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Emil Sinclair is a young boy raised in a bourgeois home, amidst what is described as a Scheinwelt, a play on words that means "world of light" as well as "world of illusion". Emil's entire existence can be summarized as a struggle between two worlds: the show world of illusion (related to the Hindu concept of maya) and the real world, the world of spiritual truth. In the course of the novel, accompanied and prompted by his mysterious classmate 'Max Demian', he detaches from and revolts against the superficial ideals of the world of appearances and eventually awakens into a realization of self.
192 pages
First published January 1, 1919
About the author
Hermann Hesse
1,854 books20.7k followersMany works, including
Siddhartha
(1922) and
Steppenwolf
(1927), of German-born Swiss writer Hermann Hesse concern the struggle of the individual to find wholeness and meaning in life; he won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1946.
Other best-known works of this poet, novelist, and painter include The Glass Bead Game , which, also known as Magister Ludi, explore a search of an individual for spirituality outside society.
In his time, Hesse was a popular and influential author in the German-speaking world; worldwide fame only came later. Young Germans desiring a different and more "natural" way of life at the time of great economic and technological progress in the country, received enthusiastically Peter Camenzind , first great novel of Hesse.
Throughout Germany, people named many schools. In 1964, people founded the Calwer Hermann-Hesse-Preis, awarded biennially, alternately to a German-language literary journal or to the translator of work of Hesse to a foreign language. The city of Karlsruhe, Germany, also associates a Hermann Hesse prize.
Other best-known works of this poet, novelist, and painter include The Glass Bead Game , which, also known as Magister Ludi, explore a search of an individual for spirituality outside society.
In his time, Hesse was a popular and influential author in the German-speaking world; worldwide fame only came later. Young Germans desiring a different and more "natural" way of life at the time of great economic and technological progress in the country, received enthusiastically Peter Camenzind , first great novel of Hesse.
Throughout Germany, people named many schools. In 1964, people founded the Calwer Hermann-Hesse-Preis, awarded biennially, alternately to a German-language literary journal or to the translator of work of Hesse to a foreign language. The city of Karlsruhe, Germany, also associates a Hermann Hesse prize.
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April 11, 2011
Hermann Hesse's Demian influenced me more than just about any book although I haven't read the novel in twenty years. Through my late teens and early twenties I searched out every Hesse book I could find, including the rarities, journals, letters, etc., going as far as to ferret out European editions in a Berlin bookstore on a solo trip as much influenced by Hesse as cheap airfare. My initial college experiences (three institutions in six semesters) ended badly. I became depressed and, although I had friends, spent much of my time isolated with books. My hostile, unsupportive parents created a tense, unsafe environment. The future looked bleak. I was terrified.
But I had Hesse. And many of the Hesse protagonists reminded my sad, desperate ass of myself. I eventually finished college, scraped out an existence, and learned to survive. Later a woman graciously and sympathetically agreed to marry me. We moved to Wisconsin. When packing up the apartment for the trek north I crated the Hesse books and didn't return to the author for twenty years.
A few weeks back I spotted a decent Demian edition, with the Thomas Mann introduction, for a couple bucks at a Borders closing sale. I read the book over seven illness-ridden gray spring days. And while my perceptions of the novel changed, of course, with the passing decades, Hesse's vision once again earned my appreciation.
Sinclair, the novel's narrator, is a German teenager transitioning from the warm, safe glow of his childhood world into a much scarier adulthood. He tries to follow the rules but feels himself called to something other than the town status quo. In school he meets a new student, the mysterious, adult and somewhat feminine Demian. Sinclair, through Demian, learns of the individuals with the “Mark of Cain.” These people are special; they can't feel fulfilled within the normal societal context and must look elsewhere for meaning. Sinclair spends much of his time alone, feels loss and terror, and almost fails out of boarding school. Do you see why this setup was attractive to a teenager who felt like he couldn't stand ten minutes in a room with his parents and couldn't pass his first university courses? I wanted to feel as if my isolation and third-rate social skills had meaning and set me apart with a purpose I couldn't comprehend. Demian and Sinclair separate after graduation and the latter experiments with alcoholic hazes before falling under the influence of a new mentor, the benevolent but drunken and limited church organist Pistorus. Sinclair paints and creates a vision of a bird breaking out of the egg as metaphor for his own process. I wanted so badly to embody that bird, to prove my failures as something deeper than incompetence. Sinclair catches up with Demian near the start of what seems to be the second world war, and when they next part they declare themselves part of a new vanguard who will help reshape the world after the military convulsions.
Demian is flawed. Some passages rely on vague, mythic language that mires in mystical and somewhat frustrating possibilities; in other words, one could accuse Hesse of taking the easy way out by framing Demian's insight as near indescribable. And when Sinclair and Hesse “call” each other the pair somehow telepathically sense the need to meet. This magic, romantic power is easier to describe than anything tangible and even as a teenager I knew this type of interaction was beyond my capabilities and probably bullshit. And when Demian says things like “The new world has begun and the new world will be terrible for those clinging to the old. What will you do?” he benefits from the lack of detail. But none of that mattered to me twenty, twenty-five years back. Hesse portrayed identity-challenged young men who struggled on the edge of mainstream daily existence and hoped for something more. And while I can see the inherent romanticism and frustrating pseudo-spiritualism with older, calmer eyes, I still feel the pull of Hesse's work. Without Demian and similar books I would have lacked a voice for emotions I couldn't articulate on my own; Hesse's work became a framework around which I could see potential self-value at a time in my life when I was precariously close to a feeling worthless. And while I can position Demian as a novel that resonates differently with me at forty-one than at nineteen, I recognize the camaraderie inherent in this book with a part of me that will never completely disappear. Demian is intrinsic to my narrative vocabulary and always will be. The vestiges of Hesse's influences are subtle but still present; while I like to think I would search for meaning in what I do, beyond convention, without ever reading Hesse, his work provided form and foundation, however mystical, on which I could build as I grew older and (hopefully) more capable. Thank you, Mr. Hesse, for being there when I needed you most.
But I had Hesse. And many of the Hesse protagonists reminded my sad, desperate ass of myself. I eventually finished college, scraped out an existence, and learned to survive. Later a woman graciously and sympathetically agreed to marry me. We moved to Wisconsin. When packing up the apartment for the trek north I crated the Hesse books and didn't return to the author for twenty years.
A few weeks back I spotted a decent Demian edition, with the Thomas Mann introduction, for a couple bucks at a Borders closing sale. I read the book over seven illness-ridden gray spring days. And while my perceptions of the novel changed, of course, with the passing decades, Hesse's vision once again earned my appreciation.
Sinclair, the novel's narrator, is a German teenager transitioning from the warm, safe glow of his childhood world into a much scarier adulthood. He tries to follow the rules but feels himself called to something other than the town status quo. In school he meets a new student, the mysterious, adult and somewhat feminine Demian. Sinclair, through Demian, learns of the individuals with the “Mark of Cain.” These people are special; they can't feel fulfilled within the normal societal context and must look elsewhere for meaning. Sinclair spends much of his time alone, feels loss and terror, and almost fails out of boarding school. Do you see why this setup was attractive to a teenager who felt like he couldn't stand ten minutes in a room with his parents and couldn't pass his first university courses? I wanted to feel as if my isolation and third-rate social skills had meaning and set me apart with a purpose I couldn't comprehend. Demian and Sinclair separate after graduation and the latter experiments with alcoholic hazes before falling under the influence of a new mentor, the benevolent but drunken and limited church organist Pistorus. Sinclair paints and creates a vision of a bird breaking out of the egg as metaphor for his own process. I wanted so badly to embody that bird, to prove my failures as something deeper than incompetence. Sinclair catches up with Demian near the start of what seems to be the second world war, and when they next part they declare themselves part of a new vanguard who will help reshape the world after the military convulsions.
Demian is flawed. Some passages rely on vague, mythic language that mires in mystical and somewhat frustrating possibilities; in other words, one could accuse Hesse of taking the easy way out by framing Demian's insight as near indescribable. And when Sinclair and Hesse “call” each other the pair somehow telepathically sense the need to meet. This magic, romantic power is easier to describe than anything tangible and even as a teenager I knew this type of interaction was beyond my capabilities and probably bullshit. And when Demian says things like “The new world has begun and the new world will be terrible for those clinging to the old. What will you do?” he benefits from the lack of detail. But none of that mattered to me twenty, twenty-five years back. Hesse portrayed identity-challenged young men who struggled on the edge of mainstream daily existence and hoped for something more. And while I can see the inherent romanticism and frustrating pseudo-spiritualism with older, calmer eyes, I still feel the pull of Hesse's work. Without Demian and similar books I would have lacked a voice for emotions I couldn't articulate on my own; Hesse's work became a framework around which I could see potential self-value at a time in my life when I was precariously close to a feeling worthless. And while I can position Demian as a novel that resonates differently with me at forty-one than at nineteen, I recognize the camaraderie inherent in this book with a part of me that will never completely disappear. Demian is intrinsic to my narrative vocabulary and always will be. The vestiges of Hesse's influences are subtle but still present; while I like to think I would search for meaning in what I do, beyond convention, without ever reading Hesse, his work provided form and foundation, however mystical, on which I could build as I grew older and (hopefully) more capable. Thank you, Mr. Hesse, for being there when I needed you most.
December 29, 2022
Nobody told me this would be kinda gay?
January 16, 2018
The Lasting Effects of Young Reading: A Short Memoir
I first read The Glass Bead Game almost 60 years ago. It changed my life. With just the right cues of romance, high-tech adventure, philosophical mystery, and heroism, the book invaded my adolescent mind, laid down roots and suggested a long term plan: I would one day be able to play the Game. And I succeeded, at least during a goodly portion of my adult life, when I wasn’t distracted by the trivialities of wealth, status, and religion. So I realised it was about time for me to revisit the ur-inspiration. A dangerous undertaking, I know, but perhaps the book could provide a sort of retrospective structure that I couldn’t consciously recall. Worth the risk then.
The epigraph alone rekindles the fire that smoulders still in my unconscious:
I viewed the “Order” and the fellowship of the game seriously and admired “... the maximum integration of the individual into the hierarchy of the educators and scholars... “ My first attempt involved a Carmelite monastery. The next a military career. Followed by a time in professional academia and subsequently an international consulting firm which is best described as a professional Protestant monastery.
All these, and most choices that followed, had the intention of assimilation into one form or another of an organisation of united and mutually supportive minds. The professional context didn’t really matter. I had, it appears, a calling not dissimilar to that of the young Joseph Knecht, eventually the Magister Ludi, who had “the capacity for enthusiasm, subordination, reverence, worshipful service” necessary to persist in The Game. Even today I find myself a member of a Dominican academic community which is the same size and similar in atmosphere to that of Knecht’s school at Waldzell. Somewhat remarkably, I suppose, I have never been a joiner of clubs, or groups, or congregations, only those with some sort of monastic potential.
Even the international firm to which I belonged, commercial as is was, had an ethos which could have been taken straight from The Game. It’s senior partners were among the most powerful and influential business leaders in the country. Yet the head of the firm said to me proudly one day at lunch “Nobody knows my name.” When he said this I immediately recalled Hesse’s lines: “The hierarchic organization cherishes the ideal of anonymity, and comes very close to the realization of that ideal.”
Rarely did this assimilation ever feel oppressive or threatening to my individuality. As with The Game: “For us, a man is a hero and deserves special interest only if his nature and his education have rendered him able to let his individuality be almost perfectly absorbed in its hierarchic function without at the same time forfeiting the vigorous, fresh, admirable impetus which makes for the savor and worth of the individual.” In order to make the point, I had the habit of submitting an undated resignation on the day I started any job. Even that felt like a ritual of integration. I exercised it myself by “leaping,” to use Joseph Knecht’s term, whenever I felt The Game was being threatened.
The idea of the rules of The Game, its language, and symbology undoubtedly provoked some sort of teen-age mysticism. But what most attracted me and still does is that The Game is “... a mode of playing with the total contents and values of our culture...” years later I would discover Wittgenstein and know that this is precisely what he must have meant in his term ‘language games.’
The downside from a career perspective, of course, is that narrow disciplinary constrains and professional mores became increasingly problematic. The world at large expects increasing specialisation with age. But for me intellectual maturity has always been a matter of expansion rather than refinement. This has made me less well-off than I might have been. But I am more than content. I also find that I retain some tendencies toward teen-age mysticism. Perhaps this is an accomplishment.
It has been said that one is born either an Aristotelian or a Platonist. Empirically, it seems to me, there is some strength in this assertion. I am certainly in the camp of the latter and therefore fit right in to the Platonic bias of The Game, which Aristotelians would merely find just silly. It was Hesse who piqued my interest in philosophers like Nicholas of Cusa and Gottfried Leibniz. And through them into the idea of the ideal as a symbol of both purpose and the aesthetical.
Unconsciously I suppose, I found myself associating with other Platonists and quasi-Platonists - West Churchman at Berkeley, Russell Ackoff and Tom Cowan at Penn, Oliver O’Donovan at Oxford. Around each of these was a sort of invisible college, the members of which unknowingly participated in many rounds of The Game. That many of them are dead or no longer in my daily life is neither regrettable nor sad since the Order continues to unite us.
Hesse’s idea of the Age of the Feuilleton as a motivating social force for the development of The Game resonated in my young life with what I perceived as the random character of what people worried about - nuclear war, mortal sin, cures for acne - and what might actually matter. For Hesse, the daily newspaper was more about gossip than the factual information necessary for life. Hesse’s narrator has only disdain for this age of wasted freedom:
Years later, I encountered William Gaddis’s Recognitions and had a spark of remembrance about Hesse’s witty critiques of celebrity and “intellectual privateers”, particularly among self-proclaimed artists, and most specifically writers. And many years still later, I am overwhelmed by Hesse’s prescience in anticipating the evil of unintelligent internet social media. Perhaps they will be exactly the catalyst necessary for the real creation of The Game!
Mathematics and Music are the core disciplines of The Game. I can blame Hesse for implanting this as a seed in my psyche. It legitimised for me my interest in numbers (but certainly not the techniques of calculation insisted upon by my teachers) and classical music (of which none of my contemporaries had the slightest interest). Once again, it is unclear whether The Game provoked or merely articulated these interests.
Ultimately it doesn’t matter because The Game is my personal symbol for both. Recently while reading Edward Rothstein’s Emblems of Mind (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...), a book which critiques music in terms of mathematical aesthetics and vice versa, I had very clear flashbacks of my pleasant surprise at being able to adopt Hesse’s discovery as my own. I have occasionally abandoned either mathematics or music as one might lose one’s childhood religion. But they have always returned as the matrix of my own version of The Game.
I could go on ad nauseam recounting the many other specific influences that The Glass Bead Game has had on my life. But this short reflection is enough to show me the profound depths to which we can be influenced by what we consume as literature in early life. I don’t know what lessons this might entail.
Perhaps the reflection is only productive as a sort of therapy that makes conscious what has been hidden for decades from will and choice. Hesse suggests this might be his intent in the text where he describes The Game evolving as “a form of concentrated self-awareness for intellectuals.“ Having said that, there is nothing I would change about allowing The Game into my life.
I first read The Glass Bead Game almost 60 years ago. It changed my life. With just the right cues of romance, high-tech adventure, philosophical mystery, and heroism, the book invaded my adolescent mind, laid down roots and suggested a long term plan: I would one day be able to play the Game. And I succeeded, at least during a goodly portion of my adult life, when I wasn’t distracted by the trivialities of wealth, status, and religion. So I realised it was about time for me to revisit the ur-inspiration. A dangerous undertaking, I know, but perhaps the book could provide a sort of retrospective structure that I couldn’t consciously recall. Worth the risk then.
The epigraph alone rekindles the fire that smoulders still in my unconscious:
Nothing is harder, yet nothing is more necessary, than to speak of certain things whose existence is neither demonstrable nor probable. The very fact that serious and conscientious men treat them as existing things brings them a step closer to existence and to the possibility of being born.I have experienced just this motivation with the force of compulsion. The task is both poetic and practical: to help people, particularly myself, to see what is hidden by what they already see, the things within and beyond what is apparently there. For a child of 13 or so, to have one’s inarticulate intuition confirmed - that there is more to life than its surface - is profoundly important.
I viewed the “Order” and the fellowship of the game seriously and admired “... the maximum integration of the individual into the hierarchy of the educators and scholars... “ My first attempt involved a Carmelite monastery. The next a military career. Followed by a time in professional academia and subsequently an international consulting firm which is best described as a professional Protestant monastery.
All these, and most choices that followed, had the intention of assimilation into one form or another of an organisation of united and mutually supportive minds. The professional context didn’t really matter. I had, it appears, a calling not dissimilar to that of the young Joseph Knecht, eventually the Magister Ludi, who had “the capacity for enthusiasm, subordination, reverence, worshipful service” necessary to persist in The Game. Even today I find myself a member of a Dominican academic community which is the same size and similar in atmosphere to that of Knecht’s school at Waldzell. Somewhat remarkably, I suppose, I have never been a joiner of clubs, or groups, or congregations, only those with some sort of monastic potential.
Even the international firm to which I belonged, commercial as is was, had an ethos which could have been taken straight from The Game. It’s senior partners were among the most powerful and influential business leaders in the country. Yet the head of the firm said to me proudly one day at lunch “Nobody knows my name.” When he said this I immediately recalled Hesse’s lines: “The hierarchic organization cherishes the ideal of anonymity, and comes very close to the realization of that ideal.”
Rarely did this assimilation ever feel oppressive or threatening to my individuality. As with The Game: “For us, a man is a hero and deserves special interest only if his nature and his education have rendered him able to let his individuality be almost perfectly absorbed in its hierarchic function without at the same time forfeiting the vigorous, fresh, admirable impetus which makes for the savor and worth of the individual.” In order to make the point, I had the habit of submitting an undated resignation on the day I started any job. Even that felt like a ritual of integration. I exercised it myself by “leaping,” to use Joseph Knecht’s term, whenever I felt The Game was being threatened.
The idea of the rules of The Game, its language, and symbology undoubtedly provoked some sort of teen-age mysticism. But what most attracted me and still does is that The Game is “... a mode of playing with the total contents and values of our culture...” years later I would discover Wittgenstein and know that this is precisely what he must have meant in his term ‘language games.’
The downside from a career perspective, of course, is that narrow disciplinary constrains and professional mores became increasingly problematic. The world at large expects increasing specialisation with age. But for me intellectual maturity has always been a matter of expansion rather than refinement. This has made me less well-off than I might have been. But I am more than content. I also find that I retain some tendencies toward teen-age mysticism. Perhaps this is an accomplishment.
It has been said that one is born either an Aristotelian or a Platonist. Empirically, it seems to me, there is some strength in this assertion. I am certainly in the camp of the latter and therefore fit right in to the Platonic bias of The Game, which Aristotelians would merely find just silly. It was Hesse who piqued my interest in philosophers like Nicholas of Cusa and Gottfried Leibniz. And through them into the idea of the ideal as a symbol of both purpose and the aesthetical.
Unconsciously I suppose, I found myself associating with other Platonists and quasi-Platonists - West Churchman at Berkeley, Russell Ackoff and Tom Cowan at Penn, Oliver O’Donovan at Oxford. Around each of these was a sort of invisible college, the members of which unknowingly participated in many rounds of The Game. That many of them are dead or no longer in my daily life is neither regrettable nor sad since the Order continues to unite us.
Hesse’s idea of the Age of the Feuilleton as a motivating social force for the development of The Game resonated in my young life with what I perceived as the random character of what people worried about - nuclear war, mortal sin, cures for acne - and what might actually matter. For Hesse, the daily newspaper was more about gossip than the factual information necessary for life. Hesse’s narrator has only disdain for this age of wasted freedom:
Years later, I encountered William Gaddis’s Recognitions and had a spark of remembrance about Hesse’s witty critiques of celebrity and “intellectual privateers”, particularly among self-proclaimed artists, and most specifically writers. And many years still later, I am overwhelmed by Hesse’s prescience in anticipating the evil of unintelligent internet social media. Perhaps they will be exactly the catalyst necessary for the real creation of The Game!
Mathematics and Music are the core disciplines of The Game. I can blame Hesse for implanting this as a seed in my psyche. It legitimised for me my interest in numbers (but certainly not the techniques of calculation insisted upon by my teachers) and classical music (of which none of my contemporaries had the slightest interest). Once again, it is unclear whether The Game provoked or merely articulated these interests.
Ultimately it doesn’t matter because The Game is my personal symbol for both. Recently while reading Edward Rothstein’s Emblems of Mind (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...), a book which critiques music in terms of mathematical aesthetics and vice versa, I had very clear flashbacks of my pleasant surprise at being able to adopt Hesse’s discovery as my own. I have occasionally abandoned either mathematics or music as one might lose one’s childhood religion. But they have always returned as the matrix of my own version of The Game.
I could go on ad nauseam recounting the many other specific influences that The Glass Bead Game has had on my life. But this short reflection is enough to show me the profound depths to which we can be influenced by what we consume as literature in early life. I don’t know what lessons this might entail.
Perhaps the reflection is only productive as a sort of therapy that makes conscious what has been hidden for decades from will and choice. Hesse suggests this might be his intent in the text where he describes The Game evolving as “a form of concentrated self-awareness for intellectuals.“ Having said that, there is nothing I would change about allowing The Game into my life.
October 13, 2012
I wanted only to try to live in accord with the promptings which came from my true self. Why was that so very difficult?
This quote stands alone on the very first page of the novel, and it tells you all you need to know.
I loved this book. I want to make you love it. I sit here at this keyboard and try to write, yet after reading this exquisite novel, everything I have to say sounds trite. I type. I delete. Type some more. Delete. Nothing I say is adequate.
I feel like I live inside Hermann Hesse’s thoughts. All of my struggles – with morality and purpose and meaning – they were his struggles too. There were moments while reading this book where I just closed the pages, closed my eyes and thought, “Wow. I just want to live in THIS moment. Suddenly, everything is clear. I don’t want to read anymore or think anymore or talk anymore. I just want to experience THIS.” So profound was his writing that I can’t even manage to explain it to you. It's visceral. There were moments where that cognitive dissonance that I’m constantly battling just stopped… It was like a bright light was shone on all my dark tendencies and I could clearly see my true nature. Sincerely, it was that profound for me. I want it to be profound for you, too. Because then maybe, just maybe, we will understand each other.
You are only afraid if you are not in harmony with yourself… A whole society composed of men afraid of the unknown within them! They all sense that the rules they live by are no longer valid, that they live according to archaic laws – neither their religion nor their mortality is in any way suited to the needs of the present.
Everyone who ponders, seeks, wonders, philosophizes… everyone who Thinks should read this book.
December 6, 2014
The Glass Bead Game is a profound and complex contemplation on the relation between reality and art. The game of the title is a symbol and quintessence of pure art – art for art’s sake.
Young Joseph Knecht is taken to the boarding school in Castalia – a kind of intellectual utopia inhabited only by highly creative minds. On attaining the great skill in music, spirituality and meditation, Joseph decides to devote himself to the art of the Glass Bead Game. When he achieves perfection he becomes the master of the game – Magister Ludi. His highest goal seems to have been reached but he feels that he is surrounded with futility, his existence is full of vacuum, he wants to share his tremendous knowledge with others and to be useful.
He finds an apt pupil in the outside world and becomes his tutor…
If a denizen of the ivory tower forsakes his intellectual resort, he is doomed.
“As you well know, there are some who do not think well of the Glass Bead Game. They say it is a substitute for the arts, and that the players are mere popularizers; that they can no longer be regarded as truly devoted to the things of the mind, but are merely artistic dilettantes given to improvisation and feckless fancy.”
Young Joseph Knecht is taken to the boarding school in Castalia – a kind of intellectual utopia inhabited only by highly creative minds. On attaining the great skill in music, spirituality and meditation, Joseph decides to devote himself to the art of the Glass Bead Game. When he achieves perfection he becomes the master of the game – Magister Ludi. His highest goal seems to have been reached but he feels that he is surrounded with futility, his existence is full of vacuum, he wants to share his tremendous knowledge with others and to be useful.
Game and discipline of the mind through meditation had become the truly characteristic values of Castalia…
To Knecht, therefore, this meant one more tie, one more counterpoise to his growing urge to renounce everything and achieve a breakthrough into a new and different sphere of life. Nevertheless, this urge developed inexorably. Ever since he himself had become fully aware of it – that may have been in the sixth or seventh year of his magistracy – it had grown steadily stronger.
He finds an apt pupil in the outside world and becomes his tutor…
If a denizen of the ivory tower forsakes his intellectual resort, he is doomed.
November 24, 2022
There are two worlds: the world of good and the world of evil… The world of light and the world of darkness…
We live in the world of duality… Dichotomy is present in everything… There is the apparent world and there is the secret world… The world of pride and the world of humility… The world of Cain and the world of Abel…
There is the world of creators and there is the world of creatures… We dwell in the material world… And we abide in the world of psyche… There is the world of verity and the world of hypocrisy…
There are two worlds: the world without and the world within.
There were stories of the lost boys, prodigal sons, that this had happened to, and I read them avidly. The return to the father, to what was good, was always such a magnificent liberation in these stories – I was perfectly aware that this was the only right and good and desirable outcome; but still, the part of the story that took place among the lost and evil souls was always much more exciting, and, if it were only possible to admit it, it was sometimes actually rather a shame that the lost soul had to repent and be found again.
We live in the world of duality… Dichotomy is present in everything… There is the apparent world and there is the secret world… The world of pride and the world of humility… The world of Cain and the world of Abel…
…on a walk with my father I asked him what to make of the fact that some people thought Cain was better than Abel.
He was very surprised by the question. He explained to me that this interpretation was in no way new; it had emerged already in the earliest centuries of Christianity and been taught in various sects, one of which called itself the “Cainites.” But obviously, he said, this insane teaching was nothing but the devil’s attempt to destroy our faith. For if you believe that Cain was in the right and Abel in the wrong, then it follows that God was in error, or in other words that the God of the Bible is not the one true god but a false god.
There is the world of creators and there is the world of creatures… We dwell in the material world… And we abide in the world of psyche… There is the world of verity and the world of hypocrisy…
At the end of class, Demian said rather thoughtfully: “There’s something I don’t like about that story, Sinclair. Read it through again, and test it out on your tongue: there’s something about it that leaves an insipid taste in your mouth. It’s the part about the two thieves. It’s magnificent, of course, those three crosses standing next to one another on the hill! But then this sentimental little tract about the good thief! He used to be a criminal, he’s committed God knows what crimes, and now he gets all mushy and performs these whiny rituals of self-improvement and repentance?! What’s the point of remorse if you’re two steps away from the grave, I ask you? It’s nothing but a sanctimonious fairy tale, treacly and dishonest, insipid and sentimental and obviously didactic.”
There are two worlds: the world without and the world within.
June 17, 2011
There’s a scene in Antonio Tabucchi’s Indian Nocturne in which the narrator meets an Indian intellectual who asks him, among other things, what he thinks of Hermann Hesse. The narrator, resenting the interruption and perhaps with a sense he is being mocked, heaps scorn on the German “spiritualist”, calling him sentimental and likening him to a sweet liqueur, and only later realises he hasn’t said what he thought of Hesse at all. In some way, these days, I suspect there’s a little of this narrator in many of us. Hesse – unlike Kafka or Beckett or Mann – is not an intellectual’s badge of honour. Frequently, I’ve approached one or another of his books again after a hiatus half-expecting that this time I will have grown out of him, but I never do.
The Journey to the East
has enthralled me since I first read it in my teens – and probably I understand only marginally more of it now than I did then. The “Treatise on the Steppenwolf” (unlike much of the rest of that most famous of his novels) I likewise revere. The early novella
Knulp
is a small masterpiece, touching and true. Demian has its moments, Siddhartha too (though again its fame is out of proportion to its content), and Klingsor’s Last Summer and many of the short stories and even Narziss and Goldmund if you’re on a roll and don’t want to stop. But looming over all of them, dwarfing them and pulling together most of what’s best in each of them is The Glass Bead Game, a book which, despite myself, and though I doubt I’ll be able to convey why without reading it again (a fourth time), I count among the five or so most transformative reading experiences in my lifetime.
Like The Journey... or “The Treatise...”, the “General Introduction [to the Glass Bead Game] for the Layman” is Hesse at his finest – not so dissimilar to Borges in his essayistic tone and otherworldly humour, and throwing out mindbending concepts with casual aplomb.
In other words, an early glimpse of post-modernity, but telescoped into an imaginary future (after what Hesse dryly characterises as “The Age of the Feuilleton”) in which – for the purposes of players of the Glass Bead Game – artistic production has stopped or gone underground, and the highest cultural calling is to manipulate what has been left behind by former ages, to create – in a hyper-ritualised setting and for the benefit of worldwide audiences – these “games” that are part music, part mathematics, and use a futuristic brand of calligraphic characters to sample and integrate their component parts into a quasi-equation that can later be studied and reproduced. At the centre of this enterprise, the Magister Ludi – or master of the Glass Bead Game – is treated like a priest or deity by devotees of the game. But there is none of the rock- or movie-star “cult of personality” about these figures; not only are their identities kept secret except from a few close initiates, but their study in biographies or histories is discouraged.
Nevertheless, The Glass Bead Game is, for the most part, a biography of one earnest if somewhat rebellious Magister, Joseph Knecht – a man whose early brilliance followed by his ultimate resignation is a touchstone for all who question the value of life behind the cloistered walls of Castalia, the “pedagogical province” in which his story takes place. What do we have here then, if not the old, “pathology”-based form of a biography? A kind of everyman story, the story of a type. But Hesse’s type – and I think this is beautiful in light of the leader of his former homeland when he wrote this – is a leader, the ideal leader, and the culmination of a search which runs throughout Hesse’s work. Joseph Knecht is a kind of holy man, but with none of the pomp or self-importance which, maybe, these days, that implies. “Knecht” in German means “servant”, and throughout his short life Knecht impresses us as just that, a servant both to those he governs and to some other voice – or “calling” – which comes to him from beyond. Like all of Hesse’s characters, Knecht exists to “find himself”, but unlike Harry Haller or Knulp or Emil Sinclair or even Siddhartha, he does not despair (at least not in these pages); like Leo, the leader-in-disguise of the Journeyers to the East, he remains tranquil and alert to his duties. Throughout the book Knecht’s own writings are quoted, and at the end of the “Introduction...”, in speaking of classical music, he writes the following:
Earlier Knecht’s biographer had warned us:
People fault Hesse for what they see as his sentimentality. Sometimes, I can see their point (as in the relationship of Harry Haller to his young prostitute friend in Steppenwolf, for example). But when he manages to rise above all the doubts and complaints of that lonely wolf of the steppes, there is actually something quietly heroic in Hesse’s stance. In Switzerland, in 1943, along with his friends Paul Klee and Hugo Ball of the Cabaret Voltaire, this man refuses absolutely to play the “heaven-offending keys”. Whatever he creates will partake only of that “superhuman laughter” and “death-defying intrepidity”, no matter what horrors his homeland can spew forth (and, as his writings on the war show, Hesse was far from ignorant of these). And so, on the surface, his may seem a fantasy for which the modern (or post-modern) world has little use: escapism, idealism, even (amid the destruction of Europe by guns and explosives) lyricism. But read more closely and it’s evident that the despairing, human Hesse is passionately present in almost every word of this. Yes, the characters in The Glass Bead Game – like Beckett’s characters, like Kafka’s – can seem more or less than human. No, there is no sexuality in their world (nor in Waiting For Godot, for that matter), and as if to foreground this lack Hesse writes his “Introduction...” entirely from a genderless “we” standpoint, which while not spelling it out seems to suggest (or has always suggested to me, anyway) that we are to treat these characters as beyond or outside of the ordinary realm of the sexual. (Why? Perhaps because, to a German in Europe in 1943, sexuality did not seem that crucial a topic.) Me, I’ve never demanded “realism” from fiction; in fact, I like writers who alert me to the fact that the beings they create are not human. Likewise, I don’t care in the least that the end section of the book – “Joseph Knecht’s Posthumous Writings” – is probably just a series of sketches done in warm-up for the task of creating Knecht. To me, at least one of these novellas (“The Father Confessor”) is easily among the best of Hesse’s works in its own right and never fails to have me in tears by the end of it. And even the poetry (poorly-suited to translation as it is) is illuminating in showing the genesis of the conception.
If I haven’t said much about the substance of Knecht’s story, the truth is I don’t remember much of it, but for snatches of scenery (which Hesse describes so well) and a general feeling of the excitement of a young man following his calling. If you read for plot, this isn’t the book for you. But if you want to hear the wisdom of a wise, possibly heartbroken man determined, despite everything, not to hit the jarring notes of the diabolic keys but to sing with the laughing voice of an angel, this is it. I don’t care if that sounds sentimental. The world needs artists who are willing to speak calmly from the storm, and Hermann Hesse was one of them. I take my hat off to you, Herr Hesse. Thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for your guidance.
Like The Journey... or “The Treatise...”, the “General Introduction [to the Glass Bead Game] for the Layman” is Hesse at his finest – not so dissimilar to Borges in his essayistic tone and otherworldly humour, and throwing out mindbending concepts with casual aplomb.
The Glass Bead Game is thus a mode of playing with the total contents and values of our culture; it plays with them as, say, in the great age of the arts a painter might have played with the colours on his palette. All the insights, noble thoughts, and works of art that the human race has produced in its creative eras, all that subsequent periods of scholarly study have reduced to concepts and converted into intellectual property – on all this immense body of intellectual values the Glass Bead Game player plays like the organist on an organ.
In other words, an early glimpse of post-modernity, but telescoped into an imaginary future (after what Hesse dryly characterises as “The Age of the Feuilleton”) in which – for the purposes of players of the Glass Bead Game – artistic production has stopped or gone underground, and the highest cultural calling is to manipulate what has been left behind by former ages, to create – in a hyper-ritualised setting and for the benefit of worldwide audiences – these “games” that are part music, part mathematics, and use a futuristic brand of calligraphic characters to sample and integrate their component parts into a quasi-equation that can later be studied and reproduced. At the centre of this enterprise, the Magister Ludi – or master of the Glass Bead Game – is treated like a priest or deity by devotees of the game. But there is none of the rock- or movie-star “cult of personality” about these figures; not only are their identities kept secret except from a few close initiates, but their study in biographies or histories is discouraged.
Certainly, what nowadays we understand by personality is something quite different from what the biographers and historians of earlier times meant by it. For them, [...] the essence of a personality seems to have been deviance, abnormality, uniqueness, in fact all too often the pathological. We moderns, on the other hand, do not even speak of major personalities until we encounter men who have gone beyond all original and idiosyncratic qualities to achieve the greatest possible integration into the generality, the greatest possible service to the suprapersonal.
Nevertheless, The Glass Bead Game is, for the most part, a biography of one earnest if somewhat rebellious Magister, Joseph Knecht – a man whose early brilliance followed by his ultimate resignation is a touchstone for all who question the value of life behind the cloistered walls of Castalia, the “pedagogical province” in which his story takes place. What do we have here then, if not the old, “pathology”-based form of a biography? A kind of everyman story, the story of a type. But Hesse’s type – and I think this is beautiful in light of the leader of his former homeland when he wrote this – is a leader, the ideal leader, and the culmination of a search which runs throughout Hesse’s work. Joseph Knecht is a kind of holy man, but with none of the pomp or self-importance which, maybe, these days, that implies. “Knecht” in German means “servant”, and throughout his short life Knecht impresses us as just that, a servant both to those he governs and to some other voice – or “calling” – which comes to him from beyond. Like all of Hesse’s characters, Knecht exists to “find himself”, but unlike Harry Haller or Knulp or Emil Sinclair or even Siddhartha, he does not despair (at least not in these pages); like Leo, the leader-in-disguise of the Journeyers to the East, he remains tranquil and alert to his duties. Throughout the book Knecht’s own writings are quoted, and at the end of the “Introduction...”, in speaking of classical music, he writes the following:
[...] always there may be heard in these works a defiance, a death-defying intrepidity, a gallantry, and a note of superhuman laughter, of immortal gay serenity. Let that same note also sound in our Glass Bead Games, and in our whole lives, acts, and sufferings.
Earlier Knecht’s biographer had warned us:
The poets told horrific fables about the forbidden, diabolic, heaven-offending keys, [...] the “music of decline”; no sooner were these wicked notes struck in the palace than the sky darkened, the walls trembled and collapsed, and kingdom and sovereign went to their doom.
People fault Hesse for what they see as his sentimentality. Sometimes, I can see their point (as in the relationship of Harry Haller to his young prostitute friend in Steppenwolf, for example). But when he manages to rise above all the doubts and complaints of that lonely wolf of the steppes, there is actually something quietly heroic in Hesse’s stance. In Switzerland, in 1943, along with his friends Paul Klee and Hugo Ball of the Cabaret Voltaire, this man refuses absolutely to play the “heaven-offending keys”. Whatever he creates will partake only of that “superhuman laughter” and “death-defying intrepidity”, no matter what horrors his homeland can spew forth (and, as his writings on the war show, Hesse was far from ignorant of these). And so, on the surface, his may seem a fantasy for which the modern (or post-modern) world has little use: escapism, idealism, even (amid the destruction of Europe by guns and explosives) lyricism. But read more closely and it’s evident that the despairing, human Hesse is passionately present in almost every word of this. Yes, the characters in The Glass Bead Game – like Beckett’s characters, like Kafka’s – can seem more or less than human. No, there is no sexuality in their world (nor in Waiting For Godot, for that matter), and as if to foreground this lack Hesse writes his “Introduction...” entirely from a genderless “we” standpoint, which while not spelling it out seems to suggest (or has always suggested to me, anyway) that we are to treat these characters as beyond or outside of the ordinary realm of the sexual. (Why? Perhaps because, to a German in Europe in 1943, sexuality did not seem that crucial a topic.) Me, I’ve never demanded “realism” from fiction; in fact, I like writers who alert me to the fact that the beings they create are not human. Likewise, I don’t care in the least that the end section of the book – “Joseph Knecht’s Posthumous Writings” – is probably just a series of sketches done in warm-up for the task of creating Knecht. To me, at least one of these novellas (“The Father Confessor”) is easily among the best of Hesse’s works in its own right and never fails to have me in tears by the end of it. And even the poetry (poorly-suited to translation as it is) is illuminating in showing the genesis of the conception.
If I haven’t said much about the substance of Knecht’s story, the truth is I don’t remember much of it, but for snatches of scenery (which Hesse describes so well) and a general feeling of the excitement of a young man following his calling. If you read for plot, this isn’t the book for you. But if you want to hear the wisdom of a wise, possibly heartbroken man determined, despite everything, not to hit the jarring notes of the diabolic keys but to sing with the laughing voice of an angel, this is it. I don’t care if that sounds sentimental. The world needs artists who are willing to speak calmly from the storm, and Hermann Hesse was one of them. I take my hat off to you, Herr Hesse. Thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for your guidance.
September 13, 2016
The things I do for BTS...
Joking, this was one of the few books that really had an impact on my way of thinking. It talked about religion, belief and growth in a very profound way, as if Hesse wasn't really writing but more conversing directly with my mind.
Sinclair and Demian, though being very peculiar and surreal characters, were one the mirror of the other, surrounded by a plot heavy with symbolism and magical elements.
The idea of the two worlds, one so close to the other that you could esily slip into one another is very fascinating and paonts a very sad but true picture of the human being and its behaviour.
"The bird fights its way out of the egg. The egg is the world. Who would be born must first destroy a world. The bird flies to God. The God's name is Abraxas"
Joking, this was one of the few books that really had an impact on my way of thinking. It talked about religion, belief and growth in a very profound way, as if Hesse wasn't really writing but more conversing directly with my mind.
Sinclair and Demian, though being very peculiar and surreal characters, were one the mirror of the other, surrounded by a plot heavy with symbolism and magical elements.
The idea of the two worlds, one so close to the other that you could esily slip into one another is very fascinating and paonts a very sad but true picture of the human being and its behaviour.
"The bird fights its way out of the egg. The egg is the world. Who would be born must first destroy a world. The bird flies to God. The God's name is Abraxas"
March 22, 2009
A tremendous disappointment, especially given the shimmering praise the book garners on all sides. I realize I’m at odds with the world in judging this book harshly, and I realize there may yet be some dimension of brilliance here that I’m just not seeing, but grant me this, it’s not for lack of trying. No other novel have I ever laid down without a backward glance within a few dozen pages of the end, certain at last that the great payoff for my eight hundred pages of patience was never going to come. Here’s the big plot spoiler: nothing at all happens in this book. Not “nothing” in a loaded, John Cage way, just nothing, as when the author cannot deliver on his heady promises but publishes a book anyhow. I actually think it’s kind of important to call bullshit on all the approbation the book receives.
The two fundamental failures in the book are its main character and its central device, the Game itself. Both failures are drearily total, and each is all the more of a letdown for the breathless, never-ending clamor of hype both within and without the book’s pages.
The book starts right out with the declaration of Joseph Knecht’s pivotal importance, as the greatest player the Game has ever had, after whose career the history of the Game could never be the same. This is repeated ceaselessly throughout, in narrative asides. Meanwhile, we watch a pleasant, unassuming, talented young boy as he is handpicked by a professor, becomes a promising student whose great potential is remarked on by everyone he meets, and moves on to become a professor at a young age. He is indeed the youngest ever to become Magister Ludi, so at least that should earn him a mention in the history books. We are told, I think precisely once, that when he runs a game, it’s a good one. And then he gets old; along the way he meets some people and has some conversations. And then he dies in a swimming accident, and then we riffle through some of his personal papers until the book is over. Even his youthful writings, a strange little coda to his own life story, echo the pattern of fervent affirmation of the importance of a character—plainly himself in thin disguise, but now being described, just as fawningly, in his own voice—who goes on to do nothing much.
If in fact Knecht ever does anything of greater historical importance than being generally agreeable and good at what he does, it is not told to us. His life is a dull blank, undeserving of a biography at all, especially when at least three other characters go by who might actually have made good reading. Consider the strangely beatified Music Master, whose unexpectedly mystical transcendence of humanity Knecht merely witnesses when it comes along late in the book; that might be worthy of history. Or Knecht’s boyhood rival, a fiery young student who leaves the academic world and is reunited with Knecht later on one of the protagonist’s vanishingly rare ventures outside his ivory tower; his relationship to the Game is complex and troubled, but this barely ruffles the surface of Knecht’s complacency. Or there is the Sinophile who draws Knecht into a dialogue with Chinese history and literature, who gets to deliver the book’s most interesting challenge: when Knecht seeks his assistance in bringing the symbology of the I Ching into the vocabulary of the Game (much easier, you’d think, than it would have been to encapsulate French poetry or organic chemistry, since the I Ching is already encoded in a set of symbols easily printed on beads), his new mentor smiles and says you can build a garden in the world, but good luck fitting the entire world inside your garden. What’s this? A character within the Glass Bead Game dismissing the Game itself as far lesser than some other symbol system? Here, now, we have the potential for a meaty examination of this Game thing, which we deserve after putting up with so much talk about it. But Knecht just shrugs and goes about his business, and there will be no exposition upon either system. Because the Game is the other aching nullity at the heart of the book; there’s nothing there.
Hesse was inspired to write, beyond doubt, by the legitimately awesome notion of the Game. He imagines a symbol system within which all academic disciplines can be encoded, and can interact with each other, like a conversion chart for all fields of knowledge. Within this system, all concepts are encoded on beads, and it seems any of them can meaningfully combine with any other, such that wild new ideas emerge in the interplay. Here is the complex discourse wherein some kind of game, some competition or contest, can flourish, a game of all human learning, ranging like lightning from one discipline to another, referencing everything. Only a rarefied kind of academic could hope to understand such a game, let alone play it competitively. And the book is set within the cloistered academy where these super-scholars are trained.
It’s a sweeping, fascinating idea. It’s enough, without adding much of anything else, to drive a really memorable short story. But Hesse wanted it to crown a towering edifice, worthy of the sense of weight and magnitude that was, in fact, only the subject of the idea rather than its dimensions. By which I mean: it was a vague little slip of an idea about something vast and weighty, rather than actually being a vast and weighty idea. But Hesse fooled himself, and in his excitement he determined to write a very long novel, and that was a mistake from which there could be no recovery.
The fatal problem is that Hesse wilts instantly before the task of filling in any kind of detail about what the game was and how it worked. He hasn’t a clue. Inspired by his book, several people have gone on to design more or less playable games to match their impressions of the game he only alludes to—you can find them on the internet if you look around—but he never does. And the more ambient suspense the author generates by promising a brilliant reality, without ever showing even a flickering corner of it, the worse the bland filler starts to smell when it all gets stale. Mind you, I know it’s too much to ask for him to generate a practical game that lives up to his vision. But we don’t need him to do that. He need only sketch some part of it, fill in a detail here and a detail there that his characters can make part of their workaday conversations. He does need to do something, though, and it needs to pass muster as at least a tantalizing beginning of the thing itself. One example, perhaps, of a specific bead that represents something from the science of biology; what is written or drawn on the bead? What might be one instance of that bead’s being played in answer to a bead representing some architectural concept? That would be enough. He makes frequent mention of music—indeed the deification of music, common among writers, is so relentless here as to become a minor problem in its own right—but no sign of how it relates to any other field. Of course, a writer needs to be able to let the reader fill in empty spaces that the story only sketches with spare gestures. But the gestures need to be the beginning of something worthy.
In the event, that one game—”composed” by Knecht during his tenure as Top Official in Gameland—gives us just enough detail to make clear, after most of the book has gone by, that what’s actually happening here is a solo show. Knecht has composed a complex exercise in advance, and now the other players are just acting it out, perhaps filling in some details at their own discretion but abiding by a predetermined structure. Our one glimpse of the practical nature of the game has all the fanfare of a whoopee cushion. The Game isn’t actually a game. Nobody's playing. There are no objectives. It’s some sort of abstruse, very quiet performance art.
A long book full of portentious self-promotion but with nothing to say. An elaborately wrapped present with no gift inside. A big fat nothing. Not the nothing of the Buddhist, who longs for nothing and seeks it, but that of the Wizard of Oz—a nothing that noisily proclaims itself to be everything.
The two fundamental failures in the book are its main character and its central device, the Game itself. Both failures are drearily total, and each is all the more of a letdown for the breathless, never-ending clamor of hype both within and without the book’s pages.
The book starts right out with the declaration of Joseph Knecht’s pivotal importance, as the greatest player the Game has ever had, after whose career the history of the Game could never be the same. This is repeated ceaselessly throughout, in narrative asides. Meanwhile, we watch a pleasant, unassuming, talented young boy as he is handpicked by a professor, becomes a promising student whose great potential is remarked on by everyone he meets, and moves on to become a professor at a young age. He is indeed the youngest ever to become Magister Ludi, so at least that should earn him a mention in the history books. We are told, I think precisely once, that when he runs a game, it’s a good one. And then he gets old; along the way he meets some people and has some conversations. And then he dies in a swimming accident, and then we riffle through some of his personal papers until the book is over. Even his youthful writings, a strange little coda to his own life story, echo the pattern of fervent affirmation of the importance of a character—plainly himself in thin disguise, but now being described, just as fawningly, in his own voice—who goes on to do nothing much.
If in fact Knecht ever does anything of greater historical importance than being generally agreeable and good at what he does, it is not told to us. His life is a dull blank, undeserving of a biography at all, especially when at least three other characters go by who might actually have made good reading. Consider the strangely beatified Music Master, whose unexpectedly mystical transcendence of humanity Knecht merely witnesses when it comes along late in the book; that might be worthy of history. Or Knecht’s boyhood rival, a fiery young student who leaves the academic world and is reunited with Knecht later on one of the protagonist’s vanishingly rare ventures outside his ivory tower; his relationship to the Game is complex and troubled, but this barely ruffles the surface of Knecht’s complacency. Or there is the Sinophile who draws Knecht into a dialogue with Chinese history and literature, who gets to deliver the book’s most interesting challenge: when Knecht seeks his assistance in bringing the symbology of the I Ching into the vocabulary of the Game (much easier, you’d think, than it would have been to encapsulate French poetry or organic chemistry, since the I Ching is already encoded in a set of symbols easily printed on beads), his new mentor smiles and says you can build a garden in the world, but good luck fitting the entire world inside your garden. What’s this? A character within the Glass Bead Game dismissing the Game itself as far lesser than some other symbol system? Here, now, we have the potential for a meaty examination of this Game thing, which we deserve after putting up with so much talk about it. But Knecht just shrugs and goes about his business, and there will be no exposition upon either system. Because the Game is the other aching nullity at the heart of the book; there’s nothing there.
Hesse was inspired to write, beyond doubt, by the legitimately awesome notion of the Game. He imagines a symbol system within which all academic disciplines can be encoded, and can interact with each other, like a conversion chart for all fields of knowledge. Within this system, all concepts are encoded on beads, and it seems any of them can meaningfully combine with any other, such that wild new ideas emerge in the interplay. Here is the complex discourse wherein some kind of game, some competition or contest, can flourish, a game of all human learning, ranging like lightning from one discipline to another, referencing everything. Only a rarefied kind of academic could hope to understand such a game, let alone play it competitively. And the book is set within the cloistered academy where these super-scholars are trained.
It’s a sweeping, fascinating idea. It’s enough, without adding much of anything else, to drive a really memorable short story. But Hesse wanted it to crown a towering edifice, worthy of the sense of weight and magnitude that was, in fact, only the subject of the idea rather than its dimensions. By which I mean: it was a vague little slip of an idea about something vast and weighty, rather than actually being a vast and weighty idea. But Hesse fooled himself, and in his excitement he determined to write a very long novel, and that was a mistake from which there could be no recovery.
The fatal problem is that Hesse wilts instantly before the task of filling in any kind of detail about what the game was and how it worked. He hasn’t a clue. Inspired by his book, several people have gone on to design more or less playable games to match their impressions of the game he only alludes to—you can find them on the internet if you look around—but he never does. And the more ambient suspense the author generates by promising a brilliant reality, without ever showing even a flickering corner of it, the worse the bland filler starts to smell when it all gets stale. Mind you, I know it’s too much to ask for him to generate a practical game that lives up to his vision. But we don’t need him to do that. He need only sketch some part of it, fill in a detail here and a detail there that his characters can make part of their workaday conversations. He does need to do something, though, and it needs to pass muster as at least a tantalizing beginning of the thing itself. One example, perhaps, of a specific bead that represents something from the science of biology; what is written or drawn on the bead? What might be one instance of that bead’s being played in answer to a bead representing some architectural concept? That would be enough. He makes frequent mention of music—indeed the deification of music, common among writers, is so relentless here as to become a minor problem in its own right—but no sign of how it relates to any other field. Of course, a writer needs to be able to let the reader fill in empty spaces that the story only sketches with spare gestures. But the gestures need to be the beginning of something worthy.
In the event, that one game—”composed” by Knecht during his tenure as Top Official in Gameland—gives us just enough detail to make clear, after most of the book has gone by, that what’s actually happening here is a solo show. Knecht has composed a complex exercise in advance, and now the other players are just acting it out, perhaps filling in some details at their own discretion but abiding by a predetermined structure. Our one glimpse of the practical nature of the game has all the fanfare of a whoopee cushion. The Game isn’t actually a game. Nobody's playing. There are no objectives. It’s some sort of abstruse, very quiet performance art.
A long book full of portentious self-promotion but with nothing to say. An elaborately wrapped present with no gift inside. A big fat nothing. Not the nothing of the Buddhist, who longs for nothing and seeks it, but that of the Wizard of Oz—a nothing that noisily proclaims itself to be everything.
July 19, 2018
“I realize today that nothing in the world is more distasteful to a man than to take the path that leads to himself.”
Demian is a sad and lonely read; it is a thoroughly depressing exploration of the human soul and the adolescent mind.
The book portrays a general sense of detachment and dispossession with reality and the rest of the world. Emil Sincliar is different. We all are, in our own way; though Emil is separate to everyone else in his solitude. He doesn’t quite belong with other people; he doesn’t enjoy the same things and often feels unmoved by things that would directly affect most people: he is an outsider looking in, fated to exist apart from the rest of humanity.
Unlike Harry Haller in Steppenwolf, Emil is not a genius or particularly gifted with anything; however, he is a truth seeker: he wishes to find the truth of himself in a world that dictates otherwise. Society is driven by monetary success, relationship success and occupation success though Emil does not want any of these things: he wants to understand human nature at its very core so he can better understand himself and his own place within this world. He is suicidal, depressed and exhausted with the realities of modern existence.
“I have been and still am a seeker, but I have ceased to question stars and books; I have begun to listen to the teaching my blood whispers to me.”
He looks within himself and finds the answers. Through the words of a friend, he realises that morality, that good and evil, that god and the devil, are not necessarily diametrically opposed but are part of larger whole: one entity that exists in union. (Sounds like Hesse has been reading Nietzsche.) His soul becomes less fractured and his person becomes more solid as a result. He is ready to be born anew with his knew knowledge; thus, he expresses himself in art, art that echoes the images and ideas of the surrealists.
As with most modernist works, Demian is an absolute treasure trove of psychoanalytical theory. Part of me considered that none of the events are real or the characters, but are mere tools used by the author and our narrator (Emil) to express his mental states and his sense of anguish in a world that he feels apart from. Despite being a relatively short work, the narrative is dense and obscure. I would love to read this in conjunction with Jung or Freud and consider the implications of the dreams and the expressions of emotions. There’s certainly a lot to pick apart here.
This is a very clever book, though I don’t think it is nearly as successful as Steppenwolf, which explores similar themes to a higher degree of effectiveness; it is, nevertheless, definitely worth a read for the philosophically minded.
Demian is a sad and lonely read; it is a thoroughly depressing exploration of the human soul and the adolescent mind.
The book portrays a general sense of detachment and dispossession with reality and the rest of the world. Emil Sincliar is different. We all are, in our own way; though Emil is separate to everyone else in his solitude. He doesn’t quite belong with other people; he doesn’t enjoy the same things and often feels unmoved by things that would directly affect most people: he is an outsider looking in, fated to exist apart from the rest of humanity.
Unlike Harry Haller in Steppenwolf, Emil is not a genius or particularly gifted with anything; however, he is a truth seeker: he wishes to find the truth of himself in a world that dictates otherwise. Society is driven by monetary success, relationship success and occupation success though Emil does not want any of these things: he wants to understand human nature at its very core so he can better understand himself and his own place within this world. He is suicidal, depressed and exhausted with the realities of modern existence.
“I have been and still am a seeker, but I have ceased to question stars and books; I have begun to listen to the teaching my blood whispers to me.”
He looks within himself and finds the answers. Through the words of a friend, he realises that morality, that good and evil, that god and the devil, are not necessarily diametrically opposed but are part of larger whole: one entity that exists in union. (Sounds like Hesse has been reading Nietzsche.) His soul becomes less fractured and his person becomes more solid as a result. He is ready to be born anew with his knew knowledge; thus, he expresses himself in art, art that echoes the images and ideas of the surrealists.
As with most modernist works, Demian is an absolute treasure trove of psychoanalytical theory. Part of me considered that none of the events are real or the characters, but are mere tools used by the author and our narrator (Emil) to express his mental states and his sense of anguish in a world that he feels apart from. Despite being a relatively short work, the narrative is dense and obscure. I would love to read this in conjunction with Jung or Freud and consider the implications of the dreams and the expressions of emotions. There’s certainly a lot to pick apart here.
This is a very clever book, though I don’t think it is nearly as successful as Steppenwolf, which explores similar themes to a higher degree of effectiveness; it is, nevertheless, definitely worth a read for the philosophically minded.
September 7, 2012
قرأت حول هرمان هسه في كتاب اللامنتمي، وقرأت عن اللامنتمي في كتاب العالميّة الإسلاميّة الثّانية، هكذا قادني القدر إلى دميان وسنكلير، لكن لماذا الرّواية الّتي كان بطلها سنملير تعنون باسم دميان ؟
سنكلير يرمز إلى هسه .. الباحث عن نفسه، كما يعبّر في بداية كتابه: " لم أكن أريد إلاّ أن أعيش وفق الدّوافع الحقيقيّة الّتي تنبع من داخلي، فلما كان الأمر بعذه الصّعوبة؟ " وهذه المقدّمة القصيرة هي أكثر ما مسّ روحي من الرّواية - وما مسّها كثير - لقد أردتُ دائمًا أن أعيش حياة طبيعيّة، الحياة الّتي خُلقت من أجلها، الحياة الّتي تنبع من داخلي بعيدًا عن أيّ تشويه مدني أو ثقافيّ، أردتُ الذّهاب إلى بقعة بكر من الكرة الأرضيّة علّ روحي تعود بكرًا .
وسنكلير أراد ذلك أيضًا، وهسه، لكنّ ونلسون يقول بأنّه لم يجد الإجابة في أيّ من رواياته، أمّا أنا فأتخيّل بأنّه لو عرف محمّدًا لوجد لديه الكثير، إنّ هسه يفتّش عن الدّين، لكنّه لا يجد الدّين الّذي يبحث عنه في المسيحيّة، لأنّه يبحث عمّا هو أقرب للإنسان، وهو يعبّر عن ذلك على لسان دميان في قوله: " بالطّريقة ذاتها يمتدحون الله كأب للحياة كلّها، ولكنّهم، ببساطة، يرفضون قول كلمة واحدة عن حياتنا الجنسيّة الّتي يقوم عليها كلّ شيء، ويصفونها بالخطيئة كلّما أمكنهم ذلك، على أساس أنّها من عمل الشّيطان "، أجد في هذه الجملة فيضًا من التقدير لغريزة الإنسان الّتي حقّرتها الكنيسة، وهذا ما يعبّر عنه بيجوفتش بقوله أنّ المسيحية هي دين الرّوح في كتابه الإسلام بين الشرق والغرب .
أمّا نبيّ الإسلام محمّد فقد كان يشجّع النّاس على الحياة وفق الطّبيعة الّتي جبلهم الله عليها، لكنّ دعوته تلك لم تكن مبتذلة ولا إباحيّة، بل ضبط الإسلام الغريزة بالزّواج تقديسًا وتكريمًا لها من العبث وحرّم اللهو بها خارج الميثاق الإلهي، إنّها الممازجة الخلاّقة بين الرّوح والجسد، وهسه كان يبحث عن شيء كهذا .
وجد سنكلير خلاصه الرّوحي في امرأتين، الأولى هي بياتريس، الفتاة البريئة الطّاهر الّتي رأى طهر العالم المفقود متمثّلاً فيها، وتغيّرت حياته مباشرة دون أن يتحدّث معها، توقّف عن ارتياد الحانات والإسراف في الشّرب والحياة المبتذلة، أمّا المرأة الثّانية فهي إيڤا والدة دميان، كانت أمّه وحلمه ومسيحه وغريزته الجسديّة وأمانه الرّوحي، وقد افترقا قبل أن يتّصلا جسديًا، ولا أفهم لماذا اختار هسه بأن تكون إيفا أكبر من سنكلير، إنّ في الأمر سرًا ما يشبه السرّ الّذي جعل لمحمّد زوجة مثل خديجة، كم أحبّ فلسفة هسه لعلاقة المرأة بالرّجل في هذه الرّواية .
وأحب دميان كذلك، قرأتُ في هامش الرّواية بأنّه اسم محرف عن demon أيّ الرّوح الشّيطانيّة، أو ما يشبه ذلك، لكنّ دميان لم يكن شيطانًا، لقد كان إنسانًا متطرّفًا في إنسانيته، وكثيرًا ما يحوّلنا التطرّف هذا إلى شياطين في منظومة القيم الخاصّة بالآخرين، نجد دميان يقدّس شخصيّة قابيل الذي قتل شقيقه هابيل، ويحاول دفع سنكلير للتفكير بالقصّة من زاوية أخرى، لأنّ الإنسانيّة تعني أن نخطئ، وقد قال لسنكلير ذات مرّة : " لا أعني بأن تقتل أو تغتصب فتاة، ولكن فكّر في المسموح مرّة أخرى " .
الموسيقى الّتي يعزفها بستريوس في الرّواية خدشت قلبي أيضًا، تمنّيت لو كان باستطاعتي الجلوس على مقعد خشبي بالقرب منه والاستماع إليه وإلى سنكلير دون أن يرونني، إنّ بستريوس يرمز إلى الإنسان الّذي يريد صناعة المستقبل، لكنّه متعلّق بالماضي، لذلك هو يصنع الأنبياء والكهنة الّذين بدورهم يصنعون المستقبل .
" الطّائر يكافح للخروج من البيضة، البيضة هي العالم، والّذي يريد أن يُولد عليه أولاً أن يدمّر عالمًا ... الطّائر يطير إلى الله "
March 8, 2021
„Ca orice idee mare, jocul acesta nu are propriu-zis un început, ci, ca idee, a existat întotdeauna... Ideea jocului este veșnică; prin aceasta a existat și s-a manifestat cu mult înainte de realizarea ei în practică”.
Maaaaamăăă, da ce rezistență la frustrare aveam pe vremuri :)
Mi-am găsit notele de odinioară. Priveam romanul ca pe o carte de eterată înțelepciune și copiam răbdător fraze complicate, cu mulți termeni abstracți, care acum nu-mi mai spun absolut nimic. Sugerau ceva cu privire la muzică: „Muzica ia ființă din măsură și-și trage sevele din Marele Unic. Marele Unic este genitorul celor doi poli; cei doi poli dau mișcare puterii întunericului și luminii etc.”.
Nu prea mă interesa pe atunci ce povestește la propriu cartea lui Hesse, o priveam ca pe o biografie a unui ales angelic (asemănătoare cu Doctor Faustus a lui Thomas Mann, care prezintă, în schimb, un ales diabolic) și căutam îndeosebi „metafizica”. Fără spor...
Acțiunea se petrece pe la anul 2400 și ceva, undeva într-o provincie a fericiților, Castalia. Romanul ar fi, așadar, o utopie, descrierea unei lumi a seninătății calme și a jocurilor ingenioase.
În Castalia, elita tinerimii luminate studiază cu magiștri eminenți (există și un Magistru al muzicii) în condiții ascetice. Unii elevi nu rezistă privațiunilor și se întorc în lumea oamenilor obișnuiți. Alții fac față cu brio. Dintre învățăcei se remarcă, firește, prin însușiri ieșite din comun, Joseph Knecht (Knecht = slugă). Mai tîrziu, Knecht este ales în fruntea ordinului castalian și primește titlul ambiguu de Magister Ludi (în latină, „ludus, ludi” înseamnă școală, joc, spectacol etc.).
Magistru al Școlii și al Jocului: dar în ce constă jocul? Criticii și-au bătut capul ani de zile (încă nu s-au oprit) să ghicească la ce anume s-a referit autorul cînd și-a întitulat romanul Das Glasperlenspiel. Încă nu s-a ajuns la o concluzie fermă, nu sînt temeiuri. Vagul în care se păstrează naratorii (romanul are mai mulți) m-a intrigat și la prima lectură. Cum adică? Ce fel de joc e acesta? Nu știu de ce, dar m-am gîndit atunci la un șirag de mătănii, cam așa se traduce termenul german. Inițiații stau, meditează și învîrt cu dexteritate mărgele pe degete, așa cum în altă parte călugării orientali fac să se miște o roată / morișcă a rugăciunilor. Altceva nu mi-a trecut prin minte și nici nu avea cum. Era o conjectură puerilă, recunosc... Acum mă gîndesc că este vorba de o limbă perfectă de formule matematice, o „ars combinatoria”, așa cum a propus cîndva Leibniz.
Deci, jocul cu mărgele de sticlă rămîne un mister, o activitate (pur mintală?). Are legătură cu muzica și cu notele muzicale, asta e sigur, dar mai precis nu se știe, nimeni n-a pătruns mai departe. Tinerii sînt educați să se prindă într-un joc extins (și asta m-a frapat prima dată, inițiații sînt răspîndiți pretutindeni). Studierea jocului este anevoioasă:
„Regulile acestui joc al jocurilor se învață numai pe calea obișnuită, prescrisă, care cere cîțiva ani, și nimeni dintre inițiați nu ar putea avea vreun interes să facă aceste reguli ale jocului mai ușor de învățat”.
Partea cea mai amuzantă a romanului este descrierea epocii actuale, numită „epocă a foiletoanelor” și a răspîndirii cunoașterii prin vulgarizare (prelecțiuni cu public). Eu nu văd nimic rău în asta, dar prozatorul pare a privi foiletonul (și restul) ca un semn definitiv al declinului și dezordinii, o neputință de a reconstitui un întreg spart în fragmente pestrițe. Într-un fel, Hermann Hesse a văzut corect. Astăzi toată lumea compune articole, foiletoane și eseuri (inclusiv susiscălitul), prelegeri nu se mai țin din pricina pandemiei:
„Ei, care citeau atîtea articole şi audiau atîtea conferinţe, nu-şi acordau timp şi nu-şi dădeau osteneala să se fortifice împotriva fricii, să combată în sufletul lor teama de moarte, trăiau tresărind şi nu mai credeau în nici o dimineaţă”.
Așadar, foiletoanele și interviurile de azi ascund un rău mai adînc...
Mă întreb dacă un astfel de roman mai are astăzi cititori și nu știu ce să răspund, mă îndoiesc...
P. S. Desigur, romanul cuprinde și o discuție despre relația dintre lumea formelor platoniciene și istorie. Formele se situează în afara timpului, dar cel care le contemplă senin e afectat de vremelnicie. Joseph Knecht moare tînăr...
April 8, 2011
“No permanence is ours; we are a wave
That flows to fit whatever form it finds”
― Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game
I remember reading Hesse's Siddhartha and Narcissus and Goldmund right out of high school. There was something both disquieting and uniquely calming about these strange little books that Hesse wrote detailing his love and fascination with Eastern thought and philosophy. I figured this year I would read the Glass Bead Game (and later Steppenwolf). It is in many ways Hesse's subtle answer to the growing Fascism in his country. But, at its heart, it isn't an anti-Fascist book. He is aiming for more. He is thinking bigger.
It is a book about harmony and the arts. The exploration of how music, mathematics, intellectualism and life can become transcendent and beautiful. The Glass Bead Game is a mysterious fill-in that allows it to be at once none and all of man's endeavors. It is a holy raga, a tactile masbaha, a literary syncretism, that captures the whole of man's achievements and is practiced by an elite few. Using the framework of the Game Hesse is able to look at the dynamic of all of man's achievements as being both beautiful, worthwhile, but also frivolous and fleeting. He looks at the tension between those who remove themselves from mankind's experiences with those who live IN the world. There is a pull and a reciprocity between these two groups. He is looking for those things that balance those groups and ultimately those things that cause these groups to separate.
The book also explores the (mostly) Eastern ideas of meditation, surrender, loss and renewal. I found these ideas (obviously) beautiful and rewarding, but I'm still not sure if I really liked the structure of the book: Part 1 (pages 7-44): Introduction to GBG; Part 2 (Pages 45-427): Magister Ludi's story; Part 3 (428-445): Magister Ludi's poems; Part 4 (446-558): The Three Lives (other incarnations of Magister Ludi). I'm just not sure if the structure worked for me. It did well enough, but I loved and hated it too. Maybe that was Hesse's intention. The first part was a parody of those 'history of the saints' that appear so often and so frequently in all religious traditions. It was interesting, but just didn't mix well with the final parts of the novel. I did like having Knecht's (re)incarnations be outside of time. While Magister Ludi was set in the future, the other incarnations of Magister Ludi were more likely from the past. An interesting construct, but the weight of the last was too little for the heavy front.
But these are frivolous issues. For the most part, I liked the book. It is incredible that in the face of WWII and Nazi Germany Hesse could write this. History and the inevitable burning push of evil must have seemed dark and heavy, but ultimately this book (written from 1931 to 1943) contains the germs of peace and tranquility. I think that peace comes from the idea of a spiritual retreat (a common theme) and surrender. Hesse wasn't saying to run from Evil, although he did himself leave Nazi Germany. But I think his book was communicating the ability to find peace through surrendering to one's own situation and place in the universe. The Glass Bead Game one day will disappear, but so too ONE DAY will fascism and evil, because all of man's creation is a game. So, surrender to the game and surrender to the universe.
That flows to fit whatever form it finds”
― Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game
I remember reading Hesse's Siddhartha and Narcissus and Goldmund right out of high school. There was something both disquieting and uniquely calming about these strange little books that Hesse wrote detailing his love and fascination with Eastern thought and philosophy. I figured this year I would read the Glass Bead Game (and later Steppenwolf). It is in many ways Hesse's subtle answer to the growing Fascism in his country. But, at its heart, it isn't an anti-Fascist book. He is aiming for more. He is thinking bigger.
It is a book about harmony and the arts. The exploration of how music, mathematics, intellectualism and life can become transcendent and beautiful. The Glass Bead Game is a mysterious fill-in that allows it to be at once none and all of man's endeavors. It is a holy raga, a tactile masbaha, a literary syncretism, that captures the whole of man's achievements and is practiced by an elite few. Using the framework of the Game Hesse is able to look at the dynamic of all of man's achievements as being both beautiful, worthwhile, but also frivolous and fleeting. He looks at the tension between those who remove themselves from mankind's experiences with those who live IN the world. There is a pull and a reciprocity between these two groups. He is looking for those things that balance those groups and ultimately those things that cause these groups to separate.
The book also explores the (mostly) Eastern ideas of meditation, surrender, loss and renewal. I found these ideas (obviously) beautiful and rewarding, but I'm still not sure if I really liked the structure of the book: Part 1 (pages 7-44): Introduction to GBG; Part 2 (Pages 45-427): Magister Ludi's story; Part 3 (428-445): Magister Ludi's poems; Part 4 (446-558): The Three Lives (other incarnations of Magister Ludi). I'm just not sure if the structure worked for me. It did well enough, but I loved and hated it too. Maybe that was Hesse's intention. The first part was a parody of those 'history of the saints' that appear so often and so frequently in all religious traditions. It was interesting, but just didn't mix well with the final parts of the novel. I did like having Knecht's (re)incarnations be outside of time. While Magister Ludi was set in the future, the other incarnations of Magister Ludi were more likely from the past. An interesting construct, but the weight of the last was too little for the heavy front.
But these are frivolous issues. For the most part, I liked the book. It is incredible that in the face of WWII and Nazi Germany Hesse could write this. History and the inevitable burning push of evil must have seemed dark and heavy, but ultimately this book (written from 1931 to 1943) contains the germs of peace and tranquility. I think that peace comes from the idea of a spiritual retreat (a common theme) and surrender. Hesse wasn't saying to run from Evil, although he did himself leave Nazi Germany. But I think his book was communicating the ability to find peace through surrendering to one's own situation and place in the universe. The Glass Bead Game one day will disappear, but so too ONE DAY will fascism and evil, because all of man's creation is a game. So, surrender to the game and surrender to the universe.
February 2, 2022
«Quería tan solo intentar vivir lo que tendía a brotar espontáneamente de mí. ¿Por qué había de serme tan difícil?»
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Schiller, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Thomas Mann, Günter Grass, Hermann Hesse.
Aquí, en esta lista está comprimida la mejor literatura que dio jamás Alemania y que difícilmente se igualará.
Hermann Hesse forma parte de esos autores que marcaron a fuego la literatura alemana a partir de su genio inconmensurable y su literatura inolvidable.
“Demian” es uno de los libros clave de su obra junto con “El lobo estepario”, “El juego de Los abalorios”, “Siddhartha”, "Narciso y Goldmundo" o “Bajo las ruedas”.
Escrito a modo de bildungsroman o “novela de formación” nos narra los primeros pasos y la juventud de Emil Sinclair y de cómo se abre este a la vida, narrado por el autor con una prosa maravillosa, tierna y difícil de olvidar.
Emil Sinclair, al igual que los personajes de otras novelas como la de su primo Harry Haller, el lobo estepario, tiene también conexión con otros tamnbién conocidos como lo son Stephen Dedalus, Oscar Matzerath, David Copperfield o Niétochka Nezvanova, solo para traer al tapete a algunos ejemplos en donde la búsqueda de la superación personal y el hacerse camino en la vida es lo que abarca la lectura del libro en cuestión.
En el caso de Emil Sinclair, iremos pasando por las distintas etapas de su vida que incluye esta dicotomía planteada entre el bien y el mal, lo sagrado y lo profano, lo correcto y lo desviado que se le presenta sin dejar de lados sus cavilaciones, sus dudas, sus preguntas y dificultades primero con sus padres, sus primeros compañeros de escuela, el despertar sexual en contraposición con la religión y su especialísima relación con ese muchacho tan enigmático como atrayente: Max Demian.
Toda la vida de Sinclair cambiará a partir del descubrimiento de Demian y será a partir de allí en donde nos encontraremos con las distintas situaciones y pruebas que deberán atravesar ambos personajes que en cierto modo es la vida misma, la de ellos en la ficción o la nuestra propia que cada día nos cambia las reglas del juego.
Una novela corta pero intensamente profunda, maravillosa, de esas que lo dejan a uno pensando ha escrito Hesse en 1919, un año después de terminada la gran Primera Guerra Mundial.
La novela de Hesse es a la vez una mirada sobre quiénes somos y cómo intentamos avanzar en esta, la única vida que nos da Dios, ya que en nuestras manos está la posibilidad de aprovecharla día a día y que no se nos escurra entre las manos como arena.
Al fin y al cabo, aunque no nos demos cuenta, es demasiado corta.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Schiller, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Thomas Mann, Günter Grass, Hermann Hesse.
Aquí, en esta lista está comprimida la mejor literatura que dio jamás Alemania y que difícilmente se igualará.
Hermann Hesse forma parte de esos autores que marcaron a fuego la literatura alemana a partir de su genio inconmensurable y su literatura inolvidable.
“Demian” es uno de los libros clave de su obra junto con “El lobo estepario”, “El juego de Los abalorios”, “Siddhartha”, "Narciso y Goldmundo" o “Bajo las ruedas”.
Escrito a modo de bildungsroman o “novela de formación” nos narra los primeros pasos y la juventud de Emil Sinclair y de cómo se abre este a la vida, narrado por el autor con una prosa maravillosa, tierna y difícil de olvidar.
Emil Sinclair, al igual que los personajes de otras novelas como la de su primo Harry Haller, el lobo estepario, tiene también conexión con otros tamnbién conocidos como lo son Stephen Dedalus, Oscar Matzerath, David Copperfield o Niétochka Nezvanova, solo para traer al tapete a algunos ejemplos en donde la búsqueda de la superación personal y el hacerse camino en la vida es lo que abarca la lectura del libro en cuestión.
En el caso de Emil Sinclair, iremos pasando por las distintas etapas de su vida que incluye esta dicotomía planteada entre el bien y el mal, lo sagrado y lo profano, lo correcto y lo desviado que se le presenta sin dejar de lados sus cavilaciones, sus dudas, sus preguntas y dificultades primero con sus padres, sus primeros compañeros de escuela, el despertar sexual en contraposición con la religión y su especialísima relación con ese muchacho tan enigmático como atrayente: Max Demian.
Toda la vida de Sinclair cambiará a partir del descubrimiento de Demian y será a partir de allí en donde nos encontraremos con las distintas situaciones y pruebas que deberán atravesar ambos personajes que en cierto modo es la vida misma, la de ellos en la ficción o la nuestra propia que cada día nos cambia las reglas del juego.
Una novela corta pero intensamente profunda, maravillosa, de esas que lo dejan a uno pensando ha escrito Hesse en 1919, un año después de terminada la gran Primera Guerra Mundial.
La novela de Hesse es a la vez una mirada sobre quiénes somos y cómo intentamos avanzar en esta, la única vida que nos da Dios, ya que en nuestras manos está la posibilidad de aprovecharla día a día y que no se nos escurra entre las manos como arena.
Al fin y al cabo, aunque no nos demos cuenta, es demasiado corta.
June 4, 2013
I like Herman Hesse. I like Siddhartha, I remember liking Steppenwolf, I like huge sagas that probe the mind. I usually like weighty wordy novels where nothing in particular happens.
I did not like the Glass Bead Game.
I really did not like the Glass Bead Game.
And I don’t understand how people did.
First of all, I’ve gone through a lot of reviews. I was about fifty percent through the book, bored out of my mind, and I started reading reviews trying to get some motivation to finish this tome. I didn’t find ANY. First of all, everyone that gave it lots of stars either didn’t write a review, or wrote a review that’s literally a re-writing of the synopisis from Wikipedia. I’m not trying to insinuate that they didn’t really read it, or that they didn’t really understand it, or even that they are trying to seem cool by giving a Nobel winning book a good star rating--- I’m not insinuating that, but I have to wonder. I didn’t hardly find a single review that actually illuminated what that person actually enjoyed about the book.
Most reviews were along the lines of “This story follows the life of Josef Knecht, who rose to become the youngest Master Ludi.” Or “This book talks about elitism, intellectualism, and touches on Buddhism.”
Ok? But what did any of you THINK about that? I mean, I know WHAT the book is about, I want to know if you enjoyed the presentation of those arguments, the story, did you agree or disagree?
There was nothing about that. So, at 50% through, I stopped reading. I have a rule, I usually give a book 100 pages to grab me, if it’s a long book I’ll give it 200. I gave this book more than a fair shake, I even looked for reasons to keep going, but I don’t think there are any.
There is nothing in this book, that wasn’t a total rehash of every other book that Hesse wrote. So, here is my opinion- this is a dull drab affair in which nothing happens. I feel that there were some really interesting things that COULD have happened, or hell, even a treatise just on the ideals of the Glass Bead Game itself would’ve been more interesting. I love the idea that the GBG is a synthesis of the knowledge and culture of mankind throughout history. The Glass Bead Game is a design that is supposed to move this story forward, that is supposed to be the gravitational pull at the center of the book that all the words orbit around. Instead it’s nothing that’s nearly so forceful; it’s shrouded in mystery, but not the interesting-leaves-you-wondering-days-after-the-book kind, it’s the oh-you-couldn’t-be-bothered-to-actually-figure-it-out kind. That leaves Josef as the driving force of the book, but the only time he comes to life is when the actually interesting side-characters come back into the book, like the Master of Music. Josef is just a receptacle for the intervention of the other characters. So basically this book is like 800 pages of reading about someone with the personality of a garbage can and about some marbles that aren’t ever really described to you. Good luck.
And, if you honestly DID, enjoy it, for the love of god tell me why, without summarizing the book. If I hear a good enough argument I’ll go back and finish it, but at this point, I have no faith that it gets any better, and I cannot force myself into it.
Read Hesse’s other books, they are much more enjoyable. If you want something to touch your soul read Siddhartha.
I did not like the Glass Bead Game.
I really did not like the Glass Bead Game.
And I don’t understand how people did.
First of all, I’ve gone through a lot of reviews. I was about fifty percent through the book, bored out of my mind, and I started reading reviews trying to get some motivation to finish this tome. I didn’t find ANY. First of all, everyone that gave it lots of stars either didn’t write a review, or wrote a review that’s literally a re-writing of the synopisis from Wikipedia. I’m not trying to insinuate that they didn’t really read it, or that they didn’t really understand it, or even that they are trying to seem cool by giving a Nobel winning book a good star rating--- I’m not insinuating that, but I have to wonder. I didn’t hardly find a single review that actually illuminated what that person actually enjoyed about the book.
Most reviews were along the lines of “This story follows the life of Josef Knecht, who rose to become the youngest Master Ludi.” Or “This book talks about elitism, intellectualism, and touches on Buddhism.”
Ok? But what did any of you THINK about that? I mean, I know WHAT the book is about, I want to know if you enjoyed the presentation of those arguments, the story, did you agree or disagree?
There was nothing about that. So, at 50% through, I stopped reading. I have a rule, I usually give a book 100 pages to grab me, if it’s a long book I’ll give it 200. I gave this book more than a fair shake, I even looked for reasons to keep going, but I don’t think there are any.
There is nothing in this book, that wasn’t a total rehash of every other book that Hesse wrote. So, here is my opinion- this is a dull drab affair in which nothing happens. I feel that there were some really interesting things that COULD have happened, or hell, even a treatise just on the ideals of the Glass Bead Game itself would’ve been more interesting. I love the idea that the GBG is a synthesis of the knowledge and culture of mankind throughout history. The Glass Bead Game is a design that is supposed to move this story forward, that is supposed to be the gravitational pull at the center of the book that all the words orbit around. Instead it’s nothing that’s nearly so forceful; it’s shrouded in mystery, but not the interesting-leaves-you-wondering-days-after-the-book kind, it’s the oh-you-couldn’t-be-bothered-to-actually-figure-it-out kind. That leaves Josef as the driving force of the book, but the only time he comes to life is when the actually interesting side-characters come back into the book, like the Master of Music. Josef is just a receptacle for the intervention of the other characters. So basically this book is like 800 pages of reading about someone with the personality of a garbage can and about some marbles that aren’t ever really described to you. Good luck.
And, if you honestly DID, enjoy it, for the love of god tell me why, without summarizing the book. If I hear a good enough argument I’ll go back and finish it, but at this point, I have no faith that it gets any better, and I cannot force myself into it.
Read Hesse’s other books, they are much more enjoyable. If you want something to touch your soul read Siddhartha.
July 29, 2009
i am so glad i give authors three books to make me love them. this was hesse's last chance to woo me, and he really almost got a five-star valentine from me, but we will call it a four and a half - must be a little coy, after all. this is a book that i would love to go back in time and give myself upon graduating from high school. i would love to know whether it would have made me more or less insufferable than i am now. because i could see it going either way, at seventeen. i could see myself taking this as a cautionary tale, in a way, or i could see myself going whole hog into some sort of mystical, quasi-intellectual liter-orgical spree and alienating everyone around me. i can see myself smoking a pipe and holding court with my philosophies and my revelations ohhhh my revelations. as it is, i held no court - i just finished it on the subway, took moll flanders out of my bag, and started reading that, in some quiet bookish equivalent to chain-smoking. but o what could have been...
come to my blog!
come to my blog!
January 1, 2022
بضمير المتكلم، وبإحساس مثقف مر وعيه برحلة مزعجة سعيا لمعرفة نفسه، والميلاد الثاني الذاتي الذي يختار فيه مساره بعد مراحل الغفلة والنزق والعقاب والتمرد والتأمل واستخلاص ما يشبه صورة يرتضيها شعوره من مدركات أعماقه وواقعه وأحلامه، يكتب هرمان هيسة رواية دميان، ذاك الآخر الذي يستطيع أن يكون مساعدا سحريا، وفي الوقت نفسه يثير التساؤلات بصدد قصة إنسانيتنا الكلية
ومع ذلك لا يقتنع القارئ أن إميل سنكلير قد وجد نفسه في نهاية الرواية، وكأنه أصبح من إخوان الصفا، فأن يرى الناس متجهين إلى حرب عالمية بابتسامة تلتمس أخوة مغدورة لا يجعلك تتعاطف مع العالم القاسي
لقد ارتاح إميل سنكلير، إميل المستعار من روسو، إلى حل توفيقي يجمع بين الخير والشر، وكأن هذا هو الجديد، أو كأنه بطل لن أعيش في جلباب أبي الذي حيّرنا معه قبل أن يستقر في دكان بوكالة البلح مجاورا أبيه ومستكملا مساره، ربما كان نموذج نجيب محفوظ في قلب الليل أكثر تمكنا في فهم طموح الروح في الوصول إلى حقيقة تنطق بها وتجد لها صدى في سياق البشرية
أيا كان الأمر - كما كان يقول أستاذنا عبد الله خورشيد - فإن السرد استطاع أن يمضي بك في منطقة تتضافر فيها حيوية المغامرة مع تجريد الفكر، ولكنها قصة تكوين تناسب هوية شاب حائر بين الهداية والغواية، تسيطر عليه نزعة أوديبية رافضة للأب، وراغبة في حضن أم يماثل الإنسانية
تلك الكتابة التي تمضي بإصرار في غابة الذاكرة الكثيفة الأشجار
تتغلغل من الفروع داخل الجذوع صوب الجذور
معها كشّاف الوعي الدقيق الحاد الذي ينفذ في سمك العتمات
سرد معرفة الذات التي تزيح الركام عن صورتها المترامية في أصداء الصمت
الترجمة قصيدة ناصعة متماسكة متمكنة، تحملها صياغة رصينة للجمل المتوازية المحققة لشعرية تجربة شاب يخوض مغامرته الروحية، الأسلوب لا يسير وفقا للمعيارية الصارمة، فاستغلال إمكانات اللغة بخاصة التقديم والتأخير، مع الحفاظ على السبك النصي، منح القارئ صوتا جماليا يليق برواية لها مكانتها في تاريخ رواية التكوين
ومع ذلك لا يقتنع القارئ أن إميل سنكلير قد وجد نفسه في نهاية الرواية، وكأنه أصبح من إخوان الصفا، فأن يرى الناس متجهين إلى حرب عالمية بابتسامة تلتمس أخوة مغدورة لا يجعلك تتعاطف مع العالم القاسي
لقد ارتاح إميل سنكلير، إميل المستعار من روسو، إلى حل توفيقي يجمع بين الخير والشر، وكأن هذا هو الجديد، أو كأنه بطل لن أعيش في جلباب أبي الذي حيّرنا معه قبل أن يستقر في دكان بوكالة البلح مجاورا أبيه ومستكملا مساره، ربما كان نموذج نجيب محفوظ في قلب الليل أكثر تمكنا في فهم طموح الروح في الوصول إلى حقيقة تنطق بها وتجد لها صدى في سياق البشرية
أيا كان الأمر - كما كان يقول أستاذنا عبد الله خورشيد - فإن السرد استطاع أن يمضي بك في منطقة تتضافر فيها حيوية المغامرة مع تجريد الفكر، ولكنها قصة تكوين تناسب هوية شاب حائر بين الهداية والغواية، تسيطر عليه نزعة أوديبية رافضة للأب، وراغبة في حضن أم يماثل الإنسانية
تلك الكتابة التي تمضي بإصرار في غابة الذاكرة الكثيفة الأشجار
تتغلغل من الفروع داخل الجذوع صوب الجذور
معها كشّاف الوعي الدقيق الحاد الذي ينفذ في سمك العتمات
سرد معرفة الذات التي تزيح الركام عن صورتها المترامية في أصداء الصمت
الترجمة قصيدة ناصعة متماسكة متمكنة، تحملها صياغة رصينة للجمل المتوازية المحققة لشعرية تجربة شاب يخوض مغامرته الروحية، الأسلوب لا يسير وفقا للمعيارية الصارمة، فاستغلال إمكانات اللغة بخاصة التقديم والتأخير، مع الحفاظ على السبك النصي، منح القارئ صوتا جماليا يليق برواية لها مكانتها في تاريخ رواية التكوين
October 28, 2022
„Ca orice idee mare, jocul acesta nu are propriu-zis un început, ci, ca idee, a existat întotdeauna... Ideea jocului este veșnică; prin aceasta a existat și s-a manifestat cu mult înainte de realizarea ei în practică”.
Mi-am găsit notele de la prima lectură. Au trecut vreo 15 ani. Pot face, așadar, o comparație. Priveam romanul ca pe o carte de eterată înțelepciune și copiam răbdător fraze complicate, cu mulți termeni abstracți, care acum nu-mi mai spun absolut nimic. Sugerau ceva cu privire la muzică: „Muzica ia ființă din măsură și-și trage sevele din Marele Unic. Marele Unic este genitorul celor doi poli; cei doi poli dau mișcare puterii întunericului și luminii etc.”. Mai obscur decît atît nu se poate...
Nu prea mă interesa pe atunci ce povestește la propriu cartea lui Hesse, o priveam ca pe o biografie a unui ales angelic (asemănătoare cu Doctor Faustus a lui Thomas Mann, care prezintă, în schimb, un ales diabolic) și căutam îndeosebi „metafizica” romanului. Fără spor...
Acțiunea se petrece pe la anul 2400 și ceva, undeva într-o provincie a fericiților, Castalia. Romanul ar fi, așadar, o utopie, descrierea unei lumi a seninătății calme și a jocurilor ingenioase.
În Castalia, elita tinerimii luminate studiază cu magiștri eminenți (există și un Magistru al muzicii) în condiții ascetice. Unii elevi nu rezistă privațiunilor și se întorc în lumea oamenilor obișnuiți. Alții fac față cu brio. Dintre învățăcei se remarcă, firește, prin însușiri ieșite din comun, Joseph Knecht (Knecht = slugă). Mai tîrziu, Knecht este ales în fruntea ordinului castalian și primește titlul ambiguu de Magister Ludi (în latină, „ludus, ludi” înseamnă școală, joc, spectacol etc.).
Magistru al Școlii și al Jocului: dar în ce constă jocul? Criticii și-au bătut capul ani de zile (nu s-au oprit nici astăzi) să ghicească la ce anume s-a referit autorul cînd și-a întitulat romanul Das Glasperlenspiel. Încă nu s-a ajuns la o concluzie fermă, nu sînt temeiuri, găsim doar ipoteze de lectură. Vagul în care se păstrează naratorii (romanul are mai mulți) m-a intrigat și la prima lectură. Cum adică? Ce fel de joc e acesta? Nu știu de ce, dar m-am gîndit atunci la un șirag de mătănii, cam așa se traduce termenul german. Inițiații stau, meditează și rotesc cu dexteritate mărgele pe degete, așa cum în altă parte călugării orientali fac să se miște o roată / morișcă a rugăciunilor. Altceva nu mi-a trecut prin minte și nici nu avea cum. Era o conjectură puerilă, recunosc... Acum, mă gîndesc că este vorba de o limbă perfectă de formule matematice, o „characteristica universalis”, așa cum a propus cîndva Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz.
Deci, jocul cu mărgele de sticlă rămîne un mister, o activitate (pur mintală?). Are legătură cu muzica și cu notele muzicale, asta e sigur, dar mai precis nu se știe, nimeni n-a pătruns mai departe. Tinerii sînt educați să se prindă într-un joc extins (și asta m-a frapat prima dată, inițiații sînt răspîndiți pretutindeni). Studierea jocului este anevoioasă:
„Regulile acestui joc al jocurilor se învață numai pe calea obișnuită, prescrisă, care cere cîțiva ani, și nimeni dintre inițiați nu ar putea avea vreun interes să facă aceste reguli ale jocului mai ușor de învățat”.
Partea cea mai amuzantă a romanului este descrierea epocii actuale, numită „epocă a foiletoanelor” și a răspîndirii cunoașterii prin vulgarizare (prelecțiuni cu public). Eu nu văd nimic rău în asta, dar prozatorul pare a privi foiletonul (și restul) ca un semn definitiv al declinului și dezordinii, o neputință de a reconstitui un întreg spart în fragmente pestrițe. Într-un fel, Hermann Hesse a văzut corect. Astăzi toată lumea compune articole, foiletoane și eseuri (inclusiv susiscălitul), prelegeri nu se mai țin din pricina pandemiei:
„Ei, care citeau atîtea articole şi audiau atîtea conferinţe, nu-şi acordau timp şi nu-şi dădeau osteneala să se fortifice împotriva fricii, să combată în sufletul lor teama de moarte, trăiau tresărind şi nu mai credeau în nici o dimineaţă”.
Așadar, foiletoanele și interviurile de azi sînt semne de superficialitate și ascund un rău mai adînc...
Mă întreb dacă un astfel de roman mai are astăzi cititori și nu știu ce să răspund, mă cam îndoiesc...
P. S. Desigur, romanul cuprinde și o discuție despre relația dintre lumea formelor platoniciene și istorie. Formele se situează în afara timpului, dar cel care le contemplă senin e afectat de vremelnicie. Joseph Knecht moare tînăr...
July 9, 2023
Demian is a semi-autobiographical novel written by Hermann Hesse. Combining Hesse's own experiences with theories of psychoanalysis of Carl Jung, Nietzschean philosophy, and Eastern Mysticism, Hesse writes a story of Emil Sinclair's journey from "the world of illusion" to the "world of reality".
Emil Sinclair lives through a naive childhood, in a "world of illusion", completely believing in the conventional morality he was brought up in. A childish lie of his subjects him to the clutches of a bully who compels him to commit acts that are nothing but "crimes" according to Christian morality. Sinclair leads a miserable existence repenting over his sins. However, his meeting with Max Demian, an older student at his school, changes all. For the rest of Sinclair's life, Max Demian becomes a powerful influence and guide for Sinclair. He not only frees Sinclair from the clutches of the bully but also frees him from conventional morality, teaching Sinclair to accept unconventional thoughts ("the world of darkness") as part of human nature. Demian teaches Sinclair that God and Demon both exist within a man and it's for the man to deal with the inner Demon and raise the self towards God. This teaching denies that a man can be governed by external forces like good and evil as set by conventional morality but by the deeper inner spirit. It is then for the man to purify his inner spirit so as to become closer to God.
Sinclair's path to finding "the real world" is not easy. It is shrouded by the illusory world which is dictated by conventional morality. These social rules, strongly influenced by Christianity, bind humans so strongly that one cannot break free at once. Demian's teachings question his once secure world of illusion and slowly shatter it. Unable to comprehend these new doctrines, Sinclair rebels against everything he believed in. He walks through a path of self-destruction and is saved by two intermediate mentors. Demian's return to Sinclair's life marks his ultimate salvation, and together with his mother, Frau Eva, Demian awakens Sinclair's mind towards self-realization.
The story has many symbolic representations. Hesse's description of psychoanalytic theories comes to life in the form of a symbolic narrative drawn from Christian theology. Even the characters of Max Demian and Frau Eva can be explained as symbols. In more than one instance, Demian is portrayed as Sinclair's deep inner self. And Frau Eva represents Sinclair's feelings of love and longing for physical intimacy. In other words, Frau Eva is symbolic of Sinclair's sensuality. Another symbolic interpretation I drew on the characters of Demian and Eva is that they represent Sinclair's masculine and feminine elements respectively. In ancient times, it was believed that harmony of both masculine and feminine elements of oneself is essential for one's supreme spiritual attainment, and I felt both Demian's death and his kiss to Sinclair on behalf of his mother at the point of his death symbolizes the complete masculine and feminine harmony one attains within oneself. When one is in harmony with oneself, the port for self-realization opens to him.
The novel is filled with thought-provoking philosophical content. The themes expounded are impressive. The experimental style of writing with symbolic narrative, which while beautiful, is not the easiest to read. Nor can I claim that the story was particularly interesting. Nevertheless, it has the power to elevate the readers' minds toward new dimensions.
More of my reviews can be found at http://piyangiejay.com/
Emil Sinclair lives through a naive childhood, in a "world of illusion", completely believing in the conventional morality he was brought up in. A childish lie of his subjects him to the clutches of a bully who compels him to commit acts that are nothing but "crimes" according to Christian morality. Sinclair leads a miserable existence repenting over his sins. However, his meeting with Max Demian, an older student at his school, changes all. For the rest of Sinclair's life, Max Demian becomes a powerful influence and guide for Sinclair. He not only frees Sinclair from the clutches of the bully but also frees him from conventional morality, teaching Sinclair to accept unconventional thoughts ("the world of darkness") as part of human nature. Demian teaches Sinclair that God and Demon both exist within a man and it's for the man to deal with the inner Demon and raise the self towards God. This teaching denies that a man can be governed by external forces like good and evil as set by conventional morality but by the deeper inner spirit. It is then for the man to purify his inner spirit so as to become closer to God.
Sinclair's path to finding "the real world" is not easy. It is shrouded by the illusory world which is dictated by conventional morality. These social rules, strongly influenced by Christianity, bind humans so strongly that one cannot break free at once. Demian's teachings question his once secure world of illusion and slowly shatter it. Unable to comprehend these new doctrines, Sinclair rebels against everything he believed in. He walks through a path of self-destruction and is saved by two intermediate mentors. Demian's return to Sinclair's life marks his ultimate salvation, and together with his mother, Frau Eva, Demian awakens Sinclair's mind towards self-realization.
The story has many symbolic representations. Hesse's description of psychoanalytic theories comes to life in the form of a symbolic narrative drawn from Christian theology. Even the characters of Max Demian and Frau Eva can be explained as symbols. In more than one instance, Demian is portrayed as Sinclair's deep inner self. And Frau Eva represents Sinclair's feelings of love and longing for physical intimacy. In other words, Frau Eva is symbolic of Sinclair's sensuality. Another symbolic interpretation I drew on the characters of Demian and Eva is that they represent Sinclair's masculine and feminine elements respectively. In ancient times, it was believed that harmony of both masculine and feminine elements of oneself is essential for one's supreme spiritual attainment, and I felt both Demian's death and his kiss to Sinclair on behalf of his mother at the point of his death symbolizes the complete masculine and feminine harmony one attains within oneself. When one is in harmony with oneself, the port for self-realization opens to him.
The novel is filled with thought-provoking philosophical content. The themes expounded are impressive. The experimental style of writing with symbolic narrative, which while beautiful, is not the easiest to read. Nor can I claim that the story was particularly interesting. Nevertheless, it has the power to elevate the readers' minds toward new dimensions.
More of my reviews can be found at http://piyangiejay.com/
March 21, 2015
"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."
It's quite timely that I read this one so soon after reading Zweig's tale ( Burning Secret ) about a young boy leaving childhood. This book followed a similar thread, a boy named Emil goes through his personal journey of becoming, and it definitely goes into more depth. Unlike Zweig's book, our protagonist comes of age in the real world, not in an isolated setting, and he does so with a sort of spiritual guide, a curious boy named Demian.
I haven't read Hesse since I was a teenager and I think this book would have been even more impactful to me at that time, when I was trying to discover myself and choose my path. Even so, I really did enjoy this book and I found myself relating so much to this little German boy, something I never expected to be able to do.
Entering the mind of a child on the journey to find out who he or she is, something I hadn't thought of for a long time, was very interesting because it's so easy to forget that we all go through this phase, a time of pain or angst for many when we lose our innocence, learn new things, discover new philosophies, and struggle to find meaning.
I felt I could relate more to the younger Emil, which makes sense because he and I chose very different paths.
Hesse is very philosophical and I enjoyed the conversation on spirituality and dualism although I can’t necessarily say I agreed with them. I was left with several thought-provoking quotes, some I will include here:
"I have been and still am a seeker, but I have ceased to question stars and books; I have begun to listen to the teachings my blood whispers to me."
"Each man's life represents a road toward himself, an attempt at such a road, the intimation of a path."
"Examine a person closely enough and you know more about him than he does himself.'
"I wanted only to try to live in accord with the promptings which came from my true self. Why was that so very difficult?”
It's quite timely that I read this one so soon after reading Zweig's tale ( Burning Secret ) about a young boy leaving childhood. This book followed a similar thread, a boy named Emil goes through his personal journey of becoming, and it definitely goes into more depth. Unlike Zweig's book, our protagonist comes of age in the real world, not in an isolated setting, and he does so with a sort of spiritual guide, a curious boy named Demian.
I haven't read Hesse since I was a teenager and I think this book would have been even more impactful to me at that time, when I was trying to discover myself and choose my path. Even so, I really did enjoy this book and I found myself relating so much to this little German boy, something I never expected to be able to do.
Entering the mind of a child on the journey to find out who he or she is, something I hadn't thought of for a long time, was very interesting because it's so easy to forget that we all go through this phase, a time of pain or angst for many when we lose our innocence, learn new things, discover new philosophies, and struggle to find meaning.
I felt I could relate more to the younger Emil, which makes sense because he and I chose very different paths.
Hesse is very philosophical and I enjoyed the conversation on spirituality and dualism although I can’t necessarily say I agreed with them. I was left with several thought-provoking quotes, some I will include here:
"I have been and still am a seeker, but I have ceased to question stars and books; I have begun to listen to the teachings my blood whispers to me."
"Each man's life represents a road toward himself, an attempt at such a road, the intimation of a path."
"Examine a person closely enough and you know more about him than he does himself.'
"I wanted only to try to live in accord with the promptings which came from my true self. Why was that so very difficult?”
July 18, 2024
What another mixed -up kid trying to discover in life what is real , important and indeed even worth living book, the great German writer Herman Hesse's life resembles the plot to a certain degree, his popularity spiked sky high in the decade of the turbulent, chaotic unrest of the 1960s. The sensitive youth Emil Sinclair a shy fainted-hearted rather aimless boy of ten living in a town by the Black Forest in Germany before the cataclysm of the First World War...No surprise an older boy Franz Kromer sees the weakling, bullies and threatens Mr. Sinclair into becoming a pathetic and reluctant juvenile delinquent a virtual slave , any petty crime he will do. Afraid to inform his loving parents or sisters, a bit of a coward, we would say unkindly. Intimidated , but like an angel of mercy another kid by the name of Demian brings light into a world of endless, shadowy night of drab darkness, terrifying the jerk and despair evaporates, from a boy he hardly knowns , hope flows. Mr. Kromer disappears into the background but his new, mysterious friend is a vague apparition too, maybe,
still will he endure , help the helpless, give direction , bravery and strength which Mr. Sinclair desperately requires to feel normal, whatever that is. Thus the teachings begins in earnest for the would -be confused seeker of truth, knowledge and enlightenment. A quest , a rather slim one to discover a spiritual heaven on earth , to perceive God's will if not his grace. It is a bumping road, a journey which seems infinite yet required for salvation. The novel is a genuine voyage, yes not only an entertainment, but a look into the possible. Sinclair becomes older if not wiser, will he prevail though ? Demian where has he gone , the boy Emil , a student dreams of this enigma, the image floats in his brain and finally at last sees his hero on the lonely streets, he's attending the same university. Meeting the mother of the friend and idol , Frau Eva , a beautiful, charming, intelligent, charismatic older woman, the magic is apparent the attractions very palpable. However nothing last forever or seems real , the troubled man boy nevertheless becomes content, this is home. No more wandering around, quite a refuge from the distractions, noises and the phony people, even better than in his parents and siblings house. A difficult almost plotless story, a deep exercise in obscure religious beliefs, and rites, as the mind of a child and body grows to adulthood. Experiences mental aberrations, uneasiness, but could be a monumental path forward . Still lots of others from all walks of humanity, living in many corners of our enormous sphere have liked, however, more I think did not and will not. But I did very much so.
still will he endure , help the helpless, give direction , bravery and strength which Mr. Sinclair desperately requires to feel normal, whatever that is. Thus the teachings begins in earnest for the would -be confused seeker of truth, knowledge and enlightenment. A quest , a rather slim one to discover a spiritual heaven on earth , to perceive God's will if not his grace. It is a bumping road, a journey which seems infinite yet required for salvation. The novel is a genuine voyage, yes not only an entertainment, but a look into the possible. Sinclair becomes older if not wiser, will he prevail though ? Demian where has he gone , the boy Emil , a student dreams of this enigma, the image floats in his brain and finally at last sees his hero on the lonely streets, he's attending the same university. Meeting the mother of the friend and idol , Frau Eva , a beautiful, charming, intelligent, charismatic older woman, the magic is apparent the attractions very palpable. However nothing last forever or seems real , the troubled man boy nevertheless becomes content, this is home. No more wandering around, quite a refuge from the distractions, noises and the phony people, even better than in his parents and siblings house. A difficult almost plotless story, a deep exercise in obscure religious beliefs, and rites, as the mind of a child and body grows to adulthood. Experiences mental aberrations, uneasiness, but could be a monumental path forward . Still lots of others from all walks of humanity, living in many corners of our enormous sphere have liked, however, more I think did not and will not. But I did very much so.
December 22, 2022
Compare this: Do I know where hell is? Hell is in hello. Heaven is goodbye forever, it’s time for me to go.
With this:
If we accept a home of our own making, Familiar habit makes for indolence. We must prepare for parting and leave taking Or else remain the slaves of permanence.
Much the same thought is expressed in each one, though admittedly the first has more snap. And if you ever heard Lee Marvin growl through Wand’rin’ Star you won’t have forgotten it’s from the film of the musical Paint Your Wagon (1969). I’ve sometimes wondered if lyricist Alan Jay Lerner had been reading his Hermann Hesse.
The second extract has a little more heft, which you’ll be expecting by the time you come to it in one of Joseph Knecht’s student poems. It’s his fictional biography that’s at the center of The Glass Bead Game. And Hermann Hesse doesn’t do snappy. Or for that matter any explanation of how the bead game is played, even with more than five hundred pages available to try.
An account of the game’s invention begins well, but then as it develops dissolves in complexity, ambiguities, obscurity, the mystic. Much like Joseph’s story. Much like life. I remember being wowed by the author’s Siddhartha and Steppenwolf long years ago. But increasingly as I get older, I prize clarity and ideas that can be articulated to me. I don’t need to agree with them, but I do Iike to know where they stand. That said, Joseph Knecht’s is quite a journey of discovery, Master of the Glass Bead Game, leaden poet (at least in English translation), mysticism and all. It’s a work of maturity, Hesse’s last work published in exile in Switzerland amid the second world war. Even so, it might just be that I’ve grown too old for it. You might not have.
With this:
If we accept a home of our own making, Familiar habit makes for indolence. We must prepare for parting and leave taking Or else remain the slaves of permanence.
Much the same thought is expressed in each one, though admittedly the first has more snap. And if you ever heard Lee Marvin growl through Wand’rin’ Star you won’t have forgotten it’s from the film of the musical Paint Your Wagon (1969). I’ve sometimes wondered if lyricist Alan Jay Lerner had been reading his Hermann Hesse.
The second extract has a little more heft, which you’ll be expecting by the time you come to it in one of Joseph Knecht’s student poems. It’s his fictional biography that’s at the center of The Glass Bead Game. And Hermann Hesse doesn’t do snappy. Or for that matter any explanation of how the bead game is played, even with more than five hundred pages available to try.
An account of the game’s invention begins well, but then as it develops dissolves in complexity, ambiguities, obscurity, the mystic. Much like Joseph’s story. Much like life. I remember being wowed by the author’s Siddhartha and Steppenwolf long years ago. But increasingly as I get older, I prize clarity and ideas that can be articulated to me. I don’t need to agree with them, but I do Iike to know where they stand. That said, Joseph Knecht’s is quite a journey of discovery, Master of the Glass Bead Game, leaden poet (at least in English translation), mysticism and all. It’s a work of maturity, Hesse’s last work published in exile in Switzerland amid the second world war. Even so, it might just be that I’ve grown too old for it. You might not have.
November 1, 2015
دوستانی که دنبال خط داستانی و فراز و نشیب داستان نویسی هستن سراغ این کتاب نرن.
این کتاب بیشتر جنبه فلسفی داره تا جنبه سرگرمی و داستان.
اولین کتابی بود که از هسه می خوندم، عالی بود :)
این کتاب بیشتر جنبه فلسفی داره تا جنبه سرگرمی و داستان.
اولین کتابی بود که از هسه می خوندم، عالی بود :)
November 29, 2011
الرواية صغيرة، ولكنها وعرة وكما هي عادة هرمان هيسه .. فهي ليست نصاً سهلاً، ولا بيضاً مسلوقاً، ولا شيئا تستطيع أن تقرأه وتستوعبه كاملاً ما لم تمنحه نفسك كاملاً. الرواية رحلة داخلية يخوضها البطل صوب ذاته، وعليه فهي فقيرة بالأحداث والحوارات (نسبياً) .. ومليئة بتلك العبارات التي تضيء وتلتبسُ في غياهب المعنى. الرواية جميلة، تغادرها وأنت تحسّ بأنك .. هممم .. لست الشخص نفسه؟
July 13, 2026
Not all books survive the test of time.
This second-hand philosophy wrapped in an intricate overly complicated writing was very tedious. Some ideas were interesting but mostly they were lost in between boring uneventful descriptions. The book is plotless and tell the story of an unlikable uninteresting man. It attempts to explore master-student dynamic and introduce spirituality. But again, very boring.
This second-hand philosophy wrapped in an intricate overly complicated writing was very tedious. Some ideas were interesting but mostly they were lost in between boring uneventful descriptions. The book is plotless and tell the story of an unlikable uninteresting man. It attempts to explore master-student dynamic and introduce spirituality. But again, very boring.
August 10, 2018
“Man knows how much powder it takes to kill a man, but doesn’t know how to be happy.”—Demian
Update, 7/3/19: I reread this with a small group of students reading Growing Up novels. We have read so far James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Jeffery Eugenides' The Virgin Suicides and now this. All three I realize deal with the struggle between spirituality and sensuality for young people "coming-of-age."
Original review, edited a little, 8/6/18:
Demian: The Story of Emil Sinclair’s Youth is a 1919 novel situated early on in pre-WWI world of an adolescent boy, Emil, who early on is bullied, with Max Demian intervening on his behalf. I first read it when I was 16 and was thoroughly engaged in it. It wasn’t until I reread it recently that I realized how it had influenced my early thinking about spirituality and identity. More accessible than Steppenwolf or even Siddhartha, it was one of my very favorite Hesse books, because it situates the spiritual (and in this case Hindi) and psychological (in this case Jungian) ideas in a story of what seem to be real young people (as opposed to abstractions, though some scenes featuring just ideological/spiritual conversations can seem pretty abstract).
It’s a story, like most Hesse stories, about a young man in the west (specifically Germany, and probably Hesse himself) who comes to Enlightenment by trying to fuse different things he cares about from western and eastern philosophical traditions. The early bullying trauma is the most engaging section of the book because it is the most narrative, feels the most real, like it is pulled right out of Hesse’s own life. The rest of the book is a kind of condensed developmental allegory of the coming of age ideas of Emil. There are a variety of boys who help lead Emil, a good boy, along a path of doubting the conventional religion with which he was raised, into a time of worldly pursuits and drinking, and back somewhat more in the direction of the Light, the Sacred, and self-realization.
Max Demian is a kind of doppleganger, a shadow self, in Emil Sinclair's Jungian struggle between the shadow and the light. The dialogues in the book between Demian and Sinclair (and other, older boys in the book) feel real enough, but they can also be seen as self- or inner-dialogues. Demian gets him to question conventional interpretations of Biblical stories. He gets him to be skeptical, to doubt, to more freely interpret everything he sees and reads. There is a kind of Jungian dualism that Sinclair struggles with, and a Hindu struggle between the world of illusion (the Hindu concept of Maya) and the real world, the world of spiritual truth, but it is different than the Good-Evil dualism of Christianity in which he was raised.
The backdrop of the book is WWI, and a sense that the world must die before it is reborn into a better thing:
“The bird struggles out of the egg. The egg is the world. Who would be born must first destroy a world. The bird then flies to God. That God's name is Abraxas.”
Abraxas would seem to be the God of a New Religion that emerges when people see through their worldly illusions. This didn’t really work out, Herman, did it? Or it may have for a few million people, but not far enough to truly transform the planet. It’s interesting to see the trend in the US to seek more women politicians to replace rapaciously worldly men. Because in Hesse’s conception, Emil falls in love with a girl named Beatrice that represents to him a kind of spiritual ideal consistent with this New Religion. I think Email/Hesse thinks going the way of women is generally better than the way of men.
Emil Sinclair later in the book seems to fall in love, too, with Frau Eva, Max Demian’s mother, whom he views as an image of “the Universal Mother,” which maybe evolved into the sixties conception of the Earth Mother, a feminist environmental ideal that was seen as possibly a key to saving the planet. Emil sees Eva as a Goddess image, the Female ideal, representing an ethereal, sensual, emotional life in contrast to the world of men that leads us to death and war. Ironically, most of Sinclair’s transformations happens through conversations in and through intense relationships with boys, such as Demian and Pistorius. Not teachers, but somewhat older boys who open up his mind to different ideas.
Interestingly, for a guy who develops a kind of Goddess ideal, Emil has almost no real connection to women or girls at all, so he idealizes them in various ways. If he meets a woman, such as Beatrice, he thinks about her, he watches her, but never really talks to her. Other boys seem to have early sexual experiences, but not Sinclair. And yet Woman becomes for Emil the Ideal Spiritual/bodily guide for him. Sinclair’s challenge: Can he find a way to weave together sexuality (the body, attraction, something renounced by Christianity) and holiness (the Spirit) in Love? And to find the Feminine in himself without completing renouncing the Masculine. Not opposites, but a fusion of the two.
Demian and Max fight in WWI, and one can see how Demian (the book) was so popular among young anti-war people in 1919, after "the war to end all wars," and again in the anti-Vietnam War sixties/early seventies. What Hesse encourages is for young people to “discover their true selves,” and to “follow their inner vision.” Love can be part of that process, of course, but it never seems to me a truly social love, or a social self, with a commitment to changing the world. Hesse’s is a spiritual quest, a quest for Self-Enlightenment.
When I was 16 I was highly encouraged to make what we called in the Dutch Reformed Church “Profession of Faith” in keeping with the tenets of the Heidelberg Catechsim, which we had to basically memorize over a series of years. I was a skeptic, taking notes on sermons I heard that made me worry about my church's Calvinist grounding in Original Sin. We were all--in my church's most conservative version of this view--to see ourselves fundamentally as Sinners. During this same year I read Demian and other works by Hesse. And in the next couple years, I would read the existentialists, and Dostoevsky. It was my Aunt Florence who emerged in this time as my Universal Mother: A one-time flapper, an artist, a teacher, a nudist, joyful, not at all like my Dutch Reformed traditions. She told me once (when I was maybe fourteen?) that she had never believed in the idea of Hell, and this sort of stunned me, because I could never understand it, either, but I was surprised and glad to find someone who agreed with me within my family. Like Emil, who was confirmed in his Church even as he left it, I made my parents happy and made a "Profession of Faith," even as I faced the possibility of being drafted in the Vietnam war. Unlike Emil and Demian, I never served in the military nor fired a weapon in a war.
I was possessed as a young man like Emil with intense feelings ranging from joy to self-pity to melancholy, which is to say adolescence, I guess, and my experience like Emil's featured intense discussions of books and the ideas embodied in them. Self-exploration was central for me at 16, and what contributions I might make to the needs other people were secondary, until I decided to work in a psychiatric institution for some years, and then become a teacher. I very much liked revisiting my past self through this book. I maybe didn't love it as much as I did when I first read it, but I will hold on to my 5 starring of it that I felt then.
Update, 7/3/19: I reread this with a small group of students reading Growing Up novels. We have read so far James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Jeffery Eugenides' The Virgin Suicides and now this. All three I realize deal with the struggle between spirituality and sensuality for young people "coming-of-age."
Original review, edited a little, 8/6/18:
Demian: The Story of Emil Sinclair’s Youth is a 1919 novel situated early on in pre-WWI world of an adolescent boy, Emil, who early on is bullied, with Max Demian intervening on his behalf. I first read it when I was 16 and was thoroughly engaged in it. It wasn’t until I reread it recently that I realized how it had influenced my early thinking about spirituality and identity. More accessible than Steppenwolf or even Siddhartha, it was one of my very favorite Hesse books, because it situates the spiritual (and in this case Hindi) and psychological (in this case Jungian) ideas in a story of what seem to be real young people (as opposed to abstractions, though some scenes featuring just ideological/spiritual conversations can seem pretty abstract).
It’s a story, like most Hesse stories, about a young man in the west (specifically Germany, and probably Hesse himself) who comes to Enlightenment by trying to fuse different things he cares about from western and eastern philosophical traditions. The early bullying trauma is the most engaging section of the book because it is the most narrative, feels the most real, like it is pulled right out of Hesse’s own life. The rest of the book is a kind of condensed developmental allegory of the coming of age ideas of Emil. There are a variety of boys who help lead Emil, a good boy, along a path of doubting the conventional religion with which he was raised, into a time of worldly pursuits and drinking, and back somewhat more in the direction of the Light, the Sacred, and self-realization.
Max Demian is a kind of doppleganger, a shadow self, in Emil Sinclair's Jungian struggle between the shadow and the light. The dialogues in the book between Demian and Sinclair (and other, older boys in the book) feel real enough, but they can also be seen as self- or inner-dialogues. Demian gets him to question conventional interpretations of Biblical stories. He gets him to be skeptical, to doubt, to more freely interpret everything he sees and reads. There is a kind of Jungian dualism that Sinclair struggles with, and a Hindu struggle between the world of illusion (the Hindu concept of Maya) and the real world, the world of spiritual truth, but it is different than the Good-Evil dualism of Christianity in which he was raised.
The backdrop of the book is WWI, and a sense that the world must die before it is reborn into a better thing:
“The bird struggles out of the egg. The egg is the world. Who would be born must first destroy a world. The bird then flies to God. That God's name is Abraxas.”
Abraxas would seem to be the God of a New Religion that emerges when people see through their worldly illusions. This didn’t really work out, Herman, did it? Or it may have for a few million people, but not far enough to truly transform the planet. It’s interesting to see the trend in the US to seek more women politicians to replace rapaciously worldly men. Because in Hesse’s conception, Emil falls in love with a girl named Beatrice that represents to him a kind of spiritual ideal consistent with this New Religion. I think Email/Hesse thinks going the way of women is generally better than the way of men.
Emil Sinclair later in the book seems to fall in love, too, with Frau Eva, Max Demian’s mother, whom he views as an image of “the Universal Mother,” which maybe evolved into the sixties conception of the Earth Mother, a feminist environmental ideal that was seen as possibly a key to saving the planet. Emil sees Eva as a Goddess image, the Female ideal, representing an ethereal, sensual, emotional life in contrast to the world of men that leads us to death and war. Ironically, most of Sinclair’s transformations happens through conversations in and through intense relationships with boys, such as Demian and Pistorius. Not teachers, but somewhat older boys who open up his mind to different ideas.
Interestingly, for a guy who develops a kind of Goddess ideal, Emil has almost no real connection to women or girls at all, so he idealizes them in various ways. If he meets a woman, such as Beatrice, he thinks about her, he watches her, but never really talks to her. Other boys seem to have early sexual experiences, but not Sinclair. And yet Woman becomes for Emil the Ideal Spiritual/bodily guide for him. Sinclair’s challenge: Can he find a way to weave together sexuality (the body, attraction, something renounced by Christianity) and holiness (the Spirit) in Love? And to find the Feminine in himself without completing renouncing the Masculine. Not opposites, but a fusion of the two.
Demian and Max fight in WWI, and one can see how Demian (the book) was so popular among young anti-war people in 1919, after "the war to end all wars," and again in the anti-Vietnam War sixties/early seventies. What Hesse encourages is for young people to “discover their true selves,” and to “follow their inner vision.” Love can be part of that process, of course, but it never seems to me a truly social love, or a social self, with a commitment to changing the world. Hesse’s is a spiritual quest, a quest for Self-Enlightenment.
When I was 16 I was highly encouraged to make what we called in the Dutch Reformed Church “Profession of Faith” in keeping with the tenets of the Heidelberg Catechsim, which we had to basically memorize over a series of years. I was a skeptic, taking notes on sermons I heard that made me worry about my church's Calvinist grounding in Original Sin. We were all--in my church's most conservative version of this view--to see ourselves fundamentally as Sinners. During this same year I read Demian and other works by Hesse. And in the next couple years, I would read the existentialists, and Dostoevsky. It was my Aunt Florence who emerged in this time as my Universal Mother: A one-time flapper, an artist, a teacher, a nudist, joyful, not at all like my Dutch Reformed traditions. She told me once (when I was maybe fourteen?) that she had never believed in the idea of Hell, and this sort of stunned me, because I could never understand it, either, but I was surprised and glad to find someone who agreed with me within my family. Like Emil, who was confirmed in his Church even as he left it, I made my parents happy and made a "Profession of Faith," even as I faced the possibility of being drafted in the Vietnam war. Unlike Emil and Demian, I never served in the military nor fired a weapon in a war.
I was possessed as a young man like Emil with intense feelings ranging from joy to self-pity to melancholy, which is to say adolescence, I guess, and my experience like Emil's featured intense discussions of books and the ideas embodied in them. Self-exploration was central for me at 16, and what contributions I might make to the needs other people were secondary, until I decided to work in a psychiatric institution for some years, and then become a teacher. I very much liked revisiting my past self through this book. I maybe didn't love it as much as I did when I first read it, but I will hold on to my 5 starring of it that I felt then.
June 1, 2012
Nutshell: dude goes to school, grover-dills around town with various people, and finally goes off to war, either WWI or a predicted WWII.
Along the way, some amusing readings of biblical events, delivered by Demian, the obscure object of desire in the story, regarding Golgotha (51) and Cain (23-24), the latter of which notes that "the first element of the story, its actual beginning, is the mark." The "Mark of Cain" is a metaphor that stays with the narrator the entire story, though it's not obvious what the point happens to be, though the narrator believes that he felt it for the first time (110) after committing a "trival and careless act of brutality" (109).
The story presents juveniles in a non-patronizing way, and the narrator notes that "some people will not believe that a child of little more than ten years is capable of having such feelings" (29). Zizek, in The Sublime Object of Ideology, explains that "a crucial feature of [Chaplin's] burlesques [is] a vicious, sadistic, humiliating attitude towards children: in Chaplin's films, children are not treated with the usual sweetness: they are teased, mocked, laughed at for their failures, food is scattered for them as if they were chickens, and so on. The question to ask here, however, is from which point must we look at children so that they appear to us as objects of teasing and mocking, not gentle creatures needing protection? The answer, of course, is the gaze of the children themselves" (118-19).
So, if we agree with Zizek as to the principle, it's easy to read this as a serious bildungsroman in the tradition of Goethe's Werther, which is how Mann reads it, in his introduction to the volume.
On the other hand, however, the eponymous character is presented as superhuman; he practices the "art known as thought reading" (31), through which, e.g., "his face tells me he's a first-rate bastard," regarding a third character (32). (This is likely a key text, therefore, behind R. Scott Bakker's writings, from which he has apparently lifted the semiotics of face on which his narrative relies so heavily.)
The superhuman friend appears to dispute human freedom (46) and suggests the "poverty of religion" (52), all without ceasing to believe in the power of the will or in religion. It's an odd combination of reason and unreason.
The text becomes moderately interesting only when the narrator becomes fixated on a passing woman, whom he designates as Beatrice, after Dante. He likes the "boyishness in her face" and the "boyish figure which I loved" (68). It's not hard to see where this is going, I suppose.
In order to stop jerking off so much ("no more tortured nights, no excitement before lascivious pictures, no eavesdropping at forbidden doors" (69)--creepy, that last), the narrator takes up painting (I know, right?) and begins arting out his frustrated libidinal energy. The result is a "dream face," which "looked more like a boy's face than a girl's" (70). After staring at "the close brown hair, the half-feminine mouth, the pronounced forehead with strange brightness" in the portrait, he realizes that "it was Demian's face" (71). We are not surprised. The portrait becomes something like Schroedinger's Canvas, showing either "Beatrice or Demian"--though "I began to sense that this was neither Beatrice nor Demian but myself"--so WTF? (72).
After that, narrator has a recurring dream, "the most important and enduringly significant of my life," involving "a form I had never set eyes on before, tall and strong, resembling Max Demian and the picture I had painted; yet different, for despite its strength it was completely feminine. This form drew me to itself and enveloped me in a deep tremulous embrace. I felt a mixture of ecstacy and horror" (81). That the figure also was "my mother" should not shock the freudianized reader.
The erotic gears shift again, however, when narrator meets Demian's mother, who is "my dream image" (114). It moves into the territory of The Graduate quickly enough, with Demian's momma encouraging the narrator to take her roughly from behind (phrased more in a rhetoric of German Romanticism, rather than British low comedy), though he doesn't appear to go that route, preferring instead to regard her as "a metaphor of my inner self" (131). Definitely not Hoffman-Bancroft at the motel, this crew.
Lots of mumbojumbo about "Abraxas," likely lifted from Jung. Lots of self-obsessed bullshit, as in Steppenwolf. Lots of overt nietzschean influence. Too much nauseating adolescent sex drama. Too much overt freudianisms. Too much this "represented a further step on the road toward myself" (94). FFS. Barf.
This is not Lovecraft's universe, either: "The surrender to Nature's irrational, strangely confused formations produces in us a feeling of inner harmony with force responsible for these phenomena" (90). It's too far in the opposite direction, but I'm not sure if it's worse.
I realize that Hesse was anti-war and anti-fascist, but some of the ideas that appear to be presented positively by this narrative are manifestly fascist bullshit: "You wouldn't consider all the bipeds you pass on the street human beings simply because they walk upright" (92). Or: "a new birth amid the collapse of this present world was imminent" (127), an "approaching conflict" that "will reveal the bankruptcy of present-day ideals" (119). Those ideals are summarized as a nietzschean "herd instinct," in which "men fly into each other's arms because they are afraid of each other--the owners are for the themselves, the workers for themselves" (118), commentary that suggests sympathy with Mussolini's promise to liquidate class conflict through corporatist statism.
Needless to say, those "who bore the mark felt no anxiety about the shape the future was to take" (127), knowing that "with prodigious efforts mighty new weapons had been created for mankind [sic!] but the end was flagrant, deep desolation of the spirit. Europe had conquered the whole world only to lose her own soul" (id.). In the end, "something dreadful" must happen because "the world wants to renew itself. There's a smell of death in the air. Nothing can be born without first dying" (136). These little fascists get their wish because war with Russia starts up: "of course it's not going to be any fun to fire on living beings, but that will be incidental" (140). Incidental to my quest to find myself in portraits of myself that represent myself as superimposed on my mother/best friend/lover/lover's mother/Dante's guide through paradise/&c! I've already barfed in this review, so I don't know what the appropriate visceral response is here.
Recommended for serious gender critics, proto-fascist neo-gnostics, and those filled with the lust to rage and kill, annihilate and die so that they might be born anew.
Along the way, some amusing readings of biblical events, delivered by Demian, the obscure object of desire in the story, regarding Golgotha (51) and Cain (23-24), the latter of which notes that "the first element of the story, its actual beginning, is the mark." The "Mark of Cain" is a metaphor that stays with the narrator the entire story, though it's not obvious what the point happens to be, though the narrator believes that he felt it for the first time (110) after committing a "trival and careless act of brutality" (109).
The story presents juveniles in a non-patronizing way, and the narrator notes that "some people will not believe that a child of little more than ten years is capable of having such feelings" (29). Zizek, in The Sublime Object of Ideology, explains that "a crucial feature of [Chaplin's] burlesques [is] a vicious, sadistic, humiliating attitude towards children: in Chaplin's films, children are not treated with the usual sweetness: they are teased, mocked, laughed at for their failures, food is scattered for them as if they were chickens, and so on. The question to ask here, however, is from which point must we look at children so that they appear to us as objects of teasing and mocking, not gentle creatures needing protection? The answer, of course, is the gaze of the children themselves" (118-19).
So, if we agree with Zizek as to the principle, it's easy to read this as a serious bildungsroman in the tradition of Goethe's Werther, which is how Mann reads it, in his introduction to the volume.
On the other hand, however, the eponymous character is presented as superhuman; he practices the "art known as thought reading" (31), through which, e.g., "his face tells me he's a first-rate bastard," regarding a third character (32). (This is likely a key text, therefore, behind R. Scott Bakker's writings, from which he has apparently lifted the semiotics of face on which his narrative relies so heavily.)
The superhuman friend appears to dispute human freedom (46) and suggests the "poverty of religion" (52), all without ceasing to believe in the power of the will or in religion. It's an odd combination of reason and unreason.
The text becomes moderately interesting only when the narrator becomes fixated on a passing woman, whom he designates as Beatrice, after Dante. He likes the "boyishness in her face" and the "boyish figure which I loved" (68). It's not hard to see where this is going, I suppose.
In order to stop jerking off so much ("no more tortured nights, no excitement before lascivious pictures, no eavesdropping at forbidden doors" (69)--creepy, that last), the narrator takes up painting (I know, right?) and begins arting out his frustrated libidinal energy. The result is a "dream face," which "looked more like a boy's face than a girl's" (70). After staring at "the close brown hair, the half-feminine mouth, the pronounced forehead with strange brightness" in the portrait, he realizes that "it was Demian's face" (71). We are not surprised. The portrait becomes something like Schroedinger's Canvas, showing either "Beatrice or Demian"--though "I began to sense that this was neither Beatrice nor Demian but myself"--so WTF? (72).
After that, narrator has a recurring dream, "the most important and enduringly significant of my life," involving "a form I had never set eyes on before, tall and strong, resembling Max Demian and the picture I had painted; yet different, for despite its strength it was completely feminine. This form drew me to itself and enveloped me in a deep tremulous embrace. I felt a mixture of ecstacy and horror" (81). That the figure also was "my mother" should not shock the freudianized reader.
The erotic gears shift again, however, when narrator meets Demian's mother, who is "my dream image" (114). It moves into the territory of The Graduate quickly enough, with Demian's momma encouraging the narrator to take her roughly from behind (phrased more in a rhetoric of German Romanticism, rather than British low comedy), though he doesn't appear to go that route, preferring instead to regard her as "a metaphor of my inner self" (131). Definitely not Hoffman-Bancroft at the motel, this crew.
Lots of mumbojumbo about "Abraxas," likely lifted from Jung. Lots of self-obsessed bullshit, as in Steppenwolf. Lots of overt nietzschean influence. Too much nauseating adolescent sex drama. Too much overt freudianisms. Too much this "represented a further step on the road toward myself" (94). FFS. Barf.
This is not Lovecraft's universe, either: "The surrender to Nature's irrational, strangely confused formations produces in us a feeling of inner harmony with force responsible for these phenomena" (90). It's too far in the opposite direction, but I'm not sure if it's worse.
I realize that Hesse was anti-war and anti-fascist, but some of the ideas that appear to be presented positively by this narrative are manifestly fascist bullshit: "You wouldn't consider all the bipeds you pass on the street human beings simply because they walk upright" (92). Or: "a new birth amid the collapse of this present world was imminent" (127), an "approaching conflict" that "will reveal the bankruptcy of present-day ideals" (119). Those ideals are summarized as a nietzschean "herd instinct," in which "men fly into each other's arms because they are afraid of each other--the owners are for the themselves, the workers for themselves" (118), commentary that suggests sympathy with Mussolini's promise to liquidate class conflict through corporatist statism.
Needless to say, those "who bore the mark felt no anxiety about the shape the future was to take" (127), knowing that "with prodigious efforts mighty new weapons had been created for mankind [sic!] but the end was flagrant, deep desolation of the spirit. Europe had conquered the whole world only to lose her own soul" (id.). In the end, "something dreadful" must happen because "the world wants to renew itself. There's a smell of death in the air. Nothing can be born without first dying" (136). These little fascists get their wish because war with Russia starts up: "of course it's not going to be any fun to fire on living beings, but that will be incidental" (140). Incidental to my quest to find myself in portraits of myself that represent myself as superimposed on my mother/best friend/lover/lover's mother/Dante's guide through paradise/&c! I've already barfed in this review, so I don't know what the appropriate visceral response is here.
Recommended for serious gender critics, proto-fascist neo-gnostics, and those filled with the lust to rage and kill, annihilate and die so that they might be born anew.
April 20, 2025
The Glass Bead Game is a phenomenal work. Its complex plot makes the full meaning of the novel unfathomable, but there is a certain mysterious charm that attracts the reader. It is the kind of novel that could be viewed from many angles. For my part, I was interested in its philosophical and social impact and spiritual significance.
In simple terms, The Glass Bead Game is a story of one man's spiritual maturity. However, Hesse builds up his story in a complex setting, a sort of future utopia in the 23rd century. He creates a Secular Order in a cloistered German-speaking spiritual province called Castalia. It is a world of the Mind. Its community is a highly respected intellectual male elite governed by strict laws intellectual hierarchies that reflect the disciplines of humanities. The Order regards music and mathematics as the two indispensable disciplines to achieve celestial harmony. At the center of order is the Glass Bead Game, a kind of interdisciplinary synthesis. The best of the best Castalian intellects forms part of this nucleus. The game combines unrelated disciplines of humanities (such as music, mathematics, history, philosophy) to elevate the mind to a higher level of intellect. All members practice meditation so that their elevated status of mind achieves the highest level of human understanding on existence.
On the look of it, the Castalian intellect is sort of a Nietzchean superman, a self-assured man of creativity confident and content in his self-worth. Collectively, the Castalians have developed their own values and set their own distinct moral order different from societal norms of the outside world. But as the story progresses, Hesse questions this Castalian ideal and becomes critical of the Castalian intellectual arrogance and self-sufficiency. Through the life and struggles of the protagonist, Joseph Knecht, Hesse explores the inadequacy of the pursuit of knowledge and the development of intellect alone to understand the true meaning of life. Isolation from the real world and living in a "world of mind" is not the way towards self-actualization. It can be only achieved through striking a balance between the state of mind the outside world with all its beauty, ugliness and suffering.
Hesse proposes a middle path to attain self-actualization. Neither developing intellect in isolation, nor the wordly indulgence and suffering alone can bring celestial harmony. It is the compromise of the two worlds, the world of the Mind and the World of the Body, that help humans attain their highest intellect. Hesse started writing The Glass Bead Game at a time when political turmoil checked the intellectual progress. To stimulate the mind and preserve the inner creativity, a tranquil utopia was needed. That may have directed his pen towards creating the Castalian Order, an islolated community that have preserved inner peace and serenity. However, the the discussion on the decline and the future futility of the Order may be Hesse's way of expressing disapppointment on the European intellectual circle that was collectively unresponsive towards fascism.
But these deeper philosophical, social, and psychological aspects are not what drew me to this novel. They played a part of course, but it was the reading experience that mesmerized me. Even without fully understanding the text, I was captivated by Hess's prose. He took me to a mysterious realm with his words. I read it like one hypnotized. Reading the novel was like engaging in some sort of meditation. I have never felt that way about any book in my life! And I think I'm justified in calling The Glass Bead Game a phenomenal work.
More of my views can be found at http://piyangiejay.com/
In simple terms, The Glass Bead Game is a story of one man's spiritual maturity. However, Hesse builds up his story in a complex setting, a sort of future utopia in the 23rd century. He creates a Secular Order in a cloistered German-speaking spiritual province called Castalia. It is a world of the Mind. Its community is a highly respected intellectual male elite governed by strict laws intellectual hierarchies that reflect the disciplines of humanities. The Order regards music and mathematics as the two indispensable disciplines to achieve celestial harmony. At the center of order is the Glass Bead Game, a kind of interdisciplinary synthesis. The best of the best Castalian intellects forms part of this nucleus. The game combines unrelated disciplines of humanities (such as music, mathematics, history, philosophy) to elevate the mind to a higher level of intellect. All members practice meditation so that their elevated status of mind achieves the highest level of human understanding on existence.
On the look of it, the Castalian intellect is sort of a Nietzchean superman, a self-assured man of creativity confident and content in his self-worth. Collectively, the Castalians have developed their own values and set their own distinct moral order different from societal norms of the outside world. But as the story progresses, Hesse questions this Castalian ideal and becomes critical of the Castalian intellectual arrogance and self-sufficiency. Through the life and struggles of the protagonist, Joseph Knecht, Hesse explores the inadequacy of the pursuit of knowledge and the development of intellect alone to understand the true meaning of life. Isolation from the real world and living in a "world of mind" is not the way towards self-actualization. It can be only achieved through striking a balance between the state of mind the outside world with all its beauty, ugliness and suffering.
Hesse proposes a middle path to attain self-actualization. Neither developing intellect in isolation, nor the wordly indulgence and suffering alone can bring celestial harmony. It is the compromise of the two worlds, the world of the Mind and the World of the Body, that help humans attain their highest intellect. Hesse started writing The Glass Bead Game at a time when political turmoil checked the intellectual progress. To stimulate the mind and preserve the inner creativity, a tranquil utopia was needed. That may have directed his pen towards creating the Castalian Order, an islolated community that have preserved inner peace and serenity. However, the the discussion on the decline and the future futility of the Order may be Hesse's way of expressing disapppointment on the European intellectual circle that was collectively unresponsive towards fascism.
But these deeper philosophical, social, and psychological aspects are not what drew me to this novel. They played a part of course, but it was the reading experience that mesmerized me. Even without fully understanding the text, I was captivated by Hess's prose. He took me to a mysterious realm with his words. I read it like one hypnotized. Reading the novel was like engaging in some sort of meditation. I have never felt that way about any book in my life! And I think I'm justified in calling The Glass Bead Game a phenomenal work.
More of my views can be found at http://piyangiejay.com/
November 20, 2020
The Glass Bead Game (1943) is Hermann Hesse's ultimate work, which took nearly ten years to complete. Perhaps this is why a large part of the novel escaped me: too much, too esoteric. Reading the Glass Beads Game was a torment, as this book is so wordy and repetitive.
However, I became attached to this objective, false biography of Joseph Valet, a talented student who became a distinguished member of the Order of Castalia, a fictitious intellectual elite whose goal is to learn universal knowledge. This spirit of synthesis of science is expressed through the game of glass beads, in which the participants combine music, mathematics, poetry, and philosophy.
The author continues with the themes developed in these previous novels: self-realization, the opposition between Nature and Culture, sensuality and spirituality (p.172), Hindu and Nietzschean philosophy, the myth of the eternal return (p.420), and the emptiness of intellectual work for those who dedicate their existence to austere studies.
The book ends with three short stories that Joseph Valet would have written. I preferred this part; the reader will find their ancient philosophical tales like Siddharta.
Obviously, behind its complexity, the game of glass beads hides multiple messages and, above all, an uncompromising critique of twentieth-century society, its wars, its ignorance, and its loss of values at a time of the rise of totalitarianism.
However, I became attached to this objective, false biography of Joseph Valet, a talented student who became a distinguished member of the Order of Castalia, a fictitious intellectual elite whose goal is to learn universal knowledge. This spirit of synthesis of science is expressed through the game of glass beads, in which the participants combine music, mathematics, poetry, and philosophy.
The author continues with the themes developed in these previous novels: self-realization, the opposition between Nature and Culture, sensuality and spirituality (p.172), Hindu and Nietzschean philosophy, the myth of the eternal return (p.420), and the emptiness of intellectual work for those who dedicate their existence to austere studies.
The book ends with three short stories that Joseph Valet would have written. I preferred this part; the reader will find their ancient philosophical tales like Siddharta.
Obviously, behind its complexity, the game of glass beads hides multiple messages and, above all, an uncompromising critique of twentieth-century society, its wars, its ignorance, and its loss of values at a time of the rise of totalitarianism.
January 24, 2022
“I live in my dreams — that's what you sense. Other people live in dreams, but not in their own. That's the difference.”
Herman Hesse's Demian: The Story of Emil Sinclair's Youth is a short novel I've read several times and will probably read again. At its core, it's about living your true life. For Emil Sinclair, this is a journey that he initially doesn't even know he is on. Instead, he just sees himself as an extension of his family and their values. That changes with his meeting of Max Demian.
Hesse makes it clear that being a seeker (as he calls it) is a journey fraught with anguish and loneliness. For some reason, that seems very relatable. Even though it is never explicit, the drumbeats leading to World War I provide a fascinating and ominous backdrop to Sinclair's journey. I am not overly fond of the actual ending, but I remind myself that it really is about being on the path.
“I wanted only to live in accord with the promptings which came from my true self. Why was that so very difficult?”
“Gaze into the fire, into the clouds, and as soon as the inner voices begin to speak... surrender to them. Don't ask first whether it's permitted, or would please your teachers or father or some god. You will ruin yourself if you do that.”
Herman Hesse's Demian: The Story of Emil Sinclair's Youth is a short novel I've read several times and will probably read again. At its core, it's about living your true life. For Emil Sinclair, this is a journey that he initially doesn't even know he is on. Instead, he just sees himself as an extension of his family and their values. That changes with his meeting of Max Demian.
Hesse makes it clear that being a seeker (as he calls it) is a journey fraught with anguish and loneliness. For some reason, that seems very relatable. Even though it is never explicit, the drumbeats leading to World War I provide a fascinating and ominous backdrop to Sinclair's journey. I am not overly fond of the actual ending, but I remind myself that it really is about being on the path.
“I wanted only to live in accord with the promptings which came from my true self. Why was that so very difficult?”
“Gaze into the fire, into the clouds, and as soon as the inner voices begin to speak... surrender to them. Don't ask first whether it's permitted, or would please your teachers or father or some god. You will ruin yourself if you do that.”
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