The Curious Silence of a Lucky Find

Hermann Hesse looking serious. CC BY-SA 3.0 NL image courtesy Dutch National Archives and Wikimedia Commons. Two weeks away from the ol’ blog felt especially long, trapped as I was in a van with people half my age who were shit-talking nonstop. When we pulled to a halt in front of the tourist shop in Hooker, OK—town motto “It’s a location, not a vocation”—I didn’t even mind what I thought would amount to stretching my legs while surrounded by a sea of off-color paraphernalia. But lo, a moment of grace, right there in the panhandle: the shop had a few shelves of used books, each for the bargain price of a quarter. And there, in among all the romances and thrillers, was a 1969 translation of Hermann Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game, aka Magister Ludi. When I stepped up to the cashier, who’d just rung up about eighteen purchases of “All My Friends Are Hookers” t-shirts, the sweet little lady didn’t want to take my money. It felt like a brief recognition between two literature lovers trying to…