I read Hesse's "Glass Bead Game" when I was a kid sailor. I barely understood the ramifications of it then, but the story was vivid and it stayed with me all these years to find a resonance in this creative/academic world of ours:
All the insights, noble thoughts and works of art that the human race has produced in its creative eras, all that subsequent periods of scholarly study have reduced to concepts and converted into intellectual property - on all this immense body of intellectual values the Glass Bead Game player plays like an organist on an organ. And this organ has attained almost unimaginable perfection; its manuals and pedals range over the entire intellectual cosmos; its stops are almost beyond number. Theoretically this instrument is capable of reproducing in the Game the entire intellectual content of the universe. These manuals, pedals and stops are now fixed. Changes in their number and order, and attempts at perfecting them, are actually no longer feasible except in theory...
Leave a comment