Touschek

I am reading about Bruno Touschek. Here is a biography by Eodardo Amaldi titled The Bruno Touschek Legacy: Vienna 1921 - Innsbruck 1978. It includes some of his drawings at the end! In any case, I was quite interested to find at the end of it a statement that Touschek was very enthusiastic about Herman Hesse's Magister Ludi, or the Glass Bead Game (p. 53):

It was the final phase of his life that it became easier for his Italian friends to grasp the profound reasons for his enthusiasm for Das Glasperenspiel, Versuch einer Lebensbeschreibung des Magister Ludi Josef Kneckt by Hermann Hesse (1877-1962)-- his enthusiasm for this Utopia in which the various figures fluctuate between a real and symbolic existence, in an imaginary future country, where, in about two centuries, mankind has succeeded in overcoming the present world and society, characterized by frequent wars, by wild individualism, and by a culture reduced to "feullitons" that is to the "third page" ("potted culture" page) of the newspapers. The new society is guilded, morally and culturally, by an intellectual aristocracy, which, through the study and meditation, always deeper, of the form and contents of music and mathematics in all their aspects, has succeeded in producing a new order, which at the end, reveals itself to be without a way out, based on a game, extremely refined by sterile, like so many others.