Each new generation makes its own inquiry into the meaning of life, writes its own
Siddhartha; but never more so than in recent years has the search
for something to do with oneself led young people into extreme, violent, and contradictory experiences.
In
The Story of Sirio Camon constructs a parable where the young heroes are show advancing through the successive phases of a typical
via crucis: here we see the middle class boy at home, enveloped in the middle class dream, and invited to put his life into the service of production and expansion; here he is a runaway and living in the other world of society's rebels; here we see him enter into the world of romantic love; and here into the artificial paradise of drugs. And finally we see him, now part of an encounter group, undertaking that painful and grave effort at self-analysis, that effort to know oneself which, for Camon, must precede any meaningful effort at social revolution.