Hermann Karl Hesse
“I wanted only to try to live my life in accord with the promptings which came from my true self. Why was that so very difficult?”
This sentence explained better than any other the angst of my teenage years.
I was 13, passionately reading Herman Hesse and feeling that most of his strange and emotional sentences belonged to me, too.
Many things changed in time, but my respect for his quest for true emotion stayed still.
Demian
by
Hermann Hesse
(1919)
"I do not consider myself less ignorant than most people. I have been and still am a seeker, but I have ceased to question stars and books; I have begun to listen to the teachings my blood whispers to me. My story is not a pleasant one; it is neither sweet nor harmonious, as invented stories are; it has the taste of nonsense and chaos, of madness and dreams — like the lives of all men who stop deceiving themselves.
Each man's life represents the road toward himself, and attempt at such a road, the intimation of a path. No man has ever been entirely and completely himself. Yet each one strives to become that — one in an awkward, the other in a more intelligent way, each as best he can.
...
Each of us has to find out for ourselves what is permitted and what is forbidden - forbidden for him. It's possible for one never to transgress a single law and still be a bastard. And vice versa. Actually, it's only a question of convenience. Those who are too lazy and comfortable to think for themselves and be their own judges obey the rules. Others sense their own laws within them; things are forbidden in them that every honorable man will do in any day of the year, and other things are allowed to them that are generally despised. Each person must stand on his own feet.
...
Each man had only one genuine vocation - to find the way to himself. He might end up as a poet or madman, as prophet or criminal - that was not his affair, ultimately it was of no concern. His task was to discover his own destiny - not an arbitrary one - and live it out wholly and resolutely within himself. Everything else was would-be existence, an attempt at evasion, a flight back to the ideals of the masses, conformity and fear of one's own inwardness."