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Notes -
Wrapped up The Glass Bead Game. I think it's better than I initially thought and there's some cleverness around how Hesse writes the authors writing the biography. Still, I feel that despite the salvation of Castalia being the main thrust of the book, and clearly being successful based on the device of the frame story, it never became clear to me what good Castalia actually is. The Benedictines exist in the book as a kind of religious foil that have persisted for over a thousand years and preserved useful learning and culture. What good is a bunch of eggheads playing the glass bead game without coming up with anything new or useful? Several characters bring this up in the book but the objection is simply never answered head on.
The other thing is that I really don't like Hesse's, shall we call it, anti-didactic worldview. We see this in Siddhartha where he basically says that there's no way for one generation to stand on the shoulders of a previous one in terms of figuring out the good life. Here Hesse seems to go a step further and say that even ordinary lessons are futile. The hero Knecht never learns anything from anyone (sure, whatever, hagiography) and his first and last lesson to Tito consists in death by drowning (but still has the intended effect). It seems like a pretty corrosive outlook for any kind of developed society. I guess it's a step up from the Talmudic view that each generation is strictly less enlightened than the last.
Tried reading Mo Yan's Red Sorghum but couldn't get into it. Mostly torture porn of Chinese peasants at the hands of the Japanese. Prose is decent but one wonders how this guy got a Nobel. The word "sorghum" appears 500 times in the book, and it shows.
Fermat's Enigma by Simon Singh. Huge amounts of filler but an interesting core of interviews and anecdotes remains. Tough to imagine the psychological state of Weil during the year between the flaw being found in his proof and the fixing of the flaw given his obsession with the problem since childhood.
Currently on Chadwick's The Decipherement of Linear B.
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