’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 Ikuhara