This novel, by Hesse Hermann, was published in 1943. Yet the raging WWII is no where in sight in the story. In fact, this novel is painstakingly speculative about a utopia where a society of intellectual elite is preserved by society to engage in pure thoughts and culture along the conflicting lines: “the liberation of thought and belief from the sway of all authority”, vis-a-vis “the covert and passionate search for a means to confer the legitimacy on this freedom”. In other words, does Life of Mind has more freedom than Life of World? This book is a mystic rumination on both the necessity and beauty of the former, as well as its fragility and constraints. Knecht’s life, his friendship with a few people, and his own conversations and actions, convey the sense of resolved conflict and essential tragedy. This is an exquisite but imperfect bejeweled treatise, obscuring by three layers of literary veils: the speculative utopia, a fictional biographer, inaccessibility of the actual “glass bead game”. For this reader, this book’s arch of events does not hold much sway, but several long fragments of conversations are worthy all the consideration.