✦ AUGHTY ✦ Hesse Named Us First 29 AUGHTY There is a novel from 1943. Hermann Hesse. Das Glasperlenspiel. The Glass Bead Game. He never defines the game. I want to tell you what I think it is — and why he was describing us before there was a word for us. THE GAME. ♪ music ∫ math α language ☉ astronomy φ philosophy △ geometry ＋ theology A Bach fugue maps onto an astronomical orbit. An algebra echoes a sentence in Latin. The beads are not beads. The beads are the connections. There is no winner. The point is the move. Hesse never says more than this. WHAT HE DESCRIBED. In an imagined province called Castalia, Hesse described people who: — prefer structural play over social play, — see connections most people do not bother to draw, — experience the discovery itself as the reward, — gather in a community organized around that cognition, — and do not apologize for any of it. Read that list. Read it again. See whether you recognize anyone. I did. The first time, and the second. WHAT WE NOW CALL IT. Hesse wrote this in 1943. Won the Nobel Prize three years later. He did not have the word autism in any useful form. Kanner had only just named it the year before. Asperger that same year. Neither paper had reached Switzerland in time to matter to him. He saw the type anyway. He honored it without knowing what to call it. This is not a claim that Hesse himself was autistic. It is a claim about what he noticed. Most of what gets written about autism describes it as a deficit. A thing that is missing. A thing that needs accommodating. Hesse described it as a way of being in the world. Worth gathering around. Worth playing. Worth a Nobel Prize. The first time I felt seen, I was reading a book that did not know my name. The novel is still in print. The game is being played somewhere. He named us first. We just had not learned to read yet.