Word: knecht
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Hesse is plainly smiling at all ivory-tower intellectuals, all tight little groups that seek salvation by separateness. Joseph Knecht apparently learned his lesson just in time. "We're all in this together...
Magister Ludi has an underlying theme as savage as some of Jonathan Swift, but it is written in an elegant, leisurely, almost wearily lyrical prose. The combination is arresting. The book, laid in some remote and undefined future, purports to be a study of the career of one Joseph Knecht. Hesse is not so simple as to imagine that biographers in the future will write like those of the present. Many dates, names and places will mean little then, and many historical events nothing. This biographer of the future in the present rambles and rapturizes, leaves out everything a contemporary...
Where Protagonist Joseph Knecht fits into this is not as clear as it might be. He comes & goes between long essays on music, philosophy, theology, the Game and the Order. He was an orphan, was chosen for one of the elite schools, joined the Order, spent two years in China trying to incorporate Chinese thought into the Game, was sent on a sort of exchange scholarship to a Benedictine monastery, and at 37 became the youngest Magister Ludi in the history of the Order. After reaching the greatest height of the Order, he left it, and tried to return...