In the first chapter of Demian, Emil Sinclair describes two worlds of his youth. In the first “were straight lines and paths that led into the future … duty and guilt, evil conscience and confession, pardon and good resolution, love and adoration … To this world our future had to belong; it had to be crystal clear, beautiful and well-ordered.” In the other there were “ghost stories and the breath of scandal … a gaily colored flood of monstrous, tempting, terrible enigmatical goings-on, the slaughter-house and prison, drunken men and scolding women … tales of burglaries, murders, suicides …” Emil finds it wonderful that there is one world of “peace, order and repose” and no less wonderful “that there were other things … sinister and violent ...” The rub is that soon the youth can’t keep the worlds apart, and as he succumbs to theft in one and deception in the other, he notes:
“My life at that time was a sort of insanity. I was shy, and lived in torment like a ghost in the midst of the well-ordered peace of our house.”
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