Das Glasperlenspiel
Hesse’s most highly acclaimed book, The Glass Bead Game is set in a fictional state in Central Europe in the 25th Century. The state of Castalia is the home of an austere order of intellectuals who run a group of boarding schools for boys but also make it their life’s work to extend their knowledge and prowess of the Glass Bead Game, a mysterious game whose rules are never revealed. The story chronicles the life of Magister Ludi, the man responsible for administering the game. Although educated in Castalia he has spent a significant length of time in the outside world and as he reflects on his experiences in China and elsewhere he begins to doubt the value of the introverted life he and his fellow masters are leading.
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- I loved HPMOR for what it is, but I would suggest The Glass Bead Game ("Das Glasperlenspiel") by Hermann Hesse. I read it around the same time as HPMOR and it works its way back into my thoughts more frequently.
If you like novels of ideas, consider this endorsement of it from the 1946 Nobel Prize committee:
In Hesse’s more recent work the vast novel Das Glasperlenspiel (1943) occupies a special position. It is a fantasy about a mysterious intellectual order, on the same heroic and ascetic level as that of the Jesuits, based on the exercise of meditation as a kind of therapy. The novel has an imperious structure in which the concept of the game and its role in civilization has surprising parallels with the ingenious study Homo ludens by the Dutch scholar Huizinga. Hesse’s attitude is ambiguous. In a period of collapse it is a precious task to preserve the cultural tradition. But civilization cannot be permanently kept alive by turning it into a cult for the few. If it is possible to reduce the variety of knowledge to an abstract system of formulas, we have on the one hand proof that civilization rests on an organic system; on the other, this high knowledge cannot be considered permanent. It is as fragile and destructible as the glass pearls themselves, and the child that finds the glittering pearls in the rubble no longer knows their meaning. A philosophical novel of this kind easily runs the risk of being called recondite, but Hesse defended his with a few gentle lines in the motto of the book, «…then in certain cases and for irresponsible men it may be that non-existent things can be described more easily and with less responsibility in words than the existent, and therefore the reverse applies for pious and scholarly historians; for nothing destroys description so much as words, and yet there is nothing more necessary than to place before the eyes of men certain things the existence of which is neither provable nor probable, but which, for this very reason, pious and scholarly men treat to a certain extent as existent in order that they may be led a step further toward their being and their becoming.»
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1946/ceremony-s...
- In my late teenage years, I was fond of Hesse's novels. Demian was interesting enough to get me started. Narziss und Goldmund was by far my favorite. Siddhartha was also a good read, but at this point it was getting repetitive with its other works, and I didn't share the author's fascination for Indian religion and philosophy. Der Steppenwolf was a disappointment.
A few years later, a friend lent me Das Glasperlenspiel (The Glass Bead Game). I was deeply surprised, because it was so different from his previous works. It's a dystopia, but the focus is elsewhere. The book is much less romantic than usual, more subtle and intriguing. Twenty years later , I remember it fondly, and I can't think of any similar book. If you like Hesse, you really should try his last novel.
- Hear my rationale for Catholicism-infused Daoism (or Daoism-infused Catholicism, but the equivalence proof thereof shall be postponed to a later margin :)
*In other contexts, I'd have used the term "Designor", to inspire interest in Hesse's Das Glasperlenspiel)If the pontiff is chief designer*, and bean counters the cardinals..>Hesse frequently mentioned his understanding of the Taoist philosophies of Laozi (老子) and Zhuangzi (庄子) in letters to his friends, and Taoist ideas such as 'Tao' (道) or 'One' and 'polar opposites and unity' recur across his work.
Another worthy ref: https://isonomiaquarterly.com/archive/volume-3-issue-2/the-u...
(What jumped out at me was that author considered Poland to be smaller than Switzerland)
Edit: the Godfather ref in TFA also worthy of consideration https://old.reddit.com/r/television/comments/1i74th9/seth_ma...
- Sounds like we're evolving in the same measure-preserving open:
https://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~lekheng/interviews/ANKolmogoro...
> K.: ... it must be possible to return to a more basic and child-like joy in living. Do you know the German writer Hesse?
> M.: Yes.
> K.: In Das Glasperlenspiel, Hesse depicts such a society, and quite brilliantly, I would say.
grātiās tibi agō, vīnny̅vīchī!
- This strongly reminds me of The Glass Bead Game (Das Glasperlenspiel) by Herman Hesse[1]. The idea of simplifying and restricting the creative space into a grid, but then assigning abstract value to the grid (e.g. game of life, minesweeper) seems to be a persistent meme in computers.
- If you ever read The Glass Bead Game(Das Glasperlenspiel) by Hermann Hesse, you'll see that Hesse was able to get a lot out of this overlap of terms.
