Knecht’s rejection of the intellectual life and his transition into a worldly life was a balm for my desires during that stage of my bodily confinement. In such an age, the metaphor of the glass bead game felt particularly appropriate.Īfter many years of study, Knecht becomes the Magister Ludi, but he ultimately decides to defect from the monastery and become a teacher of gifted youth. I first read this novel in an era when electronics had combined music and physics, when sculpture and painting were plotted according to a table of logarithms, and when philosophy had fused with mathematics to create a new language of symbolic logic, an age in which literary and sociological research was carried out by IBM machines.
To master the game, one must combine the information contained in all intellectual and spiritual disciplines and abstract that knowledge into a formula that is expressed in musical symbols. The game was invented by a group of musicians and is played with beads arranged in a device much like an abacus. Knecht’s education there leads him through a monastic life, the goal of which is to achieve the highest degree of proficiency in the so-called glass bead game. The story follows the life of Joseph Knecht, beginning at age 12, when he is chosen to leave his home to study at a remote place reserved for the intellectual elite. The Glass Bead Game, commonly known as Magister Ludi, which was published in 1943 and earned Hesse the Nobel Prize in literature in 1946, describes the journey toward becoming such a master. Magister Ludi is the Master of the Game, a person who achieves enlightenment through synthesizing all knowledge and expressing it in musical metaphors. The Magister Ludi allegory seemed to answer the ambivalence in my lifestyle. At that age, my mind had been fashioned by academics, yet my psyche craved pragmatic conquests. In retrospect, Hesse provided a bittersweet insight into my contradictory nature.
Timothy Leary called Hermann Hesse “the poet of the interior journey.” I was probably naively drawn to him for that reason. The Glass Bead Game (Magister Ludi) Review of the Book “The Glass Bead Game (Magister Ludi)”
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