Unintelligible Thanksgiving musings on knowledge and idealism:

Clunky-head home from the harvest feast, wanders around his home. He finds in his hands a copy of Hesse’s Glass Bead Game.

Clunky-head wonders, as clunky-head often does:

Should I read the introduction?

Theodore Ziolkowski’s foreword talks about how Hesse’s humor and irony fall largely on deaf ears. “Such ages [of conformity] have little use for critics of the system and prophets of the ideal.” Yeah, that doesn’t apply for all time and all culture does it Mr. observant critic. Every age with idealists has a hankering for some more ideal past or utopian future, so that would be every age.

Ah well, poor Hesse. No one gets your jokes. No one but Thomas Mann, and he was living in California when your book came out. Perhaps we all should move there. Well, that’s Kali Yuga for you, never an informed audience when you need one (that was a relatively obscure joke about relatively obscure jokes).

Adam used to call the game (that we are now playing) The Great Conversation. Hesse, ever the idealist, called it Universitas Litterarum – that imaginary temple of knowledge for which culture workers sculpt, scientists and theologians alike.

As I sit here and wonder about the relative accessibility of Hesse’s humor, the accessibility of the game (from which I removed myself some time ago), I am reminded of Carver’s short story Cathedral. On one level the story is about explaining medieval architecture and flying buttresses to a blind man. I wonder what Carver had in mind with that metaphor, is it a good college story for freshmen to read about their initiation into intellectual life? Carver is as ironic as Hesse. Risk in the face of imagined futility. It’s a game of ironies, jokes in dead languages and language in dead jokes. But perhaps it is as they say: the only game worth playing.

“In several essays that he [Hesse] wrote around 1920 – most notably in pieces on Nietzsche and Dostoevsky – Hesse argued that men must seek a new morality that, transcending the conventional dichotomy of good and evil, will embrace all extremes of life in one unified vision. A later essay, “A bit of Theology” (1932), outlines the three-stage progression toward this goal. The child, he says, is born into a state of unity with all being. It is only when the child is taught about good and evil that he advances to the second level of individuation characterized by despair and alienation; for he has been made aware of laws and moral codes, but feels incapable of adhering to the arbitrary standards established by conventional religious or moral systems since they exclude so much of what seems perfectly natural. A few men – like the hero of Siddhartha or those whom Hesse calls “The Immortals” in Steppenwolf – manage to attain a third level of awareness where they are once again capable of accepting all being. But most men are condemned to live on the second level, sustained only by a sense of humor through which they neutralize oppressive reality and by an act of the imagination through which they share from time to time in the kingdom of the Immortals, the realm of the spirit.”

Yup – that about sums it up.