Hermann hesse: The Glass Bead Game

This book certainly lends itself to literary analysis. I could write paper upon paper about it, never repeating myself, about the parallels between Ludi's life and his fictional autobiographies, about the homosexual undercurrent, about the underdevelopment of female characters, especially about the books dazzling ending. But I shall not.

As tempting as it is to grind out one of those sort of essays, it is even more tempting to make some unlooked for connections between the book and other recent projects of mine. There is a fortuitous and obscure common thread between this novel, Doctor Zhivago, and the letters of Pliny the Younger, very nearly all of my recent literary consumption. The thread is The Plight of the Amateur Poet. Doesn't that have a nice ring to it? I'm sure the theme has not been touched, and I would do it justice. But I shall not.

Instead, I am compelled to write that least reputable of literary analyses, the personal reaction. As dense as The Glass Bead Game is with content, and as ripe as it is for analysis, I am holding a personal grief which the book has brought to a boil. It concerns Robert, also technically a contributor to this blog, but I think there is little danger of his reading it. If he does happen upon it, I think that itself an indicator that he might be feeling similarly.

The eponymous game of Hesse's is not a game at all, of course. This is true not only in the sense that it is a metaphor, but also that it is a way of thinking--not a competition. The player connects and orders symbols to create a systematic and harmonius train of thought. The trick lies in the fact that each symbol has sundried meanings, perhaps a musical theme of Bach's alongside a correlating astronomical equation, a passage of Homeric Latin, and perhaps a mathematical theorem. The idea is that all fields of thought are connected, and what is true for music is true for Astronomy, literature and indeed all of reality. The protagonist's contention is that each "game" points to a kernel of truth at the center of all reality, and spends the book searching for . . . well, that's another essay.

It is this very game that Robert and I used to play, connecting his ideas about movies or science to mine about philosophy or literature, and often vice versa. These are easily the most stimulating interactions I've ever had with another human, and I miss them. It's a pity that our paths have forked--or rather that such an amazing interchange has disappeared along with the very love that it fertilized. Is there a way for me to play the glass bead game again? with Robert or with someone else?