Demian

by Hermann Hesse

Perhaps I was at the crossroads right now, perhaps from this time on I would belong to the bad element forever and ever, sharing secrets with evil people, depending on them, obeying them, necessarily becoming like them.

A morning without school was something enchanted, like a fairy tale; the sun would poke around in the room, and it wasn’t the same sun that we shut out in school by lowering the green curtains.

to some extent I was playing the role of a boy younger than I actually was, a boy still good and free, innocent and secure.

he bore and behaved himself like a prince in disguise in the midst of farmboys, making every effort to resemble them.

They were afraid of the children of Cain, who possessed a ‘mark.’ And so they explained the mark not for what it was, as a distinction, but as the opposite. They said that fellows with that mark were weird, and so they were.

In short, I think Cain was a terrific guy, and people made up that story about him just because they were afraid of him.

The mark of Cain a distinction! It was absurd, it was blasphemous and wicked. Where was God in all of this?

No one needs to be afraid of anyone. If a person is afraid of someone, it’s because he has allowed that someone to acquire power over him. For example, he’s done something wrong and the other person knows it—then he has power over you. Get it? It’s surely clear, isn’t it?”

I made myself younger, more dependent, and more child-like than I was. I was compelled to exchange my dependency on Kromer for a new one, because I was unable to walk on my own.

As it happens to everyone, I too was attacked by the gradually awakening perception of sex as an enemy and destroyer, as something forbidden, as seduction and sin.

I saw his attentive, serene, bright face turned toward the coat-of-arms, the face of a grown man, a scholar or an artist, superior and full of willpower, unusually bright and serene, with knowing eyes.

His gaze seemed to be directed at the horse’s head, and once more it had that profound, quiet, almost fanatical, and yet passionless attentiveness.

somehow millennial, somehow outside of time, bearing the mark of different eons from those we live in.

The moment that’s the case, the moment you attempt a task that something inside you orders you to do, you’ll succeed, you can harness your willpower like a trusty draft horse.

Only, Demian had accustomed me to look on, and to interpret, the stories and the articles of faith in a freer, more personal, less rigid, more imaginative way; at least I always followed the interpretations he suggested to me gladly and with enjoyment.

He’s a man of character, and people of character generally get short shrift in Bible stories. Maybe he’s a descendant of Cain. Don’t you think so?”

It was not into the Church that I was now ready to be received, but into something quite different, into a select society of thought and personality which had to exist somewhere on earth, an order whose representative or envoy I took my friend to be.

In just such a way the leaves fall around a tree in autumn; the tree doesn’t feel it, the rain trickles down it, or sunshine, or frost, and within it life slowly retreats into its narrowest, inmost recesses. It doesn’t die. It waits.

It was at the beginning of November. I had grown accustomed to taking short walks for thinking things over, no matter what the weather was; on these walks I often enjoyed a sort of rapture, a rapture filled with melancholy and with contempt for the world and for myself.

But as I did so, I felt terrible. My life drifted by in a self-destructive orgy, and while I was looked on by my schoolmates as a leader and a hell of a guy, a damned plucky and witty fellow, deep inside me my anxiety-ridden soul was shaking with alarm.

It was all like a compulsion. I did what I had to, because otherwise I simply had no idea what to do with myself. I was afraid of being alone for long periods; 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.

In the same park where I had run across Alfons Beck in the fall, it happened at the beginning of spring, just when the hawthorn hedges were beginning to get green, that a girl caught my attention.

Of all the new practices in which I sought expression for my new frame of mind, one became important to me. I began to paint. It started with my finding that the English picture of Beatrice I owned didn’t sufficiently resemble that girl I used to see.

that knows everything, wills everything, does everything better than we

But it seems that Abraxas has a much greater significance. We may look upon the name as that of a deity who had the symbolic task of combining the godlike and the devilish.”

we see the borderline between us and nature tremble and dissolve, and we become acquainted with the mood in which we don’t know whether the images on our retina are coming from external impressions or from within us.

Rather, it’s the same indivisible godhead that is active in us and in nature; and if the outside world were to perish, anyone of us would be capable of reconstructing it, because mountain and river, tree and leaf, root and blossom, every form in nature, has a pre-image inside us; it originates from the soul, whose nature is eternity, whose nature we don’t know but is generally revealed to us as the power of love and creativity.

But I tell you: live out those dreams, play out your role in them, build altars to them! That still won’t be perfect, but it’s a way.

Stars flared up and went out before my eyes; memories reaching back to my earliest, most completely forgotten childhood, and even back to prior existences and early stages of evolution, flowed past me in throngs.

Together we read a Greek text about Abraxas; he read aloud to me portions of a translation of the Vedas and taught me how to pronounce the sacred syllable om.

Only, it wasn’t the person of Pistorius that I imagined, or that of Max Demian; it was the picture I had dreamed and painted, the androgynous dream image of my daemon that I had to invoke. Now it no longer lived merely in my dreams or painted on paper, but inside me, as an ideal and a heightening of myself.

And suddenly I felt deep down: precisely what Pistorius had been to me and had given me, he couldn’t be to himself and give himself. He had led me along a path that had to go beyond even him, the guide, and leave him behind.

That dream had been to be a priest, to proclaim the new religion, to offer new forms of edification, love, and worship, to set up new symbols. But that was beyond his powers, it wasn’t his office.

His love was attached to images that the world had already seen, and at the same time he surely knew in his mind that those new things had to be new and different, that they must gush up out of fresh soil and not be drawn from collections and libraries, as if from some old well.

The person who truly wants nothing except his destiny no longer has others of his own kind; he stands completely alone and has only the chill of outer space around him.

There it was, the tall, almost masculine female figure, resembling her son, with traces of motherhood, traces of severity, traces of deep passion, beautiful and alluring, beautiful and unapproachable, daemon and mother, destiny and beloved. It was she!

I lived in a quiet, pretty place nestled in the old walls outside of town, and I had a few volumes of Nietzsche on my table. I lived with him, feeling the solitude of his soul and sensing the fate that drove him on implacably; I suffered along with him and was overjoyed to know that there had been a man who had followed his own path so relentlessly.

Everywhere, he said, togetherness and the herd instinct were prevalent, but freedom and love were nowhere to be found.

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!

I walked slowly into the garden, which extended far along the riverbank. Finally I found Demian. He was standing in a little open garden building, stripped to the waist, practicing boxing with a sand-filled bag that was suspended there.

Outside, “reality” existed; outside there were streets and houses, people and their institutions, libraries and lecture halls—but in here there was love, soul; here, fairy tale and dream dwelt.

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. And slowly I was initiated into the mystery of those who bore “the mark” on their person.

We in the narrower circle listened but accepted none of these doctrines as anything but symbols. We marked men were not at all worried about the shape the future would take. To us every credo, every doctrine of salvation seemed stillborn and useless.

You must be able to give up those wishes, or else desire them completely and firmly. If some day you are able to make the request feeling quite certain it will be granted, then it will actually be granted. But you make wishes and then regret them, feeling afraid all the while. But you have to get over that. I’ll tell you a tale.”

Sinclair, your love is being attracted by me. Whenever it begins to attract me, I shall come. I don’t want to make a gift of myself, I want to be won.”

While reading a book I gained a new insight, and it was the same feeling as being kissed by Lady Eve.

She was an ocean, and I a river flowing into it. She was a star, and I another star journeying toward her; we met and felt each other’s attraction, stayed together, and revolved around each other blissfully for all eternity in close, musical orbits.

He brought me up to his room; in the lab a gas flame was burning, papers were scattered around, he seemed to have been working.

It was an intoxication in which they acted that way, they weren’t in harmony with their fate;

Earlier I had thought a lot about why it was so extremely unusual for a person to be able to live for an ideal. Now I saw that many people, all in fact, are capable of dying for an ideal. Only, it mustn’t be a personal, freely chosen ideal, but one held in common and taken over from other people.