Word: ludi
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...late '60s and early '70s, the spine-cracked paperback editions of Hermann Hesse (Steppenwolf, Siddhartha, Magister Ludi) stood in a haphazard pile beside every mattress on the floor, next to the roach clips and Earth Shoes. The American counterculture claimed the Swabian mystic as a guru of its own discovery, its subterranean priest. That was perhaps an instructive case of self-absorbed audience imitating self-obsessed author. In fact, Hesse during his astonishingly long career had been appropriated by three other generations (in Germany, anyway) as their own secret voice. Hesse possessed a strange, lifelong affinity for adolescents...
...said Siddhartha to his friend, 'Govinda, come with me to the banyan tree. We will practice meditation.' " Hesse hung his earlier stories with necromantic swags. In the middle period of Steppenwolf, he contrived a surreal kind of existentialism. In his masterpiece, The Glass Bead Game (or Magister Ludi, the English title), composed during precisely the years when Hitler consolidated his power, Hesse invented his own classical serenity, all civilization encoded in an infinite chess game to be played like the Pythagorean music of the spheres, but in a motionless universe. The book was completed in Hesse...