Demian by Hermann Hesse

  From that moment on, the connection between Demian and me existed once again. And, strangely, no sooner was this feeling of a spiritual bond there in the soul than it was almost magically transposed into physical space as well. I didn't know if he had done it or if it was pure chance--back then, I still believed in chance--but after a few days Demian had suddenly moved to a different seat in religion class, directly in front of me. (I still remember how happy I was, surrounded by the horrid morning air of an overfilled schoolroom that reeked like a poorhouse, to breathe in the fresh clean smell of soap from his neck!) After another couple days he had changed seats again and was now sitting next to me, and that was where he stayed, through the winter and all spring.

  The class was entirely transformed. It was no longer soporific and boring. I looked forward to it. Sometimes we both listened to the pastor with the greatest interest--one glance from my neighbor was enough to call my attention to a remarkable story or strange proverb. And another glance from him--a very particular kind of glance--was enough to put me on alert and awaken my doubt and critique.

  Often, though, we were bad students who didn't listen at all. Demian always behaved well around his teachers and fellow students--I never saw him playing schoolboy pranks or laughing out loud or whispering in class; no teacher ever had to reprimand him. But he knew how to communicate with me, more with silent signs and glances than with words. And the thoughts and ideas he shared with me were sometimes very strange.

  He told me, for example, which of the students he found interesting and how he was studying them. He had very exact knowledge about some of them. For example he would tell me before class: "When I give you a signal with my thumb, so-and-so will turn around to look at us," or scratch his neck, or whatever it was. Then during class, usually when I had almost forgotten about it, Max would suddenly turn to me and make a conspicuous gesture with his thumbs and I would quickly look at the student he was pointing to, and every time I saw him making the predicted gesture like a puppet on a string. I nagged Max to try it on the teacher sometime, but he didn't want to. One time, though, when I came to class and told him I hadn't done my homework, and that I really hoped the pastor would not call on me, he helped me. The pastor looked around for a student to recite a section of the catechism, and his roving gaze rested on my guilty face. He slowly came over, stretched out his finger toward me, already with my name on his lips--and then suddenly looked confused or distracted, tugged at his collar, walked over to Demian, who was looking him straight in the face, and seemed to want to ask him something, but unexpectedly turned away again, coughed once or twice, and called on someone else.

  These games amused me very much; I noticed only gradually that my friend often played the same kind of trick on me. It happened sometimes on my walk to school that I would suddenly have the feeling that Demian was walking behind me, and when I turned around, there he was.

  "Can you really make other people think what you want?" I asked him.

  He readily answered, calmly and objectively in his usual adult manner.

  "No," he said, "no one can. Because we do not have free will, even if the pastor pretends we do. Other people can't think what they want, so I can't make them think what I want. But it is possible to observe someone closely enough that you can say, sometimes rather precisely, what he's thinking or feeling, and then you can usually predict what he's about to do. It's very easy, people just don't know how. It takes practice, of course. Let me give you an example. Among butterflies there are certain species where the females are much rarer than the males. They reproduce just like other animals, with the male fertilizing the female, which lays eggs. Now if you have a female of one of these species--scientists have tested this many times--the males come flying toward this female all night, sometimes from hours away. Hours, just think! From miles and miles away, these males feel the presence of the only female in the area! People have tried to explain the phenomenon, but it's difficult. They must have a kind of special sense of smell or something, the same way good hunting dogs can pick up and follow imperceptible traces. Do you understand? Nature is full of such things that no one can explain. Now I say: if the females were as common as the males, this species of butterfly would not have such a sensitive sense of smell! They have it only because they've trained themselves to have it. If an animal, or a person, directs his whole attention and will at a particular thing, he attains it. That's all it is. And it's the same with what you're thinking. If you look at someone closely enough, you will know more about him than he knows himself."

  The word "mind-reading" was on the tip of my tongue, I was about to utter it and remind him of the incident with Kromer that lay so far in the past. But that was another odd thing between us: neither he nor I ever, ever made the slightest reference to this decisive intervention he had made in my life. It was as though there had never been anything between us, or as though each of us firmly believed the other had forgotten it. Once or twice we even ran into Franz Kromer when we were walking down the street, but we exchanged not a glance, not a word about him.

  "What do you mean about free will?" I asked. "You say we don't have any, but then you say that you only have to direct your will firmly toward something and you'll get it. That doesn't make sense! If I'm not the master of my own will, then I can't direct it here or there however I want."

  He clapped me on the shoulder. He always did that when I pleased him in some way.

  "It's good you asked!" he said with a laugh. "It's important to always ask, always doubt. But the answer is very simple. If one of our butterflies tried to direct his will toward a star or something, he couldn't do it. It's just--he never tries to. He seeks out only what has value and meaning for him, what he needs, what he absolutely must have. And then the unbelievable happens, he develops a magical sixth sense that no other animal has! 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. For example, if I got the idea into my head that I wanted to make our pastor stop wearing glasses, it wouldn't work. That would just be playing games. But back in the fall, when I made the firm decision to be moved from my desk up in front, it worked perfectly. Suddenly someone showed up who had been sick until then, he was ahead of me in the alphabet, and since someone had to move to make room for him, it was naturally me who did it, because my will was ready to take the opportunity as soon as it came up."

  "Yes," I said, "it felt very strange for me too. As soon as you and I took an interest in each other, you came closer and closer. But how? You couldn't sit next to me right away, you sat a few rows ahead of me first, didn't you? Then what happened?"

  "It was like this: When I first felt the urge to move, I didn't quite know where I wanted to go, I only knew that I wanted to sit farther back. My will to sit next to you was there, but I wasn't conscious of it yet. At the same time, your will was exerting its force and helped me. Only when I was sitting right in front of you did it occur to me that my wish was only half-fulfilled--I realized what I actually wanted all along was to sit next to you."

  "But no new student showed up that time."

  "No, but I just did what I wanted and sat down next to you. The boy whose place I took was surprised, but what was he going to do? He moved. The pastor noticed that something had changed--in fact every time he calls on me or looks at me, something secretly bothers him, he knows my name is Demian and that it's wrong for a D to be sitting all the way back here with the S's--but it never forces its way into his consciousness, because my will opposes it, and I always prevent it from happening. He keeps noticing something is wrong, and he looks at me a
nd starts to study me more carefully, the good man, but every time that happens I do the same simple thing. I look him very, very straight in the eye. Almost no one can take that well. They all get nervous. If you want something from someone, and you look him straight in the eye and he doesn't get uncomfortable at all, then give up! You'll never get what you want from him, never! But that very rarely happens. In fact, I only know one person this strategy doesn't work on."

  "Who?" I asked quickly.

  He looked at me with the slightly narrowed eyes he always had when he was thinking about something. Then he looked away and didn't answer, and despite my burning curiosity I was unable to repeat the question.

  But I think he meant his mother. -- He apparently lived on very close terms with her, but he never talked to me about her and never invited me over to his house. I barely knew what his mother looked like.

  *

  Back then, I sometimes tried to do what he did and direct my will so powerfully toward something that I would have to achieve it. I certainly had wishes that felt urgent enough to me. But nothing happened; it didn't work. I couldn't bring myself to talk to Demian about it either. I wouldn't have been able to admit to him what I wanted. And he also didn't ask.

  My religious faith had meanwhile developed certain gaps. Still, I felt that there was a big difference between my own thinking, completely influenced as it was by Demian, and that of my unbelieving fellow students. There were some who occasionally let slip a comment about how ridiculous and beneath our dignity it was to believe in a god, how fairy tales like the trinity or Jesus's immaculate birth were simply laughable, and how it was a scandal in this day and age for anyone still to peddle such nonsense. Those were in no way my views. Even if I had my doubts, the whole experience of my childhood had taught me enough about the reality of a pious life, a life like my parents', to know it was neither undignified nor hypocritical. I had the deepest respect for religion, the same as before. It was just that Demian had gotten me to start seeing and interpreting the stories and doctrines in freer, more personal, playful, and imaginative ways; at least I always followed with pleasure and delight the interpretations he laid out for me. A lot of it was more than I could accept, of course, like the business about Cain. One time in confirmation class he shocked me with an idea that was even more radical, if that was possible. The teacher had told us about Golgotha. The Biblical account of the Savior's suffering and death had always made a very deep impression on me, as far back as I can remember; sometimes as a young boy, for instance on Good Friday after my father had read me the story of the Passion, I would live, deeply and inwardly moved, in that sorrowful, beautiful, pale and spectral yet monstrously vital world, in Gethsemane and on Golgotha, and when I heard Bach's St. Matthew's Passion the whole dark majestic glow of suffering in that mysterious world filled me with overpowering, mystical shudders. I still think this music and the "Actus tragicus" are the epitome of all poetry, all artistic expression.

  At the end of class, Demian said rather thoughtfully: "There's something I don't like about that story, Sinclair. Read it through again, and test it out on your tongue: there's something about it that leaves an insipid taste in your mouth. It's the part about the two thieves. It's magnificent, of course, those three crosses standing next to one another on the hill! But then this sentimental little tract about the good thief! He used to be a criminal, he's committed God knows what crimes, and now he gets all mushy and performs these whiny rituals of self-improvement and repentance?! What's the point of remorse if you're two steps away from the grave, I ask you? It's nothing but a sanctimonious fairy tale, treacly and dishonest, insipid and sentimental and obviously didactic. If you met those two thieves today and had to pick one of them as your friend, or decide which of the two to trust, it's completely obvious you wouldn't pick the weepy convert. You'd pick the other one--he's someone with character. He thumbs his nose at converting, which in his case would be nothing but pretty talk anyway; he follows his path to the end and doesn't chicken out at the last minute, doesn't try to talk his way out of what he owes the devil, who must have helped him up until then. He has character, all right, and people of character don't come off too well in Bible stories. Maybe he's another descendant of Cain. Don't you think?"

  I was aghast. I had believed myself entirely at home in the story of the Passion, and only now did I see how little I had engaged with the story personally, how little imaginative power I had brought to bear when I heard it and read it. That said, Demian's new idea sounded sinister, possibly fatal; it threatened to overturn certain notions I had whose continued existence I felt I had to cling to. No, you couldn't just play around with anything and everything, even the most sacred!

  As always, he noticed my resistance right away, even before I said anything.

  "I know," he said, resigned. "It's the same old story: Whatever you do, don't take what it says seriously! But there's something I want to tell you. This is one of the places where you can clearly see the flaws in this religion. This whole God, in the Old Testament and the New Testament both, is a marvelous character, true, but he's not what he's supposed to be. He is good and noble, the Father, the high and beautiful, the sentimental--all true! But the world consists of other things too. And all those other things get chalked up to the devil; that whole part of the world, that whole half, is just suppressed and hushed up. The same way God is praised for being the Father of all life, while everything sexual, everything life in fact depends on, is simply hushed up or described wherever possible as the devil's work, and sinful! I have nothing against honoring and worshipping this God Jehovah, not in the least. But I think we should honor everything, and worship everything--the whole world is sacred, not just this artificially partitioned official half! We need not only church service but a devil's service. That's what I think. Or else we need to create a God who includes the devil too, and whose eyes we don't need to cover when the most natural things in the world take place in front of him."

  He spoke with an intensity, almost violence, that was unusual for him, but he smiled as soon as his speech was done and did not push his point any further.

  *

  In me, though, these words struck at the riddle of my whole adolescence, which I carried within me every hour of every day, and about which I had never spoken a word to anyone. What Demian had just said about God and the Devil, about the godly official world and the hushed-up devilish world, was precisely my own idea, my own myth: the idea of the two worlds, or half-worlds, one of light and one of darkness. The realization that my problem was one that every person had--a problem affecting all life and all thought--came over me like a holy shadow, and I saw, and suddenly felt, with fear and awe, how deeply my innermost life and thoughts were a part of the eternal river of great ideas. 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.

  I told my friend--it was the first time in my life I had revealed such a deep secret--about the idea I had had since my earliest childhood, about the "two worlds," and he immediately saw that by doing so I was agreeing with him from the depths of my heart. But he was not the type to take advantage. He heard me out, paying me the same close attention he always had, and looked me in the eye until I had to turn away. For once again I saw in his gaze that strange, animalistic timelessness and unfathomable age.

  "We'll talk more about it another time," he said gently. "I can see you're thinking about more than you can say. But whenever that's the case, then you haven't fully lived what you've thought--as you know--and that is not good. Only a thought we've lived has any value. You knew that your 'permitted world' was only half the world, but you've tried to suppress the other half the way the pastor and teachers do. It won't work! It never does for anyone who has started to think."

  This struck a deep chord in me.

  "But still, there are trul
y forbidden and ugly things," I almost screamed, "you can't deny that! They are not allowed, and we have to not do them. I know that people commit murder and do all kinds of vicious things, but does that mean I'm supposed to go turn into a criminal?"

  "We won't be done with this today," Max said soothingly. "Of course you shouldn't rape or murder anyone, no. But you can't really see yet what is 'allowed' and what is 'forbidden'--you're not there yet. You have only felt a first piece of the truth. The rest will come, don't worry! For example, you've had an urge in yourself, for a year or so, that is considered 'forbidden.' The Greeks, on the other hand, and many other peoples too, considered this urge a God, and they honored it in great festivals. In other words, 'forbidden' is not an eternal truth--it can change. Today, anyone is allowed to sleep with a woman as soon as he's been to a pastor with her and married her. It's different with other peoples, even today. And so every one of us has to find out for himself what is allowed and what is forbidden--forbidden to him. It is entirely possible to never do anything forbidden and still be an absolute scoundrel. And vice versa. -- Really, it's just a question of comfort! Anyone too comfortable to think for himself and be his own judge simply obeys the laws as they are. He has it easy. Other people feel commandments inside themselves--things are forbidden to them that upstanding citizens do every day, and other things are permitted to them which are usually frowned upon. We all have to stand on our own."