Demian (Dover Thrift Editions: Classic Novels)

by Hermann Hesse

It was the first rift in my father’s sanctity, it was the first nick in the pillars on which my childish life had rested, and which every human being must destroy before he can become himself. It is of these experiences, invisible to everyone, that the inner, essential line of our destiny consists. That kind of rift and nick closes over again, it is healed and forgotten, but in the most secret chamber of the mind it continues to live and bleed.

There are things you’re afraid of; there are also people you’re afraid of. And there should never be any. No, no one should ever be afraid of people. You’re not afraid of me, I hope? Or are you?”

by means of inducements and admonitions, sarcasm and irony, he would have tried to make me more self-reliant. Oh, I know it today: nothing in the world is more repugnant to a man than following the path that leads him to himself!

But my opinion is that we should honor everything and hold it sacred, the whole world, not just this artificially detached, official half! And so, alongside the divine service for God, we must also have a service for the Devil. I think that would be proper. Or else, people would have to create some new God, who would also include the Devil within Himself, one in whose presence we wouldn’t have to shut our eyes when the most natural things in the world take place.”

Now he has withdrawn completely into himself, I felt as I trembled. I had never been so all alone. I had no part in him, he was inaccessible to me, he was farther away from me than if he had been on the remotest island in the world.

it was rebellion and orgy, it was life and intellect.

And while I was sitting among pools of beer at dirty tables in cheap taverns, entertaining and often frightening my friends with unusually cynical remarks, deep in my heart I revered everything I was mocking, and in my mind I was weeping on my knees before my soul, my past, my mother, and God.

I stood in fear of the numerous tender, shy, warm impulses toward which I constantly felt responsive; I stood in fear of the tender thoughts of love that came to me so frequently.

This sudden conversion made me the butt of plenty of jokes. But now I had something to love and adore, I once again had an ideal; life was once again filled with presentiments and a mysterious, variegated twilight glow. And that made me insensitive to scorn. Once more I felt at home with myself, although only as a slave and servant of a venerated image.

you are linked to me, but not you yourself, only your picture; you are a portion of my fate.

Anyway, something about it is very fine—intoxication, the bacchic aspect of it! But I find that for most people who spend lots of time in taverns that’s altogether lost. It seems to me as if frequenting taverns, especially, is something truly Philistine. Yes, for one night, with burning torches, working up to a real, beautiful frenzy and delirium! But to go on and on in the same way, one glass after another, that can’t be truth, can it? For instance, can you picture Faust sitting night after night at a table reserved for regulars?”

It’s so good to know this: that inside us there’s a self that knows everything, wills everything, does everything better than we ourselves do.—But excuse me, I must get home.”

“The bird is fighting its way out of the egg. The egg is the world. Whoever wishes to be born must destroy a world. The bird is flying to God. The god is named Abraxas.”

We may look upon the name as that of a deity who had the symbolic task of combining the godlike and the devilish.”

But my nature was never much inclined toward this sort of direct, conscious searching, in which at first you only find truths that lie in your hands like lifeless stones.

It was both, both and much more still, it was an angelic image and Satan, man and woman in one, human being and animal, the highest good and extreme evil.

There was only one thing I couldn’t do: tear out the obscurely hidden aim within me and visualize it somewhere before my eyes, as others did, those who knew precisely that they wanted to become a professor, judge, doctor, or artist, who knew how long that would take them and what benefits it would bring them. I couldn’t do that. Maybe I would become something of the sort in the future, but how was I to know? Perhaps I might even have to seek and seek for years and never become anything or reach any goal. Perhaps I might reach some goal, but it would be evil, perilous, frightening.

All I really wanted was to try and live the life that was spontaneously welling up within me. Why was that so very difficult?

“Come,” he called after a while, “let’s practice a little philosophy now; that is, let’s shut up, lie on our stomachs, and think.”

The contemplation of such shapes, the surrender to irrational, confused, rare natural forms, engenders in us a feeling that our own mind is in harmony with the will that gave rise to these forms—we

All right. But you yourself mustn’t be a moralist, either! You shouldn’t compare yourself with others; and if nature has made you a bat, you shouldn’t try to turn yourself into an ostrich. You sometimes think you’re peculiar, you reproach yourself for going other ways than most people. You’ve got to get that out of your head. Look into the fire, look into the clouds, and as soon as your presentiments come and the voices in your soul begin to speak, surrender yourself to them and don’t start off by asking whether that suits or pleases your teacher, your father, or some God or other! If you do that, you’ll ruin yourself. That way you get on the sidewalk and you become a fossil. My friend Sinclair, our god is named Abraxas; he is God and Satan; both the bright world and the dark world are contained in him. Abraxas has no objections to any of your thoughts or any of your dreams. Never forget that. But he’ll abandon you if you ever become faultless and normal.

“The things we see,” Pistorius said quietly, “are the same things that are in us.

“Community,” Demian said, “is a fine thing. But the type we see blossoming all over isn’t true community. It will originate anew, out of the knowledge that individuals have of one another, and for a while it will transform the world. The kind of community we have now is merely herd instinct. People run to one another for shelter because they’re afraid of one another—capitalists

A person is afraid only when he isn’t at one with himself. They’re afraid because they have never accepted themselves. A community consisting exclusively of people afraid of the unknown in themselves! They all feel that the rules they live by are no longer valid, that they’re following outdated commandments; neither their religions nor their morality, nothing is suited to what we need. For a century and more, Europe has done nothing but study and build factories! They know exactly how many grams of powder it takes to kill someone, but they don’t know how to pray to God, they don’t even know how to be contented for an hour at a time. Just take a look at a students’ tavern like these! Or even a pleasure resort that rich people go to! Hopeless!—My dear Sinclair, no serenity can come from any of that.

I, who had been solitary for so long, became acquainted with the society that is possible among people who have experienced total isolation. Never again did I desire to return to the banquets of the fortunate, the feasts of the happy; never again was I assailed by envy or homesickness when I observed the societies of others.

But he knew, or thought he knew, that a star couldn’t be embraced by a human being. He deemed it his fate to love a heavenly body with no hope of being requited, and on the basis of that notion he constructed an entire poetics of life consisting of renunciation and silent, faithful suffering, which was to improve him and purify him.

He had loved and, by doing so, had found himself. But most people love in order to lose themselves.