Free Klingsor's Last Summer by Hermann Hesse Page B

alone! It was false; nowhere in the world was real hair so yellow. And she wore cosmetics, too. How anyone could so lower herself as to smear lipstick on her lips—negroid! And such people went about as if the world belonged to them; they had that manner, that assurance, that brazenness, and took the joy out of life for decent persons.
    Along with the newly roiling emotions of displeasure, vexation, and constraint another great bubble of the past simmered to the surface, and suddenly another insight: these are your wife’s views you are invoking. You are setting her up as judge, you are subordinating yourself to her again! For a moment there washed over him a feeling that could perhaps be defined as: I am an ass for still counting myself among “decent people”; I am no longer one, of course; I belong just as much as this yellow-haired girl to a world which is no longer my former world, and no longer the decent world. It is one where decent and indecent no longer mean anything, where everyone is trying to live through this difficult life on his own. For the space of a moment he felt that his contempt for the yellow-haired girl was just as superficial and insincere as his onetime condemnation of Wagner the murderer, and his distaste for the other Wagner whose music he had felt to be too sensual. For a second his buried understanding, his lost self, opened its eyes and told him with its omniscient gaze that all indignation, all condemnation, all contempt were mistaken and childish and rebounded upon the poor devil who did the despising.
    This good, omniscient understanding told him also that he was again confronting a mystery whose proper interpretation was important for his life, that this slut or demimondaine, this scent of elegance, seduction, and sex, was by no means repugnant and insulting to him. Rather, that he was only imagining such judgments and had hammered them into his mind out of fear of his real nature, out of fear of Wagner, out of fear of the animal or devil he might discover if he ever threw off the fetters and disguises of his moralistic respectability. Something akin to mocking laughter abruptly flared up within him, but soon subsided. The feeling of displeasure won out again. It was uncanny the way every awakening, every emotion, every thought infallibly struck him precisely where he was weak and only too susceptible to torments. Now he was caught up in his weakness once more and brooding over his misspent life, his wife, his crime, the hopelessness of his future. Anxiety returned; the omniscient ego sank beneath the surface like an unheard sigh. Oh, what agony! No, the yellow-haired girl was not to blame for this. And all the intense feelings he had directed against her did her no harm, of course; they struck only himself.
    He got up and began walking. In the past he had often thought he was leading a fairly solitary life, and with a measure of vanity had ascribed this to a certain resigned philosophic quality in himself. Among his associates, moreover, he had the reputation of being a scholar, reader, and secret intellectual. Good Lord, he had never been solitary! He had talked with his associates, with his wife, with his children, with all sorts of people, and such talk had made the days pass and his cares bearable. Even when he had been alone, it had been no sort of solitude. He had shared the opinions, anxieties, joys, and comforts of many others, of a whole world. Community had always been all around him and had penetrated deep into him, and even in solitude, in suffering and in resignation, he had always belonged to a group, a protective association, the world of decent, righteous, and respectable people. But now, now he was tasting loneliness. Every arrow struck him directly, every reason for comfort proved pointless, every escape from anxiety only led back into that world with which he had broken, which had broken him and slipped away from him. Everything that had been good and right