Demian: A perspective
Demian is a novel by Herman Hesse, chronicling the life of an Emil Sinclair, and the enigmatic Max Demian, a boy befriended by Sinclair.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demian
While reading another of Hesse’s works, Siddhartha, i’d come across this line in the introductory essay:
“The bird struggles out of the egg. The egg is the world. Whoever wants to be born, must destroy a world. The bird flies to God. That God’s name is Abraxas.”
-which i found to be rather intriguing. Even though i had no idea about Demian, i managed to understand that the passage spoke of a metamorphosis of sorts, the casting away of old skin or breaking apart the cocoon. a renewal and a rebirth of cataclysmic proportions. the circumstances of my own life were flowing on a similar vein, so the passage had a deep impact on me. ever since that day I’ve become very fond of this avian analogy, of the egg, the hatching; as well as similar concepts/ myths like the phoenix, or Icarus, which involve birds or flying.
Demian is a very profound work, and quite philosophically heavy. Not that the concepts put forward were especially complicated, but the manner in which Hesse puts forward all these notions gives it a lot of power. The restrained pace of the narrative contributes to this more than anything for me.
Demian address the concept of two worlds; one comprising the just, the ideal, bound by orthodoxy and dogma, while the other contains envy, anger, greed, sex and other animistic instincts, which we tend to turn away from or consider impure in some way. As a child, Sinclair is perplexed by how these two co-exist in the real world, and yet we are continuously taught of these as being mutually incompatible. He later stumbles upon the idea of Abraxas, a being who is both god and devil. Abraxas is taken as a metaphor for worshipping the duality of all things, to not just accept one part but rather take in reality wholeheartedly, both the good and the evil.
Alongside this he speaks of another concept, along the lines of the bird passage mentioned above, of how it requires conscious action on our part to fashion ourselves into human beings, and that we are never really born human, but we acquire our humanity through the process of maturing. A biological birth is not sufficient to warrant someone a human; an intellectual or spiritual rebirth of sorts must occur in their lives for them to become fully human, otherwise we are merely floating somewhere in the middle of the spectrum between what is animal and what is human. A rather harsh way of putting it, but i couldn’t help but feel like this was the plainest way to say it.
Having said that, I found the book lacking in a one respect. I found myself wondering whether Demian and his mother Frau Eva were human at all. Which i felt almost defeated the main point of the book, this coming to terms with what humanity means. they seem to be painted in a very ethereal light that might just be a bit too much……………… ethereal? Either way they felt distant, and it seemed that this took away a little from the compellingness of the book.
I also had a look at Hesse’s biography, and I must say that he comes across as someone well ahead of his time. His ideas show him to be a true citizen of the world. But what I relate to most of all is his great resistance to nationalism, which also put him at odds with the rest of the German populace, especially during the rise of Nazism.
I finished reading Demian in one sitting, and by the end of it, for some reason I felt uncannily bleak. I wondered if this was what Hesse had felt too, considering that it was written in 1917, with WWI raging in the background. Not that I’d want to put people off from reading this book. Rather, I’d actively suggest it. Sad as I felt reading it, I can’t help but accept that this little book helped me advance one more step in gaining more of the ‘self-knowledge’ that Gibran spoke of:
“Your hearts know in silence the secrets of the days and the nights.
But your ears thirst for the sound of your heart’s knowledge.
You would know in words that which you have always know in thought.
You would touch with your fingers the naked body of your dreams.”
