50 Books in a Year: Book #4 Demian

"Sanity is a madness put to good uses; waking life is a dream controlled."

~George Santayana

          

...if to live than how?

           I found the movie "Waking Life" in the $1 VHS bin at a Blockbuster about a year after it came out. In the early 2000s it was easy and cheap to find VHS movies as the push for DVDs had just started and people wanted to get rid of their videos before DVDs, and now BLUE-RAYs, took over. I grabbed it up because I had, and still have a VHS player (I will never get rid of that thing!).

          After watching it and taking notes and talking about it and making others watch it, I found out that I am a theist existentialist, in short, I believe that we should live our lives with meaning and without regret. I eat up books that proliferate these concepts The Unbearable Lightness of Being, The Stranger, The Catcher in the Rye, Metamorphosis, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged...I have yet to read any Sarte, Dostoyevsky and up until yesterday any Hesse.
          I was talking about Waking Life to one of my friends and she recommended, and then bought me a used copy of, Demian by Hesse. She thought, based on what I was talking about and how I was talking about it, that I would like it.
          I never opened the book and, over time, it got shuffled under other books and movies and other aspects of culture and living. After I finished The Stranger, I was talking with this same friend about Camus and she asked if I liked Demian...I said I hadn't read it, she reiterated that I would like it. More time went by...over the last summer I put it in a box of books to take to school for the children. Last week I took the box out of the closet with the intent of finally taking it to school, the tiny tot began playing with the books and Demian fell out of the pile she had created and landed at my feet. I took the hint and put it in my bag.
         On Friday, I told my friend I was going to read Demian, mostly to  keep myself in check, she said it'd been 7 years since she'd recommended it and it was about time.