The ivory-tower games of the previous post, Space Poetics,
suggest a review of Hesse on the I Ching —
“Once Knecht confessed to his teacher that he wished to
learn enough to be able to incorporate the system of the
I Ching into the Glass Bead Game. Elder Brother laughed.
‘Go ahead and try’, he exclaimed. ‘You’ll see how it turns out.
Anyone can create a pretty little bamboo garden in the world.
But I doubt the gardener would succeed in incorporating
the world in his bamboo grove’ ” (P. 139).
— Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game (Magister Ludi) .
Translated by Richard and Clara Winston ( London, Vintage, 2000).
The above passage is as quoted and cited in
“Language Games in the Ivory Tower:
Comparing the Philosophical Investigations with
Hermann Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game ,”
by Georgina Edwards
First published: 13 December 2019,
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1467-9752.12389 .
The cited publication date was also the date of death for
a Harvard classmate of mine. As an alumnus of Phillips Andover,
he might have preferred Oliver Wendell Holmes to Hesse.