The Glass Bead Game

Long time readers may notice Hesse's 1943 novel includes mention of the I-ching, earlier encountered in Philip K Dick's Amerika. The Glass Bead game is certainly a challenging book but includes many memorable passages in the English translation.

“A fancy-free artist avoids pure mathematics or logic not because he understands them and could say something about them if he wished, but because he instinctively inclines towards other things. Such instinctive and violent inclinations and disinclinations are signs by which you can recognize the pettier souls. In great souls and superior minds, these passions are not found. Each of us is merely one human being, merely an experiment, a way station. But each of us should be on the way toward perfection, should be striving to reach the center, not the periphery. Remember this: one can be a strict logician or grammarian, and at the same time full of imagination and music. [...] We should be so constituted that we can at any time be placed in a different position without offering resistance and losing our heads.”

-Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game

1943

Peace

you can almost smell the pot coming out of the speakers.

And then all wars ended / Arms of every kind were outlawed and the masses gladly contributed them to giant foundries in which they were melted down and the metal poured back into the earth / The Pentagon was turned on its side and painted purple, yellow & green / All boundaries were dissolved / The slaughter of animals was forbidden / The whole of lower Manhatten became a meadow in which unfortunates from the Bowery were allowed to live out their fantasies in the sunshine and were cured / People swam in the sparkling rivers under blue skies streaked only with incense pouring from the new factories / The energy from dismantled nuclear weapons provided free heat and light / World health was restored / An abundance of organic vegetables, fruits and grains was growing wild along the discarded highways / National flags were sewn together into brightly colored circus tents under which politicians were allowed to perform harmless theatrical games / The concept of work was forgotten.

- Terry Riley, sleeve notes on 'A Rainbow in Curved Air', 1971