Yesterday I was on a plane to Halifax, where after a three night stay I’ll be boarding a train for a 22 hour ride back to Montreal (in a solo cabin), when I read these lines in a dog-eared copy of Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf:   

  “When I have neither pleasure nor pain and have been breathing for a while the lukewarm insipid air of these so-called good and tolerable days, I feel so bad in my childish soul that I smash my moldering lyre of contentment and would rather feel the very devil burn in me than this warmth of a well-heated room. A wild longing for strong emotions and sensations seethes in me, a rage against this toneless, flat, normal and sterile life. I have a mad impulse to smash something, a warehouse, perhaps, or a cathedral, or myself, to commit outrages, to pull off the wigs of a few revered idols, to provide a few rebellious schoolboys with the longed-for ticket to Hamburg, or to stand one or two representatives of the established order on their heads.”—Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf

  If anyone around me on that plane could have pried their eyes from their cellphones for a moment they might have wondered why I was laughing. 

  “Oh God,” I chuckled to myself, “that was me!” 

  It is the wild raucous yawp of the contemporary Shaman-Type mired in our Western middle class soulless convention and conformity! 

  Believe me over the years it cost me quite a number of jobs, and sadly in the end my very marriage. And it reminded me of another passage in another early modern classic of literature. 

  “I should put the two quotes side by side in a blog post,” I thought to myself. Unfortunately it would have to wait until I got home because I hadn’t the second book or quote with me. 

  A funny thing happened though. I arrived in Halifax, dropped my bag in the hotel, and went out to explore the town. After strolling the Halifax Harbourwalk from end to end I found a coffee/bookshop (my favourite!) and sat down for tea. Nearby a tall soft looking mutton chopped young fella with a man bun reached up to a shelf and before he could get a firm hold on it a copy of Moby Dick had fallen to the floor. 

  Just what I needed! 

  “Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off—then I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball.”—Herman Melville, Moby Dick

  “Involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses…” Hehehehehe….

  Well, long ago when my hypos got the best of me I didn’t go to sea, I went to land. That is, I hired on and drove truck, preferably through, up and over the mountains. 

  And thankfully I read other Shaman-Types who had gone before, such as the two Herman(n)s, Hesse and Melville….