Demian
This is a book I wish I had read in my perplexed years of bashful adolescence. Originally published just after the First World War, through the story of a mysterious and miserable Sinclair, it imparts enlightening wisdom of soul searching. Not that it necessarily answers to the misgivings of every lost soul, but anyone who has been through the painstaking process of finding one own self should find some resonance in the sense of inner struggle and loneliness so featured in the story.
But no matter how grown up one now is and whatever occupation one is engaged in, one should still feel for the sensation aroused, as in striking the right chord in music (or for the golfers, hitting the sweet spot): an enlightened man has but one duty - to seek the way to himself, to reach inner certainty, to grope his way forward, no matter where it leads. So each man has only one genuine vocation no matter what his job is - to find the way to himself. Everything else is "incidental".
"His task is to discover his own destiny - not an arbitrary one - and live it out wholly and resolutely within himself. Everything else is only a would-be existence, an attempt at evasion, a flight back to the ideals of the masses, conformity and fear of one's own inwardness."
I can really feel for it, I think. But it is indeed too difficult, for my general ignorance and weakness as an individual, let alone all confusion during the baffled adolescent years. Even for someone with high wits and a strong will - not me - his own form of living has to be inevitably shaped by the expectations of others surrounding, by the norms of the masses, by the culture of the society.
"I wanted only to try to live in accord with the promptings which came from my true self. Why was that so very difficult?"
But along the excruciating journey for finding ones own destiny in the story of Sinclair, I cannot help but feel Ayn Rand calling: "Someone who seeks nothing but his own fate no longer has any companions, he stands quite alone and has only cold universal space around him...the man who only seeks his destiny has neither models nor ideals, has nothing dear and consoling!"
Hermann Hesse's "Demian", however, is not only about soul searching per se, but one in the context of history and transformation - from the old world to the new one as set on by war. It is also about the writer's provocative views of religions, I think, where individual creativity may come into sharp conflict with conventional doctrines.
It is always refreshing and fulfilling to come across or even re-read and again thought-provoking and, at the same time, sensational stories - better yet, legendary ones. But whatever the source is, to me, the awakening process in reading is already a destiny in itself and, increasingly, so is writing.
But no matter how grown up one now is and whatever occupation one is engaged in, one should still feel for the sensation aroused, as in striking the right chord in music (or for the golfers, hitting the sweet spot): an enlightened man has but one duty - to seek the way to himself, to reach inner certainty, to grope his way forward, no matter where it leads. So each man has only one genuine vocation no matter what his job is - to find the way to himself. Everything else is "incidental".
"His task is to discover his own destiny - not an arbitrary one - and live it out wholly and resolutely within himself. Everything else is only a would-be existence, an attempt at evasion, a flight back to the ideals of the masses, conformity and fear of one's own inwardness."
I can really feel for it, I think. But it is indeed too difficult, for my general ignorance and weakness as an individual, let alone all confusion during the baffled adolescent years. Even for someone with high wits and a strong will - not me - his own form of living has to be inevitably shaped by the expectations of others surrounding, by the norms of the masses, by the culture of the society.
"I wanted only to try to live in accord with the promptings which came from my true self. Why was that so very difficult?"
But along the excruciating journey for finding ones own destiny in the story of Sinclair, I cannot help but feel Ayn Rand calling: "Someone who seeks nothing but his own fate no longer has any companions, he stands quite alone and has only cold universal space around him...the man who only seeks his destiny has neither models nor ideals, has nothing dear and consoling!"
Hermann Hesse's "Demian", however, is not only about soul searching per se, but one in the context of history and transformation - from the old world to the new one as set on by war. It is also about the writer's provocative views of religions, I think, where individual creativity may come into sharp conflict with conventional doctrines.
It is always refreshing and fulfilling to come across or even re-read and again thought-provoking and, at the same time, sensational stories - better yet, legendary ones. But whatever the source is, to me, the awakening process in reading is already a destiny in itself and, increasingly, so is writing.
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