Significant Moments: Part 16

No one who occupies himself with dreams can, I believe, fail to discover that it is a very common event for a dream to give evidence of knowledge and memories which the waking subject is unaware of possessing.
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams.
R. tells me . . .
Cosima Wagner's Diaries (Tuesday, December 23, 1879).
. . . a dream in which . . .
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment.
. . . he had been taken to a large Jewish synodal meeting, at which two large Jews standing at the door had received him respectfully! —
Cosima Wagner's Diaries (Tuesday, December 23, 1879).
. . . and feels almost sorry when he wakes and the interesting illusion is destroyed.
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams.
I couldn’t tell then . . .
William Faulkner, Light in August (Chapter 11).
. . . Richard said, . . .
Charles Dickens, Bleak House.
. . whether I saw it or dreamed it.
William Faulkner, Light in August (Chapter 11).
An undated memory:
Jean-Paul Sartre, The Words.
One day when I was quite small I slipped out and tried to find the synagogue, . . .
George Eliot, Daniel Deronda.
. . . about which I had heard much . . .
Edgar Allan Poe, The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether.
. . . but I lost myself a long while till a pedlar questioned me and took me home.
George Eliot, Daniel Deronda.
He asked so many questions . . .
Frances Hodgson Burnett, T. Tembarom.
. . . the old peddler:
Andrew Lang, The Blue Fairy Book: The Bronze Ring.
Where are you from?
Richard Wagner, Parsifal.
“Come out with the truth,” he said.
Franz Kafka, The Trial.
Who is your father?
Richard Wagner, Parsifal.
My father?
Charlotte M. Yonge, The Dove in the Eagle’s Nest.
Who sent you this way?
Richard Wagner, Parsifal.
“Give me an answer!”
Franz Kafka, The Trial.
Your name, then?
Richard Wagner, Parsifal.
Wagner, . . .
E.M. Forster, The Longest Journey.
. . . I stammered.
John Buchan, The Thirty-Nine Steps.
“No, no,”
Franz Kafka, The Trial.
. . .Geier!
Edgar Rice Burroughs, The Land That Time Forgot.
My father, missing me, had been in much fear, and was very angry. I too had been so frightened at losing myself that it was long before I thought of venturing out again.
George Eliot, Daniel Deronda.
Was he a Jew, like his . . . stepfather, or a Gentile . . . ?
Lawrence J. Friedman, Identity's Architect: A Biography of Erik H. Erikson.
Throughout his life Wagner was consumed by a strange love-hate for the Jews.
Robert W. Gutman, Richard Wagner: The Man, His Mind, and His Music.
. . . he constantly navigated the Jewish-Gentile divide.
Lawrence J. Friedman, Identity's Architect: A Biography of Erik H. Erikson.
R. and I discuss the curious attachment individual Jews have for him; he says Wahnfried will soon turn into a synagogue!
Cosima Wagner's Diaries (Monday, January 13, 1879).
Once they have been brought together, though, God help them!
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Elective Affinities.
—I am, of course, speaking of the anonymous letter linking Cosima Wagner with Levi—
Peter Gay, Freud, Jews and Other Germans.
A young man asks permission to call and R. receives him: "A very handsome Jew," he tells me afterward, "or metis [half-caste]"—fair-haired and sweet. R. observes that we ought to give Fidi . . .
Cosima Wagner's Diaries (Thursday, August 7, 1879).
Siegfried
Richard Wagner, Siegfried.
. . . a crooked nose.
Cosima Wagner's Diaries (Thursday, August 7, 1879).
The whole ambivalence that once upon a time was directed against the father is now transferred against the son.
K.R. Eissler, Goethe: A Psychoanalytic Study 1775-1786.
Ironically, research has so far failed to produce a single demonstrably Jewish ancestor on the Geyer family tree. But Richard could not have known this.
Robert W. Gutman, Richard Wagner: The Man, His Mind, and His Music.
. . . his lifelong quest to discover the identity of his father would remain unfulfilled.
Lawrence J. Friedman, Identity's Architect: A Biography of Erik H. Erikson.
This to me—
Wilkie Collins, The Legacy of Cain.
. . . without question, . . .
Jack London, The Sea Wolf.
. . . is the most tragic condition a man could find himself in—not to know what he is and to know that he will never know.
William Faulkner, Light in August (editor’s note quoting Faulkner).
That hysterical anti-Semitism which continued unabated throughout his life may well have grown from attempts to evince an Aryan purity.
Robert W. Gutman, Richard Wagner: The Man, His Mind, and His Music.
The phantom of Wagner’s possible contamination with Jewish hemoglobin struck horror into the hearts of good Nazi biologists and archivists; they delved anxiously into Geyer’s own and, much to the relief of Goebbels and other Nazi intellectuals, it was found that Geyer, like Wagner’s nominal father, was the purest Aryan; Wagner’s possible illegitimate birth was of no concern to the racial tenets of the Nazi Weltanschauung.
Nicholas Slonimsky, Laura Kuhn and Dennis McIntire, Baker’s Biographical Dictionary of Musicians.
On examining a persistent prejudice we invariably find that it contains the projection on to the outsider of repudiated impulses, thoughts, and feelings. These are first denied and repressed, then they are projected. Although at times these projections find qualities in their target that may make the resultant accusations seem justified, i.e., reality adequate, their sweeping, generic, stereotyped applications to ever wider discrepant groups reveals their true nature. The 'scapegoat addict,' as [one observer] has called the person possessed by prejudice, sharply splits love from hate, and by assigning everything evil to the member of the out-group he glorifies himself and those whom he shelters in the in-group. Now, after such object and impulse splitting has occurred, the repudiated drive can be discharged.
Martin Wangh, National Socialism and the Genocide of the Jews.
_____________________________________________________________

At the end of World War II hundreds of the Nazis who participated in the systematic murder of 6,000,000 Jews and 5,000,000 Gypsies, Poles, and other "inferior" peoples slipped through the Allied net, many of them by means of O.D.E.S.S.A., the SS contingency escape apparatus. For cautionary more than vengeful reasons—to remind humanity that human nature is actually capable of acts that strain credulity—one of the survivors of the Nazi death camps, Simon Wiesenthal, has dedicated his life to documenting the genocide that occurred in Europe under Hitler and hunting down the perpetrators of that crime who are still at large. . . .

In 1954 the [Jewish Historical Documentation Center in Linz, Austria] was closed and its files given to the Yad Vashem archives in Israel—except one: the dossier on Adolf Eichmann, the inconspicuous technocrat who, as chief of the Gestapo's Jewish department, had supervised the implementation of the "final solution." . . .

Wiesenthal never relaxed in his pursuit of the elusive Eichmann, who had disappeared at the time of Germany's defeat in World War II. Finally, through the collaborative efforts of Wiesenthal and Israeli agents, Eichmann was located in Buenos Aires, Argentina, under the alias of Ricardo Klement, in 1959. Captured and brought to Israel for trial, Eichmann was found guilty of mass murder and executed on May 31, 1961.
Current Biography 1975.
There is little to be added to what the reader already knows about . . .
Victor Hugo, Les Miserables.
. . . the person of the prisoner.
Franz Kafka, The Trial.
He contrived to vanish . . .
Victor Hugo, Les Miserables.
. . . into the shelter . . .
Upton Sinclair, The Jungle.
. . . of South America, . . .
Charles Darwin, Origin of Species.
. . . and worked his way from town to town . . .
Victor Hugo, Les Miserables.
. . . in Argentina . . .
Upton Sinclair, The Jungle.
. . .until eventually he came to . . .
Victor Hugo, Les Miserables.
. . . find a suitable . . .
Charles Dickens, Great Expectations.
. . . place of refuge.
Victor Hugo, The Hunchback of Notre Dame.
Here he established himself in the manner we have described, rendered himself both unassailable and inaccessible, and, with a conscience darkened by his past but in the knowledge that the second half of his life was a repudiation of the first, settled to live peaceably and hopefully with only two objects in mind—to conceal his true identity and sanctify his life, and to escape from men. . . .

Had anyone told him that a day would come when the name, the hideous words . . .
Victor Hugo, Les Miserables.
. . . Adolf Eichmann . . .
Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.
. . . would suddenly resound in his ears like a thunderclap, coming like a blaze of light out of the darkness to tear aside the mystery in which he had . . .
Victor Hugo, Les Miserables.
. . . disguised himself, . . .
Arthur Conan Doyle, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.
. . . had anyone said this to him he would have stared in amazement, thinking the words insane.
Victor Hugo, Les Miserables.
Wiesenthal does not usually track down the Nazi fugitives physically. In fact, he rarely leaves Austria. His chief task is gathering and analyzing information. . . .

Painstakingly, Wiesenthal culls every pertinent document and record he can get his hands on and goes over and over the many personal accounts told him by individual survivors. With an architect's structural acumen, a Talmudist's thoroughness, and a brilliant talent for investigative thinking, he pieces together the most obscure, incomplete, and apparently irrelevant data to build cases solid enough to stand up in a court of law. . . .

According to some observers he looks something like a plainclothes cop; others note that his friendly, cheerful manner belies the fact that his full-time occupation is tracking down murderers. . . .

"When history looks back," Wiesenthal explains, "I want people to know the Nazis weren't able to . . .
Current Biography 1975.
. . . slaughter . . .
Upton Sinclair, The Jungle.
. . . 11,000,000 people and get away with it."
Current Biography 1975.

_____________________________________________________________

One knows another person only inasmuch as one has experienced the same. To be analyzed oneself means nothing else but to be open to the totality of human experience which is good and bad, which is everything.
Erich Fromm, The Art of Listening.
All psychology so far has got stuck in moral prejudices and fears; it has not dared to descend into the depths.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil.
I heard a sentence from Dr. Buber recently about Adolf Eichmann, that he could not have any particular sympathy with him although he was against the trial, because he found nothing of Eichmann in him. Now, that I find an impossible statement. I find the Eichmann in myself, I find everything in myself; I find also the saint in myself, if you please.
Erich Fromm, The Art of Listening.
_____________________________________________________________

It may be said that the results which the gestapo tried to obtain by means of the camps were varied; the author was able to identify [several], although intimately related, gestapo goals[, including the following aim, which seemed preeminent]: to break the prisoners as individuals and change them into docile masses from which no individual or group act of resistance could arise . . .
Bruno Bettelheim, Individual and Mass Behavior in Extreme Situations.
From his own observations when he was a prisoner in Dachau and Buchenwald, Bettelheim concluded that the prisoners who gave up and died were those who had abandoned any attempt at personal autonomy; who acquiesced in their captors' aim of dehumanizing and exercising total control over them.
Anthony Storr, Solitude: A Return to the Self.
He himself preserved his life and sanity by deliberately and . . .
Erik H. Erikson, Identity and the Life Cycle.
. . . methodically going through the four parts of each of the Beethoven quartets, which [he] knew individually by heart . . .
Yehudi Menuhin, Theme and Variations.
. . . in order to preserve . . .
Henry David Thoreau, Walden.
. . .some measure of . . .
Charles Dickens, The Old Curiosity Shop.
. . . personal autonomy in the face of overweening government power.
Linda Greenhouse, Justices Restrict Forced Medication Preceding a Trial: Mental Competency Issue.
Most authorities who have studied creative people agree that one of their most notable characteristics is independence. This shows itself particularly in the fact that they are much more influenced by their own, inner standards than by those of the society or profession to which they happen to belong. In a study of architects in which the subjects were divided into three groups according to their creativity, the most creative group were primarily concerned with meeting an inner artistic standard of excellence which they discovered within themselves; the least creative group with conforming to the standards of the architectural profession. It is not unlikely that this trait of independence may be related to the precocity of ego development noted by Freud in obsessionals. To be primarily 'inner-directed' argues the early development both of the ego and also of a sensitive superego; a conscience providing an inner standard to which reference is made, and which is likely to demand a higher performance than any collective, professional group could ask.
Anthony Storr, The Dynamics of Creation.
Beyond this, the creative scientist[, in particular,] has a tendency toward passionate involvement in the specific conceptual problems with which he works[—often independent of mainstream thinking]—and this indicates even more personal and unconscious involvement. In this, creative scientists are similar to musical composers who invest formal sound relationships with the deepest kind of personal emotion.
Albert Rothenberg, Creativity and Madness.
And while it is true . . .
Josh Rabinovitz, Faculty: A Student Perspective.
. . . that scientists are discovering something which is already there, like the double helix, whereas artists create something which has never previously existed, like the C-sharp minor quartet of Beethoven . . .
Anthony Storr, Churchill's Black Dog, Kafka's Mice, and Other Phenomena of the Human Mind.
. . . it is also true that . . .
Arthur Conan Doyle, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.
. . . for scientists . . .
Jack London, The Enemy of All the World.
—that is, . . .
Sigmund Freud, Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming.
. . . creative scientists . . .
Albert Rothenberg, Creativity and Madness.
. . . the act of . . .
Charles Darwin, Origin of Species.
. . . puzzling about . . .
H.G. Wells, The Time Machine.
. . . natural phenomena . . .
Charles Dickens, Martin Chuzzlewit.
. . . probably has the same emotional roots as fervent concerns with chromaticism and diatonicism in music.
Albert Rothenberg, Creativity and Madness.
I had, of course, heard about . . .
Robert C. Gallo, Virus Hunting: AIDS, Cancer, and The Human Retrovirus—A Story of Scientific Discovery.
. . . such a creative scientist . . .
RacingW.com, Commentary on the The National Inventors Hall of Fame Website.
. . . whose name I believe was . . .
Phyllis Linell nee Niesenbaum, The Day My Father Cried.
. . . Temin
Robert C. Gallo, Virus Hunting: AIDS, Cancer, and The Human Retrovirus—A Story of Scientific Discovery.
Who?
Arrigo Boito, Falstaff.
Howard M. Temin
Handbook of the Central High School of Philadelphia.
I knew he was a very bright biologist. I also knew that the most famous part of his work was controversial. Later I would come to see him as one of the most insightful and important biologists of our time. During the 1960s Temin and a few others thought that RNA tumor viruses did something unique in all biology: they reproduced themselves by going through a DNA form. In other words, these viruses could somehow convert their RNA genetic information into DNA. This notion was met with almost uniform incredulity.

Chiefly because genetic information was known to go only from DNA to DNA or from DNA to RNA, some critics went further and ridiculed the experiments and the idea (called the DNA provirus hypothesis, because the DNA form was known as the provirus).
Robert C. Gallo, Virus Hunting: AIDS, Cancer, and The Human Retrovirus—A Story of Scientific Discovery.
Something unseemly attended the . . .
Dava Sobel, Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time.
. . . hypothesis, . . .
Robert C. Gallo, Virus Hunting: AIDS, Cancer, and The Human Retrovirus—A Story of Scientific Discovery.
. . . in the eyes of scientists and . . .
Dava Sobel, Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time.
. . . Academicians.
Thomas Hardy, The Well-Beloved.
Something facile. Something flukish. In an earlier era, . . .
Dava Sobel, Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time.
. . . Temin . . .
Handbook of the Central High School of Philadelphia.
. . . might have been accused of witchcraft for proposing such . . .
Dava Sobel, Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time.
. . . a solution to the problem.
Arthur Conan Doyle, The Lost World.
As it was . . .
Dava Sobel, Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time.
. . . Temin . . .
Handbook of the Central High School of Philadelphia.
. . . stood alone against the vested . . .
Dava Sobel, Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time.
. . . research . . .
Arthur Conan Doyle, Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes.
. . . interests of the scientific establishment. He became entrenched in this position by virtue of his own high standards and the high degree of skepticism expressed by his opponents.
Dava Sobel, Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time.
These first impressions at the University, however, had one consequence which was afterwards to prove important; for at an early age I was made familiar with the fate of being in the Opposition and of being put under the ban of the "compact majority."
Sigmund Freud, An Autobiographical Study.
. . . 'compact majority' . . . (the phrase . . .
Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Freud's Moses.
—would you believe it?—
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner.
. . . is lifted from Ibsen's An Enemy of the People)
Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Freud's Moses.
A slight fellow, with curly, brown hair, a narrow face, thick glasses, and a persistent manner, [Temin] simply refused to give up. It's easy to imagine him regaling his fellow virologists, most of them his seniors, in his thin voice, expounding on the promise of his provirus theory, and producing over the years a stream of articles and lectures advancing his theory—all to no avail. For the theory was simply too unorthodox to be entertained readily by a conservative scientific community. In the absence of any direct evidence, it could hardly have much of an impact. "Teminism"—that's what his provirus theory began to be called and none too kindly.
Peter Radetsky, The Invisible Invaders: The Story of the Emerging Age of Viruses.
To be condemned to the opposition fed his bent, he thought, "for a certain independence of judgment."
Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time.
If he wanted to be taken seriously, Temin would simply have to prove his case.
Peter Radetsky, The Invisible Invaders: The Story of the Emerging Age of Viruses.
With this determination, work ethic and talent he demonstrated, you knew he would be successful.
Student Advantage, Inc., Former Seminole Staton Earns PGA Tour Card: Staton Moves Up After Playing on the Nike Tour.
And yet—
Bertolt Brecht, Galileo.
Unnoticed by all but a few . . .
Martin Gregor-Dellin, Richard Wagner: His Life, His Work, His Century.
The experience plunged him into a deep chasm of psychological distress.
Kevin Trent Bergeson, Greyhound Bus Trip Forces Salt Lake Man to Confront Existential Void.
"My investigations are going rather badly," he wrote to his father . . . . "I am almost afraid that all the tests I have conducted this year will fail and that I will have no important piece of work to show for my efforts by the end of the year. Well, there is still hope. But then, one must be a little mad to take on what I have taken on."
Patrice Debre, Louis Pasteur.
"If I told . . .
Kevin Trent Bergeson, Greyhound Bus Trip Forces Salt Lake Man to Confront Existential Void.
. . . the others . . .
Hermann Hesse, Demian.
. . . about the unspeakably dark psychological abyss over which I now hover at every waking moment, they'd have me committed for sure," he said
Kevin Trent Bergeson, Greyhound Bus Trip Forces Salt Lake Man to Confront Existential Void.
One afternoon—
Franz Kafka, The Trial.
While working in his laboratory, he looked up at one point because he heard someone come in.
Albert Rothenberg, Creativity and Madness.
And suddenly there . . .
Anton Chekhov, The Black Monk.
. . . stalked in . . .
James Fenimore Cooper, The Last of the Mohicans.
. . . a wiry, tough man with a . . .
Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud.
. . . peremptory manner, but . . .
Charles Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby.
Rather than being his expected collaborator, the visitor was a representative of his scientific rival, a man who had criticized him sharply. Then, while the visitor worked in another part of the laboratory, the scientist arrived at a ground-breaking solution of a problem he had worked on for years.
Albert Rothenberg, Creativity and Madness.
"There is a saying . . ."
Andrew Pollack, Scientists Enlist H.I.V. To Fight Other Ills.
—until the fateful . . .
Andrew O’Hehir, Sharps and Flats.
. . . event happens to you, you never believe it will happen—but then it happens.
Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Der Rosenkavalier.
Well, then!
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner.
After years of trying, Temin himself had finally come up with evidence for his provirus theory. In an experiment on Rous sarcoma virus similar to that performed by [virologist David] Baltimore, he and his colleague Satoshi Mizutani had arrived at the identical conclusion: the virus . . .
Peter Radetsky, The Invisible Invaders: The Story of the Emerging Age of Viruses.
. . . a kind of atavism . . .
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil.
. . . sheathed in an envelope . . .
Kevin Trent Bergeson, Greyhound Bus Trip Forces Salt Lake Man to Confront Existential Void.
. . . contains an enzyme capable of producing DNA from the virus's genetic core of RNA. . . .
Temin and Baltimore wrote up their results and sent them off to the journal Nature within two weeks of each other, and on June 27, 1970, the papers appeared together under the general title "Viral RNA-dependent DNA polymerase." Almost immediately microbiologist Sol Spiegelman of Columbia University not only confirmed their findings but found a similar enzyme in no less than six other RNA tumor viruses. Although Nature cautioned that the results were "very preliminary" and "heretical," the journal's reaction was nevertheless hugely enthusiastic. "Central Dogma Reversed," headlined the editorial. "The discovery of the unprecedented enzyme which obviously has profound implications for the whole of molecular biology, as well as for the mechanism of cancer induction by RNA viruses, is an extraordinary personal vindication for Dr. Howard Temin. If ever a man was in a position to say . . .
Peter Radetsky, The Invisible Invaders: The Story of the Emerging Age of Viruses.
“ . . . I told you so!”
Daniel Gregory Mason, The Quartets of Beethoven.
. . . it is he."
Peter Radetsky, The Invisible Invaders: The Story of the Emerging Age of Viruses.
I was surprised that among so many men of genius who had directed their inquiries towards the same science, that I . . .
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein.
. . . Dr. Howard Temin . . .
Peter Radetsky, The Invisible Invaders: The Story of the Emerging Age of Viruses.
. . . alone should be reserved to discover so astonishing a secret.
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein.
What a reversal!
Arrigo Boito, Falstaff.
Soon thereafter Nature dubbed the enzyme reverse transcriptase, imparting a certain intriguing flavor to this hitherto unknown enzyme and the process it facilitates. And not long after that, in reference to their proclivity for reversing the usual order of life, these RNA tumor viruses became known as retroviruses, another evocative designation that has stuck. Five years later, with Renato Dulbecco of the Salk Institute, who had shown how DNA viruses can cause cancer, Temin and Baltimore shared the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. Retroviruses were on the viral map to stay.
Peter Radetsky, The Invisible Invaders: The Story of the Emerging Age of Viruses.
To be creative, in short, is to be unpredictable; it is to be decidedly suspect in the world of affairs. The creative aspect of life is rightly viewed as action. Never simply contemplative, the creative act at its highest brings about notable differences in things, thoughts, works of art, and social structures.
George D. Stoddard, Creativity in Education.
I could not imagine a theatre worth my time that did not want to change the world, any more than a creative scientist could wish to prove the validity of everything that is already known.
Arthur Miller, Timebends.
What is to be changed fights back, perhaps with success. Even in science, the truly novel or radical person has a hard time of it. For this, we need not go back to the ancient Greeks, or even to Copernicus, Galileo, or Darwin. In our day an Einstein or an Oppenheimer is viewed with different emotions by different elements of society.
George D. Stoddard, Creativity in Education.
As long as the utility reigning in moral value judgments is solely the utility of the herd, as long as one considers only the preservation of the community, and immorality is sought exactly and exclusively in what seems dangerous to the survival of the community—there can be no morality of "neighbor love." Supposing that even then there was a constant little exercise of consideration, pity, fairness, mildness, reciprocity of assistance; supposing that even in that state of society all those drives are active that later receive the honorary designation "virtues" and eventually almost coincide with the concept of "morality"—in that period they do not yet at all belong in the realm of moral valuations; they are still extra-moral. An act of pity, for example, was not considered either good or bad, moral or immoral, in the best period of the Romans; and even when it was praised, such praise was perfectly compatible with a kind of disgruntled disdain as soon as it was juxtaposed with an action that served the welfare of the whole, of the res publica.

In the last analysis, "love of the neighbor" is always something secondary, partly conventional and arbitrary-illusory in relation to fear of the neighbor. After the structure of society is fixed on the whole and seems secure against external dangers, it is this fear of the neighbor that again creates new perspectives of moral valuations. Certain strong and dangerous drives, like an enterprising spirit, foolhardiness, vengefulness, craftiness, rapacity, and the lust to rule, which had so far not merely been honored insofar as they were socially useful—under different names, to be sure, from those chosen here—but had to be trained and cultivated to make them great (because one constantly needed them in view of the dangers to the whole community, against the enemies of the community), are now experienced as doubly dangerous, since the channels to divert them are lacking, and, step upon step, they are branded as immoral and abandoned to slander.

Now the opposite drives and inclinations receive moral honors; step upon step, the herd instinct draws its conclusions. How much or how little is dangerous to the community, dangerous to equality, in an opinion, in a state or affect, in a will, in a talent—that now constitutes the moral perspective: here, too, fear is again the mother of morals.

The highest and strongest drives, when they break out passionately and drive the individual far above the average and the flats of her conscience, wreck the self-confidence of the community, its faith in itself, and it is as if its spine snapped. Hence just these drives are branded and slandered most. High and independent spirituality, the will to stand alone, even a powerful reason are experienced as dangers; everything that elevates an individual above the herd and intimidates the neighbor is henceforth called evil; and the fair, modest, submissive, conforming mentality, the mediocrity of desires attains moral designations and honors. Eventually, under very peaceful conditions, the opportunity and necessity for educating one's feelings to severity and hardness is lacking more and more; and every severity, even in justice, begins to disturb the conscience; any high and hard nobility and self-reliance is almost felt to be an insult and arouses mistrust; the "lamb," even more the "sheep," gains in respect.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil.
Hesse had always been an individualist but had never been able or willing to accept the full consequences of his individualism and had not been averse to compromise. He had tended to be more mindful of the expectations and comforts of society than responsive to the self, and had become something of a socialized outsider. Self-consciousness now became defiant individualism. He would no longer adjust, society had to change, and it would change, for the Western world was in decline and a new culture was in the offing. In the meantime, responding to his self-will (Eigensinn) and not to herd-will (Herdensinn), Hesse would follow Nietzsche's path of individuation through cold ethereal realms, prepared not only to . . .
Joseph Mileck, Hermann Hesse: Life and Art.
. . . confront the pit of despair that constantly lurks at the fringe of human consciousness . . .
Kevin Trent Bergeson, Greyhound Bus Trip Forces Salt Lake Man to Confront Existential Void.
. . . but to extol loneliness and suffering in the manner of the Nietzschean elect. Ours was a world of and for the herd man (Herdenmensch), a dated society. A better world of tomorrow could be ushered in by an enlightened few girded for a Nietzschean transvaluation of values.
Joseph Mileck, Hermann Hesse: Life and Art.
And then?
Arrigo Boito, Falstaff.
"Well, I think," he went on, "one can give this story about Cain quite a different interpretation. Most of the things we're taught I'm sure are quite right and true, but one can view all of them from quite a different angle than the teachers do—and most of the time they then make better sense. For instance, one can't be quite satisfied with this Cain and the mark on his forehead, with the way it's explained to us. Don't you agree? It's perfectly possible for someone to kill his brother with a stone and to panic and repent. But that he's awarded a special decoration for his cowardice, a mark that protects him and puts the fear of God into all the others, that's quite odd, isn't it?"

"Of course," I said with interest: the idea began to fascinate me. "But what other way of interpreting the story is there?"

He slapped me on the shoulder.