conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me a plot for a book about Knecht, Castalia, Magister entitled The Glass Bead Game.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The Glass Bead Game: The Glass Bead Game takes place at an unspecified date centuries into the future.\nHesse suggested that he imagined the book\'s narrator writing around the start of the 25th century.\nThe setting is a fictional province of central Europe called Castalia, which was reserved by political decision for the life of the mind; technology and economic life are kept to a strict minimum.\nCastalia is home to an austere order of intellectuals with a twofold mission: to run boarding schools for boys, and to cultivate and play the Glass Bead Game, whose exact nature remains elusive and whose devotees occupy a special school within Castalia known as Waldzell.\nThe rules of the game are only alluded to—they are so sophisticated that they are not easy to imagine.\nPlaying the game well requires years of hard study of music, mathematics, and cultural history.\nThe game is essentially an abstract synthesis of all arts and sciences.\nIt proceeds by players making deep connections between seemingly unrelated topics.\nThe novel is an example of a bildungsroman, following the life of a distinguished member of the Castalian Order, Joseph Knecht, whose surname means "servant" (and is cognate with the English word knight).\nThe plot chronicles Knecht\'s education as a youth, his decision to join the order, his mastery of the Game, and his advancement in the order\'s hierarchy to eventually become Magister Ludi, the executive officer of the Castalian Order\'s game administrators.\nThe beginning of the novel introduces the Music Master, the resident of Castalia who recruits Knecht as a young student and who is to have the most long-lasting and profound effect on Knecht throughout his life.\nAt one point, as the Music Master nears death in his home at Monteport, Knecht obliquely refers to the Master\'s "sainthood".\nAs a student, another meaningful friendship develops with Plinio Designori, a student from a politically influential family, who is studying in Castalia as a guest.\nKnecht develops many of his personal views about what larger good Castalia can achieve through vigorous debates with Designori, who views Castalia as an "ivory tower" with little to no impact on the outside world.\nAlthough educated within Castalia, Knecht\'s path to "Magister Ludi" is atypical for the order, as he spends a significant portion of his time after graduation outside the boundaries of the province.\nHis first such venture, to the Bamboo Grove, results in his learning Chinese and becoming something of a disciple to Elder Brother, a recluse who had given up living within Castalia.\nNext, as part of an assignment to foster goodwill between the order and the Catholic Church, Knecht is sent on several "missions" to the Benedictine monastery of Mariafels, where he befriends the historian Father Jacobus – a relationship which also has profound personal impact for Knecht.\nAs the novel progresses, Knecht begins to question his loyalty to the order; he gradually comes to doubt that the intellectually gifted have a right to withdraw from life\'s big problems.\nKnecht, too, comes to see Castalia as a kind of ivory tower, an ethereal and protected community, devoted to pure intellectual pursuits but oblivious to the problems posed by life outside its borders.\nThis conclusion precipitates a personal crisis, and, according to his personal views regarding spiritual awakening, Knecht does the unthinkable: he resigns as Magister Ludi and asks to leave the order, ostensibly to become of value and service to the larger culture.\nThe heads of the order deny his request to leave, but Knecht departs Castalia anyway, initially taking a job as a tutor to his childhood friend Designori\'s energetic and strong-willed son, Tito.\nOnly a few days later, the story ends abruptly with Knecht drowning in a mountain lake while attempting to follow Tito on a swim for which Knecht was unfit.\nThe fictional narrator leaves off before the final sections of the book, remarking that the end of the story is beyond the scope of his biography.\nThe concluding chapter, entitled "The Legend", is reportedly from a different biography.\nAfter this final chapter, several of Knecht\'s "posthumous" works are then presented.\nThe first section contains Knecht\'s poetry from various periods of his life, followed by three short stories labeled "Three Lives".\nThe stories are presented as exercises by Knecht imagining his life had he been born in another time and place.\nThe first story tells of a pagan rainmaker named Knecht who lived "many thousands of years ago, when women ruled".\nEventually the shaman\'s powers to summon rain fail, and he offers himself as a sacrifice for the good of the tribe.\nThe second story is based on the life of St Hilarion and tells of Josephus, an early Christian hermit who acquires a reputation for piety but is inwardly troubled by self-loathing and seeks a confessor, only to find that same penitent had been seeking him.\nThe final story concerns the life of Dasa, a prince wrongfully usurped by his half brother as heir to a kingdom and disguised as a cowherd to save his life.\nWhile working with the herdsmen as a young boy, Dasa encounters a yogi in meditation in the forest.\nHe wishes to experience the same tranquility as the yogi, but is unable to stay.\nHe later leaves the herdsmen and marries a beautiful young woman, only to be cuckolded by his half brother (now the Rajah).\nIn a cold fury, he kills his half brother and finds himself once again in the forest with the old yogi, who, through an experience of an alternate life, guides him on the spiritual path and out of the world of illusion (Maya).\nThe three lives, together with that as Magister Ludi, oscillate between extroversion (rainmaker, Indian life – both get married) and introversion (father confessor, Magister Ludi) while developing the four basic psychic functions of analytical psychology: sensation (rainmaker), intuition (Indian life), feeling (father confessor), and thinking (Magister Ludi).\nOriginally, Hesse intended several different lives of the same person as he is reincarnated.\nInstead, he focused on a story set in the future and placed the three shorter stories, "authored" by Knecht in The Glass Bead Game, at the end of the novel.\nTwo drafts of a fourth life were published in 1965.\nthe second version being recast in the first person and breaking off earlier.\nDated 1934, they describe Knecht\'s childhood and education as a Swabian theologian.\nThis Knecht has been born some dozen years after the Treaty of Rijswijk in the time of Eberhard Ludwig, and in depicting the other characters Hesse draws heavily on actual biographies: Friedrich Christoph Oetinger.\nJohann Friedrich Rock, Johann Albrecht Bengel and Nicolaus Zinzendorf make up the cast of Pietist mentors.\nKnecht is heavily drawn to music however, both that of the acknowledged master Pachelbel and the more exotic Buxtehude.\nThe fragment breaks off as the young contemporary of Bach happens upon an organ recital in Stuttgart.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the first two paragraphs for this book.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The Glass Bead Game
  Thus far he had come in understanding during that ride. He had not, however, managed to apprehend and punish Govinda's men. They escaped with their booty, and in order to show his determination and prove his courage he himself now had to raid across the border, damage one of his neighbor's villages, and carry off some cattle and a few slaves.
  He had been away many days. On the homeward ride, a victor, he had again sunk into meditation, and returned home very quietly and rather sorrowful. For in the course of his meditations he had realized how entirely ensnared he was, without any hope of escaping; his whole nature and all his actions were caught and being strangled in a diabolic net. While his leaning toward philosophy, his love for quiet contemplation and a life of innocence and inaction, were constantly growing, there was likewise growing from another source his love for Ravana, his anxiety about his son's life and future, an equally forceful compulsion to action and entanglement. Out of affection grew conflict, out of love war. Already, in the effort to mete out justice, he had seized a herd, terrified a village, and forcibly carried off poor innocent people. Out of that, of course, would grow a new act of vengeance, new violence, and so on and on until his whole life and his whole country were plunged in warfare and violence and the clash of arms. It was this insight, or vision, which made him so silent and sorrowful upon his homecoming.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me three more paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Whether or not Pravati's admiration for the cavalry captain, and his for her, remained within the bounds of morality, in any case Pravati was less guilty than he, Dasa, himself. That much he understood. To be sure, thinker and doubter that he was, he tended to blame her for the evaporation of his happiness. Or at any rate he considered that she was partly responsible for his having stumbled into the complexities of life, into love, into ambition, into acts of revenge and raids. In his thoughts he even blamed woman, love, and lust for everything on earth, for the whole crazy dance, the whole wild chase of passions and desires, of adultery, of death, of killing, of war. But at the same time he knew quite well that Pravati was not to blame. She was not a cause, but herself a victim. She had not made, and could not be held accountable for, either her beauty or his love for her. She was only a grain of dust in the rays of the sun, a ripple in the stream. It should have been his task, and his alone, to withdraw from woman and love, from ambition and the hunger for happiness. He should have remained either a contented cowherd among herdsmen, or else he should have tried to overcome his own inadequacy by the mysterious path of yoga. He had neglected to do so, had failed; he had no vocation for greatness, or else he had not kept faith with his vocation, so that after all his wife was right to regard him as a coward. On the other hand, she had given him this son, this frail, handsome boy for whom he felt so fearful but whose existence filled his own life with meaning, who was in fact a great joy—a painful and fearful joy, certainly, but still a joy, his true happiness. Now he was paying for this happiness with the sorrow and bitterness in his heart, with his readiness for war and death, with his consciousness of moving toward a dire fate.
  Meanwhile Rajah Govinda sat in his own capital, listening to the bidding of the mother of Nala, the slain seducer of evil memory. Govinda's incursions and challenges were growing ever more frequent and brazen. Only an alliance with the powerful Rajah of Gaipali could have made Dasa strong enough to enforce peace and neighborly relations. But this Rajah, although he was well disposed toward Dasa, was Govinda's kinsman and had politely repulsed all efforts to win him over to such an alliance. There was no escape, no hope of sanity or humanity. The fated outcome was drawing nearer and would have to be undergone. Dasa himself almost longed for the war now. If only the accumulated lightnings would strike; if only the calamity would come speedily, since it could no longer be averted.
  Once more he paid a visit to the Rajah of Gaipali and exchanged fruitless courtesies with him. In his council he urged moderation and patience, but by now he was doing so without hope. For the rest, he improved his armaments. The council was divided only on the question of whether to respond to the enemy's next raid with invasion of his territory and outright war, or whether to await his major offensive, so that the people and all neutrals would see who was truly guilty of violating the peace.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the last five paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Unrest drove him to his feet once more. If there were no rest in this accursed round-dance, if his one most acute desire could not be fulfilled, then he might just as well fill his gourd again and bring it to this old man who had sent him on this errand, although he did not really have any right of command over him. It was a service that had been asked of him. It was an assignment. He might just as well obey and carry it out. That was better than sitting here and pondering methods of self-destruction. Altogether, obeying and serving were better and far easier, seemlier and far more harmless, than commanding and taking responsibility. That much he knew. Very well, Dasa, take the gourd, fill it carefully with water, and bring it to your master!
  When he reached the hut, the master received him with a strange look, a slightly questioning, half-compassionate, half-amused look of complicity—such a look as an older boy might have for a younger one whom he sees returning from a strenuous and somewhat shameful adventure, a test of courage that has been assigned to him. This herdsman prince, this poor fellow who had stumbled in here, was only coming back from the spring, where he had been for water, and had been gone no more than fifteen minutes. But still he was also coming from a dungeon, had lost a wife, a son, and a principality, had completed a human life and had caught a glimpse of the revolving wheel. The chances were that this young man had already been wakened once or several times before, and had breathed a mouthful of reality, for otherwise he would not have come here and stayed so long. But now he seemed to have been properly awakened and become ripe for setting out on the long journey. It would take a good many years just to teach this young man the proper posture and breathing.
  By this look alone, this look which contained a trace of benevolent sympathy and the hint of a relationship that had come into being between them, the relationship between master and disciple—by this look alone the yogi accepted the disciple. This one look banished the fruitless thoughts from the disciple's head. It bound him in discipline and service. There is no more to be told about Dasa's life, for all the rest took place in a realm beyond pictures and stories. He never again left the forest.
  For information on Picador Reading Group Guides, as well as ordering, please contact the Trade Marketing department at St. Martin's Press.
  Originally published in German under the title Das Glasperlenspiel by Fretz & Wasmuth Verlag AG, Zürich in 1943
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Delete the first sentence.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: If there were no rest in this accursed round-dance, if his one most acute desire could not be fulfilled, then he might just as well fill his gourd again and bring it to this old man who had sent him on this errand, although he did not really have any right of command over him. It was a service that had been asked of him. It was an assignment. He might just as well obey and carry it out. That was better than sitting here and pondering methods of self-destruction. Altogether, obeying and serving were better and far easier, seemlier and far more harmless, than commanding and taking responsibility. That much he knew. Very well, Dasa, take the gourd, fill it carefully with water, and bring it to your master!
  When he reached the hut, the master received him with a strange look, a slightly questioning, half-compassionate, half-amused look of complicity—such a look as an older boy might have for a younger one whom he sees returning from a strenuous and somewhat shameful adventure, a test of courage that has been assigned to him. This herdsman prince, this poor fellow who had stumbled in here, was only coming back from the spring, where he had been for water, and had been gone no more than fifteen minutes. But still he was also coming from a dungeon, had lost a wife, a son, and a principality, had completed a human life and had caught a glimpse of the revolving wheel. The chances were that this young man had already been wakened once or several times before, and had breathed a mouthful of reality, for otherwise he would not have come here and stayed so long. But now he seemed to have been properly awakened and become ripe for setting out on the long journey. It would take a good many years just to teach this young man the proper posture and breathing.
  By this look alone, this look which contained a trace of benevolent sympathy and the hint of a relationship that had come into being between them, the relationship between master and disciple—by this look alone the yogi accepted the disciple. This one look banished the fruitless thoughts from the disciple's head. It bound him in discipline and service. There is no more to be told about Dasa's life, for all the rest took place in a realm beyond pictures and stories. He never again left the forest.
  For information on Picador Reading Group Guides, as well as ordering, please contact the Trade Marketing department at St. Martin's Press.
  Originally published in German under the title Das Glasperlenspiel by Fretz & Wasmuth Verlag AG, Zürich in 1943