'. Harry can never fully become a wolf again, and if he did he would realise that even wolves are not simple and primitive creatures but complex and many-sided. Wolves also have two and more than two souls in their wolves' breasts, and anyone desiring to be a wolf is guilty of the same kind of forgetfulness as the man who sings 'What bliss still to be a child!' The likeable but sentimental chap wih his song about the blissfully happy child would also like to get back to nature, to his innocent origins, but he has totally forgotten that children are by no means blissfully happy. Rather, they are capable of many conflicts, a host of contradictory moods, suffering of all kinds.
There is no way back at all, either to the wolf or the child. Things do not begin in innocence and simplicity; all created beings, even the ostensibly simplest, are already guilty, already full of contradictions. Cast into the muddy stream of becoming they can never, never hope to swim back up against the current. The road to innocence, to the state before creation, to God, doesn't run backwards, either to the wolf or the child, but forwards, further and further into guilt, deeper and deeper into the experience of becoming fully human. Nor is suicide, poor Steppenwolf, a serious solution to your problem. You will just have to go down the longer, more onerous, more difficult road to becoming truly human. You will frequently have to multiply your two selves, make your already complex nature a great deal more complicated. Instead of making your world more confined and your soul simpler you are going to have to include more and more world, ultimately the entire world in your soul as it painfully expands, until one day, perhaps, you reach the end and find rest. This, in so far as they succeeded in the venture, is the path taken by Buddha, by all great human beings, some knowingly, others unconsciously. Every birth entails separation from the cosmos, enclosure within limits, isolation from God, painful self-renewal. Returning to the cosmos, overcoming the painful experience of individuation, achieving God-like status: all these entail an expansion of the soul to the point where it is once again able to contain the whole cosmos within itself."
Steppenwolf, Hermann Hesse
