Читать книгу The FIFTH FORCE of NATURE or, HELLO, EINSTEIN! Fantastic story - Ludmila Naumova - Страница 4

Night came at last. The Professor began to doze. He had a dream about a childhood friend. Boy Maxim from the past. This boy lived next door, he was kind, but stupid. But his simplicity, sincerity appealed to Green, so Green was friends with him. He helped him at school in math lessons, as Maxim had a hard time learning. And now in a dream, Green meets him in adulthood, he believes that Maxim in life has not progressed anywhere, and works as a simple salesman in a food store. And what was his surprise when Maxim began to ask him about one of the equations from string theory. To the question: «why do you need this?» Maxim replied that there were some ideas that he needed to test, but his method is more original than can imagine – it combines thoughts and ideas from different seemingly unrelated aspects of life. And Green in his dream envied Maxim, his ability to think so original.

When Green awoke, he tried to make sense of the dream. This dream gave him the idea of the novel is Hesse’s «Glass bead Game».

The bead game, Hesse wrote in the introduction, resembles «an organ whose keys and pedals cover the entire spiritual cosmos.» By playing it, the castalians could «reproduce all the spiritual content of the world». Each party, the author gave a quite technical definition, was «a sequential combination, grouping and opposition of concentrated ideas from many mental and aesthetic spheres.» The essence of the Game is in its elements, in these «concentrated ideas». Being able to read and use what you read is a game. A skilled reader does not store thoughts, but uses them. But only a master knows the art of stringing. Its goal is not a mechanical connection, but an organic fusion of the taken. He does not read stories and characters, but epochs and cultures, and sees the author as his school. By loading someone else’s text with his associations, he draws the book into a new batch. By entering the world of reading, the game changes its meaning and composition. The best games are played in a mind so rich in internal connections that it no longer needs external reality. Playing with beads is a creative activity for yourself. To squeeze the spirit into the body, Hesse offered (and practiced) a special meditation. Not the one that bypasses consciousness directly connects us to the cosmos, but some mental effort of consciousness that leads deep into the contemplated and connects with it.

So Professor Green realized that he had had a dream about a game of beads and his party in this game is still ahead. Playing with beads became a method of research for him.