The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse book review
The Glass Bead Game, a refinement of the world's greatest achievements: music, mathematics, language. The players bring beautiful symmetry to all of these things, using symbols of their own making, attempting to define the solution and genius of man.
The Glass Bead Game is a sham, a waste of valuable time and energy. Life becomes an aristocratic pie eating contest.
The refinement of culture into the intellectual aristocracy is a dangerous precipice. Culture cannot be without the flesh, without nature, without the tides of humanity.
Herman Hesse is demonstrating what a progressive, intellectual aristocracy looks like. It's a fakery, a mockery, a sham, a waste. Much like a monastic, self-important religious sect.
Through the idiot narrator and his worthless love affair with hierarchy we realize that Oneness is not the refinement of knowledge, it is NOT The Glass Bead Game, but a delicate balance of Yin and Yang, of Good and Evil, of Highs and Lows, Night and Day, Light and Dark, Chaos and Order.
In many ways the book reflects perfectly on our current state of affairs. The Glass Bead Game is being played by ignorant social media dilettantes everywhere, sharing and refining their stupid posts, never creating anything new, pretending to understand something when they understand nothing. If the 1960s counter-culture perceived their world collapsing from the weight of consumerism and capitalism (moving away from nature), it follows almost perfectly that the future has built the Order of Castalia, the keepers of the game. The hierarchy is your dumb social media networks.
The book was difficult to read. The subject of aristocracy and religious zealotry makes me want to throw up. How abhorrent all this talk of sanctimonious art and virtue, a perversion of music and everything nice in the world. Castalia can suck it.
When I finally made it to the end, I was grateful to Mr. Hesse. He completely affirmed my absolute hatred for all things sanctimonious when the main character, Joseph Knecht, the great master of The Glass Bead Game, told all of his lords to fuck off and left his high position for a real place in the world.
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