What is the “Glass Bead Game”? in the idyllic poem, “Hours in the Garden” (1936), which he wrote during the composition of his novel, [Hermann] Hesse speaks of “a game of thoughts called the Glass Bead Game” that he practiced while burning leaves in his garden. As the ashes filter down through the gate, he says, “I hear music and see men of the past and future. I see wise men and poets and scholars and artists harmoniously building the hundred-gated cathedral of the mind”.

These lines depict as personal experience that intellectual pastime that Hesse, in his novel, was to as “the unio mystica of all separate members of the Universitas Litterarum” and that he bodied out symbolically in the form of an elaborate game…            

The Glass Bead Game is an act of mental synthesis through which the spiritual values of all ages are perceived as simultaneously present and vitally alive.

Theodore Ziolkowski, "Foreword,"The Glass Bead Game, p. XI