{"id":178,"date":"2008-03-12T17:41:10","date_gmt":"2008-03-12T17:41:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/skullcull.wordpress.com\/?p=178"},"modified":"2008-03-12T17:41:10","modified_gmt":"2008-03-12T17:41:10","slug":"turn-the-page-the-glass-bead-game-by-herman-hesse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/skullcull.com\/?p=178","title":{"rendered":"Turn The Page: The Glass Bead Game by Herman Hesse"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\\\"http:\/\/skullcull.files.wordpress.com\/2008\/03\/glas-bead-game.jpg\\\" title=\\\"glass bead\u00a0game\\\"><img src=\\\"http:\/\/skullcull.files.wordpress.com\/2008\/03\/glas-bead-game.jpg\\\" alt=\\\"glass bead\u00a0game\\\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>My friend seemed to have almost the entire Herman Hesse library and I borrowed and read a fair proportion of it. This was the largest of all those books; <i>Steppenwolf, The Prodigy <\/i>and<i> Klingsor\\&#8217;s Last Summer<\/i> being fairly slim volumes. As a story it possessed a lot of the characteristics and concerns of the smaller books &#8212; reframing eastern philosophy in a way perhaps more palatable to the Western sensibility. I would say that Hesse more than any other person, apart from maybe Kerouac and Ginsberg, laid the foundations for the current interest in eastern modes of thinking.<\/p>\n<p>The primary difference in this book in comparison to the others is scale &#8212; the intricacy of the game described allows the culture within which it embedded to be described in a way that is more subtle than most science fiction is capable of. I always found the i-ching fascinating and this elucidated upon that and obviously weaved in some of its own ideas. As with all of\u00a0 Hesse\\&#8217;s work the characters seem real and the story seems to have been paid careful attention to &#8212; you very rarely stumble around in Hesse\\&#8217;s stories: everything seems designed to be in exactly the place you find it. Of course this could be the quality of the translation but that idea doesn\\&#8217;t hold when you look at the number of books and how brilliant they are. Hesse was a genius &#8212; able to take the complex and make it read simply; that takes true talent. All of his books are a joy to read &#8212; they are touching and they make you think and sometimes, as with this book, they are capable of changing your life.<\/p>\n<p>&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;-<br \/>\nNow playing: <a href=\\\"http:\/\/www.foxytunes.com\/artist\/blur\/track\/m.o.r.\\\" title=\\\"\\'Blur - m.o.r.\\' - open on FoxyTunes Planet\\\">Blur &#8211; m.o.r.<\/a><br \/>\n<span style=\\\"color:#999999;font-style:italic;font-size:10px;\\\">via <a href=\\\"http:\/\/www.foxytunes.com\/signatunes\/\\\" title=\\\"FoxyTunes - Web of music at your fingertips\\\">FoxyTunes<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>My friend seemed to have almost the entire Herman Hesse library and I borrowed and read a fair proportion of it. This was the largest of all those books; Steppenwolf, The Prodigy and Klingsor\\&#8217;s Last Summer being fairly slim volumes. <a href=\"http:\/\/skullcull.com\/?p=178\"> Read more&#8230;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[74,168,171,181],"tags":[275,306,681,887,1072,1193,1194,1197],"class_list":["post-178","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-herman-hesse","category-turn-the-page","category-updates","category-words","tag-beautiful","tag-book","tag-literature","tag-prose","tag-the-glass-bead-game","tag-writer","tag-writers","tag-writing"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/skullcull.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/skullcull.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/skullcull.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/skullcull.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/skullcull.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=178"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/skullcull.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/skullcull.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=178"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/skullcull.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=178"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/skullcull.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=178"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}