Mar 25, 2012 02:02 AM
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This was the first Herman Hesse novel I ever read. I am ashamed to confess that I hadn't even heard of this nobel prize winning author till I chanced across Demian one day at a sale.
I just happened to pick it up because I thought the title sounded dark and mysterious. And as soon as I read the first sentence I was hooked.
"All I really wanted was to try and live the life that was spontaneously welling up within me. Why was that so very difficult?"
At that instant, the thought that flashed through my mind was "someone has captured the essence of my thought and printed it here" let's see if he will live up to the expectation. And I wasn't really disappointed.
The book pretty much sums up the phases we go through in our life through the world of Sinclair, the narrator cum protagonist of this book.
Sinclair and his relationship with his family basically reminds of my own childhood where family stands for safety and purity. Anything that can hurt them or the values they teach us tends to send us further down the abyss. I think it is at this stage where we start drifting in our own lives. The little white lies and other small sins that are seem so big at that point which when we try to hide hardens into calluses.
The Sinclair and kromer relationship projects just that. A stupid white lie to impress backfires and slowly becomes a tightening noose. In hindsight it would have been so easy to confess and extricate oneself from it. But the imagined stigma is hard to bear even at that tender age. in Sinclair's life a Demian enters to save him.
In most of our lives there are no Demians. We either pull ourselves out or we sink completely or we pray for a miracle. Pulling ourselves out is better cos it makes us stronger. But very few of us have that opportunity.
The Sinclair and Damien story is much like the person who exerts strong influence on our lives, there is a positivity that it imparts and becomes part of our DNA but there is also the negative which doesnt allow us to completely give in. There would be those who do give in but then it's never going to help us find ourselves, and Demian is all about Sinclair journey to self realization.
Sinclair the rebel forms the next part of the story. We all might have gone through this phase either in school or college. And somehow we are not able to help the fact that whatever we do only seems to send is spiraling further down the abyss. Beatrice proves his salvation though he never really meets her.
From there the book seems to move into the world of magic realism. The conjuring up of Demians mother, a woman he has never met, in his dreams; running into Demian; meeting his mother whom he had actually painted years back though he had never met her; the references to there being a people bearing the mark and he being one, etc.
Pistorius is another character who helped me realize the truth about some people in my own life. There have been people from whom I learned a lot. In fact even now I keep meeting such people. But somewhere down the line you start wondering what is it that kept you with that person. They don't live up to expectation. And there is a falling out. Something similar happens with Pistorius. He teaches Sinclair a lot but then he reaches a ceiling beyond which he wont move. I realized the people I wanted to leave behind had actually taught me all that they knew and they were happy where they were. I was the one who was still on a quest to learn more and move on. Sinclair does just that.
And then he meets Demian's mother. The ideal women, the women who promises love but whom he never gets. I guess we all have such women in our heads or probably have already met her. I also think not being able to get that woman is in a way good cos the goddess image is maintained, and it helps us dream on. reality would have probably been a disaster.
