Demian

by Hermann Hesse

  I was gripped with sadness and the desperate desire to die in this enchanted hour. I felt tears well up inside me and overpower me, irresistibly--it had been so infinitely long since the last time I'd cried! I turned violently away from her, stepped over to the window, and looked out past the flowerpots with blind eyes.

  Behind me I heard her voice. It sounded calm, and nonetheless as full of affection as a goblet filled to the rim with wine.

  "Sinclair, you're acting like a child! Your destiny loves you. It will be completely yours someday, just how you dream it, as long as you stay true to it."

  I had regained control of myself and I turned back to face her again. She gave me her hand.

  "I have a few friends," she said with a smile, "a few--very few, very close--friends who call me Eve. You can use my first name too, if you want."

  She led me to the door, opened it, and pointed out into the garden. "You'll find Max out there."

  I stood under the tall trees, numb and shaken, either wider awake or more deeply dreaming than ever, I wasn't sure. The rain dripped gently from the branches. I walked slowly into the garden, which extended a long way up and down the riverbank. Finally I found Demian. He was in an open summer house, shirtless, practicing boxing with a hanging sandbag.

  I stood rooted to the spot. Demian looked magnificent, with his broad chest, firm, manly head, and raised arms with huge, taut, strong muscles. Movements burst from his hips, shoulders, and wrists like playing fountains.

  "Demian!" I called out. "What are you doing there?"

  He gave a cheerful laugh.

  "Training. I've promised my little Japanese friend a match, and he's quick as a cat and just as spiteful. But he won't beat me. There's a tiny little humiliation I need to pay him back for."

  He pulled on a shirt and jacket.

  "You've already been to see my mother?" he asked.

  "Yes, Demian, what a glorious mother you have! And: Eve! The name fits her perfectly, she really is like the mother of us all."

  He looked thoughtfully into my face for a moment.

  "She's already told you her first name? You can be proud, my boy, you are the first person she's ever told it to the first time she met him."

  From that day on I came and went in their house like a son and a brother, although also like a lover. As soon as I had shut the gates behind me--actually as soon as I'd seen, from a distance, the tops of the garden's tall trees--I was rich, I was happy. Outside was "reality"; outside were streets and buildings, people and institutions, libraries and lecture halls--but here inside was light, and the soul; here dreams and fairy tales had come to life. And yet we did not live cut off from the world at all--in our thoughts and our conversations we were usually right in the middle of it, only on a different plane. It was not borders and frontiers that separated us from the mass of men, but rather a different way of seeing. Our task was to play the role of an island in the world--maybe we would be a model for others, maybe not, but either way we would proclaim that there were other possible ways to live. I, who had been lonely for so long, learned what true community means, the kind that is possible between people who have felt complete and total solitude. Never again did I yearn for the tables of the happy or the feasts of the blessed; never again did envy or longing for the past come over me at the sight of groups of people. I was slowly being initiated into the mystery of those who bore "the mark."

  We, with the mark, might justly be considered strange, even crazy and dangerous, by the rest of the world. We were awakened, or at least awakening; our efforts were directed toward ever more complete awareness, while others always longed to merge their opinions, ideals, and duties, their lives and their happiness, more and more closely with those of the herd. That was a striving too--there was strength in that effort, and even a kind of greatness. But we, with the sign, felt that we embodied nature's will for the new, the individual, and the future, while the others' lives showed only a will to persist in the old. They loved humanity as much as we did, but for them it was something already finished, to be preserved and protected, while for us it lay in a distant future we were all moving toward, whose image was still unknown, and whose laws had never been written.

  Aside from Eve, Max, and me, other seekers of very different kinds belonged to our circle, more or less intimately. Some of them followed strange paths, devoted themselves to bizarre goals, and clung to opinions and practices far outside the mainstream. The group included astrologers and kabbalists, a follower of Count Tolstoy, and all sorts of fragile, shy, and vulnerable types--followers of new sects, devotees of yoga, vegetarians, and others. In fact we had nothing in common with them spiritually, except for the mutual respect everyone showed for one another's esoteric ideals. We felt closer to other members of the group, the ones who pursued mankind's search for gods and new ideals in the past. Their studies often reminded me of those of my old friend Pistorius. They brought books with them, translated texts from ancient languages for us, showed us reproductions of old symbols and depictions of ancient rites, and taught us to see how every ideal the human race had ever possessed was a dream from the unconscious soul, dreams in which mankind had gropingly followed the dim premonitions of its future possibilities. And so we ran through the wondrous, thousand-headed chaos of gods from the ancient world, all the way up to the conversion to Christianity; we learned about the beliefs of the solitary saints and the changes and transformations that religions underwent from one people to the next. Everything we collected led us to the same critique of our time and the Europe of our day: its titanic endeavors had created powerful new human weapons but had finally ended in a profound and scandalous desolation of spirit. It had conquered the whole world only to lose its own soul.

  Our group also included believers and adherents of various doctrines of salvation. There were Buddhists who wanted to convert Europe, Tolstoyans, and other faiths too. We in the inner circle listened to them but took none of their teachings as anything but a symbol. We who bore the sign felt no concern whatsoever for how the future would look. Every faith, every doctrine of salvation, seemed equally dead and useless to us from the start. We recognized only one thing as our duty and destiny: every one of us had to become himself, had to be true to and live for the sake of the seed of nature at work in himself, so completely that the uncertain future would find us ready for anything and everything it might bring.

  For it was equally clear to us all, whether the sense was spoken or unspoken, that a new birth and the collapse of the present world were near, and already discernible. Demian sometimes told me: "No one can imagine what will come. Europe's soul is an animal that has lain in chains for an eternity. When it is free at last, its first stirrings will not be the sweetest and gentlest. But how we get there doesn't matter, as long as the true needs of the soul--so anesthetized and buried with lies for so long--see the light of day at last. Then our day will have come. They will need us, not as a guide or a giver of new laws (we will not live to see the new laws) but as the ones who are ready and willing to go and stand wherever destiny summons us. Look, anyone is prepared to do incredible things when his ideals are threatened, but when a new ideal, a new and perhaps dangerous or sinister stirring of growth comes knocking, there is no one. The few who will stand up and join in the transformation--will be us. That is what we are marked for, the same way Cain was marked to arouse fear and hate and to drive the humanity that existed then out of its cramped idyll into the wide, dangerous world. Everyone who has changed the course of human history, every last one was able to do so only because he was ready for his destiny. That's true of Moses and the Buddha, Napoleon and Bismarck. The wave that carries us, the star that guides us--we cannot choose it. If Bismarck had sympathized with the Social Democrats and joined them, he would have been an intelligent man but not a man of destiny. The same with Napoleon, with Caesar, with Ignatius of Loyola, with everyone! You have to think of these things in biological, evolutionary terms, always! When radical changes on the earth's surface hu
rled sea creatures onto dry land, or land animals back into the water, the specimens ready for their destiny were the ones that carried out the new, unimaginable transformation and adapted to save their species. Maybe up until then these specimens had stood out among their kind as conservative preservers of the past, or maybe they were the outsiders and revolutionaries, we don't know. But they were ready, and so they could save their species by evolving into something new. That we know. That is what we are ready for too."

  Eve was often present during conversations like this, but she didn't talk the same way. All of us who expressed our thoughts found a listener in her, an echo, full of trust and understanding. It seemed as though all the thoughts originated with her and were only returning back to her. Sitting near her, hearing her voice now, and breathing in the atmosphere of soulful maturity that surrounded her--that was what made me happy.

  She sensed at once when any change took place in me: any dullness of spirit or any renewal. The dreams I had in my sleep seemed to me to have been sent by her. I often told her about them, and she always found them comprehensible and natural; there were no details her sensitive feelings could not follow. For a time I had dreams that were like replicas of our daytime conversations: I dreamed that the whole world was in turmoil and that I, either alone or with Demian, was waiting anxiously for the great destiny to come. It stayed hidden, but somehow it bore Eve's features. To be chosen by her or rejected by her was what destiny meant.

  Sometimes she said with a smile: "That's not your whole dream, Sinclair, you've forgotten the best part"--and then it sometimes happened that another part of the dream came back to me, and I couldn't understand how I could possibly have forgotten it.

  At times, all this wasn't enough; I was tortured with desire. I thought I could not bear seeing her next to me without taking her in my arms. That too she noticed right away. One time, when I stayed away for several days and then returned distraught, she took me aside and said: "You mustn't have wishes you don't believe in. I know what you wish for. Either you can give up these wishes or you need to fully and properly wish for them. If you can ever ask in such a way that you are entirely sure your wish will be fulfilled, then fulfillment will come. But now you're just wishing and then feeling bad about it, scared the whole time. That is what you need to overcome. Let me tell you a story."

  And she told me that once upon a time there was a young man in love with a star in the sky. He stood on the ocean's shore, reached out his hands, and worshipped the star; he dreamed about it and directed all his thoughts at it. But he knew, or thought he knew, that a star cannot be clasped in human arms. He thought it was his destiny to love a heavenly body without any hope of fulfillment, and from this idea he constructed an entire poetry of life based on renunciation and silent faithful suffering that would make him purer and better. Still all his dreams were of the star. One night he was standing by the ocean again, on a high cliff, and he looked at the star and burned with love for it. And at the pinnacle of his greatest longing, he leaped into thin air toward the star. But the instant he made the leap, he thought, fast as lightning: It's not possible! Then he was lying down on the beach, broken to pieces. He did not know how to love. If, at the moment he jumped, he had had the strength of soul to be firm and sure that his longing would be fulfilled, he would have flown up to the sky and become one with the star.

  "Love cannot ask," she said, "or plead. Love must have the strength to reach certainty from within. Then one's love is no longer attracted, it attracts. Sinclair, your love is drawn to me. If it ever draws me to it, I will come. I don't want to do anyone a favor, I want to be won."

  Another time, she told me a different fairy tale. There once was a lover who loved without hope. He withdrew completely into his heart and thought his love would consume him. He was lost to the world; he no longer saw the blue sky and the green forest, the stream did not murmur past for him, the harp did not sound, everything was gone, and he had grown poor and miserable. Still his love grew and grew, and he would have much rather died and withered away than give up on possessing the beautiful woman he loved. Then he felt how his love had turned everything else in his heart to ashes; his passion grew powerful; its force of attraction pulled and pulled, and the beautiful woman had no choice but to obey: she came to him, and he stood with outspread arms to draw her to him. But she, standing there before him, had been utterly transformed--he saw and felt with a shudder that he had drawn the whole lost world to him. It stood before him and gave itself to him, sky and forest and mountain stream, everything came to him fresh and magnificent, in new colors, and it belonged to him, spoke his language. Instead of winning just one woman, he had the whole world pressed to his heart; every star in the sky shone within him, sparkling with pleasure through his soul. -- He had loved and had found himself in the process. Most people love only in order to lose themselves.

  My love for Eve seemed like the only thing in my life. But every day it looked different. Sometimes I felt certain that my essential nature was not in fact struggling to reach her actual person, rather that she was only a symbol of what was inside me, trying only to lead me deeper into myself. The things she said often sounded like my own unconscious mind's answers to the burning questions I had. At other times there were moments when I was aflame with sensual desire next to her, and kissed things she had touched. Gradually my sexual and asexual love, reality and symbol, began to merge. Then, thinking about her in calm tranquility alone in my room, I sometimes seemed to feel her hand in mine, her lips on mine. Or else I would be with her, looking into her face, talking to her and hearing her voice, and I couldn't tell if she was even real or just a dream. I started to realize how a person can possess a love forever, immortally. I learned something new from reading a book and it was the exact same feeling as a kiss from Eve; she stroked my hair and smiled her fresh, sweet-smelling warmth at me and I had the same feeling as when I had made progress within myself. Everything that mattered to me, every part of my destiny, could take on her shape. She could turn into every one of my thoughts and vice versa.

  I had to spend Christmas vacation with my parents, and I had been afraid of it because I thought it would be torture to be away from Eve for two weeks. But it was no such thing--it was wonderful to be at home and to think about her. When I returned to H., I stayed away from her house for another two days, savoring my security and my independence from her physical presence. I had dreams, too, in which my union with her took place in new, metaphorical ways. She was an ocean and I was a river pouring into her; she was a star and I was another star hurtling toward her, and we met, felt drawn to each other, stayed close to each other, and orbited blissfully around each other in tight, singing circles for all eternity.

  I told her this dream the next time I visited her.

  "That's a beautiful dream," she said quietly. "Make it come true!"

  Early that spring there came a day I will never forget. I walked into the hall, where a window was open; a warm breeze wafted the thick smell of hyacinths through the house. Since no one was there, I went upstairs to Max Demian's study. I knocked lightly on the door and, as I habitually did, walked in without waiting for an answer.

  The room was dark, all the curtains pulled shut. The door to a small side room where Max had set up a chemical laboratory was open, and from there came the bright white light of the spring sun shining through the rain clouds. I thought no one was in the room, and I pulled back a curtain.

  Then I saw Max Demian sitting on a stool near the curtained window, hunched over and strangely altered. A feeling flashed through me like lightning: you've seen that before! His arms hung limp with his hands in his lap, his head hung slightly bent forward, and his face, with his eyes open, was dead and unseeing--a tiny glare of reflected light shone in the pupil of one eye, as though in a dead piece of glass. His wan face was as if turned in on itself, expressionless except for a horrible rigidity; it looked like an ancient, primitive animal mask at the gate of a temple. He did not seem to be bre
athing.

  I felt a shudder of memory: I had seen him like that, exactly like that, once before, many years ago, when I was still a boy. His eyes had stared inward the same way; his hands had lain lifelessly next to each other the same way; a fly had walked across his face. And back then, maybe six years before, he had looked exactly as old and as timeless as he looked now. Not a wrinkle in his face was any different.

  Gripped with fear, I quietly left the room and went downstairs. In the hall I saw Eve. She looked pale and seemed tired, in a way I had never seen her. A shadow flew in through the window; the glaring white sunlight was suddenly gone.

  "I just saw Max," I whispered hurriedly. "Has something happened? He is asleep, or turned in on himself, I don't know how to put it. I've seen him like that once before."

  "You didn't wake him up, did you?" she asked hurriedly.

  "No. He didn't hear me. I left right away. Tell me, Eve, what's the matter with him?"

  She wiped her brow with the back of her hand.

  "Don't worry, Sinclair, nothing's the matter with him. He has withdrawn. It won't last long."

  She stood up and went out into the garden, even though it had just started to rain. I could tell I wasn't supposed to go with her. So I paced back and forth in the hall, smelled the stupefying scent of the hyacinths, stared at my bird picture over the door, and anxiously breathed in the strange shadow that had filled the house that morning. What was it? What had happened?

  Eve soon came back. There were raindrops in her dark hair. She sat down in her armchair, exhausted. I walked over to her, bent down, and kissed the drops from her hair. Her eyes were quiet and bright, but the drops tasted like tears.

  "Should I check on him?" I asked in a whisper.

  She smiled weakly.

  "Don't be a little boy, Sinclair!" she warned, in a loud voice as though trying to break a spell she was under. "Go away now, and come back later, I can't talk to you right now."

  I left the house and hurried out of the city toward the mountains, into the fine, slanting rain. The clouds moved past, low in the sky, under heavy pressure, as though in fear; beneath them there was hardly any breeze. A storm seemed to be raging on the peaks. More than once the sun burst through the steel-gray clouds for a moment, pale in hue but dazzlingly bright.