Demian

“No creía que el mundo pudiera ser aún tan hermoso. Me había acostumbrado a vivir replegado en mí mismo y me había hecho a la idea de que había perdido el sentido por lo que pasaba fuera, de que la pérdida de los colores luminosos estaba inevitablemente unida a la pérdida de la infancia y que había que pagar la libertad y madurez del alma con la renuncia a ese suave resplandor. Ahora descubría emocionado que todo aquello había estado sólo tapado y oscurecido y que era posible también, como hombre libre que ha renunciado a la felicidad de la infancia, ver refulgir el mundo y disfrutar de la visión infantil.”

“—¿Nosotros? ¡Oh!, quizá sucumbamos con él. También nos pueden matar. Sólo que con eso no acabarán con nosotros. En torno a lo que quede de nosotros, o en torno a los que sobrevivan entre nosotros, se agrupará la voluntad del futuro. Y se mostrará la voluntad de la humanidad, que nuestra Europa ahogó con su feria de técnica y ciencia. Entonces se demostrará que la voluntad de la humanidad no se identifica nunca, en ningún lado, con las sociedades actuales, los Estados, las naciones, las asociaciones y las Iglesias. Porque lo que la naturaleza quiere hacer del hombre, está escrito en cada individuo, en ti y en mí. Estaba escrito en Jesucristo y está escrito en Nietzsche. Cuando las sociedades actuales se derrumben, habrá sitio para estas corrientes, las únicas importantes, que naturalmente pueden variar cada día.”

I was an experiment on the part of nature, a ‘throw’ into the unknown, perhaps for some new purpose, perhaps for nothing and my only vocation was to allow this ‘throw’ to work itself out in my innermost being, feel its will within me and make it wholly mine. That or nothing!

I had often toyed with pictures of the future, dreamed of roles which might be assigned to me - as a poet, maybe, or prophet or painter or kindred vocation. All that was futile. I was not there to write poetry, to preach or to paint; neither I nor any other man was there for that purpose. They were only incidental things. There was only one true vocation for everybody - to find the way to himself.

He had loved and had found himself in the process. Most people love only in order to lose themselves.

I was gripped with sadness and the desperate desire to die in this enchanted hour.

It was the first time the outside world was in pure harmony with my inner world, and that is a high holiday of the soul—a day that makes it worthwhile to be alive.

“Community is a beautiful thing,” Demian said. “But what we see flourishing everywhere around us is no such thing. True community will arise again when actual individuals come to know each other; then will come a time when it reshapes the world. The communities we have now are just herds. People run as fast as they can to each other because they’re afraid of each other—the rich come together over here, the workers over there, the educated elites somewhere else! And why are they afraid? Fear always comes from a split in yourself. They are afraid because they have never gotten to know who they really are. A whole society of people afraid of the unknown in their own hearts! They all can feel that the principles they live by are not valid anymore, that they’re following the old laws; none of it, neither their religion nor their morality, is right for us today. For a hundred years and more, Europe has done nothing but go to school and build factories! They know exactly how many ounces of powder it takes to kill someone, but don’t know how to pray to God. They don’t even know how to be happy for an hour at a time. Just look at these student bars! Or anywhere rich people go to amuse themselves! It’s hopeless!

I had already tasted great loneliness. Now I began to suspect the existence of even deeper solitudes, and that they were inescapable.

I had often toyed with ideas and images of my future, dreaming up roles to play: as a writer, for example, or prophet, or painter, or whatever it was. All that meant nothing. I was not put on earth to write, or preach, or paint—and nor was anyone else. These things were only secondary. Every person’s true calling was only to arrive at himself.

I was an unusual young man then, around eighteen years old—precocious in a hundred ways but very far behind and helpless in a hundred other ways. When I compared myself to other people my age, as I would do every now and then, I sometimes felt proud and conceited but just as often demoralized and depressed. There were many times I saw myself as a genius, many times as half insane. I was never able to share and join in the others’ pleasures, and I was eaten up with worries and self-hatred about how hopelessly isolated I was from them, how cut off from life.

At other times my whole existence felt like unbearable torture, and I was prepared to take my own life.

“The bird fights its way out of the egg. The egg is the world. Whoever wants to be born must destroy a world. The bird flies to god. The god is called Abraxas.”

There are many ways in which the god can make us lonely and lead us to ourselves. This was the path he took with me.

Whatever the weather, I would take little intellectual walks, which often gave me a kind of pleasure that was full of melancholy, scorn for the world, and contempt for myself as well.

I was well aware that it was impossible to love me as I was, and I did not love myself either.

This realization was not a happy one, although it did give me a certain satisfaction. It was hard—it left a harsh taste in my mouth—because a note of responsibility resounded in it, a sense of no longer being able to remain a child. Of standing alone.

He spoke with an intensity, almost violence,

We humans have a wider range, certainly, and more interests than an animal, but we too are stuck in a relatively narrow circle and cannot break free of it. Of course I can imagine this or that, decide that I absolutely have to reach the North Pole or what have you, but I can will it strongly enough to actually accomplish it if the wish lies entirely in my self, if it truly, completely corresponds to my nature. When that happens, when you try to follow a command from within, then it works, you can harness your will like a good workhorse.

I looked at Demian’s face and saw the face of a man, not a boy; but not only that, I also thought I could see, or feel, that this was not just the face of a man, it was something else too. There seemed to be something of a woman’s face in it as well, in fact the face seemed to me, for a moment, neither manly nor childlike, neither old nor young, but somehow millennial, timeless, marked with different spans of time from the ones we lived in. A

Like almost all parents, mine did nothing to help the life forces awakening within me, which were never spoken about. They only tried, endlessly and untiringly, to help me in my hopeless efforts to deny reality and stay in a child’s world that grew more and more false and unreal every day. I do not know if parents can do anything else, and I am not criticizing mine in particular. It was up to me to finish growing up and find my own way; I did it badly, like most well-raised children.

I know that some people might have a hard time believing that a child, not even eleven years old, could feel such things. My story is not for them. It is meant for people who better understand the human heart. Adults, who have learned to transmute some of their feelings into thoughts, do not see such thoughts in children, so they conclude that the experiences are not there either. But there are very few times in my life that I have lived and suffered as deeply as I did then.

Now I was hand in hand with the devil; now the enemy was right behind me.

All I wanted to do was try to live the life that was inside me, trying to get out. Why was that so hard?