Demian

by Hermann Hesse

I have no right to call myself one who knows. I was one who seeks, and I still am, but I no longer seek in the stars or in books; I’m beginning to hear the teachings of my blood pulsing within me.

No person has ever been completely himself, but each one strives to become so, some gropingly, others more lucidly, according to his abilities.

And the strangest thing of all was how the two worlds bordered each other, how close together they were!

Naturally I belonged to the bright and correct world, I was my parents’ child; but wherever I turned my eyes and ears, the other world was there and I lived in it, too, even though it was often unfamiliar and uncanny to me, even though I regularly got pangs of conscience and anxiety from it.

the first time I tasted death, and death tastes bitter because it is birth, it is anxiety and terror in the face of a frightening innovation.

This man had power, people shied away from this man. He had a ‘mark.’ They explained it any way they wanted. And ‘they’ always want what’s convenient for them and puts them in the right. 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.

People with courage and character always seem weird to other people. It was very uncomfortable to have a race of fearless, weird people running around, so now they hung a nickname on that race and made up a story about it in order to take revenge on it, in order to be compensated to some extent for all the fear they had undergone.

Stories that are so old, so very ancient, are always true, but they aren’t always correctly noted down and explained.

I know that many people won’t believe that a child not yet eleven is capable of such feelings. It is not to those people that I am telling my story. I’m telling it to those who have greater knowledge of humanity. An adult who has learned how to transform part of his emotions into thought processes notices that such thoughts aren’t present in a child, and then concludes that the experiences aren’t present, either. But only seldom in my life have I had such deep and painful experiences as I had then.

nothing in the world is more repugnant to a man than following the path that leads him to himself!

People try to explain it, but it’s hard. It must be some kind of sense of smell or something like that, more or less the way good hunting hounds are able to locate an imperceptible trail and follow it. Understand? There are such things, nature is full of them, and no one can explain them.

The fact is that this whole God, both in the Old and the New Testament, may be an outstanding figure, but He’s not what He should really represent. He is goodness, nobility, the Father, beauty and also loftiness, sentimentality—all fine! But the world is made up of other things, too. And all that is simply ascribed to the Devil, and this whole part of the world, an entire half, is swept under the table and buried in silence. In the same way, they praise God as the Father of all life, but when it comes to sex life, on which life after all depends, they simply bury it in silence and as much as possible declare it to be sinful, the work of the Devil! I have nothing against honoring this God Jehovah, not in the least. But my opinion is that we should honor everything and hold it sacred, the whole world, not just this artificially detached, official half!

“Smart talk has no value, none at all. It just leads you away from yourself. To depart from yourself is a sin. A person must be able to crawl away into himself completely, like a turtle.”

5]. Beata Beatrix, by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1863.

“We always limit our personality much too narrowly! We always count as pertaining to our person only what we recognize as individual differences that set us apart.

All the gods and devils that ever existed, whether among the Greeks, Chinese, or Zulus, are all inside us, they exist there as possibilities, as wishes, as ways of escape. If mankind died out except for a single halfway-gifted child that had received no education, that child would rediscover the whole course of events, it would be able to produce again the gods, demons, Edens, positive and negative commandments, the Old and the New Testament.”

Our conversations were more or less of that type. They seldom offered me anything completely new or totally surprising. But all of them, even the most banal, hit the same spot in me with a steady, gentle hammer blow; they all helped form my character, they all helped to strip dead skins off me, to crush eggshells; and after each one I raised my head a little higher, a little more freely, until my yellow bird pushed its beautiful predator’s head out of the shattered globe.

“The impetus that makes you fly is the great store of humanity that each of us possesses. It’s the feeling of interconnectedness with the roots of all power, but we soon get alarmed by it! It’s damned dangerous! And so most people are glad to give up flying; they prefer walking on the sidewalk, following the rules and regulations. But not you. You keep on flying, as a clever fellow should.

But you, Sinclair, you can pull it off. And how, I ask? I suppose you don’t know yet. You do it by using a new organ, a breath regulator. And now you can see that your soul, deep down, isn’t all that ‘personal.’ Because you didn’t invent that regulator! It’s not new! It’s a loan, it has existed for millennia. It’s the organ of equilibrium that fish have, the air bladder. And in fact there are still a few rare, conservative species of fish extant today in which the air bladder is also a kind of lung and under certain conditions can actually be used for breathing. So they’re precisely like the lungs you use as a flying bladder in your dream!”

Around eighteen at the time, I was an unusual young person, precocious in a hundred ways but very undeveloped and helpless in a hundred others.

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!

Even without such formal proceedings you can treat your urges and so called evil temptations with respect and love. Then they show their true sense, and they all make sense.—Whenever

“I can’t tell you anything, Knauer. In such matters people can’t help each other. No one helped me, either. You have to meditate on your own needs, and then you must do whatever is in accord with your own real nature. Nothing else will help. If you can’t find yourself, you won’t find any spirits, either; that’s what I think.”

“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 stick together, workers stick together, scholars stick together! And why are they afraid? 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

no serenity can come from any of that. These people who rub elbows so anxiously are filled with fear and filled with malice, none of them trusts anyone else. They cling to ideals that no longer count, and they cast stones at everyone who proclaims a new one.

If Bismarck had understood the Social Democrats and had adapted his policies to them, he would have been a smart man, but not a man of destiny. And so it was with Napoleon, with Caesar, with Loyola, with all of them!

“Love ought not to make requests,” she said, “but shouldn’t make demands, either. Love must have the strength to reach certainty for itself. Then it no longer undergoes the power of attraction, but exerts it.

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.

Not only while attacking, but all the time, many of them, very many, had that steady, distant, almost obsessed gaze that is not directed at goals but indicates complete surrender to the prodigious. No matter what they chose to believe and think—they were ready, they were useful, the future could be formed from them.