The Glass Bead Game

This book is WAY too Christian for my queer Jewish ass. It's shot through with a secularized Christian ideology of saintliness, monasticism, hierarchy, and contemplation that I find revolting. It takes the concept of "high art" to a fetishistic extreme, framing it as essentially the ONLY true virtue and everything lower (by standards that the book considers obvious and objective) to be purely sensual and thus valueless. There is no room for me in this world and so I reject it wholeheartedly.

Nor is this even particularly compelling as a novel! It notionally consists of various documents written by different people in different contexts, but the authorial voice, perspective, and themes maintain a constant tone of snobbish aloofness throughout. Never do you get the sense that it is not specifically Hermann Hesse speaking to you. The characters are similarly nothing more than philosophical chess pieces for him to lay out his concepts of the "aristocracy of the mind".

The only reason I'm giving this a second star is that, buried within its bloviation, there are occasional real insights and impressive turns of phrase. But they don't make up for the profoundly distasteful arc of the book as a whole.

Second book into Hesse’s corpus and I’m noticing Hesse has quite the obsession with the balance between ascetic intellectualism and giving in to worldly desires/instincts and nature… I like it.

He picks up on his theme of self-actualisation and discovering ‘true’ love of the world again quite well—somehow his characters feel fresh despite all their developments essentially being through the same wanderer arc? The neuroticism of some of his characters—Tegularius in specific—is finely executed and is reminiscent of Dostoevsky’s ‘troubled’ archetype.

5/5 So good I might get into Indian philosophy and a bit of Nietzsche myself…

—

‘World history is a race with time, a scramble for profit, for power, for treasures. What counts is who has the strength, luck, or vulgarity not to miss his opportunity. The achievements of thought, of culture, of art are just the opposite. They are always an escape from the serfdom of time, man crawling out of the muck of his instincts and out of his sluggishness and climbing to a higher plane, to timelessness, liberation from time, divinity. They are utterly unhistorical and antihistorical.’

I read this book 3 to 4 or 5 times. I cannot even remember the exact number of times. Every time I had different consciousness shift and every time I am reminded why it is my favorite. I first read The Glass Bead Game almost 40 years ago and have since followed the Hesse's thought - I would one day be able to play the Game, be able to meditate, be able to connect to the higher states of consciousness. It set a path, or changed my life. I remember my first meditation attempts, as a teen being only 18 years old, spending evenings visualizing a white glass pearl in my mind's eye. The book saved me from another favorite author, Dostoyevsky, who almost led me to a suicide invading my mind, in quite a different way. I still love Dostoyevsky, yet would not recommend him to faint hearted... Hesse has opened the door for Tolstoy and his most wonderful wisdom. That in turn led me to an exploration of Greek, Hindu, Chinese philosophers. This in turn got me writing about metaphysics, cosmos, life.

I read this book 3 to 4 or 5 times. I cannot even remember the exact number of times. Every time I had different consciousness shift and every time I am reminded why it is my favorite. I first read The Glass Bead Game almost 40 years ago and have since followed the Hesse's thought - I would one day be able to play the Game, be able to meditate, be able to connect to the higher states of consciousness. It set a path, or changed my life. I remember my first meditation attempts, as a teen being only 18 years old, spending evenings visualizing a white glass pearl in my mind's eye. The book saved me from another favorite author, Dostoyevsky, who almost led me to a suicide invading my mind, in quite a different way. I still love Dostoyevsky, yet would not recommend him to faint hearted... Hesse has opened the door for Tolstoy and his most wonderful wisdom. That in turn led me to an exploration of Greek, Hindu, Chinese philosophers. This in turn got me writing about metaphysics, cosmos, life.

This is a strange book. Written in the 1930s, it is set in the future, and in that it is similar to [b:Brave New World|5479|Brave New World / Brave New World Revisited|Aldous Huxley|https://d2arxad8u2l0g7.cloudfront.net/books/1331315450s/5479.jpg|39947767] by [a:Aldous Huxley|3487|Aldous Huxley|https://d2arxad8u2l0g7.cloudfront.net/authors/1387374697p2/3487.jpg], which somehow seems to invite comparison. And there are comparisons, though these two eighty-year-old visions of the future are also very different. But both describe a hierarchical society. Huxley's book has a reservation for savages, those who do not fit in to the highly organised society of the civilised, where consumerism is taught from infancy.

In [b:The Glass Bead Game|16634|The Glass Bead Game|Hermann Hesse|https://d2arxad8u2l0g7.cloudfront.net/books/1386922806s/16634.jpg|2959456], however, the reservation is not for savages, but for intellectuals, who live in the province of Castalia, where they are free to engage in their intellectual pursuits, untroubled by the world outside. It is an all-male society of elite schools whose students are picked by the elite.

The main part of the book is the story of one of these elite students, Joseph Knecht, who rises through the ranks to become the Master of the epitome of Castalian society, the Glass Bead Game. The book begins with a history of the Glass Bead Game, which explains nothing about the game itself -- how it is played, or how one wins or loses. In the course of his schooling Joseph Knecht meets a fellow student from the outside world beyond Castalia, a world to which he returns for his holidays, and he alone is critical of Castalian society and its values. He points out that there is nothing creative about it. They study creations of people of the past, art, music and science, without studying the past itself which produced them. Joseph Knecht alone has an interest in history, to the study of which he was introduced during a visit to a Benedictine monastery.

At the end of the book are some poems and three short stories, said to have been written by Joseph Knecht himself. And the three short stories are better than the entire book.

I nearly didn't read the three short stories. I thought the book was long, and I carried on reading because I wanted to see what happened, but I tired of the two-dimensional description of a two-dimensional world. Yet the short stories are in fact an essential part of the book, and are the key to understanding the rest of the story.

Maybe I didn't get it or maybe this could have used some extensive editing. This had the makings of a great work, but it just didn't come together. I felt like it was too drawn out and the character / action was too distant from the readers. Some great ideas but the execution just wasn't there for me.

I don't think it makes much sense to go through the plot or lack there of.