Seven years passed. I took it with me on a plane to South Korea and was intrigued by a world in which the follies of academics are the source of great scandal, a future in which society reaches a fundamental breaking point simply because of overspecialization, an obsession with trivia, and a quest for entertainment rather than enlightenment. I found this future very prescient, and I found what came next incredibly unique, for the vapidity of society does not lead to a dystopian, postapocalyptic hell but to a second Middle Ages. I mean that in a literal, historical sense--fraternal scholastic monasticism takes hold of Europe. While the normal dregs of society continue as they have always, a key class of intelligent minds retreats to the mountains in order to study... everything. Everything at once. The Glass Bead Game is a fascinating concept and perhaps a symbol for the terrifying obsession of my own life--it is an attempt to learn and synthesize and correlate all of human knowledge and expression into one symphonic language. It is a secular polytheism in which the characters of a novel from Equatorial Guinea, the melody of an ancient folk song from Bolivia, the geology of a moon of Jupiter, and the square root of infinity are all seen to be variations of the same cosmic theme.