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Hermann Hesse's
Das Glasperlenspiel [The Glass Bead Game] |
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"In Hesse's more recent work the vast novel Das Glasperlenspiel (1943) occupies a special position. It is a fantasy about a mysterious intellectual order, on the same heroic and ascetic level as that of the Jesuits, based on the exercise of meditation as a kind of therapy... In a period of collapse it is a precious task to preserve the cultural tradition. But civilization cannot be permanently kept alive by turning it into a cult for the few. If it is possible to reduce the variety of knowledge to an abstract system of formulas, we have on the one hand proof that civilization rests on an organic system; on the other, this high knowledge cannot be considered permanent. It is as fragile and destructible as the glass pearls themselves, and the child that finds the glittering pearls in the rubble no longer knows their meaning." -presentation speech for the 1946 Nobel Prize in Literature |
| HESSE,
Hermann. Das Glasperlenspiel. (Zurich): Fretz & Wasmuth Verlad Ag,
1943. Octavo, original cloth, original dust-jackets. $1800. First edition of Hesse's great utopian magnum opus, one of the works specifically cited when Hesse was awarded the 1946 Nobel Prize for Literature. Both volumes fine. Dust jackets about fine with some very trivial signs of fatigue at spine ends (vol. 2 with thin band of tape reinforcement at inner top 1/4" of spine). A superb set of this important title. Rare in original dustjackets. |
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