Demian

I’ve been familiar with the book Damien since I was a kid. It is a familiar and famous work of literature that many adults and book lovers have passed through at one time or another. However, the prejudice that it would be difficult to read, and the pressure of the pile of books to be read, prevented me from reaching for this book. However, recently, the keyword ‘growth’ has served as the centerpiece of my journey to find myself fully. It’s often said that when choosing a book, you should read something that will help you, so maybe it was fate that I chose Damien because I was craving growth.

The book begins with two worlds, one good and one evil. The main idea of the novel is that Sinclair, the protagonist, meets Damien, tastes the two extremes, reconciles them, and eventually finds his way to himself. As the key word is ‘growth’, it is a rather clichéd plot of an ordinary human being facing hardships and adversity and overcoming them, but the author’s style of writing is so fluid and vivid that it feels like a return to childhood. The embarrassment, wandering, and falling in love were so vivid that it was as if I could see myself as a child, recreating the past in front of my eyes. It was like a trip to a different world. As I closed the book, I felt a strange and indescribable emotion overwhelm me as I experienced the protagonist’s growth and expansion into my own.

However, there is a question as to why the book is named Damien. The main character’s name is Sinclair. So I decided to come up with my own interpretation. The first is that Hermann Hesse wrote Damien under the name of Emile Sinclair. The second interpretation is that in order to grow in the world, you must have a helper to guide you. In the East, there is a lion’s name called ‘Zultakdongshi’. When an egg hatches, the mother bird breaks the egg outside, and the chick breaks the egg inside with its beak. In this way, you can think of it as a way of saying that personal awakening is a solo endeavor, but that help from others is indispensable. Of course, the name “Damien” could have been used without any meaning.

The book gives us a glimpse into many of Nietzsche’s ideas. The Apollonian and Dionysian worlds, the will to power, Amorphati, and other philosophical ideas are deeply embedded in the book. Therefore, if you are familiar with Nietzsche, you can enjoy the book even more. He was also heavily influenced by the analytical psychology of Carl Jung. It’s clear that this kind of knowledge is invaluable. It is a beautiful thing to think about the philosophies of different people through reading, to develop your own ideas, and to live your life to the fullest. That is why many people read. It was very meaningful to think about the meaning of reading through Damien.

Good and evil, mind and body, reason and instinct. We often make mistakes when it comes to these dichotomous concepts. It’s a kind of biased thinking. When we look at the world, we evaluate and interpret it in terms of binary opposites. It is as if we evaluate people based on reason and emotion alone. Sinclair, the protagonist, was in a world of goodness, but he grew through the process of encountering and integrating the world of evil. In the same way, we can grow through the dialectical process of integrating two incompatible concepts, just as Sinclair did in Damien.