storytime

Ok kids, gather ’round… it’s story time!

      There once was a young man who was in love with a star. He stood by the sea, held out his hands, and worshipped the star; he dreamt about it and turned his thoughts to it. But he knew, or thought he knew, that a star couldn’t be embraced by a human being. He deemed it his fate to love a heavenly body with no hope of being requited, and on the basis of that notion he constructed an entire poetics of life consisting of renunciation and silent, faithful suffering, which was to improve him and purify him. But all his dreams were of the star. Once he was standing by the sea again at night, on the high cliff, looking up at the star and blazing with love for it. And in a moment of supreme longing, he jumped and plunged into the void, in the direction of the star. But at the moment he jumped he still though, quick as a flash: “But it’s impossible!” There he lay, down on the beach, shattered. He didn’t know how to love. If, at the moment he jumped, he had had the psychic strength to believe firmly and certainly that his love would be requited, he would have flown into the sky to be united with the star.
        Love ought not to make requests, but shouldn’t make demands, either. Love must have the strength to reach certainty for itself. Then it no longer undergoes the power of attraction, but exerts it.

Here’s another….

     There once was a man who loved without hope. He withdrew completely inside himself, and thought he would burn up with love. He lost contact with the world; he no longer saw the blue sky and the green forest; the brook didn’t murmur for him, the harp didn’t sound for him; everything had gone under, and he had become poor and miserable. But his love grew, and he was much readier to die and wither away than to renounce the possession of the beautiful woman he loved. Then he noticed his love had burn up everything else in him; it became powerful and exerted more and more attraction; and the beautiful woman was compelled to follow; she came, he stood there with outstretched arms to draw her to himself. But when she stood before him, she was totally transformed, and with trembling he felt and saw that he had attracted himself to the entire world he had lost. It stood before him and yielded itself to him; sky and forest and brook, everything came to meet him in new colors, vivid and splendid; it belonged to him, it spoke his language. And instead of merely winning a woman, he had the whole world on his bosom, and every star in the sky shone within him and sparkled joy into his soul.–He had loved and, by doing so, had found himself. But most people love in order to lose themselves.

Both of the above are taken from Hermann Hesse’s “Demian”