Demian
And yet it was not at all as it should have been. And this is the point
which alone can truly explain my forgetfulness of Demian. I ought to
have made a confession _to him_! The confession would have been
less touching and less specious, but for me it would have borne more
fruit. I was now clinging fast to my former paradisaical world, I had
returned home and had been received in grace. But Demian belonged in no
wise to this world, he did not fit into it. He also--in a different way
from Kromer--but nevertheless he also was a seducer, he too bound me to
the second, evil, bad world, and of this world I never wanted to hear
anything more. I could not now, and I did not wish to give up Abel and
help to glorify Cain, now when I myself had again become an Abel.
So much for the outward correlation of events. But inwardly it was like
this: I had been freed from the hands of Kromer and the devil, but not
through my own strength and effort. I had ventured a footing on the
paths of the world, and they had been too slippery for me. Now that
the grasp of a friendly hand had saved me, I ran back, without another
glance round, to mother’s lap, to the protecting, godly and tender
security of childhood. I made myself younger, more dependent on others,
more childlike than I really was. I had to replace my dependence on
Kromer by a new one, since I was powerless to strike out for myself.
So I chose, in the blindness of my heart, the dependence on father
and mother, on the old, beloved, “bright world,” on this world which
I knew already was not the sole one. Had I not done this, I should
have had to hold to Demian, to entrust myself to him. The fact that I
did not, appeared to me then to be due to justifiable distrust of his
strange ideas; in reality it was due to nothing else than fear. For
Demian would have required more of me than did my parents, much more.
By stimulation and exhortation, by scorn and irony he would have tried
to make me more independent. Alas, I know that to-day: nothing in the
world is so distasteful to man as to go the way which leads him to
himself!
And yet, about half a year later, I could not resist the temptation to
ask my father while we were out for a walk, what was to be made of the
fact that many people declared Cain to be better than Abel.
He was much surprised, and explained to me that this was a conception
by no means novel. It had even emerged in the early Christian era, and
had been professed by sects, one of which was called the “Cainites.”
But naturally this foolish doctrine was nothing else than an attempt of
the devil to undermine our belief. For, if one believes that Cain was
right and Abel was wrong, then it follows that God has erred, and that
the God of the Bible is not the true and only God, but a false one. The
Cainites really used to profess and preach something approximating this
doctrine; but this heresy vanished from among mankind a long time ago
and he wondered the more that a school friend had been able to learn
something on the subject. Nevertheless, he earnestly exhorted me not to
let these ideas occupy my attention.
CHAPTER THREE
THE THIEF ON THE CROSS
I could describe scenes of my childhood, spent in peaceful security at
the side of father and mother, relate how I passed this period of my
life, playing contentedly in the midst of surroundings brightened by
love and tenderness. But others have done that. I am only interested
in the steps I took in life, in order to attain self-realization. All
the pretty resting-places, happy isles and children’s paradises, whose
charm is not unknown to me, I leave lying behind me in the shimmer of a
distant horizon, and I have no desire to set foot there again.
For that reason I will speak, so far as I intend to dwell on the period
of my childhood, only of new events which overtook me, of what impelled
me forward enabling me to throw off my shackles.
These impulses always came from the “other” world, they always brought
fear, coercion and a bad conscience in their train, they were always
of a revolutionary tendency and a danger to the peace in which I would
willingly have been allowed to remain.
There came the years in which I had to discover anew that there was
within me an instinct which had to lie close and concealed in the
bright world of moral sanction. As to every man, the slowly awakening
sense of sex came to me as an enemy and a destroyer, as something
forbidden, as seduction and sin. What my curiosity sought to know, what
caused me dreams, desire and fear, the great secret of puberty, that
was not at all in keeping with the guarded happiness of my peaceful
childhood. I did as everyone else. I led the double life of a child,
who is yet a child no longer. My conscious self lived under the
conditions sanctioned at home; it denied the existence of the new world
whose dawn glimmered before me. But I lived as well in dreams, impelled
by desires of a secret nature, upon which my conscious self anxiously
attempted to build a new fabric, as the world of my childhood fell in
ruins about me. Like almost all parents, my own did nothing to help
the awakening life-instincts, about which not a syllable was uttered.
They only aided, with untiring care, my hopeless attempts to deny the
reality, and to continue my existence in a child-like world which was
ever becoming more unreal and more mendacious. I do not know whether
parents can do much in such a case, and I make mine no reproach. It
was my own affair, to settle my difficulties and to find my way, and
I carried through the business badly, like most of those who are well
brought up.
Every man passes through this difficulty. For the average person, this
is the point in his life where the demands of his own life come most
in conflict with his surroundings, where the road forward has to be
attained through the bitterest fighting. For many people this is the
only time in their lives that they experience the sequence of death
and rebirth that is our fate, when they become conscious of the slow
process of the decay and breaking up of the world of their childhood,
when everything beloved of us leaves us, and we suddenly feel the
loneliness and deathly cold of the universe around us. And for very
many this pitfall is fatal. They cling their whole life long painfully
to the irrevocable past, to the dream of a lost paradise, the worst and
most deadly of all dreams.
But to return to the story. The sensation and dream pictures in which
the close of childhood presented itself to me are not important
enough to be described. The important point was that I was once again
conscious of the existence of the “dark” world, the “other” world. What
Frank Kromer had once been to me, was now present within myself. And
so, from the outside as well, the other world once more gained power
over me.
Several years had passed since my affair with Kromer. That dramatic
and guilty time of my life lay far behind me at that time and seemed
to have passed like a quick nightmare into nothingness. Frank Kromer
had long since disappeared from my life; I scarcely gave it a moment’s
thought if I chanced to meet him. But the other important figure in my
tragedy, Max Demian, never entirely disappeared from my life. However,
for a long time he stood on the far horizon, visible, but not affecting
me. Only by degrees he approached me again, and I came once more under
the ray of his power and influence.
I will try to recollect what I know of Demian in that period. Perhaps
for a year, or longer, I did not have a single conversation with him.
I avoided him, and he in no wise forced himself on me. Once or twice,
when we met, he nodded to me in friendly greeting. Then it seemed to
me at times that there was a note of scorn or ironical reproach in his
friendliness, but that might only have been imagination on my part. My
relation with him, and the strange influence he had exercised over me,
were as if forgotten, by him as well as by me.
I try to recall his face--as I recollect him, I see that I was
conscious of his existence after all, and took notice of him. I can
see him going to school, alone or with some of the other big boys. I
see him walking among them like a stranger, lonely and still like a
celestial body, enveloped in a different atmosphere and subject to
his own laws. No one liked him, he was intimate with no one, except
his mother, and his relations with her did not seem like those of a
child, but those of a grown-up person. The masters left him as much as
possible in peace. He was a good pupil, but he did not go out of his
way to please them. From time to time we heard, in gossip, of a word, a
comment or a retort he had made to a master, and which left nothing to
be desired in the way of blunt challenge or irony.
I call him to mind, as I close my eyes, and I see his picture emerge.
Where was it? Ah, now I have it again. It was in the street, in front
of our house. There one day I saw him standing, a note book in his
hand. I saw that he was drawing. He was drawing the old crest with the
bird over the door of our house. And I stood at a window, concealed
behind a curtain, and gazed at him. I saw with astonishment his
attentive, cool, bright features turned to the crest, the features
of a man, of a research worker, or an artist, superior and full of
will-power, oddly bright and cool, with knowing eyes.
And again I can see him. It was a little later, in the street; we had
come out of school and were all standing round a horse that had fallen
down. It lay, still harnessed to the shaft, in front of a peasant’s
cart, and sniffed the air pitifully with open nostrils, while blood
flowed from an invisible wound, so that the white dust in the street
darkened as it became slowly saturated. As I, with a feeling of nausea,
turned my gaze away, I saw Demian’s face. He had not pressed forward,
he stood furthest back of all, rather elegant, quite at his ease, as
was proper to him. His gaze seemed to be directed at the horse’s
head, and expressed again that deep, quiet, almost fanatical and yet
calm attentiveness. I could not resist watching him some considerable
time, and I remember feeling, though quite unconsciously, that there
was something very peculiar about him. I saw Demian’s face, I saw not
only that he had not the face of a boy, but that of a man; I saw still
more, I thought I saw, or felt, that it was not the face of a man
either but something else besides. There seemed to be also something
of the woman in his features, and particularly it seemed to me for a
moment, not manly or boyish, nor old or young, but somehow or other a
thousand years old, not to be measured by time, bearing the stamp of
other epochs. Animals could look like that, or trees, or stones--I did
not realize that precisely, I did not experience the exact sensation
which I, a grown-up person, am now describing, but what I felt then
approximated in some way to what I have just related. Perhaps he was
beautiful, perhaps he pleased me, perhaps even he was repugnant--I
could not then determine. I saw only that he was different from us, he
was like an animal, or a spirit, or a picture, I know not what he was
like, but he was different, inconceivably different from us all.
My reminiscence tells me nothing more, and perhaps even what has been
described has arisen, in part, from later impressions.
Until I was several years older, I did not come into close contact
with him again. Contrary to custom, Demian had not been confirmed with
the boys of his year, and in consequence fresh rumors concerning him
were set afloat. In school they were again saying that he was really
a Jew, or no, a heathen, and others pretended to know that he and his
mother professed no religion, or that they belonged to a bad sect in