It felt like it was constantly striving towards universality without realizing how narrow and nearsighted its vision was. I felt that way about everything in this book. It was almost fetishistic in ita approach to classical music of the the 18th century but it’s refusal to acknowledge any other type of music was… so limiting. But I felt that the total lack of forward vision really prevented me from engaging with Hesse’s thoughts on art, music, and religion, and what I did find in the text did not strike me as deep or interesting. Really, you can’t imagine a world with female students? You assume that technology will be functionally the same? And of course, art and creativity conveniently stop during the time of writing. It was enough to make it very hard for me to appreciate the allegory/themes/writing. I just read Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game/Magister Ludi and I just… I don’t understand why this book is so beloved.įirst of all, I know it’s not the point that the book is set in the future because it is really about the apocalyptic time Hesse was writing in (during WWII) but I just could not abide his “ideas” about the 23rd century.
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