The Glass Bead Game
First published 1943 · German · 580 pages
- Novels
- Science fiction
- Dystopia
- Fantasy
Set in a distant future, this late novel describes Castalia, a secluded province of scholars devoted to the Glass Bead Game, an art that joins music, mathematics and the humanities into a single symbolic language. The story follows Joseph Knecht, a gifted pupil who rises within this ordered, intellectual world and begins to question its distance from ordinary life. It is a thoughtful, ambitious book about learning, community, duty and the limits of pure intellect, and it was central to Hesse's Nobel Prize.
Quotes
At the end of and era of apparent victory and success they found themselves suddenly confronting a void: ... an accelerating distrust of the intellect itself, of its own virtue and dignity and even of its own existence.
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.
The life of the mind in the Age of the Feuilleton might be compared to a degenerate plant which was squandering its strength in excessive vegetative growth, and the subsequent corrections to pruning the plant back to the roots.
describing the invention of “Joculator Basiliensis”