My quick jotting down / notes… and discussions with chatgpt!
few things stood out:
- age of feuilleton felt very relatable to what’s happening with memes and instagram etc. right now
- his friends - tegularius, designori, and his influences - jacobius, music master were written well.
- i could see some of myself in the characters themselves: my leaving microsoft and the conversations i had then with my mentors felt parallel to the last chapter, esp. because i left at the peak; i could also relate to tegularius (overly intellectual, not in the world) and to designori (worn down by the cares of the world, stopping meditation, drinking more)… it was fascinating…
Going back to the book, The Glass Bead Game, the book seems to be written by a fairly modest biographer. Is this ironic? It makes the book harder to read than, let’s say, Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse. So clearly Hermann Hesse is a brilliant writer, but was affecting the tone of a modest biographer.
Somewhere in the book, the author writes about, or the biographer writes about, how this Castalian system had forgotten how to create new things and was stuck in this analysis and almost, what should I say, a stasis of some sort. Comment on this?
Both feulleiton and castalia seem like curating… One is tweets and instareels, the other is dry phd papers that recycle old thought
Action in service seems the right path, grounded in the world… But the risk is to become like designori
What about tegularius… I guess he’s the genius who shows the worst that castalia can become