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    The Glass Bead Game: (Magister Ludi) A Novel
    The Glass Bead Game: (Magister Ludi) A Novel
    The Glass Bead Game: (Magister Ludi) A Novel
    Ebook675 pages15 hours

    The Glass Bead Game: (Magister Ludi) A Novel

    By Hermann Hesse, Richard Winston, Theodore Ziolkowski and Clara Winston

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    The Glass Bead Game, for which Hesse won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1946, is the author's last and crowning achievement, the most imaginative and prophetic of all his novels. Setting the story in the distant postapocalyptic future, Hesse tells of an elite cult of intellectuals who play an elaborate game that uses all the cultural and scientific knowledge of the Ages. The Glass Bead Game is a fascinating tale of the complexity of modern life as well as a classic of modern literature.

    This edition features a Foreword by Theodore Ziolkowski that places the book in the full context of Hesse's thought.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateDec 6, 2002
    ISBN9781466835023
    The Glass Bead Game: (Magister Ludi) A Novel
    Author

    Hermann Hesse

    Hermann Hesse was born in 1877. His books include Siddhartha, Steppenwolf, Narcissus and Goldmund, and Magister Ludi. He died in 1962.

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    Reviews for The Glass Bead Game

    4/5

    1,290 ratings44 reviews

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    • 4/5
      A precious read.
    • 4/5
      Intense read
    • 2/5
      Ik kan echt niet enthousiast worden van dit boek. Het kralenspel ligt volledig in de lijn van Hesse's vorige werken, gaat andermaal over de strijd tussen geest en wereld, 'to be or not to be', maar de uitwerking is zo droog. Waar Siddharta virtuoos en briljant was, is dit boek gewoon saai; alleen de slotessays zijn verteerbaarder, al voegen ze weinig toe.
    • 3/5
      What wonders are revealed by these words? WHO KNOWS? Or, who cares?
    • 4/5
      A wonderful device of an attempted biography and an ethereal tale.
    • 3/5
      A long rambling story devoid of interesting characters, novel ideas, or gripping conflict. The title refers to a game built upon a system for describing all human potential by a future society of monk-like intellectuals (Costalians). Hesse provides elaborate details of the most mundane aspects of everyday life of the Costalians and of the curation of the game without ever introducing any struggle for why any of it matters. Instead the book is about finding meaning and purpose in life, but in this he also fails. The supposedly uplifting argument he gives falls flat and leaves one hollow. I felt similarly after reading Camus' The Stranger, but at least Camus seems to have intended a hollow feeling. This book was a great disappointment because of the intriguing idea of the game and because I so thoroughly enjoyed Hesse's surreal Steppenwolf and was hoping for something similar. It did not deliver, and I don't think it should have been nominated for a retro Hugo award. The science aspect of the game or the Costalians is used only to whet the reader's curiosity at the beginning and is never developed.
    • 2/5
      Ik kan echt niet enthousiast worden van dit boek. Het kralenspel ligt volledig in de lijn van Hesse's vorige werken, gaat andermaal over de strijd tussen geest en wereld, 'to be or not to be', maar de uitwerking is zo droog. Waar Siddharta virtuoos en briljant was, is dit boek gewoon saai; alleen de slotessays zijn verteerbaarder, al voegen ze weinig toe.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      Set in the future, the 23rd century, I think, the setting is Castalia. The story is the last by Hermann Hesse and is called a work of Science Fiction. I don't see the SF part of it but it also can be described as fantasy and fictional biography. It also is full of Hesse's interest in Eastern philosophy and Western religion. The author received the Nobel probably because of this book in 1946. Joseph Knecht is the young initiate into the monastic secular life of Castalia. The men study various subjects and the Glass Bead game links them. The reader is never told how this game works but it involves all knowledge and especially music and mathematics. Knecht eventually leaves the society and the high position of Magister Ludi when he becomes disillusioned with a society that really is not helping society. He then takes on the role of teacher of his friends wild son. The biography section of the book soon ends. The rest of the book is some stories by Knecht which really are short stories. Over all this book did not engage me. I read it and perhaps will read it again some day but so far, I am not hippy enough to enjoy Hesse's writing. This being the second book by the author for me.
    • 5/5
      I read this in German a long time ago (2002-06-15).I suppose it depends on whether working through the difficulty brings you genuine insights into the human condition. I'm ashamed to say I've only read one book on this list - Ulysses - and enjoyed it. I like modernism, and Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is one of my favourites. Woolf is a bit daunting, but Mrs. Dalloway is superb.I heard a radio adaptation of Tristram Shandy - I'm a big fan of digression and unreliable narrators - which inspired me to a hitherto unfulfilled wish to read the book. Doctor Faustus is another of those unfulfilled wishes. The rest of the list (apart from a couple I hadn't heard of) I have avoided not quite like the plague.Sometimes it's just because the book is cool for its time. I waded through Hermann Hesse's The Glass Bead Game as a teenager and was none the wiser at the end. But at least I had the bragging rights. Later I re-read it. And I loved the Glass Bead Game but I'm never sure why. I'd describe it as boring, but it's one book I've actually re-bought when I lost a copy. I'm never quite sure if it's sending up or celebrating intense academic specialisation and culture for cultures sake, but the most sympathetic character is the main character's friend, who leaves to be something important in the 'real world'. You admire Joseph Knecht for his dedication to somewhat esoteric knowledge and understanding of the game but are also left thinking that outside of that particular environment, it has very little use or meaning.It is a familiar theme of Hesse's work - the contrast of worldly life with academia or religious training. I suspect he found himself drawn to the latter but with the fear of losing touch with normality in a religious or academic cocoon. I do love the sense of things happening just outside, threatening the enclosed world of the universities. And hence outside pupils who go through the schools but are expected to return to the world. And there are hints of a complicated history, and how the universities came to be what they are, and we're, frustratingly almost, made to focus on the interior of this world. Knecht does leave though, and suffers one of the weirdest deaths in literature.I did read all the Hermann Hesse novels at the time because he was the man with the Truth, but they've mostly all blurred together into a generic Hessian fable. Apart from Steppenwolf, with whom I desperately identified, and Siddartha.

      2 people found this helpful

    • 5/5
      I'm glad that I came late to this book because I don't believe I had the emotional maturity to take this journey earlier in my life. The numerous passages that I copied into my notebook may not have resonated in my earlier years. This is an immersive meditation on the tension between the active life and the contemplative life. A jewel.

      2 people found this helpful

    • 5/5
      One of the great books of German literature, A trip of a lifetime wandering with Joseph K as he transforms from the ordinary man to the Magister ludi - the Master of the game - and then - as an enlightened man - wise beyond any - find the true meanings of the game. A must read for anyone seeking truth and discernment. Perhaps a bit cerebral for some. Hesse captures the soul of mankind in the wonderful tome.
    • 5/5
      Hermann Hesse's vision of a future in which intellectuals in monastic communities devote themselves to a complex game loosely based on the Chinese alphabet is beguiling and spiritual but somewhat baffling. Highly recommended but it does demand some concentration.
    • 4/5
      This novel is about the human tendency to game reality and try to understand the consequences of the process in the World of David Hume's social truths. Read this book when young, spend some years trying to develop computer role-playing games and then reread. It will seem less dull, and you won't even forget the first reading.This book was written in 1943 in Switzerland.
    • 5/5
      "The Glass Bead Game" is so full of thoughts. I first loved it for it's freemasonic ideas, the scholarly touch, the way a world was created in my mind. Later for the impressingly drawn picture of an interaction between system and individual. Towards the end of Knechts life for the calm, relaxing, maze-like structure of the book, seeing it as a glass bead game itself. The final, indian story left the next remarkable impression on me– after all that contemplation, Maya seems so much more painful than ever before. The longing for solitude and pure awareness seemed to become my own.
      My mind went all this way with the protagonist, the biographer and the system of Castalia – this book leaves me a bit richer in paths of thinking, or so I hope.
    • 5/5
      A very intriguing work. In a distant future, an intelectually challenging game determines who will rule an order isolated from the vast majority of humanity.
    • 5/5
      Hippie heaven. Or how I found another way to calculate life (and love).

      1 person found this helpful

    • 3/5
      The Glass Bead Game is set in a dystopian future where the age of creation and creativity is long past, where the best and brightest are culled from the population and brought to the province of Castalia. There, they are indoctrinated in the approved subject matter (no history, of course, lest they realize how terrible life is now compared to earlier eras), assigned a path in life by the superiors in the Castalian hierarchy without any say as to their own preference, and pushed into a life of celibacy and isolation from the outside world. The closest they can get to doing anything creative is playing the titular Glass Bead Game, a game which at first appears to be a systematic understanding of all human knowledge, but on closer inspection reveals itself to be a nebulous construct where elements of previous knowledge are endlessly recombined without actual comprehension. Even the rules of this game are impervious to any attempt at creativity: the first section of the book makes clear that changes to the rules are now all but impossible, and while winning a specific tournament creates the potential for a person's proposed changes to be adopted, in practice the winner of that tournament is the one who plays the most conservatively, without proposing new additions to the preexisting rules. Even the way people speak is regulated so that everyone sounds the same. The perfect person in this world is a servant, not a leader. Those who disappoint the Castalian hierarchy or attempt to leave it are met with swift death. At least this is how I chose to interpret the book, because if I read this work as merely the story of a boring character working his way through a slightly futuristic university it would have been unbearably dull.

      Most of these points have been made before, but I'll reiterate them briefly: The main character Joseph Knecht is incredibly boring, with little personality for the vast majority of the book, but despite that he is beloved by everyone for no discernible reason. He rises rapidly in the hierarchy through luck, not because it makes any sense, but because Hesse wanted to tell the story of a person rapidly rising in the hierarchy. His speech is bland, you never get a sense of his motivations until the book has them come out of nowhere, and in general it is all but impossible to get invested or excited by his life. There are a few other characters that might have been more intriguing, but we never follow anyone else so it's an academic point.

      The writing in general is incredibly flat. There are few descriptions and the prose lacks beauty, and while you could attribute this to the story supposedly being written in an era that eschews beautiful prose in favor of a more scientific account of a person's biography, this interpretation is undercut by the dialogue also being subpar. Every character talks in the same voice, consistently delivering page-long speeches in a way that no real person ever talks. There is a segment where Knecht talks to a young boy in the same longwinded academic style he does to everyone else, and the effect is laughable. With this being a fictional biography you could attribute even this flaw in the writing to the writer-character, but if Hesse set up a story so that it necessitated poor writing then he made an even bigger flaw.

      So if the characters are boring and the writing is flat, you would hope that the concepts the book explores would be interesting. Sadly, this isn't the case. I already presented what I found to be the most interesting interpretation of the book in my opening paragraph, but I'm the first to admit that such an interpretation requires the text to be stretched. A more supported interpretation of the text is that it centers on what is basically a fictional university, isolated from the outside world, where perpetual studenthood is allowed and even encouraged. Despite the text’s assertions to the contrary, Castalia isn’t much different from an elite university town, except for the fact that it is the bastion of the Glass Bead Game. At first, this game appears to encompass all human knowledge, and based on the fact that it supplies the title of the book I thought the book would delve into this concept. Just hearing the premise, I thought of the Borges story “On Exactitude in Science” wherein a map was created in such detail that it covers all the land it is meant to depict, and effectively becomes that land. Such seems the inevitable outcome of a game that actually encompassed all knowledge. Instead Hesse’s game, from what little the text presents of it, isn’t about actual knowledge but the association of concepts and the recombination of previously thought of ideas. Knecht spends years actually learning the material gone over in a single game, highlighting that such games merely require a familiarity with a concept, not understanding of it. Of course I could be way off base about this, but that is because The Glass Bead Game is never clearly laid out. In truth I don’t think Hesse had a clear idea in his head of how the game worked or even how it looked; if he had, then at a minimum he didn’t communicate it to the reader. What should have been the most interesting part of this book was instead a nonentity.

      An uninteresting main character, a text that isn’t engaging, subpar writing, and a lack of truly interesting ideas combine to make this a book you should skip. Also, it is about twice as long as it needed to be to explore what Hesse wanted to explore, with the excess length mostly created by the long speeches every character feels obliged to say at each other at every opportunity. I would skip this one, but I’m giving it three stars because while nothing in the text was done well, nothing was so poorly done to reach the level of embarrassment, and it was interesting to reinterpret the story in such a way as to make it less boring. So one of these stars is for me, I guess.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      This novel of a distant future is presented as a scholarly work about the life of Joseph Knecht, a man who rose to distinction as the master (i.e. Magister Ludi) of the Glass Bead Game. The game itself is vaguely described but consists of extrapolating relationships between disparate bodies of knowledge (e.g. chemistry and music), played with enthusiasm for centuries and which brings (at least to the most erudite) a sort of insight into the human condition. This game is somewhat like a vision of the Internet - a bringing together and sharing of all knowledge, only more rigid and static.It's a tedious read for its sustained lack of conflict if the novel's central questions don't grab you. Hermann Hesse explored the quest for perfect knowledge and being in his fiction, and this last novel is the culminating expression of that quest, but it results in a rather different conclusion than the insular view he previously espoused. In this instance the spotlight falls on determining whether such personal epiphany should be put in service to practical application. Does a man of knowledge bears any responsibility towards influencing the course of the world in which he is raised and has achieved insight? To put it still another way: must we remember our roots?Others have pointed out that Hesse comes closest here to detailing how our inner and outer lives must ideally intersect, but still falls short. Is this failure or done on purpose? From a scene in the novel where one character admires another's work: "Each of these Games moved with such gravity and sincerity toward solution, only at the last to so nobly forgo the attempt at solution, that it was like a perfect elegy upon the transitoriness inherent in all beautiful things and the ultimate dubiety immanent in all soaring flights of the intellect." Note, this novel is unusually structured; my edition, at least, features three short stories as appendices purportedly written by the central character during his student days. At the point they were mentioned I put the novel on pause and read them before continuing. Given the foreshadowing that resulted, I'd recommend that approach to other readers.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      Fiction. Excellent book except for the very end which seemed a bit laboured.
    • 4/5
      I love Hesse, one of my favorite authors ever. Not only is the spirtualism/sensualism dichotomy (which forms the major theme of all of his works) one of the more interesting philosophical questions of mankind, but I can't think of any author who has continually revealed his own personal neuroses and self-doubts through their characters. This quality has always provoked a certain empathy, admiration, and even self-recognition when I read his books. As someone concerned with those important questions of life, I can identify with his characters, and, because his characters are so autobiographical, I feel like I can consequently identify with Hesse himself.

      One of the more fascinating thought exercises related to Hesse is studying his works as attempts to reconcile these two aspects of life: the ethereal, divine and ecstatic with the corporeal, material and sensual. As brilliant as he was, he never figured out how to do it completely, which is what makes all of his novels ultimately unsatisfying. The interesting part, however, is that each successive novel comes closer to the answer, so that Demian feels by far the least developed, and while Hesse realizes "Nirvana" in Siddhartha, it never feels authentically earned. Steppenwolf feels altogether more on the right track before devolving into a psychedelic madhouse (perhaps precisely because he didn't know where next to take it?), and then Narcissus and Goldmund and The Journey to the East get even closer to the ultimate reconciliation while still falling short. The Glass Bead Game is by far the most developed of his novels and gets tantalizingly close to a "solution" for this problem, but it still leaves the reader vaguely grasping at the "how" of Hesse's prescription.

      As obsessed as Hesse was with this issue, he was never able to solve it, and it leaves us with the suspicion that it is an insoluble problem, perhaps THE insoluble issue of humanity. His books are so enjoyable, though, precisely because nobody has ever taken up the question with such earnest seriousness. All of his books leave us unsatisfied, but upon further thought one concludes that they are unsatisfactory only because they so unerringly reflect the great human predicament: the paradox of the divine animal. **Full Disclosure: I can no longer remember concretely, but I suspect that I owe a lot of credit for this analysis to Colin Wilson, from his fantastic The Outsider.**
    • 5/5
      An astonishing book, combining many of the aspects which made Hesse great.
    • 2/5
      Can't believe that Hermann Hesse's "The Glass Bead Game" won a Nobel Prize for literature! (I've since learned it was not for this book in particular but for his work in general.) I guess I just didn't get it because the whole story bored me to tears. In fact, the only part I really enjoyed was the three stories at the end, which were supposedly written by the book's main character.The novel is a biography of Joseph Knecht, one of the elite, whose education gives him the right to sit penned up from society and basically think about the connections between things. All of these educated folks play the Glass Bead Game to show how connected things are while they themselves are completely apart from the rest of the world.My major problem with the book was that it was very dry -- almost like a lecture and Hesse did a lot of telling rather than showing. Knecht was a thoroughly boring individual and it was hard to read more than 30 pages of this dense prose without falling asleep. This is the only book by Hesse I've read... I'm not sure if I just started with the wrong one or he is an author that just doesn't click with me. Given that I disliked this book, which is considered his magnum opus, I'm guessing it's the latter.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      I consider this Hesse's greatest work. It is a celebration of intellectual topics. It reveals a truth that most intellectuals begin to discover: various topics that seem unrelated still have some connection that can bring them together. It is intense, but worth reading.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 3/5
      I first read Hesse about 40 years ago, "Beneath the Wheel" in high school. I progressed to "Siddhartha" and then to "Steppenwolf." Now I have completed his final work "The Glass Bead Game." As I read him I often question why I am taking the time. When I finish though I am vaguely tuned into the symbolism and message of his work and I know it was important to read him. Deep psychology, mysticism, and meaning in life is how I describe him and worth the time spent.
    • 4/5
      The Glass Bead Game takes the reader into the academic utopia world called Castalia by following the development of its hero Joseph Knecht from the time of his childhood all the way through his career. One overarching theme of this book was the constant battle between "the world" and Castalia. While the students at the communal Castalia were able to concentrate on their studies free from the worries of worldly problems, the rest of the country had to deal with politics, war, and poverty. Why should some chosen few get to live lives that are free of these issues when in fact it is the people who are dealing with the problems who are supporting the welfare of Castalia? Knecht devotes and sacrifices his life to bridge this gap. Much of the beginning of the book dwells on the power of the Glass Bead Game, which I understood it to be a battle of wits in which the game's language allowed opponents to use any means of knowledge to counter another's logic. The language of the game has been developed so that a mathematical equation might be use to argue a musical interpretation. The Glass Bead Game was used to show just how unworldly this Castalia had become as people devote lifetimes to the pursuit of this purely academic profession.There was also a lot of time spent on meditation in the book. Meditation and aura. The Musical Master was an important character who provided mentorship for Knecht. He was a sage character who reaches an enlightened state by the end of his life yet it seems only Knecht understands that the master is on another plane. Knecht makes his way through the order of Castalia to the highest rank, Magister Ludi, but finds discord within himself as the "Ivory Tower" of this culture is too out of touch with reality for him. In fact, he has never known what outside reality is. He takes on the tutorship of a student and by the end of this life, he becomes elevated into sainthood or enlightenment, and as he drowns in a lake his spirit is passed on to the student in which he hadn't even begun to tutor. There are several incarnations of Knecht that take place at the end of the book and yet occur in the past. In one story he is a tribe's rainmaker, one who is so in touch with the world that he can affect the weather. In another he is an Indian prince who passes through an entire lifetime during a meditation only to find out that the entire life had never even occurred. Then there is the his life as a shahman who outwardly has not a judgment nor a selfish feeling and only hears others sins. However, he deals with issues of happiness and needs to fight against a depression.
    • 5/5
      This is Hesse's last novel, which won him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948. The story is set several hundred years in the future where the intellectual elite study and live their lives out in Castalia, a group of utopian villages set in an unnamed country. Specifically, the novel describes the life of Joseph Knecht, whose love of learning and talents eventually land him the ultimate leadership position in Castalia, that of Magister of the Glass Bead Game. Knecht, as described by the narrator, becomes one of the most successful leaders of this abstract game, which attempts to synthesize art, music, philosophy and scientific law. Ultimately, his “awakening” during his leadership tenure allows him to see the dangers of a purely intellectual or aesthetically oriented existence without commitment to the world around it. For Knecht, Castalia and the Glass Bead Game have, over time, become too far removed from the world that ultimately funds and support this intellectual utopia. The last chapters of the novel tell of Knecht’s decision to resign his position and leave Castalia. Hesse also includes several poems and three wonderful short stories, The Rainmaker, Father Confessor and the Indian Life, supposedly written by Knecht during his school days.
    • 4/5
      The Glass Bead Game is about a future society called Castalia in which the most highly regarded cultural institution, almost a religion, is the game of the title, in which players relate ideas to one another in a sort of cabalistic exercise but encompassing every field of human knowledge (but especially mathematics and music) rather than just scripture. The Game, however, has little connection to real life but operates in a sort of Platonic world of Forms, as the relations between ideas it establishes are generally superficial rather than based on real, essential or fundamental similarities.The story follows one past (to the narrator) Magister Ludi, or Master of the Game, and tells of his eventual disillusionment as he learns more of history and the outside world. "I regarded it as my mission," as he puts it, "to expand Castalian life and thought"---but ultimately, he resigns his post and leaves Castalia altogether.His resignation ties the story, which seems a bit disjointed up to that point, together: "But I must also tell you the meaning that the word 'transcend' has had for me since my student years and my 'awakening.' It came to me, I think, while reading a philosopher of the Enlightenment...and ever since then it has been a veritable magic word for me, like 'awakening,' an impetus, a consolation, and a promise. My life, I resolved, ought to be a perpetual transcending, a progression from stage to stage; I wanted it to pass through one area after the next, leaving each behind, as music moves on from theme to theme, from tempo to tempo, playing each out to the end, completing each and leaving it behind, never tiring, never sleeping, forever wakeful, forever in the present."The Glass Bead Game is a great novel and probably Hesse's masterpiece, certainly better than Demian or Siddhartha, though personally I probably enjoyed Narcissus and Goldmund more. It starts off a bit slowly, but builds and builds and is ultimately fascinating and quite satisfying. Definitely worth a read.If you enjoyed The Glass Bead Game, you might want to check out James Beckel's Pulitzer-prize nominated horn concerto of the same title, inspired by and loosely based on the novel (all the more appropriate given the important role of music in the story).
    • 5/5
      The Times reviewed this as "one of the most important books of the century, in any language". I have no reason to disagree. Rich in scope yet simply humane, Hesse weaves a pattern from the threads of a life which helps us understand the tapestry of our own. The person who cannot gain some morsel of insight from this book is functionally incomplete. Except for the fact that forced study of cultural touchstones invariably kills them instantly, I would recommend that it be added to the curriculum of all schools (both for pupils and more importantly teachers). As it is, it will remain a gem to be discovered serendipitously, its value all the more radiant when faced one-to-one.
    • 4/5
      For my money, and there isn't a lot of it, this is Hesse's greatest achievement. Sure, the weird abrupt ending, the lack of real description of the game itself, all the things that critics of the book hoot about... it all, for me, adds to its greatness. Steppenwolf will always have my heart since it was the first Hesse novel I read, but this is my favorite.
    • 5/5
      Around the time I turned thirteen, my grandfather took me to the bookstore. Not for me to peruse and pick something to my own liking, but specifically to buy this book and have me read it. This is a novel that was very important to him. No doubt it was a major marker in his intellectual and spiritual development. He spoke often of Hesse, and particularly of The Glass Bead Game, of the Magister Ludi. At that time, I made a feeble attempt to read it, but soon lost interest. Perhaps the premise seemed boring to me, young as I was. Maybe I was intimidated by the book’s length. One year later, I came across Siddhartha. It was there that my own love affair with Hesse began. I soon devoured Steppenwolf, and then a few years later read Demian, and then Narcissus and Goldmund only two summers ago. It is true I have taken long breaks, but each time I return I feel as though I am stepping through the door to home. I am with friends. My grandfather passed three years ago, and The Glass Bead Game has remained unread on my shelf all that time since. I felt that I have continually postponed a commitment, a sort of duty, by not reading it. Perhaps the daunting length was still a factor. Maybe the personal importance I have placed upon the work deterred me in some way, as though to encounter it was a great task or a rare privilege to be taken up with caution. Maybe so. Despite this, I am fairly sure that any sentimental value I place upon the work does not too drastically affect my opinion of it.It is Hesse's magnum opus, truly. Here again, he explores duality. The duality between the intellectual life and the worldly life. In the end, it is shown that the intellectual life, fully realized, must have as its goal some service to the greater human community. It is a clever joke then that the book is written in the form of an indulgent scholarly biography, as Joseph Knecht ultimately rejects such a life. To simply restate the overarching themes of this book does little good. It is quite unlike any other, even among Hesse's own work. I now wonder how my experience of reading the book might have changed if I first read the appended posthumous writings attributed to Knecht. They hint at the ideas that are more fully elaborated upon in the main work.Some may yawn at the prospect of being cast into some elite province of the far future (which, in turn, feels wonderfully ancient) that is cut off from everything worldly to trace the purely cerebral life of an austere and confident man. Let them not be fooled. Hesse makes us feel attachment and concern for Knecht and his companions, crafting a tale that in all its headiness and calm, never bores. Joseph Knecht learns much, and so do we. A reader might be more gratified, perhaps, with the mysticism of Siddhartha or the tale of chaotic transformation found in Steppenwolf. Though Demian or Narcissus and Goldmund might be my favorite of his, I can say without hesitation that this is the most intricate and fully realized among Hesse's major works. I didn't mark up this book as I have his others, but if it is not necessarily quotable it is memorable. It is not so much here about the structure of a phrase, but the structure of the overall narrative and the depth of characterization. It is a journey, and one I am so glad to have taken. Thanks Grandpa.

    Book preview

    The Glass Bead Game - Hermann Hesse

    THE GLASS BEAD GAME: A GENERAL INTRODUCTION TO ITS HISTORY FOR THE LAYMAN

    … Non entia enim licet quodammodo levibusque hominibus facilius atque incuriosius verbis reddere quam entia, veruntamen pio diligentique rerum scriptori plane aliter res se habet: nihil tantum repugnat ne verbis illustretur, at nihil adeo necesse est ante hominum oculos proponere ut certas quasdam res, quas esse neque demonstrari neque probari potest, quae contra eo ipso, quod pii diligentesque viri illas quasi ut entia tractant, enti nascendique facultati paululum appropinquant.

    ALBERTUS SECUNDUS

    tract. de cristall. spirit.

    ed. Clangor et Collof. lib. I, cap. 28.

    In Joseph Knecht’s holograph translation:

    … For although in a certain sense and for light-minded persons non-existent things can be more easily and irresponsibly represented in words than existing things, for the serious and conscientious historian it is just the reverse. Nothing is harder, yet nothing is more necessary, than to speak of certain things whose existence is neither demonstrable nor probable. The very fact that serious and conscientious men treat them as existing things brings them a step closer to existence and to the possibility of being born.

    It is our intention to preserve in these pages what scant biographical material we have been able to collect concerning Joseph Knecht, or Ludi Magister Josephus III, as he is called in the Archives of the Glass Bead Game. We are not unaware that this endeavor runs, or seems to run, somewhat counter to the prevailing laws and usages of our intellectual life. For, after all, obliteration of individuality, the maximum integration of the individual into the hierarchy of the educators and scholars, has ever been one of our ruling principles. And in the course of our long tradition this principle has been observed with such thoroughness that today it is exceedingly difficult, and in many cases completely impossible, to obtain biographical and psychological information on various persons who have served the hierarchy in exemplary fashion. In very many cases it is no longer even possible to determine their original names. The hierarchic organization cherishes the ideal of anonymity, and comes very close to the realization of that ideal. This fact remains one of the abiding characteristics of intellectual life in our Province.

    If we have nevertheless persisted in our endeavor to determine some of the facts about the life of Ludi Magister Josephus III, and at least to sketch the outlines of his character, we believe we have done so not out of any cult of personality, nor out of disobedience to the customs, but on the contrary solely in the service of truth and scholarship. It is an old idea that the more pointedly and logically we formulate a thesis, the more irresistibly it cries out for its antithesis. We uphold and venerate the idea that underlies the anonymity of our authorities and our intellectual life. But a glance at the early history of that life of the mind we now lead, namely, a glance at the development of the Glass Bead Game, shows us irrefutably that every phase of its development, every extension, every change, every essential segment of its history, whether it be seen as progressive or conservative, bears the plain imprint of the person who introduced the change. He was not necessarily its sole or actual author, but he was the instrument of transformation and perfection.

    Certainly, what nowadays we understand by personality is something quite different from what the biographers and historians of earlier times meant by it. For them, and especially for the writers of those days who had a distinct taste for biography, the essence of a personality seems to have been deviance, abnormality, uniqueness, in fact all too often the pathological. We moderns, on the other hand, do not even speak of major personalities until we encounter men who have gone beyond all original and idiosyncratic qualities to achieve the greatest possible integration into the generality, the greatest possible service to the suprapersonal. If we look closely into the matter we shall see that the ancients had already perceived this ideal. The figure of the Sage or Perfect One among the ancient Chinese, for example, or the ideal of Socratic ethics, can scarcely be distinguished from our present ideal; and many a great organization, such as the Roman Church in the eras of its greatest power, has recognized similar principles. Indeed, many of its greatest figures, such as St. Thomas Aquinas, appear to us—like early Greek sculptures—more the classical representatives of types than individuals.

    Nevertheless, in the period before the reformation of the intellectual life, a reformation which began in the twentieth century and of which we are the heirs, that authentic ancient ideal had patently come near to being entirely lost. We are astonished when the biographies of those times rather garrulously relate how many brothers and sisters the hero had, or what psychological scars and blotches were left behind from his casting off the skins of childhood and puberty, from the struggle for position and the search for love. We moderns are not interested in a hero’s pathology or family history, nor in his drives, his digestion, and how he sleeps. Not even his intellectual background—the influence upon his development of his favorite studies, favorite reading, and so on—is particularly important to us. For us, a man is a hero and deserves special interest only if his nature and his education have rendered him able to let his individuality be almost perfectly absorbed in its hierarchic function without at the same time forfeiting the vigorous, fresh, admirable impetus which make for the savor and worth of the individual. And if conflicts arise between the individual and the hierarchy, we regard these very conflicts as a touchstone for the stature of a personality. We do not approve of the rebel who is driven by his desires and passions to infringements upon law and order; we find all the more worthy of our reverence the memory of those who tragically sacrificed themselves for the greater whole.

    These latter are the heroes, and in the case of these truly exemplary men, interest in the individual, in the name, face, and gesture, seems to us permissible and natural. For we do not regard even the perfect hierarchy, the most harmonious organization, as a machine put together out of lifeless units that count for nothing in themselves, but as a living body, formed of parts and animated by organs which possess their own nature and freedom. Every one of them shares in the miracle of life. In this sense, then, we have endeavored to obtain information on the life of Joseph Knecht, Master of the Glass Bead Game, and especially to collect everything written by himself. We have, moreover, obtained several manuscripts we consider worth reading.

    What we have to say about Knecht’s personality and life is surely familiar in whole or in part to a good many members of the Order, especially the Glass Bead Game players, and for this reason among others our book is not addressed to this circle alone, but is intended to appeal more widely to sympathetic readers.

    For the narrower circle, our book would need neither introduction nor commentary. But since we also wish our hero’s life and writings to be studied outside the Order, we are confronted with the somewhat difficult task of prefacing our book with a brief popular introduction, for that less-prepared reader, into the meaning and history of the Glass Bead Game. We stress that this introduction is intended only for popular consumption and makes no claim whatsoever to clarifying the questions being discussed within the Order itself on the problems and history of the Game. The time for an objective account of that subject is still far in the future.

    Let no one, therefore, expect from us a complete history and theory of the Glass Bead Game. Even authors of higher rank and competence than ourself would not be capable of providing that at the present time. That task must remain reserved to later ages, if the sources and the intellectual prerequisites for the task have not previously been lost. Still less is our essay intended as a textbook of the Glass Bead Game; indeed, no such thing will ever be written. The only way to learn the rules of this Game of games is to take the usual prescribed course, which requires many years; and none of the initiates could ever possibly have any interest in making these rules easier to learn.

    These rules, the sign language and grammar of the Game, constitute a kind of highly developed secret language drawing upon several sciences and arts, but especially mathematics and music (and/or musicology), and capable of expressing and establishing interrelationships between the content and conclusions of nearly all scholarly disciplines. The Glass Bead Game is thus a mode of playing with the total contents and values of our culture; it plays with them as, say, in the great age of the arts a painter might have played with the colors on his palette. All the insights, noble thoughts, and works of art that the human race has produced in its creative eras, all that subsequent periods of scholarly study have reduced to concepts and converted into intellectual property—on all this immense body of intellectual values the Glass Bead Game player plays like the organist on an organ. And this organ has attained an almost unimaginable perfection; its manuals and pedals range over the entire intellectual cosmos; its stops are almost beyond number. Theoretically this instrument is capable of reproducing in the Game the entire intellectual content of the universe. These manuals, pedals, and stops are now fixed. Changes in their number and order, and attempts at perfecting them, are actually no longer feasible except in theory. Any enrichment of the language of the Game by addition of new contents is subject to the strictest conceivable control by the directorate of the Game. On the other hand, within this fixed structure, or to abide by our image, within the complicated mechanism of this giant organ, a whole universe of possibilities and combinations is available to the individual player. For even two out of a thousand stringently played games to resemble each other more than superficially is hardly possible. Even if it should so happen that two players by chance were to choose precisely the same small assortment of themes for the content of their Game, these two Games could present an entirely different appearance and run an entirely different course, depending on the qualities of mind, character, mood, and virtuosity of the players.

    How far back the historian wishes to place the origins and antecedents of the Glass Bead Game is, ultimately, a matter of his personal choice. For like every great idea it has no real beginning; rather, it has always been, at least the idea of it. We find it foreshadowed, as a dim anticipation and hope, in a good many earlier ages. There are hints of it in Pythagoras, for example, and then among Hellenistic Gnostic circles in the late period of classical civilization. We find it equally among the ancient Chinese, then again at the several pinnacles of Arabic-Moorish culture; and the path of its prehistory leads on through Scholasticism and Humanism to the academies of mathematicians of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and on to the Romantic philosophies and the runes of Novalis’s hallucinatory visions. This same eternal idea, which for us has been embodied in the Glass Bead Game, has underlain every movement of Mind toward the ideal goal of a universitas litterarum, every Platonic academy, every league of an intellectual elite, every rapprochement between the exact and the more liberal disciplines, every effort toward reconciliation between science and art or science and religion. Men like Abelard, Leibniz, and Hegel unquestionably were familiar with the dream of capturing the universe of the intellect in concentric systems, and pairing the living beauty of thought and art with the magical expressiveness of the exact sciences. In that age in which music and mathematics almost simultaneously attained classical heights, approaches and cross-fertilizations between the two disciplines occurred frequently. And two centuries earlier we find in Nicholas of Cues sentences of the same tenor, such as this: The mind adapts itself to potentiality in order to measure everything in the mode of potentiality, and to absolute necessity in order to measure everything in the mode of unity and simplicity as God does, and to the necessity of nexus in order to measure everything with respect to its peculiar nature; finally, it adapts itself to determinate potentiality in order to measure everything with respect to its existence. But furthermore the mind also measures symbolically, by comparison, as when it employs numerals and geometric figures and equates other things with them.

    Incidentally, this is not the only one of Nicholas’s ideas that almost seems to suggest our Glass Bead Game, or corresponds to and springs from a similar branch of the imagination as the play of thought which occurs in the Game. Many similar echoes can be found in his writings. His pleasure in mathematics also, and his delight and skill in using constructions and axioms of Euclidean geometry as similes to clarify theological and philosophical concepts, likewise appear to be very close to the mentality of the Game. At times even his peculiar Latin (abounding in words of his own coinage, whose meaning, however, was perfectly plain to any Latin scholar) calls to mind the improvisatory agility of the Game’s language.

    As the epigraph of our treatise may already have suggested, Albertus Secundus deserves an equal place among the ancestors of the Glass Bead Game. And we suspect, although we cannot prove this by citations, that the idea of the Game also dominated the minds of those learned musicians of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries who based their musical compositions on mathematical speculations. Here and there in the ancient literatures we encounter legends of wise and mysterious games that were conceived and played by scholars, monks, or the courtiers of cultured princes. These might take the form of chess games in which the pieces and squares had secret meanings in addition to their usual functions. And of course everyone has heard those fables and legends from the formative years of all civilizations which ascribe to music powers far greater than those of any mere art: the capacity to control men and nations. These accounts make of music a kind of secret regent, or a lawbook for men and their governments. From the most ancient days of China to the myths of the Greeks we find the concept of an ideal, heavenly life for men under the hegemony of music. The Glass Bead Game is intimately bound up with this cult of music (in eternal transmutations the secret power of song greets us here below, says Novalis).

    Although we thus recognize the idea of the Game as eternally present, and therefore existent in vague stirrings long before it became a reality, its realization in the form we know it nevertheless has its specific history. We shall now attempt to give a brief account of the most important stages in that history.

    *   *   *

    The beginnings of the intellectual movement whose fruits are, among many others, the establishment of the Order and the Glass Bead Game itself, may be traced back to a period which Plinius Ziegenhalss, the historian of literature, designated as the Age of the Feuilleton, by which name it has been known ever since. Such tags are pretty, but dangerous; they constantly tempt us to a biased view of the era in question. And as a matter of fact the Age of the Feuilleton was by no means uncultured; it was not even intellectually impoverished. But if we may believe Ziegenhalss, that age appears to have had only the dimmest notion of what to do with culture. Or rather, it did not know how to assign culture its proper place within the economy of life and the nation. To be frank, we really are very poorly informed about that era, even though it is the soil out of which almost everything that distinguishes our cultural life today has grown.

    It was, according to Ziegenhalss, an era emphatically bourgeois and given to an almost untrammeled individualism. If in order to suggest the atmosphere we cite some of its features from Ziegenhalss’ description, we may at least do so with the confidence that these features have not been invented, badly drawn, or grossly exaggerated. For the great scholar has documented them from a vast number of literary and other sources. We take our cue from this scholar, who so far has been the sole serious investigator of the Feuilletonistic Age. As we read, we should remember that it is easy and foolish to sneer at the mistakes or barbarities of remote ages.

    Since the end of the Middle Ages, intellectual life in Europe seems to have evolved along two major lines. The first of these was the liberation of thought and belief from the sway of all authority. In practice this meant the struggle of Reason, which at last felt it had come of age and won its independence, against the domination of the Roman Church. The second trend, on the other hand, was the covert but passionate search for a means to confer legitimacy on this freedom, for a new and sufficient authority arising out of Reason itself. We can probably generalize and say that Mind has by and large won this often strangely contradictory battle for two aims basically at odds with each other.

    Has the gain been worth the countless victims? Has our present structure of the life of the mind been sufficiently developed, and is it likely to endure long enough, to justify as worthwhile sacrifices all the sufferings, convulsions, and abnormalities: the trials of heretics, the burnings at stake, the many geniuses who ended in madness or suicide? For us, it is not permissible to ask these questions. History is as it has happened. Whether it was good, whether it would have been better not to have happened, whether we will or will not acknowledge that it has had meaning—all this is irrelevant. Thus those struggles for the freedom of the human intellect likewise happened, and subsequently, in the course of the aforementioned Age of the Feuilleton, men came to enjoy an incredible degree of intellectual freedom, more than they could stand. For while they had overthrown the tutelage of the Church completely, and that of the State partially, they had not succeeded in formulating an authentic law they could respect, a genuinely new authority and legitimacy. Ziegenhalss recounts some truly astonishing examples of the intellect’s debasement, venality, and self-betrayal during that period.

    We must confess that we cannot provide an unequivocal definition of those products from which the age takes its name, the feuilletons. They seem to have formed an uncommonly popular section of the daily newspapers, were produced by the millions, and were a major source of mental pabulum for the reader in want of culture. They reported on, or rather chatted about, a thousand-and-one items of knowledge. It would seem, moreover, that the cleverer among the writers of them poked fun at their own work. Ziegenhalss, at any rate, contends that many such pieces are so incomprehensible that they can only be viewed as self-persiflage on the part of the authors. Quite possibly these manufactured articles do indeed contain a quantity of irony and self-mockery which cannot be understood until the key is found again. The producers of these trivia were in some cases attached to the staffs of the newspapers; in other cases they were free-lance scriveners. Frequently they enjoyed the high-sounding title of writer, but a great many of them seem to have belonged to the scholar class. Quite a few were celebrated university professors.

    Among the favorite subjects of such essays were anecdotes taken from the lives or correspondence of famous men and women. They bore such titles as Friedrich Nietzsche and Women’s Fashions of 1870, or The Composer Rossini’s Favorite Dishes, or The Role of the Lapdog in the Lives of Great Courtesans, and so on. Another popular type of article was the historical background piece on what was currently being talked about among the well-to-do, such as The Dream of Creating Gold Through the Centuries, or Physico-chemical Experiments in Influencing the Weather, and hundreds of similar subjects. When we look at the titles that Ziegenhalss cites, we feel surprise that there should have been people who devoured such chitchat for their daily reading; but what astonishes us far more is that authors of repute and of decent education should have helped to service this gigantic consumption of empty whimsies. Significantly, service was the expression used; it was also the word denoting the relationship of man to the machine at that time.

    In some periods interviews with well-known personalities on current problems were particularly popular. Ziegenhalss devotes a separate chapter to these. Noted chemists or piano virtuosos would be queried about politics, for example, or popular actors, dancers, gymnasts, aviators, or even poets would be drawn out on the benefits and drawbacks of being a bachelor, or on the presumptive causes of financial crises, and so on. All that mattered in these pieces was to link a well-known name with a subject of current topical interest. The reader may consult Ziegenhalss for some truly startling examples; he gives hundreds.

    As we have said, no doubt a goodly dash of irony was mixed in with all this busy productivity; it may even have been a demonic irony, the irony of desperation—it is very hard indeed for us to put ourselves in the place of those people so that we can truly understand them. But the great majority, who seem to have been strikingly fond of reading, must have accepted all these grotesque things with credulous earnestness. If a famous painting changed owners, if a precious manuscript was sold at auction, if an old palace burned down, if the bearer of an aristocratic name was involved in a scandal, the readers of many thousands of feature articles at once learned the facts. What is more, on that same day or by the next day at the latest they received an additional dose of anecdotal, historical, psychological, erotic, and other stuff on the catchword of the moment. A torrent of zealous scribbling poured out over every ephemeral incident, and in quality, assortment, and phraseology all this material bore the mark of mass goods rapidly and irresponsibly turned out.

    Incidentally, there appear to have been certain games which were regular concomitants of the feature article. The readers themselves took the active role in these games, which put to use some of their glut of information fodder. A long disquisition by Ziegenhalss on the curious subject of Crossword Puzzles describes the phenomenon. Thousands upon thousands of persons, the majority of whom did heavy work and led a hard life, spent their leisure hours sitting over squares and crosses made of letters of the alphabet, filling in the gaps according to certain rules. But let us be wary of seeing only the absurd or insane aspect of this, and let us abstain from ridiculing it. For these people with their childish puzzle games and their cultural feature articles were by no means innocuous children or playful Phæacians. Rather, they dwelt anxiously among political, economic, and moral ferments and earthquakes, waged a number of frightful wars and civil wars, and their little cultural games were not just charming, meaningless childishness. These games sprang from their deep need to close their eyes and flee from unsolved problems and anxious forebodings of doom into an imaginary world as innocuous as possible. They assiduously learned to drive automobiles, to play difficult card games and lose themselves in crossword puzzles—for they faced death, fear, pain, and hunger almost without defenses, could no longer accept the consolations of the churches, and could obtain no useful advice from Reason. These people who read so many articles and listened to so many lectures did not take the time and trouble to strengthen themselves against fear, to combat the dread of death within themselves; they moved spasmodically on through life and had no belief in a tomorrow.

    For there was also a good deal of lecturing, and we must briefly discuss this somewhat more dignified variant of the feature article. Both specialists and intellectual privateers supplied the middle-class citizens of the age (who were still deeply attached to the notion of culture, although it had long since been robbed of its former meaning) with large numbers of lectures. Such talks were not only in the nature of festival orations for special occasions; there was a frantic trade in them, and they were given in almost incomprehensible quantities. In those days the citizen of a medium-sized town or his wife could at least once a week (in big cities pretty much every night) attend lectures offering theoretical instruction on some subject or other: on works of art, poets, scholars, researchers, world tours. The members of the audience at these lectures remained purely passive, and although some relationship between audience and content, some previous knowledge, preparation, and receptivity were tacitly assumed in most cases nothing of the sort was present. There were entertaining, impassioned, or witty lectures on Goethe, say, in which he would be depicted descending from a post chaise wearing a blue frock-coat to seduce some Strassburg or Wetzlar girl; or on Arabic culture; in all of them a number of fashionable phrases were shaken up like dice in a cup and everyone was delighted if he dimly recognized one or two catchwords. People heard lectures on writers whose works they had never read and never meant to, sometimes accompanied by pictures projected on a screen. At these lectures, as in the feature articles in the newspapers, they struggled through a deluge of isolated cultural facts and fragments of knowledge robbed of all meaning. To put it briefly, they were already on the verge of that dreadful devaluation of the Word which produced, at first in secret and within the narrowest circles, that ascetically heroic countermovement which soon afterward began to flow visibly and powerfully, and ushered in the new self-discipline and dignity of the human intellect.

    It must be granted that many aspects of the intellectual life of that era showed energy and grandeur. We moderns explain its concomitant uncertainty and falseness as a symptom of the horror which seized men when at the end of an era of apparent victory and success they found themselves suddenly confronting a void: great material scarcity, a period of political and military crises, and an accelerating distrust of the intellect itself, of its own virtue and dignity and even of its own existence. Yet that very period, filled though it was with premonitions of doom, was marked by some very fine intellectual achievements, including the beginnings of a science of music of which we are the grateful heirs.

    But although it is easy to fit any given segment of the past neatly and intelligibly into the patterns of world history, contemporaries are never able to see their own place in the patterns. Consequently, even as intellectual ambitions and achievements declined rapidly during that period, intellectuals in particular were stricken by terrible doubts and a sense of despair. They had just fully realized (a discovery that had been in the air, here and there, from the time of Nietzsche on) that the youth and the creative period of our culture was over, that old age and twilight had set in. Suddenly everyone felt this and many bluntly expressed this view; it was used to explain many of the alarming signs of the time: the dreary mechanization of life, the profound debasement of morality, the decline of faith among nations, the inauthenticity of art. The music of decline had sounded, as in that wonderful Chinese fable; like a thrumming bass on the organ its reverberations faded slowly out over decades; its throbbing could be heard in the corruption of the schools, periodicals, and universities, in melancholia and insanity among those artists and critics who could still be taken seriously; it raged as untrammeled and amateurish overproduction in all the arts. Various attitudes could be taken toward this enemy who had breached the walls and could no longer be exorcised. Some of the best tacitly acknowledged and stoically endured the bitter truth. Some attempted to deny its existence, and thanks to the shoddy thinking of some of the literary prophets of cultural doom, found a good many weak points in their thesis. Moreover, those who took exception to the aforementioned prophets could be sure of a hearing and influence among the bourgeoisie. For the allegation that the culture he had only yesterday been proud to possess was no longer alive, that the education and art he revered could no longer be regarded as genuine education and genuine art, seemed to the bourgeois as brazen and intolerable as the sudden inflations of currency and the revolutions which threatened his accumulated capital.

    Another possible immunization against the general mood of doom was cynicism. People went dancing and dismissed all anxiety about the future as old-fashioned folly; people composed heady articles about the approaching end of art, science, and language. In that feuilleton world they had constructed of paper, people postulated the total capitulation of Mind, the bankruptcy of ideas, and pretended to be looking on with cynical calm or bacchantic rapture as not only art, culture, morality, and honesty, but also Europe and the world proceeded to their doom. Among the good there prevailed a quietly resigned gloom, among the wicked a malicious pessimism. The fact was that a breakdown of outmoded forms, and a degree of reshuffling both of the world and its morality by means of politics and war, had to take place before the culture itself became capable of real self-analysis and a new organization.

    Yet during the decades of transition this culture had not slumbered. Rather, during the very period of its decay and seeming capitulation by the artists, professors, and feature writers, it entered into a phase of intense alertness and self-examination. The medium of this change lay in the consciences of a few individuals. Even during the heyday of the feuilleton there were everywhere individuals and small groups who had resolved to remain faithful to true culture and to devote all their energies to preserving for the future a core of good tradition, discipline, method, and intellectual rigor. We are today ignorant of many details, but in general the process of self-examination, reflection, and conscious resistance to decline seems to have centered mostly in two groups. The cultural conscience of scholars found refuge in the investigations and didactic methods of the history of music, for this discipline was just reaching its height at that time, and even in the midst of the feuilleton world two famous seminaries fostered an exemplary methodology, characterized by care and thoroughness. Moreover, as if destiny wished to smile comfortingly upon this tiny, brave cohort, at this saddest of times there took place that glorious miracle which was in itself pure chance, but which gave the effect of a divine corroboration: the rediscovery of eleven manuscripts of Johann Sebastian Bach, which had been in the keeping of his son

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