Skip to main content

The Glass Bead Game


I first read Hesse's masterpiece when I was seventeen and remember the shock when its key protagonist, Joseph Knecht, dies two thirds through, not realising that the last third is devoted to Knecht's literary products - his poems and three lives of imagined past biographies. I was expecting this life that I had come to know and feel so closely would unfold to an aged conclusion. It was not to be.

It is a remarkable book from its open, dry chapter on how the Glass Bead Game arose that reads as an ever fresh, ironic critique of our own times (as relevant now as when Hesse wrote it in the 1940s). The wonderful skewering of the notion that we consult celebrities for their views on politics or culture is artfully pointed at our own mores. But, more importantly, Hesse's exploration of the relationship between eternal values and the flux of history remains deeply moving, and as unresolved as he himself found it.

At heart, Hesse defends both the civilising mission of culture and the recognition that it is a never ending task, that must be taken up anew in each and every epoch. There is no such thing as progression in time - the Spirit is not inexorably unfolding towards some summit with Hegelian inevitability (or plodding along in the fields of matter in some Marxian version of the same).

Time simply is, it flows on, and, at times, it is more or less gathered up in reflecting timeless values of truth and goodness and, at other times, it falls away and is carried along by other passions, untamed, undisciplined, by any sense of order. Thus, critically, much depends on our choices, whether we will step into the ring of history, at however humble an entry point, to try and grace it with an harmonising order, that does not deny but hallows our instinctual, passionate lives or we retreat. We retreat either into a hermetically sealed bastion of elitist values, represented here by Castalia, the Order and Province of Scholars, or we retreat into a defence of our unhallowed instincts that inevitably leads to patterns of conflict and violence.

In Joseph Knecht, Hesse paints a remarkable portrait of a man who serves (and Knecht means servant) the values of the true, the good and the beautiful but not as eternally frozen archetypes but as patterns that coalesce in time, in the hearts of individuals, and must be continually midwifed into living existence. All Hesse's scepticism about the ability to capture truth in words is here to the fore.

Hesse was a practitioner of what the poet, Milton, called 'lovely wisdom'. A wisdom that enterprises after knowing, that is embodied in a vulnerable openness to experience (what Knecht calls his sense of 'awakening') but which never comes to closure around 'the truth'. It is a wisdom that is always journeying on.

St Gregory of Nyssa reminds us that since God is infinite there can be no end to the knowing of God. Each fullness of such knowing is, in truth, also an emptying that invites you on.

Knecht's image for this is music that occupies a space only to move onto a new one in unfolding movement in which we are enfolded if we have the ears of the heart to truly listen. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Red Shambala

Nicholas Roerich is oft depicted as a spiritual seeker, peace visionary, author of numberless paintings, and a brave explorer of Central Asia. However, Andrei Znamenski in his 'Red Shambala: Magic, Prophecy, and Geopolitics in the Heart of Asia' has him perform another role - that of geopolitical schemer. The scheming did have at its heart a religious vision - of a coalition of Buddhist races in Central Asia that would establish a budding utopia - the Shambala of the title - from which the truths of Buddhism (and co-operative labour) would flow around the globe. This would require the usurpation of the 13th Dalai Lama to be replaced by the Panchen Lama guided by the heroic saviour (Roerich) who appears above dressed for the part. In the achievement of these aims, the Roerichs (including his wife, Helena, who had a visionary connection with 'Mahatmas' whose cryptic messaging guided their steps) were willing to entertain strange bedfellows that at one time include...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Buddha meets Christ in embrace

Reading Lama Anagarika Govinda is proving nostalgic on a number of fronts. I recall my first reading of it in my first year at university, bought at Watkins, the famous 'esoteric' bookshop in Cecil Court in London. I sat in my hall of residence room transfixed by a world made familiar; and, it was deepening of a commitment to contemplation (which has been observed fitfully)! I remember returning, at the time, to my school to give a talk to the combined fifth form on Buddhism and using Govinda as the backbone of my delivery (both this book, and his equally wonderful, the Foundations of Tibetan Buddhism). I was voted (I immodestly remember) their best invited speaker of the year. I had even bought a recording of Tibetan music as opener and closer! He reminded me of how important Buddhism was (and is) to my own thinking and comprehension of my experience. The Buddha's First Sermon in the Deer Park was the first religious text I read (of my own volition) at the tender age...
13 comments
Read more

The Jewel in the Crown

I spent six months in Nizhny Novgorod ostensibly as both the chair and the director of a micro-finance fund. I must confess much of that work -apart from the spectacular resignation of my predecessor as director - has faded from view but what I vividly recall is at weekends progressing through Paul Scott's 'The Raj Quartet' and subsequently re-watching its painstaking and triumphant dramatization (by Granada) that I had watched, long before, on the television. It was without doubt my most deeply cherished reading experience to date. This extraordinary narrative of the British in the last, declining days of colonial rule that begins with the doomed relationship of Hari Kumar and Daphne Manners, her rape, and the injustice of Kumar as accused by Ronald Merrick, the Police Superintendent, and one of the most malevolent characters ever created in fiction. He is a magnified alter ego of Scott himself especially the sharply, destructively repressed homosexuality. The narrati...
Post a Comment
Read more