“The "music of decline" had sounded, as in that wonderful Chinese fable; like a thrumming bass on the organ its reverberations faded slowly out over decades; its throbbing could be heard in the corruption of the schools, periodicals, and universities, in melancholia and insanity among those artists and critics who could still be taken seriously; it raged as untrammeled and amateurish overproduction in all the arts.”

— Hermann Hesse , book The Glass Bead Game

The Glass Bead Game (1943)

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Hermann Hesse 168

German writer 1877–1962

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