Chapter Three: The Thief on the Cross
There would be beautiful, tender, and lovable things to tell of my childhood, of my safety with my father and mother, of a child’s love and a contented, playful drifting through life in gentle, dear, bright surroundings. Others have told enough about such things. I am interested only in the steps I took in my life to get to myself. All the pretty resting places, islands of happiness, and paradises whose magic I came to know I leave lying in the glow of distance, and I have no desire to set foot in them again.
That is why, as long as I am still dwelling on my boyhood, I speak only of what came to me that was new, what drove me forward, what tore me loose.
These impulses always came from the “other world”; they always brought fear, compulsion, and a bad conscience with them; they were always revolutionary and endangered the peace in which I would gladly have gone on living.
The years came in which I had to discover anew that there lived in me myself a primal urge which had to creep away and hide in the permitted and bright world. As it does every human being, the slowly awakening feeling of sex fell upon me as an enemy and destroyer, as something forbidden, as temptation and sin. What my curiosity was seeking, what created dreams, desire, and fear in me, the great secret of puberty, did not fit at all into the sheltered bliss of my childhood peace. I did what everyone does. I led the double life of a child who is no longer a child. My consciousness lived in what was familiar and permitted; my consciousness denied the new world that was dawning. But alongside it I lived in dreams, urges, and wishes of a subterranean kind, over which that conscious life built itself ever more anxious bridges, for the child’s world in me was falling apart. Like almost all parents, mine gave no help to the awakening drives of life, which were never spoken of. They helped only, with inexhaustible care, my hopeless attempts to deny what was real and to go on living in a child’s world that was growing more and more unreal and false. I do not know whether parents can do much in this, and I do not reproach mine. It was my own business to come to terms with myself and find my way, and I did my business badly, as most well-brought-up people do.
Every human being goes through this difficulty. For the average person this is the point in life where the demands of one’s own life come into the harshest conflict with one’s surroundings, where the way forward has to be fought for most bitterly. Many people experience the dying and being born again that is our fate only this one time in their lives, in the rotting and slow collapse of childhood, when everything we have come to love is about to leave us and we suddenly feel the loneliness and deadly cold of space around us. And a great many remain hanging on this cliff forever and cling painfully all their lives to the irretrievable past, to the dream of the lost paradise, which is the worst and most murderous of all dreams.
Let us return to the story. The feelings and dream images in which the end of childhood announced itself to me are not important enough to be told. The important thing was this: the “dark world,” the “other world,” was there again. What had once been Franz Kromer was now lodged in me myself. And with that the “other world” gained power over me again from outside as well.
Several years had passed since the business with Kromer. That dramatic and guilt-laden time of my life lay very far from me then and seemed to have vanished into nothing like a short nightmare. Franz Kromer had long since disappeared from my life; I hardly took notice if I ever happened to meet him. But the other important figure in my tragedy, Max Demian, never again disappeared entirely from my circle. Yet for a long time he stood far off at the edge, visible but not active. Only gradually did he come nearer again, radiate powers and influences again.
I am trying to recall what I know of Demian from that time. It may be that for a year or longer I did not speak to him a single time. I avoided him, and he in no way pushed himself on me. Now and then, when we met, he would nod me a friendly greeting. It sometimes seemed to me then that there was a faint note of scorn or ironic reproach in his friendliness, but that may have been imagination. The story I had lived through with him and the strange influence he had had on me then seemed forgotten, by him as by me.
I search for his figure, and now that I think back on him, I see that he was there after all and that I noticed him. I see him going to school, alone or among others of the older pupils, and I see him moving among them strange, solitary, and quiet, like a star, surrounded by an air of his own, living under laws of his own. No one loved him, no one was close to him, except his mother, and even with her he seemed to deal not as a child but as a grown man. The teachers left him alone as much as they could; he was a good pupil, but he made no effort to please anyone, and every so often we heard rumors of some word, some remark or retort, he was supposed to have given a teacher, which left nothing to be desired in blunt challenge or in irony.
I think back, with my eyes closed, and I see his image come up. Where was that? Yes, now it is back. It was in the street in front of our house. One day I saw him standing there with a notebook in his hand, and I saw that he was drawing. He was copying the old coat of arms with the bird over our front door. And I stood at a window, hidden behind the curtain, and watched him, and saw with deep amazement his attentive, cool, bright face turned toward the coat of arms, the face of a man, of a scholar or an artist, superior and full of will, strangely bright and cool, with knowing eyes.
And again I see him. It was a little later, in the street; coming from school, we were all standing around a horse that had fallen. It lay, still harnessed to the shaft, in front of a farm wagon, snorting searchingly and piteously into the air with distended nostrils and bleeding from an invisible wound, so that at its side the white dust of the road was slowly soaking through dark. As I turned away from the sight, with a feeling of nausea, I saw Demian’s face. He had not pushed his way forward; he stood at the very back, at ease and rather elegant, as was his way. His gaze seemed to be fixed on the horse’s head and again had that deep, quiet, almost fanatical and yet passionless attentiveness. I had to look at him for a long time, and then, still far from being conscious of it, I felt something very peculiar. I saw Demian’s face, and I saw not only that his was not a boy’s face but a man’s; I saw more, I believed I saw, or felt, that it was not a man’s face either, but something else besides. It was as if there were something of a woman’s face in it as well, and above all this face seemed to me, for a moment, not male or childlike, not old or young, but somehow a thousand years old, somehow timeless, stamped by other ages than the one we live in. Animals could look like that, or trees, or stars—I did not know that; I did not feel exactly what I am saying about it now as a grown man, but something like it. Perhaps he was handsome, perhaps I liked him, perhaps he was repugnant to me, that too could not be decided. All I saw was this: he was different from us, he was like an animal, or like a spirit, or like a picture; I do not know what he was like, but he was different, unimaginably different from all of us.
My memory tells me no more than that, and perhaps even this has partly been drawn from later impressions.
It was only when I was several years older that I at last came into closer contact with him again. Demian had not been confirmed in church with his own age group, as custom would have required, and at once rumors had again attached themselves to that too. It was said again at school that he was really a Jew, or no, a heathen, and others knew that he and his mother were without any religion at all or belonged to some fabulous, wicked sect. In connection with this I think I also heard the suspicion that he lived with his mother as with a lover. Presumably it was the case that he had been brought up until then without any denomination, but that this now gave reason to fear some disadvantage or other for his future. In any case his mother decided after all to let him take part in confirmation now, two years later than others of his age. So it came about that for months he was my classmate in confirmation lessons.
For a while I kept quite apart from him; I wanted no share in him; he was too surrounded for me by rumors and secrets; but above all I was bothered by the feeling of obligation that had remained in me since the affair with Kromer. And just then I had enough to do with secrets of my own. For me the confirmation lessons coincided with the time of decisive enlightenment in sexual matters, and despite my good will my interest in pious instruction was much impaired by it. The things the clergyman talked about lay far away from me in a quiet, holy unreality; they were perhaps quite beautiful and valuable, but not in the least urgent and exciting, and those other things were exactly that in the highest degree.
The more indifferent this state of mine made me to the lessons, the more my interest turned again toward Max Demian. Something seemed to bind us. I must follow this thread as precisely as possible. As far as I can recall, it began in a lesson early in the morning, when the lamp was still burning in the schoolroom. Our clerical teacher had come to speak of the story of Cain and Abel. I was paying hardly any attention; I was sleepy and scarcely listening. Then the pastor began, with raised voice, to speak urgently of the mark of Cain. At that moment I felt a kind of touch or reminder, and looking up I saw from the front rows Demian’s face turned back toward me, with a bright, speaking eye whose expression could just as well have been mockery as earnestness. He looked at me only for a moment, and suddenly I was listening intently to the pastor’s words, heard him speak of Cain and his mark, and felt deep within me a knowledge that it was not as he taught it, that you could look at it differently too, that it was open to criticism!
From that minute on there was a connection between Demian and me again. And strangely—hardly was this feeling of a certain belonging together there in my soul when I saw it carried over, as if by magic, into physical space as well. I did not know whether he could arrange it himself or whether it was pure chance—at that time I still firmly believed in chance—after a few days Demian had suddenly changed his seat in the religion lesson and was sitting right in front of me (I still remember how gladly, in the middle of the wretched poorhouse air of the overcrowded schoolroom in the morning, I breathed in the delicate, fresh smell of soap from the back of his neck!), and again after a few days he had changed again and was now sitting beside me, and there he stayed, the whole winter and the whole spring through.
The morning lessons had been entirely transformed. They were no longer sleepy and boring. I looked forward to them. Sometimes we both listened to the pastor with the greatest attention; a glance from my neighbor was enough to point me to a curious story, a strange saying. And another glance from him, a very particular one, was enough to remind me, to stir criticism and doubt in me.
Very often, though, we were bad pupils and heard nothing of the lesson. Demian was always well behaved toward teachers and classmates; I never saw him get up to schoolboy foolishness, he was never heard laughing out loud or chattering, he never earned a teacher’s rebuke. But very quietly, and more with signs and glances than with whispered words, he knew how to let me take part in his own pursuits. Some of these were of a curious kind.
He told me, for instance, which of the pupils interested him and in what way he studied them. Some of them he knew very precisely. Before the lesson he said to me: “When I give you a sign with my thumb, then so-and-so will turn around and look at us, or scratch his neck, etc.” Then during the lesson, when I had often almost stopped thinking about it, Max would suddenly turn his thumb toward me with a conspicuous gesture; I looked quickly toward the pupil in question and saw him every time, as if pulled on a wire, make the required gesture. I pestered Max to try it on the teacher too sometime, but he would not do it. But once, when I came into the lesson and told him I had not learned my work today and very much hoped the pastor would not call on me, he helped me. The pastor was looking for a pupil to recite a piece of the catechism, and his roving eye came to rest on my guilty face. Slowly he came over, stretched out his finger toward me, already had my name on his lips—then he suddenly became distracted or uneasy, tugged at his collar, stepped toward Demian, who was looking him firmly in the face, seemed about to ask him something, but surprisingly turned away again, coughed for a while, and then called on another pupil.
Only gradually, while these jokes greatly amused me, did I notice that my friend often played the same game with me. It happened that on the way to school I would suddenly have the feeling that Demian was walking some way behind me, and when I turned around, sure enough, there he was.
“Can you actually make someone else think what you want him to?” I asked him.
He gave the information readily, calmly and matter-of-factly, in his grown-up way.
“No,” he said, “you can’t do that. You see, there’s no such thing as free will, even if the pastor pretends there is. Neither can the other person think what he wants, nor can I make him think what I want. But you can observe someone well, and then you can often say fairly exactly what he’s thinking or feeling, and then you can usually also foresee what he’s going to do the next moment. It’s quite simple, people just don’t know it. Of course it takes practice.
“Among butterflies and moths, for example, there are certain moths in which the females are much rarer than the males. The moths reproduce just like all animals: the male fertilizes the female, which then lays eggs. Now if you have a female of these moths—naturalists have often tried this—the male moths come flying to this female in the night, and from hours away! Hours away, imagine! For many kilometers all these males sense the one female in the area! People try to explain it, but it’s hard. It must be a kind of sense of smell or something like that, rather the way good hunting dogs can find and follow an imperceptible trail. You understand? Those are the kind of things nature is full of, and no one can explain them. But now I say: if the females of these moths were as common as the males, they simply wouldn’t have that fine nose! They have it only because they’ve trained themselves for it. When an animal or a human being directs all his attention and all his will toward a particular thing, then he attains it too. That’s all. And it’s exactly the same with what you mean. Look at someone closely enough, and you know more about him than he does himself.”
The word “mind reading” was on the tip of my tongue, and with it I could have reminded him of the scene with Kromer, which lay so far back. But this too was a strange thing between the two of us: never, ever did either he or I make the faintest allusion to the fact that several years before he had once intervened so seriously in my life. It was as if nothing had ever been between us before, or as if each of us were firmly counting on the other’s having forgotten it. Once or twice it even happened that we were walking down the street together and met Franz Kromer, but we exchanged no glance and said no word about him.
“But then how is it with the will?” I asked. “You say there’s no free will. But then you say again that you only need to direct your will firmly at something, and then you can reach your goal. That doesn’t fit! If I’m not master of my will, then I can’t direct it this way or that just as I please either.”
He clapped me on the shoulder. He always did that when I pleased him.
“Good that you ask!” he said, laughing. “You must always ask, you must always doubt. But the thing is very simple. If a moth like that, for instance, wanted to direct its will at a star or somewhere else, it couldn’t. Only—it doesn’t even try. It seeks only what has meaning and value for it, what it needs, what it absolutely has to have. And that’s exactly where it achieves the unbelievable—it develops a magical sixth sense that no animal but it possesses! People like us have more room to play, certainly, and more interests than an animal. But we too are bound within a relatively quite narrow circle and can’t go beyond it. I can fancy this and that, of course, imagine, say, that I absolutely want to get to the North Pole, or something of the kind, but I can carry it out and want it strongly enough only if the wish lies wholly within me, if my whole being is really filled with it. As soon as that’s the case, as soon as you try something that you’re commanded to do from within, then it works, then you can harness your will like a good horse. If, for example, I were to make up my mind now that I want to bring it about that our pastor no longer wears glasses, it won’t work. That’s just playing around. But when, back in the fall, I got the firm will to be moved from my seat up front, it worked quite well. All at once there was someone there who came before me in the alphabet and who had been ill until then, and because someone had to make room for him, naturally I was the one who did, because my will was ready to seize the opportunity at once.”
“Yes,” I said, “it was very strange for me too at the time. From the moment we took an interest in each other, you kept moving closer and closer to me. But how was that? At first you didn’t come and sit right next to me, you sat a few times in the bench in front of me first, didn’t you? How did that come about?”
“It was like this: I didn’t really know myself where I wanted to go when I longed to get away from my first seat. I only knew that I wanted to sit farther back. It was my will to come to you, but I hadn’t become conscious of it yet. At the same time your own will was pulling along with it and helping me. Only when I was sitting there in front of you did it occur to me that my wish was only half fulfilled—I noticed that what I had really wanted was nothing other than to sit next to you.”
“But no new boy came in that time.”
“No, but that time I simply did what I wanted and sat down next to you without further ado. The boy I changed places with was only surprised and let me do it. And the pastor did notice once that there had been a change—in general, every time he has to deal with me, something secretly bothers him; you see, he knows that my name is Demian and that it isn’t right for me, with my D, to be sitting way back there among the S’s! But that doesn’t get through to his consciousness, because my will is against it and because I keep preventing him. He notices every so often that something isn’t right, and looks at me and starts to puzzle over it, the good gentleman. But I have a simple remedy for that. Every time, I look him very, very firmly in the eyes. Almost everyone takes that badly. They all grow uneasy. If you want to get something from someone, and you unexpectedly look him very firmly in the eyes, and he doesn’t grow uneasy at all, then give up! You’ll get nothing from him, ever! But that’s very rare. Actually I know of only one single person with whom it doesn’t help me.”
“Who is that?” I asked quickly.
He looked at me with the somewhat narrowed eyes he got when he was thinking. Then he looked away and gave no answer, and in spite of my violent curiosity I could not repeat the question.
But I believe he was speaking of his mother then.—He seemed to live very close to her, but he never spoke to me of her, never took me home with him. I hardly knew what his mother looked like.
At that time I sometimes made attempts to do as he did and to concentrate my will on something so hard that I would have to attain it. There were wishes in me that seemed urgent enough. But it came to nothing and did not work. I could not bring myself to talk to Demian about it. What I wished for I could not have confessed to him. And he did not ask, either.
My faith in matters of religion had meanwhile developed a number of gaps. Yet in my thinking, which was thoroughly influenced by Demian, I differed greatly from those of my classmates who could show a complete lack of belief. There were a few of these, and now and then they let fall remarks such as that it was ridiculous and unworthy of a human being to believe in a God, that stories like the one about the Trinity and the immaculate birth of Jesus were simply laughable, and that it was a disgrace that people still went around peddling such stuff today. I did not think so at all. Even where I had doubts, I knew enough from the whole experience of my childhood of the reality of a pious life, such as my parents led, and knew that it was neither unworthy nor hypocritical. On the contrary, I had the deepest reverence for religious things, as before. Only Demian had accustomed me to look at the stories and articles of faith more freely, more personally, more playfully, more imaginatively, and to interpret them so; at least I always followed the interpretations he suggested to me gladly and with relish. Much, admittedly, was too harsh for me, such as the business about Cain. And once during confirmation lessons he startled me with a view that was, if possible, bolder still. The teacher had spoken of Golgotha. The biblical account of the Savior’s suffering and death had made a deep impression on me from my earliest days; sometimes as a little boy, on Good Friday say, after my father had read the story of the Passion aloud, I had lived fervently and deeply moved in that sorrowfully beautiful, pale, ghostly, and yet tremendously living world, in Gethsemane and on Golgotha, and when I listened to Bach’s St. Matthew Passion the dark, mighty splendor of suffering of that mysterious world had flooded over me with every mystic shudder. Even today I find in this music, and in the Actus tragicus, the epitome of all poetry and all artistic expression.
Now at the end of that lesson Demian said to me thoughtfully: “There’s something there, Sinclair, that I don’t like. Read the story again and taste it on your tongue; there’s something in it that tastes flat. I mean the business with the two thieves. Magnificent, the way the three crosses stand together on the hill! But then this sentimental little tract of a story about the good, honest thief! First he was a criminal and committed shameful deeds, God knows what all, and now he melts away and celebrates such tearful feasts of reform and repentance! What sense does such repentance make two steps from the grave, I ask you? It’s once again nothing but a real parson’s tale, sugary and dishonest, larded with sentiment, and with a most edifying background. If you had to choose one of the two thieves for your friend today, or consider which of the two you could more readily trust, it certainly wouldn’t be this tearful convert. No, it’s the other one, he’s a man and has character. He doesn’t give a fig for a conversion, which in his position can be nothing but pretty talk anyway; he goes his way to the end and doesn’t cravenly renounce the devil at the last moment, the devil who had to help him until then. He has character, and people of character tend to get short shrift in Bible history. Perhaps he’s a descendant of Cain, too. Don’t you think?”
I was very dismayed. Here in the story of the Crucifixion I had believed myself quite at home, and only now did I see how impersonally, with how little power of imagination and fancy, I had heard it and read it. Even so, Demian’s new idea sounded fatal to me and threatened to overturn notions in me that I believed I had to hold on to. No, you could not treat everything and anything like that, the holiest things included.
As always, he noticed my resistance at once, even before I said anything.
“I know,” he said, resigned, “it’s the old story. Heaven forbid anyone should get serious! But I’ll tell you something—: here is one of the points where you can see the defect in this religion very clearly. The thing is that this whole God of the Old and New Testaments is an excellent figure, certainly, but not what he’s really supposed to represent. He is the good, the noble, the fatherly, the beautiful and also the lofty, the sentimental—quite right! But the world is made of other things too. And all that is simply ascribed to the devil, and this whole part of the world, this whole half, is suppressed and hushed up. Just as they praise God as the father of all life but simply say not a word about the whole of sexual life, on which life after all depends, and declare it if they can to be the devil’s work and sinful! I have nothing against worshiping this God Jehovah, not the least thing. But I think we ought to worship everything and hold it holy, the whole world, not just this artificially separated, official half! So then, alongside the service of God, we must also have a service of the devil. I would think that right. Or else one would have to create a God for oneself who includes the devil in himself as well, and before whom one doesn’t have to shut one’s eyes when the most natural things in the world happen.”
Against his habit he had become almost vehement; right afterward, however, he smiled again and pressed me no further.
But in me these words struck the riddle of my whole boyhood, which I carried within me every hour and about which I had never said a word to anyone. What Demian had said there about God and the devil, about the divine, official world and the hushed-up, devilish one, was exactly my own idea, my own myth, the idea of the two worlds or halves of the world—the bright and the dark. The insight that my problem was a problem of all human beings, a problem of all life and thought, passed over me suddenly like a holy shadow, and fear and awe came over me as I saw and suddenly felt how deeply my most personal life and opinions shared in the eternal stream of the great ideas. The insight was not joyful, though somehow confirming and gladdening. It was hard and had a harsh taste, because there was in it a note of responsibility, of not being allowed to be a child anymore, of standing alone.
Revealing so deep a secret for the first time in my life, I told my companion about the idea of the “two worlds” that I had held since my earliest childhood days, and he saw at once that my deepest feelings thereby agreed with him and proved him right. But it was not his way to take advantage of such a thing. He listened with deeper attention than he had ever given me, and looked me in the eyes until I had to turn mine away. For I saw again in his look that strange, animal timelessness, that unimaginable age.
“We’ll talk more about it another time,” he said considerately. “I see that you think more than you can tell anyone. But if that’s so, then you also know that you’ve never entirely lived what you thought, and that isn’t good. Only the thinking we live has any value. You knew that your ‘permitted world’ was only half the world, and you tried to suppress the second half from yourself, the way the pastors and teachers do. You won’t succeed! No one succeeds, once he has begun to think.”
It struck me deeply.
“But,” I almost shouted, “there just are things that are really and truly forbidden and ugly, you can’t deny that! And they are forbidden, and we have to renounce them. I know there’s murder and all possible vices, but am I supposed to go off and become a criminal just because they exist?”
“We won’t finish with it today,” Max soothed me. “You certainly shouldn’t kill anyone or rape and murder girls, no. But you aren’t yet at the point where you can see what ‘permitted’ and ‘forbidden’ really mean. You’ve only sensed one piece of the truth so far. The rest will come, you can count on it! For instance, for about a year now you’ve had an urge in you that’s stronger than all the others, and it’s considered ‘forbidden.’ The Greeks and many other peoples, on the contrary, made a deity of this urge and worshiped it in great festivals. So ‘forbidden’ isn’t anything eternal; it can change. Even today anyone may sleep with a woman as soon as he has been to the pastor with her and married her. Among other peoples it’s different, even today. That’s why each of us has to find out for himself what is permitted and what is forbidden—forbidden for him. You can go through life without ever doing anything forbidden and still be a great scoundrel. And just the same the other way around.—Really it’s only a question of laziness! Whoever is too lazy to think for himself and be his own judge simply submits to the prohibitions as they happen to be. He has it easy. Others feel commandments within themselves; things are forbidden to them that every man of honor does every day, and other things are permitted to them that are otherwise frowned upon. Each of us has to stand on his own.”
He seemed suddenly to regret having said so much, and broke off. Even then I could understand with my feelings, to some extent, what he felt in doing so. For pleasantly and apparently offhandedly as he used to bring out his ideas, he could not abide for the life of him a conversation “just for the sake of talking,” as he once said. But in me he sensed, alongside genuine interest, too much play, too much pleasure in clever chatter, or something of the kind; in short, a lack of complete earnestness.
As I read again the last words I have written—“complete earnestness”—another scene suddenly comes back to me, the most compelling one I lived through with Max Demian in those still half-childish times.
Our confirmation was approaching, and the last of the religious lessons dealt with Holy Communion. This was important to the pastor, and he took pains; something of consecration and solemn feeling could no doubt be sensed in these hours. But in just these last few hours of instruction my thoughts were bound up with something else, namely with the person of my friend. As I looked forward to confirmation, which was explained to us as our solemn reception into the community of the church, the thought forced itself on me irresistibly that for me the value of this half year or so of religious instruction lay not in what we had learned here, but in Demian’s nearness and influence. It was not into the church that I was now ready to be received, but into something quite different, into an order of thought and personality that must somehow exist on earth and of which I felt my friend to be the representative or messenger.
I tried to push this thought back; I was in earnest about experiencing the confirmation ceremony, in spite of everything, with a certain dignity, and this seemed to go poorly with my new thought. But do what I would, the thought was there, and it gradually joined itself in my mind to the thought of the church ceremony so near at hand; I was ready to celebrate it differently from the others; for me it was to mean reception into a world of thought such as I had come to know in Demian.
It was in those days that I once again had a lively argument with him; it was just before a lesson. My friend was buttoned up and took no pleasure in my talk, which was no doubt rather precocious and self-important.
“We talk too much,” he said with unaccustomed earnestness. “Clever talk is worth nothing, nothing at all. It only takes you away from yourself. Getting away from yourself is a sin. You have to be able to crawl completely into yourself, like a tortoise.”
Right after that we entered the schoolroom. The lesson began; I made an effort to pay attention, and Demian did not disturb me in it. After a while I began to feel something peculiar from the side where he sat beside me, an emptiness or a coolness or something of the sort, as if the seat had unexpectedly become empty. When the feeling began to grow oppressive, I turned around.
There I saw my friend sitting, upright and with good posture as usual. But all the same he looked quite different than usual, and something went out from him, something surrounded him, that I did not know. I thought he had his eyes closed, but saw that he was keeping them open. But they were not looking; they were not seeing; they were fixed and turned inward or toward some great distance. He sat there perfectly motionless; he did not even seem to breathe; his mouth was as if carved out of wood or stone. His face was pale, uniformly pale, like stone, and his brown hair was the most living thing about him. His hands lay before him on the desk, lifeless and still like objects, like stones or fruit, pale and motionless, yet not limp, but like firm, good husks around a hidden, strong life.
The sight made me tremble. He is dead! I thought; I almost said it aloud. But I knew that he was not dead. My eyes clung spellbound to his face, to this pale, stony mask, and I felt: this was Demian! The way he usually was, when he walked and talked with me, was only half a Demian, one who for the time being was playing a part, adapting himself, going along out of kindness. But the real Demian looked like this, like this one, so stony, ancient, animal, stonelike, beautiful and cold, dead and secretly full of unheard-of life. And around him this quiet emptiness, this ether and starry space, this lonely death!
“Now he has gone entirely into himself,” I felt, shuddering. Never had I been so alone. I had no share in him; he was out of my reach; he was farther from me than if he had been on the remotest island in the world.
I could hardly understand that no one but me saw it! Everyone ought to be looking this way, everyone ought to be shuddering! But no one paid any attention to him. He sat like a statue and, as I could not help thinking, strangely stiff like an idol; a fly settled on his forehead and walked slowly across his nose and lips—not a crease of his face twitched.
Where, where was he now? What was he thinking, what was he feeling? Was he in a heaven, in a hell?
It was not possible for me to ask him about it. When, at the end of the lesson, I saw him living and breathing again, when his eyes met mine, he was as before. Where had he come from? Where had he been? He seemed tired. His face had color again, his hands moved again, but his brown hair was now without luster and as if weary.
In the following days I gave myself over several times in my bedroom to a new exercise: I sat bolt upright on a chair, made my eyes fixed, held myself completely motionless, and waited to see how long I could stand it and what I would feel. But I only got tired and had a violent itching in my eyelids.
Soon afterward came the confirmation, of which no important memories have stayed with me.
Now everything became different. Childhood fell into ruins around me. My parents looked at me with a certain embarrassment. My sisters had become complete strangers to me. A disenchantment falsified and faded the feelings and pleasures I was used to; the garden had no fragrance, the forest did not beckon, the world stood around me like a clearance sale of old things, flat and without charm; books were paper, music was noise. So the leaves fall around an autumn tree; it does not feel it; rain runs down it, or sun, or frost, and within it life slowly withdraws into the narrowest and innermost place. It does not die. It waits.
It had been decided that after the vacation I was to go to another school and for the first time be sent away from home. At times my mother came to me with particular tenderness, taking leave in advance, trying to conjure love, homesickness, and unforgettableness into my heart. Demian had gone away on a journey. I was alone.