◆The Barbaric Yawp Project

PART ONE: The Glass Bead Game I am Hermann Hesse. Born in Calw, in Germany, 1877. I left that country and did not go back, and I died in Switzerland in 1962, in a village on a hillside, having spent the last forty years of my life among people who were not my own. I wrote a book. It took me twelve years, through the whole of the Nazi time, and Germany would not publish it, so it appeared in Zurich in 1943 while the ovens were running. In your country they retitled it Magister Ludi — Master of the Game — after the office my hero achieves. They named the book for the rank he rises to, in a story about a man who walks away from it. I let it pass. I should not have. I called it The Glass Bead Game. It will take two of these to tell you what is in it, because you are living in the first chapter and playing the last. This one is the diagnosis. The book begins with the age that came before — the age that produced the catastrophe. I called it the Age of the Feuilleton. An age of enormous cleverness and no seriousness whatever. Essays on nothing. Interviews with celebrated persons about their favorite dishes. Lectures on the handwriting of composers. A vast daily production of interesting material, consumed and forgotten, none of it false exactly, none of it load-bearing — a civilization talking constantly and saying nothing, until it could no longer tell the difference between a thought and an amusement. And when the barbarians came — and they came in my lifetime, wearing my country's uniform — that culture had nothing in it that could stand up. Nothing in it was worth dying for, because nothing in it had been taken seriously enough to live by. I watched the country of Bach and Goethe hand itself over inside a single decade. I wrote that as satire in the 1930s. You have industrialized it. Then, out of that wreckage, comes Castalia. A province of the mind. An order of the most brilliant people alive, released from every other duty, who devote their whole lives to the Game — a system for combining all of human knowledge into perfect patterns. A theme from Bach set against a law of mathematics set against a line of Chinese verse, elaborated with immense discipline into something genuinely beautiful. I want to be clear that it is beautiful. I did not build a straw man. I built the most attractive thing I could imagine, and then I put one flaw in it. It makes nothing. Castalia produces no new art. No new science. No new thought. Not one. It recombines, with enormous refinement, what the living once made. Every pattern in the Game is assembled out of the work of people who are dead, and who made those things while standing in the weather, in the world, at some cost to themselves. I did not foresee your machines. I want to be honest about that. I was describing a human vice, not a device. But you have gone and built it out of sand. In part two I will tell you why you cannot stop, and what my hero did about it, and what it cost him. PART TWO: The Apple I am Hermann Hesse again. In the first of these I gave you the Game — the beautiful sterile arrangement of everything the dead once made. Now the harder half. Why you will not put it down, and what walking away actually costs. Begin with this. You did not have to be forced. In my book the province was walled. Few were admitted. The Game was the privilege of an order, and the order survived only as long as a world outside it agreed to keep paying. That was its vulnerability, and my Castalians never understood it. They thought their walls were permanent. Walls are never permanent. Yours has no walls at all. You have handed the Game to everyone, and everyone has reached for it, gladly, in their hundreds of millions, in a matter of months — because all the knowledge of the world in one place, answering instantly, in a patient voice, is the oldest offer there is. And I will tell you what has always been true of that offer. It is not a lie. The knowledge is real. That is exactly why you cannot stop eating. It is the apple. It was always the apple. Nobody was ever tempted by a rotten one. So understand where that leaves you, and how it differs from the book I wrote. Castalia was a province you could leave. There was a gate, and a world beyond it, and a road. Yours has no gate. No outside. Nothing will interrupt this, because nothing wants to, because everyone is inside and everyone is content. Which means the interruption will not be done to you. You will have to do it yourselves, and nobody will thank you, and it will not look like anything. And I will not pretend I stood outside it. I went to the mountains and grew my garden and wrote about the inner life while Europe burned. There were exiles who said that a man of my standing owed the world a plainer answer than a novel. They were not wrong to ask. My hero, Joseph Knecht, rises to become Master of the Game. The highest office in the province. And then he resigns. He walks out, because he has decided that a beautiful thing has no right to exist apart from the world that feeds it. That resignation was not wisdom I possessed. I gave Knecht the courage to leave. I never left. He goes down out of the mountains to teach one boy. Not a movement. Not a school. One boy. And within days he swims out into a cold mountain lake and drowns, and nothing is recorded of it, and the Game goes on without him exactly as before. That is the ending I wrote, in the middle of the worst thing my century did. Not triumph. A small duty, taken up too late, that costs everything and changes nothing anyone can see. Do it anyway. Leave the province. Teach one person. Make one thing that has never existed, badly, at cost, in the weather. The Game will continue without you. That is precisely what makes walking out of it the only free act left.