Magister Ludi: The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse

Author:Hermann Hesse
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: fantasy, Philosophy, Science Fiction, classics
ISBN: 9780553119169
Publisher: Bantam Books
Published: 1955-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

Knecht, who had listened with good humor to this outburst, asked casually: "Doesn't the history of thought, of culture and the arts, have some kind of connection with the rest of history?"

"Absolutely not," his friend exclaimed. "That is exactly what I am denying. World history is a race with time, a scramble for profit, for power, for treasures. What counts is who has the strength, luck, or vulgarity not to miss his opportunity. The achievements of thought, of culture, of art are just the opposite. They are always an escape from the serfdom of time, man crawling out of the muck of his instincts and out of his sluggishness and climbing to a higher plane, to timelessness, liberation from time, divinity. They are utterly unhistorical and antihistorical."

Knecht went on drawing Tegularius out on this theme for a while longer, smiling at his hyperbole. Then he quietly brought the conversation to a close by commenting: "Your love for culture and the products of the mind does you credit. But it happens that cultural creativity is something we cannot participate in quite so fully as some people think. A dialogue of Plato's or a choral movement by Heinrich Isaac -- in fact all the things we call a product of the mind or a work of art or objectified spirit -- are the outcomes of a struggle for purification and liberation.

They are, to use your phrase, escapes from time into timelessness, and in most cases the best such works are those which no longer show any signs of the anguish and effort that preceded them. It is a great good fortune that we have these works, and of course we Castalians live almost entirely by them; the only creativity we have left lies in preserving them. We live permanently in that realm beyond time and conflict embodied in those very works and which we would know nothing of, but for them. And we go even further into the realms of pure mind, or if you prefer, pure abstraction: in our Glass Bead Game we analyze those products of the sages and artists into their components, we derive rules and patterns of form from them, and we operate with these abstractions as though they were building blocks. Of course all this is very fine; no one will contend otherwise. But not everyone can spend his entire life breathing, eating, and drinking nothing but abstractions. History has one great strength over the things a Waldzell tutor feels to be worthy of his interest: it deals with reality. Abstractions are fine, but I think people also have to breathe air and eat bread."

Every so often Knecht found time for a brief visit to the aged former Music Master. The venerable old man, whose strength was now visibly ebbing and who had long since completely lost the habit of speech, persisted in his state of serene composure to the last. He was not sick, and his death was not so much a matter of dying as

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