![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
Demian
"But every man is more than just himself; he also represents the unique, the very special and always significant and remarkable point at which the world's phenomena intersect, only once in this way and never again."
As a non-religious person, I've always been fascinated by religion. Sometimes this fascination contains admiration, although frequently it's accompanied by incredulity. I just read Herman Hesse's Demian, though, which is concerned with a young man's formation of his own religious self, and despite this lack in my own life I found his search very interesting. First, I was intrigued by the cover, which in this garage-sale copy I picked up depicts several forms--boys, a woman, and a hawk--melded and melting into each other. Then I opened the cover, and on the inside was quoted:
"...it was not a boy's face but a man's; I also felt or saw that it was not entirely the face of a man either, but had something feminine about it, too. Yet the face struck me at that moments as neither masculine nor childlike, neither old nor young, but somehow a thousand years old, somehow timeless, bearing the scars of an entirely different history than we knew; animals could look like that, or trees, or planets..."
"Hot," I said.
So. I bought it. It took awhile to get around to reading it, because I have so many books around me all the time. But it's thin, and I finally picked it up last week. I'd read Siddhartha before, and liked it very much. This book is darker and more uncertain.
I like the conclusions reached about self-determination in one's spiritual journey, and the melding of different traditions to discover what is True, although the communal flavor of the last part of the book made me a little incredulous. I am wondering, however, about the way the "dark" side is portrayed in the novel. If we are to accept, by the end, that the god Abraxas, who combines the forces of light and dark, is worthy of veneration; if we are to accept Emil's fascination with this darker side which seems at the beginning to involve sin but later, at Demian's insistence, loses that sense of hedonism; how do we reconcile the "evil" we encounter at the beginning? This "evil" is clearly detrimental to Emil's well-being and his family, and does not seem to be the same thing he finds later with Demian and his mother. Is Hesse pointing out the necessity of disciplined religious study in order to join the forces of life and death and everything in between without falling into a self-destructive trap?
Could someone (hint hint) with a more theological (and Hessian) background help me out?
By the way, I loved this bit from the prologue:
"Yet, what a real living human being is made of seems to be less understood today than at any time before, and men--each one of whom represents a unique and valuable experiment on the part of nature--are therefore shot wholesale nowadays. If we were not something more than unique human beings, if each one of us could really be done away with once and for all by a single bullet, storytelling would lose all purpose. But every man is more than just himself; he also represents the unique, the very special and always significant and remarkable point at which the world's phenomena intersect, only once in this way and never again. That is why every man's story is important, eternal, sacred; that is why every man, as long as he lives and fulfills the will of nature, is wondrous, and worthy of every consideration. In each individual the spirit has become flesh, in each man the creation suffers, within each one a redeemer is nailed to the cross."
That's a religious sentiment I can embrace.
As a non-religious person, I've always been fascinated by religion. Sometimes this fascination contains admiration, although frequently it's accompanied by incredulity. I just read Herman Hesse's Demian, though, which is concerned with a young man's formation of his own religious self, and despite this lack in my own life I found his search very interesting. First, I was intrigued by the cover, which in this garage-sale copy I picked up depicts several forms--boys, a woman, and a hawk--melded and melting into each other. Then I opened the cover, and on the inside was quoted:
"...it was not a boy's face but a man's; I also felt or saw that it was not entirely the face of a man either, but had something feminine about it, too. Yet the face struck me at that moments as neither masculine nor childlike, neither old nor young, but somehow a thousand years old, somehow timeless, bearing the scars of an entirely different history than we knew; animals could look like that, or trees, or planets..."
"Hot," I said.
So. I bought it. It took awhile to get around to reading it, because I have so many books around me all the time. But it's thin, and I finally picked it up last week. I'd read Siddhartha before, and liked it very much. This book is darker and more uncertain.
I like the conclusions reached about self-determination in one's spiritual journey, and the melding of different traditions to discover what is True, although the communal flavor of the last part of the book made me a little incredulous. I am wondering, however, about the way the "dark" side is portrayed in the novel. If we are to accept, by the end, that the god Abraxas, who combines the forces of light and dark, is worthy of veneration; if we are to accept Emil's fascination with this darker side which seems at the beginning to involve sin but later, at Demian's insistence, loses that sense of hedonism; how do we reconcile the "evil" we encounter at the beginning? This "evil" is clearly detrimental to Emil's well-being and his family, and does not seem to be the same thing he finds later with Demian and his mother. Is Hesse pointing out the necessity of disciplined religious study in order to join the forces of life and death and everything in between without falling into a self-destructive trap?
Could someone (hint hint) with a more theological (and Hessian) background help me out?
By the way, I loved this bit from the prologue:
"Yet, what a real living human being is made of seems to be less understood today than at any time before, and men--each one of whom represents a unique and valuable experiment on the part of nature--are therefore shot wholesale nowadays. If we were not something more than unique human beings, if each one of us could really be done away with once and for all by a single bullet, storytelling would lose all purpose. But every man is more than just himself; he also represents the unique, the very special and always significant and remarkable point at which the world's phenomena intersect, only once in this way and never again. That is why every man's story is important, eternal, sacred; that is why every man, as long as he lives and fulfills the will of nature, is wondrous, and worthy of every consideration. In each individual the spirit has become flesh, in each man the creation suffers, within each one a redeemer is nailed to the cross."
That's a religious sentiment I can embrace.
Someone?
(Anonymous) 2005-12-11 12:34 am (UTC)(link)In those two, at least, Hesse seemed to imply that enlightenment was partly reached through a great deal of experience -- through going through hell and emerging purged...
I'm off school on the 15th; I think I'll make a point of digging out this book and coming back with a more reasoned look into it.
Re: Someone?
I'd like that...