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
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