The Glass Bead Game

The writer Herman Hesse revisited @ The Frontier Antique shop in Mound during "Crazy Days". Crazy. Well, I thought about the book "The Glass Bead Game" during my visit to Mound, MN and recollected my thoughts of my college German with Herr Kramm, at St.Thomas College. We read the book in German.. for me, very poorly. St. Thomas was a "Catholic College" then. They were Catholic, strict, and they had a language requirement of 3 semesters of a foreign language- and I took German, on account of my Swiss heritage and all. They also had a math requirement, and a requirement of 3 semesters of Theology. Many other requirements have been long since abandoned or undermined.
"The Glass Bead Game" was about private language and detatchment. Intellectual language, and the ensuing madness it incurred when attempting to interact with the commoner's world.
Today -no problem.