Smallhouse Log

Tuesday

So I said I wanted to write out my reflections on Demian. I was thinking, at the time, as an essay, but it doesn't look like that's going to happen. So. Demian is a book by Hermann Hesse, an author who was recently recommended to me. The first book I read, I didn't quite get: I felt like it wasn't written for me. I understood the plot and the themes and the philosophy, but not the message, the telos, the thing it was really saying, written between the lines in figures I couldn't read. It was very frustrating, I had to have someone explain it to me.

I did not have that same experience with Demian, though I struggle to explain it. Sinclair, the protagonist, is too cowardly, too impatient, too solitary for me to identify with strongly; yet his transformation, his philosophical journey, I feel as my own, as a familiar path, a smiling reminder of things I came to understand as slowly as Sinclair did. I feel a reassurance from this book. I feel like I, as Sinclair at first is, should perhaps be shocked by the assertions Demian (the character or the book, it doesn't matter) makes: that a well-reasoned heresy carries as much weight as a scripture, that advocates of the Devil do the work of God, that virtue can be the opponant of salvation, that there is often no difference between a blessing and a curse. But I am not shocked, not even surprised. I am reassured.

Demian is essentially a novel about ethics. I am perhaps not reknowned for my great love of ethicism (or even ethicality, sadly) but I assure all who have their doubts that it is a favorite subject of mine. The title character expounds a system of ethics, putting forward a few basic principles and then sewing them up together. These are not new ideas: some of the first principles he relates to Sinclair are, in their basic forms: think for yourself, might makes right, and -that favorite of ethicists- it is good to be ethical (that is, to follow this system) and bad to be unethical. It is pointless to describe Demian's views further here; the book is not a long one. Suffice it to say that I enjoyed it fully.

And now back to your regularly scheduled Internets.

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