Harry Haller’s Records

humble poor, but instead and deliberately in these respectable and wearisome and spotless middle class homes, which smell of turpentine and soap and where there is a panic if you bang the door or come in with dirty shoes. The love of this atmosphere comes, no doubt, from the days of my childhood, and a secret yearning I have for something homelike drives me, though with little hope, to follow the same old stupid road. Then again, I like the contrast between my lonely, loveless, hunted, and thoroughly disorderly existence and this middle-class family-life. I like to breathe in on the stairs this odour of quiet and order, of cleanliness and respectable domesticity. There is something in it that touches me in spite of my hatred for all it stands for. I like to step across the threshold of my room and leave it suddenly behind; to see, instead, cigar-ash and wine-bottles among the heaped-up books and there is nothing but disorder and neglect; and where everything⁠—books, manuscript, thoughts⁠—is marked and saturated with the plight of lonely men, with the problem of existence and with the yearning after a new orientation for an age that has lost its bearings.