’The bird fights its way out of the egg. The egg is the world. Who would be born must first destroy a world. The bird flies to God. That God’s name is Abraxas.’
--Hermann Hesse, Demian (translated from the German by Michael Roloff and Michael Lebeck)
When I was in middle school, my classmate T. recommended to me a book by Hesse.
He said, ’Inside the book is everything about me.’ I didn’t know what he was on about.
However, that particular quote stuck with me. One day long afterwards, T. and I met up again after not seeing each other for over a decade, and I brought it up.
’What was that, again
...?’
He didn’t even remember the book existed, let alone that he’d recommended it to me. To think he’d just forget ’everything about himself’... I wonder if Hesse wasn’t needed in the world T. lived in after middle school. In which case, I wonder why I didn’t forget. I experimentally added another passage to Hesse’s:
’If we don’t crack the world’s shell, we will die without being born.
Smash the world’s shell. For the revolution of the world.’
-Kunihiko IkuharaShow more