FIVE

　　　　　　　　　　　THE MISSION




KNECHT'S FIRST STAY at the monastery lasted two years. At this time he was in his thirty-
seventh year. One morning, some two months after his long letter to Dubois, he was called into
the Abbot's office. He expected the affable Abbot would want to chat a bit about Chinese, and
made his appearance promptly. Gervasius came forward to meet him, a letter in hand.

"I have been honored with a commission for you, my esteemed friend," he said gaily in his
amiably patronizing manner, and promptly dropped into the ironically teasing tone that had
developed as an expression of the still unclarified amity between the religious and the Castalian
Orders--the tone that was actually a creation of Father Jacobus. "Incidentally, my respects to
your Magister Ludi. What letters he writes! The honorable gentleman has written to me in Latin,
Heaven knows why. When you Castalians do something, one never knows whether you intend a
courtesy or mockery, an honor or a rap on the knuckles. At any rate, the venerable dominus has
written to me in the kind of Latin that no one in our whole Order could manage at this time,
except possibly Father Jacobus. It's a Latin that might have come directly out of the school of
Cicero, but laced with a carefully measured dash of Church Latin--and of course it's again
impossible to tell whether that is intended naively as bait for us padres, or meant ironically, or
simply springs from an irresistible impulse to playact, stylize, and embellish. At any rate, his
honor writes that your esteemed authorities wish to see and embrace you once again, and also
to determine to what extent your long stay among semi-barbarians like us has had a morally and
stylistically corrupting effect upon you. In brief, if I have correctly interpreted the lengthy
epistle, a leave has been granted you, and I have been requested to send my guest home to
Waldzell for an indefinite term, but not forever; on the contrary, the authorities contemplate your
returning by and by, if that seems agreeable to us. I must beg your pardon; I am scarcely capable
of appreciating all the subtleties of the letter. Nor do I imagine that Magister Thomas expected
me to. I have been asked to transmit to you this notice; and now go and consider whether and
when you wish to depart. We shall miss you, my friend, and if you should stay away too long we
shall not fail to demand your return."

In the envelope the Abbot had given him Knecht found a terse notice from the Board inform-
ing him that a leave had been granted him both as a vacation and for consultation with his
superiors, and that he was expected in Waldzell in the near future. He need not see the current
Game course for beginners through to the end unless the Abbot specifically asked him to. The
former Music Master sent his regards. As he read that line, Joseph started and grew pensive.
How had the writer of the letter, the Magister Ludi, been asked to pass on this greeting, which in
any case did not really fit the official tone of the letter? There must have been a conference of
the entire Board, to which the former Music Master had been invited. Very well, the meetings and
decisions of the Board of Educators did not concern him, but the tone of these greetings struck
him as strange. The message sounded curiously as if it were directed to an equal. It did not
matter what question had been discussed at the conference; the regards proved that the highest
authorities had also talked about Joseph Knecht on that occasion. Was something new in the
offing? Was he to be recalled? And would this be a promotion or a setback? But the letter spoke
only of a leave. To be sure he was eager for this leave; he would have gladly left the next day.
But at least he must say good-by to his pupils and leave instruction for them. Anton would be
very saddened by his departure. And he also owed a farewell visit to some of the Fathers.

At this point he thought of Jacobus, and to his mild astonishment he felt a slight ache, an
emotion which told him that his heart was more attached to Mariafels than he had realized. Here
he lacked many of the things which he was used to, and which were dear to him; and in the
course of the two years, distance and deprivation had made Castalia even more beautiful in his
imagination. But at this moment he saw clearly that what Father Jacobus meant to him was
irreplaceable, and that he would miss it in Castalia. At the same time he realized more clearly
than ever how much he had learned in the monastery. Because of his experiences here, he looked
forward with rejoicing and confidence to the journey to Waldzell, to reunions, to the Glass Bead
Game, and his holiday. But his happiness would have been far less were it not for the prospect of
returning.

Coming to an abrupt resolution, he called on Father Jacobus. He told him of his recall, and
of his surprise to find underneath his pleasure at going home and seeing friends a joyful
anticipation of returning. This joy, he said respectfully, was chiefly connected with Father
Jacobus himself. Therefore he had summoned up his courage and was venturing to ask a great
favor: when he returned, would Father Jacobus be his mentor, if only for an hour or two a week?

Father Jacobus gave a deprecating laugh, and once more came forth with elegantly sardonic
compliments: a simple monk could only gape in mute admiration and shake his head in wonder
at the surpassing range of Castalian culture. But Joseph could gather that the refusal was
not meant seriously, and as they shook hands in parting Father Jacobus said amiably that he
could rest easy about his request, he would gladly do what he could for him, and he bade Jo-
seph good-by with heartfelt warmth.

Gladly, he set out for his vacation at home, already sure in his heart that his period in the
monastery had not been profitless. At departure he felt like a boy, but he soon realized that he
was no boy and no longer a youth either. He realized that by the feelings of embarrassment and in-
ner resistance that flooded him as soon as he tried, by a gesture, a shout, some childish act, to
give vent to the mood of release and of schoolboy happiness at vacation time. No doubt about it,
the things that once had been natural and a relief, a jubilant cry to the birds in a tree, a march-
ing song chanted aloud, swinging along the road in a light, rhythmical dance-step--these would
not do any more. They would have come out stiff and forced, would have been foolish and childish.
He felt that he was a man, young in feelings and youthful in strength, but no longer used to
surrendering to the mood of the moment, no longer free, instead kept on his mettle, tied down
and duty-bound--by what? By an official post? By the task of representing his country and his
Order to the monks? No, rather it was the Order itself, the hierarchy. As he engaged in this
sudden self-analysis, he realized that he had incomprehensibly grown into the hierarchy, become
part of its structure. His constraint came from the responsibility, from belonging to the higher
collectivity. This it was that made many young men old and many old men appear young, that
held you, supported you, and at the same time deprived you of your freedom like the stake to
which a sapling is tied. This it was that took away your innocence even while it demanded ever
more limpid purity.

In Monteport he paid his respects to the former Music Master, who in his younger years had
himself once been a guest at Mariafels and studied Benedictine music there. He plied Joseph
with many questions about the place. Joseph found the old man somewhat more subdued and
withdrawn, but stronger and gayer in appearance than he had been at their last meeting. The
fatigue had departed from his face; it was not that he had grown younger since resigning his
office, but he definitely looked handsomer and more spiritualized. Knecht was struck by the fact
that though he inquired about the organ, the chests of music manuscripts, and the choral singing
in Mariafels, and even wanted to hear whether the tree in the cloister garden was still standing,
he seemed to have no curiosity about Knecht's work there, the Glass Bead Game course, or the
purpose of his present leave. Before he continued his journey, however, the old man gave him a
valuable hint. "I have heard," he said with seeming jocularity, "that you have become something
of a diplomat. Not really a very nice occupation, but it seems our people are satisfied with you.
Interpret that as you like. But if it doesn't happen to be your ambition to stay in this occupation
forever, then be on your guard, Joseph. I think they want to capture you for it. Defend yourself;
you have the right to. . . No, ask me no questions; I shall not say a word more. You will see."

In spite of this warning, which he carried with him like a thorn in his flesh, Joseph felt
something like rapture on returning to Waldzell. It was as if Waldzell were not only home and
the most beautiful place in the world, but as if it had become even lovelier and more interesting
in the meanwhile; or else he was returning with fresh and keener eyes. And this applied not only
to the gates, towers, trees, and river, to the courtyards and halls and familiar faces. During this
furlough he felt a heightened receptivity to the spirit of Waldzell, to the Order and the Glass
Bead Game. It was the grateful understanding of the homecoming traveler now grown matured and
wiser. "I feel," he said to his friend Tegularius at the end of an enthusiastic eulogy on Wald-
zell and Castalia, "I feel as if I spent all my years here asleep, happy enough, to be sure, but
unconscious. Now I feel awake and see everything sharply and clearly, indubitable reality. To
think that two years abroad can so sharpen one's vision."

He enjoyed his vacation as if it were a prolonged festival. His greatest pleasure came from
the games and discussions with his fellow members of the elite at the Vicus Lusorum, from see-
ing friends again, and from the genius loci of Waldzell. This soaring sense of happiness did
not reach its peak, however, until after his first audience with the Glass Bead Game Master;
up to then his joy had been mingled with trepidation.

The Magister Ludi asked fewer questions than Knecht had anticipated. He scarcely mentioned
the Game course for beginners and Joseph's studies in the music archives. On the other hand,
he could not hear enough about Father Jacobus, referred back to him again and again, and was
interested in every morsel Joseph could tell him about this man. From the Magister's great
friendliness Joseph concluded that they were satisfied with him and his mission among the
Benedictines, very satisfied indeed. His conclusion was confirmed by the conduct of Monsieur
Dubois, to whom he was promptly sent by Magister Thomas. "You've done a splendid job," Du-
bois said. With a low laugh, he added: "My instinct was certainly at fault when I advised
against your being sent to the monastery. Your winning over the great Father Jacobus in addi-
tion to the Abbot, and making him more favorable toward Castalia, is a great deal--more than
anyone dared to hope for."

Two days later Magister Thomas invited Joseph, together with Dubois and the current head of
the Waldzell elite school, Zbinden's successor, to dinner. During the conversation hour
after dinner the new Music Master unexpectedly turned up, as did the Archivist of the Order--
two more members of the Supreme Board. One of them took Joseph along to the guest house for
a lengthy talk. This invitation for the first time moved Knecht publicly into the most intimate
circle of candidates for high office, and set up between himself and the average member of the
Game elite a barrier which Knecht, now keenly alert to such matters, at once felt acutely.

For the present he was given a vacation of four weeks and the customary official's pass to
the guest houses of the Province. Although no duties were assigned to him, and he was not even
asked to report, it was evident that he was under observation by his superiors. For when he went
on a few visits and outings, once to Keuperheim, once to Hirsland, and once to the College of
Far Eastern Studies, invitations from the high officials in these places were immediately forth-
coming. Within those few weeks he actually became acquainted with the entire Board of the Order
and with the majority of the Masters and directors of studies. Had it not been for these highly
official invitations and encounters, these outings would have betokened a return to the freedom
of his years of study. He began to cut back on the visits, chiefly out of consideration for Teg-
ularius, who was painfully sensitive to these infringements on their time together, but also for
the sake of the Glass Bead Game. For he was very eager to participate in the newest exercises
and to test himself on the latest problems. For this, Tegularius proved to be of invaluable
assistance to him.

His other close friend, Ferromonte, had joined the staff of the new Music Master, and Joseph
was able to see him only twice during this period. He found him hard-working and happy in his
work, engrossed in a major musicological task involving the persistence of Greek music in
the dances and folksongs of the Balkan countries. Enthusiastically, Ferromonte told his friend
about his latest discoveries. He had been exploring the era at the end of the eighteenth century,
when baroque music was beginning to decline and was taking in new materials from Slavic folk
music.

However, Knecht spent the greater part of these holidays in Waldzell occupied with the
Glass Bead Game. With Fritz Tegularius he went over the notes Fritz had taken on a private
seminar the Magister had given for advanced players during the past two semesters. After his
two years of deprivation Knecht again plunged with all his energy into the noble world of the
Game, whose magic seemed to him as inseparable from his life and as indispensable to it as
music.

The last days of his vacation arrived before the Magister Ludi came around to mentioning Jo-
seph's mission in Mariafels, and his next task for the immediate future. He chatted casually at
first, but soon changed to a more earnest and insistent tone as he told Joseph about a plan
conceived by the Board which the majority of the Masters, as well as Monsieur Dubois, con-
sidered highly important: the plan to establish a permanent Castalian representative at the
Holy See. The historic moment had come, Master Thomas explained in his engaging, urbane
manner, or at any rate was drawing near, for bridging the ancient gulf between Rome and the
Order. In future dangers, they would undoubtedly have common enemies, would share a common
fate, and hence were natural allies. In the long run the present state of affairs was un-
tenable and, properly speaking, undignified. It would not do for the two powers, whose his-
toric task in the world was to preserve and foster the things of the spirit and the cause of
peace, to go on existing side by side almost as strangers to each other. The Roman Church had
survived the shocks of the last great epoch of wars, had lived through the crises despite severe
losses, and had emerged renewed and purified, whereas the secular centers of the arts and
sciences had gone under in the general decline of culture. It was out of their ruins that the
Order and the Castalian ideal had arisen. For that very reason, and because of its venerable
age, it was right and proper to grant the Church precedence. She was the older, more distin-
guished power, her worth tested in more and greater storms. For the present, the problem was
to awaken the Roman Catholics to greater awareness of the kinship between the two powers, and
their dependence upon each other in all future crises.

(At this point Knecht thought: "Oh, so they want to send me to Rome, possibly forever."
Mindful of the former Music Master's warning, he inwardly put himself in a posture of defense.)

An important step forward, Master Thomas continued, had already been taken as a result of
Knecht's mission in Mariafels. In itself this mission had been only a polite gesture, imposing
no obligations and undertaken without ulterior motives at the invitation of the others. Other-
wise, of course, the Board would not have sent a politically innocent Glass Bead Game player,
but some younger official from Dubois's department. But as it turned out this experiment, this
innocuous mission, had had astonishing results. A leading mind of contemporary Catholicism,
Father Jacobus, had been made acquainted with the spirit of Castalia and had come to take a
favorable view of that spirit, which he had hitherto flatly rejected. The authorities were
grateful to Joseph Knecht for the part he had played. Here lay the significance of his mission.
The further course of Knecht's work must be regarded in the light of it, since all future ef-
forts at rapprochement would be built upon this success. He had been granted a vacation--which
could be somewhat extended if he wished--and most of the members of the higher authorities had
met and talked with him. His superiors had expressed their confidence in Knecht and had now
charged the Magister Ludi to send him on a special assignment and with broader powers back to
Mariafels, where he was, happily, sure of a friendly reception.

He paused as if to allow time for a question, but Joseph only signified by a courteous
gesture of submission that he was all attention and was awaiting his orders.

"The assignment I have for you now," the Magister went on, "is the following. We are plan-
ning, sooner or later, to establish a permanent embassy of our Order at the Vatican, if
possible on a reciprocal basis. As the younger group, we are ready to adopt a highly deferential
though of course not servile attitude toward Rome; we are quite willing to accept second place
and allow Rome the first. Perhaps--I am no more sure of it than Dubois--the Pope would accept
our offer straightaway. But we cannot risk a rebuff. As it happens, there is a man within our
reach whose voice has the greatest influence in Rome: Father Jacobus. And your assignment is
to return to the Benedictine monastery, live there as you have already done, engage in studies,
give an inconsequential course in the Glass Bead Game, and devote all your attention and care to
slowly winning Father Jacobus over to our side and seeing to it that he promises to support our
plans in Rome. In other words, this time the goal of your mission is precisely defined. It does not
matter much how long you take to achieve it; we imagine that it will require at least a year, but
it might also be two or several years. You are by now acquainted with the Benedictine tempo and
have learned to adjust to it. Under no circumstances must we give the impression of being im-
patient or overeager; the affair must ripen of its own accord, right? I hope you agree to this
assignment, and that you will frankly express any objections you may have. You may have a few
days to think it over if you like."

Knecht, for whom the assignment was not such a surprise, thanks to some recent conversations,
replied that he had no need to think it over. He obediently accepted, but added: "You know,
sir, that missions of this kind are most successful when the emissary has no inner resist-
ances and inhibitions to overcome. I have no reluctance about accepting; I understand the
importance of the task and hope I can do justice to it. But I do feel a certain anxiety about
my future. Be so kind, Magister, to hear me admit my entirely personal, egotistic concern. I
am a Glass Bead Game player. As you know, due to my mission among the Benedictines I have
omitted my studies of the Game for two full years. I have learned nothing new and have neglect-
ed my art. Now at least another year and probably more will be added. I should not like to
fall still further behind during this time. Therefore I would like to be allowed frequent brief
leaves to visit Waldzell and continual radio contact with the lectures and special exercises of
your seminar for advanced players."

"But of course," the Master said. There was already a note of dismissal in his tone, but
Knecht raised his voice and spoke of his other anxiety: that if his mission in Mariafels suc-
ceeded he might be sent to Rome or employed otherwise for diplomatic work. "Any such prospect,"
he concluded, "would have a depressing effect upon me and hamper my efforts at the monastery.
For I would not at all like to be permanently consigned to the diplomatic service."

The Magister frowned and raised his finger chidingly. "You speak of being consigned. Really,
the word is ill chosen. No one here ever thought of it as a consigning, but rather as a dis-
tinction, a promotion. I am not authorized to give you any information or make any promises
in regard to the way we shall be employing you in the future. But by a stretch of the imagination
I can understand your doubts, and probably I shall be able to help you if your fears really prove
to be justified. And now listen to me: you have a certain gift for making yourself agreeable and
well liked. An enemy might almost call you a charmer. Presumably this gift of yours prompted
the Board to make this second assignment to the monastery. But do not use your gift too freely,
Joseph, and set no immoderate value on your achievements. If you succeed with Father Jacobus,
that will be the proper moment for you to address a personal request to the Board. Today it
seems to me premature. Let me know when you are ready to leave."

Joseph received these words in silence, laying more weight on the benevolence behind
them than the patent reprimand. Soon thereafter he returned to Mariafels.

There he found the security of a precisely defined task a great benefaction. Moreover, this
task was important and honorable, and in one respect it coincided with his own deepest desires:
to come as close as possible to Father Jacobus and to win his full friendship. At the monastery he
was evidently taken seriously as an envoy now, and was thought to have been raised in rank. The
conduct of the dignitaries of the abbey, especially Abbot Gervasius himself, made that plain to
him. They were as friendly as ever, but a discernible degree more respectful than before. They no
longer treated Joseph as a young guest of no standing, toward whom they showed civility for the
sake of his origins and out of benevolence toward him personally. He was now received as a
high-ranking Castalian official, given the deference due to an ambassador plenipotentiary. No
longer blind in these matters, Joseph drew his own conclusions.

Nevertheless, he could discover no change in Father Jacobus's attitude toward him. The
old scholar greeted him with friendliness and pleasure. Without waiting to be asked or reminded,
he himself brought up the matter of their working together. Joseph was deeply touched. He
rearranged his schedule; his daily routine was now very different from what it had been before
his vacation. This time the Glass Bead Game course no longer formed the center of his work and
duties. He gave up his studies in the music archives and his friendly collaboration with the
organist. Now his chief concern was the instruction he received from Father Jacobus: lessons in
several branches of historical science. The monk introduced his special pupil to the background
and early history of the Benedictine Order and to the sources for the early Middle Ages. He set
aside a special hour in which they would read together one of the old chroniclers in the original.
Father Jacobus was not displeased when Knecht pleaded to have young Anton participate in the
lessons; but he had little difficulty persuading Joseph that even the best-intentioned third party
could prove a serious hindrance to this kind of intensely private instruction. In consequence,
Anton, who knew nothing of Knecht's efforts on his behalf, was invited to take part only in the
readings of the chronicler, and was overjoyed. Undoubtedly these lessons constituted a
distinction for the young monk, concerning whose life we have no further information. They
must have been a supreme pleasure and stimulus, for he was being allowed to share in the work
and intellectual exchange of two of the purest and most original minds of his age. Share,
however, is perhaps an exaggeration; for the most part the young recruit merely listened.

Joseph repaid Father Jacobus by giving him an introduction to the history and structure of
Castalia and the main ideas underlying the Glass Bead Game. This instruction followed immed-
iately after his own lessons in epigraphy and source work, the pupil becoming the teacher and
the honored teacher an attentive listener and often a captious critic and questioner. For a long
while the reverend Father continued to hold the whole Castalian mentality in distrust. Because
he saw no real religious attitude in it, he doubted its capacity to rear the kind of human being
he could take seriously, despite the fact that Knecht himself represented so fine a product of
Castalian education. Even long after he had undergone a kind of conversion, insofar as that was
possible, through Knecht's teaching and example, and was prepared to recommend the rapproche-
ment of Castalia to Rome, this distrust never entirely died. Knecht's notes are full of strik-
ing examples of it, jotted down at the moment. We shall quote from one of them:

Father Jacobus: "You are great scholars and aesthetes, you Castalians. You measure the weight
of the vowels in an old poem and relate the resulting formula to that of a planet's orbit.
That is delightful, but it is a game. And indeed your supreme mystery and symbol, the Glass
Bead Game, is also a game. I grant that you try to exalt this pretty game into something akin
to a sacrament, or at least to a device for edification. But sacraments do not spring from such
endeavors. The game remains a game."

Joseph: "You mean, reverend Father, that we lack the foundation of theology?"

Father Jacobus: "Come now, of theology we will not speak. You are much too far from that. You
could at least do with a few simpler foundations, with a science of man, for example, a real
doctrine and real knowledge about the human race. You do not know man, do not understand him
in his bestiality and as the image of God. All you know is the Castalian, a special product,
a caste, a rare experiment in breeding."

For Knecht, of course, it was an extraordinary piece of good fortune that these hours of in-
struction and discourse provided him with the widest field and the most favorable opportunities
to carry out his assignment of gaining Father Jacobus's approval of Castalia and convincing him
of the value of an alliance. The situation in fact was so favorable to his purposes that he soon
began to feel twinges of conscience. He came to think it shameful and unworthy when they sat
together, or strolled back and forth in the cloisters, that the reverend man should be so trust-
fully sacrificing his time, when he was all the while the object of secret political designs.
Knecht could not have accepted this situation in silence for long, and he was already consider-
ing just how to make his disclosure when, to his surprise, the old man anticipated him.

"My dear friend," he said to him with seeming off-handedness one day, "we have really found
our way to a most pleasant and, I would hope, also a fruitful kind of exchange. The two act-
ivities that have been my favorites throughout my life, learning and teaching, have fused into
a fine new combination during our joint working sessions, and for me that has come at just the
right time, for I am beginning to age and cannot imagine any better cure and refreshment than
our lessons. As far as I am concerned, therefore, I am the one who gains from our exchange. On
the other hand, I am not so sure, my friend, that you and particularly those whose envoy you are
and whom you serve will have profited from the business as much as they may hope. I should like
to avert any future disappointment and would be sorry to have any unclear relationship arise
between us. Therefore permit an old hand a question. I have of course had occasion to think
about the reason for your sojourn in our little abbey, pleasant as it is for me. Until recently,
that is up to the time of your vacation, it seemed to me that the purpose of your presence among
us was not completely clear even to yourself. Was my observation correct?"

"It was."

"Good. Since your return from that vacation, this has changed. You are no longer puzzling
or anxious about the reason for your presence here. You know why you are here. Am I right? —
Good, then I have not guessed wrong. Presumably I am also not guessing wrong in my notion of
the reason. You have a diplomatic assignment, and it concerns neither our monastery nor our
Abbot, but me. As you see, not very much is left of your secret. To clarify the situation
completely, I shall take the final step and ask you to inform me fully about the rest of it.
What is your assignment?"

Knecht had sprung to his feet and stood facing Fattier Jacobus, surprised, embarrassed,
feeling something close to dismay. "You are right," he cried, "but at the same time that you
relieve me of a burden, you also shame me by speaking first. I have long been considering how I
could manage to give our relationship the clarity you have established so rapidly. The one saving
thing is that my request for instruction and our agreement fell in the period before my vacation.
Otherwise it truly would have seemed as if the whole thing had been diplomacy on my part, and
our studies merely a pretext."

The old man spoke with friendly reassurance: "I merely wanted to help both of us move forward
a step. There is no need for you to aver the purity of your motives. If I have anticipated
you and helped speed the coming of something that also seems desirable to you, all is well."

After Knecht had told him the nature of his assignment, he commented: "Your superiors in Cas-
talia are not exactly brilliant diplomats, but they are not so bad either, and they know a
good thing when they see it. I shall give all the consideration to your mission, and my decision
will depend partly on how well you can explain your Castalian constitution and ideals, and make
them seem plausible to me. Let us give ourselves all the time we need for that." Seeing that
Knecht still looked somewhat crestfallen, he gave a brittle laugh and said: "If you like, you
can also regard my proceeding thus as a kind of lesson. We are two diplomats, and diplomats'
intercourse is always a combat, no matter how friendly a form it may take. In our struggle, as
it happens, I was momentarily at a disadvantage; I had lost the initiative. You knew more than
I. Now the balance has been restored. The chess move was successful; therefore it was the right
one."

Knecht thought it important to win Father Jacobus's approval for the Castalian authorities'
project; but it seemed to him far more important to learn as much as possible from him, and for
his own part to serve this learned and powerful man as a reliable guide to the Castalian world.
A good many of Knecht's friends and later disciples envied him as remarkable men are always
envied, not only for their greatness of soul and energy, but also for their seeming luck, their
seeming preferment by destiny. The lesser man sees in the greater as much as he can see, and
Joseph Knecht's career cannot help striking every observer as unusually brilliant, rapid, and
seemingly effortless. Certainly we are tempted to say of that period in his life: he was lucky.
Nor would we wish to try to explain this "luck" rationalistically or moralistically, either as
the causal result of external circumstances or as a kind of reward for special virtue. Luck has
nothing to do with rationality or morality; by its nature it has about it a quality akin to magic,
belonging to a primitive, more youthful stage of mankind's history. The lucky innocent, showered
with gifts by the fairies, pampered by the gods, is not the object of rational study, and hence
not a fit subject for biographical analysis; he is a symbol who always stands outside the personal
and the historical realms. Nevertheless, there are outstanding men with whose lives "luck" is in-
timately bound up, even though that luck may consist merely in the fact that they and the task pro-
per to their talents actually intersect on the plane of history and biography, that they are born
neither too soon nor too late. Knecht seems to have been one of these. Thus his life, at least for
a considerable part of his way, gives the impression that everything desirable simply fell into his
lap. We do not wish to deny or to gloss over this aspect of his life. Moreover, we could explain it
rationally only by a biographical method which is not ours, neither desired nor permitted in Cast-
alia; that is, we would have to enter into an almost unlimited discussion of the most personal,
most private matters, of health and sickness, the oscillations and curves in his vitality and self-
confidence. We are quite sure that any such biographical approach--which is out of the question
for us--would reveal a perfect balance between Knecht's "luck" and his suffering, but neverthe-
less would falsify our portrayal of his person and his life.

But enough digression. We were saying that many of those who knew Knecht, or had only heard
of him, envied him. Probably few things in his life seemed to lesser folk so enviable as his
relationship to the old Benedictine Father, for he was at one and the same time pupil and
teacher, taker and giver, conquered and conqueror, friend and collaborator. Moreover, none of
Knecht's conquests since his successful courting of Elder Brother in the Bamboo Grove had
given him such happiness. No other had made him feel so intensely honored and abashed, reward-
ed and stimulated. Of his later favorite pupils, almost all have testified to how frequently,
gladly, and joyfully he would refer to Father Jacobus. Knecht learned from the Benedictine
something he could scarcely have learned in the Castalia of those days. He acquired an overview
of the methods of historical knowledge and the tools of historical research, and had his first
practice in applying them. But far beyond that, he experienced history not as an intellectual
discipline, but as reality, as life; and in keeping with that, the transformation and elevation
of his own personal life into history. This was something he could not have learned from a mere
scholar. Father Jacobus was not only far more than a scholar, a seer, and a sage; he was also a
mover and shaper. He had used the position in which fate had placed him not just to warm
himself at the cozy fires of a contemplative existence; he had allowed the winds of the world to
blow through his scholar's den and admitted the perils and forebodings of the age into his heart.
He had taken action, had shared the blame and the responsibility for the events of his time; he
had not contented himself with surveying, arranging, and interpreting the happenings of the
distant past And he had not dealt only with ideas, but with the refractoriness of matter and the
obstinacy of men. Together with his associate and antagonist, a recently deceased Jesuit, he was
regarded as the real architect of the diplomatic and moral power and the impressive political
prestige that the Roman Church had regained after ages of meekly borne ineffectuality and
insignificance.

Although teacher and pupil scarcely ever discussed current politics (the Benedictine's
practice in holding his counsel as well as the younger man's reluctance to be drawn into such
issues combined to prevent that), Father Jacobus's political position and activities so permeated
his mind that all his opinions, all of his glances into the thicket of the world's squabbles were
those of the practical statesman. Not that he was an ambitious or an intriguing politician. He was
no regent and leader, no climber either, but a councilor and arbitrator, a man whose conduct was
tempered by sagacity, whose efforts were restrained by a profound insight into the inadequacies
and difficulties of human nature, but whose fame, experience, knowledge of men and conditions,
as well as his personal integrity and altruism, had enabled him to gain significant power.

Knecht had known nothing of all this when he came to Mariafels. He had even been
ignorant of Father Jacobus's name. The majority of the inhabitants of Castalia lived in a state of
political innocence and naivete such as had been quite common among the professors of earlier
ages; they had no political rights and duties, scarcely ever saw a newspaper. Such was the habit
of the average Castalian, such his attitude. Repugnance for current events, politics, newspapers,
was even greater among the Glass Bead Game players who liked to think of themselves as the
real elite, the cream of the Province, and went to some lengths not to let anything cloud the
rarefied atmosphere of their scholarly and artistic existences. As we have seen, at the time
of his first appearance at the monastery, Knecht had come not as a diplomatic envoy but solely
as a teacher of the Glass Bead Game, and had no political knowledge aside from what Monsieur
Dubois had managed to instil in a few weeks. He was by comparison much more knowing now,
but he had by no means surrendered the Waldzeller's distaste for engaging in current politics.
Although his association with Father Jacobus had awakened hini politically and taught him a
good deal, this had not happened because Knecht was drawn to this realm. It just happened,
as an inevitable though incidental consequence.

In order to add to his equipment and the better to fulfill his honorable task of lecturing de
rebus castaliensibus to his pupil, Father Jacobus, Knecht had brought with him from Waldzell
literature on the constitution and history of the Province, on the system of the elite schools,
and on the evolution of the Glass Bead Game. Some of these books had served him twenty years
before during his struggle with Plinio Designori--and he had not looked at them since. Others,
meant specially for the officials of Castalia, had been barred to him as a student. Now he read
them for the first time. The result was that at the very time his areas of study were so notably
expanding, he was also forced once again to contemplate, understand, and reinforce his own
intellectual and historical base. In his efforts to present the nature of the Order and of the
Castalian system to Father Jacobus with maximum simplicity and clarity, he inevitably stumbled
over the weakest point in his own and all Castalian education. He found that he himself had only
a pale and rigidly schematic notion of the historical conditions which had led to the foundation of
the Order and everything that followed from it. His picture of the conditions which had furthered
the growth of the new system lacked all vividness and orderliness. Since Father Jacobus was any-
thing but a passive pupil, the result was an intensified collaboration, an extremely animated
exchange of views. While Joseph tried to present the history of his Castalian Order, Jacobus help-
ed him to see many aspects of this history in the proper light for the first time, and to discern
its roots in the general history of nations. Because of the Benedictine's temperament, these dis-
cussions often turned into passionate disputes, and as we shall see they continued to bear fruit
years later and remained a vital influence down to the end of Knecht's life. On the other hand,
the close attention Father Jacobus had given Knecht's exposition, and the thoroughness with
which he came to know and appreciate Castalia, was evidenced by his subsequent conduct. Due to
the work of these two men, there arose between Rome and Castalia a benevolent neutrality and
occasional scholarly exchange which now and then developed into actual co-operation and alli-
ance and ultimately produced the concord which continues to this day. In time Father Jacobus
asked to be introduced to the theory of the Glass Bead Game--which he had originally pooh-
poohed--for he sensed that here lay the secret of the Order and what might be called its faith
or religion. Once he had consented to penetrate into this world he had hitherto known only from
hearsay, and for which he had felt little liking, he resolutely proceeded in his shrewd and
energetic way straight toward its center. And although he did not become a Glass Bead Game play-
er--he was in any case far too old for that--the devotees of the Game and the Order outside
the borders of Castalia had hardly a friend as earnest and as influential as the great Benedict-
ine.

Now and then, after a session of joint work, Father Jacobus would indicate that he would be
at home to Joseph that evening. After the strenuous lessons and the tense discussions, those
were peaceful hours. Joseph frequently brought his clavichord along, or a violin, and the old man
would sit down at the piano in the gentle light of a candle whose sweet fragrance of wax filled
the small room like the music of Corelli, Scarlatti, Telemann, or Bach which they played alter-
nately or together. The old man's bedtime came early, while Knecht, refreshed by these brief
musical vespers, would continue his studies into the night, to the limits his self-discipline
permitted.

Aside from his lessons with Father Jacobus, his perfunctory course in the Game, and an
occasional Chinese colloquium with Abbot Gervasius, we also find Knecht engaged at this
time in an elaborate task. He was taking part in the annual competition of the Waldzell elite,
from which he had abstained in the past two years. The competition involved working out sketch-
es for Games based on three or four prescribed main themes. Stress was placed on new, bold,
and original associations of themes, impeccable logic, and beautiful calligraphy. Moreover,
this was the sole occasion when competitors were permitted to overstep the bounds of the canon.
That is, they could employ new symbols not yet admitted to the official code and vocabulary of
hieroglyphs. This made the competition--which in any case was the most exciting annual event
in Waldzell except for the great public ceremonial games--a contest among the most promis-
ing advocates of new Game symbols, and the very highest distinction for a winner in this
competition consisted in the recognition of his proposed additions to the grammar and
vocabulary of the Game and their acceptance into the Game Archives and the Game language.
This was a very rare distinction indeed; usually the winner had to be content only with the
ceremonial performance of his Game as the best candidate's Game of the year. Once, some twen-
ty-five years ago, the great Thomas von der Trave, the present Magister Ludi, had been award-
ed this honor with his new abbreviations for the alchemical significance of the signs of the
zodiac--later, too, Magister Thomas made large contributions to the study and classification
of alchemy as a highly meaningful secret language.

For his entry Knecht chose not to draw on any new Game symbols such as virtually every can-
didate had in readiness. He also refrained from using his Game as an avowal of attachment to
the psychological method of Game construction, although that would have been closer to his
inclinations. Instead, he built up a Game modern and personal enough in its structure and themes,
but of transparently clear, classical composition and strictly symmetrical development in the
vein of the old masters. Perhaps distance from Waldzell and the Game Archives forced him to take
this line; perhaps his historical studies made too great demands on his time and strength; but it
may also be that he was more or less consciously guided by the desire to shape his Game so that
it would correspond as closely as possible to the taste of his teacher and friend, Father Jacobus.
We do not know.

We have used the phrase "psychological method of Game construction," and perhaps some of our
readers will not immediately understand it. In Knecht's day it was a slogan bandied about a
good deal. No doubt all periods have seen currents, vogues, struggles, and differing views
and approaches among the initiates of the Glass Bead Game. At that time two opposing concepts
of the Game called forth controversy and discussion. The foremost players distinguished two
principal types of Game, the formal and the psychological. We know that Knecht, like Tegu-
larius--although the latter kept out of the arguments--belonged to the champions of the
latter type. Knecht, however, instead of speaking of the "psychological" mode of play usual-
ly preferred the word "pedagogical."

In the formal Game the player sought to compose out of the objective content of every game,
out of the mathematical, linguistic, musical, and other elements, as dense, coherent, and
formally perfect a unity and harmony as possible. In the psychological Game, on the other hand,
the object was to create unity and harmony, cosmic roundedness and perfection, not so much in
the choice, arrangement, interweaving, association, and contrast of the contents as in the
meditation which followed every stage of the Game. All the stress was placed on this meditation.
Such a psychological--or to use Knecht's word, pedagogical--Game did not display perfection
to the outward eye. Rather, it guided the player, by means of its succession of precisely
prescribed meditations, toward experiencing perfection and divinity. "The Game as I conceive
it," Knecht once wrote to the former Music Master, "encompasses the player after the completion
of meditation as the surface of a sphere encompasses its center, and leaves him with the feeling
that he has extracted from the universe of accident and confusion a totally symmetrical and
harmonious cosmos, and absorbed it into himself."

Knecht's entry, then, was a formally rather than a psychologically constructed Game. Poss-
ibly he wanted to prove to his superiors, and to himself as well, that in spite of his
elementary course and diplomatic mission in Mariafels, he had lost none of his deftness,
elegance, and virtuosity and had not suffered from lack of practice. If so, he succeeded in
proving it. Since the final elaboration and clean copy of his Game outline could only be
completed in the Waldzell Archives, he entrusted this task to his friend Tegularius, who was
himself participating in the competition. Joseph was able to hand his drafts to his friend
personally, and to discuss them with him, as well as to go over Tegularius's own outline; for
Fritz was finally able to come to the monastery for three days. Magister Thomas had at last
authorized the visit, after Knecht had made two previous requests in vain.

Eager as Tegularius had been to come, and for all the curiosity he, as an insular Castalian,
had about life in the monastery, he felt extremely uncomfortable there. Sensitive as he was, he
nearly fell ill amid all the alien impressions and among these friendly but simple, healthy, and
somewhat rough-hewn people, not one of whom would have had the slightest understanding for his
thoughts, cares, and problems. "You live here as if you were on another planet," he said to his
friend, "and I don't see how you have been able to stand it for three years. I certainly admire
you for that. To be sure, your Fathers are polite enough toward me, but I feel rejected and re-
pelled by everything here. Nothing meets me halfway, nothing is natural and easy, nothing can be
assimilated without resistance and pain. If I had to live here for two weeks, I would feel as if
I were in hell. "

Knecht had a difficult time with him. Moreover, it was disconcerting to witness, for the
first time as an onlooker, how alien the two Orders, the two worlds were to one another. He felt,
too, that his oversensitive friend with his air of anxious helplessness was not making a good
impression among the monks. Nevertheless, they revised their respective Game plans for the
competition thoroughly, each critically examining the other's work. When, after an hour of this
Knecht went over to Father Jacobus in the other wing, or to a meal, he had the feeling that he
was being suddenly transported from his native country to an entirely different land, with a
different soil and air, different climate, and different stars.

After Fritz had departed, Joseph drew out Father Jacobus on his impressions. "I hope," Jaco-
bus said, "that the majority of Castalians are more like you than your friend. You have shown
us an inexperienced, overbred, weakly, and nevertheless, I am afraid, arrogant kind of person.
I shall go on taking you as more representative; otherwise I should certainly be unjust to
your kind. For this unfortunate, sensitive, overintelligent, fidgety person could spoil one's
respect for your whole Province. "

"Well," Knecht replied, "I imagine that in the course of the centuries you noble Benedict-
ines have now and then had sickly, physically feeble, but for that very reason mentally
sound and able men, such as my friend. I suppose it was imprudent of me to have invited him
here, where everyone has a sharp eye for his weaknesses but no sense of his great virtues.
He has done me a great kindness by coming." And he explained to Father Jacobus about his join-
ing in the competition. The Benedictine was pleased with Knecht for defending his friend. "Well
answered," he said with a friendly laugh. "But it strikes me that all of your friends are dif-
ficult to get along with."

He enjoyed Knecht's bewilderment and astonished expression for a moment, then added casually:
"This time I am referring to someone outside Castalia. Have you heard anything new about your
friend Plinio Designori?"

Joseph's astonishment increased; stunned, he asked for an explanation.

It seemed that De signori had written a political polemic professing violently anticlerical
views, and incidentally strongly attacking Father Jacobus. Through friends in the Catholic
press, Jacobus had obtained information on Designori, and in this way had learned of Plinio's
schooldays in Castalia and his relationship to Knecht.

Joseph asked to borrow Plinio's article; and after he had read it he and Father Jacobus had
their first discussion of current politics. A few more, but only a few, followed. "It was strange
and almost alarming," Joseph wrote to Ferromonte, "for me to see the figure of our Plinio--and
by-the-by my own--suddenly standing on the stage of the world's politics. This was something
I had never imagined." As it turned out, Father Jacobus spoke of Plinio's polemic in rather
appreciative terms. At any rate, he showed no sign of having taken offense. He praised Design-
ori's style, commenting that his training in the elite school showed up clearly; in the run of
everyday politics, one had to settle for a far lower level of intelligence, he said.

About this time Ferromonte sent Knecht a copy of the first part of his subsequently
famous work entitled The Reception and Absorption of Slavic Folk Music by German Art Music
from Joseph Haydn on. In Knecht's letter of acknowledgment we find, among other things: "You
have drawn a cogent conclusion from your studies, which I was privileged to share for a while.
The two chapters dealing with Schubert, and especially with the quartets, are among the sound-
est examples of modern musicology that I have read. Think of me sometimes; I am very far from
any such harvest as you have reaped. Although I have reason to be content with my life here--
for my mission in Mariafels appears to be meeting with some success--I do occasionally feel
that being so far from the Province and the Waldzell circle to which I belong is distinctly
oppressive. I am learning a tremendous amount here, but adding neither to my certainties nor my
professional skills, only to my problems. I must grant, though, a widening of horizon. However,
I now feel much easier about the insecurity, strangeness, despondency, distraitness, self-doubt,
and other ills that frequently assailed me during my first two years here. Tegularius was here
recently--for only three days, but much as he had looked forward to seeing me and curious though
he was about Mariafels, by the second day he could scarcely bear it any longer, so depressed and
out of place did he feel. Since a monastery is after all a rather sheltered, peaceful world, and
favorable enough to things of the spirit, in no way hike a jail, a barracks, or a factory, I con-
clude from my experience that people from our dear Province are a good deal more pampered and
oversensitive than we realize."

At about the date of this letter to Carlo, Knecht persuaded Father Jacobus to address a brief
letter to the directorate of the Castalian Order acquiescing in the proposed diplomatic step.
To this Jacobus added the request that they would permit "the Glass Bead Game player Joseph
Knecht, who is universally popular here" and who was kindly giving him a private course de
rebus castaliensibus, to remain for a while longer. The Castalian authorities were, of course,
glad to oblige. Joseph, who had been thinking that he was still very far from any such "harvest,"
received a commendation, signed by the directorate and by Monsieur Dubois, congratulating him
on the success of his mission. But what struck him as most important about this honorific
document and what gave him the greatest pleasure (he reported it in well-nigh triumphant tones
in a note to Fritz) was a short sentence to the effect that the Order had been informed by the
Magister Ludi of his desire to return to the Vicus Lusorum, and was disposed to grant this
request after completion of his present assignment. Joseph also read this passage aloud to Fa-
ther Jacobus and now confessed how greatly he had feared possible permanent banishment from
Castalia and being sent to Rome. Laughing, Father Jacobus commented: "Yes, my friend, there is
something about Orders; one prefers living in their bosom rather than out on the periphery, let
alone in exile. You've touched the soiled fringes of politics here, but now go right ahead and
forget it, for you are not a politician. But do not break your troth with history, even though it
may remain forever a secondary subject and a hobby for you. For you had the makings of a his-
torian. And now let us profit by our time together, as long as I have you."

Joseph Knecht seems to have made little use of his privilege to pay more frequent visits
to Waldzell. However, he listened on the radio to one seminar and to a good many lectures and
games. So also, from afar, sitting in his excellent guest room in the monastery, he took part in
that "solemnity" in the festival hall of the Vicus Lusorum at which the results of the prize
competition were announced. He had handed in a rather impersonal and not at all revolutionary,
but solid and elegant piece of work whose value he knew, and he was prepared for an honorable
mention or a third or second prize. To his surprise he now heard that he had been awarded first
prize, and even before surprise had given way to delight, the spokesman for the Magister Ludi's
office continued reading in his beautiful low voice and named Tegularius as winner of the
second prize. It was certainly a moving and rapturous experience that the two of them should
emerge from this competition hand in hand, as the crowned winners. He sprang to his feet
without listening to the rest, and ran down the stairs and through the echoing corridors out into
the open air.

In a letter to the former Music Master, written at this time, we may read: "I am very happy,
revered Master, as you can imagine. First the success of my mission and its commendation by
the directorate of the Order, together with the prospect--so important to me--of soon re-
turning home to friends and to the Glass Bead Game, instead of being kept in the diplomatic
service; and now this first prize for a Game whose formal aspects I did take pains with, but
which for good reasons by no means drained me of everything I had to contribute. And on top of
that the joy of sharing this success with my friend--it really was too much all at once. I am
happy, yes, but I could not well say that I am merry. Because of the dearth of the preceding
period--at any rate what seemed to me a dearth--my real feeling is that these fulfillments are
coming rather too suddenly and too abundantly. There is a measure of unease mingled with my
gratitude, as if the vessel is so filled to the brim that only another drop is needed to tilt it. But,
please, consider that I have not said this; in this situation every word is already too much."

As we shall see, the vessel filled to the brim was destined to have more than just one
additional drop added to it. But at the moment Joseph Knecht devoted himself to his happiness,
and the concomitant unease, with great intensity, as if he had a premonition of the impending
great change. For Father Jacobus, too, these few months were a happy, an exuberant time. He
was sorry that he would soon be losing this disciple and associate; and in their hours of work
together, still more in their free-ranging conversations, he tried to bequeath to him as much as
he could of the understanding he had acquired during a long life of hard work and hard thinking,
understanding of the heights and depths in the lives of men and nations. He also had some things
to say about the consequences of Knecht's mission, assessing its meaning, and the value of amity
and political concord between Rome and Castalia. He recommended that Joseph study the epoch
which had seen the founding of the Castalian Order as well as the gradual recovery of Rome
after a humiliating time of tribulation. He also recommended two books on the Reformation and
schism of the sixteenth century, but strongly urged him to make a principle of studying the
primary sources. He advised Joseph to confine himself to graspable segments of a field in
preference to reading ponderous tomes on world history. Finally, Father Jacobus made no bones
about his profound mistrust of all philosophies of history.




　　　　　　　　　　　　　　SIX

　　　　　　　　　　MAGISTER LUDI




KNECHT had DECIDED to postpone his final return to Waldzell until the spring, the time of
the great public Glass Bead Game, the Ludus anniversarius or sollemnis. The era when annual
Games lasted for weeks and were attended by dignitaries and representatives from all over the
world--what we may call the great age in the memorable history of these Games--already
belonged forever to the past. But these spring sessions, with the one solemn Game that usually
lasted for ten days to two weeks, still remained the great festive event of the year for all of
Castalia. It was a festival not without its high religious and moral importance, for it brought
together the advocates of all the sometimes disparate tendencies of the Province in an act of
symbolic harmony. It established a truce between the egotistic ambitions of the several dis-
ciplines, and recalled to mind the unity which embraced their variety. For believers it pos-
sessed the sacramental force of true consecration; for unbelievers it was at least a substitute
for religion; and for both it was a bath in the pure springs of beauty. The Passions of Johann
Sebastian Bach had once upon a time--not so much in the time they were written as in the cen-
tury following their rediscovery--been in similar fashion a genuine consecratory act for some
of the performers and audience, a form of worship and religious substitute for others, and
for all together a solemn manifestation of art and of the Creator spiritus.

Knecht had had scant difficulty obtaining the consent of both the monks and his home author-
ities for his decision. He could not quite determine the nature of his position after his
reassignment to the little republic of the Vicus Lusorum, but he suspected that he would not
long be left unoccupied and would soon be burdened and honored with some new office or mission.
For the present he looked forward happily to returning home, to seeing his friends and par-
ticipating in the approaching festival. He enjoyed his last days with Father Jacobus, and
accepted with dignity and good humor the rather demonstrative kindnesses of the Abbot and
monks when the time came for farewells. Then he left, feeling some sadness at parting from a
place he had grown fond of and from a stage in his life he was now leaving behind, but also in
a mood of festive anticipation, for although he lacked guidance and companions, he had, on his
own initiative, scrupulously undertaken the whole series of meditation exercises prescribed as
preparations for the festival Game. He had not been able to prevail on Father Jacobus to accept
the Magister Ludi's formal invitation to attend the annual Game and accompany him, but this had
not affected his good spirits; he understood the old anti-Castalian's reserved attitude, and he
himself for the moment felt entirely relieved of all duties and restrictions and ready to sur-
render his whole mind to the impending ceremonies.

Festivities have their own peculiar nature. A genuine festival cannot go entirely wrong, un-
less it is spoiled by the unfortunate intervention of higher powers. For the devout soul, even
in a downpour a procession retains its sacral quality, and a burned feast does not depress him.
For the Glass Bead Game player every annual Game is festive and in a sense hallowed. Nevertheless,
as every one of us knows, there are some festivals and games in which everything goes right, and
every element lifts up, animates, and exalts every other, just as there are theatrical and musical
performances which without any clearly discernible cause seem to ascend miraculously to glorious
climaxes and intensely felt experiences, whereas others, just as well prepared, remain no more
than decent tries. Insofar as the achievement of intense experiences depends on the emotional
state of the spectator, Joseph Knecht had the best imaginable preparation: he was troubled by
no cares, returning from abroad loaded with honors, and looking forward with joyous anticipa-
tion to the coming event.

Nevertheless, this time the Ludus sollemnis was not destined to be touched by that aura of
the miraculous and so rise to a special degree of consecration and radiance. It turned out, in
fact, a cheerless, distinctly unhappy, and something very close to an unsuccessful Game. Although
many of the participants may have felt edified and exalted all the same, the real actors and
organizers of the Game, as always in such cases, felt all the more inexorably that atmosphere of
apathy, lack of grace and failure, of inhibition and bad luck which overshadowed this festival.
Knecht, although he of course sensed it and found his high expectations somewhat dashed, was
by no means among those who felt the fiasco most keenly. Even though the solemn act failed to
reach the true peak of perfection and blessing, he was able, because he was not playing and bore
no responsibility for it, to follow the ingeniously constructed Game appreciatively, as a devout
spectator, to let the meditations quiver to a halt undisturbed, and with grateful devotion to share
that experience so familiar to all guests at these Games: the sense of ceremony and sacrifice, of
mystic union of the congregation at the feet of the divine, which could be conveyed even by a cer-
emony that, for the narrow circle of initiates, was regarded as a "failure." Nevertheless, he too
was not altogether unaffected by the unlucky star that seemed to preside over this festival. The
Game itself, to be sure, was irreproachable in plan and construction, like every one of Master
Thomas's Games; in fact it was one of his cleanest, most direct, and impressive achievements.
But its performance was specially ill-starred and has not yet been forgotten in the history of
Waldzell.

When Knecht arrived, a week before the opening of the great Game, he was received not by the
Magister Ludi himself, but by his deputy Bertram, who welcomed him courteously but informed
him rather curtly and distractedly that the venerable Master had recently fallen ill and that
he, Bertram, was not sufficiently informed about Knecht's mission to receive his report. Would
he therefore go to Hirsland to report his return to the directorate of the Order and await its
commands.

As he took his leave Knecht involuntarily betrayed, by tone or gesture, his surprise at the
coolness and shortness of his reception. Bertram apologized. "Do forgive me if I have disap-
pointed you, and please understand my situation," he said. "The Magister is ill, the annual
Game is upon us, and everything is up in the air. I don't know whether the Magister will be able
to conduct the Game or whether I shall have to leap into the breach." The revered Master's ill-
ness could not have come at a more difficult moment, he went on to say. He was ready as always
to assume the Magister's official duties, but if in addition he had to prepare himself at such
short notice to conduct the great Game, he was afraid it would prove a task beyond his powers.

Knecht felt sorry for the man, who was so obviously depressed and thrown off balance; he was
also sorry that the responsibility for the festival might now lie in the deputy's hands. Jo-
seph had been away from Waldzell too long to know how well founded Bertram's anxiety was.
The worst thing that can happen to a deputy had already befallen the man: some time past he
had forfeited the trust of the elite, so that he was truly in a very difficult position.

With considerable concern, Knecht thought of the Magister Ludi, that great exponent of clas-
sical form and irony, the perfect Master and Castalian. He had looked forward eagerly to the
Magister's receiving him, listening to his report, and reinstalling him in the small community
of players, perhaps in some confidential post. It had been his desire to see the festival Game
presided over by Master Thomas, to continue working under him and courting his recognition.
Now it was painful and disappointing to find the Magister withdrawn into illness, and to be
directed to other authorities. There was, however, some compensation in the respectful good will
with which the secretary of the Order and Monsieur Dubois received him and heard him out. They
treated him, in fact, as a colleague. During their first talk he discovered that for the present
at any rate they had no intention of using him to promote the Roman project. They were going to
respect his desire for a permanent return to the Game. For the moment they extended a friendly
invitation to him to stay in the guesthouse of the Vicus Lusorum, attend the annual Game, and
survey the situation. Together with his friend Tegularius, he devoted the days before the public
ceremonies to the exercises in fasting and meditation. That was one of the reasons he was able to
witness in so devout and grateful a spirit the strange Game which has left an unpleasant after-
taste in the memories of some.

The position of the deputy Masters, also called "Shadows," is a very peculiar one--especially
the deputies to the Music Master and the Glass Bead Game Master. Every Magister has a deputy
who is not provided for him by the authorities. Rather, he himself chooses his deputy from the
narrow circle of his own candidates. The Master himself bears the full responsibility for all
the actions and decisions of his deputy. For a candidate it is therefore a great distinction
and a sign of the highest trust when he is appointed deputy by his Magister. He is thereby
recognized as the intimate associate and right hand of the all-powerful Magister. Whenever
the Magister is prevented from performing his official duties, he sends the deputy in his
stead. The deputy, however, is not entitled to act in all capacities. For example, when the
Supreme Board votes, he may transmit only a yea or nay in the Master's name and is never
permitted to deliver an address or present motions on his own. There are a variety of other
precautionary restrictions on the deputies.

While the appointment elevates the deputy to a very high and at times extremely exposed pos-
ition, it is at a certain price. The deputy is set apart within the official hierarchy, and
while he enjoys high honor and frequently may be entrusted with extremely important functions,
his position deprives him of certain rights and opportunities which the other aspirants possess.
There are two points in particular where this is revealed: the deputy does not bear the respon-
sibility for his official acts, and he can rise no farther within the hierarchy. The law is un-
written, to be sure, but can be read throughout the history of Castalia: At the death or resig-
nation of a Magister, his Shadow, who has represented him so often and whose whole existence
seems to predestine him for the succession, has never advanced to fill the Master's place. It
is as if custom were determined to show that a seemingly fluid and movable barrier is in fact
insuperable. The barrier between Magister and deputy stands like a symbol for the barrier be-
tween the office and the individual. Thus, when a Castalian accepts the confidential post of
deputy, he renounces the prospect of ever becoming a Magister himself, of ever really possess-
ing the official robes and insignia that he wears so often in his representative role. At the
same time he acquires the curiously ambiguous privilege of never incurring any blame for poss-
ible mistakes in his conduct of his office. The blame falls upon his Magister, who is answerable
for his acts. A Magister sometimes becomes the victim of the deputy he has chosen and is forced
to resign his office because of some glaring error committed by the deputy. The word "Shadow"
originated in Waldzell to describe the Magister Ludi's deputy. It is splendidly apposite to
his special position, his closeness amounting to quasi-identity with the Magister, and the
make-believe insubstantiality of his official existence.

For many years Master Thomas von der Trave had employed a Shadow named Bertram who seems
to have been more lacking in luck than in talent or good will. He was an excellent Glass Bead
Game player, of course. As a teacher he was at least adequate, and he was also a conscientious
official, absolutely devoted to his Master. Nevertheless, in the course of the past few years,
he had become distinctly unpopular. The "new generation," the younger members of the elite,
were particularly hostile to him, and since he did not possess his Master's limpid, chivalric
temperament, this antagonism affected his poise. The Magister did not let him go, but had for
years shielded him from friction with the elite as much as possible, putting him in the pub-
lic eye more and more rarely and employing him largely in the chanceries and the Archives.

This blameless but disliked man, plainly not favored by fortune, now suddenly found himself
at the head of the Vicus Lusorum due to his Master's illness. If it should turn out that he
had to conduct the annual Game, he would occupy for the duration of the festival the most
exposed position in the entire Province. He could only have coped with this great task if the
majority of the Glass Bead Game players, or at any rate the tutors as a body, had supported him.
Regrettably, that did not happen. This was why the Ludus sollemnis turned into a severe trial
and very nearly a disaster for Waldzell.

Not until the day before the Game was it officially announced that the Magister had fallen
seriously ill and would be unable to conduct the Game. We do not know whether this postpone-
ment of the announcement had been dictated by the sick Magister, who might have hoped up to
the last moment that he would be able to pull himself together and preside. Probably he was
already too ill to cherish any such ideas, and his Shadow made the mistake of leaving Cas-
talia in uncertainty about the situation in Waldzell up to the last moment. Granted, it is
even disputable whether this delay was actually a mistake. Undoubtedly it was done with good
intentions, in order not to discredit the festival from the start and discourage the admirers
of Master Thomas from attending. And had everything turned out well, had there been a relation
of confidence between the Waldzell community of players and Bertram, the Shadow might actually
have become his representative and--this is really quite conceivable--the Magister's absence
might have gone almost unnoticed. It is idle to speculate further about the matter; we have
mentioned it only because we thought it necessary to suggest that Bertram was not such an ab-
solute failure, let alone unworthy of his office, as public opinion in Waldzell regarded him
at that time. He was far more a victim than a culprit.

As happened every year, guests poured into Waldzell to attend the great Game. Many arrived
unsuspectingly; others were deeply anxious about the Magister Ludi's health and had gloomy
premonitions about the prospects of the festival. Waldzell and the nearby villages filled
with people. Almost every one of the directors of the Order and the members of the Board of
Educators were on hand. Travelers in holiday mood arrived from the remoter parts of the coun-
try and from abroad, crowding the guest houses.

On the evening before the beginning of the Game, the ceremonies opened with the meditation
hour. In response to the ringing of bells the whole of Waldzell, crowded with people as it
was, subsided into a profound, reverent silence. Next morning came the first of the musical
performances and announcement of the first movement of the Game, together with meditation
on the two musical themes of this movement. Bertram, in the Magister Ludi's festival robes,
displayed a stately and controlled demeanor, but he was very pale. As day followed day, he
looked more and more strained, suffering and resigned, until during the last days he really
resembled a shadow. By the second day of the Game the rumor spread that Magister Thomas's
condition had worsened, and that his life was in danger. That evening there cropped up here and
there, and especially among the initiates, those first contributions to the gradually developing
legend about the sick Master and his Shadow. This legend, emanating from the innermost circle
of the Vicus Lusorum, the tutors, maintained that the Master had been willing and would have
been able to conduct the Game, but that he had sacrificed himself to his Shadow's ambition and
assigned the solemn task to Bertram. But now, the legend continued, since Bertram did not seem
equal to his lofty role, and since the Game was proving a disappointment, the sick man felt to
blame for the failure of the Game and his Shadow's inadequacy, and was doing penance for the
mistake. This, it was said, this and nothing else was the reason for the rapid deterioration
of his condition and the rise in his fever.

Naturally this was not the sole version of the legend, but it was the elite's version and
indicated that the ambitious aspirants thought the situation appalling and were dead set against
doing anything to improve it. Their reverence for the Master was balanced by their malice for his
Shadow; they wanted Bertram to fail even if the Master himself had to suffer as well.

By and by the story went the rounds that the Magister on his sickbed had begged his deputy and
two seniors of the elite to keep the peace and not endanger the festival. The next day it was
asserted that he had dictated his will and had named the man he desired for his successor. More-
over, names were whispered. These and other rumors circulated along with news of the Magister's
steadily worsening condition, and from day to day spirits sagged in the festival hall as well
as in the guest houses, although no one went so far as to abandon the festival and depart.
Gloom hung over the entire performance all the while that it proceeded outwardly with formal
propriety. Certainly there was little of that delight and uplift that everyone familiar with the
annual festival expected; and when on the day before the end of the game Magister Thomas, the
author of the festival Game, closed his eyes forever, not even the efforts of the authorities could
prevent the news from spreading. Curiously, a good many participants felt relieved and liberated
by this outcome. The Game students, and the elite in particular, were not permitted to don mourn-
ing before the end of the Ludus sollemnis, nor to make any break in the strictly prescribed se-
quence of the hours, with their alternation of performances and meditation exercises. Neverthe-
less, they unanimously went through the last act and day of the festival as if it were a funeral
service for the revered deceased. They surrounded the exhausted, pale, and sleepless Bertram,
who continued officiating with half-closed eyes, with a frigid atmosphere of isolation.

Joseph Knecht had been kept in close contact with the elite by his friend Tegularius. As
an old player, moreover, he was fully sensitive to all these currents and moods. But he did not
allow them to affect him. From the fourth or fifth day on he actually forbade Fritz to bother him
with news about the Magister's illness. He felt, and quite well understood, the tragic cloud that
hung over the festival; he thought of the Master with sorrow and deep concern, and of the Shadow
Bertram--condemned as it were to sharing the Magister's death--with growing disquiet and com-
passion. But he sternly resisted being influenced by any authentic or mythical account, practic-
ed the strictest concentration, surrendered gladly to the exercises and the course of the beauti-
fully structured game, and in spite of all the discords and dark clouds his experience of the
festival was one of grave exaltation.

At the end of the festival Bertram was spared the additional burden of having to receive
congratulants and the Board in his capacity of vice-Magister. The traditional celebration for
students of the Glass Bead Game was also cancelled. Immediately after the final musical per-
formance of the festival, the Board announced the Magister's death, and the prescribed days
of mourning began in the Vicus Lusorum. Joseph Knecht, still residing in the guest house,
participated in the rites. The funeral of this fine man, whose memory is still held in high
esteem, was celebrated with Castalia's customary simplicity. His Shadow, Bertram, who had sum-
moned up his last reserves of strength in order to play his part to the end during the festival,
understood his situation. He asked for a leave and went on a walking trip in the mountains.

There was mourning throughout the Game village, and indeed everywhere in Waldzell. Possibly
no one had enjoyed intimate, strikingly friendly relations with the deceased Magister; but
the superiority and flawlessness of his aristocratic nature, together with his intelligence and
his finely developed feeling for form, had made of him a regent and representative such as
Castalia with its fundamentally democratic temper did not often produce. The Castalians had
been proud of him. If he had seemed to hold himself aloof from the realms of passion, love, and
friendship, that made him all the more the object for youth's craving to venerate. This dignity
and sovereign gracefulness — which incidentally had earned him the half-affectionate nickname
"His Excellency"--had in the course of years, despite strong opposition, won him a special
position in the Supreme Council of the Order and in the sessions and work of the Board of
Educators.

Naturally, the question of his successor was hotly discussed, and nowhere so intensely as
among the elite of the Glass Bead Game players. After the departure of the Shadow, whose
overthrow these players had sought and achieved, the functions of the Magister's office were
temporarily distributed by vote of the elite itself among three temporary deputies--only the
internal functions in the Vicus Lusorum, of course, not the official work in the Board of
Educators. In keeping with tradition, the Board would not permit the Magistracy to remain
vacant more than three weeks. In cases in which a dying or departing Magister left a clear,
uncontested successor, the office was in fact filled immediately, after only a single plenary
session of the Board. This time the process would probably take rather longer.

During the period of mourning, Joseph Knecht occasionally talked with his friend about the
festival game and its singularly troubled course.

"This deputy, Bertram," Knecht said, "not only played his part tolerably well right up to
the end--that is, tried to fill the role of a real Magister--but in my opinion did far more than
that. He sacrificed himself to this Ludus sollemnis as his last and most solemn official act. You
all were harsh--no, the word is cruel--to him. You could have saved the festival and saved
Bertram, and you did not do so. I don't care to express an opinion about that conduct; I suppose
you had your reasons. But now that poor Bertram has been eliminated and you have had your
way, you should be generous. When he comes back you must meet him halfway and show that
you have understood his sacrifice."

Tegularius shook his head. "We did understand it," he said, "and have accepted it. You were
fortunate in being able to participate in the Game as a guest; as such you probably did not
follow the course of events so very closely. No, Joseph, we will not have any opportunity to
act on whatever feelings for Bertram we may have. He knows that his sacrifice was necessary
and will not attempt to undo it."

Only now did Knecht fully understand him. He fell into a troubled silence. Now he realized
that he had not experienced these festival days as a real Waldzeller and a comrade of the
others, but in truth much more like a guest; and only now did he grasp the nature of Bertram's
sacrifice. Hitherto Bertram had seemed to him an ambitious man who had been undone by a task
beyond his powers and who henceforth must renounce further ambitious goals and try to forget
that he had once been a Master's Shadow and the leader of an annual Game. Only now, hearing
his friend's last words, had he understood--with shock--that Bertram had been fully con-
demned by his judges and would not return. They had allowed him to conduct the festival Game
to its conclusion, and had co-operated just enough so that it would go off without a public
scandal; but they had done so only to spare Waldzell, not Bertram.

The fact was that the position of Shadow demanded more than the Magister's full confidence--
Bertram had not lacked that. It depended to an equal degree on the confidence of the elite,
and the unfortunate man had been unable to retain it. If he blundered, the hierarchy did
not stand behind him to protect him, as it did behind his Master and model. And without the
backing of such authority, he was at the mercy of his former comrades, the tutors. If they did
not respect him, they became his judges. If they were unyielding, the Shadow was finished. Sure
enough, Bertram did not return from his outing in the mountains, and after a while the story
went round that he had fallen to his death from a cliff. The matter was discussed no further.

Meanwhile, day after day high officials and directors of the Order and of the Board of
Educators appeared in the Game village. Members of the elite and of the civil service were
summoned for questioning. Now and then some of the matters discussed leaked out, but only
within the elite itself. Joseph Knecht, too, was summoned and queried, once by two directors
of the Order, once by the philological Magister, then by Monsieur Dubois, and again by two
Magisters. Tegularius, who was also called in for several such consultations, was pleasantly
excited and joked about this conclave atmosphere, as he called it. Joseph had already noticed
during the festival how little of his former intimacy with the elite had remained, and during the
period of the conclave he was made more painfully aware of it. It was not only that he lived in
the guest house like a visitor, and that the superiors seemed to deal with him as an equal. The
members of the elite themselves, the tutors as a body, no longer received him in a comradely
fashion. They displayed a mocking politeness toward him, or at best a temporizing coolness.
They had already begun to drift away from him when he received his appointment to Mariafels,
and that was only right and natural. Once a man had taken the step from freedom to service, from
the life of student or tutor to member of the hierarchy, he was no longer a comrade, but on the
way to becoming a superior or boss. He no longer belonged to the elite, and he had to realize that
for the time being they would assume a critical attitude toward him. That happened to everyone
in his position. The difference was that he felt the aloofness and coolness with particular in-
tensity at this time, partly because the elite, orphaned as it now was and about to receive a new
Magister, defensively closed its ranks; partly because it had just so harshly demonstrated its
ruthlessness in the case of the Shadow, Bertram.

One evening Tegularius came running to the guest house in a state of extreme excitement. He
found Joseph, drew him into an empty room, closed the door behind him, and burst out: "Joseph,
Joseph! My God, I should have guessed it, I ought to have known, it was likely enough. . .
Oh, I'm altogether beside myself and truly don't know whether I ought to be glad." And he,
who was privy to all the sources of information in the Game village, babbled on: it was more
than probable, already virtually certain, that Joseph Knecht would be elected Master of the
Glass Bead Game. The director of the Archives, whom many had regarded as Master Thomas's pre-
destined successor, had obviously been eliminated from the sifted group of prospects the day
before yesterday. Of the three candidates from the elite whose names had hitherto headed the
lists during the inquiries, none, apparently, enjoyed the special favor and recommendation of
a Magister or of the directors of the Order. On the other hand, two directors of the Order
as well as Monsieur Dubois were supporting Knecht. In addition to that, there was the weighty
vote of the former Music Master, who to the certain knowledge of several persons had been
consulted by several Masters.

"Joseph, they're going to make you Magister!" Fritz exclaimed once more. Whereupon his friend
placed his hand over his mouth. For a moment Joseph had been no less surprised and stirred by
the possibility than Fritz, and it had seemed to him altogether impossible. But even while
Tegularius was reporting the various opinions circulating in the Game village about the status
and course of the "conclave," Knecht began to realize that his friend's guess was not likely
to be wrong. Rather, in his heart he felt something akin to assent, a sense that he had known and
expected this all along, that it was right and natural. And so he placed his hand on his excited
friend's mouth, gave him an aloof, reproving look, as if he had suddenly been removed to a great
distance, and said: "Don't talk so much, amice; I don't want to hear this gossip. Go to your
comrades."

Tegularius, though he had meant to say a great deal more, fell silent at once. He turned pale
under the gaze of this utter stranger, and went out. Later he remarked that at first he had felt
Knecht's remarkable calm and iciness at this moment as if it were a blow and an insult, a slap
in the face and a betrayal of their old friendship and intimacy, an almost incomprehensible
overstressing and anticipation of his impending position as supreme head of the Glass Bead
Game. Only as he was leaving--and he actually went out like a man who had been slapped--
did the meaning of that unforgettable look dawn on him, that remote, royal, but likewise suf-
fering look, and he realized that his friend was not proud of what had fallen to his lot, but
that he was accepting it in humility. He had been reminded, he said, of Joseph Knecht's thought-
ful expression and the note of deep compassion in his voice when, recently, he had inquired a-
bout Bertram and his sacrifice. It was as if he himself were now on the point of sacrificing
and extinguishing himself like the Shadow. His expression had been at once proud and humble,
exalted and submissive, lonely and resigned; it was as if Joseph Knecht's face had become an
effigy of all the Masters of Castalia who had ever been. "Go to your comrades," he had said.
Thus, in the very second he first heard of his new dignity, this incomprehensible man had fitted
himself into it and saw the world from a new center, was no longer a comrade, would never be
one again.

Knecht might easily have guessed that this last and highest of his calls, the appointment as
Magister Ludi, was coming, or at least he might have seen it as possible, or even probable. But
this time, too, his promotion startled him. He might have guessed it, he afterward told himself,
and he smiled at his zealous friend Tegularius, who to be sure had not expected the appointment
from the start, but all the same had calculated and predicted it several days before the decision
and announcement. There were in fact no objections to Joseph's election to the highest Board
except perhaps his youth; most of his predecessors had entered on their high office at the age of
forty-five to fifty, whereas Joseph was still barely forty. But there was no law against any such
early appointment

Now, when Fritz surprised his friend with the results of his surmises and observations, the
observations of an experienced elite player who knew down to its smallest detail the complex
apparatus of the small Waldzell community, Knecht had immediately realized that Fritz was
right; he had instantly grasped the fact of his election and accepted his fate. But his first
reaction to the news had been that rejection of his friend, the refusal to "hear this gossip."
As soon as Fritz had left, stunned and very nearly insulted, Joseph went to a meditation room to
order his thoughts. His meditation started from a memory that had assailed him with unusual force.
In his vision he saw a bare room and a piano. Through the room fell the cool, blithe light of
forenoon, and at the door of the room appeared a handsome, friendly man, an elderly man with
graying hair and a lucid face full of kindness and dignity. Joseph himself was a small Latin
school pupil who had waited in the room for the Music Master, partly frightened, partly over-
joyed, and who now ^saw the venerated figure for the first time, the Master from the legendary
Province of elite schools, and the Magister who had come to show him what music was, who then
led him step by step into his Province, his realm, into the elite and the Order, and whose col-
league and brother he had now become, while the old man had laid aside his magic wand, or his
scepter, and had been transformed into an amiably taciturn, still kindly, still revered, but
still mysterious elder whose look and example hovered over Joseph's life and who would always
be a generation and several stages of life ahead of him, as well as immeasurably greater in
dignity and also modesty, in mastership and in mystery, but would always remain his patron
and model, gently compelling him to walk in his steps, as a rising and setting planet draws
its brothers after it.

As long as Knecht permitted the flow of inner images to come without direction, as they do,
like dreams, in the initial stage of relaxation, there were two principal scenes which emerged
from the stream and lingered, two pictures or symbols, two parables. In the first Knecht, as a
boy, followed the Master along a variety of ways. The Music Master strode before him as his
guide, and each time he turned around and showed his face he looked older, more tranquil and
venerable, visibly approaching an ideal of timeless wisdom and dignity, while he, Joseph Knecht,
devotedly and obediently walked along after his exemplar, but all the time remaining the self-
same boy, at which he alternately felt at one moment shame, at another a certain rejoicing, if
not something close to defiant satisfaction. And the second picture was this: the scene in the
piano room, the old man's entering where the boy waited, was repeated again and again, an in-
finite number of times; the Master and the boy followed each other as if drawn along the wires
of some mechanism, until soon it could no longer be discerned which was coming and which
going, which following and which leading, the old or the young man. Now it seemed to be the
young man who showed honor and obedience to the old man, to authority and dignity; now again
it was apparently the old man who was required to follow, serve, worship the figure of youth, of
beginning, of mirth. And as he watched this at once senseless and significant dream circle, the
dreamer felt alternately identical with the old man and the boy, now revering and now revered,
now leading, now obeying; and in the course of these pendulum shifts there came a moment in
which he was both, was simultaneously Master and small pupil; or rather he stood above both,
was the instigator, conceiver, operator, and onlooker of the cycle, this futile spinning race
between age and youth. With shifting sensations he alternately slowed the pace and speeded it to
a frantic rush. Out of this process there evolved a new conception, more akin to a symbol than a
dream, more insight than image: the conception or rather the insight that this meaningful and
meaningless cycle of master and pupil, this courtship of wisdom by youth, of youth by wisdom,
this endless, oscillating game was the symbol of Castalia. In fact it was the game of life in
general, divided into old and young, day and night, yang and yin, and pouring on without end.
Having arrived at this in his meditation, Joseph Knecht found his way from a world of images to
tranquility, and after long absorption returned strengthened and serenely cheerful.

When a few days later the directors of the Order summoned him, he went confidently. He re-
ceived the fraternal greeting of the superiors, a brief clasping of hands and suggestion of
an embrace, with composure and grave serenity. He was informed of his appointment as Magister
Ludi, and commanded to appear at the festival hall on the day after the morrow for the invest-
iture and swearing-in. This was the same hall in which, so short a while ago, the deceased
Master's deputy had completed the dismal ceremonies as if he were a sacrificial beast decked out
with gold. The day before the investiture was to be devoted to a careful study, accompanied by
ritual meditations, of the formula of the oath and the "breviary for the Magister" under the
guidance and supervision of two superiors. This time they were the Chancellor of the Order and
the Magister Mathematicae, and during the noon rest of this very strenuous day Joseph vividly
recalled his admission to the Order and how the Music Master had talked with him beforehand.
This time, to be sure, the rite of admission did not lead him, as it yearly did hundreds of
others, through a wide gate into a large community. Rather, he was passing through the eye of the
needle into the highest and narrowest circle, that of the Masters. Later he confessed to the former
Music Master that on that day of intensive self-examination one thought had given him trouble,
one altogether ridiculous notion. He had, he said, feared the moment in which one of the Masters
would point out to him how unusually young he was to be receiving the highest dignity. He had
seriously had to fight this fear, this childishly vain thought, and to fight as well the impulse
to answer, if there should be some allusion to his age: "Why not then wait until I am older? I
have never aspired to this elevation, you know." But further self-examination showed him that
unconsciously the thought of his appointment, and the desire for it, could not after all have been
so far from his mind. And, he went on to tell the Music Master, he had admitted this to himself,
had recognized the vanity of his thought and rejected it; moreover, neither on that day nor at
any other time did any of his colleagues remind him of his age.

The election of the new Master was, however, all the more animatedly discussed and criticized
among those who had hitherto been Knecht's fellow aspirants. He had no downright adversaries,
but he had had rivals, among them some who were of riper years than he. The members of this
circle were not at all minded to approve the choice without a trial of strength, or at least
without subjecting the new Master to extremely exacting and critical scrutiny. Almost in
every case a new Magister's inauguration and early period in office is a kind of purgatory.

The investiture of a Master is not a public ceremony. Aside from the Board of Educators and
the directorate of the Order, the only participants are the senior pupils, the candidates, and
the officials of the faculty which is receiving a new Magister. At the ceremony in the festival
hall, the Master of the Glass Bead Game had to take the oath of office, to receive from the au-
thorities the insignia of his office, consisting of certain keys and seals, and to be clad by the
Speaker of the Order in the festive robe which the Magister wears at all the major ceremonies,
especially while celebrating the annual Game. Such an act lacks the splash and mild intoxication
of public festivities; it is by nature ceremonious and rather sober. On the other hand, the mere
presence of all the members of the two highest authorities confers an uncommon dignity upon it.
The small republic of Glass Bead Game players is receiving a new lord and master, who will pre-
side over it and speak for its interests within the Board. That is a rare and important event,
and although the younger students may not fully grasp its significance and be conscious only
of the ritual, all the other participants are fully aware of just how important it is. They are
sufficiently integrated with their community, so substantially akin to it, that they experience
the event as if it were part and parcel of themselves.

This time the festive rejoicing was overshadowed by mourning for the previous Master,
by the unhappy temper of the annual Game, and by the tragedy of the deputy, Bertram. The
investiture was performed by the Speaker of the Order and the Chief Archivist of the Game.
Together, they held the robe high and then placed it over the shoulders of the new Glass Bead
Game Master. The brief festival oration was spoken by the Magister Grammaticae, the Master of
classical philology in Keuperheim. A representative of the elite of Waldzell handed over the keys
and seal, and the aged former Music Master in person stood near the organ. He had come to see
his protege invested, and to give him a glad surprise by his unexpected presence, perhaps also
to offer a helpful bit of advice. The old man would have liked to provide the music for the
ceremony with his own hands, but he could no longer risk such exertions and therefore left the
playing to the organist of the Game Village, but stood behind him turning the pages. He looked
at Joseph with a beatific smile, saw him receive the robes and keys, and heard him first repeat
the oath and then deliver his extemporaneous inaugural address to his future associates, offic-
ials, and students. Never before had this boy Joseph seemed to him as dear and pleasing as he
was today, when he had almost ceased to be Joseph and was beginning to be no more than the
wearer of robes and the keeper of an office, a jewel in a crown, a pillar in the structure of the
hierarchy. But he was able to speak with his boy Joseph alone for only a few minutes. He con-
ferred his serenely cheerful smile upon him, and admonished: "Make sure you manage the next
three or four weeks well; a great deal will be asked of you. Always think of the Whole, and al-
ways remember that missing out on some detail does not count for much now. You must devote
your entire attention to the elite; don't think of anything else. Two men will be sent to help initi-
ate you. One of them is the yoga specialist Alexander. I have instructed him myself. Pay close
attention to him; he knows his business. What you need is an unshakable confidence that the
superiors were right in making you one of their own. Trust them, trust the people who have been
sent to help you, and blindly trust your own strength. But be on your guard against the elite;
that is what they expect. You will win out, Joseph, I know."

The new Magister was familiar with most of the functions of his office, for he had already
assisted in the performance of them on various occasions, both in lowly and responsible cap-
acities. The most important were the Game courses, stretching from courses for schoolboys and
beginners, holidayers and guests, to the practice sessions, lectures, and seminars for the elite.
Every newly appointed Magister could feel himself equal to all but the last of these tasks,
whereas the new functions which had previously lain outside his scope caused him far more con-
cern and effort. Such was the case with Joseph also. He would have liked to turn first of all,
with undivided zeal, to these new duties, the properly magisterial duties: sitting on the Su-
preme Council of Education, working with the Council of Magisters and the directorate of the
Order, representing the Vicus Lusorum in dealings with all the authorities. He was all afire
to familiarize himself with these new tasks and to strip them of the menace of the unknown. He
wished that he could initially set aside several weeks for a careful study of the constitution,
the formalities, the minutes of previous sessions of the Board, and so on. He knew, of course,
that information and instruction on these matters were readily available to him. He need only
turn to Monsieur Dubois and to the specialist on magisterial forms and traditions, the Speaker
of the Order. Although not a Magister himself, and therefore ranked below the Masters, the
Speaker held the chair in all sessions of the Board and took care that the traditional rules
of order were observed. In this he somewhat resembled the master of ceremonies at a sove-
reign's court.

Joseph would only too gladly have asked this prudent, experienced, inscrutably courteous man,
whose hands had just solemnly decked him with the robes of office, for a few private lessons,
if only the Speaker had lived in Waldzell instead of Hirsland, half a day's journey away. How
gladly, too, Joseph would have fled to Monteport for a while to be instructed in these matters
by the former Music Master. But such recourses were out of the question; it was not for a
Magister to harbor any such private desires, as if he were still a student. Instead, he had to
start off by attending to those very functions which he fancied would give him little trouble,
and to concentrate his whole mind on them.

During Bertram's festival Game he had observed a Magister forsaken by his own community,
the elite, fighting and as it were suffocating in airless space. He had sensed something
then, and his presentiment had been confirmed by the old Music Master's words on the day of
his investiture. Now he faced it every minute of his official day, and every moment he could
spare for reflection on his situation: that he must above all concern himself with the elite
and the tutorship, with the highest stages of the Glass Bead Game studies, with the seminar
practice sessions, and with personal intercourse with the tutors. He could leave the Archives
to the archivists, the beginners' courses to the present set of teachers, the mail to his sec-
retaries, and would not be neglecting any serious matters. But he did not dare leave the elite
to themselves for a moment. He had to keep after them, impose himself on them, and make himself
indispensable to them. He had to convince them of the merit of his abilities and the purity of
his will; he had to conquer them, court them, win them, match wits with every candidate among
them who showed a disposition to challenge him — and there was no lack of such candidates.

In this struggle he was aided by a number of factors which he had earlier considered draw-
backs, in particular his long absence from Waldzell and the elite, who therefore looked upon
him as something of a homo novus. Even his friendship with Tegularius proved useful. For
Tegularius, that brilliant, sickly outsider, obviously did not have to be considered a rival for
office, and seemed so little career-minded himself that any preference shown him by the new
Magister would not be seen as an affront to other candidates. Nevertheless it was something of
a task for Knecht to probe and penetrate this highest, most vital, restive, and sensitive stratum
in the world of the Glass Bead Game, and master it as a rider masters a thoroughbred horse. For
in every Castalian institute, not only that of the Glass Bead Game, the elite group of candidates,
also called tutors--men who have completed their formal education but are still engaged in free
studies and have not yet been appointed to serve on the Board of Educators or the Order--con-
stitute the most precious stock in Castalian society, the true reserve and promise for the fut-
ure. Everywhere, not only in the Game Village, this dashing select band of the younger genera-
tion tends to resist and criticize new teachers and superiors, accords a new head the bare min-
imum of politeness and subordination, and must be convinced, overpowered, and won over on a
purely personal basis. The superior must devote his whole being to courting them before they
will acknowledge him and submit to his leadership.

Knecht took up his task without timidity, but he was nevertheless astonished at its diffi-
culties; and while he solved them and gradually won the arduous, consuming battle, those other
duties which he had been inclined to worry about receded of their own accord and seemed to
demand less of his attention. He confessed to a colleague that he had participated in the first
plenary session of the Board--to which he traveled by the fastest express and returned in the
same way--almost in a dream and afterward had no time to give another thought to it, so com-
pletely did his current task claim all his energies. In fact, even during the conference itself,
although the subject interested him and although he had looked forward to it with some uneasi-
ness, since this was his first appearance as a member of the Board, he several times caught him-
self thinking not of his colleagues here and the deliberations in progress, but of Waldzell. He
saw himself rather in that blue room in the Archives where he was currently giving a seminar
in dialectics every third day, with only five participants. Every hour of that bred far greater
tension and demanded a greater output of energy than all the rest of his official duties, which
were also not easy and which he could not evade or postpone. For as the former Music Master had
informed him, the Board provided him with a timekeeper and coach who supervised the course of
his day hour by hour, advising him about his schedule and guarding him against too much concen-
tration on any one thing, as well as against total overstrain. Knecht was grateful to him, and
even more grateful to Alexander, the man deputized by the directorate of the Order, who enjoyed
a great reputation as master of the art of meditation. Alexander saw to it that Joseph, even
though he was working to the utmost limit of his strength, practiced the "little" or "brief"
meditation exercise three times daily, and that he abided strictly by the prescribed course
and number of minutes for each such exercise.

Before his evening meditation he and his aides, the coach and the meditation master, were sup-
posed to review each official day, noting what had been well done or ill done, feeling his own
pulse, as meditation teachers call this practice, that is, recognizing and measuring one's own
momentary situation, state of health, the distribution of one's energies, one's hopes and cares
— in a word, seeing oneself and one's daily work objectively and carrying nothing unresolved on
into the night and the next day.

While the tutors observed the prodigious labors of their Magister with an interest partly sym-
pathetic, partly aggressive, missing no opportunity to set him new tests of strength, patience,
and quick-wittedness, trying one moment to inspire, the next to block his work, an uncomfortable
void had come into being around Tegularius. He understood, of course, that Knecht could not
spare any attention, any time, any thought or sympathy for him right now. But he could not
harden himself sufficiently, could not resign himself to being so neglected. It was all the more
painful to him because he not only seemed to have lost his friend from one day to the next,
but also found himself the object of some suspicion on the part of his associates, and was
scarcely spoken to. That was hardly surprising. For although Tegularius could not seriously
stand in the way of the ambitious climbers, he was known as one of the new Magister's partisans
and favorites.

Knecht could easily have grasped all this. To be sure, the responsibilities of the moment in-
volved his laying aside all private, personal affairs for a while, including this friendship.
But, as he later admitted to his friend, he did not actually do this wittingly and willingly,
but quite simply because he had forgotten Fritz. He had so thoroughly converted himself into an
instrument that such personal matters as friendship vanished into the realm of the impossible.
If on occasion, as for example in that seminar he held for the five foremost Glass Bead Game
players, Fritz's face and figure appeared before him, he did not see Tegularius as a friend or
personality, but as a member of the elite, a student, candidate, and tutor, a part of his work,
a soldier in the regiment whom he had to train so that he could march on to victory with it. A
shudder had gone through Fritz when the Magister for the first time addressed him in that way.
From Knecht's look, it was clear that this remoteness and objectivity were not pretense, but
uncannily genuine, and that the man before him who treated him with this matter-of-fact cour-
tesy, accompanied by intense intellectual alertness, was no longer his friend Joseph, was en-
tirely a teacher and examiner, entirely Master of the Glass Bead Game, enveloped and isolated
by the gravity and austerity of his office as if by a shining glaze which had been poured over
him in the heat of the fire, and had cooled and hardened.

During these hectic weeks a minor incident connected with Tegularius occurred. Sleepless and
under severe psychological strain, he was guilty during the seminar of a discourtesy, a minor
outburst, not toward the Magister but toward a colleague whose mocking tone had grated on his
nerves. Knecht noticed, noticed also the delinquent's overwrought state. He reproved him word-
lessly, merely by a gesture of his finger, but afterward sent his meditation master to him to
calm the troubled soul. Tegularius, after weeks of deprivation, took this concern as a first
sign of reviving friendship, for he assumed that it was an attention directed toward himself
as a person, and willingly submitted to the cure. In reality Knecht had scarcely been aware
of the object of his solicitude. He had acted solely as the Magister, had observed irritabi-
lity and a lack of self-control in one of his tutors, and had reacted to it as an educator,
without for a moment regarding this tutor as a person or relating him to himself. When, months
later, his friend reminded him of this scene and testified how overjoyed and comforted he had
been by this sign of good will, Joseph Knecht said nothing. He had completely forgotten the
affair, but did not disabuse his friend.

At last he attained his goal. The battle was won. It had been a great labor to subdue this
elite, to drill them until they were weary, to tame the ambitious, win over the undecided,
impress the arrogant. But now the work was done; the candidates at the Game Village had ack-
nowledged him their Master and submitted to him. Suddenly everything went smoothly, as if
only a drop of oil had been needed. The coach drew up a last agenda with Knecht, expressed
the Board's appreciation, and vanished. Alexander, the meditation master, likewise departed.
Instead of a morning massage, Knecht resumed his customary walks. As yet he could not even
begin to think of anything like studying or even reading; but now he was able to play a
little music some days, in the evening before going to sleep.

The next time he attended a meeting of the Board, Knecht distinctly sensed, although the
matter was never so much as mentioned, that he was now regarded by his colleagues as tested
and proved. He was their equal. After the intensity of the struggle to prove himself, he was
now overcome once more by a sense of awakening, of cooling and sobering. He saw himself in
the innermost heart of Castalia, sat in the highest rank of the hierarchy, and discovered with
strange sobriety and almost with disappointment that even this very thin air was breathable,
but that he who now breathed it as though he had never known anything different was altoge-
ther changed. That was the consequence of this harsh period of trial. It had burned him out
as no other service, no other effort, had previously done.

The elite's acknowledgment of him as their sovereign was marked this time by a special ges-
ture. When Knecht sensed the end of their resistance, the confidence and consent of the tu-
tors, and knew that he had successfully put the hardest task behind him, he realized that the
moment had come for him to choose a "Shadow." In point of fact he would never more sorely
need someone to relieve him of burdens than right now, after the victory was won, when he
found himself suddenly released into relative freedom after an almost superhuman trial of
strength. Many a Magister in the past had collapsed just at this point in his path. Knecht now
renounced his right to choose among the candidates and asked the tutors as a body to select
a Shadow for him. Still under the impact of Bertram's fate, the elite took this conciliatory
gesture very seriously, and after several meetings and secret polls, made their choice, pro-
viding the Magister with one of their best men, a deputy who until Knecht's appointment had
been regarded as one of the most promising candidates for the office of Magister.

He had survived the worst. Now there was time for walks and music again. After a while he
could once more think of reading. Friendship with Tegularius, occasional correspondence
with Ferromonte, would be possible. Now and then he would be able to take half a day off,
perhaps sometimes permit himself to go away for a short vacation. But all these amenities
would benefit another man, not the previous Joseph who had thought himself a keen Glass
Bead Game player and a tolerably good Castalian, but who had nevertheless had no inkling
of the innermost nature of the Castalian system. Hitherto he had lived in so innocuously
selfish, so puerilely playful, so inconceivably private and irresponsible a way. Once he
recalled the tart reproof he had incurred from Master Thomas after he had expressed the
desire to go on studying freely for a while longer: "You say a while, but how long is
that? You are still speaking the language of students, Joseph Knecht." That had been only
a few years ago. He had listened with admiration, with profound reverence, along with a
mild horror of this man's impersonal perfection and discipline, and he had felt Castalia
reaching out for himself as well, seeking to draw him close in order, perhaps, to make of
him just such a Thomas some day, a Master, a sovereign and servant, a perfect instrument.
And now he stood on the spot where Master Thomas had stood, and when he spoke with one
of his tutors, one of those clever, sophisticated players and scholars, one of those diligent
and arrogant princes, he looked across to him into a different world of alien beauty, a
strange world that had once been his, exactly as Magister Thomas had gazed into his own
strange student world.




　　　　　　　　　　　　　　SEVEN

　　　　　　　　　　　　　IN OFFICE




At FIRST, ASSUMPTION of the Magister's office seemed to have brought more loss than gain.
It had almost devoured his strength and his personal life, had crushed all his habits and
hobbies, had left a cool stillness in his heart, and in his head something resembling the
giddiness after overexertion. But the period that now followed brought recovery, reflection,
and habituation. It also yielded new observations and experiences.

The greatest of these, now that the battle was won, was his collaboration with the elite on
the basis of mutual trust and friendliness. He conferred with his Shadow. He worked with
Fritz Tegularius, whom he tried out as an assistant on his correspondence. He gradually
studied, checked over, and supplemented the reports and other notes on students and associ-
tes which his predecessor had left. And in the course of this work Knecht familiarized him-
elf, with increasing affection, with this elite whom he had imagined he knew so well. Now
its true nature, and the whole special quality of the Game Village as well as its role in
Castalian life, were revealed to him in their full reality for the first time.

Of course he had belonged to this artistic and ambitious elite and to the Players' Village
in Waldzell for many years. He had felt completely a part of it. But now he was no longer
just a part. Not only did he intimately share the life of this community, but he also felt
himself to be something like its brain, its consciousness, and its conscience as well, not
only participating in its impulses and destinies, but guiding them and being responsible
for them.

In an exalted moment, at the end of a training course for teachers of beginners in the Game,
he once declared: "Castalia is a small state in itself, and our Vicus Lusorum a miniature
state within the state, a small, but ancient and proud republic, equal in rights and digni-
ies to its sisters, but with its sense of mission lifted and strengthened by the special
artistic and virtually sacramental function it performs. For our distinction is to cherish
the true sanctuary of Castalia, its unique mystery and symbol, the Glass Bead Game. Castalia
rears pre-eminent musicians and art historians, philologists, mathematicians, and other scho-
ars. Every Castalian institute and every Castalian should hold to only two goals and ideals:
to attain to the utmost command of his subject, and to keep himself and his subject vital
and flexible by forever recognizing its ties with all other disciplines and by maintaining
amicable relations with all. This second ideal, the conception of the inner unity of all
man's cultural efforts, the idea of universality, has found perfect expression in our illu-
trious Game. It may be that the physicist, the musicologist, or other scholar will at times
have to steep himself entirely in his own discipline, that renouncing the idea of universal
culture will further some momentary maximum performance in a special field. But we, at any
rate, we Glass Bead Game players, must never allow ourselves such specialization. We must
neither approve nor practice it, for our own special mission, as you know, is the idea of
the Universitas Litterarum. Ours to foster its supreme expression, the noble Game, and
repeatedly to save the various disciplines from their tendency to self-sufficiency. But how
can we save anything that does not have the desire to be saved? And how can we make the
archaeologists, the pedagogues, the astronomers, and so forth, eschew self-sufficient
specialization and throw open their windows to all the other disciplines? We cannot do it
by compulsory means, say by making the Glass Bead Game an official subject in the lower
schools, nor can we do it by invoking what our predecessors meant this Game to be. We can
prove only that our Game and we ourselves are indispensable by keeping the Game ever at
the summit of our entire cultural life, by incorporating into it each new achievement, each
new approach, and each new complex of problems from the scholarly disciplines. We must
shape and cultivate our universality, our noble and perilous sport with the idea of unity,
endowing it with such perennial freshness and loveliness, such persuasiveness and charm,
that even the soberest researcher and most diligent specialist will ever and again feel
its message, its temptation and allure.

"Let us imagine for the moment that we players were to slacken in our zeal for a time, that
the Game courses for beginners became dull and superficial, that in the Games for advanced
players specialists of other disciplines looked in vain for vital, pulsating life, for inellectual
contemporaneity and interest. Suppose that two or three times in a row our great annual
Game were to strike the guests as an empty ceremony, a lifeless, old-fashioned, form-
listic relic of the past. How quickly, then, the Game and we ourselves would be done for.
Already we are no longer on those shining heights where the Glass Bead Game stood a genera-
tion ago, when the annual Game lasted not one or two but three or four weeks, and was the
climax of the year not only for Castalia but for the entire country. Today a representative
of the government still attends this annual Game, but all too often as a somewhat bored guest,
and a few cities and professions still send envoys. Toward the end of the Game days these
representatives of the secular powers occasionally deign to suggest that the length of the
festival deters many other cities from sending envoys, and that perhaps it would be more in
keeping with the contemporary world either to shorten the festival considerably or else to
hold it only every other year, or every third year.

"Well now, we cannot check this development, or if you will, decadence. It may well be that
before long our Game will meet with no understanding at all out in the world. Perhaps we shall
no longer be able to celebrate it. But what we must and can prevent is the discrediting and
devaluation of the Game in its own home, in our Province. Here our struggle is hopeful, and has
repeatedly led to victory. Every day we witness the phenomenon: young elite pupils who have
signed up for their Game course without any special ardor, and who have completed it dutifully,
but without enthusiasm, are suddenly seized by the spirit of the Game, by its intellectual
potentialities, its venerable tradition, its soul-stirring forces, and become our passionate
adherents and partisans. And every year at the Ludus sollemnis we can see scholars of disti-
nction who rather looked down on us Glass Bead Game players during their work-filled year,
and who have not always wished our institution well. In the course of the great Game we see
them falling more and more under the spell of our art; we see them growing eased and exalt-
ed, rejuvenated and fired, until at last, their hearts strengthened and deeply stirred, they bid
good-by with words of almost abashed gratitude.

"Let us consider for a moment the means at our command for carrying out our mission. We see
a rich, fine, well-ordered apparatus whose heart and core is the Game Archive, which we
gratefully make use of every hour of the day and which all of us serve, from Magister and
Archivist down to the humblest errand boy. The best and the most vital aspect of our insti-
tution is the old Castalian principle of selection of the best, the elite. The schools of
Castalia collect the best pupils from the entire country and educate them. Similarly, we
in the Players' Village try to select the best among those endowed by nature with a love
for the Game. We train them to an ever-higher standard of perfection. Our courses and sem-
inars take in hundreds, who then go their ways again; but we go on training the best until
they become genuine players, artists of the Game. You all know that in ours as in every
art there is no end to development, that each of us, once he belongs to the elite, will
work away all his life at the further development, refinement, and deepening of himself
and our art, whether or not he belongs to our corps of officials.

The existence of our elite has sometimes been denounced as a luxury. It has been argued
that we ought to train no more elite players than are required to fill the ranks of our of-
ficialdom. But in the first place, our corps of officials is not an institution sufficient
unto itself, and in the second place not everyone is suited for an official post, any
more than every good philologist is suited for teaching. We officials, at any rate, feel
certain that the tutors are more than a reservoir of talented and experienced players
from which we fill our vacancies and draw our successors. I am almost tempted to say
that this is only a subsidiary function of the players' elite, even though we greatly stress
it to the uninitiated as soon as the meaning and justification of our institute is brought
up.

"No, the tutors are not primarily future Masters, course directors, Archive officials.
They are an end in themselves; their little band is the real home and future of the Glass
Bead Game. Here, in these few dozen hearts and heads the developments, modifications,
advances, and confrontations of our Game with the spirit of the age and with the various
disciplines take place. Only here is our Game played properly and correctly, to its hilt,
and with full commitment. Only within our elite is it an end in itself and a sacred miss-
ion, shorn of all dilettantism, cultural vanity, self-importance, or superstition. The
future of the Game lies with you, the Waldzell tutors. And since it is the heart and soul
of Castalia, and you are the soul and vital spark of Waldzell, you are truly the salt of
the Province, its spirit, its dynamism. There is no danger that your numbers could grow
too large, your zeal too hot, your passion for the glorious Game too great. Increase it,
increase it! For you, as for all Castalians, there is at bottom only a single peril,
which we all must guard against every single day. The spirit of our Province and our Or-
der is founded on two principles: on objectivity and love of truth in study, and on the
cultivation of meditative wisdom and harmony. Keeping these two principles in balance
means for us being wise and worthy of our Order. We love the sciences and scholarly dis-
ciplines, each his own, and yet we know that devotion to a discipline does not necessa-
rily preserve a man from selfishness, vice, and absurdity. History is full of examples
of that, and folklore has given us the figure of Doctor Faust to represent this danger.

"Other centuries sought safety in the union of reason and religion, research and asceti-
cism. In their Universitas Litterarum, theology ruled. Among us we use meditation, the
fine gradations of yoga technique, in our efforts to exorcise the beast within us and
the diabolus dwelling in every branch of knowledge. Now you know as well as I that the
Glass Bead Game also has its hidden diabolus, that it can lead to empty virtuosity, to
artistic vanity, to self-advancement, to the seeking of power over others and then to
the abuse of that power. This is why we need another kind of education beside the inte-
llectual and submit ourselves to the morality of the Order, not in order to reshape our
mentally active life into a psychically vegetative dream-life, but on the contrary to
make ourselves fit for the summit of intellectual achievement. We do not intend to flee
from the vita activa to the vita contemplativa, nor vice versa, but to keep moving for-
ward while alternating between the two, being at home in both, partaking of both."

We have cited Knecht's words--and many similar statements recorded by his students have
been preserved--because they throw so clear a light upon his conception of his office, at
least during the first few years of his magistracy. He was an excellent teacher; the pro-
fusion of copies of his lectures which have come down to us would alone provide evidence
for that. Among the surprises that his high office brought him right at the start was his
discovery that teaching gave him so much pleasure, and that he did so well at it. He would
not have expected that, for hitherto he had never really felt a desire for teaching. Of
course, like every member of the elite, he had occasionally been given teaching assign-
ments for short periods even while he was merely an advanced student. He had substituted
for other teachers in Glass Bead Game courses at various levels, even more frequently
had helped the participants in such with reviews and drill; but in those days his freedom
to study and his solitary concentration had been so dear and important to him that he
had regarded these assignments as nuisances, despite the fact that he was even then skill-
ful and popular as a teacher. He had, after all, also given courses in the Benedictine
abbey, but they had been of minor importance in themselves, and equally minor for him.
There, his studies and association with Father Jacobus had made all other work secondary.
At the time, his greatest ambition had been to be a good pupil, to learn, receive, form
himself. Now the pupil had become a teacher, and as such he had mastered the major task
of his first period in office: the struggle to win authority and forge an identity of
person and office. In the course of this he made two discoveries. The first was the plea-
sure it gives to transplant the achievements of the mind into other minds and see them
being transformed into entirely new shapes and emanations--in other words, the joy of
teaching. The second was grappling with the personalities of the students, the attain-
ment and practice of authority and leadership--in other words, the joy of educating.
He never separated the two, and during his magistracy he not only trained a large number
of good and some superb Glass Bead Game players, but also by example, by admonition, by
his austere sort of patience, and by the force of his personality and character, elicit-
ed from a great many of his students the very best they were capable of.

In the course of this work he had made a characteristic discovery--if we may be permit-
ted to anticipate our story. At the beginning of his magistracy he dealt exclusively with
the elite, with the most advanced students and the tutors. Many of the latter were his
own age, and every one was already a thoroughly trained player. But gradually, once he
was sure of the elite, he slowly and cautiously, from year to year, began withdrawing
from it an ever-larger portion of his time and energy, until at the end he sometimes
could leave it almost entirely to his close associates and assistants. This process took
years, and each succeeding year Knecht, in the lectures, courses, and exercises he conduct-
ed, reached further and further back to ever-younger students. In the end he went so far
that he several times personally conducted beginners' courses for youngsters--something
rarely done by a Magister Ludi. He found, moreover, that the younger and more ignorant
his pupils were, the more pleasure he took in teaching. Sometimes in the course of these
years it actually made him uneasy, and cost him tangible effort, to return from these
groups of boys to the advanced students, let alone to the elite. Occasionally, in fact,
he felt the desire to reach even further back and to attempt to deal with even younger
pupils, those who had never yet had courses of any kind and knew nothing of the Glass
Bead Game. He found himself sometimes wishing to spend a while in Eschholz or one of
the other preparatory schools instructing small boys in Latin, singing, or algebra, where the
atmosphere was far less intellectual than it was even in the most elementary course in
the Glass Bead Game, but where he would be dealing with still more receptive, plastic,
educable pupils, where teaching and educating were more, and more deeply, a unity. In the
last two years of his magistracy he twice referred to himself in letters as "Schoolmaster,"
reminding his correspondent that the expression Magister Ludi--which for generations
had meant only "Master of the Game" in Castalia--had originally been simply the name
for the schoolmaster.

There could, of course, be no question of his realizing such schoolmasterly wishes. They
were arrant dreams, as a man may dream of a midsummer sky on a gray, cold winter day. For
Knecht there were no longer a multitude of paths open. His duties were determined by his
office; but since the manner in which he wished to fulfill these duties was left largely
to his own discretion, he had in the course of the years, no doubt quite unconsciously
at first, gradually concerned himself more and more with educating, and with the earliest
age-groups within his reach. The older he became, the more youth attracted him. At least
so we can observe from our vantage point. At the time a critic would have had difficulty
finding any trace of vagary in his conduct of his office. Moreover, the position itself
compelled him again and again to turn his attention back to the elite. Even during peri-
ods in which he left the seminars and Archives almost entirely to his assistants and his
Shadow, long-term projects such as the annual Game competitions or the preparations for
the grand public Game of the year kept him in vital and daily contact with the elite. To
his friend Fritz he once jokingly remarked: "There have been sovereigns who suffered all
their lives from an unrequited love for their subjects. Their hearts drew them to the
peasants, the shepherds, the artisans, the schoolmasters, and schoolchildren; but they
seldom had a chance to see anything of these, for they were always surrounded by their
ministers and soldiers who stood like a wall between them and the people. A Magister's
fate is the same. He would like to reach people and sees only colleagues; he would like
to reach the schoolboys and children and sees only advanced students and members of the
elite."

But we have run far ahead of our story, and now return to the period of Knecht's first
years in office. After gaining the desired relationship with the elite, he had next to
turn his attention to the bureaucracy of the Archives and show it that he intended to be
a friendly but alert master. Then came the problem of studying the structure and proce-
dures of the chancery, and learning how to run it. A constant flow of correspondence,
and repeated meetings or circular letters of the Boards, summoned him to duties and tasks
which were not altogether easy for a newcomer to grasp and classify properly. Quite often
questions arose in which the various Faculties of the Province were mutually interested
and inclined toward jealousy--questions of jurisdiction, for instance. Slowly, but with
growing admiration, he became aware of the powerful secret functions of the Order, the
living soul of the Castalian state, and the watchful guardian of its constitution.

Thus strenuous and overcrowded months had passed during which there had been no room
in Joseph Knecht's thoughts for Tegularius. However, and this was done half instinctively,
he did assign his friend a variety of jobs to protect him from excessive leisure. Fritz
had lost his friend, who had overnight become his highest-ranking superior and whom he
had to address formally as "Reverend sir." But he took the orders the Magister issued
to him as a sign of solicitude and personal concern. Moody loner though he was, Fritz
found himself excited partly by his friend's elevation and the excitable mood of the
entire elite, partly by the tasks assigned to him, which were activating him in a way
compatible with his personality. In any case, he bore the totally changed situation
better than he himself would have thought since that moment in which Knecht had res-
ponded to the news that he was destined to be the Glass Bead Game Master by sending him
away. He was, moreover, both intelligent and sympathetic enough to see something of the
enormous strain his friend was undergoing at this time, and to sense the nature of that
great trial of strength. He saw how Joseph was annealed by the fire, and insofar as
sentimental emotions were involved, he probably felt them more keenly than the man who
was undergoing the ordeal. Tegularius took the greatest pains with the assignments he
received from the Magister, and if he ever seriously regretted his own weakness and his
unfitness for office and responsibility, he did so then, when he intensely wished to
stand by the man he so warmly admired and give him what help he could as an assistant,
an official, a "Shadow."

The beech forests above Waldzell were already browning when Knecht one day took a lit-
tle book with him into the Magister's garden adjoining his residence, that pretty little
garden which the late Master Thomas had so prized and often tended himself with Hora-
tian fondness. Knecht, like all the students, had once imagined it as an awesome and
sanctified spot, a Tusculum and magical island of the Muses where the Master came for
recuperation and meditation. Since he himself had become Magister and the garden his,
he had scarcely entered it and hardly ever enjoyed it at leisure. Even now he was com-
ing only for fifteen minutes after dinner, and he allowed himself merely a brief care-
free stroll among the high bushes and shrubs beneath which his predecessor had planted
a good many evergreens from southern climes. Then, since it was already cool in the
shade, he carried a light cane chair to a sunlit spot, sat down, and opened the book he
had brought with him. It was the Pocket Calendar for the Magister Ludi, written seventy
or eighty years before by Ludwig Wassermaler, the Glass Bead Game Master of the day. E-
ver since, each of his successors had made in it a few corrections, deletions, or addi-
tions, as changing times indicated. The calendar was intended as a vade mecum for still
inexperienced Masters in their first years in office, and led the Magister through his
entire working and official year, from week to week, reminding him of his duties some-
times in mere cue phrases, sometimes with detailed descriptions and personal recommend-
ations. Knecht found the page for the current week and read it through attentively. He
came upon nothing surprising or especially urgent, but at the end of the section stood
the following lines:

"Gradually begin to turn your thoughts to the coming annual Game. It seems early, and
in fact might seem to you premature. Nevertheless I advise you: Unless you already have
a plan for the Game in your head, from now on let not a week pass, certainly not a
month, without turning your thoughts to the future Game. Make a note of your ideas;
take the pattern of a classical Game with you now and then, even on official journeys,
and look it over whenever you have a free half-hour. Prepare yourself not by trying
to force good ideas to come, but by recalling frequently from now on that in the com-
ing months a fine and festive task awaits you, for which you must constantly strengthen,
compose, and attune yourself."

These words had been written some three generations before by a wise old man and master
of his art, at a time incidentally in which the Glass Bead Game had probably reached its
supreme refinement in the formal sense. In those days the Games had attained a delicacy
and wealth of ornamentation in their execution comparable to the arts of architecture
and decoration in the late Gothic or rococo periods. For some two decades it had been a
Game so fragile that it seemed as if it were really being played with glass beads, a seem-
ingly glassy game almost empty of content, a seemingly coquettish and wanton pastime
full of frail embellishments, an airy dance, sometimes a tightrope dance, with the sub-
tlest rhythmic structure. There were players who spoke of the style of those days as if
it were a lost talisman, and others who condemned it as superficial, cluttered with or-
namentation, decadent, and unmanly. It had been one of the masters and co-creators of
that style who had composed the sagacious advice and admonishments in the Magister's
calendar, and as Joseph Knecht searchingly read his words a second and third time he
felt a gay, blissful stirring in his heart, a mood such as he had experienced only once
before, it seemed to him. When he reflected, he realized that it had been in that medi-
tation before his investiture; it was the mood that had swept him as he imagined that
strange round-dance, the round between the Music Master and Joseph, Master and begin-
ner, age and youth. It had been a very old man who had thought and set down these words:
"Let no week pass. . ." and ". . .not by trying to force good ideas." It had been a man
who had held the high office of Master of the Game for at least twenty years, perhaps
much longer. And in that sportively rococo age he must undoubtedly have dealt with an
extremely spoiled and arrogant elite. He had devised and celebrated more than twenty
of those brilliant annual Games which in those days lasted for a month--an old man
for whom the annually recurring task of composing a grand, solemn Game must long since
have ceased to be merely a high honor and joy, must have become far more a burden de-
manding great effort, a chore to which he had to attune himself, persuade himself, and
somewhat stimulate himself.

At this moment Knecht felt something more than grateful reverence toward this wise old
man and experienced adviser--for the calendar had already served him frequently as a
valuable guide. He also felt a joyous, a gay and high-spirited superiority, the super-
iority of youth. For among the many cares of a Magister Ludi, with which he had already
become acquainted, this particular care did not occur. He really did not have to force
himself to think about the annual Game in good time, or worry about not encountering
this task in a sufficiently joyful and composed spirit. He need not fear any lack of
enterprise, let alone ideas, for such a Game. On the contrary, Knecht, who had at
times during these few months given an impression of being aged beyond his years, felt
at the moment young and strong.

He was unable to yield to this fine feeling for long. He could not savor it to the full,
for his brief period of rest was almost over. But the inspiriting joyful emotion remain-
ed in him; he took it with him when he left; and so the brief rest in the Magister's
garden, and his reading of the calendar, had after all borne fruit. It had given him
relaxation and a moment of happily heightened vitality, but it had also produced two
inspired thoughts, both of which at once assumed the character of decisions. First,
whenever he too became old and weary he would lay down his office the moment the
composition of the annual Game became a troublesome duty and he found himself at
a loss for ideas. Secondly, he would in fact start work on his first annual Game soon,
and he would call in Tegularius to be his foremost assistant in this work. That would
gratify and gladden his friend, and for himself it would be a good trial step toward a
new modus vivendi for their temporarily arrested friendship. For the initiative could not
come from Fritz; it had to come from the Magister himself.

The task would certainly give his friend plenty to do. Ever since his stay in Mariafels,
Knecht had been nurturing an idea for a Glass Bead Game which he now decided to use
for his first ceremonial Game as Magister. The pretty idea was to base the structure
and dimensions of the Game on the ancient ritual Confucian pattern for the building of
a Chinese house: orientation by the points of the compass, the gates, the spirit wall,
the relationships and functions of buildings and courtyards, their co-ordination with
the constellations, the calendar and family life, and the symbolism and stylistic prin-
ciples of the garden. Long ago, in studying a commentary on the I Ching, he had thought
the mythic order and significance of these rules made an unusually appealing and charm-
ing symbol of the cosmos and of man's place in the universe. The age-old mythic spirit
of the people in this tradition of domestic architecture had also seemed to him won-
derfully and intimately fused with the mandarin and magisterial spirit of speculative
scholarliness. He had lovingly dwelt on the plan for this Game, though without so far
setting down any of it, often enough for the Game to have really been formulated as a
whole in his mind; but since taking office he had not had a chance to apply himself to
it. Now he resolved to construct his festival Game on this Chinese idea; and if Fritz
proved receptive to the spirit of the plan, he would ask him to begin at once on the
necessary background studies and the procedure for translating it into the Game language.
There was one difficulty: Tegularius knew no Chinese. It was far too late for him to
learn it now. But with some briefing from Knecht himself and from the Far Eastern Col-
lege, and some reading up on the subject, there was no reason why Tegularius could not
become sufficiently acquainted with the magical symbolism of Chinese architecture.
After all, no philological questions were involved. Still, that would take time, espe-
cially for a pampered person like his friend who did not feel up to working every day,
and so it was well to start the business going at once. In this respect, then, he real-
ized with a smile and pleasant feelings of surprise, the cautious old author of the
Pocket Calendar had been perfectly right.

The very next day, since his office hours happened to end early, he sent for Tegularius.
He came, made his bow with that rather markedly submissive and humble expression he had
assumed in his dealings with Knecht, and was quite astonished not to be addressed in the
laconic manner his friend had recently adopted. Instead, Joseph nodded to him with a
certain roguishness and asked: "Do you recall that in our student years we once had some-
thing like a quarrel in which I failed to convert you to my view? It was about the value
and importance of Far Eastern studies, particularly Chinese subjects, and I tried to per-
suade you to spend a while in the college learning Chinese? You do remember? Well, I am
thinking again what a pity that I could not persuade you at that time. It would be so
fortunate now if you knew Chinese. There's a marvelous project on which we could colla-
borate."

He teased his friend a while longer, holding him in suspense, and finally came out with
his proposal: that he wanted to begin working out the annual Game and would like Fritz,
if it were agreeable to him, to take over a large part of this work, just as he had
helped with the preparations for the prize Game in the elite competition while Knecht
was living among the Benedictines. Fritz looked at him almost incredulously, profoundly
surprised and delightfully upset by the merry tone and smiling face of his friend, who
had been comporting himself solely as superior and Magister toward him. Joyfully stir-
red, he was conscious not only of the honor and confidence expressed by this proposal,
but also grasped the significance of this handsome gesture. He realized that it was an
attempt at healing the breach, at reopening the newly closed door between his friend
and himself. He brushed aside the factor of his ignorance of Chinese, and promptly de-
clared his willingness to be wholly at the Reverend Magister's disposal and to devote
his full time to developing the Game.

"Good," the Magister said, "I accept your offer. So we shall once again be sharing per-
iods of work and studies, as we used to in those days that seem strangely far away,
when we worked through and fought through so many a Game. I am glad, Tegularius. And
now the main thing is for you to inform yourself concerning the underlying idea of the
Game. You must come to understand what a Chinese house is and the meaning of the
rules for its construction. I shall give you a recommendation to the Far Eastern Col-
lege; they will help you there. Or--something else occurs to me--a prettier notion.
Perhaps we can try Elder Brother, the man in the Bamboo Grove, whom I used to tell
you so much about. He may feel it beneath his dignity, or too much trouble to bother
with someone who knows no Chinese, but we might try it at any rate. If he cares to,
this man can make a Chinese of you."

A message was sent to Elder Brother, cordially inviting him to come to Waldzell for
a while as the Glass Bead Game Master's guest, since the cares of office did not per-
mit the Magister Ludi to call on him and explain what help he wanted of him. Elder
Brother, however, did not leave his Bamboo Grove. The messenger returned with a note
in Chinese ink and script. It read: "It would be honorable to behold the great man.
But movement leads to obstacles. Let two small bowls be used for the sacrifice. The
younger one greets the exalted one."

Knecht thereupon persuaded his friend, not without difficulty, to make the trip to
the Bamboo Grove and ask to be received and instructed. But the journey proved fruit-
less. The hermit in the grove received Tegularius almost deferentially, but answered
every one of his questions with amiable aphorisms in the Chinese language and did
not invite him to stay, despite the fine letter of recommendation from the hand of
the Magister Ludi, drawn elegantly on handsome paper. Rather out of sorts, having ac-
complished nothing, Fritz returned to Waldzell. He brought back a gift for the Magi-
ster: a sheet of paper on which was carefully brushed an ancient verse about a gold-
fish.

Tegularius now had to try his luck in the College of Far Eastern Studies. There
Knecht's recommendations proved more effective. As a Magister's emissary, the peti-
tioner was given a friendly reception and all the help he needed. Before long he
had learned as much about his subject as could possibly be acquired without know-
ledge of Chinese, and in the course of his work he became so intrigued with Knecht's
idea of using house symbolism for the underpinning of the Game that his failure
in the Bamboo Grove ceased rankling, and was forgotten.

While he listened to Fritz's report on his visit to Elder Brother, and afterward,
by himself, while he read the lines about the goldfish, Knecht felt surrounded by
the hermit's atmosphere. Vivid memories arose of his long-ago stay in the hut, with
the rustling bamboos and yarrow stalks outside, along with other memories of free-
dom, leisure, student days, and the colorful paradise of youthful dreams. How this
brave, crotchety hermit had contrived to withdraw and keep his freedom; how his
tranquil Bamboo Grove sheltered him from the world; how deeply and strongly he live-
d in his neat, pedantic and wise Sinicism; in how beautifully concentrated and in-
violable a way the magic spell of his life's dream enclosed him year after year and
decade after decade, making a China of his garden, a temple of his hut, divinities
of his fish, and a sage of himself! With a sigh, Knecht shook off this notion. He
himself had gone another way, or rather been led, and what counted was to pursue
his assigned way straightforwardly and faithfully, not to compare it with the ways
of others.

Together with Tegularius, he sketched out and composed his Game, using whatever
leisure hours he could find. He left the entire task of selection in the Archives, as
well as the first and second drafts, to his friend. Given this new content, their
friendship acquired life and form once more, though the form differed from that of
the past. Fritz's eccentricities and imaginative subtlety colored and enriched the
pattern of their Game. He was one of those eternally dissatisfied and yet self-suf-
ficient individuals who can linger for hours over a bouquet of flowers or a set table
that anyone else would regard as complete, rearranging the details with restive
pleasure and nervous loving manipulations, turning the littlest task into an absorb-
ing day's work.

In future years the association persisted: the ceremonial Game represented a joint
accomplishment each time thereafter. For Tegularius it was a double satisfaction to
prove that he was more than useful, indispensable, to his friend and Master in so
important a matter, and to witness the public performance of the Game as the unname-
d collaborator whose part was nevertheless well known to the members of the elite.

One day in the late autumn of Knecht's first year in office, while his friend was still
deep in his initial studies of China, the Magister paused as he was skimming through the
entries in his secretariat's daily calendar. He had come upon a note that caught his in-
terest: "Student Petrus, arrived from Monteport, recommended by Magister Musicae, brings
special greetings from former Music Master, requests lodgings and admission to Archives.
Has been put up in student guesthouse." Knecht could be easy in his mind about leaving
the student and his request to the Archive staff; that was routine. But "special greet-
ings from the former Music Master" was directed only to himself. He sent for the student
— who turned out to be a quiet young man, at once contemplative and intense. Evidently
he belonged to the Monteport elite; at any rate he seemed accustomed to audiences with
a Magister. Knecht asked what message the former Music Master had given him.

"Greetings," the student said, "very cordial and respectful greetings for you, reverend
sir, along with an invitation."

Knecht asked him to sit down. Carefully choosing his words, the young man continued: "As I
have said, the venerable former Magister requested me to give you his warmest regards. He
also hinted that he hoped to see you in the near future, in fact as soon as possible. He
invites you, or urges you, to visit him before too long a time has passed, assuming, of
course, that the visit can be fitted into an official journey and will not excessively
discommode you. That is the burden of the message."

Knecht studied the young man, convinced that he was one of the old Master's proteges.
Cautiously, he queried: "How long do you linger in our Archives, studioseV

"Until I see that you are setting out for Monteport, reverend sir," was the reply.

Knecht considered a moment. "Very well," he said. "And why have you not repeated the
exact wording of the ex-Master's message, as you should have done?"

Petrus unflinchingly met Knecht's eyes, and answered slowly, still circumspectly choos-
ing his words, as if he were speaking a foreign language. "There is no message, reverend
sir," he said, "and there is no exact wording. You know my reverend Master and know that
he has always been an extraordinarily modest man. In Monteport it is said that in his
youth, while he was still a tutor but already recognized by the entire elite as predestin-
ed to be the Music Master, they nicknamed him 'the great would-be-small.' Well, this mod-
esty, and his piety no less, his helpfulness, thoughtfulness, and tolerance have actually
increased ever since he grew old, and more so since he resigned his office. Undoubtedly
you know that better than I. This modesty of his would forbid him to do anything like ask-
ing your Reverence for a visit, no matter how much he desired it. That is why, Domine, I
have not been honored with any such message and nevertheless have acted as if I received
one. If that was a mistake, you are free to regard the nonexistent message as actually
nonexistent."

Knecht smiled faintly. "And what about your work in the Game Archives, my good fellow?
Was that mere pretext?"

"Oh no. I have to obtain the ciphers for a number of clefs, so that I would in any case
have had to cast myself upon your hospitality in the near future. But I thought it advis-
able to speed this little journey somewhat."

"Very good," the Magister said, nodding, his expression once again grave. "Is it permis-
sible to ask into the reason for this haste?"

The young man closed his eyes for a moment. His forehead was deeply furrowed, as though
the question pained him. Then he looked once more into the Magister's face with his
searching, youthfully incisive gaze.

"The question cannot be answered unless you would be so good as to frame it more
precisely."

"Very well then," Knecht said. "Is the former Master's health bad? Does it give reason for
anxiety?"

Although the Magister had spoken with the greatest calm, the student perceived his affect-
ionate concern for the old man. For the first time since the beginning of their conversation
a gleam of good will appeared in his rather fierce eyes, and as he at last prepared to state
candidly the real object of his visit, his voice sounded a trace friendlier and less distant.

"Reverend Magister," he said, "rest assured that my honored Master's condition is by no
means bad. He has always enjoyed excellent health and does so still, although his advanced age
has naturally greatly weakened him. It is not that his appearance has so much changed or that his
strength had suddenly begun to diminish rapidly. He takes little walks, plays a little music every
day, and until recently even continued to give two pupils organ lessons, beginners moreover, for
he has always preferred to be surrounded by the youngest pupils. But the fact that he dismissed
these pupils a few weeks ago is a symptom that caught my attention all the same, and since then I
have watched the venerable Master rather more closely, and drawn my conclusions about him.
That is the reason I have come. If anything justifies my conclusions, and my taking such a step, it
is the fact that I myself was formerly one of the former Music Master's pupils, more or less one
of his favorites, if I may say so; moreover, for the past year I have served him as a kind of
secretary and companion, the present Music Master having named me to look after him. It was a
very welcome assignment; there is no one in the world for whom I feel such veneration and
attachment as I do for my old teacher and patron. It was he who opened up the mystery of music
for me, and made me capable of serving it; and everything I may have acquired since in the way
of ideas, respect for the Order, maturity, and inner concord has all come from him and is his
doing. This past year I have been living at his side, and although I am occupied with a few
studies and courses of my own, I am always at his disposal, his companion at table and on walks,
making music with him, and sleeping in an adjoining room. Being so close to him all the time, I
have been able to keep close watch over the stages of--I suppose I must say, of his aging, his
physical aging. A few of my associates comment pityingly or scornfully now and then about its
being a peculiar assignment that so young a person as myself should be the servant and compan-
ion of a very old man. But they do not know, and aside from myself I suspect no one really
knows, what kind of aging the Master is privileged to undergo. They do not see him gradually
growing weaker and frailer in the body, taking less and less nourishment, returning from his
short walks more fatigued every time, without ever being really sick, and at the same time be-
coming, in the tranquility of age, more and more spiritual, devout, dignified, and simple in
heart. If my office of secretary and attendant has any difficulties at all, they arise solely
from the fact that his Reverence does not want to be waited on and tended at all. He still
wants only to give and never to take."

"Thank you," Knecht said. "I am happy to know that his Reverence has so devoted and grateful
a pupil at his side. And now, since you are not speaking on his orders, tell me plainly
why you feel that I should visit Monteport."

"You asked with concern about the reverend former Music Master's health," the young man an-
swered, "evidently because my request suggested to you that he might be ill and it could be
high time to pay him one last visit. To be frank, I do think it is high time. He certainly does
not seem to me to be close to his end, but his way of taking leave of the world is quite unique.
For the past several months, for example, he has almost entirely lost the habit of speaking; and
although he always preferred brevity to loquacity, he has now reached a degree of brevity and
silence that frightens me somewhat. At first, when he did not answer a remark or question of
mine, I thought that his hearing was beginning to weaken. But he hears almost as well as ever; I
have made many tests of that. I therefore had to assume that he was distracted and could no
longer focus his attention. But this, too, is not an adequate explanation. Rather, it is as if he
has been on his way elsewhere for some time, and no longer lives entirely among us, but more and
more in his own world. He rarely visits anyone or sends for anyone; aside from me he no longer
sees another person for days. Ever since this started, this absentness, this detachment, I have
tried to urge the few friends whom I know he loved most to see him. If you were to visit him,
Domine, you would make your old friend happy, I am sure of that, and you would still find rela-
tively the same man whom you have revered and loved. In a few months, perhaps only in a few
weeks, his pleasure in seeing you and his interest in you will probably be much less; it is even
possible that he would no longer recognize you, or at any rate pay attention to you."

Knecht stood up, went to the window, and stood there for a while looking out and breathing
deeply. When he turned back to Petrus he saw that the student was also standing, as though he
thought the audience over. The Magister extended his hand.

"I thank you once more, Petrus," he said. "As you surely know, a Magister has all sorts of
duties. I cannot put on my hat and leave at once; schedules have to be rearranged. I hope that I
shall be able to leave by day after tomorrow. Would that be time enough, and would you be able
to finish your work in the Archives by then? Yes? Then I shall send for you when I am ready."

A few days later Knecht left for Monteport, accompanied by Petrus. When they reached
the pavilion in the gardens where the former Music Master now lived--it was a lovely and
beautifully tranquil monastic cell--they heard music from the back room, delicate, thin, but
rhythmically firm and deliciously serene music. There the old man sat playing a two-part melody
with two fingers--Knecht guessed at once that it must be from one of the many books of duets
written at the end of the sixteenth century. They remained outside until the music ended; then
Petrus called out to his master that he was back and had brought a visitor. The old man appeared
in the doorway and gave them a welcoming look. The Music Master's welcoming smile, which
everyone loved, had always had an open, childlike cordiality, a radiant friendliness; Joseph
Knecht had seen it for the first time nearly thirty years before, and his heart had opened and
surrendered to this friendly man during that tense but blissful morning hour in the music room.
Since then he had seen this smile often, each time with deep rejoicing and a strange stirring of
his heart; and while the Master's gray-shot hair had gradually turned completely gray and then
white, while his voice had grown softer, his handshake fainter, his movements less supple, the
smile had lost none of its brightness and grace, its purity and depth. And this time Joseph, the
old man's friend and former pupil, saw the change beyond a doubt. The radiant, welcoming message
of that smiling old man's face, whose blue eyes and delicately flushed cheeks had grown paler
with the passing years, was both the same and not the same. It had grown deeper, more myster-
ious, and intense. Only now, as he was exchanging greetings, did Knecht really begin to under-
stand what the student Petrus had been concerned about, and how greatly he himself, while
thinking he was making a sacrifice for the sake of this concern, was in fact receiving a
benefaction.

His friend Carlo Ferromonte was the first person to whom he spoke about this. Ferromonte was
at this time librarian at the famous Monteport music library, and Knecht called on him a few
hours later. Their conversation has been preserved in a letter of Ferromonte's.

"Our former Music Master was your teacher, of course," Knecht said, "and you were very fond
of him. Do you see him often nowadays?"

"No," Carlo replied. "That is, I see him fairly often, of course, when he is taking his walk,
say, and I happen to be coming out of the library. But I haven't talked with him for months. He is
more and more withdrawing and no longer seems able to bear sociability. In the past he used to
set aside an evening for people like me, those among his former subordinates who are officials in
Monteport now; but that stopped about a year ago. It amazed us all that he went to Waldzell for
your investiture."

"Ah yes," Knecht said. "But when you do see him occasionally, haven't you been struck by any
change in him?"

"Oh yes. You mean his fine appearance, his cheerfulness, his curious radiance? Of course we
have noticed that. While his strength is diminishing, that serene cheerfulness is constantly
increasing. We have grown accustomed to it. But I suppose it would strike you."

"His secretary Petrus sees far more of him than you do," Knecht exclaimed, "but he hasn't
grown accustomed to it, as you say. He came specially to Waldzell, on a plausible excuse, of
course, to urge me to make this visit. What do you think of him?"

"Of Petrus? He has a first-rate knowledge of music, though he's more on the pedantic than
the brilliant side--a rather slow-moving if not slow-witted person. He's totally devoted to the
former Music Master and would give his life for him. I imagine his serving the master he ido-
lizes is the whole content of his life; he's obsessed by him. Didn't you have that impression
too?"

"Obsessed? Yes, but I don't think this young man is obsessed simply by a fondness and pass-
ion; he's not just infatuated with his old teacher and making an idol out of him, but obsessed
and enchanted by an actual and genuine phenomenon which he sees better, or has better under-
stood emotionally, than the rest of you. I want to tell you how it struck me. When I went to
the former Master today, after not having seen him for six months, I expected little or nothing
from this visit, after the hints his secretary had dropped. I had simply been alarmed to think
that the revered old man might suddenly depart from us in the near future, and had hastened here
in order to see him at least once more. When he recognized and greeted me, his face glowed, but
he said no more than my name and shook hands with me. That gesture, too, and his hand, seemed to
me also to glow; the whole man, or at least his eyes, his white hair, and his rosy skin, seemed
to emit a cool, gentle radiance. I sat down with him. He sent the student away, just with a look,
and there began the oddest conversation I have ever had. At the beginning, I admit, it was very
disturbing and depressing for me, and shaming also, for I kept addressing the old man, or asking
questions, and his only answer to anything was a look. I could not make out whether my questions
and the things I told him were anything but an annoying noise to him. He confused, disappointed,
and tired me; I felt altogether superfluous and importunate. Whatever I said to the Master, the
only response was a smile and a brief glance. If those glances had not been so full of good will
and cordiality, I would have been forced to think that he was frankly making fun of me, of my
stories and questions, of the whole useless trouble I had taken to come and visit him. As a mat-
ter of fact, his silence and his smile did indeed contain something of the sort. They were act-
ually a form of fending me off and reproving me, except that they were so in a different way,
on a differing plane of meaning from, say, mocking words. I had first to wear myself out and
suffer total shipwreck with what had seemed to me my patient efforts to start a conversation,
before I began to realize that the old man could easily have manifested a patience, persistence,
and politeness a hundred times greater than mine. Perhaps the episode lasted only fifteen minutes
or half an hour; it seemed to me like half a day. I began to feel sad, tired, and angry, and to
repent my journey. My mouth felt dry. There sat the man I revered, my patron, my friend, whom
I had loved and trusted ever since I could think, who had always responded to whatever I might
say--there he sat and listened to me talk, or perhaps did not listen to me, and had barricaded
himself completely behind his radiance and smile, behind his golden mask, unreachable, belong-
ing to a different world with different laws; and everything I tried to bring by speech from
our world to his ran off him like rain from a stone. At last--I had already given up hope--he
broke through the magic wall; at last he helped me; at last he said a few words. Those were the
only words I heard him speak today.

" 'You are tiring yourself, Joseph,' he said softly, his voice full of that touching friend-
liness and solicitude you know so well. That was all. 'You are tiring yourself, Joseph.' As
if he had long been watching me engaged in a too-strenuous task and wanted to admonish me to
stop. He spoke the words with some effort, as though he had not used his lips for speaking for
a long time. And at that moment he laid his hand on my arm--it was light as a butterfly--
looked penetratingly into my eyes, and smiled. At that moment I was conquered. Something of his
cheerful silence, something of his patience and calm, passed into me; and suddenly I understood
the old man and the direction his nature had taken, away from people and toward silence, away
from words and toward music, away from ideas and toward unity. I understood what I was privil-
eged to see here, and now for the first time grasped the meaning of this smile, this radiance.
A saint, one who had attained perfection, had permitted me to dwell in his radiance for an hour;
and blunderer that I am, I had tried to entertain him, to question him, to seduce him into a
conversation. Thank God the light had not dawned on me too late. He might have sent me away
and thus rejected me forever. And I would have been deprived of the most remarkable and won-
derful experience I have ever had."

"I see," Ferromonte said thoughtfully, "that you have discovered something akin to a saint
in our former Music Master. A good thing that you and none other has told me about this. I
confess that I would have received such a story with the greatest distrust from anyone else.
I am, taken all in all, not fond of mysticism; as a musician and historian I am pedantically
given to neat classification. Since we Castalians are neither a Christian congregation nor a
Hindu or Taoist monastery, I do not see that any of us qualify for sainthood--that is, for a
purely religious category. Coming from anyone but you, Joseph--excuse me, I mean Domine--I
would regard any such ascription as going off the deep end. But I imagine you do not mean to
initiate canonization proceedings for our former Master; you would scarcely find a competent
consistory for them in our Order. No, don't interrupt me, I am speaking seriously; I don't
mean that as a joke at all. You have told me about an experience, and I must admit that I feel
somewhat ashamed, because neither I nor any of my colleagues here at Monteport has entirely
overlooked the phenomenon you describe. No, we have merely noticed it and paid it little heed.
I am reflecting on the reason for my failure and my indifference. One explanation of course
is the fact that you encountered the Master's transformation as a finished product, whereas I
witnessed its slow evolution. The former Magister you saw months ago and the one you saw today
differed sharply from each other, whereas we, his neighbors, meeting him every so often, ob-
served almost imperceptible changes. But I admit that this explanation doesn't satisfy me. If
something like a miracle is taking place before our eyes, however quietly and slowly, we ought
to have been more stirred by it than we have been, and would have been if we had been unbiased.
Here, I think, I've hit on the reason for my obtuseness: I was not in the least unbiased. I
failed to observe the phenomenon because I did not want to observe it. Like everyone else, I
noticed our Master's increasing withdrawal and taciturnity, and the concurrent increase in his
friendliness, the ever-brighter and more ethereal radiance of his face when we met and he re-
sponded mutely to my greeting. I noticed that, of course, and so did everyone else. But I fought
against seeing anything more in it, and I fought against it not from lack of reverence for the
old Magister, but in part out of distaste for the cult of personality and enthusiasm in general,
in part out of distaste for such enthusiasm in this special case, for the kind of cult the stu-
dent Petrus practices with his idolization of the Master. I've only fully realized all this as
you were telling your story."

Knecht laughed. "That was quite a roundabout way for you to discover your own dislike for poor
Petrus," he said. "But what now? Am I also a mystic and enthusiast? Am I too indulging in the
forbidden cult of personality and hagiolatry? Or are you admitting to me what you won't admit
to the student, that we have seen and experienced something real, objective, not mere dreams
and fancies?"

"Of course I admit it to you," Carlo replied slowly and thoughtfully. "No one is going to deny
your experience or doubt the beauty and serenity of the Magister who can smile at us in that
incredible way. The question is only: Where do we classify this phenomenon? What do we call
it, how explain it? That sounds like the pedantic schoolmaster, but we Castalians are school-
masters, after all; and if I want to classify and find a term for your and our experience, it is
not because I wish to destroy its beauty by generalizing it, but because I want to describe and
preserve it as distinctly as possible. If on a journey I hear a peasant or child humming a melody I
have never heard before, that is likewise an important experience for me, and if I immediately try
to transcribe this melody as precisely as I can, I am not dismissing and filing it away, but paying
due honor to my experience, and taking care that it is not lost."

Knecht gave him a friendly nod. "Carlo," he said, "it is a great pity we can so rarely see
each other any more. Not all friendships of youth survive reunions. I came to you with my story
about the old Magister because you are the only person here whose knowing and sharing it mat-
ters to me. Now I must leave it to you to do with my story whatever you like, and to assign what-
ever term you will to our Master's transfigured state. It would make me happy if you would call
on him and stay in his aura for a little while. His state of grace, perfection, wisdom of age,
bliss, or whatever we want to call it, may belong to religious life. But although we Castalians
have neither denominations nor churches, piety is not altogether unknown to us. And our former
Music Master in particular was always a thoroughly pious person. Since there are accounts of
blessed, perfected, radiant, transfigured souls in many religions, why should not our Castalian
piety occasionally have this kind of blossoming?. . . It is late by now--I ought to go to sleep
— I must leave early tomorrow morning. But I hope to come back soon. Let me just briefly tell you
the end of my story. After he had said to me, 'You are tiring yourself,' I was at last able to stop
straining at conversation; I managed not only to be still, but to turn my will away from the
foolish goal of using words in the effort to probe this man of silence and draw profit from him.
And the moment I gave up that effort and left everything to him, it all went of its own accord.
You may want to substitute terms of your own for mine, but please listen to me, even if I seem
vague or confound categories. I stayed about an hour or an hour and a half with the old man,
and I cannot communicate to you what went on between us or what was exchanged; certainly no
words were spoken. I felt, after my resistance was broken, only that he received me into his
peace and his brightness; cheerful serenity and a wonderful peace enclosed the two of us. With-
out my having deliberately and consciously meditated, it somewhat resembled an unusually suc-
cessful and gladdening meditation whose subject might have been the Magister's life. I saw or
felt him and the course of his growth from the time he first entered my life, when I was a boy,
up to this present moment. His was a life of devotion and work, but free of obstructions, free
of ambition, and full of music. It was as if by becoming a musician and Music Master he had
chosen music as one of the ways toward man's highest goal, inner freedom, purity, perfection,
and as though ever since making that choice he had done nothing but let himself be more and
more permeated, transformed, purified by music--his entire self from his nimble, clever pianist's
hands and his vast, well-stocked musician's memory to all the parts and organs of body and soul,
to his pulses and breathing, to his sleep and dreaming--so that he was now only a symbol, or
rather a manifestation, a personification of music. At any rate, I experienced what radiated from
him, or what surged back and forth between him and me like rhythmic breathing, entirely as
music, as an altogether immaterial esoteric music which absorbs everyone who enters its magic
circle as a song for many voices absorbs an entering voice. Perhaps a non-musician would have
perceived this grace in different images: an astronomer might have seen it as a moon circling
around a planet, or a philologist heard it as some magical primal language containing all
meanings. But enough for now, I must be going. It's been a great pleasure, Carlo."

We have reported this episode in some detail, since the Music Master held so important a
place in Knecht's life and heart. We have also been drawn into prolixity by the chance
circumstance that Knecht's talk with Ferromonte has come down to us in the latter's own record
of it in a letter. This is certainly the earliest and most reliable account of the Music Master's
"transfiguration"; later, of course, there was a swarm of legends and embroideries.




　　　　　　　　　　　　　　EIGHT

　　　　　　　　　　　THE TWO POLES




The ANNUAL Game, remembered to this day as the Chinese House Game, and often quoted,
was for Knecht and his friend Tegularius a happy outcome to their labors, and for Castalia and
the Boards proof that they had done well to summon Knecht to the highest office. Once more
Waldzell, the Players' Village, and the elite had the satisfaction of a splendid and exultant
festival. Not for many years had the annual Game been such an event as it was this time,
with the youngest and most-discussed Magister in Castalian history making his first public
appearance and showing what he could do. Moreover, Waldzell was determined to make up for
the failure and disgrace of the previous year. This time no one lay ill, no cowed deputy awaited
the great ceremony with apprehension, coldly ringed by the malevolent distrust of the elite,
faithfully but listessly supported by nervous officials. Quiet, inaccessible, entirely the high
priest, white-and-gold-clad major piece on the solemn chessboard of symbols, the Magister cel-
ebrated his and his friend's work. Radiating calm, strength, and dignity, beyond the reach of
any profane summons, he appeared in the festival hall in the midst of his many acolytes, con-
ducting step after step of his Game with the ritual gestures. With a luminous golden stylus
he delicately inscribed character after character on the small tablet before him, and the same
characters promptly appeared in the script of the Game, enlarged a hundredfold, upon the gi-
gantic board on the rear wall of the hall, to be spelled out by a thousand whispering voices,
called out by the Speakers, broadcast to the country and the world. And when at the end of
the first act he wrote the summary formula for that act upon his tablet, with graceful and
impressive poise gave instructions for the meditation, laid down the stylus and, taking his
seat, assumed the perfect meditation posture, in the hall, in the Players' Village, throughout
Castalia and beyond, in many countries of the globe, the faithful devotees of the Glass Bead
Game reverently sat down for the selfsame meditation and sustained it until the moment the
Magister in the hall rose to his feet once again. It was all as it had been many times before,
and yet it was all stirring and new. The abstract and seemingly timeless world of the Game was
flexible enough to respond, in a hundred nuances, to the mind, voice, temperament, and hand-
writing of a given personality, and the personality in this case was great and cultivated e-
nough to subordinate his own inspirations to the inviolable inner laws of the Game itself.
The assistants and fellow players, the elite, obeyed like well-drilled soldiers, yet each one
of them, even though he might be executing only the bows or helping to draw the curtain around
the meditating Master, seemed to be performing his own Game, inspired by his own ideas. But
it was the crowd, the great congregation filling the hall and all of Waldzell, the thousands
of souls who followed the Master down the hieratic and labyrinthine ways through the endless,
multidimensional imagery of the Game, who furnished the fundamental chord for the ceremony,
the low, throbbing base bellnote, which for the more simple-hearted members of the community
is the best and almost the only experience the festival yields, but which also awakens awe
in the subtle virtuosi and critics of the elite, in the acolytes and officials all the way
up to the leader and Master.

It was an exalted festival. Even the envoys from the outside world sensed this, and pro-
claimed it; and in the course of those days a good many new converts were won over to the
Glass Bead Game forever. In the light of this triumph, however, Joseph Knecht, at the end
of the ten-day festival, made some highly curious remarks in summing up the experience to
his friend Tegularius. "We may be content," he said. "Yes, Castalia and the Glass Bead Game
are wonderful things; they come close to being perfect. Only perhaps they are too much so,
too beautiful. They are so beautiful that one can scarcely contemplate them without fear-
ing for them. It is not pleasant to think that some day they are bound to pass away as ev-
erything else does. And yet one must think of that."

With this historic statement, the biographer is forced to approach the most delicate and mys-
terious part of his task. Indeed, he would have preferred to postpone it for a while longer
and continue--with that placidity which clear and unambiguous conditions afford to the nar-
rator of them--to depict Knecht' s successes, his exemplary conduct of his office, the bril-
liant peak of his life. But it would seem to us misleading, and out of keeping with our sub-
ject, if we failed to take account of the duality, or call it polarity, in the revered Master's
life and character, even though it was so far known to no one but Tegularius. From now on
our task, in fact, will be to accept this dichotomy in Knecht's soul, or rather this ever-
alternating polarity, as the central feature of his nature, and to affirm it as such. As a
matter of fact, a biographer who thought it proper to deal with the life of a Castalian Mag-
ister entirely in the spirit of hagiography, ad maiorem gloriam Castaliae, would not find it
at all difficult to describe Joseph Knecht's years as Magister, with the sole exception of
the last moments, entirely as a glorious list of achievements, duties performed, and suc-
cesses. To the eye of the historian who holds solely to the documented facts, Magister
Knecht's conduct in office appears as blameless and praiseworthy as that of any Glass Bead
Game Master in history, not even excepting that of Magister Ludwig Wassermaler who reigned
during the era of Waldzell's most exuberant passion for the Game. Nevertheless, Knecht's
period in office came to a most unusual, sensational, and to the minds of many judges scan-
dalous end, and this end was not mere chance or misfortune but a wholly logical outcome of
what went before. It is part of our task to show that it by no means contradicts the reverend
Master's brilliant and laudable achievements. Knecht was a great, an exemplary administrator,
an honor to his high office, an irreproachable Glass Bead Game Master. But he saw and felt the
glory of Castalia, even as he devoted himself to it, as an imperiled greatness that was on the
wane. He did not participate in its life thoughtlessly and unsuspectingly, as did the great ma-
jority of his fellow Castalians, for he knew about its origins and history, was conscious of it
as a historical entity, subject to time, washed and undermined by time's pitiless surges. This
sensitivity to the pulse of historical process and this feeling for his own self and activities
as a cell carried along in the stream of growth and transformation, had ripened within him in the
course of his historical studies. Much was due to the influence of the great Benedictine Father
Jacobus, but the germs of such consciousness had been present within him long before. Anyone
who honestly tries to explore the meaning of that life, to analyze its idiosyncrasy, will easily
discover these germs.

The man who could say, on one of the finest days of his life, at the end of his first festival
Game and after a singularly successful and impressive demonstration of the Castalian spirit, "It
is not pleasant to think that some day Castalia and the Glass Bead Game are bound to pass away--
and yet one must think of that"--this man had early on, long before he had acquired insight into
history, borne within himself a metaphysical sense of the transitoriness of all that has evolved
and the problematical nature of everything created by the human mind. If we go back to his boy-
hood we will remember his depression and uneasiness whenever a fellow pupil disappeared from
Eschholz because he had disappointed his teachers and been demoted from the elite to the ordin-
ary schools. There is no record that a single one of those expelled had been a close friend of
young Joseph; what disturbed him was not personal loss, not the absence of this or that indi-
vidual. Rather, his grief was caused by the mild shock to his child's faith in the permanence
of Castalian order and Castalian perfection. He himself took his vocation so seriously as
something sacred, and yet there were boys and youths who had been granted the happiness of
acceptance into the elite schools of the Province and had squandered this boon, thrown it away.
This was shocking, and a sign of the power of the world outside Castalia. Perhaps also--though
here we can only speculate--such incidents aroused the boy's first doubts of the Board of
Educators' infallibility, since this Board now and then brought to Castalia pupils whom it
subsequently had to dismiss again. There is no saying whether these earliest stirrings of
criticism of authority also affected his thinking.

In any case, the boy felt every dismissal of an elite pupil not only as a misfortune, but also
as an impropriety, an ugly glaring stain, whose presence was in itself a reproach involving
all of Castalia. This, we think, is the basis for that feeling of shock and distraction which
Knecht as a schoolboy experienced on such occasions. Outside, beyond the boundaries of the
Province, was a way of life which ran counter to Castalia and its laws, which did not abide by
the Castalian system and could not be tamed and sublimated by it. And of course he was aware
of the presence of this world in his own heart also. He too had impulses, fantasies, and des-
ires which ran counter to the laws that governed him, impulses which he had only gradually
managed to subdue by hard effort.

These impulses, he concluded, could be so strong in a good many pupils that they erupted des-
pite all restraints and led those who yielded to them away from the elite world of Castalia and
into that other world which was dominated not by discipline and cultivation of the mind, but by
instincts. To one striving for Castalian virtue that world seemed sometimes a wicked underworld,
sometimes a tempting playground and arena. For generations many young consciences have experi-
enced the concept of sin in this Castalian form. And many years later, as an adult student of
history, Knecht was to perceive more distinctly that history cannot come into being without
the substance and the dynamism of this sinful world of egoism and instinctuality, and that even
such sublime creations as the Order were born in this cloudy torrent and sooner or later will
be swallowed up by it again. This is what underlay all the powerful movements, aspirations, and
upheavals in Knecht's life. Nor was this ever merely an intellectual problem for him. Rather,
it engaged his innermost self more than any other problem, and he felt it as partly his respon-
sibility. His was one of those natures which can sicken, languish, and die when they see an
ideal they have believed in, or the country and community they love, afflicted with ills.

Tracing this same thread further, we come to Knecht's first period in Waldzell, his final
years as a schoolboy, and his significant meeting with the guest pupil Designori, which we have
described in detail in its proper place. This encounter between the ardent adherent of the
Castalian ideals and the worldling Plinio was not only intense and long-lasting in its effects,
but also had a deeply symbolic significance for young Knecht. For the strenuous and important
role imposed upon him at that time, seemingly sent his way by sheer chance, in fact so closely
corresponded with his whole nature that we are tempted to say his later life was nothing but a
reiteration of this role, an ever more perfect adaptation to it. The role, of course, was that
of champion and representer of Castalia. He had to play it once more some ten years later a
gainst Father Jacobus, and as Master of the Glass Bead Game he played it to the end: champion
and representative of the Order and its laws, but one who was constantly endeavoring to learn
from his antagonist and to promote not the rigid isolation of Castalia, but its vital collabo-
ration and confrontation with the outside world. The oratorical contest with Designori had been
partly a game. With his far more substantial friendly antagonist, Father Jacobus, it was alto-
gether serious. He had proved himself against both opponents, had matured in his encounter
with them, had learned from them, had given as much as he had taken in the course of their
disputes and exchanges of views. In neither case had he defeated his antagonist; from the
start that had not, after all, been the goal of the disputations. But he had succeeded in mak-
ing each of them respect him as a person, and the principles and ideal he advocated. Even if
the disputation with the learned Benedictine had not led directly to its practical result, the
establishment of a semi-official Castalian envoy at the Holy See, it would have been of
greater value than the majority of Castalians could have guessed.

These embattled friendships with Plinio Designori and with the wise old Benedictine had
provided Knecht, who otherwise had had little to do with the world outside Castalia, with some
knowledge, or at any rate some intuitions, about that world. Few persons in Castalia could say
the same for themselves. Except for his stay in Mariafels, which could scarcely give him any
acquaintance with the real life of the outside world, he had neither seen nor experienced this
worldly life since his early childhood. But through Designori, through Jacobus, and through his
historical studies he had acquired a lively sense of its reality. His intimations, though they
were mostly intuitive and accompanied by very meager experience, had made him more knowledge-
able and more receptive to the world than the majority of his Castalian fellow citizens, in-
cluding the higher authorities. He had always been a loyal and authentic Castalian, but he
never forgot that Castalia was only a small part of the world, though for him the most val-
uable and beloved part.

What was the character of his friendship with Fritz Tegularius, that difficult and prob-
lematical character, that sublime acrobat of the Glass Bead Game, that pampered and high-
strung pure Castalian whose brief visit among the coarse Benedictines in Mariafels had made
him so wretched that he declared he could not have stayed there a week, and enormously ad-
mired his friend for enduring the life there quite well for two years? We have entertained a
wide variety of thoughts about this friendship, have had to reject some of them, while others
seemed to stand up to examination. All these thoughts centered around the question of what the
root and the significance of this lasting friendship must have been. Above all we should not
forget that in all of Knecht's friendships, with the possible exception of that with the Bene-
dictine Father, he was not the seeking, courting, and needy partner. He attracted, he was ad-
mired, envied, and loved simply for his noble nature; and from a certain stage of his "awak-
ening" on he was even conscious of this gift. Thus he had already been admired and courted
by Tegularius in his early student years, but had always kept him at a certain distance.

Nevertheless, there are many tokens that he was really fond of his friend. As we see it, it
was not just the latter's outstanding talent, his nervous brilliance and receptivity, partic-
ularly to all the problems of the Glass Bead Game, that drew Knecht to him. Rather, Knecht
took so strong an interest not only in his friend's great gifts, but also in his faults, in his sick-
liness, in precisely those qualities that other Waldzellers found disturbing and frequently
intolerable in Tegularius. This eccentric was utterly Castalian. His whole mode of existence,
inconceivable outside the Province, was so entirely consonant with its atmosphere and level
of culture that if he had not been so eccentric and hard to get along with he might have de-
served the epithet arch-Castalian. And yet this arch-Castalian hardly fitted in with his fellows;
he was no more popular with them than with his superiors, the officials. He constantly disturbed
people, repeatedly offended them, and but for the stout protection and guidance of his prudent
friend he would probably have been destroyed very early. For what was called his illness was
primarily a vice, a character defect, a form of rebelliousness. He was profoundly unhierarchical,
totally individualistic in his attitudes and his conduct. He adjusted to the system only enough
to pass muster within the Order.

He was a good, even a shining light as a Castalian to the extent that he had a many-sided
mind, tirelessly active in scholarship as well as in the art of the Glass Bead Game, and
enormously hard-working; but in character, in his attitude toward the hierarchy and the morality
of the Order he was a very mediocre, not to say bad Castalian. The greatest of his vices was a
persistent neglect of meditation, which he refused to take seriously. The purpose of meditation,
after all, is adaptation of the individual to the hierarchy, and application in it might very well
have cured him of his neurasthenia. For it infallibly helped him whenever, after a period of bad
conduct, excessive excitement, or melancholia, his superiors disciplined him by prescribing strict
meditation exercises under supervision. Even Knecht, kindly disposed and forgiving though he
was, frequently had to resort to this measure.

There was no question about it: Tegularius was a willful, moody person who refused to fit in-
to his society. Every so often he would display the liveliness of his intellect. When highly
stimulated he could be entrancing; his mordant wit sparkled and he overwhelmed everyone with
the audacity and richness of his sometimes somber inspirations. But basically he was incurable,
for he did not want to be cured; he cared nothing for co-ordination and a place in the scheme of
things. He loved nothing but his freedom, his perpetual student status, and preferred spending his
whole life as the unpredictable and obstinate loner, the gifted fool and nihilist, to following
the path of subordination to the hierarchy and thus attaining peace. He cared nothing for peace,
had no regard for the hierarchy, hardly minded reproof and isolation. Certainly he was a most
inconvenient and indigestible component in a community whose idea was harmony and orderliness.
But because of this very troublesomeness and indigestibility he was, in the midst of such a
limpid and prearranged little world, a constant source of vital unrest, a reproach, an
admonition and warning, a spur to new, bold, forbidden, intrepid ideas, an unruly, stubborn
sheep in the herd. And, to our mind, this was the very reason his friend cherished him.

Certainly there was always a measure of pity in Knecht's relationship to Tegularius. His
imperiled and usually unhappy state appealed to all his friend's chivalric feelings. But this
would not have sufficed to sustain this friendship after Knecht's elevation to an official
life overburdened with work, duties, and responsibilities. We take the view that Tegularius
was no less necessary and important in Knecht's life than Designori and Father Jacobus had
been. Moreover, exactly like the other two, he was a dynamic element, a small open window that
looked out upon new prospects. In this peculiar friend Knecht sensed, we think, the features
of a type. As time went on he realized that the type was one not yet existent except for Teg-
ularius. For Tegularius was a portent of the Castalian as he might some day become unless the
life of Castalia were rejuvenated and revitalized by new encounters, new forces. Like most
solitary geniuses, Tegularius was a forerunner. He actually lived in a Castalia that did not
yet exist, but might come into being in the future; in a Castalia still sequestered from the
world, but inwardly degenerating from senility and from relaxation of the meditative morality
of the Order; a Castalia in which the highest flights of the mind were still possible, as well
as totally absorbed devotion to sublime values--but this highly developed, freely roaming in-
tellectual culture no longer had any goals beyond egotistic enjoyment of its own overbred fac-
ulties. Knecht saw Tegularius as the two things in one: embodiment of the finest gifts to be
found in Castalia, and at the same time a portent of the demoralization and downfall of those
abilities. Measures must be taken to keep Castalia from becoming a dream-ridden realm populat-
ed entirely by Tegulariuses.

The danger was remote, but it was there. Castalia as Knecht knew it needed only to build its
walls of aristocratic isolation slightly higher, needed only to undergo a decline in the disc-
ipline of the Order, a lowering of the hierarchical morality, and Tegularius would cease to be
an eccentric individual; he would become the prototype of a deteriorating Castalia. Magister
Knecht's most important insight, the source of all his concern, was that the potentiality for
such decadence existed. The disposition for it was there; in fact it had already begun. Probably
he would have realized this much later, perhaps never at all, had not this future Castalian,
whom he knew so intimately, lived at his side. To Knecht's keen instincts, Tegularius was a
danger signal, as the first victim of a still unknown disease would be for a clever physician.
And Fritz was after all no average man; he was an aristocrat, a supremely gifted person. If the
still unknown disease just coming to light in this forerunner Tegularius were ever to spread
and change the whole image of Castalian man, if the Province and the Order were ever to assume
the degenerate, morbid form latent in them, these future Castalians would not be all Tegulari-
uses. Not everyone would have his precious gifts, his melancholy genius, his flickering inten-
sity and acrobatic artistry. Rather, the majority of them would have only his unreliability,
his tendency to fritter away his talents, his lack of any discipline or sense of community. In
times of anxiety Knecht seems to have had such gloomy premonitions; and surely it cost him a
great deal of strength to overcome them, partly by meditation, partly by intensified activity.

The very case of Tegularius offers an instructive example of the way Knecht attempted to ov-
ercome morbidity and temperamental difficulties by meeting them directly. But for Knecht's
watchfulness and pedagogic guidance, his imperiled friend would in all likelihood have come to
grief early in his life. What is more, he would undoubtedly have introduced endless disturbances
into the Players' Village. There had in any case been a good deal of such discord ever since
Fritz had become a member of the elite. With consummate art the Magister kept his friend tole-
rably well on course, while at the same time contriving to employ his gifts in the interests
of the Glass Bead Game and to extract fine achievements from Fritz's talent. The patience with
which he coped with the latter's eccentricities, overcoming them by tirelessly appealing to his
virtues, must be called a masterpiece in the technique of human relations. Incidentally, it would
be a fine project which might yield some surprising insights (we should like to recommend it
strongly to some of our historians of the Glass Bead Game) to subject the annual Games of
Knecht's magistracy to a close analysis of their stylistic peculiarities. These Games, so majestic
and yet sparkling with delightful inspirations and formulations, so scintillating and original in
their rhythms, yet such a far cry from smug virtuosity, owed their underlying idea, their dev-
elopment, and the slant of their series of meditations exclusively to Knecht's mind, whereas
the fine polishing and the minor details of Game technique were mostly the work of his collab-
orator Tegularius. Even had these Games been forgotten, Knecht's life and work would lose none
of its attractiveness and pertinence for posterity. But to our great good fortune they have
been recorded and preserved like all official Games. And they do not merely lie dead in the
Archives. They survive in our traditions to this day, are studied by the young, supply cherish-
ed examples for many a Game course and many a seminar. And in them the collaborator survives,
who otherwise would be forgotten, or would at any rate be no more than a strange, shadowy fig-
ure out of the past, haunting a host of anecdotes.

Thus, in managing to assign a place to his refractory friend Fritz, and in providing him
with an area in which he could work effectively, Knecht enriched the history and culture of
Waldzell, while at the same time assuring his friend's memory a certain permanence. Inciden-
tally, this great educator was well aware of the real basis of his educational influence on
his friend. That basis was his friend's love and admiration. As we have seen, the Magister's
harmonious personality, his innate sense of mastery, had almost from the first won over so many
other fellow aspirants and pupils that he counted on this more than on his high office to sustain
his authority, despite his kindly and conciliatory nature. He sensed precisely the effect of a
friendly word of greeting or appreciation, or of withdrawal and disregard. Long afterward one of
his most ardent disciples related that one time Knecht did not speak a single word to him in class
and in his seminar, seemingly did not see him, ignored him completely--and that in all the years
of his schooling this had been the bitterest and most effective punishment he had ever known.

We have considered these retrospective observations essential in order that our reader
may perceive the two antipodal tendencies in Knecht's personality. Having followed our account
to the present peak of Knecht's remarkable life, the reader will then be prepared for its final
phases. The two tendencies or antipodes of this life, its Yin and Yang, were the conservative
tendency toward loyalty, toward unstinting service of the hierarchy on the one hand, and on the
other hand the tendency toward "awakening," toward advancing, toward apprehending reality.
For Joseph Knecht in his role of believer and devoted servant, the Order, Castalia, the Glass
Bead Game were sacrosanct. To him in his awakened, clairvoyant, pioneering role they were, ir-
respective of their value, full-grown institutions, their struggles long past, vulnerable to the
danger of aging, sterility, and decadence. The idea underlying them always remained sacred to
him, but he had recognized the particular forms that idea had assumed as mutable, perishable, in
need of criticism. He served a community of the mind whose strength and rationality he admired;
but he thought it was running grave risks by tending to see its own existence as the be-all and
end-all, by forgetting its duties to the country and the outside world. If it continued along this
course, growing increasingly separated from the whole of life, it was doomed to fall into ster-
ility. In those earlier years he had had presentiments of this peril; that was why he had so often
hesitated, fearing to devote himself solely to the Glass Bead Game. In discussions with the
monks, and especially with Father Jacobus, the problem had come to mind ever more forcibly,
even while he was bravely defending Castalia. Ever since he had been back in Waldzell, and
holding office as Magister Ludi, he had continually seen tangible symptoms of that danger: in
the loyal but unworldly and formalistic methods of work among his own officials and in many of
the other departments; in the highly intelligent but arrogant expertise of the Waldzell elite;
and last but not least, in the touching but worrisome personality of his friend Tegularius.

With his first difficult year in office behind him, he resumed his historical studies. For the
first time he examined the history of Castalia with his eyes open, and soon became convinced
that things were not going as well as the inhabitants of the Province thought. Castalia's re-
lationships with the outside world, the reciprocal influences operating between Castalia and the
life, politics, and culture of the country, had been on the downgrade for decades. Granted, the
Federal Council still consulted the Board of Educators on pedagogical and cultural matters; the
Province continued to supply the country with good teachers and to pronounce on all questions
of scholarship. But these matters had assumed a routine and mechanical cast. Young men from
the various elites of Castalia nowadays volunteered less eagerly, and less frequently, for teach-
ing assignments extra muros. Individuals and authorities in the rest of the country less frequent-
ly turned for advice to Castalia, whose opinion had in earlier times been sought and listened to
even, for example, on important cases of law. If the cultural level of Castalia were compared
with that of the country at large, it became apparent that the two were by no means approaching
each other; rather, they were moving apart in a deeply troubling way. The more cultivated, speci-
alized, overbred that Castalian intellectuality became, the more the world inclined to let the
Province be and to regard it not as a necessity, as daily bread, but as a foreign body, something
to be a little proud of, like a precious antique which for the time being the owners would not
like to give up or give away, but which they would happily keep stored in the attic. Without fully
grasping the situation, people on the outside attributed to Castalians a mentality, a morality,
and a sense of self which was no longer viable in real, active life.

The interest of the country's citizens in the life of the Pedagogic Province, their sympathy
with its institutions and especially with the Glass Bead Game, were likewise on the downgrade,
as was the sympathy of the Castalians for the life and the fate of the country. Knecht had long
ago realized that this lack of interest in each other was a grave fault in both, and it was a grief
to him that as Master of the Glass Bead Game in his Players' Village he dealt exclusively with
Castalians and specialists. Hence his endeavors to devote himself more and more to beginners'
courses, his desire to have the youngest pupils--for the younger they were, the more they were
still linked with the whole of life and the outside world, the less tamed, trained, and specialized
they were. Often he felt a wild craving for the world, for people, for unreflective life--assuming
that such still existed out there in the unknown world. Most of us have now and then been
touched by this longing, this sense of emptiness, this feeling of living in far too rarefied an
atmosphere. The Board of Educators, too, is familiar with this problem; at least it has from time
to time looked for methods to combat it, such as by laying more stress on physical exercises and
games, and by experimenting with various crafts and gardening. If our observations are correct,
the directorate of the Order had of late shown a tendency to abandon some overrefined
specialties in the scholarly disciplines and to emphasize instead the practice of meditation. One
need not be a skeptic or prophet of doom, nor a disloyal member of the Order, to concede that
Joseph Knecht was right in recognizing, a considerable time before the present day, that the
complicated and sensitive apparatus of our republic had become an aging organism, in many
respects badly in need of rejuvenation.

As we have mentioned, from his second year in office on we find him engaging in historical
studies again. In addition to his investigations of Castalian history, he spent much of his
leisure reading all the large and small papers that Father Jacobus had written on the history
of the Benedictine Order. He also found opportunities to vent some of his opinions on historical
matters, and have his interest kindled anew in conversations with Monsieur Dubois and with one
of the Keuperheim philologists, who as secretary of the Board was present at all its sessions.
Such talk was always a delight to him, and a welcome refreshment, for among his daily associ-
ates he lacked such opportunities. In fact the apathy of these associates toward any dealings
with history was embodied in the person of his friend Fritz. Among other materials we have
come across a sheet of notes on a conversation in which Tegularius insisted that history was
a subject altogether unfit for study by a Castalian.

"Of course it's possible to talk wittily, amusingly, even emotionally, if need be, about inter-
pretations of history, the philosophy of history," he declared. "There's as much sport in that
as in discussing other philosophies, and I don't have any objection if someone wants to entertain
himself that way. But the thing itself, the subject of this amusement, history, is both banal and
diabolic, both horrible and boring. I don't understand how anyone can waste time on it. Its sole
content is sheer human egotism and the struggle for power. Those engaged in the struggle
forever overestimate it, forever glorify their own enterprises--but it is nothing but brutal, bestial,
material power they seek--a thing that doesn't exist in the mind of the Castalian, or if it does has
not the slightest value. World history is nothing but an endless, dreary account of the rape of the
weak by the strong. To associate real history, the timeless history of Mind, with this age-old,
stupid scramble of the ambitious for power and the climbers for a place in the sun--to link the
two let alone to try to explain the one by the other--is in itself betrayal of the living spirit. It
reminds me of a sect fairly widespread in the nineteenth or the twentieth century whose members
seriously believed that the sacrifices, the gods, the temples and myths of ancient peoples, as well
as all other pleasant things, were the consequences of a calculable shortage or surplus of food
and work, the results of a tension measurable in terms of wages and the price of bread. In other
words, the arts and religions were regarded as mere facades, so-called ideologies erected above a
human race concerned solely with hunger and feeding."

Knecht, who had listened with good humor to this outburst, asked casually: "Doesn't the
history of thought, of culture and the arts, have some kind of connection with the rest of
history?"

"Absolutely not," his friend exclaimed. "That is exactly what I am denying. World history
is a race with time, a scramble for profit, for power, for treasures. What counts is who has the
strength, luck, or vulgarity not to miss his opportunity. The achievements of thought, of culture,
of art are just the opposite. They are always an escape from the serfdom of time, man crawling
out of the muck of his instincts and out of his sluggishness and climbing to a higher plane, to
timelessness, liberation from time, divinity. They are utterly unhistorical and antihistorical."

Knecht went on drawing Tegularius out on this theme for a while longer, smiling at his
hyperbole. Then he quietly brought the conversation to a close by commenting: "Your love for
culture and the products of the mind does you credit. But it happens that cultural creativity is
something we cannot participate in quite so fully as some people think. A dialogue of Plato's or a
choral movement by Heinrich Isaac--in fact all the things we call a product of the mind or a
work of art or objectified spirit--are the outcomes of a struggle for purification and liberation.
They are, to use your phrase, escapes from time into timelessness, and in most cases the best
such works are those which no longer show any signs of the anguish and effort that preceded
them. It is a great good fortune that we have these works, and of course we Castalians live almost
entirely by them; the only creativity we have left lies in preserving them. We live permanently in
that realm beyond time and conflict embodied in those very works and which we would know
nothing of, but for them. And we go even further into the realms of pure mind, or if you prefer,
pure abstraction: in our Glass Bead Game we analyze those products of the sages and artists into
their components, we derive rules and patterns of form from them, and we operate with these
abstractions as though they were building blocks. Of course all this is very fine; no one will
contend otherwise. But not everyone can spend his entire life breathing, eating, and drinking
nothing but abstractions. History has one great strength over the things a Waldzell tutor feels
to be worthy of his interest: it deals with reality. Abstractions are fine, but I think people
also have to breathe air and eat bread."


Every so often Knecht found time for a brief visit to the aged former Music Master. The ven-
erable old man, whose strength was now visibly ebbing and who had long since completely lost
the habit of speech, persisted in his state of serene composure to the last. He was not sick,
and his death was not so much a matter of dying as a form of progressive dematerialization, a
dwindling of bodily substance and the bodily functions, while his life more and more gathered in
his eyes and in the gentle radiance of his withering old man's face. To most of the inhabitants
of Monteport this was a familiar sight, accepted with due respect. Only a few persons, such as
Knecht, Ferromonte, and young Petrus, were privileged to share after a fashion in this sunset
glow, this fading out of a pure and selfless life. These few, when they had put themselves into
the proper frame of mind before stepping into the little room in which the Master sat in his
armchair, succeeded in entering into this soft iridescence of disembodiment, in sharing in the
old man's silent movement toward perfection. They stayed for rapt moments in the crystal sphere
of this soul, as if in a realm of invisible radiation, listening to unearthly music, and then
returned to their daily lives with hearts cleansed and strengthened, as if descending from a high
mountain peak.

One day Knecht received the news of his death. He hastened to Monteport and found the old man,
who had passed peacefully away, lying on his bed, the small face shrunken to a silent rune and
arabesque, a magical figure no longer readable but nevertheless somehow conveying smiles and
perfected happiness. Knecht spoke at the funeral, after the present Music Master and Ferromonte.
He did not talk about the enlightened sage of music, nor of the man's greatness as a teacher,
nor of his kindness and wisdom as the eldest member of the highest ruling body in Castalia. He
spoke only of the grace of such an old age and death, of the immortal beauty of the spirit
which had been revealed through him to those who had shared his last days.

We know from several statements of Knecht's that he wanted to write the former Master's bio-
graphy, but official duties left him no time for such a task. He had learned to curb his own
wishes. Once he remarked to one of his tutors: "It is a pity that you students aren't fully
aware of the luxury and abundance in which you live. But I was exactly the same when I was
still a student. We study and work, don't waste much time, and think we may rightly call our-
selves industrious--but we are scarcely conscious of all we could do, all that we might make
of our freedom. Then we suddenly receive a call from the hierarchy, we are needed, are given
a teaching assignment, a mission, a post, and from then on move up to a higher one, and unex-
pectedly find ourselves caught in a network of duties that tightens the more we try to move
inside it. All the tasks are in themselves small, but each one has to be carried out at its
proper hour, and the day has far more tasks than hours. That is well; one would not want it to
be different. But if we ever think, between classroom, Archives, secretariat, consulting room,
meetings, and official journeys--if we ever think of the freedom we possessed and have lost,
the freedom for self-chosen tasks, for unlimited, far-flung studies, we may well feel the great-
est yearning for those days, and imagine that if we ever had such freedom again we would fully
enjoy its pleasures and potentialities."

Knecht had an extraordinary aptitude for fitting his students and officials into their proper
place in the service of the hierarchy. He chose his men for every assignment, for every post, with
great care. His reports on them show keen judgment, especially of character. Other officials often
sought his advice on the handling of personality problems. There was, for example, the case of
the student Petrus, the former Music Master's last favorite pupil. This young man, the typical
quiet fanatic, had done remarkably well in his unique role of companion, nurse, and adoring
disciple. But when this role came to its natural end with the former Magister's death, he lapsed
into melancholia that was understood and tolerated for a while. Soon, however, his symptoms
began to cause Music Master Ludwig, the present director of Monteport, serious concern. For
Petrus insisted on remaining on in the pavilion where the deceased Master had spent his last
days. He guarded the cottage, continued to keep its furnishings and arrangements painstakingly
in their former state, and especially regarded the room in which the Master had died, with its
armchair, deathbed, and harpsichord, as a sort of shrine. In addition to caring for these relics,
his only other activity consisted in tending the grave of his beloved Master. His vocation, he
felt, was to devote his life to a permanent cult of the dead man, watching over the places asso-
ciated with his memory as if he were a temple servant. Perhaps he hoped to see them become places
of pilgrimage. During the first few days after the funeral he had taken no food; afterward he lim-
ited himself to the tiny and rare meals with which the Master had been content during his last days.
It appeared that he intended to go so far in imitatio of the Master that he would soon follow him
into death. Since he could not sustain this for long, however, he shifted to the mode of conduct
which would presumably entitle him to become guardian of house and grave, permanent custodian
of this memorial site. From all this it was plain that the young man, naturally obstinate in any
case and having enjoyed for some time a distinctive position, was bent on holding on to that pos-
ition and had not the slightest desire to return to the commonplace duties of life; no doubt
he secretly felt that he could no longer cope with them. "By the way, that fellow Petrus who
was assigned to the late Master is cracked," Ferromonte reported acidly in a note to Knecht.

Strictly speaking, a Monteport music student was no concern of the Waldzell Magister, who should
have felt no call to add to his own responsibilities by interfering in a Monteport affair. But
things went from bad to worse. The unfortunate young man had to be removed by force from his
pavilion. His agitation did not subside with the passage of time. Distraught, still mourning,
he had lapsed into a state of withdrawal in which he could not very well be subjected to the
usual punishments for infractions of discipline. And since his superiors were well aware of
Knecht's benevolent feelings toward the young man, the Music Master's office applied to him for
advice and intervention. In the meantime the refractory student was being kept under observation
in a cell in the infirmary.

Knecht had been reluctant to become involved in this troublesome affair. But once he had given
some thought to it and had decided to try to help, he took the matter vigorously in hand. He
offered to take Petrus under his wing as an experiment, on condition that the young man be
treated as if he were well and permitted to travel alone. With his letter to the Music Master's
office he enclosed a brief, cordial invitation to Petrus, asking him to pay a short visit if
it were convenient, and hinting that he hoped for an account of the former Music Master's last
days.

The Monteport doctor hesitantly consented. Knecht's invitation was handed to the student,
and as Knecht had rightly guessed, nothing could have been more welcome to the young man,
trapped as he was in the deplorable situation he had created for himself, than a swift escape
from the scene of his difficulties. Petrus immediately agreed to undertake the journey, ac-
cepted a proper meal, was given a travel pass, and set out on foot. He arrived in Waldzell in
fair condition. On Knecht's orders, everyone ignored the jitteriness in his manner. He was put
up among the guests of the Archive and found himself treated neither as a delinquent nor as a
patient, nor for that matter as a person in any way out of the ordinary. He was after all not
so ill as to fail to appreciate this pleasant atmosphere; and he took the road back into life
thus offered him, although during the several weeks of his stay he remained a considerable nui-
sance to the Magister. Knecht assigned him the sham task of recording, under strict supervision,
his Master's last musical exercises and studies, and in addition systematically employed him
for minor routine jobs in the Archives. This on the pretext that the Archives personnel were
overburdened at the moment, and it would be good of him to lend a hand whenever he had the
time.

In short, the temporary deviant was guided back to the right road. After he had calmed down
and seemed ready to fit himself into the hierarchy, Knecht began exerting a direct educational
influence upon him. In a series of brief talks the Magister relieved the youth of his delusion
that setting up the deceased Music Master as the subject of an idolatrous cult was either a re-
ligious act or one tenable in Castalia. Since, however, Petrus was still terror-stricken at the
prospect of returning to Monteport, although he seemed otherwise cured, a post of assistant mu-
sic teacher in one of the lower elite schools was provided for him. In that capacity he hence-
forth behaved quite acceptably.

We might cite a good many other examples of Knecht's psychiatric and educative work. Moreover,
there were many young students who fell under the gentle sway of his personality and were won
over to a life in the genuine spirit of Castalia much the way Knecht himself had been won over
by the Music Master. All these examples show us the Magister Ludi as anything but a problemat-
ical character; all are testimonies to his soundness and balance. But his kindly efforts to
help unstable and imperiled personalities such as Petrus or Tegularius do suggest an unusually
alert sensitivity to such maladies or susceptibilities on the part of Castalians. They suggest
that since his first "awakening" he had remained keenly alive to the problems and the dangers
inherent in Castalian life. No doubt the majority of our fellow citizens thoughtlessly or smugly
refuse to see these dangers; but he in his forthright courage could not take such a course. And
presumably he could never follow the practice of most of his associates in authority, who were
cognizant of these dangers but as a matter of principle treated them as nonexistent. He recog-
nized their existence, and his familiarity with the early history of Castalia led him to regard
life in the midst of such dangers as a struggle, and one which he affirmed. He loved these very
perils, whereas most Castalians considered their community, and the lives they led within it, as
a pure idyll. From Father Jacobus's works on the Benedictine Order he had also absorbed the con-
cept of an order as a militant community, and of piety as a combative attitude. "No noble and
exalted life exists," he once said, "without knowledge of devils and demons, and without con-
tinual struggle against them."

In our Province explicit friendships among the holders of high office are most rare. We need
therefore not be surprised that during his first years in office Knecht entered into no such
ties with any of his colleagues. He cordially liked the classical philologist in Keuperheim,
and felt profound esteem for the directors of the Order; but in these relationships personal
affection is almost entirely excluded, private concerns objectified, so that intimacies beyond
the joint work on an official level are scarcely possible. Nevertheless, one such friendship
did develop.

The secret archives of the Board of Educators are not at our disposal. What we know about
Knecht's demeanor at sessions of the Board, or how he voted, must therefore be deduced from
his occasional remarks to friends. During his early days in office he tended to keep silent at
such meetings, but although later on he spoke up, he seems to have done so only rarely, unless
he himself had launched a motion. Mention is made of how quickly he learned the tone traditional
at the summit of our hierarchy, and the gracefulness, ingenuity, and wit with which he used these
forms. As is well known, the heads of our hierarchy, the Masters and directors of the Order,
treat each other in a carefully sustained ceremonial style. Moreover, it has been their custom,
or inclination, or secret ruling--since when, we cannot say--to employ more and more carefully
polished and strict courtesies, the greater their differences of opinion and the larger the
controversial question under discussion. Presumably this formality handed down from the past
serves, along with any other functions it may have, primarily as a safety valve. The extremely
courteous tone of the debates protects the persons engaged from yielding to passion and helps
them preserve impeccable bearing; but in addition it upholds the dignity of the Order and of the
high authorities themselves. It drapes them in the robes of ceremonial and conceals them behind
veils of sanctity. Such no doubt is the rationale of this elaborate art of exchanging compliments,
which the students often make fun of. Before Knecht's time his predecessor, Magister Thomas von
der Trave, had been a particularly admired master of this art. Knecht cannot really be called
his successor in it, still less his imitator; rather, he was more a disciple of the Chinese, so
that his mode of courtesy was less pointed and peppered with irony. But he too was considered
among his colleagues unsurpassed in the art of courtesy.




　　　　　　　　　　　　　　NINE

　　　　　　　　　　A CONVERSATION




We HAVE COME to that point in our study when we must focus our attention entirely upon the
remarkable change of course which occupied the last years of the Master's life and led to his
bidding farewell to his office and the Province, his crossing into a different sphere of life,
and his death. Although he administered his office with exemplary faithfulness up to the moment
of his departure, and to his last day enjoyed the affectionate confidence of his pupils and
colleagues, we shall not continue our description of his conduct of the office now that we see
him already weary of it in his innermost soul, and turning toward other aims. He had already
explored all the possibilities the office provided for the utilization of his energies and
had reached the point at which great men must leave the path of tradition and obedient subor-
dination and, trusting to supreme, indefinable powers, strike out on new, trackless courses
where experience is no guide.

When he became conscious that this had happened, he dispassionately examined his situation
and what might be done to change it. He had arrived, at an unusually early age, upon that
summit which was all that a talented and ambitious Castalian could imagine as worth striving
for. Yet neither ambition nor exertion had brought him there. He had neither tried for his
high honor nor consciously adapted himself to it. It had come almost against his will, for an
inconspicuous, independent scholar's life free of official duties would have been much more
in keeping with his own desires. He did not especially prize many of the benefits and powers
that followed from his position. In fact, within a short time after he assumed office, he seem-
ed already to have tired of some of these distinctions and privileges. In particular, he always
regarded political and administrative work in the highest Board as a burden, although he gave
himself to it with unfailing conscientiousness. Even the special, the characteristic and unique
task of his position, the training of an elite group of perfected Glass Bead Game players, for
all the joy it sometimes brought him, and despite the fact that this elite took great pride in
their Magister, seems in the long run to have been more of a burden than a pleasure to him. What
delighted him and truly satisfied him was teaching, and in this he discovered by experience that
both his pleasure and his success were the greater, the younger his pupils were. Hence he felt
it as a loss that his post brought to him only youths and adults instead of children.

There were, however, other considerations, experiences, and insights which caused him to take
a critical view of his own work, and of a good many of the conditions in Waldzell; or at the
least to consider his office as a great hindrance to the development of his finest and most
fruitful abilities. Some of these matters are known to all of us; some we only surmise. Was
Magister Knecht right in seeking freedom from the burden of his office, in his desire for less
majestic but more intensive work? Was he right in his criticisms of the state of Castalia? Should
he be regarded as a pioneer and bold militant, or as a kind of rebel, if not a deserter from the
cause? We shall not go into these questions, for they have been discussed to excess. For a time
the controversy over them divided the entire Province into two camps, and it has still not entirely
subsided. Although we profess ourselves grateful admirers of the great Magister, we prefer not to
take a position in this dispute; the necessary synthesis which will ultimately emerge from the
conflict of opinions on Joseph Knecht's personality and life has long since begun taking shape.
We prefer neither to judge nor to convert, but rather to tell the history of our venerated Master's
last days with the greatest possible truthfulness. Properly speaking, however, it is not really
history; we prefer to call it a legend, an account compounded of authentic information and mere
rumors, exactly as they have flowed from various crystalline and cloudy sources to form a single
stream among us, his posterity in the Province.

Joseph Knecht had already begun thinking of how he might find his way into fresher air when
he unexpectedly came upon a figure out of his youth, whom he had in the meanwhile half for-
gotten. It was none other than Plinio Designori, scion of the old family that had served Cast-
alia well in the distant past. The former guest pupil, now a man of influence, member of the
Chamber of Deputies as well as a political writer, was paying an official call on the Supreme
Board of the Province. Every few years elections were held for the government commission in
charge of the Castalian budget, and Designori had become a member of this commission. The first
time he appeared in this capacity at a session of the directorate of the Order in Hirsland, the
Magister Ludi happened to be present. The encounter made a profound impression on him, and
was to have certain consequences.

Some of our information about this meeting comes from Tegularius, some from Designori himself.
For during this period in Knecht's life, which is somewhat obscure to us, Designori became
his friend again, and even his confidant.

At their first meeting after decades, the Speaker as usual introduced the new members of the
budget commission to the Magisters. When Knecht heard Designori's name, he felt somewhat strick-
en at not having immediately recognized the friend of his youth. But he was quick to rectify
this by omitting the official bow and the set formula of greeting, and smilingly holding out his
hand. Meanwhile he searched his friend's features, trying to fathom the changes which had foiled
recognition. During the session itself his glance frequently rested on the once-familiar face.
Designori, incidentally, had addressed him by his title of Magister; Joseph had to ask him twice
before he could be persuaded to return to the first-name basis of their boyhood.

Knecht had known Plinio as a high-spirited, communicative, and brilliant young man, a good
student and at the same time a young man of the world who felt superior to the unworldly Cast-
alians and often baited them for the fun of it. Perhaps he had been somewhat vain, but he
had also been openhearted, without pettiness, and had charmed, interested, and attracted his
schoolmates. Some of them, in fact, had been dazzled by his good looks, his self-assurance, and
the aura of foreignness that surrounded him, the hospitant from the outside world. Years later,
toward the end of his student days, Knecht had seen him again, and had been disappointed;
Plinio had then seemed to him shallower, coarsened, wholly lacking his former magic. They had
parted coolly, with constraint.

Now Plinio once more seemed a totally different person. Above all he seemed to have wholly
laid aside or lost his youthful gaiety, his delight in communication, argument, talk, his
active, winning, extroverted character. His diffidence on meeting his former friend, his
slowness to greet Knecht, and his qualms at taking up the Magister's request to address him
with their oldtime intimacy, were signs of a change evident also in his bearing, his look,
his manner of speech and movements. In place of his former boldness, frankness, and exuber-
ance there was now constraint. He was subdued, reticent, withdrawn; perhaps it was stiff-
ness, perhaps only fatigue. His youthful charm had been submerged and extinguished in it,
but the traits of superficiality and blatant worldliness had also vanished. The whole man,
but especially his face, seemed marked, partly ravaged, partly ennobled by the expression
of suffering.

While the Glass Bead Game Master followed the proceedings, he dwelt with part of his mind
on this change, wondering what kind of suffering had overwhelmed this lively, handsome, life-
loving man, and set such a mark on him. It seemed to Knecht an alien suffering, of a kind he
had never known, and the more he pondered and probed, the more he felt sympathetically drawn
to this suffering man. Mingled with this sympathy and affection was a faint feeling as if he
were somehow to blame for his friend's sorrow, as if he must in some way make amends.

After considering and rejecting a variety of suppositions about Plinio's sadness, it occur-
red to him that the suffering in the man's face was most uncommon. It was, rather, a noble,
perhaps a tragic suffering, and its mode of expression was also of a type unknown in Castalia.
Knecht recalled having sometimes seen a similar expression on the faces of people who lived in
the world, although he had never seen it in so pronounced and fascinating a form. He realized
that he knew it also from portraits of men of the past, portraits of scholars or artists in which
a touching, half morbid, half fated sorrow, solitariness, and helplessness could be read. To the
Magister, with his artist's fine sensitivity to the secrets of expressions and his educator's
perception of the various shades of character, there were certain physiognomic signs which he
instinctively went by, without ever having reduced them to a system. So, for example, he could
recognize a peculiarly Castalian and a peculiarly worldly way of laughing, smiling, showing
merriment, and likewise a peculiarly worldly type of suffering or sadness. He now detected this
worldly sadness in Designori's face, expressed there with the greatest purity and intensity, as
though this face were meant to be representative of many, to epitomize the secret sufferings
and morbidity of a multitude.

He was disturbed and moved by this face. It seemed to him highly significant that the world
should have sent his lost friend here, so that Plinio and Joseph might truly and validly
represent respectively the world and the Order, just as they had once done in their schoolboy
debates. But it struck him as even more important and symbolic that in this lonely countenance,
overlaid by sorrow, the world had dispatched to Castalia not its laughter, its joy in living,
its pleasure in power, its crudeness, but rather its distress, its suffering. That Designori
seemed rather to avoid than to seek him, that he responded so slowly and with such resistance,
gave Knecht much food for thought. It also pleased him, for he had no doubt that he would
nonetheless be able to win Plinio over. To be sure, his former schoolmate, thanks to his
education in Castalia, was not one of those unyielding, sulky, or downright hostile commission
members, such as Knecht had dealt with more than once. On the contrary, he was an admirer of
the Order and a patron of the Province, which was indebted to him for many a service in the
past. He had, however, given up the Glass Bead Game many years before.

We are in no position to report in detail how the Magister gradually regained his friend's
trust. Those of us who are familiar with the Master's serenity and affectionate courtesy may
imagine the process in our own way. Knecht steadily continued to court Plinio, and who in the
long run could have resisted the Magister when he was seriously concerned to win someone's
heart?

In the end, several months after that first reunion, Designdri accepted the repeated invi-
tation to visit Waldzell. One windy, slightly overcast autumn afternoon, the two men drove
through a countryside constantly alternating between light and shade toward the site of their
schooldays and early friendship. Knecht was in a blithe frame of mind, while his guest was silent
but moody, undergoing abrupt alternations, like the harvested fields between sunlight and shadow,
between the joys of return and the sadness of alienation. Near the village, they alighted and
tramped on foot along the old paths which they had walked together as schoolboys, remembering
schoolmates and teachers and some of their topics of discussion in those long-ago days. Desig-
nori stayed a day as Knecht's guest, looking on at all of his official acts and labors, as
had been agreed. At the end of the day--the guest was due to leave early next morning — they
sat together in Knecht's living room, already on the verge of their old intimacy. The course of
the day, during which he had been able to observe the Magister's work hour by hour, had made a
great impression upon Designori. That evening the two men had a conversation which Designori
recorded immediately after his return home. Although it incorporates a few unimportant matters
which some readers may feel disturb the even flow of our account, we think it advisable to set
down the complete text.

"I had in mind to show you so many things," the Magister said, "and now I did not get to
them after all. For example, my lovely garden--do you still recall the Magister's Garden and
Master Thomas's plantings? Yes, and so many other things. I hope there will be future occasions
for seeing them. But in any case, you have had the chance to check on a good many of your
recollections, and you also have some idea of the nature of my official duties and my routine."

"I am grateful to you for that," Plinio said. "Only today have I begun to divine again what
your Province really is, and what remarkable secrets it contains, although over the years I have
thought about all of you here far more than you suspect. You have afforded me a glimpse of your
office and of your life, Joseph, and I hope this will not be the last time and that we shall have
many opportunities to discuss the things I have seen here, which I cannot yet talk about today.
On the other hand, I am well aware that I should in some way be requiting your cordiality, and
that my reserve must have taken you aback. However, you will visit me too some day, and see
my native ground. For the present I can only tell you a little, just enough for you to know
something about my situation. Speaking frankly, though it will be embarrassing and something
of a penance for me, will probably unburden my heart.

"You know that I come from an old family that has served the country well and also been well
disposed toward your Province--a conservative family of landowners and moderately high offi-
cials. But you see, even this simple fact brings me sharply up against the gulf that separates
the two of us. I say 'family' and imagine I am saying something simple, obvious, and unambig-
uous. But is it? You people of the Province have your Order and your hierarchy, but you do not
have a family, you do not know what family, blood, and descent are, and you have no notion of
the powers, the hidden and mighty magic of what is called 'family.' I fear that this is also
true for most of the words and concepts which express the meaning of our lives. The things
that are important to us are not to you; very many are simply incomprehensible to you, and
others have entirely different meanings among you and among us. How can we possibly talk to
each other? You see, when you speak to me, it is as if a foreigner were addressing me, although
a foreigner whose language I learned and spoke myself in my youth, so that I understand most of
what is said. But the reverse is not the case; when I speak to you, you hear a language whose
very phrases are only half familiar to you, while you are entirely ignorant of the nuances and
overtones. You hear tales about a life, a way of existing, which is not your own. Most of it,
even if it happens to interest you, remains alien and at best only half understood. You remem-
ber our many debates and talks during our schooldays. On my part they were nothing but an at-
tempt, one of many, to bring the world and language of your Province into harmony with my own.
You were the most receptive, the most willing and honest among all those with whom I attempted
to communicate in those days; you stood up bravely for the rights of Castalia without being a-
gainst my different world and unsympathetic to its rights, not to speak of despising it. In
those days we certainly came rather close to each other. But that is a subject we will return
to later."

As he paused to marshal his thoughts, Knecht said cautiously: "This matter of not being
able to understand may not be as drastic as you make it out. Of course two peoples and two
languages will never be able to communicate with each other so intimately as two individuals
who belong to the same nation and speak the same language. But that is no reason to forgo the
effort at communication. Within nations there are also barriers which stand in the way of
complete communication and complete mutual understanding, barriers of culture, education,
talent, individuality. It might be asserted that every human being on earth can fundamentally
hold a dialogue with every other human being, and it might also be asserted that there are no
two persons in the world between whom genuine, whole, intimate understanding is possible--the
one statement is as true as the other. It is Yin and Yang, day and night; both are right and at
times we have to be reminded of both. To be sure, I too do not believe that you and I will ever
be able to communicate fully, and without some residue of misunderstanding, with each other. But
though you may be an Occidental and I a Chinese, though we may speak different languages, if
we are men of good will we shall have a great deal to say to each other, and beyond what is
precisely communicable we can guess and sense a great deal about each other. At any rate let
us try."

Designori nodded and continued: "For the time being I want to tell you the little you must
know in order to have some inkling of my situation. Well, then, first of all, the family is the
supreme power in a young person's life, whether or not he acknowledges it. I got on well with
my family as long as I was a guest student in your elite school. Throughout the year I was well
taken care of among you; during the holidays I was pampered at home, for I was the only son. I
had a deep and in fact a passionate love for my mother; separation from her was the only grief I
felt each time I departed. My relationship to my father was cooler, but friendly, at least during
all the years of my boyhood and youth that I spent among you. He was an old admirer of Castalia
and proud to see me being educated in the elite schools and initiated into such elevated matters
as the Glass Bead Game. My vacations at home were gay and festive; I might almost say that the
family and I in a sense knew each other only in party dress. Sometimes, when I set out for
vacation, I pitied all of you who were left behind for having nothing of such happiness.

"I need not say much about those days; you knew me better than anyone else, after all. I
was almost a Castalian, a little gayer, coarser, and more superficial, perhaps, but happy and
enthusiastic, full of high spirits. That was the happiest period in my life, although of course
at the time I never suspected that this would be so, for during those years in Waldzell I expect-
ed that happiness and the crowning experiences of my life would come after I returned home from
your schools and used the superiority I had acquired in them to conquer the outside world. In-
stead, after my departure from you a conflict began which has lasted to this day, and I have not
been the victor in this struggle. For the place I returned to no longer consisted in just my home;
and the country had not been simply waiting to embrace me and acknowledge my Waldzell superiority.
Even at home I soon encountered disappointments, difficulties, and discords. It took a while be-
fore I noticed. I was shielded by my naive confidence, my boyish faith in myself, and my happi-
ness, and shielded also by the morality of the Order which I had brought back with me, by the
habit of meditation.

"But what a disappointment and disillusionment I had at the university where I wanted to study
political subjects. The general tone among the students, the level of their education and social
life, the personalities of so many of the teachers--how all this contrasted with what I had
become accustomed to among you. You recall how in defending our world against yours I used
to extol the unspoiled, naive life? If that was a piece of foolishness deserving punishment, my
friend, I have been harshly punished. Because this naive, innocent, instinctual life, this child-
like, untrammeled brilliance of the simple soul, may possibly exist among peasants or artisans, or
somewhere, but I never succeeded in finding it, let alone sharing in it. You remember too, don't
you, how I would speechify about the arrogance and affectation of Castalians, attacking them for
being a conceited and decadent lot with their caste spirit and their elite haughtiness. Now I had
to discover that people in the world were no less proud of their bad manners, their meager cul-
ture, their coarse, loud humor, the dull-witted shrewdness with which they kept themselves to
practical, egotistic goals. They regarded themselves as no less precious, sanctified, and elect
in their narrow-minded crudity than the most affected Waldzell show-off could ever have done.
They laughed at me or patted me on the back, but a good many of them reacted to the alien,
Castalian qualities in me with the outright enmity that the vulgar always have for everything
finer. And I was determined to take their dislike as a distinction."

Designori paused briefly, and threw a glance at Knecht to see whether he was tiring him. His
eyes met his friend's and found in them an expression of close attention and friendliness
which comforted and reassured him. He saw that Knecht was totally absorbed; he was listening
not as people listen to casual talk or even to an interesting story, but with fixed attention
and devotion, as if concentrating on a subject of meditation. At the same time Knecht's eyes
expressed a pure, warmhearted good will--so warm that it seemed to Plinio almost childlike.
He was swept with a kind of amazement to see such an expression upon the face of the same man
whose many-sided daily labors, whose wisdom and authority in the governance of his office he
had admired all through the day. Relieved, he continued:

"I don't know whether my life has been useless and merely a misunderstanding, or whether it
has a meaning. If it does have a meaning, I should say it would be this: that one single
specific person in our time has recognized plainly and experienced in the most painful way how
far Castalia has moved away from its motherland. Or for my part it might be put the other way
around: how alien our country has become from her noblest Province and how unfaithful to that
Province's spirit; how far body and soul, ideal and reality have moved apart in our country; how
little they know about each other, or want to know. If I had any one task and ideal in life, it
was to make myself a synthesis of the two principles, to be mediator, interpreter, and arbitrator
between the two. I have tried and failed. And since after all I cannot tell you my whole life, and
you would not be able to understand it all anyhow, I will describe only one of the situations in
which my failure was revealed.

"The difficulty after I began attending the university consisted not so much in my being
unable to deal with the teasing or hostility that came my way as a Castalian, a show-off. Those
few among my new associates who regarded my coming from the elite schools as a glory gave
me more trouble, in fact, and caused me greater embarrassment. No, the hard part, perhaps the
impossible task I set myself, was to continue a life in the Castalian sense in the midst of
worldliness. At first I scarcely noticed; I abided by the rules I had learned among you, and for
some time they seemed to prove their validity in the world. They seemed to strengthen and shield
me, seemed to preserve my gaiety and inner soundness and to increase my resolve to pass my
student years in the Castalian way as far as possible, following the paths that my craving for
knowledge indicated and not letting anything coerce me into a course of studies designed to
prepare the student as thoroughly as possible in the shortest possible time for a speciality in
which he could earn his livelihood, and to stamp out whatever sense of freedom and universality
he may have had.

"But the protection that Castalia had given me proved dangerous and dubious, for I did not
want to be like a hermit, cultivating my peace of soul and preserving a calm, meditative state
of mind. I wanted to conquer the world, you see, to understand it, to force it to understand me.
I wanted to affirm it and if possible renew and reform it. In my own person I wanted to bring
Castalia and the world together, to reconcile them. When after some disappointment, some clash
or disturbance, I retired to meditate, I derived great benefit at first; each time, meditation was
like relaxation, deep breathing, a return to good, friendly powers. But in time I realized that
this very practice of meditation, the cultivation and exercising of the psyche, was what isolated
me, made me seem so unpleasantly strange to others, and actually rendered me incapable of really
understanding them. I saw that I could really understand those others, those people in the world
and of it, if I once again became like them, if I had no advantages over them, including this
recourse to meditation.

"Of course it may be that I am putting it in a better light when I describe it in this way.
Perhaps it was simply that without associates trained to the same practices, without supervision
by teachers, without the bracing atmosphere of Waldzell, I gradually lost the discipline, that I
grew sluggish and inattentive and succumbed to carelessness, and that in moments of guilty
conscience I then excused myself on the ground that carelessness was one of the attributes of this
world, and that by giving way to it I was coming closer to an understanding of my environment.
I'm not trying to make things out better than they are for your sake, but neither do I want to deny
or conceal the fact that I went to considerable lengths, that I strove and fought, even where I
was mistaken. I was serious about the whole problem. But whether or not my attempt to find a
meaningful place for myself was mere conceit on my part--in any case, it ended as it was bound
to end. The world was stronger than I was; it slowly overwhelmed and devoured me. It was exact-
ly as if life took me at my word and molded me wholly to the world whose rightness, naive strength,
and ontological superiority I so highly praised and defended against your logic in our Waldzell
disputations. You remember.

"And now I must remind you of something else which you probably forgot long ago, since it meant
nothing to you. But it meant a great deal to me; it was important, important and terrible. My
student years had come to an end; I had adapted, had been defeated, but not entirely. Inwardly
I still thought of myself as your equal and imagined that I had made certain adjustments, shed
certain customs, more out of prudence and free choice than as the consequence of defeat. And so
I also clung to a good many of the habits and needs of my earlier years. Among them was the
Glass Bead Game, which probably had little point, since without constant practice and constant
association with equal and especially with better players, it's impossible to learn anything,
of course. Playing alone can at best replace such practice the way talking to oneself replaces
real, serious dialogue. So without really understanding how I stood, what had happened to my
player's skill, my culture, my status as an elite pupil, I struggled to save at least some of
these values. In those days, whenever I sketched a Game pattern or analyzed a Game movement
for one of my friends who knew something about the Game but had no notion of its spirit, it
probably seemed akin to magic to these total ignoramuses. Then, in my third or fourth year at
the university, I took part in a Game course in Waldzell. Seeing the countryside and the town
again, visiting our old school and the Players' Village, gave me melancholy pleasure; but you
were not here; you were studying somewhere in Monteport or Keuperheim at the time, and were
considered an ambitious eccentric. My Game course was only a series of summer classes for pit-
iable worldlings and dilettantes like myself. Nevertheless, I worked hard at it and was proud at
the end of the course to receive the usual C, that passing mark which qualifies the holder for
future vacation courses of the same sort.

"Well, then, a few years later I once again summoned up the energy and signed up for a vaca-
tion course under your predecessor. I tried to prepare myself for Waldzell. I read through my
old exercise books, made some stabs at the technique of concentration--in short, within my
modest limits I composed myself, gathered my energies, and put myself in the mood for the
course rather the way a real Glass Bead Game player readies himself for the great annual Game.
And so I arrived in Waldzell, where after this longer interval I found myself a good deal more
alienated, but at the same time enchanted, as if I were returning to a lovely land I had lost,
in whose language I was no longer very fluent. And this time my fervent wish to see you again
was granted. Do you by any chance recall, Joseph?"

Knecht looked earnestly into his eyes, nodded and smiled slightly, but said not a word.

"Good," Designori continued. "So you remember. But just what do you remember? A casual reu-
nion with a schoolmate, a brief encounter and disappointment, after which one goes on and thinks
no more about it, unless the other fellow tactlessly reminds one about it decades later.
Isn't that it? Was it anything else, was it more than that for you?"

Although he was obviously trying very hard to hold himself in check, it was apparent that
emotions accumulated over many years, and never mastered, were on the brink of eruption.

"You are anticipating," Knecht said carefully. "We will speak of my impressions when it is my
turn to render an accounting. You have the floor now, Plinio. I see that the meeting was not
pleasant for you. It was not for me either, at the time. And now go on and tell me what it was
like. Speak bluntly."

"I'll try," Plinio said. "I certainly don't want to blame you for anything. I must concede
that you behaved with absolute courtesy toward me--more than that. When I accepted your
invitation to come here to Waldzell, where I have not been since that second course, not even
since my appointment to the Castalian Commission, I made up my mind to confront you with
what I experienced at that time, whether or not this visit turned out pleasantly. And now I mean
to continue. I had come to the course and been put up in the guest house. The people in the
course were almost all about my age; some were even a good deal older. There were at most
twenty of us, the majority Castalians, but either poor, indifferent, or slack Glass Bead Game
players, or rank beginners who had tardily decided that they ought to obtain some familiarity
with the Game. It was a relief to me that I knew none of them. Although our instructor, one of
the Archive assistants, really tried hard and was most friendly toward us, the whole thing had
from the start the feeling of being a half-baked, useless affair, a make-up course whose random
collection of students no more believes in its importance or chance of success than does the
teacher, although no one involved will admit it. Why, you might have wondered, should this
handful of people get together to engage in something they had no capacity for nor enough
interest in to go at it with perseverance and devotion, and why should a skilled specialist
bother to give them instruction and assign them exercises which he himself scarcely thought
would come to anything? At the time I didn't know--I found out from more experienced persons
later on--that I simply had bad luck with this course, that another group of participants might
have made it stimulating and useful, even inspiring. It often suffices, I was later told, to have
two members of the class who kindle each other, or who already know each other and are good
friends, to give the whole course, for all the participants and the teacher as well, the nece-
ssary impetus. But you are the Game Master, after all; you must know all about such matters.

"Well, then, I had rotten luck. The animating spark was missing from our haphazard group;
there was no impetus, not even a little warmth. The whole thing remained a feeble extension
course for grown-up schoolboys. The days passed, and my disappointment increased with each
passing day. Still, besides the Glass Bead Game there was Waldzell, a place of sacred and
cherished memories for me. If the Game course were a failure, I still ought to be able to
celebrate a homecoming, to chat with former schoolmates, perhaps have a reunion with the
friend who more than anyone else represented to me Our Castalia--you, Joseph. If I saw a few
of the companions of my schooldays again, if on my walks through this beautiful, beloved region
I met again the lares and penates of my youth, and if good fortune would have it that we might
come close to each other again and a dialogue should spring up between us as in the old days,
less between you and me than between my problem with Castalia and myself--then this vacation
would not be wasted; then it would not so much matter about the course and all the rest.

"The first two old schoolfellows who crossed my path were innocuous enough. They were glad
to see me, patted me on the back and asked childish questions about my legendary life out in
the world. But the next few were not so innocuous; they were members of the Players' Village
and the younger elite and did not ask naive questions. On the contrary, when we ran into one
another in one of the rooms of your sanctuaries and they could not very well avoid me, they
greeted me with a pointed and rather tense politeness, or rather a condescending geniality. They
made it clear that they were busy with important matters quite closed to me, that they had no
time, no curiosity, no sympathy, no desire to renew old acquaintance. Well, I did not force
myself on them; I let them alone in their Olympian, sardonic, Castalian tranquility. I looked
across at them and their busy, self-satisfied doings like a prisoner watching through bars, or
the way the poor, hungry, and oppressed eye the wealthy and aristocratic, the handsome, culti-
vated, untroubled, well-bred, well-rested members of an upper class with their clean faces and
manicured hands.

"And then you turned up, Joseph, and when I saw you I felt rejoicing and new hope. You were
crossing the yard; I recognized you from behind by your walk and at once called you by name.
At last a human soul, I thought; at last a friend, or perhaps an opponent, but someone I can
talk to, a Castalian to the bone, certainly, but someone in whom the Castalian spirit has not
frozen into a mask and a suit of armor. A man, someone who understands. You must have noticed
how glad I was and how much I expected from you, and in fact you met me halfway with the great-
est courtesy. You still recognized me, I meant something to you, it gave you pleasure to see
my face again. And so we did not leave it at that brief warm greeting in the yard; you invited
me and devoted, or rather sacrificed, an evening to me. But what an evening that was! The two
of us tormented ourselves trying to seem jocose, civil, and comradely toward each other, and
how hard it was for us to drag that lame conversation from one subject to another. Where the
others had been indifferent to me, with you it was worse--this strained and profitless effort to
revive a lost friendship was much more painful. That evening finally put an end to my illusions.
It made me realize with unsparing clarity that I was not one of your comrades, not seeking the
same goals, not a Castalian, not a person of importance, but a nuisance, a fool trying to ingra-
tiate himself, an uncultivated foreigner. And the fact that all this was conveyed to me with such
politeness and good manners, that the disappointment and impatience were so impeccably masked,
actually seemed to me the worst of it. If you had upbraided me: 'What has become of you, my
friend, how could you let yourself degenerate this way?' the ice would have been broken and I
would have been happy. But nothing of the sort. I saw that my notion of belonging to Castalia
had come to nothing, that my love for all of you and my studying the Glass Bead Game and our
comradeship were all nothing. Elite Tutor Knecht had taken note of my unfortunate visit
to Waldzell; for my sake he had put himself through a whole evening of boredom, and shown me
the door with undeviating courtesy."

Designori, struggling with his agitation, broke off and with a tormented expression looked a-
cross at the Magister. Knecht sat there, all attention, absorbedly listening, but not in the
least upset; he sat looking at his old friend with a smile that was full of friendly sympathy.
Since Designori did not continue, Knecht rested his eyes on him, with a look of good will and
satisfaction, in fact with a touch of amusement. For a minute or longer Plinio bleakly met that
gaze. Then he cried out forcefully, although not angrily: "You're laughing! Laughing? You think
it was all fine?"

"I must admit," Knecht said smilingly, "that you have described that episode remarkably well,
splendidly. That is exactly how it was, and perhaps the lingering sense of insult and accusa-
tion in your voice was needed for you to bring it out as effectively as you did and to recall
the scene to my mind with such perfect vividness. Also, although I'm afraid you still see the
whole affair in somewhat the same light as you did then, and have not fully come to terms with
it, you told your story with objective correctness--the story of two young men in a rather
embarrassing situation in which both had to dissemble, and one of whom--that is, you--made
the mistake of concealing the painfulness of the whole matter behind a gay exterior, instead of
dropping the masquerade. It seems as if you were to this day blaming me more than yourself for
the fruitlessness of that encounter, although it was absolutely up to you to have set its terms.
Have you really failed to see that? But still you have described it very well, I must say. You've
called back the whole sense of oppression and embarrassment over that weird evening. For a while
I've felt as if I had to fight for composure again, and I've been ashamed for the two of us.
No, your story is exactly right. It's a pleasure to hear a story so well told."

"Well now," Plinio began, rather astonished, and with an offended and mistrustful note linger-
ing in his voice, "it's good that my story has amused at least one of us. If you want to know,
it didn't amuse me."

"But you do see," Knecht said, "how merrily we can now regard this story, which isn't
exactly to the credit of either of us? We can laugh at it."

"Laugh? Why should we?"

"Because this story about the ex-Castalian Plinio who struggled to master the Glass Bead
Game and worked so hard for his former friend's appreciation is now past and over with for
good, exactly like the story of the tutor Knecht who in spite of all his training in Castalian
manners was a total duffer when it came to dealing with this Plinio who suddenly blew in on
him, so that today after so many years that clumsy behavior can be held up to him as in a mirror.
Once again, Plinio, you have an excellent memory and you've told the story well--I couldn't
have done it justice. It's fortunate that the tale is over and done with and we can laugh at it."

Designori was perplexed. He could not help feeling the warmth and pleasantness of the Magister's
good humor. It was obviously far removed from mockery. And he felt also that an intense serious-
ness lay behind this gaiety. But in telling his story he had too painfully relived the bitter-
ness of that episode, and his narrative had been so much in the nature of a confession that
he could not change key so readily.

"Perhaps you forget," he said hesitantly, already half persuaded, "that what I related was
not the same for me as it was for you, For you it was at most chagrin; for me it was defeat and
collapse, and incidentally also the beginning of important changes in my life. When I left
Waldzell that time, just as soon as the course ended, I resolved never to return here, and I was
close to hating Castalia and all of you. I had lost my illusions and had realized that I would
never again belong among you, perhaps had never belonged as much as I had imagined. It would not
have taken much more to make me into a renegade and an outright enemy of everything
Castalian."

Knecht fixed him with a look at once cheerful and penetrating.

"Certainly," he said, "and of course you're going to tell me all about that soon, I very much
hope. But for the present I see our relationship as this: In our early youth we were friends,
were parted and took very different paths. Then we met again--this at the time of your unlucky
holiday course. You'd become half or entirely a person of the world; I was a rather conceited
Waldzeller, much preoccupied with Castalian forms; and today we have recalled this disappoint-
ing and shaming reunion. We have seen ourselves and our awkwardness at that time and we
have been able to laugh at it, because today everything is completely different. I freely admit
that the impression you made on me at that time did in fact embarrass me greatly; it was an
altogether unpleasant, negative impression. I could make nothing of you; to me you unexpect-
edly, disturbingly, and annoyingly seemed unfinished, coarse, worldly. I was a young Castal-
ian who knew nothing of the world and actually wanted to know nothing of it. And you, well,
you were a young foreigner whose reason for visiting us I could not rightly understand. I
had no idea why you were taking a Game course, for you seemed to have almost nothing of the
elite pupil left in you. You grated on my nerves as I did on yours. Of course I could not help
striking you as an arrogant Waldzeller without any basis for his arrogance who was bent on
keeping his distance from a non-Castalian and amateur at the Game. And to me you were a kind
of barbarian, semicultured, who seemed to be making bothersome and groundless claims upon
my interest and my friendship. We fended each other off; we came close to hating each other.
There was nothing we could do but part, because neither of us had anything to give the other
and neither of us could be fair to the other.

"But today, Plinio, we have been able to revive that shamefully buried memory and we may
laugh at that scene and at the pair of us, because today we have come together as different
men and with quite different intentions and potentialities--without sentimentality, without
repressed feelings of jealousy and hatred, without conceit. Both of us grew up long ago; both
of us are men now."

Designori smiled with relief. But still he asked: "Are we so sure of that? After all, we had
good will enough even then."

"I should think we had," Knecht said, laughing. "And with all our good will we drove and
strained ourselves until we couldn't bear it any longer. At that time we disliked each other
instinctively. To each of us the other was unfamiliar, disturbing, alien, and repugnant, and only
an imaginary sense of obligation, of belonging together, forced us to play out that tedious farce
for a whole evening. I realized that soon after your visit. Neither of us had properly outgrown
either our former friendship or our former opposition. Instead of letting that relationship die
we thought we had to exhume it and somehow continue it. We felt indebted to it and had no idea
how to pay the debt. Isn't that so?"

"I think," Plinio said thoughtfully, "that even today you are still being somewhat overpo-
lite. You say 'we both,' but in fact it was not the two of us who were seeking and unable to
find each other. The seeking, the love, was all on my side, and so the disappointment and suf-
fering also. And now I ask you: What has changed in your life since that meeting? Nothing. In
my case, on the other hand, it was a deep and painful dividing line, and I cannot accept your
laughing way of dismissing it."

"Forgive me," Knecht amiably apologized. "I have probably rushed matters. But I hope that in
time you too will be able to laugh at that incident. Of course you were wounded then, though
not by me, as you thought and still seem to think. You were wounded by the gulf between your-
self and Castalia, by the chasm between your world and mine which we seemed to have bridged
in the course of our schoolboy friendship but which suddenly yawned before us so fearfully
wide and deep. Insofar as you blame me personally, I beg you to state your accusation frank-
ly."

"Oh, it was never an accusation. But it was a plaint. You didn't hear it at the time, and it
seems you don't want to hear it even now. At the time you answered it with a smile and a show
of good manners, and you're doing the same thing again."

Although he sensed the friendship and profound good will in the Magister's eyes, he was impel-
led to stress this point; it was necessary for this burden he had borne for so long to be at
last thrown off.

Knecht's expression did not change. After a moment's reflection he said cautiously: "Only
now am I beginning to understand you, friend. Perhaps you are right and we must discuss this
too. Still, may I remind you that you could legitimately have expected me to enter into what you
call your plaint only if you had really expressed it. But the fact was that during that evening's
conversation in the guest house you expressed no plaints whatsoever. Instead you put as brisk
and brave a face as possible on the whole thing, just as I did. Like me, you acted the fearless
warrior who has no grievances. But secretly you expected, as you now tell me, for me to hear the
hidden plaint somehow and to recognize your true face behind your mask. Well, I fancy I did
notice something of the sort at the time, though far from everything. But how was I to suggest
to you that I was worried about you, that I pitied you, without offending your pride? And what
would have been the good of my extending my hand, since my hand was empty and I had nothing
to give you, no advice, no comfort, no friendship, because our ways had parted so completely?
As a matter of fact, at the time the hidden uneasiness and unhappiness that you concealed be-
hind a brash manner annoyed me; to be frank, I found it repugnant. It contained a claim on my
sympathy which was contradicted by your manner. I felt there was something importunate and
childish about it, and it made my feelings chill toward you all the more. You were making
claims on my comradeship. You wanted to be a Castalian, a Glass Bead Game player; and at the
same time you seemed so uncontrolled, so odd, so lost in egotistic emotions. That was the
tenor of my opinion at the time, for I could see clearly that virtually nothing was left of
the Castalian spirit in you. You had apparently forgotten even the elementary rules. Very
well, that wasn't my affair. But then why were you coming to Waldzell and wanting to hail us
as your fellows? As I've said, I found that annoying and repugnant, and at the time you were
absolutely right if you interpreted my assiduous politeness as rejection. I did instinctively
reject you, and not because you were a worldly person, but because you were asserting a claim
to be regarded as a Castalian. But when you recently reappeared after so many years, there was
no longer any trace of that. You looked worldly and talked like a man from outside. I noticed
the difference especially in the expression of sadness, grief or unhappiness on your face. But
I liked everything about you, your bearing, your words, even your sadness. They were beautiful,
suited you, worthy of you. None of that bothered me; I could accept you and affirm it all with-
out the slightest inner resistance. This time no excessive politeness and good manners were
necessary, and so I promptly met you as a friend and tried to show you my affection and concern.
But this time the situation was reversed; this time it was I who tried to win you while you
held back. My only encouragement was that I tacitly understood your appearance in our Province
and your interest in our affairs as a sign of attachment and loyalty. So then, finally you re-
sponded to my wooing, and we have now come to the point of opening our hearts to each other and
in this way, I hope, being able to renew our old friendship.

"You were just saying that our meeting at that time was painful for you, but insignificant for
me. We won't argue about that; you might be right. But our present meeting, amice, is by no
means insignificant for me. It means a great deal more to me than I can possibly tell you, more
than you can possibly guess. Just to give you the briefest of hints, it means more to me than the
return of a lost friend and the resurrection of times past with new force and in a new light. Above
all it represents to me a kind of call, an approach toward me from outside. It opens a way for me
into your world; it confronts me once more with the old problem of a synthesis between you and
us. And this occurs at the right moment. This time the call does not find me deaf; it finds me
more alert than I have ever been, because it does not really surprise me. It does not come to me
as something alien, something from outside which I may or may not respond to, as I please. Rather,
it comes out of myself; it is the twin to a very powerful and insistent desire, to a need and
a longing within myself. But let us talk of this some other time; it is already late and we both
need our rest.

"You spoke of my good cheer and your sadness, and you meant, it seems to me, that I was not be-
ing fair to what you call your 'plaint,' and that I have not been fair to it today either, since
I respond to this plaint with smiles. There is something here I don't quite understand. Why should
not a complaint be listened to with cheerfulness; why must one wear a doleful face instead of a
smile? From the fact that you came to Castalia again, and to me, with your grief and your burden,
I think I may conclude that our cheerful serenity means something to you. But if I do not go a-
long with your sadness, do not let myself be infected by it, that does not mean I don't recog-
nize it or take it seriously. I fully recognize and honor your demeanor, which your life in
the world has imprinted upon you. It becomes you and belongs to you; it is dear to me and de-
serves respect, although I hope to see it change. Of course I can only guess at its source; you
will tell me or not tell me about it later, as seems right to you. I can see only that you seem
to have a hard life. But why do you think I would not or cannot be fair to you and your burdens?"

Designori's face had clouded over once more. "Sometimes," he said resignedly, "it seems to me
that we have not only two different languages and ways of expressing ourselves, each of which
can only vaguely be translated into the other, but that we are altogether and fundamentally
different creatures who can never understand each other. Which of us is really the authentic
and integral human being, you or me? Every so often I doubt that either of us is. There were
times when I looked up to you members of the Order and Glass Bead Game players with such rev-
erence, such a sense of inferiority, and such envy that you might have been gods or supermen,
forever serene, forever playing, forever enjoying your own existences, forever immune to suf-
fering. At other times you seemed to me either pitiable or contemptible, eunuchs, artificially
confined to an eternal childhood, childlike and childish in your cool, tightly fenced, neatly
tidied playground and kindergarten, where every nose is carefully wiped and every troublesome
emotion is soothed, every dangerous thought repressed, where everyone plays nice, safe, blood-
less games for a lifetime and every jagged stirring of life, every strong feeling, every gen-
uine passion, every rapture is promptly checked, deflected, and neutralized by meditation ther-
apy. Isn't it an artificial, sterilized, didactically pruned world, a mere sham world in which
you cravenly vegetate, a world without vices, without passions, without hunger, without sap and
salt, a world without family, without mothers, without children, almost without women? The in-
stinctual life is tamed by meditation. For generations you have left to others dangerous, daring,
and responsible things like economics, law, and politics. Cowardly and well-protected, fed by
others, and having few burdensome duties, you lead your drones' lives, and so that they won't be
too boring you busy yourselves with all these erudite specialties, count syllables and letters,
make music, and play the Glass Bead Game, while outside in the filth of the world poor harried
people live real lives and do real work."

Knecht had listened to him with unswervingly friendly attentiveness.

"My dear friend," he said deliberately, "how strongly your words remind me of the spirited
battles of our schooldays. The difference is that today I no longer need play the same part
as I did then. My task today is not defense of the Order and the Province against your as-
saults, and I am very glad that this troublesome task, which overtaxed me at the time, is mine
no longer. You see, it's become rather difficult to repel the sort of glorious cavalry charge
you've once again mounted. You talk, for example, of people out in the rest of the country who
live real lives and do 'real work'. That sounds so fine and absolute--practically axiomatic--
and if one wanted to oppose it one would have to rudely remind the speaker that his own 'real
work' consists partly in sitting on a committee for the betterment of Castalia. But let us
leave joking aside for the moment. It is apparent from your words and your tone that your heart
is still full of hatred for us, and at the same time full of despairing love toward us, full
of envy and longing. To you we are cowards, drones, or children playing in a kindergarten, but
at times you have also seen us as godlike in our serenity. From all this, though, I think I may
rightly conclude one thing: Castalia is not to blame for your sadness, your unhappiness, or
whatever we choose to call it. That must come from elsewhere. If we Castalians were to blame,
your accusations against us would not be just what they were in the discussions of our boyhood.
In later conversations you must tell me more, and I don't doubt that we shall find a way to
make you happier and more serene, or at least to change your relationship toward Castalia into
a freer and more pleasant one. As far as I can see right now, you have a false, constrained,
sentimental attitude toward us. You have divided your own soul into a Castalian and worldly
part, and you torment yourself excessively about things for which you bear no responsibility.
Possibly you also do not take seriously enough other things for which you do bear responsibi-
lity. I suspect that it is some time since you have done any meditation exercises. Isn't that
so?"

Designori gave an anguished laugh. "How keen you are, Domine! Some time, you say? Many, many
years have passed since I gave up the magic of meditation. Now you are suddenly so concerned
about me! That time you met me here in Waldzell during the vacation course and showed me so
much courtesy and contempt, and turned down my plea for comradeship in so polished a manner,
I left here with the firm resolve to put an end to everything Castalian about me. From then
on I gave up the Glass Bead Game, ceased meditating; even music was spoiled for me for a
considerable time. Instead I found new friends who gave me instruction in worldly amusements.
We drank and whored; we tried all available narcotics; we sneered at decency, reverence, i-
dealism. Of course the thing didn't go on very long at such a crude level, but long enough
to remove completely the last traces of Castalian veneer. And then, years later, when I
occasionally realized that I had gone too far and badly needed some of the techniques of
meditation, I had become too proud to start again."

"Too proud?" Knecht murmured.

"Yes, too proud. I had meanwhile plunged into the world and become a man of the world. I want-
ed nothing more than to be one with the others; I wanted no other life than the world's life
— its passionate, childlike, crude, ungoverned life vacillating forever between happiness and
fear. I disdained the idea of procuring a degree of relief and some transcendence over others by
employing your methods."

The Magister gave him a sharp look. "And you endured that, for many years? Didn't you use any
other methods to cope with it all?"

"Oh yes," Plinio confessed. "I did and still do. At times I go back to drinking, and usually
I need all kinds of sedatives so that I can sleep."

For a second Knecht closed his eyes, as though suddenly weary; then he fixed his gaze upon
his friend once more. Silently, he looked into his face, earnestly probing at first, but with
his own expression gradually growing gentler, friendlier, serener. Designori has recorded that
he had never before encountered such a look in anyone's eyes, a look at once so searching and
so loving, so innocent and so critical, radiating such kindness and such omniscience. He admits
that this look disturbed him unpleasantly at first, but gradually reassured and overcame him by
its gentle insistence. But he was still trying to fight back.

"You said that you know ways to make me happier and more serene. But you don't ask whether
that is what I really want."

"Well," Joseph Knecht said, laughing, "if we can make a person happier and more serene, we
should do it in any case, whether or not he asks us to. And how could you not want that and
not be seeking it? That's why you are here, that's why we are once again sitting face to face,
that's why you returned to us, after all. You hate Castalia, you despise it, you're far too
proud of your worldliness and your sadness to wish to find relief through the use of reason and
meditation. And yet a secret, unquenchable longing for us and our serenity remained with you all
through these years, luring you to return, to try us once more. And I must tell you that you
have come at the right moment, when I too have been longing intensely for a call from your world,
for an opening door. But we'll talk about that next time. You've confided a great deal to me,
friend, and I thank you for it. You will see that I too have some things to confess to you. It
is late, you're leaving tomorrow, and another day of official routines awaits me. We must go to
bed. But please give me another fifteen minutes."

He stood up, went to the window, and looked up at the starry, crystalline night sky over-
laid by the scudding clouds. Since he did not return to his chair at once, his guest also
stood up and came over to the window beside him. The Magister stood there, drinking in the
cool, thin air of the autumnal night with rhythmic inhalations. He pointed toward the sky.

"Look," he said. "This landscape of clouds and sky. At first glance you might think that the
depths are there where it is darkest; but then you realize that the darkness and softness are
only the clouds and that the depths of the universe begin only at the fringes and fjords of this
mountain range of clouds--solemn and supreme symbols of clarity and orderliness. The depths and
the mysteries of the universe lie not where the clouds and blackness are; the depths are to be
found in the spaces of clarity and serenity. Please, just before going to sleep look up for a
while at these bays and straits again, with all their stars, and don't reject the ideas or dreams
that come to you from them."

A strange quiver went through Plinio's heart--he could not tell whether it was of grief or
happiness. An unimaginably long time ago, he recalled, in the lovely, serene beginnings of his
life as a Waldzell student, he had been summoned in similar words to his first meditation
exercises.

"And let me say one word more," the Glass Bead Game Master resumed, again in his low voice.
"I would like to say something more to you about cheerful serenity, the serenity of the stars
and of the mind, and about our Castalian kind of serenity also. You are averse to serenity,
presumably because you have had to walk the ways of sadness, and now all brightness and good
cheer, especially our Castalian kind, strikes you as shallow and childish, and cowardly to boot,
a flight from the terrors and abysses of reality into a clear, well-ordered world of mere forms
and formulas, mere abstractions and refinements. But, my dear devotee of sadness, even though for
some this may well be a flight, though there may be no lack of cowardly, timorous Castalians
playing with mere formulas, even if the majority among us were in fact of this sort--all this
would not lessen the value and splendor of genuine serenity, the serenity of the sky and the mind.
Granted there are those among us who are too easily satisfied, who enjoy a sham serenity; but in
contrast to them we also have men and generations of men whose serenity is not playful shallow-
ness, but earnest depth. I knew one such man--I mean our former Music Master, whom you used
to see in Waldzell now and then. In the last years of his life this man possessed the virtue of ser-
enity to such a degree that it radiated from him like the light from a star; so much that it was
transmitted to all in the form of benevolence, enjoyment of life, good humor, trust, and confi-
dence. It continued to radiate outward from all who received it, all who had absorbed its bright-
ness. His light shone upon me also; he transmitted to me a little of his radiance, a little of
the brightness in his heart, and to our friend Ferromonte as well, and a good many others. To
achieve this cheerful serenity is to me, and to many others, the finest and highest of goals. You
will also find it among some of the patriarchs in the directorate of the Order. Such cheerfulness
is neither frivolity nor complacency; it is supreme insight and love, affirmation of all reality,
alertness on the brink of all depths and abysses; it is a virtue of saints and of knights; it is
indestructible and only increases with age and nearness to death. It is the secret of beauty and
the real substance of all art. The poet who praises the splendors and terrors of life in the dance-
measures of his verse, the musician who sounds them in a pure, eternal present--these are bring-
ers of light, increasers of joy and brightness on earth, even if they lead us first through tears
and stress. Perhaps the poet whose verses gladden us was a sad solitary, and the musician a mel-
ancholic dreamer; but even so their work shares in the cheerful serenity of the gods and the stars.
What they give us is no longer their darkness, their suffering or fears, but a drop of pure light,
eternal cheerfulness. Even though whole peoples and languages have attempted to fathom the depths
of the universe in myths, cosmogonies, and religions, their supreme, their ultimate attainment
has been this cheerfulness. You recall the ancient Hindus--our teacher in Waldzell once spoke
so beautifully about them. A people of suffering, of brooding, of penance and asceticism; but
the great ultimate achievements of their thought were bright and cheerful; the smile of the as-
cetics and the Buddhas are cheerful; the figures in their profound, enigmatic mythologies are
cheerful. The world these myths represent begins divinely, blissfully, radiantly, with a sprin-
gtime loveliness: the golden age. Then it sickens and degenerates more and more; it grows coarse
and subsides into misery; and at the end of four ages, each lower than the others, it is ripe
for annihilation. Therefore it is trampled underfoot by a laughing, dancing Siva--but it
does not end with that. It begins anew with the smile of dreaming Vishnu whose hands playfully
fashion a young, new, beautiful, shining world. It is wonderful--how these Indians, with an
insight and capacity for suffering scarcely equalled by any other people, looked with horror and
shame upon the cruel game of world history, the eternally revolving wheel of avidity and
suffering; they saw and understood the fragility of created being, the avidity and diabolism of
man, and at the same time his deep yearning for purity and harmony; and they devised these
glorious parables for the beauty and tragedy of the creation: mighty Siva who dances the
completed world into ruins, and smiling Vishnu who lies slumbering and playfully makes a new
world arise out of his golden dreams of gods.

"But to return to our own, Castalian cheerfulness, it may be only a lateborn, lesser variety
of this great universal serenity, but it is a completely legitimate form. Scholarship has not been
cheerful always and everywhere, although it ought to be. But with us scholarship, which is the
cult of truth, is closely allied to the cult of the beautiful, and allied also with the practice of
spiritual refreshment by meditation. Consequently it can never entirely lose its serene
cheerfulness. Our Glass Bead Game combines all three principles: learning, veneration of the
beautiful, and meditation; and therefore a proper Glass Bead Game player ought to be drenched
in cheerfulness as a ripe fruit is drenched in its sweet juices. He ought above all to possess the
cheerful serenity of music, for after all music is nothing but an act of courage, a serene, smiling,
striding forward and dancing through the terrors and flames of the world, the festive offering of a
sacrifice. This kind of cheerful serenity is what I have been concerned with ever since I began
dimly to sense its meaning during my student days, and I shall never again relinquish it, not even
in unhappiness and suffering.

"We shall go to sleep now, and tomorrow morning you are leaving. Come back soon, tell me
more about yourself, and I shall begin to tell you, too. You will hear that even in Waldzell
and even in the life of a Magister there are doubts, disappointments, despairs, and dangerous
passions. But now I want you to take an ear filled with music to bed with you. A glance into
the starry sky and an ear filled with music is a better prelude to sleep than all your seda-
tives."

He sat down and carefully, very softly, played a movement from the Purcell sonata which was
one of Father Jacobus's favorite pieces. The notes fell into the stillness like drops of golden
light, so softly that along with them the song of the old fountain in the yard could be heard.
Gently, austerely, sparingly, sweetly, the lovely separate voices met and mingled; bravely and
gaily they paced their tender rondo through the void of time and transitoriness, for a little
while making the room and the night hour vast as the universe. And when the friends bade each
other good night, the guest's face had changed and brightened, although his eyes had filled with
tears.




　　　　　　　　　　　　　　TEN


　　　　　　　　　　　PREPARATIONS




Now THAT KNECHT had managed to break the ice, a vital association, revitalizing to the
two of them, began between himself and Designori. The latter, who for long years had lived
in resigned melancholia, had to admit that his friend was right: what had drawn him back to
the Pedagogic Province was in fact the longing for a cure, for brightness, for Castalian
cheerfulness. While Tegularius observed the new development with jealous mistrust, Plinio
began visiting frequently, even when he had no commission business. Soon Magister Knecht knew
all he needed to know about him. Designori's life had been neither so extraordinary nor so
complicated as Knecht had imagined after those initial revelations. In his youth Plinio had
suffered certain disappointments and humiliations, the more painful to one of his active, en-
thusiastic temperament, of which we have already heard. He had failed in his efforts to become
a mediator between the world and Castalia; he had not contrived to create a synthesis of the
worldly and Castalian components in his background and character, and had instead turned into
an isolated and embittered outsider. Nevertheless, he was not simply a failure. In defeat and
renunciation he had in spite of everything shaped a selfhood.

In him Castalian education seemed to have miscarried. At least it had so far produced nothing
but conflicts and disappointments for him, and a profound loneliness difficult for a man of
his sort to bear. It seemed, moreover, that since he had once stumbled into this thorny path of
maladjustment, he was driven to commit all kinds of acts that increased his isolation and his
difficulties. Thus while still a student he found himself irreconcilably at odds with his fam-
ily, in particular with his father.

Although not reckoned among actual political leaders, his father like all the Designoris
had been a lifelong supporter of the conservative, pro-government party. He was hostile to all
innovations, opposed to the claims of the underprivileged to new rights and a fair share in the
economy. He was suspicious of men without name or rank, devoted to the old order, and prepared
to make sacrifices for everything he regarded as legitimate and sacred. Without having any
special religious vein, he was friendly toward the Church. And although he did not lack a
sense of justice, benevolence, charity, and helpfulness, he was obstinately and on principle
opposed to the efforts of tenant-farmers to better their lot. He was wont to cite the program and
slogans of his party as a rationalization for this harshness. In reality, what motivated him was
neither conviction nor insight, but blind loyalty to his class and the traditions of his family.
This spirit was in keeping with a deep chivalrousness and feeling for chivalric honor, and an
outspoken contempt for everything that pretended to be modern, progressive, and contemporary.

It was a bitter blow to a man of this sort when his son Plinio, while still in his student
days, joined a distinctly oppositional and modernistic party. In those days a youthful left
wing of an old middle-class liberal party had been formed, led by a man named Veraguth, a pub-
licist, deputy, and forceful orator. He was a highly emotional populist and libertarian with
a tendency to become intoxicated by his own rhetoric. This man courted the students by giving
public lectures in university towns, and met with considerable success. Among other enthusiastic
followers, he won over Designori. The young man, disappointed with the university and seeking
something to sustain him, some substitute for the Castalian morality which had lost its hold on
him, seeking some kind of new idealism and program, was carried away by Veraguth's lectures.
He admired the man's passion and fighting spirit, his wit, his hortatory style, his good looks
and fine speech. Soon Plinio joined a faction of students who had been converted by Veraguth's
lectures and were working for his party and aims.

When Plinio's father learned of this, he set out at once for the university town. In a thunder-
ing rage, shouting at his son for the first time in his life, he charged him with conspiracy,
betrayal of his father, his family, and the traditions of his house, and ordered him to undo his
error at once by severing all ties with Veraguth and his party. This was certainly not the right
way to influence the young man, who saw his position turning into a kind of martyrdom. Plinio
stood up to his father's thunder. He hadn't attended the elite school for ten years and the
university for several, he declared, in order to give up his power of judgment. He was not going
to let a clique of selfish landowners prescribe his views on government, economics, and justice.
In framing this reply, he profited by the example of Veraguth, who modeled himself on the great
tribunes of the people in never speaking of his own or class interests, but only of pure absolute
justice and humanity.

Plinio's father burst into bitter laughter and suggested that his son at least finish his
studies before he meddled in grown-up affairs and fancied that he knew more about human life
and justice than venerable generations of noble families whose degenerate scion he was and
whom he was now traitorously stabbing in the back. With every word the quarrel grew more bitter
and insulting, until the father suddenly stopped in icy shame, as though a mirror had shown
him his own face distorted with rage. In silence, he took his leave.

From then on, Plinio's old pleasant and intimate relationship to his paternal home was never
restored. He remained loyal to his faction and its neo-liberalism. What is more, after com-
pleting his studies he became Veraguth's disciple, assistant, and intimate associate, and a few
years later his son-in-law. Since Designori's psychic equilibrium had been disturbed by his
education in the elite schools, or perhaps we should say by his difficulties in readjusting to the
world and to life back home, so that he was already beset by problems, these new relationships
threw him into an exposed, complex, and delicate situation. He gained something of indubitable
value, a kind of faith, political convictions, and membership in a party which satisfied his
youthful craving for justice and progressiveness. In Veraguth he acquired a teacher, leader, and
older friend whom at first he uncritically admired and loved, and who moreover seemed to need
him and appreciate him. He gained a direction and goal, work and a mission in life. That was a
good deal, but it had to be dearly bought. To some degree the young man came to terms with the
loss of his natural position in his father's family and among his peers; to some degree he
managed to meet expulsion from a privileged caste, and its subsequent hostility, with a sort of
relish in martyrdom. But there were some things he could never get over, above all the gnawing
sense that he had inflicted pain on his beloved mother, had placed her in an uncomfortable
position between his father and himself, and by doing so had probably shortened her life. She
died soon after his marriage. After her death Plinio scarcely ever visited his home, and when
his father died he sold the ancient family seat.

Among those who have made heavy sacrifices for a position in life, a government post, a mar-
riage, a profession, there are some who contrive to love their position and affirm it the more
on the strength of these very sacrifices. What they have suffered for constitutes their happiness
and their fulfillment. Designori's case was different. Although he remained loyal to his party and
its leader, his political beliefs and work, his marriage and his idealism, he began to doubt
everything connected with these things. His whole life had become problematical to him. The
political and ideological fervor of youth subsided. In the long run, the struggle to prove one-
self right no more made for gladness than had the trials undertaken out of defiance. Experience
in professional life had its sobering effect. Ultimately he wondered whether he had become a
follower of Veraguth out of a sense of truth and justice or whether he had not been at least half
seduced by the man's gifts as a speaker and rabble-rouser, his charm and nimble wit in public
appearances, the sonority of his voice, his splendid virile laughter, and the intelligence and
beauty of his daughter.

More and more he began to doubt whether old Designori with his class loyalty and his obduracy
toward the tenant-farmers had really held the baser view. He became uncertain whether good and
bad, right and wrong, had any absolute existence at all. Perhaps the voice of one's own con-
cience was ultimately the only valid judge, and if that were so, then he, Plinio, was in the
wrong. For he was not happy, calm, and balanced; he was not confident and secure. On the
contrary, he was plagued by uncertainty, doubts, and guilts. His marriage was not unhappy and
mistaken in any crude sense, but still it was full of tensions, complications, and resistances.
It was perhaps the best thing he possessed, but it did not give him that tranquility, that hap-
iness, that innocence and good conscience he so badly missed. It required a great deal of
circumspection and self-control. It cost him much effort. Moreover, his handsome and gifted
small son Tito very soon became a focal point of struggle and intrigue, of courting and jealousy,
until the boy, pampered and excessively loved by both parents, inclined more and more to his
mother's side and became her partisan. That was the latest and, so it seemed, the bitterest
sorrow and loss in Designori's life. It had not broken him; he had assimilated it and found an
attitude toward it, a dignified, but grave, worn, and melancholy way of bearing it.

While Knecht was gradually learning all this from his friend in the course of frequent visits,
he had also told him a great deal about his own experiences and problems. He was careful not
to let Plinio fall into the position of the one who has made his confession only to regret it at
a later hour or, with a change of mood, to wish to take it all back. On the contrary, he won Plinio's
confidence by his own candor and strengthened it by his own revelations. In the course of time
he showed his friend what his own life was like--a seemingly simple, upright, regulated life
within a clearly structured hierarchic order, a career filled with success and recognition, but
nevertheless a hard and completely lonely life of many sacrifices. And although as an outsider
there was much that Plinio could not entirely grasp, he did understand the main currents and
basic emotions. Certainly he could comprehend Knecht's craving to reach out to the youth, to
the younger pupils unspoiled by miseducation, and sympathize with his desire for some modest
employment such as that of a Latin or music teacher in a lower school, free of glamor and of the
eternal obligation to play a public role. It was wholly in the style of Knecht's methods of
teaching and psychotherapy that he not only won over this patient by his frankness, but also
planted the thought in Plinio's mind that he could help his friend, and thus spurred him really
to do so. For in fact Designori could be highly useful to the Magister, not so much in helping
him to solve his main problem, but in satisfying his curiosity and thirst for knowledge about
innumerable details of life in the world.

We do not know why Knecht undertook the difficult task of teaching his melancholy boyhood
friend to smile and laugh again, or whether any thought of a reciprocal service was involved.
Designori, at any rate, who was certainly in a position to know, did not think so. He later
said: "Whenever I try to fathom how my friend Knecht managed to do anything with a person as
confirmedly unhappy as myself, I see more and more plainly that his power was based on magic
and, I must add, on a streak of roguishness. He was an arch-rogue, far more than his own und-
erlings realized, full of playfulness, wit, slyness, delighting in magician's tricks, in guises,
in surprising disappearances and appearances. I think that the very moment I first turned
up at the Castalian Board meeting he resolved to snare me and exert his special sort of influence
on me--that is, to awaken and reform me. At any rate he took pains to win me over from the
very first. Why he did it, why he bothered with me, I cannot say. I think men of his sort usually
do such things unconsciously, as a kind of reflex. When they encounter someone in distress they
feel it as their task to respond to that appeal immediately. He found me distrustful and shy, by
no means ready to fall into his arms, let alone ask him for help.

"He found me, his once frank and communicative friend, disillusioned and reticent; yet this
very obstacle seemed to stimulate him. He did not give up, prickly though I was, and he finally
achieved what he wanted. Among other things he made it seem that our relationship was one of
mutual aid, as though my strength were equal to his, my worth to his, my need of help paral-
leled by an equal need on his part. In our very first long conversation he implied that he had
been waiting for something like my appearance, that he had in fact been longing for it, and
gradually he admitted me into his plan of resigning his office and leaving the Province. He
always made me aware of how much he counted on my advice, my assistance, my secrecy, since
aside from me he had not a single friend in the world outside, and no experience at all with
that world. I admit that I liked to feel this, and that it contributed a good deal toward my
trusting him completely and my putting myself more or less at his mercy. I believed him abso-
lutely. But later, in the course of time, the whole thing began to seem totally dubious and
improbable, and I would have been unable to say whether and to what extent he really expected
something from me, and whether his way of capturing me was innocent or politic, naive or sly,
sincere or contrived and a kind of game. He was so far superior to me, and did me so much good,
that I would never have ventured to look deeper into the matter. In any case, nowadays I regard
the fiction that his situation was similar to mine, and he just as dependent on my sympathy and
aid as I on his, as merely a form of politeness, an engaging and pleasant web of suggestion that
he wove around me. Only that to this day I cannot say to what extent his game with me was con-
scious, preconceived, and deliberate, to what extent it was in spite of everything naive and a pure
product of his nature. For Magister Joseph was certainly a great artist. On the one hand his urge
to educate, to influence, to heal and help and develop the personalities of others, was so strong
that he scarcely scrupled about the means he used; on the other hand it was impossible for him to
undertake even the smallest task without devoting himself totally to it. But one thing is certain:
that at the time he took me under his wing like a friend and like a great physician and guide. He
did not let go of me once he held me, and ultimately he awakened me and cured me as far as that
was possible. And the remarkable thing, so utterly typical of him, was that while he pretended to
be asking me to help him escape from his office, and while he listened calmly and often with
actual approval to my crude and simple-minded jibes at Castalia, and while he himself was
struggling to free himself from Castalia, he actually lured and guided me back there. He
persuaded me to return to meditation. He schooled and reshaped me by means of Castalian music
and contemplation, Castalian serenity, Castalian fortitude. He made me, who in spite of my
longing for your way had become so utterly un-Castalian and anti-Castalian, into one of your
sort again; he transformed my unrequited love for you into a requited love."

Such were Designori's comments, and no doubt he had reason for his admiring gratitude. It may
not be too difficult to teach boys and young men the lifestyle of the Order, with the aid of
our tried and true methods. It was surely a difficult task in the case of a man who was already
approaching his fiftieth year, even if this man were himself full of good will. Not that Designori
ever became anything like a model Castalian. But Knecht succeeded fully in what he had set out
to do: in lifting the bitter weight of unhappiness, in leading Designori's touchy, vulnerable
soul back to something like harmony and serenity, and in replacing a number of his bad habits by
good ones. Naturally the Magister Ludi could not himself undertake all the detailed work that
was involved. He enlisted the apparatus and energies of Waldzell and the Order in behalf of this
honored guest. For a while he even dispatched a meditation master from Hirsland, the seat of the
Order's directorate, to stay a while with Designori and supervise his exercises. But the whole
plan and direction of the cure remained in Knecht's hand.

It was in his eighth year as Magister that he at last yielded to his friend's repeated invita-
tions and visited him at his home in the capital. With permission from the directorate of the
Order, with whose President, Alexander, he had close and affectionate relations, he devoted a
holiday to his visit. Although he expected a great deal of it, he had been putting it off for a
whole year, partly because he first wished to be sure of his friend, partly, no doubt, out of a
natural timidity. This was, after all, his first step into that world from which his friend Pli-
nio had brought his stony sadness, the world which held so many important secrets for him.

He found the modern house which his friend had exchanged for the old Designori townhouse
presided over by a stately, highly intelligent, and reserved lady. She, however, was dominated
by her handsome, cheeky, and rather ill-behaved son who seemed to be the center of everything
here and who had apparently taken over from his mother a supercilious and rather insulting
attitude toward his father.

Initially rather cool and suspicious of everything Castalian, both mother and son soon came
under the spell of the Magister, whose office gave him, in their eyes, an almost mythical aura
of mystery and consecration. Nevertheless, the atmosphere during this first visit was stiff
and forced. Knecht remained rather quiet, observing and awaiting events. The lady of the house
received him with formal politeness and inner distaste, as if he were a high officer of some
enemy army being quartered on her. Tito, the son, was the least constrained of the three;
probably he had often enough looked on in amusement on similar situations. No doubt he had
also profited by them. His father seemed to be only playing the part of master of the house.
Between him and his wife the prevailing tone was one of gentle, cautious, rather anxious pol-
iteness, as if each of them were walking on tiptoe. This tone was maintained far more easily
and naturally by the wife than by her husband. As for the son, Plinio was always making over-
tures of comradeship to the boy which were at times taken up for selfish reasons, at other
times impudently rebuffed.

In short, the three lived together in a sultry atmosphere of effort, guiltiness, and sternly
repressed impulses, filled with fear of friction and eruptions, in a state of perpetual tension.
The style of behavior and speech, like the style of the whole house, was a little too careful
and deliberate, as though a solid wall had to be built against eventual breaches and assaults.
Knecht also noted that a great deal of Plinio's regained serenity had vanished from his face
again. Though in Waldzell or in the guest house of the Order in Hirsland he was by now almost
free of gloom, in his own house he still stood in the shadows, and provoked as much criticism
as pity.

The house was a fine one. It bespoke wealth and luxurious tastes. In each room the furnishings
were of the right proportions for the space; each was tuned to a pleasant harmony of two or
three colors, with here and there a valuable work of art. Knecht looked about him with pleasure;
but in the end all these delights to the eye struck him as a shade too handsome, too perfect,
and too well thought out. There was no sense of growth, of movement, of renewal. He sensed that
this beauty of the house and its belongings was also meant as a land of spell, a defensive ges-
ture, and that these rooms, pictures, vases, and flowers enclosed and accompanied a life of
vain longing for harmony and beauty which could be attained only in the form of tending such
well-co-ordinated surroundings.

It was in the period after this visit, with its somewhat unedifying impressions, that Knecht
sent a meditation teacher to his friend's home. After having spent a single day in the curiously
taut and charged atmosphere of this house, the Magister understood much that he had not wished
to know but needed to learn for his friend's sake. Nor was this first visit the last. He came a-
gain, several times, and on some of these occasions the talk turned to education and the diffi-
culties with young Tito. In these conversations Tito's mother took a lively part. The Magister
gradually won the confidence and liking of this highly intelligent and skeptical woman. Once, when
he said half jokingly that it was a pity her boy had not been sent to Castalia early, while there
was still time for him to be educated there, she took the remark seriously as if it were a reproof,
and came to her own defense. She doubted, she said, whether Tito would have been admitted; he was
gifted enough, certainly, but hard to handle, and she would never have wished to impose her own
ideas on the boy. After all, a similar attempt in the case of his father had not worked out well.
Besides, neither she nor her husband had ever thought to claim the old Designori family privilege
for their son, since they had broken with Plinio's father and the whole tradition of the ancient
house. Finally, she added, with a painful smile, that in any case she would not have been able to
part with her child, since he was all that made her life worth living.

Knecht gave a great deal of thought to this last remark, which obviously had been made without
reflection. So her house, in which everything was so distinguished, elegant, and harmonious, so
her husband, her politics, her party, the heritage of the father she had once adored--so all
this was not enough to give meaning to her life. Only her child could make it worth living. And
she would rather allow this child to grow up under the harmful conditions that prevailed in this
house than be separated from him for his own good. For so sensible and seemingly so cool and in-
tellectual a woman, this was an astonishing confession. Knecht could not help her as directly as
he had her husband, nor did he have the slightest intention of trying. But as a result of his
rare visits and of the fact that Plinio was under his influence, some moderation and a reminder
of better ways were introduced into the warped and wrong-headed family situation. The Magister
himself, however, as he gained increasing influence and authority in the Designori household
with each succeeding visit, found himself more and more puzzled by the life of these worldly
people. Unfortunately we know very little about his visits in the capital and the things he saw
and experienced there, so that we must content ourselves with the matters we have already indi-
cated.

Knecht had not hitherto approached the President of the Order in Hirsland any more closely
than his official functions demanded. He probably saw him only at those plenary sessions
of the Board of Educators which took place in Hirsland, and even then the President generally
performed only the more formal and ornamental duties, the reception and conge of his col-
leagues, with the principal work of conducting the session being left to the Speaker. The
previous President, who at the time of Knecht's assuming office was already an old man, had
been highly respected by the Magister Ludi, but had made not a single gesture toward lessen-
ing the distance between them. For Knecht he was scarcely a human being, no longer had any
personality; he hovered, a high priest, a symbol of dignity and composure, silent summit and
crowning glory, above the entire hierarchy. This venerable man had recently died, and the
Order had elected Alexander its new President.

Alexander was the same Meditation Master whom the heads of the Order had assigned to our
Joseph Knecht years ago, during the early period of his magistracy. Ever since, the Magister
had retained an affectionate gratitude for this exemplary representative of the spirit of hi-
erarchy. And Alexander himself, during the time he daily watched over the Magister Ludi and
became virtually his father confessor, had seen enough of his personality and conduct to come
to love him. Both grew aware of the hitherto latent friendship from the moment that Alexander
became Knecht's colleague and President of the Order. Henceforth they saw each other fre-
quently and had work to do together. It was true that this friendship lacked a foundation in ev-
eryday, commonplace tasks, just as it lacked shared experiences in youth. It was rather the
mutual sympathy of two colleagues at the summit of their respective vocations, who expressed
their friendliness by a slightly greater warmth in greetings and leave-takings, by the deftness of
their mutual comprehension, at most by a few minutes of chatting during brief breaks at a sit-
ting of the Board.

Constitutionally, the President, who was also called Master of the Order, was in no way sup-
erior to his colleagues, the other Magisters. But he had acquired an indefinable superiority
due to the tradition that the Master of the Order presided over the meetings of the Supreme
Board. And as the Order had grown more meditative and monastic during the last several dec-
ades, his authority had increased--although only within the hierarchy and the Province, not
outside it. Within the Board of Educators, the President of the Order and the Master of the
Glass Bead Game had more and more become the twin exponents and representatives of the
Castalian spirit. As against the ancient disciplines handed down from pre-Castalian eras--such
as grammar, astronomy, mathematics, or music--the Glass Bead Game and discipline of the mind
through meditation had become the truly characteristic values of Castalia. It was therefore of
some significance that the two present leaders in these fields stood in a friendly relationship to
each other. For each it was a vindication of his own worth, for each an extra dash of warmth
and satisfaction in his life; for both it was an additional spur to the fulfillment of their task of
embodying in their own persons the deepest values, the sacral energies of the Castalian world.

To Knecht, therefore, this meant one more tie, one more counterpoise to his growing urge
to renounce everything and achieve a breakthrough into a new and different sphere of life.
Nevertheless, this urge developed inexorably. Ever since he himself had become fully aware of
it--that may have been in the sixth or seventh year of his magistracy--it had grown steadily
stronger. Subscribing as he did to the idea of "awakening," he had unfalteringly received it
into his conscious life and thinking. We believe we may say that from that time on the thought
of his coming departure from his office and from the Province was familiar to him. Sometimes
it seemed like a prisoner's belief in eventual freedom, sometimes like knowledge of impending
death as it must appear to a man gravely ill.

During his first frank conversation with Plinio, he had for the first time expressed the thing
in words. Perhaps he had done so only in order to win over his friend and persuade him to open
his heart; but perhaps also he had intended, by this initial act of communication, to turn this
new awakening of his, this new attitude toward life, in an outward direction. That is, by letting
someone into his secret he was taking a first step toward making it a reality. In his further con-
versations with Designori, Knecht's desire to shed his present mode of life sooner or later, to
undertake the leap into a new life, assumed the status of a decision. Meanwhile, he carefully built
on his friendship with Plinio, who by now was bound to him not only by his former admiration,
but also by the gratitude of a cured patient. In that friendship Knecht now possessed a bridge
to the outside world and to its life so laden with enigmas.

It need not surprise us that the Magister waited so long before allowing his friend Tegularius
a glimpse of his secret and of his plan for breaking away. Although he had shaped each of his
friendships with kindness and with regard for the good of the other, he had always managed to
keep a clear, independent view of these relationships, and to direct their course. Now, with
the re-entry of Plinio into his life, a rival to Fritz had appeared, a new-old friend with
claims upon Knecht's interest and emotions. Knecht could scarcely have been surprised that
Tegularius reacted with signs of violent jealousy. For a while, until he had completely won over
Designori, the Magister may well have found Fritz's sulky withdrawal a welcome relief. But in
the long run another consideration took a larger place in his thoughts. How could he reconcile a
person like Tegularius to his desire to slip away from Waldzell and out of his magistracy? Once
Knecht left Waldzell, he would be lost to this friend forever. To take Fritz along on the narrow
and perilous path that lay before him was unthinkable, even if Fritz should unexpectedly
manifest the desire and the courage for the enterprise.

Knecht waited, considered, and hesitated for a very long time before initiating Fritz into his
plans. But he finally did so, after his decision to leave had long been settled. It would have
been totally unlike him to keep his friend in the dark, and more or less behind his back prepare
steps whose consequences would deeply affect him as well. If possible Knecht wanted to make him,
like Plinio, not only an initiate, but also a real or imaginary aide, since activity makes every
situation more bearable.

Knecht had, of course, long ago made his friend privy to his ideas about the doom threatening
the Castalian organization, as far as he cared to communicate these ideas and Tegularius to re-
ceive them. After he resolved to tell Fritz of his intentions, the Magister used these ideas as
his link. Contrary to his expectations, and to his great relief, Fritz did not take a tragic
view of the plan.

Rather, the notion that a Magister might fling his post back at the Board, shake the dust of
Castalia from his feet, and seek out a life that suited his tastes, seemed to please Fritz. The
idea actually amused him. Individualist and enemy of all standardization that he was, Tegularius
invariably sided with the individual against authority. If there were prospect of fighting, taunt-
ing, outwitting the powers of officialdom, he was always for it.

His reaction gave Knecht a valuable clue as to how to go on. With an easier conscience,
and laughing inwardly, the Magister promptly entered into his friend's attitude. He did not
disabuse Fritz of his notion that the whole thing was a kind of coup de main against bureaucracy,
and assigned him the part of an accomplice, collaborator, and conspirator. It would be necessary
to work out a petition from the Magister to the Board, he said--an exposition of all the reasons
that prompted him to resign his office. The preparation of this petition was to be chiefly
Tegularius's task. Above all he must assimilate Knecht's historical view of the origins,
development, and present state of Castalia, then gather historical materials with which Knecht's
desires and proposals could be documented. That this would lead him into a field he had hitherto
rejected and scorned, the field of history, seemed not to disturb Tegularius at all, and Knecht
quickly taught him the necessary procedures. Soon Tegularius had immersed himself in his new
assignment with the eagerness and tenacity he always had for odd and solitary enterprises. This
obstinate individualist took a fierce delight in these studies which would place him in a position
to challenge the bigwigs and the hierarchy in general, and show them their shortcomings.

Joseph Knecht took no such pleasure in these endeavors, nor had he any faith in their outcome.
He was determined to free himself from the fetters of his present situation, leaving himself
unencumbered for tasks which he felt were awaiting him. But he fully realized that he could
not overpower the Board by rational arguments, nor delegate Tegularius any part of the real
work that had to be done. Nevertheless, he was very glad to know that Fritz was occupied
and diverted for the short while that they would still be living in proximity to each other.
The next time he saw Plinio Designori he was able to report: "Friend Tegularius is now busy,
and compensated for what he thinks he has lost because of your reappearance on the scene. His
jealousy is almost cured, and working on something for me and against my colleagues is doing
him good. He is almost happy. But don't imagine, Plinio, that I count on anything concrete
coming out of this project, aside from the benefit to himself. It is most unlikely that our highest
authority will grant this petition of mine. In fact, it's out of the question. At best they will
reply with a mild reprimand. What dooms my request is the nature of our hierarchy itself. A Board
that would release its Magister Ludi in response to a petition, no matter how persuasively argued,
and would assign him to work outside Castalia, wouldn't be to my liking at all. Besides, there
is the character of our present Master of the Order. Master Alexander is a man whom nothing can
bend. No, I shall have to fight this battle out alone. But let us allow Tegularius to exercise his
mind for the present. All we lose by that is a little time, which I need in any case so as to
leave everything here so well arranged that my departure will cause no harm to Waldzell. But
meanwhile you must find me some place to live on the outside, and some employment, no matter
how modest; if necessary I shall be content with a position as a music teacher, say. It need
only be a beginning, a springboard."

Designori said he thought something could be found, and when the time came his house
was at his friend's disposal for as long as he liked. But Knecht would not accept that.

"No," he said, "I wouldn't do as a guest; I must have some work. Besides, my staying more than
a few days in your house, lovely as it is, would only add to the tensions and troubles there.
I have great confidence in you, and your wife, too, nowadays treats me in a friendly way, but
all this would look entirely different as soon as I ceased to be a visitor and Magister Ludi,
and became a refugee and permanent guest."

"Surely you're being a little too literal-minded about it," Plinio said. "Once you've made
your break and are living in the capital, you'll soon be offered a suitable post, at least a
professorship at the university--you can count on that as a certainty. But such things take
time, as you know, and of course I can only begin working in your behalf after you have won
your freedom."

"Of course," the Master said. "Until then my decision must remain secret. I cannot offer
myself to your authorities before my own authority here has been informed and has made its
decision; that goes without saying. But for the present, you know, I am not at all seeking a
public appointment. My wants are few, probably fewer than you can imagine. I need a little room
and my daily bread, but above all work to do, some task as a teacher; I need one or a few pupils
to whom I can be near and whom I can influence. A university post is the last thing on my mind.
I would be just as glad--no, I would by far prefer--to work with a boy as a private tutor, or
something of the sort. What I am seeking and what I need is a simple, natural task, a person who
needs me. Appointment at a university would from the start mean my fitting into a traditional,
sanctified, and mechanized bureaucracy, and what I crave is just the opposite of that."

Hesitantly, Designori brought up the project that had been on his mind for some time.

"I do have something to propose," he said, "and hope you will at least think it over. If you
can possibly accept it, you would be doing me a service too. Since that first day I visited you
here you have given me a great deal of help. You've also come to know my household and know
how things stand there. My situation isn't good, but it is better than it has been for years. The
thorniest problem is the relationship between me and my son. He is spoiled and impudent; he's
made himself a privileged position in our house--as you know, this was virtually pressed on him
while he was still a child and courted by both his mother and myself. Since then he's decidedly
gone over to his mother's side, and gradually whatever authority I might have had over him has
been adroitly taken out of my hands. I had resigned myself to that, as I have to so much else in
my botched life. But now that I have recovered somewhat, thanks to you, I've regained hope.
You can see what I am driving at. I would think it a piece of great good fortune if Tito, who is
having difficulties in school anyhow, were to have a tutor who would take him in hand. It's a
selfish request, I know, and I have no idea whether the task appeals to you at all. But you've
encouraged me to make the suggestion, as least."

Knecht smiled and extended his hand.

"Thank you, Plinio. No proposal could be more welcome to me. The only thing lacking is your
wife's consent. Furthermore, the two of you must be prepared to leave your son entirely to
me for the time being. If I am to do anything with him, the daily influence of his home must
be excluded. You must talk to your wife and persuade her to accept this condition. Go at it
cautiously; give yourselves time."

"Do you really think you can do something with Tito?" Designori asked.

"Oh yes, why not? He has good blood and high endowments from both parents. What is missing is
the harmony of these forces. My task will be to awaken in him the desire for this harmony, or
rather to strengthen it and ultimately to make him conscious of it. I shall be happy to try."

Thus Joseph Knecht had his two friends occupied with his affair, each in a different way.
While Designori in the capital presented the new plan to his wife and tried to couch it in terms
acceptable to her, Tegularius sat in a carrel in the library at Waldzell following up Knecht's leads
and gathering material for the petition. The Magister had put out good bait in the reading matter
he had prescribed. Fritz Tegularius, the fierce despiser of history, sank his teeth into the history
of the warring epoch, and became thoroughly infatuated with it. With his enthusiasm for any
pastime, he ferreted out more and more anecdotes from that epoch in the dark prehistory of the
Order. Soon he had collected such copious notes that when he presented them to his friend,
Knecht could use only a tenth of them.

During this period Knecht made several visits to the capital. Because a sound, integrated per-
sonality often finds easy access to troubled and difficult people, Designori's wife came to
trust him more and more. Soon she consented to her husband's plan. Tito himself, on one of these
visits, boldly informed the Magister that he no longer wished to be addressed with the familiar
pronoun, as if he were a child, since everyone nowadays, including his teacher, used the polite
pronoun to him. Knecht thanked him with perfect courtesy and apologized. In his Province, he
explained, the teachers used the familiar form to all students, even those who were quite grown
up. After dinner he invited the boy to go for a walk with him and show him something of the
city.

In the course of the walk Tito guided him down a stately street in the old part of the city,
where the centuries-old houses of wealthy patrician families stood in an almost unbroken row.
Tito paused in front of one of these substantial, tall, and narrow buildings and pointed to a
shield over the doorway. "Do you know what that is?" he asked. When Knecht said he did not, he
explained: "Those are the Designori arms, and this is our old house. It belonged to the family for
three hundred years. But we are living in our meaningless, commonplace house just because after
grandfather's death my father took it into his head to sell this marvelous old mansion and build
himself a fashionable place that by now isn't so modern any more. Can you understand anyone's
acting like that?"

"Are you very sorry about the old house?" Knecht asked.

"Very sorry," Tito said passionately, and repeated his question: "Can you understand anyone's
acting like that?"

"Things become understandable if you look at them in the right light," the Magister said. "An
old house is a fine thing, and if the two had stood side by side and your father were choosing
between them, he probably would have kept the old one. Certainly, old houses are beautiful and
distinguished, especially so handsome a one as this. But it is also a beautiful thing to build one's
own house, and when an ambitious young man has the choice of comfortably and submissively
settling into a finished nest, or building an entirely new one, one can well see that he may de-
cide to build. As I know your father--and I knew him when he was a spirited fellow just about
as old as you are--the sale of the house probably hurt no one more than himself. He had had
a painful conflict with his father and his family, and it seems his education in our Castalia was
not altogether the right thing for him. At any rate it could not deter him from several impa-
tient acts of passion. Probably the sale of the house was one of those acts. He meant it as a
thrust at tradition, a declaration of war upon his family, his father, the whole of his past and
his dependency. At least that is one way to see it. But man is a strange creature, and so another
idea does not appear altogether improbable to me, the idea that by selling this old house your
father wanted primarily to hurt himself rather than the family. To be sure, he was angry at the
family; they had sent him to our elite schools, had given him our land of education, only to con-
front him on his return with tasks, demands, and claims he could not handle. But I would rather
go no further in psychological analysis. In any case the story of this sale shows how telling
the conflict between fathers and sons can be--this hatred, this love turned to hate. In force-
ful and gifted personalities this conflict rarely fails to develop--world history is full of
examples. Incidentally, I could very well imagine a later young Designori who would make it
his mission in life to regain possession of the house for the family at all costs."

"Well," Tito exclaimed, "wouldn't you think he was right?"

"I would not like to judge him. If a later Designori recalls the greatness of his family and
the obligations that such greatness imposes, if he serves the city, the country, the nation,
justice, and welfare with all his energies and in the process grows so strong that he can
recover the house, then he will be a worthy person and we would want to take our hats off to
him. But if he knows no other goal in life besides this house business, then he is merely ob-
sessed, a fanatic, a man surrendering to a passion, and in all probability someone who never
grasped the meaning of such youthful conflicts with a father and so went on shouldering their
load long after he became a man. We can understand and even pity him, but he will not increase
the fame of his lineage. It is fine when an old family remains affectionately attached to
its residence, but rejuvenation and new greatness spring solely from sons who serve greater
goals than the aims of the family."

Although on this walk Tito listened attentively and quite willingly to his father's guest,
on other occasions he exhibited dislike and fresh defiance. In this man, whom his otherwise
discordant parents both seemed to hold in high esteem, Tito sensed a power which threatened
his own pampered freedom, so that at times he treated Knecht with outright rudeness. Each
time, however, he would be sorry and try to make up for such breaches, for it offended his
self-esteem to have shown weakness in the face of the serene courtesy that surrounded the
Magister like a coat of shining armor. Secretly, too, in his inexperienced and rather un-
ruly heart, he sensed that this was a man he might love and revere.

He felt this particularly one half-hour when he came upon Knecht alone, waiting for his fa-
ther, who was busy with affairs. As Tito entered the room he saw their guest sitting still,
with eyes half closed, in a statuesque pose, radiating such tranquility and peace in his
meditation that the boy instinctively checked his stride and began to tiptoe out of the room
again. But at that point the Magister opened his eyes, gave him a friendly greeting, rose,
indicated the piano in the room, and asked whether he liked music.

Tito said he did, although he had not had music lessons for quite some time and had left
off practicing because he was not doing so well in school and those drill-masters who called
themselves teachers were always keeping after him. Still and all he'd always enjoyed listening
to music. Knecht opened the piano, sat down at it, found it was tuned, and played an andante
movement of Scarlatti's which he had recently used as the basis for a Glass Bead Game exercise.
Then he stopped, and seeing the boy rapt and attentive, began outlining more or less what took
place in such an exercise. He dissected the music, giving examples of some of the analytical
methods that could be used and the ways the music could be translated into the hieroglyphs of
the Game.

For the first time Tito saw the Magister not as a guest, not as a learned celebrity whom he
resented as a danger to his own self-esteem. Rather, he saw him at his work, a man who had
acquired a subtle, exacting art and practiced it with a masterly hand. Tito could only dimly
sense the meaning of that art, but it seemed to be deserving of full devotion and to call
forth all the powers of an integrated personality. That this man thought him grown-up and
intelligent enough to be interested in these complicated matters also gave him greater as-
surance. He grew quiet, and during this half-hour he began to divine the sources of this
remarkable man's cheerfulness and unruffled calm.

During this last period Knecht's official activities were almost as strenuous as they had
been in the difficult time after his assumption of office. He was determined to leave all the
areas under his control in exemplary condition. Moreover, he achieved this aim, although he
failed in his further aim of making his own person appear dispensable, or at least easily re-
placeable. That is almost always the case with the highest offices in our Province. The Mag-
ister hovers rather like a supreme ornament, a gleaming insigne, above the complex affairs
of his domain. He comes and goes rapidly, flirting amiably by, says a few words, nods an as-
sent, suggests an assignment by a gesture, and is already gone, already talking to the next
subordinate. He plays on his official apparatus like a musician on his instrument, seems to
expend no force and scarcely any thought, yet everything runs as it should. But every offi-
cial in this apparatus knows what it means when the Magister is away or ill, what it means
to find a substitute for him even for a few hours or a day.

Knecht spent his time rushing once more through the whole principality of the Vicus Lus-
orum, checking everything and especially taking pains to secretly groom his Shadow for the
task the man would soon confront, that of representing him in all earnest. But all the while
he could observe that at heart he had already liberated himself from all this, had moved
far away from it. The preciosity of this well-arranged little world no longer enraptured
him. He saw Waldzell and his magisterial function as something that already virtually lay
behind him, a region he had passed through, which had given him a great deal and taught
him much, but which could no longer tempt him to new accomplishments, to a fresh outpour-
ing of energy. More and more, during this period of slow breaking loose and bidding fare-
well, he came to see the real reason for his alienation and desire to escape. It was pro-
bably not, he thought, his knowledge of the dangers to Castalia and his anxiety about her
future, but simply that a hitherto idle and empty part of his self, of his heart and soul,
was now demanding the right to fulfill itself.

At this time he once again carefully studied the Constitution and Statutes of the Order.
His escape from the Province would not, he saw, be so hard to accomplish, so nearly impos-
sible as he had initially imagined. He did have the right to resign his office on grounds
of conscience, and even to leave the Order. The Order's vow was not a lifetime matter, al-
though members had claimed this freedom seldom, and a member of the highest Board never.
What made the step seem so difficult to him was not so much the strictness of the law but
the hierarchic spirit itself, the loyalty within his own heart. Of course he was not plan-
ning to skip out; he was preparing a circumstantial petition for release, and that dear
fellow Tegularius was working day and night at it. But he had no confidence in the suc-
cess of this petition. He would receive soothing assurances, admonishments, would perhaps
be offered a vacation in Mariafels, where Father Jacobus had recently died, or perhaps
in Rome. But the authorities would not let him go; that seemed more and more clear. To
release him would violate all the traditions of the Order. If the Board were to do so,
it would be admitting that his request was justified, admitting that life in Castalia,
and what was more in such a high post, might in some circumstances not be satisfying
to a man, might mean renunciation and imprisonment.




　　　　　　　　　　　　　ELEVEN


　　　　　　　　THE CIRCULAR LETTER




WE ARE APPROACHING the end of our tale. As we have already indicated, our knowledge
of this end is fragmentary, rather more in the nature of a legend than of a historical
narrative. We shall have to be content with that. We therefore take all the more plea-
sure in being able to fill out this next-to-last chapter of Knecht's life with an au-
thentic document, namely with that voluminous memorandum in which the Glass Bead Game
Master himself presents the authorities with the reasons for his decision and asks
them to release him from his office.

As we have repeatedly stated, Joseph Knecht no longer believed in the success of this
memorandum which he had had so conscientiously prepared. We must admit, moreover, that
when the time came he wished he had neither written nor handed in this "petition." He
suffered the fate of all who exercise a natural and initially unconscious power over
other men: this power is not exercised without a certain cost to its possessor. Al-
though the Magister had been glad to win his friend Tegularius's support for his plans,
and to have made him a promoter and associate in them, the consequences went far beyond
what he had conceived or wished. He had coaxed or misled Fritz into undertaking a task
whose value he himself, as its author, no longer believed in; but when his friend at
last presented him with the fruits of his labors, he could no longer undo the work.
Nor, since the purpose of the assignment had been to make Fritz better able to bear
their separation, could he lay the data aside and leave them unused without thoroughly
offending and disappointing his friend. At the time, we are convinced, Knecht would
much rather have brusquely resigned his office and declared his withdrawal from the
Order instead of choosing the roundabout mode of the "petition," which in his eyes
had become virtually a farce. But consideration for Tegularius caused him to restrain
his impatience for a while longer.

It would no doubt be interesting if we had his industrious friend's manuscript at our
disposal. It consisted mainly of historical material meant to serve as proof or illu-
stration; but we may safely assume that it contained a good many sharp and witty epi-
grams on the hierarchy, as well as on the world and world history. But even if this
document, composed as it was in months of tenacious labor, were still in existence--
as it quite possibly may be--we would have to forbear from publishing it here, since
this book of ours would not be the proper place for it.

Our concern is only with the use the Magister Ludi made of his friend's work. When Teg-
ularius solemnly presented this document to him, he accepted it with cordial words of
gratitude and appreciation, and knowing what pleasure this would give, asked Fritz to
read it aloud. For several days, therefore, Tegularius spent half an hour in the Magi-
ster's garden, for it was summertime, and read with gusto the many pages of his manu-
script. Often the reading was interrupted by peals of laughter on the part of both.
These were good days for Tegularius. Afterward, however, Knecht went into seclusion in
order to compose his letter to the Board. We present here its exact text. No further
commentary on it is necessary.


　　　　　　　　　　The Magister Ludi's Letter to the
　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　Board of Educators

Various considerations have prompted me, the Magister Ludi, to present to the Board a pecial
request in this separate and somewhat more private memorandum, instead of including it in my
official report. Although I am appending this memorandum to the official accounting that is now
due, and await an official reply, I regard it rather as a circular letter to my colleagues in
office.

Every Magister is required to inform the Board of any hindrances or danger to his conducting
his office in keeping with the Rule. Although I have endeavored to serve with all my strength,
the conduct of my office is (or seems to me to be) threatened by a danger which resides in my
own person, although that is probably not its sole origin. At any rate, I see my suitability
to serve as Magister Ludi as imperiled, and this by circumstances beyond my control. To put it
briefly: I have begun to doubt my ability to officiate satisfactorily because I consider the Glass
Bead Game itself in a state of crisis. The purpose of this memorandum is to convince the Board
that the crisis exists, and that my awareness of it demands that I seek a position other from
the one I now hold.

Permit me to clarify the situation by a metaphor. A man sits in an attic room engaged in a
subtle work of scholarship. Suddenly he becomes aware that fire has broken out in the house
below. He will not consider whether it is his function to see to it, or whether he had not b
etter finish his tabulations. He will run downstairs and attempt to save the house. Here I am
sitting in the top story of our Castalian edifice, occupied with the Glass Bead Game, working
with delicate, sensitive instruments, and instinct tells me, my nose tells me, that down below
something is burning, our whole structure is imperiled, and that my business now is not to
analyze music or define rules of the Game, but to rush to where the smoke is.

Most of us brothers of the Order take Castalia, our Order, our system of scholarship and school-
ing, together with the Game and everything associated with it, as much for granted as most men
take the air they breathe and the ground they stand on. Hardly anyone ever thinks that this
air and this ground could sometime not be there, that we might some day lack air or find the
ground vanishing from under us. We have the good fortune of living well protected in a small,
neat, and cheerful world, and the great majority of us, strange as it may seem, hold to the fic-
tion that this world has always existed and that we were born into it. I myself spent my younger
years in this extremely pleasant delusion, although I was perfectly well aware of the reality
that I was not born in Castalia, but only sent here by the educational authorities and raised
here. I knew also that Castalia, the Order, the Board, the colleges, the Archives, and the Glass
Bead Game have not always existed, are by no means a product of nature, but a belated and
noble creation of man's will, and transitory like all such things. I knew all this, but it had no re-
ality for me; I simply did not think of it, ignored it, and I knew that more than three-quarters
of us will live and die in this strange and pleasant illusion.

But just as there have been centuries and millennia without the Order and without Castalia,
there will again be such eras in the future. And if today I remind my colleagues and the honor-
able Board of this platitude, and call upon them to turn their eyes for once to the dangers
that threaten us, if I assume for a moment the unenviable and often ludicrous role of prophet,
warner, and sermonizer, I do so fully prepared to accept mocking laughter; but I hope never-
theless that the majority of you will read my memorandum to the end and that some of you
may even agree with me on a few of its points. That in itself would be a good deal.

An institution such as our Castalia, a small Province dedicated to the things of the mind,
is prone to internal and external perils. The internal perils, or at least a good many of them,
are known to us; we keep watch for them and take the necessary measures. Every so often we
send individual pupils back, after having admitted them to the elite schools, because we discover
in them ineradicable traits and impulses which would make them unfitted for our community and
dangerous to it. Most of them, we trust, are not lesser human beings on that score, but merely
unsuited to Castalian life, and after their return to the world are able to find conditions more
appropriate to them, and develop into capable men. Our practice in this respect has proved its
value, and on the whole our community can be said to sustain its dignity and self-discipline and
to fulfill its task of being and constantly recruiting a nobility of the mind. Presumably we
have no more than a normal and tolerable quota of the unworthy and slothful among us.

The conceit that can be observed among the members of our Order is rather more objectionable.
I am referring to that class arrogance to which every aristocracy inclines, and with which ev-
ery privileged group is charged, with or without justification. The history of societies shows
a constant tendency toward the formation of a nobility as the apex and crown of any given soci-
ety. It would seem that all efforts at socialization have as their ideal some kind of aristocracy,
of rule of the best, even though this goal may not be admitted. The holders of power, whether
they have been kings or an anonymous group, have always been willing to further the rise of a
nobility by protection and the granting of privileges. This has been so no matter what the nature
of the nobility: political, by birth, by selection and education. The favored nobility has always
basked in the sunlight; but from a certain stage of development on, its place in the sun, its
privileged state, has always constituted a temptation and led to its corruption. If, now, we regard
our Order as a nobility and try to examine ourselves to see to what extent we earn our special
position by our conduct toward the whole of the people and toward the world, to what extent we
have already been infected by the characteristic disease of nobility--hubris, conceit, class
arrogance, self-righteousness, exploitativenes---if we conduct such a self-examination, we may
be seized by a good many doubts. The present-day Castalian may not be lacking in obedience to
the rules of the Order, in industry, in cultivated intelligence; but does he not often suffer from a
severe lack of insight into his place in the structure of the nation, his place in the world and
world history? Is he aware of the foundation of his existence; does he know himself to be a leaf,
a blossom, a twig or root of a living organism? Does he have any notion of the sacrifices the
nation makes for his sake, by feeding and clothing him, by underwriting his schooling and his
manifold studies? And does he care very much about the meaning of our special position? Does
he have any real conception of the purpose of our Order and life?

There are exceptions, granted, many and praiseworthy exceptions. Nevertheless I am inclined
to answer all these questions with a No. The average Castalian may regard the man of the out-
side world, the man who is not a scholar, without contempt, envy, or malice, but he does not
regard him as a brother, does not see him as his employer, does not in the least feel that he
shares responsibility for what is going on outside in the world. The purpose of his life seems to
him to be cultivation of the scholarly disciplines for their own sake, or perhaps even to be taking
pleasurable strolls in the garden of a culture that pretends to be a universal culture without ever
being quite that. In brief, this Castalian culture of ours, sublime and aristocratic though it
certainly is, and to which I am profoundly grateful, is for most of those associated with it not an
instrument they play on like a great organ, not active and directed toward goals, not consciously
serving something greater or profounder than itself. Rather, it tends somewhat toward smugness
and self-praise, toward the cultivation and elaboration of intellectual specialism. I know there are
a large number of Castalians who are men of integrity and worth, who really desire only to serve.
I mean the teachers who are the products of our system, who then go out into the country to engage
in unselfish and incalculably important service far from the pleasant climate and the intellectual
luxuries of our Province. These fine teachers out there are, strictly speaking, the only ones a-
mong us who are really carrying out the purpose of Castalia. Through their work alone we are
repaying the nation for the many benefits we receive from it. Granted that every one of us
brothers of the Order knows that our supreme and most sacred task consists in preserving the
intellectual foundation of our country and our world. That foundation has proved to be a moral
element of the highest efficacy, for it is nothing less than the sense of truth--on which justice is
based, as well as so much else. But if we examine our real feelings, most of us would have to
admit that we don't regard the welfare of the world, the preservation of intellectual honesty and
purity outside as well as inside our tidy Province, as the chief thing. In fact, it is not at all
important to us. We are only too glad to leave it to those brave teachers out there to pay our debt
to the world by their self-sacrificing work, and so more or less justify the privileges we enjoy,
we Glass Bead Game players, astronomers, musicians, and mathematicians. It is part of the above-
mentioned arrogance and caste spirit that we do not much care whether we earn our privileges by
accomplishments. Even though our abstemious way of life is prescribed by the Order, a good many
of us plume ourselves on it, as if it were a virtue we were practicing purely for its own sake
instead of its being the least that we owe to the country that makes our Castalian existence
possible.

I shall content myself with merely referring to these internal defects and dangers. They are
not insignificant, although in peaceful times they would not come anywhere near imperiling
our existence. But as it happens, we Castalians are dependent not only on our own morality and
rationality. We depend vitally on the condition of the country and the will of the people. We eat
our bread, use our libraries, expand our schools and archives--but if the nation no longer wants
to authorize this, or if it should be struck by impoverishment, war, and so on, then our life and
studying would be over in a minute. Some day our country might decide that its Castalia and our
culture are a luxury it can no longer afford. Instead of being genially proud of us, it may come
round to regarding us as noxious parasites, tricksters, and enemies. Those are the external
dangers that threaten us.

To portray these dangers in any graphic form, I would probably have to draw upon examples from
history. And if I were talking to the average Castalian, I would surely encounter a measure of
passive resistance, an almost childish ignorance and indifference. As you know, among Castalians
interest in world history is extremely weak. Most of us, in fact, not only lack interest but also
respect for history. We fail to do it justice, I might say. Over the years I have done consid-
erable searching into the sources of this feeling--this mixture of indifference and arrogance to-
ward world history--and I have found that it derives from two causes. First, the content of his-
tory strikes us as rather inferior--I am not speaking of intellectual and cultural history, which
is of course within our purview. Insofar as we have any notions at all about world history, we
see it as consisting in brutal struggle for power, goods, lands, raw materials, money--in short,
for those material and quantitative things which we regard as far from the realm of Mind and
rather contemptible. For us the seventeenth century is the age of Descartes, Pascal, Froberger,
not of Cromwell or Louis XIV.

The second reason we fight shy of history is our traditional and I would say valid distrust
of a certain kind of history writing which was very popular in the age of decadence before the
founding of our Order. A priori we have not the slightest confidence in that so-called philosophy
of history of which Hegel is the most brilliant and also most dangerous representative. In the
following century it led to the most repulsive distortion of history and destruction of all feeling
for truth. To us, a bias for this sham philosophy of history is one of the principal features of that
era of intellectual debasement and vast political power struggles which we occasionally call the
Century of Wars, but more often the Age of the Feuilleton. Our present culture, the Order and
Castalia, arose out of the ruins of that age, out of the struggle with and eventual defeat of its
mentality--or insanity.

But it is part of our intellectual arrogance that we confront world history, especially in mod-
ern times, in much the same spirit that the hermits and ascetics of early Christianity confront-
ed the theatrum mundi, the great theater of the world. History seems to us an arena of instincts
and fashions, of appetite, avarice, and craving for power, of blood lust, violence, destruction,
and wars, of ambitious ministers, venal generals, bombarded cities, and we too easily forget that
this is only one of its many aspects. Above all we forget that we ourselves are a part of history,
that we are the product of growth and are condemned to perish if we lose the capacity for further
growth and change. We are ourselves history and share the responsibility for world history and
our position in it. But we gravely lack awareness of this responsibility.

Let us glance at our own history, at the periods in which the present pedagogic provinces
arose, in our own country and in so many others. Let us glance at the origins of the various
Orders and hierarchies of which our Order is one. We see immediately that our hierarchy and
our homeland, our beloved Castalia, was certainly not founded by people who held so proudly
detached an attitude toward world history as we do. Our predecessors and founders began their
work in a shattered world at the end of the Age of Wars. Our official explanation of that age,
which began approximately with the so-called First World War, is all too one-sided. The trouble
was, we say, that the things of the mind did not count in those days; that the powerful rulers
considered intellect itself merely a weapon of inferior quality, and meant only for occasional
use. This attitude, we say, was a consequence of "feuilletonistic" corruption.

Very well--the anti-intellectuality and brutality of that period are all too visible to us.
When I call it anti-intellectual, I do not mean to deny its imposing achievements in intelligence
and methodology. But we in Castalia are taught to consider intellect primarily in terms of
striving for truth, and the kind of intellect manifested in those days seems to have had nothing
in common with striving for truth. It was the misfortune of that age that there was no firm moral
order to counter the restiveness and upheaval engendered by the tremendously rapid increase in
the human population. What remnants there were of such a moral order were suppressed by the
contemporary sloganizing. And those struggles produced their own strange and terrible conflicts.
Much like the era of Church schism introduced by Luther four centuries earlier, the entire world
was gripped by an immense unrest. Everywhere lines of battle formed; everywhere bitter enmity
sprang up between old and young, between fatherland and humanity, between Red and White. We
in our day can no longer reconstruct, let alone comprehend and sympathize with the impetus and
power of such labels as Red and White, let alone the real meanings of all those battle cries.
Much as in Luther's time, we find all over Europe, and indeed over half the world, believers and
heretics, youths and old men, advocates of the past and advocates of the future, desperately
flailing at each other. Often the battlefronts cut across frontiers, nations, and families. We
may no longer doubt that for the majority of the fighters themselves, or at least for their lea-
ders, all this was highly significant, just as we cannot deny many of the spokesmen in those
conflicts a measure of robust good faith, a measure of idealism, as it was called at the time.
Fighting, killing, and destroying went on everywhere, and everywhere both sides believed they
were fighting for God against the devil.

Among us, that savage age of high enthusiasms, fierce hatreds, and altogether unspeakable
sufferings has fallen into a kind of oblivion. That is hard to understand, since it was
so closely linked with the origin of all our institutions, was the basis and cause of those
institutions. A satirist might compare this loss of memory with the kind of forgetfulness
that parvenu adventurers who have at last obtained a patent of nobility have for their birth
and parentage.

Let us continue to dwell a little longer on those warlike times. I have read a good many of
their documents, taking less interest in the subjugated nations and destroyed cities than in
the attitude of the intellectuals of the day. They had a hard time of it, and most of them
did not endure. There were martyrs among the scholars as well as among the clergy, and the
example of their martyrdom was not entirely without some effect, even in those times so ac-
customed to atrocities. Still and all, most men of mind did not stand up under the pressures
of that violent age. Some capitulated and placed their talents, knowledge, and techniques at
the disposal of the rulers--let us recall the well-known statement of a university professor
in the Republic of the Massagetes: "Not the faculty but His Excellency the General can proper-
ly determine the sum of two and two." Others put up a struggle as long as it was possible to
do so in a reasonably safe fashion, and published protests. A world-famous author of the time
— so we read in Ziegenhalss - in a single year signed more than two hundred such protests,
warnings, appeals to reason, and so on--probably more than he had actually read. But most
learned the art of silence; they also learned to go hungry and cold, to beg and hide from the
police. They died before their time and were envied for this by the survivors. Countless num-
bers took their own lives. There was truly no pleasure and no honor in being a scholar or a
writer. Those who entered the service of the rulers and devised slogans for them had jobs and
livelihoods, but they suffered the contempt of the best among their fellows, and most of them
surely suffered pangs of conscience also. Those who refused such service had to go hungry,
live as outlaws, and die in misery or exile. A cruel, an incredibly harsh weeding out took
place. Scientific research that did not directly serve the needs of power and warfare rapidly
sank into decadence. The same was true for the whole educational system. History, which each
of the leading nations of any given period referred exclusively to itself, underwent revision
and fantastic simplification. Historical philosophy and feuilletonism dominated the field.

So much for details. Those were wild and violent times, chaotic and Babylonian times in
which peoples and parties, old and young, Red and White, no longer understood each other.
After sufficient bloodletting and debasement, it came to its end; there arose a more and more
powerful longing for rationality, for the rediscovery of a common language, for order, moral-
ity, valid standards, for an alphabet and multiplication table no longer decreed by power blocs
and alterable at any moment. A tremendous craving for truth and justice arose, for reason,
for overcoming chaos. This vacuum at the end of a violent era concerned only with superficial
things, this sharp universal hunger for a new beginning and the restoration of order, gave
rise to our Castalia. The insignificantly small, courageous, half-starved but unbowed band
of true thinkers began to be aware of their potentialities. With heroic asceticism and self-
discipline they set about establishing a constitution for themselves. Everywhere, even in
the tiniest groups, they began working once more, clearing away the rubble of propaganda.
Starting from the very bottom, they reconstructed intellectual life, education, research,
culture.

Their labors were fruitful. Out of those intrepid and impoverished beginnings they slowly
erected a magnificent edifice. In the course of generations they created the Order, the Board
of Educators, the elite schools, the Archives and collections, the technical schools and
seminaries, and the Glass Bead Game. Today we live as their heirs in a building almost too
splendid. And let it be said once again, we live in it like rather vapid and complacent
guests. We no longer want to know anything about the enormous human sacrifices our founda-
tion walls were laid on, nor anything about the ordeals of which we are the beneficiaries,
nor anything about history which favored or at least tolerated the building of our mansion,
which sustains and tolerates us today and possibly will go on doing so for a good many Cas-
talians and Magisters after our day, but which sooner or later will overthrow and devour
our edifice as it overthrows and devours everything it has allowed to grow.

Let me return from history and draw my conclusion. What all this means to us at the present
time is this: Our system has already passed its flowering. Some time ago it reached that
summit of blessedness which the mysterious game of world history sometimes allows to things
beautiful and desirable in themselves. We are on the downward slope. Our course may possibly
stretch out for a very long time, but in any case nothing finer, more beautiful, and more des-
irable than what we have already had can henceforth be expected. The road leads downhill.
Historically we are, I believe, ripe for dismantling. And there is no doubt that such will be
our fate, not today or tomorrow, but the day after tomorrow. I do not draw this conclusion
from any excessively moralistic estimate of our accomplishments and our abilities; I draw it
far more from the movements which I see already on the way in the outside world. Critical
times are approaching; the omens can be sensed everywhere; the world is once again about
to shift its center of gravity. Displacements of power are in the offing. They will not take
place without war and violence. From the Far East comes a threat not only to peace, but to
life and liberty. Even if our country remains politically neutral, even if our whole nation
unanimously abides by tradition (which is not the case) and attempts to remain faithful to
Castalian ideals, that will be in vain. Some of our representatives in Parliament are already
saying that Castalia is a rather expensive luxury for our country. The country may very soon
be forced into serious rearmament--armaments for defensive purposes only, of course--and
great economies will be necessary. In spite of the government's benevolent disposition to-
ward us, much of the economizing will strike us directly. We are proud that our Order and
the cultural continuity it provides have cost the country as little as they have. In compar-
ison with other ages, especially the early period of the Feuilletonistic Age with its lav-
ishly endowed universities, its innumerable consultants and opulent institutes, this toll
is really not large. It is infinitesimal compared with the sums consumed for war and arm-
aments during the century of wars. But before too long this kind of armament may once again
be the supreme necessity; the generals will again dominate Parliament; and if the people
are confronted with the choice of sacrificing Castalia or exposing themselves to the danger
of war and destruction, we know how they will choose. Undoubtedly a bellicose ideology will
burgeon. The rash of propaganda will affect youth in particular. Then scholars and scholarship,
Latin and mathematics, education and culture, will be considered worth their salt only to the
extent that they can serve the ends of war.

The wave is already gathering; one day it will wash us away. Perhaps that will be as it
should be. But for the present, my revered colleagues, we still possess that limited freedom of
decision and action which is the human prerogative and which makes world history the history of
mankind. We may still choose, in proportion to our understanding of events, in proportion to our
alertness and our courage. We can, if we will, close our eyes, for the danger is still fairly far
away. Probably we who are Magisters today will be able to complete our terms of office in peace
and lie down to die in peace before the danger comes so close that it is visible to all. But for
me, and no doubt for others like me, such peace could not be had with a clear conscience. I would
rather not continue to administer my office in peace and play Glass Bead Games, contented that
the coming upheavals will probably find me no longer alive. Rather, it seems to me urgent to
recollect that we too, nonpolitical though we are, belong to world history and help to make it.
Therefore I said at the beginning of this memorandum that my competence as Magister Ludi is
compromised, since I cannot keep my mind from dwelling anxiously upon the future danger. I do
not allow myself to imagine what form the disaster might assume for us and for me. But I cannot
close my mind to the question: What have we and what have I to do in order to meet the danger?
Permit me to say a few words more about this.

I am not inclined to urge Plato's thesis that the scholar, or rather the sage, ought to rule
the state. The world was younger in his time. And Plato, although the founder of a sort of
Castalia, was by no means a Castalian. He was a born aristocrat, of royal descent. Granted,
we too are aristocrats and form a nobility, but one of the mind, not the blood. I do not be-
lieve that man will ever succeed in breeding a hereditary nobility that is at the same time
an intellectual nobility. That would be the ideal aristocracy, but it remains a dream. We Cas-
talians are not suited for ruling, for all that we are civilized and highly intelligent people.
If we had to govern we would not do it with the force and naivete that the genuine ruler needs.
Moreover, our proper field and real concern, cultivation of an exemplary cultural life, would
be quickly neglected. Ruling does not require qualities of stupidity and coarseness, as con-
ceited intellectuals sometimes think. But it does require wholehearted delight in extroverted
activity, a bent for identifying oneself with outward goals, and of course also a certain
swiftness and lack of scruple about the choice of ways to attain success. And these are traits
that a scholar--for we do not wish to call ourselves sages--may not have and does not have,
because for us contemplation is more important than action, and in the choice of ways to at-
tain our goals we have learned to be as scrupulous and wary as is humanly possible.

Therefore it is not our business to rule and not our business to engage in politics. We are
specialists in examining, analyzing, and measuring. We are the guardians and constant verif-
iers of all alphabets, multiplication tables, and methods. We are the bureaus of standards
for cultural weights and measures. Granted we are many other things also. In some circumstances
we can also be innovators, discoverers, adventurers, conquerors, and reinterpreters. But our
first and most important function, the reason the people need us and keep us, is to preserve
the purity of all sources of knowledge. In trade, in politics, and what have you, turning an
X into a Y may occasionally prove to be a stroke of genius; but never with us.

In former ages, during the wars and upheavals of so-called periods of "grandeur," intellect-
uals were sometimes urged to throw themselves into politics. This was particularly the case
during the late Feuilletonistic Age. That age went even further in its demands, for it insist-
ed that Mind itself must serve politics or the military. Just as the church bells were being
melted down for cannon, as hapless schoolboys were drawn on to fill the ranks of the decimat-
ed troops, so Mind itself was to be harnessed and consumed as one of the materials of war.

Naturally we could not accept this demand. In emergencies a scholar might be called from his
lectern or his desk and made into a soldier. In some circumstances he might volunteer for such
service. In a country exhausted by war the scholar must restrict himself in all material things,
even to the point of sheer starvation. Surely all this is taken for granted. The higher a per-
son's cultivation, the greater the privileges he has enjoyed, the greater must be his sacri-
fices in case of need. We hope that every Castalian would recognize this as a matter of course,
if the time should come. But although we are prepared to sacrifice our well-being, our comfort,
and our lives to the people, when danger threatens, that does not mean that we are ready to sac-
rifice Mind itself, the tradition and morality of our spiritual life, to the demands of the hour,
of the people, or of the generals. He would be a coward who withdrew from the challenges, sacri-
fices, and dangers his people had to endure. But he would be no less a coward and traitor who
betrayed the principles of the life of the mind to material interests--who, for example, left
the decision on the product of two times two to the rulers. It is treason to sacrifice love of
truth, intellectual honesty, loyalty to the laws and methods of the mind, to any other inte-
rests, including those of one's country. Whenever propaganda and the conflict of interests
threatens to devalue, distort, and do violence to truth as it has already done to individuals,
to language, to the arts, and to everything else that is organic and highly cultivated, then
it is our duty to resist and save the truth, or rather the striving for truth, since that is
the supreme article in our creed. The scholar who knowingly speaks, writes, or teaches false-
hood, who knowingly supports lies and deceptions, not only violates organic principles. He
also, no matter how things may seem at the given moment, does his people a grave disservice.
He corrupts its air and soil, its food and drink; he poisons its thinking and its laws, and
he gives aid and comfort to all the hostile, evil forces that threaten the nation with anni-
hilation.

The Castalian, therefore, should not become a politician. If need be, he must sacrifice his
person, but never his fealty to the life of the mind. The mind of man is beneficent and nob-
le only when it obeys truth. As soon as it betrays truth, as soon as it ceases to revere
truth, as soon as it sells out, it becomes intensely diabolical. Then it becomes far worse
than instinctual bestiality, which always retains something of the innocence of nature.

I leave it to each of you, my esteemed colleagues, to reflect upon the duties of the Order
when the country and the Order itself are imperiled. Certainly there will be a variety of
opinions. I have my own, and after much consideration of all the questions I have posed here,
I have for my part come to a clear conception of what seems to me desirable, of what my duty
is. This leads me to a personal petition to the honorable Board, with which I shall conclude
my memorandum.

Of all the Masters composing our Board, I as Magister Ludi am probably most remote from the
outside world, by virtue of my office. The mathematician, the philologist, the physicist, the
pedagogue, and all the other Masters labor in fields which they share with the profane world.
In the ordinary, non-Castalian schools of our country, mathematics and linguistics are part
of the normal curriculum. Astronomy and physics have a place in the secular universities. Even
the completely untutored make music. All these disciplines are age-old, much older than our
Order; they existed long before it and will outlive it. Only the Glass Bead Game is our own
invention, our speciality, our favorite, our toy. It is the ultimate, subtlest expression of
our Castalian type of intellectuality. It is both the most precious and the most nonutilita-
rian, the most beloved and the most fragile jewel in our treasury. It is the first precious
stone that will be destroyed if the continuance of Castalia is imperiled, not only because
it is the frailest of our possessions, but also because to laymen it is undoubtedly the most
dispensable aspect of Castalia. Therefore when the time comes to save the country every need-
less expenditure, the elite schools will be contracted, the funds for the maintenance and ex-
pansion of the libraries and collections will be trimmed and ultimately eliminated, our meals
will be cut down, our clothing allowance withdrawn, but all the principal subjects in our Un-
iversitas Litterarum will be allowed to continue except for the Glass Bead Game. Mathematics
is needed, after all, to devise new firearms, but no one will believe--least of all the mil-
itary--that closing the Vicus Lusorum and abolishing our Game will cause the country and pe-
ople the slightest loss. The Glass Bead Game is the most outlying and most vulnerable part of
our structure. Perhaps this explains why the Magister Ludi, head of our unworldliest disci-
pline, should be the first to sense the coming calamity, or at any rate the first to express
this feeling to our Board.

In case of political upheavals, therefore, especially if they involve war, I regard the Glass
Bead Game as a lost cause. It will deteriorate rapidly, however many individuals cling to it,
and it will never be restored. The atmosphere which will follow a new era of wars will not con-
done it. It will vanish just as surely as did certain highly cultivated customs in musical his-
tory, such as the choruses of professional singers of the period around 1600, or the Sunday
concerts of figurate music in churches around 1700. In those days men's ears heard sounds whose
angelic purity cannot be conjured up again by any amount of science or magic. In the same way
the Glass Bead Game will not be forgotten, but it will be irrecoverable, and those who study
its history, its rise, flourishing, and doom, will sigh and envy us for having been allowed
to live in so peaceful, cultivated, and harmonious a world of the mind.

Although I am now Magister Ludi, I do not at all consider it my (or our) mission to prevent
or postpone the ultimate end of our Game. Beauty, even surpassing beauty, is perishable like
all other things, as soon as it has become a historical phenomenon upon this earth. We know
that and can grieve that it is so, but cannot seriously try to change it, for it is unalter-
able law. When the Glass Bead Game is destroyed, Castalia and the world will suffer a loss,
but they will scarcely be aware of it at the moment, for at the time of great crisis they
will be absorbed in saving whatever can still be saved. A Castalia without the Game is con-
ceivable, but not a Castalia without reverence for truth, without fidelity to the life of
the mind. A Board of Educators can function without a Magister Ludi. But although we have
almost forgotten it, "Magister Ludi" of course originally meant not the office we have in
mind when we use the word, but simply schoolmaster. And the more endangered Castalia is,
the more its treasures stale and crumble away, the more our country will need its school-
masters, its brave and good schoolmasters. Teachers are more essential than anything else,
men who can give the young the ability to judge and distinguish, who serve them as exampl-
es of the honoring of truth, obedience to the things of the spirit, respect for language.
That holds not only for our elite schools, which will be closed down sooner or later, but
also and primarily for the secular schools on the outside where burghers and peasants, art-
isans and soldiers, politicians, military officers, and rulers are educated and shaped
while they are still malleable children. That is where the basis for the cultural life of
the country is to be found, not in the seminars or in the Glass Bead Game. We have always
furnished the country with teachers and educators, and they are, as I have said, the best
among us. But we must do far more than we have done hitherto. We must no longer rely on
a constant influx of the best from the schools outside to help maintain our Castalia. More
and more we must recognize the humble, highly responsible service to the secular schools
as the chief and most honorable part of our mission. That is what we must seek to extend.

Which brings me to my personal petition to the esteemed Board. I herewith request the
Board to relieve me of my office as Magister Ludi and entrust to me an ordinary school,
large or small, outside in the country; to let me staff it with a group of youthful mem-
bers of our Order. I would recruit as teachers those whom I could confidently expect to
help instil our principles into young people out in the world.

I hope that the esteemed Board will deign to examine my petition and its reasoning with
due benevolence and let me know its decisions.

The Master of the Glass Bead Game.

Postscript:

Permit me to cite a remark of the Reverend Father Jacobus, which I noted down in the
course of one of his private lessons:

"Times of terror and deepest misery may be in the offing. But if any happiness at all is
to be extracted from that misery, it can be only a spiritual happiness, looking backward
toward the conservation of the culture of earlier times, looking forward toward serene
and stalwart defense of the things of the spirit in an age which otherwise might succumb
wholly to material things."


Tegularius did not know how little of his work was present in this memorandum; he was not
shown the final version, although Knecht did let him read two earlier, much more detailed
drafts. The Magister Ludi dispatched the memorandum and awaited the Board's answer with far
less impatience than his friend. He had come to the decision not to involve Fritz in his
further actions. He therefore forbade him to discuss the matter any more, merely indicat-
ing that it would surely be a long time before the Board reacted to the memorandum.

When in fact the reply arrived sooner than he had expected, Tegularius heard nothing
about it. The letter from Hirsland read:


To His Excellency the Magister Ludi in Waldzell.

Esteemed Colleague:

The Directorate of the Order and the Assembly of Masters have taken note of your warm-
hearted and perspicacious circular letter with more than ordinary interest. We have found
your historical observations no less absorbing than your ominous picture of the future, and
some of us will undoubtedly long continue to ponder and to draw profit from your reflect-
ions, which surely are not groundless. We have all recognized, with gladness and deep ap-
preciation, the principles that inspire you, the truly Castalian principles of altruism.
We see that you are motivated by a profound and by now almost instinctive love for our
Province, for its life and its customs, a concerned and at the moment somewhat overanxious
love. With equal gladness and appreciation we observe the personal overtones of that
love, its spirit of sacrifice, its active impulse, its earnestness and zeal, and its her-
oic element. In all this we recognize the character of our Glass Bead Game Master as we
know it; we see his energy, his ardor, his daring. How characteristic of the famous Bene-
dictine's disciple that he does not study history as a mere scholarly end in itself, an
aesthetic game to be regarded without emotion, but rather applies his historical know-
ledge directly to current needs; that his perceptions impel him to take certain measures.
And, revered colleague, how perfectly it corresponds with your character that you should
feel drawn not to political missions, not to posts of influence and honor, but to the role
of simple Ludi Magister, that of a schoolmaster.

Such are some of the impressions, some of the thoughts that were awakened by the very first
reading of your circular letter. Most of your colleagues responded in much the same way.
The Board has not, however, been able to take a stand on your warnings and requests. We have
met and held a lively discussion of your view that our very existence is threatened. Much
was said about the nature, extent, and possible imminence of the dangers. The majority of
our members obviously took these questions most seriously indeed, and grew quite heated in
discussing them. But we are compelled to inform you that on none of these questions did a
majority favor your view. The imaginative power and farsightedness of your historico-poli-
tical observations was acknowledged; but none of your specific conjectures, or shall we say
prophecies, was fully approved. None was accepted as wholly convincing. Only a few of us
agreed with you (and then with reservations) even on the question of the degree to which
the Order and our Castalian system has shared the responsibility for the unusually long era
of peace, or whether the Order can even be held a factor in political history. In the view
of the majority, the calm that has descended upon our Continent must be ascribed partly to
the general prostration following the bloodlettings of the terrible wars, but far more to
the fact that the Occident has ceased to be the focal point of world history and the arena
in which claims to hegemony are fought out. Certainly we would not wish to cast doubt upon
the true achievements of our Order. Nevertheless, we cannot grant that the Castalian ideal,
the ideal of high culture under the aegis of disciplined meditation, has any powers to shape
history, any vital influence upon world political conditions. Urges or ambitions of this
sort are totally alien to the Castalian mentality. Several serious disquisitions on the sub-
ject have stressed the point that Castalia seeks neither political sway nor influence on
peace or war. Indeed, there could be no question of Castalia's having any such purpose, so
the argument has gone, because everything Castalian is related to reason and operates with-
in the framework of rationality--which certainly could not be said of world history, or
said only by someone willing to revert to the theological and poetic sentimentalities of
romantic historical philosophy. From that vantage point, of course, the whole murderous,
destructive course of political history could be explained as merely the method of cosmic
Reason. Moreover, even the most casual survey of the history of thought shows that the
great ages of culture have never been adequately explained by political conditions. Rather,
culture, or mind, or soul, has its own independent history--a second, secret, bloodless,
and sanctified history -- running parallel to what is generally called world history, by
which we mean incessant struggles for material power. Our Order deals only with this sanc-
tified and secret history, not with "real," brutal world history. It can never be our task
to be continually taking soundings in political history, let alone to help to shape it.

It therefore does not matter whether or not the political constellation is really as your
circular letter suggests. In any case, our Order has no right to do anything about it. Our
only position must be one of patient waiting to see what comes. And therefore your argument
that this constellation requires us to take an active position was decisively rejected by
the majority, with only a few votes in its favor.

Your views of the present world situation and your suggestions regarding the immediate
future obviously impressed most of our colleagues. In fact, some of them were thunder-
struck. But here too, although most of the speakers manifested respect for your know-
ledge and acuity, there was no evidence that the majority agreed with you. On the con-
trary, the consensus was that your comments on this matter were remarkable and extreme-
ly interesting, but excessively pessimistic. One colleague raised his voice to ask whe-
ther it might not be described as dangerous, if not outrageous--but surely frivolous--
for a Magister to alarm his Board by such sinister images of allegedly imminent perils
and tribulations. Certainly an occasional reminder of the perishability of all things
was permissible; every man, and especially everyone holding a high position of respon-
sibility, must occasionally cry out to himself the memento mori. But to announce in
such sweeping terms the impending doom of the entire body of Masters, the entire Order,
and the entire hierarchy was a tasteless assault upon the tranquility and the imagina-
tion of his colleagues, and threatened the efficiency of the Board itself. The work of
a Magister surely could not profit by his going to his office every day with the thought
that his position itself, his labors, his pupils, his responsibility to the Order, his
life for and in Castalia--that all this might be wiped out by tomorrow or the day af-
ter. . . Although the majority did not support the colleague who raised this objection,
he received considerable applause.

We shall keep our present communication brief, but are at your disposal for a discussion
in person. From our brief summary you can already see that your circular letter has not
had the effect you may have hoped for. In large part its failure no doubt is based on
objective grounds, the incompatibility of your opinions with those of the majority. But
there are also purely formal reasons. At any rate it seems to us that a direct personal
discussion between yourself and your colleagues would have taken a significantly more
harmonious and positive course. We would moreover suggest that it was not only your
couching of the matter in the form of a written memorandum that affected the Board adver-
sely. Far more striking was your combining, in a way highly unusual among us, a profess-
ional communication with a personal request, a petition. Most of your colleagues consider
this fusion an unfortunate attempt at innovation; some bluntly called it impermissible.

This brings us to the most delicate point of all, your request for release from your
office and transfer to some secular school system. The petitioner should have realized
from the outset that the Board could not possibly approve so sudden and curiously ar-
gued a request. Of course the Board's reply is, "No."

What would become of our hierarchy if the Order no longer assigned each man to his
place? What would become of Castalia if everyone wished to assess his own gifts and
aptitudes and choose his position for himself? We suggest that the Master of the Glass
Bead Game reflect upon this subject for a few minutes, and bid him to continue admin-
istering the honorable office he has been entrusted with.

In saying this we have met your request for a reply to your letter. We have been unable
to give the answer you may have hoped for. But we should also like to express our ap-
preciation for the stimulating and admonitory value of your document. We trust we will
be able to discuss its content with you orally, and in the near future. For although
the directorate of the Order believes that it can rely on you, that point in your memo-
randum in which you speak of an incapacity to conduct the affairs of your office natu-
rally gives us grounds for concern.

Knecht read the letter without any great expectations, but with the closest attention.
He had expected that the Board would have "grounds for concern," and moreover had had
signs that it was truly worried. A guest from Hirsland had recently come to the Players'
Village, provided with a regular pass and a recommendation from the directorate of the
Order. He had requested hospitality for a few days, supposedly for work in the Archives
and library, and had also asked permission to audit a few of Knecht's lectures. An eld-
erly man, silent and attentive, he had turned up in almost all the departments and build-
ings of the Village, had inquired after Tegularius, and had several times called on the
director of the Waldzell elite school, who lived in the vicinity. There could scarcely
be any doubt that the man had been sent as an observer to determine whether there were
any traces of negligence in the Players' Village, whether the Magister was in good health
and at his post, the officials diligent, the students stimulated. He had stayed for a
full week and missed none of Knecht's lectures. Two of the officials had even commented
on his quiet ubiquitousness. Evidently the directorate of the Order had waited for the
report from this investigation before dispatching its reply to the Magister.

What was he to think of this answer, and who had probably been its author? The style be-
trayed nothing; it was the conventional, impersonal officialese the occasion demanded.
But on subtler analysis the letter revealed more individuality than he had thought at
first reading. The basis of the entire document was the hierarchic spirit, a sense of
justice and love of order. It was plain to see how unwelcome, inconvenient, not to say
troublesome and annoying Knecht's petition had been. Its rejection had undoubtedly been
decided at once by the author of this reply, without regard to the opinions of others.
On the other hand, the vexation was leavened by another emotion, for there was a clear
note of sympathy present in the letter, with its mention of all the more lenient and
friendly comments Knecht's petition had received during the meeting of the Board. Knecht
had no doubt that Alexander, the President of the Order, was the author of this reply.

We have now reached the end of our journey, and hope that we have reported all the es-
sentials of Joseph Knecht's life. A later biographer will no doubt be in a position to
ascertain and impart a good many additional details about that life.

We forbear to present our own account of the Magister's last days, for we know no more
about them than every Waldzell student and could not tell the story any better than the
Legend of the Magister Ludi, many copies of which are in circulation. Presumably it was
written by some of the departed Magister's favorite students. With this legend we wish
to conclude our book.




　　　　　　　　　　　　　TWELVE


　　　　　　　　　　　 THE LEGEND




WHEN WE LISTEN to our fellow students talk about our Master's disappearance, about the
reasons for it, the rightness or wrongness of his decisions and acts, the meaning or
meaninglessness of his fate, it sounds to us like Diodorus Siculus explaining the suppos-
ed causes for the flooding of the Nile. We would think it not only useless but wrong to
add to such speculations. Instead, we wish to preserve in our hearts the memory of our
Master, who so soon after his mysterious departure into the world passed over into a
still more mysterious beyond. His memory is dear to us, and for this reason we wish to
set down what we have learned about these events.

After the Master had read the letter in which the Board denied his petition, he felt a
faint shiver, a matutinal coolness and sobriety which told him that the hour had come,
that from now on there could be no more hesitating or lingering. This peculiar feeling,
which he was wont to call "awakening," was familiar to him from other decisive moments
of his life. It was both vitalizing and painful, mingling a sense of farewell and of
setting out on new adventures, shaking him deep down in his unconscious mind like a
spring storm. He looked at the clock. In an hour he had to face a class. He decided to
devote the next hour to meditation, and went into the quiet Magister's garden. On his
way a line of verse suddenly sprang into his mind:

　　　　　　In all beginnings is a magic source. . .

He murmured this under his breath, uncertain where he had read it. The line appealed to
him and seemed to suit the mood of this hour. In the garden, he sat down on a bench
strewn with the first faded leaves, regulated his breathing, and fought for inner tranquility,
until with a purged heart he sank into contemplation in which the patterns of this hour
in his life arranged themselves in universal, suprapersonal images. But on the way to the
small lecture room, the line of verse came back to him. He turned the words over in his
mind, and thought that he did not have them quite right. Suddenly his memory cleared. Un-
der his breath he recited:

　　　　　　In all beginnings dwells a magic force
　　　　　　For guarding us and helping us to live.

But it was not until nearly evening, long after his lecture was over and he had passed on
to all sorts of other routine matters, that he discovered the origin of the verses. They
were not the work of some old poet; they came from one of his own poems, which he had
written in his student days. He remembered now that the poem had ended with the line:

　　　　　　So be it, heart: bid farewell without end!

That very evening he sent for his deputy and informed him that on the morrow he would
have to leave for an indefinite time. He put him in charge of all current affairs, with brief
instructions, and bade good-by in a friendly and matter-of-fact way, as he would ordinari-
ly have done before departing on a brief official journey.

He had realized some time earlier that he would have to leave without informing his friend
Tegularius and burdening him with farewells. This course was essential, not only to spare
his oversensitive friend, but also in order not to endanger his whole plan. Presumably Fritz
would make his peace with the accomplished fact, whereas an abrupt disclosure and a farewell
scene might lead to a regrettable emotional upheaval. Knecht had for a while even thought of
departing without seeing Fritz for the last time. But now he decided that it would seem too
much like evading a difficult encounter. However wise it was to spare his friend agitation
and an occasion for follies, he had no right to make the thing so easy for himself. A half-
hour remained before bedtime; he could still call on Tegularius without disturbing him or
anyone else.

Night had already settled in the broad inner courtyard as he crossed to his friend's cell.
He knocked with that strange feeling of: this is the last time, and found Tegularius alone.
Delighted, Fritz laid aside the book he had been reading and invited Knecht to sit down.

"An old poem came to my mind today," Knecht remarked casually, "or rather a few lines from
it. Perhaps you know where the rest can be found." And he quoted: "In all beginnings dwells
a magic force. . ."

Tegularius traced it with no great trouble. After a few minutes of reflection he recognized
the poem, got up, and produced from a desk drawer the manuscript of Knecht's poems, the
original manuscript which Knecht had once presented to him. He looked through it and brought
out two sheets of paper containing the first draft of the poem. Smilingly, he held them out
to the Magister.

"Here," he said, "your Excellency may examine them himself. This is the first time in many
years that you have deigned to remember these poems."

Joseph Knecht studied the two sheets attentively and with some emotion. In his student days,
during his stay in the College of Far Eastern Studies, he had covered these two sheets of
paper with lines of verse. They spoke to him of a remote past. Everything about them, the
faintly yellowed paper, the youthful handwriting, the deletions and corrections in the text,
reminded him painfully of almost forgotten times. He thought he could recall not only the
year and the season when these verses had been written, but even the day and the hour. There
came to him now the very mood, that proud and strong feeling that had gladdened him and found
expression in the poem. He had written it on one of those special days on which he had exper-
ienced that spiritual shock which he called "awakening."

The title of the poem had obviously been written even before the poem itself, and had seeming-
ly been intended as the first line. It had been set down in a large impetuous script, and read:
"Transcend!"

Later, at some other time, in a different mood and situation, this title as well as the ex-
clamation mark had been crossed out, and in smaller, thinner, more modest letters another title
had been written in. It read: "Stages."

Knecht now remembered how at the time, filled with the idea of his poem, he had written down
the word "Transcend!" as an invocation and imperative, a reminder to himself, a newly formu-
lated but strong resolve to place his actions and his life under the aegis of transcendence,
to make of it a serenely resolute moving on, filling and then leaving behind him every place,
every stage along the way. Almost whispering, he read some lines to himself:

　　　　　　Serenely let us move to distant places
　　　　　　And let no sentiments of home detain us.
　　　　　　The Cosmic Spirit seeks not to restrain us
　　　　　　But lifts us stage by stage to wider spaces.

"I had forgotten these lines for many years," he said, "and when they happened to come to my
mind today, I no longer knew how I knew them and didn't realize they were mine. How do they
strike you today? Do they still mean anything to you?"

Tegularius considered.

"I have always had a rather odd feeling about this particular poem," he said finally. "The
poem itself is among the very few you've written that I didn't really like. There was some-
thing about it that repelled or disturbed me. At the time I had no idea what it was. Today
I think I see it. I never really liked this poem of yours, which you headed 'Transcend!' as
if that were a marching order--thank God you later substituted a better title--I never
really liked it because it has something didactic, moralizing, or schoolmasterly about it.
If this element could be stripped away, or rather if this whitewash could be scrubbed off,
it would be one of your finest poems--I've just realized that again. The real meaning is
rather well suggested by the title 'Stages,' although you might just as well and perhaps
better have called it 'Music' or 'The Nature of Music.' For if we discount the moralizing or
preachy attitude, it is really about the nature of music, or if you will a song in praise of
music, of its serenity and resolution, its quality of being constantly present, its mobility
and unceasing urge to hasten on, to leave the space it has only just entered. If you content-
ed yourself with this contemplation or praise of the spirit of music, if you had not turned
it into an admonition and sermon--though obviously you had pedagogic ambitions even then--
the poem might have been a perfect jewel. But as it stands it seems to me not only too hort-
atory but also afflicted by faulty logic. It equates music and life solely for the sake of
the moral lesson. But that is highly questionable and disputable, for it transforms the nat-
ural and morally neutral impulse which is the mainspring of music into a 'Life' that summons,
calls, commands us, and wants to impart good lessons to us. To put it briefly, in this poem
a vision, something unique, beautiful, and splendid, has been falsified and exploited for
didactic ends, and it is this aspect that always prejudiced me against it."

The Magister had been listening with pleasure as his friend worked himself up into that
angry ardor which he so liked in him.

"Let's hope you're right," he said half jokingly. "You certainly are right in what you say
about the poem's relationship to music. The idea of serenely moving to distant places and
the underlying concept of the lines actually does come from music, without my having been
conscious of it. I really don't know whether I corrupted the idea and falsified the vision;
you may be right. When I wrote the poem, at any rate, it no longer dealt with music, but with
an experience--the very experience that the lovely parable of music had revealed its moral
aspect to me and become, within me, an awakening and an admonition to respond to the sum-
mons of life. The imperative form of the poem, which so particularly displeases you, is not the
expression of any desire to command or teach, because the command is addressed to myself a-
lone. That should have been clear from the last line, my friend, even if you weren't already
well aware of it. I experienced an insight, a perception, an inward vision, and was bent on
telling the content and the moral of this insight to myself, and impressing it on my mind.
That is why the poem remained in my memory, although I was not conscious of it. So whether
these lines are good or bad, they've accomplished their purpose; the admonition remained a-
live inside me and was not forgotten. Today I hear it again as if it were brand new. That's
a fine little experience, and your mockery can't spoil it for me. But it's time for me to
go. How lovely were those days, my friend, when we were both students and could so often al-
low ourselves to break the rules and stay together far into the nights, talking. A Magister
can no longer allow himself such luxuries--more's the pity."

"Oh," Tegularius said, "he could allow it--it's a question of not having the courage."

Laughing, Knecht placed a hand on his shoulder.

"As far as courage goes, my boy, I might be guilty of worse pranks than that. Good night,
old grumbler. "

Gaily, he left the cell. But on the way out through the deserted corridors and courtyards
of the Vicus Lusorum his seriousness returned, the seriousness of parting. Leave-takings al-
ways stir memories. Now, on this nocturnal walk, he remembered that first time he had strolled
through Waldzell and the Vicus Lusorum as a boy, a newly arrived Waldzell pupil, filled with
misgivings and hopes. Only now, moving through the coolness of the night in the midst of si-
lent trees and buildings, did he realize with painful sharpness that he was seeing all this
for the last time, listening for the last time to silence and slumber stealing over the Play-
ers' Village, by day so lively; for the last time seeing the little light above the gatekeep-
er's lodge reflected in the basin of the fountain; for the last time watching the clouds in
the night sky sailing over the trees of his Magister's garden. Slowly, he went over all the
paths and into all the nooks and corners of the Players' Village. He felt an impulse to open
the gate of his garden once more and enter it, but he did not have the key with him, and that
fact swiftly sobered him and caused him to collect himself. He returned to his apartment,
wrote a few letters, including one to Designori announcing his arrival in the capital, and
then spent some time in careful meditation to calm his intense emotions, for he wanted to be
strong in the morning for his last task in Castalia, the interview with the Head of the Order.

The following morning the Magister rose at his accustomed hour, ordered his car, and drove
off; only a few persons noticed his departure and none gave it any thought. The morning
seemed to be drowning in the mists of early autumn as he drove toward Hirsland. He arrived
toward noon and asked to be announced to Magister Alexander, the President of the Order.
Under his arm he carried, wrapped in a cloth, a handsome metal casket normally kept in a se-
cret compartment in his office. It contained the insignia of his office, the seals and the
keys.

He was received with some surprise in the "main" office of the Order. It was almost unprec-
edented for a Magister to appear there unannounced and uninvited. On instructions from the
President of the Order he was given lunch, then shown to a rest cell in the old cloisters and
informed that His Excellency hoped to be able to find time for him in two or three hours. He
asked for a copy of the rules of the Order, settled down with it and read through the entire
booklet, to assure himself once more of the simplicity and legality of his plan. Nevertheless,
even at this late hour he could not see how to put into words its meaning and its psychologi-
cal justification.

There was a paragraph in the rules that had once been assigned to him as a subject for med-
itation, in the last days of his youthful freedom. That had been shortly before his admission
into the Order. Now, reading the paragraph again, he meditated on it once more, and while doing
so he became aware of how utterly different a person he was now from the rather anxious young
tutor he had then been. "If the High Board summons you to a post," the passage read, "know this:
Each upward step on the ladder of officialdom is not a step into freedom, but into constraint.
The greater the power of the office, the stricter the servitude. The stronger the personality,
the more forbidden is the arbitrary exercise of will." How final and unequivocal all that had
once sounded, but how greatly the meaning of so many of the words had changed, especially such
insidious words as "constraint," "personality," "will." And yet how beautifully clear, how well-
formed and admirably suggestive these sentences were; how absolute, timeless, and incontestably
true they could appear to a young mind! Ah yes, and so they would have been, if only Castalia
were the world, the whole multifarious but indivisible world, instead of being merely a tiny
world within the greater, or a section boldly and violently carved out of it. If the earth were
an elite school, if the Order were the community of all men and the Head of the Order God, how
perfect these sentences would be, and how flawless the entire Rule. Ah, if only that had been
so, how lovely, how fecund and innocently beautiful life would be. And once that had really
been so; once he had been able to see it that way: the Order and the Castalian spirit as equi-
valent to the div-ine and the absolute, the Province as the world, Castalians as mankind, and
the non-Castalian sphere as a kind of children's world, a threshold to the Province, virgin
soil still awaiting cultivation and ultimate redemption, a world looking reverently up to Cas-
talia and every so often sending charming visitors such as young Plinio.

How strange was his own situation, how strange the nature of Joseph Knecht's own mind! In for-
mer days, and in fact only yesterday, had he not considered his own special kind of perception
--that way of experiencing reality which he called "awakening"--as a slow, step-by-step pene-
tration into the heart of the universe, into the core of truth; as something in itself absolute,
a continuous path or progression which nevertheless had to be achieved gradually? In his youth
he had thought it right and essential to acknowledge the validity of the outside world as
Plinio represented it, but at the same time deliberately to hold aloof from it. At that time
it had seemed to him progress, awakening, to make himself a Castalian. And again it had been
progress, and his own truth, when after years of doubting he had decided in favor of the Glass
Bead Game and the life of Waldzell. It had been the same again when at Master Thomas's
command he entered the service, was inducted into the Order by the Music Master, and later
when he accepted the appointment as Magister. Each time he had taken a larger or smaller step
on a seemingly straight road--and yet he now stood at the end of this road, by no means at the
heart of the universe and the innermost core of truth. Rather, his present awakening, too, was
no more than a brief opening of his eyes, a finding himself in a new situation, a fitting into
new constellations. The same strict, clear, unequivocal, straight path that had brought him to
Waldzell, to Mariafels, into the Order, into the office of Magister Ludi, was now leading him out
again. What had been a consequence of acts of awakening had likewise been a consequence of
partings. Castalia, the Game, the magistracy--each had been a theme which needed to be devel-
oped and dismissed; each had been a space to pass through, to transcend. Already they lay
behind him. And evidently, even in times past when he had thought and done the opposite of the
things he was thinking and doing today, he had somehow known or at least dimly divined the
dubiousness of it all. Had he not, in that poem written in his student days and dealing with
stages and partings, placed above it the imperative title "Transcend!"?

Thus his path had been a circle, or an ellipse or spiral or whatever, but certainly not
straight; straight lines evidently belonged only to geometry, not to nature and life. Yet he
had faithfully obeyed the exhortation and self-encouragement of his poem, even after he had
long forgotten the poem and the awakening he had then experienced. Granted, he had not obeyed
perfectly, not without falterings, doubts, temptations, and struggles. But he had courageously
passed through stage upon stage, space upon space, composedly and with reasonable serenity--
not with such radiant cheerfulness as the old Music Master, but without weariness and dejection,
without disloyalty and defection. And if at this point he had at last become a defector from the
Castalian point of view, if he were flouting all the morality of the Order, seemingly serving
only the needs of his own individuality--still, this too would be done in the spirit of courage
and of music. No matter how it turned out, he would do it with serenity and a clean tempo. If
only he had been able to clarify to Master Alexander what seemed so clear to him; if only he
had been able to prove that the apparent willfulness of his present action was in reality ser-
vice and obedience, that he was moving not toward freedom, but toward new, strange, and hith-
erto unknown ties; that he was not a fugitive, but a man responding to a summons; not head-
strong, but obedient; not master, but sacrifice!

And what about the virtues of serenity, firm tempo and courage? They dwindled in size perhaps,
but remained intact. Even if he might not be advancing on his own, but was only being led, e-
ven if what he was undergoing was not independent transcending, but merely a revolving of the
space outside him around himself as its center, the virtues persisted and retained their value
and their potency. They consisted in affirmation instead of negation, in acceptance instead of
evasion. And perhaps there might even be some small virtue in his conducting himself as if he
were the master and an active focus, in accepting life and self-deception--with its corollary
self-determination and responsibility--without examining these things too closely. Perhaps it
was inherently virtuous that for unknown reasons he was by nature more inclined to acting than
acquiring knowledge, that he was more instinctual than intellectual. Oh, if only he could have
a talk with Father Jacobus about these matters!

Thoughts or reveries of this sort reverberated in him after his meditation. "Awakening," it
seemed, was not so much concerned with truth and cognition, but with experiencing and proving
oneself in the real world. When you had such an awakening, you did not penetrate any closer to
the core of things, to truth; you grasped, accomplished, or endured only the attitude of your
own ego to the momentary situation. You did not find laws, but came to decisions; you did not
thrust your way into the center of the world, but into the center of your own individuality.
That, too, was why the experience of awakening was so difficult to convey, so curiously hard
to formulate, so remote from statement. Language did not seem designed to make communications
from this realm of life. If, once in a great while, someone were able to understand, that per-
son was in a similar position, was a fellow sufferer or undergoing a similar awakening. Fritz
Tegularius had to some degree shared this insight; Plinio's understanding had gone somewhat
further. Whom else could he name? No one.

Twilight was already beginning to fall; he had been completely lost in his reflections, was
altogether remote from his actual situation, when there came a knock on the door. Since he
did not respond at once, the person outside waited a little and then tried once more, knock-
ing softly. This time Knecht answered; he rose and went along with the messenger, who led him
into the secretariat and without any further ado into the President's office. Master Alexan-
der came forward to meet him.

"A pity you came without warning, so that we had to keep you waiting," he said. "I am eager
to hear what has brought you here so suddenly. Nothing bad, I hope?"

Knecht laughed. "No, nothing bad. But do I really come so unexpectedly and have you no
idea why I want to see you?"

Alexander gave him a troubled look. "Well, yes," he said, "I do have some idea. I had, for
example, been thinking in the past few days that the subject of your circular letter had
certainly not been treated adequately as far as you were concerned. The Board was obliged
to answer rather tersely, and perhaps both the tone and the substance of the answer were
disappointing to you, Domine."

"Not at all," Joseph Knecht replied. "I hardly expected any other answer as far as the sub-
stance of the Board's reply went. And as for the tone, that pleased me greatly. I could tell
that the reply had cost the author considerable effort, almost sorrow, and that he felt the
need to mingle a few drops of honey in an answer that was necessarily unpleasant and rather
a snub to me. Certainly he succeeded remarkably well, and I am grateful to him for that."

"Then you have taken the substance of the reply to heart, esteemed Master?"

"Taken note of it, and I should say that at bottom I have also understood it and approved
it. I suppose the reply could not have been anything but a rejection of my petition, togeth-
er with a gentle reprimand. My circular letter was something untoward, and altogether incon-
venient to the Board--I never for a moment doubted that. Moreover, insofar as it contained
a personal petition, it probably was not couched in a suitable way. I could scarcely expect
anything but a negative reply."

"We are pleased," the President of the Order said with a hint of acerbity, "that you regard
it in this light and that our letter therefore could not have surprised you in any painful
way. We are very pleased by that. But I still do not understand. If in writing your letter
you already--I do understand you aright, don't I?--did not believe in its success, did not
expect an affirmative answer, and in fact were convinced in advance that it would fail, why
did you persist with it and go to the farther trouble--the whole thing must have involved
considerable effort--of making a clean copy and sending it out?"

Knecht gave him an amiable look as he replied: "Your Excellency, my letter had two purposes,
and I do not think that both were entirely fruitless. It contained a personal request that I
be relieved of my post and employed at some other place. I could regard this personal request
as relatively subsidiary, for every Magister ought to regard his personal affairs as second-
ary, insofar as that is possible. The petition was rejected; I had to make the best of that.
But my circular letter also contained something quite different from that request, namely a
considerable number of facts and ideas which I thought it my duty to call to the attention
of the Board and to ask you all to weigh carefully. All the Masters, or at any rate the maj-
ority of them, have read my exposition--let us not say my warnings--and although most of
them were loath to ingest them and reacted with a good deal of annoyance, they have at any
rate read and registered what I believed it essential to say. The fact that they did not ap-
plaud the letter is, to my mind, no failure. I was not seeking applause and assent; I intend-
ed rather to stir uneasiness, to shake them up. I would greatly regret if I had desisted
from sending my letter on the grounds you mention. Whether it has had much or little effect,
it was at least a cry of alarm, a summons."

"Certainly," the President said hesitantly. "But that explanation does not solve the riddle
for me. If you wished your admonitions, warnings, cries of alarm to reach the Board, why did
you weaken or at least diminish the effectiveness of your golden words by linking them with a
private request, moreover a request which you yourself did not seriously believe would be or
could be granted? For the present I don't understand that. But I suppose the matter will be
clarified if we talk it over. In any case, there is the weak point in your circular letter:
your connecting the cry of alarm with the petition. I should think that you surely had no
need to use the petition as a vehicle for your sermon. You could easily have reached your
colleagues orally or in writing if you thought they had to be alerted to certain dangers.
And then the petition would have proceeded along its own way through official channels."

Knecht continued to look at him with the utmost friendliness. "Yes," he said lightly, "it
may be that you are right. Still--consider the complications of the matter once more. Nei-
ther the admonition nor the sermon was anything commonplace, ordinary, or normal. Rather,
both belonged together in being unusual and in having arisen out of necessity and a break
with convention. It is not usual and normal for anyone, without some urgent provocation
from outside, to suddenly implore his colleagues to remember their mortality and the dub-
iousness of their entire lives. Nor is it usual and commonplace for a Castalian Magister
to apply for a post as schoolteacher outside the Province. To that extent the two separate
messages of my letter do belong together quite well. As I see it, a reader who had really
taken the entire letter seriously would have had to conclude that this was no matter of
an eccentric's announcing his premonitions and trying to preach to his colleagues, but
rather that this man was in deadly earnest about his ideas and his distress, that he was
ready to throw up his office, his dignity, his past, and begin from the beginning in the
most modest of places; that he was weary of dignity, peace, honor, and authority and des-
ired to be rid of them, to throw them away. From this conclusion--I am still trying to
put myself into the mind of the readers of my letter--two corollaries would have been pos-
sible, so it seems to me: the writer of this sermon is unfortunately slightly cracked; or
else the writer of this troublesome sermon is obviously not cracked, but normal and sane,
which means there must be more than whim and eccentricity behind his pessimistic preach-
ments. And that 'more' must then be a reality, a truth. I had imagined some such process
in the minds of my readers,and I must admit that I miscalculated. My petition and my ad-
monition did not support and reinforce each other. Instead, they were both not taken ser-
iously and were laid aside. I am neither greatly saddened nor really surprised by this
rejection, for at bottom, I must repeat, I did expect it to turn out that way.And I must
also admit that I desired it so. For my petition, which I assumed would fail, was a kind
of feint, a gesture, a formula."

Master Alexander's expression had become even graver and overcast with gloom. But he
did not interrupt the Magister.

"The case was not," Knecht continued, "that in dispatching my petition I seriously hoped
for a favorable reply and looked forward joyfully to receiving it; but it is also not the
case that I was prepared to accept obediently a negative answer as an unalterable decis-
ion from above."

"... not prepared to accept obediently a negative answer as an unalterable decision from
above--have I heard you aright, Magister?" the President broke in, emphasizing every
word. Evidently he had only at this point realized the full gravity of the situation.

Knecht bowed slightly. "Certainly you have heard aright. The fact was that I could scarce-
ly believe my petition had much prospect of success, but I thought I had to make it to
satisfy the requirements of decorum. By doing so I was, so to speak, providing the est-
eemed Board with an opportunity to settle the matter in a relatively harmless way. But
if it eschewed such a solution, I was in any case resolved neither to be put off nor
soothed, but to act."

"And to act how?" Alexander asked in a low voice.

"As my heart and my reason command. I was determined to resign my office and take on
work outside Castalia even without an assignment or leave from the Board."

The Head of the Order closed his eyes and seemed to be no longer listening. Knecht saw
that he was performing that emergency exercise used by members of the Order in moments
of sudden danger to regain self-control and inner calm; it consisted in twice emptying
the lungs and holding the breath for long moments. As Knecht watched, Alexander's face
paled slightly, then regained color as he inhaled slowly, beginning with the muscles of
the stomach. Knecht was sorry to be inflicting psychic distress on a man whom he so
highly esteemed, indeed loved. He saw Alexander's eyes open with a staring, abstracted
look, then focus and grow keener. With a faint sense of alarm he saw those clear, con-
trolled, disciplined eyes, the eyes of a man equally great in obeying and commanding,
fixed upon him now, regarding him with cool composure, probing him, judging him. He
withstood that gaze in silence for what seemed long minutes.

"I believe I have now understood you," Alexander said at last in a quiet voice. "You
have been weary of your office or weary of Castalia for a long time, or tormented by
a craving for life in the world. You chose to pay more heed to this mood than to the
laws and your duties. You also felt no need to confide in us and ask the Order for ad-
vice and assistance. For the sake of form and to relieve your conscience, you then ad-
dressed that petition to us, a petition you knew would be unacceptable, but which you
could refer to when the matter came up for discussion. Let us assume that you have rea-
sons for such unusual conduct and that your intentions are honorable--I really cannot
conceive them to have been otherwise. But how was it possible that with such thoughts,
cravings, and decisions in your heart, inwardly already a defector, you could keep
silent and remain in your office for so long a time, continuing to conduct it flawless-
ly, so far as anyone can see?"

"I am here," the Magister Ludi replied with unaltered friendliness, "to discuss all
this with you, to answer all your questions. And since I have resolved upon a course
of self-will, I have made up my mind not to leave Hirsland and your house until I know
that you have gained some understanding of my situation and my action."

Master Alexander considered. "Does that mean you expect me to endorse your conduct
and your plans?" he asked hesitantly.

"Oh, I have no thought of winning your endorsement. But I hope that you will under-
stand me and that I shall retain a remnant of your respect when I go. This will be my
one and only leave-taking of our Province. Today I left Waldzell and the Vicus Lus-
orum forever."

Again Alexander closed his eyes for a few seconds. He felt battered by the revelations
coming all at once from this incomprehensible man.

"Forever?" he said. "Then you are thinking of not returning to your post at all? I must
say, you are a master of surprises. One question, if I may ask it: Do you still regard
yourself as Magister Ludi?"

Joseph Knecht picked up the small casket he brought with him.

"I was until yesterday," he said, "and consider myself liberated today by returning to
you, as representative of the Board, the seals and keys. The insignia are intact, and
when you go to inspect things in the Players' Village you will find everything in order."

Slowly, the President of the Order rose. He looked weary and suddenly aged.

"Let us leave your casket standing here for the present," he said drily. "If by receiv-
ing the seals I am supposed to be accepting your resignation, let me remind you that I
am not so empowered. At least a third of the Board would have to be present. You used
to have so much feeling for the old customs and forms that I cannot adjust so quickly
to this new mode of doing things. Perhaps you will be kind enough to give me until to-
morrow before we go on with our conversation?"

"I am completely at your disposal, your Reverence. You have known me and known my res-
pect for you for a good many years. Believe me, that has not changed in the slightest.
You are the only person I am bidding good-by to before leaving the Province, and I am
addressing you now not only in your capacity as President of the Order. Just as I have
returned the seals and keys to your hands, I also hope you will release me from my oath
as a member of the Order, once we have discussed everything fully, Domine."

Alexander met his eyes with a sorrowful, searching look, and stifled a sigh. "Leave me
now. You have given me cares enough for one day and provided material enough for reflec-
tion. Let that do for today. Tomorrow we shall speak further; return here about an hour
before noon."

He dismissed the Magister with a courteous gesture, and that gesture, full of resigna-
tion, full of deliberate politeness of the kind no longer meant for a colleague, but
for a total stranger, pained the Glass Bead Game Master more than anything he had said.

The attendant who fetched Knecht for the evening meal a while later led him to a guest
table and informed him that Master Alexander had withdrawn for meditation and assumed
that the Magister would not wish company tonight, and that a guest room had been pre-
pared for him.

The Magister Ludi's visit and announcement had taken Alexander completely by surprise.
Ever since he had edited the Board's reply to the circular letter, he had of course
counted on Knecht's turning up sooner or later, and had thought of the ensuing discus-
sion with faint uneasiness. But that Magister Knecht, noted for his exemplary obedience,
his cultivated formalities, his modesty and profound tact, could one day descend on
him without warning, resign his office on his own initiative and without previously
consulting the Board, and throw over all usage and tradition in this startling manner--
these were acts he would have considered absolutely impossible. Granted, Knecht's man-
ner, tone, and language, his unobtrusive courtesy, were the same as ever; but how ap-
palling and offensive, how novel and surprising, and above all how totally un-Castal-
ian were the substance and the spirit of everything he said. No one hearing and seeing
the Magister Ludi would have suspected him of being ill, overworked, irritated, and
not completely master of himself. The scrutiny which the Board had recently ordered
in Waldzell had turned up not the slightest vestige of disturbance, disorder, or neg-
lect in the life and work of the Players' Village. And nevertheless this appalling man,
until yesterday the dearest of his colleagues, now stood here and deposited the chest
with the insignia of office as if it were a suitcase, declaring that he had ceased to
be Magister, had ceased to be a member of the Board, a brother of the Order and a Cas-
talian, and had dropped in only to say good-by. This was the most disturbing situation
his office as President of the Order had ever involved him in, and he had had great
difficulty in preserving his outward composure.

And what now? Should he resort to force--place the Magister Ludi under house arrest,
say, and at once, this very evening, send emergency messages to all members of the
Board and call a meeting? Was there any objection to his doing so? Was that not the
most logical and correct procedure? It was, and yet something within him protested.
What would he really achieve by such measures? Nothing but humiliation for Magister
Knecht, and nothing at all for Castalia; at most some alleviation for himself who
would no longer have to face this ugly and complex situation alone, bearing all the
responsibility. If anything could still be saved out of this vexatious affair, if
any appeal to Knecht's sense of honor were possible and if it were conceivable that
he might change his mind, such an outcome could only be achieved in a private inter-
view. The two of them, Knecht and Alexander, would have to fight out this bitter
conflict to the end--no one else. And even as he thought this he had to concede that
basically Knecht had acted correctly and honorably by refraining from further contact
with the Board, which he no longer recognized, but coming personally to consult him,
the President, for the final struggle and leave-taking. This man Joseph Knecht, even
when he did something so outrageous and repulsive, nevertheless acted with taste and
tact.

Master Alexander decided to trust to his own powers of persuasion and leave the entire
official apparatus out of the affair. Only now, after he had come to this decision,
did he begin to reflect upon the details of the matter and to ask himself to what ex-
tent the Magister's action was right or wrong--for after all, Knecht seemed to have
no doubt of the integrity and justness of his incredible step. Now that he tried to
classify the Magister Ludi's audacious plan and determine where it stood legally--for
no one knew the rules of the Order better than he--he came to the surprising conclu-
sion that Joseph Knecht was not in fact violating the letter of the rules. Granted,
for decades no one had ever tested the relevant clauses, but the rules did provide
that every member of the Order was at liberty to resign any time he so desired. Of
course he would at the same time renounce all his privileges and separate himself
from the Castalian community. If Knecht now returned his seals, informed the Order
of his resignation, and betook himself into the world, he was to be sure doing some-
thing unheard of in living memory, something highly unusual, alarming, and perhaps
unseemly, but he was committing no infraction of the rules. Incomprehensible the step
might be, but it was not illegal in any formal way. And that he chose not to take it
behind the President's back, but was ready to come and announce his decision, was
in fact more than punctilious. But how had this venerated man, one of the pillars
of the hierarchy, come to such a decision? After all, what he was planning was no-
thing short of desertion. How could he invoke the written rules when a hundred un-
written but no less sacred and self-evident ties should have kept him from taking
this step?

Alexander heard a clock strike. He wrenched himself away from his profitless thoughts,
took his bath, spent ten minutes on careful breathing exercises, and then went to
his meditation cell in order to store up strength and tranquility for an hour be-
fore going to sleep. He would think no more of this matter until the morrow.

Next morning a young servant of the directorate's guest house led the Magister Ludi
to the President, and was thus privy to the way the two men greeted each other. Ac-
customed as the youth was to the manner prevalent among these masters of meditation
and self-discipline, he was nevertheless struck by something in the appearance, the
bearing, and the tone of these two notables as they greeted each other. There was
something new, an extraordinary degree of composure and clarity. It was, so he told
us, not quite the usual salutation between two of the highest dignitaries of the Or-
der, which might be either a serene and casual ceremony or an act of formal but joy-
ful festivity--although occasionally it also turned into a competition in courtesy,
deference, and stressed humility. It was rather as though a stranger were being re-
ceived, say a great master of yoga come from afar to pay his respects to the Presi-
dent of the Order and cross swords with him. In word and gesture both men were ex-
ceedingly modest and sparing, but their eyes and their expressions, though tranquil,
collected, and composed, were charged with a hidden tension, as though both were lum-
inescent or carrying an electric current. Our informant did not have the opportunity
to see or hear any more of the encounter. The two vanished into the office, presuma-
bly going to Master Alexander's study, and remained there for several hours. No one
was permitted to disturb them. What record we have of their conversations comes from
accounts set down on various occasions by the honorable Delegate Designori, to whom
Joseph Knecht related some details.

"You took me by surprise yesterday," the President began, "and very nearly disconcert-
ed me. In the meantime I have been able to reflect upon the matter somewhat. My view-
point has not changed, of course; I am a member of the Board and the directorate of
the Order. According to the letter of the Rule, you have the right to announce your
withdrawal and resign your post. You have come to the point of regarding your post as
burdensome and of feeling an attempt to live outside the Order as a necessity. What
if I were now to propose that you make this trial, but not in terms of your categori-
cal decisions--rather in the form of a prolonged or even an indeterminate leave? Act-
ually, this is what your petition sought to accomplish."

"Not entirely," Knecht said. "If my petition had been approved, I would certainly have
remained in the Order, but not in office. Your kind proposal would be an evasion. In-
cidentally, Waldzell and the Glass Bead Game would scarcely be well served by a Magi-
ster who was absent on leave for a long or indeterminate period of time and who might
or might not return. Moreover, if he did return after a year or two, his skills in
the conduct of his office and in his discipline, the Glass Bead Game, would only have
suffered, not advanced."

Alexander: "He might have profited in all sorts of ways. Perhaps he would have learn-
ed that the world outside is not what he imagined and needs him no more than he does
it. He might come back reassured and glad to remain in old and well-tested paths."

"Your kindness goes very far indeed. I am grateful for it; nevertheless I cannot ac-
cept it. What I am seeking is not so much fulfillment of idle curiosity or of a hank-
ering for worldly life, but experience without reservations. I do not want to go out
into the world with insurance in my pocket, in case I am disappointed. I don't want
to be a prudent traveler taking a bit of a look at the world. On the contrary, I crave
risk, difficulty, and danger; I am hungry for reality, for tasks and deeds, and also
for deprivations and suffering. May I ask you not to press your kind proposal, and
altogether to abandon any attempt to sway me and coax me back? It would lead to
nothing. My visit with you would lose its value and its solemnity for me if it now
brought me approval of my petition after all, when I no longer desire that. I have
not stood still since writing that petition; the way I have embarked on is now my
one and all, my law, my home, my service."

With a sigh, Alexander nodded assent. "Let us assume then," he said patiently, "that
you in fact cannot be influenced or dissuaded. Let us assume that contrary to all
appearances you are deaf to all representations, all reason, all kindness, that you
are running amok or going berserk, so that people must simply keep out of your path.
For the time being I will not try to change your mind or influence you. But tell me
what you came here to tell me. Let me hear the story of your defection. Explain the
acts and decisions which are to us so shocking. Whether what you have to offer is a
confession, a justification, or an indictment, I want to hear it."

Knecht nodded. "Running amok though I am, I pause to express my gladness. I have no
indictments to make. What I wish to say--if only it were not so hard, so incredibly
hard to put into words--seems to me a justification; to you it may be a confession."

He leaned back in his chair and looked up, where traces of Hirsland's former days as
a monastery showed in the vault of the ceiling, in sparse, dreamlike lines and colors,
patterns of flowers and ornamentation.

"The idea that even a Magister could tire of his post and resign it first came to me
only a few months after my appointment as Magister Ludi. One day I was sitting read-
ing a little book by my once famous predecessor Ludwig Wassermaler, a journal of the
official year, in which he offers guidance to his successors. There I read his admo-
nition to give timely thought to the public Glass Bead Game for the coming year. If
you felt no eagerness for it and lacked ideas, he wrote, you should try to put your-
self into the right mood by concentration. With my strong awareness of being the
youngest Magister, I smiled when I read this. With the brashness of youth I was a bit
amused at the anxieties of the old man who had written it. But still I also heard in
it a note of gravity and dread, of something menacing and oppressive. Reflecting on
this, I decided that if ever the day came when the thought of the next festival game
caused me anxiety instead of gladness, fear instead of pride, I would not struggle to
work out a new festival game, but would at once resign and return the emblems of my
office to the Board. This was the first time that such a thought presented itself to
me. At the time I had just come through the great exertions of mastering my office,
and had all my sails spread to the wind, so to speak. In my heart I did not really
believe in the possibility that I too might some day be an old man, tired of the work
and of life, that I might some day be unequal to the task of tossing off ideas for
new Glass Bead Games. Nevertheless, I made the decision at that time. You knew me
well in those days, your Reverence, better perhaps than I knew myself. You were my
adviser and father confessor during that first difficult period in office, and had
taken your departure from Waldzell only a short while before."

Alexander gave him a searching look. "I have scarcely ever had a finer assignment,"
he said, "and was then content, in a way that one rarely is, with you and myself.
If it is true that we must pay for everything pleasant in life, then I must now a-
tone for my elation at that time. I was truly proud of you then. I cannot be so to-
day. If you cause the Order disappointment, if you shock all of Castalia, I know
that I share the responsibility. Perhaps at that time, when I was your companion
and adviser, I should have stayed in your Players' Village a few weeks longer, or
handled you somewhat more roughly, subjected you to stricter examination."

Knecht cheerfully returned his look. "You must not have such misgivings, Domine,
or I should have to remind you of various admonishments you felt called upon to
give me at the time when I, as the youngest Magister, took the duties of my of-
fice too seriously. At one such moment you told me--I have just remembered this
--that if I, the Magister Ludi, were a scoundrel or an incompetent and did ever-
ything a Magister is forbidden to do, in fact if I deliberately set out to use
my high position to do as much harm as possible, all this would no more disturb
our dear Castalia or affect it any more profoundly than a pebble that is thrown
into a lake. A few ripples and circles and all trace is gone. That is how firm,
how secure our Castalian Order is, how inviolable its spirit, you said. Do you
recall? No, you are certainly not to blame for any efforts of mine to be as bad
a Castalian as possible and to do the greatest possible harm to the Order.
Moreover, you also know that what I do cannot shake your own tranquility. But I
want to go on with my story. The fact that I could make such a decision at the
very beginning of my magistracy, and that I did not forget it, but am now about
to carry it out--that fact is related to a kind of spiritual experience I have
from time to time, which I call awakening. But you already know about that; I
once spoke to you about it, when you were my mentor and guru. In fact I complain-
ed to you at the time that since my accession to office that experience had not
come to me, and seemed to be vanishing more and more into the distance."

"I remember," the President agreed. "I was somewhat taken aback at the time by
your capacity for this kind of experience; it is rather rare among us, whereas in the
world outside it occurs in so many varied forms: sometimes in the genius, especial-
ly in statesmen and generals, but also in feeble, semi-pathological, and on the
whole rather meagerly gifted persons such as clairvoyants, telepaths, and mediums.
You seemed to me to have no kinship at all with these two types, the aggressive
heroes or the clairvoyants and diviners. Rather you seemed to me then, and until
yesterday, to be a good Castalian, prudent, clearheaded, obedient. I thought it com-
pletely out of the question that you should ever be the victim of mysterious voices,
whether of divine or diabolic origin, or even voices from within your own self.
Therefore I interpreted the states of 'awakening' which you described to me simply
as your becoming aware occasionally of personal growth. Given that interpretation,
it followed that these spiritual insights would not be coming your way for a consi-
derable time. After all, you had just entered office and had assumed a task which
still hung loosely around you like an overcoat too big for you--you would still have
to grow into it. But tell me this: have you ever believed that these awakenings are
anything like revelations from higher powers, communications or summons from the
realm of an objective, eternal, or divine truth?"

"In saying this," Knecht replied, "you bring me to my present difficulty: to express
in words something that refuses to be put into words; to make rational what is obvious-
ly extrarational. No, I never thought of those awakenings as manifestations of a god
or daimon or of some absolute truth. What gives these experiences their weight and
persuasiveness is not their truth, their sublime origin, their divinity or anything
of the sort, but their reality. They are tremendously real, somewhat the way a violent
physical pain or a surprising natural event, a storm or earthquake, seem to us charged
with an entirely different sort of reality, presence, inexorability, from ordinary
times and conditions. The gust of wind that precedes a thunderstorm, sending us into
the house and almost wrenching the front door away from our hand--or a bad toothache
which seems to concentrate all the tensions, sufferings, and conflicts of the world in
our jaw--these are such realities. Later on we may start to question them or examine
their significance, if that is our bent; but at the moment they happen they admit no
doubts and are brimful of reality. My 'awakening' has a similar kind of intensified
reality for me. That is why I have given it this name; at such times I really feel as
if I had lain asleep or half asleep for a long time, but am now awake and clearheaded
and receptive in a way I never am ordinarily. In history, too, moments of tribulation
or great upheavals have their element of convincing necessity; they create a sense of
irresistible immediacy and tension. Whatever the consequence of such upheavals, be it
beauty and clarity or savagery and darkness, whatever happens will bear the semblance
of grandeur, necessity, and importance and will stand out as utterly different from
everyday events."

He paused to catch his breath, then continued: "But let me try to examine this matter
from another angle. Do you recall the legend of St. Christopher? Yes? Well now, Christ-
opher was a man of great strength and courage, but he wanted to serve rather than to
be a master and govern. Service was his strength and his art; he had a faculty for it.
But whom he served was not a matter of indifference to him. He felt that he had to
serve the greatest, the most powerful master. And when he heard of a mightier master,
he promptly offered his services. I have always been fond of this great servant, and
I must in some way resemble him. At any rate, during the one period in my life when I
had command over myself, during my student years, I searched and vacillated for a long
time before deciding what master to serve. For years I remained mistrustful of the Glass
Bead Game and fended it off, although I had long ago recognized it as the most precious
and characteristic fruit of our Province. I had tasted the bait and knew that there was
nothing more attractive and more subtle on earth than the Game. I had also observed
fairly early that this enchanting Game demanded more than naive amateur players, that
it took total possession of the man who had succumbed to its magic. And an instinct
within me rebelled against my throwing all my energies and interests into this magic
forever. Some naive feeling for simplicity, for wholeness and soundness, warned me a-
gainst the spirit of the Waldzell Vicus Lusorum. I sensed in it a spirit of specialism
and virtuosity, certainly highly cultivated, certainly richly elaborated, but neverthe-
less isolated from humanity and the whole of life--a spirit that had soared too high
into haughty solitariness. For years I doubted and probed, until the decision had ma-
tured within me and in spite of everything I decided in favor of the Game. I did so
because I had within me that urge to seek the supreme fulfillment and serve only the
greatest master."

"I understand," Master Alexander said. "But no matter how I regard it and no matter how
you try to represent it, I come up against the same reason, for your singularities. You
have an excessive sense of your own person, or dependence on it, which is far from the
same thing as being a great personality. A man can be a star of the first magnitude in
gifts, will-power, and endurance, but so well balanced that he turns with the system to
which he belongs without any friction or waste of energy. Another may have the same
great gifts, or even finer ones, but the axis does not pass precisely through the center
and he squanders half his strength in eccentric movements which weaken him and disturb
his surroundings. You evidently belong to this type. Only I must admit that you have
contrived to conceal it remarkably. For that very reason the malady seems to be break-
ing out now with all the greater virulence. You spoke of St. Christopher, and I must
say that although there is something grand and touching about this saint, he is not a
model for a servant of our hierarchy. One who wishes to serve should abide by the master
he has sworn to serve for good and ill, and not with the secret reservation that he will
change as soon as he finds a more magnificent master. In assuming such an attitude the
servant makes himself his master's judge, and this indeed is what you are doing. You
always want to serve the highest master, and are naive enough to decide for yourself
the rank of the masters among whom you make your choice. "

Knecht had listened attentively, although a shadow of sadness passed across his face.
Now he continued: "I respect your opinion, and could not have imagined that it would
be any different. But let me go on with my story just a little longer. I became Mag-
ister Ludi and in fact was sure for a good while that I was serving the highest of
all masters. At any rate my friend Designori, our patron in the Federal Council, once
described to me in extremely vivid terms what an arrogant, conceited, blase elitist
and virtuoso of the Game I once was. But I must also tell you the meaning that the
word 'transcend' has had for me since my student years and my 'awakening.' It came
to me, I think, while reading a philosopher of the Enlightenment, and under the in-
fluence of Master Thomas von der Trave, and ever since then it has been a veritable
magic word for me, like 'awakening,' an impetus, a consolation, and a promise. My
life, I resolved, ought to be a perpetual transcending, a progression from stage to
stage; I wanted it to pass through one area after the next, leaving each behind, as
music moves on from theme to theme, from tempo to tempo, playing each out to the
end, completing each and leaving it behind, never tiring, never sleeping, forever wakeful,
forever in the present. In connection with the experiences of awakening, I had not-
iced that such stages and such areas exist, and that each successive period in one's
life bears within itself, as it is approaching its end, a note of fading and eager-
ness for death. That in turn leads to a shifting to a new area, to awakening and new
beginnings. I am telling you about the significance to me of transcending in order
to provide another clue which may help you interpret my life. The decision in favor
of the Glass Bead Game was an important stage, as was the first time I took my place
in the hierarchy by accepting an assignment. I have also experienced such movements
from stage to stage in my office as Magister. The best thing the office has given
me was the discovery that making music and playing the Glass Bead Game are not the
only happy activities in life, that teaching and educating can be just as exhilara-
ting. And I gradually discovered, furthermore, that teaching gave me all the more
pleasure, the younger and more unspoiled by miseducation the pupils were. This too,
like many other things, led me in the course of the years to desire younger and
younger pupils, so that I would have liked most to have become a teacher in an e-
lementary school. In short, at times my imagination dwelt on matters which in
themselves lay outside my functions."

He paused for a moment to rest. The President remarked: "You astonish me more and
more, Magister. Here you are speaking about your own life, and you mention scarce-
ly anything but subjective experiences, personal wishes, personal developments
and decisions. I really had no idea that a Castalian of your rank could see him-
self and his life in such a light."

His voice had a note between reproach and sorrow. It pained Knecht, but he re-
mained equable and exclaimed merrily: "Esteemed Magister, we are not speaking a-
bout Castalia, about the Board and the hierarchy at the moment, but only about
me, about the psychology of a man who unfortunately has been forced to cause you
great inconvenience. It would be improper for me to speak of my conduct of of-
fice, the way I have met my obligations, my value or lack of it as a Castalian
and Magister. My conduct of office lies open before you. You can easily look
into it, as you can into the entire exterior of my life. You will not find much
to censure. But what we are concerned with here is something wholly different.
I am trying to show you the path I have trodden as an individual, which has led
me out of Waldzell and will lead me out of Castalia tomorrow. Please, be so kind
as to listen to me a little while longer.

"My consciousness of a world outside our little Province I owe not to my studies,
in which this world occurred only as the remote past, but primarily to my fellow
student Designori, who was a guest from outside, and later to my stay among the
Benedictines, and to Father Jacobus. What I have seen of the world with my own
eyes is very little, but Father Jacobus gave me an inkling of what is called his-
tory. And it may be that in acquiring that I was laying the groundwork for the i-
solation into which I stumbled after my return. I returned from the monastery
into a land where history virtually didn't exist, into a Province of scholars and
Glass Bead Game players, a highly refined and extremely pleasant society, but one
in which I seemed to stand entirely alone with my smattering of the world, my cur-
iosity about that world, and my sympathy for it. To be sure, there was enough to
compensate me here. There were several men I revered, so that I felt all at once
abashed, delighted, and hon-ored to work with them as their colleague, and there
were a large number of well-bred and highly cultivated people. There was also work
aplenty and a great many talented and lovable students. The trouble was that during
my apprenticeship under Father Jacobus I had made the discovery that I was not on-
ly a Castalian, but also a man; that the world, the whole world, concerned me and
exerted certain claims upon me. Needs, wishes, demands, and obligations arose out
of this discovery, but I was in no position to meet any of them. Life in the world,
as the Castalian sees it, is something backward and inferior, a life of disorder
and crudity, of passions and distractions, devoid of all that is beautiful or des-
irable. But the world and its life was in fact infinitely vaster and richer than
the notions a Castalian has of it; it was full of change, history, struggles, and
eternally new beginnings. It might be chaotic, but it was the home and native soil
of all destinies, all exaltations, all arts, all humanity; it had produced langua-
ges, peoples, governments, cultures; it had also produced us and our Castalia and
would see all these things perish again, and yet survive. My teacher Jacobus had
kindled in me a love for this world which was forever growing and seeking nourish-
ment. But in Castalia there was nothing to nourish it. Here we were outside of the
world; we ourselves were a small, perfect world, but one no longer changing, no
longer growing."

He took a deep breath and fell silent for a while. Since the president made no re-
ply, and only looked expectantly at him, he gave a pensive nod and continued: "For
me, this meant bearing two burdens, and I did so for a good many years. I had to
administer an important office and meet its responsibilities, and I had to deal
with this love for the world. My office, I realized from the outside, must not
suffer because of this love. On the contrary, I thought it ought to benefit. I
hoped to carry out my duties as thoroughly and irreproachably as a Magister is ex-
pected to; but if I should fall short in these, I nevertheless knew that inwardly
I was more alert and alive than a good many of my more punctilious colleagues, and
that I had something to give to my students and associates. I regarded it as my mis-
sion to expand Castalian life and thought slowly and gently without breaking with
tradition, to add to its warmth, to infuse it with new blood from the world and
from history. By the happy workings of Providence, at the same time, outside in our
country, a man of the world had precisely the same thought. He dreamed of a rappro-
chement and interpenetration of Castalia and the world. That man was Plinio Desig-
nori."

Master Alexander's mouth took on a slightly sour expression as he said: "Well yes,
I have never hoped for anything very good from this man's influence upon you,
any more than I have from your spoiled protege Tegularius. So it is Designori
who brought you to the point of a complete breach with the system?"

"No, Domine, but he helped me, in part without being aware of it. He brought fresh
air into my quietude. Through him I came into contact with the outside world again,
and only then was I able to realize and to admit to myself that I was at the end
of my career here, that I had lost all real joy in my work, and that it was time
to put an end to the ordeal. One more stage had been left behind; I had passed
through another area, another space, which this time was Castalia."

"How you phrase that!" Alexander remarked, shaking his head. "As if Castalian space
were not large enough to serve a great many people worthily all their lives! Do
you seriously believe that you have traversed this space and gone beyond it?"

"Oh no," Knecht replied with strong feeling. "I've never believed anything of the
sort. When I say that I have reached the border of this space, I mean only that
I have done all that I as an official could do here. In this sense I have reached
my limits. For some time I have been standing at the frontier where my work as
Magister Ludi has become eternal recurrence, an empty exercise and formula. I
have been doing it without joy, without enthusiasm, sometimes even without faith.
It was time to stop."

Alexander sighed. "That is your view, but not the view of the Order and its rules.
A brother in our Order has moods, and at times he wearies of his work--there is
nothing new and remarkable about that. The rules show him the way to regain har-
mony, to find his center again. Had you forgotten that?"

"I do not think so, your Reverence. My administration is open to your inspection,
and only recently, after you had received my circular letter, you conducted an
investigation of the Players' Village and of me personally. You learned that the
work was being done, that Secretariat and Archive were in order, that the Magist-
er Ludi showed no signs of illness or vagary. I was able to carry on, and sustain
my strength and composure, because of those very rules which you so skillfully
taught me. But it cost me great effort. And now, unfortunately, it is costing me
almost as much effort to convince you that I am not giving in to moods, whims, or
vague yearnings. But whether or not I succeed, I insist at least on your acknow-
ledging that my personality and my work were sound and useful up to the moment
you last evaluated them. Is that asking too much of you?"

Master Alexander's eyes twinkled rather sardonically.

"My dear colleague," he said, "you address me as if we were two private individu-
als holding a casual conversation. But that applies only to yourself; you are now
in fact a private individual. I am not, and whatever I think and say, I do not
speak for myself, but as President of the Order, and he is responsible to his Board
for every word. What you are saying here today will remain without consequences.
No matter how earnest your intentions, yours is the speech of a private person ur-
ging his own interests. But for me, my office and responsibility continue, and what
I say or do today may have consequences. I shall plead your cause before the Board.
You want the Board to accept your account of the circumstances, or perhaps even ac-
knowledge that you have made a correct decision. Your case then is that until yest-
erday, though you may have had all sorts of weird ideas in your head, you were an
irreproachable Castalian, an exemplary Magister; that you may have experienced temp-
tations, spells of weariness, but that you consistently fought and overcame them.
Let us assume that I accept that; but then how am I to understand that the upright
Magister who only yesterday obeyed every rule today suddenly defects? You must ad-
mit this is more understandable in terms of a Magister whose mind had in fact been
impaired, who was suffering from psychic illness, so that he went on considering
himself an excellent Castalian long after he had in reality ceased to be one. I al-
so wonder why you make such a point of your having been a dutiful Magister up to
the very end. Since you have after all taken the step, broken your vow of obedience,
and committed the act of desertion, why be concerned about establishing such a point?"

Knecht protested. "I beg your pardon, your Reverence, but why should I not be con-
cerned about that? My name and reputation is involved, the memory I shall leave be-
hind here. Also involved is the possibility of my working for Castalia on the outside.
I am not here to salvage something for myself, or even to win the Board's approval
of my action. I counted on being regarded by my colleagues henceforth as a dubious
phenomenon, and am prepared for that. But I don't want to be regarded as a traitor
or madman; that is a verdict I cannot accept. I have done something you must disap-
prove of, but I have done it because I had to, because it was incumbent upon me, be-
cause that is my destiny, which I believe in and which I assume with good will. If
you cannot concede this much, then I have been defeated and have spoken with you in
vain."

"Again and again it comes down to the same thing," Alexander replied. "You want me
to concede that in some circumstances an individual has the right to break the laws
in which I believe and which it is my task to represent. But I cannot simultaneously
believe in our system and in your personal right to violate it--please, don't inter-
rupt me. I can concede that to all appearances you are convinced of the rightness
and meaningfulness of your dreadful step, and that you believe you have been called
to take such action. You certainly don't expect me to approve the step itself. On the
other hand, you have achieved something, for I have given up my initial thought of
winning you back and changing your decision. I accept your withdrawal from the Order
and shall pass on to the Board the news of your voluntary resignation of your post.
I cannot make any further concessions to you, Joseph Knecht."

The Magister Ludi made a gesture of submission. Then he said quietly: "Thank you. I
have already given you the casket. I now turn over to you, as representative of the
Board, my notes on the state of affairs in Waldzell, especially on the body of tut-
ors and my recommendations on the persons I consider possible successors to my of-
fice."

He took a few folded sheets of paper from his pocket and placed them on the table.
Then he rose, and the President rose also. Knecht took a step toward him, looked in-
to his eyes for a long moment in sorrowful friendliness, then bowed and said: "I
had wanted to ask you to shake hands with me in parting, but I suppose I must forgo
this now. You have always been especially dear to me, and today has not changed that
in any way. Good-by, dear and revered Master."

Alexander stood still. He was rather pale. For a moment it seemed as though he meant
to extend his hand to the departing Magister. He felt his eyes growing moist. Then
he inclined his head, responded to Knecht' s bow, and let him go.

After Knecht had closed the door behind him, the President stood unmoving, listening
to the departing footsteps. When the last one had faded away and there was nothing
more to be heard, he walked back and forth across the room for a while, until foot-
steps again sounded outside and there was a soft knock at the door. The young servant
entered and reported that a visitor wished to see him.

"Tell him that I can receive him in an hour and that I request him to be brief; there
are urgent matters to attend to. No, wait a moment. Also go to the Secretariat and
inform the First Secretary to convoke a meeting of the entire Board for the day after
tomorrow. All members must attend; only severe illness will be acceptable as an ex-
cuse for absence. Then go to the steward and tell him I must leave for Waldzell ear-
ly tomorrow morning; have my car ready by seven."

"I beg your pardon," the young man said, "but the Magister Ludi's car is at your
disposal."

"How is that?"

"His Reverence came by car yesterday. He has just left word that he is continuing
his journey on foot and leaving the car here at your disposal."

"Very well, I'll take the Waldzell car tomorrow. Repeat, please."

The servant repeated: "The visitor will be received in an hour; he is to be brief.
The First Secretary is to convoke the Board for the day after tomorrow, attendance
mandatory, absence excused only on grounds of severe illness. Departure for Wald-
zell at seven o'clock tomorrow morning in the Magister Ludi's car."

Master Alexander took a deep breath once the young man had gone. He went over to
the table where he had sat with Knecht. Still echoing in his ears were the footsteps
of that incomprehensible man whom he had loved above all others and who had inflict-
ed this great grief upon him. He had loved this man ever since the days he had first
helped him; and among other traits it had been Knecht's way of walking that had ap-
pealed so strongly to him--a firm, rhythmic step that was also light, almost airy,
expressing something between dignity and childlikeness, between priestliness and the
dance--a strange, lovable, and elegant walk that accorded with Knecht's face and
voice. It accorded equally well with his peculiar way of being a Castalian and Magi-
ster, his kind of mastership and serenity, which sometimes reminded Alexander of
the aristocratically measured manner of his predecessor, Master Thomas, sometimes
of the simple, heartwarming former Music Master. So he had already left, in his haste,
and on foot, who could say where, and probably he, Alexander, would never see him
again, never again hear his laugh and watch the fine, long and slender fingers of his
hand drawing the hieroglyphs of a Glass Bead Game phrase. Alexander reached for
the sheets of paper that had been left lying on the table and began reading them.
They amounted to a brief testament, extremely terse and matter-of-fact, frequently
consisting only of cue words rather than sentences; their purpose was to facilitate
the Board's work in the forthcoming investigation of the Vicus Lusorum and the ap-
pointment of a new Magister. The laconic, sensible remarks stood there in neat, small
letters, the words and handwriting just as uniquely and unmistakably typical of Joseph
Knecht as his face, his voice, his gait. The Board would scarcely find a man of his
stature for his successor; real masters and real personalities were all too rare, and
each one was a matter of good luck and a pure gift, even here in Castalia, the pro-
vince of the elite.


Joseph Knecht enjoyed walking; it was years since he had last traveled on foot. In
fact, when he reviewed the matter it seemed to him that his last real walking tour
had been the one that had long ago taken him from Mariafels monastery back to Cast-
alia and to that annual game in Waldzell which had been so overshadowed by the death
of Magister Thomas von der Trave and had resulted in his own appointment to succeed
the Magister Ludi. Ordinarily, when he thought back upon those days, let alone upon
his student years and the Bamboo Grove, it had always been as if he were gazing from
a cool, dull room out into broad, brightly sunlit landscapes, into the irrevocable
past, the paradise of memory. Such recollections had always been, even when they
were free of sadness, a vision of things remote and different, separated from the
prosaic present by a mysterious festiveness. But now, on this bright and cheerful
September afternoon, with the strong greens and browns all around him and the eth-
ereal, gently misted tones of blue verging into violet in the distance, as he trudg-
ed along at an easy pace, with frequent pauses to look about him, that walking tour
of so long ago did not seem a distant paradise cut off from a resigned present. Ra-
ther his present journey was the same as that of the past, the present Joseph Knecht
was close as a brother to the Knecht of those days. Everything was new again, myst-
erious, promising; all that had been could recur, and many new things as well. It
was long, long since he had looked out upon the day and the world and seen them as
so unburdened, so beautiful and innocent. The happiness of freedom, of commanding
his own destiny, flooded through him like a strong drink. How long it was since he
had last had this feeling, last entertained this lovely and rapturous illusion. He
pondered that, and recalled the time this precious feeling had first been bruised,
then given a fatal blow. It had happened during a conversation with Magister Thomas,
under the latter's friendly and ironic glance. He now recalled the strange sensa-
tion of that hour in which he had lost his freedom. It had not really been a pang,
a burning anguish, but rather an onset of timidity, a faint shiver at the nape of
his neck, an organic warning somewhere above his diaphragm, a change in the tempera-
ture and especially in the tempo of his consciousness of life. That anxious, con-
stricting sensation, the hidden threat of suffocation of that fateful hour, was be-
ing recompensed now, or healed.

The day before, during his drive to Hirsland, Knecht had decided that whatever
might happen there, he would not repine. Now he forbade himself to think over the
details of his conversations with Alexander, of his struggle with him and his
struggle to win him. He left himself entirely open to the feeling of relaxation
and freedom that filled him like the approach of evening leisure for a peasant
whose day's work lies behind him. He was conscious of being safe and under no ob-
ligations. For a moment he was utterly dispensable, exempt from all responsibili-
ties, not required to perform any tasks, to do any thinking. The bright, vari-
colored day surrounded him with a gentle radiance, wholly visual, wholly present,
imposing no demands, having neither yesterday nor tomorrow. Now and then as he
walked he contentedly hummed one of the marching songs he and his schoolmates
used to sing in three or four parts on outings, when he was an elite pupil at
Eschholz, and out of that serene early morning of his life small bright memories
and sounds came fluttering to him like the chirping of birds.

Under a cherry tree with leaves already showing glints of purple he stopped to
rest and sat down in the grass. He reached into the pocket of his coat and took
out a thing that Master Alexander would never have guessed he would be carrying,
a small wooden flute, which he contemplated for a moment with tenderness. He had
not owned this naive, childish-looking instrument for long, perhaps half a year,
and he recalled with pleasure the day he had acquired it. He had ridden to Mont-
eport to discuss some problems of musical theory with Carlo Ferromonte. Their
conversation had turned to the woodwinds of certain ages, and he had asked his
friend to show him the Monteport instrument collection. After an enjoyable stroll
through several halls filled with old organ manuals, harps, lutes, and pianos,
they had come to a building where instruments for the schools were stored. There
Knecht had seen a whole drawer full of such little flutes; he had examined and
tried one, and asked his friend whether he might have one. Laughing, Carlo had
invited him to choose; still laughing, he had presented him with a receipt to
sign; but then he had seriously explained the structure of the instrument, its
fingering, and the technique of playing it. Knecht had taken the pretty little
toy with him, and practiced on it occasionally--for he had not played a wind
instrument since the recorder of his boyhood in Eschholz, and had often resolv-
ed to learn one again. In addition to scales, he had used a book of old melo-
dies which Ferromonte had edited for beginners, and every so often the soft,
sweet notes of the flute had sounded from the Magister's garden or from his bed-
room. He was far from a master of the instrument, but had learned to play a num-
ber of chorales and songs; he knew the music by heart, and also the words of
a good many of them. One of these songs now sprang into his mind; it seemed
highly suitable to the moment. He sang a few lines under his breath:

　　　　　My body and head
　　　　　Lay asleep like the dead,
　　　　　But now I stand strong,
　　　　　Gay as the day is long
　　　　　And turn my face to heaven.

He brought the instrument to his lips and blew the melody, looking out into the
radiant plain that arched toward the distant mountains, listening to the serene-
ly devout song ringing out in the sweet notes of the flute, and feeling at one
and content with the sky, the mountains, the song, and the day. With pleasure,
he felt the smooth wand between his fingers and reflected that aside from the
clothes on his body this toy flute was the only piece of property he had allow-
ed himself to take from Waldzell. In the course of years he had accumulated a
good many things that could be more or less regarded as personal property, a-
bove all writings, notebooks, and so on. He had left all these things behind;
the Players' Village might use them as it wished. But he had taken the flute,
and he was glad to have it with him; it was a modest and lovable traveling
companion.

On the second day he arrived in the capital on foot and called at the Designo-
ri home. Plinio sped down the steps to meet him and embraced him with emotion.

"We have been longing for you, and anxiously waiting for you!" he exclaimed.
"You have taken a great step, friend--may it bring good things to all of us.
But to think that they let you go! I never would have believed it."

Knecht laughed. "You see, I am here. But I'll tell you about it by and by. But
now I'd like to greet my pupil, and of course your wife, and discuss every-
thing with you--how we are going to arrange my new position. I am eager to
start on it."

Plinio called a maid and told her to bring his son at once.

"The young gentleman?" she asked, seemingly astonished, but hurried off while
Plinio showed his friend to the guest room. He began eagerly describing what
preparations he had made for Knecht's arrival, and how he imagined the tutor-
ing of young Tito would work out. Everything had been arranged as Knecht wish-
ed it, he said; Tito's mother, after some initial reluctance, had also grasped
the reasons for these wishes and assented to them. The family owned a vaca-
tion cottage in the mountains, called Belpunt, pleasantly situated on a lake.
There Knecht would live with his pupil for the time being. An elderly servant
would keep house for them; she had already left several days ago to put the
place in order. Of course they could stay there only for a short time, at most
till the onset of winter; but such isolation would certainly be beneficial,
especially for the initial period. Fortunately, Tito loved the mountains and
Belpunt, so the boy made no difficulties about going there. He was even look-
ing forward to the project. At this point Designori remembered that he had an
album of photos of the house and its environs. He drew Knecht along into his
study, searched eagerly for the album, and when he had found it began showing
his guest the house and describing the big farm kitchen-living room, the tile
stove, the arbors, the lake shore, the waterfall.

"Does it seem nice to you?" he asked insistently. "Will you feel comfortable
there?"

"Why not?" Knecht said calmly. "But I wonder where Tito is. It's been quite
some time since he was sent for."

They chatted for a while longer. Then they heard footsteps outside. The door
opened, but neither Tito nor the maid dispatched for him entered. It was Ti-
to's mother, Madame Designori. Knecht rose to greet her. She extended her
hand, smiling with a somewhat artificial friendliness; he could see beneath
this polite smile an expression of anxiety and vexation. She barely managed
a few words of welcome and then turned to her husband and impetuously burst
out with what was troubling her.

"It's really so awkward," she exclaimed. "Imagine, the boy has vanished and
is nowhere to be found."

"Oh well, I imagine he has gone out," Plinio said soothingly. "He'll be along."

"Unfortunately that isn't likely," his wife said. "He's been gone all day. I
noticed his absence early this morning."

"And why am I only now being told about it?"

"Because I naturally expected him back any minute and saw no reason to trouble
you needlessly. At first I took it for granted that he had simply gone for a
walk. When he didn't return by noon I began to worry. You were not lunching
with us today or I would have spoken to you. Even then, I tried to persuade
myself that it was simply carelessness on his part to make me wait so long.
But it seems it wasn't that."

"Permit me a question," Knecht said. "The young man knew I would be arriving
soon, didn't he, and about your plans for him and me?"

"Of course, Magister. And he seemed to be agreeable to those plans--or at
least he preferred having you as his teacher to being sent back to some
school."

"Oh well," Knecht said, "then there is nothing to worry about. Your son is
used to a great deal of freedom, Signora, especially of late. It's understand-
able that the prospect of a tutor and disciplinarian should be rather dreadful
to him. And so he's made off at just the moment he was to be turned over to
his new teacher--probably less with the hope of actually escaping his fate
than with the thought that he'll lose nothing by postponement. Besides, he
probably wanted to play a trick on his parents and the schoolmaster they've
found for him, and so show his defiance to the whole world of grown-ups and
teachers."

Designori was glad that Knecht took the incident so lightly. He himself was
full of anxiety; with his intense love for his son, he imagined all sorts of
dangers. Perhaps, he thought, the boy had run away in all earnest; perhaps he
even intended to do himself some harm. It seemed as if they were going to pay
for all their faults of omission and commission in the boy's upbringing, just
when they were hoping to remedy things.

Against Knecht's advice, he insisted that something must be done; he could not
take this latest crisis passively, and worked himself up to a pitch of impati-
ence and nervous agitation which his friend found deplorable. It was therefore
decided to send messages to the homes of a few of Tito's friends, where he
sometimes stayed overnight. Knecht was relieved when Madame Designori left to
attend to this, and he had Plinio to himself for a while.

"Plinio," he said, "you look as if your son had just been carried dead into the
house. He is no longer a small child and is not likely to have been run over or
to have eaten deadly nightshade. So get a grip on yourself, my dear fellow. Since
the boy isn't here, permit me for a moment to teach you something in his stead.
I have been observing you and find that you're not in the best of form. The mo-
ment an athlete receives an unexpected blow or pressure, his muscles react of
their own accord by making the necessary movements, stretching or contracting
automatically and so helping him master the situation. You too, my pupil Plinio,
the moment you received the blow--or what you exaggeratedly thought a blow--
should have applied the first defensive measure against psychic assaults and re-
sorted to slow, carefully controlled breathing. Instead you breathed like an
actor when he seeks to represent extreme emotion. You are not sufficiently arm-
ored; you people in the world seem to be singularly exposed to suffering and
cares. There is something helpless and touching about your state; though often,
when real suffering is involved and there is meaning to such pangs, it is also
magnificent. But for everyday life these protective measures are most valuable
and should not be ignored. I will make sure that your son will be better armed
when he needs such equipment. And now, Plinio, be so kind as to do a few exer-
cises with me, so that I can see whether you have really forgotten it all."

With the breathing exercises, which he guided by strictly rhythmical commands,
he was able to distract Plinio from his self-induced agonies until he was will-
ing to listen to rational arguments and dismantle the structure of alarm and
anxiety he had so lavishly built. They went up to Tito's room, where Knecht
looked benignly around at the confusion of boyish possessions. He picked up a
book lying on the night-table, saw a slip of paper jutting from it, and found
it was a note from the vanished boy. Laughing, he handed the paper to Designori,
whose expression immediately brightened. Tito had written that he was leaving
at daybreak and going to the mountains alone, where he would wait at Belpunt for
his new teacher. He hoped, the message said, that his parents would not mind
his having this last little jaunt before his freedom was once more awfully re-
stricted; his spirits sank when he thought of having to make this pleasant
little journey accompanied by his teacher, a prisoner under supervision.

"Quite understandable," Knecht commented. "I'll leave for Belpunt tomorrow and
will probably find the boy already there. But now you'd better go to your wife
and tell her the news."

For the rest of the day the atmosphere in the house was happy and relaxed. That
evening, on Plinio's insistence, Knecht summarized the events of the past sev-
eral days, and in particular described his two conversations with Master Alex-
ander. On that evening he also scribbled some curious lines of verse on a scrap
of paper which is today in the possession of Tito Designori. That came about in
the following way.

Before dinner his host had left him alone for an hour. Knecht saw a bookcase full
of old books which aroused his curiosity. Idle reading was another pleasure which
he had unlearned and almost forgotten in years of abstinence. This moment now re-
minded him intensely of his student years: to stand before a shelf of unknown
books, reach out at random, and choose one or another volume whose gilt or author's
name, format or the color of the binding, appealed to him. With pleasure he glanc-
ed over the titles on the spines and saw that the shelf consisted entirely of
nineteenth- and twentieth-century belles-lettres. Finally he picked out a faded
cloth-bound volume whose title, Wisdom of the Brahmans, tempted him. Standing for
a while, then seated, he leafed through the book, which contained many hundreds of
didactic poems. It was a curious composite of learned loquacity and real wisdom,
of philistinism and genuine poetry. This strange and touching book held, it seemed
to him, a good deal of important esoteric philosophy, but this was almost lost in
the heavyhanded treatment. The best poems were by no means the ones in which
the poet tried hard to give form to a theory or a truth, but the ones in which the
poet's temperament, his capacity for love, his sincerity, humanitarianism, and
deep respectability, found expression. As Knecht delved into the book, with mixed
feelings of esteem and amusement, he was struck by a stanza which he absorbed
with satisfaction and assent. Reading it, he nodded smilingly, as if it had been
specially sent to him for this day in his life. It went:

　　　　　Our days are precious but we gladly see them going
　　　　　If in their place we find a thing more precious growing:
　　　　　A rare, exotic plant, our gardener's heart delighting;
　　　　　A child whom we are teaching, a booklet we are writing.

He opened the drawer of the desk, found a sheet of paper, and copied out the
stanza. Later he showed it to Plinio, and commented: "I liked these lines.
There is something special about them; they are so dry and at the same time
so deeply felt. And they so well suit me and my momentary situation and mood.
Although I am not a gardener and don't intend to devote my days to the cult-
ivation of an exotic plant, I am a teacher, and am on the way to my task, to
the child I mean to teach. How I am looking forward to it! As for the author
of these lines, the poet Ruckert, I would suppose he possessed all three
of these noble passions: that of gardener, teacher, and writer. I suppose
the third ranked highest with him; he shapes the stanza so that it receives
the maximum stress, and dotes so on the object of his passion that he becomes
positively tender and calls it not a book, but a booklet. How touching that
is."

Plinio laughed. "Who knows," he observed, "whether the diminutive is not just
a rhymester's trick because he needed a two-syllable instead of a one-syllable
word there."

"Let us not underestimate him," Knecht replied. "A man who wrote tens of thou-
sands of lines of verse in his lifetime would not be driven into a corner by
shabby metrical necessity. No, just listen to it, how loving it sounds, and
at the same time just a little sheepish: a booklet we are writing. Perhaps it
isn't only his affection that transforms the book into a booklet. Perhaps he
also meant it apologetically. Probably this poet was so devoted to his writ-
ing that now and again he felt his own passion for making books as a kind of
vice. In that case the word booklet would have not only the sense of an en-
dearment, but also a propitiating, disarming connotation, as when a gambler
invites someone to a 'little game' or a drinker asks for 'just a drop.' Well,
these are speculations. In any case, I find myself in full agreement and sym-
pathy with the poet about the child he wishes to teach and the booklet he
wants to write. Because I am not only familiar with the passion for teaching;
I'm also rather inclined to do a little scribbling too. And now that I have
liberated myself from officialdom, I am much drawn to the idea of using my
leisure and good spirits one of these days to write a book--or rather, a book-
let, a little thing for friends and those who share my views."

"What about?" Designori asked with curiosity.

"Oh, anything, the subject would not matter. It would only be a pretext for
me to seclude myself and enjoy the happiness of having a great deal of lei-
sure. The tone would be what mattered to me, a proper mean between the sol-
emn and the intimate, earnestness and jest, a tone not of instruction, but
of friendly communication and discourse on various things I think I have
learned. I don't suppose the way this poet Friedrich Riickert mixes in-
struction and thinking, information and casual talk, would be my way, and
yet something about it appeals strongly to me; it is personal and yet not
arbitrary, playful and yet submits to strict rules of form. I like that.
Well, for the present I shall not enter upon the joys and problems of writ-
ing little books; I have to keep my mind on other tasks. But some time lat-
er, I imagine, I might very well experience the joys of authorship, of the
sort I foresee: an easygoing, but careful examination of things not just
for my solitary pleasure, but always with a few good friends and readers in
mind."

Next morning Knecht set out for Belpunt. Designori had wanted to accompany
him, but Knecht had firmly vetoed the idea, and when the father attempted to
press it, had almost snapped at him. "The boy will have enough to do coming
to terms with this nuisance of a new teacher," he said curtly. "To foist his
father on him at the same time would scarcely help things."

As he rode through the brisk September morning in the car Plinio had hired
for him, his good humor of yesterday returned. He chatted frequently with the
chauffeur, asking him to stop or drive slowly every so often when the land-
scape looked particularly attractive, and several times he played his little
flute. It was a beautiful and exciting ride from the lowlands in which the
capital lay toward the foothills and on into the high mountains. The journey
also led from fading summer deeper into autumn. About noon the last great
climb began, over sweeping serpentines, through thinning evergreen forest,
past foaming mountain streams roaring between cliffs, over bridges and by
solitary, massive walled farmhouses with tiny windows, into a stony, ever
rougher and more austere world of mountains, amid whose bleakness and sobri-
ety the flowering meadows bloomed like tiny paradises with doubled loveliness.

The small cottage they reached at last was tucked away near a mountain lake,
among gray cliffs with which it scarcely contrasted. The traveler was at once
aware of the austerity, even the gloom, of this kind of building, which so ac-
corded with the ruggedness of the mountains. But then a cheerful smile lighted
his face, for in the open door of the house he saw a figure standing, a young
man in a colorful jacket and shorts. It could only be his pupil Tito, and al-
though he had not really been seriously concerned about the fugitive, he nev-
ertheless breathed a grateful sigh of relief. If Tito were here and welcoming
his teacher on the threshold, all was well; that disposed of a good many pos-
sible complications he had been considering during the ride.

The boy came forward to meet him, smiling, friendly, and a little embarrassed.
While helping Knecht out of the car, he said: "I didn't mean to be horrid,
letting you travel alone." And before Knecht had a chance to reply, he added
trustfully: "I think you understood my feeling. Otherwise you would have
brought my father with you. I've already let him know that I arrived safely."

Laughing, Knecht shook hands with the boy. He was guided into the house, where
the servant welcomed him and promised that supper would soon be ready. Yield-
ing to an unwonted need, he lay down for a little while before the meal, and
only then realized that he was curiously tired, in fact exhausted, from the
lovely automobile trip. During the evening, moreover, as he chatted with his
pupil and looked at Tito's collections of mountain flowers and butterflies,
his fatigue increased. He even felt something akin to giddiness, a kind of
emptiness in the head that he had never experienced before, and an annoying
weakness and irregularity of his heartbeat. But he continued to sit with Tito
until their agreed bedtime, and took pains not to show any sign that he was
not feeling well. Tito was somewhat surprised that the Magister said not a
word about the beginning of school, schedules, report cards, and similar mat-
ters. In fact, when he ventured to capitalize on this good mood and proposed
a long walk for the morning, to acquaint his teacher with his new surroundings,
the proposal was readily accepted.

"I am looking forward to the walk," Knecht added, "and want to ask you a favor
right now. While looking at your plant collection I could see that you know
far more about mountain plants than I do. One of the purposes of our being to-
gether is, among other things, that we exchange knowledge and reach a balance
with each other. Let us begin by your checking over my meager understanding
of botany and helping me go further in this field."

By the time they bade each other good night, Tito was in excellent spirits
and had made some good resolutions. Once again he had found this Magister
Knecht very much to his liking. Without using fancy language and going on a-
bout scholarship, virtue, the aristocracy of intellect, and so on, as his
schoolteachers were prone to do, this serene, friendly man had something in
his manner and his speech that imposed an obligation and brought out your
good, chivalric, higher aspirations and forces. It could be fun, and some-
times you felt it as a badge of honor, to deceive and outwit the ordinary
schoolmaster, but in the presence of this man such notions never even occur-
red to you. He was--why, what exactly was he like? Tito reflected on this,
trying to determine what it was about this stranger that was so likeable and
at the same time so impressive. He decided that it was the man's nobility,
his innate aristocratic quality. This was what drew him to Knecht, this a-
bove all. He was a nobleman, although no one knew his family and his father
might have been a shoemaker. He was nobler and more aristocratic than most
of the people Tito knew, more aristocratic than Tito's own father. The boy,
who highly prized the patrician instincts and traditions of his house and
could not forgive his father for having broken with them, was for the first
time encountering intellectual aristocracy, cultivated nobility. Knecht was
an example of that power which under favorable conditions can sometimes
work miracles, overleaping a long succession of ancestors and within a sin-
gle human life transforming a plebeian child into a member of the highest
nobility. In the proud and fiery boy's heart there stirred an inkling that
to belong to this kind of nobility, and to serve it, might be a duty and
honor for him; that here perhaps, embodied in this teacher who for all his
gentleness and friendliness was a nobleman through and through, the meaning
of his own life was drawing near to him, that his own goals were being set.

Knecht, after being shown to his room, did not lie down at once, although
he craved rest. The evening had cost him a great effort. He had found it
difficult to comport himself so that nothing in his expression, posture,
or voice would reveal his peculiar fatigue or depression or illness to the
young man, who was undoubtedly observing him closely. Still, he seemed to
have succeeded. But now he had to meet and master this vacuity, this nausea,
this alarming giddiness, this deathly tiredness which was at the same time
restiveness. He could master it only if he recognized its cause. This was
not hard to find, although it took him some time. The reason for his indis-
position, he decided, was simply the journey which had taken him in so short
a time from the lowlands to an altitude of close to seven thousand feet. Ex-
cept for a few outings in his early youth, he was unaccustomed to such
heights and had not reacted well to the rapid ascent. Probably this disabi-
lity would last another day or two. If it did not disappear by then, he would
have to return home with Tito and the housekeeper, in which case Plinio's
plan for a stay in lovely Belpunt would come to nothing. That would be a
pity, but no great misfortune.

After these reflections, he went to bed, and since sleep refused to come,
spent the night partly in reviewing his travels since his departure from
Waldzell, partly trying to quiet his heartbeat and his exacerbated nerves.
He also thought a good deal about his pupil, with pleasure, but without
making any plans. It seemed to him wiser to tame this noble but refractory
colt by kindness and slow domestication; nothing must be hasty or forced
in this case. He thought that he would gradually bring the boy to an aware-
ness of his gifts and powers, and at the same time nourish in him that no-
ble curiosity, that aristocratic dissatisfaction from which springs love for
the sciences, the humanities, and the arts. The task was a rewarding one,
and his pupil was not just any talented young man whom he had to awaken
and train. As the only son of a wealthy and influential patrician he was also
a future leader, one of the social and political shapers of the country and
the nation, destined to command and to be imitated. Castalia had failed the
Designori family; it had not educated Tito's father thoroughly enough, had
not made him strong enough for his difficult position poised between the
world and culture. As a result, gifted and charming young Plinio had become
an unhappy man with a life out of balance and ill managed. As a further re-
sult, his only son was endangered in his turn and had been drawn into his
father's difficulties. Here was something to heal and make good; here was
a debt to be paid. It seemed meaningful, and gladdened him, that this task
should fall to him of all persons, to him the disobedient and seemingly ap-
ostate Castalian.

In the morning, when he sensed the house awakening, he rose. Finding a dres-
sing gown laid ready beside his bed, he put it on, and stepped out through
the rear door that Tito had shown him the night before into the arcade
that connected the house with the bath hut by the lake.

Before him the little lake lay motionless, gray-green. Further off was a
steep cliff, its sharp, jagged crest still in shadow, rearing sheer and
cold into the thin, greenish, cool morning sky. But he could sense that the
sun had already risen behind this crest; tiny splinters of its light glit-
tered here and there on corners of rock. In a few minutes the sun would ap-
pear over the crenellations of the mountain and flood lake and valley be-
low with light. In a mood of earnest attentiveness, Knecht studied the
scene, whose stillness, gravity, and beauty he felt as unfamiliar and nev-
ertheless of deep concern and instructiveness to him. Now, even more strong-
ly than during yesterday's ride, he felt the ponderousness, the coolness
and dignified strangeness of this mountain world, which does not meet men
halfway, does not invite them, scarcely tolerates them. And it seemed to
him strange and significant that his first step into the freedom of life
in the world should have led him to this very place, to this silent and
cold grandeur.

Tito appeared, in bathing trunks. He shook hands with the Magister and point-
ing to the cliffs opposite said: "You've come at just the right moment; the
sun will be rising in a minute. Oh, it's glorious up here."

Knecht gave him a friendly nod. He had learned long ago that Tito was an
early riser, a runner, wrestler, and hiker, if only from protest against
his father's casual, unsoldierly, comfort-loving ways. For the same reason
he refused to drink wine. These leanings occasionally led him into a pose
of being an anti-intellectual child of nature--the Designoris seemed to
have this bent for exaggeration. But Knecht welcomed it all, and was deter-
mined to share his interest in sports as a means for winning over and tam-
ing the temperamental young man. It would be only one means among several,
and not at all the most important; music, for example, would lead them much
further. Of course he had no thought of matching the young man in physical
feats, let alone surpassing him. But harmless participation would suffice
to show the boy that his tutor was neither a coward nor a mere bookworm.

Tito looked eagerly toward the dark crest of the mountain, behind which
the sky pulsed in the morning light. Now a fragment of the rocky ridge
flashed violently like a glowing metal beginning to melt. The crest blur-
red and seemed suddenly lower, as if it were melting down, and from the
fiery gap the dazzling sun appeared. Simultaneously, the ground, the
house, and their shore of the lake were illuminated, and the two, stand-
ing in the strong radiance, instantly felt the delightful warmth of this
light. The boy, filled with the solemn beauty of the moment and the glor-
ious sensation of his youth and strength, stretched his limbs with rhyth-
mic arm movements, which his whole body soon took up, celebrating the
break of day in an enthusiastic dance and expressing his deep oneness with
the surging, radiant elements. His steps flew in joyous homage toward the
victorious sun and reverently retreated from it; his outspread arms embrac-
ed mountain, lake, and sky; kneeling, he seemed to pay tribute to the earth
mother, and extending his hands, to the waters of the lake; he offered him-
self, his youth, his freedom, his burning sense of his own life, like a
festive sacrifice to the powers. The sunlight gleamed on his tanned shoul-
ders; his eyes were half-closed to the dazzle; his young face stared mask-
like with an expression of inspired, almost fanatical gravity.

The Magister, too, was overpowered by the solemn spectacle of dawn breaking
in this silent, rocky solitude. But he was even more fascinated by the human
spectacle taking place before his eyes, this ceremonial dance performed by
his pupil to welcome the morning and the sun. The dance elevated this moody,
immature youth, conferring upon him a priestly solemnity, suddenly in a sing-
le moment irradiating and revealing to the onlooker his deepest and noblest
tendencies, gifts, and destinies just as the appearance of the sun opened
and illuminated this cold, gloomy mountain dale. In this moment the young
man seemed to him stronger and more impressive than he had hitherto thought,
but also harder, more inaccessible, more remote from culture, more pagan.
This ceremonial and sacrificial dance under the sign of Pan meant more than
young Plinio's speeches and versemaking ever had; it raised the boy several
stages higher, but also made him seem more alien, more elusive, less obedi-
ent to any summons.

The boy himself was in the grip of his impulse, without knowing what was hap-
pening to him. He was not performing a dance he already knew, a dance he had
practiced before. This was no familiar rite of celebrating sun and morning
that he had long ago invented. Only later would he realize that his dance
and his transported state in general were only partly caused by the mountain
air, the sun, the dawn, his sense of freedom. They were also a response to
the change awaiting him, the new chapter in his young life that had come in
the friendly and awe-inspiring form of the Magister. In that morning hour ma-
ny elements conspired in the soul of young Tito to shape his destiny and dis-
tinguish this hour above a thousand others as a high, a festive, a consecrated
time. Without knowing what he was doing, asking no questions, he obeyed the
command of this ecstatic moment, danced his worship, prayed to the sun, pro-
fessed with devout movements and gestures his joy, his faith in life, his pi-
ety and reverence, both proudly and submissively offered up in the dance his
devout soul as a sacrifice to the sun and the gods, and no less to the man he
admired and feared, the sage and musician, the Master of the magic Game who
had come to him from mysterious realms, his future teacher and friend.

All this, like the torrent of light from the sunrise, lasted only a few min-
utes. Stirred to the core, Knecht watched the wonderful show, in which his
pupil before his eyes, changed and revealed himself, presenting himself in a
new light, alien and entirely his equal. Both of them stood on the walk be-
tween house and hut, bathed in the radiance from the east and deeply shaken
by their experience. Tito, having barely completed the last step of his dance,
awoke from his ecstasy and stood still, like an animal surprised in solitary
play, aware that he was not alone, that not only had he experienced and per-
formed something unusual, but that he had also had a spectator. His first
thought was how to extricate himself from the situation, which struck him
now as somehow dangerous and shaming. He had to act vigorously, and smash the
magic of these strange moments, which had totally absorbed and overwhelmed him.

His face, but a moment before an ageless, stern mask, assumed a childish and
rather foolish expression, like that of a person awakened too abruptly from a
deep sleep. His knees swayed slightly; he looked into his teacher's face with
vapid astonishment, and in sudden haste, as though something very important
had just occurred to him, something he had neglected, he stretched out his
right arm and pointed toward the opposite shore of the lake, which along with
half the lake's waters still lay in the great, rapidly contracting shadow of
the cliff whose top had already been conquered by the brilliance of the dawn.

"If we swim very fast," he called out with boyish impetuosity, "we can just
reach the other shore before the sun."

The words were barely uttered, the challenge to a swimming race with the sun
barely issued, when Tito with a tremendous leap plunged headfirst into the
lake, as if in his high spirits or his shyness he could not get away fast e-
nough and obliterate all memory of the preceding ritual by intensified activ-
ity. The water splashed up and closed around him. A few moments later his
head, shoulders, and arms reappeared and remained visible on the blue-green
surface, swiftly moving away.

Knecht had not, when he came out, had in mind to bathe or swim. Both air and
water were much too cool, and after his night of semi-illness, swimming would
probably do him little good. But now, in the beautiful sunlight, stirred by
the scene he had just witnessed, and with his pupil urging him into the water
in this comradely fashion, he found the venture less deterring. Above all he
feared that the promise born in this morning hour would be blasted if he dis-
appointed the boy by opposing cool, adult rationality to this invitation to a
test of strength. It was true that his feeling of weakness and uncertainty,
incurred by the rapid ascent into the mountains, warned him to be careful; but
perhaps this indisposition could be soonest routed by forcing matters and meet-
ing it head-on. The summons was stronger than the warning, his will stronger
than his instinct. He quickly shed the light dressing gown, took a deep breath,
and threw himself into the water at the same spot where his pupil had dived.

The lake, fed by glacial waters so that even in the warmest days of summer one
had to be inured to it, received him with an icy cold, slashing in its enmity.
He had steeled himself for a thorough chilling, but not for this fierce cold
which seemed to surround him with leaping flames and after a moment of fiery
burning began to penetrate rapidly into him. After the dive he had risen quick-
ly to the surface, caught sight of Tito swimming far ahead of him, felt bitter-
ly assailed by this icy, wild, hostile element, but still believed he could
lessen the distance, that he was engaging in the swimming race, was fighting
for the boy's respect and comradeship, for his soul - - when he was already
fighting with Death, who had thrown him and was now holding him in a wrest-
ler's grip. Fighting with all his strength, Knecht held him off as long as
his heart continued to beat.

The young swimmer had looked back frequently and seen with satisfaction that
the Magister had followed him into the water. Now he peered once again, no
longer saw him, and became uneasy. He looked and called, then turned and swam
rapidly back. He could not find him. Swimming and diving, he searched for the
lost swimmer until his strength too began to give out in the bitter cold.
Staggering, breathless, he reached land at last, saw the dressing gown lying
on the shore, and picking it up began mechanically rubbing his body and limbs
until the numbed skin warmed again. Stunned, he sat down in the sunlight and
stared into the water, whose cool blue-green now blinked at him strangely em-
pty, alien, and evil. He felt overpowered by perplexity and deep sorrow, for
with the waning of his physical weakness, awareness and the terror of what
had happened returned to him.

Oh! he thought in grief and horror, now I am guilty of his death. And only
now, when there was no longer need to save his pride or offer resistance, he
felt, in shock and sorrow, how dear this man had already become to him. And
since in spite of all rational objections he felt responsible for the Master's
death, there came over him, with a premonitory shudder of awe, a sense that
this guilt would utterly change him and his life, and would demand much great-
er things of him than he had ever before demanded of himself.





JOSEPH KNECHT'S POSTHUMOUS WRITINGS



THE POEMS OF KNECHT'S STUDENT YEARS




Lament


No permanence is ours; we are a wave
That flows to fit whatever form it finds:
Through day or night, cathedral or the cave
We pass forever, craving form that binds.

Mold after mold we fill and never rest,
We find no home where joy or grief runs deep.
We move, we are the everlasting guest.
No field nor plow is ours; we do not reap.

What God would make of us remains unknown:
He plays; we are the clay to his desire.
Plastic and mute, we neither laugh nor groan;
He kneads, but never gives us to the fire.

To stiffen into stone, to persevere!
We long forever for the right to stay.
But all that ever stays with us is fear,
And we shall never rest upon our way.



A Compromise


The men of principled simplicity
Will have no traffic with our subtle doubt.
The world is flat, they tell us, and they shout:
The myth of depth is an absurdity!

For if there were additional dimensions
Beside the good old pair we'll always cherish,
How could a man live safely without tensions?
How could he live and not expect to perish?

In order peacefully to coexist
Let us strike one dimension off our list.

If they are right, those men of principle,
And life in depth is so inimical,
The third dimension is dispensable.



But Secretly We Thirst. . .


Graceful as dancer's arabesque and bow,
Our lives appear serene and without stress,
A gentle dance around pure nothingness
To which we sacrifice the here and now.

Our dreams are lovely and our game is bright,
So finely tuned, with many artful turns,
But deep beneath the tranquil surface burns
Longing for blood, barbarity, and night.

Freely our life revolves, and every breath
Is free as air; we live so playfully,
But secretly we crave reality:
Begetting, birth, and suffering, and death.



Alphabets


From time to time we take our pen in hand
And scribble symbols on a blank white sheet.
Their meaning is at everyone's command;
It is a game whose rules are nice and neat.

But if a savage or a moon-man came
And found a page, a furrowed runic field,
And curiously studied lines and frame:
How strange would be the world that they revealed.
A magic gallery of oddities.
He would see A and B as man and beast,
As moving tongues or arms or legs or eyes,
Now slow, now rushing, all constraint released,
Like prints of ravens' feet upon the snow.
He'd hop about with them, fly to and fro,
And see a thousand worlds of might-have-been
Hidden within the black and frozen symbols,
Beneath the ornate strokes, the thick and thin.
He'd see the way love burns and anguish trembles,
He'd wonder, laugh, shake with fear and weep
Because beyond this cipher's cross-barred keep
He'd see the world in all its aimless passion,
Diminished, dwarfed, and spellbound in the symbols,
And rigorously marching prisoner-fashion.
He'd think: each sign all others so resembles
That love of life and death, or lust and anguish,
Are simply twins whom no one can distinguish. .
Until at last the savage with a sound
Of mortal terror lights and stirs a fire,
Chants and beats his brow against the ground
And consecrates the writing to his pyre.
Perhaps before his consciousness is drowned
In slumber there will come to him some sense
Of how this world of magic fraudulence,
This horror utterly behind endurance,
Has vanished as if it had never been.
He'll sigh, and smile, and feel all right again.



On Reading an Old Philosopher


These noble thoughts beguiled us yesterday;
We savored them like choicest vintage wines.
But now they sour, meanings seep away,
Much like a page of music from whose vines

The clefs and sharps are carelessly erased:
Take from a house the center of gravity,
It sways and falls apart, all sense debased,
Cacophony what had been harmony.

So too a face we saw as old and wise,
Loved and respected, can wrinkle, craze,
As, ripe for death, the mind deserts the eyes,
Leaving a pitiful, empty, shriveled maze.

So too can ecstasy stir every sense
And barely felt can quickly turn to gall,
As if there dwelt within us cognizance
That everything must wither, die, and fall.

Yet still above this vale of endless dying
Man's spirit, struggling incorruptibly,
Painfully raises beacons, death defying,
And wins, by longing, immortality.



The Last Glass Bead Game Player


The colored beads, his playthings, in his hand,
He sits head bent; around him lies a land
Laid waste by war and ravaged by disease.
Growing on rubble, ivy hums with bees;
A weary peace with muted psalmody
Sounds in a world of aged tranquility.
The old man tallies up his colored beads;
He fits a blue one here, a white one there,
Makes sure a large one, or a small, precedes,
And shapes his Game ring with devoted care.
Time was he had won greatness in the Game,
Had mastered many tongues and many arts,
Had known the world, traveled in foreign parts--
From pole to pole, no limits to his fame.
Around him pupils, colleagues always pressed.
Now he is old, worn-out; his life is lees.
Disciples come no longer to be blessed,
Nor masters to invite an argument.
All, all are gone, and the temples, libraries,
And schools of Castalia are no more. At rest
Amid the ruins, the glass beads in his hand,
Those hieroglyphs once so significant
That now are only colored bits of glass,
He lets them roll until their force is spent
And silently they vanish in the sand.



A Toccata by Bach


Frozen silence. . . Darkness prevails on darkness.
One shaft of light breaks through the jagged clouds
Coming from nothingness to penetrate the depths,
Compound the night with day, build length and breadth,
Prefigure peak and ridge, declivities, redoubts,
A loose blue atmosphere, earth's deep dense fullness.

That brilliant shaft dissevers teeming generation
Into both deed and war, and in a frenzy of creation
Ignites a gleaming terrified new world.
All changes where the seeds of light descend,
Order arises, magnificence is heard
In praise of life, of victory to light's great end.

The mighty urge glides on, to move
Its power into all creatures' being,
Recalling far divinity, the spirit of God's doing:
Now joy and pain, words, art, and song,
World towering on world in arching victory throng
With impulse, mind, contention, pleasure, love.

　　　　　　　　　　　　　Translated by Alex Page



A Dream


Guest at a monastery in the hills,
I stepped, when all the monks had gone to pray,
Into a book-lined room. Along the walls,
Glittering in the light of fading day,
I saw a multitude of vellum spines
With marvelous inscriptions. Eagerly,
Impelled by rapturous curiosity,
I picked the nearest book, and read the lines:
The Squaring of the Circle--Final Stage.
I thought: I'll take this and read every page!
A quarto volume, leather tooled in gold,
Gave promise of a story still untold:
How Adam also ate of the other tree. . .
The other tree? Which one? The tree of life?
Is Adam then immortal? Now I could see
No chance had brought me to this library.
I spied the back and edges of a folio
Aglow with all the colors of the rainbow,
Its hand-painted title stating a decree:
The interrelationships of hues and sound:
Proof that for every color may be found
In music a proper corresponding key.
Choirs of colors sparkled before my eyes
And now I was beginning to surmise:
Here was the library of Paradise.
To all the questions that had driven me
All answers now could be given me.
Here I could quench my thirst to understand,
For here all knowledge stood at my command.
There was provision here for every need:
A title full of promise on each book
Responded to my every rapid look.
Here there was fruit to satisfy the greed
Of any student's timid aspirations,
Of any master's bold investigations.
Here was the inner meaning, here the key,
To poetry, to wisdom, and to science.
Magic and erudition in alliance
Opened the door to every mystery.
These books provided pledges of all power
To him who came here at this magic hour.

A lectern stood near by; with hands that shook
I placed upon it one enticing book,
Deciphered at a glance the picture writing,
As in a dream we find ourselves reciting
A poem or lesson we have never learned.
At once I soared aloft to starry spaces
Of the soul, and with the zodiac turned,
Where all the revelations of all races,
Whatever intuition has divined,
Millennial experience of all nations,
Harmoniously met in new relations,
Old insights with new symbols recombined,
So that in minutes or in hours as I read
I traced once more the whole path of mankind,
And all that men have ever done and said
Disclosed its inner meaning to my mind.
I read, and saw those hieroglyphic forms
Couple and part, and coalesce in swarms,
Dance for a while together, separate,
Once more in newer patterns integrate,
A kaleidoscope of endless metaphors--
And each some vaster, fresher sense explores.

Bedazzled by these sights, I looked away
From the book to give my eyes a moment's rest,
And saw that I was not the only guest.
An old man stood before that grand array
Of tomes. Perhaps he was the archivist.
I saw that he was earnestly intent
Upon some task, and I could not resist
A strange conviction that I had to know
The manner of his work, and what it meant.
I watched the old man, with frail hand and slow,
Remove a volume and inspect what stood
Written upon its back, then saw him blow
With pallid lips upon the title--could
A title possibly be more alluring
Or offer greater promise of enduring
Delight? But now his finger wiped across
The spine. I saw it silently erase
The name, and watched with fearful sense of loss
As he inscribed another in its place
And then moved on to smilingly efface
One more, but only a newer title to emboss.
For a long while I looked at him bemused,
Then turned, since reason totally refused
To understand the meaning of his actions,
Back to my book--I'd seen but a few lines--
And found I could no longer read the signs
Or even see the rows of images.
The world of symbols I had barely entered
That had stirred me to such transports of bliss,
In which a universe of meaning centered,
Seemed to dissolve and rush away, careen
And reel and shake in feverish contractions,
And fade out, leaving nothing to be seen
But empty parchment with a hoary sheen.
I felt a hand upon me, felt it slide
Over my shoulder. The old man stood beside
My lectern, and I shuddered while
He took my book and with a subtle smile
Brushed his finger lightly to elide
The former title, then began to write
New promises and problems, novel inquiries,
New formulas for ancient mysteries.
Without a word, he plied his magic style.
Then, with my book, he disappeared from sight.



Worship


In the beginning was the rule of sacred kings
Who hallowed field, grain, plow, who handed down
The law of sacrifices, set the bounds
To mortal men forever hungering

For the Invisible Ones' just ordinance
That holds the sun and moon in perfect balance
And whose forms in their eternal radiance
Feel no suffering, nor know death's ambience.

Long ago the sons of the gods, the sacred line,
Passed, and mankind remained alone,
Embroiled in pleasure and pain, cut off from being,
Condemned to change unhallowed, unconfined.

But intimations of the true life never died,
And it is for us, in this time of harm
To keep, in metaphor and symbol and in psalm,
Reminders of that former sacred reverence.

Perhaps some day the darkness will be banned,
Perhaps some day the times will turn about,
The sun will once more rule us as our god
And take the sacrifices from our hands.



Soap Bubbles


From years of study and of contemplation
An old man brews a work of clarity,
A gay and involuted dissertation
Discoursing on sweet wisdom playfully.

An eager student bent on storming heights
Has delved in archives and in libraries,
But adds the touch of genius when he writes
A first book full of deepest subtleties.

A boy, with bowl and straw, sits and blows,
Filling with breath the bubbles from the bowl.
Each praises like a hymn, and each one glows;
Into the filmy beads he blows his soul.

Old man, student, boy, all these three
Out of the Maya-foam of the universe
Create illusions. None is better or worse.
But in each of them the Light of Eternity
Sees its reflection, and burns more joyfully.



After Dipping Into the Summa Contra Gentiles


To truth, it seems to us, life once was nearer,
The world ordered, intelligences clearer,
Wisdom and knowledge were not yet divided.
They lived far more serenely, many-sided,
Those ancients of whom Plato, the Chinese,
Relate their incandescent verities.
Whenever we entered the temple of Aquinas,
The graceful Summa contra Gentiles,
A new world greeted us, sweet, mature,
A world of truth clarified and pure.
There all seemed lucid, Nature charged with Mind,
Man moving from God to Him, as He designed.
The Law, in one great formulary bound,
Forming a whole, a still unbroken round.
But we who belong to his posterity
Seem condemned to doubt and irony,
To journeys in the wilderness, to strife,
Obsessions, and longings for a better life.

But if our children's children undergo
Such sufferings as ours, they will bestow
Praise upon us as blessed and as wise.
We will appear transfigured in their eyes,
For out of our lives' harsh cacophonies
They will hear only fading harmonies,
The legends of an anguish often told,
The echoes of contentions long grown cold.

And those of us who trust ourselves the least,
Who doubt and question most, these, it may be,
Will make their mark upon eternity,
And youth will turn to them as to a feast.
The time may come when a man who confessed
His self-doubts will be ranked among the blessed
Who never suffered anguish or knew fear,
Whose times were times of glory and good cheer,
Who lived like children, simple happy lives.

For in us too is part of that Eternal Mind
Which through the aeons calls to brothers of its kind:
Both you and I will pass, but it survives.



Stages


As every flower fades and as all youth
Departs, so life at every stage,
So every virtue, so our grasp of truth,
Blooms in its day and may not last forever.
Since life may summon us at every age
Be ready, heart, for parting, new endeavor,
Be ready bravely and without remorse
To find new light that old ties cannot give.
In all beginnings dwells a magic force
For guarding us and helping us to live.

Serenely let us move to distant places
And let no sentiments of home detain us.
The Cosmic Spirit seeks not to restrain us
But lifts us stage by stage to wider spaces.
If we accept a home of our own making,
Familiar habit makes for indolence.
We must prepare for parting and leave-taking
Or else remain the slaves of permanence.

Even the hour of our death may send
Us speeding on to fresh and newer spaces,
And life may summon us to newer races.
So be it, heart: bid farewell without end.



The Glass Bead Game


We re-enact with reverent attention
The universal chord, the masters' harmony,
Evoking in unsullied communion
Minds and times of highest sanctity.

We draw upon the iconography
Whose mystery is able to contain
The boundlessness, the storm of all existence,
Give chaos form, and hold our lives in rein.

The pattern sings like crystal constellations,
And when we tell our beads, we serve the whole,
And cannot be dislodged or misdirected,
Held in the orbit of the Cosmic Soul.




　　　　　　　　　THE THREE LIVES


　　　　　　　　　　　　 ONE


　　　　　　　　　THE RAINMAKER




It WAS many thousands of years ago, when women ruled. In tribe and family,
mothers and grandmothers were revered and obeyed. Much more was made of the
birth of a girl than of a boy.

There was an ancestress in the village, a hundred or more years ago, whom ev-
eryone revered and feared as if she were a queen, although in the memory of man
she had seldom lifted a finger or spoken a word. Many a day she sat by the en-
trance to her hut, a retinue of ministering kinsfolk around her, and the women
of the village came to pay their respects, to tell her their affairs, to show
her their children and ask her blessing on them. The pregnant women came to
ask her to touch their bellies and name the expected child. Sometimes the tri-
bal mother would give the touch, sometimes she only nodded or shook her head,
or else remained motionless. She rarely said anything; she was merely there,
sitting and ruling, sitting with her yellowish-white hair falling in thin
strands around her leathery, farsighted eagle's face, sitting and receiving
veneration, presents, requests, news, reports, accusations, sitting and known
to all as the mother of seven daughters, and the grandmother and ancestor of
many grandchildren and great- grandchildren, sitting and holding in those
wrinkled features and back of that brown forehead the wisdom, the tradition,
the law, the morality, and the honor of the village.

It was a spring evening, overcast, the darkness falling early. The ancient her-
self was not sitting in front of the mud hut. In her stead was her daughter,
almost as white-haired and stately and not much younger. She sat and rested.
Her seat was the threshold, a flat field stone, covered with a skin in cold
weather. At a little distance from her a few children, women, and boys squat-
ted in a semicircle in the sand or grass. They squatted here every evening
that it was not raining or too cold, for they wanted to hear the ancient's
daughter tell stories or sing spells. Formerly, the ancient herself had done
this, but now that she was too old and no longer communicative, her daughter
took her place. Just as she had learned all the stories and spells from the
old woman, so she also had her voice, her figure, the quiet dignity of her
bearing, her movements, and her language. The younger listeners knew her much
better than her mother and by now scarcely realized that she sat here in an-
other's place passing on the tales and wisdom of the tribe. The wellspring of
knowledge flowed from her lips on these evenings. She preserved the tribe's
treasure under her white hair. Behind her gently furrowed old brow dwelt the
memory and the mind of the village. Anyone who knew any spells or stories
had learned them from her. Aside from her and the ancient, there was only
one other guardian of knowledge in the tribe, but he remained hidden most of
the time: a mysterious and extremely silent man: the Rainmaker, or as he
was also called, the Weathermaker.

Crouching among the listeners was also the boy Knecht, and beside him a lit-
tle girl named Ada. He was fond of this girl, often played with her and pro-
tected her, not out of love, for he knew nothing of that as yet, was still
too much a child, but because she was the Rainmaker's daughter. Knecht adore-
d the Rainmaker; next to the ancient and her daughter he admired no one so
strongly as the Rainmaker. But the others were women. You could venerate
and fear them, but you could not conceive the thought, could not possibly
cherish the wish to become what they were. The Rainmaker was a rather unap-
proachable man; it was not easy for a boy to stay near him. That had to be
managed in roundabout ways, and one of these roundabout ways to the Rainma-
ker was Knecht's concern for his child. As often as possible he went to the
Rainmaker's somewhat isolated hut to fetch her. Then he would sit with her
listening to the old woman's tales, and later take her home. He had done
this today, and now he was squatting beside her in the dark group, listen-
ing.

Today the old woman was telling about the Witches' Village:

"Sometimes there is a wicked woman in a village who wishes harm to every-
one. Usually these women conceive no children. Sometimes one of these wo-
men is so wicked that the village will no longer let her stay. Then the village-
rs go to her hut at night, her husband is fettered, and the woman is beaten
with switches and driven far out into the woods and swamps. She is cursed
with a curse and left there. Soon the husband's fetters are removed and if
he is not too old, he can take himself another wife. But if the expelled wo-
man does not die, she wanders about in the woods and swamps, learns the
language of animals, and when she has roamed long enough, sooner or later
she finds her way to a small village that is called the Witches' Village.
There all the wicked women who have been driven from their villages have
come together and made a village of their own. There they live, do their
wickedness, and make magic. But especially, because they have no children
of their own, they like to coax children from the proper villages, and when
a child is lost in the woods and never seen again, it may not have drowned
in the swamp or been eaten by a wolf, but led astray by a witch and taken
to the Witches' Village. In the days when I was still little and my grand-
mother was the eldest in the village, a girl once went to pick bilberries
with the others, and while she was picking she grew tired and fell asleep.
She was small, the ferns hid her from sight, and the other children moved
on and did not notice until they were back in the village and it was alrea-
dy evening. Then they saw that the girl was no longer with them. The young
men were sent out; they searched and called in the woods until night fell,
and then they came back and had not found her. But the little girl, after
she had slept enough, went on and on in the woods. And the more frightened
she became, the faster she ran, but she no longer had any idea where she
was and only ran farther away from the village, deeper and deeper into wild
country. Around her neck, on a strip of bast, she wore a boar's tooth that
her father had given her. He had brought it back from the hunt, and with a
stone tool bored a hole through the tooth so that the bast could be drawn
through it, and before that he had boiled the tooth three times in boar's
blood and sung good spells, and anyone who wore such a tooth was protected
against many kinds of magic. Now a woman appeared from among the trees.
She was a witch. She put on a kindly face and said: 'Greetings, pretty child,
have you lost your way? Come along with me, I'll take you home.' The child
went along. But she remembered what her mother and father had told her,
that she should never let a stranger see the boar's tooth, and so while she
walked she slipped the tooth off the strip of bast and tucked it into her
belt without being noticed. The woman walked for hours with the girl; it
was already night when they reached the village, but it was not our village,
it was the Witches' Village. There the girl was locked up in a dark stable,
but the witch went to sleep in her hut. In the morning the witch said:
'Don't you have a boar's tooth with you?" The child said no, she had had
one, but she had lost it in the woods, and she showed her necklace with the
tooth missing from it. Then the witch took a clay pot filled with earth,
and three plants were growing in the earth. The child looked at the plants
and asked what they were. The witch pointed to the first plant and said:
'That is your mother's life.' Then she pointed to the second and said: 'That
is your father's life.' Then she pointed to the third plant: 'And that is
your own life. As long as the plants are green and growing, you are all a-
live and well. If one withers, then the one whose life it is falls sick.
If one is pulled out, as I am going to pull one out now, then the one whose
life it is will surely die.' She took hold of the plant that meant the fa-
ther's life and began tugging at it, and when she had pulled it out a lit-
tle so that a piece of the white root could be seen, the plant gave a deep
sigh..."

At these words the little girl beside Knecht sprang to her feet as if she had
been bitten by a snake, screamed, and ran headlong away. She had been sitting
for a long time fighting back the terror caused by the story, until she could
no longer endure it. One old woman laughed. Other listeners were almost as
frightened as the little girl, but they controlled themselves and remained
seated. But Knecht, startled out of his trance of fear, also sprang up and
ran after the girl. The old woman went on with her story.

The Rainmaker had his hut close by the village pond, and Knecht looked for
the runaway in this direction. He searched and tried to lure her out of hid-
ing with coaxing, reassuring hums, and singsongs and clucks, using the voice
that women use to call chickens, sweet, long drawn- out notes, intent on en-
chantment. "Ada," he called and sang. "Ada, little Ada, come here, Ada, here
I am, Knecht." He sang again and again, and before he had heard a sound from
her or caught a glimpse of her he suddenly felt her small soft hand force
its way into his. She had been standing by the path, pressed against the
wall of a hut, and been waiting for him since hearing his first call. With
a sigh of relief she moved close to him; he seemed to her as tall and strong
as a man.

"Were you frightened?" he asked. "You shouldn't be, no one will hurt you,
everyone likes Ada. Come, we'll go home." She was still trembling and sob-
bing a little, but was already calmer, and went gratefully and trustfully
along with him.

Dim red light filtered through the doorway of the hut. Inside, the Rainmaker
sat stooped by the hearth. Yellow and red light gleamed through his flowing
hair. The hearth-fire was lit and he was boiling something in two small pots.
Before entering with Ada, Knecht watched curiously from outside for a few mo-
ments. He could see at once that whatever was being boiled was not food;
that was done in different pots, and besides it was already much too late to
prepare a meal. But the Rainmaker had already heard him. "Who is standing at
the door?" he called out. "Step forward, come in! Is it you, Ada?" He placed
lids on his pots, raked glowing embers up against them, and turned around.

Knecht was still peering at the mysterious little pots; he felt curiosity,
awe, and a sense of oppression all at once, as he always did whenever he en-
tered this hut. He came here as often as he could, made up all sorts of pre-
texts for coming, but once he was here he always felt this half-thrilling,
half-warning sensation of slight uneasiness, of eager curiosity and pleasure
warring with fear. The old man knew that Knecht had long been trailing after
him, turning up as he did at odd moments and unlikely places. The boy was
pursuing him like a hunter following a spoor, and mutely offering his ser-
vices and his company.

Turu, the Rainmaker, looked at him with his bright hawk's eyes. "What are
you doing here?" he asked coolly. "This is no time of day for visits to
strange huts, my boy."

"I've brought Ada home, Master Turu. She was listening to the Mother tell
stories about witches and all of a sudden she was so frightened she scream-
ed, so I walked her home."

The Rainmaker turned to his daughter. "You're too timid, Ada. Sensible lit-
tle girls need not fear witches. You're a sensible little girl, aren't you?"

"Yes, but the witches know all sorts of wicked tricks, and if you don't have
a boar's tooth..."

"I see, you'd like to have a boar's tooth. All right. But I know something
even better, a special root I'll give you. We'll look for it in the autumn.
It protects sensible girls from all kinds of magic and even makes them pret-
tier."

Ada smiled happily; she was already reassured, now that the smell of the hut
and the familiar firelight surrounded her. Shyly, Knecht asked: "Couldn't I
help look for the root? If you would only describe the plant to me. . ."

Turn's eyes narrowed. "A good many little boys would like to know that," he
said, but his voice did not sound angry, only slightly mocking. "There's time
for that. Perhaps in the autumn."

Knecht slipped away and went to the youth house where he slept. He had no par-
ents; he was an orphan; for that reason, too, he was entranced by Ada and her
hut.

Turu the Rainmaker was not fond of words. He did not like to hear himself or
others talking. Many tribesmen thought him peculiar, and some sullen. But he
was neither. He knew what was going on around him, or at any rate knew more
than anyone would have expected in a man seemingly so solitary, absent-minded
and full of learning. Among other things he knew quite well that this somewhat
bothersome but handsome and evidently clever boy was running after him and ob-
serving him. He had noticed this as soon as it began, for it had been going on
a year or longer now. He knew, too, exactly what it meant. It meant a great
deal for the boy's future, and also meant a great deal for him, the Rainmaker.
It meant that this boy had fallen in love with rainmaking and was longing to
learn the art. Every so often there would be such boys in the village, and they
would begin to hang about him, much as this boy was doing. Some could easily
be discouraged and frightened away, others not; and he had taken on two of them
as his disciples and apprentices. Both had married into other villages far away
and were the rainmakers or simples gatherers there. Since then, Turu had been
alone, and if he ever again took another apprentice, it would be to train him
as his own successor. That was how it had always been; that was how it ought
to be, and it could be no other way. A gifted boy always had to turn up and
attach himself to the man whom he saw as the master of his craft. Knecht was
talented; he had what was needed, and he also had several signs to commend him:
above all the look in his eyes, at once piercing and dreamy; the reserve and
quiet in his manner; and in the expression of his face and the carriage of his
head something questing, scenting, and alert, an attentiveness to noises and
smells. There was something of the hawk and something of the hunter about him.
Surely this boy could become a weathermaker, perhaps a magician also. He could
be taught. But there was no hurry; the boy was still too young, and there was
no reason to show him that he had been recognized. Apprenticeship must not be
made too easy for him; he must go the whole way himself. If he could be intim-
idated, deterred, shaken off, discouraged, he would be no great loss. Let him
wait and serve; let him creep around and pay court.

Knecht sauntered through the gathering night, under a cloudy sky with two or
three stars. He made his way into the village, content and happily excited.
This village knew nothing of the luxuries, beauties, and refinements which we
today take for granted and which even the poorest among us regard as indispen-
sable. The village had no culture and no arts. Its only buildings were the
crooked mud huts. It knew nothing of iron and steel tools. Even wheat and wine
were unknown. Inventions such as candles or lamps would have seemed dazzling
wonders to these people. But Knecht's life and the world of his imagination
were no poorer on that account. The world surrounded him like a picture book
full of inexhaustible mysteries. Every day he conquered another little piece
of it, from the animal and plant life to the starry sky; and between mute,
mysterious nature and the breathing soul in his solitary, nervous boyish frame
there dwelt all the kinship and all the tension, anxiety, curiosity, and crav-
ing for understanding of which the human soul is capable. Although there was
no written knowledge in his world, no history, no books, no alphabets, and al-
though everything that lay more than three or four hours' walk beyond his vill-
age was totally unknown and unreachable, he nevertheless lived fully and com-
pletely in his village, in the things that were his. The village, home, the
community of the tribe under the guidance of the mothers gave him everything
that nation and state can give to man: a soil filled with thousands of roots
among whose intricate network he himself was a fiber, sharing in the life
of all.

Contentedly, he sauntered along. The night wind whispered in the trees. Branch-
es creaked. There were smells of moist earth, of reeds and mud, of the smoke
of wood still partly green, an oily and sweetish smell that meant home more
than any other; and finally, as he approached the youth hut, there was its
smell, the smell of boys, of young men's bodies. Noiselessly, he ducked under
the reed mat, into the warm, breathing darkness. He settled into the straw
and thought about the story of the witches, the boar's tooth, Ada, the Rain-
maker and his little pots in the fire, until he fell asleep.

Turu only grudgingly yielded to the boy's importunity; he did not make it
easy for him. But the youth was always on his trail. Something drew him to
the old man, though he himself often did not know what it was. Sometimes,
when the Rainmaker was off somewhere in a remote spot in the woods, swamp,
or heath, setting a trap, sniffing the spoor of an animal, digging a root,
or collecting seeds, he would suddenly feel the boy's eyes upon him. Invisi-
ble, making no sound, Knecht had been following him for hours, watching his
every move. Sometimes the Rainmaker would pretend not to notice; sometimes
he growled and ungraciously ordered the boy to make himself scarce. But some-
times he would beckon him and let him stay for the day, would assign him
tasks, show him one thing and another, give him advice, set tests for him,
tell him the names of plants, order him to draw water or kindle fires. For
each of these procedures he knew special tricks, knacks, secrets, and formu-
las which must, he impressed this on the boy, be kept strictly secret. And
finally, when Knecht was somewhat older, he took him from the youth house
into his own hut, thus acknowledging the boy as his apprentice. By that act
Knecht was distinguished before all the people. He was no longer one boy a-
mong others, he was the Rainmaker's apprentice, and that meant that if he
bore up and amounted to something, he would be the next Rainmaker.

From the moment the old man took Knecht into his hut, the barriers between
them dropped--not the barrier of veneration and obedience, but of distrust
and constraint. Turu had submitted; he had allowed Knecht to conquer him by
tenacious courtship. Now he wanted nothing more than to make a good Rain-
maker and successor of the boy. In this course of instruction there were
no concepts, doctrines, methods, script, figures, and only very few words.
The Master trained Knecht's senses far more than his intellect. A great
heritage of tradition and experience, the sum total of man's knowledge of
nature at that era, had to be administered, employed, and even more, pass-
ed on. A vast and dense system of experiences, observations, instincts,
and habits of investigation was slowly and hazily laid bare to the boy.
Scarcely any of it was put into concepts; virtually all of it had to be
grasped, learned, tested with the senses. The basis and heart of this sci-
ence was knowledge of the moon, of its phases and effects as it waxed and
waned, peopled by the souls of the dead whom it sent forth into new births
in order to make room for the newly dead.

Like that evening when he had escorted the frightened Ada to her father's
hearth, another time was deeply etched on Knecht's memory. This was a time
when the Master woke him two hours after midnight and went out with him in
deep darkness to show him the last rising of a vanishing crescent moon.
The Master in motionless silence, the boy somewhat tremulous, shivering
from lack of sleep, they waited a long time on a ledge of rock in the midst
of the forested hills, watching the spot indicated by the Master, until
the thin, gently curving line of the moon appeared in the very position
and shape he had described beforehand. Fearful and fascinated, Knecht
stared at the slowly rising heavenly body. Gently it floated between dark
banks of clouds in an island of clear sky.

"Soon it will change its shape and wax again; then will come the time to
sow the buckwheat," the Rainmaker said, counting out the days on his fing-
ers. Then he lapsed into silence again. Knecht crouched as if he were a-
lone on the rock gleaming with dew. He trembled with cold. From the depths
of the forest came the long-drawn call of an owl. The old man pondered for
a long while. Then he rose, placed his hand on Knecht's hair, and said
softly, as if awakening from a dream: "When I die, my spirit will fly into
the moon. By then you will be a man and need a wife. My daughter Ada will
be your wife. When she has a son by you, my spirit will return and dwell
in your son, and you will call him Turu, as I am called Turu."

The apprentice heard all this in astonishment. He did not dare say a word.
The thin silvery sickle rose and was already half devoured by the clouds.
A strange tremor passed through the young man, an intimation of many links
and associations, repetitions and crosscurrents among things and events. He
felt strangely poised both as spectator and participant against this alien
night sky where the thin, sharp crescent, precisely predicted by the Master,
had appeared above endless woods and hills. How wonderful the Master seemed,
and veiled in a thousand secrets--he who could think of his own death, whose
spirit would live in the moon and return from the moon back into a person
who would be Knecht's son and bear the former Master's name. The future, the
fate before him, seemed strangely torn asunder, in places transparent as the
cloudy sky; and the fact that anyone could know it, define it, and speak of
it seemed to throw open a view into incalculable spaces, full of wonders and
yet also full of orderliness. For a moment it seemed to him that the mind
could grasp everything, know everything, hear the secrets of everything--the
soft, sure course of the planets above, the life of man and animals, their
bonds and hostilities, meetings and struggles, everything great and small a-
long with the death locked within each living being. He saw or felt all this
as a whole in a first shudder of premonition, and himself fitted into it, in-
cluded within it as a part of the orderliness, governed by laws accessible to
the mind. This first inkling of the great mysteries, their dignity and death
as well as their knowability, came to the young man in the coolness of the
forest as night moved toward morning and he crouched on the rock above the
multitude of whispering treetops. It came to him, touched him like a ghostly
hand. He could not speak of it, not then and never in his whole life, but he
could not help thinking of it many times. In all his further learning and ex-
periencing, the intensity of this hour was present in his mind. 'Think of it,"
it reminded him, "think that all this exists, that there are rays and currents
between the moon and you and Turu and Ada, that there is death and the land
of the souls and a returning therefrom and that in your heart there is an an-
swer to all the things and sights of the world, that everything concerns you,
that you ought to know as much about everything as it is possible for man to
know."

Something like this was what the voice said. For Knecht, this was the first
time he heard the inner voice speaking thus, heard the seductive and impera-
tive bidding of man's spirit. He had seen many a moon wander across the sky
and heard many a nocturnal owl shrieking; and laconic though the Master was,
he had heard many a word of ancient wisdom or of solitary reflection from his
lips, but at this moment something new and different had struck him--presen-
timent of wholeness, the feeling for connections and relations, for the order
that included him and gave him a share in the responsibility for everything.
If you had the key to that, you did not need to depend on footprints to re-
cognize an animal, or roots or seeds to know a plant.You would be able to
grasp the whole world, stars, spirits, men, animals, medicines, and poisons,
to grasp everything in its wholeness and to discern, in every part and sign,
every other part. There were good hunters who could read more than others
in a track, in fewmets, a patch of fur and remains; they could say from a few
tiny hairs not only what kind of animal these came from, but also whether it
was old or young, male or female. From the shape of a cloud, a smell in the
air, the peculiar behavior of animals or plants, others could foretell the
weather for days in advance; his master was unsurpassed in this art, and near-
ly infallible. Still others had an inborn skill: there were boys who could hit
a bird with a stone at thirty paces. They had not learned it; they could sim-
ply do it; it did not come by effort, but by magic or grace. The stone in their
hand flew off by itself; the stone wanted to hit and the bird wanted to be hit.
There were said to be others who knew the future, whether a sick man would
live or die, whether a pregnant woman would give birth to a boy or a girl. The tri-
bal mother's daughter was famous for this, and the Rainmaker too was said to
possess some of this knowledge. There must, it seemed to Knecht at this mo-
ment, be a center in the vast net of associations; if you were at this center you
could know everything, could see all that had been and all that was to come.
Knowledge must pour in upon one who stood at this center as water ran to the
valley and the hare to the cabbage. His word would strike sharply and infall-
ibly as the stone in the sharpshooter's hand. By virtue of the mind's power he
would unite all these wonderful gifts and abilities within himself, and use
them at will. He would be the perfect, wise, insurpassable man. To become like
him, to draw nearer to him, to be on the way to him: that was the way of ways,
that was the goal, that gave sacredness and meaning to a life.

Something like this was the way he felt, and our attempts to speak of it in our
conceptual language, which he could never know, convey nothing of the awe and
the passion of his experience. Rising at night, being led through the dark,
still woods full of dangers and mysteries, waiting on the ledge in the chill of
night and early morning, the appearance of the thin phantom of a moon, the wise
Master's few words, being alone with the Master at so extraordinary an hour —
all this was experienced and preserved by Knecht as a solemn mystery, as a sol-
emn initiation, as his admission into a league and a cult, into a humble but
honorable relationship to the Unnamable, the cosmic mystery. This and many an-
other similar experience could not be put into thoughts, let alone words. Even
more remote from his way of thinking, even more impossible than any other
thought, would have been words such as this: "Is it only I alone who have cre-
ated this experience, or is it objective reality? Does the Master have the same
feelings as I, or would mine amuse him? Are my thoughts new, unique, my own, or
have the Master and many before him experienced and thought exactly the same?"
No, for him there were no such analyses and differentiations. Everything was
reality, was steeped in reality, full of it as bread dough is of yeast. The
clouds, the moon, and the shifting scenes in the theater of the sky, the cold
wet limestone under his bare feet, the damp, trickling cold dew in the pallid
night air, the comforting homelike smell of hearth smoke and bed of leaves suf-
fusing the skin the Master had slung around him, the dignity and the faint note
of old age and readiness for death in his rough voice--all that was beyond real-
ity and penetrated almost violently into the boy's senses. And sense impressions
are a deeper soil for growing memories than the best systems and analytical
methods.

Although the Rainmaker was one of the few members of the tribe who had an occu-
pation, who had developed a special art and ability, his everyday life outwardly
did not differ greatly from that of the other members of the tribe. He was an im-
portant man with considerable prestige; he also received payment from the tribe
whenever he had to do some service for the community; but this happened only on
special occasions. By far his most important and sacred function came in the
spring when he determined the proper day for sowing every kind of fruit and
plant. He did this by carefully considering the state of the moon, partly by
handed-down rules, partly by his own experience. But the solemn act of opening
the season of seeding--the strewing of the first handful of grain and seeds on
the community land--was no longer part of his office. That task was too high for
any mere man; it was performed every year by the tribal mother herself or by
her oldest female relative. The Master became the principal person in the vil-
lage only when he really had to function as Weathermaker. This happened when a
long drought, or a long spell of damp and cold, struck the fields and threatened
the tribe with famine. Then Turu had to apply the methods effective against
drought and poor crops: sacrifices, exorcisms, processions. According to legend,
in cases of obstinate drought or endless rain, when all other means failed and
the spirits could not be moved by persuasion, pleas, or threats, there was a
last infallible method used in the days of the mothers and grandmothers: sacri-
fice of the Weathermaker himself by the community. The tribal mother, it was
said, had witnessed one such sacrifice.

Aside from looking after the weather, the Master also had a kind of private prac-
tice as an exorcist, as a maker of amulets and charms, and in some cases as a doc-
tor, wherever medical matters were not reserved to the tribal mother. But for the
rest, Master Turu lived the life of every other tribesman. He helped to till the
common land when his turn came, and also had his own small garden near the hut.
He gathered and stored fruit, mushrooms, and firewood. He hunted and fished, and
kept a goat or two. As a farmer he was like all the others, but as hunter, fisher-
man, and herb gatherer he was not like anyone else. Rather, he was a solitary gen-
ius with a reputation for knowing a great many natural and magical tricks, devices,
knacks, and aids. It was said he could weave a willow noose which no animal could
escape. He had special recipes for fish bait; he knew how to lure crayfish; and
there were some who thought that he understood the language of many a beast. But
his real specialty was more arcane: observation of the moon and the stars, know-
ledge of the weather signs, ability to forecast weather and growth, and a command
of many magical effects. Thus he was a great collector of plant and animal materi-
als efficacious for remedies and poisons, for working magic, for conferring bless-
ings, and for fending off dangerous spirits. He knew where to find even the rarest
plants; he knew when they blossomed and ripened seed, and the right time to dig
their roots. He knew where to find all kinds of snakes and toads, knew how to use
horns, hoofs, claws, hair. He knew what to do with growths, deformities, weird and
horrible excrescences: knots, tumors, burls, and scales, of wood, of leaves, of
grain, of nuts, of horns and hoofs.

Knecht had more to learn with his feet and hands, his eyes, skin, ears, and nose,
than with his intellect, and Turu taught far more by example and by dumbshow than
by words and prescription. The Master rarely spoke coherently, and even when he
did his words were only a supplement to his singularly impressive gestures. Knecht's
apprenticeship differed little from the apprenticeship a young hunter or fisherman
undergoes with a good master, and it gave him great pleasure, for he learned only
the things that were already latent within him. He learned to be in wait, to lis-
ten, to stalk, to watch, to be on his guard, to be alert, to spy and sense; but
the game that he and his master stalked was not only fox and badger, otter and
toad, bird and fish, but essence, the whole, meaning, relationship. They sought
to determine, to recognize, to guess and forecast the fleeting, unstable weather,
to know the death lying hidden in a berry or snakebite, to eavesdrop on the secret
relations between clouds or storms and the phases of the moon, relations that af-
fected the growth of crops as they did the haleness or doom of man and beast. No
doubt they were really seeking the same ends as the science and technology of late-
r centuries, dominance over nature and a control over her laws; but they went a-
bout it in an entirely different way. They did not stand off from nature and try
to penetrate into her secrets by violence. They were never opposed and hostile to
nature, but always part of her and reverently devoted to her. It is quite likely
that they knew her better and dealt more wisely with her. But one thing was utter-
ly impossible for them: not even in their most audacious moments would it have oc-
curred to them to meet nature and the world of spirits without fear, let alone to
feel superior to them. Such hubris was unthinkable; they could not have imagined
having any other attitude but fear toward the forces of nature, toward death and
the demons. Fear loomed over the life of man. It could not be overcome. But it
could be pacified, outwitted, masked, brought within bounds, placed within the or-
derly framework of life as a whole. The various systems of sacrifices served this
purpose. Fear was the permanent pressure upon the lives of these people, and with-
out this high pressure their life would have lacked stress, of course, but also
lacked intensity. A man who had been able to ennoble his fear by transforming part
of it into awe had gained a great deal. People of this sort, people whose fear had
become a form of piety, were the good men and the progressive men of that age.
There were many sacrifices and many kinds of sacrifice; and a certain portion of
these sacrifices, with their accompanying rites, fell within the province of the
Weathermaker.

Alongside Knecht in the hut, little Ada grew up--a pretty child, the old man's darl-
ing; and when he thought the time had come, he gave her to his disciple for a wife.
From this point on Knecht was considered the Rainmaker's assistant. Turu presented
him to the village Mother as his son-in-law and successor, and thereafter allowed
him to carry out many official acts and functions as his deputy. Gradually, as the
seasons and years passed, the old Rainmaker lapsed into the solitary meditative-
ness of age and left all his duties to Knecht. By the time the old man was found
dead, crouched over some small pots of magic brew on the hearth, his white hair
singed by the fire--the boy, the disciple Knecht had long been familiar to the
village as the Rainmaker. He demanded that the village council provide an impress-
ive funeral for his teacher, and as a sacrifice burned a whole heap of precious
medicinal herbs and roots over the grave. That, too, had happened long ago, and
several of Knecht's children already crowded Ada's hut, among them a boy named
Turu. In him the old man had returned from his death flight to the moon.

Knecht fared much as had his teacher in times past. Part of his fear was trans-
formed into piety and thought. Part of his youthful aspiration and his profound
longings remained alive, part faded away and evaporated as he grew older in his
work, in his love and solicitude for Ada and the children. His foremost passion
was still for the moon and its influence upon the seasons and the weather; to
this he devoted persistent study, and in knowledge of these matters he reached
and ultimately surpassed his master, Turu. And because the waxing and waning of
the moon are so closely bound up with the birth and death of men; because of all
the fears in which men live, fear of having to die is the strongest, Knecht ac-
quired from his adoration and knowledge of the moon a devout and purified atti-
tude toward death. In his riper years he was less subject to the fear of death
than other men. He could speak reverently with the moon, or supplicatingly or
tenderly; he knew that he was linked to it by delicate spiritual bonds. He knew
the moon's life with great precision, shared with all the force of his own soul
in the episodes of the moon's destiny. He experienced its disappearance and re-
birth like a mystery within himself, suffered with it, felt alarm when the dread-
ed event occurred and the moon seemed exposed to illness and dangers, change
and harm, when it lost its brightness, changed color, darkened until it seemed on
the verge of extinction. At such times, it was true, everyone sympathized with
the moon, trembled for it, recognized menace and the imminence of disaster in its
eclipse, and stared anxiously at its old, ravaged face. But precisely at such times
Rainmaker Knecht showed that he was closer to the moon and knew more about
it than others. For although he shared in its suffering, although his heart con-
stricted with anxiety, his memory of similar experiences was keener, his confi-
dence better founded. He had greater faith in eternity and a second coming, in
the possibility of revising and conquering death. Greater, too, was the degree
of his devotion; at such times he felt in himself a readiness to share the fate
of the celestial orb to the point of doom and rebirth. At times he even felt
something akin to temerity, a kind of rash courage and the resolution to defy
death by the power of mind, to strengthen his own selfhood by surrender to sup-
erhuman destinies. Some trace of this was apparent in his manner; others sensed
it and regarded him as knowing and devout, a man.

He had to prove these gifts and virtues in many hard tests. Once he had to with-
stand a period of poor crops and adverse weather that extended over two years.
It was the greatest trial of his life. Troubles and bad portents had begun with
the repeatedly postponed sowing, and then every imaginable misfortune had affect-
ed the crops, until in the end they were virtually destroyed. The village had
starved cruelly, and Knecht, the Rainmaker, with it. It was a considerable a-
chievement in itself to have survived this bitter year without losing all cred-
ence and standing, so that he could still help the tribe bear the catastrophe
with humility and some degree of composure. When the next year, after a hard win-
ter in which many of the tribe perished, all the miseries of the preceding year
were repeated, when during the summer the common land parched and cracked in a
stubborn drought, the mice multiplied fearfully, and the solitary conjurations
and sacrifices of the Rainmaker proved as vain as the public ceremonies, the drum
choruses, and the processions of the whole community; when evidence mounted that
this time the Rainmaker could not make rain, it was no small matter and more than
ordinary strength was needed to bear the responsibility and hold up his head a-
gainst the frightened and infuriated people. There were two or three weeks in
which Knecht stood entirely alone confronting the entire village, confronting hun-
ger and despair, confronting the ancient belief among the people that only sacri-
fice of the Weathermaker could propitiate the powers. He had won the victory by
yielding. He had not opposed the idea, had offered himself as the sacrifice.
Moreover, with enormous toil and devotion he had helped to alleviate distress,
had repeatedly discovered sources of water, divining a spring here, a trickling
stream there. Even in a time of greatest distress he had not allowed the vill-
agers to slaughter all their livestock. Above all he had lent his support to the
tribal mother, who had succumbed to fatalism and weakness in these difficult
times. By advice, threat, magic, and prayer, by example and intimidation, he
saved her from collapsing completely and letting everything drift wildly. In
those times of calamity and universal anxiety it became apparent that a man is
the more useful, the more his life and thinking is turned toward matters of the
spirit, matters that go beyond the personal realm, the more he has learned to
venerate, observe, worship, serve, and sacrifice. The two terrible years, which
had almost cost him his life, ended with his being more highly regarded and trust-
ed than ever, not by the thoughtless crowd, of course, but by the few who bore
responsibility and were able to judge a man of his type.

His life had passed through these and many other trials by the time he reached
the best years of his maturity. He had officiated over the burial of two of the
tribal mothers, had lost a charming six-year-old son who had been carried off by
a wolf. He had survived a severe illness without outside help, acting as his
own physician. He had suffered hunger and cold. All this had marked his face,
and his soul no less. He had also made the discovery that, in a certain peculiar
manner, men of thought gave offense and aroused the repugnance of their fellows.
They might be valued at a distance and called on in emergencies, but others nei-
ther love them nor accept them, rather give them a wide berth. He had also learn-
ed that the sick and unfortunate are far more receptive to traditional magic
spells and exorcisms than to sensible advice; that people more readily accept af-
fliction and outward penances than the task of changing themselves, or even exam-
ining themselves; that they believe more easily in magic than reason, in formulas
than experience. These are matters which in the several thousand years since his
era have probably not changed so much as a good many history books claim. But he
had also learned that a seeking, thoughtful man dare not forfeit love; that he
must meet the wishes and follies of men halfway, not showing arrogance but also
not truckling to them; that it is always only a single step from sage to charl-
atan, from priest to mountebank, from helpful brother to parasitic drone, and that
the people would by far prefer to pay a swindler and be exploited by a quack than
accept help given freely and unselfishly. They would much rather pay in money and
goods than in trust and love. They cheat one another and expect to be cheated
themselves. You had to learn to see man as a weak, selfish, and cowardly creature;
you also had to realize how many of these evil traits and impulses you shared your-
self; and nevertheless you allowed yourself to believe, and nourished your soul on
the faith, that man is also spirit and love, that something dwells in him which is
at variance with his instincts and longs to refine them. But all these thoughts
are no doubt far too abstract and explicit for Knecht to have been capable of them.
Let us say: he was on the way to them; his way would some day lead him to them and
past them.

While he went his way, longing for abstract thought but living far more in the
senses, in the spell of the moon, in the pungency of an herb, the saltiness of a
root, the taste of a piece of bark, in cultivating simples, blending salves, sub-
mitting to the whims of weather and atmosphere, he developed many abilities within
himself, including some that we of a later generation no longer possess and only
half understand. The most important of these abilities was, of course, rainmaking.
Although there were a good many special times when the sky stayed obdurate and
seemed to mock his efforts, Knecht nevertheless made rain hundreds of times, and
almost every time in a slightly different way. He would, of course, never have
dared to make the slightest change or omission in the sacrifices and the rite of
processions, conjurations, and drumming. But that was only the official, the pub-
lic part of his work, the priestly side, which was for show; and undoubtedly it
was very fine and produced a fine exalted feeling when after a day of sacrifices
and processions the sky gave way in the evening, the horizon clouded over, the
wind began to smell damp, the first drops of rain splattered down. But it had tak-
en the Weathermaker's art to choose the day well, not to strive blindly when the
prospects were poor. You could implore the powers, even besiege them, but you had
to do so with feeling and moderation, with submission to their will. Even more
than those glorious triumphant experiences of felicitous intercession he preferred
certain others that no one but himself knew about, and even he knew about them on-
ly timorously, more with his senses than his understanding. There were weather
conditions, tensions of the atmosphere and of heat, cloud formations and winds,
smells of water and earth and dust, threats and promises, moods and whims of the
weather demons, which Knecht detected in advance with his skin, his hair, with all
his senses, so that he could not be surprised by anything, could not be disappoint-
ed. He concentrated the very vibrations of the weather within himself, holding them
within him in such a way that he could command the clouds and the winds--not, to be
sure, just as he pleased, but out of the very intimacy and attachment he had with
them, which totally erased the difference between him and the world, between inside
and outside. At such times he could stand rapt, listening, or crouch rapt, with all
his pores open, and not only feel the life of the winds and clouds within his own
self, but also direct and engender it, somewhat in the way we can awaken and repro-
duce within ourselves a phrase of music that we know by heart. Then he needed only
to hold his breath--and the wind or the thunder stopped; he needed only to nod or
shake his head--and the hail pelted down or ceased; he needed only to express by
a smile the balance of the conflicting forces within himself — and the billows of
clouds would part, revealing the thin, bright blueness. There were many times of un-
usually pure harmony and composure in his soul when he carried the weather of the
next few days within himself with infallible foreknowledge, as if the whole score
were already written in his blood in such a way that the outside world must play
every note exactly as it stood. Those were his best days, his reward, his delight.

But when this intimate connection with the outside was broken, when the weather and
the world were unfamiliar, incomprehensible, and unpredictable, then currents were
interrupted and derangements occurred within him. Then he felt that he was not a
real Rainmaker, that his responsibility for weather and crops was an error and nui-
sance. At such times he was domestic, behaved obediently and helpfully toward Ada,
sedulously shared the household tasks with her, made toys and tools for the children,
pottered about preparing medicines, craved love and wanted nothing better than to
differ as little as possible from other men, to conform wholly to them in customs
and morals, and even to listen to the otherwise vexatious gossip of his wife and the
neighboring women about the life, health, and conduct of others. But in good times
his family saw little of him, for then he roamed, fished, hunted, searched for roots,
lay in the grass or crouched in trees, sniffed, listened, imitated the voices of an-
imals, kindled little fires and compared the shapes of the smoke clouds with the
clouds in the sky, drenched his skin and hair with fog, rain, air, sun, or moonlight,
and incidentally gathered, as his Master and predecessor Turu had done in his life-
time, objects whose inner character and outward form seemed to belong to different
realms, in which the wisdom or whimsicality of nature seemed to reveal some fragment
of her rules and secrets of creation, objects which seemed to unite symbolically wide-
ly disparate ideas: gnarled branches with the faces of men or animals, water-polished
pebbles grained like wood, petrified animals of the primordial world, misshapen or
twinned fruit pits, stones shaped like kidneys or hearts. He read the veinings of a
leaf, the pattern on a mushroom cap, and divined mysteries, relations, futures, poss-
ibilities: the magic of symbols, the foreshadowing of numbers and writing, the reduct-
ion of infinitudes and multiplicities to simplicity, to system, to concept. For all these
ways of comprehending the world through the mind no doubt lay within him, name-
less, unnamed, but not inconceivable, not beyond the bounds of presentiment, still in
the germ, but essential to his nature, part of him, growing organically within him.
And if we were to go still further back beyond this Rainmaker and his time which to
us seems so early and primitive, if we were to go several thousands of years further
back into the past, wherever we found man we would still find--this is our firm belief
--the mind of man, that Mind which has no beginning and always has contained every-
thing that it later produces.

The Weathermaker was not destined to win immortality by any one of his premonitions,
or to come any closer to proving their validity. For him, indeed, they scarcely need-
ed proof. He did not become one of the many inventors of writing, nor of geometry,
nor of medicine or astronomy. He remained an unknown link in the chain, but a link
as indispensable as any other. He passed on what he had received, and he added what
he had newly acquired by his own struggles. For he too had disciples. In the course
of the years he trained two apprentices to be Rainmakers, one of whom was later to
become his successor.

For long years he had gone about his affairs and practiced his craft alone and unob-
served. Then, shortly after a great crop failure and time of famine, a boy started
appearing, watching him, spying on him, adoring him, and generally skulking about--
one who was drawn to rainmaking and the Master. With a strange, sorrowful tug at his
heart he sensed the recurrence and reversal of the great experience of his youth,
and at the same time had that austere feeling, at once constricting and stirring,
that afternoon had set in, that youth was gone and noonday passed, that the blossom
had become a fruit. And to his own surprise he behaved toward the boy exactly as old
Turu had once behaved toward him. The stiff rebuff, the delaying, wait-and-see atti-
tude, came of its own accord; it was neither an imitation of his deceased Master nor
did it spring from moralistic and pedagogic considerations that a young man must be
tested for a long time to see whether he is serious enough, that initiation into mys-
teries should not be made easy, and similar theories. On the contrary, Knecht simply
behaved toward his apprentices the way every somewhat aging solitary and learned ec-
centric behaves toward admirers and disciples. He was embarrassed, shy, distant, rea-
dy for flight, fearful for his lovely solitude and his freedom to roam in the wilder-
ness, to go hunting and collecting alone, to dream and listen. He was full of a jeal-
ous love for all his habits and hobbies, his secrets and meditations. There could be
no question of his embracing the timid youth who approached him with worshipful curi-
osity, no question of helping him overcome this timidity by encouraging him, no ques-
tion of his rejoicing and having a sense of reward, appreciation, and pleasant success
because the world of the others was at last sending him an emissary and a declaration
of love, because someone was courting him, someone felt drawn to him, and like him-
self called to the service of mysteries. On the contrary, at first he felt it merely
as a troublesome disturbance, infringement on his rights and habits, loss of his in-
dependence. For the first time he realized how much he prized that independence. He
resisted the wooing and became clever at outwitting the boy and hiding himself, at
covering his tracks, evading and escaping. But what had happened to Turu now happen-
ed to him also: the boy's long, mute courtship slowly softened his heart, slowly,
slowly wore down his resistance, so that the more the boy gained ground, the more
Knecht learned to turn to him and open his mind to him, approve his longing, accept
his courtship, and eventually come to regard the new and often vexatious duty of
teaching and having a disciple as inevitable, imposed by fate, one of the require-
ments of a life of thought. More and more he had to bid farewell to the dream, the
feeling and the pleasure of infinite potentialities, of a multiplicity of futures.
Instead of the dream of unending progress, of the sum of all wisdom, his pupil
tood by, a small, near, demanding reality, an intruder and nuisance, but no longer
to be rebuffed or evaded. For the boy represented, after all, the only way into the
real future, the one most important duty, the one narrow path along which the Rain-
maker's life and acts, principles, thoughts, and glimmerings could be saved from
death and continue their life in a small new bud. Sighing, gnashing his teeth, and
smiling, he accepted the burden.

But even in this important, perhaps most responsible aspect of his work, the pass-
ing on of tradition and the education of successors, the Weathermaker was not spare-
d bitter disillusionment. The first apprentice who sued for his favor was named
Maro; and when after long delay and every form of deterrence he accepted the boy,
Maro disappointed him in a way he could never quite reconcile himself to. The boy
was obsequious and wheedling, and for a long time pretended unconditional obedience,
but he had certain faults. Above all he lacked courage. He was especially afraid
of night and darkness, a fact he tried to hide. Knecht, when he noticed it at last,
continued for a long time to regard it as lingering childishness which would even-
tually disappear. But it did not disappear. This disciple also completely lacked
the gift of selfless devotion to observation for its own sake, to the procedures
and processes of the Rainmaker's work, and to ideas and speculations. He was cle-
ver, had a quick, bright mind, and he learned easily and surely whatever could be
learned without surrender of the self. But it became more and more apparent that
he had self-seeking aims, and that it was for the sake of these that he wanted to
learn rainmaking. Above all he wanted status; he wanted to count for something and
make an impression. He had the vanity of talent but not of vocation. He longed for
applause. As soon as he acquired some scraps of knowledge and a few tricks, he
showed off to his fellows. This, too, could be considered childish and might be
outgrown. But he wanted more than applause; he also strove for power and advantag-
es over others. When the Master first began to notice this, he was alarmed and gra-
dually withdrew his favor from the young man. Maro had been an apprentice for some
years when Knecht caught him in serious misdemeanors. One time he was induced, in
return for presents, to treat a sick child with medicines without his Master's
knowledge and authorization. Another time he undertook on his own to rid a hut of
rats by reciting spells. And when, in spite of all his Master's warnings and his
own pledges, he was caught again in similar practices, the Master dismissed him,
informed the tribal mother of the affair, and tried to banish the ungrateful and
useless young man from his memory.

His two later disciples compensated for this disappointment, especially the sec-
ond, who was his own son Turu. He deeply loved this youngest and last of his ap-
prentices, and believed the boy could become greater than himself. Plainly, his
grandfather's spirit had returned in him. Knecht experienced the invigorating sat-
isfaction of having passed on the sum of his knowledge and belief to the future,
and of having a person who was his son twice over, to whom he could hand over his
duties any time these became too heavy for him. But still that ill-favored first
disciple could not be dismissed from his life and thoughts. In the village Maro
became a man who while not especially enjoying high honor, was nevertheless ex-
tremely popular and wielded considerable influence. He had taken a wife, amused
many people by his talents as a kind of mountebank and jester, and had even be-
come chief drummer in the drum corps. He remained a secret enemy of the Rainmaker,
consumed by envy and inflicting large and small injuries upon him whenever he
could. Knecht had never had a gift for friendship and gregariousness. He needed
solitude and freedom; he had never sought out respect or love, except for the
time he was a boy seeking to win over Master Turu. But now he learned how it felt
to have an enemy, someone who hated him. It spoiled a good many of his days.

Maro had been one of those highly talented pupils who in spite of their talent
are always unpleasant and a grief to their teachers because their talent has not
grown from below and from within. It is not founded on organic strength, the del-
icate, ennobling mark of a good endowment, of sound blood and a sound character,
but is in a curious way something adventitious, accidental, perhaps even usurped
or stolen. A pupil of meager character but high intelligence or sparkling imagi-
nation invariably embarrasses the teacher. He is obliged to transmit to this pu-
pil the knowledge and methodology he himself has inherited, and to prepare him
for the life of the mind — and yet he cannot help feeling that his real and higher
duty should be to protect the arts and sciences against the intrusion of young
men who have nothing but talent. For the teacher is not supposed to serve the pu-
pil; rather, both are the servants of their culture. This is the reason teachers
feel slightly repelled by certain glittering talents. A pupil of that type falsi-
fies the whole meaning of pedagogy as service. All the help given to a pupil who
can shine but cannot serve basically means doing harm to service and is, in a way,
a betrayal of culture. We know of periods in the history of many nations in which
profound upheavals in cultural processes led to a surge of the merely talented
into leading positions in communities, schools, academies, and governments. High-
ly talented people sat in all sorts of posts, but they were people who wanted to
rule without being able to serve. Certainly it is often very difficult to recog-
nize such people in good time, before they have entrenched themselves in the in-
tellectual professions. It is equally difficult to treat them with the necessary
ruthlessness and send them back to other occupations. Knecht, too, had made mis-
takes; he had been patient far too long with his apprentice Maro. He had entrust-
ed esoteric knowledge to a superficial climber. That was a pity, and the conse-
quences for himself were far greater than he could ever have foreseen.

A year came--by then Knecht's beard was already quite gray--in which the orderly
relationships between heaven and earth seemed to have been distorted by demons of
unusual strength and malevolence. These distortions began in the autumn with e-
vents of such fearful majesty that every soul in the village shook with terror.
Shortly after the equinox, which the Rainmaker always observed with heightened
attentiveness and celebrated with solemnity and reverent worship, there was a dis-
play in the heavens that had not occurred within the memory of man. An evening
came that was dry, windy, and rather cool. The sky was crystal clear except for
a few restless small clouds which floated at a very great height, holding the
rosy light of the setting sun for an unusually long time. They looked like loose
and foamy bundles of light drifting in cold, pale cosmic space. For several days
past Knecht had sensed something that was stronger and more remarkable than the
feeling he had every year at this time when the days began growing shorter: a
seething of the powers in the sky, a sense of alarm in earth, plants and animals,
a nervousness in the air, something inconstant, expectant, frightened, lowering
in all of nature. The small clouds with their lingering, quivering flames formed
part of the strangeness. Their fluttery movements did not correspond with the
direction of the wind on the ground. After a long sad struggle against extinction,
their piteous red light grew cold and faded, and suddenly they were invisible.

It was quiet in the village. The circle of children before the tribal mother's
hut had long scattered. A few boys were still chasing about and tussling, but all
the rest of the tribe were in their huts. Everyone had eaten. Many were already
asleep; scarcely anyone but the Rainmaker observed the twilit clouds. Knecht
walked back and forth in the small garden behind his hut, pondering the weather,
tense and restive. At times he sat down for a brief rest on a stump that stood
among the nettles and served him for splitting wood. As soon as the last glimmer
of cloud was extinguished the stars suddenly appeared against the greenish glow
of the sky, and rapidly grew in number and brightness. Where there had been only
two or three visible a moment before, there were now ten, twenty. The Rainmaker
was familiar with many of them individually and in their groups and families. He had
seen them many hundreds of times; there was always something reassuring about
their unvarying reappearance. Stars were comforting. Though they hung so high,
remote and cold, radiating no warmth, they were reliable, firmly aligned, pro-
claiming order, promising duration. Seemingly so aloof and far and opposed to
life on earth, seemingly so untouched by the warmth, the writhings, the suffer-
ings and ecstasies in the life of man, so superior in their cold majesty and e-
ternity that they seemed to make mock of human things, the stars nevertheless
had a relation to us. They guided and governed us perhaps, and if any human know-
ledge, any intellectual hold, any sureness and superiority of the mind over tran-
sitory things could be attained and retained, it would resemble the stars, shin-
ing like them in cool tranquility, comforting with chilly shivers of awe, looking
down eternally and somewhat mockingly. That was how they had often seemed to the
Rainmaker, and although he felt toward the stars nothing like the close, stimulat-
ing, constantly changing and recurring relationship he had toward the moon, the
great, near, moist orb, the fat magic fish in the sea of heaven, he nevertheless
revered them and attached many beliefs to them. To gaze at them for a long time
and allow their influence to work upon him, to expose his intelligence, his warmth,
his anxiety to their serenely cold gaze, often laved and assuaged him like a heal-
ing draft.

Tonight, too, they looked as they always did, except that they were very bright
and seemed highly polished in the taut, thin air; but he could not find within
himself the repose to surrender to them. From unknown realms some power was
tugging at him; it ached in his pores, sucked at his eyes, quietly and continually
affected him. It was a current, a warning quiver. In the hut nearby the warm,
dim light of the hearth-fire glimmered. Life flowed small and warm inside: a cry,
a laugh, a yawn, human smells, skin warmth, motherhood, children's sleep. All
that innocent presence seemed to deepen the night, to drive the stars still fur-
ther back into the incomprehensible distances and heights.

And now, while Knecht heard Ada's voice inside the hut crooning and humming a
low melody as she quieted a child, there began in the sky the calamity that the
village would remember for many years. A flickering and glimmering appeared here
and there in the still, glittering network of stars, as if the usually invisible
threads of the net were suddenly leaping into flame. Like hurled stones, glowing
and guttering, a few stars fell slantwise across the sky, one here, two there,
a few more here; and before the eye had turned from the first vanished falling
star, before the heart, stilled at the sight, had begun to beat again, the lights
falling or hurled at a slant or a slight arc across the sky began to come in
swarms of dozens, hundreds. A countless host, borne on a vast, mute storm, they
slanted across the silent night, as if a cosmic autumn were tearing all the stars
like withered leaves from the tree of heaven and flinging them noiselessly into
the void. Like withered leaves, like wafting snowflakes, they rushed away and
down, thousands upon thousands, in fearful silence, vanishing beyond the wooded
mountains to the southeast where never a star had set since time immemorial.

With frozen heart and swimming eyes, Knecht stood, head tilted back, gazing hor-
rified but insatiably at the transformed and accursed sky, mistrusting his eyes
and yet only too certain of the direness of what they beheld. Like all who watch-
ed this nocturnal spectacle, he thought the familiar stars themselves were waver-
ing, scattering, and plunging down, and he expected that if the earth itself did
not swallow him first, the firmament would soon appear black and emptied. After
a while, however, he recognized what others could not know--that the well-known
stars were still present, here and there and everywhere; that the frightful dis-
persion was taking place not among the old, familiar stars, but in the space be-
tween earth and sky, and that these new lights, fallen or flung, so swiftly ap-
pearing and swiftly vanishing, glowed with a fire of another sort from the old,
the proper stars. This was somewhat reassuring and helped him regain his balance.
But even if these were new, transitory, different stars scattering through the
air, still it meant disaster and disorder. Deep sighs came from Knecht's parched
throat. He looked toward the earth; he listened to find out whether this uncanny
spectacle were appearing to him alone, or whether others were also seeing it.
Soon he heard groans, screams, and cries of terror from other huts. Others had
seen it too; their cries had alarmed the sleepers and the unaware; in a moment
panic had seized the entire village. With a sigh, Knecht took the burden on him-
self. This misfortune affected him, the Rainmaker, above all others, for he was
in a way responsible for order in the heavens. Always before he had known or
sensed great catastrophes in advance: floods, hailstorms, tempests. Always he had
warned the mothers and elders to be prepared. He had averted the worst evils. He
had interposed himself, his knowledge, his courage, and his confidence in the po-
wers above, between the village and consternation. Why had he foreknown nothing
this time, so that he could take no measure? Why had he said not a word to anyone
of the obscure foreboding he had, after all, felt?

He lifted the mat hung over the entrance of the hut and softly called his wife's
name. She came, her youngest at her breast. He took the baby from her and laid
it on the pallet. Holding Ada's hand, he placed a finger to his lips, enjoining
silence, and led her out of the hut. He saw her patiently tranquil face grow dis-
torted by terror.

"Let the children sleep; I don't want them to see this, do you hear?" he whis-
pered intensely. "Don't let any of them come out, not even Turu. And you your-
self stay inside."

He hesitated, uncertain how much to say, how many of his thoughts he ought to
reveal. Finally he added firmly: "Nothing will harm you and the children."

She believed him at once, although her face and her mind had not yet recovered
from the fright.

"What is it?" she asked, again staring at the sky. "Is it, very bad?"

"It is bad," he said gently. "I think it may be very bad. But it doesn't con-
cern you and the children. Stay in the hut; keep the mat drawn. I must talk to
the people. Go in, Ada."

He pressed her through the opening, drew the mat carefully closed, and stood
for the span of a few breaths with his face turned toward the continuing rain
of stars. Then he bowed his head, sighed heavily once more, and walked swiftly
through the night toward the tribal mother's hut.

Half the village was already assembled there. A muted roar rose from them, a
tumult half numbed by terror and choked by despair. There were women and men
who surrendered with a kind of voluptuous rage to their sense of horror and
impending doom. Some stood stiff, rapt. Others jerked about wildly with uncon-
trolled movements of their limbs. One woman was foaming at the mouth as she
danced, alone, a despairing and obscene dance, at the same time pulling out
whole handfuls of her long hair. Knecht realized that the effects were al-
ready at work. Almost all had succumbed to the intoxication; they were be-
witched or driven mad by the falling stars, and an orgy of madness, fury,
and self-destructiveness might follow. It was high time to collect the few
brave and sensible members of the tribe, and support their courage.

The ancient tribal mother was calm. She believed that the end of all things
had come, and that there was nothing to be done about it. Toward the inevi-
table she showed a firm, hard face that looked almost mocking in its pinched
astringency. He persuaded her to listen to him. He tried to show her that
the old stars, the ones that had always been, were still in the sky. But she
could not grasp it, either because her eyes no longer had the strength to
discern them, or because her conception of the stars was too unlike the Rain-
maker's. She shook her head and maintained her courageous grin, but when Knecht
implored her not to abandon the people to their terror, she instantly was of
his mind. A small group of frightened but not yet maddened villagers still
willing to be led formed around her and the Weathermaker.

Up to the moment he reached the group, Knecht had hoped to be able to check
the panic by example, reason, speech, explanations, and encouragement. But
his brief conversation with the tribal mother had shown him that it was too
late for anything of the sort. He had hoped to let the others share in his
own experience, to make them a gift of it. He had hoped to persuade them
that the stars themselves were not falling, or not all of them, that no cos-
mic storm was sweeping them away. He had imagined that by such urging he
would be able to move them from helpless dismay to active observation, so
that they would be able to bear the shock. But he quickly saw that there
were very few villagers who would hearken to him, and by the time he won
them over all the others would have utterly given way to madness. No, as
was so often the case, reason and sensible speech could accomplish nothing
here.

Fortunately there were other means. Although it was impossible to dispel
their mortal terror by appeal to reason, this terror could still be guided,
organized, given shape, so that the confusion of maddened people could be
made into a solid unity, the wild, single voices merged into a chorus. But
there was no time to be lost. Knecht stepped before the people, loudly cry-
ing the well-known prayers that opened public ceremonies of penance and
mourning: the lament for the death of a tribal mother, or the ceremony of
sacrifice and atonement in the face of perils such as epidemics and floods.
He shouted the words in rhythm and reinforced the rhythm by clapping his
hands; and in the same rhythm, shouting and clapping his hands all the while,
he stooped almost to the ground, straightened up, stooped again, and straight-
ened up. Almost at once ten or twenty others joined in his movements. The
white-haired mother of the village murmured in the same rhythm and with tiny
bows sketched the ritual movements. Those who were still flocking to the as-
semblage from the huts at once joined in the beat and the spirit of the cer-
emony; the few who had gone off their heads collapsed, and lay motionless,
or else were caught up in the murmur of the chorus and the religious genu-
flections. His method was effective. Instead of a demoralized horde of mad-
men, there now stood a reverent populace prepared for sacrifice and penance,
each one benefiting, each one encouraged by now having to lock his horror
and fear of death within himself, or bellow it crazily for himself alone.
Each now fitted into his place in the orderly chorus of the multitude, keep-
ing to the rhythm of the exorcistic ceremony. Many mysterious powers are
present in such a rite. Its greatest comfort is its uniformity, confirming
the sense of community; its infallible medicine meter and order, rhythm and
music.

While the whole night sky was still covered by the host of falling stars
like a rushing, silent cascade consisting of droplets of light--for anoth-
er two hours it went on squandering its great red globules of fire--the
horror in the village changed to submission and devotion, to prayers to
the powers and penitential feelings. In their fear and weakness men met
the disorder of the sky with order and religious concord. Even before the
rain of stars began to slacken, the miracle had taken place; the inner
miracle radiated healing powers; and by the time the sky seemed slowly to
be quieting down and recovering, all the dead-tired penitents had the re-
deeming feeling that their worship had placated the powers and restored
order in the heavens.

That night of terror was not forgotten. The village talked about it all
through the autumn and winter. But soon this was no longer done in timo-
rous whispers, but in an everyday tone of voice and with that satisfac-
tion that people feel when they look back upon a disaster faced and with-
stood, a peril successfully overcome. The villagers now battened on de-
tails; each had been surprised in his own way by the incredible event;
each claimed to have been the first to discover it. Some ventured to make
fun of those who had been particularly shaken by it. For a long time a
certain amount of excitement persisted in the village. There had been a
great event; something extraordinary had happened.

Knecht did not share this mood, or feel the same gradual loss of inter-
est in the phenomenon. For him, the whole uncanny experience remained
an unforgettable warning, a thorn that continued to prick him. He could
not dismiss it on the grounds that it had passed, that the danger had
been averted by processions, prayers, and penances. The further it re-
ceded in time, in fact, the greater its importance became for him, be-
cause he filled it with meaning. It gave full scope to his tendency to
brood and interpret. The event in itself, the whole of that miraculous
natural spectacle, had been an enormously difficult problem involving
many aspects. A man who had once seen it could probably spend a life-
time pondering it.

Only one other person in the village would have watched the rain of stars
from a kindred point of view, and on the basis of similar knowledge. That
was his own son and disciple, Turu. Only what this one witness would have
said, to bear out or to revise his own observation, would have mattered
to Knecht. But he had let this son sleep; and the longer he wondered why
he had done so, why he had refrained from sharing the sight of the incred-
ible event with the only eyewitness whose judgment he would have taken ser-
iously, the more convinced he became that he had acted rightly, obeying a
wise instinct. He had wanted to spare his family the sight, including his
apprentice and associate; had wanted to spare him especially, for he loved
no one so much as Turu. For that reason he had concealed the rain of fall-
ing stars from him, had defrauded him of the sight. He believed in the good
spirits of sleep, especially of the sleep of youth. Moreover, if he remem-
bered rightly, the first sight of the heavenly sign had scarcely seemed to
betoken any momentary danger to the lives of the villagers. Rather, he had
instantly decided that the event was an omen of future disaster, and one
that concerned no one so closely as himself, the Weathermaker. The calamity,
when it came, would strike him alone. Something was in the offing, a threat
from that realm with which his office linked him. No matter what the form
in which it came, he would be the one who would chiefly bear its brunt. To
keep himself alert to this danger, to oppose it resolutely when it came, to
prepare his soul and accept it but not let it intimidate or dishonor him--
such was the resolve he came to, such was the command he thought he had re-
ceived from the great omen. The danger that loomed would call for a mature
and courageous man. For that reason it would not have been well to draw his
son into it, to have him as a fellow sufferer, or even as a partner in the
knowledge. For although he thought so highly of his son, he did not know
whether a young and untested person would be able to cope with the menace.

His son Turu, however, was most unhappy because he had slept through the
great spectacle. No matter how it was interpreted, it had been a great thing in
any case, and perhaps nothing of the sort would happen all the rest of his life.
For quite a while he was resentful toward his father on that account. Knecht
overcame the resentment by increased attentiveness and affection. He drew
Turu more and more into all the duties of his office. In anticipation of
things to come, he took greater pains to complete Turu's training and make
him as perfect an initiate and successor as possible. Although he rarely
spoke with him about the rain of stars, he admitted him with less and less
restraint into his secrets, his practices, his knowledge and researches, and
allowed the boy to accompany him on his walks and investigations of nature,
and to join him in experiments. All this he had previously shared with no one.

The winter came and passed, a damp and rather mild winter. No more stars
fell, no great and unusual things happened. The village was reassured. Dil-
igently, the hunters went out looking for game. On racks beside the huts
hung stiffly frozen bundles of hides, clacking against one another in windy
weather. Loads of wood were dragged in from the forest on long, smoothed
boards that rode lightly over the snow. It happened that just during the
brief period of hard frost an old woman died. She could not be buried at
once; for some days, until the ground thawed again, the frozen corpse was
laid out beside the door of her hut.

The spring partly confirmed the Weathermaker's forebodings. It was a drea-
ry, joyless spring, without ardor and sap, betrayed by the moon. The moon
was always tardy; the various signs that determined the day of sowing never
coincided. In the forest the flowers blossomed sparsely; buds shriveled on
the twigs. Knecht was deeply troubled, but did not show it; only Ada and
especially Turu could see how anxious he was. He not only undertook the
usual incantations, but also made private sacrifices, boiling savory, ar-
omatic brews and infusions for the demons, as well as cutting his beard
short on the night of the new moon and burning it in a mixture of resin
and damp bark that produced heavy smoke. He postponed as long as possible
the public ceremonies, the village sacrifices, the processions, and the
drum choruses. As long as possible he kept the accursed weather of this
evil spring as his private concern. But eventually, when the usual time
for sowing was already many days past, he had to report to the tribal mo-
ther. Sure enough, here too he encountered misfortune and trouble. The old
tribal mother, who was his good friend and had rather maternal feelings
for him, did not receive him. She was ill, lying in bed, and had handed o-
ver all her duties to her sister. This sister, as it happened, was distinct-
ly cool toward the Rainmaker. She did not have the older woman's austere,
straightforward character, was rather fond of distractions and frivolities,
and hence had taken a liking to Maro, the drummer and mountebank, who knew
how to entertain and flatter her. And Maro was Knecht's enemy. Knecht sens-
ed at their first conversation her coolness and dislike, although she in no
way questioned his proposals. He urged that they postpone the sowing for a
while longer, as well as any sacrifices or processions. She agreed to this,
but she had received him icily and treated him like a subordinate. She re-
fused his request to see the sick tribal mother, or at least to be allowed
to prepare medicine for her.

Knecht returned from this interview dejected, feeling poorer, and with a
bad taste in his mouth. For half a moon he tried in his own way to make
weather which would permit sowing. But the weather, which had so often
followed the same direction as the currents within him, remained unmanage-
able. It mocked all his efforts. Neither spells nor sacrifices worked. The
Rainmaker had no choice; he had to go to the tribal mother's sister again.
This time he was virtually pleading for patience, for postponement; and he
realized at once that she must have spoken with that clown Maro about him
and his affairs. For in the course of the conversation on the necessity of
setting the day for sowing, or else ordering ceremonies of public prayer,
the old woman showed off her knowledge and used a few expressions which she
could only have learned from Maro, the former Rainmaker's apprentice. Knecht
asked for three days' grace and then decided that the constellation was more
favorable. He set the sowing for the first day of the third quarter of the
moon. The old woman consented, and pronounced the ritual words. The decision
was proclaimed to the village, and everyone prepared for the rite of sowing.

But now, when everything seemed to be in hand for a while, the demons again
showed their malice. On the very day of the longed-for and carefully prepared
sowing, the old tribal mother died. The ritual sowing had to be postponed and
her funeral prepared instead. It was celebrated with great solemnity; behind
the new village mother, with her sisters and daughters, the Rainmaker took
his place in the robes reserved for great processions, wearing his tall, point-
ed fox-fur headdress. He was assisted by his son Turu, who struck the two-tone-
d hardwood clappers together. Great honors were shown to the deceased and to
her sister, the new tribal mother. Maro, leading the drummers, kept in the fore-
front of the mourners and won much attention and applause. The village wept and
celebrated, lamented and feasted, enjoyed the drum music and the sacrifices. It
was a fine day for all, but the sowing had again been put off. Knecht stood
through it all with dignity and composure, but he was profoundly saddened. It
seemed to him that along with the tribal mother he was burying all the good days
of his life.

Soon afterward, at the request of the new tribal mother, the sowing was like-
wise celebrated with special magnificence. Solemnly, the procession marched a-
round the fields; solemnly, the old woman scattered the first handfuls of seed
on the common land. To either side of her walked her sisters, each carrying a
pouch of grain into which the eldest dipped her hand. Knecht breathed a little
easier when this ceremony was finally completed.

But the seed sowed so festively was destined to bring no joy and no harvest. It
was a merciless year. Beginning with a relapse into wintry frosts, the weather
indulged in every imaginable caprice and spite that spring. In summer, when mea-
ger crops at last covered the fields thinly, half as tall as they should have
been, the last blow of all came: an incredible drought, the worst anyone could
remember. Week after week the sun blazed in a white haze of heat. The smaller
brooks dried up. Only a muddy marsh remained of the village pond, a paradise for
dragonflies and a monstrous brood of mosquitoes. Deep cracks gaped in the parched
earth. The villagers could see the crops withering. Now and then clouds gathered,
but the lightning storms remained dry. If a brief shower fell, it was followed
by days of a parching east wind. Lightning often struck tall trees, setting fire
to their withered tops.

"Turu," Knecht said to his son one day, "this will not turn out well. We have
all the demons against us. It began with the falling stars. I think it is going
to cost me my life. Remember this: If I must be sacrificed, assume my office at
once and insist that my body be burned and my ashes strewn on the fields. You
will suffer great hunger through the winter. But the evil spells will be broken.
You must see to it that no one touches the community's seed grain, under penalty
of death. Next year will be better, and people will say: 'Good that we have the
new young Weathermaker.' "

There was despair in the village. Maro incited the people. Frequently, threats
and curses were shouted at the Rainmaker. Ada fell sick and lay shaken by vomit-
ing and fever. The processions, the sacrifices, the long, heart-throbbing drum
choruses were useless. Knecht led them, for that was his duty, but when the peo-
ple scattered again, he stood alone, shunned by all. He knew what was necessary,
and he knew also that Maro had already besieged the tribal mother with demands
that he be sacrificed. For his own honor and his son's sake, he took the last
step himself. He dressed Turu in the ceremonial robes, went to the tribal mother
with him, and proposed him as his successor, at the same time offering himself
as a sacrifice. She looked at him for a short while with a curious, searching
glance. Then she nodded and assented.

The sacrifice was carried out that same day. The whole village would have attend-
ed, but many lay sick with dysentery. Ada, too, was gravely ill. Turu, in his
robes, with the tall fox-fur headdress, all but collapsed from heatstroke. All
the dignitaries and leaders of the village who were not ill joined in the process-
ion, including the tribal mother with two of her oldest sisters, and Maro, the
chief of the drum corps. Behind them followed the mass of the villagers. No one
insulted the old Rainmaker; the procession was silent and dejected. They marched
to the woods and sought out a large circular clearing that Knecht himself had ap-
pointed as the site of the sacrifice. Most of the men had their stone axes with
them to cut wood for the funeral pyre.

When they reached the clearing, they placed the Rainmaker in the center and the
dignitaries of the village formed a small ring around him, with the rest of the
crowd in a larger circle on the outside. There was an indecisive, embarrassed sil-
ence, until the Rainmaker himself spoke.

"I was your Rainmaker," he said. "I did my work as well as I could for many years.
Now the demons are against me; nothing I do succeeds. Therefore I have offered my-
self for a sacrifice. That will placate the demons. My son Turu will be your new
Rainmaker. Now kill me, and when I am dead do exactly as my son says. Farewell!
And now who will be my executioner? I recommend the drummer Maro; he is surely the
right man for the task."

He fell silent. No one stirred. Turu, flushed deeply under the heavy fur head-
dress, gave a tormented look around the circle. His father's mouth twisted mock-
ingly. At last the tribal mother stamped her foot furiously, beckoned to Maro
and shouted at him: "Go ahead! Take the axe and do it."

Maro, axe clutched in his hands, posted himself before his former teacher. He
hated him more than ever; the lines of scorn around those silent old lips irked
him bitterly. He raised the axe and swung it over his head. Taking aim, he held
it aloft, staring into the victim's face, waiting for him to close his eyes. But
Knecht did not; he kept his eyes wide open, fixed steadily on the man with the
axe. They were almost expressionless, but what expression there was hovered be-
tween pity and scorn.

In fury, Maro flung the axe away. "I won't do it," he murmured, and pressing
through the circle of dignitaries he lost himself in the crowd. Several villagers
laughed softly. The tribal mother had turned pale with rage, as much at Maro's
uselessness and cowardice as at the arrogance of the Rainmaker. She beckoned to
one of the oldest men, a quiet, dignified person who stood leaning on his axe and
seemed to be ashamed of this whole unseemly scene. He stepped forward and gave the
victim a brief, friendly nod. They had known each other since boyhood. And now the
victim willingly closed his eyes; Knecht closed them tightly, and bowed his head a
little. The old man struck with the axe. Knecht fell. Turu, the new Rainmaker, could
not say a word. He gave the necessary orders with gestures alone. Soon the pyre was
heaped up and the body laid on it. The solemn ritual of making fire with two conse-
crated sticks was Turu's first official act




　　　　　　　　　　　　 TWO


　　　　　　THE FATHER CONFESSOR




In THE DAYS when St. Hilarion was still alive, although far advanced in years,
there lived in the city of Gaza a man named Josephus Famulus who until his thir-
tieth year or longer had led a worldly life and studied the books of the pagans.
Then, through a woman whom he was pursuing, he had been instructed in the divine
doctrine and the sweetness of the Christian virtues, had submitted to holy bap-
tism, renounced his sins, and sat for several years at the feet of the presbyters
of his city. In particular he listened with burning curiosity to the popular tales
of the life of pious hermits in the desert, until one day, at the age of thirty-
six, he set out on the path already taken by St. Paul and St. Anthony, and which
so many devout souls have taken since. He gave his goods to the elders, to be dis-
tributed to the poor of the community, bade farewell to his friends at the city
gate, and wandered out into the desert, out of this vile world, to take up the life
of the penitent.

For many years the sun seared and parched him. He scraped his knees on rock and sand
as he prayed. He waited, fasting, for the sun to set before he chewed his few dates.
Devils tormented him with temptations, mockery, and trials, but he struck them down
with prayer, with penitence, with renunciation of self, in the ways we may find des-
cribed in the Lives of the blessed Fathers. Through many sleepless nights he gazed at
the stars, and even the stars provided temptations and confusions for him. He scanned
the constellations, for he had learned to read in them stories of the gods and sym-
bols of human nature. The presbyters held this science in abomination, but he was
still engrossed by fantasies and ideas he had entertained in his pagan days.

In those times eremites lived wherever the barren wilderness was broken by a spring,
a patch of vegetation, a large or small oasis. Some dwelt entirely alone, some in small
brotherhoods, as they are pictured in a painting in the Campo Santo of Pisa, practic-
ing poverty and love of neighbor. They became adepts of a languishing ars moriendi,
the art of dying: mortification of the ego and dying to the world, passing through
death to Him, the Redeemer, to the inalienable reward. They were attended by angels
and devils; they wrote hymns, expelled demons, healed and blessed, and seemed to have
assumed the duty of making up for the pleasure-seeking, brutality, and sensuality of
many past and future ages by engendering a mighty surge of enthusiasm and devotion, an
ecstatic excess of renunciation. Many of them probably were acquainted with ancient pa-
gan practices of purification, methods and exercises of spiritualization elaborated in
Asia for centuries. But nothing was said of such matters. These methods and yoga exer-
cises were no longer taught; they lay under the ban that Christianity more and more
sternly imposed upon everything pagan.

In some of these penitents the fervor of their life developed special gifts, gifts of
prayer, of healing by laying on of hands, of prophecy, of exorcism, gifts of judging
and punishing, comforting and blessing. In Josephus too a gift slumbered, and with the
passing years, as his hair began to gray, it slowly came to flower. It was the gift of
listening. Whenever a brother from one of the hermitages, or a child of the world har-
ried and troubled of soul, came to Joseph and told him of his deeds, sufferings, tempt-
ations, and missteps, related the story of his life, his struggle for goodness and his
failures in the struggle, or spoke of loss, pain, or sorrow, Joseph knew how to listen
to him, to open his ears and his heart, to gather the man's sufferings and anxieties in-
to himself and hold them, so that the penitent was sent away emptied and calmed. Slowly,
over long years, this function had taken possession of him and made an instrument of
him, an ear that people trusted.

His virtues were patience, a receptive passivity, and great discretion. More and more
frequently people came to him to pour out their hearts, to relieve their pent-up dis-
tress; but many of them, even though they had come a long way to his reed hut, would
find they lacked the courage to confess. They would writhe in shame, be coy about their
sins, sigh heavily, and remain silent for hours. But he behaved in the same way toward
all, whether they spoke freely or reluctantly, fluently or hesitantly, whether they
hurled out their secrets in a fury, or basked in self-importance because of them. He
regarded every man in the same way, whether he accused God or himself, whether he mag-
nified or minimized his sins and sufferings, whether he confessed a killing or merely
an act of lewdness, whether he lamented an unfaithful sweetheart or the loss of his
soul's salvation. It did not alarm Josephus when someone told of converse with demons
and seemed to be on the friendliest terms with the devil. He did not lose patience when
someone talked at great length while obviously concealing the main issue. Nor was he
stern when someone charged himself with delusory and invented sins. All the complaints,
confessions, charges, and qualms of conscience that were brought to him seemed to pour
into his ears like water into the desert sands. He seemed to pass no judgment upon them
and to feel neither pity nor contempt for the person confessing. Nevertheless, or per-
haps for that very reason, whatever was confessed to him seemed not to be spoken into
the void, but to be transformed, alleviated, and redeemed in the telling and being heard.
Only rarely did he reply with a warning or admonition, even more rarely did he give ad-
vice, let alone any order. Such did not seem to be his function, and his callers appar-
ently sensed that it was not. His function was to arouse confidence and to be receptive,
to listen patiently and lovingly, helping the imperfectly formed confession to take
shape, inviting all that was dammed up or encrusted within each soul to flow and pour
out. When it did, he received it and wrapped it in silence.

His response was always the same. At the end of every confession, the terrible ones
and the innocuous ones, the contrite ones and the vain ones, he would tell the peni-
tent to kneel beside him and recite the Lord's Prayer. Then he would dismiss him,
kissing him on the brow. Imposing penances and punishments was not his business, nor
did he even feel empowered to pronounce a proper priestly absolution. Neither judging
nor forgiving sin was his affair. By listening and understanding he seemed to take u-
pon himself a share of the transgression; he seemed to help to bear it. By remaining
silent, he seemed to bury what he had heard and consign it to the past. By praying
with the penitent after the confession, he seemed to receive him as his brother and
acknowledge him as his fellow. By kissing him, he seemed to bless him in a more bro-
therly than priestly, a more affectionate than ceremonial manner.

His reputation spread through the whole neighborhood of Gaza and beyond. Sometimes
he was even mentioned in the same breath as the great hermit and father confessor
Dion Pugil. The latter's fame, however, was already some ten years older, and was
founded on quite different abilities. For Father Dion was celebrated for being able
to read the souls of those who sought him out without recourse to words. He often
surprised a faltering penitent by charging him bluntly with his still unconfessed
sins. Joseph had heard a hundred amazing stories about his acuity, and would never
had ventured to compare himself with him. Father Dion was also a wise counselor of
erring souls, a great judge, chastiser, and rectifier. He assigned penances, casti-
gations, and pilgrimages, ordered marriages, compelled enemies to make up, and en-
joyed the authority of a bishop. Although he lived in the vicinity of Ascalon, peo-
ple came to him from as far away as Jerusalem and places even more remote.

Like most eremites and penitents, Josephus Famulus had lived through long years of
passionate and exhausting struggle. Although he had abandoned his life in the world,
had given away his house and possessions and left the city with its manifold invita-
tions to the pleasures of the senses, he was still saddled with his old self. Within
his body and soul were all those instincts which can lead a man into distress and
temptation. At first he had struggled primarily against his body; he had been stern
and harsh with it, subjecting it to hunger and thirst, to scars and calluses, until
it had gradually withered. But even in its gaunt ascetic's shell the old Adam could
shamefully catch him by surprise and vex him with foolish cravings and desires,
dreams and hallucinations. We know well that the devil lays special siege to penitents
and fugitives from this world. When, therefore, people seeking consolation and con-
fession occasionally visited him, he gratefully acknowledged their coming as a sign
of grace, and a consolation to him in his ascetic's life. For he had been given a
meaning beyond himself. A task had been conferred upon him. He could serve others,
or serve God as an instrument for drawing souls to Him.

That had been a wonderful and elevating feeling. But in the course of time he had
learned that even the goods of the soul belong to the earthly realm and can become
temptations and snares. For often, when such a traveler arrived, either on foot or
riding, stopped at his cave for a drink of water, and asked the hermit to hear his
confession, a feeling of satisfaction and pleasure would creep over our Joseph. He
felt well pleased with himself. As soon as he recognized this vanity and self-love,
he was profoundly alarmed. Often he knelt to beg God's forgiveness and ask that no
more penitents be sent him in his unworthiness, neither from the huts of the ascetic
brethren in the vicinity nor from the villages and towns of the world. But when for
a while no one came to confess, he found himself not much better off, and on the o-
ther hand when the stream of penitents resumed, he caught himself sinning once more.
After a time, listening to some confessions, he found himself subject to spasms of
coldness and lovelessness, even to contempt for the penitents. With a sigh he accept-
ed these struggles too, and there were periods during which he inflicted solitary
humiliations and penances upon himself after each confession. Moreover, he made it a
rule to treat all penitents not only as brothers, but also with a kind of special
deference. The less he liked the person, the more respectfully he behaved toward him,
for he regarded each one as a messenger from God, sent to test him. Belatedly, after
many years, when he was already approaching old age, he arrived at a certain equani-
mity. To those who lived in the vicinity he seemed to be a man without faults who had
found his peace in God.

But peace, too, is a living thing and like all life it must wax and wane, accommodate,
withstand trials, and undergo changes. Such was the case with the peace Josephus Famulus
enjoyed. It was unstable, visible one moment, gone the next, sometimes near as a candle
carried in the hand, sometimes as remote as a star in the wintry sky. And in time a new
and special kind of sin and temptation more and more often made life difficult for him.
It was not a strong, passionate emotion such as indignation or a sudden rush of in-
stinctual urges. Rather, it seemed to be the opposite. It was a feeling very easy to
bear in its initial stages, for it was scarcely perceptible; a condition without any
real pain or deprivation, a slack, lukewarm, tedious state of the soul which could only
be described in negative terms as a vanishing, a waning, and finally a complete absence
of joy. There are days when the sun does not shine and the rain does not pour, but the
sky sinks quietly into itself, wraps itself up, is gray but not black, sultry, but not
with the tension of an imminent thunderstorm. Gradually, Joseph's days became like this
as he approached old age. Less and less could he distinguish the mornings from the eve-
nings, feast days from ordinary days, hours of rapture from hours of dejection. Every-
thing ran sluggishly along in limp tedium and joylessness. This is old age, he thought
sadly. He was sad because he had expected aging and the gradual extinction of his pass-
ions to bring a brightening and easing of his life, to take him a step nearer to harmony
and mature peace of soul, and now age seemed to be disappointing and cheating him by of-
fering nothing but this weary, gray, joyless emptiness, this feeling of chronic satiation.
Above all he felt sated: by sheer existence, by breathing, by sleep at night, by life in
his cave on the edge of the little oasis, by the eternal round of evenings and mornings,
by the passing of travelers and pilgrims, camel riders and donkey riders, and most of
all by the people who came to visit him, by those foolish, anxious, and childishly cred-
ulous people who had this craving to tell him about their lives, their sins and their
fears, their temptations and self-accusations. Sometimes it all seemed to him like the
small spring of water that collected in its stone basin in the oasis, flowed through
grass for a while, forming a small brook, and then flowed on out into the desert sands,
where after a brief course it dried up and vanished. Similarly, all these confessions,
these inventories of sins, these lives, these torments of conscience, big and small, ser-
ious and vain, all of them came pouring into his ear, by the dozens, by the hundreds,
more and more of them. But his ear was not dead like the desert sands. His ear was alive
and could not drink, swallow, and absorb forever. It felt fatigued, abused, glutted. It
longed for the flow and splashing of words, confessions, anxieties, charges, self-con-
demnations to cease; it longed for peace, death, and stillness to take the place of this
endless flow.

That was it, he wished for the end. He was tired, had had enough and more than e-
nough. His life had become stale and worthless. Things went so far with him that
at times he felt tempted to put an end to it, to punish and extinguish himself, as the
traitor Judas had done when he hanged himself. Just as the devil had plagued him in the
earlier stages of his ascetic's life by smuggling into his soul the desires, notions, and
dreams of sensual and worldly pleasures, so the evil one now assailed him with ideas of
self-destruction, so that he found himself considering every tree with the view to its
holding a noose, every cliff in the vicinity with a view to casting himself from its top.
He resisted the temptation. He fought. He did not yield. But day and night he lived in a
fire of self-hatred and craving for death. Life had become unbearable and hateful.

To such a pass had Joseph come. One day, when he was again standing on one of the cliffs,
he saw in the distance between earth and sky two or three tiny figures. Obviously they
were travelers, perhaps pilgrims, perhaps visitors who intended to call on him for the
usual reason. And suddenly he was seized by an irresistible craving to leave as fast as
possible, to get away from this place at once, to escape from this life. The craving
that seized him was so overpowering, so instinctive, that it swept away all the thoughts,
objections, and scruples that naturally came to him--for how could a pious penitent have
obeyed an impulse without twinges of conscience? But he was already running. He sped
back to the cave where he had dwelt through so many years of struggle, where he had ex-
perienced so many exaltations and defeats. In reckless haste he gathered up a few hand-
fuls of dates and a gourd of water, stuffed them into his old traveling pouch, slung it
over his shoulder, took up his staff, and left the green peace of his little home, a fug-
itive and restless roamer, fleeing away from God and man, and most of all fleeing from
what he had formerly thought the best he had to offer, his function and his mission.

At first he tore on frantically, as if those figures in the distance whom he had seen
from the cliff were enemies who would pursue him. But after an hour of tramping, his an-
xious haste ebbed away. Movement tired him pleasantly, and he stopped to rest, although
he did not allow himself to eat--it had become a sacred habit for him to take no food be-
fore sunset. While he rested, his reason, skilled in self-examination, once more asserted
itself. It looked into his instinctive action, seeking to form a judgment. And it did not
disapprove, wild though the action might seem, but rather viewed it with benevolence. His
reason decided that for the first time in a long while he was doing something harmless
and innocent. This was flight, a sudden and rash flight, granted, but not a shameful one.
He had abandoned a post which he was no longer fit for. By running away he had admitted
his failure to himself and to Him who might be observing him. He had given up a daily re-
peated, useless struggle and confessed himself beaten. There was nothing grand, heroic,
and saintly about that, his reason decided, but it was sincere and seemed to have been in-
escapable. Now he found himself wondering that he had attempted this flight so late, that
he had held on for so long. It now seemed to him that the doggedness with which he had for
so long defended a lost position had been a mistake. Or rather that it had been prompted
by his egotism, his old Adam. Now he thought he understood why this obstinacy had led to
such evil, to such diabolic consequences; to such division and lethargy in his soul, and
even to demonic possession, for what else could he call his urge toward death and self-
destruction? Certainly a Christian ought to be no enemy of death; certainly a penitent and
saint ought to regard his life as an offering; but the thought of suicide was utterly dia-
bolic and could arise only in a soul no longer ruled and guarded by God's angels, but by
evil demons.

For a while he sat lost in thought and deeply crestfallen, and finally, shaken and pro-
foundly contrite. For from the perspective that a few miles of tramping had given him, he
saw the life he had been living with fuller awareness, the miserable life of an aging man
who had gone astray, so much so that he had been haunted by the gruesome temptation of
hanging himself from the branch of a tree like the Saviour's betrayer. If the idea of vol-
untary death so horrified him, there certainly lingered in this horror a remnant of prime-
val, pre-Christian, ancient pagan knowledge: knowledge of the age-old custom of human sac-
rifice, whereby the king, the saint, the chosen man of the tribe gave up his life for the
general welfare, often by his own hand. But this echo of forbidden heathen practices was
only one aspect of the matter that made it so horrifying. Even more terrible was the
thought that after all the Redeemer's death on the cross had also been a voluntary human
sacrifice. As he thought about it he realized that a germ of this awareness had indeed been
present in that longing for suicide: a bold-faced urge to sacrifice himself and thus in
an outrageous manner to imitate the Saviour--or outrageously to imply that His work of re-
demption had not been enough. He was deeply shocked by this thought, but also grateful
that he had now escaped that peril.

For a long time he considered the penitent Joseph who now, instead of imitating Judas or
Christ, had taken flight and thus once again put himself into God's hand. Shame and de-
jection grew in him the more plainly he recognized the hell from which he had just es-
caped. After a while his misery lumped in his throat like a choking morsel. It grew into
an unbearable sense of oppression, and suddenly found release in a torrent of tears that
miraculously helped him. How long he had been unable to weep! The tears flowed, his eyes
were blurred, but the deadly strangulation was eased, and when he became aware of himself
again, tasted the salt on his lips, and realized that he had been weeping, he felt for a
moment as if he had become a child again and knew nothing of evil. He smiled, slightly
ashamed of his weeping. At last he rose and continued his journey. He felt uncertain, for
he did not know where his flight was leading him and what would become of him. He was like
a child, he thought, but there was no longer any conflict or will within him. He moved on
easily, as if he were being led, as if a distant, kind voice were calling and coaxing him,
as if his journey were not a flight but a homecoming. Now he was growing tired, and reason
too fell still, or rested, or decided that it was dispensable.

Joseph spent the night at a water hole where several camels and a small company of travel-
ers were camped. Since there were two women among them, he contented himself with a gesture
of greeting and avoided falling into talk. After he had eaten a few dates at sunset, prayed,
and lain down to rest, he overheard the conversation between two men, one old and one some-
what younger, for they were lying close by him. It was only a fragment of their talk that he
could hear; the rest was lost in whispers. But even this small passage stirred his interest.
It gave him matter for thought through half the night.

"All right," he heard the old man's voice saying. "It's fine that you want to go to a pious
man and make your confession. These people understand many things, let me tell you. They
know a thing or two, and some of them are skilled in magic. When they just call out a word
to a springing lion, the beast crouches, tucks his tail between his legs, and slinks away.
They can tame lions, I tell you. One of them was so holy that his tame lions actually dug
him his grave when he died, neatly scraped the earth into a mound over him, and for a long
time two of them kept watch over the grave day and night. And it isn't only lions they can
tame, these people. One of them gave a Roman centurion a piece of his mind. That was a cruel
bastard, that soldier, and the worst whoreson in all Ascalon. But the hermit so kneaded
his wicked heart that the man stole away frightened as a mouse and looked for a hole to
hide in. Afterward he was almost unrecognizable, he'd become so quiet and meek. On the o-
ther hand, the man died soon afterward — that's something to think about."

"The holy man?"

"Oh no, the centurion. His name was Varro. After the holy man gave him such a jolt, he went
to pieces fast--had the fever twice and was a dead man three months later. Oh well, no
great loss. But still, I've often thought the hermit didn't just drive the devil out of him. He
probably said a little spell that put the man six feet under."

"Such a pious man? I can't believe that."

"Believe it or not, my friend, but from that day on the man was changed, not to say
bewitched, and three months later. . ."

There was silence for a little while. Then the younger man revived the conversation:
"There's a holy man who must live somewhere right around here. They say he lives all a-
lone near a small spring on the Gaza road. His name is Josephus, Josephus Famulus. I've
heard a lot about him."

"Have you now? Like what?"

"He's supposed to be awfully pious and never to look at a woman. If a few camels happen
to come by his place and there's a woman on one of them, no matter how heavily veiled,
he just bolts into his cave. Lots of people have gone to confess to him--thousands."

"I guess he can't be so famous or else I would have heard of him. What kind of thing does
he do, this Famulus of yours?"

"Oh, you just go to confess to him, and I suppose people wouldn't go if he wasn't good
and didn't understand things. The story is he hardly says a word, doesn't scold or bawl
anyone out, doesn't order penances or anything like that. He's supposed to be gentle and
shy."

"But if he doesn't scold and doesn't punish and doesn't open his mouth, what does he do?"

"They say he just listens and sighs marvelously and makes the sign of the cross."

"Sounds like a quack saint to me. You wouldn't be so foolish as to apply to this silent Joe,
would you?"

"Yes, that's what I mean to do. I'll find him. It can't be much farther from here. This eve-
ning there was a poor monk standing around the waterhole here, you know. I'm going to ask
him tomorrow morning. He looks like a hermit himself."

The old man flared up. "You'd be wasting your time. A man who only listens and sighs and is
afraid of women can't do or understand anything. No, I'll tell you the one to go to. It's a
bit far from here, beyond Ascalon, but he's the best hermit and confessor there is. Dion is
his name, and he's called Dion Pugil--that means 'the boxer,' because he piles right into all
the devils, and when somebody confesses his sins, my friend, Pugil doesn't sigh and keep his
counsel. He sounds off and gives it to the man straight from the shoulder. They say he actu-
ally beats some till they're black and blue. He made one man kneel bare-kneed on the rocks
all night long and on top of that ordered him to give forty pennies to the poor. There's a
hermit for you, my boy, he'll make you sit up and take notice. When he looks at you, you'll
shake; his eyes go right through you. None of this sighing business. That man has the stuff.
If a man can't sleep or has bad dreams and visions, Pugil will put him on his feet again, let
me tell you. I don't say this on hearsay; I know because I've been to him myself. Yes I have
--I may be a poor fool, but I betook myself to the hermit Dion, the man of God, God's boxer.
I went there in misery, nothing but filth and shame on my conscience, and I left clean and
bright as the morning star, and that's as true as my name is David. Remember what I tell you:
the name is Dion, called Pugil. You go see him as soon as you can, and you'll be amazed.
Prefects, presbyters, and bishops have gone to him for advice."

"Yes," the younger man said, "next time I'm in that neighborhood I'll consider it. But today
is today and here is here, and since I'm here today and the hermit Josephus is located in
these parts and I've heard so much good about him. . ."

"Good? What so commends this Famulus to you?"

"I like the way he doesn't scold and make a fuss. I just like that, I tell you. I'm not a
centurion and I'm not a bishop either; I'm just a nobody and I'm sort of timid myself. I
couldn't stand a lot of fire and brimstone. God knows, I don't have anything against being
treated gently--that's just the way I am."

"Treated gently--I like that! When you've confessed and done penance and taken your punish-
ment and purged yourself, all right, maybe then it's time to treat you gently. But not when
you're unclean and stand before your confessor and judge stinking like a jackal."

"All right, all right. Not so loud--the others want to sleep."

Suddenly the younger man chuckled. "By the way, I just remembered a funny story I
heard about him."

"About whom?"

"About the hermit Josephus. You see, after somebody's told his story and confessed, the
hermit blesses him and before he leaves gives him a kiss on the cheek or the brow."

"Does he now? He certainly has peculiar habits."

"And, you see, he's so shy of women. They say that a harlot from the neighborhood once went
to him in man's clothing and he didn't notice and listened to her lies, and when she was
finished confessing he bowed to her and solemnly gave her a kiss."

The old man burst into titters; the other hastily shushed him, and thereafter Joseph heard
nothing more than half- suppressed laughter that went on for a while.

He looked up at the sky. The crescent moon hung thin and keen beyond the tops of the
palm trees. He shivered in the cold of the night. It had been strange, like looking into a
distorting mirror, listening to the camel drivers talking about him and the office which he
had just abandoned. Strange but instructive. And so a harlot had played this joke on him.
Well, that was not the worst, though it was bad enough. He lay for a long time pondering
the conversation between the two men. And when, very late, he was at last able to fall a-
sleep, it was because his meditations had not been fruitless. He had come to a conclusion,
to a resolve, and with this new resolve fixed firmly in his heart he slept deeply until
dawn.

His resolve was the very one that the younger of the two camel drivers had not taken. He
had decided to take the older man's advice and pay a visit to Dion, called Pugil, of whom
he had heard for so many years and whose praises had been so emphatically sung this very
night. That famous confessor, adviser, and judge of souls would surely have advice, judg-
ment, punishment for him, would surely know the proper way for him. Josephus would go to
him as a spokesman of God and willingly obey whatever course he prescribed.

He left while the two men were still asleep, and after a tiring tramp reached a spot which
he knew was inhabited by pious brethren. From there he hoped he would be able to reach the
usual caravan route to Ascalon.

The place he reached toward evening was a small, lovely green oasis. He saw towering
trees, heard a goat bleating, and thought he detected the outlines of roofs amid the green
shadows. It seemed to him too that he could scent the presence of men. As he hesitantly drew
closer, he felt as if he were being watched. He stopped and looked around. Under one of the
outermost trees, he saw a figure sitting bolt upright. It was an old man with a hoary beard
and a dignified but stern and rigid face, staring at him. The man had evidently been look-
ing at him for some time. His eyes were keen and hard, but without expression, like the eyes
of a man who is used to observing but without either curiosity or sympathy, who lets people
and things approach him and tries to discern their nature, but neither attracts nor invites
them.

"Praise be to Jesus Christ," Joseph said.

The old man answered in a murmur.

"I beg your pardon," Joseph said. "Are you a stranger like myself, or are you an
inhabitant of this beautiful oasis?"

"A stranger," the white-bearded man said.

"Perhaps you can tell me, your Reverence, whether it is possible to reach the road to
Ascalon from here?"

"It is possible," the old man said. Now he slowly stood up, rather stiffly, a gaunt giant.
He stood and gazed out into the empty expanse of desert. Joseph felt that this aged giant
had little wish for conversation, but he ventured one more query.

"Permit me just one other question, your Reverence," he said politely, and saw the man's
eyes return from his abstraction and focus on him. Coolly, attentively, they looked at him.

"Do you by any chance know where Father Dion, called Dion Pugil, may be found?"

The stranger's brows contracted and his eyes became a trace colder.

"I know him," he said curtly.

"You know him?" Joseph exclaimed. "Oh, then tell me, for it is to Father Dion I am
journeying."

From his superior height the old man scrutinized him. He took his time answering. At last
he stepped backward to his tree trunk, slowly settled to the ground again, and sat leaning
against the trunk in his previous position. With a slight movement of his hand he invited
Joseph to sit also. Submissively, Joseph obeyed the gesture, feeling as he sat down the great
weariness in his limbs; but he forgot this promptly in order to focus his full attention on
the old man, who seemed lost in meditation. A trace of unfriendly sternness appeared upon
his dignified countenance. But that was overlaid by another expression, virtually another
face that seemed like a transparent mask: an expression of ancient and solitary suffering
which pride and dignity would not allow him to express.

A long time passed before the old man's eyes returned to him. Then he again scrutinized
Joseph sharply and suddenly asked in a commanding tone: ""Who are you?"

"I am a penitent," Joseph said. "I have led a life of withdrawal from the world for many
years."

"I can see that. I asked who you are."

"My name is Joseph, Joseph Famulus."

When Joseph gave his name, the old man did not stir, but his eyebrows drew together so
sharply that for a while his eyes became almost invisible. He seemed to be stunned, trou-
bled, or disappointed by the information he had received. Or perhaps it was only a tiring
of the eyes, a distractedness, some small attack of weakness such as old people are prone
to. At any rate he remained utterly motionless, kept his eyes shut for a while, and when
he opened them again their gaze seemed changed, seemed to have become still older, still
lonelier, still flintier and long-suffering, if that were possible. Slowly, his lips parted and he
asked: "I have heard of you. Are you the one to whom the people go to confess?"

Abashed, Joseph said he was. He felt this recognition as an unpleasant exposure. For the
second time on his journey he was ashamed to encounter his reputation.

Again the old man asked in his terse way: "And so now you are on your way to Dion
Pugil? What do you want of him?"

"I would like to confess to him."

"What do you expect to gain by that?"

"I don't know. I trust him, and in fact it seems to me that a voice from above has sent me
to him."

"And after you have confessed to him, what then?"

"Then I shall do what he commands."

"And suppose he advises or commands you wrongly?"

"I shall not ask whether it is right or wrong, but simply obey."

The old man said no more. The sun had moved far down toward the horizon. A bird cried
among the leaves of the tree. Since the old man remained silent, Joseph stood up. Shyly,
he reverted to his request.

"You said you knew where Father Dion can be found. May I ask you to tell me the place
and describe the way to it?"

The old man's lips contracted in a kind of feeble smile. "Do you think you will be
welcome to him?" he asked softly.

Strangely disconcerted by the question, Joseph did not reply. He stood there abashed.At
last he said: "May I at least hope to see you again?"

The old man nodded. "I shall be sleeping here and stay until shortly after sunrise," he
replied. "Go now, you are tired and hungry."

With a respectful bow, Joseph walked on, and as dusk fell arrived at the little settle-
ment. Here, much as in a monastery, lived a group of so-called cenobites, Christians
from various towns and villages who had built shelters in this solitary place in order
to devote themselves without disturbance to a simple, pure life of quiet contemplation.
Joseph was given water, food, and a place to sleep, and since it was apparent how tired
he was, his hosts spared him questions and conversation. One cenobite recited a prayer
while the others knelt; all pronounced the Amen together.

At any other time the community of these pious men would have been a joy to him, but
now he had only one thing in mind, and at dawn he hastened back to the place where he
had left the old man. He found him lying asleep on the ground, rolled in a thin mat,
and sat down under the trees off to one side, to await the man's awakening. Soon the
sleeper became restive. He awoke, unwrapped himself from the mat, and stood up awkward-
ly, stretching his stiffened limbs. Then he knelt and made his prayer. When he rose a-
gain, Joseph approached and bowed silently.

"Have you already eaten?" the stranger asked.

"No. It is my habit to eat only once a day, and only after sunset. Are you hungry, your
Reverence?"

"We are on a journey," the man replied, "and we are both no longer young men. It is
better for us to eat a bite before we go on."

Joseph opened his pouch and offered some of his dates. He had also received a millet
roll from the friendly folk with whom he had spent the night, and he now shared this
with the old man.

"We can go," the old man said after they had eaten.

"Oh, are we going together?" Joseph exclaimed with pleasure.

"Certainly. You have asked me to guide you to Dion. Come along."

Joseph looked at him in happy astonishment. "How kind you are, your Reverence!" he ex-
claimed, and began framing ceremonious thanks. But the stranger silenced him with a curt
gesture.

"God alone is kind," he said. "Let us go now. And stop calling me 'your Reverence.' What
is the point of civilities and courtesies between two old hermits?"

The tall man set off with long strides, and Joseph kept pace with him. The sun had risen
fully. The guide seemed sure of his direction, and promised that by noon they would reach
a shady spot where they could rest during the hours of hottest sun. Thereafter they spoke
no more on their way.

When they reached the resting place after several strenuous hours in the baking heat,
and lay down in the shade of some vast boulders, Joseph again addressed his guide. He
asked how many days' marches they would need to reach Dion Pugil.

"That depends on you alone," the old man said.

"On me?" Joseph exclaimed. "Oh, if it depended on me alone I would be standing before
him right now."

The old man did not seem any more inclined to conversation than before.

"We shall see," he said curtly, turning on his side and closing his eyes. Joseph did not
like to be in the position of observing him while he slumbered; he moved quietly off to
one side, lay down, and unexpectedly fell asleep, for he had lain long awake during the
night. His guide roused him when the time for resuming their journey had come.

Late in the afternoon they arrived at a camping place with water, trees, and a bit of grass.
Here they drank and washed, and the old man decided to make a halt. Joseph timidly objected.

"You said today," he pointed out, "that it depended on me how soon or late I would reach
Father Dion. I would gladly press on for many hours if I could actually reach him today or
tomorrow."

"Oh no," the other man replied. "We have gone far enough for the day."

"Forgive me," Joseph said, "but can't you understand my impatience?"

"I understand it. But it will not help you."

"Why did you say it depends on me?"

"It is as I said. As soon as you are sure of your desire to confess and know that you are
ready to make the confession, you will be able to make it."

"Even today?"

"Even today."

Astonished, Joseph stared at the quiet old face.

"Is it possible?" he cried, overwhelmed. "Are you yourself Father Dion?"

The old man nodded.

"Rest here under the trees," he said in a kindly voice, "but don't sleep. Compose yourself,
and I too will rest and compose myself. Then you may tell me what you crave to tell me."

Thus Joseph suddenly found himself at his goal. Now he could scarcely understand how it was
that he had not recognized the venerable man sooner, after having walked beside him for an
entire day. He withdrew, knelt and prayed, and rallied his thoughts. After an hour he re-
turned and asked whether Dion was ready.

And now he could confess. Now all that he had lived through for years, all that for a long
time seemed to have totally lost meaning, poured from his lips in the form of narrative,
lament, query, self-accusation--the whole story of his life as a Christian and ascetic,
which he had intended for purification and sanctification and which in the end had become
such utter confusion, obscuration, and despair. He spoke also of his most recent experi-
ences, his flight and the feeling of release and hope that this flight had given him, how
it was that he had decided to go to Dion, the encounter of the previous evening, his feel-
ing of instant trust and affection for the older man, but also how in the course of this
day he had several times condemned him as cold and peculiar, or at any rate moody.

The sun was already low by the time he had finished speaking. Old Dion had listened with
unflagging attentiveness, refraining from the slightest interruption or question. And even
now, when the confession was over, not a word fell from his lips. He rose clumsily, looked
at Joseph with great friendliness, then stooped, kissed him on the brow, and made the sign
of the cross over him. Only later did it occur to Joseph that this was the same brotherly
gesture of forbearance with which he himself had dismissed so many penitents.

Soon afterward they ate, said their prayers, and lay down to sleep. Joseph reflected for a
while. He had actually counted on a strong upbraiding and a strict sermon. Nevertheless he
was neither disappointed nor uneasy. Dion's look and fraternal kiss had comforted him. He
felt inwardly tranquil, and soon fell into a beneficial sleep.

Without wasting words, the old man took him along next morning. They covered a good deal of
ground that day, and after another four or five days reached Dion's cell. There they dwelt.
Joseph helped Dion with his daily chores, became acquainted with his routine and shared it.
It was not so very different from the life he himself had led for so many years, except that
now he was no longer alone. He lived in the shadow and protection of another man, and for
that reason it was after all a totally different life. From the surrounding settlements, from As-
calon and from even further away, came seekers of advice and penitents eager to confess. At
first Joseph hastily withdrew each time such visitors came along, and reappeared only after
they had left. But more and more often Dion called him back, as one calls a servant, ordered
him to bring water or perform some other menial task; and after this had gone on for some
time Joseph grew accustomed to attending a confession every so often, and listening unless
the penitent himself objected. But most of them were glad not to have to sit or kneel before
the dreaded confessor Pugil alone; there was something reassuring about the presence of this
quiet, kind-looking, and assiduous helper. In this way Joseph gradually became familiar with
Dion's way of listening to confession, offering consolation, intervening and scolding, pun-
ishing and advising. Only rarely did Joseph venture to question Dion as he did one day after
a scholar or literary man paid a call, since he was passing by.

This man, as became apparent from his stories, had friends among the magi and astrologers.
Since he was stopping for a rest, he sat for a while with the two old ascetics, a civil and
loquacious guest. He talked long, learnedly, and eloquently about the stars and about the pil-
grimage which man as well as all his gods must make through all the signs of the zodiac from
the beginning to the end of every aeon. He spoke of Adam, the first man, maintaining that he
was one and the same as the crucified Jesus, and he called the Redemption Adam's passage from
the Tree of Knowledge to the Tree of Life. The serpent of Paradise, he contended, was the
guardian of the Sacred Fount, of the dark depths from whose night-black waters all forms, all
men and gods, arose.

Dion listened attentively to this man, whose Syrian was heavily sprinkled with Greek, and Jo-
seph wondered at his patience. It bothered him, in fact, that Dion did not lash out against
these heathen errors. On the contrary, the clever monologues seemed to entertain Dion and
engage his sympathy, for he not only listened with keen attention, but also smiled and nodded
at certain phrases, as though he were highly pleased.

After the man had left, Joseph asked, in a zealot's tone, with something bordering on rebuke:
"How could you have listened so calmly to the false doctrines of this unbelieving heathen? It
seemed to me that you listened not only with patience, but actually with sympathy and a cer-
tain amount of appreciation. How could you fail to oppose him? Why didn't you try to refute
this man, to strike down his errors and convert him to faith in our Lord?"

Dion's head swayed on his thin, wrinkled neck. "I did not refute him because it would have
been useless, or rather, because I would not have been able to. In eloquence and in making
associations, in knowledge of mythology and the stars, this man is far ahead of me. I would
not have prevailed against him. And furthermore, my son, it is neither my business nor yours
to attack a man's beliefs and tell him these are lies and errors. I admit that I listened to
this clever man with a good measure of appreciation. I enjoyed him because he spoke so well
and knew a great deal, but above all because he reminded me of my youth. For in my younger
days I devoted a great deal of my time to just such studies. Those stories from mythology,
which the stranger charted about so gracefully, are by no means benighted. They are the ideas
and parables of a religion which we no longer need because we have acquired faith in Jesus,
the sole Redeemer. But for those who have not yet found our faith, perhaps never can find it,
their own faith, deriving from the ancient wisdom of their fathers, is rightly deserving of
respect. Of course our faith is different, entirely different. But because our faith does not
need the doctrine of constellations and aeons, of the primal waters and universal mothers
and similar symbols, that does not mean that such doctrines are lies and deception."

"But our faith is superior," Joseph exclaimed. "And Jesus died for all men. Therefore those
who know Him must oppose those outmoded doctrines and put the new, right teaching in their
place."

"We have done so long ago, you and I and so many others," Dion said calmly. "We are believ-
ers because the faith, the power of the Redeemer and His death for the salvation of all men,
has overwhelmed us. But those others, those who construct mythologies and theologies of the
zodiac and out of ancient doctrines, have not been overwhelmed by that power, not yet, and it
is not for us to compel them. Didn't you notice, Joseph, how gracefully and skillfully this
mythologist could talk and compose his metaphors, and how comfortable he was in doing so,
how serenely he lives in his wisdom of images and symbols? That is a token that this man is not
oppressed by suffering, that he is content, that all is well with him. Such as we have nothing
to say to men for whom all goes well. Before a man needs redemption and the faith that redeems,
before his old faith departs from him and he stakes all he has on the gamble of belief in the
miracle of salvation, things must go ill for him, very ill indeed. He must have experienced
sorrow and disappointment, bitterness and despair. The waters must rise up to his neck. No,
Joseph, let us leave this learned pagan in the happiness of his philosophy, his ideas, and his
eloquence. Tomorrow perhaps, or perhaps in a year or in ten years something may happen that
will shatter his arts and his philosophy; perhaps the woman he loves will die or his only son
will be killed, or he will fall into sickness and poverty. Should that occur and we meet him
again, we will try to help him; we will tell him how we have tried to master suffering. And
if he then asks us: 'Why didn't you tell me that yesterday or ten years ago?' we will reply:
'You were too fortunate at the time.' "

He subsided into a grave silence for a while. Then, as if rousing himself from reveries of
the past, he added: "I myself once amused myself with the philosophies of the fathers, and
even after I was aiready on the way of the Cross, playing with theology often gave me plea-
sure, though grief enough too. My thoughts dwelt mostly on the Creation of the world, and
with the fact that at the end of the work of Creation everything in the world should have
been good, for we are told: 'God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very
good.' But in reality it was good and perfect only for a moment, the moment of Paradise,
and by the very next moment guilt and a curse had entered into the perfection, for Adam had
eaten of the tree which he was forbidden to eat of. There were teachers who said: the God
who made the Creation and along with it Adam and the Tree of Knowledge is not the sole and
highest God, but only a part of him, or an inferior god, the Demiurge. Creation was not good,
they said, but a failure; and therefore created being was accursed and given over to evil
for an aeon until He himself, God the One Spirit, decided to put an end to the accursed aeon
by means of his Son. Thereafter, they taught, and I thought as they did, the Demiurge and
his Creation began to perish, and the world will continue gradually to fade away until in
a new aeon there will be no Creation, no world, no flesh, no lust and sin, no carnal beget-
ting, bearing, and dying, but a perfect, spiritual, and redeemed world will arise, free of
the curse of Adam, free of eternal damnation and the urges of cupidity, generation, birth,
and death. We blamed the Demiurge more than the. first man for the present evils of the
world. We thought that if the Demiurge had really been God, he would have made Adam differ-
ently or have spared him temptation. And so at the end of our reasoning we had two Gods,
the Creator God and God the Father, and we did not blanch at passing judgment on the first.
There were even some among us who went a step further and contended that the Creation was
not God's work at all, but the devil's. We thought all our clever ideas were going to be
helpful to the Redeemer and the coming aeon of the Spirit, and so we reasoned out gods and
worlds and cosmic plans. We disputed and theologized, until one day I fell into a fever and
became deathly ill. In my deliriums the Demiurge continually filled my mind. I had to wage
war and spill blood, and the visions and nightmares grew more and more ghastly, until one
night when my fever was raging I thought I had to kill my own mother in order to undo my
carnal birth. Yes, in those deliriums the devil harried me with all his hounds. But I re-
covered, and to the disappointment of my former friends I returned to life a silent, stupid,
and dull person who soon regained physical strength but never recovered his pleasure in phil-
osophizing. For during the days and nights of my convalescence, when those horrible fevered
visions had vanished and I was sleeping almost all the time, I felt the Redeemer with me in
every waking moment. I felt strength pouring in and out of me from Him, and when I was well
again I was aware of a deep sadness that I could no longer feel His presence. I then felt a
great longing for that presence, and regarded this longing as my most precious possession. But
as soon as I began listening to disputations again, I could feel how this longing was in dan-
ger of vanishing, of sinking into thoughts and words as water sinks into sand. To make a long
story short, my friend, that was the end of my cleverness and theology. Since then I have
been one of the simple souls. But I do not despise and do not like to bait those who know
how to philosophize and mythologize and play those games I myself once indulged in. Just as
I had to rest content with letting the incomprehensible relations and identities of Demiurge
and Spirit-God, Creation and Redemption, remain unsolved riddles for me, so I must also rest
content with the fact that I cannot convert philosophers into believers. That is not my pro-
vince."


Once, after a man had confessed to murder and adultery, Dion said to his assistant: Murder
and adultery--it sounds atrocious and grandiose, and certainly it is bad enough, I grant
you. But I tell you, Joseph, in reality these people in the world are not real sinners at
all. Whenever I attempt to put myself entirely into the minds of any of them, they strike
me as absolutely like children. They are not decent, good, and noble; they are selfish,
lustful, overbearing, and wrathful, but in reality and at bottom they are innocent, inno-
cent in the same way as children."

"And yet," Joseph said, "you often belabor them mightily and paint them a vivid picture
of hell."

"Exactly. They are children, and when they have pangs of conscience and come to confess,
they want to be taken seriously and reprimanded seriously. At least that is my view. You
went about it differently; you didn't scold and punish and deal out penances, but were
friendly and sent the penitents off with a brotherly kiss. I don't mean to criticize you,
but that wouldn't be my way."

"No doubt," Joseph said hesitantly. "But then tell me why, after I made my confession, you
did not treat me as you would your other penitents, but silently kissed me and said not a
word about penances?"

Dion Pugil fixed his piercing eyes upon him. "Was what I did not right?" he asked.

"I am not saying it was not right. It was surely right, for otherwise that confession would
not have done me so much good."

"Well then, let it be. In any case, I did impose a long and stern penance on you, without
calling it such. I took you with me and treated you as my servant, and led you back to your
duty, forcing you to hear confessions when you had tried to escape from that."

He turned away; the conversation had already been too long for his liking. But this time
Joseph was pressing.

"You knew in advance that I would follow your orders; I'd pledged that before the confess-
ion and even before I knew who you were. No, tell me, was it really for this reason that
you treated me so?"

Dion Pugil took a few steps back and forth. Then he stopped in front of Joseph and laid
his hand on his shoulder. "Worldly people are children, my son. And saints--well, they do
not come to confess to us. But you and I and our kind, we ascetics and seekers and eremites
--we are not children and are not innocent and cannot be set straight by moralizing sermons.
We are the real sinners, we who know and think, who have eaten of the Tree of Knowledge,
and we should not treat one another like children who are given a few blows of the rod and
left to go their way again. After a confession and penance we do not run away back to the
world where children celebrate feasts and do business and now and then kill one another. We
do not experience sin like a brief bad dream which can be thrown off by confession and sac-
rifice; we dwell in it. We are never innocent; we are always sinners; we dwell in sin and
in the fire of conscience, and we know that we can never pay our great debt unless after
our departure God looks mercifully upon us and receives us into His grace. That, Joseph,
is the reason I cannot deliver sermons and dictate penances to you and me. We are not in-
volved in one or another misstep or crime, but always and forever in original sin itself.
This is why each of us can only assure the other that he shares his knowledge and feels
brotherly love; neither of us can cure the other by penances. Surely you must have known
this?"

Softly, Joseph replied: "It is so. I knew it."

"Then let us not waste our time in talk," the old man said curtly. He turned to the stone in
front of his hut, on which he was accustomed to pray.


Several years passed. Every so often Father Dion was subject to spells of weakness, so
that Joseph had to help him in the mornings, for otherwise he could not stand up by him-
self. Then he would go to pray, and after prayer he was again unable to rise without
aid. Joseph would help him, and then Father Dion would sit all day long staring into
space. This happened on some days; on others the old man would manage to stand up by
himself. He also could not hear confessions every day; and sometimes, after Joseph had
acted as his substitute, Dion would want a few words with the visitor and would tell
him: "My end is nearing, my child, my end is nearing. Tell the people that Joseph here
is my successor." And when Joseph demurred at such talk, the old man would fix him
with that terrible look of his that penetrated like an icy ray.

One day, when he had been able to stand without help, and seemed stronger, he called
Joseph and led him to a spot at the edge of their small garden.

"Here is where you will bury me," he said. "We will dig the grave together; we have a
little time, I think. Bring me the spade."

Thereafter he had Joseph dig a little early in the morning every day. If Dion was feel-
ing stronger, he would himself scoop out a few spadefuls of earth with great diffi-
culty, but also with an air of gaiety, as though he enjoyed the work. All through the
day this gaiety would persist. From the time he started the project, he remained in
continual good humor.

"You will plant a palm on my grave," he said one day while they were working. "Perhaps
you will even live to eat its fruit. If not, another will. Every so often I have plant-
ed a tree, but too few, far too few. Some say a man should not die without having
planted a tree and left a son behind. Well, I am leaving behind a tree and leaving you
also. You are my son."

He was calm and more cheerful than Joseph had ever known him, and he grew more and
more so. One evening as it was growing dark--they had already eaten and prayed--he call-
ed out to Joseph and asked him to sit beside his pallet for a while.

"I want to tell you something," he said cheerfully. He seemed wakeful and not at all
tired. "Do you remember, Joseph, the time you were so miserable in your cell near Gaza
and tired of your life? And then you fled, and decided to find old Dion and tell him
your story? And in the cenobite settlement you met the old man whom you asked to dir-
ect you to Dion Pugil? You remember. And was it not like a miracle that the old man
turned out to be Dion himself? I want to tell you now how that happened. Because you
see, it was strange and like a miracle for me too.

"You know what it is like when an ascetic and father confessor grows old and has listen-
ed to so many confessions from sinners who think him sinless and a saint, and don't know
that he is a greater sinner than they are. At such times all his work seems useless and
vain to him, and everything that once seemed important and sacred--the fact that God had
assigned him to this particular place and honored him with the task of cleansing human
souls of their filth--all that seems to him too much of an imposition. He actually feels
it as a curse, and by and by he shudders at every poor soul who comes to him with his
childish sins. He wants to get rid of the sinner and wants to get rid of himself, even if
he has to do it by tying a rope to the branch of a tree. That is how you felt at the time.
And now the hour of confession has come for me too, and I am confessing: it happened that
way to me also. I too thought I was useless and spiritually dead. I thought I could no
longer bear to have people flocking to me so trustfully, bringing me all the filth and
stench of human life that they could not cope with, and that I too could no longer cope
with.

"I had often heard talk of a hermit named Josephus Famulus. People also flocked to him
for confession, I heard, and many preferred him to me, because he was said to be a gentle,
merciful fellow who asked nothing of them and did not berate them, but treated them like
brothers, merely listened to them and dismissed them with a kiss. That was not my way, as
you well know, and the first few times I heard stories about this Josephus, his method seem-
ed to me rather foolish and infantile. But now that I had begun to doubt my own way, it be-
hooved me not to pass judgment on this method of Joseph's, or to set up my own as superior
to it. What kind of powers did this man have, I wondered. I knew he was younger than I,
but still ripe in years. That reassured me, for I would not have found it easy to trust a
young man. But I did feel drawn to this Josephus Famulus. And so I decided to make a pilgri-
mage to him, to confess my misery to him and ask him for advice or, if he gave no advice,
perhaps to receive consolation and strength from him. The very decision did me good, and
relieved me.

"I set out on my journey and made my way toward the place where his cell was said to be. But
meanwhile Brother Joseph had been having the same experience as myself, and had done exactly
what I was doing; he had taken flight in order to seek advice from me. When I ran into him,
under to be sure odd circumstances, he was enough like the man I had expected for me to rec-
ognize him. But he was a fugitive; things had gone badly with him, as badly as for me, or
perhaps worse, and he was not at all inclined to hear confessions. Rather, he was all agog to
make a confession of his own, and to place his distress in another's hands. That was a singu-
lar disappointment to me, and I was very sad. For if this Joseph, who did not recognize me,
had also grown tired of his service and was in despair over the meaning of his life--did that
not seem to mean that both of us amounted to nothing, that both of us had lived uselessly,
were both failures?

"I am telling you what you already know--let me be brief. I stayed alone that night while you
were shown hospitality by the cenobites. I meditated, and put myself into Joseph's mind, and
I thought: what will he do if he learns tomorrow that his errand is in vain and he has vainly
placed his faith in Pugil; if he learns that Pugil too is a fugitive and subject to temptation?
The more I put myself into his place, the sorrier I was for Joseph, and the more it seemed to
me that God had sent him to me so that I might understand and cure him, and in doing so cure
myself. After coming to this conclusion I was able to sleep; by then half the night was gone.
Next day you joined up with me and have become my son.

"I wanted to tell you this story. I hear that you are weeping. Weep on; it will do you good.
And since I have fallen into this unseemly talkative vein, do me the kindness to listen a lit-
tle longer and take what I now say into your heart: Man is strange, can scarcely be relied on,
and so it is not impossible that those sufferings and temptations will someday strike you once
again and threaten to overcome you. May our Lord then send you as kindly, patient, and consol-
ing a son and disciple as He has given to me in you. But as for the branch on the tree and the
death of Judas Iscariot, visions of which the tempter sent you in those days, I can tell you
one thing: it is not merely a folly and a sin to inflict such a death on oneself, although our
Redeemer can well forgive even such a sin. But it also a terrible pity for a man to die in des-
pair. God sends us despair not to kill us; He sends it to us to awaken new life in us. When on
the other hand He sends us death, Joseph, when He frees us from the earth and from the body
and sum-mons us to Himself, that is a great joy. To be permitted to sleep when we are tired,
to be al-lowed to drop a burden we have borne for a long time, is a precious, a wonderful
thing. Since we have dug the grave--don't forget the young palm you are to plant on it--ever
since we began digging the grave I have been happier and more content than in many years.

"I have babbled on long, my son; you must be tired. Go to sleep; go to your hut. God be
with you ! "

On the following day Dion did not appear for the morning prayer, nor did he call Joseph.

When Joseph grew alarmed and looked into Dion's hut, he found the old man in his last sleep.
His face was illumined with a childlike, radiant smile.

Joseph buried him. He planted the tree on the grave and lived to see the year in which the
tree bore its first fruit.




　　　　　　　　　　　　THREE


　　　　　 　 　　THE INDIAN LIFE




When Vishnu, OR rather Vishnu in his avatar as Rama, fought his savage battles with the
prince of demons, one of his parts took on human shape and thus entered the cycle of forms
once more. His name was Ravana and he lived as a warlike prince by the Great Ganges. Ravana
had a son named Dasa. But the mother of Dasa died young, and the prince took another wife.
Soon this beauteous and ambitious lady had a son of her own, and she resented the young
Dasa. Although he was the firstborn, she determined to see her own son Nala inherit the ru-
lership when the time came. And so she contrived to estrange Dasa's father from him, and
eant to dispose of the boy at the first opportunity. But one of Rav ana's court Brahmans,
Vasudeva the Sacrificer, became privy to her plan. He was sorry for the boy who, moreover,
seemed to him to possess his mother's bent for piety and feeling for justice. So the Brah-
man kept an eye on Dasa, to see that the boy came to no harm until he could put him out of
reach of his stepmother.

Now Rajah Ravana owned a herd of cows dedicated to Brahma. These were regarded as sacred,
and frequent offerings of their milk and butter were made to the god. The best pastures in
the country were reserved for these cows.

One day a herdsman of these sacred cows came to the palace to deliver a batch of butter and
report that there were signs of drought in the region where the herd had been grazing. Hence
the band of herdsmen were going to lead the cows up into the mountains, where water and
grass were available even in the driest of times.

The Brahman had known the herdsman for many years as a friendly and reliable man. He took
him into his confidence. Next day, when little Prince Dasa could not be found, only Vasu-
deva and the herdsman knew the secret of his disappearance. The herdsman took the boy Dasa
into the hills with him. They caught up with the slowly moving herd, and Dasa gladly join-
ed the band of herdsmen. He helped to guard and drive the cows, learned to milk, played
with the calves, and idled about in the mountain meadows, drinking sweet milk, his bare feet
smeared with cow-dung. He liked the life of the herdsmen, learned to know the forest and its
trees and fruits, loved the mango, the wild fig, and the varinga tree, plucked the sweet lo-
tus root out of green forest pools, on feast days wore a wreath of the red blossoms of the
flame-of-the-woods. He became acquainted with the ways of all the animals of the wilder-
ness, learned how to shun the tiger, to make friends with the clever mongoose and the pla-
cid hedgehog, and to while away the rainy seasons in the dusky shelter of a makeshift hut
where the boys played games, recited verse, or wove baskets and reed mats. Dasa did not com-
pletely forget his former home and his former life, but soon these seemed to him like a
dream.

One day, when the herd had moved on to another region, Dasa went into the forest to
look for honey. Ever since he had come to know the woods he had loved them, and this
particular forest seemed to him uncommonly beautiful. The rays of sunlight wound through
leaves and branches like golden serpents; the noises of the forest, bird calls, rustle of
treetops, jabber of monkeys, twined into a lovely, mildly luminescent network resembling
the light amid the branches. Smells, too, similarly joined and parted again, the perfumes
of flowers, varieties of wood, leaves, waters, mosses, animals, fruits, earth and mold,
pungent and sweet, wild and intimate, stimulating and soothing, gay and sad. In some un-
seen gorge a stream gurgled; a velvety green butterfly with black and yellow markings
danced over white flowers; deep among the blue shadows of the trees a branch broke and
leaves dropped heavily into leaves, or a stag bellowed in the darkness, or an irritable
she-ape scolded her family.

Dasa forgot about looking for honey. While listening to the singing of several jewel-bright
small birds, he noticed a trail running between tall ferns that stood like a dense minia-
ture forest within the great forest. It was the narrowest of footpaths, and he silently
and cautiously pressed between the ferns and followed where it led. After a while he came
upon a great banyan tree with many trunks. Beneath it stood a small hut, a kind of tent
woven of fern leaves. Beside the hut a man sat motionless. His back was straight as a rod
and his hands lay between his crossed feet. Under the white hair and broad forehead his
eyes, still and sightless, were focused on the ground. They were open, but looking inward.
Dasa realized that this was a holy man, a yogi. He had seen others before; they were men
favored by the gods. It was good to bring them gifts and pay them respect. But this man
here, sitting before his beautifully made and well-concealed fern hut, so perfectly mo-
tionless, so lost in meditation, more strongly attracted the boy and seemed to him rarer
and more venerable than any of the others he had seen. He seemed to be floating above the
ground as he sat there, and it was as if his abstracted gaze saw and knew everything. An
aura of holiness surrounded him, a magic circle of dignity, a flame of concentrated in-
tensity and a wave of radiant yoga energies, which the boy could not pass through, which
he would not have dared to breach by a word of greeting or a cry. The majesty of his form,
the light from within which radiated from his face, the composure and bronze unassailabi-
lity of his features, emanated waves and rays in the midst of which he sat enthroned like
a moon; and the accumulated spiritual force, the calmly concentrated will, wove such a
spell around him that Dasa sensed that here was someone who, by a mere wish or thought,
without even raising his eyes, could kill and restore to life.

More motionless than a tree, whose leaves and twigs stir in respiration, motionless as the
stone image of a god, the yogi sat before his hut; and from the moment he had seen him the
boy too remained motionless, fascinated, fettered, magically attracted by the sight. He
stood staring at the Master. He saw a spot of sunlight on his shoulder, a spot of sunlight
on one of his relaxed hands; he saw the flecks of light move slowly away and new ones come
into being, and he began to understand that the streaks of light had nothing to do with
this man, nor the songs of birds and the chatter of monkeys from the woods all around, nor
the brown wild bee that settled on the sage's face, sniffed at his skin, crawled a short
distance along his cheek, and then flew off again, nor all the multifarious life of the for-
est. All this, Dasa sensed, everything the eyes could see, the ears could hear, everything
beautiful or ugly, engaging or frightening--all of it had no connection at all to this holy
man. Rain would not chill or incommode him; fire could not burn him. The whole world around
him had become meaningless superficiality. There came to the princely cowherd an inkling
that the whole world might be no more than a breath of wind playing over the surface, a rip-
ple of waves over unknown depths. He was not conscious of this as a thought, but as a phys-
ical quiver and slight giddiness, a feeling of horror and danger, and at the same time of
intense yearning. For this yogi, he felt, had plunged through the surface of the world,
through the superficial world, into the ground of being, into the secret of all things. He
had broken through and thrown off the magical net of the senses, the play of light, sound,
color, and sensation, and lived secure in the essential and unchanging. The boy, although
once tutored by Brahmans who had cast many a ray of spiritual light upon him, did not un-
derstand this with his intellect and would have been unable to say anything about it in
words, but he sensed it as in blessed moments one senses the presence of divinity; he sense-
d it as a shudder of awe and admiration for this man, sensed it as love for him and long-
ing for a life such as this man sitting in meditation seemed to be living. Strangely, the
old man had reminded him of his origins, of his royalty. Touched to the quick, he stood
there on the edge of the fern thicket, ignoring the flying birds and the whispered conver-
sations of the trees, forgetting the forest and the distant herd, yielding to the spell
while he stared at the sage, captivated by the incomprehensible stillness and impassivity
of the man, by the bright serenity of his face, by the power and composure of his posture,
by the complete dedication of his service.

Afterward he could not have said whether he had spent two or three hours, or days, at the
hut. When the spell released him, when he noiselessly crept back between the ferns, found
the path out of the woods, and finally reached the open meadows and the herd, he did so
without being aware of what he was doing. His soul was still entranced, and he did not
really come to until one of the herdsmen called him. The man was angry with him for hav-
ing been away so long, but when Dasa only stared at him in wide-eyed astonishment, as if
he did not understand what was being said to him, the herdsman broke off, disconcerted by
the boy's strange look and solemn bearing. "Where have you been, my boy?" he asked. "Have
you seen a god by any chance, or run into a demon?"

"I was in the woods," Dasa said. "Something drew me there; I wanted to look for honey. But
then I forgot about it because I saw a man there, a hermit, who sat lost in meditation or
prayer, and when I saw the way his face glowed I could not help standing still and watching
him for a long time. I would like to go again this evening and bring him gifts. He is a ho-
ly man."

"Do so," the herdsman said. "Bring him milk and sweet butter. We should honor the holy
men and give them what we can."

"But how am I to address him?"

"There is no need to address him, Dasa. Only bow and place the gifts before him. No
more is needed."

Dasa did so. It took him a while to find the place again. The clearing in front of the hut
was deserted, and he did not dare go into the hut itself. He therefore laid his gifts on
the ground at the entrance and left.

As long as the herdsmen remained with the cows in this vicinity, Dasa brought gifts every
evening, and once he went there by day again. He found the holy man deep in meditation,
and this time too felt impelled to stand there in a state of bliss, receiving those rays
of strength and felicity that emanated from the yogi.

Long after they had left the neighborhood and were driving the herd to new pastures, Dasa
remembered his experience in the forest. And as is the way of boys, when he was alone he
sometimes daydreamed of himself as a hermit and practitioner of yoga. But with time the
memory and the dream faded, all the more so since Dasa was now rapidly growing into a
strong young man who threw himself with zest into the sports and brawls of his fellows.
But a gleam, a faint inkling remained in his soul, a suggestion that the princely life
and the sovereignty he had lost might some day be replaced by the dignity and power of
yoga.

One day, when they had come to the vicinity of the capital, they heard that a great fes-
tival was in preparation. Old Prince Ravana, bereft of his former strength and grown
quite frail, had appointed the day for his son Nala to succeed him.

Dasa wanted to go to the festival. He wished to see the city once more, for he had only
the faintest memories of it from his childhood. He wanted to hear the music, to watch
the parade and the tournament among the nobles; and he also wanted to have a look at
that unknown world of townsfolk and magnates who figured so largely in tales and legends,
for he knew, although this was only a tale or legend or something even more insubstan-
tial, that once upon a time, ages ago, their world had been his own.

The herdsmen were supposed to deliver a load of butter to the court for the festival sac-
rifices, and to his joy Dasa was one of the three young men chosen by the chief herdsman
for this task.

They brought their butter to the palace on the eve of the festival. The Brahman Vasudeva
received it from them, for it was he who had charge of the sacrifices, but he did not
recognize the youth. Then the three herdsmen joined the throngs attending the celebra-
tions. Early in the morning they watched the beginning of the sacrifices under the Brah-
man's direction. They saw the masses of shining golden butter given to the flames, watch-
ed as it was transformed into leaping fire; flickering, its light and fatty smoke soared
toward the Infinite, a delight to the thrice-ten gods. They watched the elephants leading
the parade, their riders in howdahs with gilded roofs. They beheld the flower-decked ro-
yal carriage containing the young Rajah Nala, and heard the mighty reverberations of the
drums. It was all very magnificent and glittering and also a little ridiculous, or at
least that is how it seemed to young Dasa. He was stunned and enraptured, intoxicated by
the noise, by the carriages and caparisoned horses, by all the pomp and extravagance; he
was also delighted by the dancing girls who cavorted in front of the royal carriage, their
limbs slender and tough as lotus stems. He was astonished at the size and beauty of the
city, but still and all he regarded everything, in the midst of his excitement and plea-
sure, with the sober good sense of the herdsman who basically despises the townsman.

That he himself was really the firstborn, that his stepbrother Nala, whom he had forgotten
completely, was being anointed, consecrated, and hailed in his stead, that he himself,
Dasa, ought by rights to be riding in the flower-decked carriage--such thoughts did not e-
ven occur to him. On the other hand, he took a strong dislike to this Nala; the young man
seemed to him stupid arid mean in his self-indulgence, unbearably vain and swollen with
self-importance. He would rather have liked to play a trick on this youth acting the part
of rajah, to teach him a lesson; but there was surely no opportunity for anything of the
sort, and in any case he quickly forgot all about it, for there was so much to see, to
hear, to laugh at, to enjoy. The townswomen were pretty and had pert, alluring looks, move-
ments, and turns of speech. A good many phrases were flung at the three herdsmen which
rang in their ears for a long while afterward. These phrases were called out with over-
tones of mockery, for townsfolk feel about herdsmen just the way herdsmen do about towns-
folk: each despises the other. But still and all those handsome, stalwart young men, nou-
rished on milk and cheese and living under the open sky almost all the year, were much to
the liking of the townswomen.

By the time Dasa returned from this festival, he had become a man. He chased girls and
had to hold his own in a good many hard boxing and wrestling matches with other young
fellows. They were now making their way into a different region, a region of flat meadows
and wetlands planted to rushes and bamboo trees. Here he saw a girl by the name of Prav-
ati, and was seized by a mad love for this beautiful young woman. She was a tenant farmer's
daughter, and Dasa was so infatuated that he forgot everything else and threw away his
freedom in order to win her. When the time came for the herdsmen to move along to fresh
pastures, he brushed aside advice and warnings, bade farewell to them and the herdsman's
life he had dearly loved, and settled down. He succeeded in winning Pravati as his wife.
In return he tilled his father-in-law's millet fields and rice paddies, and helped with
the work in mill and woodlot. He built a bamboo and mud hut for his wife, and kept her
shut up within it.

It must be a tremendous power that can move a young man to give up his previous joys and
friends and habits, to change his existence entirely, and to live among strangers in the
unenviable role of son-in-law. But so great was Pravati's beauty, so great and alluring the
promise of amorous delights that radiated from her face and figure, that Dasa became blind to
everything else and surrendered utterly to this woman. And in fact he found great happiness
in her arms. Many stories are told of gods and holy men so enraptured by an enchanting woman
that they remain locked in intimate embrace with her for days, moons, and years, wholly ab-
sorbed by voluptuousness and forgetting all other matters. Dasa, too, would have wished his
lot and his love to be like that. But he was destined for other things, and his happiness
did not last long. It lasted about a year, and this period, too, was not filled with pure
felicity. There was ample room for much else, for vexatious demands on the part of his
father-in-law, for the taunts of his brothers-in-law, and for the whims of his young wife.
But whenever he went to lie with her on their pallet, all this was forgotten, vanished in-
to thin air, such was the magic of her smile, so sweet was it to caress her slender limbs,
so wonderfully did the garden of delight in her young body bloom with a thousand flowers,
fragrances, and lovely shadows.

His happiness was not yet a whole year old when, one day, noise and unrest stirred the
neighborhood. Mounted messengers appeared announcing the coming of the young Rajah.
Then came troops, horses, the supply train, and finally Rajah Nala himself, to hunt in the
countryside. Tents were pitched here and there; horses could be heard neighing and horns
blowing.

Dasa paid no attention to all this. He worked in the fields, tended the mill, and kept out
of the way of hunters and courtiers. But one day when he returned to his hut he found
his wife missing. He had strictly forbidden her to set foot outside during this period,
while the court was in the neighborhood, and now he felt at once a stabbing pain in his
heart and a premonition of disaster. He hurried to his father-in-law's house. Pravati was
not there either, and no one would admit to having seen her. The pang in his heart inten-
sified. He searched the cabbage patch and the fields; he spent a whole day and then an-
other going back and forth between his hut and his father-in-law's; he lurked in the
field, climbed down into the well, called her name, coaxed, cursed, hunted for footprints.

At last the youngest of his brothers-in-law, who was still a boy, told him the truth.
Pravati was with the Rajah; she was living in his tent and had been seen riding on his
horse.

Dasa lurked invisibly about Nala's encampment, carrying the sling he had used during his
days as a herdsman. Day or night, whenever the prince's tent seemed to be unguarded for
a moment, he would steal closer; but each time guards soon appeared and he had to flee.
Hiding in the branches of a tree, he looked down on the camp and saw the Rajah, whose
repellent face he remembered from the time of the festival. Dasa watched him mount his
horse and ride off. When he returned hours later, dismounted, and threw back the tent
flap, Dasa could see into the shadowy interior where a young woman came forward to wel-
come the prince. He nearly fell from the tree as he recognized his wife Pravati. Now he
was certain, and the pressure upon his heart grew unbearable. Great as the happiness of
his love for Pravati had been, the anguish, the rage, the sense of loss and insult were
greater now. That is how it is when a man fastens all his capacity for love upon a single
object. With its loss everything collapses for him, and he stands impoverished amid ruins.

For a day and a night Dasa drifted about the woods in the neighborhood. He was utterly
exhausted, but after every brief rest the misery in his heart lashed him on. He had to
stir and keep moving; he felt as if he would have to tramp on to the end of the world
and to the end of his life, which had lost all its meaning and all its glory. Neverthe-
less, he did not wander off to distant, unknown regions. He remained in the vicinity of
his misfortunes. He circled about his hut, the mill, the fields, the Rajah's hunting tent.
Finally he concealed himself again in the trees overlooking the tent. He crouched in his
leafy hiding place, bitter and burning as a hungry beast of prey, until the moment came
for which he had been saving his last energies--until the Rajah stepped outside the tent.
Then he slipped silently down from the branch, raised the sling, and struck his enemy
squarely in the forehead with the stone. Nala fell and lay motionless on his back. There
seemed to be no one about. For a moment the storm of voluptuous, vengeful delight that
roared through Dasa's senses was checked, fearfully and strangely, by a profound silence.
Then, before a clamor broke out around the slain man and the space in front of the tent
began to swarm with servants, Dasa was in the woods, lost in the bamboo thickets that
sloped down toward the valley.

In the delirium of action, as he leaped from the tree and aimed the sling, letting it hurl
forth its death, he had felt as if he were extinguishing his own life also, as if he were
discharging his last spark of vitality and flinging himself, along with the deady stone, into
the abyss of annihilation, content to die if only his hated foe fell a moment before him.
But now that the deed had been followed by that unexpected moment of silence, a cra-
ving for life which he had not realized was in him drew him back from the abyss. A prim-
itive instinct took possession of his senses and his limbs, drove him into the depths of
the woods and the bamboo thickets, commanded him to flee and hide.

Awareness of. what was happening came to him only after he had reached a refuge and
was safe from immediate danger. As he collapsed exhausted, struggling for breath, his
frenzy giving way to weakness and sobriety, he felt disappointment and revulsion at
having escaped. But when his breathing slowed and his dizziness passed, this repug-
nance yielded to a defiant determination to live, and once more his heart gloried sav-
agely in the deed.

The hunt for the killer began. Soon searchers were swarming through the woods. They
beat the thickets throughout the day, and he evaded them only because he kept utterly
still in his hiding place in the marsh, which no one dared penetrate too deeply for fear
of tigers. He slept a little, lay on the alert for a while, crawled on a bit, rested again,
and by the third day had made his way beyond the hills, whence he pushed on toward
the higher mountains.

The homeless life he led thereafter took him here and there. It made him harder and
more callous, but also wiser and more resigned. Nevertheless, during the nights he
repeatedly dreamed of Pravati and his former happiness, or what he had in the past
called his happiness. He also dreamed many times of the pursuit and his flight-fright-
ful, heart-stopping dreams such as this: He would be fleeing through woods, the pursu-
ers close behind him with drums and hunting horns. Through forest and swamp and briers,
over rotting, collapsing bridges, he would be carrying something, a burden, a bale,
something wrapped up, concealed, unknown. All he knew about it was that it was pre-
cious and that under no circumstances must he let it out of his hands; it was some-
thing valuable and imperiled, a treasure, perhaps something stolen, wrapped in a bright
cloth with a russet and blue pattern, such as Pravati's holiday dress had been. Laden
with this pack, this treasure, or these stolen goods, he would be fleeing and skulking,
amid toil and danger, creeping under low-hanging branches or overhanging rocks, steal-
ing past snakes and crossing rivers full of crocodiles on vertiginous narrow planks,
until at last he stopped in exhaustion, fumbled with the knot of the string that tied
his pack, slowly unwrapped the cloth and spread it out, and the treasure he took out
at last and held in shuddering hands was his own head.

He led the stealthy life of a vagabond, no longer actually fleeing from people, but
rather avoiding them. And one day his roaming led him through a hilly region of lush
gass which looked lovely and serene and seemed to welcome him, as though he ought
to know it. In one place he recognized a meadow with softly swaying grasses in flower,
in another a willow grove which reminded him of the serene and innocent days when he
had not yet known love and jealousy, hatred and revenge. It was the pastureland where
he had once tended the herd with his companions; that had been the most untroubled
period of his youth. Now he looked back upon it across vast chasms of irrevocability.
A sweet melancholy in his heart answered the voices that welcomed him here, the
wind fluttering the silvery willows, the jolly song of the little brooks, the trilling of
the birds, and the deep golden buzz of bumblebees. It all sounded and smelled of ref-
uge, home; never before, used as he was to the roaming herdsman's life, had he ever
felt that a countryside was so homelike, so much part of him.

Accompanied and guided by these voices in his soul, with feelings like those of a
soldier home from the wars, he wandered about this pleasant landscape, for the first
time in many terrible months not a stranger, a fugitive, a candidate for death, but
with an open heart, thinking of nothing, desiring nothing, surrendering utterly to
the tranquil present, grateful and somewhat astonished at himself and at this new,
unwonted, rapturous state of mind, this undemanding receptivity, this serenity with-
out tensions, this new mode of taking delight in close observation. He felt drawn to
the forest which lay beyond the green meadows. In among the trees, amid the dusk
speckled by sunlight, the feeling of returning home intensified, and led him along
paths which his feet seemed to find by themselves, until he passed through a fern
thicket, a dense little forest of ferns in the midst of the greater woods, and reach-
ed a tiny hut. On the ground in front of the hut sat the motionless yogi whom he had
once watched, and to whom he had brought milk and butter.

Dasa stopped, as if he had just awakened. Everything here was the same as it had been;
here no time had passed, there had been no killing and suffering. Here, it seemed,
time and life were hard as crystal, frozen in eternity. He stood looking at the old
man, and there returned to his heart that admiration, love, and longing which he had
felt upon his first sight of the yogi. He looked at the hut and thought that it prob-
ably needed some repairs before the onset of the next rainy season. Then he ventured
a few cautious steps forward. He entered the hut and peered around. There was little
there, almost nothing: a pallet of leaves, a gourd containing some water, and an empty
pouch made of bast. He took the pouch and went into the woods searching for food. He
returned with fruit and the sweet pith of certain trees. Then he went off with the
gourd and filled it with fresh water.

Now he had done all that could be done here. There was so little a man needed to live.
Dasa kneeled on the ground and sank into reveries. He was content with this silent re-
pose and dreaming in the woods, content with himself, with the voice within him that
had led him here where as a boy he had once sensed something like peace, happiness,
and home.

And so he remained with the silent yogi. He renewed the pallet of leaves, found food
for the two of them, repaired the old hut, and began building a second for himself a
short distance away. The old man appeared to tolerate him, but Dasa could not quite
make out whether he had actually taken notice of him. When he rose from his medita-
tion, it was only in order to go to sleep in the hut, to eat a bite, or to walk a bit in
the woods. Dasa lived with him like a servant in the presence of a nobleman, or rather
the way a small pet, a tame bird or a mongoose, say, lives along with human beings,
useful and scarcely noticed. Since he had been a fugitive for so long, unsure of him-
self, suffering pangs of conscience, seeking concealment and perpetually fearing pur-
suit, this life of repose, the effortless small labors and the presence of a man who
did not seem to notice him, did him a great deal of good for a while. His sleep was
not troubled by frightful dreams; for half and then whole days at a time he forgot
what had happened. The future did not enter his mind, and if ever a longing or desire
came to him, it was to remain where he was, to be accepted by the yogi and initiated
into the secret of a hermit's life, to become a yogi himself and partake of the proud
indifference of yoga. He had begun to imitate the venerable ascetic's posture, to sit
motionless like him with crossed legs, like him to gaze into an unknown and superreal
world, and to cultivate apathy to everything around him. Whenever he made such attempts,
he tired quickly; he found his limbs stiff and his back aching, was plagued by mosqui-
toes or bothered by all sorts of itches and twitches which compelled him to move, to
scratch himself, and finally to stand up again. But several times he had felt something
different, a sense of emptiness, lightness, and floating in air, such as sometimes comes
in dreams in which we touch the ground only lightly now and then, gently pushing off
from it to drift like a wisp of fluff. At such moments he had an inkling of what it
must be like to float about that way all the time, body and soul divesting themselves
of all weight and sharing the movements of a greater, purer, sunnier life, exalted and
absorbed by a beyond, by timelessness and immutability. But these intimations had last-
ed only a moment. And every time he plummeted back into his ordinary self, disappoint-
ed, he thought that he must persuade the master to become his teacher, to initiate him
into his exercises and secret arts and make a yogi of him also. But how was he to do
that? It did not seem as if the old man would ever notice him, that there would ever
be an exchange of words between them. Just as the yogi seemed beyond the day and hour,
beyond the forest and hut, he also seemed beyond all words.

Nevertheless, one day he spoke a word. There came a time during which Dasa again
dreamt night after night, often bewilderingly sweet and often bewilderingly dreadful dreams,
either of his wife Pravati or the horrors of life as a fugitive. And by day he made no
progress, could not long endure sitting and practicing, could not help thinking about
women and love. He tramped about the forest a great deal. He blamed the weather for
his condition; these were sultry days with sudden gusts of hot wind.

One more such bad day came. The mosquitoes hummed. Dasa had had another of his anguish-
ed dreams that left him with a sense of fear and oppression. He no longer remembered it,
but upon waking it seemed to him that it had been a wretched, outrageous, and shameful
relapse into earlier states and stages of his life. All day long he moved restively a-
bout the hut, or squatted gloomily. He dabbed at odd tasks, several times sat down for
meditation exercises, but would each time be seized by a feverish unrest. His limbs
twitched, he felt as if ants were crawling over his feet, had a burning sensation in
the nape of his neck, and was unable to endure stillness for more than a few moments.
Now and then he cast shy and ashamed glances at the old man, who sat in the perfect
posture, eyes turned inward, face floating above his body in inviolable serenity like
the head of a flower.

On this day, when the yogi rose and turned toward the hut, Dasa went up to him. He had
waited long for this moment, and now blocked his way and with the courage of fear ad-
dressed him.

"Forgive me for disturbing your peace, reverend father," he said. "I am seeking peace,
tranquility; I would like to live as you do and become like you. As you see, I am still
young, but I have already tasted much suffering. Destiny has played cruelly with me. I
was born to be a prince and cast out to become a herdsman. I became a herdsman, grew
up, strong and happy as a young bull, innocent in my heart. Then my eyes were opened
to women, and when I beheld the most beautiful of them, I put my life at her service.
Not to possess her would have killed me. I left my companions, the herdsmen. I sued
for Pravati's hand, was granted it, became a son-in-law, and labored hard for her.
But Pravati was mine and loved me, or so I thought. Every evening I returned to her
arms, lay upon her heart. Then, behold, the Rajah came to the neighborhood, the same
on whose account I had been cast out as a child. He came and took Pravati from me; I
was condemned to see her in his arms. That was the greatest agony I have ever experi-
nced; it changed me and my whole life. I slew the Rajah. I killed and led the life of
a criminal and fugitive. Every man's hand was against me; my life was not safe for an
hour until I stumbled upon this place. I am a foolish man, reverend father; I am a
killer and perhaps may still be caught and drawn and quartered. I can no longer endure
this terrible life; I want to be done with it."

The yogi had listened quietly to this outburst, with downcast eyes. Now he opened them
and fixed his gaze upon Dasa's face, a bright, piercing, almost unbearably firm, com-
osed, and lucid gaze. And while he studied Dasa's face, seemingly pondering his tale,
his mouth slowly twisted into a smile, then a laugh. Soundlessly laughing, he shook
his head, and said: "Maya! Maya!"

Utterly bewildered and shamed, Dasa stood stock still. The yogi, before his evening
meal, took a short walk on the narrow path that led into the ferns. With quiet, rhyth-
ic step he paced back and forth. After several hundred paces, he returned and entered
his hut. His face was once more as it had always been, turned toward something other
than the world of appearances. What had been the meaning of the laugh breaking through
that impassive countenance? Had that terrible laughter at Dasa's anguished confession
and plea been benevolent or mocking, comforting or condemning, divine or demonic? Had
it been merely the cynical bleat of an old man no longer able to take things seriously,
or the amusement of a sage at another's folly? Had it been rejection, farewell, dis-
missal? Or was it meant as advice, an invitation to Dasa to follow his example and
join in his laughter? Dasa could not solve the riddle. Late into the night he contin-
ued to ponder the meaning of this laughter with which the old man seemed to have sum-
med up his life, his happiness, and his misery. His thoughts chewed on it as if it were a
tough root that somehow had a hidden savor. And likewise he chewed upon and pondered
and mulled over the word that the old man had called out so loudly, so laughingly and
gaily and with such incomprehensible amusement: "Maya! Maya!" He half knew, half guess-
ed the general meaning of the word, and the intonation the laughing old man had given
it seemed also to suggest a meaning. Maya--that was Dasa's life, Dasa's youth, Dasa's
sweet felicity and bitter misery. Beautiful Pravati was Maya; love and its delights
were Maya; all life was Maya. To the eyes of this yogi Dasa's life, all men's lives,
everything was Maya, was a kind of childishness, a spectacle, theater, an illusion,
emptiness in bright wrappings, a soap bubble--something one could laugh at and at the
same time despise, but by no means take seriously.

But although the yogi might be able to dismiss Dasa's life with laughter and the
word Maya, Dasa himself could not. Much as he might wish to become a laughing yogi
himself, and to see his own life as nothing but Maya, the whole of that life had
been roused in him once more during these restive days and nights. He remembered
now all the things he had nearly forgotten when he found refuge here after the
stresses of his life as a fugitive. There seemed to him only the slightest hope
that he would ever be able to learn the art of yoga, let alone to become as adept
at it as the old man himself. But then--what was the sense of his lingering in
this forest? It had been an asylum; he had recuperated a bit and gathered strength,
had come to his senses somewhat. That was something, was in fact a great deal.
And perhaps out in the country the hunt for the Rajah's murderer had ended and
he could continue his wanderings without any great danger.

He decided to do so. He would depart next day. The world was vast; he could not
remain in this hiding place forever.

This decision gave him a measure of peace.

He had intended to leave at dawn. But when he awoke after a long sleep the sun was
already high in the sky. The yogi had begun his meditation, and Dasa did not want
to leave without bidding good-by. Moreover, he still had a request to make. And so
he waited, hour after hour, until the man rose, stretched his limbs, and began his
pacing. Then Dasa once more blocked his way, bowed repeatedly, and obstinately re-
mained until the master directed an inquiring look at him.

"Master," he said humbly, "I am going my way. I shall no longer disturb your tranqui-
lity. But permit me a request this one last time, venerable father. When I told you
about my life, you laughed and exclaimed, 'Maya!' I implore you, teach me more about
Maya."

The yogi turned toward the hut, his eyes commanding Dasa to follow. Picking up the
water gourd, the old man held it out to Dasa, signing to him to wash his hands. Obe-
diently, Dasa did so. Then the master poured the remainder of the water into the
ferns, held the gourd out to Dasa once again, and asked him to fetch fresh water.
Dasa obeyed. He ran, emotions of parting tugging at his heart, for the last time
down the little footpath to the spring. For the last time he carried the light husk
with its smooth, worn rim to the little pool which so often reflected in scattered
flecks of light the muzzles of deer, the arching of treetops, and the sweet blue of
the sky. Now, as he stooped over it, it reflected for the last time his own face in
the russet dusk. He dipped the gourd slowly and thoughtfully into the water, feeling
a weird sense of uncertainty. He could not understand why, or why it had hurt him,
since he meant to leave anyhow, that the old man had not asked him to stay a while
longer, or perhaps stay forever.

Crouching by the brink of the spring, he took a drink. Then he rose, holding the
gourd carefully so as not to spill any of the water. He was about to return along
the path when his ear caught a tone that both delighted and horrified him. This was
the voice he had heard in so many of his dreams, that he had remembered with such
bitter longing in many a waking hour. It coaxed so sweetly, sounded so charming, so
childlike and loving in the dusk of the forest, that his heart shivered with fright
and pleasure. It was his wife Pravati's voice. "Dasa," she called coaxingly.

Incredulously, he looked around, still holding the gourd; and suddenly she appear-
ed among the tree trunks, slender as a reed on her long legs--Pravati, his unforget-
table, faithless beloved. He dropped the gourd and ran toward her. Smiling, somewhat
abashed, she stood before him, looking up at him with her big doe's eyes. As he ap-
proached he saw that she wore red leather sandals and a beautiful, costly dress.
There was a gold bracelet on her arm, and precious stones flashed in her black hair.
He checked his stride. Was she still a rajah's concubine? Had he not killed Nala?
Was she still going about with his gifts? How could she come before him adorned
with these clasps and gems and dare to call his name?

But she was lovelier than ever, and before he had time to demand an explanation he
could not resist taking her into his arms, pressing his forehead against her hair,
raising her face and kissing her mouth; and as he did so he felt that everything
had returned to him, that everything was his once more, all that he had ever pos-
sessed, his happiness, love, lust, joy in life, passion. All his thoughts had al-
ready moved far from the forest and the old hermit; the woods, the hermitage, medi-
tation, and yoga had vanished, were forgotten. He gave not another thought to the
old man's gourd, which he was to bring back filled with water. It remained where
he had dropped it by the spring as he rushed toward Pravati. And she, for her part,
began hastily to tell him how it was she had come here, and all that had happened
in the interval.

Her story was astonishing, astonishing and delightful, like a fairy tale, and Dasa
plunged into his new life as if it were a fairy tale. Pravati was his again; the o-
dious Rajah Nala dead. The pursuit of the murderer had long since ceased. But more
than all that, Dasa, the prince who had become a herdsman, had been proclaimed the
rightful heir and ruler. In the city an old herdsman and an old Brahman had revived
the almost forgotten story of his expulsion and made it the talk of the country. He
who had been hunted high and low to be tortured and executed as Nala's murderer was
now being sought much more ardently throughout the land, so that he could be brought
solemnly to his father's palace and installed as Rajah.

It was like a dream, and what pleased the amazed Dasa most was the pretty chance that
of all the seekers sent about the country, it had been Pravati who had found him and
been the first to salute him. On the edge of the forest he found tents erected. The
smell of smoke and roasting game filled the air, Pravati was joyously hailed by her
retinue, and a great feast began at once when she presented Dasa, her husband. Among
the throng was a man who had been Dasa's companion in his days as a herdsman. It was
he who had led Pravati and the retinue here, with the thought that Dasa might be found
at one of the places dear to him from earlier days. The man laughed with pleasure when
he recognized Dasa. He ran up to him, ready to embrace him or give him a friendly pat
on the back. But his fellow herdsman had become a rajah, and he stopped as if sudden-
ly numbed, then moved slowly and respectfully forward and bowed low. Dasa raised him,
clasped him to his breast, affectionately called him by name, and asked how he could
reward him. The herdsman wanted a heifer calf, and three were promptly assigned to
him from the Rajah's best stock.

More and more people were introduced to the new prince: officials, huntsmen, court
Brahmans. He received their salutations. A meal was served; music of drums, sitars,
and nose-flutes sounded; and all the festivity and pomp seemed to Dasa like a
dream. He could not fully believe in it. For the present the only reality seemed to
him Pravati, his young wife, whom he again held in his arms.

Moving by small daily stages, the procession approached the capital city. Runners
had been sent ahead to announce that the young Rajah had been found and was on his
way. The city resounded with the boom of gongs and drums as Dasa and his retinue
approached. A white-clad parade of Brahmans came forward to meet him, headed by the
successor of that Vasudeva who some twenty years before had sent Dasa to the herds-
men. The old man had died only recently. The Brahmans hailed the new Rajah, sang
hymns, and led him to the palace, where several great sacrificial fires had been
lit. Dasa was shown into his new home. There were more welcomings, homages, bene-
dictions, and speeches. Outside the palace, the city celebrated joyfully until late
into the night.

Instructed daily by two Brahmans, Dasa quickly acquired the knowledge necessary to
a ruler. He attended sacrifices, pronounced judgments, and practiced the arts of
chivalry and war. A Brahman named Gopala taught him politics. He explained the pos-
ition of his house and its regal privileges, what claims his future sons would have,
and who were his enemies. The principal one was Nala's mother who in the past had
robbed Prince Dasa of his rights and had sought to take his life, and who now must
certainly hate her son's murderer. She had fled to the protection of their neighbor,
Prince Govinda, and was living in his palace. This Govinda and his house had been
dangerous foes from time immemorial. They had made war upon Dasa's forefathers
and claimed certain parts of his territory. On the other hand the Prince of Gaipali,
Dasa's neighbor to the south, had been friendly with his father and had always dis-
liked Rajah Nala. Visiting him, lavishing gifts upon him, and inviting him to the
next great hunt belonged among Dasa's important duties.

The lady Pravati had rapidly adapted to the ways of the nobility. She had the bear-
ing of a princess, and in her beautiful dresses and jewelry she looked splendid, as
if she sprang from as fine a lineage as her husband. Year after year they lived to-
gether in harmonious love, and their happiness gave them a certain glow, like those
whom the gods favor, so that the people adored them. And when, after long waiting,
Pravati at last bore him a beautiful boy to whom he gave his father's name, Ravana,
his happiness was complete. All that he possessed, all the land and power, the es-
tates and barns, dairies, cattle, and horses, acquired a fresh importance in his
eyes, an added glory and value. His wealth had pleased him because it could be lav-
ished on Pravati, whose loveliness could be enhanced with apparel and jewelry. Now
his rich possessions delighted him all the more, and seemed far more important, be-
cause he saw in them his son Ravana's inheritance and future happiness.

Pravati's chief pleasures lay in festivals, parades, and pomp, luxury in dress and
finery, and a large corps of servants. Dasa preferred the joys of his garden. He
had ordered rare and precious trees and flowers planted there, and stocked the
grounds with parrots and other brilliantly plumaged birds. Feeding and talking with
these pets became one of his daily pleasures. In addition, learning attracted him.
He proved a grateful pupil of the Brahmans, learned to read and write, memorized
many poems and proverbs, and kept a personal scribe who understood the art of mak-
ing scrolls out of palm leaves. Under the scribe's skillful hands a modest library
grew. The books were kept in a small opulent room with gilded paneling of precious
woods, carved with reliefs representing incidents in the lives of the gods. Here
he sometimes invited his Brahmans, the foremost scholars and thinkers among the
priests, to conduct disputations on sacred subjects: on the creation of the world
and on great Vishnu's Maya, on the holy Vedas, the power of sacrifice, and the
still greater power of penance, by virtue of which a mortal man can make the very
gods tremble with fear of him. Those Brahmans who had spoken best and advanced the
most elegant arguments received fine gifts. As the prize for a successful disputa-
tion, some departed leading away a fine cow. On occasion there was something both
ridiculous and touching when great scholars, who a few moments before had been re-
citing maxims from the Vedas along with brilliant exegeses of the same, or who had
just proved the depth of their knowledge of all the heavens and seas, stalked off
swollen with pride in their awards, or fell to bickering with one another over
their prizes.

In general, for all his happiness, his wealth, his garden, and his books, Prince
Dasa at times could not help regarding everything that pertained to human life
and human nature as both strange and dubious, at once touching and ridiculous,
like those same sagacious and vain Brahmans, at once bright and dark, desirable
and contemptible. When his gaze dwelt on the lotus flowers in the ponds of his
garden, on the lovely iridescent plumage of his peacocks, pheasants, and rhinoce-
ros birds, on the gilded carvings of his palace, these things sometimes seemed
to him virtually divine, aglow with the fires of eternal life. But other times,
and even at the same times, he sensed in them something unreal, unreliable, ques-
tionable, a tendency toward perishability and dissolution, a readiness to relapse
into formlessness, into chaos. Just as he himself had been a prince, became a
herdsman, descended to the nadir of a murderer and outlaw, and ultimately became
a prince once more, moved and guided by unknown powers, with all his tomorrows
forever uncertain, so life's wayward Maya everywhere contained simultaneously no-
bility and baseness, eternity and death, grandeur and absurdity. Even his beauti-
ful, beloved Pravati had sometimes, for brief moments, appeared to him in a ludi-
crous light, stripped of her charm; she wore too many bracelets, had too much of
pride and triumph in her eyes, and tried too hard to move majestically.

Even dearer to him than his garden and his books was his son Ravana, the fulfill-
ment of his love and his life, the object of his tenderness and solicitude. He
was a true prince, a lovely, delicate child, doe-eyed like his mother and incline-
d to pensiveness and reverie like his father. Often, when Dasa saw the boy stand-
ing for a long time in front of one of the ornamental trees in the garden, or sit-
ting on a rug, absorbed in contemplation of a stone, a carved toy, or a feather,
eyebrows slightly raised and eyes staring quietly, somewhat absently, it seemed
to him that this son was very like himself. Dasa realized fully how intensely he
loved him the first time that he had to leave the boy for an indefinite period.

One day a messenger arrived from the frontier region where his land bordered on
that of his neighbor Govinda and reported that Govinda's men had launched a raid,
stolen cattle, and even kidnapped a number of Dasa's subjects. Dasa immediately
made his preparations. He took with him the colonel of his bodyguard and a few
dozen horses and men, and set off in pursuit of the raiders. The moment before
he rode off, he took his small son into his arms and kissed him; and love flared
in his heart like a fiery pang. The force of that pang surprised him; it affect-
ed him like some bidding from the unknown; and during the long ride his reflect-
ions on it ripened into understanding. For as he rode he pondered the reason he
was sitting in the saddle and galloping so sternly and swiftly over the country-
side. What power, he wondered, was causing him to undertake such efforts? Ponder-
ing, he realized that at the bottom of his heart it was of small concern to him
that cattle and men should have been snatched from him somewhere on his borders.
Thievery and the flouting of his authority could not suffice to kindle his rage
and spur him to action. It would have been more natural to him to have dismiss-
ed the news of the raid with a compassionate smile. But to have done so, he knew,
would have been to commit a bitter injustice to the messenger. The poor fellow
had run all the way with his news until he was ready to drop with exhaustion. No
less would he have wronged the people who had been captured and who were now pri-
soners, carried away from their homes and their peaceful life into foreign slave-
ry. Moreover, all his other subjects, though they had not been harmed in the
least, would also have felt wronged. They would have resented his passivity, not
understanding why the prince could not protect his country better. They took it
for granted that if violence were done to any of them they could count upon their
ruler for aid and vengeance.

He realized that it was his duty to undertake this expedition of reprisal. But
what is duty? How many duties there are that we so often neglect without the
slightest compunction? What was the reason that this duty of vengeance was no
trivial one, that he could not neglect it, and that in fact he was not performing
it perfunctorily and halfheartedly, but with zest and passion? As soon as the que-
stion arose in his mind, his heart answered it, for once again it quivered with
that pang he had felt on parting from little Prince Ravana. If the Rajah, he real-
ized, made no resistance when cattle and people were taken from him, robbery and
violence would spread from the borders of his country closer and closer to the
center, and ultimately the enemy would stand directly before him and would strike
him where he was prone to the bitterest pain: in the person of his son. They would
take his son, his successor, from him; they would carry the boy off and kill him,
perhaps under torture; and that would be the most extreme suffering he could ever
experience, even worse, far worse, than the death of Pravati herself. So that was
the reason he was riding off so zealously and was so dutiful a sovereign. Not
from concern for the loss of cattle and land, not from kindness for his subjects,
not from ambition to match his father's noble name, but out of intense, painful,
irrational love for this child, and out of intense, irrational fear of the pain
he would feel at the loss of this child.

Thus far he had come in understanding during that ride. He had not, however, man-
aged to apprehend and punish Govinda's men. They escaped with their booty, and
in order to show his determination and prove his courage he himself now had to
raid across the border, damage one of his neighbor's villages, and carry off some
cattle and a few slaves.

He had been away many days. On the homeward ride, a victor, he had again sunk
into meditation, and returned home very quietly and rather sorrowful. For in the
course of his meditations he had realized how entirely ensnared he was, without
any hope of escaping; his whole nature and all his actions were caught and being
strangled in a diabolic net. While his leaning toward philosophy, his love for
quiet contemplation and a life of innocence and inaction, were constantly growing,
there was likewise growing from another source his love for Ravana, his anxiety
about his son's life and future, an equally forceful compulsion to action and
entanglement. Out of affection grew conflict, out of love war. Already, in the
effort to mete out justice, he had seized a herd, terrified a village, and forc-
ibly carried off poor innocent people. Out of that, of course, would grow a new
act of vengeance, new violence, and so on and on until his whole life and his
whole country were plunged in warfare and violence and the clash of arms. It was
this insight, or vision, which made him so silent and sorrowful upon his home-
coming.

He had been right, for the hostile neighbor gave him no peace. The incursions
and raids were repeated. Dasa had to march out again for reprisals and defense,
and when the enemy withdrew, his own soldiers and chasseurs had to be turned u-
pon the neighboring people. Mounted and armed men were more and more a familiar
sight in the capital. In a good many frontier villages there were now permanent
garrisons of soldiers on guard. Military conferences and preparations troubled
Dasa's days. He could not see what purpose this endless guerrilla warfare serve-
d; he grieved for the plight of the victims, for the lives of the dead. He grieve-
d because more and more he had to neglect his garden and his books. He grieved
for the lost peace of his days and his heart. Often he spoke with Gopala, the
Brahman, about these matters, and sometimes with his wife Pravati.

Should they not ask one of the respected neighboring princes to act as mediator?
For his part he would gladly help to bring about peace by conciliation and sur-
rendering a few pastures and villages. He was disappointed and somewhat angered
when neither the Brahman nor Pravati would hear of anything of the kind.

His difference of opinion with Pravati on this question led to an extremely vio-
lent quarrel, and ended with a serious estrangement. Insistently, he pleaded his
points with her. But she behaved as if every word were directed not against the
war and the useless killing, but solely against herself. In a verbose, furious
retort she declared that it was precisely the enemy's aim to take advantage of
Dasa's good nature and love of peace (not to say his fear of war); the enemy
would persuade him to conclude one peace treaty after another, each paid for
in small concessions of territory and population. And in the end he would still
not be satisfied, but as soon as Dasa was sufficiently weakened, would return
to open war and seize everything that was left to him. She was not concerned
about herds and villages, merits and demerits, but with the fate of the whole,
their survival or annihilation. And if Dasa did not know what he owed to his
dignity, his son, and his wife, she would have to be the one to teach him. Her
eyes blazed; her voice shook; it was long since he had seen her so beautiful
and so passionate, but he felt only sorrow.


Meanwhile the border raids and breaches of peace continued; they came to a tem-
porary end only with the beginning of the rainy season. By now there were two
factions at Dasa's court. One side, the peace party, was very small; aside from
Dasa it numbered only a few of the older Brahmans. These were all learned men
absorbed in their meditations. But the war party, the party of Pravati and Go-
pala, had the majority of priests and all the army officers on its side. The
country armed feverishly, and it was known that the hostile neighbor was doing
the same. The chief huntsman instructed Prince Ravana in the art of the bow,
and his mother took him along to every inspection of troops.

During this period Dasa sometimes thought of the forest where he had lived for
a while as a poor fugitive, and of the white-haired old hermit who lived there
absorbed in contemplation. Sometimes he felt a desire to call upon the yogi, to
see him again and ask his advice. But he did not know whether the old man was
still living, nor whether he would listen and give counsel. And even if he were
alive and would advise, everything would nevertheless take its course. Nothing
could be changed. Meditation and wisdom were good, were noble things, but appar-
ently they throve only on the margin of life. If you swam in the stream of life
and struggled with its waves, your acts and suffering had nothing to do with
wisdom. They came about of their own accord, were fated, and had to be done and
suffered. Even the gods did not live in eternal peace and eternal wisdom. They
too experienced danger and fear, struggle and battle; that he knew from the many
tales of the gods.

And so Dasa yielded. He no longer contended with Pravati. He reviewed the troops,
saw the war coming, anticipated it in debilitating dreams, and as his body grew
leaner, and his face darker, he saw his happiness fading, his gaiety shriveling.
There remained only his love for his son. That increased along with his anxiety,
increased along with the arming and the drilling of soldiers. It was the flaming
red flower in his parching garden. He wondered at how much emptiness and joyless-
ness a man could endure; at how easy it was to grow accustomed to care and gloom,
and he also wondered that so anxious and solicitous a love could so painfully
dominate a life that had seemingly lost the capacity for passion. Although his
life might be meaningless, it was certainly not without a center; it revolved a-
round his love for his son. It was on Ravana's account that he rose from his bed
in the morning and spent his days in occupations and exertions directed solely
toward war, and therefore repugnant to him. On Ravana's account he patiently con-
ferred with his generals, and withstood majority opinion only to the extent that
he prevailed on them to wait and see, not plunge recklessly into adventures.

Just as his joys, his garden, and his books had gradually deserted him, so he was
also deserted by those who for so many years had shaped his happiness and repre-
sented his pleasures. It had begun with politics, with Pravati's passionate speech
excoriating his fear of sinning and love of peace, almost openly calling all that
cowardice. She had spoken with flushed cheeks and in fiery phrases of heroism,
a prince's honor, and the prospect of disgrace. At that time, stunned and with a
sense of giddiness, he had suddenly realized how far his wife had become estrange-
d from him, or he from her. Ever since, the gulf between them had widened. It was
still growing, and neither of them did anything to check its growth. Or rather,
it should have fallen to Dasa to do something about it. For only he saw the gulf
for what it was. In his imagination it more and more grew into the gulf of gulfs,
became a cosmic abyss between man and woman, between yes and no, between soul
and body. In retrospect he thought he saw the whole thing with, complete clarity. He
remembered how Pravati, magically beautiful, had captivated him until he parted
with his friends, gave up his carefree life as a herdsman, and for her sake lived
as a servant in an alien world, the son-in-law in the house of unkind people who
exploited his infatuation to extract labor from him. Then Nala had come along,
and his misfortunes had begun. The wealthy, handsome Rajah with his fine clothes
and tents, his horses and servants, had seduced his wife. That might have cost him
little effort, for poor Pravati had not been accustomed to regal splendor. But
would she really have been led astray so easily and quickly if she had been faith-
ful and virtuous at heart? Very well, the Rajah had seduced her, or simply taken
her, and thus inflicted upon him the most horrible grief he had ever experienced.
But he, Dasa, had taken revenge. He had killed the thief of his happiness, and
had felt the killing as a moment of high triumph. But scarcely was the deed done
than he had had to flee. For days, weeks, and months he had lived in swamp and
forest, an outlaw, trusting no man.

And what had Pravati been doing all that time? The two of them had never spoken
much about that. In any case, she had not fled also. She had sought and found him
only after he had been proclaimed Nala's successor, because of his birth, and she
needed him in order to enter the palace and ascend the throne. Then she had ap-
peared, had fetched him from the forest and the venerable hermit's purlieus. He
had been dressed in fine garments, made Rajah, and since then he had had nothing
but glory and felicity--but in reality: what had he abandoned at that time, and
what had he gained in exchange? He had gained the splendor and the duties of
a sovereign, duties that had been initially easy and had ever since grown harder
and harder. He had regained his beautiful wife, the sweet hours of lovemaking
with her, and then his son, who had taught his heart a new kind of love and in-
creasing concern for his imperiled life and happiness, so that now the whole
country was on the brink of war. This was what Pravati had conferred upon him
when she discovered him by the spring in the woods. But what had he left behind,
what had he sacrificed? He had left behind the peace of the forest, pious soli-
tude, and the presence and the example of a holy yogi. In addition he had sacri-
ficed the hope of becoming a disciple and successor, of sharing the sage's pro-
found, radiant, unshakable peace of soul, of being liberated from the struggles
and passions of life. Seduced by Pravati's beauty, entangled by the woman, and
infected by her ambition, he had abandoned the only way that led to liberation
and peace.

That was how the story of his life appeared to him now. And in fact it could eas-
ily be interpreted thus. Only a few blurrings and omissions were needed to see
it that way. He had omitted, among other things, the fact that he had not been
the hermit's disciple at all. On the contrary, he had been on the point of leav-
ing him voluntarily. But perspectives often shift in hindsight.

Pravati regarded these matters quite differently, although she was far less in-
clined to reflection than her husband. She did not think about Nala at all. On
the other hand, if she remembered rightly it had been she alone who had founded
Dasa's good fortune. She was responsible for his becoming the Rajah. She had giv-
en him a son, had lavished love and happiness upon him. But in the end she had
found him unable to match her greatness, unworthy of her soaring projects. For
it was clear to her that the coming war could have no outcome other than the des-
truction of the enemy and the doubling of her own power and possessions. But in-
stead of exulting in this prospect and collaborating enthusiastically, Dasa, most
unlike a prince, hung back from war and conquest and would have preferred to grow
old idling away his time with his flowers, trees, parrots, and books. On the oth-
er hand there was Vishwamitra, the commander of the cavalry forces. He was a dif-
ferent sort of man, next to herself the most ardent partisan of the war, repeat-
edly urging that they strike for victory as soon as possible. In any comparison
between the two, Vishwamitra could not help showing to advantage.

Dasa had not failed to notice his wife's growing friendship with Vishwamitra. He
saw how much she admired him, and let herself be admired by this brave and cheer-
ful but possibly rather shallow, perhaps somewhat unintelligent army officer
with his manly smile, his fine strong teeth and well-tended beard. Dasa observ-
ed it all with bitterness and at the same time with contempt. He deceived himself
into thinking he felt only scornful indifference. He did not spy on them or try
to discover whether their friendship had overstepped the limits of decency. He
regarded Pravati's infatuation with the handsome cavalryman, and the looks which
showed how she preferred him to her unheroic husband, with the same outwardly in-
different, inwardly embittered calm with which he was wont to view everything
that happened. Whether his wife was determined upon infidelity and betrayal, or
whether she was merely expressing her contempt for Dasa's principles, it did not
matter. The thing had come and was developing, was beginning to confront him like
the war and the disaster whose imminence he sensed. There was nothing to be done
about it. The only possible attitude toward it was one of acceptance, of stoic
endurance. For that, instead of attack and conquest, was Dasa's kind of manliness
and heroism.

Whether or not Pravati's admiration for the cavalry captain, and his for her, re-
mained within the bounds of morality, in any case Pravati was less guilty than he,
Dasa, himself. That much he understood. To be sure, thinker and doubter that he
was, he tended to blame her for the evaporation of his happiness. Or at any rate
he considered that she was partly responsible for his having stumbled into the com-
plexities of life, into love, into ambition, into acts of revenge and raids. In
his thoughts he even blamed woman, love, and lust for everything on earth, for the
whole crazy dance, the whole wild chase of passions and desires, of adultery, of
death, of killing, of war. But at the same time he knew quite well that Pravati
was not to blame. She was not a cause, but herself a victim. She had not made,
and could not be held accountable for, either her beauty or his love for her. She
was only a grain of dust in the rays of the sun, a ripple in the stream. It should
have been his task, and his alone, to withdraw from woman and love, from ambition
and the hunger for happiness. He should have remained either a contented cowherd
among herdsmen, or else he should have tried to overcome his own inadequacy by the
mysterious path of yoga. He had neglected to do so, had failed; he had no vocation
for greatness, or else he had not kept faith with his vocation, so that after all
his wife was right to regard him as a coward. On the other hand, she had given him
this son, this frail, handsome boy for whom he felt so fearful but whose existence
filled his own life with meaning, who was in fact a great joy--a painful and fear-
ful joy, certainly, but still a joy, his true happiness. Now he was paying for this
happiness with the sorrow and bitterness in his heart, with his readiness for war
and death, with his consciousness of moving toward a dire fate.

Meanwhile Rajah Govinda sat in his own capital, listening to the bidding of the mo-
ther of Nala, the slain seducer of evil memory. Govinda's incursions and challenges
were growing ever more frequent and brazen. Only an alliance with the powerful Raj-
ah of Gaipali could have made Dasa strong enough to enforce peace and neighborly
relations. But this Rajah, although he was well disposed toward Dasa, was Govinda's
kinsman and had politely repulsed all efforts to win him over to such an alliance.
There was no escape, no hope of sanity or humanity. The fated outcome was drawing
nearer and would have to be undergone. Dasa himself almost longed for the war now.
If only the accumulated lightnings would strike; if only the calamity would come
speedily, since it could no longer be averted.

Once more he paid a visit to the Rajah of Gaipali and exchanged fruitless court-
esies with him. In his council he urged moderation and patience, but by now he was
doing so without hope. For the rest, he improved his armaments. The council was
divided only on the question of whether to respond to the enemy's next raid with
invasion of his territory and outright war, or whether to await his major offen-
sive, so that the people and all neutrals would see who was truly guilty of viola-
ting the peace.

The enemy, unconcerned with such questions, put an end to reflection, discussion,
and hesitation. One day he struck. He staged a major raid which inveigled Dasa, a-
long with the cavalry captain and his best troops, into rushing to the frontier.
While they were on the way, Govinda's main force invaded the country, stormed the
gates of Dasa's capital, and besieged the palace. As soon as Dasa heard the news
he turned back. He knew that his wife and his son were encircled in the palace,
and that bloody battles were raging in the streets of the city. His heart pounded
with fury and sorrow when he thought of his loved ones and the dangers that faced
them. Now he was no longer a reluctant and cautious commander. He burned with an-
guish and rage, urged his men homeward in wild haste, found the battle surging
through the streets, cut his way through to the palace, confronted the enemy and
fought like a madman until, at twilight on that bloody day, he collapsed exhaust-
ed, bleeding from several wounds.

When he recovered consciousness, he found himself a prisoner. The battle was lost.
City and palace were in the hands of his enemies. Bound, he was taken before Go-
vinda, who greeted him disdainfully and led him into one of the other rooms of
the palace. It was the room with the carved and gilded walls where Dasa kept his
scrolls. Here, sitting bolt upright on one of the rugs, stony-faced, was his wife
Pravati. Armed guards stood behind her. Across her knees lay their son. Like a
broken flower that frail body lay dead, face gray, his garments soaked with blood.
The woman did not turn when her husband was led in. She did not see him; she sat
staring expressionlessly at the small corpse. But she seemed to Dasa strangely
transformed. It took a while before he realized that her hair, which only a few
days before he had seen raven black, was now everywhere shot through with gray.
She seemed to have been sitting that way for a long time, the boy on her lap,
numbed, her face a mask.

"Ravana!" Dasa exclaimed. "Ravana, my child, my flower!" He knelt. His face fell
forward upon the dead boy's head. As if in prayer he knelt before the mute woman
and the child, mourning both, paying homage to both. He smelled the odor of blood
and death, mingled with the fragrance of the aromatic pomade on the child's hair.

With numbed gaze Pravati stared blankly down at the two of them.

Someone touched his shoulder. It was one of Govinda's captains, who ordered him
to stand up. The soldiers led him out. He had not addressed a word to Pravati, or
she to him.

Bound, he was placed on a wagon and taken to a dungeon in Govinda's capital. There
his fetters were partly loosened. A soldier brought a jug of water and put it on the
stone floor. The door was closed and barred, and he was left alone. A wound on his
shoulder burned like fire. He groped for the water jug and moistened his hands and
face. He wanted to drink, but forbore; this way he would die faster, he thought.
How much longer would it take, how much longer! He longed for death as his parched
throat longed for water. Only death would still the torture in his heart. Only then
would the picture of the mother with their dead son be erased. But in the midst of
his agony, merciful weariness and weakness overcame him. He sank down and fell a-
sleep.

When he returned hazily to consciousness after this brief slumber, he tried to rub
his eyes, but could not. Both hands were occupied, were holding something tightly.
When he took heart and forced his eyes open, he saw that he was no longer surround-
ed by dungeon walls. Greenish light flowed bright and strong over leaves and moss. He
bunked several times. The light struck him like a fierce though noiseless blow. A
twitch of horror, a shudder of fear, passed through the nape of his neck and down
his spine. Once more he blinked, screwed up his face as if he were weeping, and
opened his eyes wide.

He was standing in a forest, holding in both hands a gourd full of water. At his
feet the basin of a spring reflected browns and greens. Beyond the fern thicket,
he recalled, stood the hut and the waiting yogi who had sent him to fetch water,
who had laughed so strangely and whom he had asked to teach him something about
Maya.

He had lost neither a battle nor a son. He had been neither a rajah nor a father.
Rather, the yogi had granted his wish and taught him about Maya. Palace and gar-
den, library and aviary, the cares of sovereignty and paternal love, war and jeal-
ousy, his love for Pravati and his violent suspicion of her--all that had been no-
thing. No, not nothing. It had been Maya! Dasa stood there shattered. Tears ran
down his cheeks. His hands trembled, shaking the gourd he had just filled for the
hermit. Water spilled over the rim and onto his feet. He felt as if someone had
just amputated one of his limbs, removed something from his head. Suddenly the
long years he had lived, the treasures cherished, the delights enjoyed, the pangs
suffered, the fears endured, the despair he had tasted to the brink of death--all
this had been taken from him, extinguished, reduced to nothingness. And yet not
to nothingness! For the memory was there. The images had remained with him. He
still saw Pravati sitting, tall and rigid, with her hair so suddenly gray, her
son in her lap, as though she herself had killed him. The child lay there like
the prey of some beast, his legs dangling limply across her knees.

Oh how swiftly, how swiftly and horribly, how cruelly and thoroughly, had he been
taught about Maya! Everything had been deranged; charged years had shrunk to mo-
ments. All that crowded reality had been a dream. Perhaps, too, he had dreamed all
that had happened previously; the tales of Prince Dasa, of his life as a herdsman,
his marriage, his vengeance upon Nala, his taking refuge with the hermit. All that
had been pictures such as one might admire on a carved palace frieze where flowers,
stars, birds, monkeys, and gods could be seen amid the foliage. And was what he was
experiencing this moment, what he saw before his eyes, awakening from rulership and
war and imprisonment, standing beside the spring, this gourd from which he had just
spilled a little water, together with what he was now thinking about it all--was
not all this made of the same stuff? Was it not dream, illusion, Maya? And every-
thing he would still experience in the future, would see with his eyes and feel with
his hands, up to the moment of his death--was it any different in substance, any
different in kind? It was all a game and a sham, all foam and dream. It was Maya,
the whole lovely and frightful, delicious and desperate kaleidoscope of life with
its searing delights, its searing griefs.

Dasa still stood numbed. Again the gourd shook in his hands and its water spilled,
wetting his toes and running into the ground.What ought he to do? Fill the bowl
again, carry it back to the yogi, and be laughed at for all that he had suffered
in his dream? That was not alluring. He let the gourd tilt, emptied it, and threw
it into the moss. Then he sat down on the green bed and began to reflect seriously.
He had had enough and more than enough of this dreaming, of this diabolic texture
of experiences, joys, and sufferings that crushed your heart and made your blood
stand still, only to be suddenly revealed as Maya, so that you were nothing but
a fool. He had had enough of everything. He no longer craved either wife or child,
either a throne or victory or revenge, either happiness or cleverness, either power
or virtue. He desired nothing but peace, nothing but an end of turmoil. He no long-
er wanted anything but to check this endlessly turning wheel, to stop this endless
spectacle, to extinguish it all. He wanted to find rest for himself and extinguish
himself. That was what he had wanted when he hurled himself at the enemy in that
last battle, slashing all about and being slashed at in return, giving wounds and
receiving them, until he collapsed. But what then? Then there was a brief pause of
unconsciousness, or slumber, or death, and immediately afterward you were awake a-
gain, had to admit the currents of life into your heart once more and once more let
the dreadful, lovely, terrible flood of pictures pour into your eyes, endlessly,
inescapably, until the next unconsciousness, until the next death. That was, per-
haps, a pause, a moment of rest, a chance to catch your breath. But then it went
on, and once again you were one of the thousand figures engaged in the wild, intox-
icating, desperate dance of life. Ah, there was no extinction. It went on forever.

Unrest drove him to his feet once more. If there were no rest in this accursed
round-dance, if his one most acute desire could not be fulfilled, then he might just
as well fill his gourd again and bring it to this old man who had sent him on this
errand, although he did not really have any right of command over him. It was a ser-
vice that had been asked of him. It was an assignment. He might just as well obey
and carry it out. That was better than sitting here and pondering methods of self-
destruction. Altogether, obeying and serving were better and far easier, seemlier
and far more harmless, than commanding and taking responsibility. That much he
knew. Very well, Dasa, take the gourd, fill it carefully with water, and bring
it to your master!

When he reached the hut, the master received him with a strange look, a slightly
questioning, half-compassionate, half-amused look of complicity--such a look as
an older boy might have for a younger one whom he sees returning from a strenuous
and somewhat shameful adventure, a test of courage that has been assigned to him.
This herdsman prince, this poor fellow who had stumbled in here, was only coming
back from the spring, where he had been for water, and had been gone no more than
fifteen minutes. But still he was also coming from a dungeon, had lost a wife, a
son, and a principality, had completed a human life and had caught a glimpse of
the revolving wheel. The chances were that this young man had already been wake-
ned once or several times before, and had breathed a mouthful of reality, for o-
therwise he would not have come here and stayed so long. But now he seemed to
have been properly awakened and become ripe for setting out on the long journey.
It would take a good many years just to teach this young man the proper posture
and breathing.

By this look alone, this look which contained a trace of benevolent sympathy and
the hint of a relationship that had come into being between them, the relation-
ship between master and disciple--by this look alone the yogi accepted the disc-
iple. This one look banished the fruitless thoughts from the disciple's head. It
bound him in discipline and service. There is no more to be told about Dasa's
life, for all the rest took place in a realm beyond pictures and stories. He never
again left the forest.

































































































































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