According to Herman Hesse, inner harmony can only be attained by the complete acceptance of all natural desires and actions. He illustrates the necessity of self-awareness through his portrayal of the individual and his or her continuous quest through life to ultimate self-acceptance. In the novel Demian, Hesse creates the character Sinclair as an archetype for the individual, using Sinclair’s personal quest to illustrate the pain and despair resulting from uncertainty in one’s feelings and actions. Through Sinclair’s stories of his life, Hesse teaches that self-understanding and peace can only come with the recognition and realization of all one’s drives. In pursuit of this goal, one must not allow the often unnatural and hypocritical standards of society to prevent the expression of all aspects of one’s personality.
Demian begins with a story of the narrator, Sinclair, at age 10. This is when he began realizing that he had both desires that were accepted by society and desires that were not. Sinclair says that discovering this dual nature of his impulses led him to realize there were two realms of his world and two sides to himself. Hesse describes these as “day and night, two different worlds.” At this time, Sinclair sees the realms as very separate. To him, they are realms of pure, distinct good and evil. One realm was of “brilliance, clarity and cleanliness, gentle conversations, washed hands, clean clothes, and good manners.” The other, however, was one that “smelled different” and “contained servant girls and workmen, ghost stories, rumors of scandal.” Sinclair tries to deny himself thoughts or actions that lay in the dark world. He says that he “unquestionably belonged to the realm of light and righteousness.” He shows doubt as to his conviction, however, when he says, “at times I didn’t want…to repent and be found again. But one didn’t dare think this, much less say it out loud.” Although Sinclair sometimes felt that there was no reason to repent, he could not cross the line between worlds without suffering from the guilt and shame that society dictated he should feel.
The Essay on Brave New World Society And Socio economic Class
ter> Discuss how the society in Brave New World works to ensure that people do not change their socio-economic class. Through Brave New World, Huxley depicts a new, industrialized world, which is financially stable and has prevented poverty and self-destruction. Dictatorial governments are there to ensure stability and maintain perfection of the world. Therefore, just like under any other ...
It is not until Sinclair meets Demian that he truly begins to appreciate the dichotomy within himself. Demian does the unthinkable. He does not constrain his thoughts and desires to those that society accepts. Demian interprets the bible in ways different then those taught in school, and he isn’t afraid to put his philosophy into practice. He advises Sinclair to kill Kromer to rid himself of the other boy’s tyranny. Under Demian’s influence, Sinclair begins to think for himself, rather than swallowing everything he is spoon-fed by his parents and teachers. He begins feeling impulses that “came from the ‘other world’ and were accompanied by fear, constraint, and a bad conscience.” It is at this time that he realizes the awakening sense of his own sexuality and he sees it as “something forbidden, tempting and sinful.” Sinclair is wrought by distress because he is forced to become a “child who is no longer a child” and must act as if he does not have these forbidden drives and desires. Attempting to ignore his newfound awareness of his sexuality leaves him feeling discontented and alone.
Soon after this, Sinclair describes his amusement with various mind tricks Demian performs on students and teachers alike. He questions how Demian is able to understand and predict the actions of these people. Demian explains, using a moth as a metaphor, that one’s search must be for “what has sense and value” for him or her. He says that to achieve a goal or desire, one has to “desire it strongly enough so that [his/her] whole being was ruled by it.” Demian describes an inner force that guides the individual and states that the individual’s responsibility is simply to follow it. Sinclair himself attempts to imitate Demian’s wholehearted efforts towards achieving a goal, but he cannot find the requisite strength within himself.
The Essay on Painting Pictures
The year 2007 saw the production and release of several notable films, and one of these is There Will Be Blood, written and directed by Paul Anderson. This movie takes after a novel by Upton Sinclair entitled Oil! (1927), which, as the book’s title suggests, maintains the discovery of oil as a backdrop, and hunger for power as its driving force. Sinclair’s Oil! narrates the story of James Arnold ...
Sinclair is given another taste of Demian’s alternative theology in his interpretation of the story of the Crucifixion. He says that the man who remains steadfast in his belief, although considered wrong, is the man of true character. He explains that an entire half of the world is “is suppressed and hushed up.” Demian says that everything must be considered sacred – all desires, all actions, both those that are part of the light side and those that are part of the dark. Sinclair feels some confirmation and gratification in what Demian says because this is what he has been struggling with. Sinclair starts to realize that he must find out for himself “what is permitted and what is forbidden.”
When Sinclair begins to lose himself through alcohol, he sees a girl named Beatrice and devotes himself completely to finding spirituality. He says “I had something I loved and venerated, I had an ideal again, life was rich with intimations of mystery and a feeling of dawn that made me immune to taunts.” Sinclair was able to dedicate himself completely to his pursuit of a world of light, but in doing so, he ignored the other side once again. Hesse uses Sinclair’s painting as a metaphor for his inner thoughts and desires. Sinclair attempts repeatedly to paint the image of Beatrice. He is, however, unsuccessful until he allows himself to give into his “imagination and intuition that arose spontaneously from the first strokes, as though out of the paint and brush themselves.” When he does this, his painting turns out to express the dichotomy of the world. It was “half male, half female, ageless, as purposeful as it was dreamy, as rigid as it was secretly alive.” Later, after producing this painting, Sinclair often saw Beatrice, but only felt a “gentle harmony” because her image allowed him to accept his inner self and portray it in his painting.
When Sinclair learns of Abraxas in class, he is very interested. He learns that “we may conceive of the name as that of a godhead whose symbolic task is the uniting of godly and devilish elements.” At the same time, he was having a strange dream in which he saw his mother who he wanted to embrace. She was however tall and strong, yet completely feminine. He felt a “mixture of ecstasy and horror” upon embracing her, and he sometimes “awoke from this dream with a feeling of profound ecstasy, at other in mortal fear and with a racked conscience as though” he had “committed some terrible crime.” Love for Sinclair became both devout transfiguration and dark animalistic drive. “It was the image of an angel and Satan, man and woman in one flesh, man and beast, the highest good and the worst evil.” Sinclair began to love himself completely. The image he painted expressed his innermost desires and fears. It was a mixture of both his animalistic drives and his sanctified ones. Sinclair was finally determined to do as he felt and to love what he felt. “I wanted only to try to live in accord with the promptings which came from my true self. Why was that so very difficult?” He, however, was unable to do this because he still feared the result of following his true self.
The Essay on Oil Paintings
The oil painting technique traces its roots all the way back to a time between the fifth and ninth century when it was first used in Western Afghanistan, yet it was made famous and the premier means of expression by the Renaissance movement in the 15th century by men like Leonardo Da Vinci and Raphael (Davide 46). The reason the oil painting technique gained this newfound popularity was due in ...
When Sinclair comes upon Pistorious playing music in the small church, he is enthralled by it. Later, he says that he enjoys its sound because it is amoral. It is neither defined as good nor evil, but something that is either in between or all encompassing. Later, he says that it is “music that seemed to listen to itself” which is what he had been trying to do his entire life. From Pistorious he learns more about this acceptance of what feels right and renunciation of what feels wrong. When Pistorious and Sinclair gaze into the fire intently, forgetting everything worldly, Sinclair is able to accept the fire within himself and he feels and see images that he desired. It was “the surrender to nature’s irrational, strangely confused formations” that produced a feeling of “inner harmony.”
Soon after leaving Pistorious, Sinclair finds himself seeking out the image he saw in his painting. He finds that the image looks the same as Demian’s mother and so he sets out to find her. When he does, she is everything he had hoped. She is all the good of the world and all the bad. Sinclair sometimes finds himself wanting her sexually, but is unsure of himself. Frau Eva reiterates for him what he has been seeking and learning his entire life, that “you must not give way to desires which you don’t believe in” and “you should, however, either be capable of renouncing these desires or feel wholly justified in having them.” Sinclair finds that he must accept himself in his entirety in order to gain peace and contentment. When he finally does this, he is able to look at his image in a dark mirror and find that he is able to see himself.
The Essay on Desired Dream Dreams Feel Don
Have you ever dreamt about a dream in which seems so impossible that it's buried within your heart? Many times people feel that a dream is more like a wish in which they can only pray upon. With any dream, no matter how big or small, it takes a lot of hard work yet in the end you accomplish a desired purpose. My dream belongs to my writing. I want to write an intimate diary for teen girls to read ...
Herman Hesse uses the character of Sinclair to illustrate the individual’s need to understand his or her self. He tells the story of Sinclair’s bouts with depression brought about by his sexuality, and feelings of being an outcast. However, through this, the reader can understand the importance of accepting one’s thoughts and desires even if they do not correlate with those of society. It is this acceptance and acknowledgment of all aspects of the individual that allows for a peaceful and harmonious being.
