Hermann Hesse: Demian

"One never reaches home," she said. "But where paths that have affinity for each other intersect the whole world looks like home, for a time."

--Frau Eva. Hermann Hesse. Demian.

I just finished Hermann Hesse's Demian for the first time... Long overdue, I know. But, as is appropriate for this book, I think it came at the perfect time, just when I needed it the most. I actually started reading it in February when Claire and I went on our post-retail-Christmas-season vacation to Florida. I was fairly enraptured and ready the first couple chapters, but once I returned home I was immersed again in dull life and didn't pick it up again until this Sunday. I had it under my external hard drive to muffle the hum and I looked at it every day, but I finally picked it up, went to Cafe Amore with Claire, and chowed down a good 90 pages.

I finished the rest of it today on my lunch break at work. I can say that it's rare a book makes me cry in public, but the closing pages got me there. I think part of it had to do with my sudden uneasiness of the latter portion of the book, where Sinclair is so enraptured and content that I suddenly wondered if Hesse was going to end the novel there. It seemed so contrary to the entire point he was trying to make -- until that point there was never a lull in Sinclair's confused, blundering attempts to reach the ideal he wanted of and for himself, and suddenly he was hung in an Edenic purgatory, and I was concerned.

Then the closing pages culminated perfectly everything I felt about what was happening, both in the book, for the author, for the reader, and for myself. It was so perfect and haunting and peaceful that I read that final sentence and almost decided to give up writing, because I don't feel I'll ever achieve that level of bittersweet perfection.

But that puts me in the same state of disarray and discontent that forces us to move forward; it is that doubt that makes us challenge our own determination. If we don't embrace our desires fully for what they are -- if we so much as whisper in doubt "it's impossible" -- then it will be so and we will crash to the ground with the weight of our own fears.