They had their faults, and bad habits, but ones that never ran very deep, I felt. Not like with me, where any contact with evil was so painful and difficult, and where the dark world seemed to lie so much closer.
I kept quiet, but I was afraid I would stand out for just that reason and draw Kromer's anger.
I had to look on, my heart growing cold within me, as my world—my beloved, happy life—detached itself from me and turned into the past.
For the first time I tasted death, and death tastes bitter because it is birth: anxiety and terror in the face of frightening renewal.
I wanted to pray for a miracle from God, that He would let me make such a find, but I knew I no longer had any right to pray.
I kept looking over at Demian, whose face strangely fascinated me.
There's no way to know if it was really his brother, but that doesn't really matter, in the end all men are brothers.
Everything I suffered from and loathed when Kromer did it, I accepted happily from Demian, with a feeling as much of rapture as of terror.
I was startled, and set off at a run. Someone ran after me, and a hand grabbed me gently from behind. It was Max Demian. I let myself be caught.
You're not scared of me, are you? Or are you?
I like you, or I find you interesting, and so I want to bring to the surface your inner way of seeing things.
If someone is afraid of another person, it's because he has given this person some kind of power over him.
It was like in my dream: I was under his influence, overpowered by his voice. I only nodded. Wasn't he speaking in a voice that could just as well have come from within myself? That knew everything, better and more clearly that I knew it myself?
But you already know this fear of him isn't right, don't you? Such fear just destroys us, we have to break free of it. You have to break free of it or you will never be all right. Do you understand that?
If there's nothing else you can do, then kill him! I would be impressed if you did, and happy. I'd even help you.
I was left with the same awkward feeling toward him, a strange mix of gratitude and shyness, admiration and fear, affection and inner resistance.
I decided to see him again soon; I wanted to talk more with him about everything, including Cain.
I should have confessed to him! That confession would have been less ornamental and moving but more fruitful for me.
I had to replace my dependence on Kromer with a new one, because I was unable to walk alone, so I chose, in my blind heart, dependence on Father and Mother, on the old beloved “world of light,” even though I already knew it was not the only one.
I will speak of only the things that felt new, that pushed me onward, broke me loose.
I see him going to school, alone or between two other older students, and I see him walking between the others like an exotic creature, solitary and silent, like a distant star, surrounded by a different air of his own, living under his own laws.
I stood at a window, hidden behind a curtain, and watched him, and saw, with deep admiration, his keen, cool, bright face turned toward the coat of arms—the face of a man, a scholar or artist, supercilious and purposeful, strangely bright and cold, with knowing eyes.
I could not help looking at him for a long time, and even back then I felt, far from consciously, something very unusual and special about him.
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. Animals might look like that, or trees, or stars—I didn't know, I didn't feel precisely what I would say about it now, as an adult, but I felt something like that. Maybe he was beautiful, maybe I was attracted to him and maybe repelled too, there was no way to decide that either. I saw only that he was different from us—he was like an animal, or like a spirit, or like a picture, I don't know what he was but he was different, unimaginably different from us all. My memory tells me nothing more. Maybe this scene too is partly made up of later impressions.
There seemed to be some kind of bond between us. I need to retrace this connecting thread as carefully as I can.
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...
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.
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.
No, 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.
Nature is full of such things that no one can explain.
If you look at someone closely enough, you will know more about him than he knows himself.
It was as though there had never been anything between us, or as though each of us firmly believed the other had forgotten it.
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.
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.
As soon as you and I took an interest in each other, you came closer and closer. But how?
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.
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.
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.
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.
But I think we should honor everything, and worship everything—the whole world is sacred, not just this artificially partitioned official half!
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.
In other words, ‘forbidden' is not an eternal truth—it can change.
He may have expressed these ideas in a casual, sociable way, but actually he was sick to death of talking “just for the sake of conversation,” as he once put it.
But in just those classes my thoughts were elsewhere—in fact they were on my friend.
There is no point in clever talk, none at all. It only leads you away from yourself. Going away from yourself is a sin. What a person needs to do is crawl entirely into himself, like a turtle.
The way he usually was when he walked and talked with me was only half of him—a Demian playing a temporary role, adapting himself to others and going along with things for the sake of politeness.
The true Demian, though, looked like this: stony, ancient, like an animal, like marble, beautiful and cold, dead and secretly full of tremendous life.
I had never felt so abandoned. No part of him had stayed with me; he was unreachable; he was farther away than if he had been on the most remote island in the world.
Where was he, where? What was he thinking, what was he feeling? Was he in some kind of Heaven, or a Hell?
Demian had left on vacation. I was alone.
Now I had completely changed. I acted with total indifference toward the outside world and spent days at a time attending only to myself, listening to the dark, forbidden, underground currents rushing and roaring inside me.
I was well aware that it was impossible to love me as I was, and I did not love myself either.
It had thrown me out and now looked upon me with disgust! Everything I had so profoundly loved, everything back to the most distant, golden garden of childhood my parents had given me—every kiss from Mother, every Christmas, every bright, pious Sunday morning at home, every flower in the garden—it was all laid to waste, I had trampled it all under my feet!
Despite everything, it was almost pleasurable to suffer these torments. I had crept around blind and numb for so long, my heart cowering poor and miserable in the corner, that even this self-hatred, this horror, this whole horrible feeling in my soul was welcome. At least I felt something!
On the inside I kneeled in tears before my soul, before my past and my mother, before God.
I never felt truly one with my companions—I was still lonely when I was with them, and that was why I suffered so.
I was alone, and full of a burning longing for love—a hopeless longing even while I talked like a hardened libertine.
It looked more like a boy's face than a girl's; the hair was not light blond, like my pretty girl's, but reddish brown, and the chin was firm and strong, though the mouth glowed a vivid red; the whole face was somewhat stiff and mask- like, but impressive and full of inner life. As I sat before the finished picture, it made a strange impression on me. It struck me as a kind of idol or icon or sacred mask—half masculine, half feminine; ageless; strong-willed and dreamy at once; rigid and at the same time secretly vital and alive. This face had something to tell me—it belonged to me—it demanded something of me. And it bore a certain similarity to someone, though I didn't know who.
One morning when I woke up from one of these dreams, I suddenly recognized the face. It looked at me with such marvelous familiarity and intimacy, as though it were calling my name. It seemed to know me like a mother, seemed to have been turned toward my face since the dawn of time. I stared at the sheet with my heart pounding—at the thick brown hair, the half-feminine mouth, the strong and oddly bright brow (it had dried like that on its own)—and I felt recognition, rediscovery, and knowledge coming closer and closer to me. I leaped out of bed, stood before the face, and looked at it up close— stared right into the wide-open, greenish, fixed eyes, the right one slightly higher than the left. And suddenly that right eye twitched, lightly and delicately but clear as day, and with that flutter I recognized the image. . . . How could it have taken me so long! It was Demian's face.
The picture didn't look like me—and it wasn't supposed to, I felt—but it was my life, it was my soul, my destiny, my daemon. That was how my friend would look, if I ever found another friend; that was how my lover would look, if I ever found her. That was how my life would be, and my death—it was the sound and the rhythm of my destiny.
you are joined to me, but not you, only your image; you are a part of my destiny.
And anyway—neither of us really knows the real reason why you're drinking. Whatever it is inside you shaping your life knows already.
It's so good to know that there's something inside us, and that it knows everything, wants everything, and does everything better than we do!
It did not bring me any closer to them, or to anyone—it only made me lonelier.
There was no one I could say anything to about my hopes, my dreams, my inner transformation, even if I had wanted to. And how could I have wanted to?
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.
She no longer satisfied the longings in my soul.
A longing for life blossomed within me, or rather a longing for love.
Bliss mingled with horror—the embrace was in the service of god and also a terrible crime.
Her embrace violated every kind of reverence and was nonetheless blissful salvation.
Bliss and horror, man and woman blended together, the most sacred holiness intertwined with the most hideous abomination, deep guilt flashing through the loveliest innocence—such was the image I saw in my sex dream and so too was Abraxas.
Love was no longer either the dark, animalistic drive I had fearfully felt it to be at first, or the pious, spiritual worship I had offered up to the image of Beatrice. It was both—both and much more: angelic and Satanic, man and woman in one, human and animal, the highest good and the uttermost evil. To live this love seemed to be my destiny, to taste of it my fate. I longed for it and was terrified of it at the same time, but it was always there, always above 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?
Where was he? I didn't know. I knew only that he and I were linked. When would I see him again?
I lived with Demian, with the sparrow hawk, with the image of the tremendous dream-shape that was both my fate and my beloved.
I could see right through most of them whenever I wanted, and I sometimes startled and amazed them by doing so. But I rarely or never wanted to. I cared only about myself, always myself.
His face was just as I had expected: ugly and a little wild, searching and inflexible, stubborn and willful, but soft and childlike around the mouth. All the masculinity and strength of that face lay in the eyes and the brow; the lower half of the face was delicate and unfinished, lacking in self-control, almost effeminate, the chin indecisive and boyish as though in protest against the forehead and the gaze. I liked his dark brown eyes, full of ferocity and pride.
And just so you know, I am his gifted and promising son who unfortunately went off the rails, and to some extent mad.
All the gods and devils that ever existed, whether those of the Greeks or the Chinese, or the Zulu kaffirs, they are all inside us, all there as possibilities, as wishes, as outlets.
But really we are all made up of the substance of the whole world—every one of us.
But all of them, even the most ordinary, hit me in the same place with their soft, steady hammer blows; they all helped shape me, helped me shed my layers of skin, break the eggshell, and after every one I held my head up a little bit higher, with a little more freedom, until my yellow bird poked its gorgeous raptor's head out of the shattered shell of the world.
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.
You can't keep comparing yourself to other people—if nature has made you a bat, you can't decide you want to be an ostrich. You sometimes feel like you don't belong, you blame yourself for following a different path than most other people. You have to unlearn that. Stare into the fire, look at the clouds, and when ideas or intuitions come to you and the voices in your soul start to speak, trust them and don't worry about whether your teacher or your daddy or any other lord above likes what they have to say!
My dear Sinclair, our god is called Abraxas, and he is God and Satan both, he contains the world of light and the world of darkness. Abraxas does not reject a single one of your thoughts and dreams.
Ah, every religion is beautiful. Religion is soul, irrespective of whether you take Christian communion or make the pilgrimage to Mecca.
I know that you must be having dreams you don't tell me about. I don't want to know what they are. But I tell you: Live your dreams! Act them out, build altars to them! It is not ideal, but it is a path.
It is possible to treat your drives and so-called temptations with respect and love, even if you don't act on them. Then they show you what they mean—and they all do mean something.
When we hate someone, what we hate is something in him, or in our image of him, that is part of ourselves. Nothing that isn't in us ever bothers us.
The things we see are the same things that are in us. There is no reality other than what we have inside us. That is why most people live such unreal lives, because they see external images as reality and never give their own internal world a chance to express itself.
No one can help anyone else. No one helped me either. You have to just reflect on yourself and then do what truly comes from your nature. There's nothing else. If you can't find yourself, then you won't find any spirits either, it seems to me.
It was woman, man, girl—a young child, an animal, a blurry patch on the wall—and then big and clear again. Finally, obeying a powerful inner command, I closed my eyes and I saw the image within me, stronger and more powerful than ever. I wanted to kneel down before it, but it was so much a part of me that I could no longer distinguish it from myself. It was as though it had become entirely I.
And we aren't pigs, like you said. We are human beings. We make gods and then wrestle with them, and they bless us.
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.
That was when, for the first time, I felt the mark of Cain on my forehead.
It was impossible to choose, impermissible to want anything about it. You must want only yourself, your own fate.
And in my soul I saw the image of my guide, who looked like Demian and whose eyes held my fate.
I felt a stab of joyous shock with every word. I knew the person who was speaking—it was Demian.
I listened to their conversation and was happy to hear the sound of Demian's voice. It had the same old tone from before, the same beautiful confidence and serenity, the same power over me. Now everything was going to be all right. I had found him.
We used to call it the mark of Cain, if you recall. It is our special sign. You always had it—that's why I wanted to be your friend.
I wanted to write to you, so many times, but I couldn't. I've felt for a while that I'd find you soon. I waited for it every day.
He tucked his arm into mine and walked on with me, exuding a calm that entered me too. Soon we were chatting the same way we used to.
Fear always comes from a split in yourself. They are afraid because they have never gotten to know who they really are.
Let the students go on their drinking binges and scar one another's faces, let the rotten world await its own destruction—what did I care? The only thing I awaited was the encounter with my destiny in a new form, a new image.
Her gaze was fulfillment, her greeting meant I had come home.
No one can ever go home, but when friends' paths meet, the whole world can look like home for a time.
There's a boy there with the mark on his forehead, I have to make him my friend.
He is trying to flee back into a community, he's hanging around bars. But he won't be able to do it. His mark is obscured, but secretly it is burning him.
It is always hard to be born. You know it—the bird has to struggle to get out of the egg. Think back and ask yourself: Was the path really so hard? Was it only hard? Wasn't it lovely too? Do you wish you had had a prettier, easier way?
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.
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.
The wave that carries us, the star that guides us—we cannot choose it.
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. Love must have the strength to reach certainty from within. Then one's love is no longer attracted, it attracts.
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.
Gradually my sexual and asexual love, reality and symbol, began to merge.
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.
In a matter of seconds the wind had shaped a picture out of the yellow and the blue: a gigantic bird, tearing free from the chaos of blue and disappearing into the sky with great beats of its wings.
I dreamed I was climbing up a ladder that was leaning against a tree trunk or tower. When I got to the top I saw the whole countryside on fire—a vast plain with cities and villages. I can't tell you everything, it's not all clear in my mind yet.
The world wants to be reborn. The smell of death is in the air. Nothing new comes without death.
Occasionally I would be seized with mourning for this happiness, since I knew full well it could not last. I was unable to breathe in an atmosphere of comfort and fullness—I needed torment and frenzy.
I wanted to summon up all the powers in my soul so that she would feel my love and be drawn to me.
For several moments something contracted inside me, firm and tight, something bright and cool: I felt for a second that I carried a crystal in my heart, and I knew that it was my Self. The coldness reached my chest.
Yes, it was one of the ways I conformed. You know how I don't like to stand out; I always preferred to go too far in the other direction, to seem proper.
Tall and regal, full of mystery, she strode between the silent trees, and all the many stars shone tiny and delicate above her head.
I saw a sign—not ours, but a beautiful, dignified sign that meant love and death.
Primal emotions, even the most violent, were not intended for the enemy: their bloody work was merely an emanation from inside, a manifestation of the self-divided soul that wanted to rampage and kill, destroy and die, in order to be reborn. A giant bird was fighting its way out of the egg, and the egg was the world, and the world had to shatter to pieces
He kept looking into my eyes for an endless length of time. Then he slowly brought his face closer to me until we almost touched.
I have to go away. You may need me again someday, against Kromer or something else. The next time you call me, I won't come so obviously on horseback or by train. You will have to listen inside yourself, and then you'll realize I'm in you.
Eve said if you're ever in trouble, I should give you the kiss from her she sent with me. Close your eyes, Sinclair!
I obediently closed my eyes and felt a light kiss on my lips, where I still had a little blood that refused to ever go away.
But sometimes, when I find the key and climb fully down into myself, where the images of destiny slumber in their dark mirror, I need only bend down over the black mirror and I see my own image, which now looks exactly like Him, Him, my friend and my guide.