Demian by Hermann Hesse
Next to me someone stood up out of the darkness: short and scrawny, like a phantom, and as the hairs stood up on the back of my neck I recognized my schoolmate Knauer.
"What made you come here?" he asked, half-insane with emotion. "How did you find me?"
I didn't understand.
"I wasn't looking for you," I said, dazed. It was difficult to talk; every word was an effort, struggling painfully out through my dead, heavy, almost frozen lips.
He stared at me.
"Not looking for me?"
"No. Something drew me here. Did you call me? You must have called me. What are you doing here anyway? It's the middle of the night!"
He frantically threw his thin arms around me.
"Yes, it's night, it must be almost dawn. Oh, Sinclair, you didn't forget me! Can you ever forgive me?"
"For what?"
"Oh, I was so beastly!"
Only then did I remember our conversation. It was, what, four or five days before? It seemed like a lifetime had passed since then. Then all at once I understood everything. Not only what had happened between us, but why I had come out here and what Knauer had been planning to do.
"You were going to kill yourself, weren't you, Knauer?"
He shivered with cold and fear.
"Yes, I wanted to. I don't know if I would have been able to. I was waiting until the sunrise."
I pulled him out into the open. The first horizontal rays of daylight, unspeakably cold and listless, gleamed in the gray air.
I led the boy by the arm a short way and heard a voice come out of my mouth: "Now go home and don't tell anyone about this! You've been on the wrong path, the wrong path! And we aren't pigs, like you said. We are human beings. We make gods and then wrestle with them, and they bless us."
We walked on and then parted, in silence. When I got home, it was day.
The best thing the rest of my time in St.-- still had to offer was the hours I spent with Pistorius, listening to him play the organ or lying in front of his fireplace. We read a Greek text about Abraxas together; he read me passages from a translation of the Vedas and taught me how to utter the sacred "Om." And yet these scholarly matters weren't what encouraged my soul--rather the opposite. What did me good was my forging ahead inside myself, the growing trust I had in my own dreams, thoughts, and intuitions, and my increasing knowledge of the power I carried within me.
Pistorius and I understood each other in every way. I had only to think hard about him and I could be sure that he, or a message from him, would come to me from him. I could ask him something even if he wasn't there--like Demian: I just needed to picture him firmly in my mind and ask him my questions as concentrated thoughts, and all the power of my soul I put into the question came back to me as the answer. Only it wasn't the person of Pistorius that I imagined, nor that of Max Demian--instead I summoned up the image I had dreamed and painted, the male-female dream-image of my daemon. It was alive now, no longer only in my dreams or painted on paper, but in me, as an ideal, a heightening of my self.
The relationship that developed later between me and Knauer, the would-be suicide, was odd and sometimes even funny. Ever since the night I had been sent to save him, he clung to me like a faithful servant, or a dog, following me blindly and trying to join his life to mine. He came to me with the most bizarre questions and requests; he wanted to see spirits, wanted to study the kabbalah, and didn't believe me when I assured him I didn't know a thing about any of that. He thought I had every power imaginable. But the strange thing was, he often came to me with his bizarre and stupid questions just when there was some puzzle or another inside myself that I needed to solve, and his fanciful ideas and concerns often gave me the key push I needed to solve it. He was often a burden on me, and I would send him away in lordly fashion, but I nonetheless felt that he too was sent to me; even with him, what I gave returned to me twice as rich. He too was my guide, or even the path itself. The crazy books and tracts he brought me, in which he sought his salvation, taught me more than I realized at the time.
Later this Knauer fell away from my path, unnoticed. No confrontation with him was necessary. With Pistorius it was. Near the end of my time at school in St.--, I had one more strange experience with this friend.
Even the most harmless people can hardly avoid coming into conflict, once or twice in their lives, with the beautiful virtues of piety and gratitude. At some point we all have to take the step that separates us from our father and our teachers; we all have to feel something of the cruelty of solitude, even if most people cannot endure too much and quickly crawl back to safety.
I had not parted from my parents, from the "world of light" of my wonderful childhood, in a violent struggle--I had slowly, almost imperceptibly, grown distant from it and more and more a stranger to it. I was sorry, I spent many bitter hours during my visits home, but it didn't touch me to the core, it was bearable.
But wherever we have given our love and respect not out of habit but out of our ownmost impulses--whenever we have been companions and friends with all our heart--it is a bitter and terrible moment when we suddenly recognize that the currents inside us are carrying us away from the one we once loved. When that happens, every thought pointing away from our friend or teacher is aimed like a poison arrow straight at our own heart--every defensive blow strikes us full in our own face. Then anyone who bears the reigning morality inside him feels the labels "betrayal" and "ingratitude" rise up like disgraceful, stigmatizing accusations; the terrified heart flees in fear, back to the lovely valleys of childhood virtues, and cannot bring itself to believe that this break too must be made, this connection too must be cut.
Slowly, over time, I started to feel myself turning against the idea that my friend Pistorius was my guide in all things. My friendship with him, his advice, his consolation, his closeness, had filled the most important months of my youth. God had spoken to me through him. My dreams had come back to me out of his mouth, clarified and interpreted. He had given me faith in myself. And now, alas! I felt my resistance against him slowly increasing. Too much of what he had to say was didactic; I felt that he fully understood only part of me.
There was no argument or scene between us, no break or day of reckoning. There was only one thing I said to him, actually quite harmless--and yet that was the moment when an illusion between us shattered into brightly colored shards.
I had felt the intuition weighing down on me for some time, and it became a clear feeling one Sunday in his old study. We were lying in front of the fire and he was telling me about mysteries and the other religious forms he studied and longed for, whose possibilities for the future he spent his time brooding over. To me, though, it was all curious and interesting rather than vitally important--I could hear a note of mere pedantry in his words, an exhausted rummaging around under the rubble of bygone worlds. And suddenly I felt revulsion against everything about it: this cult of mythologies, this game of making mosaics out of the forms of belief from the past.
"Pistorius," I said all of a sudden, in a burst of malice that shocked and surprised me myself, "you should tell me one of your dreams again--I mean a real dream, the kind you have at night. What you're saying now is so--so damned antiquarian!"
He had never heard me talk like that, and I myself felt, at that very moment--in a lightning flash of shame and horror--that the arrow I had just shot, which had struck him right in the heart, had been drawn from his own arsenal. I had taken self-criticisms I had sometimes heard him express ironically, and wickedly shot them back at him, sharper than before.
He felt it at once and immediately fell silent. I looked at him with fear in my heart and saw him turn terribly pale.
After a long, painful pause, he put another log on the fire and said quietly: "You are absolutely right, Sinclair. You're a smart one. I'll spare you any more antiquarianism."
He spoke very calmly, but I could easily hear the wounded pain in what he said. What had I done?
I was almost in tears
"I'm afraid you misunderstood me," I finally said, under great strain and with a dry, hoarse voice. These stupid, meaningless words came to my lips almost mechanically, as though I were reading them out of a pulp novel.
"I understood you perfectly," Pistorius said softly. "You are absolutely right." He waited. Then he slowly went on: "Insofar as anyone can be in the right against someone."
No, no! I heard the cry inside me, I'm wrong!--but I couldn't say anything. I knew that my one simple word had found an essential weakness, a wound, a need in him. I had touched the sore spot where he did not trust himself. His ideal was "antiquarian"--he was a seeker in the past, a Romantic. And all at once I felt, deep inside me: what Pistorius had been to me, and given me, was exactly what he could not be and give to himself. He had led me along a path that would run past and leave behind even him, the guide.
God knows where these things we say come from! I wasn't trying to be nasty, and had no idea of the disaster my comment would cause. I had said something I didn't understand at all when I said it; I had indulged in the impulse of a moment, a little bit clever and a little bit mean, and it had turned out to be fate. My careless minor act of cruelty was for him a judgment.
Oh, how I wanted him to get angry, defend himself, scream at me! He did none of that, so I had to do it all myself, on the inside. He would have smiled, if he could have. The fact that he couldn't showed more clearly than anything else how badly I had hurt him.
Pistorius, by so calmly accepting this blow from me, his insolent and ungrateful pupil--by saying nothing, by accepting that I was right, by taking my word as law and fate--made me hate myself, and made my impetuous remark a thousand times worse. When I'd lashed out I thought it was at someone sturdy and strong--and now he had turned into a meek, quiet, suffering little man, defenseless and acquiescing without a word.
We stayed in front of the dying fire a long time. Every glowing shape in it, every crumbling log of ash, reminded me of happy, rich, and beautiful hours and piled up what I owed to Pistorius higher and higher. Eventually I couldn't take it anymore. I stood up and left. I lingered at his door for a long time, on the dark stairs for a long time, waited outside the house for a long time to see if perhaps he would come and follow me. Then I walked away, wandered through the city and its outskirts, the park and the forest for hours and hours, until night fell. That was when, for the first time, I felt the mark of Cain on my forehead.
Only gradually was I able to think clearly about what had happened. My thoughts were all meant to accuse myself and defend Pistorius, but they all ended up doing precisely the opposite. I was ready to repent and take back my rash words, a thousand times over--and yet the fact was that they were true. Only now did I fully understand Pistorius, only now could I put together the whole structure of his dream. He had wanted to be a priest, proclaim the new religion, institute new forms of exaltation, love, and worship, and create new symbols. But this was not his strength, and not his task. He was only too happy to linger in the past--he knew all too much about what had come before: Egypt, India, Mithras, Abraxas. His love was tied to images the world had already seen, even while he knew deep down that the new would be different and new, that it would spring up from fresh soil and not need to be cobbled together out of libraries and museums. Perhaps his true task was to help lead people to themselves, the way he had me. His task was not, in fact, to give them that tremendous thing, the new gods.
At this point the realization suddenly flared within me like a sharp burst of flame: everyone has his "task," but it is never a task he can choose for himself, can define and carry out however he wants. It was wrong to want new gods, it was utterly wrong to want to give the world anything! For awakened human beings, there was no obligation--none, none, none at all--except this: to search for yourself, become sure of yourself, feel your way forward along your own path, wherever it led. -- This realization upset me deeply, and that was what I gained from the whole experience. 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. He might end up a poet or a madman, a prophet or a criminal--that was no concern of his; in the end it was meaningless. His concern was to find his own fate, not a random one, and to live it out, full and complete. Everything else was a half-measure, escapism, fleeing back into the ideal of the masses--conformity and fear of what was inside yourself. This new picture rose up before my eyes, terrifying and sacred, foreshadowed and suspected a hundred times, maybe even spoken out loud many times, and yet only now truly experienced. I was a roll of Nature's dice, thrown into the unknown, maybe into a new world, maybe into the void, and my only purpose in life was to let this throw from the primal depths play out, feel its will inside me, and make that will entirely my own. Only that!
I had already tasted great loneliness. Now I began to suspect the existence of even deeper solitudes, and that they were inescapable.
I made no effort to reconcile with Pistorius. We stayed friends, but our relationship had changed. We spoke about it only once, or actually only he did. He said: "I want to become a priest, as you know. I wanted most of all to become a priest of the new religion we have all these intuitions about. But I'll never be able to--I know that. I've known it for a long time, without ever entirely admitting it to myself. There are other priestly duties for me to perform, maybe on the organ, maybe some other way. But I need to feel beautiful and holy things around me, always: music, mystery cults, symbols, myths. I need it, and I refuse to give it up. . . . That's my fatal flaw. I know it, Sinclair--every now and then I know that I shouldn't have such desires, they are a luxury, a weakness. It would be better to put myself at the mercy of fate without making any demands. Truer too. But I can't do it. It's the one thing I can't do. Maybe you will be able to do it someday. It's hard--it's the only truly difficult thing there is, my boy. I have often dreamed of doing it, but I can't, I tremble at the thought of it. I cannot stand so utterly naked and alone, I'm like all the rest, a poor weak dog who needs warmth and food, and sometimes needs to feel close to others of his own kind. If you really and truly want nothing except your fate, there no longer is anyone of your own kind, you're completely alone with only the cold universe around you. That is Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane, you understand. There have been martyrs who were happy to let themselves be nailed to the cross, but they weren't heroes either, they weren't free: they too clung to what was familiar and comfortable for them, they followed others' examples, they had ideals. Anyone who wants nothing but fate has no model, no ideal, nothing he cares about, no consolation left! And that is the path we actually should follow. People like us are very lonely, but at least we have each other, and the secret satisfaction of being different, of rebelling, of wanting something out of the ordinary. That has to fall away too if you want to follow your path to the end. You can't want to be a revolutionary either, or an example to others, or a martyr. It's inconceivable. . . ."
Yes, it was inconceivable. But it could be dreamed, approached, intuited. I felt something of it myself a few times, when I found myself in moments of absolute stillness. Then I peered into myself and looked the image of my destiny right in its open, staring eyes. Those eyes might be full of wisdom or full of madness, might shine with love or evil, it was all the same to me. It was impossible to choose, impermissible to want anything about it. You must want only yourself, your own fate. Pistorius had guided me a good way toward it.
I wand
I wrote on a sheet of paper: "A guide has left me. I am in total darkness. I cannot take a single step alone. Help me!"
I wanted to send it to Demian. And yet I refrained; every time I wanted to do it, it seemed silly and pointless. Still, I knew this little prayer by heart and often said it to myself. It was with me every hour of the day and night. I began to have a sense of what prayer is.
*
My schooldays were over. I was supposed to take a trip during vacation--my father had planned it--and then enroll in the university. I did not know which field. A semester in the philosophy department was approved, but I would have been just as happy with any other.
CHAPTER SEVEN
EVE
One time, over vacation, I went by the house where Max Demian had lived with his mother, years before. An old woman was strolling in the garden; I talked to her and learned the house was hers. I asked after the Demian family. She remembered them well. But she didn't know where they were living now. She could tell I was interested, so she took me into the house, dug up a leather photo album, and showed me a picture of Demian's mother. I could barely remember her, but when I saw the little portrait, my heart stood still. -- It was the picture from my dream! It was her: the large, almost masculine figure, resembling her son; the signs of maternal love, strictness, and deep passion in her features; beautiful and enticing, beautiful and unapproachable, daemon and mother, fate and lover. It was her!
What a wild miracle that was for me, to learn that my dream-image was alive in the world! There was a woman who actually looked like that--who bore the features of my destiny! Where was she? Where? -- And she was Demian's mother.
Not long afterward I went away on my trip. What a strange trip it was! I traveled restlessly from place to place, following every impulse that came to me, in search of this woman. There were days when I saw nothing but figures who reminded me of her, echoed her, resembled her--who lured me down the streets of foreign cities, through train stations, into train cars, as in a long, confused dream. There were other days when I realized how useless my search was; then I sat in some park or other, in a hotel garden, in a waiting room, doing nothing, peering into myself and trying to bring the image in me to life. But it had turned shy and fugitive. I was never able to fall asleep--at most I nodded off for fifteen minutes during train rides through unfamiliar landscapes. One time, in Zurich, a woman followed me. She was pretty, and quite brazen, but I barely noticed her and kept walking as though she were thin air. I would rather have died than take an interest in any other woman for even an hour.