Balance

I want to say that I didn’t feel any emotion when I read Hermann Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game. For most people, that comment would mean that the book wasn’t good, as if feeling were the only inner motion of the human psyche. (Of course, this kind of person is unlikely to read Hermann Hesse in the first place.) But for me it represents merely a curious aspect of my response to a book that made me think a lot in a very enjoyable way.

Sometimes art that I like just makes me think without raising emotion. The film My Dinner with Andre springs to mind. Some Asimov sci-fi stories also do this. It wouldn’t be a problem here except that The Glass Bead Game seems to say that we need emotional life to balance the intellectual.

Joseph Knecht lives in a future shaped by reaction to the horrible world wars of the twentieth-century. To get away from the irrational manias that destroyed Europe and to encourage the arts and philosophy and academics, a system of schooling is established and a whole district set aside for the training of the most promising youths (all boys!) in the sciences and humanities. Over the centuries the highest school develops a game in which any idea – a part of a piece of classical music, for instance, or a passage or theme from a great piece of literature – is represented by a configuration of colored beads on a board. Players add beads representing astronomical formulas, poetic phrases, mathematical formulas, philosophical tenets and more, tracing through the arrangement on the board the common threads that connect them all. The experience of the unity of pure knowledge gives these men perspective and peace, and the rest of society looks up to them as the guiding stars that keep them all from going to war again.

History is seen in this future world as the ebb and flow of passions that cause troubles and wars and is left out of the schools and out of the game. But eventually Joseph comes to see that the game itself has had a history and must come to an end. He admires the family life of a friend he makes in the world outside his academic cloister. And because of these insights and others, ultimately he decides that life must have a balance between the intellect and passion.

But does the book really convincingly demonstrate the need for balance? Everything weird and wonderful and new in the book has to do with the extremely erudite atmosphere of the game, and ultimately if the book makes anyone want anything it is to have more of the intellectual tranquility of the Glass Bead Game.

And of course it makes me want to experience the game itself. Hesse only gives cryptic descriptions, not much more detailed than what I posted here. But a handful of game designers have tried their hands at realizing the game, and a couple of the results are available (in part at least). One seems more like a method of exploratory conversation. Its promotional material suggests a question something like this: If music were astronomy, what constellation would Bruce Springsteen be? While the answer is clearly Ophiucus (I mean, obviously!), that implementation of the game doesn’t seem to capture anything like the idea of representing the connection on a board. But a couple of the others seem promising, and I’m going to have to order them or try contacting the inventors to see if they can share a copy.