Ana’s Reviews > Magister Ludi: The Glass Bead Game > Status Update

But although it is easy to fit any given segment of the past neatly and intelligibly into the patterns of world history, contemporaries are never able to see their own place in the patterns. (…) intellectuals in particular were stricken by terrible doubts and a sense of despair. They had just fully realized (...) that the youth and the creative period of our culture was over, that old age and twilight had set in.