Finding “The Glass Bead Game” and Herman Hesse was a pivotal moment for me. In Knecht, the Magister Ludi, I found someone who innately sensed interconnectivity, the flow of consciousness and how one idea or theme intertwined others. His “lives” spoke direct to me. Finally I did not feel quite so absolutely weird. The scale of concept was vast and hugely refreshing. Someone on the planet was wired a little like me, though far more eloquent and expressive.

Like Magnus Pym and Bern, “The Perfect Spy”, had captured and conveyed a little of what it was like for me to have traversed life. His fiction more complex than mine. Yet I recognised the chameleon into which I once morphed for safety and to blend.

But it was with Narziß und Goldmund that I learned in the courtyard at Mariabronn of my own duality superimposed into a superposition state. There I sensed something of my monastic pasts and my reckless wild child. Initially I felt more Goldmund, later Narziß. The coefficient of the latter in my superposition sate is higher, when time averaged. I saw in this duality the autobiography of Hesse and his delicate and nuanced verbalisation. The sense of friction but not conflict, of phase and of interplay.

In a way each of my blogs are / have been by way of a glass bead game, only making sense to me. They are a way of arranging things like a sand Mandala, waiting for the brush of diaspora onto wind.

And again I am back with Narziß und Goldmund, wondering what fate may have left in store. Are there adventures left or is a retreat deeper into cloister on the cards…