Demian: A Novel

In my peculiar and unlovely manner, with my carrying on and my frequenting of public houses, I was at odds with the world—this was my way of protesting.

Finally I gave up the idea, and began simply to paint a face according to the guidance of my imagination, a face which gradually grew out of the one already begun, as if by itself, at the mercy of color and brush. The result was a face I had dreamed of, and I was not ill pleased with it.

“Wise speeches have no value at all, absolutely none. You only escape from yourself. To escape from yourself is a sin. You should be able to creep right into yourself, like a tortoise.”

“I cannot tell you anything, Knauer. People can’t help one another in this case. No one has helped me, either. You must think of something yourself, and you must obey the prompting which really comes from your own nature. There is nothing else. If you cannot find yourself, you won’t find any spirits, either.”

This thought led me to no definite conclusion. A stone had fallen into the well, and the well was my young soul.

“I see that you think more than you can express. But if that is so, then you also know that you have never lived in experience all that you have thought, and that is not good. Only the thought that we live through in experience has any value. You knew that your ‘world of sanction’ was simply one-half of the world, and yet you tried to suppress the

I live in my dreams: that is what you have felt about me. Other people live in dreams as well, but not in their own, that is the difference.”

He was a seeker, but retrogressive, he was a romantic. And suddenly I realized that it was just what he had been to me and had given me that he could not be and give to himself. He had guided me to a point on the road beyond which he, the guide, could not go.

People with courage and character are always called peculiar by other people.