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This is surely one of the most beautiful dreams depicted in literature. It is also a reminder that even the most beautiful dreams cannot feed our longing, which is ultimately for a reconciliation with the Real. The Glass Bead Game is an allegory of the relationship between symbol and reality, between life and the magic lantern of the mind.

Hesse's Castalia is a utopia of mind, which is born of and supported at great expense by a society recently ravaged by a terrible war. It is an enclosed place in which this society has deposited for safe-keeping all the greatest values of the spirit in a hermetically-sealed harmony immune from the ravages of worldly change. Isolation from life is intended to safeguard Castalia's status as a radiant Ark that can secure the continued existence of these supreme values of human life, transporting them unharmed and untainted across the darkness of historic flux.

“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.�

In Castalia's network of serene alleys, one finds a perfect reflection of the garden of symbols that is one's own mind. The goal of Castalia is to give concrete expression to the unity of the mind in all its manifold manifestations. Every province of the mind finds its concrete expression here, from the arts, to mathematics, to the contemplative disciplines, to the most recondite special sciences. One can feel fully at home in this environment. A cross between a Platonic academy and a Zen monastery, this is a place in which the entire structure of the mind finds its fullest expression by being concretized in actual institutions. Life here is placed entirely in the service of the mind. Here, life exists merely to fuel the progressive unfolding of mind's capacity for the ever-progressing elaboration of existence into form. The consummation of life, and Castalia's ultimate goal, is a supreme formalism that can encompass the essence of life, thereby containing it in a supreme super-structure.

This formalism is expressed in the Glass Bead Game. It realizes Leibniz's dream of a universal language (or characteristica universalis), which, he thought, once attained, would bring us to the consummation of the philosophical quest: a universal science. The goal of the Game is to lead us to the great Terminus of all seeking, a universal system "capable of reproducing in
the Game the entire intellectual content of the universe.�

“These rules, the sign language and grammar of the Game, constitute a kind of highly developed secret language drawing upon several sciences and arts, but especially mathematics and music (and/or musicology), and capable of expressing and establishing interrelationships between the content and conclusions of nearly all scholarly disciplines. The Glass Bead Game is thus a mode of playing with the total contents and values of our culture; it plays with them as, say, in the great age of the arts a painter might have played with the colours on his palette.�

Imagine having a universal language that can express the manifold content of all provinces of knowledge and experience according to a single unifying logic. This would make Chomsky's dream of a universal grammar pale in comparison. The Glass Bead Game is a language that can reduce to a single logico-grammatical plane a motif from classical Indian music and a mathematical formula, the structure of the future perfect tense and the biological structure of a rhizome, a cosmogonic myth and a logical proof. Hesse puts before us this dream of dreams, the possession of a language of thought that would give us the symbolic tools with which we could at last compare every possible datum of human experience, so that we could see what the myth and the logical proof can say to each other, and how the structure of a leaf is like a symphony and like a mathematical model.

It is like Babel undone, the reduction of all universes of discourse to one meta-discourse, offering us a genuine basis for the comparison of all meanings accessible to the mind. The closest philosophic vision to Hesse's Castalia that I can think of is Cassirer's philosophy of symbolic forms, which similarly seeks to express the unity of human knowledge into a single philosophical language.

It is, by the way, significant that music and meditation have such a prominent place in this scheme. Musical form reflects the Romantic side of cognitive form, and reflects Goethe's contribution:

“Perfect music has its cause. It arises from equilibrium. Equilibrium arises from righteousness, and righteousness arises from the meaning of the cosmos. Therefore one can speak about music only with a man who has perceived the meaning of the cosmos.�

Music reflects the level of a more immediate engagement with the world than does either mathematical or logical form. Hesse's universal language manages to bring even the seemingly formless domain of music into dialogue with the most formal of disciplines, like mathematics, and to reveal their relations as parts of a larger systematic whole. Music has to do with establishing a relationship with the world characterized by equilibrium. Music expresses the unity in difference that characterizes the realized mind. In this symbolic universe, Hesse tells us, music comes closest to disclosing the form of the real.

And the emphasis on meditation expresses Hesse's effort to reconcile East and West, Plato and Buddha. He seems to have struggled his entire life to form a philosophical outlook that placed these two cultural traditions in dialogue, such that each could comment on the significance of the other. Meditation is the ground of intellection in his Castalia; it unlocks the true meaning of cognitive form. In this, Hesse shows a remarkable understanding of the nature of form: only through a meditative act can scholars here fully reveal the content of symbolic forms:

“everything actually was all-meaningful, that every symbol and combination of symbols led not hither and yon, not to single examples, experiments, and proofs, but into the center, the mystery and innermost heart of the world, into primal knowledge. Every transition from major to minor in a sonata, every transformation of a myth or a religious cult, every classical or artistic formulation was, I realized in that flashing moment, if seen with a truly meditative mind, nothing but a direct route into the interior of the cosmic mystery, where in the alternation between inhaling and exhaling, between heaven and earth, between Yin and Yang, holiness is forever being created.�

Everything is all-meaningful, everything can be interpreted. This is a language that can express the entirety of our capacity for deriving meaning out of experience, and does so in such a way as to lead us to the central mystery: our “primal knowledge,� our latent and unrealized awareness of the “innermost heart of the world.�

The one thing that in this luminous structure remains a bit of an outlier is, significantly, history. History is hard to integrate into this shimmering edifice of Castlian symbolic-play because it consistently gestures beyond this serene, unperturbed province to the larger, dark continent of life that it is part of. It keeps pointing to the connection between the two, and to Castalia's paradoxical need for that messy, trouble, war-torn world. It is significant that the work was conceived in the nightmarish period leading up to, and culminating in, World War 2 (the first attempt at publication being 1943). This is more than historical coincidence; Hesse's narrative continually gestures to this historic background, and to a fundamental escapist motive, as the source of Castalia. It turns out that this lotus could only bloom from the dark flux of historic muck. The horror of the war is, ironically, an integral part of the significance of the beautiful Game of symbols.

Historical awareness is what ultimately awakens Knecht's ethical consciousness, sending him to turn his back on Castalia and return to the world to serve it. Through this sacrificial renunciation of his calling, Knecht the servant resembles Nietzsche's Zarathustra and the Buddha, both of whom had to leave the clear beauty of the heights in order to return to the uncaring world in order to offer it their unwanted service. His ultimate sacrifice for his one pupil at the end shows the last word of wisdom: wordless sacrifice in the service of life's inscrutable progress.

For a long time I have puzzled over Hesse's choice to conclude this novel with three fictional autobiographies written by Knecht in his school days. They symbolize Knecht's attempt to project himself into different historical periods, to really enter into the life of mind as it transpired in other times. One can see the pedagogical point: until we, too, do the same, we do not understand ourselves. History holds the key to our story. It is by transporting ourselves into other times that we can really discern where we are, the shape of our horizons, through an act of comparison.

But why these three lives... After ten years, I still don't have an answer. The most moving, to me, was the first, which is Knecht's attempt to transport himself into the mind of the earliest humans, as a rain maker. The rain maker represents the wisdom of primary, pre-symbolic (or minimally-symbolized and differentiated) experience. For him, there was no differentiation between self and world, nature and soul. Reality was perfectly contained in the totality of experience. “Everything was reality, was steeped in reality, full of it as bread dough is of yeast.� He represents the experiential ground of the unity of the whole edifice of mind:

“He read the veinings of a leaf, the pattern on a mushroom cap, and divined mysteries, relations, futures, possibilities: the magic of symbols, the foreshadowing of numbers and writing, the reduction of infinitudes and multiplicities to simplicity, to system, to concept. For all these ways of comprehending the world through the mind no doubt lay within him, nameless, unnamed, but not inconceivable, not beyond the bounds of presentiment, still in the germ, but essential to his nature, part of him, growing organically within him. And if we were to go still further back beyond this Rainmaker and his time which to us seems so early and primitive, if we were to go several thousand years further back into the past, wherever we found man we would still find - this is our firm belief - the mind of man, that mind which has no beginning and always has contained everything that it later produces.�

But the unity of the mind runs deeper still:

�...the Master and the boy followed each other as if drawn along the wires of some mechanism, until soon it could no longer be discerned which was coming and which going, which following and which leading, the old or the young man. Now it seemed to be the young man who showed honour and obedience to the old man, to authority and dignity; now again it was apparently the old man who was required to follow, serve, worship the figure of youth, of beginning, of mirth. And as he watched this at once senseless and significant dream circle, the dreamer felt alternately identical with the old man and the boy, now revering and now revered, now leading, now obeying; and in the course of these pendulum shifts there came a moment in which he was both, was simultaneously Master and small pupil; or rather he stood above both, was the instigator, conceiver, operator, and onlooker of the cycle, this futile spinning race between age and youth.�

This passage expresses, I think, the essence of the Upanishads, the intuition of the supreme identity of Atman, the deepest locus of unity, the source and goal of wisdom. The relationship between the boy and the master, their cyclical change of roles, and their ultimate identity, is Atman. Such recurring passages throughout the work give glimpses into a level of insight that is of no use to Castalian inquiry. They suggest that from the very beginnings of culture, this primal ground of insight was available to us, and that it remains with us unaltered even in the highly sophisticated intellectual culture of Castalia. This order of insight connects us to the deepest past and to the remotest future, being something no education can give (though it can perhaps take it away). Hesse, having learned from Eastern philosophy, is very sensitive to all the domains of wisdom that cannot possibly receive symbolic representation, even in the perfect formalism, the meta-language of the Game.

What is the point of telling the story about the labyrinth of mind? For many years, I thought Knecht's leaving Castalia was anticlimactic. I couldn't get why he would leave, expecting, as he did, so little from the world. He had the promise of making his life a perfect unity in that reclusive world. He left that meaning and unity behind in order to commit himself to the dark flux of the world, and, in the end, to be destroyed by it. It seems his leaving is a jarring break in the unity of the work. We cannot follow him where he goes, or discern any meaning to his ultimate sacrifice.

But now I think that IS Hesse's point: this is Hesse's movement from a purely theoretical, to a moral existence. And moral action often shows no overt consummation; often the sacrifice seems to have no discernible point. Perhaps it is with this meaningless act that Knecht finally grasped “the meaning.�

“To stiffen into stone, to persevere!
We long forever for the right to stay.
But all that stays with us is fear,
And we shall never rest upon our way.�