Again, that last statement is my opinion but it’s one that I wanted to make now before I make my other one.Įssentially, if you are a Humanities student or a University student of the Arts, this book will have some very eerie parallels to what is probably going on in your life right now. A potent group of abstract scholars called Castalians have formed and “rediscovering the lost mysteries of the ancients,” gradually created the Glass-Bead Game: the ultimate in interdisciplinary reference-making.

This story apparently takes place in the future–where wars have stalled for a while–and there seems to be a measure of global peace. I suppose I will talk about the generalizations further before going into the characters. To be honest, we never really get a straight answer as to what the particulars of the Game actually are, but a whole lot of tantalizing generalizations do occur. That is what I first thought that the Glass-Bead Game–created and practiced by the Castalian Order–actually was. Imagine a game of Tetris that uses all of the world’s culminated and sum total of knowledge to create intricate and wonderful patterns of word, song, and image.

But it wasn’t until I found a copy of the book that someone was reading at a friend’s house that I actually looked through it and was fascinated by what I saw. I’d heard of Hermann Hesse in passing from a former coworker of mine before ever I picked up a copy of The Glass-Bead Game (or Magister Ludi as it is called in some translations). His resolve to return from the intellectual inner sanctum of Castalia to the maelstrom of daily life in the 'outer world' marks his (and Hesse's) fulfilment in a life uniting both spirit and body, technical and intellectual, thought and deed, classic and romantic, Dionysian and Apollonian.Ī must read for all who would seriously ponder the role fo the intellectual in the modern world.This review probably shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise to those of you who read my entry “The State of my Blog.” You see? This is where digressions and tangents can lead you: to more book reviews! Joseph Knecht, the central character, reflects both the immediacy of Hesse's inner journey from Goethe to Thomas Mann, and the universality of the quest of the search for the divine (spirituality, art, music, philosophy) which distinguishes man from beast. Hesse's Magister Ludi is the superlative capstone of a life's work permeated by a gentle wistfulness, a growing sense that the goal of the journey (of life) may be the journey itself,and a deeper, richer sense that such human contentment as may be found is to be found in a life integrating action and deepest thought.

The glass bead game by hermann hesse