A wolf of the Steppes that had lost it’s way and strayed into the towns and the life of the herd. p17
[Regarding Haller’s left behind manuscript] They are rather the deeply loved spiritual events which he has attempted to express by giving them the form of tangible experiences….I see them as a document of the times, for Haller’s sickness of the soul, as I now know, is not the eccentricity of a single individual, but the sickness of the times themselves, the neurosis of that generation to which Haller belongs……They are an attempt to present the sickness itself in its actual manifestation. p20-21
Human life is reduced to real suffering, to hell, only when two ages, two cultures and religions overlap…Now there are times when a whole generation is caught in this way between two ages, two modes of life and has no standard, no security, no simple acquiescence p22
I feel our contemporary world is existing between two ages and modes of life.
Those who remember before the internet and those who never lived in a world without the internet. Those who remember not having a cell phone. Those who learned cursive and those who didn’t.
I was in high school when our family ‘got internet.’ It was dialup and played very specific noises when connecting. I can still ‘sing’ those noises from memory. We would lose the connection if someone called our family landline. After one and a half hours, our connection would kick us off and we’d have to re-connect.
I remember high school research involving physical libraries.
At 35, I never wrote an academic paper without a word processor on a personal computer. In fact, I’m still in awe at my parents who did scholarly work without this benefit.
WrittenCasey 