It looks at that line between the university as a place to preserve knowledge, and as a place that shapes others to change the world.īut there are more personal connotations here than the age-old issue of knowledge and scholarship becoming stagnant or running the risk of becoming “corrupted by worldly politics.” There are three characters to consider: Joseph Knecht the protagonist, his teacher the Music Master and his rival Plinio Designori. It also deals with a lot of issues as to what the importance of knowledge is to the world and how involved scholars should be in the world. Again, that last statement is my opinion but it’s one that I wanted to make now before I make my other one.Įssentially, if you are a Humanities student or a University student of the Arts, this book will have some very eerie parallels to what is probably going on in your life right now. A potent group of abstract scholars called Castalians have formed and “rediscovering the lost mysteries of the ancients,” gradually created the Glass-Bead Game: the ultimate in interdisciplinary reference-making. This story apparently takes place in the future–where wars have stalled for a while–and there seems to be a measure of global peace. I suppose I will talk about the generalizations further before going into the characters. To be honest, we never really get a straight answer as to what the particulars of the Game actually are, but a whole lot of tantalizing generalizations do occur. That is what I first thought that the Glass-Bead Game–created and practiced by the Castalian Order–actually was.
Imagine a game of Tetris that uses all of the world’s culminated and sum total of knowledge to create intricate and wonderful patterns of word, song, and image.
But it wasn’t until I found a copy of the book that someone was reading at a friend’s house that I actually looked through it and was fascinated by what I saw. I’d heard of Hermann Hesse in passing from a former coworker of mine before ever I picked up a copy of The Glass-Bead Game (or Magister Ludi as it is called in some translations). This review probably shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise to those of you who read my entry “The State of my Blog.” You see? This is where digressions and tangents can lead you: to more book reviews!
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