Beneath the Wheel
The good thing about reading is that you keep discovering your feelings have already been articulated by someone in this world. You finally realize you are not a unique “you,” just a blurry one among “them.” — Liang Dong
Before bed one night I stumbled onto a podcast about Hermann Hesse’s[1] novel Beneath the Wheel (Unterm Rad). The novel was written in 1906, yet a century later its fine-grained portrait of a utilitarian education system still lands. Any small-town kid who grew up grinding through exams will read it and feel seen.
I started reading it on WeRead on February 16[2]. In the short-video era I find it hard to settle down; finishing a book in one sitting has become ever more difficult. Over the following week I read in scattered fragments of time, and at 1:00 a.m. on February 22 I closed the last page, eight hours of reading in total.
The Characters ⚓
Hans spent his whole life searching outward for an anchor. First it was academic success, then his genuine friendship with Heilner, then a hazy desire for Emma, and finally the life of an ordinary mechanic. He never truly lived for himself, and never accepted the real, flawed self underneath. Like a willow catkin in the wind, he tried to attach himself to anything that could hold him, yet he never took root, never grew a calm of his own.
Heilner 🦅
Heilner, the “poet” and “rebel,” blew into the old seminary like a wild wind, waking the sensibility in Hans that reason and ambition had long suppressed. He was not only Hans’s confidant but the embodiment of “another life” Hans had never dared attempt. He led Hans to scorn the stale rules, turning the dryness of theological study into a celebration of life’s passion.
Yet beneath the glamour of this friendship lurked a crueler truth: Heilner was a profoundly self-centered boy. His overflowing need to express himself and his feverish rebellion often treated the gentle, extremely fragile Hans as an ideal vessel for emotional projection. In each of their all-night conversations, Heilner poured out his rage at the system, while Hans slowly lost himself under the weight of that anxiety. He no longer had the courage to retreat to the safe track of his studies, yet he also lacked Heilner’s lonely daring to break with everything.
The conflict erupted when Heilner was locked in the detention cell. While Heilner sat punished and isolated in the dark, Hans, timid and bound by his identity as a model student, chose silence and distance to protect himself. In Heilner’s eyes that silence was betrayal, and in the loneliness of the cell it bred coldness and resentment toward Hans.
But after his release, faced with Hans’s endless guilt and pain, Heilner showed a poet’s generosity — he forgave Hans. For Hans this forgiveness was both salvation and curse: they reconciled, closer than ever, but it pushed Hans fully over to the opposite side of the rules and drew the school’s harsh intervention. The headmaster forbade their friendship, trying to sever the “poison” by force. Under that suffocating pressure, Heilner once again chose radical resistance — he vanished from the school, a lone runaway disappearing into forest and fog.
When a search party finally dragged him back, a defeated “escapee,” what awaited was a public trial called “repentance.” Asked to apologize in exchange for the chance to stay, Heilner chose the proudest silence. With a refusal that bordered on contempt, he defended his last dignity as a “poet,” and cut himself off completely from that greenhouse called “the future.”
Heilner was expelled. “His friend waited and waited, but never received a single letter from him. He simply left, and disappeared without a trace.” Hans was left alone amid the wreckage the storm had churned up, carrying the double weight of abandonment by the world and by his friend, slowly walking toward his final collapse.
Emma 🧜🏻♀️
After his “nervous breakdown” at the seminary, Hans returned to his hometown in disgrace, a “failure.” The old halo of the “prodigy” had worn away, replaced by neighbors’ whispers, his father’s barely concealed disappointment, and a total vacuum where his future should have been.
The shoemaker Flaig invited him over to press fruit juice, and a girl in a blue dress walked up. That was Emma, from Heilbronn.
Emma was Flaig’s niece, already experienced in the tangled world of feeling. To her, Hans was just a “little toy” in this dull town — mildly handsome, melancholy, and pure to the point of clumsiness. She flirted, seduced, and controlled because she enjoyed the sense of power. None of it came from any understanding of Hans.
Hans misread her feelings, taking each flirtation as “fate’s favor.” For a boy who had fallen from the academic altar and become the town’s laughingstock, the need for affirmation was overwhelming. He believed Emma had seen through his melancholy shell to his soul, believed this was a love beyond the ordinary world.
While Hans lay awake all night, still soaked in the afterglow of their meetings, Emma left without a word. She briefly lit up senses that had long sat in darkness, then just as quickly went out.
Master Flaig 👷♂️
After Emma left, Hans became a “double exile”: he could not return to his prodigy past, nor cross into an adult future. The mechanic’s workshop represented the “realist” exit. It offered labor, wages, and a stable but dreary worldly order. There was no malice in it; the master even showed a plain kindness toward this former “talent.”
But for a child shaped by years of elite education, wrapping a hand that had held pens around a cold iron file was a slow execution of his self-respect.
The master could not understand Hans’s inner poetry or his silent despair. As he saw it, Hans simply needed to “get used to” physical labor. But what Hans needed was not a job. It was a framework of meaning with room for a “failed elite” — precisely the thing the industrial age had never designed.
In the end, beneath that enormous wheel called “life,” he could only watch his last vitality get squeezed out drop by drop. Which explains why, at the book’s close, when he faced the river, nothing stirred in him anymore — because in this unequal game, he had already lost everything, soul and body alike.
How It Felt to Read 🫂
Hans’s struggle and sinking overlap far too much with my own school years.
He pursued his studies under worldly expectations; even when algebra tasted like sawdust, he had to force himself to swallow it.
After he met Heilner and lived through the drowning of his classmate “Hindu,” he began to doubt what this near-masochistic grind at the seminary was even for. His grades slid along with the doubt.
"The teachers began to glower at him and cast him strange looks. The headmaster's face darkened with anger at him ... And Hans watched it all happen, watched himself change, and paid it no mind."
I fell deep into that same state late in university. Uninterested in several courses, I started to feel GPA was meaningless. Having chased academics all my life, I suddenly lost my “coordinates,” and chose escape to fight the emptiness. Instead of studying programming over break as before, I killed time with trashy web novels and short videos, and kept scrolling novels through probability class after the semester started.
Part of me longed for the detachment of “wealth and rank are not my wish; the celestial realm is beyond hope,” but the anxiety fed to me on Xiaohongshu and the winter chill of the IT job market kept “threatening” me. They became the wheel, forcing me into a kind of “fight-or-flight state”: cramming those dry interview boilerplate answers, mechanically grinding through the LeetCode problem sea. But high school had probably already spent my capacity to “force myself to study.” Two hundred LeetCode problems in two years was my absolute limit.
After hitting a few walls, I went “numb” like Hans. The feeling was eerie: I watched interview opportunities slip away, watched my own condition deteriorate, and like a detached cynic looking on, felt not the slightest ripple. As ChatGPT put it: “This numbness is not indifference but an exit of emotion, a self-protective power cut after a life handed over too completely to external expectations.”
Flipping back through my November and December diaries: pages of absurd words, a handful of bitter tears. Mercifully I landed an offer in the end, but that thin-ice survivor’s relief did nothing to dissolve the emptiness inside.
Reading the book now, after the podcast, I already knew Hans’s tragic ending. Yet watching his tragic fate unfold, and his final drowning in the river, I still felt a dull ache of grief, the kind you feel when the fox mourns the rabbit’s death.
A tangle of feelings, and I could not tell whether I was mourning Hans or shuddering for the self who once nearly fell.
Closing Thoughts
The shoemaker pointed at the people in frock coats passing through the churchyard gate and said quietly, “They had a hand in driving the boy to this.”
At the novel’s end, Hesse puts a critique of utilitarian education in the shoemaker’s mouth. But reality’s utilitarian bent is not an ideal that one line of critique can change: I would love to live in a non-utilitarian society, but reality will not yield for that wish (perhaps a broad enough mind could ignore the environment entirely, but I cannot manage that yet). Utilitarian schools and companies survive precisely because they fit the existing logic of how society runs.
Breaking through worldly resistance is not easy. However much meritocracy repels me, I still dutifully completed the gaokao; in university, the moment I slacked, interview setbacks immediately reminded me I could not fully abandon the old rules. The real choice is rarely “total refusal” or “total surrender.” The more workable path is: refuse, inwardly, to enshrine the system as gospel, and like the fisherman in the old parable, keep a self-governed space within the rules.
In a conversation with AI, I asked for some practical approaches. Here are the ones worth recording and practicing:
- Build multi-dimensional anchors of meaning. Refuse to reduce life to a single axis, whether academics, career, or one relationship. Let literature soothe the waves of feeling; let science, philosophy, and theology anchor the base of reason; take root deeper through solid practice.
- Settle body and mind in rhythm. Replace grand, hollow anxiety with firm, small habits: regular hours, daily reading, brief notes. Once life has a reliable frequency, inner turbulence can quiet down.
- Treat work as life’s foundation, not its verdict. Even in an ordinary position, as long as fine minds and thoughtful souls are around you, the job is scaffolding for your climb, not a prison holding you.
- Rebuild your worldview pragmatically. Sit down and read economics, politics, history, psychology. Understanding the mechanics of social systems dissolves the isolation of being inside them, and lets you make wiser choices in the current of the times.
- Beware the illusions of the digital age. Cut out the algorithm-fed mirages and meaningless noise. Read words that wrestle with reality; record real footprints. Take back the narrative of your life, and make sure you remain its protagonist.
Excerpts
Quote
- It was Master Flaig the shoemaker, whose house Hans used to visit some evenings, though he had not been in a long while. Walking along with him, Hans listened absently as the devout Pietist talked. Flaig spoke of the exam, wished him luck, and offered some encouragement, but the real point of his words was this: an exam, in the end, is only a surface thing, with a great deal of chance in it. Failing would be no disgrace; even the best students can fall short. And if he did fail, he should remember that God has His own plan for every person and will guide each along their own road.