The Glass Bead Game, Hermann Hesse, 1943

 I first read The Glass Bead Game in my high school years, I believe the sophomore or junior year. This would be 2011-2012, a full decade ago, as of this writing. At that time, I was infatuated with the ideal of abstract intellectualism, scholarship, and academics. I identified with that world, aspired to join it, and drew a kind of arrogance and confidence from the prospect of one day being within it. I looked down on other things and the people that preferred those other things. The copy of the book that I had was under the alternate title Magister Ludi. This exotic, latinate name lended it a mystique, an aura of hidden wisdom, and that played into my aspiration to access such wisdom which other people were either too stupid to reach for or to understand. 

The work’s high respect given to academics is matched by that paid to music, another of my high school era interests. Clear to see why I loved this book - it apparently elevated exactly the kinds of things that I liked, was good at, and made me feel important. 

I didn’t realize that Hesse’s work was to some extent a spoof of exactly this kind of thinking. 

The story of the Glass Bead Game is 

Interestingly, Hesse criticizes the “age of the feuilleton” in words that seem most applicable to the social media age. He castigates inordinate fascination with crossword puzzles, trivia, and gossip columns, all representing a kind of orgiastic freneticism of self-reference, all-too-clever inside jokes. There is a dearth of real substantive new ideas and art. The social media age has these same tendencies but on steroids - think of the remixing of memes and trends, the short attention spans, the infinitely interlinked networks of content. 

Hesse was working through a kind of dialectic - the world of the intellectual mind and of high arts on the one hand, and the world of life, industry, and love on the other. These are often contrasted, even deemed inconsistent, and the world of The Glass Bead Game explores this separation. What better representation than the literal debates between the symbols of these worlds, Joseph and Plinio. Their interaction is dialectic made manifest in flesh. In the end, they each achieve a kind of appreciation for the other and their combination, achieving a synthesis. 

In this read through, I was actually put off by the province of Castalia and its caricature of the life of the mind. I have worked very hard to connect to the other nonintellectual parts of myself, the intuitive and emotional, and I have found great peace and happiness in this. I realize that Hesse, far from exalting the ideal of the ascetically intellectual hermit, was lambasting it. 

With this powerful realization, this great contrast between my most recent reading experience and that which I remembered in my high school days, I felt compelled to put the book down. I had received from it this insight into myself, and it was challenging to push forward with it - in this moment, the book gave me what I need to feel and think, and so I put it to the side for the moment. I returned the focus and attention that I had to writing and editing my own novel’s draft.

Hesse is also known for being an early conduit for the introduction of Eastern thinking to Western audiences. The expression of Eastern philosophies is done both implicitly and explicitly, the latter done through episodes such as Joseph’s visit to the monk. I think in the background, the yin and yang idea is connected to the dialectic.