<"I am not anybody," he replied amiably. "We have no names here and we are not anybody. I am a chess player. Do you wish for instruction in building up your personality?"

"Yes, please."

"Then be so kind as to place a few dozen of your pieces at my disposal."

"My pieces--?"

"Of the pieces into which you saw your so-called personality broken up. I can't play without pieces.">

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_...

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At the center of the monastic order lies the (fictitious) glass bead game, whose exact nature remains elusive. The precise rules of the game are only alluded to, and are so sophisticated that they are not easy to imagine. Suffice it to say that playing the Game well requires years of hard study of music, mathematics, and cultural history. Essentially the game is an abstract synthesis of all arts and scholarship. It proceeds by players making deep connections between seemingly unrelated topics. For example, a Bach concerto may be related to a mathematical formula. One description says:

“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.

The Game derives its name from the fact that it was originally played with tokens, perhaps analogous to those of an abacus or the game Go. At the time that the novel takes place, such props had become obsolete and the game is played only with abstract, spoken formulas. The audience's appreciation of a good game draws on its appreciation of both music and mathematical elegance....

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I haven't read Hermann Hesse's "Glass Bead Game" ("Das Glasperlenspiel"), though I have read his "Siddhartha" many times and regard it as a masterpiece. I am amazed at the subtlety of Hesse's understanding of some elements of Eastern thought.

Of course, the Chessplayer whose games are collected above is a different person and a different "Herman" (with but one 'n' in his name). I wonder if there is a connection between the two?

(: ♗ Bishop Berkeley ♗ :)

<Steppenwolf

<The chess player states,

<You: "1. e4 e5 2. f4!?"
<Kody: "Is it edible?"
>>

I wonder, what is your opinion of "The Glass Bead Game" as a work of literature?

The following remarks from Anders Österling's 1946 Nobel Prize (in Literature) presentation speech (in honor of Hermann Hesse) certainly make it sound interesting:

http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/...

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This year's Nobel Prize in literature has been awarded to a writer of German origin who has had wide critical acclaim and who has created his work regardless of public favour. The sixty-nine-year-old Hermann Hesse can look back on a considerable achievement consisting of novels, short stories, and poems, partly available in Swedish translation....

In Hesse's more recent work the vast novel Das Glasperlenspiel (1943) [Magister Ludi] [or The Glass Bead Game] occupies a special position. It is a fantasy about a mysterious intellectual order, on the same heroic and ascetic level as that of the Jesuits, based on the exercise of meditation as a kind of therapy. The novel has an imperious structure in which the concept of the game and its role in civilization has surprising parallels with the ingenious study Homo ludens by the Dutch scholar Huizinga. Hesse's attitude is ambiguous. In a period of collapse it is a precious task to preserve the cultural tradition. But civilization cannot be permanently kept alive by turning it into a cult for the few. If it is possible to reduce the variety of knowledge to an abstract system of formulas, we have on the one hand proof that civilization rests on an organic system; on the other, this high knowledge cannot be considered permanent. It is as fragile and destructible as the glass pearls themselves, and the child that finds the glittering pearls in the rubble no longer knows their meaning. A philosophical novel of this kind easily runs the risk of being called recondite, but Hesse defended his with a few gentle lines in the motto of the book, «...then in certain cases and for irresponsible men it may be that non-existent things can be described more easily and with less responsibility in words than the existent, and therefore the reverse applies for pious and scholarly historians; for nothing destroys description so much as words, and yet there is nothing more necessary than to place before the eyes of men certain things the existence of which is neither provable nor probable, but which, for this very reason, pious and scholarly men treat to a certain extent as existent in order that they may be led a step further toward their being and their becoming....»

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Thanks in advance, should you choose to reply!

(: ♗ Bishop Berkeley ♗ :)

Musik des Weltalls und Musik der Meister
Sind wir bereit in Ehrfurcht anzuhören,
Zu reiner Feier die verehrten Geister
Begnadeter Zeiten zu beschwören.

Wir lassen vom Geheimnis uns erheben
Der magischen Formelschrift, in deren Bann
Das Uferlose, Stürmende, das Leben
Zu klaren Gleichnissen gerann.