I read the novel 'Demian' by Herman Hesse and I used a bank envelope as a bookmark and I also took notes on it. Here are the notes.
words i looked up: chthonic, loquacious, lasicivious, imprecation
art i looked up: spinoza, actus tragicus, st. matthew passion, max reger, buxtehude passacaglia
quotes/ideas:
"one cannot apologize for something fundamental"
"I realize today that nothing is more distasteful to a man than to take a path that leads to himself."
"eternal stream of great ideas"
"what isnt part of ourselves doesnt disturb us."
"I was incapabale of giving advice that did not derive from my own experience and which I myself did not have the strength to follow."
"The world, as it is now, wants to die, wants to perish-- and it will."
"Love must have the strength to become certain within itself."
"I will not make a gift of myself, I must be won."
"But most people love to lose themselves."
and here are my thoughts on the story:
The book i read before this was "Shogun," and i think i was in the wrong state of mind for it. I was looking for the kind of novel that Demian is. Shogun is great, but it is still pulp fiction. Demian is florally written and full of immense fuzzy images. It's about one boy's youth and adolescence and how he grew up through various trials, and with the help of a variety of role models and mentors, to come to a tragic understanding of his relation to society. Well i guess all the gawdyness in Shogun meant that I was ready to read something like it, because I didn't seem to be in the mood for Demian while I was reading it, thankfully it was fairly short.
Have you ever seen a movie or read a book about someone with superhuman strength? Inevitably there is a scene where some once-undefeatable baddies are spraying with machines guns or blasting away with lasers and the superhero just stands there and waits, invincible. It's the kind of thing that lets the audience enjoy watching the enemy get destroyed. Well, I kind of felt like a superhero reading Demain because the book is about coming of age in Europe just after World War one. Many of the references to european sentiment came off as crusty and snobby instead of drawing me into the author's web. But you can tell that the book is written sincerely, or maybe all of it was the translation from German into English. At any rate, you can get a sense of Hesse's genius, of the potential of a human mind. I didnt experience ww1 or any of my friend's dying in it or my country being destroyed and subsequently taken over by fascists. I'm absolutely positive that having experiences like those would have made the book a better read for me. Sometimes i get exhausted with all the images a book can make, all the questions it can pose, and i'd rather do something physical with a real object, even if its just bouncing a ball off of a wall over and over. Have you ever seen an antique comedy? The Honeymooners comes to mind. Somethings are old enough that they've lost their cultural reference, and they become independent cultures of their own. From my, admittedly vague, memory of the Honeymooners not much seems to be happening, especially not much funny. But, there is a curious arrangement of activities, sayings, and behaviours that make it entertaining in a way that cant possibly be the same as that for which it was created. Thats how I feel about Demian.
After you, my dear Alphonse