Quotes from The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse

[T]hese people with their childish puzzle games and their cultural
feature articles were by no means innocuous children or playful
Phaeacians. Rather, they dwelt anxiously among political, economic, and
moral fermements and earthquakes, waged a number of frightful wars and
civil wars, and their little cultural games were not just charming,
meaningless childishness. These games sprang from their deep need to
close their eyes and flee from unsolved problems and anxious
forebodings of doom into an imaginary world as innocuous as
possible. They assiduously learned to drive automobiles, to play
difficult card games and lose themselves in crossword puzzles - for they
faced death, fear, pain, and hunger almost without defenses, could no
longer accept the consolations of the churches, and could obtain no
useful advice from Reason. These people who read so many articles and
listened to so many lectures did not take the time and trouble to
strengthen themselves against fear, to combat the dread of death within
themselves; they moved spasmodically on through life and had no belief
in tomorrow.

"Your name is Knecht, [1] my friend, and perhaps for that reason the
word 'free' is so alluring for you. But do not take it too seriously
in this case. When the non-Castilians speak of the free professions,
the word may sound very serious and even inspiring. But when we use
it, we intend it ironically. Freedom exists in those professions only
to the extent that the student chooses the profession himself. That
produces an appearance of freedom, although in most cases the choice
is made less by the student than by his family, and many a father
would sooner bite off his tongue than really allow his son free
choice. But perhaps that is a slander; let us drop this objection. Let
us say that the freedom exists, but it is limited to the one unique
act of choosing the profession. Afterward all freedom is over. When he
begins his studies at the university, the doctor, lawyer, or engineer
is forced into an extremely rigid curriculum which ends with a series
of examinations. If he passes them, he receives his license and can
thereafter pursue his profession in seeming freedom. But in doing so
he becomes the slave of base powers; he is dependent on success, on
money, on his ambition, his hunger for fame, on whether or not people
like him. He must submit to elections, bust earn money, must take part
in the ruthless competition of castes, families, political parties,
newspapers. In return he has the freedom to become successful and
well-to-do, and to be hated by the unsuccessful, or vise versa. For
the elite pupal and later member of the Order, everything is the other
way around. He does not 'choose' any profession. He does not imagine
that he is a better judge of his own talents than are his teachers. He
accepts the place and the function within the hierarchy that his
superiors choose for him - if, that is, the matter is not reversed and
the qualities, gifts, and faults of the pupil compel the teachers to
send him to once place or another. In the midst of this seeming
unfreedom every electus enjoys the greatest imaginable freedom after
his early courses. Where as the man in the 'free' professions must
submit to a narrow and rigid course of studies with rigid examinations
in order to train for his future career, the electus, as soon as he
begins studying independently, enjoys so much freedom that there are
many who all their lives choose the most abstruse and frequently
almost foolish studies, and may continue without hindrance as long
as their conduct does not degenerate. The natural teacher is employed
as a teacher, the natural educator as an educator, the natural
translator as a translator; each, as if of his own accord, finds his
way to the place in which he can serve, and in serving be
free. Moreover, for the rest of his life he is saved from that
'freedom' of career which means such terrible slavery. He knows
nothing of the struggle for money, fame, rank; he recognizes n o
parties, no dichotomy between the individual and the office, between
what is private and what is public; he feels no dependence upon
success. Now do you see, my son, that when we speak of the free
professions, the word 'free' is meant rather humorously."

[1] Knecht means 'slave'

"Oh, if only it were possible to find understanding," Joseph
exclaimed. "If only there were a dogma to believe in. Everything is
contradictory, everything tangential; there are no certainties
anywhere. Everything can be interpreted one way and then again
interpreted in the opposite sense. The whole of world history can be
explained as development and progress and can also be seen as nothing
but decadence and meaninglessness. Isn't there any truth? Is there no
real and valid doctrine?"  The master had never heard him speak so
fervently. He walked on in silence for a little, then said: "There is
truth, my boy. But the doctrine you desire, absolute, perfect dogma
that alone provides wisdom, does not exist. Nor should you long for a
perfect doctrine, my friend. Rather, you should long for the
perfection of yourself. The diety is within you, not in ideas and
books. Truth is lived, not taught. Be prepared for conflicts, Joseph
Knecht - I can see that they already have begun."

What you call passion is not spiritual force, but friction between the
soul and the outside world. Where passion dominates, that does not
signify the presence of greater desire and ambition, but rather the
misdirection of these qualities toward an isolated and false goal, with
a consequent tension and sultriness in the atmosphere. Those who direct
the maximum force of their desires toward the center, toward true being,
toward perfection, seem quieter than the passionate souls because the
flame of their fervor cannot always be seen. In argument, for example,
they will not shout and wave their arms. But I assure you, they are
nevertheless burning with subdued fires."

But there were doubts whose very existence or possibility you had only
to know about and you instantly began to suffer them. At the beginning
it was not any serious suffering; it was merely a matter of being
slightly disturbed, uneasy - a feeling compounded of powerful urge and
guilty conscience.

"... But the fact is, Joseph, that precisely when we run into
difficulties and stray from our path and are most in need of
correction, precisely then we feel the greatest disinclination to
return to the normal way and seek out the normal form of correction..."

Since there is no marriage for Castilians, love is not governed by a
morality directed toward marriage. Since the Castilian has no money
and virtually no property, he also cannot purchase love. It is
customary in the Province for the daughters of the citizenry not to
marry early, and in the years before marriage they look upon students
and scholars as particularly desirable lovers. The young men, for
their part, are not interested in birth and fortune, are prone to
grant at least equal importance to mental and emotional capacities,
are usually endowed with imagination and humor and, since they have no
money, must make their repayment by giving more of themselves than
others would. In Castilia the sweetheart of a student does not ask
herself: will he marry me? She knows he will not.

"I imagine," Knecht wrote to his patron, "that one can be an excellent
Glass Bead Game player, even a virtuoso, and perhaps even a thoroughly
competent Magister Ludi, without having any inkling of the real
mystery of the Game and its ultimate meaning. It might even be that
one who does guess or know the truth might prove a greater danger to
the Game, were he to become a specialist in the Game, or a Game
Leader. For the dark interior, the esoterics of the Game, points drawn
into the One and All, into those depths where the eternal Atman
eternally breaths in and out, sufficient unto itself. One who had
experienced the ultimate meaning of the Game within himself would by
that fact no longer be a player; he would no longer dwell in the world
of multiplicity and would no longer be able to delight in invention,
construction, and combination, since he would know altogether
different joys and raptures."

He spoke a language that Joseph only half understood; many recurrent
expressions sounded empty to him, or seemed to have no content. At any
rate he realized that Plinio counted for something in his world, knew
his way around it, and had ambitious aims.

[A] religion that through the centuries had so many times become
unmodern and outmoded, antiquated and rigid, but had repeatedly
recalled the sources of its being and thereby renewed itself, once
again leaving behind those aspects which in their time had been modern
and victorious.

"You do not know man, do not understand him in his bestiality and as
the image of God."

Repugnance for current events, politics, newspapers, was even greater
among the Glass Bead Game players who liked to think of themselves as
the real elite, the cream of the Province, and when to some lengths
not to let anything cloud the rarefied atmosphere of their scholarly
and artistic existences.

[T]he 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.

Toward the end of the Game days these representatives of the secular
powers occasionally deign to suggest that the length of the festival
deters many other cities from sending envoys, and that perhaps it
would be more in keeping with the contemporary world either to shorten
the festival considerably or else to hold it only every other year, or
every third year.

He too had impulses, fantasies, and desires which ran counter to the
laws that governed him, impulses which he had only gradually managed
to subdue by hard effort.

The achievements of thought, of culture of art are just the
opposite. They are always an escape from the serfdom of time, man
crawling out of the muck of his instincts and out of his sluggishness
and climbing to a higher plane, to timelessness, liberation from time,
divinity.

... if we ever think of the freedom we possessed and have lost, the
freedom for self chosen tasks, for unlimited, far-flung studies, we may
well feel the greatest yearning for those days, and imagine that if we
ever had such freedom again we would fully enjoy its pleasures and
potentialities.

We prefer neither to judge nor to convert but to rather tell the history
of our venerated Master's last days with the greatest possible
truthfulness.

When I speak to you, you hear a language whose very phrases are only
half familiar to you, while you are entirely ignorant of the nuances and
overtones. 

Of course two peoples and two languages will never be able to
communicate with each other so intimately as two individuals who belong
to the same nation and speak the same language. But that is no reason to
forgo the effort at communication. Within nations there are also
barriers which stand in the way of complete communication and complete
mutual understanding, barriers of culture, education, talent,
individuality. It might be asserted that every human being on earth can
fundamentally hold a dialogue with every other human being, and it might
also be asserted that there are no two persons in the world between whom
genuine, whole, intimate understanding is possible - the one statement
is as true as the other. It is Yin and Yang , day and night; both are
right and at times we have to be reminded of both.

Now I had to discover that people in the world were no less proud of
their bad manners, their meager culture, their coarse, loud humor, the
dull-whited shrewdness with which they kept themselves to practical,
egotistic goals. They regarded themselves as no less precious,
sanctified, and elect in their narrow-minded crudity than the most
affected Waldzell show-off could have done. They laughed at me or patted
me on the back, but a good many of them reacted to the alien, Castilian
qualities in me with the outright enmity that the vulgar always have for
everything finer. And I was determined to take their dislike as a
distinction.

I wanted to conquer the world, you see, to understand it, to force it to
understand me.

I saw that I could really understand those others, those people in the
world and of it, if I once again became like them, if I had no
advantages over them, including this recourse to meditation.

	   
Gently, austerely, sparingly, sweetly, the lovely separate voices met
and mingled; bravely and gaily they paced their tender rondo through the
void of time and transitoriness, for a little while making the room and
the night hour vast as the universe. And when the friends bade each
other good night, the guest's face had changed and brightened, although
his eyes had filled with tears.

In short, the three lived together in a sultry atmosphere of effort,
guiltiness, and sternly repressed impulses, filled with fear of friction
and eruptions, in a state of perpetual tension.

What made the step seem so difficult to him was not so much the
strictness of the law but the hierarchic spirit itself, the loyalty
within his own heart.

Even though our abstemious way of life is prescribed by the Order, a
good many of us plume ourselves on it, as if it were a virtue we were
practicing purely for its own sake instead of its being the least that
we owe to the country that makes our Castilian existence possible. 

Above all we forget that we ourselves are a part of history, that we are
the product of growth and are condemned to perish if we lose the
capacity for further growth and change. We are ourselves history and
share the responsibility for world history and our position in it. But
we gravely lack awareness of this responsibility. 

Ruling doe not requires qualities of stupidity and coarseness, as
conceited intellectuals sometimes thing. But it does require
wholehearted delight in extroverted activity, a bent for identifying
oneself outward goals, and of course also a certain swiftness and lack
of scruple about the choice of ways to attain success. And these are
traits that a scholar - for we do not wish to call ourselves sages - may
not have and does not have, because for us contemplation is more
important than action, and in the choice of ways to attain our goals we
have learned to be as scrupulous and wary as is humanly possible.'

Whenever propaganda and the conflict of interests threatens to devalue,
distort, and do violence to truth as it has already done to individuals,
to language, to the arts, and to everything else that is organic and
highly cultivated, then it is our duty to resist and save the truth, or
rather the striving for truth, since that is the supreme article in our
creed. 

The mind of man is beneficent and noble only when it obeys truth. As
soon as it betrays truth, as soon as it ceases to revere truth, as soon
as it sells out, it becomes intensely diabolical. 

No one will believe - least of all the military - that closing the Vicus
Lusorum and abolishing our Game will cause the country and people the
slightest loss.

Beauty, even surpassing beauty, is perishable like all other things...

Thus his path had been a circle, or an ellipse or spiral or whatever, but
certainly not straight; straight lines evidently belonged only to
geometry, not to nature and life.

Perhaps it was inherently virtuous that for unknown reasons he was by
nature more inclined to acting that acquiring knowledge, that he was more
instinctual than intellectual.

It is not usual and normal for anyone, without some urgent provocation
from outside, to suddenly implore his colleagues to remember their
morality and the dubiousness of their entire lives.

A man can be a star of the first magnitude in gifts, will-power, and
endurance, but so well balanced that he turns with the system to which
he belongs without any friction or waste of energy. Another may have the
same great gifts, or even finer ones, but the axis does not pass
precisely through he center and he squanders half his strength in
eccentric movements which weaken him and disturb his surroundings.

My life, I resolved, ought to be a perpetual transcending, a
progression from stage to stage; I wanted it to pass through one area
after the next, leaving each behind, as music moves on from theme to
theme, from temp to tempo playing each out to the end, completing each
and leaving it behind, ever tiring, never sleeping, forever wakeful,
forever in the present.

The boy, filled with the solemn beauty of the moment and the glorious
sensation of his youth and strength, stretched his limbs with rhythmic
arm movements, which his whole body soon took up, celebrating the break
of day in an enthusiastic dance and expressing his deep oneness with the
surging, radiant elements. His steps flew in joyous homage toward the
victorious sun and reverently retreated from it; is outspread arms
embraced mountain, lake, and sky; kneading, he seemed to pay tribute to
the earth mother, and extending his hands, to the waters of the lake; he
offered himself, his youth, his freedom, his burning sense of his own
life, like a festive sacrifice to the powers. The sunlight gleamed on
his tanned shoulders; his eyes were half closed to the dazzle; his young
face stared masklike with an expression of inspired, almost fanatical
gravity.

Both of them stood on the walk between house and hut ,bathed in the
radiance from the east and deeply shaken by their experience.

--
But Secretly We Thirst

Graceful as dancer's arabesque and bow,
Our lives appear serene and without stress,
A gentle dance around pure nothingness
To which we sacrifice the here and now.

Our dreams are lovely and our game is bright,
So finely tuned, with many artful turns,
But deep beneath the tranquil surface burns
Longing for blood, barbarity, and night.

Freely our life revolves, and every breath
Is free as air; we live so playfully,
But secretly we crave reality:
Begetting, birth, and suffering, and death.

--

They did not stand off from nature, but always part of her and
reverently devoted to her.

In those times of calamity and universal anxiety it became apparent that
a man is the more useful, the more his life and thinking is turned
toward matters of the spirit, matters that go beyond the personal realm,
the more he has learned to venerate, observe, worship, serve, and
sacrifice.

People more readily accept affliction and outward penances than the task
of changing themselves; that they believe more easily in magic than
reason, in formulas than experience. These are matters which in the
several thousand year since his era have probably not changed so much as
a good many history books claim. But he had also learned that a seeking,
thoughtful man dare not forfeit love; that he must meet the wishes and
follies of men halfway, not showing arrogance but also not truckling to
them; that it is always only a single step from sage to charlatan,
from priest to mountebank, from helpful brother to parasitic drone, and
that the people would by far prepare to pay a swindler and be exploited
by a quack than accept help given freely and unselfishly. They would
much rather pay in money and goods than in trust and love. They cheat
one another and expect to be cheated themselves. You had to learn to see
man as a weak, selfish, and cowardly creature; you also had to realize
how many of these evil traits and impulses you shared yourself; and
nevertheless you allowed yourself to believe, and nourished your soul on
the faith, that man is also spirit and love, that something dwells in
him which is at variance with his instincts and longs to refine them.

[T]he teacher is not supposed to serve the pupil; rather, both are the
servants of their culture.

Even more terrible was the thought that after all the Redeemer's death
on the cross had also been a voluntary human sacrifice. As he thought
about it he realized  that a germ of this awareness had indeed been
present in that longing for suicide: a bold-faced urge to sacrifice
himself and thus in an outrageous manner to imitate the Saviour - our
outrageously to imply that His work of redemption had not been enough.

[F]or those who have not yet found our faith, perhaps never can find it,
their own faith, deriving form the ancient wisdom of their fathers, is
rightly deserving of respect. Of course our faith is different, entirely
different. But because our faith does not need the doctrine of
constellations and aeons, of the primal waters and universal mothers and
similar symbols, that does not mean that such doctrines are lies and
deception.

Before a man needs redemption and the faith that redeems, before his old
faith departs from him and he stakes all he has on the gamble of belief
in the miracle of salvation, things must go ill for him, very ill
indeed.

  In reality these people in the world are not real sinners at
all. Whenever I attempt to put myself entirely into the minds of any of
them, they strike me as absolutely like children. They are not decent,
good, and noble; they are selfish, lustful, overbearing, and wrathful,
but in reality and at bottom they are innocent, innocent in the same way
as children.
  "And yet," Joseph said, "you often belabor them mightily and paint
them a vivid picture of hell."
  "Exactly. They are children, and when they have pangs of conscience
and come to confess, they want to be taken seriously and reprimanded
seriously." 

"Worldly people are children, my son. And saints - well, they do not
come to confess to us> but you and I and our kind, we ascetics and
seekers and eremites - we are not children and are not innocent and
cannot be set straight by moralizing sermons. We are the real sinners,
we who know and think, who have eaten of the Tree of Knowledge, and we
should not treat one another like children who are given a few blows of
the rod and left to go their way again. After a confession and penance
we do not run away back to the world where children celebrate feasts and
do business and now and then kill one another. We do not experience sin
like a brief bad dream which can be thrown off by confession and
sacrifice; we dwell in it. We are never innocent; we are always sinners;
we dwell in sin and in the fire of conscience, and we know that we can
never pay our great debt unless after our departure God looks mercifully
upon us and receives us into His grace. That, Joseph, is the reason I
cannot deliver sermons and dictate penances to you and me. We are not
involved in one or another misstep or crime, but always and forever in
original sin itself. This is why each of us can only assure the other
that he shares his knowledge and feels brotherly love; neither of us can
cure the other by penances.

God sends us despair not to kill us; He sends it to us to awaken new
life in us. When on the other hand He sends us death, Joseph, when He
frees us form the earth and from the body and summons us to himself,
that is a great joy. to be permitted to sleep when we are tired, to be
allowed to drop a burden we have borne for a long time, is precious, a
wonderful thing.

Great as the happiness of his love for Pravati had been ,the anguish,
the rage, the sense of loss and insult were greater now. That is how it
is when a man fastens all his capacity for love upon a single
object. With its loss everything collapses for him, and he stands
impoverished amid ruins.

In one place he recognized a meadow with softly swaying grasses in
flower, in another a willow grove which reminded him  of the serene and
innocent days when he had not yet known love and jealousy, hatred and
revenge. It was the pastureland where he had once tended the herd with
his companions; that had been the most untroubled period of his
youth. Now he looked back upon it across vast chasms of
irrevocability. A sweet melancholy in his heart answered the voices that
welcomed him here, the wind fluttering, the silvery willows, the jolly
song of the little brooks, the trilling of the birds, and the deep
golden buzz of bumblebees. It all sounded and smelled of refuge, home;
never before, used as he was to the roaming herdsman's life, had he
ever felt that a countryside was so homelike, so much a part of him.

Every evening I returned to her arms, lay upon her heart.

In general, for all his happiness, his wealth, his garden, and his
books, Prince Dasa at times could not help regarding everything that
pertained to human life and human nature as both strange and dubious, at
once touching and ridiculous, like those same sagacious and vain
Brahmans, at once bright and dark, desirable and contemptible. When his
gaze dwelt on the lotus flowers in the ponds of his garden, on the
lovely iridescent plumage of his peacocks, pheasants, and rhinoceros
birds, on the gilded carvings of his palace, these things sometimes
seemed to him virtually divine, aglow with the fires of eternal
life,. But other times, and even at the same times, he sensed in them
something unreal, unreliable, questionable, a tendency toward
perishability and dissolution, a readiness to relapse into formlessness,
into chaos. 

So that was the reason he was riding off so zealously and so dutiful a
sovereign. Not from concern for the loss of cattle and land, not from
kindness for his subjects, not from ambition to match his father's noble
name, but out of intense, painful, irrational love for this child, and
out of intense, irrational fear of the pain he would feel at the loss of
this child.