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The Lasting Effects of Young Reading: A Short Memoir

I first read The Glass Bead Game almost 60 years ago. It changed my life. With just the right cues of romance, high-tech adventure, philosophical mystery, and heroism, the book invaded my adolescent mind, laid down roots and suggested a long term plan: I would one day be able to play the Game. And I succeeded, at least during a goodly portion of my adult life, when I wasn’t distracted by the trivialities of wealth, status, and religion. So I realised it was about time for me to revisit the ur-inspiration. A dangerous undertaking, I know, but perhaps the book could provide a sort of retrospective structure that I couldn’t consciously recall. Worth the risk then.

The epigraph alone rekindles the fire that smoulders still in my unconscious:

Nothing is harder, yet nothing is more necessary, than to speak of certain things whose existence is neither demonstrable nor probable. The very fact that serious and conscientious men treat them as existing things brings them a step closer to existence and to the possibility of being born.

I have experienced just this motivation with the force of compulsion. The task is both poetic and practical: to help people, particularly myself, to see what is hidden by what they already see, the things within and beyond what is apparently there. For a child of 13 or so, to have one’s inarticulate intuition confirmed - that there is more to life than its surface - is profoundly important.

I viewed the “Order�� and the fellowship of the game seriously and admired ��... the maximum integration of the individual into the hierarchy of the educators and scholars... �� My first attempt involved a Carmelite monastery. The next a military career. Followed by a time in professional academia and subsequently an international consulting firm which is best described as a professional Protestant monastery.

All these, and most choices that followed, had the intention of assimilation into one form or another of an organisation of united and mutually supportive minds. The professional context didn’t really matter. I had, it appears, a calling not dissimilar to that of the young Joseph Knecht, eventually the Magister Ludi, who had “the capacity for enthusiasm, subordination, reverence, worshipful service�� necessary to persist in The Game. Even today I find myself a member of a Dominican academic community which is the same size and similar in atmosphere to that of Knecht’s school at Waldzell. Somewhat remarkably, I suppose, I have never been a joiner of clubs, or groups, or congregations, only those with some sort of monastic potential.

Even the international firm to which I belonged, commercial as is was, had an ethos which could have been taken straight from The Game. It’s senior partners were among the most powerful and influential business leaders in the country. Yet the head of the firm said to me proudly one day at lunch “Nobody knows my name.�� When he said this I immediately recalled Hesse’s lines: “The hierarchic organization cherishes the ideal of anonymity, and comes very close to the realization of that ideal.��

Rarely did this assimilation ever feel oppressive or threatening to my individuality. As with The Game: “For us, a man is a hero and deserves special interest only if his nature and his education have rendered him able to let his individuality be almost perfectly absorbed in its hierarchic function without at the same time forfeiting the vigorous, fresh, admirable impetus which makes for the savor and worth of the individual.�� In order to make the point, I had the habit of submitting an undated resignation on the day I started any job. Even that felt like a ritual of integration. I exercised it myself by “leaping,�� to use Joseph Knecht’s term, whenever I felt The Game was being threatened.

The idea of the rules of The Game, its language, and symbology undoubtedly provoked some sort of teen-age mysticism. But what most attracted me and still does is that The Game is ��... a mode of playing with the total contents and values of our culture...�� years later I would discover Wittgenstein and know that this is precisely what he must have meant in his term ‘language games.��

The downside from a career perspective, of course, is that narrow disciplinary constrains and professional mores became increasingly problematic. The world at large expects increasing specialisation with age. But for me intellectual maturity has always been a matter of expansion rather than refinement. This has made me less well-off than I might have been. But I am more than content. I also find that I retain some tendencies toward teen-age mysticism. Perhaps this is an accomplishment.

It has been said that one is born either an Aristotelian or a Platonist. Empirically, it seems to me, there is some strength in this assertion. I am certainly in the camp of the latter and therefore fit right in to the Platonic bias of The Game, which Aristotelians would merely find just silly. It was Hesse who piqued my interest in philosophers like Nicholas of Cusa and Gottfried Leibniz. And through them into the idea of the ideal as a symbol of both purpose and the aesthetical.

Unconsciously I suppose, I found myself associating with other Platonists and quasi-Platonists - West Churchman at Berkeley, Russell Ackoff and Tom Cowan at Penn, Oliver O’Donovan at Oxford. Around each of these was a sort of invisible college, the members of which unknowingly participated in many rounds of The Game. That many of them are dead or no longer in my daily life is neither regrettable nor sad since the Order continues to unite us.

Hesse’s idea of the Age of the Feuilleton as a motivating social force for the development of The Game resonated in my young life with what I perceived as the random character of what people worried about - nuclear war, mortal sin, cures for acne - and what might actually matter. For Hesse, the daily newspaper was more about gossip than the factual information necessary for life. Hesse’s narrator has only disdain for this age of wasted freedom:

Years later, I encountered William Gaddis’s Recognitions and had a spark of remembrance about Hesse’s witty critiques of celebrity and “intellectual privateers��, particularly among self-proclaimed artists, and most specifically writers. And many years still later, I am overwhelmed by Hesse’s prescience in anticipating the evil of unintelligent internet social media. Perhaps they will be exactly the catalyst necessary for the real creation of The Game!

Mathematics and Music are the core disciplines of The Game. I can blame Hesse for implanting this as a seed in my psyche. It legitimised for me my interest in numbers (but certainly not the techniques of calculation insisted upon by my teachers) and classical music (of which none of my contemporaries had the slightest interest). Once again, it is unclear whether The Game provoked or merely articulated these interests.

Ultimately it doesn’t matter because The Game is my personal symbol for both. Recently while reading Edward Rothstein’s Emblems of Mind (/review/show...), a book which critiques music in terms of mathematical aesthetics and vice versa, I had very clear flashbacks of my pleasant surprise at being able to adopt Hesse’s discovery as my own. I have occasionally abandoned either mathematics or music as one might lose one’s childhood religion. But they have always returned as the matrix of my own version of The Game.

I could go on ad nauseam recounting the many other specific influences that The Glass Bead Game has had on my life. But this short reflection is enough to show me the profound depths to which we can be influenced by what we consume as literature in early life. I don’t know what lessons this might entail.

Perhaps the reflection is only productive as a sort of therapy that makes conscious what has been hidden for decades from will and choice. Hesse suggests this might be his intent in the text where he describes The Game evolving as “a form of concentrated self-awareness for intellectuals.�� Having said that, there is nothing I would change about allowing The Game into my life.