Harry, the antihero of Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf, suffers a prolonged, fundamental identity crisis. One idea that gives him comfort is the concept of eternity, which various supporting characters define anew for him in illustrious ways.
There is Goethe, for example, who appears to Harry on several occasions, claiming that “eternity is but a moment, just long enough for a joke.” Harry’s friend Hermine, on the other hand, claims that eternity is “the realm of the real,” including such great human feats as the music of Mozart, epic poems, and the saints who provided a great example for their fellow men. “But eternity also includes the image of every real deed, the strength of every real emotion, even if no one knows about it and sees it and writes it down for posterity. In eternity, there is no posterity, only the contemporary.”
It all sounds mysterious and vague at first, but if you sit with it, you’ll see that, in essence, Harry’s friends are drawing a map for him, and that map breaks down into three particular kinds of eternity:
- Liberating insignificance: Compared to the age of history, the age of Earth, the age of the universe, you are but a grain of dust in the desert. Most likely, nothing you do will ever matter, and even if it does—what are 500 years of remembering Shakespeare against millions of years of his nonexistence? Nothing has meaning, so don’t take your life and yourself so seriously.
- Empowering significance: Paradoxically, at the same time that nothing matters, everything is indelible. When you stroke your partner’s cheek, that’s real. When you eat a piece of fish, that’s real. And when you feel a strong emotion while looking at a painting, that, too, is real. Everything you do, feel, and experience is definitive, and it will all become an infinitesimally small part of that gargantuan, overwhelming tapestry that is eternity. So in a way, everything has meaning, and perhaps you should act accordingly.
- Transcending presence: If both everything and nothing we do becomes part of eternity, how are we to live? As Harry’s friends hint at and he eventually realizes, “eternity was nothing more than the salvation of time, was in a way its return to innocence, its reconversion into space.” In other words: Live in the present. Give yourself fully to every moment, because in an existence where time squeezes us from both sides, with both crushing pressure and debilitating meaninglessness, the only path forward is to transcend time by surrendering to it. Once we relinquish control, we are free.
In the novel, Harry recognizes this last kind of eternity, the final stage of enlightenment, by a particular type of laughter he hears throughout the book. “The laughter of the immortals,” he calls it. It’s not laughing at someone. It’s “only light, only brightness.” An innocent, childlike, wholehearted laughter from deep within. Whenever he hears this laughter, be it from Goethe in a dream or from himself in a strange situation he takes with surprising ease, Harry knows: Eternity is but a moment, just long enough for a joke—and that’s all we need for a lifetime of happiness.