Basically, he leaves the ivory tower and experiences what one might call real life. Knecht, though, is not like other players and residents of Castalia he spends a lot of his time out of the province and sees how the rest of the world lives. The novel centers around Joseph Knecht, who is brought to Castalia as a child and eventually becomes Magister Ludi, a master of the Glass Bead Game. It’s a different topic than what I want to dive into, however, which is the main character and how he shows us some of the struggles artists and intellectuals face when it comes to interacting with societies.
The game is, essentially, about making elegant and new connections between concepts.Ĭan an intellectual do more good by engaging and becoming more practical, or by removing themselves and focusing on big-picture understanding?Īll of that is interesting, and there are various technical ways that the plot and language serve to draw readers in, which is all worth exploring.
Readers never get a full explanation of the game, but we do find out that it’s evolved over the years (it used to have glass beads), and now involves a complex synthesis of human ideas, from music to philosophy. The Glass Bead Game itself is also strange in the sense that it involves no glass beads. There is little technology or politics in Castalia so the residents can focus. Its residents engage in a life of the mind: basically, they study, teach, and play the Glass Bead Game. It takes place about 300 years in the future where there is a region, Castalia, that is removed from the rest of society. The plot and structure of The Glass Bead Game is heady, to say the least. Steppenwolf and Narcissus and Goldmund get readers a little bit further into what Hesse was about, but his magnum opus, The Glass Bead Game, is the deepest expression of his ideas, and it provides some insight on how artists can approach the issues we face in 2022. Siddhartha is an excellent book, but alone it gives a limited view of Hesse and the issues he explored in his fiction, many of which remain prescient today. His most famous novel, Siddhartha, is about the search for enlightenment set in the time of the Buddha, and has been widely read by anyone in the west who’s curious about eastern religions. Hermann Hesse, born July 2, 1877, might be best known today as that European author who wrote a lot about Buddhism.
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