Glass Bead Games: The Quest for a Grand Synthesis

Copyright © 2006 by Marie Thomas McNaughton.

In his introduction to The Glass Bead Game, also published as Das Glasperlinspiel and Magister Ludi, German novelist Herman Hesse says “there are hints” of the Glass Bead Game “in Pythagoras,” “among Hellenistic Gnostic circles,” “among the ancient Chinese,” “at the several pinnacles of Arabic-Moorish culture,” “through Scholasticism and Humanism to . . . the Romantic philosophies. . . . [It] has underlain . . . every Platonic academy, every league of an intellectual elite, every rapprochement between the exact and the more liberal disciplines, every effort toward reconciliation between science and art or science and religion.”(fn.1)

Hesse’s fictional mind game—based in musicology and mathematics and incorporating science, humanities, and mysticism—is, in part, a call for integrated studies programs such as San Francisco State University’s Humanities Department; it is, as well, an indictment of elitist rigidity in institutions of higher learning. It hearkens to the grand synthesis and strange ecumenism Giovanni Pico della Mirandola attempted in the fifteenth century (and which inspired an inquiry by the Roman Catholic Church into his heretical inclinations). It presages today’s cyber world where Internet users play virtual Glass Bead Games, some mastered by the Sacred Science Institute, A MysticoMagical Cosmological Portal “dedicated to the preservation and application of Sacred Knowledge, Metaphysics, and MysticoMagical Cosmology in the modern world.”(fn.2) It is this timeless quality—incorporating the present tense of the reader’s experience; the past, through its litany of intellectual traditions; and its sense of being part of our future, being set in the twenty-second century—that continues to draw new generations of readers to the text.

The Game itself—never described in detail by Hesse—is organized into Beads or themes set by the Magister Ludi, upon which the players extemporize. This game will include ten beads.

Bead One: Hermann Hesse

Born in 1877, in the Black Forest town of Calw, Germany, Hesse grew up in a nation engaged in intense industrialization and militarization. The Black Forest region (in what is now the state of Baden-Wurttemberg in southwest corner of Germany, near the borders of France and Switzerland), however, was then a mountainous land of cuckoo clocks still removed from the hurly-burly of modern hyperactivity (much like the fictional Castalia, where The Glass Bead Game (GBG) is set). Hesse’s parents were religious missionaries; his “mother spent several years of her youth in India and had done missionary work there.” In addition, his childhood “was interrupted by several years of living in Basle (1880-86) . . . . I spent most of my school years in boarding schools in Wuerttemberg and some time in the theological seminary of the monastery at Maulbronn.” He was a good student, though he acknowledged in his official biography written for the Nobel Prize committee that he “was not a very manageable boy, and it was only with difficulty that I fitted into the framework of a pietist education that aimed at subduing and breaking the individual personality.”(fn.3) Raised and schooled in environments strong on the messages of faith and service and intellectual rigor, Hesse’s writings reflect his interests in education and pedagogy, spirituality and faith, and the dialectical oppositions of the vita contemplativa and the vita activa. He was also deeply committed to pacifism and moved permanently to Switzerland in 1904, at the age of 27, in a rejection of German militancy. This same year he published Peter Camenzind, a secularized fictional account of the life of St. Francis of Assisi. Indeed, his major works (and minor) are a sacred canon of meditations on the quest for meaning and understanding:

Hesse wrote no more fiction after Das Glasperlenspiel, the original German title of The Glass Bead Game, though he continued to write essays in the decades leading up to his death in 1962. His health was poor, but the ultimate reason for his fictional silence, I believe, was that he had said his piece in GBG, a bildungsroman of life-long searching and discovery. Hesse had been highly influenced by his visits to India and other parts of Asia, where he studied Eastern philosophy and theology. He was also a follower of Jung, whose psychological theories were instrumental in easing the festering wounds of alcoholism and depression, from which Hesse suffered particularly during his twenties and thirties. During the First World War, he worked passionately for pacifism. The period between the wars was his most prolific, culminating in his masterpiece, GBG, which revisited the paths of inquiry of all the preceding novels, refreshed his ideas, and gave them a broad enough game board on which to play themselves out.

Beads Two & Three, A Fused Pair:
Castalia, the Pedagogic Province, and The Order

The Glass Bead Game is set in the fictional nation of Castalia in the twenty-second century; very much like Hesse’s homes in southwest Germany and Switzerland, it is a land of peaks and valleys connected by footpaths that open suddenly onto startling vistas. According to the anonymous Narrator Archivist of “The life of Magister Ludi Joseph Knecht,” which comprises the bulk of GBG, Castalia is unlike the rest of world, which he characterizes as “simpler, more primitive, more dangerous, more disorderly, less sheltered” than Castalia. This “pedagogic province” is “more orderly, more secure,” and serves as a “training ground for that small band of men whose lives were to be consecrated to Mind and to truth.”(fn.4)

Here, “in the academies, seminars, libraries, archives, and laboratories of the Pedagogic Province, every student is completely equal, no matter what his origins or prospects.” Top students in normal schools are evaluated and, if found promising, invited to “elite schools.” There they receive the very best in purely academic education and an introduction to the Glass Bead Game. To continue as a candidate for superlative Order, a student must relinquish all connections to the world at large, give up any thought of birth family and friends, marriage and children. Candidates are often orphans who have few personal attachments to sever. They must submit to a life of study—without family or property, but also without want.

This system does little to benefit Castalia’s general citizenry. While the Order produces the country’s teachers, it otherwise removes the sharpest intellects from participation in the active life, away from doing social or economic good, away from the creative impulse—thus enervating both realms. Children are sacrificed to a god of sterile intellect and are allowed to create nothing for their race. To produce traditional forms of cultural expressions is forbidden to members of the Order, including new music, art, dance, or literature. They are limited to developing new Glass Bead Games that play on established works. Life in the Order is one of personal abnegation. Says the Narrator Archivist:

Obliteration of individuality, the maximum integration of the individual into the hierarchy of the educators and scholars, has ever been one of our ruling principles . . . . The hierarchic organization cherishes the ideal of anonymity, and comes very close to the realization of that ideal . . . . This fact remains one of the abiding characteristics of intellectual life in our Province.(fn.5)

This is a subculture that disapproves of the personal, where the writing of poetry is banned. It thinks of itself as an “aristocracy of the spirit,”(fn.6) but it so limits the lives of its members that few even recognize the society’s sterility. In the book and in the society there is a constant tension between rationality and mysticism. The Order cloaks itself in the religious, brings its members to the brink of transcendence in its daily meditative practices, the Twelve-day Great Exercise, which cannily evoke the Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola practiced by the Roman Catholic Society of Jesus (the Jesuits). The Glass Bead Game itself pulls back from the edge clinging to that which can be known. Father Jacobus, a Dominican monastic leader with whom Joseph Knecht establishes a deep relationship, calls the Order “a blasphemous imitation” of the Catholic monastic model.(fn.7)

Bead Four: Magister Ludi Joseph Knecht, Hero of Castalia

In a society that abjures the “cult of personality,”(fn.8) only the hero of The Glass Bead Game, Joseph Knecht, transcends institutional anonymity. For this, he is mocked by a contemporary as a “Castalian saint”(fn.9) and held up by the Narrator Archivist as a Castalian hero. According to the latter, previous GBG players have lost their identities—biographical and psychological—in the mists of tradition. Even their names are lost.

We moderns . . . do not even speak of the major personalities until we encounter men who have gone beyond all original and idiosyncratic qualities to achieve the greatest possible integration into the generality, the greatest possible service to the suprapersonal. . . . [They] tragically sacrificed themselves for the greater whole. These heros we can look at as individuals because their total devotion merits it. Thus is Joseph Knecht, master of the GBG worthy of this attention.(fn.10)

The book is purportedly a collection of archival material organized by the Narrator Archivist for our edification 200 years after the life of Knecht. It includes information on the Glass Bead Game (so that outsiders may gain a rudimentary understanding of Knecht’s virtuosity), a biography of Knecht, some poems written in his youth, and the three fictional “Lives” Knecht wrote before submitting entirely to the Order. His society hasn’t changed except to become more arrogant and acarpous than before. Yet, strangely, he is still remembered, revered in a world where individuality ought to be completely subsumed into the service of the game. The book is presented only for “popular consumption.” Why then does the Order “wish our hero’s life and writings to be studied outside the Order”?(fn.11) Is it meant to be a justification of Castalia’s existence to the “normal” world that supports it financially. The answers to these questions are left to Hesse’s readers to determine.

Significantly, Hesse’s hero’s name is “Knecht.” This means nothing to the average English-translation reader, but to the German reader, the significance is obvious; the word means “serf” or peasant or common man. Knecht could be anyone or Everyman—Castalia being a meritocracy. “Knecht” also means one who brings forth fruit from the land—a rich metaphor indeed. Finally, it means “servant.” Here we find a truly felicitous connection. Members of the Order live in service to the game and the intellectual life, just as members of religious orders live in service to their faith. They act in accordance with traditional rules and give up their personal projects—except as they serve the Order or Game.

But Knecht’s intimates are not other servants, but seekers, who in turn tell stories of still more seekers. The major events in his life are relational; that is, each is a moment of intellectual or spiritual connection with a peer, teacher, or student that illuminates Knecht’s choices in life and guides him in his decision-making. They are liminal moments in which a portal to alternative consciousnesses and life paths opens to him. For most of his career he chooses Castalia and the contemplative life of the Game despite a deep attraction to and opportunities for an active, individual life beyond and the deepest spiritual life within. More than anything, he yearns for balance, equilibrium, equanimity. As a student, he engages in a three-year debate with a guest student who will return to the outside world when his studies are complete. The issues are characterized as a series of dialectical opposites that bedevil Knecht throughout his life:

While still young and deciding his life path, Knecht sees the ultimate potential of the game and writes to his mentor:

One can be an excellent Glass Bead Game player, even a virtuoso . . . without having any inkling of the real mystery of the Game and its ultimate meaning . . . . For the dark interior, the esoterics of the Game, points down into the One and All, into those depths where the eternal Atman eternally breathes in and out, sufficient unto itself.(fn.12)

There he fears to go, but the lengthy confrontation of choices exhausts him; he finds that contemplation equals refreshment and chooses life in the Order; he becomes a Glass Bead Player. His acceptance of himself and his place in the world allows him to pass through the Glass Bead portal to a mystical transcendence. He writes to a friend:

I suddenly realized that . . . everything actually was all-meaningful, that every symbol and combination of symbols led not hither and yon, not to single examples, experiments and proofs, but into the center, the mystery and innermost heart of the world, into primal knowledge . . . . I realized in that flashing moment, if seen with a truly meditative mind, nothing but a direct route into the interior of the cosmic mystery.(fn.13)

He realizes that he wants to become a Master of the Game, a Magister Ludi. He becomes the greatest Magister Ludi in history.

Bead Five: The Glass Bead Game,
An Expression of Castalian Culture

A beginner’s Glass Bead Game begins with a meditation on music (usually seventeenth or eighteenth European classical) and/or musicology and mathematics. It links colors to musical notes and notes to mathematical formulations. The object is to find and interrelate patterns of thought. As the player becomes more sophisticated, these basic formulae are then extended to other areas of academic interest: philosophy, art, literature, history, and science. The game is conducted in a symbolic code derived from musical notation but inclusive of other visual cues, perhaps something like computer dingbats or pictograms. It is referred to as a system of clefs and symbols and as hieroglyphics, and may also hold a resemblance to Esperanto, the universal verbal language developed in the late 19th century and of which Hesse was surely aware.(fn.14) According to the Narrator Archivist, GBG “is a universal language and method for expressing all intellectual concepts and all artist’s values and reducing them to a common denominator.”(fn.15) He also describes the game as “a model of playing with the total contents and values of our culture.”(fn.16)

Descriptions of the erudite games played in Castalian history and during the time of Joseph Knecht’s life include “[t]he delicate transition from astronomy, mathematics, and physics to the sciences of language and history”(fn.17); a tricky game path involving etymology and comparative linguistics, Greek quantities, and accentual and/or quantitative scansion(fn.18); “a rhythmic analysis of a fugal theme and in the center of it was a sentence attributed to Confucius.”(fn.19)

“Theoretically,” writes the Narrator Archivist, “this instrument is capable of producing in the Game the entire intellectual content of the universe. The manuals, pedal, and stops are now fixed. Changes in their number and order and attempts at perfecting them, are actually no longer feasible except in theory.” And with this statement, he reveals the limitations of the game: its elitism, its hubris, its stagnation, and its sterility.In its infancy, the Game was played with delicate glass beads, which have since been discarded as too . . . real? They connected the Game with the spiritual beads played by religious believers worldwide, as the robes, and secret language, and ceremonial trappings of the game form a mock religious experience in the time of the Narrator Archivist. Without them, the game flies into the ether without a tether to reality. In our world, prayer beads and the repetition of simple phrases serve as keys to transcendence. In Castalia, they are discarded and the key is lost. The Narrator Archivist makes no reference to the ecstatic states that might be achieved by Glass Bead Game players. The games as he describes them in Knecht’s time (the twenty-second century) and his own (the twenty-fourth century) apparently fall short of what seems the obvious goal.

Bead Six: The Ivory Tower of Academia

Academia and the arts, as life itself, have evolved over the centuries toward specializations. By the twentieth century, Western university life had become one of discrete institutionalized departments inhabited by highly esoteric creatures adapted to their intellectual niche. Literature. Music. Language. History. Mathematics. Art. Natural Science. Physical Science. Social Science. Economics. These, in turn, have become divided into subsets such as English Literature, Latin American Literature, Drama, Classics, ad infinitum.

In the very early days of the “Western” tradition—when the subjects of study were few and simple—it was a matter of the seven liberal arts:

The Trivium-Lower Division (devoted to language):

Grammar, Rhetoric, Logic

The Quadrivium-Upper Division (devoted to numbers):

Astronomy (moving numbers)
Music (applied numbers)
Arithmetic (pure numbers)
Geometry (stationary numbers)
Philosophy of numbers(fn.20)

With the breaking up a millennium later of Europe’s Dark Ages—during which the Catholic Church had served as a cagey curator of classical knowledge—Western scholasticism was imbued with religious dogma. Learning had to fit into the worldview of the Roman Catholic Church. Visionaries like Pico della Mirandola challenged this narrow-mindedness with his Oratorio—celebrating the universality of human intellect and endeavor at the risk of prison and execution. Within a few hundred years, the Rationalism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries opened intellectual and academic inquiry to a broader vista, less clouded by Christian religiosity and reaching far to the East and South. A new burst of encyclopedic inquiry lit the horizon. New opportunities for travel and communication created new opportunities for cultural interaction and respect. Books like George Frazer’s Golden Bough offered Westerners a glimpse of more things than previously dreamed of in their philosophy, and a new era of syncretism was born. New knowledge was, however, neatly filed into the established academic department niches, and an elitist paradigm allowed only those with proper social credentials to inhabit the archives. It was as Hesse described the Glass Bead Game:

The only way to learn the rules of this Game of Games is to take the usual prescribed course, which requires many years; and none of the initiates could ever possibly have any interest in making the rules any easier to learn.(fn.21)

This was the world of academia Hesse grew up in and which he criticized through The Glass Bead Game. He dreamed of open inquiry in which all the disciplines could learn from and build upon one another.

Amazingly, the Second World War he knew was coming as he wrote GBG, and which he feared would usher in a new Dark Age, actually ushered in a new academic universalism. In the United States, the G.I. bill introduced thousands of students to college life who would never previously have been admitted to the halls of learning, who had new questions and less reverence for established ways. Programs such as San Francisco State University’s Humanities Department encouraged interdisciplinary inquiry. Students became teachers, and the next generation demanded the dismantling of even more social and academic barriers.

In the 1970s, SFSU’s NEXA program, for example, took the interdisciplinary project a step further than the Humanities program. It put professors from humanities and science in the same classroom and challenged students of unrelated disciplines to make even more sweeping connections between their major studies and different avenues of inquiry. In the 1990s, Sonoma State University created in its Hutchins Cohort an interdisciplinary master’s program called “Action for a Viable Future.” Not only does it combine a curriculum of ecology, economics, and social justice, but requires candidates to take what they learn “to the streets,” implementing strategies for tackling “renewal energy, global warming, pollution . . . the movement and displacement of populations, the increasing disparity between haves and have nots.”(fn.22)

These programs of interrelatedness have had their detractors, who see the interdisciplinary project as one of potential dilettantism. There is an understandable disdain in academia for amateur efforts at scholarship; for the improperly initiated to attempt scholarship is an affront to the rules of the game. In addition, any connection in the humanities to commerce has traditionally been treated as highly suspect.(fn.23) But times change and the Ivory Tower university model as the ultimate in intellectual engagement may soon be an anachronism of the second millennium.

Bead Seven: The Internet or World Wide Web

Virtual reality. What a mind-bender! Using internationally understood symbolic languages like JAVA and WIKI, and digitally rendered images of words and pictures, the tools of the fabricated world are exploited to create a cyberworld for instant global communication. It sounds almost like a telepathic descendant of the Glass Bead Game.

Information technology and Castalia are both male-dominated enclaves utilizing the integrative thought processes and multi-tasking that are acknowledged as particularly “female” activities.(fn.24) It is a riddle upon which to meditate and a subject that deserves separate consideration of its own. What are we to make of Castalia’s wholly male world? Is this representative not just of the monastic metaphor (there are orders of nuns, but not generally scholarly ones; they are usually contemplative, pedagogical, or socially active). What of the profound sterility of Castalia? No forms of basic creativity are allowed, just interaction with the creations of predecessors: particularly those from the revered seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—the height of rationalism and classical music. Castalia is not a generative agency. Can the men of this world really be taking in the information they juggle? If so, how can they not be transformed? Or at least inspired to create something of their own?

The Internet, however, is highly generative. It expands like the universe taking all manner of intellectual matter and transforming itself and the people who participate in it. Games are played, information is exchanged, relationships are formed. Blogging has become the new forum for the public intellectual. It reeks of the Age of Feuilleton, so named for the popular newspapers, magazines, pamphlets that the Castalians of the twenty-fourth century deride as a cheap substitute for true intellectual inquiry. Yet life is like that: from innumerable (often ignominious) efforts come the few, glorious successes. And in that sense of Darwinian experimentation, the World Wide Web is alive and evolving.

To search the Internet for “Glass Bead Games” is to meet players who take their games to be serious examples of legitimate scholarship. It is also to meet those who reject this entirely and cite Hesse’s reluctance to answer inquiries about how exactly the game would be played. “It’s just a metaphor!” they sigh or exclaim. GlassBeadGame.com, a webpage beyond the Sacred Science Institute portal, affirms that

Hesse makes clear time and again that there is much more to that the GBG than a mere intellectual manipulation of concepts, rather, that the essence of the Game is a Transcendent Universal process leading to an experience in consciousness of the Unity of the Cosmos. Forms of meditation and mysticism were essential to the experience of the great Magister Ludi, and provided the inner essence of any profound Game. We have begun collecting and elaborating some of the most powerful systems of meditation, Magick and Mysticism for the application of those who aspire to more than intellectual manipulations of concepts. These systems lead to an Experience of the Transcendent.(fn.25)

So it is back to the traditions of mysticism we must go.

Bead Eight: It’s Just a Metaphor

What does it mean to be a metaphor? It is a mystery to be a thing yet not a thing. It is a cipher. The mystical world is one of riddles and koans; our very confrontation with such unanswerable questions takes us into a separate but connected consciousness. The spiritual traditions of the East accept this. Those of the West resist it even when they acknowledge it. For this reason, Hesse had to incorporate his own experience of Eastern mystery into the world of Castalia; a western perspective alone would have been too weak for the purpose.

Critic Björn Billing writes in his essay, “The Form of the Riddle: the Riddle of the Answer”:

The riddle is mystical and mythical, present in all cultures, through all times. It ties together, or mixes, reality with fiction. The unknown, the hidden things, have a primary place above the known, the concealing things . . . . The riddle is the bearer of a great power, tangible enough that Aristotle was not able to overlook it when he wrote “On Poetry.”(fn.26)

Billing reminds us that Jacques Derrida’s concept of diffèrance addresses this mystery, and in his essay “Shiboleth,” calls attention to “the line of demarcation that creates through dividing, that unveils through concealing.” This commentary by Billing occurs in his review of Åke Permerud’s musical piece Four Riddles: The Hidden Objects:

The music in each movement becomes question, clue, and answer simultaneously. Close to the end of the piece, we are given the four answers. After this, Parmerud takes a trump card from his sleeve by putting the four answers together and forming a new question. There is however no answer to this eternal riddle; or, perhaps, an infinite number of answers.(fn.27)

Bead Nine: Knowing Nothing, Yet Doing Something

Joseph Knecht’s nature “aims at integration, synthesis, and universality.”(fn.28) But the game to which he dedicates the bulk of his life is in the end, just a game within another game, that of life. The GBG’s great deficiency, according to Father Jacobus, is its basis in worldly knowledge:

“You are great scholars and aesthetes, you Castalians. You measure the weight of the vowels in an old poem and relate the resulting formula to that of a planet’s orbit. That is delightful, but it is a game. And indeed your supreme mystery and symbol, the Glass Bead Game, is also a game. . . . The game remains a game.”(fn.29)

According to Hesse’s view of the “Eastern” tradition, we are all simply engaged in Maya, the “desperate kaleidoscope of life,”(fn.30) the grand illusion. The only true path out of Maya is to enter another reality by way of discipline and discipleship. In other words, we must engage in this life knowing it is meaningless and through our willingness to accept nothingness will ultimately become one with it.

The Glass Bead Game concludes with the only serious creative work allowed a Castalian (the time for which is limited to the three years after the end of formal education): the writing of fictional biographies, or “lives.” Those that Knecht writes are about discipleship and transcendence. The first written, “The Rainmaker,” is about a relationship between a primitive shaman and his teacher and students. The second, “The Father Confessor,” is about two medieval hermits to whom others come for guidance, and who meet and learn from each other. The third “Life” is “The Indian Life,” in which a human offspring of the god Vishnu is removed as a boy from his life as a royal life to learn the ways of common people. He is watched over by a magical yogi (as in Western stories of King Arthur, Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella). He marries and becomes a family man. He is betrayed and lives “on the lam,” becoming a mendicant. Then he becomes a student of the yogi, under whose tutelage he dreams of returning to royal life and service to the community. Finally, he wakes to find that his life is a dream, that all life is an illusion:

Was it not dream, illusion, Maya? And everything he would still experience in the future, would see with his eyes and feel with his hands, up to the moment of his death—was it any different in substance, and different in kind? It was all a game and sham, all foam and dream. It was Maya, the whole lovely and frightful, delicious and desperate kaleidoscope of life with its searing delights, its searing griefs.(fn.31)

While this revelation, which Knecht is said to have written in his youth, is not the end of his reported life story, it is how Hesse chooses to end the novel. It therefore represents Knecht’s final word on the meaning of life and the explanation of why he had to leave Castalia and the Order. He had come to believe, as the Dominican Father Jacobus once cautioned him, that life in Castalia was just a game.

Is the GBG a self-actualizing exercise? The novel is relentless in its rephrasing of oppositions: mystical knowledge and worldly knowledge, the contemplative life and the active life, transcendence and engagement. But Knecht’s decision to retire as Magister Ludi and leave Castalia for the outside world shows a willingness to know all before the ultimate nothing.

Is modern academia a self-actualizing exercise? The impulse to learn is always one of movement: to shift, possibly to elevate one’s being to a different reality, whether that be physical, economic, social, intellectual, or spiritual. First one is educated, that is, led out of ignorance with a new set of facts, vocabulary, and perspective. Then, if one is fortunate, one is enlightened, that is, brought into the light of understanding. This is always to be hoped for, but never guaranteed.(fn.32)

Bead Ten: The Play’s the Thing

The way of understanding and meaning can be thought of also as a play in five acts. In the first act, there is exposition; we become informed and understand the facts of the matter. This, and all these acts represent a universal path. However, for the purposes of this paper, it might be likened to undergraduate school, novice glass bead game playing, or a religious order’s novitiate.

In the second act, we begin to evaluate what we have learned, to decide the truth (or if one does not believe in truth, the complexity) of the matter, to develop context. This is ideally what graduate students achieve, or journeyman GBG players.

In the critical third act, we—interchangeably, simultaneously players and audience—determine how the matter at hand relates to our views of self and the world. We recognize theses and antitheses; we synthesize. We develop norms and decide how we ought to act. This is a critical point in life that determines who we are or are likely to become—some are paralyzed, others react or are merely acted upon. Here is where riddles are answered, metaphors are made real—all becomes actionable. This is our confrontation with the world, and it happens to all, not just those in academia or fiction or any other enclave.

In the climactic fourth, we act (or not). We become masters of play (or not). And in the fifth act, we see the initial and sometimes final results of our decisions to act (or not). It is a denouement in which the earlier acts cannot be reversed, only played out. Whether life’s drama is a romance, high comedy, farce, or tragedy is determined by the choices of the players. So, advises Hesse, play!

ENDNOTES

1. Hermann Hesse, Magister Ludi (The Glass Bead Game) (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., 1972), 7.
2. “The Glass Bead Game Neural Network of the Cosmic Mind,” 6 Dec. 2004 <http://www.glassbeadgame.com>.
3. Hermann Hesse, “Herman Hesse-Autobiography,” 6 Dec. 2004 <http://www.nobelprize.org/literature/laureates/1946/hesse-autobio.html>.
4. Hesse, Magister Ludi, 86.
5. Hesse, Magister Ludi, 3.
6. Hesse, Magister Ludi, 154.
7. Hesse, Magister Ludi, 147.
8. Hesse, Magister Ludi, 3.
9. Hesse, Magister Ludi, 93.
10. Hesse, Magister Ludi, 4-5.
11. Hesse, Magister Ludi, 6.
12. Hesse, Magister Ludi, 107.
13. Hesse, Magister Ludi, 105.
14. Reinhard Selten, who won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1994, “For [his] pioneering analysis of equilibria in the theory of non-cooperative games,” is also the author of two books in Esperanto on games theory. Five other Nobel Prize winners have been conversant in Esperanto, according to “Are there any famous Esperanto speakers?” The Virtual Esperanto Library 4 Dec. 2004 <http://www.esperanto.net/veb/faq-10.html>.
15. Hesse, Magister Ludi, 106.
16. Hesse, Magister Ludi, 6.
17. Hesse, Magister Ludi, 103.
18. Hesse, Magister Ludi, 104.
19. Hesse, Magister Ludi, 106.
20. Arthur Chandler, Introduction to Humanities Lecture, 7 Feb., 2004.
21. Hesse, Magister Ludi, 6.
22. “Action for a Viable Future,” a promotional brochure published by Sonoma State University Extended Education, 2001.
23. One of my professors in the 1980s was nonplussed when I told him I sold a magazine article based on my work in his class. Although it paid for the semester’s tuition (and, by implication, his salary), it was thereby tainted.
24. Witness the gender imbalance in our own program.
25. “The Glass Bead Game Neural Network of the Cosmic Mind,” 6 Dec. 2004 <http://www.glassbeadgame.com>.
26. Björn Billing, “The Form of the Riddle: the Riddle of the Answer,” Nutida Musik No. 1, 1992. 6 Dec. 2004 <http://www.mic.stim.se/Avd/Mic/Prod/micnews.nsf/pubdocurls/AD0F55D485458639.C1256B96004B0BF4>.
27. Billing.
28. Hesse, Magister Ludi, 96.
29. Hesse, Magister Ludi, 169-170.
30. Hesse, Magister Ludi, 518.
31. Hesse, Magister Ludi, 518.
32. This is a cobbled together play with etymology: Education: To lead out of blindness—e (variant of the Latin “ex”): “out of” + duc: “lead” + ate: “blindness, recklessness, ruin” (classical goddess Ate personified fatal blindness or recklessness). Enlightenment: Into the light (of understanding)—en: into + licht: light: (Middle English-Old English-Dutch-German-Goth)).

WORKS CITED

“Action for a Viable Future,” a promotional brochure published by Sonoma State University Extended Education, 2001.

“Are there any famous Esperanto speakers?” The Virtual Esperanto Library 4 Dec. 2004 <http://www.esperanto.net/veb/faq-10.html>.

Billing, Björn. “The Form of the Riddle: the Riddle of the Answer.” Nutida Musik No. 1, 1992. 6 Dec. 2004 <http://www.mic.stim.se/avd/mic/prod/micnews.nsf/pubdocurls/AD0F55D485458639.C1256B96004B0BF4>.

Chandler, Arthur. Introduction to Humanities lecture. 7 Feb. 2004.

Hesse, Hermann. Magister Ludi (The Glass Bead Game). Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., 1972

—.”Herman Hesse-Autobiography.” 6 Dec. 2004 <http://nobelprize.org/literature/laureates/1946/hesse-autobio.html>.

“The Glass Bead Game Neural Network of the Cosmic Mind,” 6 Dec. 2004 <http://www.glassbeadgame.com>.