2. NUDGE FROM HESSE

Late October sun hallows heads

bent over books.

Don’t be taken in.

This is not Castalia,

and you’re not Joseph Knecht.

Nothing they read or write

touches their marrows

more than tomorrow’s

foggy breath.

You dream of a Glass Bead Game

and this is just a gamble.

Odds on for grades or passes.

Come July, year in year out,

you’ll pack away dice and cards

to clear the tables for another game.

 

 

 

NOTE In Hesse’s futuristic novel, The Glass Bead Game (1943) Castalian society disintegrates while an elite intelligentsia play an esoteric game in a quest for perfection. When Knecht is appointed Master of the Game he tries and fails to redirect his country’s dwindling energies to practical questions and applications.