I would be honored to one day write a book or a screenplay inspired by Hesse's "Demian." It would really be about me and Hesse. An interplay of sorts. And the main character would not necessarily be me. Just a version of me in modern times.
It would be a truly hallucinogetic experience. We'd watch a young man grow up in the eighties and nineties...a loner in a world that he feels alienated by. He has many mentors, the main one is a more advanced, Nietzchian version of himself: Demian.
By the end, as the story builds, as it does in Demian, he realizes that what happened to himself (his painful inner-renewal) is about to happen to the world. He can sense that something is coming. And as in Demian, something does come: September 11. And the world is at war. The old stone age gods want to be overthrown. And our main character finds himself in a hospital in Baghdad next to him is the Demian character lying in bed smiling, dying but before he does, telling the main character that the two of them had been integrated. That he need only look within himself if he ever needs to find Demian again. Wow. Suddenly putting the story in a modern context helps me understand the fervor around it back in 1919 after the first World War.
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