Demian by Hermann Hesse

This is an amazing book, first of all.  I remember being awed by it when I first read it (sometime during junior year, possibly during the summer)... And apparently the last time I read it, I misspelled Demian's name to Damian EVERY SINGLE TIME.  The hell was wrong with me?  I spelled it correctly in the tag.  And funny story, I must have read Fight Club right before it then too, because a quick scan shows that I quote it about ten gajillion times.  And... Then I start talking about Paradise Lost.  Okay.  There's a reason why I don't reread my old posts.

So, first of all, at the time I originally read this, what awed me was the information about Abraxas, but there's so much more that amazed me this time, mostly in that it almost always seems like Hermann Hesse read my mind and wrote down what he saw there in his book.  I mean, it's cool that my thoughts contributed to a book that won the Nobel prize, but you couldn't have asked permission?  Or hooked me up with your time machine?
I don't think it seemed like that when I first read it, I don't think I really understood those parts of it (I don't really discuss them, and I don't really remember them, so...) but anyways.
Oh, and I attempted to read the introduction about Hesse, but I just lacked the attention span.  I did get from it, however, that Hesse was bipolar and this is considered by many to be his most autobiographical work, so maybe it's not good that I'm nodding my head at almost everything he says.  Oh well.

So, this book is about a boy named Emil Sinclair.  It could be a coming-of-age story, and it partially is--if it went on, it would be one perfectly.  You see, it goes up pretty much the usual loop of storytelling--you know, rising action/falling action/climax/et cetera--with maybe a few extra humps, but there's no 'falling action' really, just an implication... Well, I don't know.  I guess it's still coming-of-age, just not your usual coming-of-age.  It starts out when he's about ten, and ends probably when he's sixteen or seventeen... It ends during the first world war, so whatever the draft age would have been.  So--let's go!

Hesse gives his own little prologue:
"Each man's life represents a road towards himself... No man has ever been entirely and completely himself" (2).
"We can understand one another; but each of us is able to interpret himself to himself alone" (2).

Hesse starts his story by saying how he seemed to be aware of a dark world and a light world--the light world being that of his parents and sisters, the dark world coming from within himself, carried in by the house servants at times, but mainly a world of those that had gone astray.  As a child, it scared him and made him feel guilty.
"There were stories of sons who had gone away, stories I read with passion.  These stories always pictured the homecoming as such a relief and as something so extraordinary that I felt convinced that this alone was the right, the best, the sought-for thing.  Still, the part of the story set among the evil and lost was more appealing by far, and--if I could have admitted it--at times I didn't want the Prodigal Son to repent and be found again" (5).

Sinclair's problems start when he tries to impress a bigger boy.  He makes up a story about stealing apples, and the bigger boy informs him that the owner of that orchard has promised two marks to anyone who tells him who thieves of his orchard are.  The boy demands that Sinclair pay him off so that he won't tell--but Sinclair only has some pfennigs.  The boy then demands that Sinclair pretty much become his personal servant boy till the debt is paid--in actuality, till the boy says so.  This plan is cut short, as Demian, a fellow classmate, just from watching, figures out the situation.  Demian never reveals exactly what he said or did to Sinclair's tormentor to make him leave Sinclair alone, but yeah.   Anyways, Demian first comes into Sinclair's scope after they learn the story of Cain and Abel.  This is what originally blew my mind.  I remember being awed.  He explains the story of Cain being marked already, and the story forming around that, not how the Bible says God marked him.  Maybe he had some strange characteristic that frightened or intimidated people and that was the mark--then the story grew up around him.  Maybe the murder was true, and that was the real mark--people were afraid to mess with him and his children.  Anyways, that stupefied me as a kid.  I had never thought of the Bible like that.  It amazed me.  I was hooked.

"'People with courage and character always seem sinister to the rest'" (24).

"'Ultimately all men are brothers'" (24).

"The question flashed through my mind whether Demian himself was not a kind of a Cain.  Why does he defend Cain unless he feels an affinity with him?" (26).  It becomes clear later that Cain and his mother seem to be marked in the same way.  They think differently, they live differently, they are almost not human--angels, demons--Abraxases (I'll explain this later), more like.  They are there own subculture, DemianStranger in a Strange Land, but with less orgies and crappy endings.

"'Cowards are constantly afraid, but you're not a coward, are you?  Certainly, you're no hero either.  There are some things you're afraid of, and some people, too.  And that should never be, you should never be afraid of men'" (31).

"It was my own affair to come to terms with myself and to find my own way, and like most well-brought-up children, I managed it badly" (41).
"Everyone goes through this crisis.  For the average person this is the point when demands of his own life come into the sharpest conflict with his environment, when the way forward has to be sought with the bitterest means at his command.  Many people experience the dying and rebirth--which is our fate--only this once during their entire life.  Their childhood becomes hollow and gradually collapses, everything they love abandons them and they suddenly feel surrounded by the loneliness and mortal cold of the universe.  Very many are caught forever in this impasse, and for the rest of their lives cling painfully to an irrevocable past, the dream of the lost paradise--which is the worst and most ruthless of dreams" (41).  Sinclair is explaining the changes in the mind and feelings as one reaches and struggles through puberty.

"'Examine a person closely enough and you know more about him then he does himself'" (47).
"'If I'm not master of my own will, then I'm in no position to direct it as I please'" (47).  Demian is remarkably perceptive, to the point where it seems as though he can read minds and control people.  This is not the case--he just studies people.  He finds it easy to figure out what makes them tick, and predict and guide their movements that they probably would make anyways in a way that seems like some sort of psychic power.  It's pretty interesting.

There's another interesting take on religious stories Demian has--this time it's the story of Jesus's crucifixion.  Jesus was crucified with two other men, two thieves.  One man repents to Jesus, and Jesus promises him a place in the kingdom of heaven.  Of course, in Sunday school, you are taught that this is the 'good' thief, because he accepted Jesus into his life and repented and all of that, and it's to show that repentance will cover all your sins, no matter what.  Demian thinks it's ridiculous--"'What's the sense of repenting if you're two steps from the grave?'" (51).  He thinks that it is pathetic and that all it does is show that the thief was a coward.  He doesn't feel bad, not really, he just doesn't want to suffer.  He is a coward.  Therefore, the other thief is the better man, because he is willing to stay stolid and reap what he has sowed.

"'I have no objection to worshiping this God Jehovah, far from it.  But I mean we ought to consider everything sacred, the entire world, not merely this artificially separated half!  Thus alongside the divine service we should have a service for the devil.  I feel that would be right.  Otherwise you must create for yourself a God that contains the devil too and in front of which you needn't close your eyes when the most natural things in the world take place'" (52).  The natural things that Demian means are things that are suppressed and considered to be the devil's works--things like sexual desire.  I want to point out that over that last sentence I have the note "Abraxas"--this was written in the book this time around.  I had forgotten that this was the book I had learned about Abraxas in!  Abraxas was a Gnostic god capable of the kindest or most evil of acts.  He is the equivalent to God or the devil, or any one side of a yin yang--he is all.  The "'uniting of godly and devilish elements'" (80).  Demian himself is incomplete, as is Sinclair--Sinclair doesn't quite become Abraxas until the very end of the book.  I know that sounds strange--and of course it is meant to be a metaphor--but I'll explain it when I get there.
Secondly, although what Demian is saying probably seems like blasphemy, it makes sense.  God created everything, including the devil.  If everything is supposed to have a spark of the divine... Well!

"'Each person must stand on his own feet'" (54).

When Sinclair goes away to college, he feels lost and adrift.  He starts drinking heavily, becomes a lover of bars (I find it interesting that this is where he falls to, whereas Stephen in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in almost the same exact situation does not fall to the drink, but to prostitutes) and makes drinking buddies with the scum of the earth.  He is lost and floundering.
"I simply did what I had to do, because I had no idea what to do with myself otherwise.  I was afraid of being alone for long, was afraid of the many tender and chaste moods that would overcome me, was afraid of the thoughts of love surging up in me " (65).
"What I missed above all else was a friend" (65).
Eventually he does redeem himself--he sees a girl that he names Beatrice, after Dante's Beatrice, that he falls in love with from afar.  He admires her figure, her face; he sees her as something divine, to be venerated.  He cleans himself up completely, stays away from the bars, improves his dress and mannerisms, picks his grades up in school--and so on.  He also begins to paint again, and in attempting to paint her he paints instead a holy image, altogether not male or female, but amazingly beautiful and touching.
"That's what my friend would look like if I were to find one ever again.  That's what the woman I would love would look like if ever I were to love one.  That's what my life and death would be like, this was the rhythm of my fate" (72).
Thinking back, he remembers running into Demian during one of his debauchery-filled nights, and Demian tells him that the sensualists and "men of the world" make the best saints when they turn.  I believe it.

"'Who would be born must first destroy a world'" (78).

Later Sinclair learns about Abraxas in school, and even later he meets a man named Pistorious who teaches him even more about the strange god.  However--again--we will get there in time.

"The figure of Beatrice with which I occupied myself so intimately and fervently gradually became submerged or, rather, was slowly receding, approaching the horizon more and more, becoming more shadowy and remote, paler.  She no longer satisfied the longings of my soul.  In the peculiar self-made isolation in which I existed like a sleepwalker, a new growth began to take shape inside me.  The longing for life grew--or rather the longing for love.  My sexual drive, which I had sublimated for a time in the veneration of Beatrice, demanded new images and objects.  But my desires remained unfulfilled and it was more impossible than ever for me to deceive my longings and hope for something from the women with whom my comrades tried their luck.  I dreamed vividly again, more in fact by day than at night.  Images, pictures, desires arose freely within me, drew me away from the outside world so that I had a more substantial and livelier relationship with the world of my own creation, with these images and longings and shadows, than with the actual world around me" (81).  So... If you switched genders and stuff around, this could be me writing.  Seriously.  Hermann Hesse literally just wrote brain processes of mine out for everyone to see.

"I was always preoccupied with myself.  And I longed desperately to really live for once, to give something of myself, to enter into a relationship and battle with it.  Sometimes when I ran through the streets in the evening, unable to return before midnight because I was so restless, I felt that now at this very moment I would have to meet my beloved--as she walked past me at the next street corner, called to me from the nearest window.  At other times all of this seemed unbearably painful and I was prepared to commit suicide" (84).  Again.  Hermann.  Please ask permission next time.

"'Everything else is so moral that I'm looking for something that isn't'" (86).

So Sinclair eventually meets Pistorius, and Pistorius teaches him more about Abraxas.  Pistorious becomes a sort of mentor for Sinclair, but as he learns more and matures he begins to see Pistorious as a dead end--Pistorious understands greatness, perhaps, but couldn't possibly have the skills to achieve it.  Thus, Sinclair begins to loathe him and they grow apart--are very much forced apart by Sinclair.  Though Sinclair doesn't mean consciously to do this and even feels guilty afterwards, it was undoubtedly seen as a necessary act to drive him back to Demian--so his unconscious self acted to do so.  This would make sense with the book--and this is all I'll really say about Pistorious before moving on.  he doesn't interest me much.

"'We aren't pigs as you seem to think, but human beings.  We create gods and struggle with them, and they bless us'" (105).

When he and Pistorious finally break apart, he (Sinclair) says that "During that walk I felt for the first time the mark of Cain on my forehead" (110).

"Each man had only one genuine vocation--to find the way to himself" (111).

So he finds Demian again--Demian:
"'For a hundred years or more Europe has done nothing but study and build factories!  They know exactly how many ounces of powder it takes to kill a man but they don't know how to pray to God, they don't even know how to be happy for a single contented hour'" (118).

"Let the students have their drunken orgies and tattoo their faces; the rotten world could await its destruction--for all I cared.  I was waiting for one thing--to see my fate step forward in a new guise" (120).  Hermann, how are you in my head, you need to stop, it's wigging me out.
Well... Sinclair visits Demian to stay with him and his mother over the holidays.  That fate's guise is Demian's mother, Eva--almost immediately he loves her.
"'How glad I am,' I said and kissed her hands.  'I believe I have been on my way my whole life--and now I have come home.'  She smiled like a mother.  'One never reaches home,' she said.  'But where paths that have affinity for each other intersect, the whole world looks like home, for a time'" (122).
"'It is always difficult to be born'" (123).
"'There is no dream that last forever, each dream is followed by another, and one should not cling to any particular one'" (124).
"'Your fate loves you.  One day it will be entirely yours--just as you dream it--if you remain constant to it'" (124).
That's all her.  The next bit is from Sinclair, and the dialogue is her's, of course: "At times I was dissatisfied with myself and tortured with desire: I believed I could no longer bear to have her near me without taking her in my arms.  She sensed this, too, at once.  Once when I had stayed away for many days and returned bewildered she took me aside and said: 'You must not give way to desires which you don't believe in.  I know what you desire.  You should, however, either be capable of renouncing these desires or feel wholly justified in having them.  Once you are able to make your request in such a way that you will be quite certain of its fulfillment, then the fulfillment will come'" (129).
"'Love must not entreat... or demand.  Love must have the strength to become certain within itself.  Then it ceases merely to be attracted and begins to attract.  Sinclair, your love is attracted to me.  Once it begins to attract me, I will come.  I will not make a gift of myself, I must be won'" (130).
"'But at present you alternate between desire and renunciation and are afraid all the time.  All that must be overcome'" (130).
"Little by little, sensual and spiritual love, reality and symbol began to overlap" (131).

"'No one dreams anything that doesn't "concern him personally"'" (135).

So--the book begins to wrap up when the first world war begins to really begin boiling.    "How strange that the stream of the world was not to bypass us any more, that it now went straight through our hearts" (141).
Demian is drafted, and shortly after Sinclair is as well.  Sinclair is at one point wounded badly, but drags himself--or is dragged, it's not entirely clear--into a building full of other wounded men.  On the mattress next to him lays Demian.  Now we get to what I meant by saying Sinclair becomes Abraxas.  Demian explains to Sinclair that when Sinclair needs Demian and calls for him he won't come to him physically anymore--that he will be inside of Sinclair to answer to his call.  As a sort of conscious.  Demian gives Sinclair a light kiss from his mother and Sinclair, exhausted, falls asleep.  When he wakes in the morning, Demian is gone and there is another in his bed.  The end: "Dressing the wound hurt.  Everything that has happened to me since has hurt.  But sometimes when I find the key and climb deep into myself where the images of fate lie aslumber in the dark mirror, I need only bend over that dark mirror to behold my own image, now completely resembling him, my brother, my master" (145).

MLA Citation Information: Hesse, Hermann.  Demian.  Perennial Classics: New York, 1999.


Read this book.  Go ahead, do it.  I'm biased, but I think it's worth a spin.  It's not my fault that Hermann Hesse was writing about me just with a gender swap.  Seriously.

Answer to last post's cryptic lyrics: Moonage Daydream by David Bowie
Answer to this post's cryptic lyrics: All the lights are fading now--if I'm dreaming all my life

You can stop the truth from leaking if you never stop believing...

I finished Damian today. I liked it more than Journey to the East, though both endings left me equally as cold. I mean, they're like... they don't really leave loose ends... but they do. They don't seem... conclusive enough. I mean, (spoilers!) it was obvious Damian had died, and they were almost the same... alpha and omega, yin and yang--they were two people that were really the same person, kind of. But I just... didn't like the ending. But I don't know how Hermann could have improved or changed it or anything, so I guess I can't complain. But I still think the ending was 'ehh...'
But, yeah, I think the point was--like Abraxas, the two of them sort of... became one, at the end, after Damian had died, but was still alive, or had become a part of Emil. But I guess that's not completely true, because Emil had gone down to the lowest pit--so they both had the capability for Abraxas. But upon meeting (and falling in love with) Damian's mother Emil kind of found his muse, his redemption, his holy muse, and saw light again. But Damian was never really evil--he just saw things differently. He was just a little different. He had the mark of Cain, as he said, though I think he meant it quite literally by the end--not just referring to the vibes he gave off, but a literal mark, somehow, passed on...
And Damian's mother, the Muse, an angel in her own right. "some hybrid mother slash lover/ she’d soothe and heal his wounds / And kiss those dying ears so softly that the reaper stops to swoon" Well, that's what I got of her, and the description of her... well, undoubtedly it makes her appear like a goddess or angel. The both of them, mother and son, appeared to have the divine and all. (and while we're thinking of yellow cat/red cat, I'm starting to feel like the lonely goat who feeds 'him' quotes...)
And, there's one section where Emil speaks with a school mate about resisting sexual contact or temptation... and by doing so, the longer you can resist it or live without it or whatever, the 'purer' you become. And it made me think of a bit in Paradise Lost (which I completely forgot about finishing... aw, crud...) where... Well, I can't remember the exact line, but the line is translated at the bottom of the page (this is the B&N edition) to its basic meaning. Basically, the line is saying that the angels have sex (I think what it actually said was 'sensual love', but, really...) all the time. Which befuddles me. How come it's okay for them to constantly be fooling around, but humankind is punished for it? John Milton doesn't bother explaining or dwelling on the subject, and he appears to be the only writer who has that thought... I mean, I'm not saying, go whore around! St Peter won't mind! Tell him John Milton made you do it! (That'd make an awesome shirt...) But I just don't get it. Then again, in Murder Mysteries (a comic book spearheaded by Neil Gaiman) the two angels who are first to love and have sex (well, they have more 'sensual love' than anything else--the angels in the book were simply eunuchs, so they couldn't really 'have sex') are eventually both killed. With love and sex comes jealousy, hatred and murder? Well, I'm not surprised.
Anyways. I sure don't get it. It's kind of unfair with that double standard. Now, keep in mind, Paradise Lost is sympathetic towards Satan... but... supposedly the reason he became disgusted and left... well, I've heard several different stories... one of which was that Satan was not allowed to 'touch' (ie, be near or be in the presence of him) the deity Job, which I don't understand. Job is a human in the bible, so unless we're going by a Vonnegut-ish sense of time, that just doesn't work. Maybe. In Murder Mysteries, he left God because he could not see what was 'just' in the killing of a fellow angel. He was the first to cry, so Vengeance said. Of course, that's sympathetic for him too. But really? I think he is a character who needs sympathy, which sounds weird, I know. No matter what, I have the feeling that what bugged him, was maybe the sort of inconsistencies he saw. Not the sex thing, either. Maybe the hierarchies, in the case of Job. He was jealous, alright, but if God's playing favorites... He didn't want to be a nothing, one of the multitude, a faceless angel in a flock of angels. Let me paraphrase Chuck Palahniuk for the ninety thousandth time in my life: What would rather be, God's worst enemy or nothing at all? Who doesn't want to be noticed, who doesn't want to be remembered? Their fifteen minutes of fame? Satan is more human than you'd think. Is that want to be something evil? Let me paraphrase you-guess-who again... How your dream will drive you insane and then kill you. That is, he became consumed with that want--it didn't kill him, but let's say he's humankind's prolonged martyr. Heaven's Tyler Durden.
Holy God.
I never realized that before. Huh. Damn. Well.
I believe I've shocked myself.
But there are so many similarities! (Minus, the idea of the Fight Club, but Tyler himself...)
...
I don't think Palahniuk meant it that way, but...
Woah.
I... I was going to continue... but...
Oh hell, I might as well. Going back to Murder Mysteries, it's also possible something shattered his loyalty. And he wanted to create something better, or he just "wanted something better" in general. And again, he's a human. "If being born makes your parents God, then puberty makes you Satan for wanting something better"--Guess Who. I've only name-dropped him like five times. He's too human not sympathize with, really. I reject what he has been bastardized into. Maybe it happened that way because us humans were scared to recognize, after all stories had been told and such (did the base story for Paradise Lost exist before Milton wrote it?) it was feared to be like... well, that kind of explains those strict puritanical rules and such. The expulsion of all similarities, mayhaps? Well, I dunno. It's late, okay? I guess in this case, there's really no backbone text like the Bible you can sort of rely on. Well, you know. Anyways, I think I'm gonna head off.
....
I better do a dissertation or something on this in college.

I'll take my clothes off, and it will be shameless, cause everyone knows that's how you get famous

Just got back from an eve of debauchery with Jackii! For once, however, we were not almost kicked out of any stores today--shocking, eh? So. She got (notice the use of the word 'got') Demian and... and... Could that have been it? Maybe? Well. I was going to choose a random Michael Chabon book, but they're all the size of a house--so I got Post Office by Bukowski--it was the only book by him there. Already I'm a little disheartened by it though, now that I've actually had a chance to read the back. It seems Chinaski is the 'hero' of this too... and I'm assuming it's set after Factotum because it mentions that he's given "ten years to the postal service"... so... I always assumed at the end of Factotum Chinaski just went off and died in some gutter somewhere--I always thought that end "I couldn't get it up" was supposed to be... well, symbolic. Yes, I found it symbolic that he couldn't get a boner, okay? I figured it meant (oh god, this always sounds so ridiculous when I try to explain it) that it was like his life--he wouldn't be able to 'get it up' that is, recover from his gutter-crawling, boozing state--and that shortly after that he'd starve, or die of alcohol poisoning, or... something... uhm... So. I guess I'm angry he's not dead? Okay, look, sometimes it's better that way! I would have personally murdered Palahniuk if Survivor had had a happy ending. I mean, you think you'd love one, but when you think about it, sometimes they just don't work. As much as you'd like them to. (And no, I haven't figured out how he could have saved himself--was it obvious?)

And, as you've gathered, I guess, I'm in the midst of Demian. I like it more than Journey to the East, that's for sure. It's kind of reminding me of Angela's Ashes, and even a little of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The theme of the search for good versus and evil and such, Emil's growing up and various epiphanies, sometimes given to him by Demian and sometimes him realizing it himself--for example, when he realizes the world isn't just black and white... well, they didn't have Animorphs back then, so he had to learn somehow. But yeah, at the moment he's drinking himself into constant stupors (oh hey, Chinaski!) and it's like Angela's Ashes, only that McCourt was sleeping around (for a Catholic schoolboy, he got loads of action) as opposed to the drinking. It's a kind of cursory connection but hey. You write a book reaction out of the school year. Yeah. That's what I thought.

And there was one book in the store about Rasputin--unfortunately, it was written by the hackneyed untalented man who wrote a book on Czar Nicholas II which I also read in France... I can't remember the book's specific title, nor can I remember his exact name... something like Edvard Radulovich? The point is, I wouldn't get it, because he is just a crappy writer. Even James Patterson beat him out. James Patterson beat you. Let that sink in, bro. You suck! The book... it was L&C's Antichrist. My inner mind commentary through the whole book was basically "That was another fragment, asshole! HEY! Pick a goddamn tense and stick with it! God!" I'm not even kidding you. That book is the bible of what not ever to do when writing. Marky Marky would not approve! It's a wonder I didn't go irrevocably insane during the process of reading it. The only reason I could press on is because the revolution interests me so... Unfortunately, the book made it pretty clear that no Romanovs survived. *sigh* You see (oh god here she goes....)
It is mentioned briefly that Anastasia had a King Charles spaniel that was small enough so that she could carry it around in her muff, or puffy princess sleeves. After the family was shot and killed, one of the generals on the scene reported that he was quite shocked when the corpse of a small dog fell from the sleeve of one of the girl's bodies. So most likely, that's an x for Anastasia as well, unless the dog managed to be some sort of shield, which even so... And okay, two of the bodies were missing--and they gave the names Alexei and Anastasia. But it's likely the names were just being pulled out of a hat, there. It could have been Tatiana... (I'll get back to that thought!) and Alexei surviving is the stupidest--sorry, but the kid was a hemophiliac. He was shot a ridiculous number of times, because he just wouldn't die--Not only that, he was stabbed with a bayonet. Even if he somehow managed to escape the troops (crawling? How?) he would have very easily bled out within, say, four or five hours at the most. And it must have been excruciating--just bruising his knee made him unable to stand and walk around, so I can't help but discredit any idea that he could have survived. Well, maybe if Rasputin was around... But he had been dead for quite sometime at that point... and yes, I know it sounds somewhat unintelligent, but I do believe Grigori had some sort of inexplicable power. That's why I wanted to get a book on him, and look more into the existence or nonexistence of it, but Edvard "I suck" got in the way of it.
What I said about Tatiana--well, apparently, a dazed and all but in shock girl claimed that she was the Romanov princess--but then claimed she was Anastasia later on. The dog thing makes me feel doubtful it was Anastasia, but the girl was practically in shell shock, and if it was the truth, you can't really blame her for being so befuddled. Being the only survivor of your family's regicide is an event that really tends to leave a mark on you. At the time of the writing, there was no conclusive evidence regarding her lineage... that is, genetic tests or some such, but 'Little K', Niocholas's former girlfriend when shown a picture of the girl (whose name was not even included! Mrs A would not approve of that--) said something along the lines of that their (the girl's and Czar Nicholas II) eyes and their faces were too similar... you'd never forget the intensity of those eyes, etc. I mean, that's not perfect, by no means... but. Well, I guess I'll have a chance to do more research on the subject when I find books regarding it that are written by someone who knows how to write. I'll get back to you guys on this one.

Anyways. Here're some pictures from France... That is, Oscar Wilde's grave.
And, for added fun--guess which set of lipstick is from me!:
.... It's actually really hard to see in that photo....